Rough Magic

by Lara Prior-Palmer

  My mind mutters on as the music of a rom-com on the television whirs. Oh my I’m ahead! I’m winning the race, what an odd sensation. I inhale the idea over and over until it’s unreal. Am winning a race, what race? And what am I winning? Things may change tomorrow—a fall, some broken bones, lost maps, a lost pony, lostness. Lost direction, a lost mind, tomorrow, tomorrow—tossed in lostness. I’m too weak to tighten the reins on my mind. I haven’t forgotten certain ideas about ways out—dropping from the race and into fiction, riding horses all the way to my heart, or to an ocean near Japan. Bernard Moitessier didn’t care to sail up to the finish line when he was on the brink of winning the 1968–1969 circumnavigatory race—instead he just carried on around two-thirds of the globe, finally pulling up in the South Pacific when it felt right.

  I turn my head on its side and feel dreams trickling into my ears. By morning I’ll forget how soft and sweet the scenes are—circles of sound tongued around me, miniature pianos all afly—here to care for me.

  XXXII

  On midwinter mornings Mum sometimes chucked cups of water on me to end my hibernation. I needed schooling. Children need schooling. We think of them just as we think of animals. Except I think of animals as gods. Stand beside the shoulder of a horse, and evaporate.

  In high school, brains were the aim of the game. We learned to store up facts like noble larders. By the time we left, we’d been taught many expensive ideas, but I lacked any desire to use them. Where next? Oxford, of course. In my household, this word summoned our lust—your life threatened to pass its sell-by date if you didn’t get into Oxford University, which I did not, and you weren’t meant to come to Mongolia for a horse race instead. Thinking was supreme, and intelligence orgasmic.

  Animals do not “think,” in the abstract sense. Ask the European philosophers. Over the centuries, they have cast the pause between animals and humans as a division. Animals “lack” in comparison to humans. Animals are not moral. They do not have will. They are not political. They do not have nations. Heidegger calls animal existence “poverty.” Hegel insists that “the courage of an animal or a robber . . . are not its true forms.” And Adorno says “the eyes of animals . . . seem to mourn that they are not human.” On they go, fingering their stale beards.

  Behind the centuries lies the animals’ silence. I think we might be envious of how they are complete in their bodies. That a donkey’s sensory system is more highly developed than any philosopher’s is my favorite fact. In the seconds I cease pretending—aboard a horse, up against a tree—I remember body before all else.

  Unzip my skin and you might find luminescent blue rubber ready for a swim. I am not really human. And nor, am I sure, is anyone else.

  Girl. People are not sure, on any given day, where you will begin. I can tell that you yourself wish you knew. What you are. Whether you have a core at all. Or are simply layers of air.

  On the sixth day of the race I wake with a terrified start, as if Mum’s water has just splashed across my patiently closed eyes. In the last parts of the night I slipped in and out of love, old loves stale but still golden, raised from the past in dreams. A glimpse of March, summer rising. On dead grass I stand with a boy-man clutching my wrists. We all spill into one another and thrive. Every person I meet is lit by my impressions of those I used to know. Yes, we are pouring into each other, as time pours into itself.

  A stack of blankets lies across my shoulders. I push them off and leap into the dawn. This is the penguin, dropping from her iceberg. I move fast to keep warm. The long-gone loves retire to their caverns, coaxed home by the coldness.

  Staff in Ulaanbaatar chain-smoked through the night as they tracked the vets racing to monitor both the main pack and the front runners. On her satellite phone at 2 a.m., Helen, the South African vet, reported to Ulaanbaatar after four hours of rest. How was she functioning on so little sleep? asked the organizers in Ulaanbaatar. I had a bath in the stream, contaminated it, she replied.

  Competitors are tumbling home. Twenty-one now remain in the race. Thanks to the speed of The Lion and the gray horse before him, I have broken a Derby record. Four and a half horse stations covered in one day. I have about seven legs left, which could mean two whole days—a long time.

  A paler shade of eaten green surrounds the pony’s iron rod. I untie the rope and let him nuzzle my face briefly. He stalks over to the horse line with his body slanting and his eyes alive. The walk of a horse has the same four-beat footfall pattern as the gallop. They can bolt from a standstill. So you never feel quite certain, a trick awaiting you at each corner.

  I know he’ll be difficult to tack up after yesterday’s bucking fit. Twitchy horses are in league with the spirit world, according to one northern and eastern European myth. The halter needs to come off; the bridle needs to go on. Between these steps he will be in limbo, free for whichever breed of freedom he’s plotting.

  I drift around him, trying to tune into his brain. He is smiling so sublimely.

  Are you in heaven? I ask.

  I tell you, he is smiling out the back end of the century.

  Halter off. Bridle approaching. He lunges back. Two steps and he shoots out of my grasp. I scramble for mane but miss. He is trotting away up the hill and as he gets smaller I get calmer, thinking the air will only be quiet when I board the plane home. Until then, there’s a delight in the not-knowing, in these whatever-next sort of seconds.

  The more I trot after him, the more certain he is to move away. I pull up my socks and retreat. What shall I ride today? All the goats come running in. I laugh and take my laughter back in through my ears. This sort of moment is my favorite of all the lonely ones.

  Inside the ger the boy with long legs is dreaming on the floor. I tap him and gesture for help. Relaxed as ever, he moves slowly to dress while I wait outside, where the wind swings the canvas at the brim of the ger. When he emerges he moves his gaze to the distant pony and goes up the shrubby incline loosely, as if the earth is walking him.

  I follow behind. He nears the pony and whistles three long notes. The dun does not move. He’s so close I’m sure the pony will flee in fright. All is held still by a rope between their minds, one I can barely touch. He links his gangly arms around the pony’s neck. I witness their standing embrace from afar. This is beautiful. Time for me to leave, I think.

  After we’ve led the pony back down the hill, I suggest to the boy, whose name I’ll never know, that he mount before I do. No way, he seems to say, amazed, and when I ask again, his head chases the question away and the dimples in his cheeks deepen. So he holds the reins while I get on. The pony bucks slightly, then we are choo choo and gone. I wave goodbye to the clarity of the dawn, his peace, that comfort, unhinged from the race.

  Trotting up the hill pass, we see birds flit through fleecy pines. The horse is talking, the earth is whispering, the grass is humming, and who knows what sounds they hear from me. The pine branches, bent sideways by wind, suggest I shut my eyes. Shut your eyes and you shall see better.

  Are you sad? You look so sad, I tell the trees.

  We only look sad because you can’t imagine a stillness that’s not.

  I would cease here and holler at the wrinkled bark, write letters to their roots. See how ribbons blow in winters gone, and listless lives sink into song. I would. If only I didn’t feel the need to keep manning the lead.

  The ovoo on the peak is a high pile of branches. No time to circle. On the descent, the groan of an engine rises behind us. Richard’s jeep overtakes and halts. He clambers out in a T-shirt and crouches in the dew, uttering one sentence as I pass.

  “She’s twenty minutes behind you.” He delivers this in monotone, barely lifting his lips. The man seems no longer to ask me questions. He just serves up carefully constructed lines. I think I might christen him the Ghost of the Race—appearing and disappearing, stilling us all.

  I watch his jeep descend and unfurl the land. The sea of grass dances in his wake, beckoning our arrival. As the horse trots o
n, I am gripped by mild terror. She’s behind you, she’s behind you, nuh-nuh na nuh-nuh. At the bottom of the hill a spirit in the shape of a dog canters up to us. Nose to the ground, he circles and pauses ahead. I look around to where he came from and see the pink dot bleeding down the hill.

  Within the minute the dog disappears, snorkeling the earth on some journey north. I stop turning my head and the land funnels us left. I can’t have Devan thinking I’m honoring her approach. And I don’t want to be too precise a target of her ambition. She barely knows who I am—she refers to me as “Laura” and is under the illusion that she’s younger than me. Her eye is on the prize, and details such as these are insignificant. I don’t think it will have crossed her mind that my drive is to bring her down to earth, and that in this way, she has created her rival. I want to put a stop to the prophecy she made at start camp.

  Sadly my competitive parts, which I took so much trouble to suppress as a teenager, have needed to return for the purpose. Maybe this is proof that certain aspects of our characters sit in a freezer somewhere, always ready to defrost.

  If I were to say to myself I want to win and I care, I might begin to find the whole competition less exciting. But instead, such words circle at the edge of my consciousness like giant birds too distant to be truly seen, let alone examined. I ride with a mysterious compulsion, not knowing where it comes from.

  With a woman in the lead and three more on her tail, the race seems likely to have its first female winner this year. It’s strange it has taken so long, considering half the entrants are usually women, and that female riders outnumber men in many countries.

  They intrigue me, these mini republics of equestriennes. Do women just really love horses? Or do horses love women? There’s the Freudian theory that women direct their erotic energy towards horses, whereas straight men often relate to them through dominance. But is there no love other than the erotic? One of the women in Robert Vavra’s 1981 book All Those Girls in Love with Horses is Aunt Lucinda. The author asks her about her first horse, Be Fair, who had natural balance and a generous spirit. “I’m told that love like that only comes round once a lifetime,” she remarked.

  My oldest brother George has suggested I’m the one who rides because I’m a product of my gender, and that may be so, but perhaps one of us just needed to partake in the family tradition. Though my father sidelined the horses, they ran through the house in Appleshaw and you could sense this in the way my mother can smell water.

  Then again, I may have needed horses more than my brothers did. Aunt Lucinda’s equestrian career spanned the shift from horses as military and transport animals to horses as sports animals and pets, increasingly aligned with women—in the UK, at least. In fact, riding has offered a counterexistence to women since before the times of Lady Godiva or the Amazons of Scythia, one in which we can be demanding and assertive.

  If horses can make us powerful, they can also make us feel powerless—it’s the persuasion required to access their power that I find compelling.

  Maybe the approaching pink dot isn’t Devan. Maybe it’s a floating pom-pom. Some Hello Kitty debris? Cinderella on the fly? My horse is tired, the urtuu is near, we cannot move faster. When the hill steepens, we slow to a walk and a rustling sweeps in. Devan’s chest pushes at the wind as she rises and plunges to the rhythm of her pony’s trot.

  “Good morning!” she sings, cheerfully.

  The spoken words surprise the grassland and surprise me too. Devan makes no eye contact and I’m wary of her tone. Like last night, I am too incensed by her to reply. Is this half rude or fully rude?

  Who’s worse, Devan or Lara?

  I like to think my silence might disarm her. I don’t want to play a part in the story she’s set on. Though I do so love to follow it, one step behind.

  Her rain jacket crinkles and her blond hair blooms as she sails on. Like a waterfall she drops off the landscape ahead.

  Devan has taken her lead back.

  Oh well.

  Oh hell.

  XXXIII

  The urtuu, number 18 of 25, is plotted in this basin but I can’t see it. Has the family packed up and moved to another valley since the organizers came through two months ago? We zigzag down the hill, praying that tumbledown goat shack over there has forty ponies tied behind it . . . but no, on we go, looping round a jutting hillock. Ah, the station is here in the next chapter, bedded on the turf by a lazy river.

  Richard is languishing next to his jeep. Devan grazes her pony, waiting for its rate to slow. Maybe they’ve just had a conversation and have nothing left to say.

  I enter into discussion with a man who raises his dark eyebrows to explain his fastest horse is being watered down at the river—if only I wouldn’t mind waiting a little for my nineteenth pony. Devan eyes us from behind. She has already picked her next horse and did not ask anyone from the Daariijav family for advice.

  When someone returns from the water with a string of horses, the herder points out the leftmost horse for me.

  Devan strides around and aims her arm at it. “I think I’ll take that one.”

  I gesture to speak, but all I produce is a swimming “ummm.” I have an urge to slap her with a fish. Does she not startle herself?

  The interpreter jumps to my assistance. “No, that horse is for Lara.”

  Devan shifts her eyes as though to look at me, but her beam skips on by.

  Behind us, Richard grins and casts a line. “Now, now. Don’t get competitive, you two.”

  Dear Devan, with all her thick blond hair and chest-led rises to the trot. Do I just find her so extreme because I only spend five-minute periods with her? Perhaps I’ve been constructing an elaborate muckheap out of nothing. Not for a moment have I tried to access her inner world: no idea if she hates me back, what she fantasizes about apart from winning, or whether she still has a relationship with her childhood teddy bear.

  I used to love winning just as much as she does, but it was accompanied by shame. As a nine-year-old in the swimming pool, facing down, my expressed effort was hidden. Running races in the London parks, I never wanted to commit the crime of appearing fast, so I strode with my arms hung like insouciant curtain tassels and trailed my legs on the long stretches. I was irritated by the girl in my class who stuck her bottom out and told everyone her personal bests for a lap of breaststroke. It was as though she canceled out all my efforts at shrugging off the world.

  Somewhere along the line I seem to have learned that overt ambition is distasteful. The glimpse I’ve had of Devan so perfectly bulldozes any of those ideas about modesty, I might just be jealous of her. A certain vet admires Devan for being “who she is,” “pretense-free.” Of course, politeness isn’t what we’re here for, is it?

  I don’t know where my love of shrugging comes from. I’m just suspicious of demonstrations of supreme willfulness. They make me think of villainy. It’s the demonstration as much as the willfulness itself that I mistrust. Why intentionally alienate other people? Maybe I just want to see Devan fallible.

  She lays her tack on a herder’s outstretched arms and steps back with her hands on her hips. I watch her watching him saddle her pony, then I turn for the ger. Richard needs shots of me with food for the website. Gleefully I glug down some white tea, unsure whether my scruffy appearance is going to ruin or enhance the photo. Perhaps my hair will require an operation when I get back. It’s so dirty even the grease has taken flight, and the curls at my ear lobes have gone solid.

  Richard is quiet, minding himself and the angle of his camera. I’m unaware his photos have already been transmitted off the steppe. They can see me at home. This should dispel any rumors about me wandering alone in the wilderness—clearly there’s a photographer giving me some occasional company, not to mention Devan—but it turns out people imagine what they like, and in this case I think they want me lonesome with the land. I don’t know why.

  When I finally see Richard’s photos, my memory separates the photographed ponies from the un
photographed. The fifteen he never sees through his lens remain with me, but for the snapped ten, I lose something. The photos place me outside of them.

  We have to rise, my legs and I. Through the door I see a horse figure dashing away from the urtuu. It’s the pink dot larger than ever, her heels dipped low for the charge. I leap outside into the vision of a gray-blue bird and run to the pony, who fires us out of the station. We are in motion and changing.

  Wink, and we’re gone.

  XXXIV

  Devan’s ahead. This is a bit of a relief. I found it torturous always having to look for her behind me. Chasing feels more positive. Up the Khanui River valley we fly, locked in a cantering lullaby as the winds of time rush by. This is a horse sensitive and lightfooted. He hears engine noise, he bolts. I sense Richard behind but I’m wrong. It’s the ABC monster advancing, and with the tree shelter behind us there’s nowhere to hide.

  The motoring red van draws up to our side and Alex’s head squirms out of the window as the horse throttles along, almost out of hand. His camera is perched in his hands, poised to drink pixelated color out of me.

  “Lara!”

  More questions, many, many questions as he takes shots of the horse. There’s so much space surrounding us we can’t look much like action. When Alex hurls his final question, the horse is out of rhythm, zipping along at a gallop I can’t allow.

  “We’re gonna go catch Devan now. Any messages for her?”

  I pause, censoring six sentences a second. “Send her a kiss.” I shout it. They swerve away up the valley towards the strengthening sun. I no longer chuckle after these encounters. I don’t like their words. I feel like their pet, their postcard. Why not let it all be forgotten?