Rough Magic

by Lara Prior-Palmer

  I holler at the chestnut as we scuttle towards the finishing stick, asking him to pick up some speed to protect us from the end. My tummy is stagnating. I’m scared Richard might be lying. And I’m also scared Richard might not be lying, which would turn my random August escapade into a miserably predictable story, equipped with a victorious underdog and everything. If they crown me winner, I’ll be left stranded on the finish island, fumbling for excuses for my conformity.

  We crumple to a standstill as soon as we pass the stick. Then the pixie within me bounds out to tell stories of the leg to the awaiting audience, like a traveling circus unpacking for a stay: the chestnut’s resignation (his ears are cocked back, listening), the search for help, and the groping man.

  “And then, I slapped him . . .”

  My monologue prevents anyone from cushioning me in congratulations or serving up other compliments. I’ve never been able to take compliments and this has frustrated my aunt in the past, who has instructed me to accept them graciously. One of my difficulties with them is their pointedness. They stop me in space for assessment and solidify me into a singular human, an absolute me I am never quite sure of.

  When I lay my voice down at the end of the report, I notice faces looking at me that are not blades of grass. These are humans—pulled-out riders and tired crew—and their looks suggest I might’ve missed the point. What are you doing? they seem to say.

  It’s glee! I scream from within, but cannot make noise. I look down at the crowd of silently giggling grass instead.

  “Don’t you know Devan’s been given a penalty?” asks Georgie, stepping forward with her arms folded. She and her neighbor share a funereal expression, the same one I used to face when in deep trouble at school.

  After sliding off the horse, I look about in search of Charles and his promised vodka. His absence bruises the scene, yet I’m more relaxed because of it. Maggie stands close by in her familiar empress stance. Behind her I see Devan’s black horse—head low, body heaving, steam rising from his flanks, flies circling and licking his sweat.

  There I was in a formation of people, us all looking at one another. Was this what being human had been before the race, and would become again?

  I wasn’t in tune with the tension that had built up among those waiting. Maybe being on the move had kept me free of that kind of gravity. If meaning is linked to place, how can you keep hold of it when rivering along? Yet Devan had managed to weigh the race down in gravity from start camp onwards. Perhaps this was what upset me. I wanted to seize conceptual power back, contesting not just her victory but also whether the Derby mattered as much as she thought it did.

  “This is not the blooming Olympics—it’s a joke race,” I said to Georgie, with whom I talked for a while after the crowd dispersed, mainly about her coccyx, which was nigh on broken and had forced her to pull out of the race.

  On the twelfth minute, my chestnut’s heart rate dropped and Maggie strode over.

  “Lara?”

  She handed me the prize. A blue can of beer.

  “Congratulations. You are our winner.”

  The words traveled up my spine in spasms. We chinked cans and took a sip each. Approximately three people applauded. I passed my can on to someone who liked beer, all the while unsure how to proceed with myself. I held my lips straight and appeared unfazed, waving off the moments like a series of bad smells. There seemed little point in expressing my confused feelings when I could depend on them. Shame lit up my cheeks. It was inconvenient to have accidentally—or, rather, fully intentionally—won the whole thing. Victory snatched away both my moral high horse and my anonymity. Already I’d become the object of mistrusting stares. I hadn’t thought about how the person who wins the world’s toughest horse race ought to act, let alone feel.

  Why couldn’t I just be triumphant, like an elephant squirting water? In other words, where was Devan when you needed her? Heaped on the ground apart from her pony, weeping with her head in her hands, unavailable for the outsourcing of my victory celebrations.

  I felt an urge to become little, and crawl into the cave of my mother’s long green coat, that snaily home of Mummy-dark, the age-old promise of “security.” The chestnut pony grazed behind me, his mouth breaking the blades of grass as he moved around the care of his poised foreleg, the experience gone from his body already. Well, what was triumph, really?

  Later, after we had disbanded, I would wonder why the moment could not contain me, or why I couldn’t contain it, and also whether there was such a thing as being dignified without being ostentatious. It had seemed best to sacrifice both, and be embarrassed. I hadn’t worked out that the idea of “one” winner made no sense to me, in the end. How could Devan not be included in the story anymore? It was almost as if victory itself became the villain, and the less I enjoyed it, the closer I came to annihilating it.

  Devan was quaking like a washing machine. So long had she lived as a parasite in my mind that her real body had me shuddering too. At least she’d enjoyed thinking she’d won in the hour before the penalty. The crowd had clapped for her and the steward had let her ring home on the satellite phone to tell her dad the good news.

  Maggie caught me looking at Devan and nudged me in her direction. I slunk over and curled my arms around her. She unfurled to embrace me back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said in the midst of our hug, not thinking of what I meant—it seemed my apologetic female mode had switched on.

  No matter. Devan was crying and I assume she could barely hear me. My limp hug had to be enough. Perhaps it was now that we found the Everest spirit that had so eluded us during the race. All the emotion taking up the space between us dissolved—not because we were hung from a rope nearing death, but because the charade was over, and we were in touch. Devan raised her head and looked me in the eye for the first time since start camp. Her face shone red with sunburn; her lips were so chapped the peeling white skin appeared as a second set of teeth surrounding her smile.

  “Congratulations,” she said. Her American accent made it sound like gift wrap to my British ears.

  I replied that what had happened wasn’t fair, and added, “Just the way things work out. I guess we’re both winners, really.”

  Her eyes fell. “Yeah,” she said.

  It turned out she did agree. Within a week, she would tell the American press that her final horse had the flu, and she was therefore the real winner of the race.

  XL

  The closure of a race so long came with no particular sensation. Finish camp was wedged below a high ridge, so my inner hamster at last had a corner to withdraw into. Nonetheless, it took time for me to slow down. Thirty-six hours after the Mongol Derby’s end, I had the urge to go for a run, and liked the idea of asking Devan if I could borrow her running shoes. It would be as though nothing had happened—which really I wasn’t sure it had. Winning disappeared in a few cow-munched moments. So, I hoped, had coming second.

  From her sunstruck malady in the ger, which she seemed not to have left since the end of the race except to go to the toilet, Devan handed out her shoes, and in my bunions leapt. I ran off slightly out of balance—questioning, as ostriches must do on a daily basis, why I found myself on two legs instead of four.

  It took three days for the rest of the riders to drift in. The doctor strode around camp topless, perfecting his crimson suntan. I spent much of my time in a state of extreme laughter with the South African vets, Helen and Pete. We were achieving a level of pained hilarity I usually only reach with my mother.

  I did not call home during this post-race period—after the conversation with family on the last leg, I sensed they might be terribly jubilant and profiting from what my father would no doubt be marketing as a “success.” I later found out he had called the organizers and demanded to speak to his daughter. Although the family had been gripped by this curious race 8,000 kilometers away, they had only been eyeing my dot as it crawled around a screen—and there in cyberspace I remained at finish cam
p, a dot ungraspable. The idea of it pleases me to this day.

  Mum, meanwhile, had—unknown to me—experienced a feverish sickness near the climax of the race and checked herself into hospital, something no one has ever known her to do. And when Devan was declared the winner on Twitter, everyone slumped back into their armchairs except Arthur, who scuttled up to his bedroom to await better news, strangely convinced I would somehow still win.

  One week after the finish, as the plane lifted me out of Ulaanbaatar’s steel palette, my stomach ached extra and I began to cry. It always seemed to happen like this—my strongest bout of emotion arriving well after the event, when I was suspended between two worlds.

  I didn’t like returning to England—not then, not ever—although something in me likes the grass there. My immediate family were not in the country when I arrived. I was collected from the airport by none other than Aunt Lucinda, who emerged from her hiding place in the earth’s mantle to express her surprise. She returned me to Appleshaw, where unfettered blue tits perched in the bushes, watching us come, having seen us go.

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve.

  I’m still amazed I took something so highbrow as The Tempest in my backpack—without caring, without meaning it to mean anything.

  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

  Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices

  That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,

  The clouds methought would open and show riches

  Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,

  I cried to dream again.

  This was Shakespeare’s final play, a play of dream, spirit, and sea. I like the way it sounds, feminine and free.

  XLI

  A woman at a dinner party tells me she died and came back to life. “I haven’t felt the same since,” she says across the wide wooden table. Then she wonders, “Did the Derby change you?”

  Woah, I reply. I can’t say it did. Seven days spent edging my way through land and air? Not really.

  Well, maybe it endorsed a haphazard manner of doing things people had frowned upon. Maybe in years to come, I will see it as a seal on the years that went before it.

  I rain maybes.

  The race did seem to lend me some faith in my placement in this world, and that faith released an energy my teenage sloth-self had let go of—I felt it fueling me for months afterwards. Anne Carson talks about the dilemma of the pilgrim who reaches her destination and “cannot bear to stop.” It’s true an idea of freedom has come to swamp my mind, taking me places I never fully intend to end up. One night I’ll find myself cycling south out of Edinburgh with London in mind; the next month, a friend and I will end up boarding a thirty-two-hour bus from Istanbul to Iraq.

  Maybe this restlessness is serving to keep some part of me alive. Or maybe I move to avoid making—making words, friends, and love. I do spread my heart thinly as I go. Will I ever accept that the most mythic, meaningful life might lie in the ordinary: the kingdom of details and daily reprises? For now, I’m stunned by all things static, scared by the idea that a “home” might exist for me somewhere.

  Our human habit is to make endings of things—close them, wrap them up, slap a cap on unruly time—no maybes involved. But what use is a conclusion or an understanding when all I want to do is open up, mess up, unpack, and unreel?

  Endings fade, but the force behind a story lives on. It passes through lifetimes, daughter to daughter. This being human means inhabiting an unfinished form, forever moving on to the next thing.

  Three years after the Derby, I travel to Somerset to see a witch doctor for my seven-year-old stomach aches. She knows nothing about me except my pain. For an hour she pops in and out of the room to touch my body and let it settle.

  “You,” she says, as I stand on the threshold of a winter night, “are a pack of racehorses, waiting for the gates to open.”

  Author’s Note

  This book follows the brief experience of a foreigner in Mongolia. If you would like to read further and deeper into Mongolia, there is some brilliant Mongolian literature available in translation.

  I’ve especially enjoyed the work of Ölziitögs Luvsandorj, whose witty short story “Aquarium,” translated by Sainbayar Gundsambuu and K. G. Hutchins, was published by Words Without Borders and can be found on that organization’s website. Thirteen of Ölziitögs’s poems, many drawing from city life, were translated by Sh Tsog and have been published on the Best American Poetry website in a series of posts by Simon Wickham-Smith titled “Modern Mongolian Literature in Seven Days.” The series also features work by poets such as Ayurzana Gun-Ajaav and Mend-Ooyo Gombojav. The End of the Dark Era, a recent collection by the adventurous poet Tseveendorjin Oidov (translated by Simon Wickham-Smith), is the first book of Mongolian poetry to be published in the United States.

  For more on steppe life, The Blue Sky is a stunning novel by Galsan Tschinag (translated from German by Katharina Rout) charting the daily rhythms of nomadic life. Byambasuren Davaa’s 2005 film, In the Cave of the Yellow Dog, is now also a book coauthored with Lisa Reisch (translated into English by Sally-Ann Spencer).

  In the English language, Uuganaa Ramsay’s memoir, Mongol, shifts between Scotland, Ulaanbataar, and the steppe. A Monastery in Time: The Making of Mongolian Buddhism, by Caroline Humphrey and Hurelbaatar Ujeed, is an academic study of Mongolian Buddhism. Time, Causality and Prophecy in the Mongolian Cultural Region, edited by Rebecca Empson, is a fascinating collection of essays by a range of authors.

  Acknowledgments

  Letters of deep gratitude keep forming in my head—

  To Robyn Drury and Jonathan Lee: I’m a cavorting-snorting foal at having been edited by the both of you.

  To Zoe Ross, who landed Rough Magic the loveliest homes:

  Catapult—thanks to Andy Hunter, Pat Strachan, Jennifer Abel Kovitz, Megan Fishmann, Lena Moses-Schmitt, Wah-Ming Chang, and everyone on the wondrous team.

  Ebury—thanks to everyone, especially Sarah Bennie and her team.

  To Josephine Rowe, for appreciating each pony and leading them to Jonathan.

  To Brittany Newell, for being provocative.

  To Parwana Fayyaz, Jamie Helyar, and Sadhana Senthilkumar for inspiration and affection.

  To Eavan Boland, John Evans, and Tobias Wolff for new beginnings; and to Dana Kletter (“you can be self-deprecating and British all day long but at some point you’ve got to hit hard and say something real”).

  To Aishwary Kumar, for teachings unfathomable.

  To Harriet Clark, Shatra Galbadrah, Sue Mott, Katy Willings, and, depthlessly, to Neal Gething.

  To each sister and brother who read this through and offered advice.

  To anyone who let me be lonely, and to those who did not.

  To so many of the above for their attentiveness, often from afar, when I’ve been unwell. To my doctors of all kinds.

  To those who homed me beyond their call—the Dorset boghills and their Hugheses, Kildale and her Sutcliffes, Anita George-Carey on the river, the Chalabys all over, and the Alegrias & animals in California. You have each allowed me to write in a place where places can exist. Immeasurable love to the people I grew up with, my family, and to my forbears.

  To all the nonhuman forces, especially horses, Appleshaw, the Pacific, the steppe, the Plains and elsewhere, for their care.

 

 

 
(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share