Steeplechase (3 page)

‘Change.

‘Change.'

The model lunges into impossible shapes. Perhaps she is a dancer or a gymnast, her breasts never seem to sag. She is gorgeous. ‘Change, change, change.'

Little stick drawings, lines really, just the general shape and movement. They are no better or worse than any other students I have had. I walk slowly around the circle of easels and the works are interchangeable. Sharp quick lines of varying thickness. Some more interested in the curve of the back, some of them breast-men and women, drawing the pretty pert hang, the ever-changing direction of the nipple. Some of them concentrate on the hair.

John has never been good at the quick drawing. I walk behind him and notice that today he has decided not to draw the model at all. Instead he has begun to sketch my desk, the model's dress hanging from it like a dead pelt, the puddle of skirt lapping at the ground beneath. Nothing quick about this drawing, he has started with shadow and is drawing back to the highlights. This is something my sister used to do. I recognise the intensity of the strokes.

‘Okay. A longer one now. Say, twenty minutes?' The model nods. I walk, slowly, glancing. I do not interfere. I am here if they want me but they never do, these bright young things with their fifties dresses and their mad hair. When I walk past John's easel, I see that he has begun to draw the model, finally. A close study of her face, politely ignoring her nakedness.

My guts feel empty. An organ has been taken out of my body and it feels like my flesh is rearranging to accommodate it. I walk from easel to easel with this empty space inside me. I wonder if I came back to work too soon.

John glances up as I walk by his easel and he is all grin. He wants me to like his work. And I do, but his need for my approval is even more charming. It is an effort for me not to rest a comforting hand on his shoulder. Instead I nod, and smile back a little and he goes back to his drawing with more enthusiasm. The woman in the picture looks pretty but sad. I do not see this in the model. This is something he has added, this edge of melancholy.

When I complete the circuit and begin another slow pass of the easels I notice that he has begun to draw one of her breasts and I feel a sudden, inexplicable stab of jealousy. I should be at home on the couch with my pretentious subtitled DVDs and my Nabokov and framed Gentileschi prints.

John looked through my video collection when he came over that first time and he laughed and asked me where the comedies were.
I don't like comedy
seemed like a bad answer at the time and it is still a terrible excuse. I am like the rest of my students—a cliché. I wear my op-shop treasures and never watch television and frown at anything that is supposed to make me laugh. John makes me laugh.

I frown at John now because he has moved down to the genitals and instead of making them half-there like the other students do, he has drawn in every fold and line and the model now looks more than naked. She looks exposed. I look past his cartridge block to where she is lying and yes, her legs are just that tiny bit parted and from this angle one of her labia is larger than the other and protruding slightly, but none of the other students have reproduced it in quite this detail. In John's eyes, we have an incredibly well realised face, one breast, a vulva. He finishes it with the neatly trimmed pubic hair and moves down to the feet. He starts to detail the toes one at a time and I move on to the other students who have spent more time on the general curve of the hip, easing over the genitals with vague pencil strokes. I look at my watch. Half an hour to go.

‘Okay,' I say. ‘Time for one more pose.'

‘You have three years' worth of holidays accrued. You have four years of sick days.'

I shake my head. ‘I know. I know.'

Ed dresses like a teenager and he really shouldn't. His runners are too bright. His T-shirt is ripped and the hair on his back shows through it. Sometimes, but thankfully not today, he wears a skinny tie over the top of his T-shirt.

‘I thought I'd be fine the next day. Keyhole sounds like something really small, you know?'

‘You've had a part of your body removed.'

‘Yeah,' I say, ‘and they wouldn't let me keep it, not even the stones.'

‘What? That's crazy, that is your body. That belongs to you. I know someone who was offered his amputated leg to take home.'

‘Yeah, go figure.'

‘How do they expect us to make art? What, do they tell Damian Hirst he isn't allowed to take his appendix home?'

I have reached my office door and I stand there with my fingers resting on the handle and he hovers. He is an odd man, awkward, but his miniatures are great and the students are fond of him. He grins and I am reminded that I am fond of him too.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and gives me his serious face, which is actually quite amusing so I smile. ‘Just take tomorrow off. For me. And book in holidays. A week, two weeks, four months. Take the rest of the year off. Go hire a studio and do some work. This isn't a private university, this is the public frigging service.' He shakes his head paternally. ‘There will be no burn-out on my watch.'

I look past Ed and John is there, leaning against the wall at the end of the corridor, looking anywhere but in my direction.

‘I'll take tomorrow off.'

‘Good,' he says. ‘Great. And your holidays?'

‘Yeah. I'll take some. Soon. I promise. After the exhibition.'

For a terrible moment I think he might hug me. He steps forward and makes a little awkward gesture with his hand, which might be a wave or an aborted attempt to touch my arm.

‘Have a good day off,' he says. I watch him walk past the place where John is leaning against the wall, then I step into my office and close the door.

It is a room filled with paintings, postcard-sized prints and some larger ones, students' work. And then there is the wall that is devoted to my sister. Pictures of sad men with flames eating their shoulders. Happy children with only darkness where their eyes should be. A boy with blowflies swarming where there should be only laughter. I wait a moment till he knocks, softly, a cat scratching. He knows I will be waiting.

I press the palms of my hands against my eyes. If I wait long enough he might go away.

The Pecking Order

We pull up outside the shop in town and there are kids playing in the gutter. They have a ball that bounces erratically. They chase after it and laugh and fall over themselves trying to catch it. Their older brothers perch on the bench and smoke cigarettes. I can see the neck of a beer bottle jutting out of a boy's jacket. They watch us jump down out of the back of the van. There is something not right about our clothing. Their clothes are bought and ours are made. Their shirts are bright with album covers on the front, our collared shirts seem prim.

‘Yokels,' Emily leans over to whisper it into my ear. I snort because it is funny, but then after a moment I realise it is not funny at all. We walk into the shop, our grandmother, our mother and us, all similarly dressed. Our mother stands at the door. Everyone knows about our mother. No matter how tight you lock the doors the truth still sneaks out in a small town. She looks okay if you don't talk to her. A little vague perhaps but she sticks close to us and keeps her head down and a stranger would never even know. It would be easier to leave her at home of course, but she might try to turn on the stove and then leave the gas on and burn the house down and the child protection would come and take us. She has to come with us when we go out but it isn't so bad. Our grandmother says that at one time she used to play with matches, so we have to be vigilant and make sure she is safe when Oma is in her study or out changing the straw for the animals.

I linger outside the shop watching the local kids. I would like to join in their game with the ball. There is something dangerous and exciting about perching on a bench, smoking a cigarette, sneaking beer. I stare at one of the boys, a skinny tall boy with his T-shirt rolled up at the sleeve and a bulge where his cigarette packet presses out of the cotton. He stares back, winks. I turn quickly and trail inside after my family.

Today we are allowed a treat. It will be a long drive. Two hours if there is no traffic. We have a basket of food, roast vegetables baked into fresh buns, a quiche cut into thick slices, herbal tea in a thermos. Emily and I can choose one of the bad things each to take with us, an ice-cream or a can of sugary drink or a chocolate bar. We must choose carefully. There will be no chance to rectify a bad decision. I have been thinking I will have a Polly Waffle because of the packet, which is pink, and because it is longer than the other chocolate bars. I know that Emily will have an ice-cream. She always picks an ice-cream and she always finishes it too quickly because it melts in the hot car and drips down her hands onto her sleeves. I will take my time with my chocolate bar, whichever one I choose, and it will last almost the whole two hours. I will leave a piece the same thickness as my thumb and I will give this to my sister because she will have spent the whole last hour watching me take excruciatingly small bites of chocolate, counting the distance between towns by the size of the bar melting in my fist.

Our hands are sticky when we clamber out from the back of the van. Our grandmother tips some water into the cups of our palms and we shake them dry over a flowerbed.

The museum is my favourite place in the world. I like it better than the art gallery, which is where we normally go so the museum is a special and unexpected pleasure. The doors slide open and it is always cold inside. It is a relief after the relentless sun on the top of the kombi. The museum smells like dust and time. It smells like history, crumbling parchment, old carpet, bones. We are greeted by the skeletal bodies of condors stretched out above us, flying in formation. Behind them there are other birds, some large, like the picked-clean bodies of pelicans, and some of them tiny, sparrows, finches, all of them wired into positions of flight, wings outstretched, angled down to catch an undetectable breeze.

Our grandmother carries a large wooden box. I know there is a painting inside but in a museum it could be anything really, bones from something extinct, a dinosaur, perhaps something deformed, the conjoined skeleton of a lamb. We trail behind her down the escalator. She is strong. The box is heavy but she carries it easily. I notice her wiry muscles. She is old but she is tough, our grandmother.
Never give up and never complain.
Past the Sepik River display, deep into the bowels of the museum, the primordial back rooms where the dark is so thick that the pinpoint shafts of light carve it like cake.

Our grandmother speaks with the man from the museum. He is a doctor and seems important. They talk about the Cretaceous era and then about herbivores, a skeleton found somewhere in the desert and then they talk about art, more pieces that they have in their collection, most of them in storage, some of them in need of work. She needs the work, that's what she tells him and then they both look towards our mother who is sitting quiet as usual in a chair in the corner. After this they talk about money. I am not supposed to listen in to conversations about money and so I wander over to where my sister is peering into a fish tank on a bench.

The tank is surrounded by bottles filled with dead things, lizards, insects, grubs, all suspended in a yellowed liquid. The tank is empty except for some twigs and leaves and dirt, or so it seems. I shrug and put my finger to a jar with a centipede inside it, but my sister taps on the glass tank, drawing my attention. There is a slight rustling of the leaves. I lean in closer and she points. I step back suddenly. There is a cockroach inside, or at least it looks like a cockroach, but it is as big as the palm of my hand and the same colour as the leaves in the tank.

‘In Burma,' my sister says, ‘if you disobey the government they tie you down in a room full of these cockroaches and let them slowly eat your face.'

I don't really believe her but I step back anyway. She told me the same thing once about a giant crustacean called a coconut crab. Still, I watch the huge insect burrow under the leaf litter and it seems plausible.

‘Put your hand inside the tank,' she whispers. She takes my hand and I lock my arm stiff and tight. She is stronger than I am and I watch in horror as my hand is pulled closer to the fish tank.

The doctor is standing behind us suddenly. Emily drops my hand and she is all sugar and lace as she points to the tank.

‘Big bugs, huh?'

She nods.

‘Natives. We breed everything larger here, don't we?'

He leads us into another room and makes us tea with real milk from a carton that isn't powdered and lumpy.

The doctor shows us another glass case that seems to be filled with more dead branches. I search the bottom for cockroaches, but Emily nods and points and when I adjust my vision I notice that some of the branches are insects that look like sticks and leaves.

There are more jars on shelves and he shows me the preserved body of a snake that has mistakenly eaten an echidna. The spines poke out through its skin.

‘It is terrible what desperation drives us to,' he says, and his voice is so deep and rich he might as well be a radio presenter and not a doctor at all.

In the car on the way back our mother starts to sing, just softly, a little tuneless song that seems stuck on a loop. Our grandmother shushes her but she sticks with it. She is still singing when we pull into a little town for lunch. We sit in the park there with the last of our buns and leave Mother in the car to eat her lunch alone. If we took her with us she would only draw attention to us. Our grandmother stares at the kombi all through lunch and I suppose she is just checking up on our mother, making sure she does nothing to harm the wooden crates filled with paintings in the back of the car. Priceless, she called them. Actually this means very expensive rather than worth nothing at all.

‘Your mother is very smart,' she says and I glance over my shoulder to where she is sitting, stiff-backed, staring out towards the parked van. ‘When something snaps it doesn't mean you are not still smart. It is like a watch when the winding mechanism is broken, it still has the potential to tell the time. Although, of course, it is broken, so it does not.'