Steeplechase (16 page)

I sit on the chair she offers me. She knows my name but I don't know hers.

‘How's the flight?'

Another girl, a pale blonde curly-haired angel. She is smoking a cigarette and ashes it onto the floor. There are people smoking at some of the other tables too. I can hear the sound of crickets chirping. I turn to see where it is coming from but there are just other tables, locals shouting at each other as if they're angry. One old woman leans away from her chair and spits onto the floor. I feel light headed.

‘Okay. Long. I got some reading done.'

‘You're a teacher right? Teach art?'

They know all about me and I don't even know their names.

My sister looks past them. I remember that look, that distant preoccupation like she is watching television, captivated by something happening outside the parameters of the world. I shift nervously in my chair.

‘Yes. At university.'

‘The next wave,' says a little nuggety, spike-haired girl in a mean singlet top. ‘Discovered any geniuses yet? Genii? Anyone we should look out for?'

I think about John. I could tell them about John, drop his name, pave the way for him, but I know that I will betray my feelings if I even mention him so I shake my head.

‘Couple of good artists in the making. Some good work. Lots of not-so-good work. You know how it is.'

They laugh. The smoking girl lights another cigarette off the first.

‘Hey, congrats on your exhibition. Awesome review, Nancy would have been green with jealousy. I went to uni with Nancy.' She rolls her eyes.

I am so startled that I can't think of anything to say. Ed told me to get the papers. I wonder what they said.

‘So you all got the floor plan?' She turns back towards the table in general.

The Chinese girl sighs. ‘I want to order first. I'm hungry. Is anyone else hungry?'

Some nods, some shrugs. I pick up the menu in front of me and there are photographs with Chinese characters beside them. Nothing is familiar. I look towards Emily but she is still staring off into the middle distance. She is the same age now as our mother was. Same age, same overblown flesh, same vacant stare. I feel a little leap in my chest and glance down at the menu once more.

The girl with the cigarette shouts something and I flinch at her tone, so confident and perhaps a little condescending. She waves her cigarette in the air and a waiter races to her side. I listen to them ordering, everyone with words for what they are after. When it comes time for my sister to order she turns to the waiter slowly and drags herself back into the real world. This is the sister of my childhood and I remember. I can feel a growing sense of unease settling on my shoulders tightening into a knot at the base of my neck.

She speaks to the waiter quietly, calmly, she points in my direction and there are more words in Mandarin. The waiter laughs and nods at me. Emily shrugs and talks and then when she is done she smiles vaguely and says, ‘I've ordered a few things you might like unless you had something particular…?'

‘No,' I tell her, and, ‘thanks.' She smiles at me briefly and I lean towards her. She is my anchor here.

When the orders have been placed and the menus collected, the girl with the cigarette slaps a folder down onto the table.

It is a familiar conversation, logistics, meterage, hanging requirements. She produces a spreadsheet and I glance at the paper that is put in front of Emily. Some of the names are familiar. Artists. I have seen some of their work in magazines. A who's who of the brave new voices on the Australian scene. Emily will have the whole of the lower floor.

The girl with the cigarette takes out an iPad and a keyboard and there is some discussion about the placement of Australian artists within the context of the wider Asian community. I read the major arts magazines. I understand their arguments, I can even interpret the impenetrable language, but I feel my vision clouding and I am certain that my vague half-smile is the same expression as my sister's. Just us against the world.

Our food arrives and Emily stirs. She places her hand on my thigh, a sign of camaraderie. She points to each dish and explains what is being placed on the table: jasmine flowers stir-fried in a spicy sauce, deep fried cheese from a particular province, grated potato, chicken, beef, fish.

‘When you look in the rivers around here you can sometimes see the fish,' she whispers to me. ‘Huge fish, gasping at the surface. You could reach out and pick them up in your hand. Sometimes I want to scoop them out just to put them out of their misery, but they are huge, the thickness of your arm or bigger. Somehow they have struggled this way through a long and difficult life. And quite a lot of industrial effluent.'

‘Thanks Emily.' The woman with the cigarette drops the butt on the floor and tamps it out with her foot. She picks up the plate of fish fillets. ‘Anyone for the seafood?'

They laugh, but I sense that they are wary of Emily. I lean closer to my sister to underline the fact that we are together. My sister picks up her chopsticks and picks some fish off the plate, a piece for me, a piece for her.

‘Should we have ordered rice?' I ask her.

‘No. Rice comes at the end if we're still hungry when all the food is gone. Rice is just to fill you up. If you're rich, like we are, then you shouldn't need the rice at all.'

I look around the room. The other diners are dressed in dowdy house frocks, crumpled old shirts, T-shirts with faded pictures on the front of them. We are like a table full of peacocks and I notice that the locals glance in our direction as if we were the floor show.

The food is good, surprisingly good. I am not a fan of Chinese food back home, which is often too glutinous or salty for me. Here the flavours are delicate and when the bill comes I make the conversion in my head and am surprised by how cheap it all is. We didn't need rice at all. I am full, and, suddenly, exhausted. I take out my wallet but Emily waves it away. She pays for the whole table. No one argues. I suppose, like John, they have all heard about Sotheby's.

‘Okay chums. See you all when we saddle up.' Emily grins and I know she is taking the piss but they don't seem to realise this.

The sound of crickets becomes an almost deafening shriek and I look up to see a row of little bamboo cages hung above the doorway. I am too short to see into them but I assume the insects are trapped inside.

It is dark outside but no cooler. I struggle with the D lock. Whole families are sitting near the doors of their still-open shops, squatting on tiny stools, fanning themselves, playing card games, chatting. An old lady is bent over her embroidery. A young man digs at a machine part with a metal tool. A toddler jumps up and down in a plastic tub with some water in the bottom, clapping his hands as his shorts soak up the wet. We step onto the bikes and this is nice, this riding beside my sister.

Perhaps I am disoriented, but it seems that we have turned the wrong corner. I have a sense that we are not heading in the direction we came from. My sister rides a little way ahead of me and no matter how hard I pedal I can't seem to catch up. She turns down an even smaller lane. Doors flank the way, some of them with candles sputtering in jam jars in little alcoves. I am completely lost. She hops off the bike while it is still in motion, cruising to a stop perched on one pedal. I come to a careful halt, my brakes squealing horribly, and there is all that fuss with the bike lock to go through.

Qingdao bar is tiny and empty.

‘Hey.' Emily nods to the Chinese bartender.

‘Hey,' she grins back.

‘Isabel, this is my sister.'

The woman leans over the bar and shakes my hand. ‘Nice to meet you, sister.' A strong, firm grip. Another Australian accent from an Asian face. ‘What can I get you?'

Emily steers me towards a table. ‘Two Mao specials for me and my sister.' Isabel takes out the equipment, a bowl, some herbs, a mortar and pestle, a shaker and a tray of ice. She reaches for the bottles of alcohol and a plastic container of juice, lime juice perhaps, the stuff is a lurid green colour.

‘You'll like this,' Emily tells me. ‘Not sweet.'

I try to imagine back to our childhood. There was never a drop of alcohol in our grandmother's house. I am not sure how she knows that I don't like my cocktails sweet.

She says, ‘Do you remember when you ate that whole nutmeg because I told you it was used as a drug in some countries?'

‘No.'

‘You grated it up, the whole thing. And then you said you were stoned.'

‘I don't remember. It doesn't sound very much like me.'

‘You were always doing stuff like that. Like when you did that steeplechase?'

I remember the steeplechase. I remember how she told me that horses died, riders died. She said this as she set the jumps for us to hurdle. When a horse fell and broke its legs they would shoot it dead where it was, pointing a gun right at its brain. I remember her saying this.

‘No. That was you with the steeplechase.'

‘Sure. I set the jumps up but you were the one who did it. I just stood at the edge and watched.'

That's not how it was at all. I remember it so vividly it might be yesterday. I remember her winning, and how slow and stupid I felt when I gave up jumping and just stepped over each of the makeshift jumps.

The drinks arrive in tall frosted glasses, I can smell the alcohol, gin perhaps, a hint of lemon.

‘Maybe I did the nutmeg, I don't remember, but the steeplechase was you.'

‘You were pretty brave.'

‘I was set upon.'

She laughs. ‘I was proud when I read about your show.'

‘What show?'

‘You know, with the posers, Nancy what's-her-face—'

‘Gato.'

‘And the paedophile geek-boy.'

‘I can't believe you read about that.'

‘Becca, the world is the tiniest little place. In London I bumped into this boy who was in the cage next door to mine for a whole month. What are the odds of that?'

She turns slow circles around her ear and I am stumped for a moment until I realise she is making the sign for madness. The cage must be the psych unit she was kept in, a locked ward. I hold my glass more firmly. Van Gogh and his ear, Fairweather and his raft, Emily and her hot air balloon.

‘So. Was it public art?'

‘The dirigible?'

I nod, although the story I heard was about a hot air balloon made of all of the canvases that were in her hotel room, glued or sewn together. I shudder when I imagine the height she fell from.

‘Nah,' she says. ‘Transportation. But I want to hear about your exhibition. The critics raved about your work. I bet Nancy Thingo was furious. All that hype and bluster. Then someone comes and blows it all away with some great paintings. Did you enjoy yourself?'

There is a slow thudding in my temples.

‘Not really.'

‘Well, we'll have to fix that. This one will be loads of fun. I am so glad you came. I was hoping you would.'

She holds her glass up and bumps it against mine.

We talk about art. My art first, which is a surprise. She knows a few of my paintings and I can't imagine how she managed to see pictures of them at all.

‘The internet,' she says, ‘is an amazing place.'

We talk about her art. She seems less interested in this.

‘No one sees my art anymore,' she says. ‘They just see my signature on the bottom of the canvas.' I glance down at the table, refusing to meet her eye.

In the toilet I feel my shoulders relax a little. A vague pain behind my temple. There is a sign telling me to put my paper in the basket not in the toilet bowl. The basket is full of paper. There is a suspicious smell from inside it, urine and shit and I try not to look too closely inside it to where some of the paper is streaked with blood. The walls are painted a dark red and there is gold writing on them, I wonder if these are more instructions on using the room but it is impossible to know. I throw my toilet paper into the basket with an odd feeling of guilt, even though I am doing exactly as instructed. I can sense my grandmother watching me, not an unfamiliar feeling.

I rinse my hands at the sink and pat my face, which is sweaty and swollen looking. I look like my sister. We look like my mother. I smile into the mirror and my sister smiles back.

I breathe deeply, a slight hesitation before opening the door.

‘You can't put the paper in the toilet?'

‘Nah. Old sewerage system. Can't even do a shit in some pubs. There's this one place that has a sieve in the bowl and a sign that says
You shit you pay
. They'll charge you, too.'

‘That's crazy.'

She leans in close to me and I can smell her perfume, woody, musky, expensive probably. ‘If anyone's afraid that China's going to take over the world,' she says, ‘they'd better think again. No country can be a superpower till they get their sanitation under control.'

I laugh. She grins. She settles back in her seat and just as I feel myself relaxing she begins to ask about home.

‘I visit Oma sometimes,' I tell her.

Her face is noncommittal. ‘Does she even know you're there?'

‘Yes. She does. She can't really speak.'

‘Nice place?'

‘Public health. Okay I suppose. They have a garden.'

‘You were always a good girl.' She sucks down the last of her cocktail and turns towards the bar. She puts two fingers in the air, an impolite sign or just the number of cocktails she is ordering.

Isabel says, ‘Coming up.'

‘Becca the good sister.' And I don't know if she is being nasty or just stating a fact.

‘Hard job,' I tell her. ‘Someone's got to do it.'

‘That's what Raphael says. And anyway, you do it with such style.'

The drinks arrive and I take a large sip of mine as she launches into a monologue about the other artists in the group exhibition.
Raphael says.
I want to wind her back, lay those two words out on the table as a valuer might lay out diamonds, holding them up to the light, hunting out imperfections with a magnifying glass. My mouth is sealed and I just nod and nod and when she says ‘—don't you think?' I can think of nothing to say to her at all.