Furious Horses

>It starts—or at least I choose to start it—as I’m going up some stairs, into her room. She lives in the attic, up through a tiny hatch. Stairs small and steep, not for her tiny feet, but my shoes take two edges at a time. A room swung on hooks, her clothes closing in. This week it’s pleated skirts, her thing, her theme. Four different sorts, layered one behind the other, a sliding scale in grey.

This girl, I must explain, can make me dance deep with my enemies. She punches right through me, and I cannot get enough. It’s the first time she’s let me up here, this secret place she exists. I’m dressed in my best clothes, rugged up for the expected cold, somehow feeling stuffy and stupid now. She kicks back, more casual than I’ve ever seen her. Jeans and singlet. Her never-previous let’s-stay-in look. She’s taking me apart. Piece by tiny piece.

>She’s got this nearly chinless face, which isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds, because she’s European, and her nose bends over in a hawklike way. And she’s small, birdy, gorgeous. She dresses in silk blouses. Colour and consistency of cream. All the time. Pencil skirts that have an actual pencil shape, that sort of horrendously perfect thing.

Whereas me, I lose change down the front of my shirt. Am described as willowy by people who do not know what this word means. Have a constant, quizzical mouth-full-of-toothpaste look which has been present since birth and seems to be here to stay. Red hair, brown, blonde, whatever light it’s in—wavy like a fucking crumpled car door. Awkward, titless, something approaching hopeless.

This is the two of us. Julia and I. Our top halves poking out the top of a makeup counter. Our island in a shopping centre sea. We’re only both here on a Saturday, the other six days we split. I’m Mondays and Tuesdays and Thursdays. I sell nothing, not one thing, in any given week. I give directions people (booth = information, apparently) and spend the rest of the time doodling in my art pad. It’s—as they say—a living.

>On went the good thick greasepaint, in went the five Wrigley’s, stacked up like pancakes. On with the worn-out cleats, just worn out enough. Walking tip-toed over the short span of concrete, clinking the bat, squeezing the worn-out rubber of the handle. Hands already sweaty, already letting seeping their own fears. The thoughts of turning back, three swipes to the gods of air, furious raging cheeks. That certain glint of sun off the pitcher’s blonde head, the dust and grass doing contortionist’s tricks. The ball already dense with spit and well-spent fury, dark as sin in the dusk. The nods of ghostly faces disappearing in the twilight outfield: wound-up bodies waiting for your muscle-twitch. Here’s the wind-up. And here it comes.

>All those thick windows, immovable. All that air, fresh-spilt from the atmosphere, circling around outside where no one could reach it. Raoul lent his head back, letting the weight of it piston out the cricks in his neck. Day nine, in this luxury hotel room. Luxury already more than gone. Just a more comfortable prison, the same way any place turned awful the longer you spent in it.

>Hush little Baby, don’t you cry,
Mama’s gonna bake you a pumpkin pie.
And if that pumpkin pie’s no good,
Mama’s gonna shack up with Robin Hood.
And if Robin Hood don’t treat her right,
Mama’s gonna set his head alight.
And if his head don’t burn so good,
Mama’s gonna throw on gas and wood.
And if Mama can evade the laws,
She’s gonna buy some robotic claws.
And if a helicopter’s free,
She’s gonna go on a killing spree.
And those who evade her metal hands,
Will get sliced up by sharpened fans.
So hush little Baby, don’t you cry.
Mama’s gonna help you, don’t ask why.

>It came at them like a backwards spun voice: uneasy, nearly identifiable, but still rapidly strange. Ghosts, they thought. Maybe. All they had was the sound of two human breaths, and above them, whatever was left after their inner selves had been expelled. Three more hours, they mouthed to each other, and then we can end it.

>It’s a windy spring day, and tree spores copter down in alien invasions. The sun blares out and scores of people wear the long-sleeved, broad-brimmed uniform of sensible outdoor workers. I can’t bring myself to join them. Even my shoes—runners with acrylic mesh across the top—are hardly the covered footwear outlined in the hastily printed posters, but they will have to do. Without the luxury of oversubscription, this particular adventure reluctantly embraces me.

Our group leader, who has a name something like Tarragon, is a bunch of bristles under a legionnaire’s cap with two deep-set eyes that I can feel do not like me at all. Those who impress Tarragon are the few who, like him, have arrived wearing wincingly reflective yellow King Gee jumpsuits, the fashion equivalent of four-wheel-drives never taken off bitumen. My legs have already sprung up in hives from the spiky pollened grass that grows waist high across nearly the entire valley.

We beat the grass with long identical sticks. Our team has been assigned a set of co-ordinates, marked in orange highlighter on a badly photocopied map, and we work our way along while each section is measuredly eliminated.

Keep to the line! shouts Tarragon, his voice carrying needlessly away over the valley.

Everyone looks up, searching for the out-of-step member of the party, and it’s me, a few steps behind, prodding the itchy grass attentively.

Stay together— there’s potential evidence everywhere! Tarragon shouts again, barbing his comment rather obviously in my direction.

I wave my hand deferentially, but hold my position. I keep my eyes fixed on the point continually opening for me in the thick grass as I bend it down with my stick, like when you push hair apart to see the scalp beneath.

I think he wants you to keep up, says a woman next to me who usually works in the newsagent’s. She touches my arm, as if I am actually in some way impaired and need gentle reminders of the way people behave.

I know, I tell the woman, but I’m not quite done here yet.

She looks at me quizzically. There’s a procedure, she says, touching my arm again. She thinks she’s just being understanding, that we’re all going through a lot right now, but if we all just pitch in together, everything will be okay.

The procedure won’t work if we’re half-arsed about it, I say. I’m taking my time, looking for details, not just thrashing around like a musketeer.

Most of the line stops, staring at the lady and I. Tarragon rapiers on oblivious, personifying my analogy rather brilliantly. Eventually he spins around and sees us all standing still.

What’s this? he shouts.

Someone thought he’d go at his own pace, sneers the newsagency lady, shedding her humanity like a fruit skin.

Tarragon’s black-marble eyes bore into me. Right, he says. You. Out of the line. Now!
I carefully step back.

Tarragon hoists a grin to his lips. If you think you’re so much more observant than us, why don’t you go back where the dawn team started, and see if they missed anything.

And where would that be?

Grid section J4. Hop to it! Tarragon waves his arms, and the line moves forward without me, enveloping my vacant space.

I swipe my black stick at the disappearing figure of our team leader. Grid section J4 is back behind where we all parked out cars—at least a twenty-minute walk. Tarragon obviously expects me to just jump back in my car and head home. I want to prove him wrong. If his ego is bigger than the importance of the day, then to acquiesce will be to let everyone else down.

I whistle as I walk, relishing my solitude in a day of forced cooperation. The hunching backs of search teams ridge every hill; foot-flattened grass stretches away in equidistant waves; low branches lie broken, wrested away by inquisitive hands. The broken call and response of walkie-talkies wails sullenly in the distance. I locate section J4 via a green cross spray-painted to a granite rock. A cigarette lies in the dirt, trodden down, peeking up like a periscope. I set off down the wide flattened trail, determined to be like those detectives in radio dramas who calmly find the clue everyone else has missed.

>We pulled in just as the sun lent a burnt lip to the mountains. Swaying past were ferns and hydrangeas, flapping at the windscreen, leaving water and pollen. Lee wiped his hand across the inside of the window, and seemed only slightly surprised when it made no difference. I thought, he said, maybe, the condensation.

I smiled thinly and re-gripped the wheel. The unpaved road made steering a series of tics and twitches, like the old jeep was a skittish, jumpy animal. Nearly there.

The garage shimmered with formaldahyde. No air for fifteen years, at least. Lee shivered. Reverse out, he said. Let me get out in the garden. And who was I to argue. I backed the jeep out, and he jumped out before I’d even stopped. I could tell already, the way he kept pushing her hair back. He didn’t want to be here. A chorus of voices told me the same thing.

We went in through the side of the house, through the always-open screen door. That smell was still there. Hot fruit and soy sauce.

Jesus, said Lee, covering his mouth with his hand.

I looked at him. I said, Seriously. You’re going to do this? and he just shrugged his shoulders, standing still. I clenched my jaw, relaxed it—the way he hated—and felt the pleasant settling pain, my teeth realigning.

She was in the back garden. Of course. Never any ceremony, especially not now.

Ahoy there, I shouted out, from the open kitchen window. My mother half-turned, a clump of rainforest soil bulging through her tightened hand. Her face, from a 90-degree bend, looked more happy than surprised.

Thought you were coming later, she shouted back. As she straightened up, the grim chalkstripe of her mouth levelled off. She had on her overalls, her constant patchwork armour since dad went; almost no denim to them now, all material scraps and dirt.

I didn’t answer her. Just watched the wind picking at her hair. Lee appeared at my side. Hi, Helv, he said.

Mum licked her lips. So, she said, I get both boys, do I?

I felt Lee’s fingers digging into my shoulder. Ignoring her comment, I said, You want we should take the guest room?

She shrugged her shoulders. Got a bit more to do here. Sleep where you want.

I leant my head against Lee’s and watched the old lady turn away.

>

Wilhelm van Bilge was a moderately successful importer. He stood up one night. That was when the ghost killed him, but the ghost was invisible, so it looked like Wilhelm just died for no particular reason. And also there was also a cot in the room he was standing in. It turned out the ghost was Wilhelm’s dead child, come back to seek revenge on him because he pushed his pregnant wife down some stairs, killing her and the child. That’s why the cot was important. But why was the cot in the room with him, if his child had been killed? Well, he had bought the cot some months before the child’s birth because it was on sale, and his wife had reasoned that the next time they saw it, when they really needed it, that the cot would be far more expensive, and that would be typical. Was Wilhelm, then, perhaps killed by this very irony? No, it was the ghost.

>God, it had been a while since The General had ridden up over a hill feeling quite so good. The morning air was fresh, the ground was thick with clean dew, and great buckets of light came through the trees in such a way that a man could be forgiven for moistening up like a Nancy-boy.

This was The Stuff. There hadn’t been much of it in The General’s life of late, what with the minor setback and detainment on the Home Front, but now The Stuff was back, and it felt terrific. Oh, and the feeling of a fine horse between his legs. How he had missed that. All the muscles and the fetlocks and all that business with the mane. Oh yes. His uniform shone, every button polished perfectly, with all those lovely epaulets and tassels in the rightest of places. And that wonderful red line that ran down the sides of his trousers without the hint of a rumple—well, that was the stuff of legend. His boots were pointy and long, and they faced dead ahead.

The General could not wait for the generous tinge of gunpowder to waft over from the valley, to hear the boom of the cannons and the frantic cry of the enemy. Life, The General was wont of saying, was simply what one did between battles. Just beyond those thick birch trees lay his camp, and a legion of faithful men waiting to respond to his every call. Oh yes, The General was a tactician of the highest quality, always weighing up the options of attack, or for that matter, defence. The General could already see his lines of battlefield incision, the brilliant flanking movements of his men encircling the enemy.

Here it was now, as he emerged from the trees. He sat up even higher on his horse, closed his eyes, and braced himself for triumphant hurrahs and perhaps a rousing bugle tune to accompany his return. The air would ring with cries of, “The General returns!” and “Thank God for The General!” as he rode proudly among his grateful troops.

Strangely, though, no such comments came. The General opened his eyes. Where his strategy tent had once stood, there was now a bare expanse of earth. The place where his faithful lieutenants and officers had queued to receive their orders was now just overgrown groundcover. Where once a thousand brave men raced past the gleaming cannons onto the glorious field of battle with their bayonets held aloft in the name of Freedom —there was now nothing but a rolling meadow, knee-high grass waving in the light breeze.

Surely, thought The General, this could not be the hallowed ground where he had once out-manoeuvred a whole battalion with the superb use of the Punnerman formation. Surely this was not the place where he had fought alongside his men—his brothers—in the cause of the common good.

And yet, there was the tree under which he had stood when all seemed lost, and devised the tactics that brought about the famous Charge of the Spades. And over there, where that depression filled the ground, was that not the spot where a wayward cannon had almost taken three hundred of his men? Where had it all gone? The sun that had gleamed brilliantly off The General’s buckles only moments before now held heavy and hot on his silver-haired head.

There was movement in the fields below. A lone figure walked towards the General, with a gently swaying walk. Great Heavens, thought The General, the lone figure was in civilian clothes, and carried his hands in his pockets. The General rode down into the valley to scrutinise the man from closer quarters.

“What ho!” said The General to the figure, who, on closer inspection, proved to be a man of a haggard description, his shirt ragged and his face unshaven. “Where is the battle that once graced these fields?”

“Battle?” growled the man, “Wha’ battle?”

The General looked at the scruffy figure with more than a hint of suspicion. Here, evidently, was a man who had not felt the cold, flat blade of war pressed against his vitals.

“Why, The Battle,” bellowed The General, rising higher in his saddle with the glorious memory.

The man just scrunched up his face, looking, to The General’s eyes, not unlike a pumpkin that had been left out too long in the sun.

“You do not mean to tell me,” said The General,”that you have never heard of the Charge of the Spades.”

The man shook his head.

“What about the Punnerman formation?”

The man shook his head again.

“But you must have heard of the great General that presided over these fields,” said The General, moustache bristling with pride.

“I told you,” said the man, “I ain’t ’eard ’o no battle, I ain’t ’eard ’o no Punner’am formation, and I ain’t ’eard ’o no general.’ He scratched his finger vigorously around inside his ear. “Whass more,” he added, “there ain’t never been no battle ’ere for as long as I been walking these fields. And that be quite a while.”

“No battle?” said the General quietly. The red stripe down the side of his trousers had rumpled slightly.

“Ravin’ loony,” said the scruffy man, before walking off over the hill.

The General was left alone in the middle of the field—a field conspicuously absent of gun smoke or courageous cries or brilliant tactical formations.

If you desire peace, The General was once fond of saying, then prepare for war. Perhaps, he thought, it should have been the other way around.

He tugged on his horse’s reins, and with a noticeable slump in his shoulders, rode back the way he had come.