Steeplechase Read Free

sister. My sister just called me and I spoke to her. I imagine the words as if they were written in a book: twenty-three years later my sister called . I flip the phone closed, then open. Check through my address book just to see that her number is still there. Check the recent calls and it is true. She called me. Last incoming call. Sister. My sister.
    I hold the phone against my chest and give in to the insistent tug of the morphine. I taste my grandmother’s soup on my tongue and I might be fifteen again. I might be ill and recovering on the couch. I might be listening to the sound of my grandmother locking the doors and windows, that rhythmic slapping of drawn bolts, locks slipping into place, windows sliding on their rail. Before it all came apart, before the terrible thing. I close my eyes and I am transported to a time when I felt safe and secure and locked up tight.

Locked Tight
    She locks all the doors and all the windows. I hear the rattle of keys taken from a hook by the door. It is summer and the air is stale and damp in the house. Perhaps outside there is some small breeze, something with an edge of cool to cut through all this heat and sweat, but our grandmother begins her rounds and there will be no evening relief.
    We listen to the rattle and scrape as one window after another is pulled to. The jangle of keys, each window a different key and she must find it on the ring and then turn it in the lock before moving on. The house is a box for warm bodies. The collective heat of us accumulates.
    I sit up in bed when our Oma comes in, but Emily does not stir. She is reading, turned onto her side, propped up with two white pillows. I hear the lazy shick of her page turning but apart from this she remains very still.
    My grandmother is a short nugget of a woman, all wire and muscle. There is no stillness in her. There is a fat metal bar on her key ring. This is a weapon. If she is attacked she will use it, a heavy blow to the head. I believe she could overpower anyone.
    She rarely talks about the past but there is this one story. She was sent away for safety, hoisted up onto a train. She was only young, our age or even younger, and she didn’t have a proper ticket. When the guard came he tried to make her leave her seat but she hooked her fingers around the arms of her chair and held on. Eventually he shrugged and moved off, hoping to find an easier offender in another carriage. My grandmother has always been fearless. ‘I stay alive,’ she says in her thick guttural accent. Her fearlessness has saved her many times, I suspect. I wonder about all the other times, the ones that she has not named. I watch her sinewy arms reaching and pulling and locking and it is impossible not to compare myself to her. I am more like my mother, round and squat and puffy in the cheeks.
    She locks the window and turns in the doorway to face us: my bed and my sister’s. She is standing on the line that runs the length of the room as if here at the exact place that divides Emily’s half from mine she might speak to both of us and prove she is not playing favourites, which is something that she simply refuses to do.
    â€˜Don’t stay up ruining your eyes.’
    I nod, but Emily says nothing. She flicks a page. Our grandmother pulls the door closed behind her and Emily rolls onto her back and holds the book open over her face. Her shoulders shake slightly. Maybe she is crying or maybe she is laughing. It is impossible to know what Emily is feeling at any moment. One emotion seems to morph so quickly into another. I hear our grandmother moving down the corridor and into our mother’s room. Emily said once that she remembered our mother as she was before. She said she looked like a princess, but it seems impossible now.
    There are thirteen windows in our house if you include the sliding glass doors. There are two heavy wooden doors. I count them, the soft squeal of my mother’s window, the twin snappings