Notes on Stohli

His name is short for Stolichnaya.

She drives under the harbour every day to see him. She drives a long way in a car the colour of bournvita. A small dent in the front left panel and clothes from the shop—a bundle of corduroys flung in the back. The winter range will feed him, the winter range will buy him a new rug and a bale of premium-grade lucerne hay. A bag of crushed oats.

She is up before the light, pulling on clothes in the small dark house. She can see the white plumes her breath makes in the morning air. White plume of his tail twitching irritation in a corner of the arena, a sign she has asked him to do something difficult—renvers or travers, perhaps counter-canter. A small circle at the canter and then a change of rein. She tolerates his bites, his teeth catch on her denim jacket as she does up the girth. ‘It’s just a game with him,’ she says, even though he has bitten every stable-hand in the place.

Dirt under her nails and steam rises from his white back as she lets the hose play over him. Morning Glory twines on the wire fence. Dirt under her nails later in the shop when one of the major suppliers comes in. ‘How’s it going today?’ he asks, meaning business not the horse. He is immaculately dressed and his girlfriend also is immaculately dressed. ‘Many customers?’

She doesn’t like to say she only just walked in. He looks at her nails and her clothes, her hair flattened by the cap. She doesn’t like to say she’s been out riding the white horse with the name like vodka. The white horse with scars on his hips so that people think he’s been in a fire. ‘How did he get out of the fire?’ they ask as she rubs yellow ointment onto the sharp bald points of his hips where the hair won’t grow. Again she sees the glistening keyboard of his teeth as he reaches around and bites air. He gives a small groan.

From the arena she can see the white dome of the Baha’i Temple sticking up above the trees. The arena her meditation, she walks down the centre-line and halts at X. Her instructor says, ‘From now on you are entering the page 52 territory where it is impossible to describe what you feel.’ He puts his lighter in the sand and pushes it back and forth to demonstrate the forces acting on the horse. These he calls created forces.

She sits on the floor and sorts the corduroy jeans into sizes and colours— mustard, teal, maroon and black, snips the loose threads because ‘The department stores won’t take them like this’. She sits on the concrete floor of the shop and thinks of the shoulder-in. The moment when he lowered his croup and rounded his back, the moment when he flexed his hocks and she felt the elastic rhythmic movement, the strong beat of his trot.

She sat very still so as not to disturb his balance, her shoulders parallel with his, her inside hand guiding him off the track, her inside leg gently telepathic—not allowing him to fall in. Somewhere in between the two— her hand and her leg—the supple bend of his spine, his hooves making three tracks in the sand along the long side of the arena. Just for a moment she felt the connection—the language perfected between them.

Milk

I knew it was him coming along the avenue of trees, mostly Moreton Bay Figs, on his white horse. I could tell by the way the horse walked with his neck stretched out, his head down ready to take a sly pick of grass escaping the neat edge of the track. I could tell by his size, the whiteness of him like a tall glass of milk I take from the refrigerator and hold to my lips.

He once told me I was good at the two things he most wanted to do. This was in the days when he began painfully to learn to ride, teetering on the end of a lunge rein while pigeons nested in the roof of the indoor arena. Their shit landed, green and messy, a white rim like the white of a poached egg which later calcified on his saddle. I watched slyly through a crack in the wall. He said it was the hardest thing he ever did, much harder than medical page 53 school and this is what kept him going, this and the Polish riding instructor who is so proud of him. He wears him on his shirt, a small star pinned there for everyone to admire.

He told me he admired my skill, something I learned as a child and his compliments discomfited me—an inability to accept praise, something also left over from childhood. Now he rides his own horse, rides well—possibly better than me—and I stand on the ground outside the restaurant where dogs are tied to metal stakes in the ground, where dogs lap water from stainless steel bowls while their owners eat lunch.

I adjust the bit where it has caught on the drop-noseband and it is as if I have touched him, smoothed the back of his collar where it has become wrinkled—this intimacy with his horse as it shoves me and leaves white hairs, the tail of a comet in the night sky of my shirt. He doesn’t bother to restrain it, his reins dark loops falling on either side of the horse’s neck. He tells me he has discovered a way to remove the green stains from its coat. These stains arrive like mould after a night spent lying in soiled straw. He shows me the piece of charcoal like a black, porous cuttlefish and how you can use it to lift the dirt, rubbing with the nap of the hair.

His face is in shadow beneath the broad brim of his hat and I can’t see his eyes. His hands, in response to mine, reach down to pat the horse’s neck. There is between us a moment of awkwardness as if we don’t know how to part. His stirrup winks at my shoulder, the toe of his boot almost touches my arm as I tilt my head to let him know it’s over and I’m about to step over the sleeping dogs. But it is he who leaves first, taking up the slack reins and walking the horse away. Its hooves make a hollow, ringing sound on the road. A sound with steel in it. I call him back to tell him something else, as if to postpone the moment of parting.