by Kate Forsyth
Sara tried to help him, hanging around Bruce’s neck, and clutching at him with her knees, but he threw her off as easily as a dog shaking off a fly. Sara hit the water with a splash, which suddenly detonated into a tall fountain as a long, dark figure dived into the pool. Water broke, ripples of light cascading over the walls. Then Augusto had Bruce by the shoulders and was throwing him up in the air so that he fell into the deep end with a smack! of bare flesh hitting water. ‘Like playing games, do we?’ Augusto said and it was hard to tell whether his voice was laughing or frowning. As Bruce struggled to the surface, Augusto seized him again and upended him over his shoulder. Sara and Joe swam to the edge and watched, laughing. Bruce tried to escape, but Augusto climbed out of the pool and marched around the edge, singing a Catalan rumba, and beating time on Bruce’s bottom. Then Augusto threw Bruce into the deep end with a resounding crack that turned his stomach pink.
That was one good thing about Augusto. He understood the need for revenge.
Sirens wailed through the greyness. Sara jerked her head up. Headlights wavered through the trees as the police jeep laboured up the steep hill. She unknotted her arms and legs and stood up. The police were brisk and business-like. They shone a spotlight over the lip of the cliff. Sara gazed down, mesmerised by the odd asymmetry of her father’s body. He was caught by one leg. The other dangled, bent at a peculiar angle. His arms hung loosely. His white shirt was dyed red all down one side. His black hair swayed in the wind.
Someone grasped her shoulders, walked her away as if she had no will of her own, sat her down with a blanket wrapped around her legs. It was a large policeman in a dark blue coat. He poured her a thermos cap of coffee. Sara clutched it, warming her hands, staring at the dim shapes working together at the cliff’s edge. After a while, she lifted her hands to her mouth and sipped, the heat relaxing the muscles around her mouth so she choked.
‘When was the last time you saw your father?’
‘After lunch. He took off on the Elephant – his motorcycle. He didn’t come home for dinner …’
‘Did he say where he was going?’
Sara shook her head, and held the cup tightly in her hands.
‘Did he give any indication at all of what he planned to do?’
‘He had his easel …’ she managed to say.
‘How did he seem?’
When Sara failed to understand, the policeman rephrased his question. ‘What sort of mood was your father in when he left the house?’
Sara was not sure how to answer. It seemed like a trap. She let her hair fall over her face and admitted, ‘He was angry. They’d been arguing.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Dad and Alex and Harry – my uncles. They always argue, though.’
‘What were they arguing about?’
‘Oh, money, I s’pose. I’m not really sure. It’s usually money. It doesn’t matter, though, ’cause Dad’s finished his painting. He’ll be able to pay Alex back now.’ Her words sounded childish to her own ears and she flushed and fell again into silence.
‘How well did your father know this headland? Did he come here often?’
‘All the time, at least, lately. He’s been painting it.’ She found it hard to answer. Little tremors ran up and down her legs, her teeth chattering against the metal cup.
‘Do you know if your father had any reason for wanting to take his own life?’
The cup fell from her hand, spilling hot coffee over her fingers. She could not look at the policeman. She could not breathe. With her eyes squeezed shut, she clenched her hands into fists and began to count under her breath, rocking back and forth. One, two, three, four … It did not work. She pressed her hands over her face, over her ears, she pushed herself as close to the ground as she could.
She felt someone touch her arm and flinched violently. One, two, three, four …
It was Joe. Sara pressed her head against his legs. Even though her hands were still jammed over her ears, she heard him shouting.
‘Can’t you see she’s upset! Why are you asking all these questions?’
The policeman said calmly, ‘When there’s been an unexplained accident of this kind, it’s necessary for us to make inquiries …’
‘Can’t you see now is not the time! It’s OK, Sara, it’s OK …’
Sara clung tighter but Joe broke her hold about his knees, striding to speak to the policeman whose walkie-talkie crackled in the silence. Then he knelt, watching the slow progress of an abseiler down the cliff-face.
‘Where’d the twins go? Why aren’t they here?’ he asked. In the half-light, Sara saw lines in her brother’s face she had never seen before.
‘They left me here.’
‘Poor Sar. Was it horrible?’
She nodded.
Suddenly there was an excited babble. The policeman shouted into his receiver and all the rescue team stared over the cliff, talking excitedly.
‘What is it?’ Joe asked, and tried to push past the blue shoulders.
‘He’s still alive,’ the policeman said. ‘He’s very badly injured, though. We’ll have to winch him up.’
Augusto’s death had been easier to believe. Sara had seen his broken figure, hanging from a ledge of stone, forty feet below. How could he have survived such a fall?
Joe sat down abruptly. His face was grey as ashes. Sara understood how he felt. Augusto was alive. Her own knees were trembling so much she could not stand either. Her head roared. She pressed her hands to her ears, hunching her face down into her knees. The roaring was so loud she thought she must faint. Suddenly a helicopter rose into view. The clamour of its blades sent leaves and dirt whirling up into little dust-devils that lashed her face and body. Sara hid her face in her knees once more.
For long moments she crouched there, surrounded by the rush and roar of the wind, then the helicopter rose once more and swung away, Augusto like Jonah in the whale’s dark belly. Sara lifted her face, then climbed shakily to her feet. The helicopter looked like a mosquito, vanishing into the cloud-capped distance. Sara wished she had had the courage to go with her father, but knew she would have been afraid, the ground dropping away, the blades whistling pitilessly, space and emptiness all around.
The sky folded. It took her by surprise. Sitting on the ground, Sara saw blood on her palm, and heard the sea inside her skull.
Then Joe’s face hung above her. ‘Sara? What’s wrong?’
Her heart slammed oddly.
‘Come on, Sar, get yourself together.’ Joe heaved her to her feet.
‘I’m just tired.’
‘You’ll be right. Let’s get you home.’ Joe steered her down the steep hill towards the truck, parked askew at the end of the track. He heaved Augusto’s motorcycle into the back, threw in the broken easel they had found near the edge, the palette of ruined paint, the paint-tubes all spilling out their brightly coloured gore. Sara stood by the truck, Augusto’s sodden sketchbook still clutched to her chest. She could not open the door.
‘You rode up here on the back of Dom’s trail bike,’ Joe said impatiently. ‘I promise you the truck is much safer and I’m a much better driver.’
Sara did not move.
‘For God’s sake, get in!’ he cried. ‘Do you want to walk home?’
Sara opened the door and clambered in. The old truck rattled down the track and onto the road, Joe accelerating towards the turn. Sara held her breath. The wide silver and black stripes of the road barrier sprang at them. ‘Joe, please don’t …’
He said nothing. She braced herself against the dashboard. As they swerved around the corner, Joe leant forward, as he always did, to see where their mother’s car had crashed through the barrier and down the side of the hill. Ten years had erased any signs of her passage. Where there had once been blackened earth and broken trees and the burnt-out hulk of her car, there was now only a faint scar to show it had ever happened. To look was a test of strength.
Sara did not look. She squeezed her eyes shut, only o
pening them once the car again sped down the straight. Through the blur of trees she saw the long contours of the land emerging from mist: the crooked line of the boundary fence, the tall poplars like a barrier of spears, the sliver of pewter that was the dam, the vague outline of the hills. Across the valley, like a boat floating on a grey sea, was the farmhouse, its windows blinking red.
Joe took the last corner like a racing driver, bouncing Sara out of her seat. ‘Joe, please don’t …’ she said again, catching her breath on a sob. As a child Sara had loved this stretch of road, which rose and fell like a roller-coaster. Now she hated it.
The truck plunged into mist, submerging Joe and Sara in a nether-world, phantoms floating through a dim, enigmatic landscape. She looked sideways at her brother. He looked angry. ‘Will he be all right?’ she said tentatively.
Joe shrugged. ‘I dunno.’
Built on the crest of a hill, the house looked north and east across lush green paddocks to the sea. Tall and white, with a steep roof made of tin and one square, fancy-trimmed turret, it had been built before the death of the last century, when Bridget’s ancestors had been in their greatest flush of wealth and able to indulge a desire for ostentation.
Her great-grandfather, Robert Halloran, had followed the fevered rush to Narooma after gold was found on Mount Dromedary in the 1860s. A cool, shrewd, hard-headed man, he had no intention of searching for gold himself, instead setting up a general store and post office and charging a fortune for his goods. By the time the creeks flowing off Mount Dromedary had been panned clean, he had made enough money to buy and clear some good dairy land and build a grand house for his growing family.
Several generations of Hallorans lived out their lives at Towradgi, ring-barking the trees and over-fertilising the land, shooting, trapping and poisoning the rabbits, enduring the grasshoppers, the droughts, the bushfires and the floods. Then, in the year Joe was born, Narooma saw the worst drought since 1923. Dead cows lay in the fields where they had fallen, and the dry soil blew into little whirlwind devils called wurrawilberoos by the local Aborigines. The dam was a red scar in the brown paddock, a thirsty crack waiting for the rain that never came. The drought lasted, with little respite, for another four years.
James Halloran, Bridget’s father, frowned, shook his head, and moved his money out of dairying and his family out of Towradgi. He bought a nice, modern house and a prosperous liquor store in Narooma, and invested in a large white motor launch for his son Alex to take tourists out whale-watching and deep sea fishing. It was to prove him as shrewd a businessman as his grandfather. The year the twins were born was the year butter prices fell to their lowest since the ’50s. Over one hundred dairy farms on the South Coast went bankrupt. The Halloran family, however, flourished as tourism grew, and when the young man Bridget Halloran had married proved himself a spendthrift and philanderer, just as her father had predicted, he felt generous enough to give her the old farm by the sea, so she would at least have a home to raise her brood of skinny, dago kids.
Years of neglect had seen the old house sag into the hill. Its white walls were peeling and stained, its gutters drooped with storm-wrack and its verandah was piled high with broken chairs, dead pot plants, mildewed cardboard boxes, cobwebbed brooms, corroded sheets of corrugated iron and discarded canvases, the delicate flowers of mould creeping over their pale backs.
Beneath the house, on the flat, was a huddle of tin sheds, brown with rust. Cows jostled against the fence of the yard, flanks red with mud. The farm’s new manager, Matthew, leant on one of the fences. He wore an ancient brown oilskin and a cigarette hung out of his mouth. His black hair, damp from the mist, drooped over his forehead. As the truck passed along the road, he looked up, and raised a hand. Large teeth gleamed.
Joe slammed on the brakes and wound down his window.
‘Morning,’ Matthew said.
‘Shouldn’t you be putting the cows through?’ Joe said.
‘Give me a break,’ Matthew replied amiably enough, though his eyes narrowed a fraction. ‘It’s only just past six and misty as hell. What are you guys doing out and about so early?’ He looked past Joe at Sara, but she hid behind her hair, staring straight ahead.
‘Gus has had an accident,’ Joe said tersely, gripping the steering-wheel. ‘We’ve been out all night looking for him. He must’ve slipped somehow, fallen. Up at Towradgi Headland. They had to bring out the rescue helicopter to winch him up.’
‘God!’ Matthew said. ‘Is he all right?’
‘What do you reckon?’ Joe spoke with an edge of bitter sarcasm.
Sara took a deep breath. ‘He’s still alive,’ she said in a quavering voice, not daring to look at Matthew. These were the first words she had ever addressed to Matthew, in the three months since he had come to live at the farm. ‘He’s very badly hurt, though. I … I don’t think he’ll be all right.’
‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry,’ Matthew said, leaning forward so he could look at her across Joe’s tense muscled arms. She looked at him sideways for a moment then swung her hair across her face again. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ he asked.
‘Put the cows through?’ Joe said wearily.
‘Sure,’ Matthew said, stepping back. ‘Of course.’
‘I’ll be down in a min,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll just drop Sara back.’
‘No need,’ said Matthew. ‘I’ll look after it.’
With the slightest twitch of his thick, dark eyebrows and an almost imperceptible flare of his nostrils, Joe made his feelings clear. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said.
‘Sure, fine, take your time,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s only early yet.’
As the truck surged forward, Sara looked back. Matthew was still watching. At once, she swung her gaze away.
Matthew always made her edgy and uncomfortable. She never looked at him or spoke to him when he came up to the house for his morning tea, yet she watched him surreptitiously as he worked around the farm, shirt off, his brown skin glistening, the swing and pump of his arms making her shiver. He was the first male outside her family that she had seen in years, she told herself. She had to expect him to ruffle her dreams and disturb her days.
The truck pushed its way along the overgrown driveway, the house disappearing behind a tangle of trees, only the roof of its tower jutting above the branches. Puddles reflected in sepia the overhanging leaves of the shrubs and bushes, crowding in close. Twigs snapped. The truck broke out of the overhang of the trees as if out of a tunnel. Joe pulled in with an impatient yank at the parking brake.
Teresa slouched out the front door. ‘Well, at least she’s up,’ Joe said. ‘I hope she’s got a hell of a hangover.’ Ignoring her, he jammed his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and stamped down the path towards the sheds.
Sara took a deep breath and opened the car door. When she got out her legs were shaking so much she had to hang on to the door to stop them from folding beneath her. She tried hard to breathe.
Staring at her in amazement, Teresa ran forward and took her arm. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded. ‘What’s happened? I woke up and everyone was gone.’
In her voice was the incredulous knowledge that Sara had gone, Sara who had not left the farm in five years. To wake up and find Sara gone was like waking and finding the sun had turned blue, all the world drowned in grotesque shadows.
Sara took a deep, wobbly breath and managed to get to the steps up to the verandah before her legs gave out. She sat down and buried her face in her hands.
‘What’s wrong?’ Teresa asked, anxiety sharp in her voice.
‘There’s been an accident. Dad fell over the cliff at Towradgi Headland.’
‘What? You’re joking!’ Suddenly the angry incredulity left Teresa’s face, as Sara sobbed aloud. ‘What happened? Is he … you don’t mean …’
Sara wiped her eyes and tried to swallow her tears. ‘He’s not dead. He’s hurt, though, really badly hurt. They’ve taken him to Moruya Hospital.’
‘How bad was he h
urt? Will he be all right?’
‘I hope so, but … he looked awful, his leg all bent, his head … He was out all night in that storm, y’know, and it was such a bad fall, he was hanging upside down for hours and hours … I can’t believe he’s alive at all.’
Hearing the thickness of the silence Sara looked up and saw Teresa’s face. Hurriedly she tried to reassure her. ‘He’ll be all right, sweetie, don’t worry. The doctors’ll look after him. He’s a tough old boot.’
Teresa sank down to press close beside her, sliding her hand into Sara’s. ‘Oh, no, not Dad too!’ she wailed. ‘Don’t let him die, don’t let him die.’
Troubled Waters
low tide – 0.5 m
4.40 am, Easter Saturday
high tide – 1.2 m
11.33 am, Easter Sunday
Sara had called Augusto’s motorcycle the Elephant since she was five. Like so many of their secret nicknames and passwords, it originated in their chess games.
Augusto first began to teach Sara to play chess to keep her amused after she was confined to bed with a broken ankle. A quiet, dreamy child, she was very clumsy, knocking vases off tables, or dropping plates into the washing-up water. One day, she tripped while running down the steps, and her ankle folded beneath her with the sound of a dry twig snapping.
Bridget was at her best when any of her children were hurt. She took Sara to Manly Hospital, dragging Joe and the two-year-old twins with her. They had to wait for three hours. The twins screamed red-faced, Sara sobbed white-faced, and Bridget sat in an icy calmness, repeating patiently to all of Sara’s pleas, ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, I don’t know where he is.’