by Kate Forsyth
Through the flashing trees they had their first sight of the farm. Paddocks, burnt sere-yellow from the summer heat, fell down to dams like red scars of mud, and a line of brown poplars along the valley road. The long range of hills facing the sea were shaped like a dying horse, dun flanks falling away from a sharp rise of spine. On the opposite hill was a white house with a squat white tower. ‘That’s where I lived when I was little,’ Bridget said.
There was no other house in the valley. ‘Are we going to live there?’ Joe said. ‘Who does it belong to?’
‘To me,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather has given it to us. It’s to be ours forever.’
‘We’re going to live here always?’ Joe demanded, winding down the window so the fresh air, spiced with the smells of the bush, flowed in over them.
‘Ever and ever,’ Bridget laughed.
The road rose and fell. The children squealed.
‘Go faster, Dad, go faster,’ Joe begged.
Augusto accelerated so the car rose and swooped like a bird. Faster and faster they went, the yellow valley flashing in and out of the blurring trees like a message in Morse code.
Then they were zooming along the valley road, the house above coming closer and closer, floating like a boat in the darkness while the sea, beyond the fall of the hills, was still luminous with last-light.
Towradgi House was empty of furniture. In the lavender twilight, the echoing rooms were eerie. Gradually the children fell silent, and Sara stayed close to her father. She found a dead bird in one room. Its eyes were closed and its beak tucked to its chest. Something had eaten out its stomach.
A gilt mirror still hung on the landing. She stood and stared solemnly at her dim, floating reflection. In the other-world of the mirror she saw her father standing in the front door, looking out at the darkening valley. Her mother came and laid her hand against his arm. He shook it off and, after a moment, she went away. Later that night, when Augusto and Sara played chess in a small room that smelt of mildew and had no furniture, he did not call the bishop a fool, and he did not let Sara win.
Sara lifted her forehead away from the door and quickly, surreptitiously, wiped a finger under each eyelid. She slid through the ill-lit house like a pale fish through murky water, her shabby ugh boots making no sound on the floorboards.
In the kitchen she stood and looked at the plates stacked unsteadily by the sink, still smeared with red and stuck with soggy crusts from the baked beans on toast they had eaten the night before. Next to them was a cluster of brown-stained coffee mugs, the empty baked bean can with a spoon still shoved in it, an open margarine container, the buttery knife, a litter of crumbs, and then an army of empty beer cans, reeking of stale ale and cigarette butts. Above the sour smell of the kitchen Sara caught a whiff of vomit and remembered, with a rebellious heave of her stomach, Teresa’s clothes, still unwashed in the laundry.
Set precisely in the middle of the kitchen table was Annie’s casserole dish. Sara felt a spur of shame, imagining her cousin Brett here in the kitchen, holding his nose, grimacing. She imagined him telling his mother about it on the way home, laughing, and Annie telling Alex and all her bowling friends, and Alex shaking his head with customers in the grog shop, and Brett and Craig sniggering with their fishing mates.
She lifted the alfoil and stared down at the hard grey nugget of meatloaf, rimmed with congealed fat. She scrunched the foil into a ball and threw it at the bin. It hit the wall a foot or two away and bounced back on to the floor. Sara hardly noticed. She grabbed a knife off the bench and loosened the meatloaf in its dish.
Then she opened the back door, kicked open the flyscreen door with her foot and with one big, easy motion flung the meatloaf out into the yard. At once the dogs began to quarrel over it, dragging it about in the dust.
‘Sorry, girls,’ Sara said. ‘Hope it doesn’t give you a tummy-ache.’
She let the doors bang shut and sat down, looking at the empty dish, a hot glow of guilty pleasure in her chest. There was misery in there too. It was impossible not to remember how her father had thrown her baked fish out the door in just that way yesterday. Samfaina y bacalao a la catalana. Thirty hours it took to soak the dried cod before it could be cooked, yet only three seconds for it to hurtle through the air and land in the dust for the dogs to snarl over.
It was the first time Sara had tried to cook anything out of her grandmother’s cookbook. She had done it to make her father happy. Yet he had flung it to the dogs. Sara sat down at the table and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
After a while, she got up and put the empty casserole dish in the sink, letting water gush into it for a few moments, not long enough for the water to heat. She looked up at the shelf above the sink. The desire to read the cards again was so sharp, so urgent, Sara understood it must be wrong. She tried to stifle the urge, fought it as she fought her panic attacks, breathing in deep and slow till her lungs hurt, breathing out till her chest cavity sunk to her hips, counting each breath, controlling time by counting it. But she was too muddled with emotion. Like a paintbrush might swirl together green, blue, trans magenta, amethyst and orange, and end up with a muddy brown, so Sara could not separate fear, guilt, shame, pleasure, hope, despair. Her need to know, her need to see through the murk, was too imperative.
To help you see more clearly, her grandmother had written.
So Sara reached up and seized the box from behind its camouflage of old magazines and yellowing bills. She cradled it to her, then sat down and opened the box, leaning over it for the ritual inhalation of cinnamon dust. She unwrapped the tarot cards and shuffled them, loving the rhythmic flick against her palm. Her fingers slowed. She held the cards against her chest, wondering for whom she read. She had meant to read for her father but now it was clear it was her own fate she sought to see. This disturbed her. She was afraid of the future.
Sara laid out the cards. Their backs had an intricate pattern of fruit and fronds that Sara had always loved. She put out one hand and blindly groped in the box. There was a rattle, then she drew out her mother’s rosary. Forbidden and hidden for many years. She glanced at it, let one, two, three black beads trickle between her finger and thumb, sounding in her mind, if not a prayer, at least a wish. Only then did she find the courage to turn over the first card.
The Fool.
Carrying a bundle on a stick over one shoulder and a white rose in the other, a young man is about to step blithely over a precipice. He stands for innocence, ignorance, folly, a dreamer who knows nothing, who still has everything to learn.
Sara stared at the card. Was she a fool?
The second card was Strength, reversed. A woman belted and garlanded with roses grips the muzzle of a lion with her hands. This was a card Sara usually associated with her cousin Gabriela, for it signified force of character, as well as the triumph of love over hate, spirituality over materialism, the higher nature over carnal desires. Upside down, it meant weakness, fear, moral laxity.
Sara’s anxiety and bafflement deepened. Was she weak?
Reluctantly she turned over the third card. Two of Swords. A woman sits blindfolded, a sword balanced over either shoulder. Behind her is the sea, frothing over sharp rocks. The Two of Swords is a card of stasis, denoting both a moment of balance and of blindness.
Was Sara blind?
She did not want to ponder what the cards were telling her. Unhappily she put the cards back in the box and coiled the rosary beads upon them, a snake with poisoned jaws clamped upon a cross of glittering jet.
Her mother’s rosary beads had always been kept in a little porcelain jar on Bridget’s dressing-table. Augusto sneered at them and so Bridget only got them out when he was not home. Even then she seemed to play with the rosary rather than pray with it, running the beads back and forth between her fingers, tilting the jet cross from side to side so it shot out black sparks.
The last time Sara had seen her mother with her rosary beads was the night before she died. Sara had woken screa
ming, fighting the sheets, her dreaming eyes still filled with a terrible vision of fire. She tumbled out of bed, and ran through the house looking for her mother.
She found Bridget sitting at her dressing-table, gazing at herself in the mirror. Her face was blank, her eyes stony-grey, her dull red hair loosened from its usual stiff bondage and flowing down on to her shoulders. In her hands Bridget held the rosary. She was counting Hail Marys, her lips moving almost soundlessly, watching herself pray.
‘Glory be,’ she whispered, and her fingers clenched on the jet-black beads.
Only then did she see Sara’s reflection in the mirror. For some reason Sara was terribly frightened, though what was there to terrify her in the sight of her mother playing with a string of beads?
Bridget did not look round. ‘Go back to bed, Sara,’ she said wearily to her daughter’s reflection. Though there was no anger in her voice, Sara obeyed at once.
That was Sara’s last memory of her mother. Though Bridget must have fed her breakfast and packed her school bag, and run after her with an apple or her hat, or her maths homework, or whatever else Sara might have forgotten, and driven her and Joe and the twins to the bus stop, just as usual, the image etched with acid on Sara’s mind was Bridget’s stony face, staring at the mirror and watching herself as she prayed.
Sara, Joe, Dylan and Dominic were on the way home from school when it happened. It was a chilly winter’s evening, the sun setting behind the low hills, the full moon rising from above the water, orange and leery as a jack-o’-lantern. The old school bus was just slowing down for their stop when Sara heard, distantly, a skidding and crashing sound. A few seconds later, a muffled boom. Everyone was craning their necks round, crying, ‘What was that! Did you hear that?’ Then they saw a cobra of smoke uncoiling ahead of them, raising its flat, evil head above the bushy headland, swaying hypnotically to the soundless command of a snake-charmer’s pipe. At once Sara had felt that terrible clutch of terror, that certainty something dreadful had happened. She had stared at it, mesmerised, her breath whimpering in her throat as she fought to cry out, to tell someone, to sound the alarm.
The bus driver would not let them out. She knew something bad had happened too. They had to wait for the police to come. By the time they were finally driven home, it was fully dark and so cold, Sara’s breath floated white before her. All was confusion. People kept coming to the house, filling the silence with noise, yet Augusto just sat, staring at his hands.
Later, he cleaned out all of Bridget’s things, stuffing them in garbage bags, his face white and knotted in fury. Sara did not know why she pilfered the rosary beads. Augusto was in such a rage he would have slapped her if he had seen. And there were many other things Sara could have taken that would have been a truer memorial of her mother. Her favourite velour jumper, the same dim cloudy-blue as her eyes and still smelling of her perfume. The big floppy hat she always wore outside, in a vain attempt to protect her skin from freckles. The gold tube of orange-brown lipstick. The pearl earrings given to her on her twenty-first birthday by her father.
Yet it was the rosary that unwound itself from Augusto’s armful of clothes and shoes and handbags and jewellery, and slithered to the floor, catching Sara’s hot, tear-dry eyes with its gleaming black scales.
So it was the rosary that was hidden in Sara’s carved wooden box that her grandmother had given her, along with Consuelo’s tarot cards, wrapped in white silk so old it was turning yellow.
Sara hid the tarot cards away again. Out of habit she listened to the silence of the house. Easter Saturday, and the house was silent as a tomb. Sara glanced at the clock. Where were the twins? She had not seen them since they had driven off into the storm on their trail bikes. That had been at four-thirty. It was now eight-thirty. Four hours. Two hundred and forty minutes. Fourteen thousand, four hundred seconds. Where were they? The question lodged in her windpipe like a fishbone.
Sara busied herself with the endless round of chores that was her life. She put Teresa’s vomit-encrusted clothes in the wash and hung out the load from yesterday, though the sky looked heavy and grey with rain. She fed the chickens and the calves, and threw the dogs a few lamb knuckles to make up for the meatloaf. She managed to take out the beer cans, though the smell made her nauseous. She could not face the dishes, so she shoved a pile in a sink full of hot water and detergent and left them to soak. She wiped over the benches and swept the dirt out the door into the yard. When she looked up at the clock she was dismayed to realise it was not yet nine o’clock. The whole day stretched before her, as grey and featureless as scrub.
Sara stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. No sound at all. The utter stillness disturbed her. Teresa was never quiet, especially not when she was angry. There should be defiant music blaring out of her room, doors banging, boots stamping, voices shouting or sobbing. Sara went upstairs, automatically counting her steps. Six steps to the landing, turn to the right, four more steps up, six steps along the corridor to Teresa’s room. No sound.
Sara rapped gently on Teresa’s door. ‘Tess?’ she called. No answer. ‘Tess, can I come in?’ No answer. Gingerly Sara eased the door open. No shoe came flying towards her head. Teresa’s room was empty.
Sara shut the door and went downstairs, counting her steps again. It took five footfalls to cross from the bottom of the steps to the living-room door, fourteen footfalls to go down the narrow, dark hall to the kitchen. Although Sara walked these song lines a hundred times a day, still she counted each pace in her head, as if reassuring herself the proportions of her world were not shrinking.
In the kitchen, Sara turned on the radio, twisting the dial until the house was filled with noise. She sang as she scrubbed the kitchen clean. She cleaned out the fridge and did her best to make the laminex shine. She washed the windows and then the floor, feeling muscles in her arms and back begin to ache. Then she moved to the living room. She dusted and shook cushions and polished the windows and even tried to wash the damp stains off the walls. Then she dragged out the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the hall, her ears filled with its dragon roar.
It did no good. The absences shouted louder than words.
At ten-thirty, Sara stood out on the front verandah, shading her eyes as she looked down the valley. No sign of the twins. No sign of Teresa. No sign of Joe. No sign of Matthew, dark magician. She went back into the house and picked up the phone, more to remind herself of her complete and utter isolation than because she wanted to check for a dial-tone. The burr against her ear startled her. She hung the phone up hurriedly, then lifted the receiver again, listening. The dial-tone troubled her. Could the telephone company have fixed the line so quickly? On Easter Saturday? Impossible.
So had Dominic lied about the phone being dead last night? Why? Why would he lie? And where was he?
Sara rang the hospital. It was too early for news, they told her. Augusto’s condition was still critical. She should call again in a few hours. Sara was not reassured by their clinical calmness. It seemed too much like the tone adults assume with children they aim to deceive. She hung up and then rang her Aunty Nita, the only telephone number she knew off by heart. Juanita was as histrionic as her brother Augusto. All her shrieks and sobs broke the brittle composure Sara had manufactured. She found herself suffocating with terror. So desperate were her grabs for air that Juanita grew frightened herself. ‘Put your head between your knees,’ she ordered. ‘Oh, sweet mother of Christ! Is there no-one there to help you? Where’s Joe?’
‘I … don’t … know,’ Sara panted. ‘All gone. Everyone gone.’
Aloneness. The most primeval of anxieties. Sara hung on to the phone as if it were an oxygen mask.
‘I’ll come out,’ Juanita said. ‘Though we’re fully booked tonight … I’ll see if Gabriela …’
‘Yes. Gabriela.’ Sara gave a great sigh of relief. Her cousin Gabriela would be better, for she was as calm as Juanita was turbulent. Sara trusted her cousin Gabriela more than anyone. Gabriela would know
what to do.
‘What are those boys thinking, leaving you all alone at a time like this? Sweet Jesus!’
Sara could not answer. Juanita hung up and Sara managed to get the receiver back into its cradle. She sat for a moment, face in her arms, listening to the rain which had begun to wash around the house again. She was cold. Shakily she got up, arms wrapped close about her, and began the long climb to her bedroom. Forty steps in total it took.
Sara crawled under her doona, turned her pillow over three times and wished for sleep, for peace, for time to turn back. Sleep did not come. Peace did not come. Time jerked forward in little mincing yet unstoppable steps as always. Sara pressed her face into her pillow so it soaked up her weak, easy tears. She knew she wept in self-pity, not grief for her father. That was an emotion still too large and raw for tears.
At last her tears ran out. Curled up, knees to chest, Sara put down her hand and pulled up the topmost book from a pile between her bed and the chest of drawers. It was a slim book, rather battered. On the cover was a dark, scowling man with a lot of hair leaning over a timid-looking blonde. It was called Heart-breaker. Joe bought books by the boxful for her, every week when he went into town to buy the groceries. Usually he went to St Vinny’s or the second-hand book stall at the weekly markets, but if he saw a garage sale or a school fete he would pull over and grab what he could, Sara’s hunger for romances never being satiated.
Sara read one, sometimes two or three, every day. She did not mind how old they were, or how battered. She did not mind if the heroine was a nurse, or a ballerina who had injured her foot, or a wilful heiress in a crinoline; or if the hero was the owner of a South American coffee plantation, or a dissolute rake, or a proud duke, or a doctor with weary eyes. As long as there were muddles and misunderstandings, longing gazes and leaping pulses, and, at the end, the hard embrace, the breathless kiss, the soaring spirit of true love.