Dancing on Knives

by Kate Forsyth

  Sara mostly read at night, when everyone else was asleep, when the darkness bent over her bed like a psychiatrist with a straitjacket. On bad days, she read during the daylight hours too, surreptitiously, always tense and listening in case her father came in and saw her, or even Joe who knew about her sick habit, and grimaced about it but did not mock. Augusto would do more than mock. He would sneer. He would ask her if she had nothing better to do, and look around at the general grime and disorder of the house, not understanding that the chores of the house were a noose slowly tightening around her neck. He would even take the book and throw it in the bin, so that Sara would have to sneak down later and dig it out with shaking fingers, dusting off the dust and ashes and potato peelings and carry it back to her room under her jumper, cold against her skin. Augusto, a man of addictions himself, could not understand Sara’s obsessive needs. Could not, would not.

  On very bad days, Sara might read five or six, back to back, lighting one on the butt of the last, till she was sick and nauseated with them. Sara’s romance novels were a keel of constancy in a stormy sea, a paean of utter predictability.

  Sara’s life was so very predictable, it was strange that she craved the same immutability in her reading. Every day followed much the same pattern as the day before. Sara woke at five-thirty every morning, when the sky over the sea was still dark, and scrambled into her tracksuit pants and an old, woolly jumper. She would stumble down the staircase in the dark, knowing exactly how many steps there were, and wake Joe as gently as she could. When he had stirred and grunted, she would slip along the dark corridor and down the stairs to the kitchen, sliding along the bare boards in her socks so as not to wake her father, who often slept on the couch in his studio.

  First she would put the kettle on, and light the gas stove. While the kookaburras jeered out in the darkness, she would make herself a cup of tea. She would drink it, warming her hands on the cup, as she mixed up the calves’ mush in a big pot on the stove. They would butt their square heads against the flyscreen door, their hooves sharp on the wooden floor of the verandah. She would carry the bucket out to them as the sky began to lighten, her arms aching from the weight. The calves gambolled endearingly beside her, uttering hoarse cries and occasionally bruising her with their heads or knees. She would watch them eat, rubbing the little buds of horns pushing through the coarse red curls on their foreheads, then stare out at the sea as it began to glow like a moonstone under a sky of fading stars.

  By the time she slipped back inside the kitchen door, Joe would be sitting at the table, pulling on his boots. Sometimes he would say ‘Morning’. Normally, though, he would sit in silence, frowning at the linoleum floor. She would pour him a cup of tea from the pot, and droop around the kitchen, getting breakfast. Joe would swallow his lukewarm tea in two determined gulps, set the mug back on the table and go down to the sheds to get the machines started up. He would come for his eggs and bacon and coffee later, when he would have leisure to light a cigarette and look over the paper. Until his coffee and that first cigarette, he was always surly and uncommunicative. Often his first words of the day were: ‘Get those lazy pigs out of bed’. This was always difficult. Sara had to stand over their beds, threatening to pour cold water on their heads. Trying to keep them quiet was another difficulty. ‘Don’t wake Dad!’ she would whisper. Teresa never really listened but the twins would tiptoe around, pulling their flannelette shirts over their rumpled orange hair and scrummaging for socks. Invariably, though, one would forget, and stumble over his boots lying beside his bed, or laugh, or swear, or drop his belt to the floor with a metallic clatter.

  Sara, breaking eggs into her pan downstairs, would hear, and listen with apprehension in case her father called out in anger. If he did, her whole day would be ruined. It was all right for the twins, they went off with Teresa to catch the bus to school. Sara stayed home all day with her father. Augusto was not a morning person. He preferred to stay up till late every evening, listening to music, or watching the late shows on television, a bottle of wine by his side. He usually slept in until eleven or even later. If he was woken too early, with an evil hangover and a mouth like the Simpson Desert, it was Sara who bore the brunt of his rage and his sarcasm, not her three brothers or her half-sister. They all had lives beyond the house. They were not fettered within the farm’s boundaries.

  Although Augusto rarely left the house these days either, his presence was indeed an absence, a constant aching reminder that the father she had once adored was gone.

  In the first few years after Bridget’s death, Augusto had seemed much the same. He had laughed, cooked, painted, swum in the sea, drummed his boot-heels to the twirling rhythm of his favourite flamenco records, practised his guitar, made love to his mistress, made her his wife.

  Gradually, though, the vitality had drained out of him. Dust settled on his books and canvases, and the twisted tubes of oil paint. The chessmen sat idle in their wooden box; his guitar strings sank out of tune; his paint-brushes set hard. Augusto slept all morning, got up unwashed and unshaven in the afternoon to sit in the garden, drinking wine, smoking cigars, and staring at the sea.

  His marriage to Gayla lasted less than four years. Once she was gone, he did not even pretend to paint.

  Sometimes Augusto could be coaxed out of his black despondency. Sara managed it occasionally, Teresa with her smart-arse mouth and mercurial charm a little more often. Usually it would be a stranger, a woman in the pub attracted by the dangerous black flash of his eyes, his sneer, his contempt for small talk.

  Augusto liked women. He had liked to paint them, in the days when the muse was still with him. He liked to have sex with them. He once said he could not paint a woman unless he had had sex with her. ‘How could you know a woman unless you fuck her?’ he said, wine flushing his blood with wit.

  His earliest paintings, when he was still a school student in Melbourne, were crammed with a multiplicity of subjects. He painted cats, cities, buildings, roses, moons. All his enthusiasms and passions were marked by the date at the bottom of the canvas. When he was seventeen, Augusto discovered women. From then on, his canvases exploded with lush curves.

  After he met Bridget, her round face and red hair began to dominate his paintings. Hers was the womb of the earth, the genesis of all life. For a number of years Augusto Sanchez painted nothing else.

  He painted her sleeping, he painted her with a belly like a ripe moon, he painted her with Joe suckling at her breast. After Sara was born, he painted the three of them together, as round and joyful and blurred as a Renoir that had been left in the rain.

  If Sara had been a boy, she would have been named after Paul Cézanne, another of his heroes. Augusto liked to say, ‘We too have eaten of Cézanne’s apples,’ as some kind of inside joke that only another artist could understand. Being a girl, and Augusto not thinking much of any women artists, she was instead christened Sara Sofia Consuelo Sanchez, the last name being by an old Spanish custom the most important name.

  By the time Consuelo was dead, other faces were creeping into Augusto’s paintings. One face in particular dominated, overthrowing Bridget’s pale moon-face. This face was proud, passionate, destructive – as sensual and emotional as Augusto himself. It was the face of the woman who in time would become Sara’s stepmother.

  Sara did not know where or how Augusto first met Gayla, but anyone could tell when it was, by the date at the bottom of the first painting in which her sly smile appeared. Sara was a few weeks away from turning three, and her mother was massively, ponderously, pregnant. Consuelo would have been cooking zarzuela de mariscos for their dinner.

  The first Gayla painting, Augusto and the Carnival, would in time become one of his most famous works of art. It was a giant canvas overflowing with back-flipping clowns, merry-go-rounds, rocket rides and big dippers, all blurring together with great sweeping brushstrokes of light and sound and motion. In the centre of all this turmoil sat a black-haired fortune-teller, smiling sideways. Augusto sat o
pposite her, half of his face looking down into her crystal ball, the other staring at the fortune-teller with her deep cleavage the colour of cold coffee and her half-slitted, sleepy eyes. Under the table Augusto’s long black-clad leg disappeared under the fortune-teller’s frothing skirt. When Sara first saw this painting, she did not know the black-haired fortune-teller would one day be her stepmother, that this painting was to mark the first crack in the surface of her life. She just knew the painting made her uneasy. It seemed full of omens.

  By the time Sara actually met Gayla, less than five weeks after her mother’s death, she knew her face and body well. Augusto had painted her at least seventeen times. By Sara’s eleventh birthday, Gayla and Augusto had married in the garden. Both bride and bridegroom were barefoot, and Gayla carried sunflowers in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  Those first years after Bridget’s death taught Sara much about sex that otherwise she would never have guessed. Whenever one of Augusto’s children entered a room, there was that sense of having interrupted. Gayla’s heavy lids would sink over her languorous eyes – Augusto would remove his hand from her thigh, would walk around the room with staccato steps, would lean against the wall and watch her. The nights were full of sounds.

  Gayla was not much interested in any of her step-children. She lolled around the house all day, dropping ash over herself and watching daytime TV. She made no attempt to win their affection. She mocked Sara’s clumsiness, ignored the twins, and deliberately prodded Joe into rage by encouraging Augusto to tell stories about his life with her before their marriage, when Bridget was still alive. At the same time, Gayla indulged her own daughter, Teresa, shamelessly.

  Most of the time, though, Gayla hardly spoke at all, drifting around in a cloud of cigarette smoke, her befrilled dressing-gown hanging open. If one of the children disturbed her, she would turn and look at them calmly and perhaps gesture with an unhurried hand for them to go away. She was quite content to lie around and eat chocolates and watch television and let the children run wild.

  At first, Augusto revelled. He had punished Bridget for her death, he had demonstrated the power of his will.

  But Augusto and Gayla were better suited as lovers than husband and wife, familiarity removing much of the intrigue. For years Gayla had been there when he wanted, smoke curling out her red mouth, her heavy lids dropped over black eyes. He could throw himself into her soft, brown, warm folds of flesh, and afterwards she would stretch and sink lower into the sheets and light a cigarette, and he could leave.

  Now everything was different. Gayla the wife was not the same woman as Gayla the secret mistress.

  Augusto began to challenge her, thwart her, beat her with words. Her silence became an enemy. Barely a night would pass when the children did not hear Augusto’s voice in full tirade, soon followed by the sound of the front door slamming as he turned his back and walked out. The five children drifted around the house, looking sideways at each other, learning to hunch their shoulders against the silence like a blow.

  One hot afternoon, soon after Sara had left school and refused to go back, a strange man in a strange car had driven up to the front door while Augusto was out at the pub. Gayla had yawned, stretched, said a languid goodbye, and rolled away. She never came back.

  It was strange. Joe, Sara and the twins had not wanted her. They had resisted her with all the silent savagery of their childish natures, had glared at her over the breakfast table, averted their eyes when she and Augusto kissed, and taken small, petty revenge for her presence whenever they could. They had forgotten to put sugar in her coffee when they knew she liked it sweet, added milk when they knew lactose made her sick, and called her names behind her back.

  It was not as if they had loved Gayla. Still, her desertion was like a death. Another disappearance in their lives. No-one spoke about it, but a sharper edge had been whetted upon them, a quickness to tears or fears or fever or fury. So they stayed away from each other, afraid of cutting themselves.

  Teresa simply could not believe her mother would leave her. It was no comfort discovering the man Gayla had left with had not wanted a rebellious teenager around, particularly another man’s child. Max planned to take Gayla to Athens and the Greek Islands on a kind of extended honeymoon and Teresa would simply miss too much school, Gayla explained over the telephone. Besides, surely she’d be happier growing up with all her brothers and sisters and making up for all the time she had lost with her real father? She and Max would be back in Australia later in the year and perhaps Teresa could come up and stay with them then, if she was still unhappy. That had been that. Gayla had blown lots of air kisses into the phone and hung up. Teresa had received a couple of postcards of brilliant white islands in an azure sea over the course of the next year, but the promised trip to Sydney never happened, even though Teresa was still emphatically unhappy.

  So too was Augusto. This time the sombra lasted for years.

  Foul weather for them all when their father was stormy.

  All day Sara would toil around the house with the heavy silence lying upon her, trying not to wake her father. When he did finally get up and lurch out to the garden, she slipped about like a little silver fish, listening all the time for the impatient drum of his feet or the call of his voice.

  The Sanchez siblings communicated amongst themselves with a crude sign language – low grunts, hand gestures, rolls of the eyes, shakes of the head. If the telephone rang, Sara startled like a rabbit. Sara was afraid of the telephone. She dreaded having to pick it up but to leave it ringing, disturbing Augusto, was far worse. So she always ran to answer it, hoping it was her cousin Gabriela and not her ominous uncle, or the ominous bank, or Teresa’s ominous school, the only people who ever seemed to ring them.

  Sara was no use to Joe in the day-to-day running of the farm. She was frightened of the milking machines, with their constant chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug, and frightened of the cows, with their solid shoulders and swinging horns, and frightened she would do something wrong and mess things up like she always did. Whenever Joe asked her for assistance, she felt a familiar sense of helplessness creep over her. If he needed her to help nail up a fallen section of fence, she would try and hold the barbed wire steady but her hands would shake and shake. Inevitably the sharp prongs would dig into her palm and she would let go of the wire with a stifled cry. Once the barbed wire sprang free and caught Joe across the face so red beads of blood sprang up, and he swore. ‘I don’t know why I fucking bother!’ he yelled. ‘Just get out of here, Sar, I’m better off doing it myself.’

  Sara had crept back to the silent house, knowing his words were true.

  Some days Sara could not stand it anymore. She would go down to her favourite rock on the seashore, watching the slow rhythm of waves, imagining colour sweeping out from her fingers. She would walk on the shore, watching the intricate, meaningless dance of the gulls in the sky, gathering shells and throwing them away, drawing shapes on the strand to be washed away by the tide.

  Or Sara would disappear into the dim, secret hills behind the house, the strange murmuring language of the trees filling her ears, tasting the scent of eucalyptus on her tongue. She would go deep into the ferny gullies where she and Joe used to play when they were children, to a cave they had once found where black stick-figures danced across the wall, carrying stylised spears, and where old oyster shells could be found in the dirt of the floor. Crouching by the cave-mouth, looking up at the ancient charred shapes on the ceiling, Sara wondered how many thousands of years had passed since those artists had felt compelled to tell their stories in lines of ochre and charcoal. She would crouch there in the green murmuring silence, listening to the birds, and scratch her own mythology into the mud with a stick.

  It was not open spaces that frightened her. It was people. Down by the sea, deep in the bush, Sara had no need of words.

  Each time she would return to the house, filled with new resolution, determined to find the strength to leave. Even if I go in
to town for groceries, she thought. People go to supermarkets every day. It’s not that hard.

  Then the silence of the house would close over her head again. The silence of the dinner table, Augusto frowning at his plate, distastefully lifting the greasy chop with his fork and letting it drop again, Joe silent with tiredness, the twins silent with boredom, the floor scuffed red with the mud from their boots, the sink full of plates and ants, the night stretching ahead of her with nothing on the telly, her life stretching ahead of her with nothing to look forward to, nothing to break the predictable pattern. For the very thought of going to the supermarket was enough to make Sara’s mouth go dry and her hands cold and clammy. Trying to set her will to it was like injecting adrenaline into her heart wall. Her whole nervous system would go into revolt, her skin standing up in goosebumps, her legs trembling, her stomach muscles tightening with nausea. Once Joe had tried to force her out to the car. She had grown so weak and dizzy with terror she had wet herself.

  Sara had no-one to blame but herself. No-one had built an invisible wall around the farm and said to her, ‘This is your world, you may not pass beyond this gate.’ No-one had said to her, ‘You may never leave this place.’ Sara had done it with her own hands. Sara had built the prison herself.

  Sara put down her book with a sigh of exasperation. The story was not weaving its usual hallucinatory magic. She could not immerse herself in the problems of Olinda Beauchamp, forced against her will into a marriage of convenience with the unscrupulous millionaire Lance Harding in order to save her father’s tobacco plantation. The phrases were so familiar they had lost all meaning, like a word written over and over again till it no longer made sense. She picked the book up again, tried to read, could not, laid it down again.

  This faint dissatisfaction with Sara’s usual choice of mind-opiate was not simply because she was exhausted from a night without sleep, though she was so tired she felt as if her eyes had been dried and salted. This feeling of discontent with the books Joe brought her had been slowly growing for the last few months.