Dancing on Knives

by Kate Forsyth

  ‘You think someone pulled the telephone wires out so that you couldn’t ring for help last night? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I don’t know … maybe.’

  ‘But that means … surely that means …’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sara said again. She shivered and pulled the shawl closer about her. ‘All I know is that everything feels wrong. There’s like … I don’t know. Undercurrents. Haven’t you felt it?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Gabriela said. ‘I mean, you all seem pretty shocked and upset, which is what I’d expect really.’ She hesitated. ‘You’re tired and strung out, you know, Sara. You haven’t really slept yet, have you? You got to expect to be feeling a bit odd and disconnected.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Sara said wearily. ‘I wish none of this had happened.’

  ‘Of course you do. Shit happens, though, Sar.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what Joe says.’

  ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve seen your dad and know what the story is.’

  Sara nodded.

  ‘Do you guys want to borrow my car? There’s really not room for all four of you in the Dodge. It’ll take you at least half an hour to get there – you might as well be comfortable.’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’

  Even the word ‘car’ was enough to make Sara’s stomach twist with anxiety. She wrapped the shawl round her tightly and slowly followed Gabriela down the hall. Every step she took towards the front of the house was another step into darkness. She came to a halt by the front door. Gabriela was rummaging in her bag for her keys.

  ‘Here you go. Take it easy, won’t you?’

  Sara shrugged and tried to smile. ‘Sure. Of course.’

  Gabriela called up the stairs. ‘Joe! Kids! Ready to go?’

  ‘OK, OK, coming,’ Joe called back and came down, the twins moping at his heels, Teresa following reluctantly behind. While Gabriela explained about the car and exchanged keys with him, Sara gripped her hands into fists and slowly breathed in and out, in and out. Already her pulse rate was quickening, her heart hammering violently in her chest. Her mouth was so dry she had difficulty swallowing. Her legs trembled.

  ‘OK, guys, see you later,’ Gabriela said, giving them all a quick hug. ‘I hope everything’s fine.’

  Sara’s mouth twisted wryly.

  The boys ran out through the rain and jumped in the car. Teresa held her shiny coat over her head and ran after them. Sara took a deep breath, expelled it fiercely, and then ran too, not giving herself time to falter. She slipped on the gravel in her too-tight red shoes, but managed to wrench open the car door and jump in.

  The sound of the engine starting sent every nerve in her body jumping.

  Panic clamped her chest. She could not breathe. She tried to swallow but her throat muscles were rigid. She managed to gasp a breath then another, putting her head down on her crossed arms to try and open her airways. The car was moving. She heard the crunch of its wheels on the gravel and then the rattle of branches on the metal roof. Waves of mortification and horror washed over her, scorching hot, then freezing cold. Her skin was cold and clammy, all her muscles unnaturally tense.

  ‘You OK, Sar?’ Joe asked.

  She did not answer.

  I’ve done this before, she told herself. I did it this morning. I survived that. Not going to kill me. Just breathe.

  After a very long time her breath began to come more easily. She lifted her head and cautiously opened her eyes. Rain slashed at the windscreen. The blurring of the landscape made her feel sick again. She shut her eyes and did not open them until the car drew up in the hospital car park.

  Her siblings had hardly spoken the whole way. Once or twice they had passed comments on the weather or the traffic, or asked Sara how she was doing. They had certainly not mentioned their father or the accident. It was as if the subject was surrounded by such a tender, swollen bruise that even the thought of touching upon it caused pain.

  Now, in the front lobby of the hospital, they were forced to press upon the bruise.

  ‘I wonder where he is,’ Teresa said nervously. ‘Will he still be in intensive care?’

  ‘We can only ask,’ Joe said. He was sickly-sallow and more fidgety than ever, tugging at his jacket or his collar. He kept groping in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes only to remember he was not allowed to smoke in the hospital. After a while he jammed his hands in his jacket pockets as if willing them to be still.

  They were told where to go and, feeling edgy and out of place, they went, all five pressing close together. Sara’s legs were trembling so much she found it hard to walk. When they came to the lift she sank down on a chair, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap.

  ‘Oh, God, I hope he’ll be OK,’ she said.

  Teresa pressed the lift button and kept on jabbing at it till the lift finally arrived.

  No-one spoke on the way up. Sara took a shuddering breath, then put out a hand and clung on to Joe’s sleeve. He put his arm around her. She was glad of the support. He took it away when the lift doors opened. She felt its absence acutely.

  She trailed behind her brothers as they made their way down a long corridor. The green linoleum floor was stained. The air stank of anesthetic and disinfectant. Through half-open doors they could see people lying immobile in high metal beds, covered with white cotton blankets. In a few rooms televisions droned. In other rooms, visitors sat on the edge of their chairs, smiling brightly. A grey fug was choking her throat. No matter how carefully she counted her breaths, the numbers galloped away from her, became hieroglyphics, without order or meaning. Her heart jitterbugged. A male nurse walked towards them, pushing a metal cart. She could not look at him. She felt he must be staring at her, wondering what she was doing here, so odd in her red flamenco dance shoes and her golden-fringed shawl. The squeal of the wheels grated upon her nerves. He passed them by without a word and she felt an irrational relief weaken her knees.

  Sara remembered D. H. Lawrence’s dread and horror of other people. It made her grieve to the very pit of her soul. She wanted to be able to walk amongst her own kind without the impulse to recoil. She did not know how to escape, though. She was driven by primitive instincts. Every cell in her body was shrieking to her to flee. All she had to cover her shrinking skin was her hair and her silence and the obsessive counting of each and every step she took.

  They came to Augusto’s room and tiptoed in. Their father lay on the narrow metal bed, his eyes closed. He was still as a corpse. Only the rhythmic beeping of one of the machines attached to him suggested his heart still beat. Bruises discoloured his skin, his neck was imprisoned in a brace, one arm was swathed in a thick white cast, sticky-red gauze was bound to his head. They had shaved off most of his long, black hair. Beside the bed, incomprehensible panels whirred and clicked. The eyes behind the closed lids flickered. It was his only movement. Liquid dripped from a bag on a rack into his arm. There were tubes up his nose. There were tubes in his slack veins. His face had sunk, like badly set pavers.

  They sat there, watching him, occasionally murmuring a question that none of the others could answer. Joe stood up, walked around the room, sat down again, then just as abruptly got up. ‘I’m going to go and ask,’ he said.

  After a while he came back. ‘The doctor will be here in just a moment, they said.’

  The minutes ticked away, and no-one had a word to say. Sara rested her head on her arms.

  A large, grey-faced man in a long white coat came in. He nodded to them all and introduced himself as he checked the instruments, scribbling quickly on a clipboard. He was kind in a dispassionate sort of way. Their father was very badly injured, he said. He had lost a lot of blood. Apart from the head wound, the worst injury was the fracture in one of the cervical vertebrae. It was too early to know if there was any nerve damage. He also had a compound fracture of the left femur, a fractured clavicle and two cracked ribs, one of which had punctured his left lung. As he spoke, he gestured to one part or another of Augusto
’s body with his pen.

  ‘Is he going to die?’ Sara asked.

  The doctor hesitated. ‘That I cannot tell you. Injuries to the head are always problematic. Until he regains consciousness … certainly he’s stabilised the last few hours. We’ve given him a blood transfusion and some painkillers. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.’

  Sara dropped her head back on her arms, her arms and legs knotted close about her body. She did not even realise she was crying until she tasted the wetness on her lips. She felt the all-too-familiar constriction of her chest, as if she too had cracked some ribs and someone was slowly and inexorably strapping them up. She fought to drag the air down into her lungs, feeling pain pierce her side. Oh, my poor father …

  Joe asked more questions but Sara did not hear the doctor’s answers. Black prehistoric wings flapped about her head. She did not have the strength to fight anymore. She had the distinct sensation of falling. She fought to drag oxygen into her lungs. All she could hear was that terrible flapping, the thudding of her own heart in her ears. It was the only pin fastening her to consciousness. She dug her fingers into her scalp, seeking to use pain as a lighthouse to guide her home. She hated herself entirely.

  ‘Sara! Sara! Are you all right? Sara?’

  At last Joe was there. She felt his hands under her armpits, lifting, his shoulder against her forehead. ‘Oh, God. Sara? Are you all right? Christ! Why did I let you come? I knew this would happen. It always does. Dylan, Dom, help me! We have to get her home.’

  Sara let him drag her up. She kept her eyes shut. With her eyes shut, she was safe.

  ‘C’mon, we’ll get you home. You’ll be right.’ She heard the twins’ quick question, heard Joe mutter an answer, felt their arms under her shoulders.

  Still she squeezed her eyes shut. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, knocking her hip against an unseen piece of furniture. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Is she OK?’ Dylan’s voice sounded right above her head. ‘I knew she shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘This is the worst she’s been for ages.’ Dominic sounded frightened.

  ‘She’ll be right,’ Joe repeated. ‘We’ll get her home.’

  Sara clamped her eyelids shut, so no light pierced her lids, and thought of home.

  The journey took forever. With her eyes shut, every swerve of the car seemed an invitation to death. She dug her nails so hard into her skull she felt the fragile skin tear. Panic beat its black crow wings above her head. She could only trust in Joe to take her home.

  At last she heard the familiar crunch of gravel under the tyres. Everyone was quiet. The silence was thunder-charged. Joe got out of the car and slammed the door shut. Feeling as weak as if she had survived a bout of cholera, Sara crept back inside the house. Her humiliation was profound.

  She paused. The house was very quiet. Her legs trembled, weak as a newborn lamb’s. Holding on to the wall she crept through the front hall, not knowing where to go or what to do. Failure tasted like vomit in her throat. The door of the studio was there, the handle just next to her hand. She crept inside like an injured animal seeking sanctuary.

  Keeping her movements precise, she closed the door behind her. Her fingers searched for and flicked the switch that dissolved the echoing darkness into the grimy, over-crowded room she knew. There was no sound. The silence frightened her.

  Silence always did.

  With a sigh Sara slowly shuffled forward, crossing the room to where her father’s canvas stood on its easel.

  It was mauve and blue. There were tree branches, a moon, a death, a stream, a swirl of orange, shadows in her eyes. She tasted sorrow. Oh my mother, long dead. A journey through an immeasurable tunnel, a fire on the hill.

  Memories crowded in on her. Flashes of her mother’s voice, a strand of red hair, smothering velvet, smoke against a clear sky. It seemed to Sara that memories sank to the depths of the sea and hardened there to strange shapes. What was once a coin became a worthless disc of rusted green. What was once an anchor became a corroded crucifix. Nothing stayed the same.

  ‘Dad,’ she said, and sat on the floor, holding his painting shirt against her.

  Augusto Sanchez cooked with passion, with drama, with flair.

  Generations of Milanese chefs leant on his shoulder as he recreated dishes from recipes that dated back to the fourteenth century. It worried him that none of his children showed a vocation for cooking.

  ‘The Sanchez family were always great cooks. We cooked for kings. It’s sad to see how thin the blood has got,’ he mused at night, when the delicious melancholy of good food and wine had again crept over him. ‘We’ll never cook for kings again.’

  Making zarzuela de mariscos, Augusto tossed back his narrow head with its oily ponytail, gesticulating wildly with his knife as he sliced a lobster neatly down the middle.

  ‘You must take out the langostinos’ intestines cleanly,’ he instructed, while Sara sorted a gigantic mound of clothing. Augusto always peppered his speech with Spanish when he cooked, although he had not set foot on Spanish soil since he was born. ‘The secret with zarzuela is the sweetness. Cinnamon, saffron, sweet paprika, bay leaves. Sweet and salty the zarzuela, like the sea, like pasión.’

  Zarzuela de mariscos was a dish his mother Consuelo had once cooked, with a recipe passed down for many generations. His sister Juanita also made zarzuela for the restaurant she owned in Bega. It was called seafood stew in brackets on the menu. Augusto was contemptuous of Juanita’s zarzuela.

  ‘She tries to make money out of it. Zarzuela should be an embarrassment of riches. It should be a gift from the cook to those that eat.’

  He admitted his niece Gabriela had some talent for cooking, but said she was too calm to cook well, especially zarzuela. ‘Zarzuela needs passion. It is an opera of taste. Gabriela is too methodical – she follows the recipe too closely. She has no imagination – how can you cook with no imagination?’

  ‘I thought you were meant to follow the recipe,’ Sara had said once.

  ‘You would think so,’ was Augusto’s reply, as he had upended a bowl of mussels into the stew.

  Augusto was a theatrical cook. With his back to the stove, he flipped a whole fish with grace and dexterity, dropped a handful of finely chopped thyme into the soup like a basketball player dunking a ball, or juggled eggs, tossing them without warning at anyone who walked into the kitchen. On the wall of the kitchen were stuck shards of ancient eggshell, yellowed and crumbling, from a missed catch.

  Although Augusto was a magician in the kitchen, he could rarely be bothered, which meant Sara had to endure his criticism and contempt of her own clumsy attempts every day. ‘Sara does not so much cook food as assassinate it,’ he told Matthew once, when inviting him up for dinner. ‘When you do find time to come up, give me some warning and I’ll cook for you myself. I’ll make you oca con peras. Trust me, it’s a dish to make your knees tremble.’

  Sara wished very much that she could cook a meal to make a man’s knees tremble, particularly Matthew’s knees. However, she could not cook. No matter how hard she tried, she would always burn something or serve it raw and cold in the middle, or have the fish perfectly grilled and the potatoes as hard as rocks. The closer the hands of the clock came to dinner-time, the more anxious and miserable Sara would become.

  She did not know what was worse. To cook a meal and have Augusto prod it with his fork, his lip lifting in a sneer, or to hear his impatient footsteps strumming down the hall halfway through making the meal. For Augusto would sweep in, raise the lids of the pots on the sink, wrinkle his high-bridged nose in distaste. ‘What a vile mess!’ he’d say, and down the sink would gurgle the soup she had spent all day preparing.

  Only the previous day Augusto had thrown her baked fish out the kitchen door for the dogs to snarl over. Sara had laboured for hours to make the samfaina y bacalao a la catalana, as the dish was called in her grandmother’s recipe book. Consuelo had left this book to Sara alon
g with her tarot cards, but Augusto had promptly appropriated it. After all, Sara was not yet four and so far too young to have any use for it. Whenever Sara showed interest in looking through it, Augusto only laughed at her. ‘Whatever for, princess? You hoping it’ll teach you how to cook? I wish it were that simple!’

  Consuelo’s recipes were all kept in a very thick old exercise book, bulging with odd bits of paper – old remedies, directions for making dandelion wine or rosemary shampoo, hand-scrawled notes on the secret properties of fruit and herbs – basil for enticing true love, rosemary for fertility, thyme for courage, apples for love and healing, figs to spell-bind love, sage for wisdom. Old letters, photographs and postcards were also tucked within its pages, all of which were stained with splashes of food and reddish-brown circles where a glass of wine had been rested to hold the pages open.

  Some recipes were torn out from newspapers or magazines or photocopied from books, and stuck in with failing glue or old, yellow sticky-tape. Others were written entirely in hand; some in Augusto’s large, flamboyant handwriting, some in handwriting Sara did not recognise, most in Consuelo’s old-fashioned formal letters. Quite a few were written entirely in Spanish, and had the English translations jotted here and there on the page. Even with the key words translated, Consuelo’s recipes were hard to read. They scorned such necessities as temperatures and measurements and time, saying things like ‘lacerate in brandy’, ‘add a blob of butter’, ‘if oranges are not Spanish, add vinegar’. Despite their difficulty, Consuelo’s recipes were always the best.

  The recipe for samfaina y bacalao a la catalane was long and complicated, and written mainly in Spanish, but Augusto loved the dish for it brought back vivid memories of his childhood. Consuelo had often cooked it on feast days and high days. Sara had planned a special lunch to celebrate the Easter long weekend – she wanted to bring the family closer together and knew no better way than for them to all eat together.

  The barometer was falling, though, storm on the way. She had known as soon as she had gone into the studio, taking Augusto his first cup of coffee for the day. Without a glance or word, he had taken the cup, and splashed in a generous nip of brandy. Brandy was the worst of storm signals, a cyclone warning.