Dancing on Knives

by Kate Forsyth

  ‘Couldn’t you have cleared up after yourselves?’ she said to the twins. ‘What am I, your servant?’

  ‘Get off our backs, Sar!’ Dylan said. ‘Nag, nag, nag. We’ve had a bit on our minds today, you know.’

  ‘I’ll clean up after dinner,’ Gabriela promised. ‘I’ve made my special Spanish roast lamb for you, you’re all looking a bit white. Did you get much sleep last night, Sar?’

  Sara stretched her arms over her head. ‘Nah. I didn’t sleep at all, and neither did the boys. How could we? I tried to have a nap this morning, but I just couldn’t.’

  ‘You should all have an early night tonight,’ Gabriela said firmly. ‘I’ll go get dinner ready. Else you’ll all fall asleep in your chairs. You look exhausted.’

  ‘Not sleepy,’ Sara said. ‘Too uptight to be sleepy. I’ll come and help you.’

  She got up, stretching until her joints cracked, then bent and picked up the dirty plates and cups from the coffee table, following her cousin from the room. She heard the silence behind her as a roar, and wondered if she was imagining all the dark undercurrents swirling through the house.

  Sara had always hated school. She had no friends. She dropped the ball in cricket, or ducked so it landed with a thud where she had been standing. She was always the last to be picked for a team. At lunchtime she ate her packed sandwiches neatly, one small bite after another, to make them last longer. She always sat alone, watching the others giggle and skip, trembling with hope that someone would ask her to play, trembling with dread in case they did.

  She was an easy victim for teasing. The uniform drooped on her thin shoulders, and her arms and legs looked like broomsticks. Her habit of standing on one leg with the other awkwardly entwined about it, like a serpent up a staff, was often mimicked cruelly in the playground. It always looked odd, so very strange to weave one’s limbs into a knot.

  Parted in the middle, her hair hung mournfully on either side of her face. Her art teacher, Mr Keismann, once told her she looked like a Modigliani. Sara was excited until she looked through her father’s book of Modigliani prints. Then she was hurt. Certainly she did not look like the other girls with their blonde permed hair and burgeoning bodies.

  So Sara hid behind the back fence until the bell went at nine o’clock so no-one could mock the way she carried her school-bag, or said ‘Why, what have you done?’ when she said ‘Excuse me?’ in her stiff, low voice.

  If anyone was friendly, Sara only looked at them in mute suspicion and turned away. Diane Kincaid had taught her that lesson. Diane was a slim, honey-coloured girl, with blonde hair and straight white teeth. She was like a queen bee with a drove of other girls humming admiringly around her. She was the first girl in their form to wear a bra, the first girl to go out on a date, and the first girl to perm her hair.

  One day, when Sara was in second form, Diane smiled at her in assembly, minded her a seat in English, and talked all lesson about her new stretch jeans, what song was going to be number one that week, and did Sara think Bob Grainger was a hunk? That lunchtime they walked around, arm in arm. Sara was in love, agreeing with every word Diane spoke. She felt as if a candle had been lit inside her, filling the air around her with a golden glow of happiness. At last she had a friend, and the most popular girl in the form too!

  Next day she did not hide behind the wooden paling fence, but came in to the playground, shyly looking for Diane. The honey-coloured girl was playing jump-rope with her friends. Together they were chanting:

  When Sara was a baby

  A baby Sara was

  She went ‘Whaa, whaa, whaa whaa whaa!’

  When Sara was a schoolgirl

  A schoolgirl Sara was

  She went ‘Miss, Miss, I can’t do this!’

  When Sara was a teenager

  A teenager Sara was

  She went ‘Ooh, aah, I lost my bra

  I left my knickers in my boyfriend’s car’

  The girls all dissolved in laughter. Sara smiled tentatively, trying to pretend she didn’t mind being teased. Diane looked right through her, so Sara’s smile withered on her face. Her friends giggled, whispering and scuffling together until the bell went for assembly, looking at Sara or obviously not looking at Sara till she was sick with mortification. ‘Sucked in, dweeb,’ one of the girls said to her. ‘Ha ha, what a joke!’

  Sara’s head burned, her hands were clammy. Her heart beat so fast it hurt the bones of her chest. Sara crept away, looking at no-one, hoping no-one was looking at her. The only thing she understood was that she had to get away, she had to find somewhere to hide. She barely made it to the bathroom before the waves of darkness crashed over her. She stayed in the bathroom for nearly half an hour, crouched against the dingy porcelain bowl, until a cleaner found her, quite by accident, and took her to sickbay. She lay on the stiff, starched sheets of a trundle bed and wished she could disappear.

  Mr Keismann, Sara’s art teacher, saw her there. ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.

  She only shrugged and looked away. It was impossible to explain what had happened. After a while, he left her there but in the weeks that followed, he tried to help her, giving her books to read and art catalogues to look at, and praising her work. ‘You must do Art for your HSC,’ he said. ‘You have real talent.’

  Painting was always the one thing that had truly given Sara pleasure. Ever since she was first able to hold a crayon, Sara had been drawing. Unlike most children, the love of drawing had not faded away as she grew older. If anything, it grew more intense. She had hundreds of scrapbooks filled with drawings of her family, the farm, scenes from favourite story-books, animals, rainbows, magical creatures. As she grew older, her work became more accomplished. She painted her dreams and her nightmares and her longings, filling her paintings with the mysterious symbols of tarot cards and medieval stories of martyred saints. A blue angel with streamers of sparks and a lily in its hand; a god of fire, hanging by his heels; a girl dressed in white running through a yellow field with a raven attacking her head; St Brigid holding high a jet-black cross and casting out a sea-eyed devil; a girl, crouched on a flight of stairs, the striped shadows of the balustrades falling across her face like bars.

  Her father did not believe a woman could ever be a true artist. He was contemptuous of women painters, calling them ‘peintresses’, a word which Sara understood to be a slur by the mocking tone in which he spoke. He liked to talk to her about art, though, perhaps because Sara always listened with such quiet and grave attention, believing every word he said. When she began to paint herself he smiled and shrugged, thinking she just wanted to be like him. When her interest continued into her teenage years and beyond, he began to frown and mock her work, so that Sara instinctively tried to keep her mysterious desire to recreate the world in paint secret from him.

  ‘Great artists are never dated,’ Augusto once told her, holding her hand as she skipped along the promenade beside Manly Beach. ‘Look at Van Gogh – his paintings are as fresh and shocking as when he painted them all those years ago. Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.’

  She had nodded, staring up at his face at the top of that great length. There was silence for a moment, and Sara ran a few steps, trying to keep up with his determined stride. ‘Great artists are never totally concerned with the conflicts of their own time,’ he had said then. ‘Influenced, yes. Controlled, never. An artist must be a reactionary.’

  Sara did not know what reactionary meant.

  Augusto went on, unheeding, ‘An artist is not ahead of his time, he is in his time. It’s everyone else that is behind the times.’

  Sara had nodded again, trying to look as if she understood.

  ‘Do you know what Pablo Picasso said? He said, “To draw you must close your eyes and sing.”’

  Sara had liked that. She often repeated to herself, ‘To draw, close your eyes and sing.’

  One day Mr Keismann gave Sara a catalogue of paintings by an artist called Pataki. Sara loved the little catalogue
. She often got it out to look at the prim, straight pictures, and to read his story. In every picture he painted, Pataki always included three swallows and three clouds as symbols of the joys and sorrows of life. Sara wished she had thought of it. She would like to paint clouds and swallows. She would like to have a code to life.

  Realising it had struck a chord in her, Mr Keismann brought her books on other artists he thought she might like – William Blake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, Edvard Munch, Charles Blackman, the Boyds. Sara devoured them all. For a while she was obsessed with Munch, who seemed in his paintings to find a way of expressing the inexpressible horror and dread that stepped at her heels, inescapable as a shadow. There was one print in particular, called Dead Mother and Child, that caught her in the chest like a punch above the heart. If she had dared, she would have tried to paint her own version but it was like probing a mouth ulcer with her tongue, it only made the memory throb more cruelly.

  She also loved the booklet on naive art Mr Keismann lent her. One of the plates was of the painting Country Fair Athlete by the French naive artist Camille Bombois, who had once been a wrestler in a circus. Like Augusto, he often painted scenes of circus life. But where Augusto’s protagonists were maimed by his interpretation, their bodies stretched out and twisted, Bombois’s circus performers were drawn simply, clearly, heroically.

  With Mr Keismann’s help, Sara discovered a whole host of painters who did not paint like Augusto. She gave up trying to paint like her father and went back to painting angels and sirens, falling gods and white horses, drowning girls and cages of wings. Sara’s paintings were drawn as clearly and as precisely as she could, taking pleasure in creating beauty out of pain, grace out of grief. Augusto did not approve. He called her style ‘faux naïf’. He said it was a style that had gone out of fashion with crinolines, and jeered at her for being out of step with her generation. His words hurt Sara but she knew they were true. Sara was out of step with everyone.

  Mr Keismann never spoke to her about Augusto. It was as if he did not know Sara was Augusto Sanchez’s daughter, so complete was his silence. Yet everyone knew. His eccentricities were town legend. Several big metropolitan newspapers or magazines had written about him over the years, most detailing some of his more unusual habits, such as receiving journalists at Towradgi with nothing on but an earring and a sarong and the courage to sit with one foot resting upon the other knee.

  Augusto Sanchez had grown especially notorious after a portrait of Gayla sparked angry debates on morality and art. The painting – which showed a naked Gayla sprawled on her stomach, her legs apart, her bottom raised, her hand thrust between her legs – was entitled Woman’s Arse, Reclining. It was decorated with real cigarette butts and Gayla’s own dark, coarse, curling pubic hair.

  An evangelist senator called the portrait ‘disgusting’ and ‘the work of a pervert’, which delighted the classmates of the Sanchez children.

  Woman’s Arse, Reclining was not very good. Even Augusto knew it. His paintings had all begun to look the same. He could not re-create the imaginative force of Circus Rider or Corrida, the strange, eerie beauty of The Sea Princess. Most people Augusto knew admired the painting, which relieved his vague anxiety a little. It was bought by a gallery in Sydney, being the first Augusto Sanchez painting for some time. No-one seemed to mind that it was very like the one before, Woman on Couch, Naked. Until the senator used Woman’s Arse, Reclining as a launch-pad for his latest attack on the declining standards of the Australian community and the breakdown of traditional family values.

  Quite a few newspapers then dredged up the old story of Bridget’s death, and Augusto’s marriage a few months later to his former mistress, Gayla. A lot of people went to look at the painting and quite a few plucked some of the pubic hairs, till that part of Gayla’s anatomy began to look rather moth-eaten. No-one bought the painting, though.

  Sara had known at her very first glance that Woman’s Arse, Reclining was not a very good picture. It was not just that she personally disliked this new phase in her father’s painting style. She just knew he had felt no real passion in the conception or execution of the picture, that he had manufactured the painting more out of a desire to shock and punish than because of any real compulsion of idea. The concept was not even that original. Brett Whiteley had won the Archibald in 1978 with a painting that included cigarette butts, a hypodermic syringe, a photograph of himself and a tuft of his own hair. That year Brett Whiteley had won not just the Archibald, but the Wynne and Sulman prizes too, the first artist ever to win the trifecta. Sara knew it was a sign of desperation on her father’s part that he should be abandoning his own vision to copy someone else’s. It made her feel sad.

  The controversy engulfed them all like a summer bushfire. Sara was in fourth form at the time, her twin brothers in first. Teresa still went to the little public school amongst the trees, where she learnt to pinch harder and whisper nastier things than any girl in her class. It was during the last term of school that the picture first went on display at the trendy little gallery in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Among the crowd of painters, fashion models and television news readers was the evangelistic senator, who had had a very trying day. Within a week, pictures of Woman’s Arse, Reclining were on national television, and many major newspapers were running third-page stories with pictures of Augusto and Gayla and the painting. It was excellent publicity.

  Joe was away at agricultural college and barely noticed the furore, being too interested in cows at the time. All four of the remaining Sanchez children managed to miss school for almost a week with no-one remarking. Sara feigned illness, and the twins disappeared into the bush instead of catching the bus, returning home hours later with their grey uniforms torn and dirtied. Teresa went to the shops, or the beach, and came home at the regular time, on her regular bus. Sara spent the days in her round attic room, absorbed in her painting and diaries, reading Mills & Boon romances and dreaming out the window. Once she climbed the paddocks to the north, scrambling up the narrow rock path to Towradgi Headland. In the fresh morning air, she stood at the very tip of the headland, letting the wind devour her, imagining she could launch off into that dizzying space. She came home at sunset, her feet thick with sand, her school tunic damp, her face hectic with sunburn.

  It was not until the school counsellor rang to inquire why none of the Sanchez siblings had attended lessons that week that anyone realised half the family had been playing hookey. Gayla made them all go to school the following Monday. She was impervious to their protestations and exclamations, their tangled explanations and glowering looks. She sat, moving her cigarette from her fat knee to her fat mouth, watching them. ‘You will go to school,’ she said, in her hoarse, dark brown voice.

  ‘But you don’t understand …’ Dominic blurted out. They all saw her jaw set hard, her small black eyes grow smaller. There was sometimes a menacing quality to Gayla’s silences. She listened to every word they spoke, occasionally wafting the smoke away from her eyes. Once she said, ‘Why listen to what they say?’ It seemed impossible to her step-children that Gayla had ever been hurt by the piercing cruelty of mockery. She would wave away direct attacks and sly digs as she waved away the chiffoning smoke. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ she would say at most, and imponderably roll on her way.

  ‘Your dad’s a pervert, your dad’s a pervert,’ was the most common form of attack. Teresa decided the evangelistic senator was to blame and wrote him a letter, asking him how he’d feel if his daughter was mocked like she was. She did not have the courage to send it. Dominic and Dylan regularly fought the other boys in their class. Being large, solid and unwieldy they could hold their own. That Monday, though, a fourth form gang beat them both up in the bathrooms and flushed Dominic’s head in the toilet.

  In a way Sara was the least affected, at least to begin with. She simply imagined she was Joan of Arc, whose biography she had just read, guiltily, and only at school in case her father should find out. So while some b
oys two years younger than she jeered ‘Your dad’s a pervert, your dad’s a pervert’ with that instinctive poetry that children have, Sara lifted her head and imagined she was Joan, going to her trial. But her fellow scholars were not used to failing to get a rise out of Sara. They’d always got a rise out of her. Their cruelty became more subtle.

  Sara never found out who it was that carefully nipped the elastic in the bloomers she wore to play hockey. They were tricky, whoever they were, and almost cut through in several places, so the elastic was holding only by a thread. Since Sara spent most of the game nervously trying to avoid being trodden on, or pushed, and hoping the ball went the other way, the elastic held almost to the end of the game. She was dreaming at the edge of the muddy oval, thin legs blue with cold, her breath smoking in soft puffs like dandelion seeds, when the ball suddenly swung her way. ‘Run, run, you idiot,’ one of the girls screamed, and Sara jolted forward over the slippery grass. The captain of the other team, a burly girl with a snarl, came at her, there was a clash of hockey sticks, wood met bone, Sara lurched with a cry. Suddenly the elastic of Sara’s bloomers snapped, and she fell, the grey material bunching around her knees.

  Sprawled in the icy mud, her skirt about her neck, a scrape on her cheek smarting, Sara heard a great swell of laughter. Everywhere she looked were thick legs in dirty sneakers, topped by huge faces, laughing.

  ‘Nice panties, dweeb!’ one jeered.

  ‘Look at dag-face.’

  ‘Good one!’ Michelle Jager said appreciatively. The laughter seemed to swell and grow, magnified horribly.

  ‘Woman’s Arse Reclining!’ Josie Worth suddenly shrieked, and all their faces were convulsed with laughter, familiar faces she knew stripped free and showing their true demonic nature. Black came the roaring wave, black, beating her to the icy ground, she could not breathe, could not fight, could not hear anything but the deep boom as if of the deepest ocean, the shrill of her own whimpers.