Dancing on Knives

by Kate Forsyth

  Sara never returned to school. Her heart beat like galloping hooves at the thought of it. Augusto came to pick her up from sickbay and she clung to him, and pushed her forehead against his arm so she did not have to look at other people as she crept to the truck. The doctor came and took her temperature – she was terrified of him, thinking she was going mad, thinking he would send her to some psychiatric hospital where she would be locked up for years. But he was kind. He said to stay in bed for a couple of days, and then he would see.

  Two days later a four-wheel drive driven by a fat man with a shiny domed head drove up the hill. Ten minutes later it drove away with Gayla in the passenger seat and all her baggage in the boot. Sara was the only one at home. ‘See ya,’ was all Gayla said.

  They ate dinner around the coffee table in the living room, washing the meal down with beer, then with gin from the old bar cabinet.

  At first Sara drank the gin with lemonade, then, when that ran out, she drank it straight. The gin made everything crystal-blue, as clear and shimmery as the sound of church bells. After they finished eating, Joe rang the hospital to speak to the doctor. There was no change.

  Teresa and the twins flung themselves down on the couch to watch TV. They were immersed in a show when Joe came over, took the remote, and changed channels.

  ‘Hey, we were watching that!’ Teresa said.

  ‘Hate those old movies,’ Joe said.

  ‘Always have to have it your way, don’t you, Joe?’ Dylan said bitterly. ‘Don’t worry about any of us.’

  ‘Right then, I won’t,’ Joe said. ‘Forget the last five years, when all I’ve done is worried about you lot, working my arse off to keep the farm going, trying to keep us out of bankruptcy court. Don’t worry about any of you, do I?’

  ‘Please don’t fight,’ Sara said wearily. ‘I don’t want to watch telly anyway.’

  ‘Nothing else to do,’ Dylan said. ‘God, we should’ve gone out, Dom.’

  ‘Yeah, typical,’ Joe said. ‘Gus is in hospital, all busted up, and you kids want to go out on the piss. Think of nobody else, do you?’

  ‘Stop it,’ Sara said. ‘Come on, please?’

  Nobody said anything, all staring blindly at the television.

  ‘Let’s go and get the washing up done, and then you can go to bed, Sara,’ Gabriela said, getting up. ‘I suppose it’s too much to ask you chauvinist pigs to give a hand round here?’

  ‘I’ll give a hand round here the day Sara gives me a hand round the farm,’ Joe said, not looking up. ‘But since she’s frightened of cows and frightened of the milking machines and scared of getting her hands dirty, I guess that’s not going to happen anytime soon.’

  ‘Don’t be so mean,’ Dominic burst out. His eyes were bloodshot, and his orange hair stood up on end like a scarecrow’s. He got up, clumsy and uncoordinated as a labrador puppy. ‘Sara can’t help being frightened of things.’

  ‘No,’ Joe said, his voice thick. ‘But the fact remains I’ve been up all night, driven to Moruya and back, and still managed to put in a good day’s work. I’m tired. I’m bloody tired.’

  ‘Then go to bed,’ Gabriela said coolly. ‘Come on, Sar-bear. Let’s leave these ape-men to their chest-beating and get those dishes done.’

  ‘I’ll come and help,’ Dominic said.

  Sara smiled at him, though her cheeks felt stiff. ‘Thanks, but no thanks, darl. We don’t have enough plates to have any more broken. Gabriela’s right, you boys should go to bed. It’s been a long, long day.’

  Dominic nodded. Though he was so tall and lanky, he looked suddenly so like the boy Sara had once known that she felt moved to hug him and kiss his ruddy hair and wish him good night. He hugged her back hard and once again she felt words struggling in him like a rabbit in a trap, unable to wrench itself free. She waited hopefully, but he said nothing, falling back, not looking at her, rubbing his face with his big, freckled hand.

  Teresa followed the boys upstairs, leaving Gabriela and Sara to clean up on their own. In the kitchen, Sara leant against the fridge and wondered why everything they owned had to be so ugly. Her grandfather must have had terrible taste, she mused, or else he had just been a cheapskate.

  Gabriela turned on the radio and squirted bright yellow liquid into the sink. A song came on that Sara had always loved. She began to dance, clicking her fingers, swaying her hips. She wished Consuelo had lived long enough to teach her flamenco. She wished so many things.

  Gin pulsed in her bloodstream. The beat of the music eased something in her, some tightness around her heart. She grabbed Gabriela’s hand and tried to make her dance too, but Gabriela just smiled and kept on washing up. Sara spun round again, lost her balance and staggered against the bench. ‘Too much gin,’ she said breathlessly.

  ‘I haven’t seen you dance in ages,’ Gabriela said. ‘Remember that time we stole your dad’s truck and drove into Narooma? We sneaked into the club, where that band was playing. I remember you dancing all night. I’ve never known someone who throws themselves into it like you do.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’

  Sara had begged her father to buy her a pair of red dancing shoes she had seen in a shop window, but her father had refused.

  ‘You want to dance flamenco?’ he had mocked. ‘You haven’t the soul for it, princess.’

  Sara had been so hurt, Joe had gone to buy the shoes for her, spending all his pocket money. Sara had danced in them until her feet were blistered red-raw.

  ‘That was one reason why I couldn’t get too angry with Teresa about last night. How could I, when I’d done exactly the same thing?’

  ‘That’s what made me think of it.’

  ‘That was the first time I got kissed.’ Sara slid down the cupboard door and sat on the floor, trying to catch her breath. She did not tell her cousin it was the only time she had ever been kissed.

  ‘No, really, was it?’ Gabriela was quietly amused. ‘God, you were a late starter! You would have been at least sixteen.’

  ‘I was fifteen,’ Sara said defiantly.

  That was something Sara had never been able to understand – where was this invisible door, one side of which was innocence, the other easy understanding? Why was she a late starter?

  In primary school, most of her fellow students had, like Sara, been instilled with a high opinion of their own virginity. The nuns were full of stories of holy martyrs who died a horrible death rather than surrender their virginity. The story of St Agnes had been a favourite. A beautiful girl, St Agnes had consecrated herself to God, swearing eternal virginity. She was much desired, because of her beauty and perhaps because of her inaccessibility. Despite threat of torture, she had insisted on preserving her virginity. Which wasn’t very logical, Sara thought. Why would anyone want to torture someone they wanted to sleep with? She wouldn’t be very beautiful after a few hours on the rack.

  They had thrown St Agnes in a brothel, first stripping her naked. But her hair grew miraculously long, concealing her nakedness. All the men were too afraid to touch her and so her chastity remained sacrosanct. Eventually she was beheaded.

  The girls at school, hanging round the back of the tuck-shop, would sometimes ask each other, ‘If you and Wayne Duggan were shipwrecked on a desert island, would you have sex with him?’

  The answer, of course, was no, though some girls, thinking of his cheeky grin at the back of the bus, would demur, saying, ‘Well, not unless a priest was there to marry us.’

  At school camps, with the weird sounds of leaves shuffling against the tent like beasts and monsters, they read aloud by the light of a wavering torch the best passages from Jackie Collins. Sara would lie with her legs tightly crossed, her stomach squirming, and that night she would have strange, disturbing dreams, of ravishment in the forest. If it was the sort of school camp where they had an end-of-week disco with the Catholic Boys’ Association camp in the next field, they would giggle and try to be cool with the boys, but still be shocked with those girls who danced the slow dance a
t the end of the night and let the boys put their tongues in their mouths. These girls were called sluts. Sometimes, Sara would watch them, fascinated by the slow roll and clutch of their tongues in each other’s cheeks. She saw her father and Gayla kiss like that, many times in the first few months, their hands grasping at each other’s back. She always thought of Gayla as some sort of hungry leopard, with her large, devouring mouth, her lazy body. She wondered that her father had not been consumed, morsel by morsel.

  ‘Gabriela,’ Sara said, not turning her head, ‘how do you know if you’re frigid?’

  Gabriela stopped drying the cutlery. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose there’s no mistaking it. Why? You don’t think you are, do you?’

  Sara did not answer but hoisted herself up and walked across to peer at her face reflected in the night-dark window.

  ‘Do you?’ Gabriela repeated.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sara said distractedly. ‘I think I might be.’

  Gabriela looked at her seriously, and said, ‘I wouldn’t think you were, Sar, you just haven’t met the right guy yet. Come to that, when do you ever meet any guys?’

  Sara hunched a shoulder.

  ‘Was it really your first kiss?’

  ‘Sure was,’ Sara replied. ‘Remember we met those guys – we went down to the beach with them? It was one of them.’

  ‘Sure I remember, I was there too. He was cute, that guy. Can’t remember his name. I do remember being furious with you because you made me take you home, and I didn’t want to go. He was really cute, the guy I was with.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sara said. ‘His name was Brett. The guy I was with was called Paul.’

  ‘What a memory,’ Gabriela said. ‘There’s no way I’d be able to remember their names.’

  That’s because you’ve been kissed by hundreds of guys, Sara wanted to say. I’ve only ever been kissed once.

  Even the memory of the sudden, unexpected intrusion of that boy’s tongue was enough to give her a strange tingling hotness in the deep hollow of her groin. At the time she had jerked away, frightened and embarrassed, and run along the sand, looking for Gabriela. Now she often replayed the scene in her head, inventing different endings.

  Instead she said, ‘When was your first kiss?’, and gulped a mouthful of gin. It burnt down her throat like holy fire.

  ‘I was nine,’ Gabriela said, ‘and Pete Wallace – d’you remember him? He chased me behind the bus stop and kissed me. I kneed him,’ she recalled with pleasure. ‘And then we used to have kissing competitions, when I was about thirteen, I suppose. We used to have parties where we’d just hang around and kiss, seeing how long we could do it.’

  Sara was amazed. This was not in her history at all. Gabriela was three years older, but that was not the answer surely. She felt her ignorance pressing heavily upon her, like the clouds upon the troubled sea that afternoon. She hurried into speech, asking quickly, ‘Have you … you know.’

  ‘Heaps,’ Gabriela said mockingly, twirling the heavy liquid round and round in her glass. ‘More than I can remember. No-one that matters.’

  Sara stared into her glass, seeing in it a sea of pure and terrible clarity – no shapes, no colour, no illusions.

  Joe put his head around the door. ‘How you going? You OK, Sar?’ He came to her, swaying slightly, and hugged her. She felt her ribs hard against his. ‘Don’t take it all so hard, Sar?’ She leant her head against him. ‘Dad’s gonna be all right, Sar, everything’s gonna be all right. It’s all a big mistake.’

  She smelt the beer on his breath. His anger seemed to have dissolved. ‘Why don’t you go to bed?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You’re exhausted, Sar, it’s been a hell of a long day. Go on, go to bed? Things’ll look much better in the morning, I promise.’

  Sara shook her head.

  ‘Dad’ll be better soon, he’ll see it’s all a mistake, he’ll sell his painting, and we’ll fix up the farm.’

  ‘I know,’ Sara said, sniffing into his shirt.

  ‘You going to bed?’

  ‘Not yet. Soon.’

  Joe sighed, and let her go. His eyes were so bloodshot, their blue-green colour was more intense than ever. ‘I’m so tired,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fallen apart.’

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ Sara said.

  Joe nodded. He looked around the room vaguely, and saw the bottle of gin on the bench. It was empty. ‘All gone,’ he announced. ‘Better get some more.’ He left again, knocking his shoulder against the door-frame on his way out. Sara leant against the refrigerator door.

  ‘Why don’t you go to bed, Sar?’ Gabriela said, something like pity in her voice.

  ‘I don’t want to, OK?’ Sara thought of shadows looming, boards creaking, storm howling. She thought of sleep, where dreams come creeping, of darkness, where ghosts walk.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Gabriela said.

  ‘Out of gin,’ Sara said. ‘Go get some more.’

  She blundered out of the kitchen, making her way towards her father’s studio. Joe was in there, sitting on the floor, staring at Augusto’s painting. He was holding the bottle of Courvoisier brandy by its slender, green neck.

  Sara sat down on the floor next to him and silently held out her glass. He splashed some brandy into it.

  ‘Getting pissed?’ he asked.

  ‘Already there,’ she answered.

  He grinned and grimaced. ‘Me too. Pissed as a parrot. Pissed off. Pissed to pieces.’

  She drank down the whole glass. It burnt away the sting of tears. Sara did not want to cry anymore. She wanted to laugh, to dance, to sing. But so many things were hurting her tonight, so many things were piercing her defences. She did not know how to protect herself. So she rested her head against Joe’s shoulder and was quiet.

  ‘Getting sloshed, you two?’ Gabriela said, coming into the room.

  ‘Think it’s a bit late,’ Joe said. ‘Already sloshed.’

  ‘Undoubtedly too late,’ Sara pronounced. ‘Much, much, much too late. But, hell, it’s Saturday night, nowhere to go, nothing to do, just like every other Saturday night! So let’s get pissed.’

  She passed Gabriela the bottle. Gabriela poured herself a little, tasted it, grimaced, and put her glass down. ‘I need some ginger ale if I’m going to drink brandy.’

  ‘You philistine!’ Joe said mockingly. ‘Put ginger ale in Courvoisier? The finest cognac in the world? Gus would throw you out if he knew.’

  ‘I wish there was some gin left,’ Sara said sadly. ‘I was really enjoying it. Such a dazzling sort of slosh. Hey, Gabriela, have you seen Dad’s painting?’ She dragged her cousin to sit down beside her. All three of them sat there in a row, staring up at the enormous canvas resting on its easel.

  Sara gazed up at that cool, round face, Bridget’s mysterious dead face. In the shaded light of the desk-lamp, her long, indolent body seemed to float upon waves of darkness, the great swirls of red hair and the pale contours of her body the only colour. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ Sara said, and felt a great pain in her side, as if she had been pierced by an arrow. ‘It’s really good!’

  Death. The shadow of it was all around them.

  ‘It’s different from his usual style,’ Gabriela said consideringly.

  Joe and Sara said nothing, staring at the painting as if mesmerised.

  ‘The colours are amazing. Look at that aquamarine and purple.’ Gabriela stood up and went closer, examining the brushwork closely. She gave a little shudder. ‘It’s a bit creepy, isn’t it? Those eyes.’

  ‘I wonder what he planned to call it,’ Joe said. His voice was raw. ‘Ordeal by Fire? Death on the Mountain? Sacrifice on the Altar of Augusto’s Lust?’

  ‘Last Testament?’ Sara said. Tears suddenly gushed down her face like water pouring out of a broken gutter.

  Gabriela rocked her against her arm. ‘It’s all right, honey, it’s all right. Don’t cry so, you’ll hurt yourself. Come on, sweetie, it’s all right.’

  Sara was bey
ond comfort, great sobs racking her thin body.

  ‘Come on, honey,’ Gabriela said, ‘let’s go to bed.’

  Sara shook her head, the black hair shuffling the dust on the floor.

  ‘No, no, come on. Come on, that’s the girl.’

  Together Gabriela and Joe steered Sara up the stairs and towards her bedroom. She could hardly walk.

  She fell face down on to her bed, muffling her tears in her pillow. She heard them leave, Gabriela saying something reproving to Joe, Joe snapping something back. Then all was silent. The floor tilted below her, she crept under the doona, trying to steady herself against the toppling of the planet. Out of long habit, she turned her pillow over three times and made a wish. Normally she wished for tomorrow to be a better day. Though her need today was too huge to be enclosed within seven such simple words, this is what she wished for again, having no other words to articulate such longing.

  The darkness fizzed. The house breathing night around her was a cage, and she was trapped, trapped. In this dark familiar room there was stillness and dust, while outside the heavens raged as if in protest at the blood spilt on the stones. Will he die? she wondered. Was he murdered?

  Sara was afraid. What did she fear?

  She did not know what she feared. She did not know what she wanted. She had dreams of creation. Certain things held certain meanings – circuses and tarot cards, cooking and the sea, kings and queens, elephants and white horses. Sex made her afraid, the commitment, the hurting, the nakedness. She was afraid of the words, the frantic honesty, to say so much, too much, to be betrayed.

  The gin ululated through her nervous system. She thought of Matthew with a wrench in her abdomen. She thought of her father. Rain smashed against the windows, and she imagined it washing down the stones, the cliff, washing away his blood, washing away any sign of him. What would she do if he died? A vision of a world without him flashed before her, reeking of sulphur and steel and desolation. So long she had been a puppet, her father the puppet-master, that for a moment she doubted her ability to subsist without him.

  One day, she thought. One day, I’ll be free.