Dancing on Knives

by Kate Forsyth

  Nya reached and turned down the music to a muted roar. ‘Want some?’ she asked. Sara shook her head, letting her hair droop over her face. Dominic passed her the almost empty bottle of vodka, and she swallowed some. Immediately her muscles relaxed.

  ‘We gotta talk to someone,’ Dylan said, carefully rolling another joint. ‘We don’t know what to do.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s about Dad.’ They looked at her with strained, white faces, pushing the scarecrow hair out of their eyes with an identical movement. Oppression settled back into Sara’s chest. ‘He’s been … sleeping with Aunty Maureen.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh.’ Their eyes opened wide. They seemed taken aback and Sara was glad. She was sick of being the last to know things all the time. She was sick of them thinking she was useless. ‘How long have you known?’ Dylan asked. He sounded put out.

  ‘I only found out this morning,’ she admitted. ‘Maureen came over, to ask how Dad was. I had a bit of a scene with her.’

  They looked at her with new respect. ‘You know that was what Alex was going on about on Friday?’

  Sara nodded.

  ‘Yeah, Dad was furious. He threw a curly at Joe, you should’ve heard him.’

  ‘At Joe?’

  ‘Yeah. Dad seemed to think Joe had told Alex all about it. He was pissed off.’ Dylan paused to have another drag on the joint. Nya rolled over so she now lay on her stomach, her head resting on her crossed arms. Sara had forgotten she was there. She was thinking back over all her conversations with Joe and feeling a most unfamiliar sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘I can’t believe … Joe told Alex?’

  ‘Yeah, so Dad said. It was after lunch, y’know. Joe made us go help him in the front paddock, and after a while Dad came by on the Elephant.’

  The twins had been clearing out black wattle, while Joe was grading the surface of the paddock with the tractor. Augusto zoomed down the steep road on his motorcycle, and screeched to a halt by the fence, near the tractor. ‘Pablo!’ he had called, and his eldest son had reluctantly stopped the tractor and leant down to speak to him. ‘You little arsehole,’ Augusto had said. ‘What the hell did you tell Alex?’

  ‘Joe kept denying it,’ Dominic said. ‘They had a real blue. We were just sort of standing there, in shock. Matt heard it all too.’

  Sara nodded. Another piece of the puzzle dropped into place.

  ‘Dad was fit to be tied. I’ve never seen him so pissed off. Joe just saying what the fuck, what the fuck. It was awful.’ As he spoke Dominic offered the joint to Sara again, and in a sort of daze she took it. Feeling very daring she put the end in her mouth and tried to inhale the way Joe smoked a cigarette. The smoke rasped her throat and she coughed violently. The second time she managed to swallow some of the smoke.

  ‘I can’t believe Joe would tell Alex something like that,’ Sara said. ‘You know how much he loves the farm, he wouldn’t do anything which would piss Alex off, surely?’

  ‘Not when Alex holds the mortgage,’ Dylan said positively.

  ‘Depends on how pissed off he was with your dad,’ Nya said.

  Remembering her, Sara retreated suddenly into silence again. Nya leant over and took the joint out of her hand.

  ‘There’s more, though,’ Dominic said abruptly. ‘We don’t know what to make of it all. If it wasn’t for … if we hadn’t seen Dad and Joe going for it …’

  ‘We just can’t work it out. It’s been driving us crazy,’ Dylan continued. ‘We don’t know if it means anything but …’

  ‘But we can’t help being afraid it does,’ Dominic finished.

  ‘What?’ Sara asked.

  They hesitated, looking at each other, then Dominic said simply, ‘We think we heard the truck coming down from the headland. Late, I mean. After the storm broke.’

  Sara stared at him. For a moment she could not think. Stingrays and sharks swam ponderously over her, their shadows darkening her eyes, their smooth shape brushing her skin.

  ‘You mean, our truck?’ she asked. ‘The Dodge?’

  They nodded.

  ‘Joe took off after the argument, he said he had to get out of there,’ Dominic explained. ‘He took the truck and his surfboard, said he was going to go and catch a wave. Said why should he be the only one working his arse off to save the farm when everyone else was only interested in their own selfish pleasure. We felt pretty bad, really.’

  ‘But we sure as hell weren’t going to hang around pulling out thistles if Joe was off surfing, so we took off too.’

  ‘With Nya,’ Sara said and was pleased at their astonished stare.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dominic said. ‘We went into the gullies. There’s a cave back there, with Aboriginal paintings and a midden. We go there all the time. It’s a secret sort of a place.’

  Sara nodded.

  ‘Yuin paintings,’ Nya said. ‘That’s what the mob down here is called.’

  ‘Yuin,’ Dominic repeated.

  ‘We didn’t really notice the storm blowing up. The trees are real tall there, and the cave is deep under all these ferns. It wasn’t until we heard the thunder that we realised we were in for a big blow. So we headed for home. We came round the long way so we could see Nya back safe and then headed down to the road. Easier than trying to get through the bush, even though the road switches back and forth so much.’

  ‘We were heading back pretty fast, ’cause it was really pelting down by then, when we heard the truck coming. We saw the headlights through the trees and then Joe came tearing round the corner, really thrashing it.’

  The twins had waved madly, but he must have failed to see them, for the truck did not slow. So they had sprung in front of the truck, and for one breathless moment were impaled by those hurtling lights like moths by a collector’s pin.

  Then the truck came to a shuddering halt, and they had all piled in the front.

  ‘Joe was all wet,’ Dominic said. ‘Not just his hair. His clothes too. And he was covered in mud.’

  ‘I said, “What you been doing, Joe, mud-wrestling?” and he said, “No, you cretin, I had to change the bloody tyre.” He sounded pretty cranky but we figured he was still upset by the scene with Dad …’ Dylan went on.

  ‘So?’ Sara prompted after a long pause.

  ‘Well, it’s just … well, when we saw Joe’s lights and heard the car, it wasn’t coming down the main road, but off the track to the headland.’

  ‘You sure?’ Sara asked.

  Dylan shrugged. ‘Not really. It was pissing down and we had our hoods up. It’s hard to be sure.’

  ‘We went back this morning, though, and went to the place where Joe picked us up. It was just below where the track comes down and meets the road. If Joe had been driving along the road, would we have seen his headlights flash in our eyes like that?’ Dominic said. ‘The angle’s all wrong. But if he’d been coming down the track, well, then we would have, I think.’

  Nya leant over and passed Sara the joint again. Thoughtfully she took a cautious pull. This time her throat did not hurt. She took another. All her bones began to melt. ‘Are you trying to say you think Joe pushed Dad off the cliff?’

  ‘No!’ Dylan cried. But Sara was looking at Dominic who was sitting all hunched up, his mouth as unhappy as she had ever seen it.

  ‘Dom?’

  He shook his head. ‘I dunno, Sar. I don’t want to – I keep telling myself he couldn’t have. But the look on his face as he was driving down that hill. He looked as if he had seen a ghost.’

  Though Sara saw many ghosts in the corridors and attics of Towradgi, there was one that haunted her mercilessly. That was the ghost of her grandmother, Consuelo Sanchez, whose roast goose cooked with pears could make grown men tremble. ‘A stick of cinnamon is the secret,’ Consuelo would tell Sara, standing at the end of the bed, a hunched little figure in black, a shadow among shadows.

  The ghost of Consuelo Sanchez was always full of advice for her soft little grand-
daughter. ‘Thyme is best for courage,’ Consuelo told her. ‘Make a cup of thyme tea with honey, that’ll help make you brave. Or wear a sprig of it in your hair, so you can smell it.’

  Or she would say, ‘Never fear, querida, the pain will pass in time. Time heals all wounds.’

  But Sara was always afraid that hearing the voice of her grandmother’s ghost was another sign that she was going slowly but irrevocably mad. She tried hard to ignore the ghost, even though the advice was sometimes very sound. ‘Punch them in the face,’ she would say. ‘Then they’d think twice before teasing you.’

  Sara never did, though.

  The ghost of Consuelo Sanchez knew many stories. When Sara had nightmares and woke screaming in the dark, the ghost of Consuelo would drift in from the shadows, saying, ‘Now, now, what’s all this noise?’ Sara would feel a hand as soft and cold as snow stroking her brow and hear the cracked voice begin to murmur, ‘La Sirenita leant her white arms on the ship’s rail and looked to the east for the first red hint of daybreak, for she knew that the first ray of sunlight would strike her dead. Then she saw her sisters rise up among the waves. They were as pale as she, and there was no sign of their lovely long hair. It had all been cut off. “We have given our hair to the witch,” they said, “so that she would help us save you from death tonight. She gave us a knife. Here it is. See the sharp blade! Before the sun rises, you must strike it into the Prince’s heart, and when his warm blood bathes your feet they will grow together and become a fishtail again, and you can come back to us in the sea. Make haste! He or you must die before sunrise.”’

  The voice of Consuelo’s ghost rose and fell in the darkness like the cadences of the sea so Sara often slipped into sleep before the story ended. For this reason, the story always had the unearthly beauty of a long-forgotten phrase of music that comes back to haunt one’s mind in moments of quiet. Sara often tried to pin down the stories by capturing them on canvas. She painted the little mermaid a number of times, though not like Arthur Rackham with his whimsical, idealised illustrations. The story inhabited Sara’s imagination more like a series of motifs that found vivid expression in her paintings – a girl dancing with a trail of bloody footprints behind her, underwater thrones, great horned creatures of the deep, seaweed like writhing snakes, shipwrecks, a girl drowning in an ocean of foam.

  Bridget was very worried. She thought Sara’s paintings morbid and unnatural. She and Augusto argued about it, and about Sara. ‘She should be playing Barbie dolls and making cubby-houses, not spending hours all by herself, mooning about and drawing pictures of people drowning!’ Bridget said. ‘And those nightmares! It’s wearing me out, all these nights waking up screaming and wetting her bed still. I think we should take her to see someone.’

  ‘Who? A quack doctor? Aren’t you overreacting a little? She’s just a bit highly strung.’

  ‘Highly strung! It’s not you that has to get up to her two or three times a week with some new night terror.’

  ‘It’s that bloody school you insist on sending her to. It’s enough to give any sensitive child nightmares, listening to all those stories of hell-flames and the devil. And those nuns! If anyone is morbid and unnatural, it’s them. You know one of them gave Sara a book on the lives of the saints to read? She’s nine years old and reading about women having their breasts cut off or being burnt alive.’

  ‘It’s a very good school,’ Bridget said defensively. ‘I went there when I was Sara’s age and I certainly wasn’t still wetting my bed at the age of nine.’

  ‘No, but no-one could ever accuse you of sensitivity, could they?’ Augusto said in his nastiest tones.

  Sara, crouching on the dark stairs and listening, got up and crept silently back to her room, feeling a void opening up inside her. That was the night she first got out the old wooden box her grandmother had left her in her will, with its pack of seventy-eight strange and beautiful cards carefully wrapped in a piece of white embroidered silk, which Augusto said had once been part of Consuelo’s wedding gown. Bridget had called the cards ‘absolute nonsense’ and once, angrily, ‘the devil’s playing cards’. She had not liked Sara to look at them and so they had stayed in their box for years, their sanctity undisturbed.

  When Sara opened the box, releasing the sweet smell of cinnamon and saffron, she found within the note in her grandmother’s formal, old-fashioned handwriting. It said simply, ‘To help you see more clearly.’

  Bending closer to breathe in the scent more deeply, Sara remembered all her father’s stories of his mother. When Consuelo had not been cooking, or cutting slices off the cured ham hanging above the counter, or wrapping up cheese in white butcher’s paper, she had been telling the fortunes of all the customers in the dark, fragrant shop where he had spent most of his childhood. She had never once been wrong, he said.

  Sara had taken out the cards and shuffled them clumsily, looking at the bright, mysterious pictures. She did not know how to read the cards. There were no instructions enclosed nor any books in the house that might explain to her how to use the cards. But that first night, alone in her room, with a terrible hatred against her mother in her heart, Sara had turned over her first card.

  It was number thirteen. Death.

  Sara ran down the hill as if trying to out-race the shadows of the clouds. She slowed only as the ground began to flatten into paddocks. Her breath came harshly. Through her wind-tossed hair she saw Matthew leaning against one of the fences. She altered her direction so she walked towards him. He straightened up abruptly.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked but without speaking she came up to him and leant her face against his shoulder. He crossed his arms about her back and held her. After several long heartbeats she broke away and began to walk again. He walked with her, both silent.

  At last she looked at him, shaking her hair away from her face. ‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to do.’ She paused, and looked into his face strongly. ‘I think I need to get away from here.’

  ‘We could go for a ride,’ he said. She nodded her head, sharply. He took her hand and led her back to the shed, where his motorcycle stood, proud and gleaming.

  At the sight of it Sara felt a sharp stab of fear. Amongst all the confusion of her emotions it was only one more needle, however, and so she climbed on without hesitation, clinging tightly to Matthew’s waist, pressing her body against his. She pressed her cheek against his back, and closed her eyes as the motorbike jolted over the rough dirt road.

  Once they reached the tarmac, the bike seemed to fly, gathering strength. Sara opened her eyes, and leant into the wind. Tears bled from the corners of her eyes. His devil-may-care black eyes glinted at her as he turned and shouted. She could not hear what he said. ‘Faster,’ she shrieked and did not know why.

  Through the cool day they flew. Grey trees swayed incessantly against a cloud-soft horizon, above a sea the colour of cigar ash. The softness, the greyness, soothed her as a bright day never could have.

  Sara wondered if he was taking her to Narooma – the road led there, bursting out of the bush to a wide view of the bay, with its long scallop of sand, the sprawl of buildings and roads, telegraph wires and bright shopfronts. She hoped they would flash past it, all the town a blur in her eyes, and keep on going, heading north, heading away.

  She closed her eyes again and let her body sway with his. Through her closed eyelids she sensed the changes in light as the road came out of an avenue of trees, then back beneath branches. She almost fell off when Matthew braked to a halt. She grabbed his waist, opening her eyes.

  He had parked at the edge of a long, empty beach. The sand was white, but cruel-looking black boulders bit through the water. He smiled at her, and held out his hand. ‘Wanna sit for a while?’

  ‘Can we walk instead?’ she asked, and pulled off her boots so she was barefoot. Matthew took off his boots too, and together they walked along the sand. Her hand was uneasy in his. She was conscious of his eyes on her face, studying her intentl
y, but she did not look up.

  ‘What’s wrong, Sara?’ he asked gently. ‘I mean, apart from the fact your father’s in hospital?’

  If his hand had not been so warm and holding hers so firmly, if he had not taken her away from the farm like that, so quickly and without question, she would not have been able to answer him. But his hand was warm and firm, and he was watching her mouth with eyes as rich and dark as chocolate cake, and so she told him, very simply, ‘I’m afraid Joe might have pushed my dad off the cliff.’

  ‘Joe?’ Matthew was surprised. ‘I was thinking of your uncle, Mr Stick-Up-The-Arse Halloran.’

  Sara smiled despite herself. ‘So was I. I accused him. Of murder! But he says he was at church with both Annie and Harry, and that the whole congregation will swear to it.’

  ‘That makes it hard to stick it on him,’ Matthew agreed.

  She took a deep breath. ‘He says I should look a little closer to home for my murderer.’

  ‘Yeah, but what does Alex know?’ Matthew said. ‘He’s the kind of guy that thinks a slim panatella is a country singer.’

  Sara was startled into laughter. Although it only lasted a moment, it felt good. She could not remember the last time she had laughed out loud.

  Matthew laughed with her. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve been trying to make you laugh for three whole months and it’s only now, when your dad’s in hospital, all busted up, and you’re telling me you think your brother’s a murderer, that I finally succeed.’

  Sara smiled ruefully. He drew her down to sit next to him on the sand, wrapping his arm about her shoulders.

  ‘Look, your uncle’s a miserly old bastard who thinks he’s God’s gift to the world. What do you care what he thinks?’

  Sara shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. ‘It’s not that, really.’