Dancing on Knives

  Perhaps she had just read too many now, too many books too much the same. Sara looked at the cover again, sighed and tossed it down, lying back on her pillow with her hands behind her head. Her thoughts went to the book she had struggled with most of the long wet summer, picking it up and putting it down, having nights when she could hardly wait to get back to it, and weeks when she read other books, totally exasperated and mystified by its odd, stilted, unnatural conversations, its strange piquant encounters.

  It had been just one of a boxful of books that Joe had bought at the church fete and given to her as the secret addition to her Christmas present. Sara had sunk into that box of books like an opium addict into a silken couch. One hot, grey, rainy day she had pulled out, at random, a book that looked much like any of the other books. Titled Women In Love, the cover pictured a dark bearded man with shaggy hair cupping the face of a smiling blonde in his hands. Sara had given the cover only a cursory glance, curling up with the book under her doona in the dim spotlight of her bedside lamp.

  At once she had felt an oddness in the writing. It was quite unlike anything she had ever read before. It was not just that the two sisters in the book did not talk like anyone Sara knew, nor look like anyone, with their white dresses and their brightly hued stockings, grass-green, rose-red, cornflower-blue. It was not just that the words on the page waltzed round and round, pirouetting on points, turning and returning ever again to the same grace notes, building to a mordent melody that thrummed chords in Sara’s own shadow-bound soul, strumming music from keys that had long lain silent and still, coated in dust.

  In their hearts they were frightened. This was the first resonating chord. As Sara read on, this string was plucked again and again, these low grave bass notes that sounded again and again like the sob of an oboe through an orchestral symphony.

  Sara had always believed, in the deepest, most secret part of her subconscious mind, that she was alone in her terror of the world. Other people seemed to live so lightly, so easily. They laughed off scorn and derision, deriding others without thought of hurting. They slept at night, dreaming without consequence, they made their way effortlessly through the days, talking and laughing and joking without ever hearing that terrible echo of their own voice in their aural chambers. They seemed to live as if deaf to the ever-present echoing footfalls of death stalking their heels.

  Lost in the dark forests of this strange book, Sara glimpsed for the first time the possibility that she was not alone. In the world of this book, everyone was afraid. Those who were not afraid were brutish and unfeeling. There was one scene, where the hero had been struck a murderous blow by his mistress and, stunned and bleeding, went and rolled naked in the wet primroses, beating himself against the branches of the young fir trees. What a dread he had of mankind, of other people. It amounted to horror, a sort of dream terror. Reading these words, Sara felt a shock run down her spine, as if she had been nudged with a cattle prod. She knew that dread, that horror. It was the key in the padlock of the chains that kept her bound to the farm. The hero was, the preface to the book said, a self-portrait of the author whose name was D. H. Lawrence. Sara wondered if D. H. Lawrence too had felt that horror of other people, feeling as if the world was too bright and sharp, as if every step caused pain.

  Sara wondered for the first time if perhaps she was not so strange. Perhaps she was not the only one who felt she was out of her natural element, heavy and awkward in this world, unable to say all the things that were in her heart.

  So although there were many times when Sara put down the book, in boredom or bewilderment, she always picked it up again. Some passages she skipped altogether, others she read over and over to herself, sometimes sounding the words out loud as if to hear them more clearly. At first these passages only made her feel, dumbstruck and passionate as a child. Then they made her think, to wonder and ponder and puzzle. When she had finally finished the book, she kept it by her bed so she could go back and read these dog-eared pages again, hear again the sombre music that somehow, despite itself, built to moments of clarity and rejoicing.

  She had underlined her favourite sentences in pencil, lines that shone out of the murk of the book like the sweeping ray of a lighthouse: Better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

  Sara’s life was a repetition of repetitions.

  She thought about the last time she had left the farm, five years ago, when she had been only fifteen. A few weeks after Gayla packed her bags and went, leaving Teresa behind, Augusto took all four of his children out to lunch on a sunny Sunday.

  Augusto drove them all into town in the Dodge. Teresa sat up next to him in the cabin and the other four climbed into the back, making themselves comfortable among the tools and sacks and coils of barbed wire. It was hot, hot and golden in the sky, hot and blue on the ground, in the eucalyptus haze above the trees and on the water, shimmering on either side between the trees as they drove up the road to town. They passed their school on the highway and involuntarily they all looked away. Only a few weeks earlier Sara had been brought home from the high school, mute and shivering.

  She had refused to go back. The very suggestion she should return to school was enough to make her tremble and cry. Doctors had come out to see her, for she would not go and see them, and had shrugged and put away their stethoscopes and their needles, saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with her – physically …’

  The school had been concerned, telling Augusto she was far too young to leave school, but Augusto simply waved his hand. ‘The path to youth takes a whole life,’ he answered.

  The truth was, Augusto enjoyed having Sara at home to clean the house and cook the meals and make sure he never ran out of cigars. Sara was so grateful that he did not force her to go back to school that she picked up after him like a Victorian scullery-maid, which was something Gayla had certainly never done.

  This trip to Narooma was the first time she had actually been away from Towradgi since the whole horrible scene at school. Sara was only there because it was the twins’ twelfth birthday and she could not find a good enough excuse to stay at home. So she sat in the back of the Dodge with her eyes closed, her back pressed against the cabin, her hands holding her heart in place. When the Dodge finally jerked to a halt on the side of the road, she clambered out of the tray with shaking legs and hoped no-one noticed how she had to cling to the side of the truck.

  They were on the bay side of the hill on which Narooma was built. Here the water was still, green and dark underneath, and lacquered with lapis lazuli above. Lines of fishing boats marched on into the bay, rising and falling gently at their moorings. The old ones were small and grey, the new ones large and white.

  The Sanchez family, cobbled together as clumsily as a child’s sampler, ate fish and chips together on the pier. The café had thick plastic walls that could be rolled up and down against the wind. Through plastic, the bay looked like an Impressionistic painting. Sara peeled all the batter off her fish, which was white and tasteless. Shark, she thought. The chips were hot and salty, though, and the children ate them by the handful. Sara leant her head against the pole and watched a sea-eagle, circling higher and higher on the warm up-draughts of air, wings and beak and eyes all motionless.

  A large white motor-launch came chugging slowly down the bay, straight into the marina, causing a little stir and bustle as she came.

  ‘That’s Craig’s boat!’ Joe cried, sitting up straight, flicking back his long hair. He was seventeen then, skinny as a reed, his forehead mottled with angry pimples. ‘Wonder what they’ve caught, to bring them in so early?’

  Brett was clambering about the prow of the boat, bare-backed and barefoot, his shoulders a fiery red and freckled heavily as bindies in dry grass. Craig was steering the boat in, squinting under his cap, angry white lines striking out from either side of his eyes. His brows and lashes were bleached as yellow as straw, his nose was peeling. Though both Brett and Craig were broad and red and homely as stee
rs, there was a feeling of richness about them, a well-fed pelt under their red hides, a thickness in the shoulders and chest, a general sense of boastfulness about them, as if they knew they would fetch a good price in the yards.

  Joe got up eagerly and went down the marina to see what they had caught, and Sara and the twins dawdled along behind. They were not the only ones. A little crowd soon gathered, admiring the boat with its sleek, smug lines, exclaiming over the big marlin hanging from a hook on the back, nudging each other over the preening passenger, a soapie star down from Sydney who had just caught his first fish.

  ‘Though he would’ve lost it if I’d left it up to him,’ Craig said to a girl in a denim skirt and a hot pink, hibiscus-printed bikini top.

  At the sight of this girl, Sara shrank away, wishing she could dissolve into invisibility. She knew the girl, her name was Diane, she went to school with Sara. Or had gone, before Sara had left school for good. At the sight of her, Diane elbowed Craig, saying something under her breath that made Craig turn even redder and hunch a shoulder against his cousin. Sara felt hot waves of mortification beating over her. She would have liked to have turned and walked away but her knees felt weak and so she sank down against the white-painted pier, her head bent, trying to pretend she was re-tying her shoelace while she fought for air.

  Luckily everyone was far too interested in the marlin to notice a hyper-ventilating fifteen year old hunched over halfway down the jetty. They were as raucous as the gulls filling the air with their white wings and shrill screams. Eventually the waves of roaring heat sank away and Sara was able to sit and stare down through the slats at the shadowy green water undulating beneath her and let it lull her into a painful sort of serenity. Her hair hung all over her face, and she sheltered behind its black curtain and hoped no-one would notice her.

  And no-one did. Craig was too interested in Diane, and Diane was too interested in the soapie star, and the soapie star was too interested in posing with the marlin for the cameras. Joe and the twins had jumped down in the boat and were talking with Brett, who was the friendliest of the Halloran mob. With their red hair and baggy shorts, the twins looked as if they belonged. Joe did not.

  Sara looked up through the net of her hair, her eyes drawn by the great fish. Its skin was mother-of-pearl, its dead eye as blue as the sky. Its spear stabbed upwards, longer than Sara was tall, as long as a man diving into the sky. The great, graceful tail hung folded, still striped with colour under the grey, like iridescent rainbows in an oily puddle. It was a dark sea-unicorn, with its wicked horn and sleek, graceful lines, something wild and fey and dangerous. Sara was sorry it was hanging there from a hook. She wondered what it must have looked like, leaping out of the waves, fighting the line, diving down the long prisms of light, searching for the deep.

  They swung it down, measured it, weighed it, chopped it up and wrapped it in plastic, shoving the chunks into ice-boxes. Everyone was cheerful. Marlin was rare enough these days to cause a pleasurable stir, and marlin caught by a fluff-haired, pretty-faced soapie star down from Sydney was good news for everyone. Diane was snapping away with her camera, and the soapie star was happy to pose with her, now the marlin was butchered out of its beauty.

  With scaly-bloody hands, Craig threw the entrails and remnants out into the bay for the seagulls to squabble over. Sara watched goblets of flesh sink down through the green-dark water, turning through the green shafts of light, down into the shadowy depths where the water-weeds swayed and tiny gleaming fish gobbled the silver-pink flesh frantically. It’s cannibalism, Sara thought. Those little gobbling fish were eating their own kind, eating the king of the deeps, with as little horror or shame as these red-faced boys who had chopped him up, discussing how much per kilogram they would be likely to get.

  ‘Ninety-five kilos, at least,’ Craig was exulting. ‘What a whopper!’ He turned to the soapie star, and said with ironic genuflection, ‘Good catch, man.’

  Sara looked back down into the watery depths. A few silvery shreds of skin still floated here and there, but otherwise the sea-unicorn was gone. Her skin prickled. She wished she knew how to grieve.

  The roar of a car’s engine sounded through the valley.

  Surprised, Sara got out of bed and went to kneel on her window-seat. A grey Volvo was coming down the long swoop of the road from the headland, almost invisible in the grey rain. It was her uncle Alex’s car. Sara’s heart sank in her chest. She closed her eyes for a moment, her breath hissing out between her teeth. Sara did not want to see her uncle. The memory of his argument with her father just the day before was too painfully sharp. Besides, he was like a bearded vulture, the very sight of him meant trouble.

  Car tyres crunched on the gravel. The passenger door opened and Joe got out. She could tell he was angry by the way his shoulders were hunched, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He bent and said something to Alex, sitting still in the driver’s seat, and then strode towards the house. Teresa climbed out after him, looking so thin and young Sara felt a twist of pain in her chest. Sara shoved her feet back into her ugh boots and thrust the book under her pillow. She could hear Joe calling her. By the time the quick familiar thud of his boots had reached her door, she had scooped up the dirty clothes off the floor and was holding them in a bundle before her, pretending she was on her way downstairs to put another load on.

  ‘Sara, Alex is here. That bloody stupid brat of a girl!’ Joe kicked open the bedroom door. His thick eyebrows were knotted together above his eagle nose.

  ‘Why, what has Tessa done now?’ Sara asked.

  ‘Alex found her hitch-hiking into town. Apparently she was trying to run away. She had her backpack and everything! I thought she was here with you.’ He stared at her accusingly.

  Sara sank down on the bed, her clothes clutched against her chest. ‘So did I,’ she said. ‘I mean, I did know she wasn’t in her room anymore but she was in such a rage – I thought she’d just gone out to walk it off, you know, down to the beach or something.’ She looked up at her brother, the hurt so sharp in her breast it was like she had actually been stabbed. ‘She was really trying to run away?’

  ‘Yes – and with fifty dollars of my money in her pocket. The thieving little bitch!’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ Sara said automatically.

  ‘Why not? She’s just like her mother, only after what she can get. She’ll be lucky if I don’t ring the police.’

  ‘But Joe …’

  ‘I know, “She’s my sister.”’ Joe mimicked her cruelly. ‘Well, she’s only a half-sister and God knows how many of them I might have, the way Gus spreads his seed around.’

  ‘Stop it, Joe. Stop it.’ To her dismay, tears were again choking her. She saw the contempt in Joe’s face as he turned away, hunching his shoulders against her.

  ‘Please,’ Sara said.

  ‘Alex says she called Annie an old cow. Doesn’t she know Alex can chuck us out any time? Why couldn’t she have kept her mouth shut for a change? We have to keep on his right side. If he forecloses, we’ll lose everything, Sar. Everything. We’ve got to do what he wants. You know he gave Gus his marching orders yesterday? We can’t afford to have Alex close us up, Sara. What would we have left? Nothing. Nothing!’

  It was not like Joe to talk so much. Sara stared at him.

  ‘All that bloody girl does is cause trouble!’ he said and turned away.

  Sara followed her brother down the stairs. She did not remember to count her steps. Teresa stood at the foot of the steps, her fists in tight little knots. ‘He has no right to tell me what to do. None of you do!’

  ‘Where were you going to go?’ Sara asked, with difficulty.

  Teresa’s face contorted. ‘To find my mum!’

  ‘You didn’t need to run away. I would have helped you find her.’

  Teresa’s expression of scorn cut like knives.

  As she spoke, the dogs barked. Footsteps crunched on the gravel. Sara felt the tightening of a giant spring beneath her breastbone.
She dreaded her uncle. She tried to count her breaths as she turned to face him, but they came too fast.

  ‘Can’t you keep her under control?’ Alex asked. He was a tall man, with red hair roughened with grey and an intolerant mouth. ‘You think I don’t have enough to do?’

  ‘I’m sorry …’ Sara twisted her hands together.

  ‘You think we haven’t tried?’ Joe said. ‘She doesn’t listen to any of us.’

  Teresa began to cry. She ran up the stairs to her room. Sara felt the sting of tears in her own eyes. No matter how hard she tried, she pleased no-one.

  ‘She’s running wild,’ Alex said. ‘Look at her little escapade last night. She’s selfish, unreliable. She could have killed herself, or worse, someone else … She was unpardonably rude to Annie this morning when your aunt was just trying to help. I’ve had just about enough …’

  ‘So have I!’ Sara cried. ‘How can you be so mean? Our father’s lying hurt in hospital. He might die!’ She wiped at her face, unable to keep the tears from falling.

  Alex started to reply angrily, then stopped and took a deep breath. After a while, he said, ‘I’m sorry if I lost my temper. I know you’re all worried about your father.’

  Sara could not speak. ‘You’re not to worry,’ Alex said. ‘We’ll come to a fair agreement over the farm. I’ll make sure you’re set.’

  ‘We’re not selling the farm!’ Joe shouted.

  Alex frowned. ‘I don’t think you understand. Your father owes me a great deal of money. The farm has to be sold. I’m willing to take it off your hands now, and give you enough money that you can set yourself up elsewhere. I’m sure the bank will not be so generous.’

  ‘We’re not selling the farm,’ Joe said again, but in a very different voice. He sounded broken. Hopeless.