Dancing on Knives

by Kate Forsyth

  Sara was cold, inside and out. She hugged her arms about her body and looked down at her bare feet. They felt like lumps of ice.

  Slowly she climbed the stairs up to her room. It took more steps than usual. Her limbs were weighted with lead. She crept under her doona, turned her pillow over three times, and rested her aching head.

  A long time passed. Sara did not sleep, though her eyes were closed. She was thinking, remembering, grieving. She did not cry. She heard the milking machines start up down in the valley, heard the lowing of the cows, the barking of one of the dogs. She heard a currawong carolling, then the deep mournful cry of a raven. She sat up, pulled on her jeans and an old white shirt, and went back downstairs.

  Gabriela was making a Spanish omelette at the old yellow range. She turned and smiled at Sara as she came in. Sara sat at the laminex table, saying nothing.

  ‘I’ve sent Joe out to feed the chickens for you, and I’ve fed the calves and hung out the load of washing that was in the machine. Now I want you to sit down and eat this.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘Come on, Sara, you need to eat. I’ve hardly seen you swallow a mouthful since I got here.’

  Sara hid her face in her fingers, as tears suddenly overwhelmed her. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m being so silly.’

  ‘You’re not being silly at all.’ Gabriela tilted the pan so the omelette slipped out onto the waiting plate. ‘You’ve had a shocking couple of days, really. I’m just glad I could get off work and come and give you a hand. Now stop crying and eat this up.’

  Sara looked down at the fragrant golden omelette before her, scattered with herbs and bright buttons of chorizo. She felt her stomach heave. ‘I … can’t,’ she gasped. Then her stomach won out. She dashed for the door, her hand over her mouth. She vomited thin bile into the garden. Tears as hot and bitter stung her eyes and she leant her head against the door-frame.

  ‘Too much gin last night,’ Gabriela said prosaically, and led Sara back to the table, giving her a glass of water and pouring her some tea.

  Sara rested her head in her hands.

  ‘The twins have gone off somewhere,’ Gabriela said conversationally, tactfully removing the plate by Sara’s elbow. ‘Joe was in a pretty foul mood. He says they’re lazy pigs and should have the shit kicked out of them.’ There was no response. Gabriela speared a forkful of omelette and ate it. ‘It’s good. Sure you don’t want any?’

  Sara shook her head.

  ‘Do you want some cereal?’

  ‘Oh, Gabriela, please, just let me alone.’

  Gabriela sat down and put her arm around Sara’s sloping shoulders. ‘Why don’t you go back to bed, Sar? Have a quiet day?’

  That made Sara sit up, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘Oh, I can’t,’ she said. ‘I need to think about all that has happened. I need to figure it out. The twins are so upset by it all, and Teresa … I know she’s wild, but this is not usual for her, she’s not usually so bad. And Joe. Joe.’

  ‘You’ve got to stop feeling as if you have to do everything for everyone, Sar-bear. You’re not their mother!’ Gabriela said.

  There was a short silence then Sara said in a quite altered voice, ‘But Gabriela! You know I’m the closest thing to a mother any of them have got. You know I’ve always tried to make up to them all for everything – for Mum dying, and for Gayla leaving.’

  ‘Yes, I know, honey, but no-one expects you to give up your entire life! When do you ever get out anymore? When do you ever spend time with your old friends?’

  What old friends? Sara wanted to ask.

  ‘You’re not their mother, and I reckon you shouldn’t encourage them all to lean on you so much.’

  ‘But, Gabriela, you know Dad asked me to help him look after them all when Gayla left …’ Sara tried to explain. ‘There was no-one else to do it.’

  ‘Yeah, so you’re the one who gives up school, and your painting, and all the normal things you should be doing. It’s not healthy for you to be stuck on this god-forsaken farm in the middle of nowhere, working your fingers to the bone – for nothing! It’s not your responsibility, Sara.’

  Sara had sometimes thought, in the first few years after she had left school, that if she should be killed, the shock would open everyone’s eyes and then they would know what they had lost. She had thought of death as a mirrored window behind which she could hide, listening to the laments of the family at her loss. But somehow implicit in this fantasy was the belief she could step back through the mirror into her life, and bask there in this new-found appreciation. But she knew now there was no return from death. It was forever. She knew her father was going to die. She knew his fall was not an accident. These facts seemed clear to her now, but she did not know how she knew or what she should do. The last few days were such confusion. She tried to think.

  Did she really believe Maureen could have pushed her father off the cliff? Sara replayed the scene in her head but no matter how she tried, she simply could not imagine her aunt finding the strength of passion, let alone the strength of body, to push Augusto over the edge of the cliff.

  But if Maureen hadn’t done it, who had? She thought about the Dodge driving up the bush track in the first ferocious tumult of the storm and almost crashing into her aunt’s car. Then she remembered how, soon after the storm broke, she had heard the Dodge draw up outside the house. She had come running out, edgy and anxious in the skin-prickle of thunder and foreboding. All three of her brothers had jumped out and run through the rain, their hoods drawn up over their heads. They had all been wet and muddy. She had whined at them about all the washing she had to do, complained that they never gave her any thought. ‘Get off our backs, Sar,’ Dylan had said.

  Sitting at the table, her eyes fixed upon the pale tendrils of steam uncoiling from her teacup, thoughts flitted across Sara’s mind as quickly and evasively as crabs scuttling for shelter. Where had her brothers been, before they came driving up out of the rain with their jeans all smeared with mud and scowls on their faces? Had they recognised Maureen’s car driving away from the headland? Had they guessed what she was doing there? What would they have done? Where had they been? Surely they couldn’t have … her mind jerked away, refusing to even consider the possibility that her brothers may have had something to do with her father’s accident.

  She seized on another suspicion and dragged it into the harsh spotlight of interrogation. What about her uncle Alex? He had – somehow – known about Augusto’s affair with Maureen. He hated Augusto, he had never tried to hide it – and they had had that big argument that very day. If murder was done, then he could be the murderer. Sara watched Murder She Wrote, she knew about motive and opportunity. Alex had them both.

  She got up and dropped three aspirin into her glass of water and drank it down. Then she went back out onto the verandah, took off her slippers and pulled on her old boots that lived by the back door. It was beginning to rain outside so she took down one of the oilskins from the back of the door and put it on, dragging the hood over her head. Gabriela looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Need to talk to Alex,’ Sara said and went out into the rain.

  She slipped and slid all the way down the steep muddy path to the sheds. The crosscurrents of her thoughts pushed her first one way, then another. Alex hated Dad. He hated him because he took Mum away, because she died, because she left Towradgi to Dad, because of Gayla. Alex had a thousand reasons to hate Dad. This affair with Maureen must have been the final straw … Click, click went the jigsaw in her mind.

  Joe was in the milking shed. He looked up, startled, as she ran in out of the rain. As usual, his thick, black brows were locked together over his eyes so that their brilliant colour could hardly be seen. She tried to speak to him but her words were lost in the roar of the machines. Joe put his cigarette back in his mouth, went over and switched them off.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.


  Sara hardly knew where to start. ‘It was Maureen,’ she said, ‘who was sleeping with Dad. Our own aunt! Mum’s own sister! And Alex knew. He knew all about it. That was why he was here on Friday, he and Harry, to have it out with Dad, that’s what the argument was about, not about money at all, it was about her! They’ve been sleeping together for three months, can you believe that? Three months, and we never knew! But Alex and Harry both knew … I don’t know how.’

  Joe said nothing.

  ‘I reckon one of them did!’ Sara finished on a note of triumph.

  ‘Did what?’ Joe said in a tight, strange voice.

  ‘Pushed Dad over the cliff.’

  ‘What a load of shit,’ Joe said angrily.

  Sara saw something in his face she did not understand. She kept on talking, almost frantic in her need to convince him: ‘Alex found out somehow – that’s why he and Harry were here on Friday – to have it out with Dad. He must have told them to go to hell. He went back up to Towradgi because Maureen was up there, waiting for him. He must have been in such a rage, they must have had another argument. He’d already hit Maureen once, I saw the bruise, couldn’t he have tried to hit her again and she pushed him away? Though Maureen swears she didn’t. She says Dad was alive when she left him.’

  ‘Dad’s still alive,’ Joe said wearily, pushing his hair out of his eyes.

  They did not look at each other. Sara knew that, like her, Joe did not expect Augusto to live much longer.

  ‘Alex could have been waiting for her to go,’ she said. ‘He could have pulled his car off the road and waited for her to drive past, and then gone back to have it out with Dad. He’s much bigger and stronger than Dad, he could easily have thrown him over the side of the cliff …’

  Falling …

  There was a long silence.

  ‘What about Harry?’ Joe said. ‘They came together. Are you saying that Harry and Alex both sat around, waiting for Maureen to go, and then pushed Gus off the cliff together?’

  His voice was sharp with sarcasm, but Sara nodded. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You stupid, stupid girl,’ Joe said savagely. ‘You must be off your nana. It was an accident. Get it into your thick skull – it was an accident.’ He looked at her with hatred. Sara fell back as if smacked. ‘You have no proof,’ Joe said then, and he walked out into the rain.

  Sara leant for a moment on the rail, trying to decide what to do. Why did she think now that someone had tried to murder her father, when yesterday she had denied it so emphatically? It was not just all the pieces of the jigsaw clicking together in her mind. It was because this was what she had been afraid of for so long – death, darkness, loss. The shadow of violent death had been laid upon her for years.

  For several long minutes, counted by the blood tick-tocking in her ears, Sara stood still, clinging to the rail. She tried to think but there was the sound of leathery wings flapping over her head. She swallowed darkness. Fear: emotion prompted by impending evil; dread. She knew what it meant. She knew what it tasted like, smelt like, all its shapes and textures. It was fear that kept her here, clinging to a rail as if it were a lifebelt. Fear had had her trapped for years.

  A new determination came over her. She went back out into the rain, sloshing through the mud towards the office. Her uncle’s grey Volvo was parked beside its corrugated iron wall. Easter Sunday and still he could not keep away. He must want the farm pretty badly, Sara thought, and for the first time wondered what he was doing spending so much time going over the farm’s accounts. Joe had been upset because he thought it meant Alex suspected him of cooking the books, but could it not mean Alex was himself altering the financial records to make it easier to foreclose on the farm?

  She opened the door and stepped inside, putting back her hood. Her uncle sat at the desk, frowning over a pile of bills and paperwork. The fluorescent light above him cast deep shadows over his face. She stood with her back to the door, frozen by a feeling compounded of terror, doubt and, strangely, pity.

  He looked up. His mouth did not relax. ‘Ah, Sara,’ he said, and the shadows swung over the harsh grooves around his eyes and down his cheeks. ‘Is there any news of your father?’

  She shook her head dumbly. He played aimlessly with the pencil in his hand, then looked at his watch. ‘I should be going.’

  ‘Why do you hate us all so much?’ Sara asked.

  He looked up at her in surprise. ‘I don’t hate you,’ he said, after a long pause.

  ‘You hate our father.’

  For a moment there was a silence so potent that the sound of the rain, the grind of the machines, the distant bark of a dog, were all drowned in an uncanny stillness.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Your scum of a father abused and humiliated my poor sister. I know what your mother put up with for all those years – better than anyone, I know. The lies, the cheating, the drunkenness, the drugs. Even the violence.’ Sara put up her hand as if to ward off a blow herself. ‘He only married her for the farm,’ he continued with a blind look in his stone-grey eyes.

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘He used to beat her up, you know.’

  ‘He did not!’

  ‘Once he threw a pair of scissors at her. God knows what would have happened if I hadn’t come by. He made Bridgie’s life a living hell and made us the laughing stock of the town. It was bad enough having Bridget a pregnant bride – you could imagine what the gossip was like – but having him living down here, carrying on his drunken affairs right in front of us and all our friends. Why, the Hallorans are one of the first families in this district – we’ve owned this land for almost a hundred and fifty years. Do you know what that means? Do you have any idea what that means? And then for Bridget to kill herself! My God! The ultimate sin.’

  Sara felt an electric shock jolt her from the top of her skull to her feet. She felt herself rock back. ‘She didn’t,’ she cried, impotent as a child. ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘And your father – that … that bastard – inherited everything. Everything! How could she do it? How could she betray me like that?’ Pain was tearing his voice apart.

  ‘She didn’t kill herself. It was an accident!’ As Sara spoke the words, she felt an odd echo, like déjà vu. But all she could do was push away her uncle’s words with all her strength. She leant back against the door, her hands spread flat, and screamed at him, ‘You killed him! You killed my father. Murderer! You killed him! You’ve always hated him, you’ve always wished he was dead. I hate you, you murderer!’

  Alex stared at her, his mouth dropping open so he looked a fool. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I know Dad didn’t just fall off that cliff! I know why you and Harry came here on Friday. You couldn’t handle Dad sleeping with your precious little sister, could you? But Dad told you to go to hell, didn’t he? I heard him …’

  ‘How does that mean I tried to kill him?’

  ‘You could have followed him up to the headland. You could have waited till Maureen was gone and then pushed him off the cliff.’

  ‘I could have. But I didn’t.’ Alex had got to his feet. He took his jacket from the back of his chair and put it on, and picked up his hat. ‘I’ve wished him dead many times. I wish he had never existed. But I didn’t kill him.’ He looked up, his mouth twisted bitterly. ‘Not that I expect you to believe me. But when am I meant to have done it? As soon as we left here, Harry and I went back into town and picked up Annie and went to church for the three o’clock service. It was Good Friday, remember? The whole congregation can attest to us being there. There was no time for me to be doing any murdering, much as I might have liked to.’

  Sara was stricken with silence. Doubts and suspicions again assailed her. As she fell back her uncle gained strength.

  He said, with an arctic chill to his voice, ‘So perhaps you should look elsewhere for your murderer, Sara. Perhaps a little closer to home? Why don’t you ask that precious sister of yours where she was all that time? Wild night to decide to stea
l a car and drive twenty kays, don’t you think? Or one of your brothers? I can’t see that any of you had much reason to want him alive …’

  Her uncle’s words struck right to the heart of the suspicions that had been torturing Sara since the moment her father had been found.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath, then turned and ran out into the blinding rain. She ran away from the sheds and the office, scrambling over the fence into the road, and over the paddocks towards the sea. As she came over the low dune and saw the shingly beach, she no longer shielded her head with the oilskin but, lifting her face to the storm, tasted the raindrops with her tongue. Lightning cracked, illuminating the underside of the clouds with an eerie light.

  She felt she was going mad. So much grief and horror, so many suspicions and fears, scuttling around her head.

  Could Joe have pushed her father off the cliff?

  He had been so late home on Friday. He said he had gone surfing but it had been dark by the time he got home, and raining hard. His clothes had been covered in mud. He had said that he had had to stop and change a tyre but she had no way of knowing if that was the truth.

  Her thoughts moved on to the twins. They said they had been out on the hills all afternoon with Nya, instead of doing their chores like they were supposed to. But again Sara had no way of knowing if this was the truth. If they had somehow found out about their father’s affair with Maureen, how would they have reacted? Would they have been as sickened and angry as she had been? Would they have wanted to smash something, like she had?

  And, of course, there was Teresa. Although she was nothing but a stick-insect of a girl, she had the strength of passion to kill, Sara knew it instinctively. She remembered how her half-sister had once deliberately stomped her foot through Joe’s kite in revenge for something he had said. She had been gone all afternoon, and had come home only to take the truck and go and get drunk at the golf club. Why? What had driven her to do such a thing?