About the Book

At twenty, Sara is tormented by a terror so profound she hasn’t left her home in five years. Like the mermaid in the fairytale her Spanish grandmother once told her, Sara imagines she is dancing on knives. She feels suffocated by her family, especially her father – the famous artist Augusto Sanchez – whose volcanic passions dominate their lives.

Then one stormy night, her father does not come home. His body is found dangling from a cliff face. Astonishingly, he is still alive, but the mystery of his fall can only be solved by the revelation of longheld family secrets.

At once a suspenseful murder mystery and a gentle love story, Dancing on Knives is about how family can constrict and liberate us, how art can be both joyous and destructive, and how strength can be found in the unlikeliest places.

For my mother, Gilly, my sister, Belinda,

and my dear friend Sarah

– the three bravest women I know

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Thirty-odd years ago, a sixteen-year-old girl began scribbling down a novel in an old exercise book. She called the novel Monk’s Gate.

Twenty-odd years ago, a twenty-six-year-old woman took the novel she had been working on for ten years and rewrote it as her thesis for a Masters of Arts in Writing. She called the novel Sea Changes.

Ten years ago or so, the novel was published as Full Fathom Five.

One year ago, while on tour with my publicist, Peri, I told her about this book that had taken me twenty years to write and which had been published under my maiden name, Kate Humphrey. Amazed that she had never heard of it, Peri asked me to send her a copy. I dug one out and sent it to her. I soon heard, to my amazement, that my publishers, Random House, wanted to re-publish it.

With some trepidation, I re-read the book for the first time in ten years. It was a strange experience – I remember so well those hopeful scribbles in my teens, my dogged persistence in my twenties, my joy when the book was finally published in my thirties.

However, I was glad to bring a fresh eye and all I have learnt in the years since to the story. It was impossible not to make changes, and I know the book is better for it.

So now, thirty-odd years after I began, I am very proud to bring you the fourth and final incarnation of that novel I began on my school holidays when I was only sixteen. It is now called Dancing on Knives …

‘I know what you want,’ said the sea witch; ‘it is very foolish of you, but you shall have your way, and it will bring you to sorrow, my lovely princess. You want to get rid of your fishtail and have two stumps instead so that you may walk about like a human being, and cause the young Prince to fall in love with you, and win him and an immortal soul besides … I shall prepare a potion for you. You must swim to land before sunrise, sit on the shore and drink the draught down … it will hurt … every step you take shall feel like stepping on sharp knives … but first you shall have to pay me …

Have you lost your courage? Stick out your little tongue and I shall cut it off …’

‘The Little Mermaid’

Hans Christian Andersen

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Epigraph

Tide on the Ebb

Troubled Waters

Low Water

Tide and Time

Sea-Change

Tide at the Flood

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Bitter Greens

The Wild Girl

Copyright Notice

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Tide On The Ebb

high tide – 1.6 m

10.47 pm, Good Friday

low tide – 0.5 m

4.40 am, Easter Saturday

Sara was afraid of many things. Some had names and a shape. Darkness. Loneliness. Madness. Others woke her at night with a start, slick with sweat, listening, listening to the hammer of her heart. These fears – nameless, shapeless, voiceless – were the most frightening of all.

Her brothers called her a wimp, and a baby, and sometimes a fucking useless girl. It did no good. If shame could stop Sara from being afraid, she would have found courage long ago.

On that storm-dark night, Sara felt the familiar wrench of anxiety beneath her breastbone as she sat at the kitchen table. It was Good Friday, a day when most families would be enjoying the long weekend together. Not her family, though. Sara was alone.

Her hands were clumsy, shuffling the shabby pack of tarot cards. She held them close to her chest for a moment, breathing deeply in an effort to quieten the banging of her pulse. Automatically she counted under her breath. One. Two. Three. Four …

Sara laid three cards face down on the table. She sat, staring at them. The only sound was the rattle of rain on the tin roof, the constant low hum of the ancient fridge. Slowly she turned the first card over.

The Emperor. Sara’s eyes widened a little. This was her father’s card. It was uncanny that it should be the first to be turned, when she had laid out the cards on her father’s behalf. Sara pressed both hands to her heart.

Then she reached down and turned over the second card. Tower Struck by Lightning. It meant change, conflict, catastrophe.

Very slowly she turned the third and last card over. The Hanged Man. Transformation through sacrifice, a growth towards wisdom.

Sara did not understand the configuration. It did not lift the shadow of foreboding that had engulfed her all afternoon. With her hands pressed hard against her heart, as if trying to stop it from cracking open her ribcage, she sat unnaturally still, unnaturally stiff, staring at the pattern laid out before her.

The cards had once belonged to her grandmother, Consuelo. The smudges of her fingerprints were still there, the smell of her spices. Augusto said his mother was descended from gypsies, that she had the power to see into the future. Sara had always thought she had inherited Consuelo’s fortune-telling eyes. Why else did the cards speak to her so clearly? Why else did she dream such strange and terrible things?

The sound of footsteps on the wooden boards of the verandah jerked her into movement. She swept all the cards off the table, wrapped them in a piece of old white silk, and hid them in an old wooden box. She thrust the box amongst a clutter of recipe books, unopened envelopes, dog-eared magazines and bills, on a shelf above the sink. She stood then with her back to the sink, her hands once again pressed hard against her chest, watching the door.

The flyscreen creaked open. Sara’s brother, Joe, stepped through, shrugging off his jacket irritably, water streaming from the oilskin all over the floor. Although he had been christened Pablo Diego Jose Francisco, in honour of Picasso, Sara’s brother would only answer to Joe. He was small and thin, with thick brows drawn over eyes of a startling green-blue colour, and an eagle nose too large for his narrow face. Although he had been born only two years before Sara, he seemed much older than twenty-two. Already there were wrinkles about his eyes, and two deep lines struck between his brows.

‘Dad still hasn’t come home,’ Sara said.

Joe did not look at her. He hung the oilskin on the back of the door then took a beer from the fridge. With his free hand he grabbed a saucer from the drainage board and set it on the table, then felt in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. He sat down heavily, lit his cigarette with a scrape of a match, and took a long drag. He then cracked the beer and drank as deeply. The knuckles of his hand were reddened and scraped. He sighed and shut his eyes.

‘It’s getting so late. Where could he be?’ Sara’s voice was shrill.

‘At the pub would be my bet.’ Joe did not open his eyes.

‘But it’s Good Friday, the pub won’t be open.’

‘At the golf club then. Don’t they have some band on tonight?’ Joe took another gulp of his beer.

‘But you know Dad hates the golf club.’

‘If it’s the only place open serving grog, Gus’ll be there. Besides, town will be full of tourists. He’s probably trying to pick up some city bird for the night.’

Sara hated the way her brother called their father ‘Gus’. His name was Augusto. It was the name of the first emperor of Rome. There was nothing majestic or venerable about the name ‘Gus’. Besides, Joe shouldn’t talk about their father that way. She crossed her arms about her breast, hugging herself close. ‘Something’s wrong, I just know it,’ she said, hating the way she sounded.

‘Gus’ll be fine. Stop worrying.’ Joe sucked on his grazed knuckles.

‘But he’s been gone for hours. And it’s pouring with rain.’

‘It wasn’t raining when he left. He’s probably hanging out somewhere waiting for the rain to blow over. You know he hates to be uncomfortable, and it’d be bloody uncomfortable riding home in this piss-down.’ Joe blew out a cloud of blue smoke, regarded it for a moment with eyes half-squinted shut, then waved it away as he got to his feet. ‘Where are the twins?’

‘Watching telly.’

‘And the brat?’

‘Tessa’s in her room.’ Sara spoke with a subtle stress of reproof in her voice.

Joe grunted and went out of the kitchen, the door banging behind him. Sara followed him, chewing at her thumbnail.

The hallway was dark, the only illumination a flicker of colour coming through the half-open door of the living room. Inside, two tall, gangly, red-headed boys sprawled on the couch, drinking beer. They looked up briefly as Joe and Sara came in, then returned their gaze to the television.

The living room had big picture windows and high ceilings with ornate cornices that once must have been beautiful. Now, though, the walls were stained and riddled with cracks, the cornices were leprous with damp, and the carpet was worn and stained. The television was at least twenty years old and flickered and buzzed constantly. Set in front of it was an old sagging couch, covered in a rough, tweedy fabric of a colour Augusto called provincial beige. There were two matching armchairs, the fabric so worn on the seat and arms that the yellow foam beneath showed through. Before the couch stood a coffee table with rusting metal legs and a pseudo-timber top that was at least twice as old as Sara. A cane magazine rack by the side of the couch was crammed with magazines, newspapers and second-hand Mills & Boon books. Most of the magazines were several years out of date, as Sara knew all too well.

Paintings covered the walls. In the uneasy sputtering of light from the television, the weeping women and laughing clowns and marching soldiers sidled disconcertingly in and out of shadow. There were no curtains on the window, nothing to draw against the windy tumult outside. Sara, hugging herself by the window, could see sharp black branches tossing against a lightning-white sky. A long, low grumble of thunder. She shivered.

Joe flung himself down in the armchair. ‘Anything on?’

‘Nah,’ Dylan replied, not looking away from the television. He was the elder of the twins. Like Dominic, he was dressed in dirty jeans, his lank red hair hanging down over the collar of his flannelette shirt.

‘Sar’s got her knickers in a knot over Gus,’ Joe said. ‘Any idea where he is?’

‘Nah,’ Dylan said again. ‘Pub, probably. He was in a pretty foul mood – I’d say he’s gone to drink it off.’

‘Pub’s shut.’

‘Oh, yeah. Dunno then. Golf club?’

‘Dad hates the golf club, he thinks it’s God’s waiting room,’ Dominic said.

‘Only place to get grog tonight,’ Dylan said.

‘Then that’s where he’ll be,’ Dominic said.

Both boys seemed even more sullen than usual. It had, however, been an unpleasant afternoon. Sara’s uncle and her uncle-in-law had come together for some kind of confrontation with Augusto. Alex, her maternal uncle, held the mortgage over the farm and was always threatening to foreclose. Recently he seemed to spend more time at Towradgi than he did at his own home and so it was not unusual for him to come and shout at Augusto. But her uncle-in-law Harry had no reason to come. He was married to Sara’s aunt Maureen, who had not visited them since the memorial service of her sister. Sara’s mother.

Sara had been so startled to see Harry that she had crept outside the window of Augusto’s studio, trying to eavesdrop.

‘You’d better start packing,’ she had heard Alex say. ‘I want you all out of here! Come Monday, I’m calling in my loan.’

Sara had not heard any more than that, stumbling away in shock. Surely Alex hadn’t meant it? Surely he couldn’t be so cruel? He knew Sara had not left the farm in more than five years. He knew that she couldn’t go anywhere.

Hail rat-a-tat-tatted against the glass. Sara gazed out the window, hoping to see the bright eye of her father’s motorbike zooming down the valley road. She had been watching and listening for her father all afternoon. Ever since he had slammed out of the studio after the argument. At first all Sara had wanted was her father to come so he might reassure her they were not to be thrown out on to the street. As the storm blew in, her needs had grown simpler. She just wanted her father home.

‘It’s pouring down out there,’ she said pleadingly. ‘He could’ve had an accident.’

‘Rotten night,’ Dylan agreed.

‘And he’s on the Elephant. You know it’s always breaking down.’

‘Pile of crap,’ Dylan agreed.

Sara twisted her hands together. ‘And he wasn’t going to town – he took his easel and sketchbook. He was going up Towradgi Headland.’

This time Dylan looked away from the television. ‘You sure?’

Sara nodded.

Dylan looked at Dominic. ‘He should be back by now, surely? Maybe the motorbike’s broken down?’

‘Bad night to be stuck,’ Dominic agreed.

Dylan grunted in his throat and stood up. ‘I suppose we’d better go look, just in case.’ Dominic got up too, stretching, yawning, and drinking down the last of his beer. The two boys put their boots on and slouched out of the room.

Silence.

Then Joe said, in a tone of long suffering, ‘I’ve been up since five-thirty and worked all bloody day. Give me a break, all right?’

‘You found time to go surfing,’ Sara said.

‘Give me a break!’ Joe cried. ‘It’s Easter fucking Friday, and I haven’t had a moment to myself since Christmas. Alex has been here every single day, going through the books, and I’ve been working my arse off trying to show him the farm’s still a goer. Why shouldn’t I take a few hours off if I want to?’

‘No need to swear,’ Sara said stiffly.

Joe hissed out his breath, got up, walked to the window, and lit another cigarette. The flame shook.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sara said. ‘It’s just … I’m worried about Dad. He should be home by now. He didn’t tell me he was going out.’

‘There’s no point in fretting yourself to death over him, Sar. You should know better by now. Gus does just what he wants to do.’

Sara said nothing. Joe dragged deeply on his cigarette, scowling at the television. ‘Gus’ll be fine, Sar. I wish you’d stop expecting the worst all the time.’

‘I’ve got a real bad feeling.’

‘You always have a real bad feeling.’

Again there was a long silence.

Joe sighed. ‘OK, I’m sorry. I know you can’t help it. I just wish …’

Sara swallowed, pressing her fingers against her eyes. Automatically she counted under her breath, breathing in on the one and out on the two, in on the three and out on the four.

Sara’s panic attacks always began with the helter-skelter of her heart. She’d feel both hot and shivery. Her limbs would be so weak she could scarcely stand, yet every instinct in her body shrieked flee, flee …

The first time it happened, Sara had been at school. Sick and trembling, she hid in the bathroom, sure something terrible must be about to happen. Nothing did. A cleaner finally found her, and she was sent home. She thought she must have been having a heart attack. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with her heart. Sara then began to fear she was going mad. They told her it was just an anxiety attack. ‘Try not to worry so much,’ they said. No-one told her how. Gradually the circle of Sara’s life had narrowed around her.

Now she counted the in-and-out of her breath. After twenty-six, the pressure in her chest began to subside. Joe had sat down again, flicking through the TV Guide then throwing it to the ground. ‘Why is there never anything on?’

Sara sat down in the other armchair and pretended to watch television, but all the time she was listening, listening.

The thunder of boots on the floorboards. The twins came back in, cans of beer in their hands.

‘The Dodge has gone,’ Dylan said. Joe looked up, surprise showing on his face for a moment. ‘Dad must’ve come back at some point, Sar,’ Dylan went on. ‘There’s no need to worry. He’d only have taken the Dodge if he was heading into town.’

‘He didn’t come back,’ Sara said. ‘I would’ve noticed.’

‘The Dodge has gone,’ Dylan said again with a shrug.

‘I was watching for him the whole time,’ Sara said.

‘You must’ve gone to the toilet or something,’ Dylan said.

‘I didn’t,’ Sara insisted, but no-one was really listening to her.

Dylan tossed Joe a beer, then sat down, putting his legs up along the couch. Dominic promptly sat on his legs, and Dylan tried to jerk him off.

‘Watch my beer!’ Dylan held it high so it would not spill.

Sara gripped her fingers together. ‘Where’s Dad’s motorbike then?’ she asked. ‘Is it there now?’

The twins both shrugged.

‘It’s pissing down out there, Sar, we really didn’t look.’ Dylan kicked off his boots.

‘What a stink!’ Dominic said. ‘When did ya last change your socks?’

Dylan thrust one foot into his twin’s face and Dominic made a fake retching noise. ‘Poo-whee! Get it out of my face, you bastard.’

Dylan promptly thrust both feet in his twin’s face. Dominic thrust them away. Beer spilt.

Joe said, ‘Shut up, you two, I can’t hear the telly!’

The twins grinned and settled down, one at either end of the couch, their legs stretched out. Then all three were quiet, eyes fixed on the television.

Sara could not sit still. She drifted to the window again, and then out to the front door, opening it against the drive of the rain and looking out into the empty yard. She chewed her thumbnail, going up the stairs to her half-sister’s room, automatically counting every step. She stood outside the closed door, listening, but could hear nothing but rain and wind. So she raised her hand and knocked. There was no response. After a while Sara turned the door handle and looked inside. The room was empty.

Sara’s agitation was increased a hundred-fold. She did not know what to do. She called Teresa’s name, looking around the room as if her half-sister was three and might be pretending to hide. She then searched the whole house. Though if Teresa was not in her room, where else would she be? All the time Sara’s breath came with difficulty. Her mind threw up terrible phantoms from the deeps but she tried to suppress them, telling herself it was just the usual anxiety that shook her so, that her father would be home soon, Teresa laughing in the shelter of his arm, and they would mock her for imagining such things.

Just after midnight, Sara heard the roar of the farm truck labouring up the hill and saw its twin headlights sweeping through the trees. She went running out to the front door, but stopped abruptly just inside its shelter, looking out at the rain, hands huddled into the sleeves of her jumper.

The Dodge jerked to a halt in the wide parking bay, tyres scrunching in the gravel. The headlights illuminated the long darting strokes of rain into falling lines of quicksilver. The truck door opened and a stick-insect of a girl fell out, only managing to save herself from falling in a puddle by grabbing at the window frame. She laughed immoderately, hauled herself upright and stumbled through the rain and up the stairs, tripping over the broken step to land on her knees at Sara’s feet.

‘Tess! What are you doing out at this hour?’

The girl looked up through spikes of short black hair. Her green-blue eyes were heavily fringed with black, mascara streaking down like a lugubrious clown’s makeup. Her eyelids were silver, and her red lipstick was smeared on her chin. She was dressed in a short black skirt under a shiny plastic coat, a purple top of sparkling nylon tied up over a black bra and fishnet stockings that were torn up one leg. On her feet were enormous cherry-red Doc Martens, and black studded bracelets clashed together on her thin wrists. Apart from the vividness of her eyes, gleaming like opals in her thin, sallow face, her most striking feature was the high-bridged, aristocratic nose.

‘Whoops, busted!’ she laughed, and got to her feet with some difficulty, using the verandah post to drag herself up.

‘But where have you been? What were you doing driving, for God’s sake?’

‘Didn’t really expect me to stay home on a Friday night, did ya? First day of the long weekend and all.’ Teresa looked at Sara through one eye, then the other, then shut both, only managing to keep her balance by hanging on to the post.

‘You’re drunk!’ Joe said contemptuously from the doorway. Behind him stood the twins, grinning.

‘Maybe just a bit tiddly,’ Teresa replied with slurred dignity.

‘You’re absolutely plastered.’

‘Drunk as a skunk,’ said Dylan.

‘Pissed as a parrot,’ said Dominic.

‘Shut up, you two. It’s not funny.’ Joe turned to his half-sister. ‘What the hell do you think you were doing?’

‘You didn’t really expect me to hang around here on a Friday night, did ya?’ Teresa said. ‘It’s like a goddamn tomb here and you lot are the fucking walking dead.’ She thrust her hand through her hair so it all stood up in spikes.

‘Where have you been?’ Joe was so furious he could hardly speak.

‘Raging my socks off at the golf club, the hotspot of Narooma night life,’ Teresa sneered. ‘Man, it was packed! All the terrorists on the loose, it was hopping.’

‘How did you get in?’ Joe shouted. ‘You’re only sixteen, and it’s a licensed bar!’

Teresa preened herself ostentatiously, running her hands down her sides and across her bare midriff. ‘Don’t ya reckon I look eighteen?’

‘You look like a whore,’ Joe said. ‘Where did you get those clothes?’

‘Nicked them,’ Teresa grinned. ‘Hot, aren’t I?’

Joe lunged and seized her by the arm, dragging her forward. His movement was so violent that both Sara and Teresa flinched, though Teresa recovered almost immediately, jerking her arm free and shouting, ‘Don’t touch me!’

‘Get to your room, you stupid little brat,’ Joe hissed. ‘Don’t you realise what trouble you could have got into? Parading around town all tarted up like that, drinking underage, stealing the truck and driving under the influence …’

‘Why shouldn’t I use the truck if I want to!’ Teresa cried. ‘It’s not stealing when you or Dylan or Dominic want to use it, is it? I live here too, remember? I’m meant to be part of the so-called family – why shouldn’t I use the truck if I want to?’

‘Because you haven’t got a licence,’ Joe yelled back. ‘And it’s a bloody farm truck, to be used on the farm. When do you ever lift a finger to help around here?’

‘Why should I?’ Teresa shot back. ‘It’s not like I belong here. I’m only here till my mum comes back and gets me. Frankly, I can’t wait. I hate this place and I hate you!’

‘Stop it!’ Sara cried. ‘Stop shouting!’

Teresa pushed past her three half-brothers. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said. ‘And not because he told me to but because I want to. I’ve danced my socks off and I’m tired.’

They heard the clump of her boots on the stairs, a bang as she bumped into the table on the half-landing, another thump as she made it to her room.

‘Why do you always have to yell at her like that?’ Sara said, her voice swimming with tears.

‘Why?’ Joe yelled. ‘For fuck’s sake, Sara!’

‘Don’t yell at me. What have I done?’ Sara paused in the front door and looked back at him. ‘And I told you Dad didn’t come back and take the Dodge. He’s still out in that storm somewhere.’

She did not wait for him to answer but made her quiet way through the dark front hall and up the stairs, automatically counting each step. She knocked on Teresa’s door. There was no answer. ‘Tess, are you OK?’

‘Sure,’ came back the answer a few seconds later, in rather a muffled voice.

‘Can I come in?’

‘I suppose so.’

Sara pushed the door open. Teresa lay flat on her back on the bed, her arms and legs spread. She had managed to take one boot off. It lay on the floor amidst a clutter of dirty clothes, magazines, school books and a half-empty school bag, its contents disgorged across the rug.

‘The whole room is going round and round,’ Teresa said with interest, staring up at the ceiling as she waved one hand around vaguely. ‘Round and round and sort of up and down. And the bed feels like a water bed, sort of rocking. Whoa …’

‘Tess,’ Sara said in distress. ‘Why do you have to make Joe so angry? How could you do such a stupid thing?’

‘Why shouldn’t I? No-one cares what I do.’

‘I do.’

‘OK, sure, you care a bit. No-one else does.’

‘Dad cares.’

‘Dad doesn’t notice a thing when he’s painting, you know that. I could jump off a cliff and he wouldn’t even look up.’

‘Oh, Tess, that’s not true.’

‘Sure it is. Whoa, I wish the bed would stop heaving about.’

‘How much have you had to drink, Tess?’

She laughed. ‘You think I remember? The whole night’s a bit of a blur. Oh oh, I think I’m going to puke.’

Teresa sat up, her hand flying up to her mouth, then she leant over the side of the bed and vomited all over the school uniform lying beside the bed. ‘Good shot,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘Oh, I don’t feel so good now.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Sara said. As Teresa flopped back on the bed she went to the bathroom and got a wet face-cloth. First she washed Teresa’s face, smearing the towel with black, then she cleaned up the worst of the mess, rolling up the school uniform and dropping it out in the hall. ‘Come on, you’d best sleep it off,’ Sara said, taking off Teresa’s other boot. ‘Let me help you out of these clothes first. They stink!’

‘Worked up a bit of a sweat,’ Teresa said. ‘And I seem to remember smoking a lot too.’

‘You’re an idiot,’ Sara said. She managed to drag off the coat and helped Teresa take off the skimpy, glittering tie-up shirt, passing her an old T-shirt from the floor. ‘Did you really steal the clothes?’ she asked in some distress.

‘Nah, of course not. They belong to a girl at school.’

‘Then why in God’s name did you tell Joe you stole them?’

‘Wanted to piss him off,’ Teresa said, flopping back on her pillows, her hands over her eyes. ‘Oh, my head!’

‘But why?’ Sara sat at the end of the bed, her hands clenched together at the juncture of her breasts. ‘Why do you always have to fight with him? You know how much I hate it.’

‘Oh, all right, I’m sorry, Sar. But, God, he shits me, the way he carries on. Anyone would think I’d committed a crime!’

‘You did,’ Sara said unevenly. ‘You’re only sixteen, Tess, you aren’t allowed in a bar. And you drove back absolutely plastered …’ She stopped, unable to speak.

‘I was all right. I wasn’t going to have a crash, or anything.’

‘How do you know? I bet you my mum didn’t think she was going to have a crash either! She knew that road a hell of a lot better than you do, and she at least had her licence!’ Sara pressed her hands against her eyes and tried to count her breathing, but the hot turmoil of tears defeated her.

For a little while the only sound was the stifled gasp of her crying, then Teresa said in a tone of long suffering, ‘OK, OK, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again – at least, not this weekend. I’ll be good, I promise.’ She rolled over, knees curled to her chest like a child. ‘Do you think you could let me go to sleep now? I feel seriously sick.’

Sara nodded and got up, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She said rather hesitantly, ‘You didn’t give Dad a lift into town by any chance, did you, Tess?’

‘Nah. Why? Dad not come home yet?’

‘I’m really worried about him. He’s been gone for hours and hours, and you know what the Elephant is like. I’m afraid he’s broken down somewhere or had a crash.’

‘Didn’t see him on the way home,’ Teresa said thickly. ‘Though, mind you, I was not seeing that well.’ She giggled inanely and began to sing, ‘Blinded by the grog …’ Her voice slurred into silence.

Sara sighed and shut the door gently behind her. She gathered up the foul-smelling bundle of clothes and made her way downstairs to the kitchen, again silently counting the number of steps.

Hail began to clatter on the roof. The wind swept around the old house, rattling doors and windows, poking cold spectral fingers through every gap and hole so that the torn nylon curtains lifted and drifted. In the harsh light of the bare bulb the kitchen looked uglier than ever. The floor was covered in worn and cracked laminex of a particularly hideous pattern, the table had the same pseudo-wood top as the coffee table in the living room, and the seats of the four chairs were covered in orange vinyl that matched the formica on the bench-top. The sink had been installed by Sara’s grandfather in the days when her mother had still been a little girl, and was lifting away from the chipboard beneath, while the round-shouldered fridge was the colour of soured cream.

Sara threw the pile of washing through the door into the laundry, looked at the pile of dirty dishes all over the orange bench and sighed a depressed sigh. After a moment she reached up and took down the wooden box hidden on the shelf. Her fingers touched the carved curlicues tenderly as she sat down at the table. Gently she opened the box. A faint evocative scent of cinnamon, saffron and bay leaves rose from within, a smell that conjured powerfully the ghost of Consuelo Sanchez. Sara inhaled, holding the sweet, dusty spiciness deep in her lungs as if it was incense, her fingers resting on the silk-wrapped cards within. After a long moment she let her breath escape in a sigh, took the pack of cards out and unwrapped it from its shroud of silk. She turned the first card over.

It was a card of the Minor Arcana. A woman awakening from sleep in the dead of night, covering her face in despair, nine swords hanging over her head. It was the Nine of Swords, a card that meant suffering, loss, desolation, the death of a loved one. Sara’s heart gave that terrible familiar lurch. Her blood pounded in her fingertips, cold prickled her skin.

‘Dad,’ she whispered. ‘Where are you?’

The Sanchez family had always lived by the sea. Augusto boasted the blood of Andalusian pirates flowed in their veins. Sara’s earliest memories were of sea-sparkle, sea-slither. She liked to lie at the very edge of the water, translucent waves running cold, delicate fingers all over her body. She liked to float on her stomach, her face below the water, watching her shadow darken the world below, like a cyclone moving in. She liked to twist and writhe through the water, legs pressed together, pretending she was a mermaid like La Sirenita in the story her grandmother used to tell, who lived in the depths of the clear blue sea, deeper than a hundred church steeples all stacked one on top of another.

Augusto had first come to the south coast in search of the sea. He had heard its beaches were clean and empty, and its ancient landscape crying out to be painted. He had only meant to come for a few weeks, to visit his sister Juanita who had just given birth to a little girl she had named Gabriela. ‘But then I met your mother,’ he would say with a shrug. ‘Somehow I found myself hitched.’

Sara guessed that Augusto had never wanted to be married. Perhaps he and Bridget had been happy at first, though. She could imagine Augusto spending his days painting, swimming, strumming his guitar, and playing with his new baby boy, Pablo. She could imagine Bridget trying to make them a home, trying to make her family like him.

There was little chance of that, however. The Hallorans did not approve of artists, and Augusto enjoyed shocking and provoking them. He thought the Hallorans were as provincial beige as their couch, and told them so. Bridget’s elder brother, Alex, in particular conceived an intense dislike for Augusto and the brothers-in-law argued every time they met. So, by the time Sara was born, Augusto was ready to try his luck in the big city.

All the important art dealers were based there, Sara knew, along with the galleries that could launch a painter’s career, the journalists and curators who could nurture it, and the art prizes that could make a painter a household name. Augusto had begun to build a reputation as an art student in Melbourne, having paintings hung in several exhibitions and winning a minor prize or two, but four years and two children had made all the difference. Students Augusto had once sneered at were now better known than he was. He had to find himself a studio, show his work to galleries, attend openings, get involved with artist-run spaces, make contacts, put together an exhibition, and start selling paintings.

Augusto had sworn that he would never return to Melbourne, so he set his heart on Sydney. Despite Bridget’s reluctance to leave her home and her anxiety about how they were to manage financially, the whole family moved to Sydney before Sara had turned one.

The next few years were spent in cheap rental accommodation by the beach first in Coogee, then Maroubra. Then Augusto declared his hatred for the eastern suburbs and they moved across the Bridge to leafy Wollstonecraft, where they lasted only six weeks before Augusto decided he was unable to paint because he was severed from his spiritual connection to the sea. By this time Bridget was heavily pregnant with the twins and losing her early infatuation with the idea of being married to an artist. After long, bitter arguments they agreed to find a flat by the sea in Manly, close to the hospital, shops, and a good primary school for Pablo, who would be starting in kindergarten only a few months before the twins were due to be born.

Sara could remember bright snatches of that time. She remembered how enormous her mother had been. Fingers swollen up like sausages, face round and red as an Edam cheese, feet so fat she could not stuff them into shoes. She remembered how her mother had to go to hospital long before the babies were born. Sara remembered how frightened she had been.

Augusto had frowned. ‘Things are happening for me at last,’ he said. ‘I’m painting better than I ever have.’

‘But, Gus, I need you,’ Bridget said, tears rolling over her cheeks. ‘Who’ll look after the kids?’

‘I’ll ring my mother,’ Augusto said.

Consuelo caught the train from Melbourne to Sydney, sleeping bolt upright in her chair, wrapped in her old Spanish shawl. She changed trains at Central Station and caught the ferry across to Manly where Augusto and the children met her at the wharf.

‘Shouldn’t you meet her at Central?’ Bridget had asked, sitting up against a pile of pillows, looking rather less round and red in the face after two days in the air-conditioned comfort of the hospital. ‘After all, she is getting rather old now.’

‘My mother escaped the Spanish Civil War, alone, on foot, pregnant and with a toddler in tow,’ Augusto said. ‘She had to climb the Pyrenees in winter. I think she can manage to find Manly on her own. Spanish women are bred tough, you know. Not like you soft Aussies.’

He laughed as he spoke, but Bridget had pressed her lips together and looked away.

Consuelo Sanchez was indeed a redoubtable woman.

Her mother, Sofia, had been a Catalan aristocrat, Augusto told his children many times. She had been educated in France and Switzerland, dressed by Parisian couturiers, taught to dance by an Italian count. On holiday on the Costa del Sol she had fallen in love with an Andalusian gypsy playing guitar in a backstreet restaurant with a troupe of flamenco singers and dancers.

Enrique Sanchez had been a charming, handsome, dissolute man with a deep voice full of pathos and an ancestry filled with pirates, horse-thieves, mercenaries and courtesans. His father, Mauricio, had been raised in a cave with a dirt floor, a tin chimney, a black pig and six chickens, and had made his money whenever he could, wherever he could, though principally with the vibrato of his voice, the snap and strum of his fingers, the click of his heels.

His mother, Madelina, had grown up in the servant quarters of Zarzuela Palace in Madrid, the daughter of the palace chef. Her family had been in the employ of the royal family since the time of mad Isabel II, who had scandalised the arrogant aristocracy of Madrid with her string of lovers, her extravagance and her violent temper. Eventually she had had to abdicate the throne and flee Spain, but Madelina’s family had simply waited until her son, Alfonso XII, won back the throne and then began cooking for him.

By the time Madelina was born, Alfonso XII was dead and his son, born posthumously, was the king. According to family mythology, the child-king and the daughter of the cook grew up together, playing hide-and-seek in the gardens and floating paper boats on the palace fountains. Sara had always thought privately that this was probably an imaginative embellishment. For by the time Sofia the Catalan aristocrat fell in love with the handsome guitar player Enrique, his mother Madelina was running a restaurant in Cádiz and no-one seemed to know how she had got from being the playmate of the king in Zarzuela Palace to being married to a flamenco dancer who had grown up in a cave.

Embellishments and exaggerations aside, Sara had always adored listening to the stories of Augusto’s ancestry, for they were filled with romance, adventure, music, dancing and danger. She loved hearing how Sofia had fallen in love with Enrique at first sight and had run away from home to marry him, giving up all her wealth and consequence, all her jewels and Parisian dresses, to work in her mother-in-law’s restaurant. By all accounts they had been happy as larks, raising seven laughing children who all inherited their father’s deep, rich voice and their mother’s high-boned aristocratic features and blue-green eyes. Eyes that Pablo, Sara and Teresa had all in turn inherited from their father.

Sara’s grandmother, Consuelo, had been the seventh child of a seventh child, which according to folklore endowed her with the gift of being able to see the future. She had grown up in that restaurant in Cádiz, stealing almonds and figs from the table as her grandmother made tocino de cielo, the rich caramel custard which rather oddly translates as ‘bacon of the heavens’, helping her mother chop onion and capsicum to make gazpacho, and being allowed to break the eggs for the huevos a la flamenco, an old gypsy dish that was one of the restaurant’s specialties.

She learnt the recipes her grandmother’s grandmother had cooked for mad Isabel II, made with partridge, duck, quince, pomegranates, the testicles of toros slain in the corridas, and other rare ingredients. She learnt to make the rich, fiery soups and tortillas of the gypsies, the olla gitana which was their primary sustenance and made with whatever meat, vegetables and fruit that were to hand. From her mother, she learnt the traditional dishes of Catalonia, the sofrito, picada, alioli, samfaina and romesco that Catalan chefs have perfected over centuries.

From her father’s family Consuelo also learnt to dance flamenco and to tell fortunes. According to family myth, she foretold the coming of General Francisco Franco, who launched his revolution against Madelina’s old playmate, Alfonso XIII, in 1936.

The streets will run with blood, she said. And they did.

Forewarned by Consuelo, the family managed to flee Cádiz which was the first city to fall to Franco. With trunks and furniture piled high in farm trucks and one elegant open car with wide running boards and headlamps like surprised eyes, they left Cádiz three days before the coup d’état. There was Consuelo’s grandmother, Madelina, Enrique and Sofia, plus five of Enrique and Sofia’s seven children, Félicité, Juan Joseph, Ramirez, Evangelique and Consuelo, who was then just twenty-two. With them went Consuelo’s husband of three weeks, her cousin Placido Enrique Augusto Sanchez, and though she did not yet know it, a tiny embryo coiled deep within Consuelo’s womb.

They went to Barcelona, to Sofia’s family, who rather reluctantly helped them all find homes and work, much of it on their own estates. Madelina opened up another restaurant where Enrique and the boys played their guitars, and the girls danced and sang and cooked, just as they had always done.

There was little money to be made from singing and dancing in those days, though. For the next three years the most terrible, bitter, bloody civil war imaginable was waged. Half a million Spaniards died, including Enrique, Sofia, Félicité, Juan Joseph, Ramirez, Evangelique, and Placido Enrique Augusto Sanchez.

Not all were murdered. Sofia died of a combination of starvation and dysentery, Evangelique died from a fever contracted after giving birth to a little stillborn girl, Florenza, who was buried with her, and Placido died in Barcelona’s last desperate attempt to keep out Franco. The city fell in January 1939, one of the last to fall. By the time Franco’s soldiers were marching down the Ramblas, Consuelo, her grandmother and her three-year-old daughter, Juanita, were among the thousands of refugees fleeing through the Pyrenees into France. It was winter and the mountain paths were deep with snow, the towering peaks wreathed in mist. Many of the refugees were barefoot and scantily clothed. Consuelo herself was six months pregnant. She had only what she could carry on her back – some bread, a bag of garbanzos, her shawl, her iron stew-pot, a knife, her beloved recipe book and her tarot cards, wrapped together in a length of silk cut from her wedding dress.

The three women – the grandmother, the young pregnant mother and the child – went through the Pass of Roncesvalles, the same pass that Charlemagne had fled through more than a thousand years earlier with the Saracens snarling at his heels. It was there that the legendary warrior Roland, Charlemagne’s nephew, raised his magical horn Oliphant and called desperately for help as the rearguard he led was ambushed by the Basques.

‘He blew his horn so hard blood gushed from his nostrils. Three times he blew, and the sound of his horn was so deafening the trees shook as if in a gale and the birds of the air fell dead about him,’ Consuelo would say. ‘But it was too late. By the time Charlemagne came charging to his rescue, Roland was dead, his sword Durendal stained to the hilt with blood, and dead too were all his men.

‘I also stained my blade with blood, coming through the Pass of Roncesvalles. That means the Valley of Thorns, you know, and indeed it was a cruel, cold, thorny way. My only consolation is that it was not Spanish blood I drew, but French, and we all would have died if I had not killed him. The Dutch say, when something is easy, that it takes as much effort as casting a Frenchman into hell. Well, I won’t say it was an easy thing to do, killing that bastardo, but he sure as hell went to hell, that I know.’

She was unable to save Madelina, who died the night before they crossed the border into France, as if she could not bear to leave Spanish soil. Augusto was born that same night, a posthumous child, like his deposed king. If Consuelo had been able to walk just a few more steps, he would have been born in France but even then his will was strong, Augusto said, and he demanded he be born in the country of his forefathers.

Consuelo laughed at this interjection and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Quizás, no quizás. All I know is that I didn’t have the heart to walk anymore that night. Though certainly you had a will to live, mis hijo. You were about the size of a fish and as blue. I never thought you’d live. Juanita had to cut the cord, although she was not much older than little Sara here, and we scrubbed you all over with snow, and wrapped you up in my shawl and then we went on. I prayed for you every step I took. Maybe it was because we were walking the old pilgrims’ way, but God heard my prayers and spared you. I think he knew I could not bear to lose anyone else.

‘I was sick, though, and hot, so hot I wanted to tear off all my clothes and lie down in the snow. I kept seeing strange things – angels and ghosts, people I knew were dead. My poor Juanita was so frightened. She ran to find help. An old shepherd took me in. Apparently I punched him in the eye. I don’t remember doing it. When I woke three days had gone by. He’d kept Augusto alive by feeding him ewe’s milk. It was from that old shepherd that I got my recipe for patatas a la riojana. It was all we ate when we were there. I would not eat it at first, it was so red, like blood, and it made me weep it was so hot. All the food in Navarre is red – it’s all the roasted bell peppers and chilli they use. It’s because so many of the adventurers who explored the New World were from Navarre, did you know that? Even though they are so far from the sea. So many good things they found in the New World – chillis, bell peppers, potatoes, chocolate – all brought back by those Navarre sailors.’

That was how Consuelo told her stories, the past and the present, myth and memory, all muddled up so no story was ever told in quite the same way. In the months after she came to live with Pablo and Sara she told them many, many stories. If either of the children woke at night it was Consuelo who came and soothed them with her deep, sad voice, which never failed to rock them back into sleep. ‘Far out at sea the water is as blue as the bluest cornflower and as clear as the clearest crystal, but it is very deep, so deep that if a hundred steeples were piled on top of each other they would not break the surface of the water. It is down there that La Sirenita lived …’

It was Consuelo who made them churros for breakfast, brazo de gitano for afternoon tea and zarzuela de mariscos for dinner. She packed up cold tortilla for Pablo to take to school for lunch, though he begged for vegemite sandwiches like the other children, and went to pick him up after kindy, dressed as always in black from head to toe and looking as much a demented widow as Queen Victoria ever did.

Their grandmother was a very small woman, with coarse, dark, greasy hair streaked with grey that she always wore in a low bun, and sea-green eyes that were extraordinarily vivid against her swarthy skin. She peppered her speech with Spanish words and phrases that meant nothing to the children, so they were never quite sure what she was saying to them.

Her stories were filled with terror and cruelty that mesmerised the children and gave them nightmares. She told them how El Cid was murdered on his wedding day by a Saracen spy and how his wife of only a few hours tied his corpse to his horse and whipped it so it galloped towards the enemy who shot arrow after arrow into it, then fled at last in terror, thinking El Cid a demon that could not be killed. Her fairy stories were filled with gruesome details not always found in the children’s picture books – red-hot shoes the evil stepmother must dance in till she dies, the cutting out of the little mermaid’s tongue, the queen asking the huntsman to bring her a bottle of Snow White’s blood stoppered with her big toe. Consuelo was drawn to the more tragic songs and tales, perhaps because she could no longer believe in happy ever after.

‘Too many bloody women in this place,’ Augusto complained. ‘Nag, nag, nag, that’s all I get.’

‘If you spent a little more time at home with your wife and children and less time out on the town around with all your artist friends, I would not be nagging you,’ Consuelo snapped back.

‘I’m not out on the town, I’m working!’ Augusto shouted.

‘Till three in the morning?’

‘Sometimes, if that’s when inspiration strikes me.’

‘Hmmph, is that what her name is?’

‘For God’s sake, Mama!’ Augusto flung up his arms and banged out of the apartment. Sara heard the roar of his beat-up old motorcycle as he accelerated up the hill and away again. Bridget went back to bed, trying to hide her tears. Consuelo banged pans together and muttered to herself in Spanish.

The new apartment was certainly so cramped there was no room for Augusto to paint. It was a dingy old place, and from their window, they could see nothing but a parking lot and another apartment building. It was near Manly Hospital, Manly Public School and the shops, though, and on sunny days the light had that pellucid brightness only found near the sea. For at the end of their street was the harbour and three blocks to the east, past shops and pubs and the mall, was the ocean, stretching to infinity.

Bridget hated it. She hated the noise of the pub on the corner, the hot blast of greasy-smelling air that wafted up from the fish and chip shop, the dogs that urinated on their front step, the grimy old men who sometimes rummaged through the garbage bin in the park by the harbour. She especially hated their flat, which was too small, too dark and too hot.

Sometimes Bridget cast an accusing glance at Sara when she complained of the apartment. Sara always felt bad, for she knew it was all her fault. If it was not for her, Augusto would have rented a suite of rooms in a grand old mansion on the south hill of Manly which had magnificent views of the ocean and of St Patrick’s College, standing proud and graceful in its wide green park.

The suite had been the entire upstairs floor of the mansion, with high ceilings, polished floorboards, a new bathroom, and an enormous, tastefully renovated kitchen. There were three large bedrooms and a big loft that Augusto could have used as a studio. It really could not have been more perfect.

Bridget had been enraptured with the suite and unable to believe the rent was so cheap. The woman showing them round told them it was because the house was the property of the church and on a ninety-year lease.

‘Look at that view!’ Bridget had wheezed, short of breath after heaving her cumbersome body up the stairs. She had only just been released from hospital and was still very bloated. She had leant against the iron-lace of the balcony rail and looked about her with shining eyes. ‘You can see all the way up the Central Coast. Oh, it’s wonderful!’

‘Light’s good,’ Augusto said. ‘I’ll be able to paint here.’

‘And walk to the beach,’ Bridget said, her face glowing. ‘Oh, Gus, I love it! It’s so spacious and bright. Everything else we’ve seen has been so dark and poky.’

Sara and Pablo were running wildly in and out of the rooms, hiding in cupboards and jumping out to scare their parents. They came to the master bedroom, a large room at the far end of the building with big windows looking east across the sea. The room was completely bare of any furniture. Pablo had run in quite happily but Sara screamed as soon as she entered the room. She crouched against the wall, hiding her face with her hands.

‘What’s wrong, princess?’ Augusto asked.

‘Have you hurt yourself?’ Bridget asked, trying to bend down and see.

Sara shook her head, shaken with sobs. Her parents, at first concerned, began to get exasperated. Sara pointed a shaking hand at one corner of the room. ‘Bad man,’ she said. ‘I frightened. Bad man there!’

‘There’s no-one there,’ Bridget said crossly. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Bad man!’ Sara screamed. ‘I frightened!’

She could not be calmed. Augusto went down on his knees and tried to comfort her, but she would not stop crying until he picked her up and carried her out of the room.

The landlady shook her head, marvelling. ‘Fancy that now,’ she said. ‘They say that about children and animals, don’t they? It’s downright uncanny.’

‘What is?’ Augusto asked, petting Sara’s back as she buried her head in his shoulder, her sobs beginning to subside.

‘Oh, the man who used to live here hung himself in that room. It was just awful! We hadn’t seen him for a while and then there was this smell … eventually my husband came up to knock on the door, to make sure everything was all right. When we couldn’t get an answer … well, we unlocked the door in the end and found him, hanging there. I’ll never forget it. He’d been dead a while, and what with the heat and all …’

Bridget had recoiled, her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh my God!’

‘We don’t really like to tell people, it turns them off the property and no wonder. Not that we didn’t give the place a decent clean.’

Bridget was ashen. ‘How horrible!’

‘It was rather. It was a while ago now, but I don’t like to think of it much. He’d lost his son in Vietnam and then his wife left him, and he got so depressed he lost his job. Sad really. I wish he’d done it some other place else, though. We’ve had such trouble renting out the rooms, ’cause once people find out they feel uncomfortable.’ The landlady sighed. ‘I guess this means you won’t be taking the place?’

Augusto looked down at Sara, still clinging to him and giving the occasional convulsive sob, and then at Bridget who looked rather sick. ‘I guess not,’ he answered.

When they had told Consuelo about it later that evening, she had sighed and nodded her head. ‘Poor child,’ she said, stroking Sara’s glossy dark hair. ‘She has the gift. Though sometimes it is more of a curse than a gift. I know.’

Consuelo had seemed to take more interest in Sara then. She got out her treasured pack of tarot cards for the little girl and told her the stories behind the beautiful, magical pictures. She made her torrijas for afternoon tea, even though Bridget protested that all Sara’s teeth would fall out, and sat by her bed and sang her the cante jondo of the gypsies till Sara drifted off to sleep.

Since Bridget was now spending most of her time in bed, only getting up to shuffle to the bathroom or to rummage for something else to eat, Pablo was at school all day and Augusto was hardly ever home, it was her grandmother with whom Sara spent all her time. Every day they walked hand-in-hand to the beach, searched for shells and feathers, paddled in the water, sang songs and told stories, then came home for an early lunch and Sara’s nap. When she woke up, she would sit at the table and draw while Consuelo folded the washing, and then she would help make dinner, proud to be allowed to roll the eggy meat up into little balls for albóndigas or chop up the vegetables for samfaina.

Sara was young enough to accept their parents’ gradual withdrawing into their own preoccupations quite complacently, but Pablo was in a constant fret of unhappiness. He missed his mother, felt an unreasoned but instinctive rage against his father, and chafed constantly against Consuelo’s odd black spiciness. Pablo wanted to be just like all the other boys at school. He wanted to play football and join the Nippers and have kids over for sleepovers. He wanted to be called Jack and have blond hair and skin that peeled in the summer. He wanted his mother to pick him up from kindy, wearing a frock and little heels and with her hair carefully blow-dried like the other mums. He wanted so much he was thin and hungry with the wanting.

Bridget was not so self-absorbed that she did not recognise his unhappiness, but she was so ill and exhausted she could do little more than try and reassure him, and pretend all was well. Augusto grew impatient with him, and mocked him, which only made Pablo sullen and resentful.

At last the twins were born, and all energy was suddenly sucked into them like light into a black hole. They were nothing but bellowing air, red-faced, red-bodied, crumpled with screaming, their sticky red hair sticking up in tufts from their soft, shapeless skulls. Day and night merged. Conversations whirled past Sara in unfinished snatches. ‘Did you … could you … coming, coming … please … have you seen … no, not yet … I’m coming!’

Once or twice Pablo tried to tell his mother how he was feeling, but she was white as she had once been red, thin as she had once been enormous. ‘Mum, couldn’t you come pick me up this afternoon? No-one else’s Grandmama picks them up. Mum, all the kids at school call me Pedro, and ask me where my donkey is. Mum, couldn’t I have vegemite sandwiches? Mum, I don’t want tortilla, no-one else ever has it. Can’t I have a normal lunch? Mum, now they’re calling me Diablo, what does that mean, Mum? Mum!’

One day, while changing one of the twins’ nappies, Bridget said rather absently, ‘I always said Pablo was a stupid name for a boy. I wanted you to be called Joseph like my uncle Joe, or Michael maybe, but he had to call you Pablo Diego José Francisco, for God’s sake, after his precious Picasso. I told him you’d be teased but when does your father ever listen to anyone?’

‘Oh, Mum, couldn’t I be Joe? Please?’

He was so intense, so desperate, that Bridget laughed rather helplessly and said she supposed so, if it was that important to him. From that moment on, Pablo insisted everyone call him Joe. He wanted to chuck off the skin of Pablo Sanchez like a cicada shell, and reinvent himself as an ordinary Joe, a Joe Blow, a Joe Muggins. Augusto was furious at first. He had sewn himself such a vivid, many-coloured cloak from his Spanish ancestry it wounded him to have his own son reject it.

Then he grew cold and distant and sarcastic. He was already so detached from the everyday life of his family that it was easy for him to take that extra step away, and stop calling his son anything much at all.

For as Augusto’s home life grew more crazed and tearful, his public life was falling into the pattern he had always wanted. His exhibition was a resounding success. Most of the paintings were sold, two bought by influential private collectors and one by a major state gallery. He won a handful of minor prizes, and then scored a major trifecta by having paintings chosen to hang in all three of the major Sydney prizes, the Archibald, the Wynne and the Sulman. He won none of them, but his name made the papers and his reputation grew. He was chosen to prepare some paintings for a travelling exhibition, and then won a well-respected regional prize. He was commissioned to do a mural for a new skyscraper being built in the city, which kept him hard at work for months, and the corporation threw a party for its unveiling that made the metropolitan newspapers. He was invited to all the gallery openings and industry parties so he was out nearly every night, while Bridget went to bed in a daze of weariness and misery.

Then Augusto won a scholarship to go and study in Rome for a year. Weeks of bitter arguments followed. In the end Augusto gave in and declined the scholarship, but irreparable damage had been done to them all. Augusto was bitter and ungracious in his defeat and Bridget bewildered and exhausted in her victory. They fell into a pattern of politeness, and that was in its way worse than the fights.

Then, one gloomy wet evening, when the twins were almost two months old, Sara was helping Consuelo roll out the pastry for pastel de cabello de ángel when she accidentally knocked over the little bowl of freshly ground cinnamon. It fell to the floor and broke, sending up a fine spray of sweet-smelling brown powder.

‘No importa, querida,’ Consuelo said, getting stiffly down on to her knees to sweep up the broken china and cinnamon with a dustpan and brush. ‘There, there, never mind.’ She gave Sara a warm, affectionate hug that smelt like cinnamon and got laboriously to her feet again. ‘We’ll put the angel’s hair marmalade in the pie, like that, see, and decorate the top like so and pop it in the oven, and then I shall run down to the shop and buy some more cinnamon. It won’t be fresh, desafortunadamente, for the people around here do not buy their cinnamon in sticks for some reason, but it will still be good.’

Sara did not want her grandmother to go. It was dark and windy and wet outside, and Bridget was asleep in bed with the twins still greedily attached to her, and Joe was at football practice and Augusto was out somewhere. Sara did not want to be left alone. Consuelo gave her a little admonitory rap on the head. ‘Nothing to get upset about, stupido. You wait here in the warm, querida, and watch our pie and by the time I am back it will be ready.’

Only Consuelo did not come back. In her customary black she was invisible in the gloom, and she was hit by a car while crossing the dark little street below their apartment. Sara sat and watched the angel’s hair pie slowly burn to a crisp while a black shroud of foreboding inexorably tightened about her. She was not allowed to touch the oven, and the only times she had ever woken her mother she had been made to regret it. Sara did not know what to do. In the end the smell of burning penetrated Bridget’s senses and she woke and got up, to find the apartment full of smoke and Sara huddled before the oven, incoherent with tears.

When the first shock and grief was over, and the funeral held and Consuelo’s affairs sorted, it was found she had written a new will only three days before her death. She had little to leave – some old clothes and jewellery which were divided between her two children, and a carved wooden box with her recipe book and a pack of tarot cards which she gave to Sara. In the box was a note written in Consuelo’s old-fashioned hand.

‘To help you see more clearly,’ the note read.

All the long uneasy night, as the tide slowly ebbed away, Sara waited for news of her father. Occasionally lightning shivered from horizon to horizon, followed by a low ominous growl of thunder. The hail had passed over, but the rain drove down so thickly that when Sara went out on to the verandah all she could see was its dark tumult. The Dodge was gone, though, and the boys’ boots from the living-room floor.

The hours dragged by. Sara sat down at the chessboard, fingering the hand-carved wooden pieces she had always loved. She flicked through the newspaper. She picked up an old romance novel but found she already knew the ending. Eventually she turned on the television and sat watching an old movie that was playing on Capital. Called The Prodigal, it made no sense to her – a series of black and white scenes without reason or connection. She no more understood what was happening in that flickering world than she understood what was happening in her own. All the uneasy night the two worlds swirled together like water and paint. All the uneasy night she waited, listening, listening.

The clock hands pointed to twenty past four when Dominic’s trail bike roared up the hill. Sara was sitting at the kitchen table under the cold fluorescent light, her hands resting on her box of tarot cards. She had not dared to try and read them again. She listened to Dominic’s footfall on the step, the squeak of the wooden flyscreen door, and watched her knuckles clench around her fingers. Dread wounded her.

‘We found him,’ Dominic said, his freckles blotches of orange. ‘He’s fallen over the headland. We think he’s dead.’

Her tongue was a stone in her mouth.

‘We’d better ring the police,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to get him up somehow, I dunno how. Dylan is up there now. We thought someone should wait.’

Dominic’s hands were clenched by his side, his head lowered into his chest, the freckles orange as distress lights on his white skin. He waited for her to respond but, when she said nothing, shrugged unhappily and picked up the phone. She watched him frown, and hit the button a few times, before he gave up. ‘Phone’s out. Damn! Better go into town.’

‘Where’s Joe?’ Sara was surprised at how calm her voice was.

‘Went up the main road in case Dad had broken down along there somewhere.’

‘You and Dylan had better go to Alex’s,’ Sara said. ‘He’ll know what to do.’ She saw her brother frown and said, ‘At least then you’ll be able to get out of the rain.’

Dominic hesitated. ‘Shouldn’t one of us wait with Dad? I mean, I know it’s too late, it won’t do any good, it’s just it seems …’ His voice trailed away.

Sara felt walled up in a citadel of ice. Across all the cold distance she heard her voice say words she never thought it possible for her to say. ‘I’ll go.’

Dominic stared at her.

She said it again, a little stronger. ‘I’ll go. Take me up to the headland.’

‘But Sara …’

‘I’ll stay with him. I want to. Please.’

He gave an uneasy shrug of his shoulders, looked at her slantwise then looked away, unable to meet her eyes. As if she were a child, he took her hand and led her outside.

Sara, who had not left the farm in more than five years, rode up to Towradgi Headland on the back of Dominic’s trail bike, her eyes clamped shut, her fingers claws in Dominic’s belt. When the bike stopped its wild bucking she managed to slip to the ground, the rain beating against her jacket.

‘He’s down there,’ Dominic said, pointing over the edge of the cliff. Dylan loomed out of the darkness, his face white within his hood. He seized Sara’s thin arms incredulously. ‘What in God’s name are you doing here?’

‘Dad …’

‘He’s dead,’ Dylan said brutally. ‘And he’s hanging upside-down halfway down the bloody cliff. There’s nothing you can do.’

She wound her arms more tightly about her body. Despite her rain jacket, water was seeping into her clothes. Her feet were very cold.

‘Line’s down,’ Dominic was explaining. ‘Sara thinks we should go to Alex’s and ring the police from there. Sara says she’ll stay here with Dad.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea …’ Dylan said to Dominic over her head.

Sara had to clench her jaw together to stop it from chattering. ‘I’ll stay,’ she forced out and felt rather than saw the long, considering glance the two boys exchanged. ‘Better if you both go,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’

Dylan shrugged and turned away, swinging his leg over the seat of his trail bike.

‘Don’t worry, we won’t be long, we’ll come back with help,’ Dominic said. There was a throaty roar, then the two motorcycles raced away over the rough ground, headlights stabbing into the thick clouds.

For a long time Sara sat still, crouched over her stomach, the hood of her jacket pulled close about her face.

The sun would rise soon. The stars faded above the racing clouds and to the east the sea was dark against a paler dark. The air smelt of sea and rain, and was cold against the numb skin of her face. Her hair was smeared across her cheek and into her mouth. She did not lift a hand to brush it away.

Augusto would not have fallen meekly. He would have clung to the hurtling sky with his toes, his knees, his hooked scream. He would not have let death take him easily.

Her chest heaved painfully. Sara Sanchez, who lived in terror of darkness and loneliness and ghosts, was alone in the dark and the rain with her dead father. How could she be so stupid? She locked her arms tight about her knees and rested her forehead upon them, so still that she could have been a bundle of bones and seaweed and shells thrown up by the sea. The rise and fall of the ocean’s song was in her ears, she wanted to float away on rocking waves, submerge herself in black rocking waves.

But the darkness was ebbing. She heard the kookaburras’ maniacal laughter, echoing from the hills. The rain petered out. She lifted her face, tasting salt on her lip. There was just enough light for her to see her own hands. Very slowly she crawled forward, both hands clinging to the ground. Though her stomach shook so much she thought she might be sick, Sara looked over the edge of the cliff. Far below she saw a dangling stick figure, like a child’s game of Hanged Man.

‘Not Dad,’ she whispered. ‘No, not Dad.’

Her foot clinked against metal, and reaching down her fingers closed over the metal rod of her father’s portable easel. She felt around blindly until her fingers closed upon his sodden sketchbook. She held it to her breast, within the shelter of her jacket. In the faint light, she could see the Elephant nearby and crawled beside it, leaning her head against its shabby seat, her arms crossed over the sketchbook.

Had he known he was falling? Did time blur into a single moment: sky, earth, sea, all spinning into a vortex of roaring? Had he screamed into the falling night? Did he cry out for someone? Who? Who would he cry for?

Falling.

Sol y sombra is what they call the two halves of the bullring in Spain, and sol y sombra was the nature of Augusto Sanchez as well. When he was pleased they all basked in the sunshine of his approval. When he was unhappy the whole family was submerged in gloom.

The sombra of Augusto’s grief hung over the family for a long time after Consuelo died. At first he drank a great deal and sat up half the night strumming his guitar and singing the deep songs of the gypsies, the droning lament of cante jondo. Some days he would not get out of bed. Bridget was troubled on his behalf, and did her best to distract him from his grief. She spoke softly and tenderly to him, and sat behind him, massaging his shoulders and trying to find things to talk to him about.

Then he was possessed by a need to explore and express the wound his mother’s death had dealt him. He began to pace the living room at night. He would stop only to hunch over a sketchbook, his pencil scoring deeply, sometimes filling the whole page with dark, frantic scribbles. The confines of the small apartment fretted him unbearably. He kicked baskets of washing out of the way, snapped at the children to be quiet, for God’s sake, and shouted at Bridget. At last he slung his painting satchel over his shoulder, bristling with paintbrushes and tubes of paint, and roared off on the Elephant.

His family hardly saw him for the next five months. He was sharing a studio in Surry Hills with three other artists and he took to sleeping there most nights, working, sleeping a few hours, waking to work again.

Struggling to care for the four children herself, Bridget only left the apartment to go to the grocery store or to get more takeaway. The twins seemed to cry all day and all night, and they were always hungry. Some days Bridget did not even bother to change out of her dressing-gown.

The confines of the apartment became Sara’s world. With Joe at school, she spent a lot of time alone, playing with her toys, drawing and colouring in, looking at picture books, and making up imaginary games.

Sara imagined she was a princess in a tower, waiting for a prince to rescue her, or that her bed was a sailing ship and she was exploring the seven seas. She set up all her soft animals and pretended she was at a tea party, or crawled about the apartment, miaowing and lapping up milk from a saucer. Sara pretended she was La Sirenita, swimming fluidly in the blue fathomless depths of the bath, dreaming of church bells and dancing in the prince’s strong arms. In her bath-towel, dripping water, she would creep to her bedroom and pretend her bed was the sea-witch’s house, made of sea wrack and human bones. She imagined the forest of the sea anemones, reaching for her with long slimy arms and fingers like slithering worms. Shivering with terror, Sara would beg the sea-witch to use her magic to take away her fishtail and give her the legs of a human. She imagined the cutting out of her tongue.

When she played this game, Sara would not speak, not for any reason. She would wince with every step as if stepping on knife blades. When Bridget demanded to know what was wrong, Sara would not answer, only shaking her head and pointing to her mouth. She mimed her tongue being cut out, but this only made Bridget puzzled and confused. ‘Don’t bother me with your silly games,’ she would say. ‘Though I suppose I should be grateful that you’re quiet.’

One day, when Bridget had not seen or heard from her husband in almost two weeks, she gathered up her courage and took the four children across to the city on the ferry. Joe and Sara felt as if they were true adventurers, setting off to discover new lands. Despite all Bridget’s attempts to make them sit still and quiet, they ran all round the ferry, hung over the sides, threw hot chips at the seagulls and squealed with excitement. Bridget slapped them both across their bare legs and made them sit down but they were too thrilled to sit still for long and were soon chasing each other around the deck again. By the time they got off at Circular Quay, the backs of their legs were red and sore from Bridget’s slaps.

They caught a train to Central Station and walked through the filthy back streets to Augusto’s studio. Bridget kept her bag clutched close under her arm and pushed the twins’ pram along so fast Joe and Sara had trouble keeping up with her.

It was a long walk and the children were hot and grizzly by the time they reached the studio. Augusto was dancing a close and passionate fandango with a paintbrush and a canvas as tall and wide as a wall. ‘The Toreador’s Song’ blared from a paint-encrusted record player on the floor. Augusto had a long, slim, black cigar in his mouth, and as he spun and lunged and stepped back, the blue smoke wove itself in flowing ribbons about his head. Resting on a table nearby was a bottle of his favourite cognac and, as his wife and four children stood in the doorway and watched, he picked it up and gulped down a mouthful.

He saw them as he turned to sweep his brush through the bright globs of ultra deep blue, nimbus grey and black disgorged across a plastic lid on the table. He scowled. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘The children had begun to forget they had a father,’ Bridget answered in a bright, brittle tone. ‘And I wanted to reassure myself that you were still alive.’

‘Well, as you can see I’m working. If you had something to say to me, couldn’t you have given me a call?’

‘I tried,’ Bridget replied in the same awful, poisonously sweet voice. ‘But the phone seems to have been disconnected.’

‘Oh, that’s right,’ Augusto replied. ‘We forgot to pay it.’ He glanced back at his painting. ‘Look, I really am busy. I’ll see you at home, all right?’

‘No, that’s not all right,’ Bridget snapped back, all the saccharine dissolving. ‘We’ve come all this way, we’re not turning around and going home without seeing you!’

While her parents wrangled, Sara leant against a paint-mucky table and stared at her father’s painting. It was huge and dark and filled with strange, twisted figures and contorted faces. In the very centre of the canvas was a great circle, cut in two, one half flooded with a cruel brilliance, the other sunk in gloom. The sol y sombra of the bullring. Within the sunlit half of the circle was a screaming horse and crimson-caped matador, rearing over a huge black bull that had fallen to its knees, its horned head sinking to the ground, its flesh cruelly pierced with beribboned banderillas. A sword had been thrust through the back of its neck and stood up like a cross, casting a long shadow across the ground.

In the shadowy half of the bullring were piled high hundreds of fallen bodies, flowers of blood blooming in the centre of their foreheads, a river of blood snaking out through the dust. Lined up around them were their executioners, rifles still raised, all of them faceless. Looming high above the bullring was an enormous, burly, moustachioed figure, caught on one side by fiery light from the sun-drenched half of the bullring.

To the left of the canvas, a white-clad angel stood with snowy wings spread wide, vast and triangular as mountains, holding upright a burning sword as if barring the way to heaven. At his feet crouched a young woman with dishevelled black hair, clutching a bloody, screaming, blue-hued child, its umbilical cord still dangling. Beside her huddled a little girl, knife held ready in her hand.

To the right of the canvas sat a guitar player, his head bent over his instrument. With long, dark hair tied back in a messy ponytail, a high-bridged nose, sea-coloured eyes and an opal glinting in one ear, the musician was clearly Augusto. He was dressed in a flowing white shirt. On a table behind Augusto were a vase of red waratahs, an apple and a knife. The two figures in white, the guitar player and the angel, framed the mandala of the bullring like embracing wings.

As Sara grew up, she read every article and review of her father’s work ever published. She discovered that this painting was composed as deliberately as if conceived by one of the Old Masters. It was divided into three like a religious triptych, she read, yet was unequivocally modern with its distortion of perspective, its use of pastiche and collage. It was, one critic wrote, strongly influenced by Picasso’s theories of synthetic cubism, with its geometric arrangement of circles and triangles.

The homage to Picasso was clearly indicated, another critic wrote, by the symbolism of the bull and the screaming horse. The white-clad guitar player was another common motif of Picasso, while the faceless executioners and enormous shadowy colossus were reminiscent of Goya. It was thought the painting depicted the massacre at Badajoz where Franco’s army slaughtered hundreds of unarmed men in the town’s bullring. The depiction of the weeping mother and the blue baby was clearly a bitter mockery of traditional Madonna and Child paintings. All these sources and influences were to help make this dark, brooding, anguished painting famous, but Sara was then too young to know more than that the painting frightened her.

Unhappily she wound one foot about her leg, twisting her fingers together, and looked away to the other sketches and paintings stacked against the wall. Many were studies or compositional studies for the large canvas, but others were finished paintings, most showing various moments in his mother’s life. Consuelo appeared as a child, a young woman, a mother, an old crone. In some she told fortunes, in one she stabbed a man to death, in another she stood with a knife carving a slice off a ham hanging from a hook in the ceiling in a dark, crowded shop. There were several of Consuelo and Child. Horses, red flowers, guitars, matadors, weeping women, soldiers giving fascist salutes, Franco’s burly moustachioed figure, daggers like crosses, and bulls appeared over and over again. All Augusto’s work was painted in bitter, melancholy shades of blue, grey, purple and black, with startling splashes of white and blood-red. Later, critics would call this Augusto Sanchez’s ‘black’ period.

Augusto saw Sara looking at the terrified, rearing horse. ‘That poet, the Spanish one – Federico Garcia Lorca,’ he rolled the name out with all the Spanish flair he could muster. ‘He said Spain is the only country where death is the national spectacle. He was talking about bullfighting but he was more right than he knew. I’ve called the painting Corrida. That is Spanish for bullfight, you know.’

Sara was silent, though she looked to her mother for reassurance. Augusto’s grin widened. ‘Did you know they cut out the horses’ vocal cords?’ he told her then. ‘To stop them from screaming?’

Bridget said stiffly, ‘That’s enough, Gus! You’ll give her nightmares. Come on, children. This is no place for you. Let’s go home.’

Subdued and rather frightened, Joe and Sara obediently followed their mother as she angrily pushed the twins’ double pram out the big roller door of the studio. When Sara looked back, she saw her father was again working as ‘Danse Bohème’ pounded and flourished about him. He was painting the intricate red hearts of the waratahs.

Summer came, and the sky was filled with the unearthly purple-blue of jacaranda trees in bloom. The days were long and hot and filled with the lure of the ocean. Augusto finished the last of his Consuelo series – fifteen paintings in all and painted in just five months – and they were exhibited in January during a long heatwave that drove many people off the beaches and into the air-conditioned comfort of shops, restaurants and galleries.

The show was an enormous success. Augusto’s depiction of the horror and brutality of war, and the way it seeped down through the generations like a stain of ink, hit a powerful nerve. The Vietnam War was in its final orgy of wanton destruction. The newspapers were full of terrible statistics and shocking photographs and people everywhere were feeling the same futile rage and melancholic disillusionment that had found such powerful expression in Augusto’s paintings of his mother. All of the major works and most of the studies sold, many bought by important collectors and art galleries, and Corrida, the major work, fetched what seemed like an incredible amount of money when it was purchased for a record price by the National Gallery of Victoria. Augusto suddenly found himself both rich and celebrated.

Sunshine now illuminated the Sanchez family. Augusto bought Bridget a car, and cooked them a feast of oca con peras, Consuelo’s signature dish. He had to order the goose in from a specialist butcher in Paddington, not many people wanting to roast geese in those days. Although he still spent quite a few nights in his studio, he made sure he was home on the weekends to play with the kids, tell them bedtime stories, and take them to the beach.

They would walk through the hot, noisy streets, loaded down with towels, buckets, spades and their boogie boards. Augusto would carry the big red and white umbrella for Bridget, who pushed the twins in their double pram, cheese and vegemite sandwiches perspiring in plastic bags. Bridget always wore a long-sleeved shirt over her bikini, and a big floppy hat. Her round cheerful face would turn red long before they reached the esplanade. Reflected in her mother’s big dark sunglasses, Sara could see shopfronts, cars, people, her own skinny body dressed only in undies and thongs, a frilly white hat tied under her chin.

Once at the beach her father would swim far out, past the breakers, past the body-surfers, until his head was a tiny dark blob in the blue-green swell. Often he would disappear from view, causing Sara to stand, squinting anxiously until she saw him reappear, throwing back his wet head with an arc of shining water like a flying fish leaping from the waves. At last he would come back in, and their clumsy pile of sand would be transformed into a fantastical sandcastle with a moat deep and wide enough for Sara and Joe to lie in, and thick banks decorated with shells and cuttlefish and seaweed and the dangling blue tentacles of bluebottles. All the other children on the beach would come to stand nearby and tentatively offer a handful of shells, or help dig a ditch to the sea so that the waves, deliciously cold and fierce, could rush in and besiege the castle.

No-one built sandcastles like Augusto. Certainly not Bridget. She did not much like the beach. She would sit on a towel under the red and white umbrella, fanning herself with the glossy pages of Cleo, rubbing sunblock into her freckled legs, occasionally leafing over the pages as she lay on her stomach, shielding the magazine so Sara could not see. The twins sat beside her, dressed in sunhats and overalls, their arms and legs white with the cream Bridget constantly reapplied. No matter how careful Bridget was, the twins always came home from the beach with angry red patches under their eyes and in the hollows behind their knees. A few days later the sunburn would blister, and the twins would sit and peel away each other’s skin in long, grey, bedraggled strips, shrieking with laughter.

Augusto never got sunburnt. His fine, smooth skin just grew darker and darker, his blue-green eyes more brilliant. Augusto said his only religion was sun-worship.

‘Wine worship,’ Bridget would reply dryly.

‘Sun, wine and women,’ Augusto would answer, seizing Bridget around her thick waist and nuzzling his rough black chin into the back of her neck, where the skin was white and tender like a child’s. She would screech and jerk herself free, rubbing her neck and saying crossly, ‘I wish you’d shave!’

When Augusto was not around, Bridget would not take them to the ocean. Sometimes, though, on a bright day, she and the children would walk down to the little beach by the harbour, where ancient pine trees cast a deep, cool shade over a falling slope of grass. Bridget would lie on the lawn in the shade, the twins crawling about her, while Sara and Joe played on the narrow flat beach and ran shrieking through the calm water. Here a shark net hung with heavy white buoys kept them safe from the sleek predators of the underworld. The water was warm and soft and brown, and they could watch the ferries cruise in to the wharf, their wake causing little white crests to form on the waves that ran so smoothly and evenly into the shore. Even rocked by the passage of the ferries, the waves never rose deeper than Sara’s knees. Never did they have the cold shock, the sudden frightening surge, of the ocean’s waves. Never did they drag at Sara’s feet and sweep her away, choking with terror, blinded and silenced, until Augusto dragged her free with a laugh and a joke. Bridget felt safer on the harbour beach, enclosed within its high cement arms.

At the far end of the West Esplanade was the Manly Aquarium, only just opened and still bright with blue paint and shining glass. Sometimes, when the shadows were beginning to grow long and the children were drugged with sun, Bridget took them in. They would sit on tiers of blue-painted cement, licking ice-cream from their wrists, and staring down with fearful fascination at the sharks and stingrays moving with dark, deadly intent through the clear water. Often one of the sharks would lie close to the bottom of the pool, hardly moving. When Bridget took them down to stand close to the underwater windows, they could see the flow of its gills, the thin mouth hanging open with row upon row of uneven white teeth, sharp as needles, and the tiny pale eye, staring at nothing. The only time the sharks surged into swift, sinuous movement was when they were fed. Bridget always took the children home then, Sara and Joe staring back over their shoulders to see the sudden savagery amidst the soft clouds of brown blood.

Once, when Joe and Sara were standing pressed up close to the underwater glass, an enormous stingray glided right over their heads. They saw the strange furling and unfurling all along the edges of its great black wings. Its long tapering tail whipped behind it, armed with saw-edged poisonous spines. It turned and slid its great white under-belly along the glass, and Sara saw its mouth curved like a cruel grin in the midst of that expanse of pure blind whiteness. Then away it soared, up into the dazzle of sunlight, a great flapping black shadow that filled all of Sara’s eyes. Although it terrified her, all that cruel primeval indifference, she could not loosen her gaze from it. In the days and weeks afterwards, she often found herself thinking of that stingray and the shadow of it falling upon her.

That was the summer of Sara’s fifth birthday, the year before everything changed. That summer Bridget was still trying to enter into Augusto’s world. She listened to him as he raved on about the importance of the new wave of Neo-Expressionist painters who were blasting away the sterile emptiness of abstract art, and about his need for more paint, canvases, sponsors, a better studio. She did her best to keep the drab reality of grocery accounts, rent-due days and childhood sniffles away from him, spending many silent nights frowning over the unpaid bills while Augusto was out at gallery openings. She did her best to strike up a friendship with Augusto’s dealer and his wife, though she had nothing in common with them and did not understand their world.

One Sunday afternoon she packed all four children into the new station wagon, insisting on accompanying Augusto to his dealer’s house for a barbecue. Augusto had made samfaina y bacalao a la catalana, while Bridget prepared French onion dip made from instant soup mix. It was a clear, fine day, so hot the black road up the hill from the apartment block shimmered with rainbow illusions.

It was a long drive to the Porters’ house, for they lived in Hunters Hill on the other side of the harbour. Sara could not see much because she was crammed in the back with the three boys, all elbows, knees and fists. Joe had recently discovered his power as her elder brother and prodded and pinched her unmercifully, yet as soon as Bridget turned round at the sound of Sara’s whimpers, he stared angelically out of the window, knees together, hands clasped meekly in his lap.

‘Please stop whingeing, Sara!’ Bridget cried.

‘But, Mum …’

Augusto smiled at her. ‘Patience, princess, we’re almost there. And they have a pool, y’know. You’ll like that, my little water-baby.’

Mary and Alan Porter’s house was a huge old mansion set on a hill with iron-laced balconies and standard white roses planted out like soldiers. Inside everything was cool and calm and cream, with the only colour being in the many paintings that crowded the walls, most violent with reds and purples. Out the back was a blue pool rimmed with wide terracotta tiles, with a lion’s head that spouted water and kumquat trees planted in massive terracotta pots. From the balcony upstairs was a clear view across the harbour to the city.

Sara had never seen Sydney from this angle before. A city of glass towers, it rose blue and airy from the shimmering water. The white curve of the Opera House gleamed below the arch of the Harbour Bridge, the soft restraint of the low, grey-green hills to the north making the tall glittering city seem even more illusory.

‘I want to live there.’ Sara pointed to the top of the highest building on the far hill, a round tower whose many windows reflected back the sun. She would be a princess in a tower, Rapunzel waiting for her prince.

‘That’s Australia Square, stupid,’ the Porters’ seven-year-old son jeered. ‘You can’t live there, it’s all offices. Don’t ya know anything?’

Bruce Porter was a sturdy boy, with thick, sandy hair that stuck up from his forehead like a cockatoo’s crest. He had been deputised to show Sara and Joe around, and demonstrated his power by not allowing them to touch anything or go into the sauna. He walked with a swagger and picked his nose while he talked, showing Sara the blob of green snot he had extracted before swallowing it with obvious relish. Sara did not like him.

Half an hour after lunch, the children were allowed to swim as long as they were quiet and did not splash. In a state of bliss, Sara lolled in the shallow end. She wore a new yellow-and-white check frilled bikini, she had eaten well and deliciously, she had seen an enchanted city, and the sun poured bright upon her wet head. Dreamily she wound her legs together and began to sway through the water, using only her arms and hands. Slowly she sank beneath the water, twisted, spun, drifted along the bottom. She could see her shadow, thin and blue, coiling along behind her, followed by the shadows of ripples. She could swim without moving her hands or feet, rippling her body forward. If she spread her feet, her ankles together, her shadow looked like that of a mermaid.

The boys were dive-bombing in the deep end. Bruce made the biggest splash Sara had ever seen – the water splattered the adults sitting at the glass-topped table in the cabana. Bruce blamed Joe but his father said in the mock-serious voice that many fathers seem to use with their sons: ‘I hardly think young Pablo is heavy enough to make a splash like that, son,’ so Bruce grinned, taking it as a compliment. Joe scowled to hear himself called Pablo.

Bruce kept doing dive-bombs but soon grew bored, dive-bombs being no fun if no-one is watching how big a splash you can make. So he dived into the water, swam up behind Sara and dragged her under the water by her legs.

Sara kicked and thrashed furiously, all the air in her lungs bursting past her eyes in a great, gleaming bubble. She could not dislodge his hold. She writhed and wriggled, hitting out with her puny fists. He dragged her under again, holding her around her tummy, turning the glistening, gliding water into her enemy. She could not breathe, she could not escape, broken-finned, she was swallowing water. For a moment she thought she might drown, but then Joe was there, wrestling Bruce away from her. She was able to break through the water’s surface, gulping air as she clung to the side of the pool with both hands. Bruce did not mind who his victim was as long as he had one, so he did not pursue her. He ducked Joe again and again until he was gasping and choking.

Sara tried to help him, hanging around Bruce’s neck, and clutching at him with her knees, but he threw her off as easily as a dog shaking off a fly. Sara hit the water with a splash, which suddenly detonated into a tall fountain as a long, dark figure dived into the pool. Water broke, ripples of light cascading over the walls. Then Augusto had Bruce by the shoulders and was throwing him up in the air so that he fell into the deep end with a smack! of bare flesh hitting water. ‘Like playing games, do we?’ Augusto said and it was hard to tell whether his voice was laughing or frowning. As Bruce struggled to the surface, Augusto seized him again and upended him over his shoulder. Sara and Joe swam to the edge and watched, laughing. Bruce tried to escape, but Augusto climbed out of the pool and marched around the edge, singing a Catalan rumba, and beating time on Bruce’s bottom. Then Augusto threw Bruce into the deep end with a resounding crack that turned his stomach pink.

That was one good thing about Augusto. He understood the need for revenge.

Sirens wailed through the greyness. Sara jerked her head up. Headlights wavered through the trees as the police jeep laboured up the steep hill. She unknotted her arms and legs and stood up. The police were brisk and business-like. They shone a spotlight over the lip of the cliff. Sara gazed down, mesmerised by the odd asymmetry of her father’s body. He was caught by one leg. The other dangled, bent at a peculiar angle. His arms hung loosely. His white shirt was dyed red all down one side. His black hair swayed in the wind.

Someone grasped her shoulders, walked her away as if she had no will of her own, sat her down with a blanket wrapped around her legs. It was a large policeman in a dark blue coat. He poured her a thermos cap of coffee. Sara clutched it, warming her hands, staring at the dim shapes working together at the cliff’s edge. After a while, she lifted her hands to her mouth and sipped, the heat relaxing the muscles around her mouth so she choked.

‘When was the last time you saw your father?’

‘After lunch. He took off on the Elephant – his motorcycle. He didn’t come home for dinner …’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

Sara shook her head, and held the cup tightly in her hands.

‘Did he give any indication at all of what he planned to do?’

‘He had his easel …’ she managed to say.

‘How did he seem?’

When Sara failed to understand, the policeman rephrased his question. ‘What sort of mood was your father in when he left the house?’

Sara was not sure how to answer. It seemed like a trap. She let her hair fall over her face and admitted, ‘He was angry. They’d been arguing.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘Dad and Alex and Harry – my uncles. They always argue, though.’

‘What were they arguing about?’

‘Oh, money, I s’pose. I’m not really sure. It’s usually money. It doesn’t matter, though, ’cause Dad’s finished his painting. He’ll be able to pay Alex back now.’ Her words sounded childish to her own ears and she flushed and fell again into silence.

‘How well did your father know this headland? Did he come here often?’

‘All the time, at least, lately. He’s been painting it.’ She found it hard to answer. Little tremors ran up and down her legs, her teeth chattering against the metal cup.

‘Do you know if your father had any reason for wanting to take his own life?’

The cup fell from her hand, spilling hot coffee over her fingers. She could not look at the policeman. She could not breathe. With her eyes squeezed shut, she clenched her hands into fists and began to count under her breath, rocking back and forth. One, two, three, four … It did not work. She pressed her hands over her face, over her ears, she pushed herself as close to the ground as she could.

She felt someone touch her arm and flinched violently. One, two, three, four …

It was Joe. Sara pressed her head against his legs. Even though her hands were still jammed over her ears, she heard him shouting.

‘Can’t you see she’s upset! Why are you asking all these questions?’

The policeman said calmly, ‘When there’s been an unexplained accident of this kind, it’s necessary for us to make inquiries …’

‘Can’t you see now is not the time! It’s OK, Sara, it’s OK …’

Sara clung tighter but Joe broke her hold about his knees, striding to speak to the policeman whose walkie-talkie crackled in the silence. Then he knelt, watching the slow progress of an abseiler down the cliff-face.

‘Where’d the twins go? Why aren’t they here?’ he asked. In the half-light, Sara saw lines in her brother’s face she had never seen before.

‘They left me here.’

‘Poor Sar. Was it horrible?’

She nodded.

Suddenly there was an excited babble. The policeman shouted into his receiver and all the rescue team stared over the cliff, talking excitedly.

‘What is it?’ Joe asked, and tried to push past the blue shoulders.

‘He’s still alive,’ the policeman said. ‘He’s very badly injured, though. We’ll have to winch him up.’

Augusto’s death had been easier to believe. Sara had seen his broken figure, hanging from a ledge of stone, forty feet below. How could he have survived such a fall?

Joe sat down abruptly. His face was grey as ashes. Sara understood how he felt. Augusto was alive. Her own knees were trembling so much she could not stand either. Her head roared. She pressed her hands to her ears, hunching her face down into her knees. The roaring was so loud she thought she must faint. Suddenly a helicopter rose into view. The clamour of its blades sent leaves and dirt whirling up into little dust-devils that lashed her face and body. Sara hid her face in her knees once more.

For long moments she crouched there, surrounded by the rush and roar of the wind, then the helicopter rose once more and swung away, Augusto like Jonah in the whale’s dark belly. Sara lifted her face, then climbed shakily to her feet. The helicopter looked like a mosquito, vanishing into the cloud-capped distance. Sara wished she had had the courage to go with her father, but knew she would have been afraid, the ground dropping away, the blades whistling pitilessly, space and emptiness all around.

The sky folded. It took her by surprise. Sitting on the ground, Sara saw blood on her palm, and heard the sea inside her skull.

Then Joe’s face hung above her. ‘Sara? What’s wrong?’

Her heart slammed oddly.

‘Come on, Sar, get yourself together.’ Joe heaved her to her feet.

‘I’m just tired.’

‘You’ll be right. Let’s get you home.’ Joe steered her down the steep hill towards the truck, parked askew at the end of the track. He heaved Augusto’s motorcycle into the back, threw in the broken easel they had found near the edge, the palette of ruined paint, the paint-tubes all spilling out their brightly coloured gore. Sara stood by the truck, Augusto’s sodden sketchbook still clutched to her chest. She could not open the door.

‘You rode up here on the back of Dom’s trail bike,’ Joe said impatiently. ‘I promise you the truck is much safer and I’m a much better driver.’

Sara did not move.

‘For God’s sake, get in!’ he cried. ‘Do you want to walk home?’

Sara opened the door and clambered in. The old truck rattled down the track and onto the road, Joe accelerating towards the turn. Sara held her breath. The wide silver and black stripes of the road barrier sprang at them. ‘Joe, please don’t …’

He said nothing. She braced herself against the dashboard. As they swerved around the corner, Joe leant forward, as he always did, to see where their mother’s car had crashed through the barrier and down the side of the hill. Ten years had erased any signs of her passage. Where there had once been blackened earth and broken trees and the burnt-out hulk of her car, there was now only a faint scar to show it had ever happened. To look was a test of strength.

Sara did not look. She squeezed her eyes shut, only opening them once the car again sped down the straight. Through the blur of trees she saw the long contours of the land emerging from mist: the crooked line of the boundary fence, the tall poplars like a barrier of spears, the sliver of pewter that was the dam, the vague outline of the hills. Across the valley, like a boat floating on a grey sea, was the farmhouse, its windows blinking red.

Joe took the last corner like a racing driver, bouncing Sara out of her seat. ‘Joe, please don’t …’ she said again, catching her breath on a sob. As a child Sara had loved this stretch of road, which rose and fell like a roller-coaster. Now she hated it.

The truck plunged into mist, submerging Joe and Sara in a nether-world, phantoms floating through a dim, enigmatic landscape. She looked sideways at her brother. He looked angry. ‘Will he be all right?’ she said tentatively.

Joe shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

Built on the crest of a hill, the house looked north and east across lush green paddocks to the sea. Tall and white, with a steep roof made of tin and one square, fancy-trimmed turret, it had been built before the death of the last century, when Bridget’s ancestors had been in their greatest flush of wealth and able to indulge a desire for ostentation.

Her great-grandfather, Robert Halloran, had followed the fevered rush to Narooma after gold was found on Mount Dromedary in the 1860s. A cool, shrewd, hard-headed man, he had no intention of searching for gold himself, instead setting up a general store and post office and charging a fortune for his goods. By the time the creeks flowing off Mount Dromedary had been panned clean, he had made enough money to buy and clear some good dairy land and build a grand house for his growing family.

Several generations of Hallorans lived out their lives at Towradgi, ring-barking the trees and over-fertilising the land, shooting, trapping and poisoning the rabbits, enduring the grasshoppers, the droughts, the bushfires and the floods. Then, in the year Joe was born, Narooma saw the worst drought since 1923. Dead cows lay in the fields where they had fallen, and the dry soil blew into little whirlwind devils called wurrawilberoos by the local Aborigines. The dam was a red scar in the brown paddock, a thirsty crack waiting for the rain that never came. The drought lasted, with little respite, for another four years.

James Halloran, Bridget’s father, frowned, shook his head, and moved his money out of dairying and his family out of Towradgi. He bought a nice, modern house and a prosperous liquor store in Narooma, and invested in a large white motor launch for his son Alex to take tourists out whale-watching and deep sea fishing. It was to prove him as shrewd a businessman as his grandfather. The year the twins were born was the year butter prices fell to their lowest since the ’50s. Over one hundred dairy farms on the South Coast went bankrupt. The Halloran family, however, flourished as tourism grew, and when the young man Bridget Halloran had married proved himself a spendthrift and philanderer, just as her father had predicted, he felt generous enough to give her the old farm by the sea, so she would at least have a home to raise her brood of skinny, dago kids.

Years of neglect had seen the old house sag into the hill. Its white walls were peeling and stained, its gutters drooped with storm-wrack and its verandah was piled high with broken chairs, dead pot plants, mildewed cardboard boxes, cobwebbed brooms, corroded sheets of corrugated iron and discarded canvases, the delicate flowers of mould creeping over their pale backs.

Beneath the house, on the flat, was a huddle of tin sheds, brown with rust. Cows jostled against the fence of the yard, flanks red with mud. The farm’s new manager, Matthew, leant on one of the fences. He wore an ancient brown oilskin and a cigarette hung out of his mouth. His black hair, damp from the mist, drooped over his forehead. As the truck passed along the road, he looked up, and raised a hand. Large teeth gleamed.

Joe slammed on the brakes and wound down his window.

‘Morning,’ Matthew said.

‘Shouldn’t you be putting the cows through?’ Joe said.

‘Give me a break,’ Matthew replied amiably enough, though his eyes narrowed a fraction. ‘It’s only just past six and misty as hell. What are you guys doing out and about so early?’ He looked past Joe at Sara, but she hid behind her hair, staring straight ahead.

‘Gus has had an accident,’ Joe said tersely, gripping the steering-wheel. ‘We’ve been out all night looking for him. He must’ve slipped somehow, fallen. Up at Towradgi Headland. They had to bring out the rescue helicopter to winch him up.’

‘God!’ Matthew said. ‘Is he all right?’

‘What do you reckon?’ Joe spoke with an edge of bitter sarcasm.

Sara took a deep breath. ‘He’s still alive,’ she said in a quavering voice, not daring to look at Matthew. These were the first words she had ever addressed to Matthew, in the three months since he had come to live at the farm. ‘He’s very badly hurt, though. I … I don’t think he’ll be all right.’

‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry,’ Matthew said, leaning forward so he could look at her across Joe’s tense muscled arms. She looked at him sideways for a moment then swung her hair across her face again. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ he asked.

‘Put the cows through?’ Joe said wearily.

‘Sure,’ Matthew said, stepping back. ‘Of course.’

‘I’ll be down in a min,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll just drop Sara back.’

‘No need,’ said Matthew. ‘I’ll look after it.’

With the slightest twitch of his thick, dark eyebrows and an almost imperceptible flare of his nostrils, Joe made his feelings clear. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said.

‘Sure, fine, take your time,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s only early yet.’

As the truck surged forward, Sara looked back. Matthew was still watching. At once, she swung her gaze away.

Matthew always made her edgy and uncomfortable. She never looked at him or spoke to him when he came up to the house for his morning tea, yet she watched him surreptitiously as he worked around the farm, shirt off, his brown skin glistening, the swing and pump of his arms making her shiver. He was the first male outside her family that she had seen in years, she told herself. She had to expect him to ruffle her dreams and disturb her days.

The truck pushed its way along the overgrown driveway, the house disappearing behind a tangle of trees, only the roof of its tower jutting above the branches. Puddles reflected in sepia the overhanging leaves of the shrubs and bushes, crowding in close. Twigs snapped. The truck broke out of the overhang of the trees as if out of a tunnel. Joe pulled in with an impatient yank at the parking brake.

Teresa slouched out the front door. ‘Well, at least she’s up,’ Joe said. ‘I hope she’s got a hell of a hangover.’ Ignoring her, he jammed his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and stamped down the path towards the sheds.

Sara took a deep breath and opened the car door. When she got out her legs were shaking so much she had to hang on to the door to stop them from folding beneath her. She tried hard to breathe.

Staring at her in amazement, Teresa ran forward and took her arm. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded. ‘What’s happened? I woke up and everyone was gone.’

In her voice was the incredulous knowledge that Sara had gone, Sara who had not left the farm in five years. To wake up and find Sara gone was like waking and finding the sun had turned blue, all the world drowned in grotesque shadows.

Sara took a deep, wobbly breath and managed to get to the steps up to the verandah before her legs gave out. She sat down and buried her face in her hands.

‘What’s wrong?’ Teresa asked, anxiety sharp in her voice.

‘There’s been an accident. Dad fell over the cliff at Towradgi Headland.’

‘What? You’re joking!’ Suddenly the angry incredulity left Teresa’s face, as Sara sobbed aloud. ‘What happened? Is he … you don’t mean …’

Sara wiped her eyes and tried to swallow her tears. ‘He’s not dead. He’s hurt, though, really badly hurt. They’ve taken him to Moruya Hospital.’

‘How bad was he hurt? Will he be all right?’

‘I hope so, but … he looked awful, his leg all bent, his head … He was out all night in that storm, y’know, and it was such a bad fall, he was hanging upside down for hours and hours … I can’t believe he’s alive at all.’

Hearing the thickness of the silence Sara looked up and saw Teresa’s face. Hurriedly she tried to reassure her. ‘He’ll be all right, sweetie, don’t worry. The doctors’ll look after him. He’s a tough old boot.’

Teresa sank down to press close beside her, sliding her hand into Sara’s. ‘Oh, no, not Dad too!’ she wailed. ‘Don’t let him die, don’t let him die.’

Troubled Waters

low tide – 0.5 m

4.40 am, Easter Saturday

high tide – 1.2 m

11.33 am, Easter Sunday

Sara had called Augusto’s motorcycle the Elephant since she was five. Like so many of their secret nicknames and passwords, it originated in their chess games.

Augusto first began to teach Sara to play chess to keep her amused after she was confined to bed with a broken ankle. A quiet, dreamy child, she was very clumsy, knocking vases off tables, or dropping plates into the washing-up water. One day, she tripped while running down the steps, and her ankle folded beneath her with the sound of a dry twig snapping.

Bridget was at her best when any of her children were hurt. She took Sara to Manly Hospital, dragging Joe and the two-year-old twins with her. They had to wait for three hours. The twins screamed red-faced, Sara sobbed white-faced, and Bridget sat in an icy calmness, repeating patiently to all of Sara’s pleas, ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, I don’t know where he is.’

By the end of the third hour, Sara had gone beyond pain to a strange sort of floating dreaminess. Her bored and restless brothers, her rigidly cheerful mother, the other bruised and bloodied patients in the casualty ward, the nurses in their neat shoes and their low, deferential voices that lifted and lightened once the doctors had bustled away – all of them seemed very far away. She closed her eyes, listened to the scrape of metal, the sigh and moan and whisper of those all around her. Phosphorescence danced against her closed lids, orange, red, purple, flame-blue. She thought she heard wings flapping about her head. Her throat was parched, her eyes flinched from the too-bright light, she feared she was in a desert, vultures wheeling above her.

Voices came closer. Someone took her wrist in cool fingers. It helped. Then her foot was moved. Sara screamed. She fell, spiralling downwards into a great, shadowy gorge of rushing noises and icy winds. She did not mark the line between consciousness and unconsciousness. All she knew, once she woke to find herself in a narrow hospital bed with a green cotton tent erected over her feet, was that a very long time had passed.

They gave her some ice to suck and told her that she could go home once the doctor had seen her. Sara spent the next few hours listening to the tread of feet up and down the corridor. Her father did not come.

He did not come for another two days. Augusto had gone off earlier in the week, saying he needed some space, and had not returned. At first, Sara thought Bridget was deliberately keeping the news of her broken ankle from him. Then she thought Augusto must have had an accident, and Bridget had not told her. Nothing could console her – not even her father’s hand-carved chess pieces. She had always liked to play with them, galloping the horses around the lush meadows of her bed, making them jump the wrinkles of her sheets, and the gushing rivers of her hair. Now she lay silently, clutching one in her small hand and wanting her father.

At last Bridget rang Augusto’s dealer Alan, swallowing her humiliation. Augusto came home that evening. Sara listened with delight to the sound of her parents arguing.

‘Where have you been?’

‘What do you care?’

‘Who was she, who have you been with?’

‘For God’s sake, Bridg, I’ve been painting. It’s too noisy here, I’ve been at the studio.’

‘Yeah, for sure. And why can’t you at least leave me a number, I’ve been at my wits’ end …’

‘I need quiet to paint, I don’t want distractions.’

‘No, I bet.’

‘I don’t have time for this, you’re always so bloody jealous, how am I meant to paint in this sort of atmosphere?’

‘Poor little Sara’s been weeping her eyes out for you, afraid something had happened to you …’ Bridget’s voice was harsh with an unnatural sarcasm. ‘Couldn’t believe her beloved daddy doesn’t care enough to even ring and see how she is.’

Sara sank back into her pillows, covering her ears with feathers. The door opened. Sara unsealed her eyelids cautiously. Augusto stood at the end of her bed, smiling at her. ‘Hello, princess, hurt yourself, you silly girl?’

At last Sara could tell him about the hospital, and how she had been afraid he had been hurt too.

‘Oh, no, princess, I’ve just been a little busy,’ he said, sitting down gently on the side of her bed and lifting the coverlet to examine her enormous white boot, covered all over with her brothers’ scribblings. ‘God, we’ll have to do better than that! How about I paint an Augusto Sanchez original on it for you? Though you’d never be able to cut it off, you’d be cutting up a potential fortune!’ Then, seeing the little wooden horse-head clutched in her hand, he smiled and said, ‘How about I teach you to play chess instead?’

‘What’s chess? Is it a new game?’

‘One which is thousands of years old,’ he told her. ‘Kings and queens used to play chess with real horses and men as the pieces. It’s as old as Christianity and a lot more interesting.’

‘How do you play it?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘It’s like a battle,’ Augusto said, lining up the pieces on her blanket. ‘I try and capture your king and you try and capture mine.’

‘That sounds easy,’ Sara said, attacking the king in his hand with the knight in hers.

‘Not that easy,’ Augusto said. ‘But I’ll teach you. I’d like to have someone to play chess with – your mother hasn’t the soul for it.’

He read her the history of chess like a bedtime story and it grew to be part of their private language. They did not call the rook a rook, or even a castle. It was always called the elephant, which Sara thought much more interesting and romantic. Rukh meant war-chariot, after all, Augusto said, and in ancient India, where chess originated, elephants were the chariots of emperors.

‘Then your motorcycle should be an elephant too,’ Sara said, knowing her father shared his name with emperors. That was why she was called Sara, he had often told her, for it meant ‘princess’ and was she not the daughter of an emperor? Augusto had been delighted at her idea, and from that time on his motorcycle had always been called the Elephant, though no-one else knew why.

The king was called a maharajah and the queen a maharani, and the bishop was always known as a fool. Sara knew this was because in medieval France the piece now called a bishop was then known as the court jester. She also knew they called the bishop a fool because it upset Bridget.

Sara grew to be fascinated by the subtle, intricate moves of the game. At first they did not play to win, but only experimented with the different moves and their consequences. Augusto would make Sara look at the game from every angle, trying to guess his next move, or identifying the many different pathways she could choose to take. Augusto said chess was a great tool for life.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘the pattern on the board seems as clear to your eyes as the shape of constellations in the sky. You know what the consequence of each move is, and all you need to do is sit back and watch the poor fool stumble into your trap. Fool’s Mate. That’s what they call the shortest possible game, you know. All it takes is three moves and you have them in checkmate.’ He laughed. ‘Yes, if you play it right, life is just like chess.’

Sara and Teresa crouched together on the verandah step, their breath short in their throats. Rain twisted and spun across the paddocks, rattling against the tin roof of the house, spitting in their faces. They heard the muted drone of a car’s engine and looked up. They saw the gleam of metal moving swiftly through the double line of poplar trees on the far hill, then saw a grey Volvo coming down the sweep of road into the valley. Both tensed, nails cutting into each other’s palms.

‘Bloody Hallorans,’ Teresa whispered.

The car disappeared behind the slope of the hill. They heard its engine coming closer and closer, then it was nudging through the overgrown shrubbery and drawing up beside the Dodge.

Sara’s cousin Craig was driving, with his mother, Annie, in the front seat and his brother, Brett, in the back. Annie climbed out, a dish covered with aluminium foil in her hands.

‘Oh, Sara, I’m so very sorry. We can hardly believe the news. What did the doctor say? Will he be all right? You look exhausted. Did you get any sleep? Come and have a cup of tea and tell us all about it.’

Sara looked up at her aunt in quiet despair. She had not seen Annie for years, and although her uncles had visited her father the day before, it had not been a pleasant call. She wished they had not come.

‘We could not believe it when Dom and Dylan turned up at five in the morning! Wanting to use the phone! You must’ve been out of your mind with worry. I’ve brought you over a meatloaf we were going to have tonight. I know you won’t feel like cooking!’

Still talking, Annie Halloran took Sara firmly by the elbow and led her through the front door. A familiar smell of dust, damp and turpentine closed over Sara’s head. The hall was an echoing space, with only darker patches against the faded walls to show where furniture had once stood. Only a chaise-lounge remained, covered with mauve velvet fading to grey. A staircase rose from the far end of the hall, branching halfway up, with a little landing where a table once stood. A gilt mirror still hung there, dark with dust, and tilted a little forward so Sara saw their indistinct floating shapes.

Annie looked about her avidly. She had not been to Towradgi since Bridget’s death and she was eager indeed to note every sign of poverty and neglect. Sara could almost hear her silent monologue. You should’ve seen the place! Filthy, and not a stick of furniture …

Sara did not want her uncle’s wife to see how old and shabby everything was. The Sanchez family was in debt to the Hallorans. Deeply in debt. Alex Halloran had bought out the mortgage over the farm from the bank earlier that year and he had been a noxious presence ever since, exclaiming at her father’s extravagances, sneering over the accounts that Joe laboured over for so long, advising care and caution and economy until they had all wanted to go out and splurge on roast duck and lobster and champagne and raspberries. Only the threat that Alex would foreclose on the farm kept them from outright rebellion – or at least, kept the children from rebelling. Augusto had always disliked his brother-in-law and he took pleasure in blowing his expensive cigar smoke into Alex’s face.

Sara had come unconsciously to a stop in the middle of the front hall. I wish I could get away from here, she was thinking. An image of her favourite rock rose before her, its feet deep in the swirling sea. She swayed away from the living-room door. Annie looked at her inquiringly. She was a heavy woman with a thin smudge of lipstick instead of a mouth. She had a scarf tied over her violet-hued hair and pink powder clung to the soft lines of her face.

‘Are you all right, pet? You look a bit pale. Brett, run and put the kettle on, would you? And put this in the fridge.’

He obeyed reluctantly and Sara was swept on into the living room on the waves of her aunt’s voice. Craig followed behind, twisting his baseball cap about in his large, pale hands. Like the twins, both Craig and Brett were tall and broad, with a thatch of red hair and freckles. Craig was particularly broad and red, with eyebrows bleached the colour and texture of straw by the sun.

He settled himself into the couch, which squeaked embarrassingly under his weight. Annie stared with avid disapproval at Augusto’s paintings hung all over the walls before sitting herself down rather gingerly in one of the armchairs. Brett came hurrying back along the corridor with a loaded tray and sat down beside his brother eagerly, sniggering a little and elbowing Craig as he too stared up at the paintings, which were hung haphazardly on the walls in a vain attempt to cover the worst of the damp stains.

There were a number of dramatic landscapes of Towradgi Headland with its distinctive profile like a heavy-browed, brooding man. There was a painting of Consuelo as a young woman with a rose in her mouth that dripped blood, and another of a sinister Easter parade where all the revellers wore masks and carried guns or knives half-hidden in their clothes. There was a painting of Bridget weeping, three of Augusto’s second wife, Gayla, lying spread-eagled amidst rumpled pillows, and four of Augusto, one swimming in the sea, one playing the guitar in darkness, one slicing up octopus tentacles, and one of himself painting himself.

The largest of the paintings, entitled Circus Rider, took up nearly an entire wall. The rider, seen from below, held both hands out, fingers splayed. Her spangled skirt stood up stiffly, showing her firm thighs, orange and pink, and the shadowy magenta curve of her buttock. The horse’s hind hooves, the girl’s calves and feet, were huge, the horse’s head thin and long. The crowd was a blur of mauve, the rider’s half-glimpsed face toned with green. From Annie’s position on the couch, she looked directly up the circus rider’s skirt. An expression of scandalised bewilderment crossed her face, and Brett giggled again.

To have so many Hallorans in the living room at once unnerved Sara. She sat in the other armchair and wondered what to say. Teresa perched on the arm, scowling. She hated the Hallorans.

Brett poured Sara a cup of tea. Everyone leant forward. ‘So what happened?’

She told them how the helicopter had lifted Augusto’s injured body up from the broken tree which had saved him, halfway down the cliff. As she spoke, she saw again the stretcher swinging in the wind.

‘Good heavens, a rescue helicopter! It must be bad! Where did they take him?’

Sara brought the cup to her mouth and sipped. It was a few moments before she could speak again.

‘Moruya, they said. He’s fractured his neck and they didn’t want to move him too much.’

‘Well, at least he’s close,’ Annie said doubtfully.

‘But how did he fall?’ Craig demanded. ‘He knows Towradgi Headland pretty bloody well. You wouldn’t think he’d just fall over.’

Brett’s eyes were round with speculation. ‘Maybe he just slipped … stepped back on a rock, prob’ly.’

‘It was raining …’ Annie said.

‘Who’s ever heard of anyone painting in the rain?’ Brett said.

‘It is Gus we’re talking about.’

‘That’s enough, Craig.’

‘Well, it was pissing down,’ Craig said. ‘It seems peculiar even for Gus to go out painting in that storm.’

‘It wasn’t raining when he went out,’ Sara said stiffly, not looking at them.

‘Had he been drinking?’ Annie asked. ‘Or smoking … pot?’ She pronounced the word with pleasurable outrage. Sara did not answer. ‘I’ve always thought that headland was a dangerous place …’ her aunt went on rather hurriedly. ‘Why, it gets so windy up there and it’s a long way down …’

Falling.

Sara clenched her fingers around her cup, and tried not to think about how her father fell. Surely he would not have just slipped and fallen, her father who always knew exactly where to put his feet and his hands. But what else could have happened? How did he fall?

‘I’m sure your dad just got involved in his painting – I hear they do,’ Annie said brightly, trying to comfort. ‘He probably forgot where he was.’

‘If he ever really knew,’ Craig whispered to Brett, who giggled.

Augusto had always been an enigma to his in-laws. He had the face of a Spanish aristocrat, with hollowed cheeks, a thin, arrogant nose that flared at the nostrils like an unbroken horse, and a mouth both sensuous and cruel. He tied his lank, black hair back from his forehead with a length of knotted leather, and wore an opal stud in his left ear. Women found his face fascinating, and wanted to trace the sharp line of his cheekbones with their thumbs. Men thought him effeminate.

Augusto was not like anyone the Hallorans knew. He refused to talk about the weather, or the footy, or whether the catch would be any good that season. He liked to argue about God and Art and Death. If someone bored him, as most people did, he would give a faint sneer and walk away halfway through their greeting. The Hallorans bored him immensely.

In the sweltering summers, Augusto seldom wore more than a faded sarong and, sometimes, an old shirt encrusted with paint. If, for some reason, he decided to go into town, he would cram a decrepit straw hat over his ponytail and slip his long, bony feet into a pair of plaited leather sandals. Usually, though, he was barefoot, a silver ring on his little toe.

Unless he was going drinking, of course. Then he would dress carefully in his black Armani trousers, shiny along the seams after twenty-five years but still impeccably cut, and a black silk shirt. He would smooth back his hair with scented pomade, carefully shave his long jaw, and fasten a string of dark wooden beads about his neck. He knew none of the pubs or clubs in town would let him in wearing sandals, even if made of leather, and so he would wear a pair of soft, black, handmade slip-ons that were almost as old as the trousers. He rarely came home those nights.

Everything about Augusto Sanchez offended his in-laws. They condemned him for spending his days lying around drinking wine and smoking long, thin, dark cigars with an occasional languid daub of paint on canvas, instead of holding down a job like an honest man. It was not as if his paintings were any good, the Hallorans thought. They might win prizes occasionally and get shown at galleries but any monkey with a paintbrush could do that these days. And, frankly, my dears, Sara had once heard her aunt Annie say, how many times can a man paint a naked woman? With purple nipples?

No-one could comprehend why Bridget Halloran – a good-natured girl from a good family – had ever married him.

‘Anyway, I’m sure your dad’ll be just fine, girls. It’s a very good hospital and your father’s strong, for all that he’s so skinny. Don’t you worry now.’

Sara and Teresa said nothing. Annie drank down the last of her tea a little too eagerly then planted her heavy feet on the floor and rose to leave. Craig and Brett rose too. Sara stood up, knowing she should say something but unable to think of a single word.

Annie pursed up her small pink mouth, with its faint down above the upper lip. ‘Ring me if you need to, dearie, you know we’re always here for you.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Teresa muttered, curling her lip. ‘What a load.’

‘What did you say?’ Annie shrilled. Heavy colour rose in her cheeks.

‘Nothing.’

‘You think I’m deaf? I heard what you said.’

‘Then why did you ask?’

‘Have some respect for your elders, young lady!’

Teresa rolled her eyes.

‘I’ve got to wonder about you. You’ve absolutely no idea how to behave. Fancy sneaking out and going on the sauce! You’re too young to be drinking! And driving back on that road under the influence – you could have been killed, or worse, killed somebody else!’

Teresa stood up abruptly. ‘Lay off me, you old cow! You’re no relation of mine, you can’t tell me what to do.’

‘Don’t talk to my mum like that!’ Craig loomed over her, low-browed and heavy-shouldered as a bull. Though she was as white as he was red, and thin as he was thick, Teresa did not recoil, but stared back at him defiantly, her hands bunched into fists.

‘Arsehole.’

He lumbered forward, but Sara stepped swiftly forward, her body curved protectively towards her half-sister.

‘Ignore, her, Craig,’ Annie said loftily. ‘I won’t have you scrapping like some little guttersnipe.’

‘Don’t call me a guttersnipe!’ Teresa cried, as Annie picked up her bag and sailed out the door. After a glowering moment, Craig followed her, Brett at his heels, grinning.

Rigid with rage, Teresa sprang after them but Sara grabbed her arm and held her back, hissing, ‘Be quiet, Tess, for God’s sake!’

She then followed her aunt and cousins out into the hall alone.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said inadequately.

‘You’re too soft with that child, Sara! She needs to be disciplined properly. I know you aren’t that much older but she has no mother, and frankly, your father is useless that way. Someone needs to take responsibility for that child and teach her how to behave.’

‘Yes, I know. You’re right. I’m sorry.’

Annie gave a huff, pulled down her tracksuit top, tucked her bag more firmly under her arm and went heavily down the steps, her sons large and hostile on either side.

Sara shut the front door behind them with relief then leant her head against the wood, tears stinging her eyelids. She heard Teresa slam the living-room door and run up the stairs, her boot-heels on the bare boards as precise and emphatic as a military tattoo. Sara knew she should go after her, but she simply could not find the energy. Teresa’s rages baffled and frightened her. They always had. Ever since Teresa had first come to the farm with her mother, little more than a month after Bridget’s death.

Teresa had been six years old and a stormy, sulky, spiteful little girl. She had smashed up their toys, chopped all the hair off Sara’s favourite doll, stomped her foot through Joe’s kite, hidden the boys’ cricket bats, sneered at the farm, and thrown the most majestic, scarlet, screaming temper tantrums. It must have been a shock to her to discover she shared her father with four strange children, all of them bearing the gaping wound of their mother’s recent death.

In her place, Sara would have slunk about like a little fish keeping to the shadows of a rock pool. She would have tried to be invisible, hoping for kindness. Teresa snarled and struck out.

If Sara had not recognised her sister-stranger’s rage as a more vivid, vocal expression of her own voiceless terror, she may well have hated her half-sister as Joe did, or at least done her best to ignore her as the twins did. But she saw the unhappiness in Teresa’s scowl-squinted eyes and so for nine years had tried, miserably and inadequately, to placate and protect her. She was too wrung out and tired to do so now, however. For the first time ever Sara did not go running after her half-sister, but let her go in silence.

For the first thousand years that chess was played, the queen had no greater power than any other chess piece. In fact, it was weak and meaningless as a pawn, and could do little to protect its king. However, in 1580 an Italian suggested making the queen the most powerful piece on the board. The game of chess was revolutionised. It was faster, more exciting and more subtle. The direction of the game could change in a moment, challenging the players’ skill and ability as the original game had not. The Italians called this new version Scacchi alla rabiosa, meaning crazy chess. The French called it Echecs de la dame enragée, or chess of the maddened queen.

When Sara was almost six, Bridget decided they were leaving Sydney and moving down the south coast to the farm where she had lived as a child.

There was no warning. One day Sara was sitting alone in the playground, eating her lunch and watching the other children play, when her mother arrived unexpectedly, her red hair falling out of its bun, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen.

‘We have to go now,’ she said.

‘But Mum …’

‘No buts, Sara. When I say now, I mean now.’ Bridget dragged Sara to her feet and pulled her along by her wrist, holding so tightly it hurt. Sara pulled back against her hold and Bridget jerked her forward. ‘No dawdling, Sara! We have to get home.’

‘But my school bag …’

‘You don’t need it anymore. We’re leaving this place.’

Sara looked up at her anxiously. Her mother’s face was so white her freckles looked like cigarette burns, and her teeth clenched on her lip in a way Sara knew well and dreaded.

Joe was running around the playground with his friends, yelling and leaping over the low wooden benches. Bridget called him angrily and, when he did not come, lunged forward and caught his wrist so hard he almost tripped. ‘I said, we have to get home!’ Bridget was silent the whole way, pushing the twins in their double pram up the hill so quickly Sara and Joe had to keep breaking into a trot to keep up with her. They did not dare ask any questions, though they exchanged apprehensive glances.

As soon as Bridget opened the door into the apartment, the band around Sara’s chest tightened so she could hardly breathe. The flat looked like a cyclone had swept through it. Clothes had been dragged out of wardrobes and drawers and lay in higgledy-piggledy piles. Cardboard boxes sat on the floor, filled with shoes, toys, books, saucepans. Two suitcases were already standing by the front door, trailing the limp arms of sweaters.

A lamp lay on the floor, its shade askew. The broken pieces of a coffee cup were scattered along one wall. Trickling down the wallpaper above was a long brown stain. The big mirror above the couch was cracked from side to side, jagged lines like a child’s drawing of lightning streaking out from a small, imploded star near the centre. On the floor, surrounded by glints of glass, was Bridget and Augusto’s wedding photo, the frame bent, the glass smashed. Bridget looked sweet and chubby in a big white frou-frou of a dress, Augusto looked stoned.

Sara stared up at the cracked mirror, thinking seven years’ bad luck. Suddenly Bridget knelt beside her, pressing Sara’s stiff face into her velour jumper, murmuring, ‘It’s all right, sweetie, it’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.’ Her chest began to heave. Her voice bucked about like a brumby. Sara struggled to get away, suffocating in the huge, soft, velvety breast. Suddenly Bridget let her go, sitting back on her heels, one hand pressed against her mouth. Her mascara was bleeding.

‘Get your things together,’ she said. ‘We’re leaving.’

‘Leaving?’ Joe demanded. ‘Where are we going?’

Bridget’s face softened as she looked at him. ‘Down the farm,’ she answered. ‘You know, where I grew up. We’re going home.’

‘This is home,’ Sara said, though the flat was almost unrecognisable in the wake of Cyclone Bridget.

‘This?’ Bridget said contemptuously, looking about the dingy little room. ‘This has never been home. Not really.’

Sara began to cry.

‘Oh, God, stop the water-spout,’ Bridget cried, as if goaded beyond endurance. ‘Go and get out of your school uniform, you won’t be needing that anymore. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.’

‘What about Dad?’ Sara asked.

‘What about him?’

‘What about his stuff? Why aren’t you packing his clothes?’

‘Dad can pack his own things,’ Bridget replied in a hard, cold voice. ‘If he wants.’

‘Isn’t Dad coming with us?’

Bridget shook her head, not looking at Sara. ‘I don’t think so, I really don’t think so.’ There was a long moment of held breath. Even the twins stopped banging on the floor, looking up in surprise. Then Bridget swung round on them, shouting, ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? Go and get changed! Get your things packed! We’re leaving now.’

Sara went to her bedroom and took off her school uniform obediently, though she trembled with suppressed tears. She could find nothing to wear. Bridget had dragged out every drawer in the wardrobe and emptied them into suitcases. Wearing nothing but a singlet, undies and white socks, Sara dug through the suitcases but everything was a jumble. Sara thought about how carefully Bridget folded the washing as she took it off the Hills Hoist in the tiny concrete yard they shared with everyone else in the apartment block. Bridget folded quickly, neatly. Always the sheets first, a swift shake, then corner to corner in four economical movements, the flat squares laid at the bottom of the basket. Then the towels, folded over and then folded again; then the pillowcases; then the twins’ nappies, a tottering white pile; then her father’s good black trousers, one side of the waistband brought to kiss the other side, then the legs folded in thirds, and laid neatly in the basket, even though Bridget would iron them later, inside out and with a damp tea towel on top to stop the wool from getting shiny; then the boys’ shorts, their T-shirts, Sara’s skimpy dresses; then all their underpants, their father’s small and printed with leopard-skin, Bridget’s large and pink, Sara’s printed with flowers or bears and edged with lace, Joe’s printed with trucks or trains; then lastly, the socks, all pegged out in their pairs, swiftly and expertly rolled inside-out. This disorder was so unlike Bridget it was as if she had been possessed by some unaccountable madness.

At last Sara found her grubby little lamb in the mess and cuddled him gratefully, sucking her thumb. Bridget found her sitting there in the mess and hauled her up, smacking her hard across her almost-bare bottom. ‘I said, get dressed,’ she hissed, low and mean. ‘Now! You’ve got five minutes to get ready. And think about what you pack because I swear we’re not coming back for anything you forget.’

Sobbing, her buttocks smarting, Sara dragged on an old T-shirt and a pair of blue flared jeans and, with her lamb huddled to her chest, began hurriedly to shove her favourite toys and books into the closest suitcase. As Bridget began to haul the boxes and suitcases down to the car, Sara leant on the window-sill, her lamb pressed to her cheek. She was waiting for her father.

Augusto returned while Bridget was shoving a few last-minute things in the back of the station wagon. The wailing twins were already strapped in, and Joe was running down the stairs with a packet of biscuits and a bottle of juice in the hope something to eat and drink would keep the little boys quiet. Sara was sitting on the front step, hugging her lamb and her father’s chessboard.

‘What the fuck?’ her father cried.

‘Exactly,’ Bridget answered, cold and grey as stone.

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘The fuck I do. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘But Bridgie …’

‘You told me it was over, you creep! I never want to see you again! Go on, go back to her, you’ve been there all week anyway, why worry about us?’

Joe started yelling, ‘Stop it! Stop it!’

‘You’re crazy, you bitch! You know that’s not true, why do you listen to gossip?’

‘Mary saw the two of you together, Gus.’

‘Bridgie, honey …’

‘Oh, I can’t believe you! Why can’t you be honest for once?’ Bridget tried to drag Sara into the car, but she clung to the railing, crying, and calling to her father. Bridget spanked her, and pulled her off the stairs. Sara dropped the chess-set, which spilt its kings and queens, its horses and castles, its little round-headed pawns, all over the pavement. She began to scream and scream. Standing bolt upright, resisting all Bridget’s attempts to drag her to the car, her scream rose higher and higher until a strange shrill echo spun round from the buildings all about. One of the neighbours called the police.

The next day they all went down the south coast. Augusto helped pack the station wagon, solicitously taking a heavy box out of Bridget’s arms. She was pale and glassy-eyed with triumph. The boot packed so high Augusto could not see in the rear-vision mirror, they drove through the blue, shiny city, out past the smudged sprawl of suburbs and down the long south road.

For a long while, the road cut through thick, grey bush, scarred with ancient fires, then wound down a steep drop with breathtaking views of the coast and high mountains of coal, caged by giant cranes. Between stretches of green country, they passed small coastal towns, each with its two churches and three pubs, and a long, pale crescent of sand. Sara leant her head against the window frame, gazing out at the precise geometry of land and sea and sky. She held her grubby lamb close.

It was hot. Her thighs stuck to the vinyl seats. She was thirsty. When the twins grew too quarrelsome, Augusto turned and yelled ‘shut up’, and strangely enough, they did. They stopped for ice-cream and lemonade, and Augusto stood by himself, staring out to the knife-edged horizon. Sara came up and slipped her hand into his, offering some obscure form of comfort, but he barely acknowledged her.

They came to the Tuross River and crossed a long, iron bridge, the criss-cross shadows of its slats falling across Sara’s face. She held her breath the whole way across, then made a wish. She had wound down the window to get some relief from the heat, and felt the yellow wind of the car’s passage drying out the pores of her skin, tugging tears from her eyes. An avenue of poplars, rustling and preening. A long stretch of grey, dry scrub, only the occasional white curve of trunk to break the monotony. Dead wallabies by the road, and once, an overturned wombat like a massive stuffed toy, too stiff to be real.

At Bodalla, they passed the Big Cheese. An old town, set in paddocks and bush, with a pretty church at either end. There was nothing on the radio but the cricket.

They passed a sign saying ‘Narooma’ and Bridget twisted round in her seat to tell the children that it used to be spelt ‘Noorooma’ but when they decided to establish a post office here, the new postmaster spelt it wrong. For a long time the two names had co-existed but mail was always going astray and in the end the original spelling was dropped. The townsfolk of Noorooma had had to get used to living in Narooma.

‘Typical,’ Augusto said. ‘Bloody bureaucracy.’

The car came over the crest of a hill, and the engine note eased. They came down a long, winding road through bush and the occasional outcrop of red-roofed suburbia and suddenly burst out of the tunnel of trees into an explosion of colour. All shades of blue. Azure, aquamarine, turquoise, lapis lazuli, ultramarine, indigo. Water on all sides, under a blue bowl of sky. Sand banks showing pale green under glittering water clear as glass. ‘This is the Wagonga Inlet,’ Bridget said. ‘It’s a dangerous spot, because of all the sandbars across the river-mouth. There’s been hundreds of shipwrecks here. You can still dive down and see some of them. They’re trying to get the government to build some breakwaters to make the entrance safer. Alex says it’d be the making of the place.’

As she talked, they crossed the bridge. Sara held her breath the whole way, though her lungs began to hurt by the end, then made a wish with her eyes shut. When she opened them, the station wagon was driving past an ugly holiday park full of caravans and cabins. Chinese takeaway. Pizza. Fishing tackle. Dive gear. A petrol station. Bottle shop. Then they saw a fairground by the river. A ferris wheel raised liquorice-coloured cars high above the trees. They heard the bang of dodgem cars, the shriek and squeal of a big dipper, smelt popcorn and hotdogs and fairy-floss. The boys cried out in delight and Augusto would have stopped, but Bridget said drily, ‘Not with the car piled with all our worldly belongings, surely?’

‘An hour or so won’t hurt,’ Augusto said.

‘Gus, we’ve been on the road six hours already. I’m tired. Let’s just get to the farm, OK? We’ve got plenty of time to see what Narooma’s got to offer in the way of fun.’

There was a short pause, then Augusto sneered, ‘Oh, yeah, Narooma, excitement capital of the world.’ The car drove on, and Joe and Sara exchanged glances, understanding there had been a shift in the power base.

They drove on through Narooma, Bridget pointing out all the landmarks of her youth. She was red with excitement. Sara had never seen so many motor-inns.

‘Look, Gus, there’s Lynch’s Hotel!’ Bridget turned to the children wedged in the back seat. ‘That’s where me and your dad met.’ She slipped her hand into Augusto’s elbow and squeezed but he said nothing.

They passed a church with a high water tower behind it, slid in a series of gear changes down a hill, past Woolies, and out of town. Once again they were adrift in a blaze of twilight blue. The colour was like an opiate, drugging the eye, over-burdening the imagination. The road ran on through the water as if it were a mirage. Then they were safe in bush again, grey-green and subtle, rustling with wind in the scabby bark and the clusters of narrow, strong-scented leaves. Magpies carolled. When the car came out the other side, the view of the sea was enormous. On their right Mount Dromedary shouldered high out of the slumbering river and bush, shutting out the sun. Bridget told them Captain Cook had named it, seeing it from his ship and thinking it looked like a camel. They all laughed at that.

‘All the local Aboriginals hate it being called that,’ she said. ‘They have another name for it, can’t remember what.’

Sara rested her head on her arm and watched the way the big hump of the hill brought dusk on them early. She did not think it looked much like a camel.

There was still enough light to see as they turned off the main road, bouncing down a rough dirt track through the bush. Trees soared high all around, some skinny as a finger, others enormously thick, gnarled, bleeding sap. Vines hung green and mysterious, creating shadowy bowers in which the light shifted as if something crouched within, breathing hard. Bracken, red bottlebrush, some plant with tall brown spikes thrusting up flowering spears, something else with tiny white waxy flowers. Above, immense trees, columns of darkness against rays of bronze light. The car struggled through the ruts. Dust and gravel rattled against the undercarriage.

Then they came to the edge of the headland. The car began to swoop and glide as if they were riding a big dipper, everyone shrieking with excitement. Augusto gunned it, foot flat to the floor, the old station wagon bouncing and fish-tailing at the corners, pebbles spraying. Even Bridget laughed, though she clung to the strap.

Through the flashing trees they had their first sight of the farm. Paddocks, burnt sere-yellow from the summer heat, fell down to dams like red scars of mud, and a line of brown poplars along the valley road. The long range of hills facing the sea were shaped like a dying horse, dun flanks falling away from a sharp rise of spine. On the opposite hill was a white house with a squat white tower. ‘That’s where I lived when I was little,’ Bridget said.

There was no other house in the valley. ‘Are we going to live there?’ Joe said. ‘Who does it belong to?’

‘To me,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather has given it to us. It’s to be ours forever.’

‘We’re going to live here always?’ Joe demanded, winding down the window so the fresh air, spiced with the smells of the bush, flowed in over them.

‘Ever and ever,’ Bridget laughed.

The road rose and fell. The children squealed.

‘Go faster, Dad, go faster,’ Joe begged.

Augusto accelerated so the car rose and swooped like a bird. Faster and faster they went, the yellow valley flashing in and out of the blurring trees like a message in Morse code.

Then they were zooming along the valley road, the house above coming closer and closer, floating like a boat in the darkness while the sea, beyond the fall of the hills, was still luminous with last-light.

Towradgi House was empty of furniture. In the lavender twilight, the echoing rooms were eerie. Gradually the children fell silent, and Sara stayed close to her father. She found a dead bird in one room. Its eyes were closed and its beak tucked to its chest. Something had eaten out its stomach.

A gilt mirror still hung on the landing. She stood and stared solemnly at her dim, floating reflection. In the other-world of the mirror she saw her father standing in the front door, looking out at the darkening valley. Her mother came and laid her hand against his arm. He shook it off and, after a moment, she went away. Later that night, when Augusto and Sara played chess in a small room that smelt of mildew and had no furniture, he did not call the bishop a fool, and he did not let Sara win.

Sara lifted her forehead away from the door and quickly, surreptitiously, wiped a finger under each eyelid. She slid through the ill-lit house like a pale fish through murky water, her shabby ugh boots making no sound on the floorboards.

In the kitchen she stood and looked at the plates stacked unsteadily by the sink, still smeared with red and stuck with soggy crusts from the baked beans on toast they had eaten the night before. Next to them was a cluster of brown-stained coffee mugs, the empty baked bean can with a spoon still shoved in it, an open margarine container, the buttery knife, a litter of crumbs, and then an army of empty beer cans, reeking of stale ale and cigarette butts. Above the sour smell of the kitchen Sara caught a whiff of vomit and remembered, with a rebellious heave of her stomach, Teresa’s clothes, still unwashed in the laundry.

Set precisely in the middle of the kitchen table was Annie’s casserole dish. Sara felt a spur of shame, imagining her cousin Brett here in the kitchen, holding his nose, grimacing. She imagined him telling his mother about it on the way home, laughing, and Annie telling Alex and all her bowling friends, and Alex shaking his head with customers in the grog shop, and Brett and Craig sniggering with their fishing mates.

She lifted the alfoil and stared down at the hard grey nugget of meatloaf, rimmed with congealed fat. She scrunched the foil into a ball and threw it at the bin. It hit the wall a foot or two away and bounced back on to the floor. Sara hardly noticed. She grabbed a knife off the bench and loosened the meatloaf in its dish.

Then she opened the back door, kicked open the flyscreen door with her foot and with one big, easy motion flung the meatloaf out into the yard. At once the dogs began to quarrel over it, dragging it about in the dust.

‘Sorry, girls,’ Sara said. ‘Hope it doesn’t give you a tummy-ache.’

She let the doors bang shut and sat down, looking at the empty dish, a hot glow of guilty pleasure in her chest. There was misery in there too. It was impossible not to remember how her father had thrown her baked fish out the door in just that way yesterday. Samfaina y bacalao a la catalana. Thirty hours it took to soak the dried cod before it could be cooked, yet only three seconds for it to hurtle through the air and land in the dust for the dogs to snarl over.

It was the first time Sara had tried to cook anything out of her grandmother’s cookbook. She had done it to make her father happy. Yet he had flung it to the dogs. Sara sat down at the table and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.

After a while, she got up and put the empty casserole dish in the sink, letting water gush into it for a few moments, not long enough for the water to heat. She looked up at the shelf above the sink. The desire to read the cards again was so sharp, so urgent, Sara understood it must be wrong. She tried to stifle the urge, fought it as she fought her panic attacks, breathing in deep and slow till her lungs hurt, breathing out till her chest cavity sunk to her hips, counting each breath, controlling time by counting it. But she was too muddled with emotion. Like a paintbrush might swirl together green, blue, trans magenta, amethyst and orange, and end up with a muddy brown, so Sara could not separate fear, guilt, shame, pleasure, hope, despair. Her need to know, her need to see through the murk, was too imperative.

To help you see more clearly, her grandmother had written.

So Sara reached up and seized the box from behind its camouflage of old magazines and yellowing bills. She cradled it to her, then sat down and opened the box, leaning over it for the ritual inhalation of cinnamon dust. She unwrapped the tarot cards and shuffled them, loving the rhythmic flick against her palm. Her fingers slowed. She held the cards against her chest, wondering for whom she read. She had meant to read for her father but now it was clear it was her own fate she sought to see. This disturbed her. She was afraid of the future.

Sara laid out the cards. Their backs had an intricate pattern of fruit and fronds that Sara had always loved. She put out one hand and blindly groped in the box. There was a rattle, then she drew out her mother’s rosary. Forbidden and hidden for many years. She glanced at it, let one, two, three black beads trickle between her finger and thumb, sounding in her mind, if not a prayer, at least a wish. Only then did she find the courage to turn over the first card.

The Fool.

Carrying a bundle on a stick over one shoulder and a white rose in the other, a young man is about to step blithely over a precipice. He stands for innocence, ignorance, folly, a dreamer who knows nothing, who still has everything to learn.

Sara stared at the card. Was she a fool?

The second card was Strength, reversed. A woman belted and garlanded with roses grips the muzzle of a lion with her hands. This was a card Sara usually associated with her cousin Gabriela, for it signified force of character, as well as the triumph of love over hate, spirituality over materialism, the higher nature over carnal desires. Upside down, it meant weakness, fear, moral laxity.

Sara’s anxiety and bafflement deepened. Was she weak?

Reluctantly she turned over the third card. Two of Swords. A woman sits blindfolded, a sword balanced over either shoulder. Behind her is the sea, frothing over sharp rocks. The Two of Swords is a card of stasis, denoting both a moment of balance and of blindness.

Was Sara blind?

She did not want to ponder what the cards were telling her. Unhappily she put the cards back in the box and coiled the rosary beads upon them, a snake with poisoned jaws clamped upon a cross of glittering jet.

Her mother’s rosary beads had always been kept in a little porcelain jar on Bridget’s dressing-table. Augusto sneered at them and so Bridget only got them out when he was not home. Even then she seemed to play with the rosary rather than pray with it, running the beads back and forth between her fingers, tilting the jet cross from side to side so it shot out black sparks.

The last time Sara had seen her mother with her rosary beads was the night before she died. Sara had woken screaming, fighting the sheets, her dreaming eyes still filled with a terrible vision of fire. She tumbled out of bed, and ran through the house looking for her mother.

She found Bridget sitting at her dressing-table, gazing at herself in the mirror. Her face was blank, her eyes stony-grey, her dull red hair loosened from its usual stiff bondage and flowing down on to her shoulders. In her hands Bridget held the rosary. She was counting Hail Marys, her lips moving almost soundlessly, watching herself pray.

‘Glory be,’ she whispered, and her fingers clenched on the jet-black beads.

Only then did she see Sara’s reflection in the mirror. For some reason Sara was terribly frightened, though what was there to terrify her in the sight of her mother playing with a string of beads?

Bridget did not look round. ‘Go back to bed, Sara,’ she said wearily to her daughter’s reflection. Though there was no anger in her voice, Sara obeyed at once.

That was Sara’s last memory of her mother. Though Bridget must have fed her breakfast and packed her school bag, and run after her with an apple or her hat, or her maths homework, or whatever else Sara might have forgotten, and driven her and Joe and the twins to the bus stop, just as usual, the image etched with acid on Sara’s mind was Bridget’s stony face, staring at the mirror and watching herself as she prayed.

Sara, Joe, Dylan and Dominic were on the way home from school when it happened. It was a chilly winter’s evening, the sun setting behind the low hills, the full moon rising from above the water, orange and leery as a jack-o’-lantern. The old school bus was just slowing down for their stop when Sara heard, distantly, a skidding and crashing sound. A few seconds later, a muffled boom. Everyone was craning their necks round, crying, ‘What was that! Did you hear that?’ Then they saw a cobra of smoke uncoiling ahead of them, raising its flat, evil head above the bushy headland, swaying hypnotically to the soundless command of a snake-charmer’s pipe. At once Sara had felt that terrible clutch of terror, that certainty something dreadful had happened. She had stared at it, mesmerised, her breath whimpering in her throat as she fought to cry out, to tell someone, to sound the alarm.

The bus driver would not let them out. She knew something bad had happened too. They had to wait for the police to come. By the time they were finally driven home, it was fully dark and so cold, Sara’s breath floated white before her. All was confusion. People kept coming to the house, filling the silence with noise, yet Augusto just sat, staring at his hands.

Later, he cleaned out all of Bridget’s things, stuffing them in garbage bags, his face white and knotted in fury. Sara did not know why she pilfered the rosary beads. Augusto was in such a rage he would have slapped her if he had seen. And there were many other things Sara could have taken that would have been a truer memorial of her mother. Her favourite velour jumper, the same dim cloudy-blue as her eyes and still smelling of her perfume. The big floppy hat she always wore outside, in a vain attempt to protect her skin from freckles. The gold tube of orange-brown lipstick. The pearl earrings given to her on her twenty-first birthday by her father.

Yet it was the rosary that unwound itself from Augusto’s armful of clothes and shoes and handbags and jewellery, and slithered to the floor, catching Sara’s hot, tear-dry eyes with its gleaming black scales.

So it was the rosary that was hidden in Sara’s carved wooden box that her grandmother had given her, along with Consuelo’s tarot cards, wrapped in white silk so old it was turning yellow.

Sara hid the tarot cards away again. Out of habit she listened to the silence of the house. Easter Saturday, and the house was silent as a tomb. Sara glanced at the clock. Where were the twins? She had not seen them since they had driven off into the storm on their trail bikes. That had been at four-thirty. It was now eight-thirty. Four hours. Two hundred and forty minutes. Fourteen thousand, four hundred seconds. Where were they? The question lodged in her windpipe like a fishbone.

Sara busied herself with the endless round of chores that was her life. She put Teresa’s vomit-encrusted clothes in the wash and hung out the load from yesterday, though the sky looked heavy and grey with rain. She fed the chickens and the calves, and threw the dogs a few lamb knuckles to make up for the meatloaf. She managed to take out the beer cans, though the smell made her nauseous. She could not face the dishes, so she shoved a pile in a sink full of hot water and detergent and left them to soak. She wiped over the benches and swept the dirt out the door into the yard. When she looked up at the clock she was dismayed to realise it was not yet nine o’clock. The whole day stretched before her, as grey and featureless as scrub.

Sara stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. No sound at all. The utter stillness disturbed her. Teresa was never quiet, especially not when she was angry. There should be defiant music blaring out of her room, doors banging, boots stamping, voices shouting or sobbing. Sara went upstairs, automatically counting her steps. Six steps to the landing, turn to the right, four more steps up, six steps along the corridor to Teresa’s room. No sound.

Sara rapped gently on Teresa’s door. ‘Tess?’ she called. No answer. ‘Tess, can I come in?’ No answer. Gingerly Sara eased the door open. No shoe came flying towards her head. Teresa’s room was empty.

Sara shut the door and went downstairs, counting her steps again. It took five footfalls to cross from the bottom of the steps to the living-room door, fourteen footfalls to go down the narrow, dark hall to the kitchen. Although Sara walked these song lines a hundred times a day, still she counted each pace in her head, as if reassuring herself the proportions of her world were not shrinking.

In the kitchen, Sara turned on the radio, twisting the dial until the house was filled with noise. She sang as she scrubbed the kitchen clean. She cleaned out the fridge and did her best to make the laminex shine. She washed the windows and then the floor, feeling muscles in her arms and back begin to ache. Then she moved to the living room. She dusted and shook cushions and polished the windows and even tried to wash the damp stains off the walls. Then she dragged out the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the hall, her ears filled with its dragon roar.

It did no good. The absences shouted louder than words.

At ten-thirty, Sara stood out on the front verandah, shading her eyes as she looked down the valley. No sign of the twins. No sign of Teresa. No sign of Joe. No sign of Matthew, dark magician. She went back into the house and picked up the phone, more to remind herself of her complete and utter isolation than because she wanted to check for a dial-tone. The burr against her ear startled her. She hung the phone up hurriedly, then lifted the receiver again, listening. The dial-tone troubled her. Could the telephone company have fixed the line so quickly? On Easter Saturday? Impossible.

So had Dominic lied about the phone being dead last night? Why? Why would he lie? And where was he?

Sara rang the hospital. It was too early for news, they told her. Augusto’s condition was still critical. She should call again in a few hours. Sara was not reassured by their clinical calmness. It seemed too much like the tone adults assume with children they aim to deceive. She hung up and then rang her Aunty Nita, the only telephone number she knew off by heart. Juanita was as histrionic as her brother Augusto. All her shrieks and sobs broke the brittle composure Sara had manufactured. She found herself suffocating with terror. So desperate were her grabs for air that Juanita grew frightened herself. ‘Put your head between your knees,’ she ordered. ‘Oh, sweet mother of Christ! Is there no-one there to help you? Where’s Joe?’

‘I … don’t … know,’ Sara panted. ‘All gone. Everyone gone.’

Aloneness. The most primeval of anxieties. Sara hung on to the phone as if it were an oxygen mask.

‘I’ll come out,’ Juanita said. ‘Though we’re fully booked tonight … I’ll see if Gabriela …’

‘Yes. Gabriela.’ Sara gave a great sigh of relief. Her cousin Gabriela would be better, for she was as calm as Juanita was turbulent. Sara trusted her cousin Gabriela more than anyone. Gabriela would know what to do.

‘What are those boys thinking, leaving you all alone at a time like this? Sweet Jesus!’

Sara could not answer. Juanita hung up and Sara managed to get the receiver back into its cradle. She sat for a moment, face in her arms, listening to the rain which had begun to wash around the house again. She was cold. Shakily she got up, arms wrapped close about her, and began the long climb to her bedroom. Forty steps in total it took.

Sara crawled under her doona, turned her pillow over three times and wished for sleep, for peace, for time to turn back. Sleep did not come. Peace did not come. Time jerked forward in little mincing yet unstoppable steps as always. Sara pressed her face into her pillow so it soaked up her weak, easy tears. She knew she wept in self-pity, not grief for her father. That was an emotion still too large and raw for tears.

At last her tears ran out. Curled up, knees to chest, Sara put down her hand and pulled up the topmost book from a pile between her bed and the chest of drawers. It was a slim book, rather battered. On the cover was a dark, scowling man with a lot of hair leaning over a timid-looking blonde. It was called Heart-breaker. Joe bought books by the boxful for her, every week when he went into town to buy the groceries. Usually he went to St Vinny’s or the second-hand book stall at the weekly markets, but if he saw a garage sale or a school fete he would pull over and grab what he could, Sara’s hunger for romances never being satiated.

Sara read one, sometimes two or three, every day. She did not mind how old they were, or how battered. She did not mind if the heroine was a nurse, or a ballerina who had injured her foot, or a wilful heiress in a crinoline; or if the hero was the owner of a South American coffee plantation, or a dissolute rake, or a proud duke, or a doctor with weary eyes. As long as there were muddles and misunderstandings, longing gazes and leaping pulses, and, at the end, the hard embrace, the breathless kiss, the soaring spirit of true love.

Sara mostly read at night, when everyone else was asleep, when the darkness bent over her bed like a psychiatrist with a straitjacket. On bad days, she read during the daylight hours too, surreptitiously, always tense and listening in case her father came in and saw her, or even Joe who knew about her sick habit, and grimaced about it but did not mock. Augusto would do more than mock. He would sneer. He would ask her if she had nothing better to do, and look around at the general grime and disorder of the house, not understanding that the chores of the house were a noose slowly tightening around her neck. He would even take the book and throw it in the bin, so that Sara would have to sneak down later and dig it out with shaking fingers, dusting off the dust and ashes and potato peelings and carry it back to her room under her jumper, cold against her skin. Augusto, a man of addictions himself, could not understand Sara’s obsessive needs. Could not, would not.

On very bad days, Sara might read five or six, back to back, lighting one on the butt of the last, till she was sick and nauseated with them. Sara’s romance novels were a keel of constancy in a stormy sea, a paean of utter predictability.

Sara’s life was so very predictable, it was strange that she craved the same immutability in her reading. Every day followed much the same pattern as the day before. Sara woke at five-thirty every morning, when the sky over the sea was still dark, and scrambled into her tracksuit pants and an old, woolly jumper. She would stumble down the staircase in the dark, knowing exactly how many steps there were, and wake Joe as gently as she could. When he had stirred and grunted, she would slip along the dark corridor and down the stairs to the kitchen, sliding along the bare boards in her socks so as not to wake her father, who often slept on the couch in his studio.

First she would put the kettle on, and light the gas stove. While the kookaburras jeered out in the darkness, she would make herself a cup of tea. She would drink it, warming her hands on the cup, as she mixed up the calves’ mush in a big pot on the stove. They would butt their square heads against the flyscreen door, their hooves sharp on the wooden floor of the verandah. She would carry the bucket out to them as the sky began to lighten, her arms aching from the weight. The calves gambolled endearingly beside her, uttering hoarse cries and occasionally bruising her with their heads or knees. She would watch them eat, rubbing the little buds of horns pushing through the coarse red curls on their foreheads, then stare out at the sea as it began to glow like a moonstone under a sky of fading stars.

By the time she slipped back inside the kitchen door, Joe would be sitting at the table, pulling on his boots. Sometimes he would say ‘Morning’. Normally, though, he would sit in silence, frowning at the linoleum floor. She would pour him a cup of tea from the pot, and droop around the kitchen, getting breakfast. Joe would swallow his lukewarm tea in two determined gulps, set the mug back on the table and go down to the sheds to get the machines started up. He would come for his eggs and bacon and coffee later, when he would have leisure to light a cigarette and look over the paper. Until his coffee and that first cigarette, he was always surly and uncommunicative. Often his first words of the day were: ‘Get those lazy pigs out of bed’. This was always difficult. Sara had to stand over their beds, threatening to pour cold water on their heads. Trying to keep them quiet was another difficulty. ‘Don’t wake Dad!’ she would whisper. Teresa never really listened but the twins would tiptoe around, pulling their flannelette shirts over their rumpled orange hair and scrummaging for socks. Invariably, though, one would forget, and stumble over his boots lying beside his bed, or laugh, or swear, or drop his belt to the floor with a metallic clatter.

Sara, breaking eggs into her pan downstairs, would hear, and listen with apprehension in case her father called out in anger. If he did, her whole day would be ruined. It was all right for the twins, they went off with Teresa to catch the bus to school. Sara stayed home all day with her father. Augusto was not a morning person. He preferred to stay up till late every evening, listening to music, or watching the late shows on television, a bottle of wine by his side. He usually slept in until eleven or even later. If he was woken too early, with an evil hangover and a mouth like the Simpson Desert, it was Sara who bore the brunt of his rage and his sarcasm, not her three brothers or her half-sister. They all had lives beyond the house. They were not fettered within the farm’s boundaries.

Although Augusto rarely left the house these days either, his presence was indeed an absence, a constant aching reminder that the father she had once adored was gone.

In the first few years after Bridget’s death, Augusto had seemed much the same. He had laughed, cooked, painted, swum in the sea, drummed his boot-heels to the twirling rhythm of his favourite flamenco records, practised his guitar, made love to his mistress, made her his wife.

Gradually, though, the vitality had drained out of him. Dust settled on his books and canvases, and the twisted tubes of oil paint. The chessmen sat idle in their wooden box; his guitar strings sank out of tune; his paint-brushes set hard. Augusto slept all morning, got up unwashed and unshaven in the afternoon to sit in the garden, drinking wine, smoking cigars, and staring at the sea.

His marriage to Gayla lasted less than four years. Once she was gone, he did not even pretend to paint.

Sometimes Augusto could be coaxed out of his black despondency. Sara managed it occasionally, Teresa with her smart-arse mouth and mercurial charm a little more often. Usually it would be a stranger, a woman in the pub attracted by the dangerous black flash of his eyes, his sneer, his contempt for small talk.

Augusto liked women. He had liked to paint them, in the days when the muse was still with him. He liked to have sex with them. He once said he could not paint a woman unless he had had sex with her. ‘How could you know a woman unless you fuck her?’ he said, wine flushing his blood with wit.

His earliest paintings, when he was still a school student in Melbourne, were crammed with a multiplicity of subjects. He painted cats, cities, buildings, roses, moons. All his enthusiasms and passions were marked by the date at the bottom of the canvas. When he was seventeen, Augusto discovered women. From then on, his canvases exploded with lush curves.

After he met Bridget, her round face and red hair began to dominate his paintings. Hers was the womb of the earth, the genesis of all life. For a number of years Augusto Sanchez painted nothing else.

He painted her sleeping, he painted her with a belly like a ripe moon, he painted her with Joe suckling at her breast. After Sara was born, he painted the three of them together, as round and joyful and blurred as a Renoir that had been left in the rain.

If Sara had been a boy, she would have been named after Paul Cézanne, another of his heroes. Augusto liked to say, ‘We too have eaten of Cézanne’s apples,’ as some kind of inside joke that only another artist could understand. Being a girl, and Augusto not thinking much of any women artists, she was instead christened Sara Sofia Consuelo Sanchez, the last name being by an old Spanish custom the most important name.

By the time Consuelo was dead, other faces were creeping into Augusto’s paintings. One face in particular dominated, overthrowing Bridget’s pale moon-face. This face was proud, passionate, destructive – as sensual and emotional as Augusto himself. It was the face of the woman who in time would become Sara’s stepmother.

Sara did not know where or how Augusto first met Gayla, but anyone could tell when it was, by the date at the bottom of the first painting in which her sly smile appeared. Sara was a few weeks away from turning three, and her mother was massively, ponderously, pregnant. Consuelo would have been cooking zarzuela de mariscos for their dinner.

The first Gayla painting, Augusto and the Carnival, would in time become one of his most famous works of art. It was a giant canvas overflowing with back-flipping clowns, merry-go-rounds, rocket rides and big dippers, all blurring together with great sweeping brushstrokes of light and sound and motion. In the centre of all this turmoil sat a black-haired fortune-teller, smiling sideways. Augusto sat opposite her, half of his face looking down into her crystal ball, the other staring at the fortune-teller with her deep cleavage the colour of cold coffee and her half-slitted, sleepy eyes. Under the table Augusto’s long black-clad leg disappeared under the fortune-teller’s frothing skirt. When Sara first saw this painting, she did not know the black-haired fortune-teller would one day be her stepmother, that this painting was to mark the first crack in the surface of her life. She just knew the painting made her uneasy. It seemed full of omens.

By the time Sara actually met Gayla, less than five weeks after her mother’s death, she knew her face and body well. Augusto had painted her at least seventeen times. By Sara’s eleventh birthday, Gayla and Augusto had married in the garden. Both bride and bridegroom were barefoot, and Gayla carried sunflowers in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

Those first years after Bridget’s death taught Sara much about sex that otherwise she would never have guessed. Whenever one of Augusto’s children entered a room, there was that sense of having interrupted. Gayla’s heavy lids would sink over her languorous eyes – Augusto would remove his hand from her thigh, would walk around the room with staccato steps, would lean against the wall and watch her. The nights were full of sounds.

Gayla was not much interested in any of her step-children. She lolled around the house all day, dropping ash over herself and watching daytime TV. She made no attempt to win their affection. She mocked Sara’s clumsiness, ignored the twins, and deliberately prodded Joe into rage by encouraging Augusto to tell stories about his life with her before their marriage, when Bridget was still alive. At the same time, Gayla indulged her own daughter, Teresa, shamelessly.

Most of the time, though, Gayla hardly spoke at all, drifting around in a cloud of cigarette smoke, her befrilled dressing-gown hanging open. If one of the children disturbed her, she would turn and look at them calmly and perhaps gesture with an unhurried hand for them to go away. She was quite content to lie around and eat chocolates and watch television and let the children run wild.

At first, Augusto revelled. He had punished Bridget for her death, he had demonstrated the power of his will.

But Augusto and Gayla were better suited as lovers than husband and wife, familiarity removing much of the intrigue. For years Gayla had been there when he wanted, smoke curling out her red mouth, her heavy lids dropped over black eyes. He could throw himself into her soft, brown, warm folds of flesh, and afterwards she would stretch and sink lower into the sheets and light a cigarette, and he could leave.

Now everything was different. Gayla the wife was not the same woman as Gayla the secret mistress.

Augusto began to challenge her, thwart her, beat her with words. Her silence became an enemy. Barely a night would pass when the children did not hear Augusto’s voice in full tirade, soon followed by the sound of the front door slamming as he turned his back and walked out. The five children drifted around the house, looking sideways at each other, learning to hunch their shoulders against the silence like a blow.

One hot afternoon, soon after Sara had left school and refused to go back, a strange man in a strange car had driven up to the front door while Augusto was out at the pub. Gayla had yawned, stretched, said a languid goodbye, and rolled away. She never came back.

It was strange. Joe, Sara and the twins had not wanted her. They had resisted her with all the silent savagery of their childish natures, had glared at her over the breakfast table, averted their eyes when she and Augusto kissed, and taken small, petty revenge for her presence whenever they could. They had forgotten to put sugar in her coffee when they knew she liked it sweet, added milk when they knew lactose made her sick, and called her names behind her back.

It was not as if they had loved Gayla. Still, her desertion was like a death. Another disappearance in their lives. No-one spoke about it, but a sharper edge had been whetted upon them, a quickness to tears or fears or fever or fury. So they stayed away from each other, afraid of cutting themselves.

Teresa simply could not believe her mother would leave her. It was no comfort discovering the man Gayla had left with had not wanted a rebellious teenager around, particularly another man’s child. Max planned to take Gayla to Athens and the Greek Islands on a kind of extended honeymoon and Teresa would simply miss too much school, Gayla explained over the telephone. Besides, surely she’d be happier growing up with all her brothers and sisters and making up for all the time she had lost with her real father? She and Max would be back in Australia later in the year and perhaps Teresa could come up and stay with them then, if she was still unhappy. That had been that. Gayla had blown lots of air kisses into the phone and hung up. Teresa had received a couple of postcards of brilliant white islands in an azure sea over the course of the next year, but the promised trip to Sydney never happened, even though Teresa was still emphatically unhappy.

So too was Augusto. This time the sombra lasted for years.

Foul weather for them all when their father was stormy.

All day Sara would toil around the house with the heavy silence lying upon her, trying not to wake her father. When he did finally get up and lurch out to the garden, she slipped about like a little silver fish, listening all the time for the impatient drum of his feet or the call of his voice.

The Sanchez siblings communicated amongst themselves with a crude sign language – low grunts, hand gestures, rolls of the eyes, shakes of the head. If the telephone rang, Sara startled like a rabbit. Sara was afraid of the telephone. She dreaded having to pick it up but to leave it ringing, disturbing Augusto, was far worse. So she always ran to answer it, hoping it was her cousin Gabriela and not her ominous uncle, or the ominous bank, or Teresa’s ominous school, the only people who ever seemed to ring them.

Sara was no use to Joe in the day-to-day running of the farm. She was frightened of the milking machines, with their constant chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug, and frightened of the cows, with their solid shoulders and swinging horns, and frightened she would do something wrong and mess things up like she always did. Whenever Joe asked her for assistance, she felt a familiar sense of helplessness creep over her. If he needed her to help nail up a fallen section of fence, she would try and hold the barbed wire steady but her hands would shake and shake. Inevitably the sharp prongs would dig into her palm and she would let go of the wire with a stifled cry. Once the barbed wire sprang free and caught Joe across the face so red beads of blood sprang up, and he swore. ‘I don’t know why I fucking bother!’ he yelled. ‘Just get out of here, Sar, I’m better off doing it myself.’

Sara had crept back to the silent house, knowing his words were true.

Some days Sara could not stand it anymore. She would go down to her favourite rock on the seashore, watching the slow rhythm of waves, imagining colour sweeping out from her fingers. She would walk on the shore, watching the intricate, meaningless dance of the gulls in the sky, gathering shells and throwing them away, drawing shapes on the strand to be washed away by the tide.

Or Sara would disappear into the dim, secret hills behind the house, the strange murmuring language of the trees filling her ears, tasting the scent of eucalyptus on her tongue. She would go deep into the ferny gullies where she and Joe used to play when they were children, to a cave they had once found where black stick-figures danced across the wall, carrying stylised spears, and where old oyster shells could be found in the dirt of the floor. Crouching by the cave-mouth, looking up at the ancient charred shapes on the ceiling, Sara wondered how many thousands of years had passed since those artists had felt compelled to tell their stories in lines of ochre and charcoal. She would crouch there in the green murmuring silence, listening to the birds, and scratch her own mythology into the mud with a stick.

It was not open spaces that frightened her. It was people. Down by the sea, deep in the bush, Sara had no need of words.

Each time she would return to the house, filled with new resolution, determined to find the strength to leave. Even if I go into town for groceries, she thought. People go to supermarkets every day. It’s not that hard.

Then the silence of the house would close over her head again. The silence of the dinner table, Augusto frowning at his plate, distastefully lifting the greasy chop with his fork and letting it drop again, Joe silent with tiredness, the twins silent with boredom, the floor scuffed red with the mud from their boots, the sink full of plates and ants, the night stretching ahead of her with nothing on the telly, her life stretching ahead of her with nothing to look forward to, nothing to break the predictable pattern. For the very thought of going to the supermarket was enough to make Sara’s mouth go dry and her hands cold and clammy. Trying to set her will to it was like injecting adrenaline into her heart wall. Her whole nervous system would go into revolt, her skin standing up in goosebumps, her legs trembling, her stomach muscles tightening with nausea. Once Joe had tried to force her out to the car. She had grown so weak and dizzy with terror she had wet herself.

Sara had no-one to blame but herself. No-one had built an invisible wall around the farm and said to her, ‘This is your world, you may not pass beyond this gate.’ No-one had said to her, ‘You may never leave this place.’ Sara had done it with her own hands. Sara had built the prison herself.

Sara put down her book with a sigh of exasperation. The story was not weaving its usual hallucinatory magic. She could not immerse herself in the problems of Olinda Beauchamp, forced against her will into a marriage of convenience with the unscrupulous millionaire Lance Harding in order to save her father’s tobacco plantation. The phrases were so familiar they had lost all meaning, like a word written over and over again till it no longer made sense. She picked the book up again, tried to read, could not, laid it down again.

This faint dissatisfaction with Sara’s usual choice of mind-opiate was not simply because she was exhausted from a night without sleep, though she was so tired she felt as if her eyes had been dried and salted. This feeling of discontent with the books Joe brought her had been slowly growing for the last few months.

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 steers, 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.

‘No need to make a decision now,’ Alex said. ‘Perhaps your father will recover.’ He put his hat back on and turned to go.

Joe lit a cigarette. He dragged deeply, looked sombrely at the glowing tip, then blew a cloud of grey smoke out the corner of his mouth. Slowly he brought the cigarette to his mouth again.

Sara could not have spoken if she tried.

Augusto had only ever painted his eldest daughter once. He painted her leaning against her green-skirted rock, the sea in storm, her hair tangled with globes of sea-fruit.

When Bridget died, her car leaving the sullen earth, taking flight in one last glorious burst of speed, Sara stayed on the rock all day and would not come away. Augusto had to carry her back to the house, scrambling over the boulders and rock-pools with her childish body limp in his arms, up the slippery red path and through the garden, her arms flopping at every step.

Annie Halloran, who had brought the family a dried-up casserole for dinner, said it was ridiculous to let the child carry on so. Augusto, sitting in his armchair with Sara on his lap, stroking her black hair, said nothing. He cooked her fried churros and hot chocolate and put her to bed.

Sara dreamt she could not speak. She tried to run, but every step was difficult, as if she trod on sharp rocks. She thought she must leave a trail of bloodied footsteps everywhere she went. She was looking for someone through a great house, a house full of empty rooms, a house full of echoes. No matter how hard she searched, she could not find whom she sought. She tried to run. She tried to call out.

She could not.

She was mute.

Sara woke, gasping for air, tears on her cheeks. Her father was sitting by her bed, sketchbook and pencil in hand, a stray beam of light filtering through the blinds and haloing his head.

‘I … I … couldn’t speak,’ she gasped.

‘You are speaking, silly.’

‘I couldn’t make a sound, no matter how hard I tried.’

‘It was just a bad dream, that’s all. Come, look what I’ve been doing.’ Augusto showed her his sketchbook. He had been drawing her head, lying on the pillow, hair waving out like seaweed. ‘I’m thinking of painting you.’

Sara glanced at the page, only half understanding, still caught in the dim, strange world between sleeping and waking. ‘I dreamt … I dreamt I was like the little mermaid. She had her tongue cut out and could not speak. Every time she moved, it was like dancing on knives.’

‘Yes, I remember that story,’ Augusto said, giving her a long, considering look. ‘My mother used to tell it to me. It’s such a sad story.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Sara said. ‘For she can fly in the end, and sing again, and she has a chance to win herself an undying soul. Isn’t that happy?’

‘To win oneself immortality,’ Augusto said in a strange voice. ‘Yes. I suppose that’s what it’s all about.’

Sara felt so strange and light she was content to sit still for her father while he drew her. It took him three days to paint La Sirenita. It was a painting of green transformations, where flesh slid into water into scales, where floating hair tangled with shells and starfish, where tears slipped into pearls and eyes reflected deep green distances. He said later that a painting had never come so easily. It was his muse’s swan-song. She left the week Bridget died and did not come back for ten long years.

Low Water

high tide – 1.2 m

11.33 am, Easter Saturday

low tide – 0.6 m

5.07 pm, Easter Saturday

A car back-firing cracked like a shot.

Sara jumped involuntarily. The next instant she was over at the window. She recognised the ute from Gunyan, and felt relief clamouring through her. She ran down the stairs and out on to the verandah.

The ute pulled up in the front drive in a crunch of gravel, and the twins scrambled out the door. One of them leant through the window of the ute to kiss the girl driving goodbye, while the other swung the trail bikes out over the back. The ute turned clumsily, trailing a plume of smoke and giving another loud bang before disappearing again down the overgrown drive.

‘Dylan! Dominic! Where have you two been!’

‘I’d have thought that was pretty obvious, since it was Nya that dropped us home,’ Dylan said.

‘But why?’

Dylan shrugged. Sara felt an unaccustomed rage flow through her. Dominic and Dylan spent much of their free time at Gunyan, an old workman’s cottage on Towradgi property which Augusto had rented out to an artist friend. Nungeena came down to visit Augusto sometimes, to drink wine and argue about art. Her daughter Nya usually came with her, though she stayed only long enough to eat before disappearing off with the twins somewhere. Joe always teased the twins about Nya and said they were in love with her. Sara could not believe they would spend the morning with her when Augusto was so badly hurt. ‘Don’t you realise I’ve been worried sick?’

‘Nope.’

She had an urge to hit Dylan, to feel bone smacking on bone. He felt it, and glanced at her.

‘I didn’t know where you were, I didn’t want to leave Dad …’

‘Why? He was dead, he wouldn’t care.’

Sara’s eyes spurted with unexpected tears. ‘Dylan, don’t speak like that! And he’s not dead, he’s alive, he’s not going to die!’

Dylan’s eyes opened wide. ‘He’s not dead?’

‘No, he’s not, much that you seem to care,’ she snapped. ‘What were you doing at Gunyan? You should have been here!’

Dominic dropped his face onto Dylan’s shoulder, who put up one hand to cover the back of his neck. They were silent. ‘We were upset, we thought Dad was dead … we just didn’t want to come home.’ Dylan’s voice was hoarse.

‘I just wish you’d thought to ring. I really didn’t need it, you know?’ Sara’s anger drained away, leaving her limp. She sat down on the verandah step, leant her head against the post.

‘We couldn’t ring you,’ Dominic said. ‘The phone’s dead, remember.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Sara said. ‘It’s working just fine now. I’ve rung Aunty Nita and the hospital already this morning. Dad’s in intensive care, if you’re interested.’

Dominic stared at her in surprise. ‘The phone’s fixed already?’

Sara said caustically, ‘On Easter Saturday? That’d be a bloody miracle!’ They stared at her. They had never heard Sara speak like that. She went on angrily, ‘There can’t have been anything wrong with it in the first place.’

Colour surged up Dominic’s face. ‘But it was dead, I’m telling you. The line was dead last night. And Nya’s mum’s phone was out too, because we did try to ring you, first thing, when we got there. But there was no dial-tone.’

Sara shrugged. ‘Never mind. Maybe a branch fell on the line or something and blew off this morning. Who knows? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is you guys are home now and I can stop worrying about you. It’s bad enough having Dad in hospital and Teresa trying to run away …’

‘What?’

‘Oh, yeah. That’s right, you weren’t here, you don’t know. Teresa tried to run away this morning. We’ve had the Hallorans over and Annie read her the riot act.’

‘Bloody Hallorans.’

‘Anyway, Alex found her trying to hitch a ride into town. He brought her back. He says we have to sell the farm. If Dad dies, I mean.’

The twins nodded. ‘Yeah. We know.’

The sound of the telephone interrupted them. Sara went running back into the house, her stomach twisting. But it was a journalist, wanting to know how Augusto was and how the fall occurred. Sara repeated the refrain, ‘He’s still in intensive care, I’m afraid … yeah, well, we’re hoping so … mmm, a terrible shock … oh, I’m sure he’ll be OK … thanks, yes …’

She knew she was lying.

Sara made a pot of tea and took it through to the living room, the quietness of the house weighing on her. Strange to think it was Easter Saturday – some holiday. Her thoughts skipped unhappily to her father, shrank away.

‘Any bickies?’ Joe, coming in for his tea, knocked her back down to reality. She shook her head, trying to hold herself together. She felt as if a touch would send all the little jigsaw pieces of herself flying out into space. Carefully she poured out the tea – first her cup, then the twins’, a little at a time to make sure the strength was equal, then lastly, Joe’s. He liked his tea strong and sweet and black. The twins sidled in, quiet and awkward, and the four of them sat in the living-room, drinking their tea and saying nothing. Both of the twins had a tense, expectant look on their faces, as if waiting for someone to say something. But no-one did.

Sara remembered times when they were like what a family was meant to be – warmed with laughter and private jokes, playing long, involved games where no-one else knew the rules.

After they had come to the farm, she and her brothers spent their days playing on the beach, searching for treasure, swimming and body-surfing, climbing the headland, looking for wombats under fallen logs, exploring the bush for miles around. They had hand-fed the orphaned calves, pretended to drive the tractors, searched for eggs, climbed trees, found a cave. They had their own little garden plots where they grew sweet corn, sunflowers and strawberries that they could raid whenever they wanted. Augusto was nearly always there. On weekends he took Joe, Sara and the twins on exploratory trips down the coast, and when they came home, Bridget laughed to see the muddy seats of their jeans where they had slid down a bank.

In Sara’s memory, these first few years at the farm were hued with sunshine. But that was a very long time ago.

Maybe it was Bridget’s death that had changed everything. Maybe the age difference was then taking effect. When Bridget died, Joe had been a thin, intense twelve-year-old, with knobbly knees and the first pimply extrusions of adolescence. The twins had been seven, robust and self-contained, with their own secret jokes, nicknames and hand-signals. Sara had been almost ten. Thinking about her mother’s death brought a lump into Sara’s throat. She took a deep breath, pressing her fingers against her eyes. When she lowered her hand, it was to see Dominic looking at her with a peculiar expression on his face. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

Dominic looked at Dylan, then at Joe, then leant forward. ‘It’s just – does anyone else find Dad’s accident kind of weird? I mean, I can’t figure out how he could just fall over the cliff like that …’

His voice trailed away. Sara was surprised how charged the silence became.

‘Accidents happen,’ Joe said curtly. He dragged the paper towards him and began to look through it, gulping down his tea.

Dominic looked stubborn. ‘Don’t you think it’s kind of weird though?’ he repeated.

‘Sure,’ Joe said. ‘Completely weird. But like I say, accidents happen.’ He rubbed the back of his neck, the premature lines on his forehead drawn in tight like a knot.

Dominic and Dylan exchanged a look. Dylan gave a little shrug and said, with an odd note of challenge in his voice, ‘You don’t think it mightn’t have been an accident?’

For a moment there was a pause, an exclamation mark of silence.

Then Sara cried, ‘No! It was an accident. Of course it was an accident.’

‘I dunno, Sar, I just reckon …’

‘No. It’s not like that.’ She remembered the tension in the air like distant thunder, the fear that had grown in her all that afternoon. ‘It was an accident.’

‘You boys have too much imagination,’ Joe said dismissively, beginning to scribble on the edge of the paper. He drew a square, turned it into a three-dimensional cube, then squares on squares, a maze of boxes.

The twins said nothing. Sara tried to push down the rising sickness, but it welled up in her throat, thick and dark. Murder? Could they mean murder? It was a word like the double clang of a bell, the sort of word that could not be ignored. It echoed.

She watched Joe’s pen scrape across the flimsy paper, and gripped her hands in her lap. Carefully he coloured in the maze of squares. Not once did he go over the lines, though once the pen scored too deeply and tore the page. Back and forth the pen moved, and gradually Sara swallowed and was able to breathe. She wondered, am I foolish, am I weak, am I blind? What had the cards been trying to tell her?

Before anyone could say anything else, there was the scrunch of tyres on the gravel. Sara could not believe it. The third visitor in one day, more than they had had all year. She looked at the boys but no-one moved and so she had to get up and go to the door, scrubbing her face with her hands to remove any trace of tears. A green Gemini was parked on the drive. A broad back and a well-curved, denim-swathed bottom stuck out of the open car-door.

‘Gabriela!’ Sara cried.

‘I came as soon as I could.’ Her cousin turned and looked at Sara with grave blue eyes, opening her comforting arms.

‘I’m so glad you’ve come!’ Sara heaved herself out of her cousin’s hug, and rubbed her eyes. ‘It’s been horrible!’

‘I bet it has. I’m so sorry.’

Together the cousins went back into the house, Gabriela carrying a small overnight bag. She seemed so solid and dependable that Sara was weak-kneed with relief.

The only child of Augusto’s sister Juanita, Gabriela had inherited nothing from her mother’s Spanish heritage but her talent in the kitchen, being blonde and phlegmatic like her father, and comfortably large. Three years older than Sara, Gabriela lived with her parents in their small house an hour away in Bega. Their garden was very neat, with a small patch of trimmed lawn, and fat orange marigolds, carefully mulched. There was never a dead flower-head to be seen. Her father, John Carrington, was an accountant, while her mother, Juanita, owned a Spanish restaurant, where she and Gabriela cooked all of Consuelo’s best recipes and flamenco dancers in red polyester skirts stamped and twirled and trilled.

Sara considered Gabriela her best friend. In fact, she was her only friend, her only contact with the outside world. Gabriela worked, had boyfriends, travelled overseas, had earned her independence. Gabriela knew how to cook zarzuela de mariscos. Gabriela was afraid of nothing.

‘Hey, Gabriela,’ Joe said and permitted her to embrace him. The twins stood stiffly as she kissed their cheeks. ‘So what happened? How did he fall?’ she asked, dropping her bag near the table.

The twins looked at each other and seemed about to blurt out something Sara did not want to hear. She hurried into speech. ‘We don’t know yet. He went out after lunch and we didn’t see him again. I only got worried when the storm was so wild, and we still hadn’t heard from him. It got later and later, and wilder and wilder, and then I found out that Tess had sneaked out, and Dad still hadn’t come home …’ Sara heard her voice fading.

‘I’m so sorry!’ Gabriela grasped Sara’s hand. The touch caused Sara’s stomach to twist. ‘It must have been awful. When did you find him?’

‘The twins found him, around four in the morning. We’d been looking for hours, as well as we could in the dark,’ Joe said, lighting a cigarette and dragging back on it lavishly. ‘I still don’t know how they found Gus, it was black as hell out there, and blowing a gale.’

‘How badly was he hurt? Will he be OK?’

‘Dunno. He’s still in intensive care. They won’t let us see him.’

‘But how could it have happened? It isn’t like Gus didn’t know the cliff was there …’

The twins exchanged meaningful looks. Joe scowled and said, ‘People do fall off cliffs sometimes. That’s why they have rescue helicopters.’

‘It began to rain, maybe the rocks were slippery,’ Sara said hesitantly. The sound of the word that had not been uttered clanged in the air between them.

‘How was he, before the accident?’ Gabriela asked uncomfortably. ‘I mean … was he in a bad mood?’

‘He’s always fucking in a bad mood.’

Sara gazed at Joe in surprise. His face twisted. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Sar. You know what an arsehole Gus can be. He wasn’t exactly sweetness and light to you, either, so don’t look at me like I’m the one that’s being an arsehole.’

‘He’d been happy the last few months. He was painting again.’

Joe laughed bitterly. ‘Happy again! That’s a good one. You’ve forgotten about lunch yesterday pretty quickly, haven’t you?’

‘What happened?’ Gabriela said. ‘I thought you were cooking samfaina y bacalao. Didn’t it work?’

Sara shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘He wouldn’t have jumped off the cliff, though,’ Dylan said. ‘No matter how much of an arsehole he’s been lately, don’t tell me you think Dad tried to commit suicide! It just isn’t something he’d do.’

‘I don’t think that!’ Joe flared. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It was an accident, pure and simple. These things happen. Gus is not the first to slip and fall when clambering around on top of a headland.’

‘But he knew Towradgi Headland – he paints there all the time!’

‘Accidents happen, Dylan,’ Joe said.

Sara looked from face to face, her nerves began to tighten.

‘Well, it’s a terrible thing to happen,’ Gabriela said. ‘Mum is so upset. I would’ve been here earlier but I had to calm her down before I could come, and then I thought I’d better arrange someone to look after the restaurant tonight – Mum’s in no state to be cooking. You know what she’s like.’

They gave a little murmur of assent, as Gabriela lifted the lid of the teapot and checked its contents. ‘Anyone for more tea?’ she asked. Again they gave that soft murmur and she gathered up the cups, stacked them on the tray and went out of the room.

The Sanchez siblings were left alone with their silence.

‘Accidents happen,’ Joe said again, insistently. No-one said anything and he huffed in exasperation and took a long drag of his cigarette, hanging his head back and staring at the ceiling. Then he let out a long plume of smoke and tried to smile. ‘Hey, kids,’ he said. ‘I know we’re all tired. It’s been a horror of a day. Try not to worry so much, OK? Dad’ll be fine, everything will be fine.’

‘Sure,’ Dylan said, trying to sound as if he meant it.

Gabriela sailed back in, carrying the tray, tendrils of steam disappearing behind her. The brown teapot and six chipped, mismatched cups were piled on an old tin tray with a picture of the Queen’s coronation.

‘Six cups?’ Joe said, an odd note in his voice.

‘Matthew came up for his tea – I told him he might as well join us. He’s just washing up.’

‘Great.’ Sara scrubbed at her face. ‘Just what I need.’

Matthew was already in the doorway. Sara lurched to her feet and across to the window. Over the crooked boards of the verandah, she looked down the slope to Towradgi Headland, a rocky outcrop silhouetted in the sullen blue of the sea. She leant her head against the glass, cool against the burn of her skin. She imagined her face, reddened with tears, her eyes puffy. She knew what she looked like when she cried. Why was it Matthew only saw her weak, ugly, weird?

Gabriela brought her a cup of tea. Her cup was chipped and read ‘Don’t let the turkeys get you down’. Automatically Sara drank a mouthful – it offered no comfort.

Matthew came to stand beside her. She did not look at him. She could think of nothing to say.

‘I’m sorry about your dad,’ he said.

She nodded and shrugged one shoulder, looking out the window.

‘What’s the matter with him? Will he be all right?’

‘I hope so,’ Sara replied.

There was silence between them. Tears rose again. ‘If I can do anything to help?’ he offered awkwardly.

She lifted a shoulder. Hold me, squeeze me, rock me, comfort me, tell me everything is all right. Tell me it was an accident. Tell me anything.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he offered.

She turned to him, almost smiling. ‘Will it? Really?’

Then, ashamed, she turned to the window, blinking back the tears, drinking from her cup. He drank too.

Joe drained his cup and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Back to work,’ he said, the curtness back in his voice. ‘You two can come give me a hand, it’s about time you worked for your living. No holidays for farmers.’

The twins looked sullen but Joe ignored their expression, having seen it too often. ‘Coming, Matt?’ Without waiting for an answer, Joe strode from the room. He had that tight, cagey expression on his face that meant he was troubled.

‘I’ll carry the tray out,’ Matthew said, and helped Sara stack up the cups. All her old awkwardness came back as they walked to the kitchen together, Sara trying not to hold her hips stiffly.

‘I had to fix the phone this morning,’ Matthew said.

Sara was so interested she actually looked directly at him. ‘Oh, was it you who fixed it?’ she exclaimed. ‘I did wonder. It was broken last night when we tried to ring the police. The poor twins had to ride all the way into town through that terrible storm.’ Embarrassment began to scorch her cheeks but her desire to know was for once stronger than her desire to retreat into silence. ‘What was wrong with it? A big branch fell on the lines or something?’

Matthew shook his head. ‘One of the wires had worked loose in the connection box,’ he said. He hesitated a moment, then shrugged. ‘It can happen, I suppose, though not often.’

Sara chewed on her thumbnail. Matthew lingered a while longer, as if expecting her to comment or ask another question, then gave a small uncomfortable shrug and opened the door.

‘Do you mean you think someone tampered with the wires?’ she asked in a rush, blood burning her ears.

He looked down at her and gave the same difficult shrug. ‘Could be,’ he answered. ‘Looked like it. Wouldn’t swear to it in a court of law, though.’

She tore a thick white crescent of thumbnail away.

‘So, any idea what really happened?’ Matthew asked, one hand on the flyscreen.

She shook her head. This question was beginning to haunt her. ‘He must’ve just slipped, I s’pose.’

‘I s’pose.’

‘What else could have happened?’ Sara asked. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘Nothing! Nothing. I just meant …’

‘Who would want to hurt Dad? Why do you all keep saying things like that? It was an accident. No-one would …’ A preternatural calm suddenly dropped over her. The tears dried. She looked at his dark heavy handsome face and waited.

‘It’s just – I wondered …’

‘What?’

‘It’s just – I heard …’

Sara waited. Her pulses began a slow, painful beat through her, quickening inexorably. She held onto her calm. Not this time, she swore.

‘This new woman of his,’ Matthew said in a rush. ‘She had a hubby, didn’t she? Wasn’t there a bit of a scene? I just thought …’

‘It was an accident,’ Sara said. ‘When Dad painted, nothing much else mattered to him. He could be close to the edge without really realising it. He must have set up too close. It was an accident.’

Matthew nodded and shrugged. The door banged shut behind him. Sara stared at it without seeing it. This new woman of his? What new woman?

Alex had hired Matthew in the New Year, to help get the farm back into shape. Sara had waited for his appearance with dread coiled like a cold snake in her belly. In five years she had not had to face anyone she did not know. Five years without once seeing a stranger.

She would have run if she could, but there was nowhere to run to. So the day Matthew was due to arrive, Sara had prepared herself as if facing the guillotine – washing her hair, putting on a childish white dress, strapping her feet into a pair of old red shoes that she had once loved, thinking they looked like a flamenco dancer’s. Then she had wandered about the house, trying to tidy things up, looking for mugs without too many chips, buttering the iced tea-cake Joe had bought at the supermarket, setting the table out in the garden, trying to settle her pulse with everyday chores. Matthew had driven up to the house on a motorbike, a big one with a throaty voice like Janis Joplin. The twins stared at it in envy. It made their trail bikes look like pumped-up bicycles. He had obviously taken some trouble with his appearance – his jaw was reddened from scraping at it with a razor and his damp curls were combed straight back – yet his Blundstones were worn and scuffed. He dismounted easily, kicking out the stand with a practised movement, and came smiling up the steps. He was older than Joe by at least three years, which made him twenty-five, a long stride away from Sara at twenty.

She busied her clammy hands with cups and plates, nodding at him brusquely when he smiled at her and turning her shoulder against him. He must have interpreted her abruptness as antagonism, particularly as Joe had all his hackles raised like a hostile dog. He did not seem to mind, though, sitting down at ease, taking the cup in his brown calloused hand, stretching out his legs, remarking on the view from the garden. He had an easiness in his skin that Sara had never seen before. She thought of black panthers slinking, and her neck grew hot.

‘So, know anything about dairy farming?’ Joe asked rather contemptuously. Sara knew he was trying to hide his own sense of deficiency but it made him sound smug and conceited. She blushed for him.

‘Grew up on one,’ Matthew smiled.

Joe snorted. ‘Got any qualifications, though?’

The smile faded. ‘Got my Ag. Certificate.’

Joe grimaced, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out of the side of his mouth. Sara cringed, seeing him as Matthew must see him, every gesture and expression so exaggerated he looked fake and affected, when really he was just trying to assert his dominance. She glanced at the twins. They were sullen and silent, as usual, sitting together with their gangly wrists hanging between their knees and their heads hunched down. They both looked as if they wished they were somewhere else.

Augusto waved away Sara’s silently proffered cup of tea and poured himself another glass of wine. Now he bent forward confidentially, waving his panatella cigar at Matthew, saying with a bit of a slur to his words, ‘But surely you’ve got dreams beyond cows, boy?’

Sara saw Matthew wince away from Augusto’s breath. He leant back in his chair, took a long drink of tea, and said, ‘I’d like to get into gardens. I might study horticulture when I’ve made some money. I like working with my hands in the earth.’

Augusto gave a contemptuous snort.

Joe turned on his father savagely. ‘At least the cows give us a living of sorts, which is more than your bloody paintings do! How many years since you sold a painting, Gus? Or even painted one?’

‘Mud and manure, that’s what your soul revels in, Pablo, isn’t it?’ Augusto sneered. He was drunker than Sara had realised, his voice slurring heavily. ‘As bovine as your mother, for all you look nothing like her.’

Joe hurled away his cigarette butt, heedless of the threat of bushfires, and leapt to his feet. ‘Don’t talk about my mother!’ He walked away through the garden, to the path that led down towards the sheds.

Sara could only stare after him with pity and sorrow. She knew the sheds had been his refuge, and now they were being invaded by this broad, dark stranger with his easy confidence and a certificate in Agricultural Studies.

She looked back to find Augusto breathing alcoholic fumes all over Matthew, as he went off into some ramble about the higher purpose of Art, that a boy with the soul of a cow couldn’t possibly understand, not meaning Matthew, of course, but his goddamn stupid son. Watching Matthew trying not to breathe, trying to make excuses for Joe, trying to be polite to her half-drunken father, a hot flame of mortification swept Sara from the soles of her feet to the roots of her hair. Without looking at anyone, she cleared away the cups and plates and slipped silently back to the kitchen.

There, she read the cards for Matthew. As she had expected, he was the Magician.

A little later, Augusto called to her to bring out the Courvoisier and some glasses. Miserably she got out two big curving glasses and the bottle of Cognac Courvoisier XO Imperial, which cost two hundred dollars a bottle. She could only hope Joe would not come back and find her father and the new manager drinking Courvoisier together. That would really turn her brother against Matthew.

She carried out the tray and poured them both a little of the rich golden brandy. Augusto held the glass in his hand, swirling the liquid round and round. ‘Fits into your palm just like the breast of a woman, doesn’t it?’ he leered. He always said that, so that Sara could have said the words with him. Then Augusto showed Matthew how to lift the glass and inhale the aroma, to cup the glass in your hand till it grew warm, to take a small sip and hold the cognac in your mouth, savouring its taste.

‘Notice how it has delicate notes of vanilla and crystallised orange that slowly deepen into a taste like fruitcake,’ Augusto said. ‘Can you taste it?’

‘Can’t say I can taste fruitcake,’ Matthew said, grinning, after tasting a few mouthfuls. ‘It’s sure got a kick to it, though.’

Sara watched them drink fistfuls of dollars with every sip and listened for the sound of Joe’s quick, distinctive step. Augusto was mellowing with every mouthful. He had offered the new manager one of his cigars now, which Matthew managed to avoid without offending him. He began to tell Matthew the story of Picasso’s birth, as Sara knew he would.

‘He was stillborn, you know, cold and blue as a dead fish. Nothing the midwife did could revive him. So she wrapped him up and put him aside, and turned her attentions to saving Pablo’s mother, who was very weak. But Pablo’s uncle, who was a doctor, refused to give up on him. They were all there with their champagne and their cigars ready to celebrate the baby’s birth. Pablo’s uncle lit his cigar and blew cigar smoke right into the baby’s lungs. It worked like a charm. They say Pablo coughed, took a breath and began to bellow like a bull.’ Augusto smiled, shook his head in amazement and lit up a cigar of his own. ‘You can always tell a cigar-smoking man.’

‘By the smell?’ Matthew said politely, glancing at Sara who almost smiled.

There was a nerve-wracking moment while Augusto decided whether to be amused or affronted. It’s hard to be affronted with Courvoisier XO Imperial heating the blood and blurring the mind, however, and so Augusto laughed. ‘No, no. Though, as Freud says, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’

‘Did you hear about the guy who was so horrified when he read about the harmful effects of smoking that he never read again?’ Matthew asked. Augusto thought this was hilariously funny, laughing so hard he almost spilt his brandy.

‘What about the guy who said, “If your wife doesn’t like the aroma of your cigar, change your wife,”’ Augusto said. ‘Now that’s my kind of philosophy!’

Sara sighed and looked anxiously down towards the sheds to make sure Joe was not on his way back. Silently she urged them to drink quickly so she could take the glasses away. Matthew was only sipping slowly, though, and wincing a little at every sip. She guessed he was a beer drinker.

Augusto had decided he liked the new manager. Flinging an arm about his shoulder he asked him if he played chess.

‘No, mate. Never learnt. My oldies were more into card games. My dad was a mean five hundred player. I know a good joke about chess, though.’

Augusto puffed luxuriously on his cigar. ‘Is that so?’

Sara held her breath. Joking around with Augusto was a precarious business. Though he liked to tease others, he disliked being teased very much and was quick to take offence.

‘Yeah. It was the Irish chess championships, OK? The two Irish grandmasters were sitting with their heads bent over the board, thinking over their next move. The minutes ticked by, then the hours. Then one of the grandmasters looked up and said, “Oh! Is it my move?”’

Sara smiled involuntarily, then realised Matthew was looking at her, watching for her reaction. She looked away immediately, drooping her head so her dark waterfall of hair swung forward to shadow her face, which had grown hot and stiff. She picked up the tray and edged away as quietly as she could, careful not to let the glasses clatter.

That was to be the pattern of their interaction over the months that followed. Eventually Matthew stopped addressing remarks to her, though he still sometimes glanced her way to see if she was laughing at his jokes, of which he had a seemingly endless repertoire.

Sara cursed her shyness constantly, but was unable to overcome the self-consciousness which kept her mute and clumsy as a wooden puppet. She watched him, though, fascinated by his strangeness, his boldness, his smell of the outside world. She begged Joe not to tell him about her weirdness, about how she never left the farm anymore, not even to do the grocery shopping, about how she could not even bear to get into a car. It was impossible to hide, however. No matter how hard Sara tried to pretend she was normal, even a blind man could see how very weird she was. The knowledge of it was a constant mortification to her.

After Matthew came to Towradgi, Sara dreamt of him often. She dreamt she sat on a gilt chair in the front hall, facing the staircase, curtains billowing around her. She dreamt Matthew came in the front door and walked up behind her, so that she could see his dark, dangerous shape floating in the mirror. She dreamt he put down his brown hand and closed it about her neck, as if around the stem of some exotic flower. She felt it, hard and warm against her throat, and dreamt she leant back her head so he could bend and kiss her, submerging her in a wave of yearning. Many times she dreamt of him – pressing her up hard against a tree in a shadowy forest, lying with her in a welter of sea foam on the strand, hidden by tall green cornstalks. It was as if he had cast a spell on her, dark magician that he was.

A little after noon, someone from the hospital rang to say Augusto had stabilised enough for the family to visit.

‘Thank you,’ Sara said and hung up. She stared unseeingly into space. Although she wanted to see her father badly, she knew it was impossible. No matter how much she willed herself to, she simply could not get in a car and drive the coast road to Moruya. She could not walk into the hospital, with so many people hurrying and fretting and shouting and weeping and moaning. She could not look down at her father, broken and defeated. She had not left the tight green embracing arms of this valley since she was fifteen years old. She could not do it now.

Sara pressed her fists against her diaphragm and tried to breathe.

‘Honey, what is it?’ Gabriela’s strong arms were around her.

‘The … hospital …’

‘Oh no! Sara!’

‘No, it’s all right. He’s stabilised, whatever that means. They say we can go see him if we want.’

‘Oh, thank God. You had me going for a second. But … what’s wrong, then?’

Sara struggled to speak. ‘It’s just … I can’t. I can’t go. You know I can’t.’

Gabriela expelled her breath in a long sigh of exasperation. ‘But, Sara!’

‘You don’t understand. I can’t. I can’t go. I’d have to get in the car … and then … so many people … I couldn’t cope, I just couldn’t.’

Gabriela sat at the kitchen table and pulled Sara down to sit opposite her. She tugged at her hands till Sara reluctantly looked up at her through the weeping willow branches of her hair.

‘I’m sorry to have to say this, honey, but it might be the last time you see your father. You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t go just because you’re scared of getting in a car!’

‘I can’t!’ Sara was fully in the grip of the panic attack now. The long night without sleep, the shock of her father’s accident, the trials of anxiety she had already undergone that morning were all too much. She let herself be flooded with emotion, clinging to Gabriela, sobbing and gasping in hysterical release. When her cousin seized her shoulders and shook her roughly, she was shocked.

‘Stop it, Sara! You’re not a child anymore! Get a grip on yourself! It’s just a trip to Moruya, for God’s sake, to see your father! You’ll be there in a little over half an hour. It’s unnatural to get into such a state about it. You can’t go on like this. No-one can help you get over these stupid fears but yourself. Do it once and it’ll be easier the next time. Each time you do it’ll get easier.’

‘You don’t understand …’

‘No, I don’t. You’re twenty years old, not five. And Augusto’s in intensive care, Sara! What a time to start having hysterics over a goddamn car ride. You’ve got to get over it, Sar.’

Sara buried her face in her hands, shoulders heaving.

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ her cousin said gruffly.

Tears trickled down Sara’s cheeks. She fought to control her breathing. Why couldn’t Gabriela understand? She didn’t want to be afraid.

‘I know it’s not easy, honey, but you can’t live your life like this. The car isn’t going to hurt you – Joe’s a good driver. What is there to be afraid of?’

Gabriela handed her a cup, and Sara sipped it obediently. It seemed everyone wanted to make her drink hot beverages today, as if that would make her feel better. She remembered how welcome the coffee on Towradgi Headland had been. She had survived that journey, and the hours of waiting that had followed, all by herself in the dark, thinking her father was dead. If she could survive that, she could survive anything.

Then it occurred to her that, if she went to see her father, maybe he would speak to her, tell her what had happened. The doubts and suspicions torturing her mind might be laid to rest. She sniffled and wiped her cheeks with her fingers.

‘Sara, honey, they say the only way to get over your fears is to face them down. I’m not being mean, really I’m not.’ Gabriela knelt on the floor beside her. ‘I know it’s not your fault, everyone’s afraid of something. It’s just your fear – your phobias – they’re ruining your life. It’s like you’re trapped. And your father really needs you now.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know so. If he could hear your voice, if he knew that you could find the courage to go and see him, think what it would mean to him. He’d know how hard it was for you, he really would. He’d be so proud.’

Sara let herself dream about this for a moment, but she knew it was no good. She stared down at her cup and shook her head. ‘I can’t. I just can’t. It’s no use talking at me, I can’t do it.’

Gabriela stood up. ‘I’ll go hang out the washing.’

Sara leant her head on her hand, as the door banged shut behind her cousin. Then, with a sudden jerky movement, she got to her feet and dug out the box hidden on the shelf. She shuffled her fortune-telling cards, then laid three of them face down on the table. One by one she turned them upwards.

The first card showed a young woman blindfolded and tightly bound, caged within eight swords thrust deep into marshy ground. Sara had seen this card many times before. The Eight of Swords, a sign of imprisonment through indecision, bondage through fear.

The second card was the Ace of Wands. A hand came out of clouds, holding aloft a flowering branch. Eight petals blew in the wind. Sara’s eyes widened, her breath caught. It never ceased to astound her, how clearly the cards spoke to her sometimes. The Ace of Wands signified new beginnings, new hope, the start of a journey, an adventure, an escapade.

Slowly she turned over the third and last card. A skeleton in armour rode upon a white horse, trampling a fallen king as it drew close to a kneeling woman and child. The skeleton carried a flag with a red rose upon it. It was the card of Death.

Gabriela marched back in, the empty washing basket on her hip. Instinctively Sara swept up her cards and hid them in her lap. As Gabriela stalked through into the laundry, Sara shoved the cards back into the box and quickly hid it again, turning to face her cousin as she came back into the kitchen, feeling a flush of guilt on her face. Gabriela did not notice. She did not even look at Sara, opening the cupboard under the sink and pulling out some detergent and a scrubbing brush with her jaw clamped tightly together.

‘I’m going to go,’ Sara said.

‘To the hospital?’

Sara nodded.

Gabriela sat back on her heels, her face relaxing. ‘Good on you, Sar-bear. I knew you could do it.’

Sara flushed and felt her mouth curve upwards a little. She looked away, embarrassed.

Gabriela kept on pulling out cleaning utensils, then stood up and piled them on the bench. ‘I’ll make you all something to eat before you go. It’s practically lunchtime.’ She opened the fridge door and looked inside.

‘I’d better call Joe and tell him to come up.’ Sara stood indecisively, not knowing what to do. What would she need to take with her? Most women carried a handbag, but Sara had never needed one. Would she need money? Would she need to get changed? She looked down at her stained tracksuit pants, her shabby ugh boots, the moth-eaten jumper. Yes, she had better get changed, but into what? Sara had few clothes, she had no need of them. The enormity of what she was about to do began to overwhelm her. Her knees trembled.

Gabriela did not notice. ‘There’s not much in the house to eat,’ she said. ‘I might run into town and get some groceries while you guys are at the hospital, then I can cook you all something yummy tonight. You all look like you need a good feed.’

Sara clutched the back of the chair. Gabriela rummaged in the fridge. ‘There are some snags here.’ She sniffed them cautiously. ‘They smell all right.’

‘Joe bought them on Thursday,’ Sara said.

‘That’ll do for lunch then. I can make habas a la catalane. Do you have bacon? Broad beans?’ Gabriela opened the cupboard next to the stove and clattered pots together as she searched for a frying-pan. ‘Don’t you ever clean your cupboards out, Sara? How can you ever find anything in this mess?’

She stood up with the frying-pan in her hand. Only then did she notice how stiffly Sara stood, her hands clenched together at the centre of her body, her head thrust forward so her hair hung all over her face.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘OK.’ Gabriela got out the bacon and grabbed an onion, chopping them up swiftly.

Sara still had not moved.

‘You sure you’re OK?’

Sara nodded, not looking at Gabriela.

‘I’ll call the boys and tell them to come down. Do you want me to ring down to the shed and tell Joe too?’

Sara nodded.

‘OK. Why don’t you go and get changed?’

Sara went out the door and up the stairs, counting every step carefully. She stood in front of her battered old wardrobe and looked blankly at the few clothes shoved inside. What to wear – a whole new anxiety.

After a while she got out her white dress and put it on. The dress had been given to her when she was only fourteen. It should not have still fitted, but it did. Her collarbones and elbows looked far too prominent. The only shoes that still fitted her were the red ones, like those a flamenco dancer might wear. Sara strapped them on. They were too tight and hurt her feet. She had to wear them, though.

Sara stared at herself in the mirror. She looked all wrong. Women her age were meant to wear tight designer jeans and high heels and snazzy earrings, and have their hair blowdried and makeup on.

Sara did not have any makeup. Her hair had not been cut in more than six years. It hung down on either side of her face, dragging at her cheeks. She turned away from the mirror, filled with a savage kind of self-hatred. Ugly, ugly, she thought as she went back downstairs. The unfamiliar sound of her shoes rapping on the rungs of the steps unnerved her. She felt like she was beating on a drum, saying, Look at me, everyone! Here I am!

The kitchen was empty. She stood at the stove, stirring the sausages with their beans and tomatoes, looking out at the grey dripping world. She was cold in the thin dress, and the skin of her arms rose up in goose-pimples. She saw Joe come up the path from the sheds, trying to smoke a cigarette in the shelter of his hood. The rain doused the burning ember so that he swore and threw the cigarette away. A few minutes later, Joe came in through the kitchen door, scowling.

‘Gabriela says you want to go to the hospital,’ he said. ‘Surely she’s joking?’

‘No,’ Sara said defensively. ‘The hospital rang and said it’s OK to go see Dad. I thought we should go.’

‘I haven’t got time to be going to the hospital,’ Joe said definitely. ‘Cows still have to be milked, you know.’

‘That’s why we have Matthew,’ Sara said with a little edge of sarcasm. ‘I’m sure he can manage without you this once.’

Joe dug his toe into the dirty lino. ‘I thought you’d be too scared to drive all the way to Moruya,’ he jeered.

Sara did not reply for a while. Then she said quietly, ‘It might be our last chance to see him.’

The lines on Joe’s forehead deepened. He dug more furiously at the floor, then said, ‘You really mean it? You really want to go?’

Sara nodded, though she knotted and unknotted her fingers.

‘I don’t think you should,’ Joe said. ‘You’ll only end up having a panic attack and embarrassing us all.’

Tears started to her eyes. She could not have spoken if she tried. Joe looked away, ashamed. He hated feeling in the wrong. He glanced at her sideways, grunted under his breath and said, as if goaded beyond endurance, ‘All right then. I’ll take you to the hospital, if you’re sure that’s what you want.’

‘It is,’ she said.

‘I’ll just go let Matthew know,’ Joe said in a long suffering tone and slouched back out the door. Sara pressed her fingers into her eyes. Dominic and Dylan came in together, looking ridiculously alike with their tousled red hair and flannelette shirts.

‘Gabriela said lunch is ready,’ Dylan said.

‘Just about,’ Sara said, poking at the sausages. ‘Can you call Tessa?’

‘Tessa!’ Dylan shouted.

‘I could have done that myself. Go and call her properly.’

With an exaggerated sigh, Dylan did as he was told. He came back in and sat down at the table, then Teresa came in, red-eyed but defiant. She sat down, as Sara got out the plates. ‘We’re going to go to the hospital after lunch, to see Dad, OK?’

They all looked up at her in surprise.

‘You too?’ Dylan said.

She nodded.

He looked troubled. ‘You sure? You’ll be OK?’

‘I hope so,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘It’s only half an hour away. How hard should that be?’

The twins stared at her incredulously.

‘If it’s so easy, how come you never do it?’ Teresa demanded.

Sara felt a little spark of anger and tried to grasp it, to use it as fuel to drive her determination. But it was not enough.

‘Who am I kidding?’ She sat down, laying her head on her arms, almost in tears. ‘I can’t do it, I can’t go. I’m stuck here forever. I’m such an idiot.’

‘No, you’re not,’ Dominic said awkwardly. He searched for something to say. ‘You went up the headland last night, didn’t you? That must’ve been hard. On the trail bike and all, I mean. Car’d be easier, I guess.’

‘I guess so,’ Sara agreed without conviction.

Joe came in again, sat down at the table and pulled a plate before him, helping himself to the sausages and beans. The others followed suit. Nobody spoke. Tiredly Sara got up, rinsing the pan under the tap and wiping down the benchtop. She rubbed her arms with her hands.

‘It’s so cold,’ she said. ‘Autumn’s really here now, isn’t it?’

Again she stood staring out the window. The falling rain filled her with an unbearable melancholy. She wished she could crawl under her doona and stay for a hundred years.

‘Aren’t you going to eat something?’ Dominic asked suddenly. ‘It’s been an awfully long day.’

Sara nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I’m just not hungry. I’ll have something when we get back from the hospital. Are you finished? Then go and get changed, boys. You can’t go to the hospital looking like that. You too, Joe. You’re filthy.’

Joe grunted and got to his feet. He went out without a word. Sara cleared the plates.

‘Go on, boys, go and get changed. And comb your hair, for God’s sake. Tessa, you get ready too.’

Teresa went out, looking morose. Sara sighed, rubbing her arms. She remembered her grandmother’s old Spanish shawl. At least she would not be so cold. She had not worn it in years. ‘Just going to go get a shawl,’ she said.

As the kitchen door swung shut behind her she heard Dylan say unhappily, ‘Dad must be really bad. If Sara’s going to the hospital – well, she must think he’s going to die.’

Sara pressed her hands to her eyes and her forehead to the wall. Dad, she thought. Falling …

‘I wish I knew what we were supposed to do,’ Dominic said. ‘I wish there was someone we could talk to.’

‘Who? We’ve tried to tell Joe what we think but he doesn’t want to listen. He thinks we’re just kids.’

‘We are just kids,’ Dominic said.

‘And Sara’s no use. No point upsetting her. Besides, what is there to tell? Joe and Dad are always arguing, and Dad’s always flirting around and trying to get up Alex’s nose. What’s so different about yesterday?’

‘Nothing, I suppose, except Dad went and fell off the fucking cliff.’

‘It could’ve been an accident.’

‘I suppose so,’ Dominic said unhappily. ‘It just feels all wrong. Everyone is acting so weird.’

‘They are all weird. It’s the fucking Munster family.’

‘Yeah, and we’re like the girl, you know, the one that was normal but the whole family felt sorry for her, thinking she was the weirdo.’

‘Yeah, that’s us.’

There was a little pause. Sara, crouching outside the door, felt a terrible sadness and shame. She wished she knew how to make things better for her brothers but knew that in a family of weirdos, she was the weirdest.

‘Better do it, I suppose,’ Dylan said and stood up, his chair scraping the floor.

‘Yeah, go hop, carrot top,’ Dominic said.

‘Drop dead, potato head!’ his twin retorted.

Together they came out of the kitchen. At the sound of their chairs Sara had slipped away down the hall. Her eyes were stinging with tears of hurt and disappointment, but it was in her mind to show her brothers that she was not as useless as they thought. She went to the living room and found the Spanish shawl and wrapped it around her thankfully.

All the while she was thinking over everything that had happened, and all that Matthew and the twins had said. She could not help feeling a growing uneasiness.

She went to Joe’s room and knocked timidly at his door.

He opened it abruptly, his chest bare, his shirt in his hand. He did not look pleased to see her.

‘Joe? Did you know Dad was having an affair? With a married woman?’

Her brother looked at her doubtfully. ‘I’d wondered if he was seeing someone,’ he admitted. ‘I didn’t know she was married.’

‘How long?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ her brother replied quietly. ‘A couple of months, I suppose. That’s how long he’s been working again, isn’t it?’ He gave a twisted smile. ‘Gus always paints when he’s getting laid, haven’t you noticed?’

She acknowledged the truth of this, and wondered why she had not thought of it herself.

‘Do you know who she is?’

Joe got up and went to the wardrobe, rattling the coat hangers as he rummaged through his clothes. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’ He found his leather jacket and put it on. ‘It could be anyone. Does it matter?’

‘No,’ Sara said slowly. ‘I suppose not. It’s just …’

Joe looked at her suspiciously. ‘What?’

‘Well, the boys are right. The whole thing is weird. Dad wouldn’t just fall off a cliff. He wasn’t up there rock-climbing or abseiling or anything like that, he was sketching. He wouldn’t have gone near the edge and he wouldn’t have stayed there after it started to rain. He just wouldn’t. So I can’t see how he could have fallen.’

Joe came quickly across the room, blood surging under his dark olive skin. He seized her shoulders and shook her. ‘I wish you’d all stop it! Why do you want to make this so much worse than it is? Accidents happen all the time. People die. Why can’t you just accept that?’

‘I don’t want him to die,’ she cried.

‘Worrying about how it happened is not going to help him live,’ her brother said brutally. ‘You saw him there, hanging upside-down like that. It’s a miracle he’s not dead already. Please, stop carrying on about how he bloody well fell and start worrying about what we’re going to do now! Because we’re on our own now, Sara, can’t you see that?’

She wrenched herself free and ran out of the room. Her red shoes rapped sharply on the steps. The sound seemed to make the house darker and colder and emptier than ever.

Gabriela was in the laundry, putting another load of washing on. ‘I wish you had a dryer,’ she said. ‘I’ll never get anything dry in all this rain. I suppose I’ll have to hang it all on the rack and hope for the best.’

She saw Sara’s face and said, ‘What’s wrong?’

Sara hesitated, feeling a tight knot of tension in the pit of her stomach. ‘I don’t know. Matthew said something this morning that’s been bothering me. It’s probably nothing but …’

‘But what?’

‘Well, it’s just … he said Dad had been having an affair with some woman, a married woman, and that there’d been some kind of trouble with her husband. It probably doesn’t mean anything but I … well, I can’t help worrying that maybe … you see, the telephone wouldn’t work last night when we wanted to ring the police. Dom and Dylan had to ride to Alex’s house to use their phone.’

‘It was a pretty bad storm,’ Gabriela said. ‘A branch probably just fell on the line.’

‘That’s what I thought but Matthew said … he fixed it this morning, you see. He said the wires had worked loose in the actual connection. He thought it looked like it had been tampered with.’

Gabriela put down the box of washing powder. ‘That’s a pretty serious accusation.’

‘He said he couldn’t be sure but …’

‘You think someone pulled the telephone wires out so that you couldn’t ring for help last night? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I don’t know … maybe.’

‘But that means … surely that means …’

‘I don’t know,’ Sara said again. She shivered and pulled the shawl closer about her. ‘All I know is that everything feels wrong. There’s like … I don’t know. Undercurrents. Haven’t you felt it?’

‘Well, no,’ Gabriela said. ‘I mean, you all seem pretty shocked and upset, which is what I’d expect really.’ She hesitated. ‘You’re tired and strung out, you know, Sara. You haven’t really slept yet, have you? You got to expect to be feeling a bit odd and disconnected.’

‘I suppose so,’ Sara said wearily. ‘I wish none of this had happened.’

‘Of course you do. Shit happens, though, Sar.’

‘Yeah, that’s what Joe says.’

‘You’ll feel better when you’ve seen your dad and know what the story is.’

Sara nodded.

‘Do you guys want to borrow my car? There’s really not room for all four of you in the Dodge. It’ll take you at least half an hour to get there – you might as well be comfortable.’

‘OK. Thanks.’

Even the word ‘car’ was enough to make Sara’s stomach twist with anxiety. She wrapped the shawl round her tightly and slowly followed Gabriela down the hall. Every step she took towards the front of the house was another step into darkness. She came to a halt by the front door. Gabriela was rummaging in her bag for her keys.

‘Here you go. Take it easy, won’t you?’

Sara shrugged and tried to smile. ‘Sure. Of course.’

Gabriela called up the stairs. ‘Joe! Kids! Ready to go?’

‘OK, OK, coming,’ Joe called back and came down, the twins moping at his heels, Teresa following reluctantly behind. While Gabriela explained about the car and exchanged keys with him, Sara gripped her hands into fists and slowly breathed in and out, in and out. Already her pulse rate was quickening, her heart hammering violently in her chest. Her mouth was so dry she had difficulty swallowing. Her legs trembled.

‘OK, guys, see you later,’ Gabriela said, giving them all a quick hug. ‘I hope everything’s fine.’

Sara’s mouth twisted wryly.

The boys ran out through the rain and jumped in the car. Teresa held her shiny coat over her head and ran after them. Sara took a deep breath, expelled it fiercely, and then ran too, not giving herself time to falter. She slipped on the gravel in her too-tight red shoes, but managed to wrench open the car door and jump in.

The sound of the engine starting sent every nerve in her body jumping.

Panic clamped her chest. She could not breathe. She tried to swallow but her throat muscles were rigid. She managed to gasp a breath then another, putting her head down on her crossed arms to try and open her airways. The car was moving. She heard the crunch of its wheels on the gravel and then the rattle of branches on the metal roof. Waves of mortification and horror washed over her, scorching hot, then freezing cold. Her skin was cold and clammy, all her muscles unnaturally tense.

‘You OK, Sar?’ Joe asked.

She did not answer.

I’ve done this before, she told herself. I did it this morning. I survived that. Not going to kill me. Just breathe.

After a very long time her breath began to come more easily. She lifted her head and cautiously opened her eyes. Rain slashed at the windscreen. The blurring of the landscape made her feel sick again. She shut her eyes and did not open them until the car drew up in the hospital car park.

Her siblings had hardly spoken the whole way. Once or twice they had passed comments on the weather or the traffic, or asked Sara how she was doing. They had certainly not mentioned their father or the accident. It was as if the subject was surrounded by such a tender, swollen bruise that even the thought of touching upon it caused pain.

Now, in the front lobby of the hospital, they were forced to press upon the bruise.

‘I wonder where he is,’ Teresa said nervously. ‘Will he still be in intensive care?’

‘We can only ask,’ Joe said. He was sickly-sallow and more fidgety than ever, tugging at his jacket or his collar. He kept groping in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes only to remember he was not allowed to smoke in the hospital. After a while he jammed his hands in his jacket pockets as if willing them to be still.

They were told where to go and, feeling edgy and out of place, they went, all five pressing close together. Sara’s legs were trembling so much she found it hard to walk. When they came to the lift she sank down on a chair, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap.

‘Oh, God, I hope he’ll be OK,’ she said.

Teresa pressed the lift button and kept on jabbing at it till the lift finally arrived.

No-one spoke on the way up. Sara took a shuddering breath, then put out a hand and clung on to Joe’s sleeve. He put his arm around her. She was glad of the support. He took it away when the lift doors opened. She felt its absence acutely.

She trailed behind her brothers as they made their way down a long corridor. The green linoleum floor was stained. The air stank of anesthetic and disinfectant. Through half-open doors they could see people lying immobile in high metal beds, covered with white cotton blankets. In a few rooms televisions droned. In other rooms, visitors sat on the edge of their chairs, smiling brightly. A grey fug was choking her throat. No matter how carefully she counted her breaths, the numbers galloped away from her, became hieroglyphics, without order or meaning. Her heart jitterbugged. A male nurse walked towards them, pushing a metal cart. She could not look at him. She felt he must be staring at her, wondering what she was doing here, so odd in her red flamenco dance shoes and her golden-fringed shawl. The squeal of the wheels grated upon her nerves. He passed them by without a word and she felt an irrational relief weaken her knees.

Sara remembered D. H. Lawrence’s dread and horror of other people. It made her grieve to the very pit of her soul. She wanted to be able to walk amongst her own kind without the impulse to recoil. She did not know how to escape, though. She was driven by primitive instincts. Every cell in her body was shrieking to her to flee. All she had to cover her shrinking skin was her hair and her silence and the obsessive counting of each and every step she took.

They came to Augusto’s room and tiptoed in. Their father lay on the narrow metal bed, his eyes closed. He was still as a corpse. Only the rhythmic beeping of one of the machines attached to him suggested his heart still beat. Bruises discoloured his skin, his neck was imprisoned in a brace, one arm was swathed in a thick white cast, sticky-red gauze was bound to his head. They had shaved off most of his long, black hair. Beside the bed, incomprehensible panels whirred and clicked. The eyes behind the closed lids flickered. It was his only movement. Liquid dripped from a bag on a rack into his arm. There were tubes up his nose. There were tubes in his slack veins. His face had sunk, like badly set pavers.

They sat there, watching him, occasionally murmuring a question that none of the others could answer. Joe stood up, walked around the room, sat down again, then just as abruptly got up. ‘I’m going to go and ask,’ he said.

After a while he came back. ‘The doctor will be here in just a moment, they said.’

The minutes ticked away, and no-one had a word to say. Sara rested her head on her arms.

A large, grey-faced man in a long white coat came in. He nodded to them all and introduced himself as he checked the instruments, scribbling quickly on a clipboard. He was kind in a dispassionate sort of way. Their father was very badly injured, he said. He had lost a lot of blood. Apart from the head wound, the worst injury was the fracture in one of the cervical vertebrae. It was too early to know if there was any nerve damage. He also had a compound fracture of the left femur, a fractured clavicle and two cracked ribs, one of which had punctured his left lung. As he spoke, he gestured to one part or another of Augusto’s body with his pen.

‘Is he going to die?’ Sara asked.

The doctor hesitated. ‘That I cannot tell you. Injuries to the head are always problematic. Until he regains consciousness … certainly he’s stabilised the last few hours. We’ve given him a blood transfusion and some painkillers. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.’

Sara dropped her head back on her arms, her arms and legs knotted close about her body. She did not even realise she was crying until she tasted the wetness on her lips. She felt the all-too-familiar constriction of her chest, as if she too had cracked some ribs and someone was slowly and inexorably strapping them up. She fought to drag the air down into her lungs, feeling pain pierce her side. Oh, my poor father …

Joe asked more questions but Sara did not hear the doctor’s answers. Black prehistoric wings flapped about her head. She did not have the strength to fight anymore. She had the distinct sensation of falling. She fought to drag oxygen into her lungs. All she could hear was that terrible flapping, the thudding of her own heart in her ears. It was the only pin fastening her to consciousness. She dug her fingers into her scalp, seeking to use pain as a lighthouse to guide her home. She hated herself entirely.

‘Sara! Sara! Are you all right? Sara?’

At last Joe was there. She felt his hands under her armpits, lifting, his shoulder against her forehead. ‘Oh, God. Sara? Are you all right? Christ! Why did I let you come? I knew this would happen. It always does. Dylan, Dom, help me! We have to get her home.’

Sara let him drag her up. She kept her eyes shut. With her eyes shut, she was safe.

‘C’mon, we’ll get you home. You’ll be right.’ She heard the twins’ quick question, heard Joe mutter an answer, felt their arms under her shoulders.

Still she squeezed her eyes shut. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, knocking her hip against an unseen piece of furniture. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Is she OK?’ Dylan’s voice sounded right above her head. ‘I knew she shouldn’t have come.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘This is the worst she’s been for ages.’ Dominic sounded frightened.

‘She’ll be right,’ Joe repeated. ‘We’ll get her home.’

Sara clamped her eyelids shut, so no light pierced her lids, and thought of home.

The journey took forever. With her eyes shut, every swerve of the car seemed an invitation to death. She dug her nails so hard into her skull she felt the fragile skin tear. Panic beat its black crow wings above her head. She could only trust in Joe to take her home.

At last she heard the familiar crunch of gravel under the tyres. Everyone was quiet. The silence was thunder-charged. Joe got out of the car and slammed the door shut. Feeling as weak as if she had survived a bout of cholera, Sara crept back inside the house. Her humiliation was profound.

She paused. The house was very quiet. Her legs trembled, weak as a newborn lamb’s. Holding on to the wall she crept through the front hall, not knowing where to go or what to do. Failure tasted like vomit in her throat. The door of the studio was there, the handle just next to her hand. She crept inside like an injured animal seeking sanctuary.

Keeping her movements precise, she closed the door behind her. Her fingers searched for and flicked the switch that dissolved the echoing darkness into the grimy, over-crowded room she knew. There was no sound. The silence frightened her.

Silence always did.

With a sigh Sara slowly shuffled forward, crossing the room to where her father’s canvas stood on its easel.

It was mauve and blue. There were tree branches, a moon, a death, a stream, a swirl of orange, shadows in her eyes. She tasted sorrow. Oh my mother, long dead. A journey through an immeasurable tunnel, a fire on the hill.

Memories crowded in on her. Flashes of her mother’s voice, a strand of red hair, smothering velvet, smoke against a clear sky. It seemed to Sara that memories sank to the depths of the sea and hardened there to strange shapes. What was once a coin became a worthless disc of rusted green. What was once an anchor became a corroded crucifix. Nothing stayed the same.

‘Dad,’ she said, and sat on the floor, holding his painting shirt against her.

Augusto Sanchez cooked with passion, with drama, with flair.

Generations of Milanese chefs leant on his shoulder as he recreated dishes from recipes that dated back to the fourteenth century. It worried him that none of his children showed a vocation for cooking.

‘The Sanchez family were always great cooks. We cooked for kings. It’s sad to see how thin the blood has got,’ he mused at night, when the delicious melancholy of good food and wine had again crept over him. ‘We’ll never cook for kings again.’

Making zarzuela de mariscos, Augusto tossed back his narrow head with its oily ponytail, gesticulating wildly with his knife as he sliced a lobster neatly down the middle.

‘You must take out the langostinos’ intestines cleanly,’ he instructed, while Sara sorted a gigantic mound of clothing. Augusto always peppered his speech with Spanish when he cooked, although he had not set foot on Spanish soil since he was born. ‘The secret with zarzuela is the sweetness. Cinnamon, saffron, sweet paprika, bay leaves. Sweet and salty the zarzuela, like the sea, like pasión.’

Zarzuela de mariscos was a dish his mother Consuelo had once cooked, with a recipe passed down for many generations. His sister Juanita also made zarzuela for the restaurant she owned in Bega. It was called seafood stew in brackets on the menu. Augusto was contemptuous of Juanita’s zarzuela.

‘She tries to make money out of it. Zarzuela should be an embarrassment of riches. It should be a gift from the cook to those that eat.’

He admitted his niece Gabriela had some talent for cooking, but said she was too calm to cook well, especially zarzuela. ‘Zarzuela needs passion. It is an opera of taste. Gabriela is too methodical – she follows the recipe too closely. She has no imagination – how can you cook with no imagination?’

‘I thought you were meant to follow the recipe,’ Sara had said once.

‘You would think so,’ was Augusto’s reply, as he had upended a bowl of mussels into the stew.

Augusto was a theatrical cook. With his back to the stove, he flipped a whole fish with grace and dexterity, dropped a handful of finely chopped thyme into the soup like a basketball player dunking a ball, or juggled eggs, tossing them without warning at anyone who walked into the kitchen. On the wall of the kitchen were stuck shards of ancient eggshell, yellowed and crumbling, from a missed catch.

Although Augusto was a magician in the kitchen, he could rarely be bothered, which meant Sara had to endure his criticism and contempt of her own clumsy attempts every day. ‘Sara does not so much cook food as assassinate it,’ he told Matthew once, when inviting him up for dinner. ‘When you do find time to come up, give me some warning and I’ll cook for you myself. I’ll make you oca con peras. Trust me, it’s a dish to make your knees tremble.’

Sara wished very much that she could cook a meal to make a man’s knees tremble, particularly Matthew’s knees. However, she could not cook. No matter how hard she tried, she would always burn something or serve it raw and cold in the middle, or have the fish perfectly grilled and the potatoes as hard as rocks. The closer the hands of the clock came to dinner-time, the more anxious and miserable Sara would become.

She did not know what was worse. To cook a meal and have Augusto prod it with his fork, his lip lifting in a sneer, or to hear his impatient footsteps strumming down the hall halfway through making the meal. For Augusto would sweep in, raise the lids of the pots on the sink, wrinkle his high-bridged nose in distaste. ‘What a vile mess!’ he’d say, and down the sink would gurgle the soup she had spent all day preparing.

Only the previous day Augusto had thrown her baked fish out the kitchen door for the dogs to snarl over. Sara had laboured for hours to make the samfaina y bacalao a la catalana, as the dish was called in her grandmother’s recipe book. Consuelo had left this book to Sara along with her tarot cards, but Augusto had promptly appropriated it. After all, Sara was not yet four and so far too young to have any use for it. Whenever Sara showed interest in looking through it, Augusto only laughed at her. ‘Whatever for, princess? You hoping it’ll teach you how to cook? I wish it were that simple!’

Consuelo’s recipes were all kept in a very thick old exercise book, bulging with odd bits of paper – old remedies, directions for making dandelion wine or rosemary shampoo, hand-scrawled notes on the secret properties of fruit and herbs – basil for enticing true love, rosemary for fertility, thyme for courage, apples for love and healing, figs to spell-bind love, sage for wisdom. Old letters, photographs and postcards were also tucked within its pages, all of which were stained with splashes of food and reddish-brown circles where a glass of wine had been rested to hold the pages open.

Some recipes were torn out from newspapers or magazines or photocopied from books, and stuck in with failing glue or old, yellow sticky-tape. Others were written entirely in hand; some in Augusto’s large, flamboyant handwriting, some in handwriting Sara did not recognise, most in Consuelo’s old-fashioned formal letters. Quite a few were written entirely in Spanish, and had the English translations jotted here and there on the page. Even with the key words translated, Consuelo’s recipes were hard to read. They scorned such necessities as temperatures and measurements and time, saying things like ‘lacerate in brandy’, ‘add a blob of butter’, ‘if oranges are not Spanish, add vinegar’. Despite their difficulty, Consuelo’s recipes were always the best.

The recipe for samfaina y bacalao a la catalane was long and complicated, and written mainly in Spanish, but Augusto loved the dish for it brought back vivid memories of his childhood. Consuelo had often cooked it on feast days and high days. Sara had planned a special lunch to celebrate the Easter long weekend – she wanted to bring the family closer together and knew no better way than for them to all eat together.

The barometer was falling, though, storm on the way. She had known as soon as she had gone into the studio, taking Augusto his first cup of coffee for the day. Without a glance or word, he had taken the cup, and splashed in a generous nip of brandy. Brandy was the worst of storm signals, a cyclone warning.

Feeling her heart submerge, Sara picked up her father’s dirty plate from the night before, his encrusted fork, the wine glass with its crimson slurry, and the great brandy balloon, reeking with spirits. She cast a quick glance at her father. He ignored her, flicking through his mail, sipping his coffee. She stifled a sigh and turned to go, then caught in the corner of her eye the huge canvas resting on its easel.

Sara stood still, as if turned to salt. She had not known what Augusto was painting. She had thought it a landscape, since he spent so much time on the headland. But there, lying sprawled across the canvas, was her dead mother’s body. Bridget’s eyes were half-closed and glazed. Her hair was the only colour – it was the orange of flames leaping on the hillside, the orange of the sun sinking, the orange of old blood drying into a trickle. Otherwise all was storm and darkness and grief, the pale roundness of the moon floating above the craggy black profile of Towradgi Headland, the round paleness of her face floating below.

Sara stood still, staring. Her hands holding the tray trembled so the plates and cups rattled together. Augusto glanced up. Rage suffused his face. ‘What are you doing? Get out! Get out!’

Sara crept back to the kitchen, only to find the roasted capsicums black and smoking unpleasantly. She sat with her head in her arms, smoke filling her vision. At last she stood, wiped her eyes, threw out the burnt peppers, and began again.

‘Soak salt cod in water until soft again,’ Consuelo’s hand had written. ‘Change the water every few hours. Then roast three large red bell peppers until the skin loosens and falls away. Salt three eggplants to draw away the bitterness. Cook onion, garlic, eggplant and zucchinis in oil, then mix in roast capsicums and sun-dried tomatoes. Fry cod.’

That was it. Sara had rung Gabriela. ‘What does it mean by salt cod?’ she asked. ‘Where do I get it?’

When Gabriela had told her, she begged Joe to buy it for her, which he had done with some ill grace, saying, ‘Why can’t we just have a barbie like normal people?’

When he had brought it, Sara had looked at the dried-up hank of fish in dismay and rung Gabriela again. ‘It looks like something the cat spat out a week ago,’ she said. ‘Are you sure that’s what I’m meant to cook?’

Gabriela reassured her.

‘It says to soak till soft. How long does that mean?’

‘At least a day and a night,’ Gabriela said.

‘But it says to change the water every few hours!’

‘Just change the water before you go to bed, then again when you get up in the morning.’

‘Are you sure that’s OK?’

‘Sure I’m sure. I’ve cooked samfaina y bacalao heaps of times. It’s easy, as long as you’ve got time and patience.’

‘Well, my social calendar looks pretty clear, I guess I’ve got the time,’ Sara had said. ‘Not so sure about the patience. How will I know if it’s soft enough?’

‘You’ll know.’

‘How will I know?’

‘It’ll be soft. It’ll fall apart if you lift it. Though don’t do that else you’ll wreck it.’

‘Great. Thanks. I’ll call you at the next crisis of confidence, OK?’

‘Sure, Sar-bear. But really, it’s easy.’

‘Easy for you,’ Sara had muttered, hanging up the phone. But it had been easy.

Cooking by herself in the kitchen, steadfastly following her grandmother’s steps, Sara had felt an unaccustomed peace. It gave her pleasure to cut all the vegetables up small and neat, and to see them soften in the sauce. It felt good to test the fish gently with a knife and see it had softened, just like the recipe said it would. The smell of the fried fish was wonderful, and the sight of it – all golden and perfect – made her feel so proud. Maybe she was not so useless after all.

Just then Augusto flung the door open.

‘Is that fish I smell?’ His voice was not pleasant.

Sara nodded.

‘Why are you cooking fish?’

‘I thought I’d make us a nice lunch …’

‘So you thought you’d cook fish. Why fish, Sara?’

Sara could not think what to say. Dumbly she stared at him, twisting the corner of her shirt about her fingers.

‘Because it’s Easter, I s’pose. You thought you’d be a good little Catholic girl and do what Mummy would’ve liked you to do. Didn’t you?’

Sara had forgotten fish was meant to be eaten on Good Friday. She had prepared samfaina y bacalao a la catalana because Augusto loved it. She wished she had remembered, and twisted the corner of her shirt into a tight corkscrew.

‘Well, Easter was something invented by a lot of fat, rich, crooked men in purple to make other people feel guilty, and pay up so they could keep on with their fat, rich, crooked lives. It’s all about money and greed, and I won’t have it celebrated in my house.’

As he spoke, Augusto swung the frying-pan off the stove and, in one easy move, flung the fish out the open door. Sara watched it hurtle through the air and splat into the dust. The dogs fell upon it, snarling with raised hackles, as Augusto stalked out of the kitchen.

After a while, Sara got out tomatoes and bread for lunch. As she sliced up the tomatoes, the knife slammed again and again into the breadboard, scoring deep into the wood.

She knew Augusto had thrown her fish to the dogs because she had seen his painting. She should not have looked. She should have gone away without raising her eyes. But the temptation had been too much to resist. It was the first major painting her father had attempted since Gayla had left. For Augusto’s muse had gone away one day and never come back. A muse is always jealous and exacting, Augusto thought. He had tried to placate her, to win her back again, but the fear he was being punished for a mortal sin refused to be banished. He offered her libations of wine, and at times swore ‘fuck you’ as if she could hear him. But no muse comes for the asking, and the last two years Augusto had not even pretended the wine was for her.

His muse had returned without warning in the New Year. Sara had taken in his midday cup of coffee to find her father scraping back an old canvas, a rag keeping his long hair out of his eyes. ‘I’ve got an idea’ was all he said, but it seemed like a promise of better times, a fresh start for the whole Sanchez family.

That night he had cooked them an elaborate feast – arroz negro con calamares rellenos, stuffed squid served with rice coloured and flavoured with the squid’s ink, a disturbing dish both rich and delicate in taste, and strange to see. With his usual morbid wit, Augusto followed this dark, brooding course with something delicate, angelic, chaste – pan de Santa Teresa, fried bread with sugar, cinnamon and lime named for Saint Teresa of Avila, whose bold spirit and wicked tongue did much to excuse her sainthood in Augusto’s eyes.

It hurt Sara when she heard the twins cheer and say, ‘Good-oh, Dad’s cooking tonight.’ She was also glad, though, for she loved her father’s cooking. She loved to watch his dramatic flourishes as he poured oil into a smoking pan, drumming his heels in rhythm to the flamenco music on the stereo, hands clapping over his head, a neat half-spin as he reached for the wine to refill his glass, a toss of his long, oily ponytail, the quick skilful dismemberment of the squids, the squirting of their blue-black blood from the ink sacs, the tossing of the little tentacles in oil, the stuffing of their guillotined heads with herbs and nuts and meat, the delicious smell that reached far back into the past, probing fingers against old memories that ached with regret and desire.

It made her so happy to see her father painting again.

Sara had forgotten, though, how nasty her father could be when he was painting. Augusto the King of Hearts was swallowed by Augusto the Demon-God. Nothing existed for him but colour, shape and texture; nothing but the canvas of his mind. This was when his worst cruelties were practised, in the name of creation. This was when her father drank brandy.

The Demon-God had been in residence all summer. Augusto painted in a frenzy, snarling at anyone who dared interrupt him, once throwing a jam-jar of murky turpentine at Joe when he came in, cheque-book in hand. Augusto slept on the couch in his studio, and ate his meals with a sketchbook in front of him, a pencil in one hand, his fork in the other. His hard shell of a body grew thinner, and for the first time Sara noticed grey hairs in his pony-tail.

She began to recognise the warning signs. If Augusto drank brandy; if he walked up and down the length of his studio so the wooden boards creaked all night; if his voice rose high and shrill when he called from his studio: these were storm signals.

So she was not surprised Augusto had sacrificed her fish. Sara was only sorry she had not thought of something else to cook. Oca con peras, for example. This subtle yet extravagant dish was the one that most reminded Augusto of his mother, that small, thin, black-clad woman with her fortune-telling eyes and quick, angry tongue. He would not have thrown oca con peras to the dogs. He would have eaten tenderly, delicately, the skin about his mouth gleaming from the goose fat, as he told them stories of his childhood and how Consuelo was the queen of the neighbourhood, ruling all with a lift of her bony finger. ‘Great men were scared of her,’ he would have said with a reminiscent smile, ‘though they could have lifted her and thrown her with one hand. Oh, she could cook, though, my mother. You call this oca con peras, princess? This is nothing but an overcooked goose. If you could but taste my mother’s oca con peras, well, then you might begin to know how to cook it.’

Sara had been stupid though. She had cooked fish, and now Augusto was in a white rage, and the whole day ruined. She could hear the angry roar of the Elephant as he revved it down the hill and knew he might be gone for hours.

But Sara was wrong. It had been only an hour or so later that Augusto had come home, cruising along the valley road on his motorcycle. Sara stood on the verandah and watched as he rose up the curve of the hill, her hands clenched together at the junction of her breasts. He was smiling when he parked the motorcycle, however, and she felt the knot of tension inside her loosen. He bounded up the stairs, his batik-print sarong all damp.

‘I know how to do it!’ he said triumphantly. ‘Princess, I’m finished. I know what to do. It’ll be magnificent. It’s a masterpiece. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. There has to be rage at the end, that’s what I’ve done wrong. Anger, fury, despair. Just a little orange pointillism in the eyes, that’s what I need. Amazing what a difference a few orange dots can make.’

He grasped Sara by the waist and waltzed exuberantly across the sunken boards of the verandah, his long black hair dripping all over her. He had forgotten his rage of that morning, forgotten her fish. Against her will, Sara felt her unhappiness slip away.

‘How long before lunch?’ he cried. ‘Have I time to do it? Such a small change, such a very small change, but oh, how great a change a small change can make!’

As he went singing flamenco into the house, his wet pony-tail plastered against his thin, brown back, Sara began to set the table with a slight smile on her face.

Eating was an important ritual in the Sanchez family and always approached with appropriate ceremony. That Good Friday, the table was set only with what was left in the pantry, since the pièce de résistance was nothing but a scatter of bones and scales in the dust. Sara had picked flowers and leaves from the garden, however, and was using the heavy, green Spanish wine-glasses her father loved. Joe had picked up a bag of small Easter eggs for her, and Sara had scattered them over the tablecloth, giving the table a festive air. After the quarrel over the fish, she had been a little wary of bringing out the brightly wrapped eggs but Augusto’s mood swing had encouraged her, and he said nothing, perhaps feeling chocolate eggs had no religious significance.

It was hard for Sara not to regret her beautiful fish, but there was plenty of bread and wine and cured ham and Catalan salad, and Augusto was at his scintillating best. Even Teresa was charmed out of her sulks, while the twins actually grinned and teased her about her new short haircut, calling her ‘Ted’ and asking her what position she played in rugby. Only Joe remained silent, brooding over his plate. But that was not unusual.

Sara was so happy Augusto was in a pleasant mood that she almost failed to recognise the first shadow, it seemed so small. This from Sara, who spent her life guarding against darkness.

When tyres scrunched on the gravel drive, she gave no more than a slight start and got up, folding her napkin and saying, ‘Whoever can this be?’ The imperious ring of the front door bell made Augusto set down his wine-glass thoughtfully.

When Sara walked around the corner, her shoulders a little hunched as she prepared herself for a stranger or an unwanted acquaintance, she saw her maternal uncles waiting gravely on the step. Alex Halloran, her mother’s brother, was tall and thin and grey, with a mouth compressed by the habit of anger. He wore a blue shirt with a button-down collar, a navy nylon tie, fawn-coloured moleskins and brown riding boots, rather worn but carefully polished. He carried his Akubra hat in one hand.

Sara was not altogether surprised to see Alex, even though it was Good Friday and he was a devout man. It was a rare day these days when Alex was not at Towradgi, frowning over the accounts, exclaiming over the erosion, criticising Joe’s handling of the dairy cows, and suggesting they take a shotgun to the kangaroos.

She was surprised to see her uncle-in-law, Harry Dunbar, however. Short and fat and balding, with a belly that shook with lascivious laughter when he told dirty jokes, Harry was married to Bridget’s sister, Maureen, and Sara had not seen him since her mother’s funeral.

‘Can we see your father, Sara?’ Alex Halloran said. He did not seem pleased to see her, but then, he never was.

‘We’re having lunch …’ she hesitated.

‘Just tell your father we want to see him,’ Harry Dunbar said, gleaming with sweat.

When Sara relayed the message to Augusto, his eyebrow lifted. As he strolled round the edge of the verandah, his shoulders were flexing. This was not a good sign. All five of his children sat and listened as he greeted his brothers-in-law contemptuously. ‘So, bros. What’s up?’

‘We need to talk to you, Gus,’ Alex said, in his thinnest, greyest tones.

‘So, talk.’

‘I think inside might be more appropriate.’

‘Sure, bros.’ His children could easily imagine his exaggerated bow as he opened the door for his brothers-in-law. A little prayer began in Sara’s head: please don’t, please don’t, please don’t. What she was praying for, she hardly knew.

Joe sprawled at the table, frowning heavily, drawing aimlessly in some salt he had spilt on the table.

‘Joe!’ Sara said. ‘You’ve got to throw a pinch over your left shoulder when you spill salt.’

He cast her a look.

‘It’s bad luck,’ she said.

‘You think everything’s bad luck,’ he said, dabbing his finger in the salt and tasting it.

Sara thought of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper, with Judas knocking over the salt cellar. ‘It’s to blind the devil,’ she said.

‘You really think the devil is standing behind my left shoulder?’ he said, the irony of his voice barbed with more than a little malice. He glanced over his left shoulder, pretending to be frightened.

‘Better safe than sorry,’ Sara said, and took a little pinch of the salt and tossed it, first over his shoulder and then over her own.

Dylan reached out a lazy hand and rapped on the table. ‘May as well knock on wood too, just to be sure.’

A fly buzzed above the broken bread. Try as they might, they could not ignore the sound of raised voices from the studio on the other side of the house. The festive mood drained away. Joe got up, and curtly told Dominic and Dylan to get their work-clothes on. ‘Farmers don’t get holidays,’ he said.

He looked at Teresa and she grinned at him impudently. ‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a manicure and there’s no way I’m breaking a nail for you.’

‘Bloody typical,’ he answered. ‘Well, you can help Sara then, for a change. She’s not your bloody servant, you know.’

‘I never thought she was,’ Teresa answered sweetly and got up, picking up a few plates and disappearing into the kitchen. By the time Sara had followed her through with the rest of the crockery she had disappeared again, as usual, and Sara was left to wash up by herself.

Instead she crept round to kneel outside the studio’s window, trying to hear what her father and uncles were saying.

Alex said, ‘Just what I’d expect from you. You just don’t care, d’you?’

Her father replied with a sneer, ‘Lick my arse.’

His words were swallowed in a bellow from Harry: ‘You bastard! I’ll fix you, you mongrel!’

A crash, a burst of shouting from Alex: ‘That’s it, you bastard. I’ve had enough. You’re all out of here, you and your bloody mob of children. You’d better start packing. I want you all out of here! Come Monday, I’m calling in my loan.’

Shadows brushed her, the shape of a stingray passing over sand. Sara had crept away, arms wrapped about her. She could not leave Towradgi. What would she do if Alex meant what he said? She had not left the house for five years. Five years trapped within its mildewed walls, five years where the mere suggestion of meeting strangers made her heart pound so hard it almost choked her. She could not leave. Even the thought of having to go to the shopping centre was enough to bring the fear in a black wave, a drowning wave. She could not believe Alex could be so callous – he knew her fears, he knew she could not leave the farm.

He and Harry had driven away, spraying gravel behind them. Then Augusto came out, his nostrils pinched white with anger. Sara shrank away from him. He walked straight past her, his portable easel slung under his arm. Crouched on the rickety seat of his motorcycle, Augusto once again disappeared into the hills. The sun had set into storm, into rain and hail and lightning, but Augusto did not come home. All evening the rain had rained and the thunder had thundered, all that long evening she had waited and worried. Sara was swallowing darkness, swimming in black ink to her eyebrows.

Tide And Time

low tide – 0.6 m

5.07 pm, Easter Saturday

high tide – 1.6 m

11.41 pm, Easter Saturday

A little before five o’clock, the police arrived.

Sara was sitting on the floor of her father’s studio, his painting shirt pressed close to her breast. It smelt of sweat, eucalyptus, turpentine and expensive cigars.

Augusto’s studio had once been the formal dining-room. It was a long room with an ornate ceiling rose and large picture-windows that looked out over the garden towards the sea. Even this late in the afternoon, sun struck brightly through the big windows, each orange-hued ray drifting with tiny motes of dust. Sara was never allowed to clean and tidy the studio, so it was littered with the detritus of ten years of Augusto’s life.

The bare boards were so thickly daubed with paint it looked like the dried mud of a swamp at low tide. Only here and there, in corners or near the skirting-boards, could the original floor be seen. Under Augusto’s easels the paint rose in hard, mud-coloured mounds like ants’ nests. Here and there were fresh daubs of colour – teal green, trans magenta, green oxide, burnt sienna, jade, gold oxide, phthalo blue, rose madder. Littered across this dried bog of wasted paint were old paintbrushes, their bristles stiff and hard; empty tubes of paint, twisted into grotesque shapes; paint-smeared knives; empty turpentine bottles; grotty tea-towels; brown-stained cups and red-stained glasses; invitations to art galleries that had been folded into paper aeroplanes; crumpled art catalogues; piles of scrunched-up and discarded sketches; cigar butts; a silver champagne bucket filled with a foul sludge of filthy turpentine bristling with brushes; and stained dust sheets strewn like hastily shed clothes across the floor.

Against the walls were stacked hundreds of unfinished canvases, some stapled onto wooden frames, others rolled and set to lean drunkenly in the corners. One or two leant against the wall face out. There were the familiar bulging lines of Gayla’s curvaceous body, painted with broad, brutal, sweeping strokes, a heavy impasto of white, pink, purple, magenta. At times the paint had been applied so thickly it achieved a three-dimensional effect, as if Augusto had squeezed the paint directly out of the tube and on to the canvas. The shape on one of the paintings was smeared wildly as if Augusto had swept his hand across it in frustration.

At the far end of the studio was an old couch with a dishevelled blanket and pillow, where Augusto had taken to sleeping. Beside the couch was a collection of empty wine bottles, reeking with cigar butts, and a bottle of Courvoisier brandy, practically empty. Above the couch was a cork noticeboard with photographs, invitations to gallery openings and newspaper clippings pinned all over it. The only thing pinned up that did not commemorate his career was a quotation written in Augusto’s extravagant scrawl. It said ‘Art is the most frenzied orgy a man is capable of’, a quotation from the French artist Jean Dubuffet. Augusto thought the man’s paintings were a load of shit, but the sentiment was good.

Facing the couch, so it was the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he saw in the morning, was Augusto’s final painting. It had nothing of the loose, frenzied brushstrokes of the Gayla period, none of the white spaces. Although the paint was richly textured and layered, it looked as if each brushstroke had been planned and laid with careful deliberation, with a precise geometric architecture underpinning the arrangement, as deliberate as the use of colour and symbol. Like Augusto’s earlier works, it was strongly indebted to synthetic cubism, with the repetition of the circular shape of the moon, the face, the open palm of the dying woman’s hand. Every inch of the canvas was filled with subtle colour, painted with delicate brushstrokes. Orange flames writhed all over the woman’s pale body like coils of hair or red-bellied snakes. In her glazed, half-slitted eyes the flames were reflected like pin-points of desperation, the last embers of a life about to flicker out. The eyes were terrifying. It was a masterpiece, Sara knew it. Augusto’s swan-song.

She heard the crunch of gravel and the slow purr of an unfamiliar car engine, and managed to look away from the painting, though she did not get up. The firm tread of feet on the boards of the verandah, a confident knocking on the front door. Sara shrank back a little, hoping Gabriela would answer it and tell whoever it was to go away. The knock came again, louder and a little more impatient. Sara laid the painting-shirt down on the rumpled blanket, and walked carefully down the length of the room and out into the hallway.

A policeman and policewoman were waiting at the front door, which still stood wide open. Immediately Sara’s step faltered, her heart began to hammer. The police were very polite but somehow this only made them seem more dangerous. She answered all their questions with the faltering evasions, hesitancies, fluctuating colour and unsteady voice of the truly guilty, each blush and stammer discomposing her more. The police said it was only routine questions they had not been able to ask that morning. Sara thought she knew differently. They asked what Augusto was doing up on Towradgi Headland. They asked if Sara noticed anything unusual in his behaviour. They asked if he had any enemies. They asked to look around Augusto’s studio. They asked her about her uncle Alex. The guns at their belts frightened her. Their questions frightened her even more.

After they had gone, Sara hurried down to find Joe in the milking yards. He frowned at the sight of her.

Sara grasped his arm. ‘Joe, the police were here.’

‘I know, they’ve been poking around down here too. What did they want?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sara answered distractedly. ‘They asked all these questions. They don’t ask questions like that unless there’s something wrong, do they?’

‘No way, Sar,’ Joe replied wearily. ‘They always ask questions like that. Don’t you ever watch Cops?’

‘But they asked if he had any enemies.’

‘So? Pigs have got suspicious minds. That’s why they’re pigs.’

‘D’you think – maybe …’

‘No, I don’t, Sara.’

‘But …’

‘Try and get it through your thick skull that it was an accident. An accident, do you hear me? And Gus is going to be all right, he’s not dead, stop talking as if he’s dead. It can’t be murder, if he’s not dead.’

At last, the word was out. Such a crash of cymbals for such a mellifluous word. There was a long exclamation mark of silence.

‘It could be attempted murder,’ Sara said quietly.

Joe’s face shifted. He eased his voice. ‘Sar, no-one tried to kill Gus. You know how treacherous it is up there. He got caught in the storm – remember how quickly it came up and caught us all by surprise? He slipped over, and fell. It was an accident, all right.’

‘But, Joe …’

‘For God’s sake!’ Joe swung a large roll of wire out of the back of the truck onto his shoulder and walked away into one of the sheds. Matthew, stacking sacks of chaff, looked up as they came in. Sara surreptitiously tried to wipe her face clean of tear-stains, but he barely noticed her.

‘I reckon we should bring in all the cows from the back paddocks,’ Matthew said. ‘If there’s going to be another storm like last night’s, I’d rather have them near the house. Wanna give me a hand?’

‘Can’t. Gotta put the milkers through. They’re bleating the place down.’ Joe spoke with a terseness that showed his mind was elsewhere. Sara was disturbed to see how deep were the lines fanning his eyes. He shifted his shoulders wearily, ran his hand over his forehead and went back into the shed without another word.

‘You’ve got dirt on your face,’ Matthew said.

She put up her hand and rubbed at her forehead.

‘Not there.’ He rubbed his thumb gently along her cheekbone. She stepped back involuntarily, her skin burning where he had touched it. He smiled at her and she looked away, swinging her hair down over her face.

Thunder cracked right over their heads, a fluorescent zigzag of lightning striking down over the sea. She jumped, giving a little cry. So intense was the shock to her nerves it was as if the scorpion’s tail of lightning had stung her heel.

‘Storm’s coming in. Better get those cows in. Want to help me?’

Her instinct was to shake her head and shrink away, but the idea of going back to the house filled her with misery. At least out here she felt as if she could breathe. And she wanted to stay with Matthew. He seemed to radiate warmth and health like the sun. She did not know how to talk to him, she felt as awkward and self-conscious as she ever had in her life, but still she wanted to bask in that warmth. So she looked at him slantwise and nodded shyly.

They walked out of the shed. The air was thick and heavy, the sky the colour of over-ripe plums. Lightning cracked again. Matthew led the way into the lean-to, where the trail bikes were kept, pulling one out and straddling it with easy grace. Sara stopped. She had not known he meant to take out the trail bikes.

He turned at her hesitation. ‘You can ride behind me,’ he suggested.

Again she felt that delicate knife balance of decision, the desire to be close to him in equal and opposite force to the instinctive recoil of terror. She had exhausted her reserves of fear that day, however, having travelled through some kind of hellish valley of darkness. It was more habit than real anxiety that kept her standing so still and doubting.

‘All right?’

There was an awful moment of suspense.

‘OK.’ Slowly Sara lifted her dress and slid her leg across the seat of the motorcycle, holding her back stiff so her breasts would not touch Matthew’s back, which she could see through the loose armhole of his singlet. It was smooth and brown.

The thrum of the motor shook the trail bike, so she slithered forward and had to grasp his waist. She tried to hold on lightly, but it was an uncomfortable, bumping ride over the rutted track, the dogs mad with excitement. She had to hold on tightly to avoid falling off. He seemed to find each rut and pothole on purpose, so she was flung against him at every swerve and turn. All the way she was aware of his bare shoulder, so close to her mouth, and of the fluctuating space between her and the stony ground.

Thunder prickled the air. She watched the dogs round up the cows, the bike weaving and jolting back and forth to discourage any stragglers. One of the dogs, a kelpie-cross called Magic, had a second sense where cows were concerned. Sara watched her duck and swerve and creep along the ground, responding to Matthew’s piercing whistle by flattening her ears against her narrow skull.

‘Good dog, that one,’ Matthew said, as they skidded to a halt to watch the dogs work, the roar of the motorbike subsiding. The dogs knew their job well – they harried the cows into a tight miserable bunch that trotted obediently down the paddock.

The sun had slipped below the clouds, gilding the tops of the trees behind the house. Matthew took Sara up the hill towards the house, revving the engine so it roared. Sara clung to him with both arms, her cheek pressed against his back, filled with an exhilaration as intense and irrational as her terror had always been. He came to a screeching halt before the house in a spray of gravel.

‘Your royal residence, Your Highness,’ he said with a mock-bow.

Sara got off the back of the trail bike, her legs shaky, trying not to smile. The twins were sitting on the front steps, staring. They looked sullen and angry. Matthew did not ride away, but sat with the bike humming beneath him, watching. Sara could feel his eyes on her back.

‘Hey, boys, what’s happening?’ Sara sat down next to the twins, trying for ease.

‘We’re going to go down to the beach,’ Dylan said. ‘Gabriela wants a swim and Joe says he needs a surf.’

Sara thought of the oblivion of the sea. An intense desire to go down to the shore, away from the shadowy house, filled her. Sara was never afraid of water. Water was rapture. In that magical underwater world, where she drifted among reeds, tensions dissolved, uncertainties disappeared, she was graceful, she was free. She could stay under water for minutes, entranced by the eddies and currents that moved her at will, as much at home as the schools of bright little fish that darted or swayed still, darted or swayed still.

‘What a great idea. I could do with a swim, I’m all sticky.’ She looked at Matthew obliquely. ‘Do you want to come?’

He grinned. ‘Sure. I’m feeling sticky too.’

Sara flushed and looked away. Everything he said had a low undercurrent of knowing laughter. She wondered if he had noticed her watching him. She hoped not.

Sara stood up. ‘I’ll go get into my swimmers. Back in a min.’

‘No hurry,’ Matthew said amiably.

Up in her room Sara stood in front of the mirror for a long time, hating her long thin body, the loose faded Speedos that had been her school swimming costume. After a while she slipped down to Teresa’s room.

‘Want to come for a swim?’ she asked.

‘Nah.’ Teresa was lying on her bed, reading a magazine.

‘Can I borrow your bikini then?’

Teresa looked up. ‘What for?’ Then her eyes narrowed. ‘That Matt guy’s going too, isn’t he? Do you like him? You do!’

‘I don’t,’ Sara said.

Teresa ignored her, jumping up and rummaging about in the mess on the floor till she found her aquamarine bikini, still rather damp and sandy. ‘Here, take my sarong as well. Do you want to put some mascara on? It’s waterproof.’

Sara shook her head, feeling self-conscious as she pulled on her half-sister’s bikini.

‘You look hot,’ Teresa said, grinning.

Sara felt even more self-conscious when she looked at herself in the mirror. The bikini was very scanty indeed. But Dylan was calling her and so she went downstairs, trying to walk naturally.

Joe threw his surfboard in the back of the Dodge but Sara had had enough of machines for one day.

‘I’ll walk down,’ she said, not looking at anyone.

Matthew and Gabriela both said they would walk too. It was the first time Sara had ever not wanted her cousin’s company.

The tide was out, revealing a long, thin crescent of pebbly sand, much broken by rocks and little overhangs of cliff. At one end was the low headland below the house, covered in scrub and leaning out over the rock where Sara liked to sit and watch the sea.

At the far end was Towradgi Headland, a great dark bulk against the stormy sky. It looked like a frowning man in profile, with a low brow and thick lips. Like every local landmark, every oddly shaped hill, every split rock, every island, every waterfall, the headland had an Aboriginal myth to explain its formation. Nungeena, the artist who rented out Gunyan Cottage, had told it to them over lunch one day, the story of Towradgi, the grieving man.

‘It’s a Dreamtime story my aunts used to tell me,’ she had said. ‘Towradgi was once a man who lived round here. He had a beautiful young wife and they were very happy together. One day, Towradgi said to Millindoolah he was going hunting, while Millindoolah stayed and looked for bush tucker. He had a good day hunting and came home with some kangaroo, only to find Millindoolah missing.

‘He saw that she’d made camp and had plenty of good tucker and so he looked about to see what had happened to her. Up in the sky was a big storm with lots of lightning, and at once Towradgi knew that she had been taken by Bundoolah, the great storm spirit. Towradgi took up his spear and his woggerah and chased after Bundoolah, but the storm spirit threw bolts of lightning at Towradgi and pelted him with hail and caused the creeks to flood so Towradgi could not catch him.

‘Then Bundoolah came to the sea and, with Millindoolah struggling in his arms, went striding out across the waves, for storms can travel as fast across water as they can across the land. But Towradgi could not follow and so he dropped there, exhausted, on the edge of the ocean to grieve for his lost love. And there he remains today, always looking out to sea. And it’s true, I’ve seen it myself, how bad the storms are around it, as if Bundoolah comes back to taunt Towradgi.’

Whenever Sara saw the sphinx-like profile of the headland she remembered this story, for it did indeed look like a grim, brooding face set in stone. Remembering the story now she gave a little shiver and wondered if the headland was somehow cursed. A grieving man who caused grief to whoever looked upon it. It was a very unsettling idea.

The water was a strange luminous green, the colour of antique Coke bottles. Sara ran into the water first, wanting to hide her thin body in the waves, wanting to wash away the smell of the day. The twins had brought their boogie boards and slid along the wet sand as the rough waves curled over. ‘Be careful,’ Sara called. The beach had a rip that sometimes caught swimmers with frightening power. Bridget’s aunt had drowned here, many years ago, when she was just a little girl. Sara sometimes imagined she could see her, a girl in an old-fashioned neck-to-knee bathing costume and red hair like all the Hallorans.

Gabriela swam out to her, thighs huge and dimpled with cellulite below her orange swimming costume. Sara found it hard to look at her.

‘I made caldereta de pastor for dinner,’ Gabriela said. ‘Roast lamb always goes down well with boys.’

Sara smiled rather wanly.

‘The twins said the trip to the hospital didn’t go so well.’

‘No,’ Sara said wearily. ‘I’m glad I went, though, all things considered.’

There was a short silence. ‘Your dad not so good?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Sara gave a little shrug. ‘Miracles happen.’

‘Of course they do,’ Gabriela said warmly. ‘Remember Grandmama’s story about how Gus was born? Small and blue as a fish, and Mum had to cut the cord? If anyone can come out of this laughing, it’ll be Gus.’

Unable to answer, Sara stared out at the ocean. Between the stormy sky and the uneasy sea there was a thin line of pure, clear air. Lightning shivered along the horizon. There the water was shimmery-grey; under the storm clouds, it was purple-grey as a bruise; and here, by the shore, it was a pale, translucent green where the long, slanting rays of the sun struck through the waves. Like her with her father, the sea was at the mercy of the weather for its moods.

‘What do the doctors say?’ her cousin asked.

‘They don’t say much,’ she said at last, ‘things like “We’re monitoring his condition closely”.’

‘Well, that’s all they can say, really,’ Gabriela said comfortingly. ‘And they’re very good there, you know, it’s a good hospital.’

‘Gabriela, he was out all night!’ Sara cried. ‘He was hanging upside down for hours in that storm, blood just pouring out of his head!’

‘He’s in the doctors’ hands now,’ Gabriela said at last. ‘And in God’s.’

‘Oh, don’t talk to me about God.’ Sara dived into the green-illuminated wave, swam down to the sand and hung there, her eyes open. Her hair floated past like seaweed midst a spray of silver bubbles. Down here the world was strange and blue and empty. She remembered the fairy tale her grandmother had used to tell her. ‘There was a wondrous blue light down there,’ Consuelo always said. ‘You might suppose yourself high up in the air, with only the sky above and below you.’

Then the backlash of the wave thrust her into the thundery air, with a slap of water across her face. She was caught unawares by a wave, knocking her down, dragging her under. Sara tumbled into the shore, her hair wrapping about her throat, her arms flailing. Her foot found sand, and she thrust upward, gulping for air as her head broke above the water. Slowly she let the wave roll her over, and sank back below the water, the shore slipping away beneath her stomach. It was gloomy down there, rocks dark menaces rising from the pale sand. She felt the rip tug her away from shore.

Sara had often thought that most people seemed to live their life only splashing about in the shallows. But she … she was dragged down into the fathomless depths again and again, where no light struck and hideous monsters of the deep swam. She tried so hard to stay where she could touch the sand with her feet. But always she was swept out, always she was sucked under.

She turned on her side and struck out for shore, swimming diagonally to the rip. A wave caught her and she rode it in, letting herself be tumbled in the white water.

Her bikini pants were dragged down with sand. Squatting in the shallow waves, she washed out the sand. As if guessing what happened, Matthew dove into the water near her. Sara struggled to drag her pants up again.

‘Want some help?’ he asked, with a wicked, knowing grin.

Hastily she ducked behind Gabriela flushing with embarrassment.

Joe was surfing alone off the rocks, all his restless energy turned to grace. Dylan ran and dived through the water, bodysurfing into shore. Dominic sat on the sand, drawing with a stick, his head bent.

Thunder cracked and whistled to the south. The sun had dropped behind the ridge and all the colour had drained away from the water. It looked like one of Augusto’s ‘black’ paintings, gloomy and filled with menace.

‘It’s going to piss down,’ Matthew said. ‘D’you reckon we should go?’

Sara looked at him and nodded. She felt the drag of the tide on her legs and was suddenly aware of how very tired she was. Matthew turned and shouted to Joe, who lifted a hand and paddled his board around. It began to rain, cold and stinging against their faces.

‘Come on,’ Gabriela called, running out on to the beach.

Sara swam towards the shore, catching a wave that lifted her and carried her forward with a little surge. She did not want to think about her father. Climbing into the warmth and dryness of the truck, Sara dragged a T-shirt on over her swimming-costume and buried her face in a towel. The other door opened, and she looked up, startled, but it was Gabriela clambering in, hair plastered all over her face. She wrapped herself in her towel, saying, ‘Wow, it’s raining, it’s pouring!’

Matthew opened the door and slid in beside Sara, showering her with cold water. ‘The twins said they’ll walk home – they’re wet enough already and there’s not enough room in the truck for us all.’

She nodded and said nothing. He squinted at her. ‘You OK?’

She gave a little shrug.

‘Upset about your father?’

She nodded.

‘He’s pretty bad, is he?’

‘I think he’s going to die.’

He moved closer to her, so that their bare arms and legs touched, but did not say anything. She was glad he did not offer her platitudes.

Gabriela said something about when there’s life, there’s hope, but Sara hardly heard her. She concentrated on the warmth all along her other side.

Then Joe came at last, throwing his surfboard in the back. He clambered in behind the steering-wheel so that they were all crushed together in the front seat. Matthew shifted even closer to Sara, lifting his arm so it lay along the back of the seat. She was so tired she let her head lie back against it, and felt him press her closer, his arm cradling her neck.

It was almost dark. As they headed up the steep dirt track, the sun ahead was a livid red smear across the sky, the sea behind only a sound to unsettle them.

They drove in silence, the headlights lighting up the road before them. Once a rabbit bounded quickly out in front of them, its eyes a sharp green as it turned to stare at the mesmerising lights, before disappearing under the fence.

They drew up in front of the dark, empty house. Sara did not want to get out. Gabriela opened the car door and ran through the rain. Joe leapt out too, grabbing his surfboard out of the back. For the count of four heartbeats, Sara sat still, then she sighed, lifted her head, began to slide along the seat to get out. Matthew followed her.

‘Night,’ he said. ‘See you tomorrow, I s’pose.’

She nodded, though he would have had trouble seeing her in all the rainy darkness.

‘I’m sorry about your dad and everything,’ he said. ‘You’ll tell me if there’s anything I can do to help, won’t you?’

She gave a soft, inarticulate murmur, wishing that she could. But she was mute.

‘Light as a swallow pursued by her enemies, La Sirenita joined in the whirling dance. Everyone applauded her, for never had she danced so wonderfully. Her soft feet felt as if they were pierced by daggers, but she scarcely noticed. Her heart suffered far greater pain.’ Consuelo paused in her story, pressing both her hands against her own heart. ‘Oh, how I know that pain.’

‘What happened?’ Sara asked, sitting up in bed. ‘Did the prince see her dance? Did he see her pain?’

Consuelo shook her head. ‘The prince did not notice a thing. He danced with his bride, oblivious to the little mermaid, whirling about so gracefully on the dance floor. While La Sirenita danced as if she was full of joy, not despair. She knew that this was the last evening that she would ever see him. She had forsaken her home and family for him, she had sacrificed her voice and suffered such terrible torments, but he knew nothing of this. He saw nothing. The merrymaking lasted long after midnight, yet still she laughed and danced on, although it felt as if she was dancing on knives …’

Sara had always thought the story of the little mermaid was the saddest she had ever heard. Consuelo told it often. It never seemed to occur to her that it was a terrible, cruel story to tell a little girl. Indeed, she seemed to linger on the cruellest parts, the cutting out of the little mermaid’s tongue, the bloody footsteps she left behind her as she danced, how she had flung herself into the sea to drown when the prince had married another girl. Yet, when Consuelo told how the little mermaid was transformed in the end to a spirit of air, with a voice of such unearthly beauty no music could ever hope to match it, and how, at the end, she had at last been able to weep tears of joy, the old woman’s own voice quavered with some intense emotion, though whether it was joy or sorrow was impossible to tell. Of all the stories Consuelo told, it was this one which rang the loudest in Sara’s imagination and the one which she remembered most clearly.

Bridget did not like the stories Consuelo told. ‘They are so cruel,’ she said to Augusto once.

‘Life is cruel,’ he replied.

Bridget did not believe in magic, yet believed in miracles. She was scornful of her husband’s myriad superstitions, yet, whenever she was troubled, picked up and rubbed the rosary beads left coiled on her dressing-table. She laughed at Sara’s stories of ghosts, yet believed in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Every Easter and Christmas, she packed her four children into her car and took them to the small Catholic church in Narooma, where a faded priest told stories of doom and glory in a faded voice.

Sara tried hard to understand the paradox of angels and devils, heaven and hell, but was left only with the menace of there being a terrible fate for naughty children. And Sara was so often naughty, and tried so hard to be good.

Until the age of ten Sara went to St Agatha’s, a small Catholic day school for girls on the outskirts of Narooma. Her three brothers attended the boys’ Catholic school nearby. The three of them would saunter along the street from the bus stop with their friends, throwing rocks, rattling fences with sticks, teasing dogs through a gate. Sara trailed behind them dreamily, her school hat pulled on crookedly. She had no friends to walk to school with. There was something about her that invited bullying. Perhaps it was because she had no defences against unkindness. Even a giggling glance could be enough to make her flush and stiffen, her feet twisting together, tears smarting her eyes. A few well-chosen words and the tears would fall, which some of the girls found vastly amusing. It gave them a sense of power, which brought its own glow and satisfaction. And no-one wanted to be friends with the school victim.

After Bridget died, Augusto refused to celebrate Christmas anymore. For the first time in Sara’s life the festive season came and passed with no feast, no carols, no presents, no tree, no twinkling lights, no dim, quiet church with the priest chanting and the organs booming. Augusto would not even let them watch television because every channel had a Christmas special, every advertisement a Noël. Christmas passed in a stiff, cold silence.

However, it was not until Sara was preparing to go back to school that she realised how deeply her father’s new prohibition of religion ran. Sara had thought she was going to be a weekly boarder at a private Catholic school more than two hours’ drive away in Nowra, and so she had been looking forward to beginning the year. She wanted to go where no-one knew who she was or how her mother had died, or that her father had brought his long-time mistress to live in their house only a scant month after he had thrown his wife’s ashes off Towradgi Headland. She wanted to slide invisibly into the big pond of high school like a little tadpole, free of the constant teasing of the girls she knew.

However, when she began to chatter about the term ahead, Augusto told her curtly that she and Joe were to go to nearby Nargul High School, while Dominic and Dylan were to be sent to the local primary school with their new sister.

All four of Bridget’s children fought bitterly against his edict. Joe did not care which school he went to, but he felt Augusto was trying to erase Bridget’s memory and he blamed Gayla for the decision. Sara was terrified of strange boys, and dreaded going to the same school as all the girls who had made primary school such an ordeal for her. Dylan and Dominic were the most upset, for how were they to explain the sudden appearance of a sister who was only fifteen months younger than they were?

Bridget’s four children even decided to appeal to their decidedly unsympathetic stepmother, to no avail. Appealing to Gayla was like throwing a ball into a bed of eiderdowns and cushions – nothing returned. There was a curve of her cheek, a moistening of her lips with her tongue, a shifting of her thighs. ‘Your father has made up his mind,’ was all she said, their protests simply waved away.

So, much against their will, the Sanchez family attended the local public schools, where the scandal over Bridget’s sudden death and Augusto’s sudden re-marriage made the five Sanchez children very uncomfortable indeed. Augusto even forbade them to study divinity, asking the school to give them an hour in the library instead. They never went to the little white church again, not even for Bridget’s memorial service which the Halloran family held in angry opposition to Augusto’s wishes. That was when the feud between the Sanchez and the Halloran families really erupted – when Augusto refused to have Bridget’s body buried in the churchyard but threw her ashes into the sea-wind from the top of Towradgi Headland.

Augusto’s hatred for the Church only served to make his children more curious. Sara read books on the lives of the saints in secret, sick with fascination over the descriptions of burnings and mutilations, the martyrdom of countless believers. Sara trembled as she read, afraid her father might be wrong and that a God really did exist.

Joe’s rebellion was much more obvious, being one of rebellion against his father, not his father’s beliefs. He kept going to church, in defiance of his father’s order, and had to bear many furious diatribes in which Augusto worked himself into a lather of rage. He wore his mother’s cross around his neck, on a gold chain, and once tried to say grace before a meal. He only tried once.

After Bridget’s death, any affection Joe had for his father seemed to vanish. He was rude, made insinuating comments, was openly insulting to his stepmother, who merely yawned, and worst of all, tried hard to be accepted by his mother’s family.

It was one of life’s cruel ironies. Thin, dark-haired Joe, who never grew any taller than a shade under five foot, seven inches, wanted desperately for the Halloran family to like him. He fetched and carried for his uncle Alex and his two red-haired derisive sons. He tried hard to play football, and every year failed to make the grade. He made disparaging remarks about his father to Alex Halloran and received a repressive frown for his pains. For more than two years he went to church at Easter and Christmas, and his only reward was to have Craig Halloran cuff him on the ear when he walked past and for his uncle to once or twice notice and acknowledge him.

Joe was not to know that his thin frame, his hooked nose, his long hair, his narrow aquamarine eyes, his quick temper and easy boasting, his fits of restlessness, all reminded Alex Halloran of Augusto Sanchez. He was not to know that any reminder of Augusto Sanchez was salt to a suppurating sore. Yet Bridget’s other sons, who were stocky, freckled and sullen, and disliked their maternal relations, aroused no such bitter reminders in Alex’s mind. He was often kind to them, and sometimes asked them about school or football. Joe grew to hate being short, being olive-skinned, not having red hair.

The Hallorans did not like Augusto. They thought he was sly and oily and immoral. They did not like Joe either. They thought he was weak. They did not know how very difficult it was for him, living at home with his father, trying desperately to save the farm that his mother had loved.

He was constantly begging Augusto, almost in tears, to stop spending so much money. It had been the primary source of tension between father and son, Augusto’s never-ending extravagances. Expensive wine, cigars, brandy. Tubes and tubes of paint that were left lying about without their lids so the vivid colour within set hard. Subscriptions to high-priced art magazines that were never opened. Augusto’s lavish feasts made with rare and costly ingredients that had to be sourced from Sydney or Canberra – veal cutlets in pomegranate sauce, roast duck with figs, truffles in sherry and butter, artichokes stuffed with white pork sausages, roast goose with pears, soup made with lobsters, prawns, mussels, clams, squid, fresh saffron threads, cognac and cinnamon – sumptuous banquets cooked in the dingy old kitchen of a farm where no-one ever came, the remnants of which were fed to the dogs.

Money, money, they were always fighting over money. Joe had worked on the farm ever since he had left school, yet he never received regular wages. Augusto had been happy for Joe to manage the affairs of the farm, but would not surrender control of the income. So Joe had to ask Augusto to sign a cheque whenever he needed anything for the farm, and just hope that the cheque would not bounce. Towradgi had been a battleground, with Joe the perpetual loser.

Sara sometimes thought Joe loved the farm so much because it was like a shrine to their mother’s memory. After all, Towradgi was where Bridget had been born and where Bridget had died. When the bank had threatened to foreclose just before Christmas, Joe had been in despair and then, when Alex had taken over the mortgage and it looked like the farm might be saved, Joe had been ecstatic. Like Augusto, it was always sol y sombra with Joe.

The house smelt like it had been abandoned for years. As Sara opened the front door, a ghostly grey light spread through the front hall. She heard dust moving in wind-patterns, the sound of rain on the tin roof, the distant melancholy moo of a cow. Slowly she walked inside, turning on the light. The light did not fill the silence.

She ran up the stairs to her own little attic room. She could hear the wind rushing around the tower, and the drum of the rain on the tin roof. It sounded like poltergeists. She was cold, her hair dripping down her neck. She sat on the bed for several minutes before she could begin to change. She could not help thinking about Matthew. It made her restless. There was a strange twist deep in her stomach. Through her window beside her bed she could see the rain passing across the dark paddocks, the tall spears of the poplars bending and swaying on the far hill.

She wondered what Matthew thought of her. Did he think her pretty? She stared at herself in the mirror, seeing her nose springing like the prow of a ship. How could he? She did not think so herself.

Her bedroom was cold. It was a small room, rounded in shape, but with big windows on all sides. It had once been an attic, but Augusto gave it to Sara when Gayla and her daughter moved in, since the old house was then filled to the limits. It was so small there was only room for her bed, and a battered chest of drawers pushed between the windows. But Sara thought of it as sanctuary – while the lights were on.

As she stripped off the wet bikini she watched her body in the mirror, and thought how ugly it was. This upset her more than anything. Her thighs were mottled with cold, her pubic hair dark like the shadow of a hand. Her arms were frail and looked oddly jointed, her breasts small and pointed. Her ribs seemed about to pierce the skin.

Sara picked up her favourite blue T-shirt from the floor and dragged it over her head, hiding her body in its folds. Then she sat on her bed to pull on her tracksuit pants. When Sara glanced up, seeing herself in the dusk-dim mirror, her arms wrapped close against the cold and the misery, her wet hair snaking down over her shoulders, she was suddenly, sharply, reminded of the last painting she had ever made.

A horrible beast reared up in Sara’s throat so that she could not breathe or cry or even whimper. She did not want to remember her paintings.

It had been a self-portrait. She had painted herself chained to a throne sinking through the sea. Her black hair had undulated like snakes out from her head. Below her were the swirling shadows of the unfathomable depths of the ocean. A woman dressed in purple-black swam up from these depths, with one hand raised as if beckoning. The other hand rested on the sleek back of some kind of dark horned creature, a black narwhal or a marlin, an enigmatic sea-unicorn. Everything was drawn with great precision and outlined carefully in black, accentuating the sinuous, rippling shapes of hair, seaweed and swirling wave.

When Sara laid the final stroke of paint upon the canvas, she thought the painting thrummed with strange power, she felt it sang. She ran at once to show her father.

Her timing could not have been worse, Sara knew that now. The winner of the Archibald Prize for Portraiture had just been announced. Augusto was always intensely interested in the outcome of the prize, sometimes applauding it, usually reacting with outrage and scorn. If he had submitted one of his own paintings and it had not even been chosen to hang in the exhibition, he succumbed to a prolonged and black depression.

That year the Archibald had been won by a painting Augusto disdained as an exercise in photo-realism. His children had been subjected to long, drunken raves about the stagnant and sterile state of art in Australia. Augusto had taken it as a personal insult and brooded about it for weeks.

Sara should never have shown him her painting. Augusto had stared at it for a moment, then turned away, lifting his lip in an incredulous sneer. ‘Christ, Sara! You have got to get a life!’

She had been chilled and afraid. ‘What do you mean? Don’t you think it’s any good?’

He had laughed. ‘A head shrinker would have a field day with you, princess. Talk about Freudian!’

Mutely she had stared at him. Augusto cast his eyes skyward. ‘Look at yourself, princess! You think you can be an artist? You can’t even go into town to do the grocery shopping. What do you know of life? You’re nothing but a frigid little virgin that’s still afraid of the dark! You’d pee in your pants if a man even looked at you.’ He gave a hard crack of laughter. ‘Art is not a pastime but a priesthood,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘You need courage, conviction, passion. None of which you have, my dear.’

Sara felt as if he had struck her on the face. She crept up to her bedroom and lay on her bed for a long time, numb with pain. Later, she got up, picked up her scissors and slashed all her paintings to pieces. Then she gathered the bright jagged ribbons, took them down to the garden, and burnt them in the corner near the compost-heap. Any ashes that did not blow away on the wind, she dug through the compost until not even one bright flake was left. She had not picked up a paint-brush since then, or begged her father for an old canvas, or even doodled in the corner of the local newspaper with a pencil. It was as if her desire to paint had been cauterised within her.

Sara stood up and moved away from the mirror. She ran downstairs through the darkness and the constant wash and sigh of rain. When she saw the little glow of warm light from the living room, she surprised herself with a sob of relief.

Gabriela had lit the gas heater, pulled the curtains, turned on the table lamp, and made tea. She and Sara sat quietly in the goblin shadows, in silence at first, and then, gradually, talking of little things. Gabriela was thinking of moving to Canberra or Sydney. She wanted to get a job in one of the big-name restaurants, learn to cook quail and truffles, maybe open her own five-star restaurant one day. Sara could only admire her confidence.

Emboldened by the little circle of warm comfort, Sara told Gabriela about their Good Friday lunch, the argument between her father and her uncles, and how Alex had threatened to foreclose on them.

‘He gave us the weekend to get out, but surely he won’t chuck us out now Dad’s in hospital?’ she asked with difficulty, and felt the easement that came with the confession of a tightly suppressed anxiety.

‘Surely not,’ Gabriela replied. ‘Alex can’t be that much of a bastard, surely?’

Sara, remembering his arctic-grey eyes, was not so sure.

Just then there was a hammering at the door. Sara jumped as if she had been stuck with a pin. ‘God! Who could that be?’

It was her cousin Craig. He stood on the front porch, shaking his wet red curls, and holding his rain jacket away from his body. Puddles were forming under his feet.

‘It’s pissing down!’ he cried. ‘Could the weather be any worse?’

Silently she held the door open. He took off his jacket, shook it out, and came inside.

‘What’s up?’ Sara asked.

‘Oh, nothing,’ he answered. ‘Dad’s checking over some accounts down in the office and I was getting bored waiting for him, so I thought I’d come up and say hi.’

Sara stared at him in surprise. She could not remember her cousin ever dropping by casually. He walked past her into the living room, spread his dripping jacket over the back of a chair, and sat down in one of the armchairs close to the heater. He seemed rather ill at ease, rubbing his hands together, nodding and smiling at Gabriela.

‘Cold, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Hasn’t the weather been bloody awful!’

‘Awful,’ Gabriela agreed politely.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Sara asked rather ungraciously.

Craig glanced at his watch. ‘A beer wouldn’t be bad,’ he said. ‘I’ve been up since dawn, though God knows why – the rain is keeping all the terrorists indoors and the fish aren’t biting.’

Sara could think of nothing to say. Luckily, Craig did not expect a response and continued easily: ‘How’s your dad? Bit of a bummer, hey? Any news?’

Sara shook her head.

‘Do they reckon he’ll be OK?’

Sara shrugged.

‘Did he say what happened? I’ve heard all sorts of stories but no-one really seems to know.’

‘What kind of stories?’ Sara demanded.

Craig hesitated, then his natural candour won out and he said in a rush, with a sort of incredulous pleasure, ‘Well, some people think he might have jumped, because he was going to lose the farm and he had nowhere to go and no money … I suppose you must know Dad told him he was going to foreclose?’ He gave Sara a sly sidelong look, half-malicious, half-apologetic. ‘He wouldn’t have, of course, he was just trying to get your dad to pay back some of his debt, but people who don’t know Dad that well think he was serious, which of course he wasn’t.’

Sara’s look of astonishment deepened. She found this hard to believe. Alex had seemed serious.

Craig gave a forced-sounding laugh. ‘And at the club today some idiot was going on about how they’d always reckoned Gus was gonna get murdered some day, ’cause he’s got so little respect for other people’s women …’

‘Interesting to know you think of women as being someone’s property, Craig,’ Gabriela said sardonically. Sara said nothing, gritting her teeth together.

He shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t mean it that way …’ He gave that unnatural-sounding laugh again.

‘Go on, Craig, what else have you heard?’ Sara was proud of herself, her voice steady, even her stomach only shaking a little.

‘Oh, nothing. We were … that is, I was just wondering if there was any more news? On what had happened, I mean. No-one wants that kind of talk about. I mean, Gus is family, sort of. I mean, you guys are, even if Gus isn’t.’

Sara could not help feeling a little sick. All day she had been worrying over the idea that her father might have been having an affair with someone, and wondering who it was. Now, as Craig got himself more and more tangled up, she gripped her fingers together, feeling the all-too-familiar thud of fear in her gut. Was Augusto involved with a married woman, like Matthew had said? Could a jealous husband have tried to harm her father? Clang clang went the word in her mind. Murder …

‘So what do you think, Craig?’ Gabriela asked.

‘Oh, it had to be an accident, of course. What else? We won’t really know till he wakes up – he hasn’t, has he?’

‘He’s still unconscious.’ Sara stared at him. All this cousinly concern seemed so unlike the Craig she knew and disliked. ‘But the doctor said he’s stabilised. What’s this all about, Craig? Why all this interest?’ She was surprised by her own vehemence.

Craig shifted awkwardly. ‘You don’t understand Dad’s side of it,’ he said after a while. ‘He wants to do what’s best for you all. Someone’s gotta look after things while your dad’s in hospital.’

‘It’s not his farm, Craig.’ Sara’s voice was thin and sharp.

‘The farm was Bridget’s, not your father’s!’ Craig retorted immediately, thrusting his head forward angrily. ‘He had no right to just take it over like that.’

‘Got no right! Mum left it to him, and to us. It was her farm – Grandpa gave it to her. She could leave it to anyone she wanted!’

Craig tried to explain. ‘You gotta understand, this is where Dad grew up. And he’s never really got over Bridgie dying like that and just giving the farm away …’

Sara jumped up. ‘Well, who has got over it? Who has? She was my mother, remember! We were the ones left all alone! Who was she meant to leave the farm to? Of course she left it to Dad! And now he’s the one dying, he’s the one lying in hospital in a coma, and you come round here complaining about the fact we’re living in your dad’s precious childhood home. Well, it’s our home now, Craig, it’s our home.’

She turned and stood staring out the window, trying to control her tears.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ Craig said awkwardly. Sara did not reply. He went on, dogged as a bull. ‘It’s just no-one seems to understand Dad’s side of it. I mean, this was where he grew up and his father too …’

‘Wasn’t that rather a long time ago?’ Gabriela said coldly.

‘Well, yes, but this place was in the Halloran family for generations,’ Craig said eagerly. ‘It’s a prime piece of property! Bridget had no right leaving it away from the family like that. When Grandad said she could live here, it was only because she had nowhere else to go – she was meant to be leaving Augusto, not bringing him down here with her! Grandad would never have wanted Bridget to just give it away like that! It should have stayed in Halloran hands. And just look at the place!’ He gestured round the dingy room, exotic flowers of damp blooming all over the walls. ‘It’s such a waste.’

‘I thought you guys reckoned there’s no future in cows anyway,’ Sara said bitterly. ‘You’ve got your grog shop and your boat, what do you want with Towradgi anyway?’

Craig laughed. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ he said. ‘Don’t you realise what this property is worth? You’ve got your own beach, for Christ’s sake! Do this place up, turn it into a B & B, put some cabins down on the flat, maybe a caravan park. Don’t you realise tourism is where the money is these days? Cows! You guys just don’t get it!’ He made an exclamation of disgust.

Sara stared at him with blackly dilated eyes. ‘That’s what you want it for,’ she said softly. ‘That’s why Alex took over the mortgage. You always meant to turn us out and take it over. How could we have been so blind?’

She heard a soft noise from near the door and lifted her gaze. Joe was standing in the doorway. He was freshly showered and changed, his long black hair combed back from his forehead. In one hand he held a beer can. He was gripping it so tightly beer was frothing up and over the sides. His thick, dark brows were locked together over his eyes.

‘Joe,’ she cried, trying to calm him.

Craig jerked round. Colour surged up his bull neck.

‘You bastard,’ Joe said and put his beer down on the coffee table, advancing on his cousin.

‘Who’s calling who a bastard, you little runt!’ Craig said contemptuously.

Quite unexpectedly, Joe lunged at his cousin, catching him off-guard with a blow to the side of his head. Craig immediately retaliated, and being much bigger and stockier than Joe, got in a few hard blows before Sara caught hold of his arm and dragged it back.

For a few moments all was noise and confusion. Joe bent over, holding his stomach, retching. ‘You bastard!’ he managed to say.

‘How dare you!’ Sara screamed at her cousin. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing!’

‘It’s not my fault!’ Craig said defensively. ‘He hit me first. I don’t know what’s the matter with him. He just snapped!’

‘You and your fucking father!’ Joe said. ‘I should’ve known, I should’ve known! Fucking Halloran charity. You were just trying to get your claws in as deep as you could …’

‘If Dad hadn’t taken over the mortgage the bank would’ve foreclosed by now,’ Craig said. ‘You’d all be on the streets if it wasn’t for us.’

‘Oh, that’s a lie,’ Joe shouted. ‘Another fucking lie! I’ve worked my arse off keeping this place afloat, things were coming good, if I’d just had a bit more time, if Gus had just pulled his neck in, we would have come good, everything would have been all right …’

‘You’re a dreamer, Joe,’ Craig said nastily. ‘Head in the clouds. A snag short of a barbecue, the lot of you. Bad blood, my dad says.’

Gabriela stood up. ‘That’s enough!’ she said. ‘Get the fuck out of here, you cretin, else I’ll give you a kick in the balls you’ll never forget.’

Craig was taken aback. He cast one look at her large and determined face and took an involuntary step away. Joe gave a laugh that was perilously shaky near the end.

‘Stop it! Stop it! All of you stop it!’ Sara cried. She shook Craig’s arm angrily. ‘This is a living room, not a boxing ring!’ She pushed him towards the door. ‘Go home! You may think you own us but the game’s not over yet, Craig Halloran. Once we sell Dad’s painting, we’ll be able to buy you and your horrible father out three times over.’

‘As if!’ he sneered. ‘Who would want to buy it?’

‘It’s a masterpiece, Craig, an absolute masterpiece. And if Dad dies, it’ll be his last ever painting. It’ll be worth a fortune!’ She waved her hand at the paintings covering the walls. ‘They’ll all be worth a fortune!’

Craig glanced up at Circus Rider incredulously, but his confidence was shaken, they could all see it in the uneasy movement of his head and shoulders, in the shamefaced scowl on his face. He picked up his jacket but did not move away. ‘Yeah, but your father’s not going to die, is he?’ he said at last, with an odd note of anxiety in his voice.

‘What do you care?’ Joe jeered.

The unexpected vulnerability in Craig’s voice and face had moved Sara, though. She said, rather shakily, ‘I hope not, Craig.’

‘You’re not to worry about the farm,’ he said with the same strange, soft, anxious tone. ‘Dad won’t be foreclosing on you with your dad in hospital and all. I’m sorry I told you that stuff about the B & B. It’s just an idea, that’s all. I wouldn’t want you to think we were going to chuck all you out.’

‘OK,’ Sara said rather uncertainly, puzzled by this sudden shift in manner.

Craig looked as if he wanted to say something else, but then evidently changed his mind, for he shrugged. ‘Better go,’ he said. ‘Dad’ll be wondering.’

Once he was gone, Sara sat down limply on the couch, lifting her palms in a gesture of bewilderment. ‘What was all that about?’

‘Bizarre,’ Gabriela said.

‘I should’ve known Alex had some ulterior motive for buying up the mortgage,’ Joe said miserably, sitting down with a sigh and reaching for his beer. ‘To think I was grateful!’

‘All Craig’s talk of his dear sweet father’s yearning for his childhood home and what they really want is to turn it into a B & B,’ Gabriela said.

‘A bloody caravan park,’ Joe groaned. ‘Bloody Hallorans.’

Sara looked at him in some surprise. Though this catchphrase was uttered frequently by the rest of the family, she had never heard Joe say it before.

‘I can’t believe you’d try and punch Craig out,’ Sara said, her voice quivering with an hysterical giggle.

Joe shot her an angry look. He tapped a cigarette out of the packet and lit it, the flame shaking.

The twins came in, dressed now in their tracksuit pants and clean T-shirts, but with their red hair still wet and slicked off their freckled faces. ‘What was all that shouting? Sounded like a fight was going on.’

‘It was,’ Gabriela replied dryly. ‘Joe and Craig had a bit of a disagreement.’

‘Fighting with everyone this weekend, Joe?’ Dylan said with a malicious edge to his voice. ‘Funny fighting with Craig. I thought you loved the Hallorans.’

Joe shot him a foul look, drained his beer dry and stood up. ‘I’m going to go get another beer,’ he asked. ‘Anyone want one?’

‘I will,’ Gabriela said, ‘for sure. Just what I need.’

‘Yo!’ Dylan said. ‘We will. We wanna get drunk. We wanna get pissed as farts. It’s been a bloody awful day.’

The first mouthful of beer was, as always, the best. Sara felt tension ebbing out of her, and leant back in her chair with her feet on the coffee table. She had to be careful where she put them, for there were two plates with the remains of vegemite toast on them, and two dirty coffee cups.

‘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 boys 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.

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 at 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 beyond 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.

But one day could be a long time away. And now, this day, was so close, was pressing upon her with its terrible truth, death, blood, storm, so she could hardly breathe with pain and doubt. Always the breathlessness the knowledge of time pouring away from her time outpacing her to be caught to be out-run leaning into the abyss. Her heart beat faster and faster pulses beat in her throat in her temples. The roof was far above her she was fixed on the bed motionless watching breathing listening to her life pour out of her waiting for the dream.

Sara’s dreams frightened her. They seemed to speak to her in a language she no longer knew. Many times there was darkness, tree branches flashing white, a car racing forward. Many times there was fire. Once she dreamt she gave birth to a fiery child, its eyeballs shimmering with heat. She dreamt birds beat around her head, gouging at her eyes. She dreamt she woke to find all her family had disappeared and Towradgi was empty, its rooms echoing, cobwebs draping from the staircase.

Sometimes Sara’s dreams were so vivid, they came back to her in waking hours and haunted her with their indecipherable hieroglyphics. It seemed as if ghosts swarmed in the darkness around her bed. Her mother often came, incandescent. A man hanging from a rope with his neck askew and his face black. A grim-faced man with a stick that he would bang on the floor, a young girl with dripping red hair and a white face.

‘A stick of cinnamon is the secret,’ said a little old woman dressed all in black. ‘It must be hot and sweet and salty, the zarzuela, like the summer sea, like pasión.’

Or she would whisper, ‘Have you lost courage?’ Sometimes, then, the ghost of Sara’s grandmother would go on telling the story as she had done so many times when Sara was a little girl and scared of the dark. The sibilant voice would whisper in the darkness, ‘Put out your little tongue and I will cut it off.’ So the little mermaid put out her tongue and the witch cut it off so she was dumb, and could neither sing nor speak. And then the witch gave her the potion, which looked like the clearest of sparkling water.

Other times, though, the voice would ask, ‘Have you lost courage?’ and it would not be the cruel jibe of the sea-witch, but a true question, asked with tenderness. Then she would say, ‘It’s thyme you need, thyme is best for courage.’ Or maybe she meant time. Time heals all wounds. Time and tide waits for no man. How was Sara to know? For in the shadowy subterranean world of dreams, everything is changed, distorted, transfigured. Time itself is fluid, and memory.

Dreams were the dark undertow of Sara’s life, they dragged her under to drown.

That night, floating on waves of gin, Sara dreamt she heard her father calling her name. ‘Sara, Sara, where are you, princess? Sara?’

She tried to call back but she was suddenly and strangely mute. No matter how hard she tried, she could make no sound. She began to run, looking for her father, following his voice. She ran down the stairs, looking in all the rooms. As she came down the stairs to the landing, she caught a glimpse of her father in the mirror. He was standing at the door, his face turned away from her. In art, this position was called profil perdu, or the lost profile. She tried to call out again, but her vocal cords were strangled. She tried to run faster but it was as if she was running through quicksand. As she stumbled down on to the landing and swung herself by the banister on to the last flight of stairs, she saw her father walking out the front door. Desperately she called to him, her silent scream futile. He shut the door behind him. Sara threw herself down the stairs and across the entrance hall. Her hand was on the knob, she turned it and flung open the door. Outside it was sunset, the whole hillside blazing with orange light. The leafless poplars looked as if they were on fire, the sea was molten lava. She could see for miles and miles and miles, across winter-sere paddocks, across the effulgent sea, into the great sunset-coloured sky. There was no sign of her father.

He was gone.

Sea-Change

low tide – 0.5 m

6.23 am, Easter Sunday

high tide – 1.1 m

12.20 pm, Easter Sunday

The shrill peal of the front doorbell woke her.

Sara swam up through thick veils of nightmares, hearing the doorbell ring again and again. The closer she came to consciousness, the more aware she was of the desperate dryness of her mouth, the pounding of her pulse in her temple. She half-fell out of bed and stumbled to her door, hardly able to see past the waves of multi-coloured lights beating against her retinas. All the way down the stairs she banged from wall to banister, one hand holding her head, the other groping for obstacles she could not see with her eyes blinded with dizziness.

At last she reached the front door and opened it, leaning against it for support. It took a moment for her vision to clear enough for her to see her aunt, Maureen.

Sara stared in bewilderment. ‘Maureen. What are you doing here?’ It was hard to talk with her mouth so dry, and she tried to swallow, to bring saliva to moisten her throat.

Maureen spread her hands helplessly. She was wearing no makeup. Sara had never seen her aunt without makeup. Her skin looked like an old, dried chamois. Her eyelashes were short, red and stubby, her mouth completely colourless. Even her throat under her chin was freckled. She had dyed her hair blonde since the last time Sara had seen her. Sara tried to remember when that had been. After Bridget’s death. Maureen had come to the house after the memorial service Augusto would not allow any of the children to attend. She had stood on the verandah, just where she was standing now, and said to Augusto with the hiss of contempt in her voice, ‘You mean you’ve had a bastard on the side all these years?’

‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’ Sara glanced out at the dim sky. A kookaburra was jeering maliciously out in the bush. ‘What time is it?’

‘I just need to know … how is he? No-one will tell me.’

‘Dad?’ Sara asked.

Her aunt nodded.

‘He … it’s not good.’ Sara pressed her fingers against her temples. Her headache was so severe she thought she might pass out. ‘But … he’s stabilised.’

‘Thank God.’ Maureen put out one hand to steady herself on the doorjamb.

Sara stared at her. On one cheek she saw the shadow of a bruise. Bile rose in her throat.

‘Why do you care?’ she asked. ‘I thought you Hallorans all hated Dad.’

Maureen looked away. ‘I never hated him.’

‘And why come here? Why not ask Alex for news? He’s been here practically all weekend, making plans for what he’ll do with the place once it’s his. Why not ask him how Dad is?’

Ugly colour rose in her aunt’s cheeks. She did not answer.

‘Have you been screwing my dad?’ Sara asked.

‘Sara! What kind of question is that?’

‘A fair one, I think. Dad was having an affair with someone … and your loving husband and brother were here on Friday, shouting at him. Did they find out? They must’ve been so angry.’

Tears welled up in Maureen’s eyes. She scrubbed at her face with her hands. ‘No. I … I’m just concerned. I wondered how you were all getting along.’

‘So kind of you to come and inquire,’ Sara said.

Maureen’s cheeks flushed even redder.

‘When did it start?’ Sara said. ‘Let me guess. New Year’s Eve?’

Her aunt’s eyes flew up to meet hers. ‘How … how do you know?’

‘Dad started painting again. He cooked for us. He … he was happy.’

Maureen’s lips curved. ‘He was?’

‘For a little while.’

Maureen drooped again. ‘He was happy,’ she whispered. ‘We were both so happy.’

Sara could not speak. She felt sick and giddy.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Maureen hurried on. ‘We didn’t want anyone to find out. I know what you must think. But it wasn’t like that, we loved each other, we couldn’t help it, it just happened.’

‘Nothing just happens,’ Sara said.

‘But … it was greater than both of us.’

‘That’s always the excuse, isn’t it?’ Sara hated this woman with her lined, freckled face and dyed hair. How could her wild and moody father, her great and fantastical father, have loved such an ordinary woman?

‘You don’t understand …’ Maureen said.

Sara remembered barbecues on Sunday afternoons, with Maureen helping Bridget make the salad, the two of them drinking gin and tonics as the shadows crept across the lawn. She remembered Maureen standing on the step the day after Bridget’s memorial service, with great red pouches under her eyes, accusing her father.

‘No, I don’t,’ she answered, through the pounding of her head.

Maureen grasped Sara’s arm. ‘I loved him,’ she said. ‘God, I left my husband for him.’

More than three months, Sara thought. And I never knew.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Maureen said, misunderstanding the recoil on Sara’s face. ‘We never meant it to happen like this. I’ve always … we used to talk all the time, you know, we’ve always been friends. I never thought … I never blamed him, y’know, for Bridgie’s death.’ Sara jerked her arm out of Maureen’s grasp, but her aunt went on talking. ‘We hadn’t seen each other for such a long while, after the accident and the trouble over the farm. I … often wanted to. And then we met, quite by chance, at a party in Batemans. We went swimming together in the bay.’

Clear waves and ripples ran across her face. Sara saw the luminance of the moon-lit bay in her eyes, the sound of the waves falling in darkness and the great dark underswell, concealing, concealing.

‘Didn’t you realise Dad only slept with you for revenge?’ Sara did not want to hear about him and her, did not want to imagine their bodies gliding together through the moon-chiffon water.

Maureen fell back a step, searched her face for some expression, then said, ‘No, you don’t understand. He loved me too, can’t you accept that?’

Sara felt like slapping her.

Oblivious, Maureen continued: ‘I came to the headland nearly every day, I couldn’t keep away. He’s painting me, you know. He said it’ll be his greatest work.’ A child-like pride rang in her voice. Sara could barely contain her contempt. ‘He’d paint, we’d eat, and drink up there in the sun. I always brought the most wonderful picnics: smoked salmon, chicken salad, pâté, caviar. He loved food like that, he loved to be indulged.’

He’s my father, Sara thought. I know what he likes!

‘Please believe me,’ Maureen was saying. ‘I love your father. I’d have gone anywhere, done anything.’

‘Your brother-in-law?’ The intensity of her hatred surprised Sara, who had always liked Maureen the best of all the Hallorans. ‘Your only sister’s husband?’

Maureen sat on the old cane chair against the wall, dabbing away her tears with a tissue. She lifted her splotched face to Sara, saying distractedly, ‘Yes, yes. It didn’t matter, don’t you see? Bridgie was dead, what did it matter to her? She’d want me to be happy, she’d want me to look after him, he needs me …’

‘Oh, bullshit! Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!’ Sara did not know whether to sob or rage, whether to hit her aunt with her fists or run away. ‘I should have known – why didn’t I guess? You’ve always lusted after him, haven’t you? I bet you were sleeping together when Mum was still alive. Your own sister! It’s dirty. I can’t believe it.’ Maureen tried to speak over the top of her but Sara was in a sort of rhythm, suspicions scrambling over and over in her mind. ‘So he was painting you, was he? Is that what he told you? Did he ever show you what he was painting?’

Her father’s mistress shook her head, and opened her mouth as if to say something. But Sara’s question of ‘Would you like to?’ cut across her, and so she just nodded.

Sara took her into her father’s dark studio, switching on the light, blinking in its cruel brightness. Her headache was so powerful it was like a pneumatic drill inside her skull.

Together they stared at the painting swimming in the darkness at the unlit end of the room. The voluptuous lavender body sprawled carelessly across the canvas, the languid hand with its round palm, the slitted eyes reflecting fire, the long coiling snakes of hair dissolving into smoke. And above, the great, dark, brooding profile of Towradgi Headland staring out to sea.

‘It’s a portrait of Mum,’ Sara said. ‘He wasn’t painting you – he was painting Mum. He only used you ’cause you looked like her. He didn’t want you really, he just wanted a model for his painting. I bet he broke up with you yesterday. You saw him in the morning, didn’t you? When he came home for lunch, he was all worked up, he was all edgy and excited. He said it was rage the painting was missing, rage and despair. That’s what you were feeling, isn’t it? Rage and despair.’

Her aunt slowly moved towards the painting, through the wall of light and into the shadows beyond. Sara again felt as if time was being stretched, so that she could not tell if many minutes passed or only a heartbeat. Maureen stared at the painting, seemed to stare deep into the dying embers of her sister’s eyes. There was no mistake. Augusto had painted the scene of his wife’s death, the uncoiling column of smoke, the broken shards of her car, her flame-encased body finally surrendering at the foot of Towradgi Headland, which stared out to sea like a man turned to stone by grief.

‘He loved me,’ Maureen said, but her voice was broken.

‘He didn’t love you! You were convenient. Dad didn’t like to paint from memory or photographs, he said it never looked real. He always painted from life, and he couldn’t, could he? Mummy was dead, and so you thought you could have him for your own. How long have you been trying to seduce him? Did you sleep together when Mummy was still alive?’

‘No.’

‘What did he do, tell you it was over? Were you up there yesterday? Did Dad tell you he’d finished the painting? Did he tell you he never wanted to see you again? You could have done it! You could have pushed him over that cliff.’

‘No, no, I loved him,’ Maureen said. ‘I loved him more than life itself. I’d never harm him.’

‘You sound like something out of a trashy novel,’ Sara said cruelly. Maureen came towards her again, crossing through the beam of light. She hardly glanced at Sara, putting out one hand as if to push her away as she moved into the hallway towards the front door. ‘I loved him,’ she said. ‘I would never have hurt him. Can’t you see? I’d kill myself before I’d kill him.’

‘Did you see him yesterday? Were you up at the headland?’

Maureen nodded her tousled head. ‘I met him there in the morning. He was cruel. He said it was no use, the painting wasn’t working, it was a waste of time. You were right. He said it was over, that it was no good, that he didn’t want to see me anymore.’

‘I knew it!’ Sara said.

Her aunt went on quickly, ‘But I said I knew he didn’t mean it. He said some awful things, he even hit me in the face when I said I’d never let him go. I told him I’d given up everything for him, that I’d thrown Harry out …’

‘So Harry did know about your affair.’

‘Not from me! You must be joking! How could I tell Harry about Gus? He would have told Alex and you know how Alex feels about your father … he would have killed me! No, I’d only told Harry I needed some space …’

‘So how did Alex and Harry know about it?’ Sara wondered.

‘I don’t know. I’d never have told them.’

‘So what happened after Dad broke up with you?’

‘But he didn’t, not really. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I was really angry, I was screaming at him, and suddenly he just changed. He laughed and kissed me, and said he loved it when I got angry, that it was all right, he knew what had been wrong. I was too happy, he said. I looked too contented. He didn’t want contentment. We made love after that, hard, angry love, and then he went for a swim …’

Sara remembered how her father had come singing up the path, his pony-tail plastered to his back. Just a little orange pointillism …

She felt sick and angry. She wanted to smash something. Dad had been up on Towradgi Headland with her, all that time …

‘What happened then?’

‘I stayed at Towradgi Headland, like he’d told me to. He said he’d come back after lunch and bring his easel. He said he had to go home, so he could finish his painting, but he’d be back, and would sketch me some more. I was his muse, he said. I was so happy. I thought about the future – I thought we could get married, maybe.’

Sara closed her eyes.

Her aunt talked on. ‘But after a couple of hours Gus came back. He was angry. He accused me of telling Harry. He told me that Alex had threatened to throw you all out of the farm. I said it didn’t matter, we could still be together. He laughed at me and told me that would never happen. He was finished with me. It was getting all dark and stormy. I could hear the thunder. Then it began to rain. He wouldn’t come away, though.’

Maureen paused, pressing both hands to her face. She went on, her voice muffled, ‘I was upset … I ran away, got in my car, drove home. I almost had a crash, practically drove into that old truck of yours. It was raining so hard and I was crying so much I could hardly see the road. I remember wondering if that was how Bridgie came to drive off the road. Maybe he made her cry that much too.’

Sara did not want her mother to be mentioned. Her head felt hot and so full of blood it was as if something was about to burst. ‘You almost ran into the truck?’ she said. Maureen nodded. ‘Who was driving?’ she asked.

Maureen shrugged a shoulder. ‘Couldn’t see. It was raining and I was crying. I didn’t really look.’

‘And Dad?’ Sara managed to say. ‘Where was Dad?’

‘That’s the last time I saw him. I swear he was alive and unhurt then! I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt your father, you must believe me. I love him and he loves me! He said he’s never felt that way about anyone before …’

‘And you believed him?’

Tears welled up in Maureen’s eyes. She hurried out of the studio. Sara followed her, wanting to say something, wanting to say she was sorry. But Maureen had run to her car and got in, slamming the door behind her. Her car started with a jerk, and skidded away, and Sara was left alone by the front door.

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 steal 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?

The rain beat at her and she lifted her face to it. On a sudden impulse, she stripped off her clothes. She hesitated a moment in her underwear, before recklessly undoing the strap of her bra and pulling down her underpants. Naked she stood on the shore, the cold rain beating against her, seagulls calling weirdly as they rose and fell in the waves of wind. Then she dived into the cold sea foam.

The current off the shore was disturbingly strong. She floated in the waves, light as driftwood, rising and falling with the pale green water. One perfectly curved wave, flecked with foam like a horse’s arched neck, lifted her and carried her to shore with a whoosh like flying. She cried out with joy and dived back into the waves, the undertow at once seizing her with its dragging force. Again and again she rode the waves to the shore, rolling against the sand in the foam, diving out again through the swell. She laughed and swam towards the far dim shape of Montague Island, her eyes stinging with salt. Inexorably, though, the current dragged her back towards the rocks at the south end and for a while she let it carry her, rocking her like the arms of a mother. How easy just to sink below the waves. It would be like sleeping, the sleep of a child, without nightmares, like day-dreaming, so soft to slip into, so salty-sweet and soft. She closed her eyes and lazily swam with the current, just a few strokes, just to feel the sea and storm in harmony with her, the deep organ music of the ocean in her ears. Then she opened her eyes and began to swim for the shore. It was a hard battle. The sea was her enemy, clawed waves dragging her down. Unexpected currents seized her legs, spun her around, dumped her under so her hair was in her mouth. She swallowed water, saw darkness in her eyes.

Just as her arms and legs were tiring, the shore still too far away, she saw a large swell coming, rearing up out of the wild crisscross of currents. She propelled herself forward and felt the wave rise beneath her. She cried aloud in delight as the wave swept her towards the shore, flinging her on to the sand in a boisterous swirl of foam.

Sara lay naked at the edge of the shore, spreading wide her arms and legs and letting the cold wind and water buffet her. She was scoured clean as a mother-of-pearl shell, clean and empty. The storm had passed. Light drifts of rain still blew here and there, carried by a capricious wind, but the dark clouds were clearing to the east. Sara was cold. She ran along the shore, scrambled into her damp clothes, thrusting her underwear into her pocket. She pulled the oilskin about her like a stiff brown cloak, and climbed the steep cliff path to the house.

Matthew stood at the top of the path. The wind blew his hair back from his face. He stared at her. She stopped, pulling the oilskin closer. He said nothing, just stared at her, and she pushed past him, her head high. For the first time she did not shake her long hair over her face and peer at him from its shelter. Nothing could dim her exalted state, not even knowing he had seen her naked.

Sara did not want to meet anyone else, the state of grace still on her, so she slipped in through the back door and crept up the stairs to her tower room. Shaking with cold, she changed quickly, putting on her white dress and combing her long wet hair. The face which looked back at her from the mirror was unfamiliar. Her green-blue eyes were as luminous as the sea, her cheeks flushed with colour.

Sara went back downstairs, her sandals in her hand. She could hear crying from Teresa’s room, and tapped on the door. ‘Tessie …’

‘Go away!’ Teresa shouted.

‘Honey, let me in. I’ve got to talk to you.’

Teresa unlocked the door and let her in. Immediately she threw herself back on the bed, and buried her head under the pillow. ‘Teresa … how long have you known about Dad and Maureen?’

Teresa sat up and stared at her. ‘How did you know?’

‘I guessed,’ Sara answered, sitting on the side of the bed. ‘So, how long?’

‘About a month, a month and a half, I guess. I saw them one day …’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Teresa looked away. ‘I didn’t want to upset you.’

Sara felt a pang of bitter regret. She had tried so hard to look after her sister, but instead her sister had felt the need to protect her.

‘Did you see them together on Friday?’

Teresa nodded. ‘I followed Dad to the headland. They had a big fight and I thought, good-o, they’re breaking up. Then Dad hit her. I was scared by that. I came back then. I didn’t know what else to do. We had lunch.’

Sara remembered how sulky Teresa had been when she had helped set the table, but how she had begun to laugh and chatter as the lunch wore on. She found it hard to understand. ‘Weren’t you upset?’

Teresa nodded, looking up at Sara with reddened eyes. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘But you seemed happy …’

Teresa shrugged and looked away. ‘I don’t know. I was glad it was over, and I was glad Dad had finished his painting …’

Sara thought about how troublesome Teresa had been all year and wondered if the sneaking out of school, the short new haircut that she knew her father would hate, the endless screaming arguments, were all a result of what Teresa had seen.

‘And what did you do then?’ Sara asked intently. ‘You were gone most of the afternoon …’

‘I went for a walk,’ Teresa said.

‘Up to the headland again?’

Teresa shot her a glance, then shook her head. Sara had to press her before she would answer. ‘I went and watched the twins,’ she said at last. ‘They were with that girl, the one from Gunyan.’

‘You spied on them too?’

Teresa gave a sly grin. ‘Sometimes.’

Sara was not sure how to take this. Teresa rolled over and rested her head on her folded arms, staring at Sara defiantly. ‘What else is there to do around here?’

‘Did you see Dad during the afternoon?’

Teresa shook her head. ‘He was at the headland, though. I saw him ride up there. And I knew Maureen was still there, I could see her car. It made me so angry …’

‘But you didn’t go up there, you didn’t go and confront him?’

‘No.’ Teresa looked away. ‘I guess that’s why I took the Dodge, though, and went into town. I had to get out for a while. If I’d known Maureen was going to try and kill Dad, I’d never have done it.’

‘So you really think Maureen pushed Dad off Towradgi?’

‘Hell, I dunno. She was up there with him, though, she admits it. If it wasn’t her, it was Alex – or fat-arse Harry.’

‘Alex says he and Harry were at church all afternoon, with Annie. He says they couldn’t have done it.’

‘Then it was Maureen. She was angry enough – at least, she was in the morning. They were screaming at each other then. Mind you, Dad seemed to like it.’ And Teresa screwed up her eyes and mouth, and covered her face with her hand. ‘He grabbed her and kissed her and threw her on the ground, Sara. He … he …’ She could not speak.

‘I know,’ Sara answered. She stroked Teresa’s short, dishevelled hair. ‘I know.’

The Moscow Circus came to Sydney a few years after they had moved to the south coast. Augusto loved circuses and so he planned a trip for them all – the first and only trip back to Sydney that the whole family went on together. The twins were so excited, they were carsick all the way up the coast road, but even that could not dampen Augusto’s cheerfulness. He told them stories about how he had once run away to join a circus.

‘I wanted to be a clown,’ he said solemnly, and they did not know whether he was telling the truth or not.

Neither Dominic nor Dylan really remembered Sydney, so Joe and Sara felt important, pointing out landmarks and remembering places they’d been. They stayed that night at a motel on the Pacific Highway and ate dinner in a restaurant. For the first time they saw Augusto in a jacket and it made him look like someone else. Bridget said she liked it.

The circus was every bit as good as Augusto promised them. There was so much to see, and all the smells and sounds were foreign, the roar of lions, elephant squeals, jangly music, and the quick exchange of word and command and gesture from the performers. Joe, Sara and the twins laughed and clapped and squealed with excitement. Bridget, a squirming Dylan in her arms, lay back in her chair laughing helplessly as the elephant squirted the clowns with water. Yet no-one laughed at the clowns and performing bears as much as Augusto. No-one watched the acrobats with as much awe and pleasure. He was transfixed by the glowing ring where act followed glittering act, trapeze artists swinging and somersaulting through the upper gloom like angels.

For weeks after, Joe dreamt of being a ring-master, with a whip and a bright blue coat. Sara wanted to be the girl in a spangled skirt, who did somersaults on the back of a white horse. The twins dreamt of being lion-tamers, though Dominic also liked the elephants, with their tiny wise eyes, and mischievous grins.

Playing ‘Circus’ was their favourite game for months. Joe misappropriated the stockman’s whip, and cracked it all around while the twins pretended to be elephants, roaring and waving their trunks. The game never failed to end in broken ornaments, grazed elbows and an argument.

For Augusto, the trip resulted in a painting called Circus Rider. Like Sara, he had liked the girl who rode the horses best. He painted himself as the ring-master, whip in one hand. Augusto often put himself into his paintings – it was as if they satisfied some urge in him to step into that alien reality, that existence so different from his own.

The trip to the circus became part of the family mythology. Joe, in particular, found the memory a source of pleasure and satisfaction. This may have been because it was one of the last memories any of them had of Bridget – she died several months later, her car arching away from the sullen earth, leaving a path of broken branches and deeply scored gravel, to soar into the blue ether. Consumed in fire. Great globules of flame dropping into the bush. Black smoke that rose in billows, turning orange against the pure blue sky. The red earth scarred and blackened, the twisted metal, the grimy ashes.

Augusto had taken his other family to the circus too, the very next night, when he was thought to be at a party at his dealer’s. He had a double memory of the circus-rider; he told the same jokes to his different families.

Sara remembered when they found out, one lunchtime soon after Augusto married Gayla. They were talking about elephants. Sara remembered the expression of guilt that flashed over Augusto’s face as Joe got up out of his chair, his face white and all screwed up. The twins’ faces closed, expressionless, Teresa angry, yelling, Sara crying. She remembered how they felt – as if all their past was tainted, and all their memories illusion.

Later that day, examining the painting in the living room, Sara saw Augusto had painted Gayla and her daughter as performers peering out from behind the curtain. She could not understand how she had failed to see them before. She could not find Bridget’s red hair, or herself, or Joe, not even the twins. Augusto had not painted them in. They might as well not have existed.

Sara and Gabriela cooked paella together for lunch. They did not speak much, just busying themselves cutting up the chicken and seafood, soaking saffron threads in water, stirring the steaming rice. Sara felt more at peace than she had for a long time.

‘We should ask Matthew up for lunch,’ Gabriela said.

Sara shot her cousin a look.

‘We have plenty,’ Gabriela said.

‘All right.’

So when Joe came up from the sheds, Matthew came with him. Teresa helped set the table, but there was no sign of the twins. Everyone was quiet and tense. Joe would not meet Sara’s eyes.

‘This is great,’ Matthew said, spooning up the paella. ‘Did you cook it?’ He looked at Sara.

‘I helped,’ she answered.

‘You did most of it,’ Gabriela said.

‘I only did the chopping.’

‘That’s the hard part,’ Gabriela replied.

An awkward silence fell. ‘Is this Spanish food?’ Matthew asked. When Sara nodded, he said, ‘I know a great joke about Spanish cooking.’

‘Of course you do,’ Joe said.

‘Well, let’s hear it then,’ Teresa said.

Matthew grinned. ‘OK. An American tourist goes into a restaurant in Spain and orders the specialty of the house. When his dinner arrives, he asks the waiter what it is. “These, senor, are the thighs of the bull killed in the ring today.”’ Matthew put on an exaggerated Spanish accent. ‘So the tourist tucks in and thinks it tastes just great. He comes back the next evening and orders the same meal. When it arrives, he says to the waiter, “These thighs are much smaller than the ones I had last night.” “Yes, senor,” replies the waiter. “You see … the bull, he does not always lose.”’

Sara could not help smiling. Matthew grinned at her, and she looked away.

‘That is a terrible joke,’ Gabriela said.

‘All his jokes are terrible.’ Sara busied herself with her bowl of paella.

‘It’s racist,’ Joe said.

‘Most jokes are,’ Matthew responded. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to offend.’

Joe grunted.

Sara could feel Matthew’s eyes on her. She risked a look at him and he quirked a smile and shrugged slightly. She shrugged back.

The phone rang. Gabriela said, ‘I’ll get it.’ They all sat tensely, waiting for her to return. She came back in a moment. ‘It’s for you, Sara.’

Everyone stared at her in surprise.

‘Is it the hospital?’ Sara asked, her stomach wrenching.

Gabriela shook her head.

Sara got to her feet and went out into the front hall to pick up the phone. Her heart banged painfully against her ribs.

It was the twins. They were drunk. She found it hard to decipher their slurred speech.

‘You gotta come up, Sar,’ Dylan said. ‘We really gotta talk to you.’

‘We’re at Gunyan, Sar,’ Dominic said.

‘What are you doing? Where have you been all morning? I wish you wouldn’t go off all the time without telling me where you’re going!’

‘We gotta talk to you, Sar.’

‘Well, come home and we’ll talk.’

‘No, no. We don’t wanna come home. We gotta talk to you. Please.’

‘OK,’ Sara said. ‘I’ll come up.’

Dominic’s emphatic ‘Don’t tell anyone’ stabbed sharply through her throat.

‘Why not?’

‘Just don’t tell anyone,’ he repeated.

Sara hung up the phone and went silently down the hall, so no-one would see her leaving. On the back verandah, she took off her sandals and put on her boots, even though they looked rather odd under her pretty white dress. As she stepped outside the door, a scud of rain blew in her face. As she walked out to the stile, she saw the Elephant leaning against the fence where Joe had left it after bringing it down from Towradgi Headland. She laid her hand against its battered seat. For the first time she wished she knew how to ride a motorcycle – it would be so much easier to get to Gunyan by road than to walk across the paddocks and up the steep slope to where the old cottage huddled into the side of the hill. One day, perhaps, she would learn.

The wind blew chill against her face, the shadows of clouds slanted over her. The brown waters of the dam rippled in the wind as if urging her to hurry, hurry. As she climbed, she moved out of the shadow cast by the massive hills, and into a frail sunlight. She was far above the world that she knew, like a god on Mount Olympus looking and watching and deciding the fate of those below.

The old cottage was crouched below the curved spine of the hill. She turned in at the crooked little gate, feeling a stitch in her side, and an ache in her lungs. The ground was black with rain. She could not see the sea but the taste of it was in the wind.

Nungeena, her father’s tenant, was sitting on the front stairs, a cup between her feet. She was an Aboriginal woman of about fifty who had returned to Narooma to get back in touch with her roots. She too was an artist, though her style could not have been more different to Augusto’s, being abstract, rich in colour, deliberate in brushwork, and drawing upon centuries of tradition and symbol. After many arguments, both pleasant and unpleasant, landlord and tenant had agreed to disagree, particularly since both agreed passionately on the one important subject and that was the stultifying narrowmindedness of those who gave out government grants.

‘Hallo, Sara,’ she said. There was a smudge of red paint across her broad, dark face, and under her pale fingernails.

Sara ducked her head, nodding shyly. She had met Nungeena a number of times but had never actually exchanged a word with her, though she liked to sit leaning against a verandah post and listening to her talk. Nungeena always had interesting things to say.

‘How’s Gus? Any news?’

Sara shook her head.

‘I’m so sorry. It’s such a terrible thing to happen. I hope he recovers all right. You after your brothers? They’re in with Nya.’ Nungeena jerked over her shoulder with one thumb. Sara smiled and climbed the steps, being careful not to brush against the woman on her way past.

The cottage was very small and rather dingy, with a dark, narrow hallway running down the middle of the house with doors leading off on either side. She identified Nya’s room by the music pumping out at great volume. For a while she hesitated outside the door but at last she gained the courage and stepped inside.

Her younger brothers were sitting on the floor, hunched over a small bowl where Dylan was crushing dusty leaves with his fingers. The room was grey with fragrant smoke. Nya lay on her bed, her legs in their ripped jeans propped up the wall, her curly black hair hanging over the edge. She was a tall, sturdy-looking girl with a warm, open, curious face and a rather mocking smile. Her skin was much lighter than Nungeena’s. Like the twins she seemed to live in old jeans, heavy metal T-shirts and flannelette shirts, though she wore round her neck some kind of talisman carved in dark wood and hung on a leather thong.

As Sara entered Nya sucked heavily on the end of a joint, before passing it overhand to Dominic, exhaling in one long plume of smoke. Sara said nothing. It was a moment before they noticed her. Dylan looked a little embarrassed, and covered the bowl with his hand, but Dominic smiled at her mistily and moved over so she could sit down. Awkwardly, Sara lowered herself to the ground.

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 intently, 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.’

‘Listen, you know who your uncle reminds me of?’

‘Who?’

‘It’s a joke my old man used to tell all the time …’

‘Oh, another joke.’

‘My dad was a big joke-teller. A joke for every occasion.’

‘Well, I can’t wait to hear which of his jokes is going to suit this situation,’ Sara said. He grinned and shifted her a little closer.

‘One day, while doing his parish rounds, Father O’Brien sees three children playing marbles on the footpath. Thinking of his duty to educate his flock he stops and offers the kids two dollars to whoever can answer the question, “Who was the greatest man on earth?” The first little boy, called Paddy, cried out, “President Kennedy!” “Sure now,” says the priest, “he was a good man, all right, but not the greatest.” “St Patrick, because he brought Christianity to Ireland,” says young Mick. “A good answer, Michael, but not the right one,” says the priest and he puts away his two dollars. The last kid piped up, “I know the answer. It was Jesus Christ.” The priest pays up but with rather a puzzled air. “Isaac,” he says, “surely someone of your faith doesn’t believe that?” “Oh, no, Father. I know Moses was the greatest. But business is business.”’

Sara began to laugh, and once she began she could not stop. ‘That is dreadful!’ she said at last. ‘Haven’t you heard of “political correctness”?’

‘Sure I have,’ Matthew said. ‘I don’t think my dad has, though. He thinks PC is a kind of policeman.’

Sara smiled. She felt warm all over. She was not surprised when he bent his head and kissed her. Their mouths tasted of salt, and the wind cut against their skins with the sharpness of paper. He shifted her, pulling her closer, and she opened her mouth to him.

At last he lifted his head, looking into her eyes from only a hand’s span away. She was lying on her back in the sand, her dress rucked up about her waist. His hand was cupping the hollow behind her knee.

‘Feeling a bit better?’ he asked, smiling.

She nodded. He took hold of her hair, wrapping it around her throat. He kissed her again, with such tenderness she felt her heart move sharply in her chest. It was the first time her heart had ever moved in any emotion other than fear. She took his head in her hands and drew his mouth closer. Even as she felt his whole body respond, she was wondering how she could ever explain to him this strange exhilaration, this cheating of death.

But he had drawn back away from her, resting on stiff arms, a hand on either side of her head. ‘Sara,’ he said rather hoarsely. ‘This would be a good time for us to stop.’

She did not say anything, but she felt herself stiffen and grow cold.

‘It’s just if we don’t stop now I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop later. I’ve kind of been wanting to do this for a long time.’

‘Really?’ she said, softening and brightening again.

He nodded. ‘And I’m pretty sure we’d be providing the surfers out on the point with a bit of entertainment they weren’t expecting if we do go on.’

Immediately a wave of intense mortification swept over her. She would have flinched right away if he was not holding her still with his body. He cupped her skull in his hands, making her meet his gaze. ‘We could go back to my place.’

She dropped her gaze. ‘OK.’

In an instant he was on his feet, pulling her up. She could not meet his gaze or speak, but she let him lead her back along the beach to his motorbike.

All the way to the farm, Sara rested her head against his back. He parked the motorbike in the shed, and took her hand. She allowed him to pull her up the stairs to his flat, long thoughts dropping like silence into a well. She thought of how the bike had run at the side of the road as if to shout ‘Try me!’ She thought of how he had kissed her. She thought of being afraid all the time.

He opened the door and led her into his tiny living room. She looked about curiously, smiling to remember what it was like when it had still been a loft and she and her brothers had played hide-and-seek amongst its giant bales of hay. He pulled her down to sit beside him on the couch, fixing her with his dark, intent gaze, and ran his finger down her breastbone, slipping inside the neckline of her dress. She shivered with excitement and dread and dropped her gaze, swinging her hair across her face, unable to look at him. On the coffee table was a bowl of peaches. They fascinated her with their colour and plushness. They reminded her of a day when she was eight, a day of wild adventuring with her father and her brothers, a day of hot blue brilliance. She longed for the taste of a peach in her mouth, for juice to slide down her chin, for the taste and scent of that day.

He reached up and took her hair in his hands, pulling it away from her face. She looked up at him. His fingers were on her neck. Keeping her eyes on his, she slowly leant forward and kissed him on the mouth. At once he took hold of her, pulling her close, his mouth hard and insistent. She shut her eyes and went down beneath the wave of his passion as if weighted with stones. She had thought of doing this so often that, now she was here, she wanted to drown in him. She wanted to feel a wild intoxication that would hurl her out of this world and into another.

For a while she did. He murmured to her as he kissed and stroked and gently bit, and his words were a pleasure to her. She smiled and pressed herself closer to him, and let herself feel the shape of his muscles in her palms. She opened her mouth to him, and felt herself fade away.

Matthew fumbled at his jeans. She was afraid to look, shutting her eyes. He pulled up her dress and tugged down her underpants. She pressed her legs together instinctively, but he pushed them apart, heavy upon her. He was pressing all the breath out of her, her mouth smothered in his neck. She turned her head and gasped. Her body resisted him. She could hear him grunting with exertion, and she tried to push herself away but the lounge was hard against her shoulder and she could not move. He lifted her and held her, positioning himself again, and the pain was sharp like the stab of a knife. Although she flinched, he did not stop. He moved hard in her for some time yet, and she braced her shoulders, feeling the rough fabric of the couch burning her skin.

Then it was over, as suddenly as it started. She held his buttocks in her hands. He lay on her, heavy, panting loudly. Her neck was twisted painfully against his. ‘Sara,’ he said, ‘Sara,’ and then was still. She thought he had fallen asleep. But his hand moved up her leg and she felt a moment’s panic, though he was only dabbling his fingers in the blood and semen that stained her thighs. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘You should have told me.’

She sat up awkwardly, dragging her dress back down. ‘Don’t,’ he said sleepily, and pulled it up again so he could see her long, bare legs and the vulnerable triangle between. ‘So beautiful,’ he said and kissed her flat stomach.

She held his dark, curly head in her hands and cradled him to her. She could not have put her feelings into words. It was exhilaration and shame, grief and joy.

He rolled over and sat up, pulling his shirt back on. ‘Better get back to work. We don’t want Joe to come looking for us.’

Sara nodded. Tears stung her eyes. His face softened and he bent and kissed her. ‘Come down to me tonight?’ he asked.

She nodded.

He pulled on his jeans and got up. ‘Okay then.’

Shakily Sara gathered up her discarded underpants and pulled them on. Her body hurt. She saw with mingled distaste and triumph the bloodstains on the back of her dress. Half-hysterically she thought about hanging it out her window, showing the proof of her broken virginity to the world. And then she panicked, wondering if the stains would come out.

It was in this state of confusion that she ran back to the house. Her head pounded, she felt like she had a fever. She hoped no-one would see her.

As she came in the front door, she heard voices from the living room. It sounded like someone was crying. Sara slipped across the front hall and up the stairs as invisibly as a tadpole through murk. She did not count her steps.

She had to go to the bathroom, she could feel something trickling down her leg. The light of the bathroom seared her eyes, but she had to see, she wanted to see. Perched on the edge of the toilet seat she looked down between her legs and watched great white goblets drop from the secret places of her body and sink slowly through the water. It hurt to urinate, she felt like she had been branded with fire, and though the thin yellow liquid was brief and hot, she had to stay sitting there for some time as her body relinquished the seeds of Matthew’s body. To her surprise, she found that she was smiling.

Sara changed out of her stained dress, hiding it under her bed, and dressed in jeans and a white lace top she had always loved. Then she slipped down the stairs in her socks, and went to the kitchen.

A bunch of freshly picked thyme lay on the table.

Sara stared at it for a moment, then picked it up and held it to her nose. Thyme for courage.

Gabriela must have picked it, Sara thought. Perhaps she planned to make soup.

But Sara’s heart was galloping like an unbroken horse. Her skin prickled all over. She rolled the sprig of thyme between her palms so the clean, strong smell came up to her in waves. Then she tucked a sprig behind her ear, holding it in place with the heavy sheet of her hair. She got down her tarot cards.

Rocking a little, Sara laid three in a row. She was reading for her father, so it did not surprise her when the first card she turned over was Death. She knew now not to read the cards as literally as she had done when just a child. With the help of an old book bought for her by Joe at a garage sale, she had learnt that the cards had metaphorical meanings that were as many layered as the dry membranes of a snowdrop bulb. The thirteenth card was a reminder that all kings must fall, that all seasons must pass. It was a card which said that destruction would be followed by renewal, and so Sara regarded the picture of a skeleton riding a white horse with a look of grave composure.

The second card was the Ten of Swords. It showed a man lying in a wasteland, his body pierced through with ten swords, a black sky above him. It was an evil card, signifying ruin, defeat, the dissolution of family, the failure of hope. It shook Sara, despite all her expectations. She had to unclench her fingers from their rigid knot before she could turn over the third card.

Three circles, one within the other. A serpent fell to the left, a jackal-headed man rose to the right. A sphinx, an angel, a winged lion and a winged bull guarded the four corners of the card-face. The innermost circle was divided with eight spokes like a compass, each pointing to strange esoteric symbols.

It was not a card that usually turned for Sara. It was the Wheel of Fortune, signifying the perpetual motion of the universe and the flux of human life within it. Birth, life, death, joy, contentment, grief, the forces of good and evil, the change of seasons. It surprised Sara as much as the card before it. She sat and stared at it for a very long time.

Sara heard a sound at the door. She looked up. Teresa was standing there. Her eyes were red and inflamed. ‘Sara, Sara, where have you been?’ she cried. ‘Oh, Sara!’

Sara stood up and went swiftly across the room to put her arm about Teresa’s shoulders.

‘Where have you been?’ Teresa sobbed. ‘We’ve been looking all over. Oh, Sara, the hospital’s rung. Dad’s dead, he’s gone!’ Teresa’s voice broke, and she began to cry.

Sara nodded. The scent of thyme was strong in her nostrils. ‘I know. Never mind, sweetie. It’s for the best.’

Teresa looked up at her. ‘What do you mean?’

He had a talent for tragedy, Sara could have said. We’d never have got free of it.

But instead she said, ‘He was so badly hurt. He’d never have been himself again. It’s better this way.’

Teresa nodded.

Sara looked out at the dusk-filled landscape, touched with an unbearable melancholy. A raven was circling through the sky, tolling its harsh bell.

‘Oh, Sara, what are we going to do? What’s going to become of us?’

Sara kept her eyes on the line of poplars on the far hill, their spear-heads still burnished with light. When she spoke her voice was grave, but even. ‘We’ll be all right, Tess. Life will go on, just in a different pattern. It’s the nature of things. People are born, people die, life goes round in its wheel.’

Teresa was angry. ‘What’s wrong with you? You don’t seem to be upset at all!’

Sara’s breath caught. ‘I’ve had all weekend to be grieving. Two days, thinking about nothing else. Upset doesn’t come close to describing what I feel.’

‘It’s just …’ Teresa made a broad gesture with her hand, unable to express what she meant.

Sara gave her shoulder a little squeeze. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I forget you didn’t see him. I was up there on the cliff, when they winched him up, you see. I knew he couldn’t survive such a fall.’

Teresa let out her breath in a long shuddering sigh.

‘Where’s Joe?’ Sara put a hand up to touch the sprig of thyme entangled in her hair.

‘He’s in the living room with Gabriela and the twins. They’re completely shattered.’ There was a sly sort of emphasis in Teresa’s voice.

‘Drunk as a skunk, pissed as parrots,’ Sara replied.

Teresa laughed. She looked at Sara with a new expression in her eyes. If it was not respect, it was at least a new wariness.

She came into the living room. Joe sat at the table, his head in his arms. Gabriela sat beside him, trying to comfort him. The twins were huddled together on the couch. They were white and wild-eyed, and stank of marijuana. As she came in, they lurched to their feet, Dominic sobbing aloud. She closed her arms about their angular shoulders and did not even try to find something comforting to say. There were times when an honest silence was better than meaningless words.

Joe stood up. His face was haggard with relief. She saw in it everything she needed to know. ‘Sar,’ he said and scrubbed his eyes angrily. ‘Oh, Sar.’

‘It’s all right, Joe,’ Gabriela said, rubbing his arm. ‘Oh, Sar, I’m so very sorry.’ She stood up and embraced Sara, who stood quietly within her heavy arms. ‘I’m so very, very sorry.’

Sara nodded.

‘Sara, I’d better ring Mum and tell her, OK? She’ll be real anxious. She’s going to be so upset.’

‘OK,’ Sara said and watched Gabriela go out of the room. Sara went over and stood by the window, looking out across the sunset-coloured paddocks to Towradgi Headland, with its grieving profile staring out to sea. The sight of it broke something in her.

Joe put out his hands. He said the same things everyone kept saying. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Are you?’ Sara said. ‘Yes. I suppose you must be.’

Joe stared at her, his lips white. ‘Huh?’ he said.

‘I don’t suppose you wanted things to be this way,’ she said. ‘I’ve been trying and trying to think what must’ve happened and I can’t see you killing him on purpose. It was an accident, wasn’t it?’

He shrank back, putting both his hands on to the table behind him to support himself. ‘No, what are you saying?’

‘You know what I’m saying, Joe.’ She looked up at him, met his eyes which were the same sea-colour as hers, the same sea-colour as their father’s had been. ‘I know, Joe,’ she said gently. ‘You think I can’t see? You think I’m blind?’ And weak? And foolish?

He tried to rally. ‘Sara, you can’t know what you’re saying. Surely you can’t mean …’

‘You know what I mean, Joe. I know you killed Dad. You pushed him … Oh, God, I never knew, I never realised, how much you must have hated him.’

She had thought she was so calm. She had thought she understood everything. What she did not understand was how sharp and poignant her feelings still were. As she spoke, pain ran her through like a spear. Her voice quivered and failed, and she had to put out a hand for something to lean on.

‘Oh my God,’ Teresa cried.

‘Oh, Joe,’ Dominic wept.

Sara said nothing more. She counted her breaths. It did not take long to win back control. She had years of practice at counting her breaths. She raised her head and looked at Joe. In her look was everything she wanted to say, the helpless rage, the bewilderment, the wish she might be wrong, the delicate, unspoken love she had for her brother, who had brought her books and red dancing shoes and tried his best to shield her.

‘It was an accident,’ Joe said then, sobbing aloud. ‘I didn’t mean it. It was an accident, I didn’t mean to kill him, not really, I just wanted to hurt him, I wanted to hit him, I didn’t mean him to die.’

He stared at Sara, hands held out, pleading for understanding.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘I know you’ve had a hard summer with him, I know you’ve had your problems, but I just can’t see what drove you to kill him. I mean, your father.’ Again there was that bewilderment, that inability to express in words her instinct that what had happened was deeply and fundamentally wrong, in a way that ran further back than public laws and legal systems.

‘It’s weird, you know,’ he said, dropping his hands, turning away. ‘I’ve often thought about killing him. After Mum died, I used to imagine putting poison in his bloody zarzuela so that he would shrivel up and die. I used to think about it all the time. But I knew I could never do it.’

He turned to Sara. ‘Do you remember when Mum first found out about Teresa? I remember how she looked. She was so white, so shocked, so … broken. She came out of the kitchen and saw us, we were sitting on the stairs, listening, do you remember?’

Sara shook her head. ‘She looked at us, sitting there, and her mouth all screwed up, and she said “A daughter!” And we didn’t understand, not then.’

Sara did remember now.

‘She said, “I knew, of course, that there was someone. I even knew what she looked like, thanks to the paintings. But a daughter! Six years old. Almost as old as the twins.” And she laughed. I didn’t know what she was talking about until Dad brought the brat here.’ Joe jerked his head at Teresa, who was staring at him. ‘She drove off the headland the very next day. I’ve always kind of wondered if she did it just on impulse, driving back down into the valley, or if she had planned it all along. If she’d planned it, surely she would have said something, tried to say goodbye?’

Sara was ashamed. Oh, my mother, long dead.

‘Gus went straight to Gayla after the funeral. He couldn’t even pretend to care, for our sakes. I hated him so much then. Mum hadn’t been dead for more than a few weeks. I can’t help thinking, if only fucking Gayla hadn’t rung Mum, hadn’t rung her and rubbed her face in it, well, then, maybe Mum would still be alive …’ He took a deep, painful breath and ran his hand over his face. He looked tired and defeated. ‘Then Gus goes and brings her here, and Mum not yet cold in her grave. How could he? I’ve never forgiven him, never.’ He looked at Sara angrily. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘I remember,’ Teresa said. ‘I remember everything. It wasn’t like that at all. Mum told me why she rang. She couldn’t bear the deceit any more. She felt it wasn’t right.’

‘Wasn’t right! Hell, she got one thing right, then. Wasn’t right! It makes me sick to the stomach to even think about it,’ Joe said.

‘You make me sick to the stomach.’ Teresa thrust her face into his. ‘You talk about right and wrong, and put my mother down … when you killed our father! You’re a murderer!’

‘Shut up! Just shut up!’

‘I don’t believe this. You kill our father, you kill him, and you talk about things which happened ten years ago, as if it’s reason enough! As if you want us to sympathise! You’re a murderer!’ Teresa punched him in the shoulder.

Joe jerked away, shouting, ‘Shut up!’

Sara grasped him by the arm. ‘Stop it! Please, just stop it!’

Only the twins were silent. Tears were trickling down Dominic’s face.

‘Don’t you understand? I didn’t mean to kill him, it just happened!’

‘How?’ Sara asked, shaking his arm gently.

He pulled away from her, sat down in one of the bamboo chairs and sunk his face into his hands. ‘I’d gone to have a surf, to try and clear my head, get over the fight I’d had with Dad. As I was coming home, Aunty Maureen drove past me, almost crashed into me. I was so angry, I couldn’t believe it. They’d been up at the headland together, even after that dreadful scene with Alex. I turned off the road, drove up the track to the headland. I don’t even really know why. Gus never cared what anyone else thought, he wouldn’t have listened to a word I said. But I was so angry, I had to have it out with him. It all got out of hand, though. He said terrible things. I couldn’t stand it. I hit him, and he sneered at me, and I hit him again, and he just slipped and fell backwards, and then … he just disappeared. I heard him scream, and then there was this, like, crunch, and then … nothing.’

Falling.

Dylan said, ‘Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you get help?’

Joe kicked at the table-leg, unable to meet anyone’s eyes. ‘I don’t know. I panicked, I guess. I just got out of there as fast as I could. I didn’t know what to do. I thought he was dead.’

‘So we searched all night,’ Dylan said sarcastically, ‘and you searched with us, pretending to be so worried, when all the time …’

‘All the time,’ Dominic continued, ‘you knew where he was, you knew what had happened.’

‘And he fiddled with the phone connection, so we couldn’t even ring for help,’ Dylan realised. ‘If we’d been able to get on to the police earlier, maybe Dad wouldn’t have had to hang there for so long.’

They stared at Joe with accusing eyes.

He brought up his hands as if to fend them off. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I thought he was dead, I thought he must be dead.’

Teresa held her stomach, sobbing quietly. ‘He is dead. He is dead,’ she whispered. ‘You killed him.’

‘He thought I’d told Alex about him and Maureen,’ Joe cried in despair. ‘How could I? I didn’t even know! He wouldn’t believe me, there was no telling him. I couldn’t believe it. He’s a monster! He doesn’t care about anyone but himself!’

‘Didn’t,’ Teresa said. Dominic gave a sharp cry. Sara gripped his shoulder.

‘It was an accident, I swear.’ Joe dropped his head in his hands. ‘He said he’d damn well sleep with anyone he damn well wanted to, and that it was none of my bloody business. We had such a fight! He was sure it was me who told Alex – I couldn’t get it out of his head.’

‘And you didn’t?’ Sara whispered.

Joe shook his head.

‘I did,’ Teresa said defiantly. ‘I told Alex, on Friday morning, after I saw them having it off up there. I rang him and told him.’

They all reeled back. It was so unexpected. Teresa hated her step-uncle – why would she tell him? For a moment it seemed Joe would hit Teresa, such a rage possessed him. They glared at each other, hating with a vengeance. ‘Then it’s your fault he’s dead!’

‘Ha! Wasn’t me who pushed him off the cliff! You’re the murderer!’

‘If you hadn’t told Alex …! Don’t you realise none of this would have happened? You bitch!’

‘Yes it would, yes it would,’ Teresa sobbed. ‘You’re the murderer, you’re the murderer.’

‘I don’t understand? How did you know?’ Dylan asked.

Teresa flung herself on the lounge. Between the storm of hysterical tears snatches of words could be heard: ‘He … I saw … they were there … and I wanted … I hated … I didn’t … I only wanted …’

Sara sat beside her and patted her shoulder. Tears were thick in her throat. ‘Why did she tell, though? I thought she hated Alex.’ Dominic looked from one to the other.

‘I hate all of you!’ Teresa sat up and stared round at them. ‘I wish Mum had never brought me here. All you do is sneer at me and look down on me and make snide comments. Wasn’t my fault Mummy and Dad weren’t married; he loved her best, he wanted to be with her, and with me. Your bloody mother wouldn’t let go!’

They all stared at her. For quite a long time, no-one said anything. Teresa looked shamefaced yet defiant, while Joe simply sat, his shoulders sagging.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Sara said at last. ‘You don’t hate us. If you hated us, you wouldn’t care so much.’

Teresa flushed and pushed her sharp chin into her shoulder, refusing to look at anyone. ‘Who says I care about any of you?’ she said then, sullenly.

‘Me,’ Sara said. ‘Not that that means much, I admit.’

‘Well, I hate him anyway,’ she said, jerking her head at Joe. ‘He never wanted me here, he’s never called me anything but “the brat” and now he’s killed my dad. I’m going to tell the police everything.’

‘He’ll be tried for murder,’ Dominic said. He was white and shaken. ‘Oh my God.’

‘We’re not telling the police anything,’ Sara said. ‘It was an accident. Joe didn’t mean to kill him.’

Teresa said angrily, ‘We can’t just let him get away with murder. I want him to pay for it, don’t you see? He killed him, he killed our father.’

‘He can’t just walk away and say, “Oh, well, what a shame. Never mind, no harm done,”’ Dominic said. ‘He took a life.’

‘It was an accident,’ Joe said angrily.

‘If we’d got him to a hospital when he first fell, he might have lived,’ Dominic said. ‘That was the real crime, I reckon.’

‘Not telling us he had fallen! Then cutting the wires!’ Dylan said. ‘So we had to ride all the way into town before we could call for help. It was criminal.’

‘Don’t you see?’ Sara said. ‘Joe’s going to pay for it, he’ll pay for it the rest of his life. There’s been too much hatred, too many recriminations. I want it to stop. Family is what counts in the end. Family.’

Teresa shook her head, her mouth set in the stubborn line they all knew well. ‘What about justice?’

Card eleven. A woman with a double-edged sword raised upwards, and a set of scales in her other hand. To turn this card means justice will be done, balance will be restored.

‘How would sending Joe to prison be justice?’ Sara said. ‘I can’t see any justice in that. Police and courts and lawyers and prisons, what has any of that got to do with us? You were the one who rang Alex and told him about Dad and Maureen. Tell me what justice you deserve.’

Teresa hunched her shoulder. ‘I’m going to tell.’

‘No, you aren’t,’ Sara said softly. ‘We may not be much of a family but we’re the only family you’ve got. You’re stuck with us. Besides, what are you going to tell them? No-one knows anything but us, and we’ll deny everything. There’s no evidence. None of us told the police anything.’ She turned to the twins. ‘Did you?’

Dylan shook his head. ‘Nup,’ he said laconically. ‘Neither of us said anything.’

‘The police might wonder how Dad came to fall like that, but they’ve got no way of knowing what really happened. It might just as easily have been you who pushed Dad off the cliff, remember.’

Teresa scowled at her.

Sara put her hand up to the sprig of thyme in her hair. ‘I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever loved,’ she said very quietly. ‘I feel like I’ve lived my life surrounded by ghosts. I don’t want to lose anyone else. Not Joe, and not you, Tess. It’s too late for Dad, he’s dead now. But it’s not too late for us. We have to make something out of what is left to us. I’m sick of unhappiness and grief. I want to live!’

‘But Joe has to pay!’ Teresa wailed.

‘He’ll pay,’ Sara said. ‘He’s lost the farm, he’s lost us, he’s lost everything. And he’ll remember.’

For the past is always a prologue. Sara saw this with great clarity, but she did not know how to express it in words. In her mind’s eye she saw enormous black storm clouds looming over the landscape, blotting out its brightness. She saw a great wave, foam flying back like hair. She saw a frail figure, swimming under that great weight of water, trying to escape the inevitable crash and collapse. She saw herself leaping out of the cold sea foam, taking flight like an albatross and soaring away over the ocean. All this she saw but she could not say. She could only look at them pleadingly, trying to make them understand they had to stride out, away from the past and into the future, leaving its shadow behind them.

Joe had put his head down on his hands. They could hear the broken rasp of his breathing. Teresa looked at him and then at Sara, and gave a little helpless gesture of her hands.

‘What’s going to happen to us now?’ Dominic said.

‘We’ll have to sell the farm, of course,’ Sara said. Unexpectedly, terror leapt up and grasped her by the throat. She had not realised how closely it still dogged her heels. She had to struggle hard to thrust it back down again, to breathe, to calm her hammering heart, to speak again. Her voice was hurried and uneven when it came but no-one seemed to notice. ‘Alex will buy it. This is just the chance he’s been waiting for.’ She took another deep breath and felt her lips twist in a small, bitter smile. ‘The Hallorans will get their caravan park after all.’

Joe got up and went to the window. Sara saw his shoulders heave. She went to his side, and saw with pity the tears on his cheeks. She put her hand on his arm. He turned to her and buried his face in her shoulder, and she comforted him as if he was a child.

Later that night, in the silence of the sleeping house, Sara let herself in through the kitchen door. Her body ached and stung. It had been better the second time. Much better. Afterwards she had lain for a long time in the warm curve of Matthew’s arm, listening to him breathe, her cheeks curved in a smile she could not banish.

Now she tiptoed through the dark kitchen, careful not to bang her hip on a chair. In an action that was so familiar she did not need to see, she reached up and found the carved wooden box her grandmother had left her. Holding it in the crook of her elbow, she reached up again until she found the battered old recipe book, bulging with the wrack of the past. Then she turned and made her silent way back to her room. Everyone else slept, worn out with the emotion of the day, but Sara was not tired. She had never felt more alive.

In the dim spotlight of her bedside lamp, Sara opened the box, leaning close to breathe in the sweet evocative smell. She took out the silk-wrapped cards and then carefully laid the recipe book back in the box. From her bedside table she took a little sprig of thyme, crushed a few leaves between her fingers so she could smell its clean spicy scent once more, then laid the herb inside the front cover of her grandmother’s recipe book. ‘Thyme for courage,’ she whispered.

This time she laid out the cards for herself. She did so slowly, gently, taking pleasure in their familiar smell and touch.

The first card was the Page of Cups. A young man stood contemplating a chalice from which a fish was jumping. Behind him the sea lay in tranquil waves.

Sara understood this card to represent herself. It often symbolised a young man or woman, melancholy, passionate, given to flights of fancy. It was a messenger card, a card that signalled change. She smiled dreamily and turned over the second card.

The Six of Swords. A boat crossed a lake to a far shore, where an orchard grew. A man poled the boat along. Sitting before him, their backs hunched, their faces covered in grief, were a woman and a child. In the prow of the boat six swords stood like crosses.

Sara gazed at the card thoughtfully. It signified a journey, away from sorrow towards calm and contentment. It could mean both a journey of the body or of the mind, or of both. Sara touched it lightly, then turned the third card over.

A woman danced, her crossed legs forming a triangle like that of the Hanged Man. Unlike that symbol of sacrifice and suffering, however, she was pointing upwards. Her dancing body was framed in a wreath of leaves and ribbons. The World, the twenty-first and last card of the Major Arcana, signifying triumph and liberation. A very good omen indeed.

Tide At The Flood

low tide – 0.77 m

4.05 pm, Thursday

high tide – 2.34 m

10.30 pm, Thursday

On the day Sara and her brothers and sister went to the headland to throw their father’s ashes into the sea, there were no clouds in the pure and perfect sky. In the last brightness of the day, the Sanchez family sat together on the cliff, bound together by a dangerous fragility. They knew this was the end of life as they knew it.

‘So that’s that,’ Dylan said at last.

‘Yes, he’s gone,’ Sara said, her voice roughened with tears.

‘I suppose we should do it,’ Dominic said.

Sara nodded slowly.

‘Do you want to do the honours?’ he asked gently, and Sara looked around at the others, questioning. Teresa grimaced at her through her tears. ‘Yeah, Sara, you do it.’

Sara got to her feet rather slowly, clutching in her arms the round metal box. Her brothers and sister also rose, and they stood together on the edge of the cliff, at the point where Augusto had fallen. Joe stood a little apart, his shoulders hunched.

‘This is, like, a chance for us to really say goodbye,’ Sara said awkwardly, thinking over each word as she spoke. ‘Dad died up here, and he died painting, which if he’d ever thought about it was probably the way he’d want to go. It was a terrible accident, and we’re all going to miss him very much.’ She paused then, not sure if she should say any more. The others looked at her expectantly. ‘There’s nothing we could do about the fact that he’s gone, or the way that he died,’ she said then. ‘So I think we’ve got to remember how much he loved life, and how fully he lived, and try and make sure we don’t let him down.’

Slowly she unscrewed the top of the canister, and with tears burning her eyes, looked out to sea. ‘Goodbye, Augusto Sanchez,’ she called and tossed out the contents of the canister.

Sara stood, watching the ashes fall into the wind. She did not need anyone to tell her that time was the great healer and soon this agony of grief would fade – she knew that, having experienced grief before. The problem was, she did not want the pain to lessen, she did not want to stop feeling this great sorrow. Once the memory faded, her father would also fade. The day he was forgotten would be the day he ceased to exist, and that would be his true death. She understood now why her father had painted her mother one last time. He had been trying to keep her alive. He had been trying to expiate her death.

She would paint him, Sara decided. She did not yet know how or whether her talent was great enough for such a task. She had spent a great deal of the past week trying to draw and discovering once again the difficulty of pinning down the moment with a streak of paint on a canvas. She felt as if she had come through a time of dark forgetting, so that her eyes and her hand no longer knew how to work together. All she could do was take pleasure in the colour and fluid texture of the paint, like a child finger-painting, and hope that, with practice, that crippled connection would find new nerve paths to travel.

So she had walked into the hills and along the shore with her sketchbook and her paints, and she had drawn and dabbled and doodled, while back at the house her relatives squabbled over Augusto’s will and diminished the truth of his death with dusty truisms. Only the Sanchez siblings had not bickered or platitudinised. They were bound tight together by a secret. The death which should have torn the whole family apart had instead, paradoxically, brought them all closer. Even Joe, although he had become slow and quiet, as if whatever it was that had kept him wound so tightly had snapped.

It did not take long for the wind to disperse their father’s ashes. Soon the air below them was clear again.

‘I’ve cooked us zarzuela,’ Sara said. ‘We’ll have one last feast before we go.’

She could hear her father’s voice, saying, ‘The secret with zarzuela is the sweetness. Cinnamon, saffron, sweet paprika, bay leaves. It should be sweet and salty, like the sea, like pasión.’

‘I don’t s’pose we’ll ever come back here,’ Dylan said. ‘It all belongs to Alex now.’

‘He won’t mind us coming back,’ Sara said consolingly. ‘I’m sure he’ll understand.’

‘We can stay in the caravan park,’ Dominic said sardonically.

‘I’ll never come back,’ Joe said. ‘Never.’

Nobody answered. Joe stared out at the sea, then turned and walked away.

To the west, a thin blue crescent of a moon was sinking towards the hills. Storm clouds were erupting out of the invisible air, drawing up heat from the sea. Everything was gilded with light. Sara lingered a moment longer, listening to the sea-sorrowful sound of waves flooding in over the rocks. She tried to pin the scene to her memory with the sharpness of her grief, knowing only that here – in this moment – was beauty as acute.

On the way back to the house Sara sat in the back of the truck, letting the wind flow through her hair like water. She felt relieved of some burden, graceful and light in the death of the day. It seemed life could go on.

As they came round the curve of the hill and began the climb towards the house, Sara saw a motorbike in the dam paddock, leaving a trail of dust as it swerved behind the mob of cows. She banged on the back of the window, shouting to Joe to let her out. The truck jerked to a halt, and she leapt over the side.

Matthew saw her coming, and wheeled the bike her way. She ran towards him, wanting to feel the pound of her blood. Sara would rein in the galloping of her heart no longer. She would spur it on.

He opened his arms to her and she ran into them. Shadows fell away behind them into the long grass, light poured on them, thin and flat and clear, as red as fire.

They did not kiss.

‘When are you going?’

‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’m going to try and go to art college.’ Her mouth twisted a little. ‘Being Augusto Sanchez’s daughter should help. I’ll have to get a job – I’m going to apply to all the art galleries. Art’s the only thing I really know anything about.’

Art and reading tarot cards. She did not say so, but it was in her mind to find someone who could teach her more about that other part of her life, the shadowy world where dreams came creeping, and where ghosts walked.

‘Sounds like you’ve got it all worked out.’ He spoke quietly, and his mouth was unhappy.

‘I’m scared,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t know anyone in Sydney, and there are so many people there – Gabriela might move up too, though, and Tessie will be there with her mum.’

‘What about the others?’

‘The twins have promised to try it out at my aunt Juanita’s place. If they hate it, well, we’ll think of something then. They’re going to come and stay with me for the May holidays, and maybe Tessie, too, if she wants.’ She was ashamed to realise she hoped the twins would like living with their aunt. Freedom seemed so close.

‘I’ve been thinking of coming up to Sydney to study horticulture,’ he said with some difficulty. ‘Maybe we could see something of each other then.’

‘That’d be good.’ She smiled and kissed him. ‘More than good.’

‘Though I don’t know how I’ll cope in the big smoke. All I know about is cows.’

‘And telling jokes,’ she said.

He grinned. Wrapping her long hair about her throat, holding her face in his hands, he kissed her slowly, thoroughly. She kissed him back till her legs felt as if they must give way beneath her.

‘Come and eat with us?’ she said. ‘I’ve cooked zarzuela. It’ll be good.’

Zarzuela should be an embarrassment of riches. A gift from the cook to those who eat.

‘That’d be good,’ Matthew said. ‘I love your cooking.’

They walked together down the paddock, their shadows stretching long before them.

‘What about Joe?’ Matthew asked. ‘He can’t stay here now. What will he do?’

Sara shrugged and did not answer. She looked across his shoulder towards the familiar triangle of land and sea and sky. Sunset still lit Towradgi Headland with red, but here it was dusk-light, free-light, everything sculpted in blue.

For five years that great towering cliff had marked the boundary of her life. It had reared black and menacing in her dreams, ringed with the fire of her mother’s last flight, the storm and shadows of her father’s. Now it was a symbol of a barrier to be crossed, the last wall of fear that needed to be climbed.

Sara had once thought she would never leave this valley, blindfolded and bound about by swords. Now she was leaving it forever.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my husband, as ever, must go the greatest thanks – for marrying me, for taking me to Spain for our honeymoon and thus igniting my fascination with all things Spanish, for enduring all the oddities of loving and living with a writer and, most of all, for helping me build this good life we share. Thanks also to my wonderful children who never fail to forgive me for daydreaming and scribbling down ideas instead of cooking dinner or matching their socks. I could not do it without you.

Special thanks must go to my big, loud, loving and ever supportive family, especially my mother who is the one person in the world who never gets bored hearing me talk about my writing, and my sister, who knows all the many reasons why, but in particular for remembering ghosts with me. Also to my dear aunt Rozzie, who gave me Jan Morris’s book on Spain to read, and my darling grandmother Nonnie – I miss you both more than I can say.

To my dearest friends too – Sarah who read this book way back when it was a different book, Michelle for taking me along to see a Caribbean Tempest in the Botanic Gardens, Dani for childhood memories and tales of a psychic, and all three for being their own sweet selves and the parts of me I need the most. I am blessed with good friends – without Adrienne Richards, Leo Robbo and Susan Shehadie, I would know nothing about art or artists, and I owe them all an enormous debt for their endless patience in answering all my strange and obscure questions. I also have to thank the kindy mums, especially Rika and Miranda, who picked up my sons and minded them for me so many times, and always listen politely when I’m in the grip of a new obsession.

A very heartfelt thank you to the midwives who helped deliver this little miracle of a book – Garth Nix, for encouraging me to dig it out of my bottom drawer and try again, and for countless words of wisdom and grace; my agent, Tara Wynne, whose faith and support has never faltered; and Julia Stiles, Nicola O’Shea and Linda Funnell, who worked with me on Full Fathom Five and helped me discover the book buried inside my teenage ramblings.

Last, but definitely not least, I’d like to thank the Random House team, in particular my publicist, Peri Wilson, my publisher, Meredith Curnow, and my editor, Patrick Mangan, for their faith in me and this book and all their hard work and commitment to bringing it back to life. I’ve loved rediscovering this story, and I am so grateful to you for allowing me the chance to work again on this novel which meant so much to me for so long. Thank you also to Nada Backovic for the gorgeous cover!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Forsyth is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including The Witches of Eileanan and Rhiannon’s Ride series for adults, and The Puzzle Ring, The Gypsy Crown and The Starthorn Tree for children. She has won or been nominated for numerous awards. Her books have been published in fourteen different countries, including Japan, Poland, Spain and Turkey. Her recent novels include Bitter Greens, a retelling of Rapunzel, and The Wild Girl, the story of how the Grimm brothers collected their folk tales.

Bitter Greens

by Kate Forsyth

An exquisite rendering of the story behind the Rapunzel fairy tale.

Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. She is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens …

After Margherita’s father steals a handful of parsley, wintercress and rapunzel from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off … unless he and his wife give away their little girl.

Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death, sixty-four years later. Called La Strega Bella, Selena is at the centre of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition.

Locked away in a tower, growing to womanhood, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does …

Three women, three lives, three stories, braided together to create a compelling tale of desire, obsession, black magic and the redemptive power of love.

‘Threads of history and folklore are richly intertwined to form this spellbinding story. Kate Forsyth has excelled herself with Bitter Greens. Compulsively unputtdownable.’ Juliet Marillier

The Wild Girl

by Kate Forsyth

Kate Forsyth is a wonderfully evocative and imaginative writer

whose novels should not be missed

GARTH NIX

Growing up in the German kingdom of Hessen-Cassel, Dortchen Wild is irresistibly drawn to the boy next door, the young and handsome fairy-tale scholar Wilhelm Grimm.

It is a time of war, tyranny and terror. Napoleon Bonaparte wants to conquer all of Europe, and Hessen-Cassel is one of the first kingdoms to fall. Forced to live under oppressive French rule, the Grimm brothers decide to save the old tales that had once been told by the firesides of houses all over the land.

Dortchen knows many beautiful old stories, including ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘The Frog King’ and ‘Six Swans’. As she tells them to Wilhelm, their love blossoms. Yet the Grimm family is desperately poor, and Dortchen’s father has other plans for his daughter. Marriage is an impossible dream.

Dortchen can only hope that happy endings are not just the stuff of fairy-tales …

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

Dancing On Knives

ePub 9780857983473

Copyright © Kate Forsyth 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A Vintage book

Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

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www.randomhouse.com.au

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First published by Vintage in 2014

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry (ebook)

Forsyth, Kate, 1966– author.

Dancing on knives/Kate Forsyth.

ISBN 9780857983473 (ebook)

Family secrets – Fiction.

Suspense fiction.

A823.3

Cover design by Nada Backovic

Cover image by Arcangel Images

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