Fire Fire (11 page)

‘Stolen fruit tastes sweeter,' he said, biting into a codlin larva.

Stolen fruit tastes sweeter,
they whispered to each other at any moment that called for bravery or laughter. Stolen fruit tastes sweeter.

Uncle Lochie was engraved on their hearts in the space of six syllables.

A few years later a letter came from Uncle Lochie saying he would arrive on the first of April. Just like him. He was such a wag. Everyone was shot through with excitement. They woke up in the morning excited and went to bed exhausted from it and dreamed of Uncle Lochie. They raced around with fervour cleaning up the house.
Leave it Leave it
, the house sighed,
he can't possibly care and
besides he won't really come
, but they ignored it and brushed its unruly hair. The great day came. They had all read the letter, they had all read the flight confirmation. Hugging the day to their leaping chests they piled into the car, no delays, quicksticks, and headed into Toggenberg town to the airport.

‘Yip Yip Yip. Hey Hey Hey,' their hearts sang.

They waited in the arrivals hall, sitting perfectly still on the blue plastic seats. Uncle Lochie's plane landed and Beate started to laugh. She laughed so much she got embarrassed and started to cry.

She cried so much she had to go to the toilet.

Uncle Lochie was not on it. Many people who were not Uncle Lochie came off, parted around them, and evaporated. They waited.

‘Maybe he played a trick on us,' Gotthilf said hesitantly.

They started to laugh, a little wanly. It was very, very clever, you had to give him that. He really got them a good one.

‘Would the Houdini family come to the Ansett information counter please. Would the Houdini family come to the information counter please.'

They looked at each other in wonder. Acantia and Pa led the way.

There on the information counter was a huge box and a letter.

Uncle Lochie had been called to fix a burst oil platform in Kuwait and apologised for being unable to come in person. He wished them a happy Easter. His handwriting was a lot like Acantia's because they had been to the same school.

Inside the box was a dragon's treasure of Easter eggs, Easter rabbits, chocolates and glittering trains with Easter egg carriages. Wealth beyond compare. They were beside themselves. It was such an up and down trick, a disappointing, delicious trick.

A little note on top of the treasure said,
Stolen fruit
.

They went home laughing and shouting, expectant, sad and happy. At home they invited Easter in early and sat down to sort through a whole table load of riches.

Among the Easter eggs Gotthilf found a Toggenberg Centre Supermarket docket. Their eyes popped out of their heads as the truth slowly sank in. They pored over the letters, shrieking with laughter. They wondered over the secretive smile of the Ansett lady, the furtive smiles the other staff had given them. They laughed at the energy with which they had cleaned the house.

‘April FOOOOOOOLS!' Acantia said, dancing, her face lovely with bright, overflowing laughter.

Pa did a little skip in the middle of the floor and they all sat around stuffing themselves with chocolate.

Goats eat whatever they like whether it's good for them or not
, Ziggy wrote in his goat diary when Pieta ate the Easter egg wrappers.

When Acantia and Pa went on holiday to New Zealand, Ursula stayed to mind the place. They had a Saanen goat, called Teresa, with an odd chronic illness. Ursula watched her hobble with finicky steps past the window and acted without thought. She called the vet.

The vet explained the incurable disease, the suffering the goat had been in for the last six months and how long it would take her to die if nothing was done about it.

The blood beat in Ursula's head. A black horror opened up inside her ribcage and her voice fluttered out like a bat from a cave, telling him to put Teresa down.

She sat with the goat's head in her lap, watching the yellow eyes calm and fade as the vet eased a shockingly large amount of straw-coloured liquid into her jugular vein. Ursula was dizzy, flying without control.

The vet offered to help bury the body but Ursula refused.

She sat in the bracken, disbelieving even when the dirty white body went cold. It took her three hours to bury it. The hole in her chest was swallowing her up. A feeble, piping, self-righteous voice told her that she had done the right thing, but the gathering roar at the heart of the cave warned that for the rest of her life she would be alone in knowing it.

Ursula broke the news on the phone. Acantia didn't say much. When she got home, she asked to see the grave. Her face was serious. Acantia told Ursula that the vet's diagnosis was tragically ignorant and that she had returned home with the cure for Teresa from a goat expert in New Zealand. She said that Ursula had been too lazy to nurse the goat to health and had taken a disgusting way out.

Ursula was eleven, a criminal and a murderer. There was no consolation.

The vet bill was added to her account, now an impossible eight hundred and forty dollars to be paid to Acantia when she was grown up.

The next time Acantia went on holiday with Pa and the children, Ursula stayed home again, waving them all off amid jokes about not killing off any more goats. She roamed around happy, the self-sufficient princess buried in the forest. She wandered from animal to animal, taking more care of them than usual, because she and they were special when she was home alone.

Fundevogel the kitten was quiet and miserable, staying in one spot most of the day. Ursula picked him up and he screamed. She felt him all over and, with her scalp crawling, touched a spongy mess filled with little rocks and shards where his firm cat pelvis should have been. He was panting, stretched out on her lap. She sat by the phone waiting for Acantia to call. When the call finally came Ursula gabbled hysterically about calling the vet. There was silence on the end of the line. Then Acantia said quite gently, ‘What's the matter? Who is ill?'

Ursula's teeth chattered.

‘Fundevogel! His pelvis is completely smashed! I have to call the vet!'

Acantia said calmly, ‘Someone must have slammed the door on him. I thought there was something wrong with him before I left. You will have to put him down. It's the humane thing to do, and I know how seriously you take that. You are a courageous girl. Get a bucket and some rocks and make the water warm so it is more comfortable for him. Now stop working yourself up. You have killed things before.'

‘I have to call the vet!'

‘No. That you may not do.'

The phone clicked like a light switch.

Fundevogel lay in Ursula's lap in a daze. She laid him out on the floor, averting her eyes from his life-in-death form, while she prepared everything as Acantia had said.

He fought but she was stronger. He bit through her hand between the thumb and forefinger. Blood spread in the green bucket like purple smoke. When he was limp, Ursula held the kitten's mouth to her lips, but then breathed in slowly, tasting water.
If I bring him to life I will only have to kill him again
. She went up into the bush cuddling his body. Now she was truly a murderer and she was back in Acantia's world. She wandered down the hill, looking at the animals with hatred. She let the cow go hungry, her resolve strengthening with every bellow.

Ursula lay in the dark house alone through the long nights until everyone returned. Acantia hugged her tightly. She said Ursula was very brave and Ursula soaked up all the comfort she could get. Acantia brought the light and peace back with her and Ursulawasable to sleep.

Never forsake me and I will never forsake you
, the kitten told her in her dreams and she was comforted.

Pa didn't appear much in Ursula's diary—there was barely a mention of him. But Ursula was dismayed to find that she didn't appear in his. Not at all.

As she made his bed one morning she found a black leather notebook in his blankets. She was safe as long as she could hear him playing. She snuck off to the edge of the bush and sat down to read it out of sight.

It was written in German. Although she didn't know some of the words, she could follow the gist of it. It was full of comments on European culture, art, poems, quotes from whatever book Pa was reading, and snippets of music. She hummed them to see whether they were familiar. They were not. She skimmed the last two-thirds, looking for her name, looking for any of their names.

She shut the book and stared up at the stringybarks, feeling very lonely. The diary covered a period of about three months. Big things had happened in that three months. She had improved on the violin, and excelled in her lessons—these were things that seemed to matter a lot to Pa. She had murdered a goat and a kitten, and had stayed at Whispers alone for two whole weeks while he went with everyone else to New Zealand. She had turned twelve.

She felt flooded with anxiety. Nothing was really as it seemed.

The viola trilled and wailed to nobody across the paddocks.

Pa wasn't really on their side at all.

wolfnotes

H
elmut and Siegfried started Christmas jokes. The first were droll puns and bad word play, usually born over Christmas dinner. They were burpets and farticles—jokes of bad taste and minor wit. But Christmas jokes evolved into quirky gilt-edged criticism of the family's pain, an end-of-year concession to suffering, a surreptitious goading notice to Acantia that the children were vaguely aware that not all was well; and, in effect, an acceptance.

One Christmas dinner when everyone was in high spirits, the twins started a casual conversation about the names of prospective children.

‘Whaddaya gunna name ya kids?' Siegfried said into the air, but everyone knew he was addressing Helmut.

‘Oh, I like the name Victoria,' Helmut said, turning with an engaging and serious face to Siegfried.

‘For myself,' Siegfried said, sucking thoughtfully on a drumstick, dropping the Aussie drawl, ‘I think Timothy is a lovely name for a boy.'

Acantia looked at them brightly. Everyone else could tell something was up.

‘You all have lovely names. When you have children we will all help!'

‘Between us, we could have one of each. “Victoooria! Teeeeeee-mothy!”' Helmut experimented with a peremptory summons.

‘Yep, I think Victoria and Timothy are the names for me,' Siegfried said.

‘But they will get called Vic and Tim!' Acantia wailed in protest.

Beate told Ursula they were cruel. She was right but even she couldn't stop laughing.

‘G'day Vic,' Ziggy would say.

‘Howdy Tim.'

The others began calling either twin Victim and the joke was banned.