Fire Fire (12 page)

‘Children. Keep your minds clean. Bad thoughts make bad people. If you desire evil that is what you will bring into the world. I desired
goodandgoodonly
and I brought you into the world. If I wanted you dead, Ursula, you would die. I would only have to point the bone, like the Aborigines. It's all in the mind.'

As they grew up and began to desire more than mental cleanliness, the demands on the house's resources increased dramatically. Helmut and Siegfried got hygiene late but when they did, the pressure on both houses was intense.

Acantia tried ridicule:

The vanity of teenage boys has no limits.

Acantia tried sabotage:

Teenage boys do not need underpants.

Acantia tried science:

Hot water gives you pimples.

Acantia tried prohibitions:

Thou shalt not use soap.

But in the end the simplest methods work best.

When the shower broke down she refused to get it repaired. This lasted two years.

But the wiles and cunning of the young are infinite.

It started with the great nudist rebellion, pioneered by Lilo. Having broken the nude barrier in the privacy of their bedrooms, Lilo, Siegfried, Helmut and Arno were fledglings ready for first flight. One day, when Acantia and Pa weren't home, Lilo's glimmering white body walked outside into the sunlight and tried to act casual, to go about its ordinary business. The naked boys emerged almost immediately from their hiding places and the fledglings stretched their new wings in solemn joy. After that whenever Acantia and Pa were out the clothes fell off and they scampered outside in all their ribby adolescent beauty, pale white skin radiant in the sunlight. They played Gotthilf's KISS tape in the auditorium. They ran about the yard shrieking, ran up the hill, strolled in a leisurely way, took the air, and sprinted for cover, the excited dog leaping and snapping dangerously close, when they heard the car labouring up the other side of the hill. They soon extended these stolen pleasures to the group scrub-up under the garden hose.

Then one day Lilo walked out in front of the kitchen window and calmly showered under the jetting hose in front of Acantia and Pa. Before they could react the boys joined her, and their four youngest children twirled their new pubic hair, glistening skin and shining bellies in a silent and aggressive dance in front of them.

They passed the soap around and made eye contact only with each other. It lasted a few frozen minutes and then they scattered, shrieking and whooping with victory and giddy freedom.

They didn't put their clothes on again that summer. For a while Acantia was at a loss and then she started painting them.

They speculated over what might have happened to Acantia. She was the rebel, the beautiful young woman who refused to be a debutante and didn't shave her legs. Acantia who toured around Australia on a motorbike in the fifties, accompanied only by her dog. Floosie was a border-collie cross with natural bikie glasses. In an old (and later scorched) photograph Acantia is shooting her mysterious, riveting smile at a camera which also takes in her long thigh and tanned leg. She sits at ease on the machine, looks at once utterly feminine and warriorlike. This was the Acantia who flashed a knife in the moonlight at the men trying to force their way into her isolated tent. Acantia who hitched alone and broke across Europe, who taught kids in London slums, who beat up a truckie who tried to tongue-kiss her. It was all suggested in those black and white photos of a wild, dark girl, so stunning that Beate always said, ‘No wonder Pa fell in love with her!' and sighed.

On the other hand they had the Acantia they knew.

Acantia now and then developed a manic desire for cleanliness. But even washing the dishes clean was impossible, for she didn't believe in any kind of cleaning agent. The house muttered,
Don't bother it
can make no difference
, and the children listened and stashed the dirty saucepans under the plum tree. Many years of no soap and rancid tea towels had left everything with a receding useable centre and a periphery of caked, greasy, cooked-on grime. Glasses left prints on their fingers. The windows were almost opaque, filmy and dim. Only at night could they see clearly through the glass, and that was when they watched the Tarsinis the way other people watched television.

Acantia began to make her own soap from goat fat. Old honey vats were filled with the fresh lard from the latest slaughter, filling the kitchen with the reek of billygoat and murder.

Varnishing the floor was the exception. It was a big job and Acantia and Ursula were a team. Ursula worked in wordless harmony with Acantia, transforming the house with one cataclysmic effort into something different. It was magical. None of this effort was pointless. It had a path and a pattern and the sequence led sensibly and predictably to the glory of the new-polished floor and an echo of the happiness of their first arrival at Whispers. Side by side, stamina and attention to detail rewarded, they smiled tiredly at each other at the end of the days. Covered in the same dust, smiling the same smile.

But the house wore Acantia out. After Ursula left home she decided that the floorboards could not sustain any more sanding and oiled the floor with some of the excess goat fat instead. From then on it joined the ranks of the utterly uncleanable. Impregnated with a sticky, viscous suet and tramped over by countless work boots carrying slush and dust and slush again, it could do nothing except collect, fester and wait for the fire.

The first crosshatched paintings had something elusive and wonderful.

Acantia said that the downwards brushstroke was the descent of divine inspiration (or the supplication of life yearning for and receiving inspiration), and the horizontals were the waiting world.

It was Water and Earth. She said the secret of the universe, material and spiritual, was revealed in her brushstroke.

A sky is suspended refractive, having the striated distortions of moving water. Liquid and structured, somehow not possible but resonant. The gossamer skies suggested something beyond their infinite colours but you could never say what. Acantia's skies reflected the world below as seen in a frozen pool. It was an icy, forbidding sky that loomed so glorious over the earth.

The world occasionally imitated her paintings. The day of the first bushfire the clouds reflected the flames in strangely geometric fragmentation.

When Ursula stared at Acantia's great paintings, she wanted to fix the world for her mother. She went into frenzies, cleaning and polishing the centre of the kitchen floor when Acantia was out. To see her come home and her face lighten as she walked in was addictive. For a while Ursula believed she held the family together with these small polished pools. She developed a responsibility complex and the house hated her.

When things went crazy the house sneered at her. The expanses of filthy floor stared smugly up at her.
You could have
prevented it somehow.

Ursula experimented with body language. She pouted and flounced. She sneered, shrugged, retorted.

Little Bear found himself in most unwholesome circumstances.
Enslaved, yes, but worse was to come. Those around him plotted for his
very life. Little Bear was going to have to find where they had hidden
Fireflame and hope he could outwit them. Fireflame was fast enough,
he was sure, to carry him to freedom, but he had to get out of range
of their weaponry. And what if they had cut her hamstrings, crippling
her forever?
Ursula planned the great escape. She escaped secretly several times but nobody noticed, which made her feel as if she had failed even before she returned home. In fact she would return home to see if they had noticed and invariably find that they had not.

Her planning was impeccable. She escaped through Mr Vatzek's place, placing a white wooden beam on the barbed wire fence so that Ember could jump it in the dark, then removing it to a hiding place in the long grass on Mr Vatzek's side. Acantia had instilled in the children a great fear of Mr Vatzek. He chased them once when they crossed the border (it was before they had built the barbed wire perimeter fence), shouting, ‘No Gots! No Gots!' and waving his stick. The stick seemed to turn into a snake, writhing and hissing, and even the goats were spooked. Mr Vatzek was seldom seen in person but inhabited their nightmares. Sometimes they saw him at dusk, hobbling like an old bent woman along the perimeter dividing their two worlds. Mr Vatzek's animals all had bits missing. His chooks were one-legged. His cows had their tails chopped off. His sheep had no ears. He had a donkey with its face all awry.

Ursula walked Ember down to Mr Vatzek's lake, tied her to a tree on a long line and lay down under the tall gumtrees, cushioned from all noise other than Ember's comforting sigh and heavy shuffle and the soft, secret conversations of birds and trees and wind. No one would even imagine that she would go this way. She camped out, shuddering with fear and something else under the beautiful darkness of the trees, the spangled sky glittering through their ragged black feathers. She could not sleep. She stared into the glimmering dark, listening, breathing. All was still. She tried to imagine that she was miles away, in Germany. But the black bowl of the sky above her looked too stale and homely. The stars were the tiny escape holes, letting in fragments of light from the real world. If she could get up there and squeeze her body through one of them, she would emerge into the light above like a cat from a drainpipe. She was like a kitten in a cardboard box, staring at the needle holes punched in it to let in air. A fox cried out from the hill above.
Wa-aah, wa-aah,
a ghostly voice hanging, eerie, like the stars themselves. She was filled with longing. The cry could carry her out like a thermal under her wings, raising her to the stars. She tried to focus on the glacial cries but her head was still trapped in the house. Images of the sleeping Houdinis floated up like dank steam into the night air and she started to cry.

Arno sleeps with his cheeks dirty in the dark, dirty with old tears no one understands. Helmut talks and burbles, as he always does when he sleeps. She looks at Siegfried, curled to the wall, his bedclothes stinking. She mentally flips him over, swinging his arm wide at a mosquito, leaving him with his face lit, dreaming, in a shaft of moonlight. The shadows under his eyes look like pools of blue ink. Lilo is asleep under her bed, cuddling a cat and six kittens. Gotthilf is lying on his tummy, naked in the moonlight as always, his buttocks gleaming and his head under the pillow. Beate in Beate's house is harder to see. Maybe she sleeps like a princess or a corpse— on her back, feet together, with her long golden hair splayed on the white pillow. Ursula has never crept in to stare at Beate sleeping and decides that she will, soon. The Houdinis rumble and rattle in concert, a warm sound percolating like a fart through the blankets and out through the room. Ursula imagines herself as the Tomten, singing a special song that only children understand. Looking in, being the Tomten, makes everything look sweeter.