Fire Fire (14 page)

‘Pretty useless,' she said, so softly that only Ursula's preternatural hearing and attunement to her mother could have recorded it.

Acantia sat bunching ixodia flowers, her back to the light. It was a moonless night and she faced nothingness like the captain of a spaceship. The floor was white with the tiny petals, green with the broken discarded stalks. The house looked like the aftermath of a wedding or a funeral, unkempt with flowers either strewn as confetti or shredded in wild bereavement. Scattered and piled about were enough flowers for more than a thousand celebrations or losses. Acantia was silent, moving rapidly, the air filled with the sappy click of stalks being broken. She was sitting on the step leading from the verandah to the paddock. Ursula was sitting directly behind her on the step leading from the house to the verandah. Her fingers, like Acantia's, were caked with the sticky, scabby green residue, the sap of countless green stalks. Her hands were green, ingrained, palms streaked from pressing the heads of the flowers together into a cauliflower shape, tired from snapping the rubber band around them and stacking them against the walls, where they formed white knobbly inner walls of everlasting flowers all around the house.

Acantia became obsessed with ixodia for several years running but Ursula's fourteenth year was definitely the worst. She didn't need the money but said that she did so passionately and so often that it was unquestioned fact. She stockpiled tens of thousands of bunches, supplies for an endless funeral. They walked through muffling corridors of flowers, crunching petals underfoot. The house walls and the paintings disappeared behind the mounting knobbled walls built from the frail roundish white bricks. She hoarded the money made from selling some to florists, saving to buy land, land and more land, enough for several cemeteries.

Flower season lasted for three months over summer. The children got a lot of good fresh air.

Ursula stared at Acantia's back. They were moving in unison, like rowers pulling at their oars, reaching into the water, hauling, paddling the verandah out into the darkness. One of Acantia's shoulders was always higher than the other, raised and twisted inwards. Ursula had never noticed before. Without breaking rhythm, she carefully raised and twisted her own, ducking her head in slightly until her body fitted the pattern of her mother's.

Something flowed around her form, knocking blindly, lurching within her sudden asymmetry. It was the body shape of unhappiness, the vessel for discomfort, annoyance, misery. Acantia was unhappy.

Ursula straightened, losing rhythm entirely. When did that happen?

When did Acantia become silently miserable? When did she last see Acantia straight and smooth? She couldn't remember and started to panic. She tried to picture her mother that morning. The shoulders were hunched, the eyes were tense, like those of a cornered cat.

Acantia sensed the broken rhythm behind her and turned her head, holding it as though her neck was braced. She stared at her daughter out of an eye, shadowed in the stark light of the hallway, invisible in a triangular black pool under her brow. Ursula wanted to cry out,
I didn't see anything, No, nothing at all.
But she also felt a jolt of excitement and power. She knew something about Acantia. Something had leaked out and Ursula was in the right place at the right time to catch it. What a thing to know.

Acantia looked wild and fierce but her face was wet.

Ursula bunched furiously. If bandaging the house with flowers would fix it, that is what she would do. She was exultant.

Acantia roamed the hills with her children denuding them of white as efficiently as a plague of locusts. It took three years to sell off that summer's stockpile. In the end Acantia had enough pieces of land in various forgotten corners of South Australia that the Houdinis had homes away from home for all the surprise holidays Acantia sprung on them.

At age fourteen, out of the blue, Ursula had sex.

She found herself one morning as dead as Fundevogel, with no plans, no passions. Nothing. She looked at the clear sky and hated it. She thought of her brothers and sisters and felt nothing. She looked down at herself. She ran a distant hand over her breasts, her legs, her belly. When she held herself at arm's length she knew she had power over the pitiful rag pinched between her thumb and forefinger. But the normal seeming morning, with its shrieks, wails and viola, was making her panic. Horror was welling up her spine again, and she became aware that she was tearing at her own chest, beating herself. She could not bear to be trapped in this . . . this filth. He had said she was lovely.

In the early years, when the woodman pressed Beate's small body up against the rough bark of the biggest pine tree and forced his tongue into her throat, Acantia and Pa were there to hear her scream. They ran out and told the woodman with outraged voices that they would not be buying wood from him again, and Gotthilf got the job of woodchopping.

‘Self-sufficiency. We don't need wood
delivered
!' Acantia said.

Wood delivery was the most outdated and ridiculous thing. The children laughed gaily, except for Beate, who was shaking, vaguely waiting for something else to be done about it all.

That was the last time Pa and Acantia were in earshot.

‘Count Ugolini has offered to have you stay with him on his yacht.' Acantia fussed at Gotthilf's collar. Her voice was hushed, even envious. Gotthilf was standing dressed in a long white shirt several sizes too big for him. He was fifteen and looked silly. Acantia would not have him going to Count Ugolini's in dirty clothes. The shirt somehow satisfied her idea of waterborne medieval aristocracy. She could see her boy sitting there silent, dressed in white, playing duets or playing chess with the Count.

Gotthilf knew better than to protest. He had his concert trousers on underneath. He was a little excited. He would be out, away, almost free, having adventures. He had never heard Ugolini say much and had expectations of silence and the sea. He imagined saying at the beginning, ‘I am enraptured with embarkation,' and at the end, ‘Thank you, Antonio, for all the immeasurable kindnesses you have shown me. I am truly honoured to have been your submariner,' and not really saying much in between.

‘You are a good boy. Do exactly what Count Ugolini asks you to.' Count Ugolini was carving the roast.The children stared at his hands, quiet and still, vague pools of nothing for eyes. The slices looked like Russian dolls, each one size smaller than the last but identical.

His hands were wrapped around the broken bone knife handle and were almost the same colour. The blade slid forward and each slice formed a lip, then a mouth, then a cresting wave sinking onto its fellows on the plate, bleeding softly. After three slices Ursula wrenched her eyes away and then she caught a glimpse of Gotthilf's face, blank as a rabbit's in headlights.

A grey mist lifted and her body curled like a salted leech.

Gotthilf too, too!
was all she could think. She sizzled with a strange envy and disappointment. Was he beautiful too? She stared at Gotthilf's miserable, pinched face, and suddenly felt much older than him; and gross to the heart. Her thin older brother was not beautiful. He looked broken—
her
body had brought the wolf into the fold. She was dizzy with the horror of it. She perversely almost hated Gotthilf for it.

Ugolini would perhaps have kept Ursula close. But he left it too long. By the time he visited after the yacht trip, Ursula had developed a terror of him so powerful that she was physically sick with fear and had to stay far away from his voice, body and breath. When he wasn't there, being the person she had been before was as simple as shaking off a bad dream. Her terror was not of him so much as of the actuality of it. She felt dizzy with confusion. It was all a dream, it had to be. She wouldn't meet his pleading, commanding eyes; she wouldn't come near and shake his hand.

It was easy be the person she had been before, and forget.

She headed off with Ember all day and no one thought that strange. She remembered dimly how much she had worshipped the Count after he got Ember for her, but that couldn't touch her now, or taint Ember. She smiled, suddenly, face to the wind, thinking of the time Ember bit him. Would have left a big bruise.

She tried to stop thinking about the Count altogether. She shaved her head and cut deep grooves into her thighs with the point of a knife. She fought the shifting patterns and tides of her terrible body.

And then it all faded and she could barely remember it. The sight of the Count's car made her feel an unpleasant tingle, a presence of something she never allowed near. She never thought about her distant hellos and goodbyes. She felt nothing and had school, now, to get on with.

Ursula liked school. She craved attention and at school she got it. School was a world of library, laboratory and lavatory, peopled by children. Ursula wandered around in a self-contained, unresponsive bubble. The aggression of children, their sideways looks and their attacks, increased the faint air of satisfaction she gave off.

Gotthilf flickered at the edge of her vision, ignoring her and anchoring her. She was impervious. She excelled. She scratched incessantly, making permanent scars on her arms.

She was almost silent but quite happy. She concentrated on all conversations she had heard and stored, inserting the witty retorts she had not made, charming herself with what had almost been a conversation, a joust, a victory. She noted fourteen-year-olds' obsessions, their attention to boys, clothes, music, and felt very pleased with herself. She marked Carolyn Treloar as the one to beat in maths. She decided she liked jeans with the pockets low on the buttocks, rounding them, not higher, missing the buttocks altogether. She blushed when the boys threw tampons at her, but it was only her body that blushed. She was pleased with herself for recognising, with no prior experience, that they were tampons, and secretly delighted that she had guessed it would be social disaster to reach down and pick one up.

And just when the novelty was wearing off, and she had begun to writhe at being tied to the slow ticking hands of the clock, the children would do something so remarkable, so worthy of study, that she was caught again.

The kids called her Ershel Who Dunny. She corrected their pronunciation until she realised it was deliberate. They made toilet flushing noises as she passed. They called her Scritch-Scratch and Leper, and made bell tinkles to mark her passage. She imagined their changed hearts when she rescued them from the inferno.

‘What does your father produce on your farm?'

Ursula thought about it. She guessed that something airy and superior about music would be risible, as Gotthilf would say. Pa didn't farm. She suddenly saw this as a lack, a failing on his part. She knew with sudden clarity that none of these farm children must ever be allowed to see the Houdinis' whisperweed-choked fields and the weed drowned orchard. She blushed. How shameful to let land go to waste!

‘Apples,' she said. The Houdinis had never actually brought in a whole harvest from the orchard, let alone sold an apple. But they did have six acres of orchard, and usually picked the tree by the house clean. ‘Red Delicious, Johnnies and Strawberry Rose.' She was impressed with herself suddenly for how much she knew about apple cultivation. ‘We had
enormous
problems this year with codlin moth, and spot. Had to
spray
. But the coolroom is full, nevertheless, because the season was that good, whaddayano. We get teams of pickers in, but it's really hard work in picking season, even with the pickers. The pruning is no fun either, but the trees like it.

I can just
feel
the sap rising, and feel them thanking me for cutting away the dead wood . . .'

Ursula was alone in the shelter shed. She thought back through the conversation like a master chef tasting a failed experiment.
Just
a touch overdone.

School was like a story in which she was the heroic outcast, and so was almost inexhaustibly entertaining. Home was more confused, unpredictable. Home was real life.

Night after night Ursula lay in bed trying to prevent corrosion and decay. Every image in her mind became carious, melted, bubbled away into nothing. She flicked through images rapidly, trying to hold onto an object which would remain full and pure. But everything became disgusting. Everything beautiful was destroyed. Sooner or later she would focus on her own feet, there in a V under the blankets. They emerged in her mind pearlescent, glowing pink. Then just as she was beginning to breathe easily and dive towards sleep, a tiny bubbling hole appeared at the base of the big toe. Her feet corroded and silently sizzled away to a flat irregular mass at the end of her legs. She focused on her legs, but they too burst in a fistulous mess and vanished away to almost nothing. As her body and her heart boiled away and died she stiffened with a frozen panic. She was left with the horrid sentient head fixed staring into the darkness, waiting hours through the night for the return of her body. She was powerless to bring it back. Usually she awoke next morning freed of the bad mood. She soon learned not to focus on things precious to her. The horse, the cat were off limits. But her body was fair game. By the time she was sixteen she enjoyed the uncontrollable mental destruction of her body and the panic peace it brought her.