Fire Fire (16 page)

Competence. Hatred. His heart began racing in a kind of terror as they were called up for the start and he almost fainted as they waited those last sickening seconds. He was going to fail. ‘Omi God, Omi God, Omi God, Goddo!' The chant sounded frail under the tin sheds and the rain. A voice came, sodden, unfamiliar, ‘Killem, Goddo!' He started badly. The track narrowed quickly to a single trail along a fence line and boys jostled and shoved in the liquid clay, slipping and stumbling. Gotthilf, the smallest, got bounced and jostled to near the back of the pack. He pounded the sludge, wiping the mud thrown from the two boys ahead of him from his eyes. The rain was pouring down now in cold streamers. Five thousand metres, maybe a little less, to go. He had no cheeky, inexhaustible spring of energy, nothing. His legs seemed to be made of a doll's wire and rubber, not flesh and bone. They bent unpredictably as they took his weight and had to be straightened with effort to take it again.

The mud splashed up his legs and into his shorts. He could feel its grit clasp his balls and ride up his belly. Each step seemed to take him deeper, each splash to grip him with greater viscosity, greater power. He warmed slowly, running half in a dream world. He suddenly imagined the earth's hands reaching for him to pull him into the dead goat's grave, but it was no idle scary thought. Something in him had switched on and he stumbled in terror, his legs dissolving. The grit rose to cloak his eyelashes and he screamed with every breath. Each sucking step pulled his leg and held and he fought, certain now that he could feel hands, mouths in the mud, certain that it had him and would never let him go. Then he fell, suddenly, arms too slow to save him, and he went face first into the track. At the last awful moment he turned his face to the side and was left buried in the mud with one eye to the soaking rain and his nose submerged in heavy clinging clay. He screamed as he sucked in panic for air, and pushed against the seemingly bottomless mud, reaching, inching slowly for a handhold. He managed to push himself out and away with all the strength he could find. The liquid earth gave him up with a sucking sound and a wet sigh. He stumbled on. The track lifted from the lowlands and into the bush.

The stringybark leaves slap-slapped in the rain with a welcome solid sound.

He was alone now in the bush, sliding and skating the slicked track, using his hands to scrape the mud off his shuddering body. He began to weep in the aftermath and from exhaustion, and in the knowledge of shame and humiliation to come.

Gotthilf ran long last. He arrived at the sodden knoll of the finishing line sobbing so openly that everyone looked away. A teacher put arms around him and that made it worse. But even as his sobs poured from his wrung-out muddy body, something in him sat still and clear-eyed, drumming with the thought,
I will
never do or be this again
.

The Berg boys were silent on the bus back to school.

Gotthilf redeemed himself with Acantia for a day. He went on a school excursion to Berg Cliffs, discovering along the way that Trevor's family were Ramindjeri and that Trevor couldn't swim. Both pieces of information put him into a high pressure state of happiness. He pestered Trevor for titbits of Ramindjeri history and of Trevor's fascinatingly miserable childhood in foster homes. He felt himself swell with skill, knowledge and power. His dives and water displays had an edge to them, a demonstration of prowess, and Trevor was uncomplicatedly admiring.

When a woman leapt into the foam to save her drowning ten year old, and when her desperate efforts began to fail in the hidden rip, Gotthilf already felt like a giant and didn't hesitate. He was a superb swimmer. He dived in, swam strongly out to the boy, trod water as he wrenched the flailing child around and pulled an arm up tight between his shoulderblades. Then Gotthilf hugged him in close and hissed, ‘Don't squirm or I'll accentuate,' demonstrating viciously what he meant. The boy wailed as he spluttered, and hid rather than thank his rescuer once on the beach. The mother managed to swim ashore, once she saw that her boy was in good hands.

Gotthilf was a hero. Even Trevor said so. The teacher clapped him on the back and told him he was a fine lad.

Acantia was very surprised. ‘Just goes to show that good blood and upbringing will out, no matter the company one keeps.' She smiled and shook her head in wonder. ‘When the going gets tough, the true character shines.' She hugged Gotthilf close while Ursula looked on with envy. Buoyed by bliss, Gotthilf told his story over and over again. Acantia made a hero's roast chicken for dinner, with carrots and potatoes and lettuce salad. Beate, Ursula and Lilo sang a song, ranged behind his chair, in his honour. Ursula longed for something terrible to happen right in front of her nose so she too could show what she was made of.

The next day Acantia's mood was grim. Gotthilf beamed at her and got no response. She gave his school uniform a leaden stare and went back to bed. When he got home from school it was all over.

‘Sit down,' she said, tight-lipped. ‘I rang your teacher, that weak man Mr Quinn, and I spoke to Mrs Poulos, the New Australian woman you say you rescued, and the surf life saving club. There were no high waves, you rescued one, not two people. You probably got in the way of the surf lifesavers, the proper men for the job, and almost caused Mrs Poulos and her son to drown.' Her eyes blasted him and she screamed in his face, ‘You pathetic, corrupt little liar! Until you leave those filthy degraded friends, don't ever pass your defiled words in my hearing!'

Gotthilf sat, small and pale. Bitter as his heart became, he could not keep silent. He took to strafing the kitchen with vile words and then running.

Ursula was delighted. With Gotthilf out of the race, she had a chance at being the good one.

School became a bad daydream. Acantia's world was crumbling and throughout their school years the younger Houdinis trickled in and out of schools. They were tortured at school.

Gotthilf was caught shoplifting underpants. Acantia sent him to a psychologist to humiliate him.

‘Children, gather round. Gotthilf is infected with the mental diseases of this society. He is a Liar and a Delinquent, yes. But he has sunk lower. He is a Thief. He has chosen the path of degradation and criminality. There is very little more I can do for him. But I will not under any circumstances let the same happen to any of you. I will stamp it out at the first sign. I know now what to look for.'

Gotthilf ran away from home after knocking Acantia out.

He covered the walls of his caravan with texta graffiti.

‘No wuckin' furries. NO WUCKIN' FURRIES! NO WUCKIN' FURRIES!' and, ‘MOTHER-F-FFF!'

He was still quite a small boy. He was a weedy seventeen, with a cheeky grin and a flinch.

They all agreed for a while that he had done a terrible thing and would rue it all his days.

Acantia was tormenting Gotthilf and he said something no one could later recall. She went to swipe his face with the pressure cooker lid and he ducked and pushed her hard against the stove top. She crumpled and lay on the floor with her eyes shut. Gotthilf was deathly pale. They all stared, paralysed. It was as if a bomb was falling in front of them and everything had slowed to nightmare time. Gotthilf stood leaning against the chair, his hair standing out like a halo around his white face. Pa was down on the floor shaking Acantia.

Lilo walked in and took in the scene. She said matter-of-factly, ‘
Gotthilf!
I reckon you've killed her!'

Beate slapped Lilo with all her might across the face and then burst into tears. Lilo nursed her cheek glowering and muttered sotto voce, ‘Only joking! Jeez! I didn't know he
really
had!'

Acantia suddenly sat up and looked around brightly. She laughed and stared into Gotthilf's eyes.

‘Scared ya!' she said, her voice shaky and mirthless, and jumped up.

Gotthilf packed his stolen underwear, socks, shoes, shirts, yet-to-be-worn jeans, matches, pocketknife, aftershave and bow resin into his stolen backpack.

‘Conflagrate in hell,' he whispered, looking back across the still grasses of the moonlit weed ocean that stretched from the house to the bush. The moonlight made a glacier inch through the grass. Then a wind gust melted it all in a frenzy of glittering eddies. The grasses sighed. He stepped over the sagging boundary fence, elated, wide-eyed, clammy.

Pa visited Gotthilf occasionally in secret but his brothers and sisters barely saw him again. Acantia acted as though he had never existed. Gotthilf and Acantia never forgave each other. It was true love between them: betrayal hurt forever. Ursula tried not to miss her delinquent brother. Ursula was a little jealous, always, of Gotthilf.

Arno was a very quiet kid. He spoke his own language, which they all learned, until he was four or five. Arno played chess with anyone he could trap into it. He hovered at the fringes of family storms and battles with the board and pieces tucked under his arm.

As soon as he had someone in his sights, he could draw and lay out the pieces with the speed of a gunslinger. Being beaten at chess by Arno was like reading on the toilet. It was time out from ordinary life, since Acantia would not interrupt a chess game, although she would ask Arno to make the kill quickly if necessary.

Arno kept five clocks going in the house, and telephoned the time regularly to check them against each other. The auditorium had Paris time, the kitchen Toggenberg time, the kids' room London time, the cuckoo clock in Beate's house Berlin time; and the time he kept on his watch was a secret. When Arno was thirteen they discovered that he was deaf, having narrow ear canals which were almost permanently swollen and blocked with wax. However, by then everyone was so used to his deaf personality that it was disturbing whenever he had his canals washed out and became someone else. He began to pretend to be deaf in order to fit in.

Arno didn't know it, but he was monochrome-sighted. He could only see blue. Standing behind Lilo on Ash Wednesday and holding Acantia's hand, Arno watched his sister's hair extended to the sky by flames on the hilltop behind her head. The hair, the flames and the sky were one. Fire was so beautiful. It was like the sweet, faint music he could sometimes hear. Fire was all the colours of the rainbow, a symphony of merging and harmonising tones. He wished everything would burn. Behind him the dam glistened like a cow's eye. Dam water was never blue, he knew. It was blue he was waiting for, straining his ears for. Sky and eye blue. Orange was the most bluish part of flame.

The sky was Arno's certainty, on a clear day. He loved blue, and the real sky was always blue. His eyes travelled upward to a zenith, from which he could anchor his world.

Arno controlled his world by remembering the days. All his energy was taken up with a mantric recitation running continuously in his head. He knew the weather, the weekday and the salient events for every date going back to his third birthday, and before that was chaos. They were catalogued and cross-referenced, memorised and maintained like a garden. The weeds from any day could start spreading to their surrounding weeks, some could jump years, once the layers thickened. Revisiting his days and weeding them of the events that belonged elsewhere made him slow at school because it was a full-time job. But he was more reliable than a calendar, and his days could be called on to resolve disputes and to find things that had been lost. The days were the key to order.

He did not like events that seemed to take more than one day to finish. The fire was very satisfactory.

Acantia once called Lilo the
all-gold girl
, but Arno could easily imagine her blue. Krishna blue, especially when she had a suntan and was sweaty. Was her blood really red like other people's? He had sometimes stared at his own in private, watching a trickle run down his arm, almost sure that, with no one else around, it was winking from red to blue. Lilo once walked in on him and screamed and the pool on the floor flicked back to red instantly.

Lilo kept his colours in place.

Arno loved what came from his body. He treasured his hair and his earwax. In spring he let birds take his hairs from the roof of his caravan and spent all summer tracking which nests he'd helped build. He never made Secret Spots. Something secret was coming from inside him and it was almost certainly blue.