Fire Fire (17 page)

Another winter battered Whispers, the rain blasting through the bush to the sound of slapping gum leaves. The ground was sodden, pungent with black beetles. Only around the house the pines and firs sighed, an oasis of whispering voices, ghosts from elsewhere. Beate's violin sang out from a candlelit room, notes of silent snowfall, of the long dark and the doona-covered world of northern winter, of the eerie deadly comfort of a blanket of snow. Beate knew she would go. As soon as she could fly, she would follow the magnetic songlines rising from the maple child cradled in her hands. She longed for the warmth of snow and the children she could love if she were far enough away.

Ursula and Acantia crept along in the undergrowth, treading carefully to avoid crackling kindling underfoot.

‘Shhh,' whispered Acantia, turning to Ursula with a mime's elaborate movements. Her arm and hand made a scroll before her finger unfurled and came to her lips. Ursula grinned and mimicked her exactly but unfurled her finger at the last minute to pick her nose.

Acantia snuffled with suppressed laughter. She pointed ahead and they both crouched down, peering through a bank of broom. The animal they had been stalking had stopped still and could not be seen clearly. Its furry form could be made out dimly. They froze, sensing that it had seen them. Ursula's heart pounded. It had a lumbering, brownish, woolly form. They had followed it for about twenty metres, alternately dashing and freezing, keeping downwind.

Suddenly it burst through the broom and hit Acantia full lob in the chest, roaring. Acantia went down under it and, her mind writhing, Ursula leapt on top of it, clenching great fistfuls of its hair. Its huge pelt came off in her hands and she fell backwards into the broom with the massive skin on top of her. She struggled frantically out from under it, hearing Acantia making a strange noise. The animal sounded as though it was eating her mother in gulps. She leapt up. Acantia was lying in the brush next to Helmut. Both of them were laughing, tears coursing down their cheeks.

All three of them lay on the underbrush and laughed themselves quiet, staring at the blue sky through the trees. A currawong whistled and klonged. Ursula answered.

Then silence. Then listening to insects.

‘Ouch,' said Acantia.

‘Hopper ant,' said Helmut.

But none of them moved.

Beate played. Her fingers flew, their stumps raw. Her fingerprints had long ago been worn away. Herviolin, crushed under her chin, was the frail love child of ebony and maple. Beate screamed and howled with its voice. The smell of hot resin and the fine white powder rising in slow motion from her flashing bow were in her nostrils.

Beate played scales like a caged tiger.

But when she played herself beyond her known world she felt her heart swelling, bursting, the hot blood drenching the violin along with her sweat and with the ooze from the suppurating sore on her chin. Her body and her senses soared, crying out for love and protection. Her music sang of her mother's arms about her, of her arms about a child and her hot whisper that would heal all:

I love you, love you, love you to the ends of the earth and the end
of time.

Ursula sat outside, pounding clay to remove the air bubbles before sculpting. Beate ripped through the Devil's Trill like a locomotive, then suddenly hit the grief of a wide valley, filled with rivers, forests, snow-covered spruces, loneliness and loss. Ursula looked up, her breath caught and held in the strings when Beate stopped. Silence sizzled around them both and Ursula could hear her sister gasping inside the room.

The children sat around the dinner table, silent. Whenever evening fell and the uncertain flicker of the fluoro lit the kitchen, something sad seemed to settle at the table with them. The lighting was yellow, the shadowed corners daunting. The Tarsinis were ranged in the dim window, their heads in their palms, lank hair also flicked over brows, elbows either side of their empty bowls. The fluoro picked up a dull shine from the walls and the fire died down to embers. No one moved. Beate looked strained and Lilo's eyes were flicking from face to face for answers. They all had the quiet-breathing rigidity of dogs with ears pricked. Acantia was howling outside in the rain, her voice emitted in time lapse snatches, tracking her sprint through the cow paddock, the orchard, and then faintly from the bush rim. Then she fell silent and the children's spines tensed as if they had all drawn breath. They waited, each looking to the others for signs. They waited long minutes. Suddenly Acantia burst in the door, breathing hard and smiling ecstatically. Her hair was black and slick, plastered in tendrils to her white forehead, her lips red. Her eyes were wild and shining. She was shaken suddenly by a storm of sobs, her smile tightening to a grimace. She doubled over. The children smiled uncertainly, hopefully, without relaxing. Acantia flung herself upright, her hair spraying the ceiling and walls from its black points.

She threw an ardent look to her children.

‘I have been communing!' she breathed.

She hugged each of them and went to bed. The children listened until they heard her door close and her bed creak and then Beate rose carefully and with almost noiseless motions made them all a dinner of fried rice, eggs and silverbeet. Lilo looked at Ursula across the table.

‘Will we ever be better?'

Ursula's face was pale, her eyes dark and worried.

‘Eat your food and shut up.'

Lilo looked relieved.

Beate, Ursula and Lilo sang madrigals and rounds, standing gazing at nothing in the centre of the auditorium. Their singing voices filled the room, knocking up against the walls, ringing through the paintings into the depths of Schwarzwald, of Luzerne, of snowfall and out faintly to the dim bush perimeter.

Beate's descant rose high in flight over the sad chords of the round. Beate was, one day, going home.

The sweet voices of the three sisters calling for the forest and Beate's lost love:

Alles Schweiget

Nachtigalen

Locken mit Süssen

Melodien

Tränen ins Auge

Schwermut ins Herz

Ziggy and Ursa riffled through the glossy catalogue of Acantia's Great Exhibition. Acantia's Great Exhibition had come as a surprise in every way. Pa had long ceased giving concerts and public appearances. Acantia had declined all official invitations on his behalf so effectively that gilt-edged letters to A Hartmut Houdini were a thing of the past. Acantia had shone all week with a fierce delight, and giggled at their open mouths when she slammed the catalogue down onto the table.

Ursula had accepted unquestioningly that the problem was with the public, not with Pa. As she looked at the catalogue, she could hear Pa practising. For the first time she heard and noted the meaning of the rough, sobbing notes, out of pitch. There was a garish, raw grief in his playing. Beate was practising too, further away. Pa's notes were embarrassing sliding tears against that crystal desire. She tried to catch Siegfried's eye, but he wasn't looking or listening.

The catalogue was an unexpectedly authentic looking document, printed with a beautiful font on fine paper, embellished with ornamental scrollwork and quotes from the artist. The paintings were reproduced in stunning colour. Ursula and Siegfried turned the pages slowly, feeling with their fingertips the independence of the image conferred by photographic reduction. The paintings had grown wings and soared away. They were minute in their altitude and distance. They were familiar and transformed. They were Acantia's children, born from her eye, flying away.

The back cover said:
With seven colours I can make the world
. Acantia.

Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red, Prussian Blue, Titanium White, Cerulean Blue and Vandyke Brown. Ursula could only ever count six but she was forgetting the one which is an absence and sits waiting on the masonite.

The catalogue gave a biography of Acantia. She was born with paintbrush in hand, it said. She was married to the famous viola player A Hartmut Houdini. She had seven brilliant children. They all lived together in a house in the bush awash with the colours of the several artists in the clan and ringing with the music of a string quartet, a trio and a bassoon. Dawn to dusk her life was Love, Hope, Music, Faith and Creativity.

It said she was studying for her doctorate in Poona University, India, in Ayurvedic Medicine and that her painting reflected a philosophy of supreme health and physical and psychic completion. She was the author of numerous books on Art and Therapy, Shells and Therapy and Canine Phrenology and, under a pseudonym, was a health columnist for the local newspaper. They laughed a little at some of her comments. She had written assessments for each painting.

This is a selfish painting, but none the worse for that. It is painted
purely for the pleasure of the artist but here that can give pleasure too.

They came to a page from which a painting leapt renewed. It was a huge picture, nearly filling a wall of their house. It had become the wall and everyone had ignored it for years. It had vanished some weeks before, and they had all stood staring in gob-smacked wonder at the clean-if-cobwebby square it had left behind. ‘It is a thing of . . . great beauty,' Helmut had said. ‘Art in the purest sense.' They shrieked in laughter and never bothered to ask where the painting was. Other paintings had disappeared too. For a while, every time they passed the blank walls, they pretended to be gripped, inspired or critical.