Fire Fire (18 page)

It is a painting of the bush track that leads to the neighbours' house. A winding path, alternately lit and shadowed. Great swathes of colour (blue, green, yellow, blue-black) hang in the air, suggesting with their solidity the delicacy and evanescence of the moment.

Acantia had written at the end of her technical commentary:
The path is uninviting. We prefer to stay at home.

Siegfried turned the page to a painting of the house viewed from above.

The house is a tiny pinkish blob with a vacant staring window and a coil of smoke ascending from the chimney. It is embedded, obscured by Prussian blue radiata pines and layers of field and forest in the colours of a late summer tinder haze. The pines in the foreground seem black, and the sandy green and dull red of the gums is brittle and dry. There is no sky.

The painting emerged from the print clearer than on the wall. Acantia had scrubbed off the browning haze of fly specks in the bathtub before the exhibition. Ursula and Ziggy pored over this painting. On the facing page Acantia had written:

This was clearly an emotional subject for the artist. The loving
brushwork and the detail of the framing landscape all centre on the
little home nestled in these beautiful hills. We can sense the harmony
and peace of life in this place. Down there, we can tell, creative and
good things are happening. It is a warm beating heart, the centre of
the artist's world.

Ursula and Ziggy stared at each other in delight. They snorted and rocked and spluttered. Ziggy hesitated only for a moment and then drew a little lighted fuse from the smoking house on the catalogue.

‘Nuclear family!' Ziggy said.

Ursula was looking at the catalogue, alone. What colour am I? The thought rolled lazily about in her mind. Arno was blue, cerulean blue and Lilo was yellow, everyone could see that. She liked the adjectives, not the nouns. Titanium. Prussian. Cadmium. Vandyke. She stared at a forest which had no density, made only from impressions of the weave of the world. All colours were somehow spun and stretched into broad verticals and horizontals and yet it was a forest. But the bush and the trees around the house were not real in the pictures. A prickling absence wrapped around her, as if floating in the sea, staring up and then suddenly feeling as though the deep extends forever behind the skull. Everything light and bright was talking ceaselessly, muttering sotto voce of darkness. She stared at the catalogue, mist descending. She started to sweat and wanted to shut the pages but she could not stop staring. Something was wrong with the world, their world. Pa was no longer a musician. Acantia was the centre now and Acantia preferred to stay at home. Home. Home. She could not bear it.

Acantia's stringybarks were too fat, too benign. They blended too smoothly, too concordantly, with their world. Light and shadow fell across one painting in spectacularly geometric assurance. Acantia had not recorded the hostility of light, the independent, aloof grey of stringybarks; their lean, hungry scramble and the scars of survival. She perhaps had not remarked that the shade of a radiata pine has a menacing look, and yet it managed to menace through the painting despite her. As Ursula stared at the beautiful painting, she had a vision.

The house's mouth opened and roared red and black and voracious around her head. Acantia's lips were stretched in a scream at the edge of Ursula's vision. Acantia's eyes loomed over that strange rim. Ursula's head was in a black, roaring tunnel. A voice said, pleading, ‘But I love you!'

‘There is something wrong with Acantia,' she whispered out loud. And she suddenly felt rather than remembered how often she had had that thought and had suppressed it.

She was crying softly, longing for numb confusion, for mountain fog. She wanted the house destroyed and the vicious white light let in.

She was sixteen.

Newkiller Family became the name of Siegfried's goat circus and that summer's number one joke.

Acantia stood still and silent in the centre of the squalid kitchen. The fridge door was open, pouring its cold rot smells into the fetid atmosphere. The window was closed, sealed shut now for two years. A bucket was overturned at Acantia's feet and yoghurt was spread across the kitchen like icing or a paint bomb. The violence of its fall was clear from the height of the white spatter on the walls.

The lemon stink of yoghurt rose as it slowly seeped down through clothes, papers, old dishes, feathers, hair, bones and dust to the floor. Acantia watched it settle, her face blank. She didn't notice Ursula watching from the porch door. She seemed to shrink, something trickling down her spine and draining away. She turned and walked back into the auditorium.

Ursula stood a long while, as blank as her mother, then turned too and walked back outside.

That was the quiet end of all Ursula's cleaning.

abendmusik

B
eate had become a pretty and dreamy girl with sapphire blue eyes and a hairstyle created by some secret implements unknown to her sisters.

It was from Beate's cache that Ursula first filched sanitary napkins. Sanitary napkins were a dangerous commodity to have in one's possession. Acantia occasionally humiliated her daughters by ripping through their things, screaming, ‘Show me your rags!' Beate and Ursula were supposed to rip up old sheets. Beate stood red, silent and rebellious when she was held up as an example. She was eighteen and had developed a workable way of measuring whether or not Acantia was right or wrong. Old sheets and menstrual blood stank: Acantia was wrong.

Tampons were only used after leaving Acantia's world. At Whispers they were spoken of with a slightly lowered voice, for a girl who used them was not a real virgin. To be caught in flagrante with a tampon was a horror not to be contemplated.

Dealing with used sanitary napkins (or unsanitary sheets) was difficult. They were supposed to burn them but the kitchen and especially the fireplace were prohibitively public places. Putting them in the garbage was also fraught with shaming dangers. If wrapped in toilet paper, they were conspicuous and wasteful and likely to arouse curiosity or ire. Burying them took a great deal of planning and a dog deterrent. Stashing them in some out of the way place was disastrous. Ursula got to the stage where she couldn't see blood on anyone or anything, even fresh, without wondering if it wasn't somehow issuing from her, or was the trail leading to her crimes, laid by the house to trap her.

Beate was lucky. She could bundle them up in her handbag and drop them into an ordinary, anonymous bin in the city on her way to uni.

Beate had become a great violinist. Her hands were never large enough to become a violist but at some point in her eighteenth year she stopped wishing for a different body. Her body sang on the metal lines running from her chin to the vanishing point at her fingers and she dreamed of riding the trans-Siberian railroad through vast snowfields. The metal lines shone under the arch of her flying fingers, vibrating through her body, through her feet down into the earth to where the lava lies. She stared down the tracks to the tunnel under her fingers. That, so close, was the way out. Beate gave concerts when she was eighteen and they said in the papers that she was a lady Menuhin.

Beate won prize after prize, finally winning a scholarship to study with the violin master Duro Elenis.

The Houdinis went wild with joy. Beate sat smiling quietly as her brothers and sisters whirled around her.

She wandered outside, adjusting to being outside for the first time. She looked at the house and at the paddocks, thinking.
There
,
I once played. There I once was Beate Houdini
. She looked at the first pine tree and imagined it cut down and carted away for firewood. She would wave it off with an appropriate show of regret and inner satisfaction. She waved her arm at the dark and sombre tree. Her brothers and sisters pelted from the house, shrieking over something or other. She would miss them, she thought happily. It would be such a pleasure to miss them. She sat with her back to the wall of the kitchen, watching them tumble in the grass like puppies. Acantia's and Pa's voices rose in the room behind her.

‘We'll have to crate some of the paintings to take with her to make it feel like home. It will only be three months a year, and with her mother by her side . . .'

Pa murmured something.

‘Yes, a true Houdini.'

Beate sat at the edge of her bed feeling as if a lead weight was pulling her through the mattress and down into the dank earth underneath the house. She was white in the face, staring down at her hands. They were clean and fine. Athletic hands. Her left was different from her right, noticeably larger. It had tough pads at the fingertips, hardened from the long journey on that cruel steel and gut. No fingerprints. The floor was spread with newspaper clippings, black and white photos of her Lady Di cut above her lost and longing eyes, her chin crooked over the chinrest and the four steel tracks blurred in the print.

TOGGENBERG BEAUTY SHOWS REAL TALENT DOING THE HOUDINIS PROUD, TOGGENBERG'S VIOLINIST ESCAPES TO GERMANY OH YOU BEAUTY, BEATE! HOUDINI WINS AGAIN

In one photo Acantia and Pa beam into the camera, Acantia crushing Beate in an embrace. Acantia has food on her cheek and forehead.

Beate looked out of the window where she had once watched the man chop Radha up. She picked up her bankbook and hid it under the floorboards where no one would find it. She walked out the door, past the deodar and the apple, and over to the woodpile. She laid her left hand, palm up, on the pitted block. She stared at the curling fingers, her hand as usual holding the neck of an invisible violin. She could see the violin and knew, coldly, that it was just wood and strings.

She swung the axe proficiently and dispassionately with her right hand, as if chopping small wood.

Two fingers and a fingertip curled in the woodchips like fat blue worms.

When Beate got out of hospital, she and Pa and Acantia were very quiet. A pall hung over everyone and the house was relatively spotless.

‘It was a terrible accident,' Acantia said, many times over, but she eyed her daughter with something new in her eyes. To Beate it looked like fear.

‘You are a violinist. Why did you chop wood? That was Ursula's job.' Then she said, tears in her eyes, ‘What will you be now? Maybe you can still become a poet. Oh Beate, that was a silly silly
silly
thing to do!'

But Acantia also left her alone after that, too shocked to harry her. Acantia began to look at her daughter as if she couldn't recognise her.

Ursula slunk about, believing that it was her fault. She had begun to prefer things to be her fault. It simplified everything and gave effort meaning. Acantia helped give the convoluted argument of Ursula's guilt some truth by interacting with her at a minimum and throwing her the occasional malevolent glance. Ursula stayed out of her mother's way and spent sleepless nights whispering
sorry sorry
sorry
to the dark ceiling. She spent her days avoiding being in the same room as Beate or Acantia, but trailing them.