Fire Fire (19 page)

Beate didn't seem to hold a grudge against her sister or her mother. She was white and silent. She had a bag packed under her bed with one change of clothes and the two remaining leaves of
The Tomten
.

Two months later Beate walked out with her pack in one hand and her bandaged arm in a sling and caught the train to Melbourne; then, a short time later, a plane to Germany.

Ursula guessed before anyone else did that Beate had done it on purpose.

Ursula could hear Acantia sobbing behind the closed door of her room, but all her mother said to the kids was, ‘She never could face the vicissitudes of life with humour. Talk about overreacting.'

No one knew for sure what she was talking about. Beate settled into Germany somehow. None of them could imagine how, so Beate ceased to be real to them. She was a collection of facts, now. They had never read Beate's prose before, so her voluminous letters with their breathless, ardent style were the letters of a stranger. An architecture student in Freiburg, Germany. Gone to the land of paintings and memories. They remembered the violinist, and the ghost of her playing haunted them. It was a shock to see that she was stump-handed and big-bellied, smiling an unfamiliar smile in her wedding photos.

Ursula missed her bitterly. With Beate and Gotthilf gone, she was the eldest. She felt a heavy cloak settle on her shoulders. She looked at Helmut, Siegfried, Lilo and Arno and knew that they had become her responsibility. She sat alone in her caravan watching the huntsman spiders conduct their affairs as if even they were already a memory and felt the heaviness of a cold truth squeeze her tight.
For
her crimes, she would pay
. They were her responsibility and the time for vacillation and childish fantasy was over. She too would be leaving, but not like the others. She would have to leave and somehow take the younger ones with her.
Thenceforth she had to keep
the little ones from harm
. She felt cold and scared.

Then she felt excited. Her limbs filled with blood and her chest swelled with a sweet intake. She could not afford regret if she was to be a hero.

Leaving was, in the end, simple, a matter of walking away and not returning.

It took a while for Ursula to get around to it. At seventeen, having scraped through the matriculation public examination, she was lounging around the farm, looking like a delinquent, with a glowering expression and chopped greasy hair, and wishing she knew how to smoke properly. Acantia couldn't bear the sight of her, so when Ursula got an offer to study Arts at the University of Toggenberg, Acantia clocked her on the head with a waffle iron and said, ‘Go, see if we care or need you here!' and Ursula washed her clothes for the first time that summer in a state of quiet excitement.

Three weeks later, against all expectations, she was at university, and Whispers ceased to exist from eight until six. Three weeks after that she was missing lectures and secretly meeting Speed, a fine-built boy whose skin had an aromatic, burning smell which she found out much later was Tiger Balm. He looked quite unlike a Houdini. For one thing he wasn't white.

Speed was pro everything but could argue anti anything better than anyone Ursula had ever encountered. She fell in love with him like a drowning tiger rescued, giddy, clutching on, bug-eyed with relief, frighteningly hungry.

But even starting university and gulping Speed down in long gasps saw her slinking home in the evenings, crawling back into her fetid bed with relief and frustration.

Then Acantia found out. Helmut saw them kissing in the savagery of parting, barely hidden in the scrub by the clay cutting, and told. Acantia beat her daughter with the broom handle and a saucepan.

‘Just leave then! What makes you think I want you, you shambling shoddy slut-thing! Penis fodder! Pack! GET OUT!' Acantia was certain of Ursula's dependence, Ursula's love, Ursula's cowardice, and perhaps this alone drove Ursula to prove herself.

‘Can't move?' Acantia heaved in dramatic parody of Ursula's gasping sobs, Ursula's shame. ‘Go hang yourself! There's rope in the shed all prepared. Yes, do you think I don't know? That sentiment-sodden van of yours! Your sketches! I regret ever giving birth to a piece of sentimental trash like you!'

Acantia slammed the flimsy board that served as the house door.

It broke, and she turned, kicking it to the ground in front of her.

Ursula had sat heavily on a chair and had her head in her hands.

Acantia screamed over her, ‘And don't think anything comes without a price! It's so easy to give up, isn't it? Look at Beate. Look at G—that brother. Give up, Give up!' Acantia dropped her voice into the tones of a stern admonishment. ‘You'll lose everything you have been given. Everything! I'll burn the lot, don't think I won't. And that will only be the beginning, because you'll lose your family. There will be no return!' She suddenly stamped through the debris at the doorway, pale and shaking, screaming, ‘And fix this bugger-er-ised door!'

Ursula felt a stabbing in her chest. Acantia was crying, as she had cried after Beate left. Ursula stood up, dizzy, something singeing her brain and turning her cold. She could hear someone sobbing, and feel her chest heaving and creaking like a ship in a storm, her breath jetting from her as if from a bellows, but she felt utterly black and calm, floating. She walked in slow motion, with her scalp crawling, to her caravan. She picked up her most perfect bird skeleton, a nightjar, brass wire shining at the joints of the translucent wing bones. It was the most beautiful thing she owned. She packed it gently in toilet paper. She looked around the van but could not bring herself to take anything else.

She walked away, ignoring Ember's whinny from the paddock, her eyes averted. Lilo trailed after her.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Away.'

‘Past the gate?'

‘Yes.'

Lilo caught her breath.

‘She'll kill the horse, Ursa!'

Ursula didn't reply.

‘Will you come back?'

‘No.'

Lilo wrapped her arms around Ursula, crying.

‘Take me too! I can be yours!'

Ursula suddenly felt strong, momentarily sure. She unwound her sister from her neck and torso, and placed her hands on Lilo's shoulders in a stagy gesture. She felt as though she was a character in a book and that cheered her. She immediately began to cry, and was cheered also by having appropriate, touching tears of parting. Everything was just right and too unreal.

‘Soon, Lilo. I'll get a good house first.'

Then, almost as a dreamy afterthought, even though she had planned and polished the phrase, she said, ‘Stay away from Ugolini.

Tell the others too. If he comes when Pa and Acantia are out, hide.

Pretend no one's home.'

Ursula sent Lilo back down to the house, needing to be alone.

She walked through the clay cutting, where just a few days before, Speed had parked his father's Ford Falcon on the disused side track, and she had torn and battered at his body to know more, and to forget. She walked past the top gate, and then turned and looked around. To one side the stringybarks glittered and slapped. The farm was invisible now, hidden behind the dark spires of the radiatas. The old gate hung awry, half shut, half open. Keeping nothing in or out. She looked at it, dizzy, her mind blank but scored with a kind of sizzling haze. The farm looked deserted. It was so long since a car had entered or left and there were no footprints except her own. Speed's tyre tracks stood out as if luminescent.

She walked, knowing that she would never return except, perhaps, after a long long time, as a detached, confident visitor.

That was the morning of Ash Wednesday. Ursula walked the twenty kilometres to Toggenberg town and behind her the hills lit up in farewell and burned for three days. Seven people died and countless animals. The hills reeked and smouldered for weeks.

Ursula had stood up, wriggled out, walked to town, and was sitting staring past Speed with wide, dry eyes. She was seeing the goats and the horse and all the vulnerable flesh and bone of her past exposed to Acantia. She knew the bushfire was out of control. Ursula had lit Acantia, dry tinder flaring with the rush of her leaving, winds sucked and swirling in the wake of her long walk down the hills and gorges.

She would go back if she could, but she knew that her past was burning, shrivelling and shrinking minute by minute. It was a conflagration, a pyre, a storm sweeping all away. She felt as if flames were streaming from behind her head, the hair of a demon. She would not look back. She fingered the fine skeleton in her lap. She held it up to Speed.

‘I made this.'

She didn't know what to say. How could he know? In just six hours she had already grown too large to ever fit back through that little hole. It had been the pinprick of starlight from that side, but was a solid ball of cooling black charcoal from this.

No more goats. February 16, 1983,
Siegfried wrote in his goat diary on Ash Wednesday, the day Ursula left home, the day Ember and the last of the goats burned to death.

Ursula rented a large, run-down house in town and collected injured and unwanted dogs, cats, cockatoos and Houdinis. It became the Houdini Halfway House, not quite as clean or organised as the house of an ordinary person but certainly halfway there.

Ursula spent more time in her first two years at university sneaking around in the bush at Whispers than studying, surprising an ecstatic Lilo with a bear hug by the chook shed, and melting at the glow Arno would give off at the sight of her. She had intended to stay away but had sneaked back to spy on her parents and her childhood before a week had passed. She was never tempted to return to live. She told herself that she was preparing the way for her brothers' and sister's eventual escape, that she was keeping an eye on them.

The collection of fugitive Houdinis was by design rather than by natural flow down a hill. Ursula terraced the pathway, planted and tended to the lures, and made sure that, when the time came, they would all fall off the mountain, roll down the predetermined track in precise, pre-plotted moves, and plop, sobbing and excited, at her front door. Their beds were ready and the bubble fridge full. It was her project, and the preparations gave her pleasure for months.

It took some years, but eventually, one by one, Siegfried, Lilo and Arno came to live there; Arno first at fourteen, Siegfried when he was seventeen, Lilo at sixteen. They stayed until ready to face the world, one way or another.