Fire Fire (20 page)

The family was weakened, bleeding from cracks and rents. Acantia started each day beleaguered, shaken by the absences at the table. The normality of meals, the forced routine were fake, they could all tell. And Pa's viola sounded rough, raw, unpleasing. It was a bad time for the world outside to also come and find the Houdinis.

Acantia's fears for the moral safety of her children boiled over with the arrival of Tracy. Tracy said that terry towelling shorts were passé. Tracy sang, ‘I'll be your pros-ti-tute whenever you want me-ee.'

Acantia took her literally and called her a toxic degenerate. Acantia said she was the incarnation of popular culture, of contemporary Australia.

Tracy put a small hand on her skinny hip and gyrated through some moves so suggestive that Acantia couldn't bear to have her children see them.

She was ten when the Houdinis first met her. No one was quite sure how she and Lilo had become friends. Tracy lived a half-hour's walk away, the other side of three gullies of dense bush. Acantia couldn't send her home for lunch all that easily. She sat with Lilo at the end of the table and whispered something in Lilo's ear. Both of them spluttered. Everyone stared, chewing mechanically, shoving forkloads into their mouths without taking their eyes off her, helping themselves to seconds by feel. Acantia put on her nicest voice and began to question Tracy.

Tracy was happy to discuss then and there:

a divorced, raped and insane mother; a drunken, murdering, wife-stabbing, self-shooting dead father; having witnessed the above; going all her life to real school and having been expelled thrice.

Tracy was deserving of compassion but from a distance. But Tracy loved the Houdinis as though she had discovered them and no fang-baring did more than excite her delighted curiosity. She studied them with the pleasure and passion of a devoted anthropologist. She remained Lilo's friend and even stayed overnight sometimes, driving Acantia to desperation.

‘Lesbians! LESBIANS! Get out get out get out!'

Acantia ripped the blankets off Tracy and Lilo who were cuddled up in Lilo's bed giggling. The little naked girls stood on the wooden floor with their mouths covered and their eyes popping out of their heads at each other.

‘Put some clothes on!' Acantia threw a handful of clothes from the gaping wardrobe at them and vanished out the door in a puff of smoke.

Lilo and Tracy rolled about on the floor in an agony of laughter for a few minutes before they could get dressed. Then they raced off to find the rest and tell.

Tracy was resilient. She was the only outsider who found Acantia amusing. She had no inhibitions: if something tasted horrible, she said, ‘Yuk!' and refused to eat it.

Acantia said that Tracy was a sexually precocious delinquent who needed an operation, but Tracy said words were only words.

Tracy told Lilo everything there was to know about sex from a ten year old's point of view. Lilo taught Tracy how to set snares for rabbits. They never caught a rabbit, but they did take the fresh body of a snake Pa had killed by the woodpile. Lilo skinned it, cleaned it and cooked it with garlic and onions. Tracy said ‘yuk' and ‘poor snake', and Lilo was startled on both counts.

Tracy gave Lilo half her clothes and showed her how to use make-up. When Count Ugolini said they looked sexy, Tracy said to his face, ‘In your dreams, you dirty old man.'

Lilo and Tracy fortified each other. With Ursula appearing so rarely in her life, Lilo needed weapons.

Sneaking home gave Ursula a strangely powerful feeling. The burned-out bush was fascinatingly transformed. She liked it. She wore black and streaked her cheeks with charcoal. Ember had no grave that she could find. She had fingered the truck tracks that could have been how bodies were carted away. She felt the black powdery trunks of the stringybarks as a monument to terrible freedom. She could come and go at will, catch a bus, visit her guilt and fear and dismay, and then farewell them again, and escape to Speed's arms and admiration, and the drama of telling him select bits of her story. So long as she was unseen, Ursula was like a visiting angel, sitting in judgment. But staying completely unseen was very difficult. It was almost as if Acantia could smell her, or the house itself was giving her away. For months, out of a certain superstition, she didn't enter the house at all, but would watch Acantia and her siblings from afar, spooked by the steady stare Acantia could direct at her hiding place. She would leave, laughing, skipping into a quickening run down the road, but feeling twisted nonetheless.

Sitting on a large flaky rock, staring down at the house far below, screened by the backlit filigree of burned bushes and trunks, and with a tummy full of outside food, Ursula could see that the world of Whispers was more hurtful, more damaging than was absolutely necessary. ‘Parents shouldn't do that sort of thing,' she said to herself primly. She was thinking about Lilo's laughing account of Tracy's impact on the family. She was trying not to see Acantia's point of view. She could see Whispers now for what it was, view it scientifically. Objectively. If Social Services knew about this, they'd take Siegfried, Lilo and Arno away from Acantia, they certainly would. Maybe even Helmut. And yet as she thought it, she knew that Social Services would never grasp what Siegfried, Lilo and Arno had done to Acantia and how punishment purified things and made what little love there was manifest in the world. Were she ever to pluck up the courage to speak with Social Services, she knew they would make a skewed assessment. They would not perceive evil in the victims or in Ursula herself.

As she watched, Acantia and Pa bounced and rocked up the track in the sedan, over the hill below her and away. She jumped up, and headed down to the house. It sighed as she entered. She wandered through, feeling its filth and strangeness, looking with fresh eyes at everything that was once like her second skin. It leaned in at her. ‘Disgusting,' she said out loud, to stave off its familiarity and keep her objectivity. She walked through more rapidly than she had planned, out to the enclosed verandah.

Acantia had been painting.

A mean and murky red had crept into some of the paintings. It was not even, seemingly, a choice. It was the passive collusion of Acantia's frugality, prolific output and failing vision. It was the sort of thing the house would have suggested. Stale blood red. The masonites were sealed with a red that was neither cadmium red nor a mix with Vandyke brown and, instead of painting reds any more, she allowed the background to be anything red she required. This lurking red had begun to take over and the latest pictures were dominated by it. Ursula found she hated them even though some of them were good. The red seemed to be the negative of things, the opposite of painting something. Acantia was depainting. Acantia was changing too, and Ursula didn't want her to. Ursula wouldn't know whom she was fighting if Acantia changed too much.

She left in a hurry, feeling dirty and torn. Shouldn't her loyalty be to Acantia too, not just the kids?

Ursula's anger and certainties didn't last. She visited Acantia and Pa openly now and then, but stopped sneaking up to Whispers to watch her parents and hear gossip from her brothers and sister after the day she realised finally that she missed Acantia. One day Siegfried looked at her coldly when she said Acantia was cute and she felt numb inside at his disapproval. He was right. Acantia wasn't cute. Then, another day the same week when everyone was at school or out, she snuck into Acantia's bedroom. Cushioned in the strange fug of her mother's sweat and breath, she went through Acantia's drawers and cupboard. Acantia didn't have much. All her things were grimy and old or torn. Some were paint-splattered, but there was no fresh paint any more. Ursula took out a grey nightie, recognising dizzily that it was the one Acantia had worn when Arno was born. She held it to her face and smelled that old familiar abyss, and then lay down with it on Acantia's bed, something she had never done, something that, although unspoken, was utterly forbidden. She held the nightie against her chest and stared up at the ceiling Acantia saw every morning and night and through the days she didn't appear, which was often now, Siegfried had said.

The bed was damp with ancient sadnesses, terrible to soak in. The ceiling dangled streamers of dusty cobwebs towards her. Acantia's room was like a cell. There was no sign in it, other than the nightie, of any of the children. It had nothing that gave any pleasure. It was the antithesis of the rooms Ursula had decorated in the Halfway House. Ursula began to weep with no warning. She turned to Acantia's greasy pillow and clenched it to her wet face. She could smell the cleanness rising from her own skin and hair. Acantia would without doubt smell that she had been here. The thought only made her cry harder. Her heart felt like a burning hole in her chest. How could she have left Acantia?

Time passed. Conditions at Whispers deteriorated. Ursula still visited occasionally, but was physically ill every time. She talked confidently to Siegfried, Helmut, Lilo and Arno about leaving home, but began to feel that she couldn't help them, didn't even want to see them, until they did. As they grew, rather than craving their company and news of their lives, Ursula found that she didn't want to hear it. She could not have said whose suffering was the greater, theirs or Acantia's, but knowing of both paralysed her.

When Helmut turned fourteen he started to smoke and smoulder. Helmut Tarsini was wrapped in a halo but the Houdinis' Helmut simply stank and glowered. Acantia called it puberty but it was obviously much more than that. He was erupting.

Helmut went out setting live chooks alight and howling like a banshee.

Siegfried joined him and Arno followed them, wide-eyed and silent.

Lilo, Siegfried and Arno gathered by the top dam, exhausted with the day's carnage, and smoked, empty and bereft. The water rippled in the summer breeze, reflecting the fire in a broken ladder of red and orange interspersed with silver from the moon. Indistinct faces stretched, broke apart and reformed endlessly in the ripples. They smoked anything they could lay their hands on. Cardboard, pine needles, basketry cane. Before long they got hold of marijuana. Lilo lit a small fire and lured Helmut in with food. He came, tucked his knees up to his chin and stared at the fire. He reached out a skinny, scarred arm, picked up a smouldering stick and used it to methodically burn the hair off his arms, legs and then his head. He didn't flinch even when his head lit up in a rush. He looked like a match. They laughed and dowsed him with water. They all tried it on their arms but most of them flinched. Helmut had scabs for weeks.

Arno watched it all but did nothing to stop them. He stopped talking altogether for a year. He stopped sleeping. He stopped attending school. Acantia ignored his presence around the house even when he was in the same room as her until 4 pm, when she looked up and caught his eye conversationally.

‘How was school?'

By unspoken agreement with his mother, Arno ceased to exist between the hours of 8 am and 4 pm. He had difficulty finding himself every afternoon at the magic hour. When he was fourteen, he suddenly started to scream and didn't stop. The hours turned into days. He screamed into the night, prowling around the outside of the house into the sodden night, screaming about Acantia and dying, petrol-drenched animals. The rain fell down in wintry shards, stinging his hot, salty face. He stared up into the black leaden sky and could bear not one second more. His voice twisted out of him inchoate, a hellish conch call.

‘Don't mind Arno,' Acantia said to Lilo and Count Ugolini, who was visiting, ‘He's just showing off.'