Fire Fire (27 page)

‘His imaginary kid.'

‘Listen! It's silent!'

‘It's a bloody Shrine of Forgetfulness!'

Arno came up and whispered, ‘Where's the Aerogard hidden now?' He craned his neck over the parapet to make sure Acantia wasn't in earshot. None of them trusted whispers even now.

Ursula went out onto the restored verandah, the cats over her shoulders in the orange light behind her. The neighbours' trees in the foreground had grown so much that they obscured the nearby houses, but in the middle distance small farms, sheds and clusters of life were visible over the fields. The view was strikingly beautiful. Peaceful, harmonious. Toggenberg Hills hid the city with their soft and rounded peaks, patched with misted vineyards and cherry orchards. Mr Vatzek's growing herd of retired horses and crippled donkeys grazed down below the ruin in the field above the lake, their sleek bodies glowing orange and black. The fences were gone and dungheaps spotted the paddock almost up to the steps. She missed Gotthilf. She tried to imagine the man he might be. Golden-haired, dreamy, tap-tapping on his computer. The
novelist
. A hairy back, thirty-five years old. But she could only see the apparition of a skinny seventeen-year-old, glancing over his shoulder as he ran through the long grasses.

He had to love them all still. Did it show in that secret book?

Books? Had he really written a book? If he had written the book she now knew in such detail, she knew that one day Gotthilf would have to tell them, maybe already had, in strange clues buried in his article and stories. She had copies in her bag. She had almost given everyone copies for Christmas, but hadn't found the moment. She was shy, hugely exposed by what the choice of her name really meant, even though none of them would guess.

Maybe tomorrow.

The verandah was scattered with masonite, paint and glue.

Ranged along the wall were stacks of finished boards. Acantia had been painting as though possessed. She had said brightly after the fire that she would repaint all the old pictures. Scattered about the remains of the verandah were strange reflections of the old forms; ghost pictures, zombie pictures. Revenants with the once beautiful flesh hanging in murky shreds. All along the wall they marched, their forms sloppy, their perspective wonky, their colours dulled.

Acantia had developed new techniques of mixing pigments using Liquid Nails. Cadmiums and Prussian blue were long gone.

Ursula became conscious after a while of a background noise. She could hear something scuttling, trickling along the walls. She turned, but there was nothing. Only the cats. But she could still hear it. It was a fragmented sibilant child's voice, one of their voices. It was singing with a lisp—

We are home

We are home

Home with the sailor home from the sea

Home is where you are meant to be

All that goes comes back to home

We are home

we are home

we are himmy home

we are home.

The sun was setting.

‘Oh, did you know that the Count is dead? It's so sad!' Acantia didn't sound sad. She hadn't mentioned him for months. It was now an accepted fact that he was responsible for the fire. ‘Yes, and he wasn't a count at all! . . . What? Oh no, we weren't
that
close to him.'

Her children were eyeing her stiffly, the atmosphere cold. Acantia flourished a newspaper clipping.

GRIMM MURDER: MACABRE FAIRYTALE KILLING Named Nigel Hobbs on his birth and death certificates, Count Ugolini was found at the bottom of Sydney Harbour weighted down with rocks sewn into his emptied bowel cavity.

‘I knew there was something fishy about him from the beginning!'

Ursula walked away with her skull empty. It was too much. Too recent, really, to begin to face any new facts to the story. Too soon to struggle against the new official version.
Gotthilf, Gotthilf!

Please come back to this scarred graveyard!

Beauty surrounded her but was held at a distance. She toyed with the word
disconsolate
, rolling it around the empty space, bouncing it against the walls, breaking it in two. This place was truly beautiful. This ruin seemed to record something that only Acantia ever saw.

‘Don't worry,' Lilo said, clanking faintly as she wandered up from behind, ‘we'll light a fire and have a toke later.' She went to get some oranges. Ursula tried to imagine bouncing oranges messily, juicily, smashing bright colours against the haggard walls.

What had it all been for? Where was a mark of the struggles and horrors these walls had seen? She stood in the centre of the house, its rooflessness giving her the feeling that it was shrunk in size, that it was a toy house in a sandpit and she had just stood up, brushed the sand from her knees and was about to step over its walls and away. It was even quaint. Where had the darkness and fear gone? Had it just been a long game or dream, something in their heads, a madness of time and place and isolation? It had burned just like any house would have, top off like an exploding kettle, guts open and leaping like popcorn. It had crisped to toffee like a marshmallow and left a sweet taste in Acantia's mouth.

A city was just twenty-five minutes away and her mother was a clinging tiny old woman who wore a mask of smiles over deep scars. The old, seeping horror crept over Ursula, and she slid towards the ancient question, waiting impassive as a guru in the darkness at the back of her mind.

Was it really Acantia who was mad and strange?

She felt each of her brothers and sisters sitting in their little compartments at the back of her skull. You could not tell that Beate was one-and-a-half-handed. She laughed in a high voice, loved her children crushingly. Gotthilf snarled from his recently opened tomb, guarding the entrance, hiding his child (did he really have a child?) and his book (a book?). Ursula was there, struggling to like sex and not to lose Speed, reading Vincent Buckley, Patrick White, Christina Stead, Xavier Herbert, dreaming not of a new family but of the old one. Siegfried, recalcitrant, by choice unemployed, was throwing his laughing baby into the air and catching her. Helmut, born again, was honouring his mother and father, bringing them pots of honey from his hives. Lilo was sitting cross legged polishing her knives, cleaning the barrel of her shotgun, surrounded by her beasts. Arno was wandering endlessly from cave to cave, straining to hear something he had not yet heard and reminding them all which day it was and which ones it resembled from the past.

They were all so normal. There was no evidence that anything, anything at all, had really happened.

It had certainly ruined her Christmas.

She went and sat on a log at the edge of the abandoned goats' paddock. It was overgrown with bracken and whisperweed, filled with rubbish that rivalled the rubbish they themselves had unearthed decades before. She tried to imagine Gotthilf sitting here back then, but found she couldn't. An ancient, intimate feeling crept over her, as if it had been waiting for her to sit still.
Filthy Ursula
. She felt it creep into her as if fingering her first slyly and then possessively between the legs. It was so long ago, and so profoundly familiar, this feeling. She wasn't surprised, somehow, that its half-life was so long, that it had waited like a hidden vapour, an infection, overlaying everything here. And she felt, for the first time in years, that she really was connected somehow with that child, that teenager she had once been. She let self-disgust wrap around her, feel her up, test her. It was almost voluntary—she was trying it on as one might to see whether a child-bride's wedding dress still fitted. She sensed that it was weakened, and that she only had to throw it off and walk away from this lilliput to be free of it again. She nearly laughed, even though her heart was thumping, and with a certain prescience she thought she ought to get up before she felt the full punch of that time. Then she suddenly passed out and fell back off the log into the bracken over the old goat's grave.

She came to quickly, disoriented, her heart racing. She was terrified for a moment that, supine, she was hopelessly vulnerable, and had a boiling feeling in her head that she had to run and run. She stayed there, staring up through the clots of pine needles at the sky and slowly calmed down. For the first time, then, she looked down at her body, her adult body, and thought:

It was me he took. He fucked me.

She could see it and feel it and remember it with absolute clarity, distinct and freed from the usual formulaic collection of words that she had used for years to signify it. For a blinding moment, it seemed real and huge, looming over, shadowing even her betrayal and loss of Gotthilf.

‘Come to think of it,' she said out loud half an hour later, ‘all in all—it was not all that good.'

Gotthilf would never come back here. She'd have to go find him, no matter what it took, clock him one over the head for using her name, and then . . . then they might be friends.

The next morning Acantia came and sat with the children on the logs in the kitchen that was. She looked tormented and square-eyed and the children tensed, bracing themselves. She sat too close to Beate, and then too close to Siegfried. Siegfried fell silent, got up abruptly and walked to the window space. Acantia grabbed Lilo by the waist, laughing gaily, and sat her youngest daughter down beside her, bodies touching.

‘Let me look again!' she grabbed Lilo's hand, making exaggerated gestures and pulling faces. She looked up at everyone, laughing again, gripping tightly onto Lilo's hand. No one relaxed.

‘Lilo is her mother's daughter! The very spitting image of me at her age! Let me see! Let me see!' She pulled Lilo violently, bringing the hand in her grip up close. ‘How many children does she have, hey? How many
children
? Might it be
seven
?'

Everything seemed grey to Ursula. Acantia was wearing the same dress as the night before, now settling rapidly into the class of the once-white.

Then Lilo said, ‘Drop dead,' and got up and began to walk away.

Acantia stood up, shaking, her mouth making a little black love heart. Then she screamed in her voice from above: ‘You stop right there, sick missy!'

Lilo barely faltered in her stride.

Acantia turned on the rest of her seated, stony-faced children.

Her eyes were wild and spittle flew from between her broken teeth.

‘You unnatural brood. Ah! Look at you sitting there eating drinking. Ah! Up here for Christmas never any other visits you come here to see each other what a cruel joke on Pa that you don't even care enough for him to come here and talk to him all he wants is for you to know him for who he is now! Ah! What sort of people
are you
?' She paused.

‘You do not love me, no, not one of you. Mandrakes! You will suffer all your lives when I am gone!' Tears were running from her crushed face. Ursula almost thought to comfort her but was cut short.

‘You!' She swung her fierce and burning gaze on Ursula.

‘The suffering you have caused is unimaginable but always Pa and I have forgiven you! We forgive you! You destroyed this family! You! Rotten and evil. None of them will thank you for turning them from their
own mother
! Carrion crow! Leave! Who wants you? Get out Get out Get out! Oh! How is it that you are such hard and cold children? It wasn't from us! You didn't get it from us!'

Acantia rushed off through the trees gasping, and Ursula vomited into the grey, ruined fireplace.

Beate, Ursula, Siegfried, Isa, Arno and Helmut stared at each other in silence. Ursula wiped her arm against her mouth.

‘Do you think there will still be a Christmas dinner?' Arno asked.

Siegfried shook his head. ‘Nup.'

Lilo's F100 pick-up fired up loudly from the other side of the wall. A current rippled through them.

‘I'm staying,' Helmut said, scandalised. Beate looked torn and bewildered but barely needed an explanation. It was hard to be the visitor from overseas.

Lilo crunched the gears trying to slam the pick-up into first. Siegfried, Ursula and Arno were stung into action, stampeding through the kitchen, past the medicine wheel, over the redgum planks and into the back of the pick-up. Isa kissed Beate briefly and followed with the baby. Beate held her maimed hand up in stiff salute.

They roared off, trailing a giant plume of yellow dust and grit. They didn't see Pa, standing alone among the twisted trees of the dying orchard. His hands hung like dead paws by his sides. He watched the flying hair and shining eyes of his children until the dust obscured them.

coda