Fire Fire (3 page)

Gotthilf's huge dictionary was a kind of shield and a source of various kinds of power. The power of greater knowledge was only one. Words themselves led him out of Acantia's world and beyond her reach. But in this moment, this snapshot of Gotthilf at age nine, he still had to get Pa or Acantia to explain any word that was unsatisfactorily explained by his Oxford. For example:

‘Rapine? That is when a man rips a woman's clothes off.'

There is a silence. The children shuffle and smile at each other. Beate smoothes her dress down and Ursula hitches her trousers up. Gotthilf, standing as always just behind Acantia's shoulder, whispers something in her ear.

‘Yes, all of them.'

The children stare at her, dumb with horror at the picture she has conjured up. Acantia shudders involuntarily and pushes Lilo off her lap.

‘Rape is a
terrible
thing. Food additives have a lot to answer for.'

Slowly Gotthilf was to piece together the outline of a world Acantia could not account for or explain. At nine he had just a hint, here or there, that Acantia's word was not to be believed if the Oxford said otherwise. He kept this knowledge to himself. It was not long before he stopped focusing on words that would impress others and began collecting words that impressed him, words that if used would get him hit more often. With these he could vent bitter little streams of unhappiness and spite. He sometimes crouched in his dirty shorts in the kitchen corner muttering and spitting a string of boneless vowels between his teeth, all his forbidden words, consonants removed. No one knew that what he was saying had any sense to it, and he began to get cuffed whenever he spoke indistinctly, because he sounded too much like a moron for Acantia's liking, and perhaps she sensed some latent power to his incantation. Malevolence is not tolerated in nine year olds in any case.

Gotthilf, like Ursula, didn't much mind the move, but, unlike Ursula, didn't see it as a huge adventure. As far as he could tell, it had been planned from before his birth. Everything had been. There was no point in getting excited. Just as he felt superior to Beate in his knowledge, he felt superior to Ursula in his disdain for enthusiasm. The twins, Helmut and Siegfried, seemed to him beneath contempt. Their interest in red trucks, yellow bulldozers and saying four times between them everything they had to comment on disgusted him. And Lilo, well she wasn't really a member of the family until she started walking and talking properly.

In fact Gotthilf's life had been unpredictable, tossed on sudden storms and major changes. He remembered their life before Germany, dimly, with its dusty back yard, passing goods train, Mr Clymo's horse, midmorning galahs and high washing line. He remembered the suddenness with which they had sold everything and rushed, dropping his teddy bear on the tarmac, to find their destiny in the Music of Europe. He remembered Beate's
talent
that later became Beate's
pride and arrogance
. The suddenness of Pa's concerts, their impromptu holidays, their wealth and mysterious pennilessness and wealth again. He knew that if he had said he didn't want to go somewhere they were going, his words would have sounded like a flutter of a passing bird's wings: sound without meaning or consequence. He was a boy who needed a carapace and an Oxford English Dictionary.

After several scares with red-bellied black snakes in the long grass, Acantia ordered Pa to slash all the grass in a hundred metre radius from the house and its trees. They discovered a tractor (and snake); an outside toilet with no cabin (and snake); a henhouse (and snake's nest); a ferret run (with wombat); an empty pond (plus snakes); and a rusty ladies' Bullock bicycle (no handlebars but plenty of redbacks). The place just got better and better, from the twins' points of view. Every night, that first spring, a fox wailed at the glorious stars.

Siegfried and Helmut talked incessantly about the activities of snakefoxes. They dressed as snakefoxes, with their shirts on their legs and their underpants on their heads. They demanded snakefox stories at night and, by agreement, arrived at all specifications of snakefoxes and their behaviour.

‘Snakefoxes bite you,' Siegfried said.

‘Snakefoxes bite you,' Helmut echoed softly to himself, thinking it over. Then he turned on Siegfried, ‘No! Snakefoxes bite
you
!'

‘No, Snakefoxes bite you.' Siegfried insisted.

Gotthilf smacked them both across the head, yelling, ‘Say things only
once
!'

The twins howled in unison until Gotthilf was punished.

‘Snakefoxes smack 'im better,' Helmut said to Gotthilf, who was nursing weals on his arms.

‘Snakefoxes smack 'im better,' Siegfried said, nodding sagely, opening his eyes wide at Gotthilf.

‘Snakefoxes smack 'im better,' Helmut said to Siegfried.

Siegfried nodded, turning to go. ‘Snakefoxes smack . . .'

Gotthilf grabbed Siegfried's head like a ball, slamming one hand over his little brother's mouth. He held on for thirty seconds, shaking in fury, roaring through gritted teeth.

Ursula was fascinated by both the living and the dead, and particularly the short transition in between. Dead animals filled her with sadness and pleasure. At night, curled in her pyjamas under the blankets, she imagined she was a highwayman's horse, mortally wounded with a bullet to the chest, gasping through the slow transition to death on a bed of gorse. (Beate found her little sister's death rattle intolerable.) Ursula taught herself taxidermy and probed flesh and skeletons with exploring fingers. Her mother said that this meant she was immune to grief.

Ursula was delighted that they were to live in the house of a suicide. She began the collective hunt for buried treasure. She secretly hunted for the suicide's vestiges. He might have left a baby or a small child lying about the place. If she found it first, it would be hers. If it was dead, well, she could get its skeleton.

She avoided finding Lilo, who always needed a nappy change and had a habit of finding Ursula. After nappy changing became Ursula's job, she decided a dead baby would be better than a live one.

In the kids' room, three double bunks were like galleons and a single bed floated in the middle like a life raft. It was not a high room: the top bunks were so close to the ceiling that a person couldn't sit upright. Eventually the kids punched a few small holes for ventilation, but a strange smell came down out of the ceiling space so, except for one, they stopped them up. The room had a small triangular window. Pa fixed a grid to the window so that the baby, who was then Lilo, wouldn't climb through and hurt herself by falling onto the verandah floor.

The music room, later the old music room, was the same size as the kids' room and directly opposite across the auditorium. It had an upright piano, floor-to-ceiling books on staggering shelves, four or five music stands and several gradations of violin and viola. The floor was powdered with resin dust. It originally had no window and was hung with beautiful paintings of Austria in winter. When the light broke they played in the dark. One year, Pa became infuriated with them playing wrong notes in the Emperor's Quartet and knocked a hole in one of the walls, letting in a jagged blast of sharp white light.

The kitchen was the largest room, other than the auditorium and the stage. It had an open-hearth fireplace big enough for three people to sit in, open through the wall to the auditorium. First thing in the morning it was still hot from the night before. Acantia cooked bolar roast, onions, potatoes and silverbeet in a top-hat pressure cooker stashed all day in a corner of the fire. If it worked, the roast was so good that it fell apart in onion-honeyed skeins and the potatoes were reddish orange toffee almost to the core. The onions disappeared altogether. When it didn't work, it was charcoal but they chewed on it anyway.

The fireplace was the only hot, dry place in the house in winter. All the walls oozed moisture and the sheets were damp. They huddled around the fire, steaming and contented, and it roared and flared welcomingly when they opened the door and walked in. Fire loved them and they loved it.

The kitchen had a low ceiling that Acantia papered with paintings done by the children. She gummed the backs, laid them over the broom and swept them over the marine blue.

The kitchen had a wooden floor with holes in the corners by the skirtings. At first they thought of rats but later they blamed the house itself. When the house was gone they found piles of molten cutlery, coins and ashen jewellery stashed away where the floorboards had coffined them.

The kitchen also had a real window; a huge expanse of glass, four foot by three.

Mr Tarsini was the Man in the Window. The Tarsinis were their neighbours over the years. They also had a family of six children, and had a baby to make it seven at about the same time as the Houdinis.

The Tarsinis were as messy as the Houdinis, although they were much quieter. They were very similar but conducted their affairs in a more civilised fashion. They were three girls and four boys, all with the same names as the Houdinis and the same ages. At times they were ignored and at times watched avidly. Ursula, Siegfried and later Lilo were amused at first by their identical forms and mannerisms, and then, bit by bit, noted the differences. The Tarsinis' world was dimmer and the dirt didn't show. The dimensions of their house were bigger and the dimensions of their Pa smaller. They fitted into their world with less trouble than the Houdinis squeezed into theirs. They were theatrical when the Houdinis were serious. They were creatures of the night. The Houdini kids only ever saw the back of Acantia Tarsini's head and in turn Acantia Houdini always sat with her back to the window. She was, however, made conscious of the Tarsinis' antics by the attention they elicited from her own children, and she was increasingly annoyed by imbecilic behaviour directed at the window.

The game of sea warfare was played out in the kids' room in smothered explosions. Then, when everyone got tired, several raised tents of sheets glowed eerily long into the night. In the early years, the most intensely pursued pastime was sillytalk and the favourite story was the Three Billy Goats Gruff.