Fire Fire (4 page)

The punishment for being caught sillytalking was the same as for ‘shit' or ‘bloody': mouth washed out with soap. This made it all the more enticing. Beate and Gotthilf couldn't stand it but the rest of them could be reduced to hissing paroxysms of laughter squidged between their teeth and eyelids by the sound of Siegfried and Helmut sillytalking into the night.

‘Bottom,' Helmut started, leaving the word hanging in the darkness. Silence. Then from the other bunk the retort, ‘Pu-pul.'

‘Shhhhhh,' Beate's bunk rocked and springs whined with her irritation.

The conversation died but the air was tense with many pricked ears.

Then . . .

‘A-Aa.'

Siegfried snorted in agony and squeaked, ‘Wee Wee Penis!'

Little snorts of laughter began popping and bubbling around the room. Helmut waited. Everyone got themselves under control and began drifting towards sleep, smiling. Then, into the still air:

‘
Mister
Yewrine.'

The galleons whined and rocked. Mouths were stuffed with pillows as Acantia burst into the room with a blare of light.

Then . . .

. . . squeezed voiceless giggles . . .

‘
Kss kss kss kss kss kss!
'

‘Hey,
Mr
!'

‘Shhhhh!'

‘We'll shhhhhh if you tell the story.'

‘Tell the story, Ursa, tell the story.'

THE THREE BILLY GOATS GRUFF

Once upon a time there were three billy goats, one little, one middling and one big. They lived in a field by a stream over which there was a bridge. On the other side of the river the grass was green and speckled with flowers. The tall trees gave shelter from the sun and rain. On their side the grass was dry and stalky, coarse and sparse, and they only got soya beans and wheatgerm for dinner. There was no shelter. They longed to cross over that bridge. But under the bridge there lived a troll who ate goats.

Gulp! Just like that . . .

The Three Billy Goats Gruff reigned in the kids' room that second summer. It then ticked away in the hearts of the children like a clock in a crocodile's belly.

Goats are courageous
, Siegfried wrote, much later, in his goat diary.

They all played violin, viola or cello. They restored the auditorium and three little studios to deal with the cacophony. The house thrived on the discord and the heated competition for practice rooms. It looked like an ancient rat's nest with bears trying to fit in it.

By the time most of the children were teenagers, the place was littered with defunct half- and three-quarter size violins, broken bows, discarded strings. The floor around the good piano was thick and sticky with resin. Pa and Acantia spared no expense on musical instruments and once Ursula and Gotthilf were playing Mozart sonatas, they had instruments of fine make and exquisite tone: concert performance instruments. From six o'clock in the morning the house was filled with sound and fury,
Sturm und Drang
. Two pianos but few pianists, two cellos and cello players, numerous violins and two to three violin players, two viola players, one double bass player. A few of them dabbled in woodwind, brass and percussion.

They sang before meals. Acantia insisted on it.
Dona Nobis
Pacem
and
Ehre Sei Gott
in four-part harmony. Siegfried quietly sang
Goat
for
Gott
.

Arno was born in the middle of the night. One night he wasn't there, and the next morning he was, all red and ugly and bundled in a clean white blanket no one had seen before. A doctor came round to see Acantia and told her to stop having babies at home. He came out of Acantia's room shaking his head.

‘What sort of people are you?' he said in the kitchen to Pa, obviously cross. Pa shuffled, looked around and didn't answer. The doctor wiped a patch of the table with his hankie and had begun to write prescriptions when Acantia burst into the room in an unfamiliar new nightie, looking pale and small. Ursula had a sick feeling in her stomach. Acantia was crying.

‘I know you! I know your kind! Get out!' She pointed a finger at the door with such sizzling expulsion in her eyes that most of the kids slunk out from various exits. The doctor sighed, handed Pa the prescriptions and walked towards the door.

Acantia snatched the prescriptions from Pa's hands. ‘Toxins!

He would try to get the child's own father to feed me toxins, oh yes!' She shredded them and threw the pieces at the doctor's back.

The doctor hesitated a moment, then kept going. ‘I'll send the district nurse,' he called angrily as he got into his car.

Ursula watched him go, much cheered.
Don't bother sending
your evil handmaiden, craven quack. We will make short shrift of her
. She swished her rapier.
Dispatched!

After he had left, Acantia stood for a long time wrapped by Pa's huge arms. Gotthilf was the only one left in the room. Acantia's and Pa's faces were turned from him, closeted together in a soft humming space made by Pa's shoulders and her long dark hair. Gotthilf thought he should leave, but stood, blankly, soaking up the mystery of it. Acantia and Pa broke the spell, separating, going together to her room, returning to Gotthilf with the sleeping baby. He flicked a glance at each of them in turn and breathed out. He wasn't in trouble. The others trickled in and Pa showed them little Arno Zoroastre Houdini and his long fingers and delicate blue eyelids.

Arno, the quietest and the sweetest, child of Acantia's blue period, was the dreamer.

The kids' room served as sleeping space for all the children, a temporary measure that lasted several years. They fought over Arno, cuddled like a kitten or a hot water bottle in the bed of whoever could wheedle him with promises and scary torchlight to crawl in with them. Acantia hoped to repair some of the rooms under the stage but by the time the children were reaching their teenage years, they were too tall to stand up in them. The damp crept further forward year by year, slowly eating away anything that was rock or mortar under the timber beauty of the front of the house, while armies of white ants, spitting acid and leaking minute puffs of methane, rose steadily through the timbers from ancient caverns beneath the earth.

In winter the grass, the mud, the clothes, the people, the walls and the beds were cold. The fire, the cats and the fresh cow pats were warm. Everything was wet. They loved the fire, fought over the cats and stood barefoot in cow pats.

It was Gotthilf's job to find and cut the wood and Ursula and Siegfried's job to gather kindling. The kitchen was dank and miserable when the fire had no fuel or the wood was mean and wet. A steady breeze blew down and in from the auditorium. Gotthilf chopped piles of wood out in the drizzle under the big radiata pine. The chips flew, spattering through the air and landing with small wet sounds in the mud. He swung the axe with a dogged determination until he had chopped just enough to coax the fire through the day, and then came inside with a dripping armload of wood and his hair plastered to his forehead.

Acantia and Ursula stood on the verandah watching the goats. Venus stared balefully at Acantia from the shed. Acantia eyeballed her until the goat turned away, and then Acantia slowly shook her head.

‘That goat does not like me,' she said to Ursula. ‘But she does carry art around on her head.'

What
is
that on that beautiful child's head? Oh, let me touch. My
goodness gracious, horns! You are blessed, child, and will have a rare
spirilli hornspan of five feet. Golden, too. Just like your hair.

Remarkable! You must be very proud of your daughter, ma'am. She will
have art wherever she goes.

They had bought four goats when they moved into the house: Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Pluto. Jupiter had a spiralled, rippled horn-span of almost two metres. He had a long curly beard and looked like an ovine Father Christmas. He had grimy hair but was gentle, if aloof. Acantia said he was impotent because he didn't stink the way a billygoat should. Venus had a fine-boned, dished face framed by locks of white hair and a high brow divided in two for the twin arcs of her horns. These spiralled outward in a still, symmetrical image, rippled like tidal flats. She had bright golden eyes with mesmerising oblong pupils. She was wild, by reputation untameable. Ursula hung about her just out of jabbing reach. The wild goddess slowly began to tolerate her company but Ursula was never sure if Venus really befriended her. Blood and yellow lumps appeared in her milk and Venus died before there was time to find out. Her kids were hand-raised.

The children worked together burying Venus. They dragged her carcass down to the bottom paddock and began to dig a huge hole. Beate gathered flowers with solemnity and Siegfried stood holding herbs to put at her mouth. Helmut, Gotthilf and Ursula dug until they were standing in a hole up to their chests, heaving out the last shovels of earth. Lilo watched, squatting like a mottled frog in the long grass. They were all serious and sombre. Strains of a viola floated down from the house, falling like ash through the breeze.

The hole was ready. Gotthilf and Ursula dragged Venus over and toppled her in. Unbelievably, she seemed to have swelled. The hole looked tiny and legs and horns jutted out all over the place. They grabbed bits and tried to pull her out again but she was much too heavy. The great mass settled into the hole and barely moved with all of them tugging. Jupiter was staring at them all the while from the goats' paddock and they felt acutely embarrassed. Ursula jumped in on top of her and manipulated her head by the horns. She stuck the nose up in one corner and pressed the horn on the other side deep into the soft earth. Gotthilf and Beate wrestled with the stiffened limbs, loosening them, bending and wedging them into the sides of the hole. Gotthilf was crying in frustration. Beate shuddered.

‘I think she's in.'

They looked down at her contorted form. As an afterthought they scattered the flowers and placed the herbs but after what they had done it seemed rather grotesque. With relief they shovelled in the earth around her and packed it down. They had filled it in before they realised that her belly swelled upward to slightly above ground level. They piled on the earth but it slithered off, revealing a plump mound of grimy locks. They wetted the earth into mud patties and packed them on. It did not look very satisfactory.

Gotthilf said hesitantly, ‘I think we should jump on her a bit.' It was a distasteful suggestion but they were not sure what else to do. He climbed gingerly onto the elastic mound and jiggled a little. Then he wailed, ‘You all have to help!'

They piled on and began jumping up and down. Helmut giggled and set them all off. Just then from deep within the earth Venus gave a long, juicy fart. They roared and leapt in terror and then jumped on her with all their might, shrieking with laughter. She deflated bit by bit and settled into her grave.

They had to go down periodically and cover exposed bits. Venus rotted very publicly. When summer came the taut dry skin of the belly, hairless and hollow, could be beaten like a drum.