Fire Fire (5 page)

Not long after Venus died Jupiter jumped the fence and went feral. Occasionally he was seen leaping away with the wild goats out beyond the boundary fence. Mars and Pluto were then castrated and became pets for a while. Eventually they went to the butcher. They were useless and Mars had taken to headbutting. Despite Acantia's insistence on keeping only nannies, the goat herd grew and Acantia had to buy a stinky billy to stop the uninvited bachelors getting birthday cake for free.

Pa played his viola nine hours a day. The viola repertoire structured their days. If the children ever thought about it, they liked it. Pa said a lot about himself and them on the viola. They were proud of him, for he had been a great player in the outside world, in the time before they moved back to Australia.

THE PRINCESS AND THE VIOLA PLAYER

Once, long long ago in a time long gone before, there was a musician,
a viola player. He could play the sun from behind the clouds, the
snowflakes into a dance, the night into day. His viola sang a song that
only people can understand: he made them happy that they were sad.
He was the most famous a viola player can be and everyone in all the
countries wanted him to play to them so they could be happy that
they were human beings, not dogs or goats or horses. They gave him
money, and flowers and beautiful instruments, and they recorded his
playing so they could take a little bit home with them to have with
dinner. But the viola player was so lonely that he could not be happy
that he was sad, no matter how beautifully he played.
Then one day he met a dark and lovely princess with a mouth
like a sword, and he ran away with her to live in secret. The people
were left to their sadness and their records.
He had escaped.

That was the story Ursula told.

Acantia was very beautiful in old photos. She was very beautiful in hand-me-down memories.

One of Acantia's early paintings was a very small board squidged all over with squirts straight from the tube. It was of an old tree but that was clear only from a distance. It was like a close-up of every insect's life cycle speeded up. It was hot with colour. The trunk was scored with a stroke of cadmium yellow over a seething charcoal, Prussian blue and red trunk. They all loved it when very young, partly because it contained a menagerie of weird three-dimensional creatures who invited eye contact and initiated furtive conversations.

‘Oi. Pssst. You there in your Papa's pyjamas.'

At the end of the cadmium streak was a fat yellow duckling with a looped tail which all the children could see, but the painting also held private secrets for select viewers. There was a drunk-looking orange squirrel with one very long finger. There was something with its eye up against a hole in the trunk, looking out at them. It was silly and mysterious. It was comforting to look at again and again. It was a painting they grew out of but always felt sentimental about. It was Acantia's only cosy painting, a kids' painting. It reminded the children of Pa.

Pa was very tall. He was tawny and downy, just like his children. He was seven foot or more and built like a bear. He had grown from a particularly straight and beautiful sapling. Photos of him when he was courting Acantia show a young, godlike being, all planes and shadows, tall and lean, with the awkward grace of a shy man hidden inside a perfect body. His eyes, somehow both resigned and desiring, longed for sex and serenity—in that order. In one photo he is bracing himself against a giant monolith that is perched precariously on another. His arms are wrapped around it, long fingers outspread, his body arched backward and pressed to the rock, straining muscles running down his thigh and leg. His cheek lies against the granite, the smooth skin pressed into the coarse grain. His teeth are white and his eyes laughing for the unknown young Acantia behind the lens.

He had some impressive snorts, farts, goat-scaring noises and burps. When he burped at the table, he said, ‘
Scoozi
.'

So did they.

Pa's hands, like his body, were huge. They wrapped around the thin, tiger-eye neck of the viola like the maw of a Rottweiler around a stick. Then they danced, each finger making room for the other at the precise point, the precise moment, the only moment, to give off the pure, painful sound. His fingers each walked a taut highwire, stretched over a chasm of silence.

Pa stood playing viola in front of a painting of Pa playing the viola. His brow worked and furrowed, and his ears waggled. His torso tossed about like a tree in a storm. The painting is a frozen midpoint that somehow manages to make the same movements. Churning spirals of purple and grey swirl around the still furrowed brow and a garishly, grotesquely twisted instrument. Pa's ears and brow and body sometimes touched exactly that moment, but his instrument stayed pristine and symmetrical, never going down the vortex of such timber-splitting torsion.

‘Isn't it strange that Pa doesn't have a real name?' Ursula asked Beate.

‘Of course he has a real name. He just doesn't need it any more because he's Pa.'

‘But who was Pa?'

‘A Hartmut Houdini, the violist.'

‘No one's a violist,' Ursula spat it out crossly. ‘That's what he does, not what he is. Who was he when he was a boy, when he was as old as me?'

‘I don't know. I wasn't there.' Beate, too, was annoyed. She intended to be a violist.

‘Do you think he played . . . ' ‘Pa can play
anything, anytime
. Listen. He's playing now.'

‘. . . games?' Ursula sighed. Pa was very playful. She knew he would have played games. What she really wanted to know was whether or not he had anything happening inside his head, now or in the past. Ursula couldn't imagine Pa as a real grown-up. But she couldn't imagine him being young like her either. What was Pa when he was alone and had no instrument and no family, no discord to soften, no frayed tempers to settle, no strings to tune? She had no idea. He might as well have been a hollow log, a disused double bass.

She knew him as little as she knew Acantia. She knew exactly what they would do or say, just as when Pa's bow was poised above the open strings of the viola, she knew exactly what sound was coming. But what they thought or desired was masked. How was it that one could have such hidden parents?

She wandered outside into the sunlight and away from the house. She knew that, a few metres behind her, Lilo would be hovering, her fierce face beaming with love and desire. Ursula trailed Lilo like a cape. She didn't need to look, any more than Lilo needed to be told that Ursula liked being shadowed. Ursula sighed, knowing the little face would be puckering in sympathy. Then she spun and pounced, punching her sister hard in the stomach and churning the gravel as she ran. Lilo tore after her, shrieking with a rage close to joy.

Lilo was like a budgerigar: convinced she was the same size or larger than anything she met. She was fierce about everything. She was fierce about art. She didn't need paint. Mud and blood would do. Acantia almost never beat Lilo.

crescendo

B
eate turned thirteen first. Pa moved out of Acantia's room into the corner of the auditorium. The smell in Acantia's room changed from a heady fug to something colder. Helmut and Siegfried moved to camp in the old music room, and the galleons were dismantled. Beate's house was built, and Beate and Gotthilf moved into it. Arno slept in his own bed in the kids' room, the head of a long-haired doll clutched in his fist. Lilo and Ursula shared the room with him. Lilo's bed stood over a nest made of paper and small pieces of the body and limbs of the same doll.

Acantia cried through the night instead of sleeping but her children only twitched and whimpered like puppies and licked her gently in their dreams. Pa snored in the corner of the auditorium with a dying fall reverberating in the heart of the house.

The house sighed into the dark air, making a smiling sound. Pa didn't move back into Acantia's room until after the children left home.

A slow tragedy was taking place in Pa's hands. Pa was always home now and rarely rang Odo Schmelzle, his agent. There were no more concerts after they left the great world. These days Pa practised as though preparing for one all the time. The children weren't allowed to interrupt when Pa played, and so he was out of reach for nine hours a day. But they could hear him, always. His slow decline kept tempo with their fading certainties.

Pa's joints thickened and ached prematurely. He played harder to ease their stiffness, but they fought him, and his knuckles tried to huddle together like old peasants with their backs to the cold.

When the sweet, tense, crying of the viola became rougher year by year, the changed sounds crept up on the children so stealthily that most of them didn't notice until they had left home and begun to listen to other viola players.

The influence of the house extended to the borders of Acantia's property and sometimes beyond. Fences sagged, fence posts rotted and vanished into the earth. Gardens were aborted half grown and abandoned to weeds and drought. Whisperweed, blackberry and African daisy marched inexorably over the fields, closing in year by year; and one by one the apple trees in the orchard were smothered and died. Radiata pines thrust their soft points through the clay, thickened and burst into full needle armour to march upwards and outwards, claiming earth and sky. The stringybarks were beaten back to the bush perimeter and, over the years, were invaded and shadowed by the taller pines. Animals developed chronic lamenesses and cats died giving birth. The young white cow, Radha, died of milk fever and a man came and chopped her up with an axe. From the house the children couldn't see the body or the man. They could only see the axe appear and disappear behind the shoulder of the hill.