Fire Fire (6 page)

Goats' hooves lengthened and curled. Bouts of ringworm predated their stalky hair and raised weals on the children's forearms, which were splashed purple with gentian violet. Not long after Beate turned thirteen, she was struck down with boils. Great pustules grew and erupted, leaving permanent scars like craters or bullet holes in her smooth limbs.

A row of seven radiata pines divided the goats' paddock from the front paddock. The tallest shadowed the house, threatening the apple and the deodar at dusk. Acantia said that each tree represented one of the children, from oldest to youngest. Gotthilf hung a swing from the second tree, and broke his arm using it. The third tree, Ursula, was both crooked and stunted, too small for a swing or anything else. Useless. It had needles of a darker green and more thickly clumped form. Deviant, it said. Siegfried's tree had a magpie nest in it and, every spring, Ursula wished that she had been born fifth and was the one blessed with dive-bombing champions. Later Count Ugolini was to say that the seven trees should be
chopped down and chopped up
. They were too close to the house. They were a fire hazard in the driest state of the driest continent. Siegfried carved his initials into the knobbled trunk of the fifth tree. He said his tree wasn't him, but was his, and that he'd do with it what he wished, when the time came. Helmut tried to build a cubby in the lower branches of the fourth, but the tree ditched it and him into the mud below.

Neither Lilo nor, later, Arno paid the trees any attention. They were both babies of Whispers, and gravitated to the stringybarks and the bush.

Pine wood spat violently from the fireplace.

The old fort headquarters, the caravans Acantia had bought as spare bedrooms and the hovels the children built as escapes melted away and left only the rusting metal chassis and unidentifiable ruins littering the property in odd corners. The Houdinis were not even hobby farmers, and everything rotted or wilted away after a brief season of fanatical attention and enthusiasm. Vestiges of projects redolent with faded passion lay all about: a row of dying bottlebrushes; the whisperweed-choked orchard; the pit, later cow grave, that was to have been a swimming pool. Whispers gradually became one of those farms that look uninhabited; farms that look as though something sad has happened and people have walked away taking nothing with them.

Beate had begun to go into the city for violin ensemble and concerts and became, as the rest termed it,
urty p'turty
. She washed herself all over. She was embarrassed by her family in public. She secretly bought deodorant. She masked her siblings' seeping, all-permeating stench with cheap perfume.

Beate's house was supposed to give Beate space to practise, privacy in which to dress and undress, now that she had breasts, as well as the necessary independence and separation from parents that is only to be expected from a thirteen-year-old.

The new house was built by Joe, Burt and Terry. Joe was the boss and smiled a lot. Burt stank of smoke and Terry never wore his shirt, even when he was eating lunch. They all called Ursula ‘Love' and Gotthilf ‘Mate'. Ursula and Gotthilf tried to help as much as possible and had to be called away from the building site twenty times a day. Acantia called both of them ‘nuisances'.

Joe, Terry and Burt had to build the house under constant surveillance from the staring, slack-jawed children. Only Ursula and Gotthilf would respond to conversation and chin-chucking. Beate stayed aloof, having been told about men and not talking to them, and the younger kids just stared harder and closed their mouths briefly when addressed directly.

Burt was their favourite.

‘G'day, mate, how they hanging?' Burt would say to Gotthilf.

‘Low, loose and fulla juice!' Gotthilf would shriek in delight.

‘How's my girlfriend?' he'd ask Ursula, winking a bright blue eye in an expanse of copper skin.

‘Good, Burt,' she'd say, beaming, looking quickly over her shoulder to check where Acantia was. ‘Gimme five!'

And Burt would slap his big, calloused, smoke-smelling hand to hers.

The day the men piled into their pick-up and roared up the drive for the last time, three arms waving, Ursula felt a weight come down on her chest, despite the magically new, paint-smelling house they left behind.

Beate's house was a three room timber frame on stilts, facing the house from a few metres away. Almost all its windows also faced the house, giving it a yearning, leggy, baby-bird look. A path made of concrete blocks passed from the front door of the house, between the apple and the deodar with a half-playful curve, to the front door of Beate's house. From the kitchen, you could see even the light of a match struck in Beate's house, so there was no cheating curfew.

Gotthilf went with Beate to the new house, as a brother should.

But he was evicted after a month for messiness and settled into a caravan that Pa parked just outside Beate's bedroom window.

The only book Beate took with her into her adolescence and into the new house was a few fragments of
The Tomten
. Beate would be going home one day, and the winter would end.

In the deepest winter, when the farmhouse lies sealed away in the
valley by snow drifts, and the moonlight plays over the buried fences and
the eiderdown fields, the Tomten visits, leaving deep, blue-shadowed
tracks in the expanses of snow. The pockmarks of his trail stretch across
the glittering fields, then travel between the stark buildings in their thick
white blankets, past the machinery and tools leaning each with icing along
their lengths, past the tractor with its spokes dusted white and the apple
crates highlighted on each slat with fine white thread.
Alles schweiget
.
The tracks enter the barn where all the animals are sleeping, dreaming of
spring. To the goats he speaks in a language only goats can understand:

Soon there will be ixodia for you to eat.

The tracks leave the barn and go under the white brow of the sleeping
house, deep into the shadows. Wet pools from soft felt boots track across
the wooden floor of the verandah. They cross the snow-buried path right
up to Beate's window, where they stop. That is where he sings a song that
only sleeping young violinists can hear:

Spring is coming.

Acantia's face was lovely, caught in the morning light streaming across the bed. Ursula held her breath, her heart twisting with longing. Acantia turned and patted the bed beside her, and Ursula leapt to sit there, straight and glowing. Acantia smiled at her and stroked the hair out of Ursula's eyes, and with that touch on her brow, Ursula was transformed, incarnated.

‘Oh, Ursa,' Acantia said softly. ‘We never think of you! What would you like
most
in the whole world?'

Ursula's delight drained out of her and her smile stiffened to a mask of brightness. More than anything in the world she wanted a horse. But what would Acantia want her to be wanting? Her mind riffled in a panic for something. She said the first thing that she could think of.

‘Trumpet lessons,' she breathed, hoping her voice sounded rapturous. The clarion, golden choice.

Acantia was so proud of her. It was the right choice.

Ursula liked her trumpet very much, just not the sound it made. She practised a lot of silent trumpet, carrying the instrument as an accessory when riding her imaginary horse.

Eventually it was confiscated and the lessons with Pa cancelled.

The Houdinis rigged up outfits from Salvation Army excursions and hand-me-downs of great lineage. Always a decade off centre and a few degrees off colour, they looked like visitors from somewhere else, a land where the sun doesn't shine. White was grey, red was brown or smoky flesh-coloured, black was brown, but a different brown from the formerly blue or green. The children didn't care but, as they got older, they yearned for nice, normal underpants. They shared an underpants drawer in the central built-in cupboard of the house. They hoarded a collection of reasonable looking ones filched when dry from the line and stretched them out as long as possible. Ursula could make one pair last three weeks before the crustiness was too irritating.

The children didn't care about being different. They were even proud of it until one by one they turned thirteen and wondered if all the things that made them distinctive really made them better than other people.

The misery of winter lifted with the onset of cold and shining days. In the spring whatever it was that was malevolent in the house was mostly quiescent. The sunlight sang, the trees glittered, the goats became fat, and a burnished copper glow radiated from the cow's sleek body. The children played in the bush or around the house, freed of school by midday, sap running riot in their veins. Acantia sat in the sun on the stairs of Beate's house, shredding the distant neighbours and smiling at Gotthilf's jokes. Breezes ruffled the brindled paddocks; the swelling seedheads stretched as far as the horizon hills and the bush border.The world looked wide, bounteous and delicious.

The children wove cubby houses and Secret Spots with swathes of broom, bacon-and-egg, witches hut tendrils and gum tree bark, weaving window casements and flax floors. The bushland was filled with these strange children's nests. Each had a small clearing and, for a little while, a crisp, civilised air. The thatching never worked. They leaked and disintegrated in the span of a season.

‘My Secret Spot is dry in the winter and so warm you would think it had a fireplace.' No one had been able to find Helmut's Secret Spot, not even Siegfried. He shared his technique generously but would never disclose the location. He went around with a Secret Spot smile which everyone was meant to see and which drove everyone wild. They took turns tailing him but he just smiled.

‘Just bend some sheets of iron and then cover it all with weaving and then cover that with mud. Then plant stuff on it, and if you give it a narrow entrance tunnel, no one will ever be able to tell.' ‘It would sound hollow,' Ursula murmured.