Fire Fire (8 page)

‘Feminism, pah! Poor things just don't know how to be real women. Broken homes behind them and ahead of them. No-hopers.' ‘People just aren't equal, so why they want to pretend they are, I don't know. Not everyone can be an artist, now, can they? Or a mathematician. Toxins on the brains, that Whitlam lot. Communists.'

‘Multiculturalism! What will they think of next! What culture? They haven't got one, let alone many. More like Muddy-culturalism.' But the Houdinis did grow up with a bare bones sketch of contemporary Australia and reluctantly, slowly, learned not to trust Acantia's knowledge of everything. They instinctively knew, especially after reaching puberty, that she was afraid and that these views were bravado.

The man in the cream hat and the safari suit was there again. He stood in the clay cutting at the bush perimeter, staring down at them. He had been there the week before but because he had gone away, they had forgotten. Now he was back and somehow his presence seemed to cast a shadow over them and they couldn't play and shriek as before. They began watching the watcher, first out of the corners of their eyes and in little looks cast at each other, then they just stood around and watched back. The man in the cream hat and the safari suit was quite a distance away, so they couldn't make out his face. He lifted one foot onto the embankment and looked as though he was tying a shoelace. Then he straightened, shaded his eyes with his palm held in front of the brim of his hat and stared down at them. He took the stick he held in the crook of his arm and swished it. Then he strode straight down the bush track towards them. The children scattered.

Acantia met him ahead of Beate, Gotthilf and Ursula. The rest stayed in hiding. Pa was practising and hadn't noticed yet. ‘Hello, what do you want, can I help you?' Acantia was shaken and couldn't quite be polite. ‘Madam, could you please tell me, how many children do you have?'

Acantia looked hunted, and even the big kids huddled a little behind her. Lilo crept up and held onto Ursula's trousers.

‘Madam, we have written to you on numerous occasions, with no response. It is illegal for school-age children to not attend school.'

‘They attend school here,' Acantia said stiffly.

‘Where?' The inspector looked around deliberately and returned his rather popped blue eyes to Acantia's face. He rocked back on his heels once, then forward, and straightened. Then he suddenly switched his attention to Gotthilf.

‘Young man, how many brothers and sisters do you have?'

‘Three . . . fo . . . four,' Gotthilf stuttered, frantically trying to work out who Acantia would be able to bear to part with.

The man in the safari suit smiled an unfriendly smile at Acantia, who stood stiff and white.

‘And you, little missy?' he asked Lilo. ‘How many siblings have you got?'

‘Just me,' said Lilo, expansively.

‘Well well well,' the school inspector said. ‘I counted seven, s-e-v-e-n. And you say they go to school!'

Pa appeared on the verandah, waved his viola, saw Acantia's face, and said, ‘We don't need encyclopaedias, thank you very much.'

The school inspector glanced up at him and smiled again. Then he turned his back and as he walked away he said, ‘Make sure they are in school next week.'

‘They are in school now, and what a mighty lesson they have learned!' Acantia suddenly screamed. ‘The rudeness!'

That evening, as everyone sat around the table, the shadow the man cast from the hill had not lifted. Acantia strode up and down the kitchen, turning and turning, gasping. She stopped and stared at them, her eyes shining with tears.

‘We are surrounded by PREDATORS!'

They didn't go to school. The education department sent a psychologist in a pale green Kingswood. He appeared through the clay cutting, slipping smoothly and easily along the bush track to the front porch entrance. There he sat for a moment, rustling his papers with his head down, perched behind a low burble of fine machinery. Then he got out and smiled brightly at Acantia. He had slightly long hair, square-rimmed glasses and tight trousers.

‘Hello,' he said, extending a hand with silver jewellery on it. ‘I'm Dr Driscoll.'

The children were stunned but Acantia just looked resigned and angry.

Dr Driscoll was nice and had a good fun day with the kids. The younger children showed him some of the abandoned Secret Spots and none of the current ones, although they told him that because he was nice they would have liked to and gave him lots of clues. They enjoyed the tests he gave them and he told them they were fabulous children and that Acantia and Pa had done a marvellous job. When he asked Ursula, after her test, if she would like to go to real school, a special school for really special people, she cried. She thought probably she should cry at that point but she was still not sure why she did. She just liked Dr Driscoll and was overwrought by his likeableness. She was overcome by having been called special.

When the psychologist gave his report, Acantia relaxed and said all would be well. Then the education department accused her and Pa of harbouring geniuses and demanded that these fugitive intellects be returned to the state.

Acantia fought but one by one the children had to go to school.

Beate was safe at sixteen, almost missing from the daily life of the family, for she practised violin eight hours a day.

She gave them Gotthilf first. She absolutely refused special school.

‘What, so they can pretend it was their sick system that made these children what they are?'

Gotthilf, aged fourteen, went to Berg Area High, a local school situated on the slopes of the mountain that gave Toggenberg its name.

Gotthilf began his school career by picking fights with all the Aboriginal kids, jealous of their higher spiritual plane. He got thrashed about ten times in three days before he changed his attitude to Aboriginal boys. They, like the dictionary, clearly possessed a world of their own beyond his knowledge. He couldn't leave them alone. He followed them, slinking

along in the bush, sauntering close to walls, looking in other directions disingenuously, or pretending to read the pocket dictionary he now carried. Occasionally they chased him, but in this one thing he excelled: he was a faster and wilier runner than any kid in school. Then they ignored him, and he became their shadow, his eyes, even in class, sliding to their dark faces and staying glued there. They beat him up mercilessly whenever they managed to catch him, but this increased his complicated yearning and respect. The other children also beat him up or held his head down the toilet whenever they could. Abo lover and Boong bonkers, they called him, but Gotthilf barely heard and developed no respect for them no matter how much they beat him.

Eventually he managed to lure Trevor into his world using a mixture of whistles and big words as bait.

‘Columnar!' he shouted from the stands, skinny arm raised in salute, and then whistled with four fingers wedged in his mouth, as Trevor was playing football.

Then he hissed, ‘Tachycardia,' in breathless excitement from the bushes behind the science block and Trevor pounced on him. Gotthilf smiled in delight and terror. Held up by the shirt front in Trevor's fist, he whispered, ‘Gotya!' and put his finger gently in the red mouth of Trevor's dragon tattoo. Trevor beat him up.

Ursula was looking for a Secret Spot. She wanted one that was better and braver and more secret than Helmut's, which no one had been able to find. She went exploring in the deserted bowels of the house, half hoping still to find a skeleton of a baby. She would put it in her museum, properly labelled. This part was buried away from the mind and from daily life. It was a catacomb, a theatre of strangeness. She wormed her way through the low, gloomy doorways into the rooms entombed in darkness and damp. She sat in one of the dank, lightless rooms that backed straight into the hillside. It was piled up with invisible unidentifiable rubbish, filled with anything that could be surrendered to a slow demolition. She closed her eyes and breathed in the sweet acid smell of rock-eating water, the smell of decades of slow digestive acids and urine. She was deep in the stomach of the hillside, smelling its hunger and its insatiability. No matter what happened, it was clear that the house would not be surviving. It might rage but it was being eaten, slowly and surely, from within. The pockmarked, cratered wall behind her whispered wetly as her back pressed against the shards of paint and plaster. The ice cold of the underground seeped into her. She could barely hear the viola. It penetrated as a whisper-thin tonal wail, somehow itself sinister. She was the queen of darkness, reaching out with her fingers to destroy all. She spread her arms and paused, trying to think of a chant.

‘Ooooooooooh. Oooooooooh?'

Each howl fell stillborn into the tiny room. The feebleness of the sound scared her and she trailed off to silence, listening. The small darkness of her mind was a tiny nut and she felt suddenly as though it was being watched. Her eyes flew open and something rushed up, electric and excited at her permeability. The darkness leapt down her throat and bored out her eyes. She stumbled blindly for the door, hands outstretched. As she scrambled against invisible rusty tricycles, treading on decapitated dolls and broken toys, the wall behind her ran with fluid whispers and tiny flour bomb explosions as lumps of plaster, fragments and flakes fell or slid to the floor. When she tumbled out into the daylight she had to close her eyes. The light burned through her and the world turned dark. She sat down heavily on the verandah step and wrapped her bony elbows around her knees. She was overwhelmed by the pointlessness of everything. There was no point in games. She couldn't remember the last time she got exactly what she would have wished from anything. She wanted to hide in the painting of the Orchard, listening for the footsteps of the hidden deer. She wanted the springtime and Acantia's light smile, to hear the whisper of the paintbrush against the masonite. She couldn't remember the last time she had heard it.

Goats won't live in houses but they will eat them on occasion
, Siegfried observed in his goat diary.

Count Ugolini out of the blue persuaded Acantia to get Ursula a horse. ‘Riding a horse is very good for a girl her age,' he said. And he knew just the horse. Ursula had saved a hundred dollars from two years of picking ixodia, a wildflower they all picked over summer. One day it vanished from her secret hiding place, and the next day Count Ugolini arrived with a horse float and a fine-limbed sorrel yearling crashed and clattered off the ramp and bolted into the bush.

Ursula had seen her for all of twenty seconds and was beside herself with terror that this wasn't what it seemed.

‘Six hundred dollars! Pure Arab!' Acantia said, hugging Ursula. ‘You can owe me five hundred. You can pay me when you're a grown-up.'

Ursula pursued Ember for three days until the horse gave up, hungry and thirsty. Ember was everything Ursula's dreams had conjured and more. For one thing Ursula had not imagined that she would be so vicious, so unpredictable. It didn't matter. Ursula left the world of her siblings for a finer one, at times inconvenienced by pain and damage inflicted by her companion. By the time Ember was eighteen months old, Ursula had slipped up onto her back and learned to ride by clinging there wherever Ember went. She tried to limit the horse's movements by placing a pile of lucerne hay in the direction she wanted Ember to choose. Inevitably, Acantia caught her. The punishment in those golden months was light. Acantia was secretly impressed. She absolutely refused a saddle, but allowed a bridle.