Fire Fire (2 page)

Beate caught herself in the middle of a hoot and stopped. She walked outside and began to cry to herself. She leaned against a young radiata pine that stood at the head of a long row near the house, and turned and stared at the wreck that was to become their home. She was ten, and being the eldest and most responsible Houdini was becoming an impossible strain. Ursula ran up to her, tossing her lank blonde hair out of her eyes.

‘Great, isn't it?'

Beate stared at her sister's ear. It was curved and sculpted, as if it were the cast, the negative of the head of a violin, a small vortex running into the mystery of Ursula's head. She calmed her breathing and hid her dismay in her clenched hands, crushed against the bark behind her back.

‘It's a desert.'

‘
Deserted!
' Ursula shrieked, and scampered away in a horse's gallop, her bony knees almost beating her chest. Her hair flicked and shone like a mane.

Beate stared at the house. It is a lost ark, she thought. The hall was surrounded by unpruned trees and then a sea of green-gold grasses, broken here and there with the red ugliness of half-hidden rusted car cabins, bonnets and chassis. Grass and rubbish dissolved into the bright and hostile bush perimeter, a uniform grey and silver barrier out of which the kombi had popped as if ejected. The trees glittered in the sunlight.

Beate was alone. She was assailed again with something she had been shutting out. She had been watching her changed mother for two sudden and shocking months and had had the occasional feeling that they had
fled
to this. It was not an adventure at all. It was the end. She could not understand it.

The thing in the back of her mind rolled towards her, lazy as a cat in the sun. It was a busy, after-concert scene, one of countless identical scenes. The children stiff and well dressed. The food.
Take
one piece only and don't be the first.
Her father's eyes catching hers through a moving skein of long gold hair which for a moment veiled his face. The hair moved, flicked, and a woman she didn't know leaned in profile to whisper some word in Pa's ear. Pa's eyes were fixed on Beate's, trapped by her glance, his lips frozen in a kiss to that hair, his eyes begging. Then he turned away.

Beate was alone. She whispered to herself the words that tolled then in her heart with a kind of distinction and horror. I am the
eldest
. She didn't feel up to it. Ursula came sprinting by in a wheeling arc, head back and throwing gravel like an ecstatic puppy. Beate reached out a skinny arm and grabbed Ursula's collar, yanking viciously. Ursula tumbled and then leapt up, breathless, grinning.

Beate was suddenly furious. She twisted Ursula's collar up tight and wrenched her sister's head close to her ear. Ursula grinned harder, choking, but her eyes shifted this way and that in bewilderment.

Beate whispered hoarsely, ‘I'm the eldest, and I have to do everything. Acantia is not . . . happy and I'm making that your job!'

Ursula went limp, wide-eyed and serious.

‘Not happy?' she quavered.

Beate let her go and dropped her hands to her sides. She turned to the tree and began to sob. Ursula stood behind her for a while, then said softly and more than a little hopefully: ‘
You're
the one who's not happy.'

She leaned forward and punched the backs of Beate's knees so that her older sister slumped suddenly. Beate ignored her but stopped crying. It's hard to maintain a decorous sobbing when your sister has just scored on you in knee-knocking.

Ursula waited a moment for a better reaction and then walked away. She might have scored two points on Beate but her mood was still ruined.

Acantia held her hand reverently to the bark and cocked her head, as if listening. Ursula was impressed. Acantia listened to the voices of the spheres for a while, nodding her head now and then. Suddenly she gasped. ‘The sadness of this place is to be redeemed!' She beamed at Ursula, ‘And we are chosen to do it!' Ursula beamed back.

It was confirmed. They had a mission here and it was all
meant
to be
. Ursula's doubts sank again into dreams and darkness and she charged about happily redeeming the land, pulling up weeds, collecting rubbish, planting seeds in the clay, and helping Acantia varnish the jarrah boards in the kitchen while Pa replaced the floor in the auditorium.

Acantia raced about in excitement, the brightness that comes with fevers glittering in her eyes.

‘Children,' their mother said. ‘If you want something hard enough, it comes to pass. If you want this house to be repaired and habitable, think only of that and before you know it,
Your Will Bedone
.'

The house had five corners, four useable rooms, three chimneys, two doors, one toilet and no plumbing. It also had a stage, auditorium and catacombs of tiny dank dressing- and props rooms built deep into a steep and slippery rock slope. It was a long and oddly shaped building, stone at the blind, buried end and brick and timber at the front. Part of it had once been a Temperance Institute and seemed to have been the last building standing of a tiny aborted bush colony, long forgotten. But there was much more. It had started as a two-roomed adobe settler's cottage with small windows and a steep roof. This was slipping down the hill off the side like a dead limb, no glass in its windows and its skeleton showing. Even destroyed, it preserved an oddly familiar air. Pa said that it must have been built by Germans. Acantia said that, shored up, it would make a good cow byre. On the other side was half a villa, and the verandah on that side had part of a terracotta mosaic on the floor and turned wood posts. The hall had been built without pulling down either of these once separate dwellings, and the extensions of the hall seemed to have cannibalised them. The remains of the villa were solid, but obviously unused for decades. The jarrah floors in the main house came from there. The hall proper was built of stone, but the main part of the house was built around it. Someone had converted it with four large front rooms and a return verandah.

The auditorium sat in the centre, a potential heartland. It was stinky, broken and festooned with webs, dust and mould. The stage was smashed and the floor had been chopped up with an axe. When Angus Bad had killed himself, some five years before, he had tried to take the house with him. Everything in it was broken. Acantia said they could stage their own plays and concerts once they had repaired the floor.

The house was surrounded by a mass of European trees. A deodar cedar, a strawberry-rose apple tree and a twist willow were planted near one corner. Claret ash, a purple plum, a snowball, cherry plum, rhododendron, conker conifer, ivy, variegated cherry and other unnameable trees rubbed leaves and branches around the side of the house. As time passed these slow-growing giants competed with steady and silent violence for the ground and the light. (When the house was gone, burned in three minutes to a carious crater, the tangled and seething embrace of the trees loomed as one mass into the space it had left, filling it almost overnight. The giant apple tree hugged the scorched deodar, dripping with baked apples from its remote tips to the alcoholic mess around its horny trunk.)

Acantia and Pa's room, the kids' room, the music room and the kitchen were the only rooms with doors and which had decent floors. Two of them were at the front of the smashed-up auditorium, the other two at the sides.

When they cleaned the house up, polished the floor and put in the window, the jarrah glimmered here and there like red treasure under the streaming sunlight. Their oak table looked stark, solid and inviting, spread with a striped flannelette sheet and stacked with oranges and blue frosted plums. They had as yet no chairs so they all sat together on the front steps, eyeing their beautiful new home with quiet delight. Acantia was happy.

‘Musicians, artists and poets,' she said. ‘That's what you'll be. Just like Pa and me and your Uncle Lochie.' She sighed happily. ‘No contaminants here! You'll be as pure as the Aborigines.'

The house had peculiar windows. Most rooms had none at all, or windows that looked in onto other rooms, rather than outside. It was an inward looking house. The windows increased the impression that the house knew something about itself and wasn't telling. Acantia said it didn't matter. She would paint pictures of all the beautiful scenery around and they could look out through them.

And she did. The children could look out, not just at the land and trees stretching up the hill, not just at the bush tracks leading away from their place, but at other countries. Sagans, Lucerne, Lake Constance, the Matterhorn, the Sisters and Mont Blanc, Engelberg and Hohenstaufen crags could all be seen from the windows of their house. After a while they forgot that they had the lights on all the time, remembering only when one guttered and spat and then plunged them and the luminous paintings into darkness.

THE ORCHARD

The blue-black forest furs the mountain like boar's bristles, echoing closer, nearer over the hidden brooks, hidden deer and other wonders until it winds like a buckled hunter's bugle call through the wind-coiled cherry trees, quince trees (they cannot see cherries or quinces) over the sea swirl of green, sonorous grasses (hiding the strawberries they once found) and out into the eye.

It is their own orchard in Germany unravelled from the paint tubes in Prussian blue and swirling helixes, made up of myriad sweeping streaks of greens and blues and cadmium yellow. It looks like a picture of music issuing from an old gramophone flower. Forest voices throbbing in one shouting chord through the throat of the orchard. This painting is from the epoch before Acantia developed her signature style. There are no broad horizontal brushstrokes, no firm vertical.

The Houdini children were advanced for their years. They knew their sums and read voraciously. They were all
phenomenally
talented
, but in different ways. They were very proud of it. Beate the firstborn was the most clearly musical one. At ten she was already a prodigy. When she wasn't practising the violin, staring intensely into some inner space at ceiling level, she was usually singing to herself. But these days she sang little, and just eyed her parents, sometimes angrily, sometimes warily. It took a lot longer to reconcile Beate with Whispers than it did Ursula.

Beate tried to talk to Gotthilf on the third day as he was sitting on the sunny steps reading the dictionary. He was, after all, the next oldest, and should share the load with her.

‘Did you know,' Gotthilf paused, looked up through his long straw-coloured fringe to secure Beate's gaze, then glanced again at the spot pinned by his forefinger, ‘that
totalitarian
means “permitting no rival loyalties or parties”?'

‘Yes,' Beate lied crossly.

Gotthilf loved words, and controlled conversations with her by knowing more words than she did. He could go into
Did-you-know
strings for hours.

‘
Didjano Didjano
,' she chanted. ‘Stop it. I want to talk to you. Do
you
know . . .?' She trailed off. What did she know?

‘You just wanted to be concert queen,' Gotthilf said quietly.

‘But the great world would have swallowed you up. Acantia said so. We left everything for
your
sake, Beate.'

Beate stared at him, wide-eyed. Then she ran. Gotthilf threw a handful of pebbles after her.

‘It's true!' he screamed. ‘Queenie!
Regina optima, planusque
Gloria!
'

Gotthilf at that time probed the mysteries of the world with his fingertip. He lugged the Oxford around the yard, its spine ticking with the strain, his head bent down over it. He used the most peculiar words for the sake of being hard to understand. He'd say things like ‘The moon has ameliorated the darkness'.

Over time, and with less and less contact with people from the outside world, Gotthilf's language had a slight influence on everyone's speech.

He was, when they moved to Whispers, only nine. He had the same leggy, knobbly build as Ursula, but already a perplexed, quick smile and the look of a boy hoarding love. He wasn't a show-off like Ursula. Show-offs have the resilience to take it or leave it. He had to stalk it, corner it, catch it and kill it to feel as though it was fully his. Both Pa and Acantia beat him more often than the other kids.