Fire Fire (21 page)

THE SUN

A harsh solar beard from the underside of the red sun slashes the chords and chasms of a still ocean. Heavy cliffs and banks of red hang in the sky, looming suspended from the darkening indigo. White haze boils from the misshapen sun. Long horizontal fingers of dead blue reach in towards the gold and white sun path, the shining crevasse closing. Cold heat. Sunset. Embers.

This was the last painting Acantia made using real paint.

Lilo walked stoned through the house and saw it magically altered. The ceiling arched high above, glimmering benignly. The walls parted and formed rooms of substantial dimensions, aglow with colour and light. The paintings became translucent and vistas of the fields and trees rushed in to greet the eager eye. The great, gold maw of the fireplace roared like a dog ridiculously pleased to see her. The timber gleamed and the glasses in the drying-up rack said
Ding! Ding!
whenever her glance touched them.

She stood looking through a painting. The colours glistened and the feathers of the trees reached out with a long, bristly caress. She touched it with her fingertips and watched the streaks and scrolls of paint come to life. The violent horizontals and elastic verticals detached themselves from the subject and floated towards her face, losing all definitions of anything other than colour. She felt the Prussian blue flow into her veins and pulse around her body.

About the time when Helmut was shaving as much of himself off as possible, Siegfried experimented with the camouflage offered by a beard and long golden locks.

He succeeded in being inscrutable. Lacking impenetrable yellow eyes he settled for impenetrable yellow hair and speaking so slowly that it was more than anybody could stand to hear him out to the end of a sentence. He managed to drop out of all interaction almost as effectively as Arno.

His facial expressions changed and he became locked within the curse of a strange muscular disorder. When he was sad, he laughed gaily; when he was happy, he grimaced. When he wished to whisper, he shouted; and when he was weeping he grinned idiotically, dry-eyed. He became so miserable that he tried to avoid contact with people altogether.

You cannot know what goats are thinking
, he had once written in his goat diary.

Up around the top dam after sunset, Siegfried, Helmut, Lilo and Tracy lay around the fire. Helmut slipped off to have sex with Tracy and hoped that Lilo wouldn't mind. Lilo didn't. She saw herself as the perfect host, providing everything her guest could desire. She wondered fleetingly: when did Helmut last wash?

Then she reassured herself that the smoke and the open night air would mask and dissipate his singed polecat. He was, at least, gorgeous to look at.

Acantia leapt upon Helmut, flailing a coffee table in one hand and a chair in the other. He parried with a baseball bat with, in the onlookers' eyes, admirable sangfroid. Acantia telephoned the police.

‘My son is attacking me with a baseball bat!'

They said they would come at once and asked for the address.

‘Oh, it's all right, I can handle it. I just thought you should know.' She hung up.

Siegfried, Helmut and Arno descended on the house like a plague of locusts at four in the afternoon. They stole and consumed silverbeet and potatoes and rice and oil. They sorted through the car glovebox, in its seat crack, under the rubber floor cover, and Pa's suit trousers, taking any coins they could find to buy bread and margarine from the little shop a mile down the road. They rattled the house with their footsteps and broke the chairs they sat in. They smashed the kitchen window when they waved their arms about. Their weight broke the beds they slept in. Their shit filled the toilet and it broke down.

The more they stole, the less Acantia gave and the more they stole.

They felled trees, lit fires and ate rabbits.

Acantia tied their feet in their lies and watched them trip.

Supine, torpid, dormant, they stared at the sky.

Acantia ignored them and went to India for her final exams for her doctorate in Ayurvedic Medicine.

Siegfried and Helmut trudged to school, making small avalanches along the creek bed, eroding the bank with their boots.

The world outside flickered on their eyeballs and was noted in the diaries of their inert hearts.

The steep slopes of the bush paddock were host to secretively placed and carefully nurtured plants. Lilo planted marijuana and Siegfried planted himself. Tiny clearings, visible only to their maker, marked the mulch and earth cradle for his army of mandrakes. He dreamed of the slow shudders of his own brood, his secret pact with the forest. The stringybarks slowly thickened their scarred trunks above his nursery as he waited for something, anything that would bring him reinforcements.

Acantia dusted Siegfried like a carpet on Saturdays, beating all the week's accumulated evil out of him. Sundays were calm with restored purity, and sometimes she even cooked and fed him. Siegfried himself felt cleaner after his beatings. School was murky and threaded with currents he couldn't gauge, and he usually felt keyed up, nasty, paranoid by Friday. Acantia belted things back into their rightful places.

Over time this changed. Siegfried began attending less and less school, and spending more and more days hunting wild goats

over the back hills with a bow and arrow, fortified by marijuana. Some weeks he felt himself to be quite clean and wild when the pressure built up in the lead-up to the beating. He began wearing Robinson Crusoe-like clothes made of goat skin, and still Acantia beat him.

‘School!' she screamed, breathing hard. ‘It's filled you with foul ideas and you stink to high heaven with them. Dirty thinking, dirty eating, dirty body. You lurch in here every day, looking like a baboon!'

Siegfried, standing straight, suddenly grabbed her arm in midstroke, and the lash of the bridle reins fell across his reeking billygoat-hide shoulders.

‘I haven't been to school once, this week,' he said quietly, but with a wobble and break in his voice.

Acantia's hands fell to her sides, and she eyed him, up and down, bewildered for a moment.

‘Yes,' she said thoughtfully, almost to herself. ‘I can see that.' She turned and walked away, dropping the bridle to the floor, and that was the end of Siegfried's beatings and his schooling.

Whispers was more hidden and more awake than it had ever been. The bush track was accessible now by 4WD only. Pa's battered sedan made the crossing to the outside world only by experienced navigation. Ugolini parked his car on the outside and walked in these days. The house was hidden behind the army of radiata pines spawned by the row of seven, and then on and on by each other. The fire-scarred stringybarks held on, with green furred radiata kittens at their feet. The radiatas had long ago sprung in their midst, but were now black skeletons. They could not survive fire. Long grass and whisperweed covered all, as they had when the Houdinis arrived. The house creaked and cackled now, cracking joints at night, humming tunes, picking up snippets of the viola repertoire in parody and off key. It had slumped or buckled inward a little, pulled into the mountain. The damp rooms at the back were smaller than before and unused. The front was twisted slightly, so windows and doors either wouldn't open or wouldn't close.
Sweetheart
, it called Acantia.
Sweetheart, cook us some chops
. And Acantia would cook one extra, for the house, she said, but none of them laughed. It was a sombre, reduced family around the table in the dim evenings. Their chairs rattled incessantly as they ate. The floor had skewed, so the table had to have a book under one leg, and everything small slid one way only and disappeared.