Fire Fire (23 page)

T
he fire was a long time coming but when it did, twenty-five years after they moved in, it was utterly effective. The house was never rebuilt.

After the fire Pa and Acantia lived in what had been Beate's house. They kept cottage alone, the lovely old childless couple in the forest. With all the children gone, Pa became the woodman. He chopped wood for the fires in the morning and tuned instruments in front of the open fire in the evenings. Acantia's hair was grey, some strands even white. Pa sometimes combed her hair, aligning the white strands harmoniously with the grey, pulling out all the black ones. She painted and mixed energy waters next to him. They were quietly in love.

Ursula, Siegfried, Lilo and Arno came home to visit more often after the fire (usually in pairs). Pa said,
you have to focus on the positive
. In this he agreed with Acantia.
We are all in this together. We can only stay attuned to one
another through effort.
His grown-up children laughed. They were cynical. They had no intention of allowing themselves to be touched or of trying to stay attuned. They muttered and growled.

‘Pa sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil.'

‘Ha!'

‘He can't even tune the piano.'

After the house burned down, Count Ugolini had sent Acantia and Pa a present of a small grand piano. His noble impracticality impressed them. Pa built a small grand piano room in one of the old burned-out dressing-rooms. The grand piano room had galvanised iron cladding made from the old sheets from the roof. Apart from enduring extremes of heat and cold, the piano had to be moved out into the open air to be played. It was never in tune.

No one really knew why Acantia stopped liking the Count.

One month he was there in the auditorium looking old and gone in the tooth, talking about his illness and the false accusations trumped up against him and the corruption of the vice squad.

‘Whispers is my sanctuary, my last refuge.'

The next month her face closed down at the mention of his name and she wandered about dim and ashen. She rewrote her will. She refused to consider Gotthilf.

‘Gotthilf has been heartless and greedy since he was breastfeeding. I would do his soul irreparable damage if I were to help him.'

They were only mildly curious about the Count's fall from grace. It made them laugh that, right when he thought he needed Acantia, she had spurned him. They didn't take anything seriously.

‘Count Ugolini was always a weak man.' Acantia shook her head slowly, staring at her porridge. ‘We gave him everything that poor people could give the very wealthy. You know, nonmaterial things. The warmth of a hearth in the heart of a loving family. He has succumbed to the evil that surrounds him, I'm afraid. I could have saved him if he had had the strength to listen to me.' Acantia had made a few mistakes. She admitted them. One was to have told the Count that he was wrong to buy the biggest arms factory in the world and that he should be using his immeasurable wealth, now that his evil old father had died and left all of it to him, for the good of mankind.

‘He has turned on us. Children, we are in grave danger. He is connected with the Mafiosi, oh, from way back, you know.' She looked up at her irritated brood, her face calm and serene, noble in the face of such peril. ‘I could heal him from his physical afflictions, easily. But proximity to his psychic evil could only contaminate me, and then I would be no use to any of you.' She sighed heavily, and then gazed lovingly at the young men and women shuffling aggressively in front of her. How much she gave for them, her look said. Ursula snorted but changed it into a sneeze. Arno stared at the ceiling.

The Count told Acantia somewhat vengefully that the piano was hot. He had sold it to two different people before hiding it at Whispers.

Acantia was a receiver of stolen property. Should she risk their lives and the lives of all her children by telling the police the whereabouts of Lady Deadlock's historic grand piano? Ugolini had become taller, darker and more distinctly Sicilian.

Perhaps she could pass the piano on to one of her scattered six (seven) children. No good. Ugolini was multinationally tentacular.

Perhaps the police would understand if she explained everything to them. No good. The police had failed to uphold the law on many occasions. No knowing what depths of Police Corruption they might by now have plumbed.

Pa wanted to burn the piano and bury it. Everyone had some advice to offer. Ursula said to bump Ugolini off first. Acantia suggested that those who suffer from such severe imaginitis that they cannot take a family emergency seriously should keep their smart comments to themselves.

Helmut told Ursula that Ugolini was ringing up often and that Acantia was genuinely scared of him.

Immediately after the fire, Acantia was too groggy to stop them and the children had leapt upon the house like starving dogs shredding an injured pack member. They smashed down the ruined walls with battering rams. They had no thought for their own safety. Helmut stood like a fiend on the battlements smashing rubble out of the wall he was standing on with a sledgehammer. Pa and Ursula battered bricks down one by one and shook the fatigued concrete lintels free.

They had lowered the ruins considerably by the time Acantia made up her mind. Then they were forbidden from battering any more.

They prowled around longing to get their teeth into it but didn't dare do more than furtive weakening of cracks.

Lilo and Ursula sat in the long summer grass at the top of the neglected orchard, staring down at the hole filled with blackened tin and rubble that had been the house. Ursula was pale under a mask of ash. ‘Just the house, luckily,' the Emergency Fire Service man said, shuddering involuntarily and holding out the rescued cat. But at the heart of this fire was another, and buckled flesh and animals screamed at the back of Ursula's mind. The smell of baked apples hung heavily in the air, and even from so far away the ground and the leaves of the trees were dusted with ash. Ursula stroked a leaf, half expecting it to be greasy. It was powder. They could see Siegfried and Arno, small blackened figures, trailing their way up through the blackberry to join them. It had been a hard day. They stared at the evening sky, streaked with flames of red and gold and aqua and purple.

‘Funny if the Count really does kill Pa and Acantia.'

‘Shhhh,' Lilo whispered, looking sober. ‘The house really
did
burn down. Bullshit comes true.'

They had all prayed for an incendiary bomb to hit the house. It had become a game, this insulting the house.

‘Best thing for it would be a match and some petrol.'

‘Only way to clean it up is to burn it down.'

‘Pity Ash Wednesday fizzled out when faced with the Houdini House.'

‘Wonder what it said.'

‘Ha ha!'

There were twelve volumes of the Houdini press clippings scrapbooks.
HOUDINIS ESCAPE HORROR FIRE TRAP
was preserved, with the other clippings that were not about Pa or Beate, in number twelve.

It was dated 16 February 1983, Ash Wednesday. Everyone knew Ursula left and then the fires started. Acantia even said that Ursula was the arsonist.

Lilo, nine years old, stood with the neighbours, her siblings and Acantia on the hill. Fire raged in the scrubland on the hill above.

Smoke and ash swirled in apocalyptic rhythms and the sun was dimmed to an angry yellow. The people huddled, praying for the safety of their deserted homes left to the mercy of fate. The Houdinis' house sat below, smoking a little. Falling leaves rimmed with fire sailed gaily through the air to land on its roof. Lilo broke free from Acantia and ran to a vantage point. Her pale hair was backlit in the weird light like a halo of an avenging sprite. She began jumping up and down shaking her fists at the distant house.

‘Burn! Burn! Burn! Burn! Burn!'

The neighbours looked uncomfortable.

The house had burned down exactly fifteen years and a day later. One by one, they gathered on the same hill to stare down at the twisted asbestos-powdered wreckage below, half laughing and half scared that they had all once wished for this. Ursula and Lilo rocked together, almost crying.

The two sisters sat through the wild sunset with their arms about each other's necks, breathing the darkening summer in and out.

In adulthood, Ursula and Lilo became friends. It wasn't clear to Ursula why Lilo would like her, only that Lilo always had, with passionate, blind partiality. For her part, Ursula admired Lilo without envy. She admired Lilo's beauty, her fearlessness, and held her close as carefully as one might cuddle a bomb.

It was amusing, if foolhardy, to humiliate Lilo.

Ursula had once picked her tiny sister up, folded her in half in a bear hug and thrown her out the door. The door crashed back open as if struck by lightning. Lilo stood there looking like a fiend. Her blonde curls stood out around her face and her eyes were torches. Ursula started to laugh. Lilo leapt in one bound to the dish-rack and grabbed the breadknife. Then she lunged with all her might at Ursula, screaming, ‘I am going to
POP YOU!
'

Later she said that she wanted to prick all of them like balloons; change their laughing faces. Give them extra holes.

Helmut had to hold her down, sit on her scuttling, sea-crab body and wrench the knife off her while she pinched and bit him. Ursula was laughing helplessly, even though she knew that Lilo meant it, and that she was in greater danger then than from any dust-up with Acantia.

As young women, Lilo was outrageous where Ursula was shy and complicated. Lilo tried everything. Ursula preferred to read or hear about it. Lilo once said to Ursula, ‘Stop analysing, or I'll belt ya.'

Lilo refined rage to an art form. She stopped playing classical violin when she was fourteen and began improvising. Pa stopped teaching her in disgust. And from then on she was alone with her instrument. She stopped holding the bow as she had been taught and stopped using major, minor or chromatic scales in any properly recognisable form, and she messed with all forms of cadence or transition. Her music became irreverent. Not long after leaving Whispers, she fitted a pick-up to her instrument and painted purple and red screaming mouths, glaring eyes and vampire teeth all over it. A snake wound around the neck. She became well known as a busker in Melbourne and was increasingly in demand for alternative no-budget film tracks. She began playing for a punk folk band. Her violin screeched and howled, torturing listeners, then shocking them with exquisite songs. Pa asked Ursula to ask Lilo to change her name. Lilo refused.

Deep in the belly of the Goat and Compasses, punk folk rage pumped out into the anaesthetised and appreciative audience. Lilo's voice was the thread of the lonely violin glowing like an ember in the damp grey smoke of urban student rebellion. But the anarchists of the Goat and Compasses were a little shaken by Lilo and her band ditched her for a more uniform sound and the name Plastiscene.

Lilo attended their inaugural gig as the malevolent fairy.

She gave them the gift of her invective.

‘Yas
SUCK
! Don't give up ya fucken
DAY JOBS
!'

She gave them the gift of minor missiles.

‘Have a
BEER
!'

She gave them an electric shock and the bouncers threw her out.

She burst down the door in an adrenaline rush, carrying the stone trough full of dogs' water, drenched the stage and crushed the amp.

She was banned from the Goat and Compasses for life. She sat on the pub windowsill like an enraged black cat for a couple of weeks but was spooking too many people and was banned from that as well.

Lilo grinned at Ursula and raised her eyebrows, golden eyes alight.

‘You have to do quite a bit to get banned for life from an anarchists' club!'

Three months after the fire, Lilo took off overseas on a one-way ticket, planning to busk her way around the world. Ursula got several cards from Budapest and felt deserted.

One day, a month or so before the first Christmas after the fire, Ursula was evading her thesis in the university library, browsing in recently acquired journals. She thumbed idly through a copy of the new literatures journal,
Rage
; then her short hair rose straight in the air all over her scalp. One of the contributors had her name.
Ursula Houdini
. There it was in the index. There in the volume:
Ursula Houdini
. There, in the list of contributors:
Ursula Houdini is
an Australian writer of fiction and other untruths
. She knew immediately that it was Gotthilf. He had maintained contact at a cryptic trickle until two years before and then severed it altogether when he heard that Acantia had spoken about getting custody of his daughter. No one had his current address.

Ursula had written rarely and had not seen him since he ran away.

‘THREE LIES A NOVELIST MAKE' BY URSULA HOUDINI

Her eyes blurred and her mind buzzed with white noise.
A novelist!
It was a silly piece about truth, fantasy and lies, and the role of parents in helping children understand the difference. She skimmed it, heart pounding. Then, suddenly, it was about her and him, and she was snagged and pulled under into his terrible joke.