Fire Fire (22 page)

Ursula visited for Mother's Day. She had avoided visiting or even calling since Christmas. Acantia forced her to stay for the night by deliberately assuming it, but still ended up sitting alone with Pa. All the children, including Ursula, melted away into the bush at dusk.

Acantia sat alone at the table, the dim light picking out a yellow halo from the loose and tousled strands of her black hair. Her children were outside in the darkness and any passing by the window could look in and observe their mother at length without her knowing it. But her eyes were hidden in dark hollows as she stared down, tracing the grain of the wood on the table with her fingers. She looked as if she was playing a silent piano. The table was almost bare. She and Pa had called, had picked over the spinach and potatoes and salad, but no children had come. Pa had slunk off to practise in Beate's house. The viola sobbed unregarded into the darkness. Siegfried had finally stopped chopping wood. He had chopped for hours, his body shaking, screaming with each downward swing, his body shining wet. Acantia had gone outside to shout at him to stop but her six foot four son had given her such a look with the axe suspended over his head that she had just smiled nastily at him and left him to it.

Through the window, as passers-by, they caught snapshots of their mother. She buried her head in her hands and her shoulders looked frail and bony but they allowed themselves no warmth.

Ursula had deserted them and their lives had filled, flowed over and burst with the weight of horrors.

If Acantia had looked out of the window, she would have seen a faint glow in the darkness above the crater of the top dam, where bowshot rabbit, damper and omelettes were often cooked in stolen pans and stewpot. If she had crept up to watch she could have witnessed them cut Arno down from the tree from which he had tried to hang himself and she would have seen them rub his limbs and feed him as though he was a little baby curled in their arms. She would have seen Ursula, Lilo and Tracy keening and sobbing over the pot.

That night when Helmut broke into the house for supplies, Siegfried followed him with the axe, chopped up the oak kitchen table and stacked it neatly as firewood next to the stove. Acantia burned it the next day without a word.

Arno clarified something for Ursula. She knew she would feel guilt.
Forever
, she thought to herself with wan theatricality, trying to cheer herself up. Her hour had come, but rather than feeling like a hero, she felt like a criminal, a traitor. She was dizzy with the horror of it. It would be the most terrible thing she had ever done to Acantia, or to Arno.

She had sat with them all in the firelight, under the starlight.

She was the one who knew both the inside and the outside, and she could feel them all relying on her to fix Arno. Arno lay, huge and heavy, half in her lap. She hadn't realised what weight there was in skin and flesh and bones, in the mysterious ball of a head. She had rubbed him, thinking hard. All their hands were on their littlest brother, rubbing rubbing. All their thoughts were on Ursula, the only one who could get help. Arno said nothing, silent for the first time in three weeks. They knew he was listening to their murmurs by the slow seeping of tears from his closed eyes. Ursula watched them, listened to them all whisper of love unbearable, love unlimited, and the preciousness of their little brother. ‘Choizus, ya fucked-up little . . . fucker,' Lilo sobbed softly.

Ursula took Arno away from Acantia. It didn't happen straightaway, but shortly after, when Ursula arrived unannounced in a strange Commodore with a psychologist and a social worker, Siegfried, Lilo and Pa shook hands with them.

When Siegfried left he went in search of Helmut, who was travelling somewhere in the north of Queensland. They met by chance hitching opposite ways along the Bruce Highway near Townsville and then jumped onto a freight train together. The train moved at a walking pace through the hot bush, then desert. Three days and Siegfried and Helmut were ill with hunger and thirst. The train inched ever on into nothingness. They jumped off into the desert and walked away from the hopeless tracks. A mob of Murri people found them and fed them for a couple of weeks and then drove them on the back of a rickety ute to the crossroads on the Stuart Highway, sick of these wide-eyed boys who spoke nonsense and ate far too much.

They rang Acantia and Pa.

‘Oh my!' Acantia said. ‘They are just like me when I was young! So adventurous. Brave and
unlimited
!'

When the boys arrived home, Lilo caught Acantia eyeing them. The thin faces, sunken cheeks and eyes, the lathe-like forms and the knobbly knees seemed to perplex her. They did not look like heroes.

They both left again within a week to fight for trees. They became ardent defenders of mountain ash,
eucalyptus regnans
and
eucalyptus globuli
. They collected criminal convictions like medals and applied their peacetime skills to the war effort. They camped in platforms halfway up mountain ashes and urinated on timber-workers through narrow slit windows.

When they were locked up in Pentridge on remand after the East Gippsland Forest Blockade, they appeared on national TV. Acantia dropped everything and raced off to help. Having wrangled her way into the jail she spent several days handing out energy water to the blockaders to keep their strength up. She cured a prison warden of piles. When they were released and returned to Whispers, Siegfried stayed only a day. It was the turning point for the twins. Siegfried's words didn't work and his army never rose behind him to shout each word in unison to the voracious loneliness he saw in his mother's eyes. His goats were dead and gone and the East Gippsland mountain ash had fallen one by one around him.

He walked out to the pine tree that had been named after him. It took him a day to chop it down and chop it up, eating away at it and screaming with each bite of the axe. Then he walked out, down to town along the Houdini escape route to Ursula's, where he lived with her and Arno for a while.

Helmut could not see things the same way. He too had spreadeagled himself on the front of a bulldozer but the trees fell anyway, making room for plantations. Longing for the only comfort he had ever known, he returned home to his mother and to the known world. Acantia became gentle and giving to Helmut, her only loving son.

Lilo left not long after Siegfried. She packed one morning, walked into the kitchen, said ‘Seeya,' and walked up the raddled bush track for the last time as a child.

For long stretches Acantia and Pa were alone, as Helmut took seasonal work as a farm labourer all over the state.

Ursula had not visited since taking Arno. The children all pictured Acantia alone at Whispers and the grief they expected, the rage they imagined, began to weigh on them after Lilo too had left. They decided one weekend to visit together, as dutiful grown-up children should.

Acantia and Pa greeted their nervous children at the door of their old home. Acantia had her arms around Pa's waist, and Pa beamed at them all. Acantia giggled at their faces, and leaned into Pa's huge frame. The children were speechless.

Ursula looked on, stunned. She yearned to hug Acantia but couldn't bear to touch her. The house was completely familiar but changed too. They were no longer able to hear it or feel it the way they had before. They all breathed in that old smell. The kitchen had a brand-new unscratched table with an unfamiliar vase of flowers in the middle. There was a tiny television on the bench (Ursula guessed without asking that a small one was less harmful than a large one).

Acantia sniffed deeply at Arno's neck as she hugged him. They all knew she was smelling for the drugs but were disoriented when she stroked his cheek and said nothing. Acantia and Pa made them lunch. Acantia twittered happily about the garden she and Pa had planted together, and how they had repainted her room. Acantia asked them about their studies and murmured approvingly, supportively about everything they had to say. ‘Do you need anything?' she asked once. ‘Pa and I could help out.' Something glittered behind her eyes when she looked at Ursula.

They didn't stay long. They hovered nervously, chewed mechanically, and then fled. They drove along the bush track to the highway in silence. Then, catching each other's sideways glances, they started to laugh and couldn't stop. ‘Who the fuck was that!'

Lilo sighed, holding her stomach, and that set them all off again.

What more could anyone say?

Ursula sank more and more deeply into blank depression. She was twenty-one, an adult. Arno no longer needed her much and was back at school, attending a city school paid for in secret by Pa. He still saw the psychologist, but refused to talk to her about it. He avoided her—slowly, quietly finding himself and his independence from them all. Lilo lived in a squat with her band and visited occasionally. The Halfway House was empty from 8.30 until 4.30, unbearable, but Ursula did nothing about it. She dragged herself like a revenant to some Honours classes and home again. The Halfway House turned into something to echo Whispers for a while.

When Ursula, dry-eyed in Siegfried's salty rented flat, told him, finally, about Ugolini, Siegfried turned away and stared at the toaster. It was too much. He couldn't look closely at Ursula again.

Whenever they met, Siegfried heard seagulls and stared at Ursula's hair, at her elbows, knees and fingertips and wondered about the length of her toenails inside her sneakers.

Siegfried gradually stopped seeking out his brothers and sisters altogether, but did write to them now and then, and ran into them on rare visits to Whispers. Even when he married, many years later, he invited only Acantia and Pa.

Until the fire.

dirige dominus
deus meus

(many years later)