Fire Fire (13 page)

She got tired of playing with their forms and looked up. Patches of stars glittered onto her face. How beautiful she must look in this light: pale face, gold-silvered hair, dark shining eyes. She would keep her mouth shut and soulful—
so
—to prevent its great width from being evident. She wouldn't grin and break the smooth planes. She jumped up and went down to the lake to stare at herself, but her face fell into deep shadow as she stared down at the water. Her hair, falling around her face, looked beautiful enough. She could just make out two star-like glimmers that had to be her eyes, looking back. The lake stared back at her like a huge, mysterious eye. The trees formed a pitch dark rim, thick lashes, and then the centre, still as still, caught each star. The Milky Way was spread in a shining convex band from corner to corner of the eye, giving it an almost completed luminosity, a strange, almost seeing, almost photographic quality. She stared at the water for a while and then sat down at the edge. Some tiny spot inside her glittered on. You reach an age, she thought sagely, when knowing what really is becomes impossible. You reach an age when you cannot know whether it is you or her. She suddenly felt very lonely. She looked down at her hands and imagined Burt's huge thick-skinned palm between them. Burt's blue-eye wink was such a long time ago. Her chest tightened.

Back at her hiding spot she lay down, still too alert to sleep. She stripped naked. She imagined his rough hands reaching out for her belly. She showed him everything there was to know, the catalogue of what a body transformed by escape and moonlight has to offer.

Ursula woke at dawn feeling ashamed, hating her body. She strapped her breasts down again with the strip of linen torn from the edge of her sheet. She went down to the lake, now streaked pink and grey and silver. She took a long stick and pierced the colours, thrusting the stick smoothly deep into the eye. The pink and grey shuddered and the reflective surface dissolved and she stared down into the clear, deep water. The stick went down down down, twisted. Where it met the water it bent suddenly and from then on went crooked. Her chest constricted and she went home slowly, taking no precautions. Mr Vatzek neither saw nor chased her. Ursula wished he had. She walked into the kitchen, her hair full of pine needles. Nobody noticed. She watched as, seemingly in slow motion, Acantia leaped like a giant and with a superhuman roar, tossed the table onto the floor and a saucepan, nine bowls of porridge, chairs and children scattered around the room. Porridge spattered the walls.

Acantia so liked to hear about the activities of delinquents that Ursula invented an encounter to please her. She pretended someone had stolen her bus fare by knocking her down. Acantia loved it and even told Count Ugolini. Ursula felt slightly guilty but Acantia's pleasure was satisfaction enough to soothe her qualms.

When a man at the bus stop showed Ursula his erect penis, lovingly, like a kangaroo giving birth, she didn't tell. She was afraid but also drawn: his solicitude for himself fascinated her. She was most afraid that Acantia would see through her and guess that she had been fascinated. Acantia always said that Ursula was the lascivious one and would have to watch her passions. From the age of nine Ursula watched them very closely, waiting to see what she meant.

Sure enough, Acantia was right.

‘My only regret is that I didn't knock the deceit out of you,' Ursula murmurs up close to the window glass. She watches Ursula Tarsini with hatred and disgust. There she is, sulking in the dirty glass. No doubt she also has to watch her passions, little lascivious liar. She has a surreptitious, sneaky face. Wide, full lips and prominent teeth. Green eyes. She has cropped lank hair and also wishes she was a boy. She looks like a boy. Like Huckleberry Finn, maybe. Tough and wiry. That is just one of her lies. Her breasts too are strapped flat with a piece of torn sheet.

Her face is rubbery and can contort into any number of expressions. That is another of her lies. Her face.

Ursula puts her lips up against the greasy window and crosses her eyes at Ursula Tarsini. Then she whispers, watching the lips form the words back at her, ‘Liar, Liar, Pants-on-Fire.'

Ursula invented comforting when she was thirteen. She told no one because she wasn't one hundred per cent sure that comforting was OK. At first she tried not to think about it too much. She told herself that it could not possibly be as bad as tampons and she told herself that her ability to invent it showed genius and resourcefulness, both of which she was supposed to be developing. She could not sleep without it so it could not be too terrible. She curled her body around her own arm and, like a wild child, buried her fingers between her legs and rubbed herself to sleep with quick, licking, tender movements. When she did think about it she was pretty sure that Acantia would not approve of comforting, and to postpone indefinitely any real certainty on the matter she kept it to herself. She felt a little guilty. If comforting was in fact a brilliant new discovery, she was denying her brothers and sisters the benefit of it by her silence. She was relieved when one day she sprung Gotthilf comforting himself and then she was annoyed. What if she hadn't invented it at all? What if there was already an edict in force as to its legality? She began to make discreet inquiries, a difficult, almost impossible mission without giving too much of her position away. Still she comforted herself every night, but she began to wonder if this was simply her passions at play and not her genius at all. Her milk was soured and she felt an almost uncontrollable desire to ask everyone she met.

‘Is comforting oneself an OK thing to do?' she finally asked Acantia outright, knowing that this was cheating and that Acantia wouldn't know the full extent.

‘Of course.'

‘Physically comforting oneself?' she persisted, her heart beating. Would Acantia guess?

‘What do you mean?'

Ursula's vision began to black over.

‘Stroking,' she said very softly, weak with terror. Suddenly, involuntarily, her hand crept up and, monkey-like, she began to stroke her own hair, patting her head until it became that of a child.

Acantia laughed, grinning at her brightly.

‘Of course, you silly little nong.'

It was cheating but she had obtained a kind of permission. She tried not to think about it after that.

The castle rests at the bottom, below the line of vision, embedded in a dreary town all facades of mist-drenched grey. Green lichen stains the earth and sky. The great mountain dwarfs the keep, paws wrapped about the buildings in careless possession. Everything is sinking into the dank blue-green soupy colours and yet they all hold out firmly. It stands defensive, assailed by ravenous mists. Everything is a warp or a weft, every stroke horizontal or vertical. A solid and fractured sky, frozen stresses. But like a mantle over the mountain lies a further image, for the mountain is also a lioness. She rests there, regal, hidden in the deep, damp mists from the African sun.

Only Ursula could see her.

This huge painting filled one wall of the old music room. It was very beautiful but, without the lioness, as pressured as the bottom of the sea, as cold as their house in winter.

They picked ixodia all over the district, Acantia teaching them the wisdom of the ages in an enraptured voice in the mornings, and falling silent by the afternoons. The hills around Toggenberg gradually changed from unmapped wildernesses inhabited by strangers to being a series of places, named and fossicked through, with treaties and agreements set up through knockings on strange doors and answerings by people, one in fluffy slippers, another with a bald head and very long fingernails, another who smelled strange, and one whose penis hung out of his pyjama fly. The people who inhabited the Toggenberg hills were invariably sleepy, but less and less strange, as they became signposts to the known paths through to ixodia patches and as they entered Acantia's conversation in the evenings. Gradually they acquired names and characters. Most were poets, philosophers, Marxists and eccentrics holed away in the bush where no one would find them. Vincent Buckley lived in a post-and-mud shack on stone blocks surrounded by sculptures, and although he originally agreed to let the Houdinis pick ixodia on his craggy place, he drove them off a week or so later with yells of dismay when they accidentally picked the rich harvest around what Acantia said was the grave of his nine-year-old daughter, the inspiration for all his poetry.

‘Poor man,' she said contritely, shaking her head. ‘He always wanted to equal Wordsworth, but grief makes you unbalanced, and it's impossible to equal Wordsworth in Australia. You can paint Australia but you can't write good poetry about it. I haven't even read his poetry, but I can tell there's no point.' She waved sympathetically but dismissively at the clay sculptures, the bottoms, breasts and open-mouthed eyeless faces of several different sizes of woman.

Patrick White was another confused recluse who had retreated to the stark, glorious scrub of the Toggenberg hills, but he never opened his door when they knocked, and Acantia wasn't one hundred per cent sure he was
the
Patrick White, the one all the fuss was about. His books weren't up to much, she said, as they picked his slopes clean to see whether this would provoke him out of his hut. She'd read much better. She didn't understand why the psychologist would say that the kids were missing out on contemporary culture. Most of contemporary culture was made up of unhappy men who couldn't write good books and who made sculptures that showed sick mentalities, and in any case who ran away from contemporary culture to live in the Toggenberg hills to try to reconnect with the spirit. As she said this she stood up, red faced from climbing through the dry bracken, scratches on her arms and cheeks in white and red weals from the low but rampant blackberry and gorse. She put her hand into the small of her back and sighed, looking around. Ursula was above her on the slope, looking out over the wild valley. Ixodia dusted the escarpments of the steep opposing hill, bleaching the undergrowth under the few sinewy stringybarks. The orange earth showed through in patches, shimmering in the heat. Below them, on the rim of a stark orange dam, built for no purpose at the end of a steep overgrown track in otherwise unbroken bushland, stood a tiny billygoat, staring up at them. Acantia squinted up at Ursula, looking tired and sad under the sweat and dust, then looked away.