Volcano Street

by David Rain

  And yet, Skip began to feel, something ominous beat beneath the day. What was Pavel saying now? Something about Baz. ‘Yair, yair … used to come here with Baz. He’d drive us out here, the year he got his licence. I can still see Baz chucking bombies off the Jump.’

  Skip could not quite believe her cousin was real. Every day she saw his clothes, his books, his Paul Newman and Jackie Stewart posters, his Airfix F-111 that revolved above the bed, but still Barry Puce might have been made up, like God or Moriarty or the Milkybar Kid.

  Now Marlo mused on Barry too; Cousin Barry, she called him, as if he were a character in a book and so was she. In Skip’s chest something strained and flopped, like an injured bird struggling to rise. Too many questions. Why did Marlo care about the answers? Was she starting to like Pavel? Or was she only making fun of him? That, thought Skip, would be unkind.

  In any case, Skip too was curious about this cousin whose room she shared. On and on the questions came. What would Cousin Barry do when the army was done with him? Would he come back to the Lakes? Would he work at Puce Hardware? How long now until they let him go? Obscurely, she felt the day’s enchantments slipping, and then heard them smash when Pavel said, ‘I’ve a birthday coming up. Never know, I might be saying howdy-do to Baz again soon.’

  Sunny spangles played through the leaves and spun across the water like coins catching the light. Skip said quickly, ‘But you wouldn’t go, would you?’

  ‘Got to do your bit.’ His voice was almost cheery.

  ‘The war’s wrong, everybody knows that.’

  ‘They’re fighting the commies.’

  ‘You could be a – what do they call it, Marlo?’ Skip urged.

  ‘Conscientious objector.’

  Pavel shook his head. ‘Cowards, I call them. Dad says we’ve got to stop the commies whatever we do.’

  ‘You’d let yourself be an agent of American imperialism? Marlo, tell him.’

  ‘What can I tell him? His father’s in Australia because he fled the communists.’

  Pavel nodded, and earnestly evoked Mr Novak’s flight from the Soviets who rolled into Prague in 1948. Skip listened impatiently. Czechoslovakia? Another planet! Dimly she imagined, in black and white, a lean swarthy young man with test-tube hair like Pavel’s clambering over barbed-wire fences, dodging bullets, flattening himself against walls as soldiers in regimented rows marched by; she could not connect this young man with big-bellied, kindly, bland Mr Novak, who cooked in an apron saying CHIEF COOK AND BOTTLE WASHER and handed around the drinks on Sanctum Sundays.

  She cried, ‘But Barry’s life is ruined!’

  Pavel blinked. ‘He’ll come home, proud to have done his bit.’

  ‘He’ll die!’ Skip was shrieking now. She had sprung to her feet, upsetting her plate and a glass of Coca-Cola. ‘Your precious mate will take a bullet in the back in some stinking, steamy jungle!’ she cried. ‘He’ll sink into the swamp and rot! Will you be happy then? Will you think he’s done his duty? You’re stupid. You’re stupid and I hate you!’

  Pavel gaped. Marlo reached out, but Skip shook off the restraining arm, turned and ran.

  She had flailed far into the bush before she paused to wonder where she was going. Shame burned in her face. Already she saw herself trudging back, slump-shouldered, rehearsing muttered apologies: ‘Sorry, Pavel. Sorry, Marlo. Didn’t mean it. You know I didn’t mean it.’ But she did, she did. She had thought Pavel was special, but he was just as stupid as Honza.

  Angrily, Skip brushed tears from her eyes and pushed on. Woods stretched thickly away from the pond. She tugged a thin branch off a bluegum and swished it like a whip against the mulchy ground. Moments later, hearing a familiar breathy loping, she turned to see Baskerville. He looked up at her, brow furrowing, pale pink tongue lolling, dripping saliva. ‘Your master’s stupid,’ she told him. ‘Do you know your master’s stupid?’

  The dog stiffened, snarling. Had he understood? But his gaze snapped away from her; the collar jangled on his neck and with a low bow-wow-wow he was off, crashing through the undergrowth after a sinuous ginger flash.

  ‘Baskerville! Come back!’ she cried and set off after him, ducking low branches, slapping away leaves. The dog quickly vanished into the trees. She followed his barking but soon became confused. Among thicker, darker bush, sound echoed oddly; noises might have come from several directions at once, and she turned, then turned again.

  The barking ceased. Baskerville could be anywhere, and so could the cat. Skip imagined reeking yellow fangs clamping shut on Mowser, the priceless puss: a spurt of blood, a crack of spine. The thought made her desperate. If Baskerville committed so vile an act, she couldn’t stand it, she would hate him for ever and ever. She looked around again. Ahead of her, glimmers of sunlight picked out a long, unbroken slope of ivy; so dense was the growth that she did not at first realise she was looking at a fence, a high fence sagging under its green burden.

  Scratching and a low growl sounded close by, and she took a few steps forward. Baskerville, head down, nuzzled at the ivy like a bloodhound on a scent. Relieved, Skip moved towards him, but then he slipped through a hole in the fence. She followed him through.

  She found herself in an overgrown garden. Far off, beyond tangled apple trees, choked paths and knee-high grass, and flanked by tumbledown outbuildings, lay the house they had passed earlier on the road. The old Dansie house. Now she approached it from the back. Ivy had overwhelmed it almost as thoroughly as it had the fence, but here and there the weathered timber walls could still be seen. Sunlight glinted on surviving glass. The veranda looked like the entrance to a cave.

  She felt something nudge her thigh. Baskerville. She curled her fingers in his collar and let him lead her onwards. Wading through the high grass she imagined they were small and growing smaller. She remembered Marlo reading to her from the book about Alice; that, she thought sadly, had been a long time ago. They passed what looked like a dairy, open to the weather; they passed sprawling stables. A door sagged open, half off its hinges, revealing a car raised on blocks; an old car, like a hearse, greenish black. How long had it been abandoned?

  They had paused under the deep cracking canopy of an elm, six feet from the veranda, when Skip saw Mowser again, an orange swish, bounding up the steps. Baskerville snarled. ‘Don’t,’ said Skip, but rather than racing after the cat, the big dog shrank back as if abashed. She screwed up her eyes. Ivy trailed from the gutters like ragged curtains and the shadows on the veranda were deep, but she made out a couple of wicker chairs, then a small circular table, then Mowser, belly slung low, leaping up onto the table, and hands that reached from the darkness, cradling him, swinging him into the air.

  The hands, long and slim, were pale as a ghost’s.

  Skip’s pulse roared in her ears. The ghost must have seen her walking towards him with Baskerville. With a powerful sense of eyes watching her, staring from the darkness, she found herself stepping out from under the elm. Whether Baskerville remained behind her, she could not be sure. She said to the ghost, ‘I’m sorry …’ Sorry for what? Some force compelled her forward.

  But she had taken only one more step when an ululation rent the air, and a dark figure leaped out of the grass. In her terrified scramble she barely had time to register Black Jack, face contorted in rage, wrench still in hand. She ran, too frightened to look back to see whether he was following. All the way back up the long yard she seemed to hear him crash behind her, and when she tripped over a branch, almost falling, she felt the sickening certainty that in an instant he would be upon her, pinning her down, wrench swinging back in a glittering arc. Wildly she sought out the hole in the fence, shoulder butting against rotted wood, like an insect crashing at a windowpane, before finally she found her way through.

  On the other side of the fence she lay gasping. Angrily she told herself she must get up, get up, until she realised she could hear no sounds of pursuit. Could she be sure? She felt as if she had started awake from a nightmare. Perhaps she had
; she knew the scene would haunt her, the weird entrancing vision of the white hands slipping out of darkness, and the black face, lips curled back in a scream, rearing up against the bright day.

  Slowly, clumsily, Skip moved away from the fence. Her face was scratched and her shirt was torn. Hearing a flurry in a patch of ferns, she turned in fear. But it was Baskerville. She ran to him, hugged him. ‘Stupid dog. Oh, you stupid dog.’ Sunlight in fuzzy columns burned between the trees.

  Now which was the way? They walked and walked: swish, swish between ferns and scratchy leaves. It all looked the same and Skip feared they were going in circles. There was something drug-like in the warmth and smell of sap. She knew they were close to the clearing only when a voice called her name, and she flailed out of the bush and into her sister’s arms. Skip almost burst into tears, but relief turned into laughter instead: a crazed pealing, too loud, too long.

  Marlo thrust her away. ‘Come on. We’re going. Now, Skip.’

  ‘What?’ Words tumbled through Skip’s mind – a haunted house, a ghost, that black man tried to kill me – but to say them aloud was impossible when Marlo, like a furious schoolmistress, was hustling her back towards the Land Rover. Colour rode high in Marlo’s face and when Skip asked her what was wrong, she only spat, ‘I told you not to leave me!’

  On the drive home, Pavel was flushed and silent. Marlo held her book open on her lap but did not appear to be reading it. More than once Skip tried to imagine the scene at the pond – Pavel, eyes ardent, declaring his love; Marlo recoiling in horror – but her thoughts kept sliding back to the old Dansie house. As she recalled what she had seen there, she found she no longer wished to speak about it. The story, like a secret, was one she would not tell.

  Chapter Six

  Marlo strode back and forth. ‘There’s no end of hypocrisy both at home and at school,’ she said. ‘At home you must hold your tongue, and at school you have to stand up and lie to the children.’

  A young man with a receding chin offered, ‘To lie?’

  ‘Yes!’ Marlo glanced at the shabby paperback she held open in one hand. ‘Do you think we don’t have to teach many and many a thing we don’t believe ourselves?’

  A shy clergyman, too late: ‘Y-yes! We know that well enough.’

  ‘If only I could afford it, I’d start a school myself,’ rejoined Marlo, picking up after this stumble, ‘and things should be very different there.’

  ‘Hmm. Pause.’ Mr Brooker sprang up from his canvas folding chair and paced forward, his back stooped, fingers interlaced beneath his chin; players parted to let him by. ‘Think, here, of those first faint soundings of a motif Beethoven might develop across a symphony – those goblin footfalls crossing the universe in the sublime Fifth, par exemple. Take it down, Marlo.’

  ‘Petra’s passionate. You said so.’

  ‘Passionate, but suppressed. Thwarted. A virgin, of course. Imagine a young girl’s thighs chafing as she lies at night in her lonely bed.’ Marlo flushed, and Mr Brooker plunged on. ‘An innocent? Not in her heart. Only small-town life – that dreary day-to-day crushing of the spirit in the drab provinces – prevents Petra from breaking free. Think: who might Petra be in the modern age?’

  ‘Ah … Miss Elizabeth Taylor?’ Mr Singh suggested.

  ‘Miss Mary Quant?’ attempted Mrs Singh, who was skinny and dark and wore her saffron sari.

  ‘Germaine Greer!’ yelped Mrs Novak.

  Mr Brooker nodded excitedly. If the others were embarrassed by his speech, they concealed it, and even managed not to react when he came to a halt before Marlo, gripped her shoulders, and murmured loudly enough for all to hear, ‘Play Petra as a sexual volcano, perpetually on the brink of eruption.’

  Skip sat cross-legged on top of the grand piano, leafing through the scrapbooks of the old Players, still laid out to inspire their successors. She had accompanied Marlo to the Sanctum only to avoid another night of Channel Eight with Auntie Noreen, but Henry Gibson seemed a poor swap for Homicide. All the characters had silly names and nothing happened except a lot of talk which Mr Brooker interrupted every minute. He had, Skip gathered, assigned himself the main role, an inspector of drains or something equally dreary. Mrs Novak played his wife and Marlo his daughter.

  The three scrapbooks – stout, musty, brittle – each contained a mixture of black and white photographs, press cuttings, playbills, programmes, ticket stubs, and drawings of sets and costumes in brownish ink. Productions opened and closed with the turning pages: Man and Superman, Antony and Cleopatra, Oedipus Rex, King Lear, Journey’s End. The same faces occurred again and again. Who was this balding middle-aged man with prissy lips, sporting here a bow tie, there a toga, here a soldier’s khaki? This plump girl with wing spectacles, smiling shyly – could that be Rhonda Sweetapple? The skinny birdlike little thing was Mrs Novak, it had to be. Skip saw something of Pavel in her, of Honza too – wiry, tight-coiled, a pent-up eagerness that longed to burst free. But that thought reminded her of Mr Brooker’s sexual volcano, perpetually on the brink of eruption. How she hated Mr Brooker!

  One figure appeared in shot after shot, a tall, slender fellow with dark hair and a square jaw who looked heroic in whatever costume he assumed. For all his height, he seemed young: very young. Frequently he directed his gaze at the camera, and Skip saw in his eyes a thrilling flash of fire, something playful, something dangerous. She turned a page and a photo fell out, a stiff eight-by-ten. It wasn’t a Players picture; instead it showed a boy on a tennis court, leaping up, body twisted, racquet whipped back ready to strike the ball. The picture looked old-fashioned and so did the boy: hair too short, shorts too long. Skip recognised him, though. He was the hero from the Players. The big knuckly hands, the tight torso, the muscular, strangely animal thighs made Skip feel oddly sad, as if the tennis player called to her across the gulf of time. But what could he be saying? One day, she thought, we will all be people in old photographs, a little ridiculous and decidedly strange even if we don’t have wing spectacles or bow ties.

  ‘And how’s Skip Wells?’ Mr Novak appeared at the piano. He wore his CHIEF COOK AND BOTTLE WASHER apron and smelled of garlic and wine. ‘Your sister’s good. Last time the Players did An Enemy of the People, my wife played that part.’ In his tone Skip detected a certain forced cheeriness. ‘Of course,’ he added, as if he meant more than he was letting on, ‘she wasn’t my wife then.’

  ‘Why aren’t you in the play?’ asked Skip.

  ‘Me? I just do refreshments.’ Perching on the piano stool, he essayed laggardly chords while Mr Brooker, in the middle of the room, expatiated on the meanings of the play. The rehearsal space was a clearing in the Sanctum. The players, twenty or so in number, reclined on easy chairs and couches ranged around it in a rough semicircle and coloured variously beige, orange, purple and chocolate brown. Older folks sat stiffly; younger ones slouched, some hugging cushions. Rain brushed the windows and the lights were too bright.

  ‘He wanted me to be in it,’ Skip said. ‘Morten, that was the name. One of the kids. Right age, right hair, he said. I don’t think he likes me since I said no.’

  ‘Rash! He’s your teacher. Aren’t you scared he’ll fail you?’

  ‘Funny name for a girl, isn’t it – Morten?’

  ‘Morten’s a boy. He wanted Honza to be Eylif.’

  ‘Eye-what?’ said Skip.

  ‘The other son. My poor boy ran a mile. Now where is he? Off with those rowdy friends again, I suppose. I’m sorry he’s not here to play with you.’

  ‘We don’t play,’ Skip snapped before she could stop herself.

  ‘Of course not. All grown up.’ Mr Novak ceased his plangent chords. ‘Would you like some lemonade? Just promise you won’t put the glass on the piano.’

  Pavel hovered at the back of the room. During Marlo’s scene, he had watched her intently; now he circulated with drinks and bowls of nuts. At a gesture from his father, he brought some lemonade for Skip and repeated, with an automatic air, the admonition not to
put the glass on the piano.

  Mr Novak looked mournful. ‘And yet why not?’ he said and sighed. ‘All these years, all these guests! Rings, scratches, burns. This piano has suffered abuse worse than one little girl could inflict.’

  The lemonade was delicious, and Skip, who had only ever drunk Leed and Woody’s, asked him if it contained real lemons. Mr Novak, it emerged, had squeezed them himself. She looked at him fondly. Would Pavel and Honza look like him when they were old? He was bald and fat with wiry eyebrows and dark craterous pores gaping in his nose and cheeks. He smelled of pipe tobacco.

  ‘Hell,’ said Pavel, ‘there’s more of it.’

  Rehearsals were proceeding with Mr Brooker taking centre stage. As actor or director, his manner was the same: pacing, stalking, declaiming with outflung hands, dropping suddenly to a stage whisper. Unlike the others, he did not consult his book; he had his part to perfection.

  ‘Now,’ he cried, ‘let them go on accusing me of fads and crack-brained notions! But they’ll not dare to. Ha-ha!’ (A flourished hand.) ‘I know they won’t.’

  There was more in this vein, about his writing, his pamphlets, his great discovery, the truth he must deliver to a shocked town. Other players serviced his monologue as chorus and prompts.

  ‘Father, do tell us what it is,’ Marlo pleaded.

  ‘What do you mean, doctor?’ demanded Mr Singh.

  ‘My dear Thomas …’ began Mrs Novak worriedly.

  Triumphantly, Mr Brooker declared that the spa town’s baths were pestiferous. Putrefying organic matter infected the water, rendering the health resort a health hazard. The baths must close. Shocked cries greeted this announcement. The economy, the economy!

  ‘What a ham,’ said Pavel, as Mr Brooker called another halt.

  ‘Our first review.’ His father’s eyes twinkled. ‘And Miss Wells? How does she see her teacher’s talents?’

  Skip drained her lemonade and wished she had more. ‘Last week in class he read us this horror story. Real gruesome it was. This bloke killed another bloke and buried him under the floorboards. But the first bloke could still hear his heart beating. So this bloke, the first bloke, went nuts.’