Volcano Street

by David Rain

  Still wondering if she could trust him, Skip followed Honza out of the school by the back way, clambering over the chain-link fence.

  ‘You should have left Lummo to me,’ he said in a tone of calm reason as they shambled towards Volcano Street.

  She sneered. ‘He’d have beaten you to a pulp.’

  ‘Would not. Me and Lummo fight all the time. For a laugh.’

  ‘Not this time. Why’s he such a bastard?’

  Honza trailed in the gutter, kicking stones. ‘Know what he did once?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was this mother cat with kittens. It was under one of them portables at school. Lummo dragged the cat out by the scruff of the neck. Everybody cheered him on. And you know what he did then? Cat’s head in one hand, back paws in the other – he tugged it, real hard, and broke its spine. Crack! – just like that. Sheilas screamed. Lummo was grinning like anything. So he chucked the cat on the ground and it tried to crawl back under the portable, pulling itself on its front paws, while the back ones dragged behind. The kittens were meowing, helpless, while the mother died. Mr Rigby found them later and drowned them.’

  Skip was speechless for some time. She thought of the cat and the kittens and Brenton Lumsden and felt as if she had plunged again into the shit pit. But this time, she would never get out. The shit pit was the world.

  ‘And you?’ she said flatly at last.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You cheered him on, didn’t you?’

  When Honza looked up, there were tears in his eyes. ‘I hate that bastard. I fucking hate him.’

  Oleanders glimmered in the sun.

  Honza said, a little later, ‘Skip? How long you been in the Lakes?’

  ‘Dunno. Few weeks now.’

  ‘And you’ve lost me all me mates.’

  She ripped at oleander leaves. ‘With mates like that …’ No need to say more. Among Honza’s many talents, she was beginning to see, was the ability to accept, with neither wonderment nor regret, each new situation in which he found himself.

  He attempted a grin. ‘Blowhole was good, eh?’

  ‘Yair.’ It had been sort of fun.

  They turned into Volcano Street. A dirty semi lumbered out of the drive of a discount carpet warehouse. In the distance, the huge fibreglass chicken stood like a sentinel over Chickenland.

  Honza screwed up his mouth. ‘That girlfriend business …’

  At the same moment, Skip began, ‘That boyfriend business …’

  Both had reddened.

  ‘They’re sick.’ Skip’s words were vehement.

  Two boys in school uniform whirled by on bikes, hooting as they passed. Honza did the fingers. So did Skip.

  After that they were always together. School had become an obstacle course. Everywhere were dangers: in phys ed with its hurtling missiles (ball, bat, javelin), its charging shoulders, its feet thrust out to trip, its slithery showers abuzz with naked tauntings; art, aglitter with scissors and knives; maths with its compasses; science with its gas taps and Bunsen burners. There were no safe times – not recess, not lunchtime – and no safe places: not by the gates, morning and evening, when the hordes entered and left; not by the bike sheds, where crimes of all kinds were committed in galvanised-iron shadows; not in the toilets, where assassins waited to drag their victims into reeking dank cubicles. Girls tugged Skip’s hair, pinched her, pushed her, spat on her. Kylie Cunliffe snatched Skip’s ruler and, next to the name SKIP WELLS, added: IS A MOLE. Honza often found himself in Mr Rigby’s office, hauled up for fighting.

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ said Skip. ‘What did we do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Honza. ‘It’s all that bastard Lummo.’

  But did either mind so much? They defended one another, saved one another. They fought back when they could. In woodwork, Honza whacked a plank of pine into Shaun Kenny’s nose. Blood went everywhere – like a massacre, everyone said. In home ec, while the teacher was out of the room, Skip pounded a shrieking Kylie Cunliffe with a dozen eggs: every one in the carton. Mr Rigby almost did cane her that day. In maths, during a chaos of paper planes, pinging bra straps, and hysterical chantings of ‘O Buddha-Buddha’, Skip and Honza crawled between the desks and set off firecrackers under the Lum’s Den. Each afternoon when the school day ended, they felt like victors: Henry V at Agincourt, Wellington at Trafalgar, Brian Rigby at El Alamein.

  They gave up the school bus. Honza rode his bike to school, though it was a long way, and Skip, determined to join him, salvaged a bike from the blowhole. Hardly a match for Honza’s purple Dragster, the bike was too big for her, its mudguards crumpled, its paintwork pitted, but with new tyres, the seat adjusted, and liberal applications of Uncle Doug’s oilcan, it was not quite good as new but good enough: a boy’s Raleigh, fire-engine red, and faster than it looked.

  Each morning they left home early, whirling down rackety roads like brats in Enid Blyton books bound for adventure. Sometimes they competed with each other, racing, standing on pedals, look-no-hands, skidding in circles to the peril of their tyres and calling to the other to keep up, keep up. Other times they rode quietly side by side. Those were the best times. Magpies cackled up in weird morning ecstasies, and sunlight, golden with spring, spilled across the broad green paddocks.

  Honza taught Skip to smoke. He laughed at her when she coughed, and she punched him, but soon she could do the drawback as if she had been at it all her life. ‘Natural as breathing,’ said Honza, and Skip agreed. At the far end of the school oval, by the back fence, was a gnarled old bluegum that became their special hideout. As the days grew warmer, they spent many hours high among the thick khaki leaves, often hours when they should have been in lessons, leaning back against that scratchy trunk, side by side on brittle boughs, Marlboros in hand.

  Childhood is a green world. When that world lies behind us, it becomes a riddle whose answer we once knew, then forgot, remembering only a question that nags at us to resolve it. Skip and Honza were children playing. They climbed trees. They peered into windows. They slid down slippery dips and clambered on jungle gyms. They had adventures without leaving Puce’s Bend: Wild West shootouts, magic quests. Everything could be transformed. If the blowhole was another planet, the abandoned service station was a war-torn city. A grove of trees was the Amazon jungle. One Sunday, they climbed the watchtower over the lakes. From the top, panting, they looked across the waters in their jagged calderas; across the town with its bungalows and wide streets; across pines and paddocks towards the green horizon, as the land with its limestone and volcanic soil rolled away towards the Southern Ocean. It was beautiful. The world was beautiful.

  Skip stretched out her arms. ‘I wish I could fly,’ she said, but she knew she could. She really could.

  They were not always in motion. For long afternoons, they sprawled on their bellies on the floor of the bedroom Honza shared with Pavel, playing chess, reading comics, listening too loudly to the top forty countdown on 5AD until Mrs Novak told them to turn that rubbish down. They came up with schemes for revenge on Lummo. They ridiculed Mr Rigby. They talked about the great things they would do one day: Honza would fly in a rocket ship to Mars; Skip would find the philosopher’s stone, like Sylvester Turville in Lion.

  Everything was plans and schemes. What they never said was: ‘When I grow up …’ Time, that spring, was held for them in suspension. Both knew, with dazzled half-knowledge, that something was about to end. Their days in the green world were almost over. They were playing in gardens that were about to close. Soon they would leave and the gates would shut, never – not for them – to be opened again.

  Chapter Seven

  There is a plangency in the fall of evening, as light seeps from the sky and darkness comes. Dusk, always poignant, is particularly so on Saturdays in South Australia in a country town. For hours the main drag has been dead, since the shops closed at midday. Kids are away somewhere, in playgrounds, in backyards; housewives are at home, with their magazines, their movie matinee
s, deep in their weekend torpor; husbands have gone to the football or the races or squint into greasy engine innards on their concrete driveways or in sheds. Families here and there have had barbecues. Some have gone to the beach. Some have taken the car out to charge up the batteries. The middle of town is silent, belonging to no one, but soon it will fill again, and noise – hoots, cries, jukebox C&W – will pour from the doors of ancient pubs with verandas frosted in iron lace. Later, when the dark is full, yahoos driving up and down the street (‘chucking a mainy’) will find the place all headlights, horns blasting, grinning blokes and their tarted-up sheilas lurching across the pavement as if it were the deck of a ship in a storm. But all this is to come. For now, the sky is a reddish purplish grey. What is it about that quality of light?

  It was one such Saturday evening, a little too late for kids to be out, when Skip and Honza, after a long ride, fetched up at Crater Gardens. They leaned their bikes against the low wall. Inevitably, they descended to the inner gardens where Pavel had once taken Skip and Marlo. The place was deserted. On the viewing deck, watching the water crash down and down, Skip told Honza about a movie she had seen once, where these blokes and this girl went on a journey to the centre of the earth.

  ‘There was dinosaurs and everything,’ she said, in the lazy slurring voice she had developed, not quite consciously, for talking to her mate. ‘And man-eating plants. And a whole ocean, under the ground. And guess how they got there? Volcano. Down the top.’

  Honza was excited, as she had known he would be, and they planned how one day they would make their own journey to the centre of the earth.

  ‘We’d better get home,’ Skip said at last. The cave was eerie in the fading light. Shadows cut blackly into the rocky walls above, and the waterfall sounded like the steamy roar of some monster underground.

  Turning, Honza slapped her arm. ‘Race you.’

  Their sneakers echoed in the silence like shots as they slapped their way up the asphalt spiral. First Skip took the lead, then Honza; then together, pushing and elbowing each other, they rounded the last of the steep rise, battered through the gate, and collapsed, Skip on the path, and Honza against the side of the wishing well. The gate banged back and forth.

  When Skip had regained her breath, she joined Honza. The wishing well was shabby, hardly a credit to the Lions Club of Crater Lakes, who claimed it in lettering emblazoned around the cupola. Cladding the sides were irregular stony slabs like crazy paving; some were cracked, some gone, exposing concrete beneath. The plaque bolted to the side, recording the gift of the well to the town, seemed to speak of a time lost to history.

  UNVEILED BY THE RIGHT WORSHIPFUL

  THE MAYOR OF CRATER LAKES

  ARCH L. GULL, ESQ.

  22 MAY, 1949

  Honza pointed to the words. ‘My gramps.’

  Mrs Novak, Skip recalled, had once been Deirdre Gull. She wondered if the gramps was still alive, but Honza gave the answer before she could speak. ‘Kicked the bucket yonks ago. Before Pav was born.’

  ‘That long?’ Skip had no more to say. Grandfathers were strange to her and not quite real. After all, even her father was a mystery to her, a myth, not a man, one of many such myths in Karen Jane’s past and not, to her sorrow, even the same myth as Marlo’s. The thought of fathers filled Skip with bafflement, even contempt; grandfathers could only be worse. Dimly she pictured a wheezing figure, tugging at her shirttails with long, gnarled fingers. She nuzzled closer to her best mate. Solemnly they hung their heads over the well. Through the brackish water glimmered faint flashes of silver and copper.

  ‘How much dosh you reckon’s there?’ said Skip.

  ‘Tons. People chuck it down all the time.’

  ‘Fifty? A hundred? What’s it all for?’

  ‘Lions Club, ain’t it? Charity.’

  ‘Every so often some bloke must come along and clear it all out.’

  Honza shrugged. ‘Suppose so.’

  Skip assumed a thoughtful air. Leaves rustled in the quiet gardens as she offered, like a scientist formulating a theory, ‘How does he clear it? That water’s, what, six foot deep?’

  ‘Has some pole thing, I suppose. With a scoop on it.’

  ‘But there’s a grille.’ The grid of metal, a foot underwater, was bolted to the sides.

  ‘And a lock. That grille lifts up.’ Eagerly, before Skip could try, Honza rolled back his sleeves, plunged his hands into the water and tugged at the grille. He bit his lower lip and tugged again. Veins stood out in his forearms like cords. For a moment he looked older; he might have been Pavel. ‘Bloody thing’s loose. Rusted near clean through.’

  ‘Reckon you could rip it off, then, muscle man?’

  ‘Might do. Could saw through it easy.’

  Skip thought of the hacksaws at Puce Hardware. ‘The well would still be filled with water, though.’

  ‘Something drains it,’ said Honza. ‘They drain it, then fill it again. But how do they drain it? All the water would have to go somewhere, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘There’s a tap on that wall.’ Skip pointed to the near wall of the town hall.

  ‘That’s for the gardener.’ A hose lay coiled beside it. ‘They must fill the well from there. That’s the inflow – but the outflow, where’s that go?’

  ‘Buggered if I know.’ Skip had begun to get bored. She shouldn’t have brought up the wishing well. Why talk about a wishing well when you could talk about journeys to the centre of the earth?

  ‘Imagine if we could empty that well!’ Honza was saying. ‘There’s a job for the night stalkers. We’ll come at midnight. Old Doug must have a hacksaw we could flog, huh?’

  Skip nodded, inspired again.

  ‘We’ll bring a couple of bags for the dosh.’

  Honza circled the well. On the side near the cave entrance, a hunch of pipe was visible where cladding had fallen away. Pondering, he looked at the well, then at the gate that led to the cave. A thick wall of trees and bushes rose darkly above the picket fence. He swung open the gate and stepped inside. Skip heard thrashing and swishing as he searched around in the foliage.

  ‘Got it!’ he called, after a moment.

  Skip joined him. He held back heavy leaves. Arcing upwards from the black soil was a low tap, bronze and discoloured. Beneath the tap ran a terracotta drain, half-filled with dirt and leaves.

  ‘It must be for the well,’ she said, impressed.

  Honza turned the tap, applying all his strength. For a time it seemed nothing would happen; then gouts of sludgy, greenish liquid vomited forth and swept the dirt and leaves down the terracotta channel. His face shone with excitement. ‘Go back to the well, eh? See if it’s going down.’

  She did as he said. At first there was no movement, but as she watched, tremors rippled the surface. They could rob the wishing well: they really could. That was when she grew frightened. Skip had thought this just another game, a wild scheme never to be put into practice. She liked stories, fantasies. This was too real. ‘All right,’ she snapped. ‘You’ve proved it. Turn it off.’

  ‘No fear. Do you know what we could do with a hundred bucks?’ Honza, dancing around her, chanted like a mad thing, ‘Night stalker, come … Night stalker, quick!’

  ‘We can’t! It’s stealing.’ Firmly Skip strode towards the tap and shut it off. It was rusted stiffly, and she gasped as she strained to turn it.

  Honza looked on, face twisted in contempt. ‘Should have known! Lummo would have jumped at the chance.’ He turned away from her, disgusted. ‘Going round with a girl! What was I thinking of?’

  Skip was enraged. ‘You take that back!’

  The fight was brief but intense. With her first lunge, Skip brought Honza down; she sat astride him, pummelling him, until he roared and flipped her off. She fell heavily; then they were grappling, rolling across the grass, until a portly man, passing through the park, saw them and lumbered towards them, yelling, ‘’Ey, stop it! ’Ey, yous kids!’ They scrambled up and raced back to their bikes.
>
  They rode home in silence. Several times Skip pushed ahead, though her broken-down bicycle had no lamp and the night had come in cloudy. Each time Honza managed to catch her up. They had rounded Puce’s Bend when he arced forward and skidded to a halt in front of her, blocking her path.

  ‘Know what?’ he said, grinning.

  ‘What?’ Her voice was hostile. Was Honza still her mate?

  ‘You still fight good. For a girl.’ He laughed, a strained laugh, plunged down on a pedal and rode away. Left alone, she thought the night that closed around her was darker than before, darker and colder.

  Skip was through with Honza. That week she rode to school alone, leaving early in the morning to be sure to avoid him. In class, she sat apart from him. She spent recess and lunch in the school library, staring with pretended intentness at pages that blurred before her eyes. Twice he tried to approach her – once catching her alone at the lockers, once leaping out at her from around a corner. She didn’t jump. ‘Go back to Lummo!’ she called, and hurried away. But Honza had not rejoined the Lum’s Den. On Tuesday, Mr Rigby caned him for fighting Andreas Haskas. Skip looked at him ruefully as he limped back into class. Honza had guts. Maybe, just maybe, they should still have been mates.

  She got into trouble herself on Wednesday. It was the worst trouble she had ever been in. After lunch they had maths – bad enough at any time, but worse when Mr Singh was sick and Mr Rigby took the class. He glared at Skip as she slouched in late. The purple was already rising in his face. Angrily he chalked fractions on the board and spun around to bark at Jason Fidler. Skip wished she had been on time. The only free seat was next to a big pudding-faced girl called Maggie Polomka, who several times jabbed her in the thigh with a succession of sharp objects. Skip bore it for as long as she could: Maggie Polomka, known among the boys as ‘Mag the Slag’, was a spaz, everybody knew that. But when ruler, pencil and pen were succeeded by compass, Skip burst to her feet, chair crashing behind her, punched Mag the Slag in the chops and yelled at her to fucking well cut it out.