by David Rain
‘Through here.’ He led her along the canvas wall and lifted a flap. Wooden steps led up to the freak-show stage from the rear. They quickly drew back as the bearded lady swished by them in a sweaty cloud and vanished into a caravan across the way. But where, Skip wondered, was Lummo?
Honza pointed. Beneath the stage was a dark space, like the cavity under a house. Skip leaned down and in the gloom saw Lummo lying on his side, turned away from them, holding his belly. He groaned. On one side of him lay Honza’s rucksack, open and empty; on the other was a flagon of cider. Sacks, rags, ropes, boxes and discarded planks and beams littered the grass around him.
Skip slapped him. ‘You knew this was their hideout, didn’t you?’
‘Don’t hit me. Why should I know?’
‘You’re one of them. I’ll bet they use it every year.’
Above them, the Wizard of Oz had repaired to the front of the stage, pacing before a drawn curtain. They heard his footsteps creaking and his voice, distorted oddly, speaking again of marvels and miracles, this time to a paying crowd enticed into the tent. Reddish lights flashed through cracks in the boards.
‘Scat! Scat!’ A Munchkin in shorts, braces and bow tie, labouring down the steps, flicked pudgy hands at Skip and Honza as if at unwanted cats. Breathlessly, the Munchkin climbed into the caravan and emerged, moments later, leading a man in a rooster suit with an enormous floppy comb. The rooster swigged from a bottle, jabbing it with difficulty into his beak, before the Munchkin sprang up and batted it away. The bottle fell; acrid-smelling brown liquid fizzed into the grass.
‘Bugger you,’ slurred the rooster, but allowed himself to be prodded up the steps, just as the curtain pulled back above and applause broke out.
In that moment the plan emerged fully in Skip’s mind. It was irresistible. ‘Quick,’ she urged Honza, and crawled into the space beneath the stage. First things first: rag, sack, rope. Footsteps thumped above and light made zebra stripes through the boards as she tore back Lummo’s hair, stuffed a rag into his mouth, and bundled his lolling head, like a cabbage, into the sack. Honza gasped. Lummo protested a little, but was too sluggish to resist as Skip, fighting her revulsion, tugged off the drunken boy’s shoes, socks, shorts, shirt and, last – no flinching now – his Y-fronts too. An awe-struck Honza, comprehending, wrenched Lummo’s arms behind his back and bound the wrists with rope.
The rooster had finished his strutting, his flapping, his drunken cacophonies of ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ as Skip, with Honza’s aid, rolled the naked Lummo into the grassy corridor. Just then the Munchkin, resignedly following the giant fowl, thumped down the steps again, ready to summon the next act.
Rooster and Munchkin disappeared into the caravan. Skip and Honza exchanged a thumbs-up. Honza slammed shut the caravan door and stood against it, bracing himself as little fists hammered within. Triumph! They forced Lummo to his feet and prodded him, swaying, up the steps.
In the tent, the Wizard of Oz announced the next atrocity of nature; the curtains pulled aside again, and blundering into the light came the obese pale naked form of Brenton Lumsden. Cries broke out; the Wizard, shocked, tried to hide his confusion, while a writhing Lummo, shocked into alertness by the noise, wrenched his hands free and tore the bag off his head. The laughter was tumultuous.
‘Got him,’ Skip whispered to herself, only wishing she could see the horror, the disgust, the appalled fascination on the jeering faces. She reeled around to Honza. ‘Got him!’ she cried, and both raised fists in the air.
By the time Lummo had been hustled from the stage, they were long gone, rushing off into the gathering night. They held hands. Honza had snatched the bottle of cider. He hugged it against his chest.
Chapter Thirteen
Imagine being Marlo Wells. Probably you wouldn’t go out with Pavel Novak. What could he offer, especially now, when you would soon sit your exams? He wasn’t the most attractive boy; he was gangly, his teeth were horsy, and his high-templed head, with its springy curls, really did look like a test tube bubbling over. He had done badly at school; he was unambitious and, no doubt, not very smart. Your scholarship was almost in the bag (you’d sit those exams – Auntie Noreen couldn’t stop you); in a few months you’d be gone, spirited away, and where would he be? Shouldering boxes in the back of Puce Hardware, now and for all time. And if you’d met another man, one who didn’t wear a blue apron at work, who could stage a play and have a ‘vision’ for it, who opened up the world of knowledge for you like Aladdin’s cave, what time could you give to a blundering country boy who drove you down the main drag in his Land Rover and said, quite sincerely, ‘The Lakes is really going ahead’? No, you wouldn’t go out with Pavel Novak.
But if, on that Saturday of the Show, you had worked back late, typing invoices until your fingers ached, and knew he was out there beyond the office door, hanging around to keep you company, because that was the kind of boy he was, perhaps your feelings might soften a little.
The shop had shut at midday; it was now after five.
‘Give it a rest, eh?’ Pavel said at last, and Marlo looked up gratefully. He had taken off his apron and leaned against the doorjamb in his jeans and a Rolling Stones T-shirt. Muscle balled tightly in his crooked left arm.
‘I can’t go home,’ she said, before she could help it. ‘I can’t stand it. Everything’s so horrible.’ She stood, with a scrape of chair, and went to the window.
‘Hey.’ He came to her. Would he put his arm around her? He was thinking about it, she could tell. But all he did was gulp, sniff a little, and say as if he meant it, ‘It’s all right.’
‘He was your friend. You didn’t cry at the service.’
‘It wasn’t real. I just kept thinking about the body and where it might be. Did they even find him? Is he lying in the jungle somewhere, rotting away? They said he was on patrol. That could mean anything.’
Marlo hugged herself as if she were cold. Sunshine streamed between the dusty curtains. ‘Funny to think of a boy our age going to war. Once I asked Uncle Doug what he did in the war, and he just sort of clammed up. Auntie Noreen said he was in New Guinea. He must have killed men, seen men killed, seen guts spilled on the jungle floor. He’s buried all that so deep he can’t even find it. Poor Uncle Doug. He’s a dead man walking.’
She felt the warmth from Pavel’s arm, so close to hers. ‘How about the Show?’ he said softly. ‘Whole town’s there.’
‘Yes. Let’s.’ Marlo swung back from the window. Quickly she began putting away the files that cascaded in cardboard waves across her desk, while a smiling Pavel, who had slumped into her chair, drummed his fingers with mock impatience. The cup of Nescafé he had made her an hour ago sat before him, undrunk. Turning in haste, she knocked it. Dark liquid soaked his lap.
Marlo gasped. ‘I’m so sorry.’
His smile didn’t drop. He raised the cup as if in a toast. ‘Guess I’ll have to scoot home and change first.’
Pavel remained in good spirits as they hurtled in the Land Rover out of town. All was quiet but for distant sounds of the Show, buffeted on the wind: loudspeakers, carnival tunes, birdcall flurryings of an excited crowd.
‘Tracks get laid down in our heads so fast,’ Marlo said, as houses gave way to green paddocks. ‘Round and round we go, Puce’s Bend to Volcano Street and back, and it seems we’ve been doing it all our lives.’
‘I have been. It’s all I’ve ever known.’
‘Don’t you want to go away?’
‘Dunno. Is there all that much, out in the world?’
‘There’s everything.’ What could she say? London, Paris, decadent Berlin and the Côte d’Azur – would the names mean a thing to him? Perhaps there was only Crater Lakes, and all else was illusion. But no. For so long Marlo had thought: I’ll go away like Germaine and not look back. My life is rising like a Saturn V rocket, shedding stages as it shoots up through the sky. Those years in Glenelg have crashed and burned and so, soon enough, will these months in Crater Lakes. But uneasi
ly Marlo knew that life, for almost everyone, could never be a rocket. It could never leave the earth.
‘Your father lived in Prague.’ She looked at Pavel.
‘I’m not even sure I could find that on the map.’ Gooseflesh stood out on his arms beneath the frayed sleeves of his Rolling Stones T-shirt. The stain, black in the middle, brownish at the edges, covered the bottom of the T-shirt and his denim thighs. Marlo felt her cheeks grow hot.
Parked outside the Novak house was a red Morris Minor. ‘Brooker’s car,’ Pavel said in a sour voice. ‘He’s driving Mum to the Show Ball.’ He jumped down to the drive with a stony crunch. ‘Coming in? Only take a minute.’
‘I’ll wait in the Land Rover,’ Marlo said. She felt confused, a little ashamed, as he vanished into the house. White walls glimmered in the early evening sun and she thought of Spain, as seen at the Ozone, Glenelg. Turning, she looked across empty paddocks. Would they all be covered with houses one day? There were so many people in the world. Too many.
Marlo remembered a time when she was small and Skip was a baby. They had lived with Karen Jane in dirty rooms in North Adelaide with a garage mechanic who reeked of beer and fags. On many a drunken night he smashed Karen Jane to the floor. In the mornings he was all tenderness, declaring that he had been mad, that he didn’t know what had come over him, that he hated himself and would do anything to make it up to her. Marlo had seen her mother draw him towards her, stroke his hair, and tell him to hush, hush, it was all right. On his birthday, she cooked him a special dinner, but Jimmy – that was his name – didn’t come home. He had promised! Karen Jane refused to give in. She would go and get him. Brutally, she dragged Marlo out of bed, flung a coat over the little girl’s shoulders and buckled her shoes. The baby had woken up and began to howl. ‘Shut up, shut up.’ Karen Jane wrung her hands helplessly, then grabbed the swaddled form and thrust it into Marlo’s arms. Yes, they would all go. Let Jimmy see, let all his drunken mates see, what he’d been neglecting! The smell of a burned roast lingered in the air. On the table between the dinner plates was a little box wrapped in paper: cufflinks, Jimmy’s present – as if he would ever wear them! Karen Jane snatched up the box and laughed. Marlo clutched Skip tightly. Helplessly, she followed their mother down the stairs.
In the leagues club, Jimmy looked first startled to see them, then angry. He had been leaning at the bar, slurring out some anecdote to his sozzled cronies, when blearily he took in mother and daughters: Karen Jane accusing, Marlo whimpering, the baby howling. Swaying, pint glass in hand, he slurred, ‘Whadya doing, woman?’ Karen Jane said nothing, only flung the little box to the floor at his feet and blathered out a tuneless ‘Happy birthday to you …’ He laughed then, and his mates laughed; all around the clubroom men were laughing, flinging back sunbeaten necks, baring brown teeth and baying like dingoes.
Brown teeth seemed to swallow the world. Marlo remembered everything as brown: the bar, the beer in a hundred glasses, the linoleum, the walls, the stained baize on the snooker table, the weak drizzling light. Then Karen Jane was screaming as if the force of her despair could shatter this brownness that threatened to destroy her. None of what happened next seemed real: not the manager storming out of his office, yelling at the barman to call the cops; not Jimmy’s glass smashing on the floor and Jimmy swinging in a rage towards Karen Jane, calling her ‘woman’, commanding her to shut up, shut the fuck up; not the fist whipping back, then slamming into her again and again.
The police arrived to find Jimmy hunched, sobbing, over a motionless form. Karen Jane woke in a prison cell. But of course it wasn’t a prison; it was a madhouse. Ever afterwards, Marlo remembered her mother that night, a small frail figure in the middle of a brown floor, men parting around her in a wide circle as she turned and turned, screaming, hands outstretched, and Marlo asked herself: What is she reaching for?
Wind rippled in shifting waves across the green paddocks. Marlo knew why she had stayed outside. She didn’t want to see Howard, that’s why. No doubt she had been a fool about him, a silly girl with a crush. She had thought her life could change and already it was set in stone. She was tired. But no wonder. She was the girl who worked in Puce Hardware. Damn Crater Lakes! Damn them all. Restlessness filled her, and she followed Pavel into the house.
Never before had Marlo entered the Novak house by the front door; she had always gone round the back to the Sanctum. A cool corridor enfolded her, a place of soft carpets, vases with flowers, pictures on the walls. Through an arch she saw a large kitchen with flagstones, varnished timber, copper pans. She imagined herself walking through to the Sanctum, where Howard and Mrs Novak would be chatting, perhaps with tea, perhaps with wine, about the future of the Players. She would say, like a grown-up, ‘Hi, Howard. Hi, Deirdre.’
Where was Pavel? Absurdly, she thought: I’ll hold his hand. Hold his hand as I say, ‘Hi, Howard.’ She wished she could afford modern, carefree clothes. She had bought her own clothes for as long as she could remember, and everything she owned looked like her school uniform. She couldn’t bear to look like Karen Jane. No tie-dyed T-shirts, no pink hot pants, no paisley caftans. But everything was different without Karen Jane. Her mother was gone, gone, gone.
The corridor had a crossroads. In the ceiling above it was a skylight, aglow with whitish blue. She turned to the left. Soft music sounded: Mozart, maybe. Some horn concerto. Pavel wouldn’t play that. She heard a laugh and a gasp of breath. What impulse pushed her forward?
A door stood ajar. ‘Pavel?’ said Marlo.
Mrs Novak had been careless. No doubt she thought she would be alone in the house all day. Never could she have imagined Marlo Wells creeping to the bedroom door, looking through the crack, then pushing the door suddenly wider.
Mozart grew more loud. The room was furnished with the same careful taste as the rest of the house: the beige, the white, the pictures on the walls. Light pressed behind drawn curtains, giving a golden sheen to the figures on the bed.
Howard was the first to see her. Marlo screamed.
* * *
‘But if there was a T-Rex –’
‘And an allosaurus. No, a T-Rex and a –’
‘One of them flying ones –’
‘A pterodactyl! If there was a T-Rex –’
‘I’m confused. You talk bullshit, Honza Novak.’
Honza sniggered. ‘Know what?’
Pause. ‘What?’
‘You’re mad and I’m not.’
Skip sniggered too. It was the funniest thing she had ever heard. Honza punched her thigh.
‘Some Enchanted Evening’ coiled around them in sugary swoops: Glenn Miller, thirty years too late, with a band shrunk to a quarter of the size. In the Arch L. Gull Memorial Hall, Skip and Honza huddled by the back wall near the podium, knees drawn up, half in shadow, watching the dancers turning and turning. Midnight must be close now. Neither had been home. Neither wanted to go. Dinner had been donuts, hot chips, and more candyfloss for dessert. Both felt a little sick.
‘They’re all so old,’ said Skip.
Foxtrotting by came Mr Rigby, huge-shouldered and barrel-chested in a yellow checked sports jacket; his partner was one of the ladies from the school office, who appeared more than a little apprehensive as the headmaster compelled her this way and that with manly firmness. Crowding the floor was many another local identity: Mrs Lumsden, puffed up on her flower-show win, confidently leading a hapless Mr Singh; Mrs Kenny, in her violent flowers, doing a turn with a local dentist; Mrs Sutton with the mayor; Mr Hill, the newsagent, who had foregone his habitual cardigan for the tux he pulled out each year from mothballs, dancing now with the lady librarian.
‘Some Enchanted Evening’ ended; there was a polite smattering of applause and on the podium a real estate agent, glistening with Brylcreem, claimed the microphone with a whistle of feedback to declare the results of the Arch L. Gull Memorial Raffle. Drumrolls preceded each announcement. Third prize (good on yer, Len): a ten-dollar book voucher from Hill’s Newsagen
cy. Second prize (you can keep it for Chrissie): a frozen turkey from Diamond’s Meat Emporium. First prize (and of course we’re sorry, very very sorry Doug and Noreen can’t be here tonight): a Victa power mower from Puce Hardware.
The Show Ball! Even in the Lakes there were events more lively: school socials where kids smuggled in grog; woolshed dances with oafish farmers eyeing up the sheilas and, later, chundering out the back; lock-ins at the Federal after the coppers had given the wink; teenage revels when the oldies were away, in which lounge rooms normally given over to Channel Eight, Nescafé and Dad in the Jason recliner were rendered exotic with coloured hankies draped over the lampshades, Led Zeppelin booming from the stereo, and the air sweet with thick illicit smoke. The Show Ball, by contrast, was the enactment of a ritual. The sideshows might be rowdy, but in the Arch L. Gull Memorial Hall the finest citizens of Crater Lakes – the respectable businessmen, the prominent landowners, the essential professionals – gathered with their wives in communal display. Without them, no land would be legally owned, no sheep or cattle slaughtered, plantations would be barren of Monterey pines, no Monaro would gun its way down Volcano Street, Channel Eight would sputter into darkness, weddings would go unlicensed, foreskins uncircumcised, and middle-aged mouths unfilled with plastic teeth.
The hall was hot. Gentlemen had stripped off jackets, rolled back shirtsleeves; ladies, not so much mutton dressed as lamb as mutton dressed as mutton, fanned themselves with copies of the Crater Lakes Times. Only the lights – a mirrorball, installed controversially the year before, spangled muted Milky Ways through the smoky haze – gave the evening a fugitive glamour. Everyone was waiting for the fireworks at midnight.
Bert Noblet’s Rhythm Stompers, since 1945 the finest ensemble between Crater Lakes and Tailem Bend, launched into ‘Woodchopper’s Ball’. Some of the older folk chose to sit this one out, but many a jug-eared farmer’s son, short back and sides newly clipped, led his girl on to the floor – and weaving between them came Pavel and Marlo.