Volcano Street

by David Rain

  Honza nudged Skip. ‘There they are again.’

  Marlo had said she would not go to the Show. How had Pavel persuaded her? Before the ball, Skip had seen them at the sideshows, where Marlo seemed distracted, standing by vacantly while Pavel, at the shooting gallery, won her a stuffed koala. Now he danced frenetically, arms jerking, while Marlo barely moved. She looked ashamed, appalled. Skip’s merriment had subsided. She watched her sister sadly, then with sudden fear. When Pavel reached for Marlo’s hand, she broke from him as if he had insulted her, and charged off the floor.

  Skip scrambled to her feet. Pushing between bulky figures, she skirted the dance floor towards her sister. Marlo leaned, breathing heavily, against the refreshments table, while the ladies behind it eyed her with alarm, certain now – they had always suspected it – that young Miss Wells was not quite-quite.

  ‘Hey, Marlo,’ said Skip.

  ‘You should be home in bed.’

  ‘And miss the crackers?’ She tugged her sister’s arm. ‘What’s Pav done? He’s upset you again, hasn’t he? He don’t mean it. Not Pav. Let’s go outside. They’ll have the crackers soon.’

  ‘Stop saying crackers. What are you, five years old?’ Marlo stared back towards the dance floor; ‘Woodchopper’s Ball’ had slipped, without a break, into ‘In the Mood’. Following Marlo’s gaze, Skip saw, at the centre of the throng, a woman in a red mini-dress with a dark cap of hair jitterbugging with a long-haired young man in a purple velvet suit.

  ‘How could she?’ Marlo’s voice was thick.

  Pleadingly, Skip looked at Pavel, who had been hanging back, abashed. Moving like a man condemned, he reached for Marlo. With a cry, she flung him off and charged between the dancers. Skip, too loudly, called her sister’s name. Faces turned: drunks opened bleary eyes; sleepy kids perked up; respectable ladies, fearing this evening had gone on too long, were about to find out how right they were as that Wells girl – you do know who her mother was? – pushed aside one protesting couple, then another.

  Obliviously, the band played on, but the dancers had stopped. Stock still. All, that is, except the pair in the middle. Reaching them, Marlo pushed Mrs Novak out of Howard Brooker’s arms. Mrs Novak reeled back.

  Mirrorball light flickered like stars across Howard Brooker as he turned, startled, to see Marlo before him. Only two things moved. One was the mirrorball; it must flash its meaningless signal until the universe wound down. The other was Marlo, swinging back her hand. Concentrated in the slap was all her rage since her exile in Crater Lakes began.

  Deirdre Novak crumpled.

  At once all was commotion: Howard Brooker rushing to comfort Mrs Novak; Skip and Pavel grabbing Marlo’s arms; the crowd buzzing; Bert Noblet’s Rhythm Stompers collapsing into tunelessness. In the end, Pavel led Marlo away. Skip wanted to follow her sister, to escape with her into the night, but the crowd was too thick, and the pair soon vanished.

  Honza appeared beside Skip. His words were like a blow, every bit as hard as Marlo’s. ‘Your sister’s nuts.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ Not that. Never.

  ‘She’s round the twist.’

  Stupid boy, did he have to grin like that? Skip pushed him and he sprawled. Hands reached to restrain her. She flung them off and burst through the crowd, just as Bert Noblet, attempting a swift recovery, bawled into the squealing mike that the moment we’d all been waiting for had arrived. ‘Cracker time!’

  Did he have to say crackers?

  Outside, the air was warm, almost sticky. Hordes spilled from the Arch L. Gull Memorial Hall. Skip slipped off to the side, turning her back on the fools with their crackers. Only five-year-olds talked about crackers. Shoulders hunched, muttering to herself, she was heading for the parking lot, wanting to conceal herself between the massed metallic ranks of Chryslers, Holdens, Ford Falcons, when two dark legs like pillars blocked her way. Whistling, that of a bomb before it bursts, filled the air; with a thunderclap, the sky flowered into brilliance, just as she looked into a familiar face lit weirdly in green and gold, then heard, over the next loud ascending whistle, the words: ‘I’m not going to hurt you, Skip. You know I’d never hurt you.’

  ‘I can’t go home again,’ she said.

  ‘Then we’re alike – refugees, both of us.’

  ‘Hey, Dad.’ Honza was behind them. Skip looked between man and boy, boy and man. Honza offered her his usual foolish grin, as if he thought she’d been joking when she pushed him away. Nor did he seem surprised when his father, sadly perhaps, told him that it was time he should know the truth as well.

  ‘Want to watch?’ said Pavel.

  Marlo shook her head. In a dream she had let herself be led to the Land Rover. She shivered, although Pavel’s arm lay around her shoulders. He helped her into the passenger seat and she slumped back, gulping in air. Vaguely she had been aware of Mrs Novak calling after them – ‘Pavel! Pavel!’ – and Pavel not turning back, leaving his mother to Mr Brooker.

  Bright eruptions filled the sky as they drove out of the parking lot. They turned down Volcano Street. On Show Saturday, the main drag was quiet, almost deserted. Marlo wondered how Pavel could stand her. ‘You must hate me. I’m so stupid. And there I was, thinking I was special.’

  ‘You are special. I always knew that.’

  ‘Just a stupid girl with a crush on a teacher.’

  ‘Brooker’s a bastard,’ Pavel said hotly. ‘Dad should fight him. If he had any guts, he would.’

  ‘Your father knows?’ said Marlo.

  ‘Sure does. She’s done this kind of thing before.’

  Streets passed, passed; between the flaring rockets, night pressed around them like purple velvet. Where could they go? Home was impossible. Home did not exist. They were strangers in the land.

  Their destination was inevitable.

  Marlo perched in the Land Rover while Pavel, at the glass doors, fumbled with his keys. The courtyard looked larger than during the day, a concrete wasteland under jaundiced streetlight. Black windows gleamed like pools that would leap with sudden light at the impact of a stone.

  Pavel opened a jangling door and Marlo carefully, as if it might be dangerous, left the Land Rover at last. She followed him inside. ‘We’d better not turn on the front lights,’ he was saying.

  In darkness, Puce Hardware was a cave of looming half-seen shapes: rakes, brooms, coiling serpentine garden hoses, curving bottles and cans that winked in fugitive light. The hardware smell seemed stronger: linoleum, bristly dry wood, acrid chemical pungencies of glue, paint, varnish. Marlo stumbled into a bank of boxes.

  ‘Give me your hand.’ Pavel’s palm was warm. Unerringly he lifted the flap in the counter and tugged her through the rustling curtain of streamers into the office. He flipped on the desklamp; in the burnished glow, the room looked surprisingly comfortable with its faded floral curtains tied back in soft folds, its chocolate-brown telephone like a sleepy tortoise.

  ‘Drink? Doug’s got his secret stash,’ said Pavel, and he bent down behind the big desk, opened a drawer, and produced a bottle of Bell’s.

  ‘Can we really stay here?’ said Marlo.

  ‘In Puce Hardware? Best range of camping gear in the Lakes. Ground sheets. Sleeping bags.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this before?’

  Pavel poured Bell’s into enamel mugs. He sat on the edge of Uncle Doug’s desk; Marlo took the room’s single easy chair. Stuffing burst from the chair’s splitting arm like wool freshly shorn; she pulled out a skein. The room smelled of vinyl, smoke, musty paper. With the desklamp behind him, Pavel’s hair leaped with orange fire. Soft-eyed, he gazed at her.

  ‘I’ve never drunk whisky.’ She took the mug.

  ‘It’s good. After the first taste.’

  The burn in her throat was thrilling. Through the curtains came the muffled swish of cars. Show Saturday was over at last. Above the door, a clock ticked, loud against the quietness like a time bomb counting down.

  A shudder passed through M
arlo. It wasn’t just the whisky. ‘I’ve lost my koala.’ Tears caught in her throat. ‘That’s the sort of thing I do, you see. You know, my koala, the one you won. I’ve left it at the ball. I can see it there, with its silly little snub nose and the ribbon round its neck, sitting in a corner on a foldout chair. Paws outstretched. Waiting. For me.’ She covered her face. ‘Christ, I’m so ashamed. How could I make such a fool of myself?’

  ‘Hey.’ Pavel slipped off the desk and kneeled before her. ‘How many times do I make a fool of myself? Every bloody time I open my mouth.’

  ‘I thought Howard was queer.’ Angrily, Marlo brushed away her tears. ‘In the beginning, I mean. I told myself we’d be friends, the best of friends. The play was just the beginning. He talked about London, New York, Berlin. I thought I’d go too. How sophisticated our lives would be! We’d be liberated. Artists. Radicals. We’d both have affairs and laugh about them. That’s what I dreamed about. Stupid girl. And now I’ve ruined everything.’

  ‘He’s just a teacher.’ Pavel gripped her hands.

  ‘Why are you so kind to me?’ said Marlo. ‘I’m a bitch. And I’ll go crazy, like my mother.’

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.

  Tick, went the time bomb. Tick. Tick.

  What would Germaine do? Marlo didn’t know. Which one it was who drew forward first, neither could have said. The kiss, when it happened, was long and deep. Marvelling, Marlo reached up, gripping Pavel’s frothing head. She slipped out of the chair. His arms enfolded her tightly. She sank and sank into a dark enthralling warmth.

  She laughed. ‘You have done this before, haven’t you?’

  They spread the sleeping bags on the office floor.

  Skip had no questions. There had been too many questions. Answers would come; she only had to wait. Scrubby vegetation slid by the car, flashing green-grey in the sweeping pallid headlights. Honza snored lightly on the back seat.

  Mr Novak spoke of the past. His voice was gentle. Once, he said, he lived with his father, mother and three brothers in Bohemia in a town called Pardoo-bitzer. He spoke of the cobbled town square, and the big gloomy church, and crazy goggle-eyed Uncle Yarn whose head grew bright red and swelled enough to burst when he drank too much becherovka; he spoke of train journeys into Prague in winter, three hours in a steamy compartment, sweeping a woolly sleeve across the window to look at the white world passing. In Australia, Mr Novak had always missed the snow. Soon it would be Christmas. Oh, for a Czech Christmas! The sharp frozen journey to midnight mass. Long stripy socks pinned expectantly over the hearth. The carp in the bathtub, flicking blackly back and forth, until Uncle Yarn in red festive braces came stomp-a-stomp down the hall, clashing together long knives that sounded like a swordfight in an old film.

  The Valiant swung around the curve of the lakes. Honza stirred but did not wake. The boy had fallen asleep almost immediately after clambering into the car. Sometimes, thought Skip, he is much younger than me.

  Mr Novak said he had wanted, when he grew up, to be an engineer and live in Prague. But even as a boy he knew his plans were idle. We think we are free but are constrained on every side: we do only what history lets us do. He spoke of the war, the occupation, and the bleak years afterwards when Czechoslovakia, abandoned first to Hitler, was abandoned again to Stalin. But what, after all, was Czechoslovakia, this cobbled-together country, this tattered rag of the Austro-Hungarian empire? You turned. You ran. You did not look back. Czechoslovakia was barbed wire and machine guns. But in dreams Vlad Novak walked the streets of Prague again: the golden city, castle on high, with the Vltava below, tumbling green and deep beneath its medieval bridges. The river dazzles and the castle flashes as the sun sinks behind far-off hills. Do not imagine it is always winter there. What wouldn’t he give to run again through a cornfield in Bohemia in the tender burgeoning summer?

  Vladislav Novak had been a student in Prague when the Russian tanks rolled in, a thin young man with, yes, hair like a frothing test tube who smoked too much and bit his nails to the quick. In time, his escape would seem unreal to him, a story he had heard about another man. Many times that other man had thought he would be killed. Russians with machine guns patrolled the border. Did he kill one? More than one? Maybe he did. When he made it to the refugee centre in West Germany, he was starved and half-mad. He wondered when they had decided to send him to Australia. Was he told? Did he agree? But here he was and a lifetime had passed. Never again would he see the golden city.

  The rhythm of the car made Skip sleepy too. What happened next unfolded as in a dream, with a dream’s inevitability. Mr Novak’s voice had become quieter as his story went on. When they turned off the road he fell silent.

  The Valiant drew to a halt. A grassy verge lay silver under the moon. Before them, the veranda sagged wide like a ruined dark mouth. Skip heard the squeal of a door opening, as if in response to the crunch of tyres. She looked at Mr Novak and he smiled as if to say: Go. You must. The figure that awaited her stood, half-revealed, on the edge of darkness and light. Of course Skip had seen him before: Vincent Price. But that was not his name.

  ‘You know who he is, don’t you?’

  Skip thought of a picture she had seen, a boy on a tennis court, heartbreaking in his youthful vigour, racquet ready to slam back a serve in a world lost in time. He was the leading light of the Players, the name scratched out from the honour roll at the high: 1948 – NO AWARD.

  Roger Dansie. Ghost of Crater Lakes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Marlo looked at Pavel for a long time. She had watched him while he slept; now he had woken but remained silent, gazing at her. How deep his eyes were, how dark! His lips were lovely, too. With a smile, she tousled his curly head. ‘Puce Hardware is a rotten place to sleep.’

  ‘I’ll never make you sleep here again.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll have to.’ She kissed him playfully. Sunlight pressed between the curtains, sparkling on curling covers of Pix and the green chipped filing cabinets that had stood guard all night beside the camping gear.

  Marlo stretched; her dark hair tumbled into her eyes. She wore Pavel’s shirt from the night before, buttons undone. He pulled her down again. Some time passed before she broke free.

  Today, she decided, must be a great day. ‘Let’s not go home. I can’t bear it. Not yet.’

  ‘We don’t have to,’ said Pavel.

  ‘Remember our picnic? That day at the swimming hole. It should have been perfect and I ruined everything. If only we could have that day again.’

  ‘Why not? It’s warm. It’s the weekend.’ Pavel was on his feet at once, tugging on his dishevelled clothes; he had already, some time earlier, stripped the shirt from Marlo’s back. He bundled together the camping gear and returned the whisky bottle to its hiding place. By the time Marlo appeared beside him, flicking back her hair in the mirror over the sink, he had washed out the enamel mugs.

  Morning was almost over. Sun splashed Marlo’s pale arms and her hair whipped back and forth in dark ropes as the Land Rover whirled away from Puce Hardware. Happily she watched Pavel. His stubbled chin gave him a raffish air. He had pushed back his shirtsleeves; muscles tautened in his veiny brown forearms as he spun the wheel, veering off Volcano Street.

  Not until Puce’s Bend was upon them did she realise he was driving the wrong way. They passed the abandoned service station. ‘Hey!’ she protested. ‘What’s the idea?’

  ‘Picnic time, ain’t it? There’s tons of stuff back home. Quick raid and we’ll be off.’ They passed the blowhole and rounded the grassy corner.

  Marlo waited apprehensively in the Land Rover while Pavel went into the Novak house. The white walls and picture windows flared in the sunlight. The house, to her relief, looked no more alive than Auntie Noreen’s or the service station. Death might have descended on Puce’s Bend.

  Magpies cawed. The paddocks across the road smelled brisk and ripe. Marlo’s fears subsided. So what if Deirdre Novak came charging out of the house, intent on vengeance
for the night before? Nothing could touch Marlo Wells.

  She remembered a time before Skip was born when Karen Jane had lived with an eccentric older man, a librarian, in the Adelaide Hills. To Marlo, the memory of his cottage would always be vivid: the rag mat in front of the big stony fireplace where she lay on cold days, leafing through Pickwick and Alice and Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, loving the pictures long before she could understand the words; the bed where she slept in an attic under the eaves; the overgrown garden with the swing that hung off-kilter from an enormous peeling bluegum. Karen Jane in those days was still a mere girl, but Marlo remembered her as more of a mother then than later: a matronly figure in a gingham shift, beating a mixing bowl in a shaft of morning light. In the afternoons they walked, hand in hand, down a bark-strewn unpaved road towards the closest shops, in a hamlet two miles away. Often not a single car would pass; the silence was deep, but for the wind in the leaves, the tickerings of insects, the high crazed cries of cockatoos and kookaburras; and Marlo, looking up at her beautiful young mother, golden in sunshine, felt a certainty that everything was all right: everything, she was sure, would always be all right. If only the librarian could have been Marlo’s father. But he was Skip’s. Marlo’s father, she knew, had been some boy who drove a delivery van.

  When Pavel came back, Marlo laughed, and he asked her what was funny. He was, of course! Struggling with that hamper, he looked like Norman Wisdom.

  ‘Anyone home?’ Marlo asked as Pavel gunned the motor.

  ‘Quiet as a tomb. No Honza. No Dad.’

  Pavel’s face was calm, untroubled. He wasn’t lying, not exactly, but thought it best to say nothing. Inside, he had raided first the pantry, then the fridge, then moved on to the wine rack, when Howard Brooker had ambled out to the kitchen in a pair of purple jockey shorts. Coppery hair fanned across his nipples and scudded down his torso in a wispy line. Scrawny! He scratched an armpit, murmured a greeting. Pavel, as if unconcerned, arranged his bounty in the hamper: fried chicken, mushroom casserole, Edam, Gouda, claret, homemade bread. Cutlery? Check. Plates? Check. Glasses and napkins. Not a haul like last time’s, but not bad.