Volcano Street

by David Rain

  ‘What you doing?’ said Honza.

  Foliage brushed against the theatre wall. Some yards down shone a rectangle of light. Girls, Skip thought queasily, must have pressed against it in cavemen times, ardent for a glimpse of Col Joye’s dick.

  She pushed between the branches, peered into the window – then snapped away, blundering into Honza, who had trailed after her, grinning, as if he still thought they were only playing a game. Violently, she pushed him in the chest, driving him back.

  ‘Hey! What was that for? What’s in there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Skip almost spat.

  Only your mother, she might have said, acting out a scene that took place the last time this play was about to start. But this time Deirdre Novak had taken a different role. Mr Brooker leaned against the dressing table; Mrs Novak was on her knees. Nothing, Skip decided, was more disgusting than grown-ups. If she could never grow up, she would be happy.

  ‘Roger?’ She broke back out onto the path.

  Where was Roger? Jack’s face was immemorial, a native mask, incongruous above his shabby plaid shirt. His voice was hollow. ‘Gone. If we’d got him in there straight away, but –’

  ‘He can’t!’ Skip ran onto the grass. ‘Roger!’

  ‘Eh!’ Tony’s head poked around the stage door. ‘What’s this carry-on? Curtain up in five. Yous kids get round the front. And you, the abo – hop it. Drink your meths in someone else’s doorway, you dirty derro.’ The stage manager flicked a hand, but already Jack had melted into the night.

  Their plan had failed. Desperately Skip tried to see how the evening could still be saved. But she could think of nothing. Honza, clearly still curious about what was happening inside that window, edged towards the foliage again, but she grabbed his collar and wrenched him back. ‘Come on,’ she commanded miserably. ‘We can watch the play, at least.’

  Mr Novak seemed annoyed when they took their places. ‘Where have you two been?’ he said. Marlo had secured them seats in the second row: splendid seats. Mr Novak looked jowly and sour – hardly relishing, perhaps, the prospect of watching his wife; Pavel, beside him, was nervous, no doubt more for Marlo than for his father or his mother. The young man had tried to slick down his hair, but already it was springing free. Honza sat next to his brother and Skip took the seat further along. In spite of the failure of their plan, Honza’s mood was boisterous. Several times he prodded fingers into Skip’s ribs to make her laugh; she slapped his hands away.

  Red curtains shifted as in a breeze. Skip, twisting around, gripped the back of her chair. The theatre was packed. Curiosity, Ton-ee had said, and here was enough to see off tribes of cats. Look: Brian Rigby, pinkly scrubbed, ramrod straight beside a withered wife. Look: Lucy Sutton, ribbons in hair, perusing – no doubt – an award-winning work of children’s fiction before the lights went down; the lady librarian, who sat beside Mrs Sutton, would be impressed. Brenton Lumsden, Brylcreemed and bow-tied, hunkered resentfully beside his floral mother. Spying Skip, he glowered and looked away. Further back, faces blurred: line upon line of pale or brownish ovals, tiered behind the brassy dress-circle rail or hovering in the shadows of the overhang that Skip liked to imagine crashing down. What about Auntie Noreen, Uncle Doug? No sign of them. Sometimes, in these last weeks, Skip could almost believe they were dead. Like Barry.

  Noise seethed to the columned heights and abated only a little as the lights dimmed. Facing forward again, Skip craned her neck; a big man sat in front of her, obscuring her view with a frizzy hump of head. She had never seen him before: the critic from the Advertiser, perhaps? And what did he see? Skip tried to imagine the play through his eyes.

  Curtain up on a silver glare. (Laughter.)

  Mrs Novak, spacesuited and masked, hair Medusa-like in baking-foil curlpapers, shrilled nervously, ‘Well, if you’re an hour late, Mr Billing, you must put up with a cold supper!’

  The shy clergyman sat at a glass table; robotically he raised a vitamin pill to his mouth. ‘It-is-ex-cell-ent. De-lic-i-ous.’

  Her husband, Mrs Novak said, insisted on regular meals. The Burgomaster, or president of the Lions Club, entered with his ray gun and fishbowl space helmet; with difficulty, he removed the latter (murmurs rose; there were fears that it was stuck) and boomed, ‘Good evening, sister-in-law.’

  Skip sighed. It was going to be a long night.

  Woodenly, Dr Stockmann discovered the parlous state of the baths; woodenly, he declared that something must be done; woodenly, the townsfolk decided that, on the contrary, nothing must be done – while the audience variously sighed, groaned, cackled, held conversations, or left, politeness forgotten, with loud uptiltings of seats. When Marlo appeared, Skip felt embarrassed for her. Petra was the only character who delivered her lines convincingly. What of it? It’s no good being a good actor if everyone else is bad.

  A bored Honza had resumed his prodding. Skip had to escape. Pretending she needed to pee, she pushed her way along her row and skulked off down the aisle. On stage, the president of the Lions Club was saying that the public really didn’t need new ideas; it got along quite well with the ones it already had. Off stage, the public was proving the point. Brooker ranted that he was the only one, the only one with a vision for this town.

  In the foyer, Skip slumped on a smelly sofa. What a fool she had been! She should have known their plan would never work. Roger could be Olivier himself – and she half believed he was – and it would make no difference. The magic that had made him famous in Crater Lakes had fled long ago and could never come back. A party of cheery men clumped by, pint glasses slopping on the swirly carpet; they were bringing back beers from the pub across the way.

  She shambled outdoors. The night was warm and the darkness now entire; yellow pools shimmered under the streetlamps. She made her way past the institute, past the town hall, along the path that curved back into the gardens. Where was Roger? Perhaps he walked the streets. Night stalker, come … Night stalker, quick. He was the real hunter; the rest of them were amateurs.

  She paced the grass, then hurled herself down on her back. Pounding filled her chest. How could she bear to hate so many things? Stars, barely blinking on this clear night, glared at her indifferently. Everything she wanted seemed, in that moment, so far away: all the mystery, all the love, all the excitement, all the adventure of a life filled perpetually with meaning and wonder.

  Muted thunder sounded from the theatre. Was it interval? She had better go back. Wearily, she hauled herself up and across the grass, past the gate that led down to the cave. She would go in through the back way and see Marlo. ‘You’re good,’ she would tell her. That, at any rate, was not a lie.

  A lamp burned weakly above the stage door; the leafy path was mauve in the light. As Skip walked down the path, the door swung open. Brooker stood above her, eyes flinty behind his mask. Cumbersome in space boots, he clumped down the steps. Was he raging at the audience’s failure to appreciate his vision, his brilliance? Was he sad? Had he expected to be loved?

  ‘Helen Wells,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Got bored, sir. Thought I’d go for a walk.’

  ‘Bored! Do you know how much work I’ve put into this production? Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t care. Don’t give a fuck, eh? Is that the sort of language you’d use, you and your little mates?’

  She said nothing. He raised a cigarette to his lips and drew back long and deeply; he expelled a slow breath. Blue ribbons curled against the darkness. ‘No, you wouldn’t understand Ibsen, would you?’

  Skip wondered if she could push past him.

  ‘I’ve seen your type before,’ he said. ‘You think you’re a tough little miss, I suppose. You laugh at everything. You roll your eyes and sneer. Well, I can predict your future exactly, Helen Wells. Leave school at fifteen. Job on the checkout. Hoon boyfriend who roars up and down the main drag every weekend. Pregnant at sixteen. Married at seventeen. Wrinkled old hag by the age of thirty. Hah! Make the most of your days in the sun. They
won’t last. No,’ he finished bitterly, ‘you wouldn’t understand An Enemy of the People.’

  Skip’s throat had tightened, but she forced out her next words hoarsely, hotly. ‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand it. You wouldn’t set it on a space station if you did. Can’t you see how stupid that is? Those Victorian rooms stuffed with furniture, that’s the whole point.’ Roger hadn’t told her this: Skip saw it for herself. ‘The burden of it! The characters can’t get out of their society,’ she ploughed on. ‘They’re stuck in it, like you’re stuck in Crater Lakes with Chickenland and Channel Eight and Puce Hardware – and Mrs Novak sucking you off in your dressing room!’

  The last words slipped out before she could stop them. When she began speaking, Brooker had grimaced and turned away; now he swung back with an inarticulate cry, perhaps of rage, perhaps of despair, and went to grab her. He had no chance. Sharp rustlings sounded behind him, and a fist, exploding from the foliage, struck Howard Brooker to the path.

  Startled, Skip gazed at Roger as he stepped out of the shadows. ‘You’ve knocked him out.’

  ‘Help me,’ said Roger. ‘We’ll drag him into the trees.’

  The pub across the way had been busy, and by the time the play resumed, many audience members were drunk and rowdy. Some simply stayed in the pub. Other people had left the theatre too. Mrs Sutton hustled Lucy away: a well-brought-up child shouldn’t be exposed to such behaviour. And the play wasn’t much better than its audience: ‘A most distasteful choice,’ the lady librarian would say the next day, as if all that happened had been Ibsen’s fault.

  Whoops and slow handclaps broke out as the lights went down. Stamping drummed from the dress circle. Where was P. C. Marky when you needed him? Scrunched in K8, as it happened, hoping that nothing worse than a few larrikins were in the offing in what he thought of as the ‘second half’. His senior officers, bastards all, were across the road, haunches oozing over vinyl-topped barstools, beer guts sagging over straining belts.

  Skip had not gone back to her seat. For the rest of interval she guarded the stage door. Roger, in his spacesuit, waited in the bushes just outside. She must keep him from the others until it was too late for them to stop him.

  Just once she had slipped inside to check, as she put it, the lie of the land. The mood backstage was glum. Tonight was to have revived a noble legacy; instead, that legacy had been ground into the dirt.

  ‘Where’s Howard?’ Mrs Novak wrung her hands. She stood outside his dressing room, but the door was locked and her pleadings through the panels met with no replies; the play’s director and star appeared to have vanished. Fearful murmurings rippled among the cast and crew.

  ‘Howard should be rallying the troops,’ said Mr Singh, whose father had been in the Bengal Lancers.

  Skip told them Brooker was preparing. ‘Like Stanis-what-sky. It’s his big speech next.’

  When the lights went down, Skip had her chance. Briefly, all was dark. She hustled Roger into the wings. They hung back, stage left; she gripped his hand, which was hot through the glove. Next came the scene of the public meeting, when Dr Stockmann, putting his case to the disbelieving townsfolk, lost control disastrously. Every player, and various roped-in children, friends and workmates, clustered on stage; a silver platform rose above the crowd, on which (so the plan went) Howard Brooker was to denounce them all.

  Ton-ee swished by. ‘Satisfied, Howie?’ he shot at Roger. ‘I told you we should have done Salad Days.’

  The curtains drew back. Noise from the auditorium swallowed the prefatory dialogue. First Citizen, Second Citizen, Third Citizen, Bystander: nobody listened to what they had to say. Mrs Novak’s first line was: ‘Do you think there’ll be any disturbance?’ The Lions Club Burgomaster burst from stage right, ray gun in hand, determined the meeting should go his way.

  Roger’s moment had come. Skip gasped as his hand slid from hers. Stiff-backed, he strode into glaring light. Faint applause and subdued hissing were required from the townsfolk; jeers and loud hissing rose from beyond the footlights. Dr Stockmann bowed as the crowd let him through.

  ‘How do you do, Katrine?’ he asked Mrs Novak.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right. Now do keep your temper, Thomas.’ She had not even looked at him. Nobody knew him. He was costumed and masked, with hair pressed beneath silver foil; he was Brooker’s height, if better built. Skip – by now relieved, even excited – slipped from the shadows into the back of the crowd.

  The scene continued. Squabbles broke out over who was to chair the meeting; the young dentist at last took the role, taking his place ponderously behind a bank of winking, whirring computers. At every turn the crowd – on stage and off – applauded, jeered, and supplied a chorus of whispers.

  ‘I therefore beg to move’ – the Burgomaster’s ray gun swept the front rows – ‘that this meeting declines to hear the proposed lecture or speech …’

  Roger missed his cue. ‘So I’m not to be heard?’ he returned, too late.

  The Burgomaster blustered on about the baths and their importance to the economy. Was the town to be ruined for a theory? The dentist said Stockmann must be a revolutionary, trying to bring down the administration. Ibsen’s script called for a drunk at the meeting, slurring out jibes; that night, many a drunk in the audience offered more. Everybody had turned on Dr Stockmann.

  Skip was barely listening. She had never stood on stage before. Bright lights seared her eyes and the blackness beyond was a fearful void, like space seen from a space station window. Burly men in silver flung the drunkard into the wings.

  ‘Can I speak?’ Roger said at last.

  Reluctantly, the dentist pressed PLAY on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, bulky as a suitcase, commanding silence with futuristic bleeps and whirs. ‘Dr Stockmann will address the meeting.’

  Stars flared from Roger’s spacesuit as he gravely mounted the platform. There, palms outspread as if to show he had no weapons, he might have been about to say, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit …’ or ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen …’ or ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do …’ He started softly, paying no heed to guffaws and sighs. Proceeding, his voice grew stronger; silence fell. Players clustered closer. Some exchanged glances. What had happened to Howard? This was not the man they had known until now. Deirdre Novak fixed entranced eyes on the silver form.

  Roger, as the doctor, said he had done a lot of thinking. What he had to say tonight was not what he’d planned to say. He had made a discovery more important than the pestilence in the baths. The town’s sources of spiritual life were poisoned. (Murmurs and angry voices punctuated the speech.) His whole society was false. The authorities were corrupt. The leading men were fools; they were goats in a young plantation, doing harm everywhere, blocking the path of the free man whichever way he turned. Leading men, he said, should be exterminated like other noxious pests. But they were not the chief danger society faced. There were other, more perfidious enemies of truth and freedom.

  ‘Who, then?’ called the players. ‘Who is it? Name, name!’

  Roger’s voice surged, filling the theatre with the force of his conviction. ‘Yes, you may be sure I’ll name them! For this is the great discovery I made yesterday! The most dangerous foe to truth and freedom in our midst is the compact majority. Yes, it’s the confounded, compact, liberal majority!’ He whipped the mask from his eyes. ‘There, I’ve told you!’

  Here it was, back in force after all these years: the talent that had dazzled Sir Laurence Olivier. Shouting, stamping, whistling filled the stage. It came from the players. It came from the audience. It came from every corner of the theatre. Skip’s heart swelled. Roger Dansie, cast out in shame a generation ago, had returned in triumph. His talent, in that moment, was a volcanic force, sweeping away all in its path. No one laughed. No one jeered.

  Yet all was not well. Deirdre Novak clutched her hands to her chest. She might have woken suddenly, painfully to find herself in a different play, a story of ghosts and hauntings. What went
through her mind in that moment? Horror, no doubt, at the irony of fate. Deirdre had done with Howard what she had failed to do with Roger, but the reenactment had gone all wrong. She had tried to return to the past and make it different. Her efforts had been in vain. The past had risen up to destroy her, as it had threatened to do all along.

  Roger cried, ‘The majority is never right – never, I say! That’s one of the social lies a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible, overwhelming majority, all the wide world over. But how can it ever be right for the fools to rule over the wise men?’

  Players tried to shout him down, but ringingly he declared that truth was always on the side of the minority.

  There was more, but Roger didn’t have the chance to say it. Deirdre Novak cried out. She rushed downstage, covered her face, collapsed to her knees. Confusion filled the theatre. Was this part of the play?

  All doubts were gone when she turned, pointed and shrieked, ‘Roger Dansie – it’s Roger Dansie!’

  Silence fell. Skip staggered as if somebody had pushed her. A hot rush, like vomit, spread in her chest. Her knees, she thought, would give out beneath her, but she forced herself forward – one step, two steps – pushing through the crowd towards the front of the stage. Something terrible had happened. There was a grenade in the theatre. Somebody had pulled the pin and tossed it, and it hurtled, as if for ever, through the crowded auditorium.

  Roger tried to continue, but his voice failed. He stood blinking, face blank. On stage, players had scattered. A yell came from the stalls: ‘Dirty bastard!’ Then another: ‘Bloody poofter!’ ‘Murderer!’ Soon, boos and catcalls filled the darkness; a beer bottle shattered on the stage. Drunkards surged from their seats.

  The world became a blur. As the lights plunged to black, Roger leaped down from the platform. Skip grabbed his hand, struggling with him through a jostling forest. They battered out of the stage door. They blundered across the gardens towards the low wall. Where now? Behind them, a crowd had spilled out of the theatre, eager for mayhem.