Volcano Street (14 page)

‘Norway. Howard felt Mr Singh added a certain international flavour. I gather he’s going for an unconventional staging. Emphasise universal themes and all that.’ Wearily, Mr Novak rose from the piano. The kitchen called. Then he noticed the photograph of the tennis player lying, curled a little, across the scored ebony. His voice seemed strained, perhaps surprised, perhaps alarmed, as he asked Skip where she had found the picture.

‘In the album. It was there loose.’

‘It’s my wife’s. I’d better put it away.’

He reached for the picture and Skip felt an impulse to snatch it back. She had put down her glass on the piano. ‘Who is that boy?’ she asked.

Mr Novak touched her glass, shifting it a little on the polished wood. His hand was pudgy, the back thickly furred. ‘A long story. The bright hope of Crater Lakes. Roger Dansie, his name was.’

‘Dansie? Like that family that lived in the haunted house?’

Mr Novak looked at her sharply. ‘He was one of them, yes. The last one.’

‘He looks like a star – a real one, I mean.’

‘We hoped he would be. He went to London to study with the Old Vic Theatre School. I liked him. When I first arrived in Crater Lakes, just a reffo boy as they called me then, I was weak and thin and coughed all the time. This young man was kind to me.’

‘What happened to him?’ Skip eyed the picture possessively.

Mr Novak held it against his chest. ‘Long story. Sad story. You might say he came to grief in foreign parts. But that’s a common
fate, isn’t it? The same might be said of me.’ He smiled. But it wasn’t really a smile.

Mr Brooker, clapping his hands, settled down the cast for a speech – one he appeared to have rehearsed well – on his director’s ‘vision’ for the play. With many a murmur, many a whistle, many a smacking of lips, they learned that it was to be set on a space station in AD 3000, and to be performed in silver spacesuits. The costume department (several ladies tittered) had a task and a half before them over the coming weeks; the set designers, too.

Rain beat steadily behind the curtains.

Most of life consists of being bored. Boredom, like a ground bass, underscores all we do. What we call growing up is largely a matter of learning to accept boredom. Those we call the well-adjusted, the mature, are those able to endure boredom with the least complaint, even to pretend it isn’t boredom at all. This enables them to work in offices or factories, get married, raise kids, work on cars in driveways, crack a few coldies, smoke fags endlessly, watch Ernie Sigley, and listen to Slim Whitman – or so thought Skip Wells, aged almost thirteen, who like all young people was capable of neither such endurance nor such self-deception. Time hangs heavily for those who feel intensely. A school term is a prison sentence; even an afternoon can stretch interminably. Of all the dull times a young person encounters, few compare with Sunday afternoon in a country town.

Skip sat with her back against the wall of the abandoned service station at Puce’s Bend, that daily accusation to Uncle Doug that neither as an entrepreneur nor as a man could he hold a candle to Willard Hartley Puce. Grass, thick as spinifex, pushed up between cracks in the forecourt; Skip ripped it out, stalk by stalk, and shredded the stalks into flakes like parsley. In the vacant lot, discarded stoves, engines and refrigerators teetered around the blowhole’s rim. She was hiding. If she went into the house, Auntie Noreen would find jobs
for her to do. Tidy your room. Fold the laundry. Have those dishes been done? She scooped up little stones and pinged them, one after the other, at one of the two rust-pocked Golden Fleece pumps. The quiet was narcotic. Slowly the day burned away towards evening, when a pall, like sickness, would descend over everything, the ashy awareness of time wasted, and school in the morning.

Honza Novak mooched along the road towards Puce’s Bend. Skip had avoided him since the night they went stalking. Now she quickly concealed herself behind the service station wall, and peeped through a broken window as he scrambled up on top of an old fridge. What a dirty, dishevelled boy he was! With his dark complexion, his coiling coppery hair, he might have been a gypsy, a ragged stranger, posed like a portent against the sky. Faintly, wind flurried over the paddocks. The sun was a lemony pallor, seeping through clouds.

Hatred welled in Skip’s throat like bile. She knew what Honza was doing: waiting for Lummo. She had seen them the Sunday before, kicking a footy, firing catapults, tumbling into the long grass, pummelling each other in fights that seemed sometimes real and sometimes play.

She still had her stones. Honza, ten feet distant, was facing away from her. Sharply, she swung back her wrist and hurled a stone through the smashed glass. It clipped his shoulder. He turned around, but already she was the Invisible Girl, hidden under the window ledge.

When she looked up again, Honza still sat on his white plinth, rubbing his shoulder, looking around him confusedly. When he slumped back, she aimed a second shot. He cried out. She had clipped his left ear.

Delighted, she sifted through her stones, choosing a big one for the third assault. Three strikes and you’re out: this time she would knock him off his perch. She bobbed up to pitch, just as he twisted around again.

‘You!’ Honza launched himself off the fridge and pounded in her direction, darting around the side of the wall as she skidded into the forecourt. She hid behind a petrol pump.

Honza, cautious now, emerged through the doorway. Skip leaped out, screamed a wordless war cry, and lobbed the stone at his cheek. She missed. He rushed at her. She pelted towards the blowhole but tripped on tussocky grass, and at once he was upon her. They grappled for a moment on the edge of the blowhole, then rolled and tumbled down its steep walls.

When they reached the bottom, they remained locked together. Skip, winded, lay breathing in gasps. Honza pinned her down; his frothing head was jammed beneath her chin. Guttural hiccoughs erupted from his throat. The boy was laughing.

‘What’s so funny?’ She was outraged. ‘Get
off
.’

‘Bloody good fighter, you are. For a girl.’

She glared at him suspiciously. Could Honza be her friend? Maybe. When Lummo wasn’t around. With little grace they disentangled themselves and sat cross-legged at a wary distance, both sullenmouthed, both covered in dirt.

‘I come down here a bit,’ said Honza. ‘You find things.’

‘What things?’ Skip tried to sound hostile.

‘Bike pump. Better than mine. Somebody chucked out a chess set once.’

‘Great. You can play with Lummo. So where is he, this mate of yours?’ Skip added acidly.

Honza shrugged. ‘I reckon he’s not coming. He can’t always come.’

‘That bugger? I thought he did what he liked.’

‘Nah. His mum’s real strict.’

Brenton Lumsden, a mummy’s boy? The sun spilled, reddening, down the blowhole’s bleak walls. Tracks wound between the debris like mountain trails; breezes skirled the grass at the rim.

‘This is like being on another planet.’

‘Shipwrecked,’ said Honza. ‘Like Robinson Crusoe.’

‘Space-wrecked. And there’s two of us.’

‘Crusoe had Friday. Say, I’ll be Crusoe –’

‘I’m not being Friday!’

‘You will. You’re littler – and a girl.’

‘We’re both Crusoe.’

‘You’re stupid. There’s only one Crusoe!’

‘We’re battling for the island.’

‘For the planet.’

Skip jumped up. They faced each other like gunfighters.

That was how the blowhole game began, a thrilling contest in which they grappled, aimed punches, pursued each other, and hid around the back of heaped-up stoves, upended twin tubs and burned-out forty-four-gallon drums, zapping each other with imaginary ray guns. Both died more than once, disintegrated in sizzling blasts.

Honza declared that the fridge on the eastern slope was a space capsule, their only link to the home world, and they battled for possession of it, scaling the blowhole’s slippery sides as if competing to plant the conqueror’s flag on Everest. Skip clambered up, slipped back; then clambered up again, almost to the top, only for Honza to pounce on her, sending her rolling back before he scrambled up to claim the prize.

He was leaping in triumph when a voice boomed out, ‘Novak! What the bloody hell you doing?’

Lummo loomed on the blowhole’s brink. Squatting on his Fanta-orange Dragster, the boy stared through the high handlebars first at Honza, then down at Skip, like an avenging Zeus, poised to give judgement.

This was the scene Skip saw now, in dumb show against the gathering twilight: Honza grinning, shaking his head; Lummo gesturing down at Skip as if he could barely believe this treachery; Honza, hand up like a stop sign, repelling the accusation; Lummo
pushing him in the chest and Honza flailing backwards; Lummo, bike clattering behind him, squelching his bulk on to Honza’s chest, swinging back a fist.

‘Stop it!’ Skip shouted. ‘Bastard, stop it!’

Furious, she scrabbled up the blowhole’s side again, but by the time she reached the top, Honza lay moaning, clutching his jaw, and the best Dragster bike in Crater Lakes had soared regally away. Spooling in an arc around Puce’s Bend, Lummo stabbed two fingers savagely in the air.

Skip returned the gesture. ‘Fuck you too!’

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Honza muttered. Frowning, he hauled himself upright, and before Skip could say more he broke from her, a desperate exile, pelting off in the direction of home.

Did he hate her? She couldn’t tell. Watching him go, she thought again of a gypsy boy, running darkly against the purple sky.

‘Skippy’s got a boyfriend!’

Skip had guessed there would be trouble at school. But not how much. First thing Monday morning, when she stepped off the bus, girls surrounded her, giggling, shrieking, jabbing fingers into her ribs, arms and back. Bewildered, she pushed through the chorus of harpies, hating them, wanting to kill them. Honza was surrounded by his own group of boys, whooping, slapping cupped palms on upraised forearms, thrusting fingers back and forth between circled lips.

At the lockers, it all broke out again.

‘Who’s Novak’s girlfriend?’

‘Helen Wells is a slag!’

‘Skippy done it with Novak – down a blowhole!’ Kylie Cunliffe led the charge, grabbing Skip’s hand, smooching mock kisses halfway up her arm.

Skip’s face burned as she took her place in home group. On the blackboard, someone had drawn a huge heart, pierced by an arrow.
In the right atrium were the initials ‘H. W.’; in the left ventricle, ‘H. N.’ When she glared at Lummo he turned away – telling her, it seemed, that she wasn’t worth bothering with; but, as if he had commanded it, the taunts began again, the sniggering, the sneers, the obscene gibes, growing in volume until Mr Something-or-other arrived, too late, and called the class to order.

All morning, the kids smouldered with scandal. ‘In a blowhole!’ wailed Lucy Sutton, appalled, when Skip, turning confusedly, looked for a place to sit in maths; Joanne Guppy, a dull-eyed girl, pizza-faced with acne, more than once mouthed taunts at Skip; every time he caught her eye, Wayne Bunny jerked a fist in the air, whack-off style, as if to say he knew what she had done with his mate and that maybe, just maybe, she could do it with him, too. The Lum’s Den shunned Honza, and Honza and Skip shunned each other, as if both were ashamed.

It was after lunch, though, that the real trouble began. What was the gust that set the fire ablaze? Skip never knew. The class was lined up outside the art block, waiting for the teacher, when Andreas Haskas pushed Honza in the chest, knocking him down, and cried, ‘You’re weak, Novak!’ That was all it took. As Honza tried to get up, Shaun Kenny and Lummo were there too, piling on him like a rugby scrum. Other boys in the class, and many of the girls, surrounded them in a pack, chanting, ‘Fight! Fight!’ in feverish ecstasy.

Skip had no time to think before she threw herself into the fray. Never mind that she was small: surprise was on her side. She crunched an arm around Lummo’s neck. He gagged, and Honza took the opportunity to push him off. Suddenly there were fights in all directions: Lummo, Novak, Haskas, Kenny, Wells. Onlookers gasped, hooted, howled, as Honza knocked down Haskas, Skip booted Kenny in the arse, and Honza wrenched Lummo’s arm up behind his back. Then the cry, like a hurled knife, slashing across the asphalt: ‘Children! What do you think you’re doing? Stop it at once!’

The headmaster! Silence fell.

Mr Brian Rigby was a large man, large in all respects, a one-time army major who took great pride in his war service, which, as all his colleagues and pupils knew, had taken him to Tobruk, El Alamein, New Guinea and Borneo. In youth (this, too, was widely known) he had been a keen boxer, and all his mates had said – meaning it as a compliment, one of the highest payable to a man – that he was built like a brick shithouse. His burly chest swelled as he strode forward. Pinprick eyes glowered in his brick-red face.

The five fighters stood before him, grazed and dusty, as the hero of El Alamein boomed that he had never, in all his born days, witnessed so disgusting an exhibition. ‘Each of you,’ he declared, ‘wears the uniform of my school. And no pupil of my school will act in this manner. Understood?’ A hank of Mr Rigby’s grey-white hair had been trained in a combover across his bald skull; it flapped now in time with his words. None dared to smirk.

Later, in his office, Mr Rigby caned each of the boys. Skip sat in the corridor outside, kicking her legs back and forth with feigned indifference as sharp cracks sounded through the closed door. Fixed to the wall opposite her was a wide plaque headed
HONOUR ROLL
; inscribed on it in twin columns, gleaming goldenly against dark varnish, were the names of which the high was proud.

1908 –
P. TELFORD
.

1909 –
D. JACOB
.

1910 –
W. JONES
.

Her eyes ran down the list, on which, she knew,
H. WELLS
could never feature. One name appeared to have been scratched out; shakier lettering, in the pale rectangle that remained, declared: 1948 –
NO AWARD
.