Volcano Street (2 page)

The roll-up waggled. ‘That Kazza was a wild one.’

‘Karen Jane?’ said Skip. ‘Still is.’

‘All the blokes round these parts reckoned so. Missed her when she went up to the smoke, we did.’ The grey head jerked towards Marlo. ‘Like mother, like daughter, eh?’ Grinning, Sandy Campbell chucked Skip under the chin and straightened to full height. ‘Don’t worry, love, I’ll run yous out when we’ve finished here – I’ll take yous,’ he added, raising his voice for Marlo’s benefit.

Skip, outraged by the man’s familiar manner, was about to tell him where he could stick his ride when an open-topped Land Rover tore down the street and drew up with a screech behind the coach. A young man jumped down from the driver’s seat and gasped out,
as if he had been running, ‘Yous the Wells sisters? I’m late. Old Ma Puce is gunna be real pissed off.’

The new arrival was a gangly fellow, more boy than man, with a darkish complexion and prominent teeth: almost horsy, but not unhandsome. His brown eyes were limpid, his brow tall, and his bronze hair bubbled over the top like a potion from a test tube. A grey apron covered his T-shirt and jeans, with pencils poking out of a narrow, high pocket.

‘So Noreen’s sent the slave.’ Sandy Campbell seemed a little put out. ‘Girls, meet Pav – Crater Lakes’ most eligible bachelor. He’s a wog, but not the worst kind.’

‘Pavel Novak.’ The young man, still puffing, extended his hand to Marlo. ‘I would have been on time but the shop floor was a mess. Stocktaking,’ he explained.

Sandy Campbell dropped his cigarette butt; it lay on the concrete, smoke upcurling. ‘Pav here’s one of your uncle’s employees,’ he told the girls. ‘Or should I say your aunt’s? Who would you say was your boss, Pav – Noreen or Doug?’

Pavel, not answering, sprang to help the Aborigine, who, after a break, had resumed work on the tea chest. ‘Lift it from the bottom. Bend the knees,’ Pavel said kindly, while Sandy Campbell, watching the two of them struggle down the alley, called, ‘He’s paid to do that! Leave the abo retard alone.’

The Aborigine, who perhaps indeed was retarded, dropped his side of the chest, almost crushing his fingers. He was little and bent, with a broad flattened face like an ebony carving, and oil-dark curly hair, thick and long.

Uncertainly, Skip and Marlo loaded their suitcases, the Qantas bag and the wicker shopping basket into the back of the Land Rover. With particular care, Skip passed her sister the Lettera 22. ‘You’d better hold Olly.’

‘So it’s goodbye for now, eh? Careful with the wog boy,’ said Sandy
Campbell. ‘Volcano Street ain’t been safe since that bugger got his licence. Used to be my Land Rover, this one’ – he pronounced it ‘Lan Drover’ – ‘before I flogged it to young Pav.’ He patted the vehicle’s green flank. ‘Wrecked it, he has. Buggered the suspension. Buggered the transmission. Spit and chewing gum, that’s all that keeps this crate on the road.’

Pavel returned, sweating. He stripped off his apron and tossed it in the back. Resuming his place at the wheel, he gestured for Marlo to sit beside him in the front. Skip climbed in next to the luggage, then thought better of it, scrambled over the long front seat and thudded down between them.

‘You don’t mind, Pav?’ She punched his arm.

‘Skip, don’t be rude,’ said Marlo.

The Land Rover moved off down Volcano Street, and Pavel apologised again for being late. He drove carefully, even too carefully, as if in deference to the girls. Skip was disappointed: she had expected a reckless ride.

The Aborigine watched them go, his eyes deep and dark.

‘Yous here for long, are yous?’ The wog boy spoke in a broad Australian accent.

‘I shouldn’t think so.’ It was Marlo who answered. She had assumed her queenly manner: straight-backed, eyes forward, hands folded neatly over Olly Olivetti. Skip understood: Marlo, bold only with books, could read about prostitutes and cunts and still be prim.

‘Picked a nice day for it,’ Pavel attempted next.

‘I heard it rains all the time,’ said Skip. ‘In the Lakes, I mean.’

‘Rains a bit,’ said Pavel. ‘Even when it’s warm.’

‘So what’s there to do here?’ Skip asked.

‘Aw, the Lakes is really going forward.’ Pavel (was he always so cheerful?) might have been repeating something he had heard a
hundred times. ‘There’s Chickenland – you’ll see the big chicken on the roof, can’t miss it – and Coles New World. Yous must have seen that on the way in.’

Marlo laughed, and Skip, not sure if they should make fun of this boy – he might, she supposed, be a bit simple – said quickly, ‘Pavel – what kind of name is that?’

‘Czech, isn’t it?’ said Marlo. ‘Czech for Paul.’

‘Why don’t you call yourself Paul, then?’ Skip asked, but Pavel only smiled. Something in that smile, in those abundant chunky teeth, disturbed her in its guilelessness, a dreamy wonderment that made her feel older, wiser.

Shops spooled by, all shut for Sunday: pie shop, pharmacy, Tom the Cheap. A gaggle of children slouched across the road and Pavel cheerily beeped the horn. At the main corner, three two-storey sandstone buildings stood in a row. Waiting at the lights, he named them: King Edward VII Theatre; Crater Lakes Institute; and Crater Lakes Town Hall (his father worked there), with its clock tower, a little Big Ben, and gardens beside it banded by a low stone wall. Iron lace lavishly decorated an ancient pub opposite.

They were turning left off Volcano Street when a sign above a whitewashed, garage-like building, crouched back from the pavement behind a parking lot, declaimed:
PUCE HARDWARE
. Lawnmowers, chained in place, stretched along a fence at the side, and a placard with an arrow exhorted customers not to miss a yard at the back (
NOREEN’S GREEN FINGERS
) filled with plants in terracotta pots and secured today by a chain-link gate.

Skip asked Pavel if he had worked there long. He said he had been there since he left the high.

Marlo perked up. ‘Where’s the high?’

He jerked a thumb. ‘Bit of a way from yous.’

They passed down a street of houses, white limestone bungalows with galvanised-iron roofs of red, green or blue. Each house had
a concrete driveway and a carport or garage; few front yards had fences, and lawns ran to the kerb.

Skip said to Pavel, ‘You must know our aunt and uncle well.’

Pavel said he supposed so. Skip feared to ask the inevitable next question: what are they like? She had been barely more than a baby when Auntie Noreen last visited Adelaide, but Marlo remembered their aunt as a big booming woman in a paisley frock who had given them gifts they didn’t want and argued bitterly with Karen Jane. ‘Me own sister! I’m ashamed of you,’ she had finally sobbed, before leaving, vowing never to return. What Karen Jane had to say about Noreen didn’t bode well.

Guilt rose in Skip again. She hated herself.

Pavel turned off the neat street and followed several shabbier roads. Tarmacadam gave way to dirt, and trees overhung the road. They passed a paddock with a pony in it, a half-built house, and vacant lots heaped with bricks, timber, and metal sheeting. The grass was richly green.

On a corner stood a service station, startlingly ruined. Twin Golden Fleece pumps rose like robot sentries before a building that looked as though it had been shaken by an earthquake. A wall had collapsed, the roof had caved in, and weeds now pushed through cracks in the forecourt. Beside the ruin, an abandoned refrigerator, several stoves, and an engine or two, brown and brittle, listed on the edge of a deep depression in the earth of the sort known as a blowhole: blasted out by explosives, it was a place to deposit junk.

‘They call this Puce’s Bend,’ said Pavel. ‘Your uncle started up that servo after the war. Went bust.’

‘We’re a long way out, aren’t we?’ said Marlo.

‘Not that far.’ Just down from the blowhole and on the other side of the road, Pavel drew up beside an unruly hedge. Beyond it was a sprawling single-storey house with high gables, twin triangles
of radiating sunburst beams above a veranda propped up by stuccoed pillars.

‘Is there a school bus?’ Marlo asked doubtfully.

‘Next corner.’ Pavel pointed. Opposite an empty paddock, a steep, overgrown verge cushioned the crook of a ninety-degree turn; there was no visible bus stop, no shelter. Beyond the corner could be seen another house, located on higher ground: a flash of white through billows of leaves.

Pavel leaped down to the road, gallantly grabbed all the luggage, and led the girls down a gravelled driveway, indicating with a tilt of his head that they should follow him around the back. The side of the house was blank but for a chimneystack halfway along, tapering like a Saturn V rocket made of bricks, and a single high sash window. Paint, dark green, flaked from the frame; shadows shifted behind the lace curtains. Between the house and a shed at the end of the drive stood a tall wooden fence with a gate in the middle. Pavel drew back a bolt and ushered the girls inside.

At the rear of the house lay a patio cluttered with buckets, rakes, brooms, flowerpots, pine planks and garden furniture, like a distant unruly satellite of Puce Hardware; a wooden extension – an incongruous chalet – stretched from the opposite side of the house. Filling the air was a noxious tang: the damp, earthy sourness of an open sewer.

Skip laughed. Marlo reached for a handkerchief.

The sun was sinking, sending bright arrows flashing down the yard. With the glare in their eyes they had not at first made out the fellow who stood beyond the rotary washing line. Pavel thudded down the luggage and raised a hand; the fellow echoed the gesture. He was thin, dressed in grey overalls, and leaned on the handle of a shovel as they approached. Beside him was a hill of dirt; he stood, like a gravedigger, above a deep pit.

‘New septic. Bloody thing backed up last night,’ he said and wiped
his forehead with a leathery hand. ‘Last thing you want to be doing on a Sunday arvo, eh?’

‘Yair.’ Pavel nodded sagely.

Marlo hung back, handkerchief in place. Skip peered into the pit. Five feet down was a wooden platform, squelchy like a rotted floor; several boards, pulled free, exposed a ceramic pipe, scaly, as if crusted with barnacles, in a reeking dark pool. Lengths of pipe and fresh timber lay on the grass above; the fellow’s task, evidently, was to extend the pipe into another pit that would then, with new planks in place, be covered up again.

‘Yous on the mains, ain’t yous?’ the man said to Pavel. ‘Bloody wish we was. Don’t know how many shit pits I’ve dug. Stand where you like in this yard, you’re standing on shit.’ He cackled mirthlessly and prodded Pavel’s chest. ‘Wouldn’t like a go with the shovel? Yair, suppose you better get going. I says to Queen Noreen, Time we got on the mains. Didn’t have mains when I was a girl, she says. Didn’t have the goggle box neither, I says, and that don’t stop you gawping at it all day. Wait till I’m gone, I says. Your old Doug won’t last for ever, not the way you work him.’

Pavel nodded. ‘Yair,’ he said again, then, ‘Yair,’ this time with conviction, and only then did Doug Puce, ponderous as an ocean liner, turn to face the girls.

‘Good trip?’ he asked Marlo, and she nodded behind the handkerchief. ‘Don’t worry, love, this lot’ll soon be fixed. Worse last night when the bloody thing backed up – all through the house you’d have smelled it then!’ He held out a long hand, thought better of it, and wiped it on his overalls.

Uncle Doug was thin in every respect: thin hair, in Brylcreemed grooves, topping a head like an Australian Rules football gone flat; thin face with narrow eyes, nose, lips; neck spindly as the forearms protruding from his rolled-up sleeves. His face and arms were teak brown and his ears stuck out sharply, as if stiffened with wires.

The call rose like a kookaburra’s: ‘Is that me girls?’

A screen door banged, and flitting eagerly over the yard came an enormous woman in a billowing muu-muu patterned in zigzags of bright pink, lime and orange. Her smile buried her eyes in fatty cushions, and blue-dyed hair sprang electrically from her head. The bare arms she held up were swollen as if with dropsy, the hands small as a doll’s at the ends of swaying, puckered swags of flesh. A startled Marlo was enfolded in doughy depths.

‘Mar-
leen
! How long is it since I seen me little Mar-
leen
? I swear, you’re pretty as Kazza, back in the day … And Baby Helen!’ Little eyes glinted at Skip. ‘Come on, don’t be shy – a big hug for your Auntie Noreen!’

Skip complied, but quickly squirmed free.

‘Bugger, what yous doing in the yard? Tea’s ready. Pav, love, bring the bags, there’s a good boy.’ Auntie Noreen pirouetted back to the house and beckoned the girls to follow. She appeared not to notice the stench in the yard.

Inside, they passed down a dim passage into the living room: floral carpeting, floral lounge suite, tasselled ornate lampshades, floral curtains tied back with braided cords. Arrayed on a low table was a massive spread. Skip’s eyes brightened at the sight of cream horns, scones with jam and cream, chocolate cake, chocolate éclairs, vanilla slices, and biscuits on dainty plates. Maybe there was something to be said for Auntie Noreen. On the television, a housewife exclaimed over a box of Lemon Fab.

The girls perched on twin armchairs; their aunt assumed her throne in the centre of the sofa. Flanking her were a knitting bag with protruding needles, a Patons pattern book, and a crumpled copy of
TV Week
. Skip looked around the room as their aunt (‘Let
me
play mother’) poured the tea. On the mantelpiece was a clock cased in lacquered wood, and several framed photographs. One showed a boy in soldier’s uniform; this, Skip supposed,
was Uncle Doug in youth. The ears were unmistakable.

‘I’ll be off then, Mrs P.’ Pavel, in the doorway, looked forlornly at the spread.

‘Right you are, love. Stocktaking up to date? Now make sure you’re at the shop in the morning, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Old Noreen knows. Never forget, Noreen knows.’

‘I won’t, Mrs P.’ Pavel nodded goodbye to the girls.

‘This
is
nice, isn’t it?’ The sofa creaked beneath Auntie Noreen as if the frame might snap. ‘How long’s it been since I seen yous kiddies? Make up for it now, won’t we? I says to Kazza when I wrote – and I
did
, whether the cow wrote back or not – it’s wrong, hiding them kiddies from kith and kin. Well, now she’s got no choice. Aw, this is lovely, this one.’