Volcano Street (20 page)

‘All right, all right.’ Brooker does his best to calm the class. See those hands, palms down, pressing something invisible? Shoosh. Shoosh. What’s he on about now? One hundred years, one whole hundred years since the Lakes was proclaimed a town. This calls, doesn’t it, for something special? Mark the occasion. Make it memorable. Stake a flag in the flux of time. The capsule, stuffed to the brim with pictures, objects, letters, is to be buried in Crater Gardens by the town hall, to be dug up by your great-great in another hundred years.

Now anybody clued up, watching this man-boy with his hippie sideburns, poofter shirt, medallion, hipster jeans with their big shiny belt buckle, might sense his degradation, his shame as he stands before these imbeciles, spooling out these platitudes as if every phrase that drivels off his lips doesn’t make him want to throw up. ‘No, no, we’re not going to the future,’ Brooker says cheerfully, ‘but the time capsule is.’ (Have his eyes – what a ham! – widened a little? What does he expect, intakes of breath?) The clued-up might guess, too, that sometimes in bed at night Brooker feels himself
drowning and starts up, gasping, struggling for breath; that old uni mates are in London right now, pulling pints in pubs, pulling birds in discotheques, or trolling around on the Grand Tour in a beat-up V Dub campervan. This causes Brooker pain. Among the books in his boarding house bedroom is a tatty
Lost Illusions
, relic of some dreary course at Flinders University, with the passage underscored: ‘Neither distinctions nor dignities will seek out the talent that is running to seed in a provincial town …’ And he had once thought Adelaide was the provincial town!

‘Yes,’ Brooker says brightly, ‘imagine if you could read a letter from your great-great. Our task’ – he claps his hands, suggesting resolve, a can-do spirit, not a moment to waste – ‘is to write those letters for our great-greats to marvel over one day (sooner than you think!) when we’re all dust and ash, in their world of bubble cars and personal helipads and package tours to Venus. And that, class, is our project for this week.’

Brooker divides them into groups to discuss it.

‘I reckon it’s stupid,’ says Mag the Slag, whose blondish hair looks this morning as if a tub of margarine has been melted over it.

Their letters, Brooker enthuses, should have a theme. Here he comes now, working the room, bending over this and that yellow-white table, interrogating: ‘What about you, Maggie?’ (Flabby cheeks redden.) ‘Think of your life – what, in your life, would fascinate your great-great …’

‘Sir! Sir! Mr Brooker?’ Lucy Sutton offers her inspiration: music. She will consecrate to eternity (with pictures, clippings; even, if the envelope will allow, a 45-rpm single or two) the talents of Johnny Farnham, Jeff Phillips and Ronnie Burns.

‘Excellent, Lucy.’

Lucy Sutton beams.

Brooker draws Skip aside after the lesson is over. Leave me alone, she thinks. Don’t even look at me. Is he going to tell her how surly
she’s become? (As if she didn’t know!) How she sits hollow-eyed in class, lower lip protruding, cheek pulped into an upheld fist?

‘Helen,’ he begins, ‘I’m concerned about your sister.’

Skip shrugs, both relieved and wary. ‘Marlo can’t come,’ she says without expression. ‘Can’t any more.’

‘I don’t understand why your aunt won’t see reason. Marlene’s Petra was shaping up so well. And her exams!’ His hand, as if sincerely, lands on Skip’s shoulder. ‘Your sister has talent. Real talent. Perhaps I could talk to your aunt.’

‘Or a brick wall.’ Skip pulls away from the hand.

Her time capsule letter weighs heavy on her mind. Who will read it in a hundred years? She has to write something, but the thought of Brooker reading it, red-penning it, handing it back for her to copy out fair, freezes inspiration. Through class after class she does fuck-all while Lucy Sutton, whose letter, exceeding all others in splendour, will be accompanied by a collage, scissors out Johnny, Jeff and Ronnie from back issues of
TV Week
.

Only on the night before they have to hand in their drafts does Skip stir herself. In a ragged
Eagle
, courtesy of the comics pile at the Institute Library, is a ‘Futurescope’ feature called ‘Standing Room Only’. In 1967 the entire population of the world, notes Lyall Watson, PhD, BSc (Hons), FZS, could stand heel-to-toe on the Isle of Wight. But two babies are born every second: 172,800 each day. By 2000 AD there will be twice as many people in the world; by 2200, one hundred times. How will humanity feed itself? First, Watson says blithely (this is a thought experiment, after all), we must eliminate all land wildlife, and use the land for farming. Second, harvest the seas: algae, don’t you know, is a rich source of protein. (All sea wildlife, too, will have to be ‘removed’.) But still the population grows. Food, food! is the cry. Where will it come from? Elementary, my dear Watson. More sunlight, that’s what we need! By 2400, enormous
space mirrors, orbiting the earth, bring perpetual daylight and melt the polar ice. Sea levels rise. Temperatures soar. Oceans boil and evaporate away. Now all food is synthesised in laboratories. The whole planet is roofed over. All space is used for human habitation: one million million million human beings, thronging through air-conditioned corridors under a dome that spans the earth. Such is the world of AD 3000.

Skip copies Dr Watson’s words exactly.

Afterwards she feels sick, and feels sick again the next day when Brooker hands back her work in class. Says the flare of red biro: C minus. Impersonal. Far-fetched. Brooker has altered Dr Watson’s punctuation, and here and there a phrase.

Pupils must copy out their corrected work, to be sealed by afternoon’s end in stiff card envelopes, each with the author’s name on the front, like letters to themselves. The room (Skip thinks) is hot. Her stomach churns, clenches. She sits by the window. A fly buzzes, butts against the glass, and buzzes again. Again: Two babies are born every second, 172,800 a day, like adding the entire population of Great Britain to the world each year. So says Watson; so says Skip. Sluggishly her hand moves across the page. She tugs at her collar. Hot, hot. Sick, yes: isn’t it sickening, these babies, babies, babies? Millions, and for what? More Brenton Lumsdens. More Kylie Cunliffes. More Maggie Polomkas. Why won’t this hateful reproduction stop?

On the wall, the clock is ticking. Skip’s hand moves faster, flying over the page, and before she knows it she has written down thoughts that have no origin in the pages of
Eagle
. She writes about babies and what they become. She names names: Brenton Lumsden. Yes, she’s written it in Bic biro: B-R-E-N-T-O-N … More! K-Y-L-I-E … The feeling of power thrills her. On and on the Bic skitters like a deranged insect. Bugger Dr Watson. She writes about what she hates, and what she hates most is Noreen Puce, the meanest woman in the world. Frenzied now, Skip piles on details of Auntie Noreen’s
vileness. Frizzy perm. Little piggy eyes. Blubbery arms. Huge fat tits. Fat belly. Fat arse. Fat fingers, like sausages about to burst, stuffing Kit-Kats Smith’s Crisps Arnott’s Custard Creams all day into her arsehole mouth. Hate! Hate! Up, up, goes Skip’s temperature (are the oceans, she wonders, already boiling away?), but what does it matter when she has skewered Noreen Puce, fixed her on paper for the future to know her in each obscene detail?

Sweat beads on Skip’s forehead as she writes. She flicks it away. When will the bell ring? Ten minutes. Heart pounding – this feeling can’t end – she turns to Barry Puce, the cousin she has never met, who naturally must be as vile as Auntie Noreen because he is after all (repellent phrase) the fruit of her loins. Inventing freely now (the historian has the last word), she attributes to Barry halitosis, cheesy feet, rotten-egg farts and a carnal interest in dogs that terrified Baskerville, the neighbouring hound, before Barry was packed off to Nam, where he machine-gunned many a peasant farmer, coshed old women with his rifle butt, skewered babies on his bayonet, and left behind him a trail of abused Fidos and Rovers; but he was sure, any day now, to be captured by the Viet Cong and tortured and mutilated before – ears lopped, eyes squished in – being turned out to wander through a minefield. Boom!

The bell. Brooker, raising his voice, says, ‘All right, seal your envelopes. Is your name on the front? Make sure your name’s on the front. Now drop it in here.’ Down the aisle he comes, sack at the ready. Drop, drop, go the messages to the future, soon to be borne away to the town hall where they will be secured inside the silver-milkcan time machine. Skip shudders with pleasure. She lets her message drop. Exultant, she has stood up, impatient to leave the class, when she hears a scream behind her: Kylie Cunliffe. Why is Kylie screaming?

‘Bleeding! She’s bleeding!’ Kylie points, her expression one of horrified glee. Everyone turns and stares; there are gasps and whispers. Someone giggles. Boys stand on desks to see and Brooker drops the
sack as Skip, nonplussed, looks down, aware only now of the hot viscous liquid that trickles down her leg and has stained the back of her skirt. Strangled horror bursts in her throat, an animal howl, and she runs to the door and down the corridor as if the crowd, like hunting dogs, are pursuing her.

Brooker calls, ‘Helen … Helen Wells!’

Her name, like a reprimand, rings behind her. But Helen Wells has gone. She has seen Brooker’s face. She disgusts him. She disgusts herself. This happened (exactly this) to a girl at Glenelg Tech, a reffo girl, a total spastic, with a squinty eye and a nose that ran with snot. Back then Skip, baying with the others, had vowed this would never be her. Now it was: Skip Wells, no better than a dirty reffo with nits in her hair and stinking of piss.

Bikes gleam in bike racks. Here’s Honza’s, and Skip, of course, knows the combo of his lock. Away, away, with the shame that will destroy her searing like a brand.

Three times she changes direction: stop, skid, go another way. Crater Gardens: she could fling herself down the waterfall. No, she will go out of town: leave the Lakes, ride until she can ride no more, and a truck comes, and she thumbs a lift, and sings along to Buck Owens on the eight-track all the way to – where? Everywhere is ruined if Skip Wells is there. Go to Puce Hardware. Do it, Skip Wells. Throw yourself on Marlo like an accusation. You forgot me, Marlo. And look what happened. You’ve killed me. Look at my blood.

No. Marlo wouldn’t care; she would only turn away.

Blue fills the sky. By the road, scattered on rich green, are buttercups, daisies, dandelions. All around her is the mocking spring, this spring that pounces in the year’s last third, potent already with a summer heat that presses down mercilessly, month on month, even in these southern corners of the continent. The birds mock her, cackling as she passes. Kookaburras. Galahs. But no one, nothing, stops Skip Wells. Let the reffo go. Blood scalds her thighs.

At Puce’s Bend stands a Greyhound bus. Skip lets Honza’s bike fall by the verge. Perhaps she will faint now; she wishes she would – anything, to be free of the burden of being Skip Wells. But something is strange: from the house comes a pulse, beating softly on the bright air. She moves towards it.

So: Sandy Campbell is here. Front door unlocked. She flits down the passage. In the sitting room are cake-crumbed plates, teacups sticky with sugar. Television dark – no
Motel
today. On the radiogram, a record spins silently, its playing time passed.
K-chuck. K-chuck
. ‘Cara Mia’ by Slim Whitman, an Auntie Noreen favourite. But where’s Auntie Noreen? Where’s Sandy Campbell? The pulse keeps drumming: rattling teacups, rippling under wallpaper, heaving up lumps in the floral carpet. Understanding now, Skip heads deeper into the house.

Thud. Thud. The door to the master bedroom stands ajar. Skip pushes it open further. Whitely, light pulses through net curtains and collects and shines in the mirrored wardrobe doors: collects, shines and flings back unreally the figures on the bed, who are all too real. Thud. The headboard, pink quilting on plywood, knocks the wall. Thud. That pink lampshade rocks. Thud. The bedspread, pink and peeled back in crumples, reveals on pink polyester sheets the sweaty straining form that plunges, plunges, a surfer riding a wave of white jelly, then ends at last with a grunt that sounds like a drunkard throwing up.

Skip watches. Nothing, she thinks, will hurt her again. She has triumphed. They are even, the world and Skip Wells. That is why she laughs, though she should flee or shrink in revulsion as Sandy Campbell pushes himself off the bed and lumbers towards her, doubled in the mirror, eyes wide as he confronts, as if in a dream, this girl who should be anywhere but here. Look at him, belly swinging, thick with damp fur, and the billy club below, purple-headed, marbled with veins, dripping its drippings on the pink carpet. And Auntie Noreen on the bed, round-eyed, a white whale wrapped in polyester.

Sandy Campbell grins: that lopsided grin! He comes closer and Skip tells herself she will not let him scare her. One barbecued forearm flattens against the wall. His dick, still half-stiff, butts her skirt.

‘Eh, heard a good one the other day.’ His voice cracks the mirrors, shatters the light. ‘There’s this little girl, see, and her name’s Fuckarada.’

Fuckarada! What sort of name is that?

‘It’s a wog name,’ says Sandy Campbell, as if Skip has spoken. Unashamed, even proud in his nakedness, he remains directly before her. From time to time he moves a little, prodding at her obscenely. ‘And this little girl,’ he says, ‘she’s a real goer. Just like her mum. Makes eyes at all the blokes. So her mum’s boyfriend sees Fuckarada and reckons, “Jeez, I wouldn’t mind a bash at that. Bet she’s nice and tight.” Well, one day Fuckarada’s mum goes to the shops. “Fuck,” reckons Fuckarada’s mum. “Haven’t got a babysitter.” Well, the bloke sees his chance: “I’ll look after Fuckarada.” “Jeez, thanks,” reckons Fuckarada’s mum, and goes out.

‘So the bloke rubs his hands together. “What are we going to do, little Fuckarada?” Fuckarada reckons, “Reckon I’ll go to bed.” “Bed?” reckons the bloke. “It’s the fucking arvo.” “Aw, but I really want to go to bed,” Fuckarada reckons with a cheeky little grin. Bloke reckons, “So, Fuckarada, shall I come and tuck yous in?” Fuckarada reckons, “If you like.”