Volcano Street (21 page)

‘So there he is in Fuckarada’s bedroom. There’s Fuckarada slipping off her shoes and socks and little frilly panties, slipping into her nightie and into the sheets. Well, the bloke ain’t half got a stiffy by now. Big as a fucking baseball bat. Fuckarada’s in bed. Bloke pulls the curtains. Fuckarada reckons, “Perhaps we could play a game.” Bloke reckons, “Yair? What sort of game?” Fuckarada reckons, “What if you put your stiffy up me twat?” “You reckon?” says the bloke. “Aw, I suppose I could try it.”

‘Well, he shoves it in a few times, and reckons it’s bloody good, nice and tight, not like her sloppy old mum, when the little girl reckons,
“Aw, you’re no good. Harder!” “Harder?” reckons the bloke. So he fucks her harder. But now the girl reckons, “Harder! Harder!” So he’s really going at it, hammer and tongs. “Harder!” yells Fuckarada. “Fuck me harder.” And he’s fucking and fucking, sweat dripping off, breath like bellows, heart thumping like it’s fit to burst, and just then the girl’s mum comes back from the shops and reckons, “Where’s Fuckarada?” So she yells, “Fuckarada! Fuckarada!” And the bloke yells back, “Harder? I’m fucking her as hard as I bloody well can!”’

Laughter wheezes from Sandy Campbell’s mouth. Spit splatters Skip’s face and she wipes it away. She’ll go. She has the power. What can Sandy Campbell, with his belly and his billy club, do to her now? In the bed, the great mound that is Noreen Puce is wobbling, wobbling, but whether with mirth, shame, sorrow or anger, Skip cannot say. For a fleeting moment she wishes she could bridge the gulf between them. Say what you like: they are women, she and her aunt, and should be on the same side. Sandy Campbell is a bastard.

The doorbell rings. What is to be done?

Auntie Noreen fumbles for her dressing gown. Sandy Campbell retrieves his Y-fronts, furry arse-crack opening as he bends, balls from behind pendulous as a dog’s. Skip is the one who goes to the door, smiles, and thanks the boy. Squinting, head on one side, she watches him go, standing up on his pushbike, treading down the pedals. Time has stopped. The telegram hangs in her hand. It might have dropped to the floor if not for Auntie Noreen, appearing beside her, huddled in pink, eyeing Skip’s hand, gasping, and, it seems, knowing everything before the envelope is open. The telegram, barely read, flutters to the floor.

‘Never.’ Her voice is cold. ‘Never. Never.’

Chapter Eleven

The F-111 turned above the bed: turned, tugged against the suspending string, then turned back again. Moonlight flickered on the green-grey fuselage. What had the F-111 been doing? Killing kids today, like LBJ? Little Hiroshimas for the jungle gooks. DDT clouds descending over green. If you could squeeze the world into a ball, that ball would be this fiery thing in the boyish flat chest of Skip Wells, burning her heart and lungs. It froze her, this burning. She was all ice and fire. How could she rise from this Barry Puce bed when the heart in her chest was too tight to beat, when the world-in-a-ball would not let her breathe?

The evening had been endless. With the telegram, the count of time was knocked back to zero. The world before? Nothing. Bloodied thighs, headboard rhythm, Fuckarada; all were stages of a rocket fallen away. Everything was the telegram: Auntie Noreen keening on the carpet, dressing gown open over one enormous breast; Sandy Campbell standing at the hall table in Y-fronts, strangely in command as he phoned Puce Hardware; Skip numb in the still-open door, picking up the yellow slip her aunt had let fall, staring at it once, twice, three times between looking out at Puce’s Bend,
where the telegram boy, as if eternally, rode away.

Naturally, the scene was succeeded by others, like slides in a projector clunking into place: Uncle Doug like a schoolboy in crisis, perched on the sofa beside Auntie Noreen, not quite daring to take his wife in his arms; Valmai Lumsden proffering a casserole, shaking her head and tut-tutting as if Your Baz had been a naughty boy; Marky Bonner on a kitchen chair, swallowing and swallowing his Adam’s apple as Sandy Campbell bit the cap from a bottle and said, ‘Here, mate. Get that down your neck.’

Strange, how death travels! Barry Puce was all over town. How he had died, where he had died, if the body would be flown home and when – all this remained unknown. Only one thing mattered: Our Baz was a saint and martyr. Here comes the clergyman, collar dazzling white, murmurously assuring the sobbing woman-jelly that Barry has gone to a far, far better, that the Lord in His wisdom – oh, what does He do? Watch the fall of every sparrow? Here comes Pavel, tongue-tied, with Marlo hovering behind him, willing him to leave. Here comes Brian Rigby, recalling one of the finest lads ever, ever to pass through the portals of Crater Lakes High. Here comes everybody, the mayor, the doctor, the president of the Lions Club, every dutiful citizen flocking to the court of Queen Noreen. And all the time, as the light declines, and Barry Puce’s picture glimmers on the mantelpiece, and Sandy Campbell’s brown bottles line up on the sink, and Valmai Lumsden’s casserole sits beside them uneaten, and Noreen Puce sobs, and Doug Puce, brown wizened whippet of a man, looks just a little more downcast than usual, Skip feels the world-ball hardening in her chest, and something is blackening, like inkstains creeping over pink polyester, soon to consume it entirely.

The evening ends at last. No nighty-nights, no TV shutdown with God Save the Queen, but somehow the lights in the house are dark, Queen Noreen is quiet, and Skip, in jeans and bomber jacket, lies on
the dead boy’s bed, pinned down by the world-ball and watching the wind, like air currents on high, buffeting the F-111 back and forth. For too long, for all the dazzled hours of the telegram, the keening, the here-comes-everybody, she has felt the world-ball grow and thought it numbness, but now she knows differently. It is guilt.

My fault. I killed Barry Puce.

‘Night stalker, come …’ But the words never would. Nights when Honza hunkered beneath the window spun away through blackness like an exploded moon. Skip sat up: her feet, in sneakers already, connected with the floor. The plan possessed her mind, fixed as the telegram and easier to read. The time capsule letter had gone to the town hall, ready for the burial that would take place in the morning. Skip must go to the town hall too.

The moon that night had a hollow, pained look. Honza’s bike was gone from the verge; she dared not take her own from the shed, risk the creak of opening doors. She walked. Why shouldn’t she? She had all night, and this time all she needed to steal was a single creamy envelope.

Crater Lakes lay like a town in a story, suspended in sleep for a hundred years. Perhaps it had been: a hundred years ago, nothing; now this town with its Lions Club and Chickenland and Coles New World. But had it ever been awake all this while? What, in truth, are any of us but sleepwalkers, going through motions dictated by time? Parents. Place of birth. (And some places are cursed.) The heft of history, pressing down like a coffin lid. Nothing else moved as Skip, like a ghost, slid through Crater Gardens. A hole, covered in canvas, had been dug already to receive the milkcan time machine.

Shimmery under the moon, the town hall rose above her. She had pictured herself smashing windows, forcing locks, but her criminal act was easy: a window on the first floor, open just a crack; a tree by the window, a branch brushing glass. She shinned up the tree.
She edged along the branch. The window sash protested faintly as she pushed it open.

In a dark office she made out typewriters under covers, filing cabinets, and a duplicator with a spindly stiff handle. Padding over the floor, she kicked a wastepaper basket. The sound it made was a gong, mournful in the silence. She winced. Where was the milkcan? She didn’t dare turn on a light. Bluish pallor flickered through the windows; faintly she heard the waterfall from the cave, falling unregarded against the night. She creaked through a door. She found herself in a hallway; a staircase stretched downwards, a hefty Victorian affair of deep carpets, slippery polished banisters, upthrusting carved newel posts. That milkcan, it had to be heavy. They would keep it downstairs.

She descended. She knew her quest was stupid: to take back the letter would undo nothing. Time would not turn back; death would still be death, and the aunt she could not love, though she knew it was only human to love her now, would still feel her agonies for all that one letter-writer might say (and mean it): I didn’t mean it. Who would read the letter? No one, not for a hundred years, if ever. But Skip knew that the letter, festering secretly, would poison her life.

Below, the light was dim. She wished she had a torch. She missed her footing on the last stair and lurched forward, tiles slapping coldly under her sneakers. Along one wall ran a counter. Portraits, in heavy frames, glowered down from the walls. Was that Mayor Gull, Honza’s gramps? Flowers on a table underneath him gave off a sickly scent.

Milkcan, where was the milkcan?

She had moved towards the back of the staircase when a loud
crack
sounded in the silence. From beneath a door seeped a pool of light. Skip stood, breathing. She crept forward, pressed her ear against the door. Silly. She was being silly. Someone had left a light on. Old buildings go
crack
at night.

The milkcan lurked in the darkness under the stairs. Skip crouched before it. The lid had been screwed on firmly, but she twisted hard, gritting her teeth, and the secrets of time were hers. Eagerly she pulled out the contents. Envelopes flurried about her on the floor. So many. Too many. She patted her jacket. Marlboros: two left. Redheads: ten? She struck one, then another, and riffled through envelopes until flame lapped her fingers. Look at these names, bound for the future, as if the future cared: Cunliffe, Kylie. Gruber, Kevin. Polomka, Margaret.

One envelope leaped out, twice as thick as the rest: Sutton, Lucy. With some satisfaction Skip might have destroyed Lucy’s A-plus effort, Johnny, Jeff, Ronnie and all, but she forgot her spite when she saw the envelope underneath: Wells, Skip. She flicked out her match. For a moment she almost believed she had saved something more than a sleeve of card and the paper inside. Yes, now that her letter to the future could never be sent, time would be rewound like a tape on a reel-to-reel. Imagine tomorrow: good old Auntie Noreen, the same old bitch again. And Barry, one day soon, is coming home.

So Skip imagined, just for a few precious seconds.

She closed her eyes and pressed the envelope against her chest. Through the stiff paper she felt her heart, the drumbeat of time. That a door had opened behind her, that light fell across her back in a yellow plane, that a hand, reaching out, was about to touch her shoulder, she had no idea until there came another
crack!
– the floorboards, it had to be – close enough this time to make her whip around, gasp, and scramble up.

In the darkness, nothing was certain, neither the figure, big and lowering, and what it would do next, nor Skip’s direction as she blundered confusedly back and forth, and broke at last for the door. The figure called out something, she didn’t know what, as it pursued her into the night. All that filled her mind was a name: Vincent Price. He had come to take her to the House of Wax.

She raced across the lawns. How close was he? At the kerb outside the gardens was a purple Valiant. Swinging behind it, she gripped the handle of the back door. It opened, and without another thought she plunged inside and pulled it shut with a sharp clunk. Crumpled on the seat was a dusty blanket; she huddled on the floor, tugged the blanket over herself and lay unmoving as footsteps, moments later, echoed along the pavement. Had Vincent Price gone away?

Skip tried to think. She must take her chance, check the coast was clear, slip out of the car and run home; soon enough she could be miles from here, back in the sleepout as if nothing had happened, staring up at the F-111. Yes, do it: take action.

She could not move. The blanket pressed down on her, heavy as time, and fear of Vincent Price manacled her in place. If he could be in the town hall he could be anywhere. Had he watched her all this time? She lay frozen under the blanket until footsteps sounded from the street again, and voices; the car doors opened and shut, springs jogged at the weight, and two men (from their voices) took their places in the front seat. Someone turned the ignition, the engine thrummed to life, and the car moved away from the kerb.

Skip knew the driver’s voice all too well: a foreigner’s, thick, deliberate, as if it issued from a mouth filled with mush. Damn: despite the dark, she should have known this car. It swung around a corner.

‘You’re taking risks,’ said Mr Novak.

‘Maybe,’ said the passenger. ‘They’ll find me out in time.’

‘You sound as if you want them to. And they will. All you have to do is carry on as you are, wandering the streets at midnight, pressing your nose against windows, sitting with your old friend in the town hall looking at pictures from the filing cabinets. What would you say you wanted?’

‘You hid in a barn on the border, didn’t you? Night after night before you could cross. But you crossed in the end. You laughed once, Vlad, when I said I envied you. But I did. There’s why.’

‘Don’t.’ Mr Novak sighed. ‘I had to do it and I did. What does Aldous Huxley say? Adventures are only exciting at second hand. Lived through, they’re just a slice of life like the rest.’

Skip, at that moment, was sure this was false. But Mr Novak always sounded dismissive when he talked about his past, as if Czechoslovakia and his youth and his escape were part of a world that had grown unreal to him.

The passenger spoke again. His accent was odd too: British, like an RAF pilot’s in a film, yet with Australian undertones. He was saying something about Huxley. ‘Deirdre was mad for him, our last year at the high.’

‘You read him for her? So did I.’

The two men laughed, but their laughter was brief, even sad. A window juddered above the back seat.

‘There was an intruder,’ said Mr Novak. ‘In the council offices.’

‘Burglar?’ The passenger didn’t sound particularly interested; the world, he seemed to imply, was full of crime. Only to be expected. ‘I burgled Mayor Gull’s office once. Did you know that?’