Volcano Street (27 page)

‘They’re not all like that. There’s Dad.’

‘And what does he do? He had ambition once, but he got trapped in Crater Lakes. Look at him: a clerk at the town hall. I suppose he makes out bills for council rates. Collects parking fines. Issues fishing permits. And the rest of the time he’s under Deirdre’s thumb. That’s no life for a man.’

Pavel looked out from the shade towards the sun. Reddish high walls cupped the bright pond like benevolent hands. His next words came to Marlo as if in a dream. At first, she could not believe he had spoken them at all. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be gone soon. Got me call-up papers, didn’t I? Last week.’

Slowly, horror rose like bile in her throat. ‘You can’t go.’

‘I have to.’ His tone was firm. ‘I can and will.’

She took a breath, then said, too calmly, ‘You can’t believe in this war.’

‘It’s what I have to do.’

‘And Barry?’ Stop, Marlo. Stop.

‘It was good enough for Baz. He did his bit.’

Her next words were a whisper. ‘You’re stupid!’

‘Don’t call me that.’ Pavel sprang up, spilling claret over the rug. Trees, thick and tangled, stretched away into green shadows. Jutting above the water, rockily defiant, was the Jump. He pounded up the scrubby track.

‘Pavel!’ Why call? Why, when you made him go?

His dive was clumsy, the splash cracking sharply as a stone against glass. Birds rose raucously into dazzling azure.

Marlo’s tears were bitter. I’m a bitch, a crazy bitch.

Silence gathered again. And gathered. Unsteadily, she stood and moved to the edge of the pond. Brightness everywhere. Gold on green. The sky above, an infinity. Oh, Pavel! Stop playing this game. She couldn’t say it aloud.

She didn’t know why she followed him to the Jump. On the path she stumbled; grazed her shin as she clambered over boulders; pushed back coarse greyish sprays of leaves until she stood, swaying, on the brittle tongue of rock, taking in the pond from on high. See that line round the red walls? Summer a-coming. Level’s gone down.

‘Pavel?’ Now she spoke aloud; sky and rock and water spiralled in her gaze as vertigo claimed her. Terrified, she stepped back. The world shuddered, scraping on its axis. She said Pavel’s name again, cried it out this time. Mockingly, her cries rebounded from the rocks.

In that moment a stranger erupted from the trees. Marlo barely had time to see the tall sinewy man, casting off his shirt and throwing it behind him, before he crashed into the pond from the shore below. He might have been a vision: for a moment there, then gone. Only the churning water told her he was real.

Her heart was a tympani booming in her ears. She clutched her arms about her and shivered, consumed by love and fear as the stranger broke the surface, floundering with Pavel back to shore.
As her lover lay on his back, so far away, his breathing laboured, all she could do was watch, until at last he rose on his elbows, turned on his side, and spluttered water.

The stranger looked up at Marlo and smiled: a large man, a handsome man. His age was hard to tell. Heroes in old films looked that way: dark hair, square jaw, torso tight but pale, almost ghostly beside Pavel’s brown skin.

‘We were out walking and heard him dive. Dangerous, at this time of year.’ The voice behind Marlo was kindly, and one she knew well.

Turning, she almost lost her footing, but a grip steadied her, and drew her away from the edge of the Jump. Dazedly, she let herself be embraced. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said and pulled away.

‘Let’s go up to the house. Your sister’s there,’ Mr Novak said.

That was the beginning of the family of the heart.

There were seven of them at the old Dansie house: Mr Novak, who had long known the house’s secret; Skip and Honza, Marlo and Pavel, outcasts of a kind who had found a place to go; and the two who had lived there all along. Black Jack, or Jack, was not retarded at all, and the man Skip had thought of as Vincent Price was no monster, madman or murderer.

When she first arrived, Roger Dansie led her down a corridor, waved a pale wrist and said, ‘This room can be yours.’ She marvelled, as if reality had given way to a story she longed to hear. The rooms with their wormy panelling, their shabby curtains and hangings, their watchful ancient portraits, had lost their original glamour long ago, yet magic lingered in every one. Jack, with Mr Novak, had tried over recent years to fix up the place, stripping wallpaper, painting, cleaning windows; with new inhabitants to help, these efforts were redoubled. Pavel was often to be seen up a ladder, scraper in hand, in a room littered with papery leaves, or on hands and knees, replacing rotted floorboards. Somehow, though, little really changed. A few
small rooms were papered brightly, fresh paint mingled with the smells of mould, but it seemed to Skip that the shabbiness was forever creeping back, reversing any changes as soon as they had been made. She didn’t mind.

Life at the old Dansie house during that heady strange November was like nothing she had experienced before. ‘Know what a commune is?’ Marlo asked her one day. They sat on the veranda, looking towards the outbuildings. ‘That’s what we’ve got here.’ Skip stroked the big orange cat she called Mowser. Roger Dansie called him Purcell. ‘We’re a family,’ said Marlo. ‘All of us.’

In the evenings, Mr Novak cooked elaborate meals on the huge wood-fired range; nights were filled with laughter, wine (Skip, hating the taste, had lemonade instead), and the din of an old piano. Roger Dansie sang in a creamy tenor; Mr Novak played. Their songs were old, ballads from before time began, but to Skip the tunes did not seem corny as they did in the hands of Bert Noblet’s Rhythm Stompers. Roger crooned ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, and she thought: That’s tonight.

Their world was not enclosed. Every day Marlo and Pavel went to work at Puce Hardware, and Mr Novak to the town hall. Skip and Honza were still in school, but all that happened there – the bickering, the fights, the interminable lessons – seemed trivial when they knew that once the last bell rang they would disappear to their haunted house. Since the Show, they had lived in a world apart. After Lummo’s humiliation, his gang had broken up. It might never have existed. Skip and Honza, to their amazement, were free.

Marlo, meanwhile, had defeated Auntie Noreen. That first Sunday evening, after Roger had saved him from the pond, Pavel drove the girls and his brother back to Puce’s Bend to collect their things. While the boys repaired to the Novak house, Marlo, with Skip hovering, faced their aunt in her living room. Doug Puce, with the blank doleful face of a man responsible for nothing, who has never
been responsible, had shown them in before retreating to his shed.

Auntie Noreen languished in darkness but for the flicker of the television screen. Wrappers littered the sofa and the carpet around it: Twisties, Mars Bars, Smith’s Crisps; on a plate on the tea table lay a solitary lamington, its survival a small miracle. The room stank of sweat and stale air.

‘You can’t take Helen.’ Auntie Noreen almost sobbed. ‘Not Helen.’

Marlo was magnificent. ‘Scandal travels quickly in a small town. We know what you’ve done. And if you don’t want the world to know about you and a certain coach driver, you won’t make a fuss.’

Auntie Noreen rallied, but feebly. Her voice was weak and her little eyes darted about her in fear. On the mantelpiece, Barry Puce still smiled politely in the killer’s uniform that had killed him in the end.

‘Oh, Marlene! You should be in the nuthouse like your mother. She’s never coming back – you know that, Helen? I’ve talked to them doctors! No more crazy letters, I told them. It’s not fair, upsetting them poor kiddies. There’s no hope this time, they told me. She’s gone right off the deep end. Now, Helen, your sister’s going the same way. What rubbish has she been filling your head with? I suppose she’s taking you to America too.’

‘I’m taking her away from here,’ said Marlo.

‘And last night? Both of yous was out all night! I was frantic. Did yous even think about that?’

They had not. The television blared out a talent-quest diva’s murderous assault on ‘Try a Little Kindness’ as Auntie Noreen grabbed the last lamington and stuffed it into her mouth. When she spoke again, cake crumbs spilling down her smelly muu-muu, she was almost crying.

‘Out of my sight, Marlene,’ she said. ‘Go. You’re old enough to leave school. Old enough to be a slut like your mother. Old enough to throw yourself at that poofter schoolteacher and God knows who
else. I found them books in your room – Greer Garson, with filth on every page! Go to hell, Marlene, and see if I care. But you’re not taking Baby Helen. I won’t let you.’

‘I’m taking her. You can’t do a thing.’

‘I loved your mum, would yous believe that? Loved her like she was me own daughter, not me little sis.’ Tears sprang to Auntie Noreen’s eyes. She snuffled loudly. ‘Lovely, Kazza was, when she was Baby Helen’s age. But Baby Helen won’t end up like her. You’re too far gone already, Marlene. I wash me hands of you. But not Baby Helen.’

Marlo stared back, unmoved. Uselessly, Auntie Noreen called for Uncle Doug. He didn’t come.

‘You won’t do this, Marlene.’ Sobbing freely now, Auntie Noreen sank into the sofa cushions. ‘You won’t. I’ll find out where you’ve took her. I’ll get Marky Bonner on you. You’re crazy, every bit as crazy as your bloody bitch of a mum. You should be locked up – locked up, you hear?’

From the doorway, Skip looked back at their aunt and felt sorry for her. If only she could comfort her! We feel sympathy for evildoers, Skip realised, only when they are broken – and Noreen Puce, with her dead son, her foetid living room, her food, her fat, her mad sister, her loveless husband skulking in his shed, had been broken utterly. Marlo, impatient, pulled Skip away.

Applause thundered from the television: time for the scoring.

Skip was awed by the change in her sister.

‘Are you doing what Germaine would do?’ she asked her one evening as they walked in the woods behind the old Dansie house. Nearly a week had passed since they left Auntie Noreen’s and nothing had happened: no Uncle Doug come to drive them home, no Marky Bonner brandishing a warrant. Auntie Noreen must have given up. They were free.

‘There’s Pav,’ Marlo said. ‘And my exams have gone to hell.’

Skip ventured, ‘What’s it like with Pav?’

‘What’s what like?’ Marlo sounded amused, not embarrassed. That afternoon she had vanished with Pavel for a long drive in the country. Skip wanted to ask if they were ‘doing it’ but didn’t dare. Should she envy her sister? She wasn’t sure she did. Marlo and Pavel were different – they had to be – from Auntie Noreen and Sandy Campbell. But it was confusing. Honza, treading water one day in Dansie’s Pond, had gestured to the bank where the lovers lay sunbathing and said, grinning, ‘You and me next?’ Skip squealed and ducked him viciously.

Marlo plucked pine needles. ‘It’s only for a while.’

Skip, puzzled, asked her what she meant, but Marlo would say no more. Baskerville chased Mowser through the gathering dark. Skip called the dog. As much as she admired her newly reckless sister, often she missed Marlo as she used to be. The little room they had shared in Glenelg. Saturdays at the Ozone. Walks on the beach, tossing stones into the waves. The days when they were younger, years younger.

For all their splendid days and nights at the old Dansie house, life was far from perfect for the family of the heart. Uncle Doug seemed not to mind what his employees got up to when they were not at work, but others minded very much. Vicious looks and whispers followed Marlo, Pavel, and all the members of the commune whenever they passed down Volcano Street. Mr Novak’s masters at the town hall gave him notice. There were darker threats, too. One night a gang surrounded the house, howling and shrieking; they tried to break in, then rained rocks on the roof. Skip and Honza were sure they were kids from school, but in the dark they could see no faces. Pavel, charging around to scare the gang off, found Jack sprawled in the drive; a gash bled above his left eye, and he limped when Skip helped him stand.

‘Who did it?’ she demanded, ready to vow revenge.

‘Oh, love!’ the old man said and laughed. ‘The whole town.’

Sometimes Skip came upon Roger Dansie standing motionless at a window. He would look down at her as if surprised she was there, this small strange girl who had appeared in his house. There was something stricken about him, but Skip never thought him broken like Auntie Noreen; flashes of life, bright enough to burn, were evident when he was singing, when he was swimming, when he ran across the yard, pursuing the cat he had called Purcell.

One day Skip asked Mr Novak, ‘Will he hide out here for ever?’

Mr Novak, who had not been back to his wife’s house since the Show Ball, was stirring a strong-smelling sauce. Solemnly he laid down his wooden spoon. ‘I was working late at the town hall one night when I found Roger haunting the midnight streets. I suppose that was three or four years ago now. He fled from me, but I was patient. Months later I spied him again; this time Jack was driving him away in the Harley-Davidson sidecar. After that, of course, I knew the truth. Roger was frightened when I first confronted him. He thought I wanted to expose him. I would never do that, but I asked him your question, Skip. He says it’s a matter of time. He wants to reveal himself to Crater Lakes again. More than once he’s said it’s time to come out of the shadows. I’ve walked the streets at night, he says; soon, I’ll walk in the day. Oh, it’s not so strange as you might think,’ Mr Novak added, as if Skip had spoken. ‘Poor Roger! He was so happy in this town as a boy. And so unhappy after he went away.’

Late afternoon brightness glinted on the wood, black metal and cracked white tiles of the big colonial kitchen. Skip, daring at last, said, ‘What did he do? Tell me the truth, Mr Novak. Please.’

The big balding man had picked up his knife; he laid it down again, evidently moved, and gripped the benchtop. ‘When I arrived in the Lakes,’ he said, his voice distant, ‘I worked as a gardener. Every Saturday I went to Mayor Gull’s house at Puce’s Bend. The house was different then, before Deirdre had it rebuilt: old and dark.
But it’s where I met Roger. He was kind to me, the only person in the Lakes who was. You should have seen him then! So friendly. So handsome. Always joking, eyes shining. He asked me about Prague; he even knew where it was. I’d been unwell and he helped me in my garden work. One day in Volcano Street, a gang of high school boys surrounded me, calling me names. I was so thin back then they could have knocked me down with a finger. And they did. Roger swept down on his Harley –’