Volcano Street

  Volcano Street

  Also by David Rain

  The Heat of the Sun

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © David Rain, 2015

  The moral right of David Rain to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 207 2

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 406 8

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  For those who stayed in the Happy Valley

  When real things are so wonderful,

  what is the point of pretending?

  E. M. FORSTER

  The fiction of one’s life is the truth.

  VINCENT PRICE

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Author’s note

  Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  My fault. All my fault.

  The judgement sounded in Skip’s head. All the way from Adelaide she had heard it, in the rattling windows, in the snores from other seats, in the tyres as they juddered over the country highway. She told herself it wasn’t true, but still it came in the swish of passing vehicles: that station wagon, chalky with dust, with surfboards lashed to the roof; that farmer’s truck, tight-packed with sheep, that thundered by and wafted back its sharp, shitty stench, filling the Greyhound for desperate minutes.

  Marlo, with her book, had moved across the aisle. How placid she looked, how self-contained: hairband like a halo, neat across her crown; elbow crooked against the chrome window frame, propping up the hand that shaded her eyes.

  Skip picked up her comic. Lex Luthor held Metropolis to ransom, threatening to destroy it with a death ray aimed from space. Never mind, Superman would sort it out. She wished she were Superman. Not Supergirl, in that dinky little skirt. Skip didn’t just want to be super, she wanted to be a man. If she were a man, she would be blamed for nothing.

  She rested her head against the window. September: the beginning of spring. The afternoon sun was pale and lemony. Monterey pines in neat plantations had replaced the flat paddocks, barbed-wire fences and scattered grey gum trees that had reeled by for hours. Abundant moist undergrowth seethed between the trees, testament to the cool green winter just gone.

  Skip loped across the aisle, dropped her head into her sister’s lap, and looked up, wide-eyed. ‘Cattus cattus?’ Their old joke (If a rat’s rattus rattus, is a cat cattus cattus?) had become a greeting. Usually Marlo laughed; today she sighed impatiently and shifted her book.

  ‘I’m starving!’ Skip sprang up. ‘How much longer?’

  ‘You’ve had lunch.’

  ‘Soggy sandwiches from a BP roadhouse!’

  ‘Wolfed them down, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m a growing boy.’

  The Wells sisters – half-sisters, really – might not have been related at all. Skip, small for her age, was a freckled tomboy with a head of coarse bright straw, cropped as if with pinking shears; Marlo, almost a woman and womanly with it, was porcelain pale, with hair that crested her shoulders in rich dark waves. Today Skip wore a nautical sweater, once white, over a plaid shirt, faded jeans with threadbare knees, and sneakers that were falling apart. Marlo’s white blouse, blue blazer, grey skirt and shiny black lace-ups could have been her uniform from Adelaide Ladies’ College, minus cap, tie and tie pin.

  ‘Marlo …’ Do you blame me? Skip almost said, but gestured instead to the book in Marlo’s lap and asked what Germaine was on about now.

  ‘Cunt hatred.’ Marlo did not drop her voice.

  On the open pages Skip picked out a few words: sex, prostitute, sex, cunt, fuck, cunt. She liked Germaine. Germaine was radical: she pissed people off.

  Sunlight flickered greenly through the pines. Sometimes it was dull to have a serious sister. Skip supposed she should shut up, but instead dug Marlo in the ribs and made a joke about the pig-faced lady who had left the coach at the last stop. Was she hurrying home on her trotters? Was she oinking?

  ‘In a pig’s ear,’ said Marlo, and Skip, delighted, twisted around, hitched her chin over the seat’s high vinyl back, and surveyed the other passengers. They were few: a fat man with a short back and sides who read the Sunday Mail with an affronted air; a thin lady in a chamberpot hat; two carrot-headed little boys who had torn up and down the aisle until the driver roared at them to bloody well cut it out. A soldier in a slouch hat, young and spotty, gazed out the window. Just back from Nam? Fascist. Skip pictured him, in grainy black and white, sloshing through a swamp. Cradled in his arms was a machine gun, and his eyes darted suspiciously through steamy haze. Skip knew all about fascists. When they got to San Fran, Karen Jane said, they’d march against the war. Everyone in San Fran was radical and marched against the war.

  The chamberpot lady looked at Skip and frowned. Skip ducked beneath the seatback. ‘That lady looks snoogish.’

  ‘You look snoogish,’ Marlo said.

  ‘What’s her name? I’ll bet it’s Miss Sweetapple.’

  ‘What Sweetapple?’

  ‘Rhonda. Can you do better?’

  Marlo turned a page. ‘Read your comic.’

  Loneliness expanded in Skip’s chest like a black balloon pressing behind her ribs, growing bigger with each breath she took. Her comic lay on the seat across the aisle. Caper, long ago, had given her a Superman comic from America. It was better than Australian ones: colour all through, not just on the cover, and the paper had an exciting foreign smell. Superman, Batman, Justice League: in the local reprints the heroes were the same, but Skip thought of them as the Australian versions, and not so good by half.

  ‘What about school?’ she said to Marlo.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s Sunday. We’ll be starting tomorrow, won’t we? I suppose you can’t mix with first years. You’ll ignore me.’ This, Skip knew, was dangerous ground. For Marlo, the worst aspect of their exile was giving up her scholarship to Adelaide Ladies’ College. ‘But you’ll look my way, won’t you, when no one else can see? Exchange glances. Roll your eyes.’

  Wearily, Marlo shut The Female Eunuch. ‘You realise I’ve exams in a couple of months? My whole future depends on this.’ She had said so before, and Skip wondered:
Whole future? What was a whole future? She could imagine next week. She could imagine next month. But a whole future?

  ‘You’ll be all right, Marlo. What do you need with that snoogish college? You’ll sail through those exams. You’ll be the smartest girl in Crater Lakes High.’

  Marlo’s laugh was bitter. ‘Crater Lakes High!’

  The approach to Crater Lakes discloses nothing remarkable. The highway neither curves around the several collapsed calderas, brimming with water, which give the town its name, nor affords much view of the remaining dead volcano that rises above them to no notable height. No dramatic ascent, no twisting and turning, signals that the town is near; the road sweeps on, flat and straight, as if impatient to cross the border into Victoria, leaving dull South Australia behind.

  The town comes like this: abruptly, regimented grids of trees, awaiting chainsaws row by row, give way to green flatlands; paddocks with sheep; paddocks with horses; a long, rusted galvanised-iron shed; a homestead, set well back from the road; signs announcing the speed limit; signs touting business (LAKES MOTEL – YOUR HOME FROM HOME); a sign welcoming the visitor to the City of Crater Lakes, South Australia, twinned with Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and declaring the population (16,025 in the year this story happened); then service station, warehouse, car yard, supermarket, as the Princess Margaret Rose Highway turns for a mile or so into Volcano Street, the town’s main drag.

  The time had just gone five. The girls stood on the pavement. Ranged around them was all they owned: two smallish suitcases, one tartan, one leather-look; a Qantas bag; Marlo’s Olivetti Lettera 22 in its zippered case; a wicker shopping basket that had been Karen Jane’s before she decided it was too bourgeois.

  Anxiously, Marlo turned this way and that. The fat man with the short back and sides had waddled away around a corner, Sunday Mail tucked beneath one arm; Rhonda Sweetapple had climbed into a Ford Falcon next to a grey, defeated-looking husband. A bustling group, all freckled, all carrot-topped, surrounded the little boys. A smaller group had turned out for the soldier: a father guffawed, a mother sobbed, and a grinning brother cuffed the slouch hat from the young man’s head.

  From an alley beside a newsagent’s emerged an Aboriginal man dressed in dungarees. Silently, he began unloading freight from compartments under the coach – tea chests, cardboard boxes, parcels wrapped in string – while the driver stood by. Once he barked at the Aborigine; more than once he glanced at Marlo. Catching her eye, he winked at her, tongue making a castanet click. ‘Got someone meeting yous, have yous?’

  ‘Our Auntie Noreen,’ said Skip. ‘And Uncle Doug.’

  ‘Doug and Noreen Puce? Kazza’s kiddies! Should have known. Forgot yous was coming.’ The driver was a big man with shaggy grey hair and a seamed brown face, like a surfer grown old. His rolled-back sleeves exposed hairy forearms, burned almost black, and his belly ballooned over a chunky belt. A badge above his breast pocket declared his name: SANDY CAMPBELL. ‘Yous’ll be living with Doug and Noreen, then?’

  Marlo’s reply was reluctant. ‘Sort of. For a while.’

  Across the street, the carrot-tops had dispersed to a battered truck; large numbers of them, piled in the flatbed, caterwauled ‘You Are My Sunshine’ as the vehicle shuddered away with many a wheeze, clatter and bang.

  Skip scuffed the pavement with her sneaker. At several stops on their journey, Sandy Campbell had tried to talk to Marlo; Skip had headed him off each time. That was what Skip did. Boys, men, creeps of all kinds tried to crack on to Marlo, and Skip made sure they didn’t. That, at least, was the idea: Marlo needed protecting and Skip protected her. But she hadn’t done her job properly. If she had, they wouldn’t be in Crater Lakes now.

  Marlo murmured, ‘Shall we ask how far it is?’

  ‘Auntie Noreen’s place?’ Skip approached the driver. Smoke curled from a roll-up in his lips. She, or her question, seemed to amuse him, and he bent down to her height. Behind them, the Aborigine struggled with a tea chest, pushing it along the alley with much grunting and gasping.

  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.’