Volcano Street Page 2

  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 i
t 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.’

  The last remark referred to the television, where Gordon MacRae, firm-jawed with gleaming dark hair, sang to Doris Day in a rowboat on a lake. For a few bars Auntie Noreen sang along, quite tunefully, then said that in younger years she had fancied she looked a little like Doris. ‘Baby Helen does too, I reckon. Blonde, girl-next-door type. But Marlene’s the beauty.’

  ‘It’s Marlo,’ Skip said coldly. ‘And I’m Skip.’

  ‘Marlo? Don’t like that. Marlene, that’s a lovely name, like Marlene Dietrich.’

  Mar-leen Deet-rich. Rhymes with bitch.

  ‘They reckon she’s had so many facelifts she can’t smile. Woman to woman, lovies: never go down that route. Me, I make do with Mother Nature’s gifts. The blokes always reckoned I had a shapely foot,’ Auntie Noreen added – and indeed the foot, in open-toed sandals, that she raised for their inspection was admirable in its contours. If it resembled Karen Jane’s, this was unsurprising; Noreen would have looked a lot like her sister, had her sister been blown up with a bicycle pump to the point just before she was about to burst.

  ‘Eat up, Marlene. Eat up, Helen,’ she urged. ‘Can’t let it go to waste, can we? There’s many a little blackie in Biafra would be glad of an Arnott’s Custard Cream.’

  Marlo applied jam to a scone with scholarly deliberation; shyly, then with increasing boldness, Skip moved in on the spread. She would have to be quick; their aunt, on her own, did enough to eat vicariously for the children of Biafra. Reaching across the tea table, plucking here a cream horn, there a vanilla slice, levering up a generous wedge of chocolate cake, Noreen Puce moved dexterously for a woman so huge. How high she heaped her plate! When there was no room for more, she sipped from her teacup, crooking a little finger, and took up her cake fork with a ladylike air.

  ‘So you work at the shop too, Aunt?’ Marlo asked.

  Their hostess seemed affronted at the idea, but explained, not impatiently, ‘I’m more in what you’d call a supervisory capacity, love. The day-to-day stuff, Dougie looks after that, but of course I has to keep an eye on him. I says to him, Don’t think you can pull any fast ones on old Noreen. I says, Your old man may have started that shop, but who did he leave it to? Old Noreen! Who kept that shop going through the war years when you was lazing round in Bongo-Bongo Land, eating mangoes? Old Noreen! Who’s understood its history? Old Noreen! Who’s cherished its legacy? Old Noreen! Stupid bugger, starting a servo in the back of beyond. Independence, he says! Be his own man! Old Noreen knew which side our bread was buttered. Established 1922: W. H. Puce (that’s Dougie’s dad, Willard Hartley Puce), for all your hardware needs.’

  Proudly, Old Noreen lifted her jowls, like a toad bobbing its head above the surface of a pond. ‘He was a visionary, Willard Hartley Puce. Before Willard Hartley Puce, where would you go in Crater Lakes for your hammer and nails, your fire tongs, your showerhead, your drill bit, your hardwood skirting board? One miserable general store, that’s where, with everything higgledy-piggledy like a mad woman’s undies: bolts of dirty fabric, sacks of chickenfeed, jars of pickled monkeys’ balls, old copies of The Bulletin and nothing you wanted ever in stock! Blokes laughed at Willard Hartley Puce. Said he was a dreamer. How could a one-horse town like Crater Lakes support a hardware emporium good as any on Collins Street, Melbourne? Pall Mall, London? Chomps-a-bloody-Lee-saze? But Willard Hartley Puce didn’t just see Crater Lakes as it was. He saw what it would become.’

  Tears filled Auntie Noreen’s eyes. Skip and Marlo struggled not to laugh, but their aunt was oblivious, assuaging her passion in fervent application to her plate. The finesse with which she wielded her fork was extraordinary; so too was the hummingbird speed with which each mouthful vanished.

  She was refilling her plate when she admonished Skip, ‘Eat up now, Helen love – try some of the cake.’

  ‘I’m Skip.’ There was an edge in Skip’s voice.

  ‘Skip! No sort of name for a girl.’

  ‘It’s my sort of name.’ Skip recalled bright afternoons on Caper’s boat, with Glenelg Beach far off, sunlight flashing on the water like scattered coins, fish thudding to the sloshing deck, and Caper, wanting her to see the latest, calling her in his Yank voice, ‘Skipper … Skip!’ That had been his name for her, and she had loved him for it; he had given her a captain’s cap and let her reel in lines. She gave him orders. ‘Make these lubbers walk the plank!’ she cried, jabbing a finger at seasick Marlo, at blissful stoned Karen Jane, and Caper saluted: ‘Aye, aye, Skip.’

  In the road, a large vehicle heaved to a halt. Through the scrim, Skip saw to her alarm a chassis with ridged silver lines below a sea-blue stripe. Painted above the stripe was a leaping greyhound.

  Auntie Noreen was saying, ‘I’m sure yous girls are going to love it here. Fresh country air, that’s what yous need.’ She inhaled theatrically, her ample chest swelling; Skip, who was breathing shallowly due to the occasional waft from the shit pit, studied her in wonder. ‘Look at yous,’ their aunt went on cheerily. ‘One of you’s pale as a ghost and the other a little starved sparrow …’ She arched towards the window. ‘Eh, what’s that bastard doing poking round here again?’

  The screen door banged. There was a commotion in the hall, masculine laughter and the tramp of heavy boots. ‘Good to see you, mate!’ and ‘Yair, couple of cold ones’ were two of the phrases the girls heard before Auntie Noreen rolled back her head and cawed, ‘Bugger, there goes me shit pit!’

  A grey shaggy head appeared around the door.

  ‘You, you old bludger!’ Auntie Noreen cried. ‘Didn’t I tell you never to darken me doors again?’

  The joke was met with a flash of yellow dentures and a wink for Marlo. ‘See yous settling in all right, love. Said yous would, eh?’ The grin alighted on Auntie Noreen, whose mountainous body wobbled with pleasure. ‘Saw that one casting spells on young Pav back at me coach stop, I did. He’ll be looking forward to seeing her in the shop tomorrow.’ He addressed Marlo again. ‘Be gentle with him, love. He’s a country boy, not used to your big-city ways!’

  Guffawing, Sandy Campbell vanished towards the kitchen. ‘Dougie, you bastard,’ he yelled, ‘where’s me beer?’

  ‘He’s a friend of yours – the coach driver?’ Skip said to her aunt.

  ‘Friend! Me old cobber Raelene, God rest her soul, was married to that bugger twenty-odd years. Things she told me, you wouldn’t believe! Stops out all hours, rolls home drunk, slaps her round the chops, then expects her to take it up the …’ But Auntie Noreen realised, perhaps, that she had gone too far. ‘Oh, it’s dreadful, the things we women endure! He’s a charmer, but any girlie who trusts him has only herself to blame. Don’t think he hasn’t come sniffing round me in his time,’ she added, with an air of horror. ‘I’m a married woman, I tells him. Dougie’s your best mate. You reckon that one cares?’

  There was nothing to be said to this, though Marlo, in a perfect world, might have quoted The Female Eunuch. From the kitchen came bellowings (Sandy Campbell’s), murmurs (Doug’s), clatterings, clumpings, and the clink-clink of bottles. Auntie Noreen, drawing up her huge round-shouldered form a little, smiled as if captured by a pleasant memory.

  ‘Aunt, what did he mean about tomorrow?’ Marlo ventured. ‘The shop – why should I be in the shop?’

  But Auntie Noreen had applied herself to the tea table again, hovering between the remaining cream horn and the remaining vanilla slice in an agony that was no agony at all, since, with the swiftness of a buzzard alighting on a carcass, she transferred both to her plate. For so prodigal a mouth, Auntie Noreen’s was surprisingly small, a puckering purplish circle that sooner or later made most people think of an anal sphincter. ‘Thought I’d put you in the spare room, Marlene,’ the sphincter was saying. ‘You’re oldest, after
all. Helen can go in the sleepout at the back.’

  ‘We’ve always had the same room.’ Skip thought sadly of the old house in Glenelg and their room above the garage. Caper’s flat, too small for them all, was far away down concrete steps and along a weedy path. She and Marlo had lived in a world of their own, one she never wanted to leave. On the walls Marlo hung foxed engravings, found in a junk shop on Jetty Road, of famous women writers: Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Skip loved lying in bed at night with Marlo close by. Beside the garage, a Norfolk pine creaked in the wind; from further off came the gentle hiss and splash of the sea.

  ‘Your sister needs her privacy,’ Auntie Noreen was saying. ‘She’s growing up. I’ll bet she thinks about nothing but boys and make-up, eh, Helen? I suppose she’s got crushes on all the hit-parade stars. Does she drive you mad, mooning over them all day? Who’s her favourite – Johnny Farnham?’

  ‘We hate Johnny Farnham,’ Skip snapped.

  ‘Don’t reckon your sister does,’ leered Auntie Noreen, and took an oozing bite of cream horn. ‘Yairs, I know yous girls are going to love it here,’ she carried on. ‘After all, it’s your home now.’

  ‘Only for a few weeks,’ said Skip.

  ‘Weeks? I shouldn’t think so. I admit it’s a stretch for me, taking on yous girls. Not as young as I used to be. And it’s not as if I don’t have enough to worry about with me poor boy away, doing his bit for Queen and Country.’ Auntie Noreen gazed fondly at the mantelpiece, from where the young soldier stared back at her with a dutiful air.

  ‘Your son?’ said Skip. ‘You’ve a son?’

  ‘What, your mother never even told you that? That’s your cousin Barry – Barry Puce!’

  ‘He’s in Vietnam?’ said Marlo.

  ‘Aren’t you angry they sent him away?’ Skip asked.

  ‘Why should I be angry?’

  ‘They sent him to die in an unjust war.’

  Auntie Noreen blinked at her niece. Colour rose in her bloated face. ‘Now listen here, missy, I’m not having commie talk in my house. My Dougie did his bit in the last show – five years slogging through the jungle, gooks to the right of him, gooks to the left – and now it’s Baz’s turn. Make a man of him, it will.’