Volcano Street Read online

  Honza was sitting just behind her, on the long bench at the back. Boys tussled for places, squashing together, punching each other in biceps and thighs, every so often forcing one of their number to the floor. ‘Quiet back there!’ and ‘Calm down, yous brats!’ the driver lady called, but the boys were too busy yelling, ‘You’ll go down, mate!’ and ‘Fight! Fight!’ to listen.

  The high was huge. Skip’s yellow bus was one of many that disgorged noisy passengers into a broad asphalted car park; pupils evidently came here from all over the district. The main building, set back behind wide lawns, was an imposing two-storey edifice, its many-windowed wings pinned together by a boxy central rectangle with a wide, arched entrance.

  On the bus, the driver had instructed Skip to present herself at ‘the office’. Making her way to the building, she was conscious of stares turned in her direction. Inside, at a counter in a dim corridor with linoleum on the floor, a birdlike lady in twin rows of pearls hovered over a card index, flicking with red talons, and chirped, ‘Helen Puce, isn’t it – Noreen’s little girl?’

  ‘Wells. I’m not related to Auntie Noreen.’

  ‘Your timetable.’ Unconcerned, the lady handed her a mauve sheet that smelled of methylated spirits. A talon pointed. ‘That’s your home group. Here’s your classes for the week, and all the rooms. Don’t suppose you brought your phys ed gear? Or your apron for home ec?’

  Skip’s home group met in one of the science labs, a long room with fixed, high benches, stools instead of chairs, and posters ranged around the walls depicting the solar system, a cross-sectioned volcano, and human bodies variously eviscerated, flayed or X-rayed. Skip hauled herself onto a free stool just as a balding young man in a lab coat rose from the front desk, clapped his hands for silence, and bade the class good morning.

  ‘Good mor-ning Mis-ter Some-thing-or-other.’

  Window monitors used long poles to pull down transoms from the tops of high windows; board monitors swept blackboards with windscreen-wiper arms; lunch monitors distributed brown paper bags on which pupils were required to record their lunch orders.

  Four boys barged in late, laughing: a piggy-faced fat fellow with blazing red curls; a swarthy Greek type with a wispy dark moustache; a hatchet-faced blond boy, gangly as a marionette; and Honza Novak, who shambled after them. Skip’s heart sank. She smoothed her timetable, which already resembled a battered treasure map. First years had no choices, no options; she would be with Honza Novak all day, every day, as they traipsed from class to class, separating only into boys’ and girls’ groups for craft (woodwork for boys, home ec for girls) and phys ed.

  Mr Something-or-other hushed the boys angrily. Then, after further demands for quiet, he launched into a roll call.

  Adamson, Janine? Present.

  Baker, Nathan? Present.

  Bunny, Wayne? Where’s Wayne Bunny? Wayne Bunny could not be found.

  The roll resumed. Cunliffe, Kylie?

  ‘Cunt lips,’ came a boy’s whisper from the next bench, followed by a wail from (presumably) Kylie Cunliffe, a well-developed girl for her age, who beat the whisperer – Honza’s piggy friend – savagely about the temples with a ruler until Mr Something-or-other restored order. Whether he had heard what the boy said, Skip could not be sure.

  An elbow nudged her. ‘Happens every day,’ said the girl beside her, a dainty creature with blonde ringlets, icy eyes, and skin so pale it was almost translucent. ‘You’re new,’ she added accusingly, and Skip could not deny it.

  Fidler, Jason.

  Gruber, Kevin.

  Guppy, Joanne.

  The piggy boy, with a cry of ‘Yo!’ – which brought him another reprimand – answered to Lumsden, Brenton.

  ‘Lum’s Den!’ said the girl beside Skip. ‘What sort of animal is a lum, do you think?’ When Mr Something-or-other called ‘Sutton, Lucy’, the girl responded proudly, back straight, hands folded neatly on the scored bench.

  Skip started as a monitor slapped a lunch bag on top of her timetable. NAME, the bag demanded, then HOME GROUP, followed by check boxes for PIE, PASTIE (extra boxes permitted W/SAUCE), CHIKO ROLL, and SANDWICH: CHEESE, HAM, PICKLE. Prices were printed beside each item: 8c, 10c, 12c.

  She was scrabbling for a pen when she realised she had no money. A two-dollar note in the pocket of her jeans had perished in the shit pit; Auntie Noreen had given her no more. She pushed the bag away. ‘I never eat lunch,’ she told Lucy Sutton, and regretted it at once. Now she would never be able to have lunch at school.

  Mr Something-or-other had reached the end of his list (Wigley, Gary; Wilkinson, Leonie) and passed to other matters – bike sheds, a sports day – before he realised what he had forgotten. ‘And don’t we have a new girl in class today?’ He shuffled papers. ‘Helen Wells, where’s Helen Wells?’

  Helen Wells raised her hand and declared with attempted casualness that everybody called her Skip. Faces swivelled towards her. ‘Eh, Skip!’ cried Brenton Lumsden, and clicked his tongue, while the lean boy, the Greek boy and Honza Novak brought their heads close to his, and crooned, like a barbershop quartet, the theme tune to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

  ‘Now you’ve done it,’ said Lucy Sutton.

  The hooter sounded for the day’s first class. Skip looked at her timetable: Maths – Central 12. She hated maths, and this was a double lesson. Glumly, to the accompaniment of Skippy mouth-clickings (did kangaroos really make a noise like that?), she followed the others to a hot upstairs room where a turbanned Indian fellow tried and failed to teach long division in a chaos of catcalls, guffaws and paper jets. To most of the class, but especially to Brenton Lumsden, everything the Indian said was hilarious. His name, Skip gathered, was Mr Singh, but the Lumsden gang addressed him as ‘Harry’, shooting hands skywards and crying, ‘Harry! Harry!’ with mock eagerness each time he asked a question.

  ‘His first name’s Harinder,’ explained Lucy Sutton, who sat with Skip and three other girls around a table topped with white vinyl. ‘They call him Harry the Hindu. Or sometimes Harry Krishna.’

  This was not his only name. Every time Mr Singh turned to the blackboard, chants of ‘O Buddha-Buddha … O Buddha-Buddha’ broke out around the room. Kylie Cunliffe led the way, slipping to her fat knees and salaaming.

  Lucy Sutton spent most of the lesson drawing hearts and arrows on the back of her folder, and whispering and giggling with the three other girls, a pair of spotty brunettes and a redhead whose large green eyes gave her a look of perpetual surprise.

  With an imperative air, one of the brunettes leaned towards Skip. ‘Do you like Johnny Farnham?’ It seemed there was no choice.

  Much discussion, much glancing and pointing, centred on the Lum’s Den, Brenton Lumsden’s gang. Soon Skip knew them all. The hatchet-faced boy was Shaun Kenny; the Greek one, Andreas Haskas, aka Greaso. With Honza Novak they surrounded Lummo in an admiring arc, taking their cues from him in everything, ever eager to do his bidding. Brenton Lumsden was the king of their class, and no doubt of their year, too. Perhaps of the whole school. Of the whole town. She wished she were back in Glenelg.

  Dealing with recess was easy, or so Skip had decided at her last school after Marlo left. Rule one: walk. Walk round and round purposefully as if heading somewhere. Never linger. Rule two: keep to crowded parts of the yard, close to buildings, entrances, shelter sheds and playing fields. Rule three (this was paramount): no toilets. School toilets are places of danger, torment, humiliation and shame. In a sane world, schools would be constructed without toilets. Rule four: hold in view, but under no circumstances approach, teachers on yard duty. In a yard full of snot-nosed brats, you need teachers around, but never risk being made to pick up litter or run messages. And never be seen as an object of pity. A firm stride, that’s what’s needed: head forward, eyes sliding quickly away from any gaze.

  Her first recess went well: nobody spoke to her; she spoke to nobody; she kept well away from the Lum’s Den and maintained a steady, rapid pace for twenty minutes. Her circui
t was soon established: all the way around Central and the asphalt yard behind it; around the art block; around the gym; past the tinny, echoing shelter shed; down the path towards the outlying portables, but only as far as the first row; there she veered sharply as if remembering something, and tracked back along the edge of the oval, watching out for flying footballs.

  The next lesson was English, and the teacher was late. Trying to avoid Lucy Sutton’s table, Skip instead found herself sitting next to Kylie Cunliffe. Just behind them were the Lum’s Den. Fearlessly, Kylie turned to the boys. Sitting astride her chair, she plumped her chin onto crossed arms and demanded of Honza, as if it were the most ordinary question, ‘Would you bum off Brooker for an apple?’

  The boy blinked. ‘No.’

  ‘Would you bum off Brooker for an orange?’

  ‘No.’ He grinned foolishly.

  ‘Would you bum off Brooker for a banana?’ And so on through the greengrocer’s shop. Honza always said no, until finally, apparently beaten down by these denials, Kylie cried, ‘I give up! What would you bum off Brooker for?’

  The reply came explosively: ‘Nothing!’ – at which she leaped up in triumph, big breasts wobbling like twin jellies, and Honza sank back, abashed, while his three mates cuffed him about the head and whooped, ‘Poofter! He’d bum off Brooker for nothing!’

  A shout rang out, ‘Shut up, cretins!’

  Silence fell suddenly.

  Skip recognised Mr Brooker. The tall young man had exchanged the purple suit of the Schubertiade for jeans, a denim jacket and tie-dyed top. Around his neck and wrists he wore beads, and his thick dark hair swooped down from his forehead in sculptural waves. In one hand he clutched a sheaf of papers, which he flapped frequently, like a fan, as he paraded before his pupils, discoursing in detail on their imbecility, illiteracy, and incapacity for all but the most degraded pleasures.

  The reason for this, Skip picked up, was the compositions Mr Brooker had just marked, in which not one pupil (not one!) had demonstrated more than the most rudimentary understanding of some mouldy old sonnet. Imperiously he swept between tables, flinging at the hapless authors the crumpled pieces of work on which he had scribbled copiously in red.

  Kylie watched him, dreamy-eyed. ‘I don’t reckon he’s really a poofter, do you?’ she whispered to Skip.

  Finally, like a wind-up toy running down, Mr Brooker lost momentum. He couldn’t be bothered with them today, he declared. They would spend the lesson reading aloud. There were groans.

  Skip, who had no book, had to look on with Kylie. Mr Brooker slung his long frame into a chair at the front, jutted out his legs, tilted back the chair as if deliberately to expose his lumpy crotch (Skip saw Kylie’s interest quicken), crossed his hands behind his head, and, with exquisite languor, directed first one, then another pupil to read. One boy stuttered; one girl stumbled over words with more than two syllables; Kylie never turned the pages on time. Skip was soon bored, and barely listened as the resentful monotone of Andreas Haskas trundled out:

  ‘Say – what is dead cats good for, Huck?’

  ‘Good for? Cure warts with.’

  ‘No! Is that so? I know something that’s better.’

  ‘I bet you don’t. What is it?’

  ‘Why, spunk-water …’

  The uproar was immediate. Kylie gaped at Skip. Mr Brooker, who seemed to have fallen asleep, started upright, and was shouting half-heartedly when crackling erupted from a loudspeaker overhead and a prissy secretarial voice instructed Honza Novak to report to the headmaster’s office.

  Honza looked bewildered, and not until Mr Brooker cried, ‘Cretin! What are you waiting for?’ did the boy leave the room at last. In the doorway, he jabbed fuck-sign fingers in Skip’s direction, and she remembered the driver lady, who must really have reported him.

  When he returned, his face was flushed and he limped; slipping gingerly back into his seat, he whispered intently as his mates leaned towards him.

  ‘But what did he do?’ Kylie wondered, and Skip, to her disgust, heard admiration in the girl’s voice.

  The Lum’s Den emerged from their huddle and turned, all of them, to look at Skip. Brenton Lumsden pointed at her, fingers poised like a pistol that he pretended to fire, mimicking the sound from spitty lips.

  Lunchtime.

  Skip trudged back to home group. The monitors, let out early from the last lesson, were ready with the plastic crate known as the lunch basket. One by one they read out names from the brown paper bags that were now plump, splotched with grease, and reddish and soggy if a check had been placed in the box marked W/SAUCE. Some bags the monitors pitched above the crowd like footballs; some were batted through the air by many hands, while hapless owners struggled to claim them. Within moments, all around the grounds – on lawns, under trees, in the shelter shed, up and down the Central steps – pupils clustered with their pies, pasties and Chiko Rolls; later, they would jostle at the canteen window for Mars Bars, Cherry Ripes, Smith’s Crisps, Twisties, Kitchener buns, Amscol icy poles. Coins would clink into the Coke machine; clunk into the silver tray would fall Cokes, Fantas, Leeds in sleek returnable bottles.

  Skip wanted to run away and hide. To have no lunch was bad enough. To have others realise it would be worse. Peeling off from the others, her destination lay behind the shelter shed: a last, low outpost of school buildings before the oval stretched away to a distant chain-link fence. She had glimpsed the place at recess, a colony of drably functional outbuildings: a gardener’s hut made of green timber; a galvanised-iron shed; and a low limestone wall that curtained off the incinerator and three huge silver bins. She glanced behind her. Nobody was watching. She slipped into the two-foot gap between the incinerator and the shelter-shed wall. The green hut, flush against silver metal, blocked the passage at the other end, but halfway down the fence a space opened out where the limestone curtain ended. Incinerator smells caught in her throat, a bitter ashy dampness. Stray planks, lengths of piping, and bricks in teetering piles cluttered the passage. She leaned against the shelter shed, hearing the hubbub through the wall.

  Then came different voices, closer, harsher: ‘You’re weak, Novak!’ ‘Am not!’ ‘Yair, wanna prove it?’ They came from around the limestone corner.

  Skip groaned silently. She had walked into the Lum’s Den.

  Retreating, she blundered into a pile of bricks, which clanged against the pipes with the sudden startling heft of a church organ. She fell forward, grazing her palms, and staggered upright as a hand tapped her shoulder.

  ‘Well, well. So the mountain comes to Mohammed. Or is it the other way round? Fucked if I know.’

  Skip drew in her breath. She turned. Brenton Lumsden had a fag in one hand and in the other a pastie, half out of its bag. Sauce smeared his lower lip and his tight brown pullover. Skip’s eyes darted up and down the passage. At the other end stood Shaun Kenny, sneering; Andreas Haskas appeared behind him. Next to Brenton Lumsden stood Honza Novak.

  The fat boy devoured the last of his pastie, balled up the bag and flung it to the ground. He licked his fingers. ‘See here,’ he said after a moment, ‘you got our mate into trouble, you did. Why’d you do that, Skippy?’

  Skip, pretending a boldness she didn’t feel, started forward as if to push her way past, but Brenton Lumsden set plump hands on his hips like Henry VIII and stood his ground. ‘We don’t like squealers,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to squeal on us again, eh, Skippy? I reckon a binning’s in order.’

  He grabbed Honza by the collar, thrust him towards her, then stood back, smirking, as his henchmen closed in. Skip swung her fists. It was no good. One boy punched her, another pushed her, and she fell, jarring her hip. Honza Novak seized her feet. Shaun Kenny grabbed her hands. As she swung into the air, her vision zigzagged over shadows, sky, planks, pipes, galvanised iron, dirt, grass, concrete, Honza Novak grinning, Shaun Kenny biting his lip, and Andreas Haskas, silver circle upraised, like a waiter removing with a flourish a cloche from a dramatic dish.

>   They flung her headfirst into a bin.

  Skip gagged. Stench filled her nostrils. Something sharp stuck into her forearm; something sticky seeped across her neck. She tried to push herself out, but when she pressed down with her hands they only sank deeper into a mulch of grass clippings, banana skins, balled-up lunch bags, ripped-off wrappings, cigarette butts and half-eaten sandwiches.

  First the shit pit, now this! Skip hated Crater Lakes.

  She braced herself on the edge of the bin. Grip the rim, that’s the idea. Haul yourself up. Her first attempt failed and she slipped back. She despised herself. Why must she be so small, so female? One day, she told herself, I’ll kill Brenton Lumsden.

  Skip had resumed her struggles when a battering filled her ears – the sound of hands, feet, clambering up beside her. Somebody grabbed her shoulders. What now? Were they going to force her deeper into the filth? She kicked and thrashed; the hands only gripped her shoulders more firmly, but then she felt them pull her up. Gracelessly she rode over the bin’s high edge and tumbled to the ground.

  Beside her stood a bashful Honza Novak. He signalled to her to be quiet, and whispered, ‘Said I was going to the bog.’

  ‘What?’ Skip spat out the word. Her brown skirt had ridden up on her thighs and she slapped it down angrily. She wanted to wear jeans. She only ever wanted to wear jeans.

  ‘Come to see if you was all right,’ said Honza.

  She punched him, hard, in the stomach and ran: ran and ran, not back towards the school buildings but across the oval, dodging footballs, fights, games of tag. Cries rang after her: ‘What happened to her?’ and ‘Get a load of that!’

  When she made it to the boundary her left hip ached and she was gasping for breath, but she hurled herself at the chain-link fence, scaled it, and dropped to the ground below.

  ‘Streuth! Who dragged you through a hedge backwards?’ Doug Puce goggled at his niece. Hunched over rickety scales, he had measured out carpet tacks in a spiky heap; his customer, a seamy-naped fellow in saggy overalls, turned, elbow on counter, and blinked at the new arrival.