Volcano Street (4 page)

‘How? We’ve no money.’

‘Hitch. Ride in trucks, up front with the driver. I’ll play the mouth organ. I’ll tie up my hair in a dirty red bandanna. Oh, Marlo, it’ll be the adventure of a lifetime. We’ll end up in Sydney – Kings Cross.’

Caper had told them about Kings Cross, where he lived when he first arrived in Sydney, a drifter up to no good. Skip imagined a shabby flat on the top floor of a white, peeling house, high above the harbour. This would be their castle and Marlo would be its queen, with Skip the loyal page boy. From a balcony frosted with iron lace they would gaze down, dazzled, at deep blue waters, while the chug of boats, the honk, the knock, the slosh, the jingle of chains from the tethering docks made merry music. In the evenings they would dine in dark, smoky cafés, hidden in basements or down snaking alleys, where poets with beards and berets argued at surrounding tables, fights broke out over the favours of waitresses, and girls who looked like Joan Baez strummed guitars and sang. Skip, who had never been to Sydney, could see it so clearly. Striding back and forth, gesturing vigorously, she did her best to convey all this to Marlo. She didn’t succeed.

‘You’re twelve. I’m sixteen. The police would be on our trail in days.’

‘We’d wear disguises. Glasses. False beards.’

‘And money? What would we live on?’

‘Your stories, Marlo. You’re going to be a writer.’ Reverently, Skip picked up Olly Olivetti, peeled back the zippered case, jammed the
typewriter into her sister’s lap, and propelled her hands to the keys. ‘You’re already a writer.’

‘Silly stories! I ripped them all up.’

‘Not “Moon Escape”? Not “The Slaughterhouse Murders”? That’s the greatest story ever.’

‘It’s kids’ stuff. I wrote it when I was your age.’

‘You’d never destroy them. You couldn’t.’ Skip dived for her sister’s luggage. Wrenching the suitcase across the floor, she tugged at the straps that stopped it flying open.

Marlo leaped towards her. ‘Go away!’

They struggled for the suitcase and Marlo grabbed it. Skip kept up her pleading. ‘You’re frightened. Don’t be. We could run off tonight. You and me and Olly Olivetti, on our way round the world.’

‘You’re a child. You don’t understand.’

‘What’s to understand?’

‘I don’t want to hitch to Sydney. Or write silly stories. I want to go to school.’

‘What would Germaine do?’ This, Skip knew, was a desperate ploy, but she had to try it. ‘That’s the key, isn’t it? In any situation, ask yourself: What would Germaine do?’

‘How do you think Germaine got where she is? She passed exams. She went to university. Keep dreaming if you want to – keep dreaming until you end up thirty-three years old, living in a squalid little flat with a layabout criminal boyfriend and a couple of bastards you can’t afford.’

‘How can you talk about Karen Jane like that?’

‘She dreamed all her life, and that’s what dreams got her.’

‘And you’ve stopped dreaming, and what have you got? Puce Hardware at nine in the morning.’ As soon as she’d said them, Skip wished she could call back the words.

‘Don’t preach to me,’ Marlo said in a pained voice. ‘You made our mother go mad.’ Gently but decisively, she hustled Skip to the door.

Skip slid to her knees in the passage as the door slammed behind her. Her breath came in gasps. Yes, she had made their mother go mad. Karen Jane was in the funny farm because Helen ‘Skip’ Wells was a stupid girl. From the kitchen still came the bellowing, the laughter. She leaned against Marlo’s door. There was no lock: if she tried, she could burst in again. But she held back. So much had happened: too much. And some things, Skip was beginning to see, could never be undone. She tapped faintly on the door and whispered, ‘Marlo? I’m sorry.’ There was nothing else to say.

Only silence came from behind the door.

How late was it now?

Skip squatted on the decking outside the sleepout, staring into the dark yard. The night was cold and she shivered. She didn’t like the sleepout and didn’t want to sleep. The room was Barry Puce’s, a damp creosote-smelling timber rectangle, like a Swedish sauna gone cold. Tacked to the walls were posters of Paul Newman and Jackie Stewart; there was a shelf of sporting trophies, and hanging from the ceiling was an Airfix F-111. She thought of Barry assembling the model, fingers sticky, breathing in the heady acrid tang of glue. The room would always be his. Half the wardrobe and half the chest of drawers still held his clothes: white shirts; Fair Isle pullovers; denim jeans, and trousers made of corduroy, khaki, linen; singlets; Y-fronts; argyle socks. The thought of sleeping in his bed frightened Skip. She pictured Barry returning at any moment.

Over a wicker chair beside the bed, Auntie Noreen had laid out Skip’s uniform for the morning: brown beret with badge, brown blouse, brown tie, brown V-necked jumper, brown skirt, long brown socks. Skip had immediately associated the uniform with the still-uncovered shit pit. The smell hovered over the garden like fog.

If she were a character in a book, thought Skip, the present chapter might be titled ‘In a Brown Study’. Chapters in books were often
called that, almost as often as they were called ‘Food for Thought’. What a brown study was, she wasn’t sure; Sherlock Holmes had a study in scarlet, but a brown one sounded nowhere near as good. It sounded damp. It sounded sad. She was sick of feeling sad. She knew, or half knew, that her dreams of running away were only that, dreams – but how real they seemed! Always the pattern was the same: the leap of possibility, like sunlight through clouds; then disappointment as the vision faded. If only Marlo could have believed too! Tonight they could have made plans that would make tomorrow all right, even if Skip still caught the school bus, and Marlo headed off to Puce Hardware.

The yard stretched perhaps a hundred feet behind the house. The shit pit, surrounded by its clutter of planks and tools, lay at a diagonal to Skip’s left; to her right, shadowy in darkness, stood the shed. At the yard’s end the ground sloped upwards; the fence, behind fruit trees, looked alarmingly high, but wasn’t high enough to block out the lights from the house around the corner: three yellow-gold oblongs turned on their sides, agleam against the dark walls and rendered fuzzy by the leaves. The weather had turned with the fall of evening. The trees creaked in the wind.

Skip thought about Karen Jane. Had they put her in a padded cell? Did they really do that? Maybe Skip didn’t have to blame herself. Karen Jane had been locked away before. She spoke about it casually (‘When I was in the funny farm …’), as if there were kudos in her madness, evidence of sensitivity and talent. If only she had never met Caper. That, too, was Skip’s fault.

One Sunday on Glenelg Beach, some years earlier, Karen Jane had lolled in sunglasses, smoking, smearing herself with Coppertone, leafing idly through
Go-Set
. Bored, Skip wandered the beach in her bathers (‘Only paddling, mind,’ said Karen Jane); Marlo, whose scholarship exam drew near, had insisted on staying home, for all that her mother called her a bore, a prude, and a pain in the arse.
Sometimes Skip wished she could call her mother hateful things: fat, old, ugly. But Karen Jane was beautiful: slender but curvy, skin smooth as honey, hair a curtain-like blonde cascade, like Mary’s from Peter, Paul and Mary.

The sky was unclouded, one of those Australian skies that arc over the earth like a vast inverted porcelain bowl with perfectly even pale blue glaze. Skip stared at the horizon. How fascinating it was, that distant line where blue met blue! Reason told her the line wasn’t real, that no seam joined sea and sky, but she could never quite believe it.

Skip plucked off her bikini top (stupid thing) and stepped into the tide. The beach behind her faded: that baby squealing, that transistor radio, that couple arguing, all receded. Wet sand pressed between her toes and foam curled, not quite coldly, around her ankles. Shallows lapped her calves, then she waded thigh-deep; a wave swept in, making her stagger back, aware of the heft behind its seeming gentleness. Flinging herself into the oncoming water, cleaving it with steely arms, she thought she would see the horizon fixed firmly, growing ever nearer; instead there were only green ramparts, silver spray, and blurry droplets glinting in her eyes.

Soon she was tired, desperately tired. She turned, treading water. Shimmery hills rose and fell. The beach was far off, a storybook tableau: long bright sands, jetty, hot-dog stand, stick figures in colourful costumes. Waves lapped in all directions; now there were no more glimpses of the beach between the shifting hills, and she was no longer sure which way was back and which out to sea. She waved a hand. Could anybody see her? She imagined herself imprisoned within castle walls, a circle impregnable as if it were made of stone.

Time distends strangely when you are about to die. Hours passed in her watery prison; each dip beneath the surface was an eternity, and she felt herself plunging down, down. When she bobbed up again she saw herself, as if from far above, tiny against the swell and
lost for ever; then all at once she was scooped up into an embrace. Wildly she resisted, as if this new presence had come to drag her under, but she was too weak to hold out for long, and gave in to the strong chest and confident, sleek arms.

Feeling hot sand beneath her back, she opened her eyes. A shadow passed over her and a face came into focus: a man’s, deeply tanned, with a droopy black moustache. She turned her head and saw people all around, jabbering in excited voices. ‘Push down on his chest!’ said one. ‘Give him mouth to mouth!’ said another.

Skip sat up indignantly, coughing, as Karen Jane descended upon them, Mary-hair flying. ‘Helen, you stupid girl,’ she said in a choking voice, while murmurs broke out among the onlookers.

‘Say, he’s a girl!’ said the man with the moustache. His accent was strange: American, no mistaking it. Karen Jane had crushed Skip to her with all a mother’s ardour; now, seeing the stranger, she let her daughter slump back and, with a delighted smile, turned her attention to the girl’s saviour.

The lifeguard’s hippie-length hair, ropy from the sea, flowed from underneath his tight cap. Beneath the droopy moustache stretched a dazzling grin. His arms and torso were well muscled, with thick fur that spread in wide wings across the pectorals before plunging in a tapering line towards a pair of tight red briefs beneath which swelled a prodigious lump.

‘My apartment’s just up from here,’ he said to Karen Jane. (Apartment? Nobody said
apartment
, not in real life.) ‘I’m done for the day. I guess you folks could use a Coke, huh?’ He held out his hand. ‘Kendall Caper.’

‘You’re a Yank?’ said Karen Jane, and tickled his palm.

Caper lived in a sprawling single-storey mansion, one street back from the beach, which had fallen on hard times and been divided into flats. Lush gardens, a barely held-back jungle, lapped at the wide, listing verandas.

That night, Skip fell asleep on the sofa while Caper played Karen Jane an LP called
Surrealistic Pillow
. Once Skip stirred to see Karen Jane and Caper propped side by side against the wall like rag dolls. Both had cigarettes in their hands, fat, shaggy roll-ups. There was a funny smell.

‘When the war’s over, I can go home,’ Caper was saying.

‘San Fran?’ said Karen Jane.

After that, she spent many nights away. When some weeks had passed, she drove Skip and Marlo to Caper’s place one sunny afternoon and said, as if it were the most inconsequential of matters, that they were all going to live there now. Caper, in jeans cut off at the knees and nothing else, stood grinning in the doorway as they arrived. In his hand he held a can of Foster’s; he swigged from it lustily before he bestirred himself, mooched forward and kissed Karen Jane long enough for the girls to be embarrassed.

Karen Jane looked eagerly to the future. The present, she told the girls, was a mere prelude to the glories that awaited them when the war ended (it had to end soon) and Caper took them to San Fran.

In Glenelg, Skip spent many an hour on the beach, coming to know it in all its moods: mornings when haze hung white over the sea; nights when kids dug fire pits in the sand and the sky was brilliant with a million stars; afternoons when the moored boats knocked and sloshed and it seemed the water would rise up over the Esplanade and spill in a grey flood down Jetty Road. Good old stinky, fishy Glenelg, with its shrieking gulls and back-to-front name! Marlo, who knew everything, said Glenelg was a palindrome, which Skip, who knew nothing, thought must be a cross between a paradox and an aerodrome.

Adelaide’s last remaining tram service tethered the shabby beachside suburb to the city. On weekday afternoons, Skip could be seen at the stop on Jetty Road, waiting for Marlo to return from another day at Adelaide Ladies’ College. Their course home would be a winding one, peering into shop windows, stopping for a chat at
Mr Cominetti’s fish shop, browsing in the public library (for Marlo, the Brontës; for Skip, Biggles) or seeking out Caper on his boat. Skip grew used to Caper: to his shaggy hair and moustache, to his tie-dyed T-shirts, to his broad lopsided grin and the way he tousled her hair. He was amiable, like a friendly dog. Everybody liked Kendall Caper. Karen Jane, after too many men, had come at last into a safe harbour, or so Skip liked to tell herself.

Behind her now, laughter carolled from the kitchen, where Sandy Campbell still held court. Faintly, different sounds came from the neighbouring house: a piano, and voices raised in song. Curious, Skip made her way to the fence, and scrambled up into a pear tree. From the branches, she had an unimpeded view.

The house, surprisingly, was large and modern, the bright oblong windows punctuating a wing shaped like a shoebox. At the far end, unfurling beyond it like a poked-out tongue, stood a brick patio, while a parapet at gutter height with overlapping palm fronds bore testimony to a roof terrace. Tonight both were empty, but many a shadowy figure moved behind the curtains. The branch Skip sat on stretched across the fence. She edged towards the end, dropped in a flurry of legs and arms, then picked her way through a patch of silverbeet, stepped over a line of garden stakes, and hurried towards the house.