Volcano Street (10 page)

Marlo hugged herself and did a little twirl. Then she was gone too.

Skip stared into empty space. Should she feel angry? Guilt had consumed her ever since their banishment to Crater Lakes. Of course Marlo blamed her. Now Marlo could have her revenge. What could be simpler? Goodbye, Crater Lakes. She would leave Skip behind.

Skip glanced at Honza. The boy lay belly-down, resting his head on his crossed arms. Was he asleep? Disgusted, Skip scrambled into
a crouch beside him, welded her fists together and swung them like an axe between his shoulder blades. He jerked up, gasping.

Her eyes were hot. ‘I hate you, Honza Novak! Who do you think you are? You’re too afraid of Lummo even to look at me at school. You treat me like shit and then, when it’s convenient for you, expect me to be your mate. You’re lower than a snake’s arse.’

If one thing maddened Skip more than what she was saying, it was the way Honza received it. All he did was look at her, blink, and say, ‘Want to go stalking? We could do it later tonight, when everyone’s asleep.’

‘That you, lovey?’

Skip, on her way to bed, was leaving the bathroom when Auntie Noreen called her. Reluctantly, she presented herself at the living-room doorway. In darkness but for the television, her aunt sat alone, surrounded by Kit-Kat wrappers. Sunday night had sunk to its dregs. On Channel Eight, a cheery but earnest American proselytised on behalf of the Christian Television Association.

‘Sit with your auntie for a minute, eh?’ Auntie Noreen patted the sofa beside her. ‘Jeez, I thought that Campbell bugger was never going to go. Quite a handful, he is. Yous should have seen him when he was a lad! All the sheilas wanted to ride in his Land Rover. Bastard, he was.’

Skip could believe that. Bastard then, bastard now. What she couldn’t believe was that any girl would want to ride in his Land Rover – ever. Had Auntie Noreen? The thought was creepy. And Auntie Noreen was creepy, sitting in the dark with her TV and her Kit-Kats. Creepy, but sad. Dutifully, Skip perched on the sofa. She wished she had the guts to go.

‘Had a rough time, ain’t yous?’ Auntie Noreen said.

Skip decided not to agree. To admit weakness of any kind seemed an unwise move. Never let anyone know you’re weak. They’ll pick
on you worse than ever. She kicked her foot against the frilly base of the sofa. It was a horrible sofa. Everything in Auntie Noreen’s house was horrible.

‘That sister of mine’s led us a merry dance, eh?’ her aunt went on. ‘Always a wild one, little Kazza. What larks we used to have when she was just a tot. And so pretty, everybody said so. Our mum kicked the bucket and I was mum to her. Well, tried to be. Maybe I didn’t do so well. What did I know? When Mum died, I was no older than you is now. Eh, and Kazza was marked out for trouble. I knew she’d never do well at that school. Fags behind the shelter shed, sneaking off with the boys, drinking beer. “I’m bored,” she used to say. “So bored!”

‘Happy as Larry she was when she left school. There she was the next day, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, behind the counter at Puce Hardware. Huh! That didn’t last for long. Three weeks, and she was off with a travelling salesman from Wagga Wagga who flashed his Irish eyes at her and promised her the moon. Dermot somebody, his name was. Derro, more like it. Not even good-looking. Forty if he was a day, with a beer gut big as a basketball. Slapped Kazza round when he got sick of her. Christ, I’d like to have got my hands on him, the dirty bastard! Don’t think old Noreen didn’t try to make her come home. Me little Kazza was underage and all. No, don’t think I took it lying down. But what can you do?’

Skip was only half listening. Often enough, Karen Jane had told stories of her past lovers. To Skip, all this took place in a land of shadows. If one of the lovers had been Marlo’s father and one of them had been Skip’s, one of them a bastard and one of them a good bloke, it made no difference. Sometimes Skip wished she had known her father. But what was the point? If only you could
choose
your father. Perhaps, she thought, we all have a secret father, a real father, not just a man who stuck his thingy in our mother, and one day we will meet him. She knew that was silly. But the longing, when it possessed her, was real all the same.

Auntie Noreen squeezed her hand. ‘Tired, aren’t you, lovey? Poor little thing! It’s a tough time in your life. You’re becoming a woman. Oh, it won’t be easy. Never is. I suppose you think you know all about it – you and your sister, with her Greer Garson! Take it from me, there are things Greer Garson don’t know about. Don’t think that cow’s ever had a hubby and kids, eh? Then she don’t know bugger-all. That’s what a woman’s life is all about.’

Did Auntie Noreen even believe this? Tears had appeared in her little eyes and Skip shifted restlessly. Her aunt had been drinking, of course: beer after beer with Sandy Campbell.

‘I’m glad you’re with us, Baby Helen,’ she was saying. ‘Might be a bit dull for you, I know. But yous are safe here. Remember that, eh? Down here in the Lakes, at least yous girls is safe.’

Credits rolled on the Christian Television Association broadcast. What next? Weather. God Save the Queen. Goodnight and close. Gently, or as gently as she could, Skip pulled herself from Auntie Noreen’s grip. From the mantelpiece, Barry Puce stared at them impassively. And Auntie Noreen stared back at him. She looked at her son in his soldier’s uniform and, Skip was certain, struggled not to cry.

‘Night stalker, come …’

At first Skip didn’t hear the voice; nor did she register the soft, ratlike scratching at the flyscreen. She stirred slowly. She had dreamed she was in a green, wet place. From all around came a drip-drip of water; voices taunted her, but where they came from she couldn’t be sure. Her heart pounded like a bass drum:
boom, boom
. Light shone from somewhere, but dimly, slithering over fantastical fleshy forms. She heard a crack: a gunshot, far away. All she knew was two things: she was frightened, and far from home.

‘Night stalker, come … Night stalker, quick!’

Fully awake now, she sat up sharply. A torch beam flashed on the Airfix F-111 above Barry Puce’s bed, then dazzled her eyes. Squinting,
she saw behind the beam a face. Grinning stupidly, it stared at her through the window. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘We’re stalking,’ said Honza. ‘Remember?’

‘You’re mad. I never said I’d go.’

‘But you will, won’t you?’

‘It’s the middle of the night. Everyone’s asleep.’

‘That’s the point!’

‘Go away.’

For a moment, Honza was silent. His head bobbed down beneath the windowsill, and Skip heard no sounds of him moving on the decking. She pulled the covers around her ears, but a clucking reached her:
Brkk-brkk … brkk-brkk … brrrrkk-brkk
. It stopped, then started again.

‘I’m not chicken!’ she declared, too loudly. On the floor beside her bed was a glass of water. She stepped out of bed and seized it, strode to the window, and flung its contents through the flyscreen.

‘Missed,’ said Honza. ‘Hurry up, it’ll be light by the time you’re ready.’

‘I’m going back to bed,’ said Skip, but even as she said it she found herself tugging her jeans over her pyjamas. She pulled on socks. She stuffed her feet into sneakers. She was no chicken. She would never be a chicken. She bundled on her jacket. She wrenched open the door. ‘Happy now?’

‘Shh!’ Honza held a finger to his lips. He sprang down lithely from the decking, led her across the garden and unlatched the gate. Like spirits, they slid into the night.

Puce’s Bend soon lay behind them. They passed between paddocks; fence posts listed, the wire strung between them thrumming faintly in a midnight breeze. Grass, inky black, shivered and swayed. Branches creaked.

‘Bet you never done this before,’ said Honza.

‘Why d’you reckon that?’

Skip remembered a night last summer. Karen Jane had been rhapsodising again about San Fran, about how their lives would change entirely from the moment they arrived in that place to which they had never been, which became in her descriptions the Land of Oz,
Adventure Island
and the Woodstock Festival all rolled into one. Suddenly, she could not say why, Skip felt the sickening certainty that they would never go there – never, not even if the place was real. ‘It’s all dreams!’ she cried. She was sick of Karen Jane’s dreams that never came true. Her mother gazed at her, hollow-eyed. She told Skip she was a stupid, ungrateful girl and Skip told Karen Jane she hated her; then she ran out of the flat and along the beach until she could run no more. She slumped in the sand and stared out to sea. It frightened her – its blackness, its immensity – but she watched and watched. The sounds it made, its suckings, its sighings, were words she did not understand but felt compelled to learn. Where would she be, she wondered, in ten years, in twenty, in fifty, in a lifetime? It was too much to imagine, impossible, yet all that was certain was that time would pass and pass. Her mind drifted, and her body too, floating on the blackness, until Marlo found her and shook her awake. Karen Jane had been too stoned to come.

‘So it’s into town and back?’ Skip said now.

‘Volcano Street. Up and down.’

‘What sort of game is that?’

But it was exciting. Was there really a ghost of Crater Lakes? How Skip wished there were! In the dark, with the torch making fuzzy luminous tunnels, ordinary sights of the day appeared touched by strange magic. Eerily the beam played over tussocky verges, potholes, twisted trees.

They talked about whether ghosts existed. ‘Don’t reckon so,’ said Skip. ‘They’d have proved it by now.’

‘Who’d have proved it?’

‘Scientists.’

‘They don’t know shit. There was this farmhand on the Kenny place, back in the old days, got his head chopped off in the combine harvester. Every year, on the night this bloke died, you could see him in that paddock, under the big old bluegum – just a body, no head.’

‘Bull.’ Honza, Skip knew, was trying to frighten her.

‘He held the head under his arm.’

‘Bull.’

Paved streets were upon them now. No cars passed; in the space between Sunday night and Monday morning, the town slept as if beneath a spell: drawn blinds, darkened windows. Behind a fence, a dog let out a mournful howl; afterwards, the stillness was deeper.

They walked in the middle of the road. Honza turned off the torch. Streetlights were dim and set far apart, each one offering only a urinous yellow trickle. Skip looked into carports as if shapes might lurk there. Leathery bushes rose like sentinels in grassy front yards.

‘Frightened now?’ Honza whispered.

‘Course not.’

‘What if we get caught?’

‘Who’d catch us?’

‘The ghost of Crater Lakes!’

‘As if …’ Skip laughed.

Honza seemed affronted. ‘There’s this movie I saw on TV one night. Dad reckoned I weren’t allowed to watch it, but Pav stayed up so I snuck out and watched it with him. There’s this bloke, see, he has this waxwork museum. He’s, like, a genius at making waxworks that look like real people. Then there’s this fire, and the bloke gets all burned up.’

‘Vincent Price,’ said Skip. ‘I’ve seen that movie.’

She had never forgotten it: not the wax figures ablaze, not the boiling, bubbling vats of wax, not the hideous burned face of the sculptor when finally it is revealed. She adored Vincent Price. In a Price movie there was a secret, and the secret, she sensed, was that
the one most haunted was Vincent Price, even if he was the monster others feared.

‘Remember after the fire?’ said Honza. ‘His face is all scars and his hands are claws. The bloke can’t make waxworks, not proper ones any more. So he gets real people, pretty girls and stuff, and has boiling wax poured all over them.’

‘Remember when the wax mask cracks off his face?’

‘Remember when he falls in the vat?’

‘Best bloody movie I ever saw,’ said Skip.

‘Well, he went stalking, didn’t he? All twisted over in a sort of cloak. Hood over his face. He’d knock you out, and when you woke up you’d be tied down, and he’d have hot wax ready to pour all over you. What if there’s a bloke like that?’

Skip shook her head sadly. ‘Is there a wax museum in Crater Lakes?’

The sawmill massed before them: grand silent sheds of corrugated iron by the railway line, grey-white in the darkness. Honza said they should cut through. Veering off the road, he waved to Skip to follow. No fences, no gates stopped them from passing between high metal walls.

‘Turn on the torch again,’ said Skip, as shadows encroached.

‘Scaredy-cat.’

‘It’s pitch black, idiot.’

The yellow beam was wavering, thin. They followed a concrete drive. Beyond a garage was a sawdust-smelling yard, with twin forklift trucks standing before the entrance as if on guard; caught in torchlight, the paintwork yielded up a sickly glow. Filling the yard was pallet after pallet of stacked pine planks. Each stack was the same: a cube, twice Skip’s height.

‘Tim-
ber
!’ cried Honza, pretending to be a lumberjack. ‘This is what the Lakes is about, Dad reckons.’

‘Doesn’t he work at the town hall?’

‘In the office. Sometimes he stays back real late.’

‘Keen, is he?’ Or not keen, Skip thought, on Deirdre Novak.

‘What about your dad?’ said Honza.

‘Haven’t got one.’

‘Did he die? How did he die?’ Honza seemed to think the answer should be funny. Suddenly Skip was sick of him. Stalking was silly, a kids’ game. But what did she expect? There was no wax museum in Crater Lakes and never would be. This was a town where nothing happened. She wondered if she could find her way home by herself. She looked around the piny yard. Between each pallet was a space a foot wide; the pale stacks rose like an ancient monument, some crumbly archaeological find uncovered in a desert – a set of tombs perhaps, or a strange priestly construction for calculating the movements of the stars.

There was a yowl. She jumped, and Honza laughed. ‘Pussycats,’ he said. ‘Hah! If I left you by yourself, you’d be screaming.’

‘I don’t scream. When did I ever scream?’

‘Girls scream. In that movie –’

‘What if I left
you
?’ Skip started forward. Briefly she jumped into the torch’s beam, fingers curled monster-style, tongue poking out, then plunged out of sight between the pallets.