Volcano Street (3 page)

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.’

Warningly, Marlo placed a hand on Skip’s arm, but Skip could not restrain herself. ‘If he were a man, he’d refuse to fight. He’d resist imperialist aggression. The Vietnamese are entitled to self-determination. They’re fighting for their freedom.’ She knew all the phrases: hadn’t she heard them enough from Caper, from Karen Jane? She’d heard them from Marlo too, and was disappointed that her sister sat there shaking her head as if to say: Stop.

Auntie Noreen’s toad-neck swelled. ‘Vietnamese? Why the Yanks don’t just drop a big one on all those slitty-eyed Wongs and be done with it, I don’t know. I see one young lady’s got a lot to learn,’ she said,
revealing the inner steel with which she ran a hardware emporium comparable to any in Collins Street, Pall Mall or the Chomps-a-bloody-Lee-saze. ‘If there’s one thing makes me blood run cold, it’s to hear a kiddie parroting propaganda.’

Skip’s face burned; she might have replied, but her sister’s grip remained tight and she sank back into her chair.

Auntie Noreen polished off the last vanilla slice, dusted her little hands together, and levered herself to her feet. Her severity was gone at once. ‘Yous girls have had a long day. I reckon it’s time I showed yous your rooms. Dinner in an hour.’ She added, with a laugh, ‘If I can shift that bugger Campbell from me kitchen.’

‘School day tomorrow, isn’t it?’ said Marlo.

‘That’s right, love.’ Auntie Noreen draped an arm around Skip. ‘This one can get the school bus. Get to know the other kiddies, eh? Your sister can ride with Doug.’

‘I’ll take the bus too,’ said Marlo.

‘Eh?’ said Auntie Noreen. ‘Nah, can’t do that.’

‘But why should Uncle Doug take only me to school?’

‘School! Love, didn’t they tell you? I know these social workers are slack, but I reckoned they’d have told you. Did you think I could have two useless girls on me hands? Said I’d take yous on one condition, didn’t I? Helen goes to the high – has to, she’s a kiddie. But the big one? She’s past leaving age, and we need a new girl in the office at Puce Hardware.’ The little mouth twisted into a smile. ‘Marlene, you’ll be marvellous.’

‘You can’t mean this.’ Gasping, Marlo blundered from the room. A voice – Sandy Campbell’s? – cackled as she ran past, and then from deeper in the house a door slammed, loud enough to shake plaster from the walls.

Wide-eyed, Skip stared at Auntie Noreen, who smiled calmly back as if unaware that she was destroying Marlo’s whole future.

Chapter Two

‘Cattus cattus?’

Skip’s voice was low. Carefully she made her way across the floor. The room was dark, but in the light from the passage she saw that Marlo still lay, fully clothed, on the bed. The leather-look suitcase, the shopping basket, and Olly Olivetti in his zippered case hunkered undisturbed beside the musty wardrobe.

Twice before Skip had scudded this way: once at Auntie Noreen’s insistence, when dinner was on the table; and once in defiance of her aunt, who said that if Miss High-and-Mighty (just like her mother!) wanted to be silly, she could stew in her own juices. Both times Marlo had stared at the ceiling and demanded to be left alone. Now Skip had been told to go to bed, but she couldn’t, not like this.

In the kitchen, the grown-ups still sat at the table. Sandy Campbell’s voice boomed, anecdote after anecdote, joke after joke, punctuated by Auntie Noreen’s delighted cackles.

‘Dinner was nice,’ Skip tried. ‘Apple pie and ice cream for dessert.’

‘I suppose Auntie Noreen ate mine.’ Marlo drew herself up. She wrapped her arms around her knees and turned towards her sister. In the slant of light her face gleamed blankly, bright against the
dark-papered wall. Her eyes were clear: she hadn’t been crying. No, Skip thought proudly, Marlo wouldn’t cry.

‘She can’t mean it, can she? You’ve got to go to school.’

‘She means it. Damn this place!’

‘Good old Marlo! This is more like it.’ Excitedly Skip paced the floor, remembering plans and schemes they used to make, long ago, as they lay in bed in their room above the garage. ‘They can’t keep us prisoners, can they? We’ll escape. We’ll run away.’