Volcano Street (38 page)

Under the window stood a table and chair. The table was a folding one Skip had found in the garage; Auntie Noreen, surprisingly, had donated a chair from the kitchen. On the table sat three things: Olly Olivetti, without his case; a fresh ream of quarto; and an Anglepoise lamp Skip had saved from the blowhole. Uncle Doug had got it working again.

She switched off the overhead light, turned on the lamp, and sat at the table: her desk, as she called it. There was something comforting in the pool of yellow light. It was a magic circle, shutting out the world outside.

On the window ledge above Skip’s desk lay three books she had found at the library: a sleek black Bible-like volume bearing the title
Famous Plays of To-day
, the first of which was
Journey’s End
by R. C. Sherriff;
Seven Famous Plays
, in a yellow jacket, by the writer she had once thought was called Henry Gibson; and a little ragged olive-coloured book,
Man and Superman
by Bernard Shaw. She was reading the Shaw; she found it hard going, but Marlo said many things were difficult when you started but not if you kept at them. Skip would read all the plays in which Roger had appeared and imagine his performances. Perhaps Mr Novak would help her. He could remember; she could imagine. Later, perhaps, they would find other plays, newer plays. Marlo could help.

Early that evening, Skip had been practising typing on Olly. His carriage had travelled far across to the left; a sheet of paper curled around the platen with nothing on it but lines of letters, nonsense words, and the name
SKIP WELLS
repeated many times. Now she ripped out the page, screwed it up and tossed it into the dark beyond the lamplight. Rolling in a fresh sheet, Skip leaned over the carriage. Olly’s smell was delicious: ink, grease, metal. She felt sad and happy at once. In eight hours’ time, or seven, the Greyhound bus would roll away down Volcano Street while Skip stood on the pavement with her aunt and uncle and watched; for a few seconds, Marlo would wave, and then she would be gone. For a sudden, intense moment, Skip longed to rush to Marlo’s room, embrace her, sob with her. But she wouldn’t. She blinked and wiped her wrist across her eyes.

Olly’s new page glared in the lamplight. What should Skip write? She had no ideas; then she looked at her library books and knew. There was a trick to everything, and so there was to this. But it was more than a trick: it was magic. You didn’t copy the stories others had written already. You steeped yourself in the spirit of those stories and that spirit would guide you. Time passes and things change; but in many ways, too, they remain the same. In age after age there are
wars and soldiers. There are men and there are supermen, or those who think they are. And there are enemies of the people. Imagine, say, a man cast out from his community, when all the time he was the one who could have saved it. She touched, like a talisman, the yellow Ibsen, and typed with care the words:
ACT ONE
.

Her cat slept peacefully as the keys clicked.

Author’s note

Those familiar with the state of South Australia may imagine they recognise Crater Lakes. They don’t. The town is fictional, as are all the people in it.

Some things are not of my invention. ‘Fuckarada’ and all the jokes told by Sandy Campbell and others are, without exception, real jokes I heard when I was young. Ditto the numerous profanities, insults, taunts. And Brenton Lumsden, or a boy not unlike him, really did do that to the mother cat.

An Enemy of the People
is quoted from the translation by E. Marx-Aveling, daughter of Karl, which appears in William Archer’s 1890 edition of Ibsen’s
Prose Dramas
. The Crater Lakes Players would, in all likelihood, have used that version; there are later versions which nowadays may be regarded as superior, including those by Arthur Miller, Peter Watts and Christopher Hampton.

‘Mowser’ was a strip cartoon – in its way, a work of genius – created by the British artist Reg Parlett (1904–1991). One of my happy childhood memories is of sitting with a stack of
Lion
comics and reading episodes of ‘Mowser’ one after the other. Dr Lyall Watson’s article about future population growth, ‘Standing Room Only’, from
Eagle
, 21 October 1967, is reprinted in Daniel Tatarsky’s
Eagle Annual: The Best of the 1960s Comic
(2009), pp. 181–2.

Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh made a famous and tumultuous theatrical tour of Australia and New Zealand with the Old Vic company in 1948. It figures in all Olivier and Leigh biographies, and a whole, quite splendid book has been written about it: Garry O’Connor’s
Darlings of the Gods: One Year in the Lives of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh
(1984). Olivier really was on the lookout for new talent. In Adelaide, he discovered Keith Michell – to become famous for his portrayal of Henry VIII on British television – and sent him to train in England; Australian actor Peter Finch, later Leigh’s lover, also came into the Oliviers’ orbit during this tour. Another notable Olivier connection, Sir Laurence’s later wife Joan Plowright, evokes life at the Old Vic Theatre School in London in the late 1940s in her memoir
And That’s Not All
(2001).

Many people helped me write this book, sometimes without knowing it. I am grateful to John Wright for introducing me to the Arthur Collection, an archive of historic photographs in the State Library of South Australia; Garry Costello, who taught me to read ‘Henry Gibson’ – and, in a sense, all the other books I’ve read; Deborah Madsen, who gave me, long ago in another life, the content of several pages; Antony Heaven, who has never lived in Crater Lakes but understands it – and helps me understand it, too; Mary Nash, who is in every line; Ravi Mirchandani, Margaret Stead, Toby Mundy, James Roxburgh, and all at Atlantic Books; Clara Finlay, who has made this book much better than it otherwise would have been; and Sara Menguc, without whom it would never have appeared at all.

I have not written this book because I hate Crater Lakes. Often I wish I could have spent my life there.

I haunt it, like Roger Dansie.

Note on the Author

David Rain is an Australian writer living in London. Formerly a lecturer in English Literature at Queens’ University, Belfast, he presently runs the MA in Creative Writing at Middlesex University. His debut novel,
The Heat of the Sun
, was published in 2012 by Atlantic Books.