Volcano Street (12 page)

‘All on his lonesome. Except for the termites. And the rats. And the bats. Unless you believe in the ghost of Crater Lakes.’

They turned off the road onto a potholed track, overhung with grey branches. Sunlight pulsed ahead of them in a pale powdery column and they trundled into it, coming to rest in a cool resinous clearing among mingled willows, gums and ferns, and pines liberated from plantation discipline.

‘Dansie’s Pond,’ said Pavel, and cut the motor, leaving a silence thick as treacle. Skip, half standing, stared around her. Edging the clearing was a rocky platform, shelving above a luminous circle in which the sky, a pale-blue sheen, shone back as if from a perfect mirror. She looked for ripples and could see none. The water was held as in a tilted bowl, with rocks rising higher on the opposite bank, anticlockwise in reddish sandy ascent. Everywhere, high and low, hung curtaining trees.

Pavel clunked shut the driver’s door, whirled the dusty blanket from the back, and tossed it over his shoulder in crumpled folds. Skip, keen to help, took the wicker basket, pleased to feel how heavy it was. Staggering, she followed him to a grassy space in the shade; from behind, torso half-emblazoned in the drape of tartan, he had about him the look of a brave Scot, marching into battle for Bonnie Prince Charlie.

‘Here, I reckon.’ He flicked out the blanket in a confident sweep, and presided, enchanter-like, as it billowed to the ground, a magic carpet spent from flight. Grunting, Skip slammed down the basket.

Pavel winked at her. ‘Look at Basky.’

With a puzzled air, the big dog patrolled the watery edge, here and there stretching his muzzle towards the sky, collared neck narrowing, haunches clenched like a fist. Droopy-eared, he looked back at Pavel. Could this be water? If not water, what? Pavel tossed a stone; it burst
the blue mirror with a startled
hrropp!
and Baskerville sprang back. Birds squawked skywards from concealing leaves.

Skip watched the spreading ripples. The reddish rocky walls skirled with dull fire. ‘Must be great here in summer.’

Pavel shook his head. ‘Dangerous. Come November, the water drops too low. Swim first?’

The question was for Marlo, who had moved towards the blanket, on which she descended gently, as if to a divan, drawing her knees into a blunt arrowhead beneath her blue skirt. In one hand she clutched a small maroon book, like a hymnal; with a settled air, she opened it. Skip had seen the book, some dreary thing Brooker had prescribed for Marlo’s exams. She wondered how Marlo could stand Brooker. Skip looked at him and thought only one thing: what a whacker. But for Marlo, of course, it was different. He was her ticket out of Crater Lakes. Sadness plunged in Skip’s chest at the thought, and she hoped that at least Brooker meant no more than that to Marlo. What if Marlo loved him? No, surely not! A girl who read Germaine? But Skip was worried. She missed Marlo. Funny, how you could miss somebody when they were still here with you.

Pavel had grabbed his trunks and towel and gone discreetly into the trees to change. Baskerville, meanwhile, floundered into the pond, splashing through quicksilver slippings of light: ears, muzzle, paddling paws. Like all big dogs, he possessed a certain grave dignity.

Marlo said suddenly, ‘Uncle Doug thinks I love him.’

Skip turned, puzzled.

Her sister’s face was a pale mask. ‘Not Uncle Doug – Pavel. Has he said anything to you?’

‘When does Pavel ever talk to me?’

‘Not Pavel. Uncle Doug. He closed the office door, paced back and forth, cleared his throat three times, leaned over my desk, pressed my wrist with one skinny hand and looked into my eyes like a doctor delivering bad news. Have you felt his fingers? They’re rough.’

‘This was this morning?’ Skip asked. Something alarmed her in the way her sister spoke: the words seemed to hover three feet above her head, a cloud dispersing on the air in gossamer skeins.

The voice dropped as Marlo slipped, with cruel accuracy, into the broad back-of-beyond tones of Uncle Doug. ‘“I know it’s been a big shake-up for yous, coming to the Lakes. Yous might feel a bit funny. Yous might lose your way … I seen the way yous been looking at young Pav.”’ Marlo hooted, a high screech that should never have come from her lips. ‘“Just don’t get too hung up on him, love. He’s only a year younger than our Baz, remember.”’

‘Stop it.’ Skip hated Marlo talking this way. Marlo, perfect Marlo, should never sound like a hick. But before she could launch herself on her sister, ready to pummel her, water exploded behind her and sprayed across them both. Reeling around, she saw a sleek ottery head bobbing up from the convulsive pond. Marvelling, she gazed at Pavel. He laughed, treading water, teeth huge as a horse’s in his brown Slavic face.

‘The Jump.’ A hand whipped out of the water, pointing. Twelve feet above the pond was a boxy outcrop, the highest point of the fiery walls.

All Skip wanted was to be in the water too. She wrenched off sneakers, socks, jeans and shirt, everything but underpants and boyish white singlet, and plummeted in from the nearest point: down, down, through swirling depths. Rushing filled her ears; cool fleshy tendrils brushed her wrists and ankles as if about to bind them; darkness pushed up from below, a soupy brown shading into black suggesting underwater chasms, tunnels, caves that would lure divers in, as if on promise of treasure, never to release them again. Breath tore from her lungs; she steeled her arms, fighting her way back. As she broke the surface, in sudden spearing light, it seemed to her there were two worlds, the green world and the golden, and she had burst from one to the other like Thunderbird 4, blasting out of water into sunny sky.

Pavel slid towards her and murmured, close to her ear, ‘Will she really not come in?’

‘When Marlo’s made up her mind, she won’t be moved.’

‘Like a tree? She’s seeing that teacher.’ His face was glum.

‘He’s teaching her,’ Skip said quickly. ‘That’s all …’ That’s all! It was everything – to Marlo, at any rate; but the hurt, bewildered look in Pavel’s eyes made Skip long to reassure him. Cold scythed through her, and she knew that Marlo had to fall in love with Pavel. Wouldn’t that solve everything? Then Marlo would stay in the Lakes! But this was no way to think. Already Skip had begun to believe they might be in the Lakes for a long time. No: of course they wouldn’t. Karen Jane would come and get them soon.

‘I want to dive off that rock too,’ Skip said, striking out for the bank, where Baskerville shook himself in a streaky rainbow cascade.

‘Race you!’ Pavel was upon her at once, the hard curve of his hollowed belly almost cupping her back as they scrambled from the water, then floundered over rock, grass, sand and slipping stones. Pavel would win: he was bigger, and shouldered Skip aside when she almost overtook him.

‘Bastard!’ she cried, but didn’t mean it, pounding in dripping underwear after the brown knobbly back, the floral board shorts that stuck, unflapping, to his sinewy thighs. Their path twisted, slid in sharp obliques, vaulted over boulders and clumps of scrub, crashed through leathery leaves, before propelling them abruptly onto the rocky overhang, where Pavel, with a jubilant ‘Bombs away!’, capered, cartwheeling, through empty air. The splash echoed around the rocky walls.

Skip swayed on the edge. She had wanted to follow him, but now that she was here could only stare into the foaming water, eyes squinting in the sun that seemed much brighter here than below. How far away the water was, how far away and strange; and strangest of all was the centre of those radiating waves, that dazzled
eye into which Pavel had disappeared, and from which, it seemed, he would not return. A pained cry writhed up from her lungs, only to swerve, as the otter head erupted through the watery sheen, into a half-laughed ‘Bastard!’

Skip plunged from estranging sun into a rapture of gasping, grappling, and wild high laughter as she pursued Pavel through flickering silver-green. He jack-in-the-boxed from the depths, pushed down her resisting head; she struggled to duck him in turn, but Pavel was a slithery eel, always escaping. Let him. Let him laugh at her, flinging back his horsy head. Skip felt entirely happy, and her happiness only grew as they clambered out of the water and raced around the rim for a second bombing run. This time she skidded first onto the Jump, and leaped shrieking into the blue before Pavel could push her.

‘Some days are perfect,’ said Pavel.

Hours had passed at the pond, or so it seemed to Skip, as she huddled on the tartan rug, long-tailed shirt wrapped around her like a robe. Delicious sour sweetness filled her mouth; Chickenland chicken never tasted like this. Charcoal and caramel crackled on the skin; the flesh parted from the bone like clotted cream. Pavel, or Mr Novak, had excelled himself. She peered into the picnic basket: crumbed veal, red and black grapes, purplish sticky chutney, an enormous crusty loaf of homemade bread, and a massive dark fruitcake, rich with raisins and glacé cherries. Wax paper, peeled back, revealed three types of cheese: a sweaty flaxen brick of cheddar, a red-lacquered Gloucester, a crushed collapsing brie. Even Marlo’s mood had lifted. Baskerville, at the clearing’s edge, yawped and snuffled over a meaty bone.

And yet, Skip began to feel, something ominous beat beneath the day. What was Pavel saying now? Something about Baz. ‘Yair, yair … used to come here with Baz. He’d drive us out here, the year he got his licence. I can still see Baz chucking bombies off the Jump.’

Skip could not quite believe her cousin was real. Every day she saw his clothes, his books, his Paul Newman and Jackie Stewart posters, his Airfix F-111 that revolved above the bed, but still Barry Puce might have been made up, like God or Moriarty or the Milkybar Kid.

Now Marlo mused on Barry too;
Cousin Barry
, she called him, as if he were a character in a book and so was she. In Skip’s chest something strained and flopped, like an injured bird struggling to rise. Too many questions. Why did Marlo care about the answers? Was she starting to like Pavel? Or was she only making fun of him? That, thought Skip, would be unkind.

In any case, Skip too was curious about this cousin whose room she shared. On and on the questions came. What would Cousin Barry do when the army was done with him? Would he come back to the Lakes? Would he work at Puce Hardware? How long now until they let him go? Obscurely, she felt the day’s enchantments slipping, and then heard them smash when Pavel said, ‘I’ve a birthday coming up. Never know, I might be saying howdy-do to Baz again soon.’

Sunny spangles played through the leaves and spun across the water like coins catching the light. Skip said quickly, ‘But you wouldn’t go, would you?’

‘Got to do your bit.’ His voice was almost cheery.

‘The war’s wrong, everybody knows that.’

‘They’re fighting the commies.’

‘You could be a – what do they call it, Marlo?’ Skip urged.

‘Conscientious objector.’

Pavel shook his head. ‘Cowards, I call them. Dad says we’ve got to stop the commies whatever we do.’

‘You’d let yourself be an agent of American imperialism? Marlo, tell him.’

‘What can I tell him? His father’s in Australia because he fled the communists.’

Pavel nodded, and earnestly evoked Mr Novak’s flight from the Soviets who rolled into Prague in 1948. Skip listened impatiently. Czechoslovakia? Another planet! Dimly she imagined, in black and white, a lean swarthy young man with test-tube hair like Pavel’s clambering over barbed-wire fences, dodging bullets, flattening himself against walls as soldiers in regimented rows marched by; she could not connect this young man with big-bellied, kindly, bland Mr Novak, who cooked in an apron saying
CHIEF COOK AND BOTTLE WASHER
and handed around the drinks on Sanctum Sundays.

She cried, ‘But Barry’s life is ruined!’

Pavel blinked. ‘He’ll come home, proud to have done his bit.’

‘He’ll die!’ Skip was shrieking now. She had sprung to her feet, upsetting her plate and a glass of Coca-Cola. ‘Your precious mate will take a bullet in the back in some stinking, steamy jungle!’ she cried. ‘He’ll sink into the swamp and rot! Will you be happy then? Will you think he’s done his duty? You’re stupid. You’re stupid and I hate you!’

Pavel gaped. Marlo reached out, but Skip shook off the restraining arm, turned and ran.

She had flailed far into the bush before she paused to wonder where she was going. Shame burned in her face. Already she saw herself trudging back, slump-shouldered, rehearsing muttered apologies: ‘Sorry, Pavel. Sorry, Marlo. Didn’t mean it. You know I didn’t mean it.’ But she did, she did. She had thought Pavel was special, but he was just as stupid as Honza.

Angrily, Skip brushed tears from her eyes and pushed on. Woods stretched thickly away from the pond. She tugged a thin branch off a bluegum and swished it like a whip against the mulchy ground. Moments later, hearing a familiar breathy loping, she turned to see Baskerville. He looked up at her, brow furrowing, pale pink tongue lolling, dripping saliva. ‘Your master’s stupid,’ she told him. ‘Do you know your master’s stupid?’

The dog stiffened, snarling. Had he understood? But his gaze snapped away from her; the collar jangled on his neck and with a low
bow-wow-wow
he was off, crashing through the undergrowth after a sinuous ginger flash.

‘Baskerville! Come back!’ she cried and set off after him, ducking low branches, slapping away leaves. The dog quickly vanished into the trees. She followed his barking but soon became confused. Among thicker, darker bush, sound echoed oddly; noises might have come from several directions at once, and she turned, then turned again.

The barking ceased. Baskerville could be anywhere, and so could the cat. Skip imagined reeking yellow fangs clamping shut on Mowser, the priceless puss: a spurt of blood, a crack of spine. The thought made her desperate. If Baskerville committed so vile an act, she couldn’t stand it, she would hate him for ever and ever. She looked around again. Ahead of her, glimmers of sunlight picked out a long, unbroken slope of ivy; so dense was the growth that she did not at first realise she was looking at a fence, a high fence sagging under its green burden.