Volcano Street (26 page)

‘Drink? Doug’s got his secret stash,’ said Pavel, and he bent down behind the big desk, opened a drawer, and produced a bottle of Bell’s.

‘Can we really stay here?’ said Marlo.

‘In Puce Hardware? Best range of camping gear in the Lakes. Ground sheets. Sleeping bags.’

‘Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this before?’

Pavel poured Bell’s into enamel mugs. He sat on the edge of Uncle Doug’s desk; Marlo took the room’s single easy chair. Stuffing burst from the chair’s splitting arm like wool freshly shorn; she pulled out a skein. The room smelled of vinyl, smoke, musty paper. With the desklamp behind him, Pavel’s hair leaped with orange fire. Soft-eyed, he gazed at her.

‘I’ve never drunk whisky.’ She took the mug.

‘It’s good. After the first taste.’

The burn in her throat was thrilling. Through the curtains came the muffled swish of cars. Show Saturday was over at last. Above the door, a clock ticked, loud against the quietness like a time bomb counting down.

A shudder passed through Marlo. It wasn’t just the whisky. ‘I’ve lost my koala.’ Tears caught in her throat. ‘That’s the sort of thing I do, you see. You know, my koala, the one you won. I’ve left it at the ball. I can see it there, with its silly little snub nose and the ribbon round its neck, sitting in a corner on a foldout chair. Paws outstretched. Waiting. For me.’ She covered her face. ‘Christ, I’m so ashamed. How could I make such a fool of myself?’

‘Hey.’ Pavel slipped off the desk and kneeled before her. ‘How many times do I make a fool of myself? Every bloody time I open my mouth.’

‘I thought Howard was queer.’ Angrily, Marlo brushed away her tears. ‘In the beginning, I mean. I told myself we’d be friends, the best of friends. The play was just the beginning. He talked about London, New York, Berlin. I thought I’d go too. How sophisticated
our lives would be! We’d be liberated. Artists. Radicals. We’d both have affairs and laugh about them. That’s what I dreamed about. Stupid girl. And now I’ve ruined everything.’

‘He’s just a teacher.’ Pavel gripped her hands.

‘Why are you so kind to me?’ said Marlo. ‘I’m a bitch. And I’ll go crazy, like my mother.’

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.

Tick, went the time bomb. Tick. Tick.

What would Germaine do? Marlo didn’t know. Which one it was who drew forward first, neither could have said. The kiss, when it happened, was long and deep. Marvelling, Marlo reached up, gripping Pavel’s frothing head. She slipped out of the chair. His arms enfolded her tightly. She sank and sank into a dark enthralling warmth.

She laughed. ‘You
have
done this before, haven’t you?’

They spread the sleeping bags on the office floor.

Skip had no questions. There had been too many questions. Answers would come; she only had to wait. Scrubby vegetation slid by the car, flashing green-grey in the sweeping pallid headlights. Honza snored lightly on the back seat.

Mr Novak spoke of the past. His voice was gentle. Once, he said, he lived with his father, mother and three brothers in Bohemia in a town called Pardoo-bitzer. He spoke of the cobbled town square, and the big gloomy church, and crazy goggle-eyed Uncle Yarn whose head grew bright red and swelled enough to burst when he drank too much becherovka; he spoke of train journeys into Prague in winter, three hours in a steamy compartment, sweeping a woolly sleeve across the window to look at the white world passing. In Australia, Mr Novak had always missed the snow. Soon it would be Christmas. Oh, for a Czech Christmas! The sharp frozen journey to midnight mass. Long stripy socks pinned expectantly over the hearth. The carp in the bathtub, flicking blackly back and forth, until Uncle Yarn
in red festive braces came stomp-a-stomp down the hall, clashing together long knives that sounded like a swordfight in an old film.

The Valiant swung around the curve of the lakes. Honza stirred but did not wake. The boy had fallen asleep almost immediately after clambering into the car. Sometimes, thought Skip, he is much younger than me.

Mr Novak said he had wanted, when he grew up, to be an engineer and live in Prague. But even as a boy he knew his plans were idle. We think we are free but are constrained on every side: we do only what history lets us do. He spoke of the war, the occupation, and the bleak years afterwards when Czechoslovakia, abandoned first to Hitler, was abandoned again to Stalin. But what, after all, was Czechoslovakia, this cobbled-together country, this tattered rag of the Austro-Hungarian empire? You turned. You ran. You did not look back. Czechoslovakia was barbed wire and machine guns. But in dreams Vlad Novak walked the streets of Prague again: the golden city, castle on high, with the Vltava below, tumbling green and deep beneath its medieval bridges. The river dazzles and the castle flashes as the sun sinks behind far-off hills. Do not imagine it is always winter there. What wouldn’t he give to run again through a cornfield in Bohemia in the tender burgeoning summer?

Vladislav Novak had been a student in Prague when the Russian tanks rolled in, a thin young man with, yes, hair like a frothing test tube who smoked too much and bit his nails to the quick. In time, his escape would seem unreal to him, a story he had heard about another man. Many times that other man had thought he would be killed. Russians with machine guns patrolled the border. Did he kill one? More than one? Maybe he did. When he made it to the refugee centre in West Germany, he was starved and half-mad. He wondered when they had decided to send him to Australia. Was he told? Did he agree? But here he was and a lifetime had passed. Never again would he see the golden city.

The rhythm of the car made Skip sleepy too. What happened next unfolded as in a dream, with a dream’s inevitability. Mr Novak’s voice had become quieter as his story went on. When they turned off the road he fell silent.

The Valiant drew to a halt. A grassy verge lay silver under the moon. Before them, the veranda sagged wide like a ruined dark mouth. Skip heard the squeal of a door opening, as if in response to the crunch of tyres. She looked at Mr Novak and he smiled as if to say: Go. You must. The figure that awaited her stood, half-revealed, on the edge of darkness and light. Of course Skip had seen him before: Vincent Price. But that was not his name.

‘You know who he is, don’t you?’

Skip thought of a picture she had seen, a boy on a tennis court, heartbreaking in his youthful vigour, racquet ready to slam back a serve in a world lost in time. He was the leading light of the Players, the name scratched out from the honour roll at the high: 1948 –
NO AWARD
.

Roger Dansie. Ghost of Crater Lakes.

Chapter Fourteen

Marlo looked at Pavel for a long time. She had watched him while he slept; now he had woken but remained silent, gazing at her. How deep his eyes were, how dark! His lips were lovely, too. With a smile, she tousled his curly head. ‘Puce Hardware is a rotten place to sleep.’

‘I’ll never make you sleep here again.’

‘Maybe I’ll have to.’ She kissed him playfully. Sunlight pressed between the curtains, sparkling on curling covers of
Pix
and the green chipped filing cabinets that had stood guard all night beside the camping gear.

Marlo stretched; her dark hair tumbled into her eyes. She wore Pavel’s shirt from the night before, buttons undone. He pulled her down again. Some time passed before she broke free.

Today, she decided, must be a great day. ‘Let’s not go home. I can’t bear it. Not yet.’

‘We don’t have to,’ said Pavel.

‘Remember our picnic? That day at the swimming hole. It should have been perfect and I ruined everything. If only we could have that day again.’

‘Why not? It’s warm. It’s the weekend.’ Pavel was on his feet at once, tugging on his dishevelled clothes; he had already, some time earlier, stripped the shirt from Marlo’s back. He bundled together the camping gear and returned the whisky bottle to its hiding place. By the time Marlo appeared beside him, flicking back her hair in the mirror over the sink, he had washed out the enamel mugs.

Morning was almost over. Sun splashed Marlo’s pale arms and her hair whipped back and forth in dark ropes as the Land Rover whirled away from Puce Hardware. Happily she watched Pavel. His stubbled chin gave him a raffish air. He had pushed back his shirtsleeves; muscles tautened in his veiny brown forearms as he spun the wheel, veering off Volcano Street.

Not until Puce’s Bend was upon them did she realise he was driving the wrong way. They passed the abandoned service station. ‘Hey!’ she protested. ‘What’s the idea?’

‘Picnic time, ain’t it? There’s tons of stuff back home. Quick raid and we’ll be off.’ They passed the blowhole and rounded the grassy corner.

Marlo waited apprehensively in the Land Rover while Pavel went into the Novak house. The white walls and picture windows flared in the sunlight. The house, to her relief, looked no more alive than Auntie Noreen’s or the service station. Death might have descended on Puce’s Bend.

Magpies cawed. The paddocks across the road smelled brisk and ripe. Marlo’s fears subsided. So what if Deirdre Novak came charging out of the house, intent on vengeance for the night before? Nothing could touch Marlo Wells.

She remembered a time before Skip was born when Karen Jane had lived with an eccentric older man, a librarian, in the Adelaide Hills. To Marlo, the memory of his cottage would always be vivid: the rag mat in front of the big stony fireplace where she lay on cold days, leafing through
Pickwick
and
Alice
and
Mr Sponge’s Sporting
Tour
, loving the pictures long before she could understand the words; the bed where she slept in an attic under the eaves; the overgrown garden with the swing that hung off-kilter from an enormous peeling bluegum. Karen Jane in those days was still a mere girl, but Marlo remembered her as more of a mother then than later: a matronly figure in a gingham shift, beating a mixing bowl in a shaft of morning light. In the afternoons they walked, hand in hand, down a bark-strewn unpaved road towards the closest shops, in a hamlet two miles away. Often not a single car would pass; the silence was deep, but for the wind in the leaves, the tickerings of insects, the high crazed cries of cockatoos and kookaburras; and Marlo, looking up at her beautiful young mother, golden in sunshine, felt a certainty that everything was all right: everything, she was sure, would always be all right. If only the librarian could have been Marlo’s father. But he was Skip’s. Marlo’s father, she knew, had been some boy who drove a delivery van.

When Pavel came back, Marlo laughed, and he asked her what was funny. He was, of course! Struggling with that hamper, he looked like Norman Wisdom.

‘Anyone home?’ Marlo asked as Pavel gunned the motor.

‘Quiet as a tomb. No Honza. No Dad.’

Pavel’s face was calm, untroubled. He wasn’t lying, not exactly, but thought it best to say nothing. Inside, he had raided first the pantry, then the fridge, then moved on to the wine rack, when Howard Brooker had ambled out to the kitchen in a pair of purple jockey shorts. Coppery hair fanned across his nipples and scudded down his torso in a wispy line. Scrawny! He scratched an armpit, murmured a greeting. Pavel, as if unconcerned, arranged his bounty in the hamper: fried chicken, mushroom casserole, Edam, Gouda, claret, homemade bread. Cutlery? Check. Plates? Check. Glasses and napkins. Not a haul like last time’s, but not bad.

Brooker attempted, ‘Who said you could take that?’

Brooker, the man of the house? ‘I said.’ Pavel stepped towards him and Brooker stepped back. Huh! The bastard was frightened. Pavel snorted. He could knock the bugger down.

Mrs Novak’s voice rang down the hall. ‘Howie? Are you coming back to bed?’

Howie! Pavel had pushed him in the chest.

Marlo’s heart swelled as they approached Dansie’s Pond. They had to play the scene again and play it right. Lemony light between the leaves. The heat. The sun-spangled water, held as in a chalice, a promise that had been kept. There could be no holding back. Strip off. Fling clothes into branches. Plunge with Pavel into glassy green. Cry out, exhilarated, as he thrashes after you, a friendly assailant. Spray dashes, dashes, mercury-bright. Then calm: calm. Round and round in a whir of green, sun red through closed eyelids. Bright, so bright. If this is eternity, all there is or can be, that will be enough.

He’s here again. Revolve, lips together, in the still centre. Sun dazzles, dazzles. His tongue plunging deep and the strange column of flesh (I am desired: a man desires me) pressing against her under the water. Fingers on nipples, smoothly rough. Tug him to the bank. Laugh. Who would believe it? The boy next door turns out to be the one. He carries condoms in his wallet. He has done this before. But after last night, so has she.

Rug on the ground. Tartan. Red, yellow, black.

Later, half-dressed, they sprawled beside the picnic basket. The fried chicken had vanished, the mushroom casserole too. Idly they ate Edam, Gouda, and ripped off chunks of crusty bread. They talked about everything and nothing. Marlo had read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and told Pavel the story.

‘Reckon you’d better lend me that book,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘we’ll just act it out.’ Tipping up her claret glass, she felt the liquid sliding down her throat.

What made her say what she said next?

‘I’m wondering about you. What will become of you.’

‘Become?’

‘You can’t stay here.’

‘In the Lakes?’ Pavel wore only his jeans; his chest was bare and glistened, biscuit-brown. Fingers traced a seam of her crumpled dress. Go on, Marlo: take those fingers in your own.

‘You and me,’ he said, ‘we’re real different, ain’t we?’

‘Stay here and what will happen to you? You’re smart, Pavel.’

‘Me? I’m the bloke in that book of yours. The gamekeeper.’

‘You’re smart,’ she said again. ‘And here you are fetching and carrying for Uncle Doug. Bowing and scraping to Auntie Noreen. It can’t go on. You’ve got to get away.’

I’ve made him sad, she thought. Say no more.

She said more. ‘Look at the men in this town. Doug Puce. Sandy Campbell.’