Volcano Street Read Online Free PDF

trophies, and hanging from the ceiling was an Airfix F-111. She thought of Barry assembling the model, fingers sticky, breathing in the heady acrid tang of glue. The room would always be his. Half the wardrobe and half the chest of drawers still held his clothes: white shirts; Fair Isle pullovers; denim jeans, and trousers made of corduroy, khaki, linen; singlets; Y-fronts; argyle socks. The thought of sleeping in his bed frightened Skip. She pictured Barry returning at any moment.
    Over a wicker chair beside the bed, Auntie Noreen had laid out Skip’s uniform for the morning: brown beret with badge, brown blouse, brown tie, brown V-necked jumper, brown skirt, long brown socks. Skip had immediately associated the uniform with the still-uncovered shit pit. The smell hovered over the garden like fog.
    If she were a character in a book, thought Skip, the present chapter might be titled ‘In a Brown Study’. Chapters in books were oftencalled that, almost as often as they were called ‘Food for Thought’. What a brown study was, she wasn’t sure; Sherlock Holmes had a study in scarlet, but a brown one sounded nowhere near as good. It sounded damp. It sounded sad. She was sick of feeling sad. She knew, or half knew, that her dreams of running away were only that, dreams – but how real they seemed! Always the pattern was the same: the leap of possibility, like sunlight through clouds; then disappointment as the vision faded. If only Marlo could have believed too! Tonight they could have made plans that would make tomorrow all right, even if Skip still caught the school bus, and Marlo headed off to Puce Hardware.
    The yard stretched perhaps a hundred feet behind the house. The shit pit, surrounded by its clutter of planks and tools, lay at a diagonal to Skip’s left; to her right, shadowy in darkness, stood the shed. At the yard’s end the ground sloped upwards; the fence, behind fruit trees, looked alarmingly high, but wasn’t high enough to block out the lights from the house around the corner: three yellow-gold oblongs turned on their sides, agleam against the dark walls and rendered fuzzy by the leaves. The weather had turned with the fall of evening. The trees creaked in the wind.
    Skip thought about Karen Jane. Had they put her in a padded cell? Did they really do that? Maybe Skip didn’t have to blame herself. Karen Jane had been locked away before. She spoke about it casually (‘When I was in the funny farm …’), as if there were kudos in her madness, evidence of sensitivity and talent. If only she had never met Caper. That, too, was Skip’s fault.
    One Sunday on Glenelg Beach, some years earlier, Karen Jane had lolled in sunglasses, smoking, smearing herself with Coppertone, leafing idly through Go-Set . Bored, Skip wandered the beach in her bathers (‘Only paddling, mind,’ said Karen Jane); Marlo, whose scholarship exam drew near, had insisted on staying home, for all that her mother called her a bore, a prude, and a pain in the arse.Sometimes Skip wished she could call her mother hateful things: fat, old, ugly. But Karen Jane was beautiful: slender but curvy, skin smooth as honey, hair a curtain-like blonde cascade, like Mary’s from Peter, Paul and Mary.
    The sky was unclouded, one of those Australian skies that arc over the earth like a vast inverted porcelain bowl with perfectly even pale blue glaze. Skip stared at the horizon. How fascinating it was, that distant line where blue met blue! Reason told her the line wasn’t real, that no seam joined sea and sky, but she could never quite believe it.
    Skip plucked off her bikini top (stupid thing) and stepped into the tide. The beach behind her faded: that baby squealing, that transistor radio, that couple arguing, all receded. Wet sand pressed between her toes and foam curled, not quite coldly, around her ankles. Shallows lapped her calves, then she waded thigh-deep; a wave swept in, making her stagger back, aware of the heft behind its seeming