Volcano Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

gentleness. Flinging herself into the oncoming water, cleaving it with steely arms, she thought she would see the horizon fixed firmly, growing ever nearer; instead there were only green ramparts, silver spray, and blurry droplets glinting in her eyes.
    Soon she was tired, desperately tired. She turned, treading water. Shimmery hills rose and fell. The beach was far off, a storybook tableau: long bright sands, jetty, hot-dog stand, stick figures in colourful costumes. Waves lapped in all directions; now there were no more glimpses of the beach between the shifting hills, and she was no longer sure which way was back and which out to sea. She waved a hand. Could anybody see her? She imagined herself imprisoned within castle walls, a circle impregnable as if it were made of stone.
    Time distends strangely when you are about to die. Hours passed in her watery prison; each dip beneath the surface was an eternity, and she felt herself plunging down, down. When she bobbed up again she saw herself, as if from far above, tiny against the swell andlost for ever; then all at once she was scooped up into an embrace. Wildly she resisted, as if this new presence had come to drag her under, but she was too weak to hold out for long, and gave in to the strong chest and confident, sleek arms.
    Feeling hot sand beneath her back, she opened her eyes. A shadow passed over her and a face came into focus: a man’s, deeply tanned, with a droopy black moustache. She turned her head and saw people all around, jabbering in excited voices. ‘Push down on his chest!’ said one. ‘Give him mouth to mouth!’ said another.
    Skip sat up indignantly, coughing, as Karen Jane descended upon them, Mary-hair flying. ‘Helen, you stupid girl,’ she said in a choking voice, while murmurs broke out among the onlookers.
    ‘Say, he’s a girl!’ said the man with the moustache. His accent was strange: American, no mistaking it. Karen Jane had crushed Skip to her with all a mother’s ardour; now, seeing the stranger, she let her daughter slump back and, with a delighted smile, turned her attention to the girl’s saviour.
    The lifeguard’s hippie-length hair, ropy from the sea, flowed from underneath his tight cap. Beneath the droopy moustache stretched a dazzling grin. His arms and torso were well muscled, with thick fur that spread in wide wings across the pectorals before plunging in a tapering line towards a pair of tight red briefs beneath which swelled a prodigious lump.
    ‘My apartment’s just up from here,’ he said to Karen Jane. (Apartment? Nobody said apartment , not in real life.) ‘I’m done for the day. I guess you folks could use a Coke, huh?’ He held out his hand. ‘Kendall Caper.’
    ‘You’re a Yank?’ said Karen Jane, and tickled his palm.
    Caper lived in a sprawling single-storey mansion, one street back from the beach, which had fallen on hard times and been divided into flats. Lush gardens, a barely held-back jungle, lapped at the wide, listing verandas.
    That night, Skip fell asleep on the sofa while Caper played Karen Jane an LP called Surrealistic Pillow . Once Skip stirred to see Karen Jane and Caper propped side by side against the wall like rag dolls. Both had cigarettes in their hands, fat, shaggy roll-ups. There was a funny smell.
    ‘When the war’s over, I can go home,’ Caper was saying.
    ‘San Fran?’ said Karen Jane.
    After that, she spent many nights away. When some weeks had passed, she drove Skip and Marlo to Caper’s place one sunny afternoon and said, as if it were the most inconsequential of matters, that they were all going to live there now. Caper, in jeans cut off at the knees and nothing else, stood grinning in the doorway as they arrived. In his hand he held a can of Foster’s; he swigged from it lustily before he bestirred himself, mooched forward and kissed Karen Jane long enough for the girls to be embarrassed.
    Karen Jane looked eagerly to the future. The present, she told the girls, was a