Volcano Street E-Book

David Rain

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

'What would Germaine do?' This is the mantra that Skip and Marlo Wells turn to as they navigate their way through the twists and turns that life brings. Such as the sectioning of their mother Karen Jane. Marlo puts her faith in her hero, Germaine Greer, and twelve-year-old Skip trusts her clever big sister to know the right thing to do. But when the sisters are forced to move to their Auntie Noreen and Uncle Doug's home in the backwater city of Crater Lakes even Marlo can't think of a solution. At age sixteen, Marlo is forced to quit school and work in the family hardware store. Skip manages to get on her auntie's bad side from the get-go and is an outcast at school as she vehemently declares the injustice of the Vietnam War - not what Noreen wants to hear with her precious son Barry off fighting. Skip and Marlo dream of escape from Crater Lakes but with Karen Jane's release nowhere on the horizon they resign themselves to their new life. Before long they make the acquaintance of the Novak brothers - Skip's classmate Honza and his eternally cheerful older brother Pavel. Marlo becomes entangled with the local drama teacher, leaving Skip to explore the town's haunts with Honza. Skip learns about the mysterious Dansie residence, a secluded house that once belonged to Roger Dansie - an actor and the closest thing to a local hero that Crater Lakes ever had. As the days roll on the Wells sisters are drawn ever deeper in to the lives of their new acquaintances, learning that their first impressions of Crater Lakes may not be as accurate as they believed. Against the backdrop of a broken home, the fight for equality and a far off war Volcano Street is a heartfelt tale of acceptance and belonging, and learning what family truly means.

Leseprobe

Volcano Street

Also by David Rain

The Heat of the Sun

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © David Rain, 2015

The moral right of David Rain to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 207 2

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 406 8

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For those who stayed in the Happy Valley

When real things are so wonderful,what is the point of pretending?E. M. FORSTER

The fiction of one’s life is the truth.VINCENT PRICE

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Author’s note

Note on the Author

Chapter One

My fault. All my fault.

The judgement sounded in Skip’s head. All the way from Adelaide she had heard it, in the rattling windows, in the snores from other seats, in the tyres as they juddered over the country highway. She told herself it wasn’t true, but still it came in the swish of passing vehicles: that station wagon, chalky with dust, with surfboards lashed to the roof; that farmer’s truck, tight-packed with sheep, that thundered by and wafted back its sharp, shitty stench, filling the Greyhound for desperate minutes.

Marlo, with her book, had moved across the aisle. How placid she looked, how self-contained: hairband like a halo, neat across her crown; elbow crooked against the chrome window frame, propping up the hand that shaded her eyes.

Skip picked up her comic. Lex Luthor held Metropolis to ransom, threatening to destroy it with a death ray aimed from space. Never mind, Superman would sort it out. She wished she were Superman. Not Supergirl, in that dinky little skirt. Skip didn’t just want to be super, she wanted to be a man. If she were a man, she would be blamed for nothing.

She rested her head against the window. September: the beginning of spring. The afternoon sun was pale and lemony. Monterey pines in neat plantations had replaced the flat paddocks, barbed-wire fences and scattered grey gum trees that had reeled by for hours. Abundant moist undergrowth seethed between the trees, testament to the cool green winter just gone.

Skip loped across the aisle, dropped her head into her sister’s lap, and looked up, wide-eyed. ‘Cattus cattus?’ Their old joke (If a rat’s rattus rattus, is a cat cattus cattus?) had become a greeting. Usually Marlo laughed; today she sighed impatiently and shifted her book.

‘I’m starving!’ Skip sprang up. ‘How much longer?’

‘You’ve had lunch.’

‘Soggy sandwiches from a BP roadhouse!’

‘Wolfed them down, didn’t you?’

‘I’m a growing boy.’

The Wells sisters – half-sisters, really – might not have been related at all. Skip, small for her age, was a freckled tomboy with a head of coarse bright straw, cropped as if with pinking shears; Marlo, almost a woman and womanly with it, was porcelain pale, with hair that crested her shoulders in rich dark waves. Today Skip wore a nautical sweater, once white, over a plaid shirt, faded jeans with threadbare knees, and sneakers that were falling apart. Marlo’s white blouse, blue blazer, grey skirt and shiny black lace-ups could have been her uniform from Adelaide Ladies’ College, minus cap, tie and tie pin.

‘Marlo …’ Do you blame me? Skip almost said, but gestured instead to the book in Marlo’s lap and asked what Germaine was on about now.

‘Cunt hatred.’ Marlo did not drop her voice.

On the open pages Skip picked out a few words: sex, prostitute, sex, cunt, fuck, cunt. She liked Germaine. Germaine was radical: she pissed people off.

Sunlight flickered greenly through the pines. Sometimes it was dull to have a serious sister. Skip supposed she should shut up, but instead dug Marlo in the ribs and made a joke about the pig-faced lady who had left the coach at the last stop. Was she hurrying home on her trotters? Was she oinking?

‘In a pig’s ear,’ said Marlo, and Skip, delighted, twisted around, hitched her chin over the seat’s high vinyl back, and surveyed the other passengers. They were few: a fat man with a short back and sides who read the Sunday Mail with an affronted air; a thin lady in a chamberpot hat; two carrot-headed little boys who had torn up and down the aisle until the driver roared at them to bloody well cut it out. A soldier in a slouch hat, young and spotty, gazed out the window. Just back from Nam? Fascist. Skip pictured him, in grainy black and white, sloshing through a swamp. Cradled in his arms was a machine gun, and his eyes darted suspiciously through steamy haze. Skip knew all about fascists. When they got to San Fran, Karen Jane said, they’d march against the war. Everyone in San Fran was radical and marched against the war.