Volcano Street by David Rain

embarrassing, to see teachers outside school! Leaning against the baby grand was Mr Brooker, gesticulating at a toothy lady in pearls. Skip hoped they weren’t about to sing.
    ‘And what can we get our youngest guest?’
    Skip turned as a man addressed her in a thick foreign accent. He was the pianist she had seen last Sunday, a hulking mound of a man, bald on top, with soft grey eyes, who carried trays of canapés in both plump hands and wore over his paunch an apron bearing the legend CHIEF COOK AND BOTTLE WASHER .
    ‘Lemonade?’ he went on. ‘I’d say gin and tonic, which you might well need, but I don’t think it’s allowed for ten-year-olds.’ He found a place for the canapés on an already laden table: nuts, crisps, crackers, cubes of cheese on sticks.
    ‘I’m twelve,’ said Skip. ‘Are you Honza’s father?’
    ‘Helen Puce, isn’t it? Honza’s still not home. Been out with that Lumsden boy all afternoon. Typical!’
    Skip tried not to look relieved. ‘I’m Wells. Like H. G. But really I’m Skip,’ she added, as Mr Novak presented her with a brimming tumbler.
    ‘You’re in Honza’s class? I hope you’re a better pupil. Both my sons, such terrible pupils! In Czechoslovakia, I study to be an engineer. Here, I am a lowly clerk. But didn’t I hope better for my sons? Pavel should have gone to university, done something with his life, and what happens? Stupid boy! Ends up in a hardware shop.’
    Skip was about to ask where Pavel was when she saw him on the other side of the room, serving drinks. Did he mind being a waiter? As always, he looked happy enough, but then a glass smashed in a far corner and he jumped a little and reeled around. Mr Novak hurried off to help.
    Left alone, Skip applied herself to the canapés, not without gusto, until a lady – Rhonda Sweetapple from the Greyhound? – looked at her snoogishly. She felt as if she were at school and it was recess. Time for a circuit. She slipped off to explore the house. Behind the Sanctum stretched long darkened corridors, branching in two directions, with a skylight in the ceiling at the point where they met. She peered into a bedroom. Everything smelled new. The kitchen, silvery in moonlight, might have belonged to a restaurant. Copper pans of many sizes hung from hooks above a wide range. Open shelves displayed big jars of preserves and little jars of spices. Skip opened a jar of something and smelled it. She wrinkled her nose. Wine bottles lay in a crisscrossing rack. Yellow-gold candelabra, spaced evenly, thrust up in a line down the middle of a long table that appeared to be made of railway sleepers.
    Skip felt sad as she made her way back to the Sanctum. The Novak house hinted at a permanence she had never known. But perhapsthe impression was false. After all, it was just a house. And it was in Crater Lakes.
    In the Sanctum, Mrs Novak huddled beside Marlo on a sofa, muttering intensely as if confiding sisterly secrets. Marlo looked tolerant, even indulgent. A picture on the wall, an abstract swirl, churned above their heads like a mushroom cloud.
    Snatches of conversation drifted in and out of Skip’s awareness.
    ‘… So I asked the cretins’ (Mr Brooker’s voice was loud) ‘which ones liked opera. Groans, of course, from the usual suspects. “Well, looks like some of us will be off to the library to do revision while the rest of us hear this opera,” I said. “Pity. Because this opera is Jesus Christ Superstar –”’
    ‘… You’ve heard she’s writing a novel, I suppose?’
    ‘Deirdre? Painting and ceramics, now writing – whatever next?’
    ‘The story, I gather, concerns a young girl’s awakening one burning summer in the Tuscan hills –’
    ‘… Yairs, so the boys hired a van and went all over England, John O’Groats to Land’s End –’
    ‘Me, I say you should see Australia first –’
    ‘… What is this about Deirdre’s big announcement tonight? She’s been dropping hints like