Cloudstreet

IX. The House is Trembling

CLOUDSTREET was torpid with shock for days after the wedding. The Lambs worked in a strange calm; it was unlike them to be so quiet. Lester forwent the noseflute solos to schoolkids on the verandah. Oriel spoke in a low murmur. The Pickles side of the house, always quiet (except when Dolly was on a binge) became mute altogether. Dolly and Sam found the silence companionable at times and there were moments when their eyes actually lit upon each other in Rose’s absence.

But the quiet between them all went unnoticed on Cloudstreet because the Water Board started fooling with diggers and pipes, testing out their new machinery.

The sixties are here, said the supervisor with great enthusiasm.

Yeah, said Lester Lamb, thinking of his age.

You can’t turn back the clock.

No, said Lester, but you don’t have to wind it either.

Men are outside digging the street. Fish Lamb stands at the window tapping the butterknife against the panes — chink, chink, cachink — watching the black man across the street. A truck rolls by with a load of huge pipes. The black man is gone in the dust it leaves, and from behind Fish, across the corridor, comes the old keening noise again. He sits on Quick’s old bed and dust rises from the quilt. The house is trembling.

How Small Our Dreams Are

I want to live in a new house, said Rose. In a new suburb in a new street. I want a car out the front and some mowed lawn. I want a small, neat house that only we live in, Quick. I don’t ever want to live anywhere old, where people have been before. Clean and new, that’s what I want.

We’ve got no money, he said, as he drove them home from their honeymoon. They’d gone crabbing. Crabbing!

I’ve been working for years, Quick. I’ve been saving all this time.

And I haven’t even got a job. I never got paid for doin the fish.

We’ll see your mother about that tomorrow.

Ah …

Don’t be gutless, Quick. You should’ve been paid.

I need a job, he said. Two jobs if we’re sposed to have a house.

We’ll get you two jobs.

You’ll be quittin, I spose.

Rose laughed. She’d married a man who still wore the clothes his mother bought for him. He didn’t know his shoe size or what size underpants he took. He read nothing but pulp westerns, had never had an official job and probably didn’t even know what a union was. He’d never signed a cheque or had a bank account or paid tax. He’d had women before — that much a girl could tell — but he never spoke about them. He was good with his hands, could see long distances, stay awake for days if he wanted to and he woke at the smallest sound. He had a beautiful copperplate hand but wrote nothing at all. He took a girl crabbing for a week on her honeymoon and on the way home expected her to quit work.

No, Quick, I won’t be quitting.

Fair enough.

You want me to.

Girls like to.

Not this girl. This girl wants to buy a house. When we get back we’re going to State Housing to sign up.

Fair enough. I’ll need a job.

Two jobs.

Fair enough.

What’ll you do?

Quick pursed his sunburnt lips and peered over the steering wheel. Join the police force.

Oh, gawd no.

Me dad was a copper, you know. But he was only in it for the uniform.

Quick, she groaned with all her Pickles blood, why?

Don’t you read the paper?

Of course I read the bloody paper.

Evil.

What?

I want to fight evil.

You’re not in a comic, Quick.

He grinned: Why’d everyone leave it so late to tell me? Quick thought of his room at Cloudstreet, the victims dancing on his wall, all the things there were to be stopped. Now Rose snuggled against him as if to reassure herself. What a head of hair. How could he have lived so long in the same house with her without noticing? She was so passionate, so full of restless energy, and hardheaded — though not nearly as tough as she let on. Still, she was her own woman. He felt dumb around her, but not stupid.

A copper, she said.

I’ll sign up after State Housing.

Right.

I feel good about it already.

Small dreams, chuckled Rose.

Just a little bigger than us, I spose.

The Day the Fifties Finished

The day the fifties finished, Rose and Quick found a little flat behind a house in Mosman Park. It was owned by a Mrs Manners who lived up the front, and Rose hated it. It was all they could afford on Rose’s pay and the academy’s allowance while their little house was being built, but being so busy they were hardly ever there. It was old, and Rose hated old. And it was sharing and Rose never wanted to share again. They worked their guts out to pay for their little dream. At night Quick drove delivery trucks and Rose took in laundry, and on Sundays they drove north in Lester’s Chev to look at their sandy quarter acre and the piles of raw bricks. They kept clear of Cloudstreet, though at night Quick often lay awake thinking about it. He’d shake it off in time, he knew. Like Rose says, they’re them now, and we’re us. It’s natural.

At the end of the year, the old Chev truck came clanking down Swan Street to pick Rose up, and though the idea of riding in it caused Rose’s cheeks to burn, she knew it was the only way she’d get to Quick’s graduation, and that maybe it was the best way, too, considering who Quick was and where he’d come from. Besides she had secret news to buoy herself with, and not even the Harley and sidecar would have been too much to bear.

When Lester came shambling down the path in his five shilling scarecrow suit, Rose locked the door of the bedsit entrance and went out to meet him. He smiled, with his lower teeth in for the occasion, and gave her a nervous kiss on the nose.

Well, love, you right? Let’s go an see em stick his number on.

Constable Lamb, eh? It was ridiculous, she knew, but there was a fat fist of pride in her throat even saying the words. She’d gotten to love him in that little two room annexe off the weatherboard house. They worked and saved so hard that they barely spent any time together. They were hungry for each other. They saved their hopes as well as their money and in time they’d be moving to a new life. Sometimes Rose wondered if perhaps she wanted the house too much. Quick wasn’t like that. He was a boy really: awkward, flatfooted, naive, but he also had the outlook sometimes of an old man. He was calm, steadfast, longsighted and a little mean with money. She was ambitious all ways, she knew, even in the dangerous way. But Quick had more aim than ambition, and for that as much as the rest, she knew she needed him.

Yairp, said Lester. Another flamin Constable Lamb.

Rose followed the old man up to the truck, noticing how much he stooped these days, his tallness turning on itself.

Did you like being a copper, Lester?

I liked the horses. Didn’t like chasin people up, much. I was better with the horses.

You sound like Dad. He’s better with the horses than he is with the betting, silly fool.

Well.

Oriel sat fidgeting in the cab, forcing a smile as they came. She shoved over to make room for Rose. Her hair was set, her skin looked raw and scrubbed and she smelt like a faintly mouldy towel.

Hello, Oriel.

The old woman scowled and accepted a kiss. She didn’t approve of first name terms with juniors and inlaws, but her son’s wife was a stubborn one, and Oriel knew it’d take time to win that battle. Besides, she hadn’t liked coughing up backpay for Quick. It went against family principles.

I’ve plucked three pullets this morning, said Oriel. There’s lunch at our place.

Lester winked behind the old girl and Rose pressed out a smile.

The big day, she murmured.

To think they knocked him back three times over a rash on his feet, said Oriel. He’s got my sensitive skin, poor soul. Well, he’s showed em.

They drove down by the river, winding along the cliffs past the houses of the rich and Anglophile. Sun forced back banks of cloud, and the mottled waters of the Swan glittered across its wide, languid course through the city and its hungry suburbs. Rose felt the sun across her knees and believed that there was everything to look forward to.

Yes, Rose thought, watching Quick step up to the dais to have his hand shaken by the Commissioner and the Minister, he looks bigger in uniform, filled out, solid. Quick stood his height, his cap set perfect on his head and the buttons on his tunic winking regimental, and up there beside the other flapeared youths, it was obvious that he was older, more a man. There he was, swearing allegiance to the Queen, the very mention of whom sent his mother into a fit of weeping beside Rose. Rose saw Lester’s quivery chin in the corner of her eye, and she wished she could be brave enough to reach across Oriel and hold the old softy’s hand.

Did you give him clean underpants? Oriel snivelled.

I even ironed them! Rose hissed.

That’s my boy.

No, Rose uttered silently, against her will, that’s my boy now.

Well, said Quick on the back step where the smell of roasting chickens and spuds and pumpkin and parsnips wafted, I’m a cop.

Rose leaned against the wall where the gully trap protruded and felt her breakfast rising relentlessly.

Yeah. And a father, too.

What?

Which makes me a mother.

Rose. You’re kiddin!

No lie. Oh. Here comes the proof of the pudd—

Toast and tea gouted up against the back wall, as Rose leant out, heaving.

Whacko, said Quick, that’s fantastic!

Thank you, said Rose, taking a breath and wiping her mouth with her hanky. Just something I learnt along the way.

Flatfoot

After a month of being a copper Quick Lamb discovered that in a shift he’d walk further than a whore, streetsweeper, salesman or vagrant and look more out of place in the windripped heart of the city than any of them. Up and down he walked. People went to work, got off and on trams and trolleys, they parked cars, ate lunch, filled pubs and went home. Evil seemed to evaporate wherever he went. He was left to tidy up brothel queues in Roe Street, clear drunks from shop doorways and help old people to crosswalks. He felt like he’d joined the Boy Scouts. There was no swagger, no truncheon swinging, no Allo, Allo. He just stumped along, marked out for invisibility by his uniform, hoping guiltily for a spot of sin to come his way. On the city beat his only pinch was a drunken football coach flashing browneyes in the Ladies’ Lounge of the Savoy.

When he was transferred to Nedlands he thought it was a dinkum shift of his fortunes, but he soon wised up. Nedlands was a political station. The MPs and business barons and the old school boys lived there and the station was open to keep watch on those bludgers’ property. The sergeant in charge was a depressed and hopeless man. He sent Quick out in the afternoons down Broadway and the Avenue to show the colours and hear the complaints of the toffs. Those days he just had his thoughts to keep him going. He’d plan the evening: get home before Rose, fix some grub, tell a few silly stories and gloat over her swollen belly. They let her work on at Bairds because on the switch she was invisible and couldn’t offend the customers. He’d think of fishing, of all his children and the life they would have.

The Shifty Shadow

Sam Pickles woke up before the winter dawn with his stump tingling and the smell of his dead father there under the blankets, and he lay awake, cold and sweaty, knowing that the Shifty Shadow had moved across him, and that today was no day to get out of bed. He turned on the bedlamp. This time he’d be no fool, bloody oath, he wouldn’t; not till what was going to come had come. Dolly slept beside him with her hair splashed grey and brown across the pillow, her face crushed and old in the lamp. The house was quiet but for the wind creaking it back on its haunches.

Yer losin yer nerve, Sam, he thought, but yer must be smartenin up a bit all the same.

He hadn’t felt it as strong and mean on him since the last day at the Abrolhos, and he knew you didn’t need to be a gambling man to know that this kind of luck wasn’t about to be wagered on.

Morning arrived, the house came alive with business. Dolly slept on, Sam felt the weight of his head on the pillow. The tingling was gone, but there was still a trace of pipe tobacco and port breath in the room. He lit a cigarette and waited. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. In the end he slept.

Dolly scrapes along the creaky morning balustrade, wild with sobriety. Out in the street those jackhammers have started again. She hasn’t touched a drop in four days and you’d swear they had one of those jackhammers up her like a suppository. No, they wouldn’t believe you, no fear, no fear, no bloody fear they wouldn’t. You can’t get a jackhammer up there, but for God’s sake, you know someone’s smuggled one in. A drinkless sleep is murder — any friggin thing could happen, you could dream anythin! Forgot bein sober was so dangerous. A night’s sleep crawling with dreams like a girl couldn’t imagine, truly like you couldn’t begin to imagine. Oh, the years she’s slept peaceful as the dead with just the sweet purr of static in her ears. Now look at that. What I mean is now look straight at that — the crappy threadbare old rug is slippin in and out of the old library door, like a tongue from a slut’s mouth. Lessee, let’s!

Dolly throws open the library door to see the rug rolled up and shivering epileptic in the corner by the piano where the room is fugged up with the smell of hot bodies.

She staggers out, needing a drink, and knowing it’s no use going on with this stupid sobering up, passes the grey old lady with the firepoker at the landing and turns wondering too late. She goes down the stairs arse over, slopping more than she thumps, like a bag of yesterday’s fish, and as she goes, she knows for sure she’d have done it better drunk.

Oriel pulls the tent flap to, and in daylight, with a morning’s work ahead still, slips the old King James from the bottom of the drawer. Its brittle gilding comes off in her hands, settles in the hairs on her forearms. She opens it. There they are, all their names:

Lester Horace William, born 10/10/94, Eden Valley, SA.

Oriel Esther (nee Barnes) born 31/12/01, Pingelly, WA.

Each one of them, right on down to Lon, and in pencil, the names of a stillborn and two miscarriages: John, Edward, Mary. There they all are, the Lambs in Lester’s lovely old Gothic and it seems right and just. We’re here, Oriel thinks, calm again; we’re here orright.

She stiffens. There’s screaming from in the house. She goes out armed and empty handed. And not quite running.

Waiting in the hallway at casualty, Lester and Sam shuffled, folded arms, watched the pretty nurses go past. Sam lit a fag, coughing his bubbly little smoker’s hack, and offered it to Lester who surprised himself by taking a drag on it.

Thanks for bringin us, said Sam.

Ah, we’re relatives these days, said Lester.

I shoulda learned to drive a car. Never had one or drove one in me life. There’s simple things I just don’t know about.

What about women?

Sam chuckled. Women? Reckon I know more about cars.

Lester laughed. Which do you prefer?

Sam pursed his lips, reminding himself that he still had his own teeth: I’m partial to trams, meself.

No, dinkum. I’m askin.

Gimme a horse any day.

Over a woman?

By Christ, yeah.

What about Rose … Lamb?

She’s not a woman, she’s a daughter.

Lester laughed. And yer missus in there gettin her leg plastered? Lester felt reckless all of a sudden as though he might confess an old sin to Sam right here and now. But he held himself. We’ve already taken his daughter, he thought; I couldn’t do it to him now just to clean meself of it.

Dolly? No, Dolly’s a woman, orright. She always said she was too much woman for me.

Well, Oriel’s always been too much Oriel for anybody.

And when they wheeled Dolly out, plastered up like a swearing saint, Lester was singing:

Give me Oriel in my lamp, keep me burning,

Give me Oriel in my lamp, I pray.

I should be drunk! yelled Dolly.

I should be rich, Sam murmured.

And I should be home, said Lester, herding them out to the truck.

Thank Christ, said Sam. I really thought it was somethin serious.

A broken leg’s serious enough, said Lester.

It’s a bloody gift.

Steam

A long way off, in a cloud of steam like the ante rooms of Hell itself a small man falls naked to the sauna floor feeling his heart stutter. So many women have loved him and suffered him, but none so much as his mother. Sometimes he has dreams about her, the kind he doesn’t like to think of. She’s just like the girls he chats up and backs up. She’s just … steam steam steam steam steam steam!

The Blacks and Whites

Look at that, the house’s timbers clenching right there in wild daylight. There’s no wind, no subsidence in the ground, nothing to resist, but every joint bleats there for a moment as if the place is bracing to sneeze or expel or smother. The river runs louder than a train on the midday air and the lost dead are quaking like sunlight.

Fish Lamb clumps the piano, but all that comes from it is the thick unending drone of middle C and he’s not pleased. He knows the sound of his own music, and this is not it. The musty, windowless room is lit like a rainforest floor, the greenish colour shed by the two figures pressed against the wall on either side of him, and in the dimness he sees his own stubby hands thumping the blacks and whites as his fury grows. The floorboards let out a horrible sweet smell. Curling in a snarl, the old rug quivers. Nails vibrate in the walls, and Fish keeps on with some hardfaced determination, while around him the two women bare their teeth at each other, dark and light, light and dark, hating, hurting, hissing silently until Fish, the great trunk in suspenders, heaves up from the stool, whirls and becomes an angry, heavy, menacing man for a moment, and bawls at the walls.

I hate youse you stupids! This is my house!

When he is gone, the two faces are vicelipped, and still, and even the sound of middle C falters a moment before continuing on like an electrical current.

Steel

The last part of the ride home from the station is downhill and it’s the only time the old police bike is any use at all. Quick pedals in a fit of aftershift madness with the wind frigid on his face. He feels so good, it’s all he can do not to yell out and yodel jubilantly all the way to Swan Street. He swerves around a milk truck, nips the claws of an ageing labrador and takes the last corner leaning out like a sailor. Some people are at their gates, getting papers and pints, men have their hats on, walking home from bus and train, and the sun is breaking up in the sky. He gives the bell a stiff thumb and coasts down the side of the old brick house where the wireless is on and someone is sobbing. The sound of it shakes him and he’s off the bike before it’s stopped. It crashes into the empty garage the moment he opens the back door.

Call someone Quick, says Rose, on her knees by the stove. She’s dressed for work and white in the cheeks. Call someone. I’m losing the baby.

Mrs Manners! Mrs Manners!

Quick stumbles through boxes and chairs on the verandah on his way to the landlady’s door, but she has it open before he knocks. She’s a small, startled looking English-woman with spectacles and soft pink hands.

Whatever’s the matter, Constable?

Rose’s havin a miscarry.

Oh, Lord, I’ll come.

I’ll go find a phone.

Pedalling uphill with a buckled front wheel and half a uniform on, he can’t for the life of him think what to do. A Holden passes, pulls up at the stop sign ahead and Quick has his idea.

Right, he wheezes to the driver who’s about to pull away. Police. I’m yer neighbour. I’m a husband. Me bike’s busted. Me—

What the bloody hell is this?

Yer car’s under arrest.

Rose woke from a doze and they were still there. Her father looked so small against Quick. He hadn’t shaved and he was taking it badly enough to make her worry. She was sore, and she could feel a great, surprising bitterness coming on her, but something made her sound stupid and cheerful.

Cmon, you two, you’ve been there forever. What’s the game?

Did yer hear Quick ran over his own bike in the car? said Sam.

Yeah, yeah, he told me, Dad. I laughed.

Good. Good. It’s funny, orright. The bloke was a decent sort in the end.

The old man’s jaw was starting up a wobble and Quick kept looking about him, as if for somewhere to spit. I wish they’d go home and leave me here, Rose thought, I wish I could sic the nurses onto them and be done with it.

I’ll be alright, Dad. You can go, you know. You look terrible.

Quick looked at her and then him, pressing his lips together. Sam mashed his fist into his stump.

What is it, you two? What’ve you cooked up? You look guilty as gold thieves.

There’s somethin I have to tell you, Rose, love. I figure there’s no use tellin you tomorrer when you’ve started to feel better.

Quick nudged the old man: Carn, Sam.

I got a telegram today from Adelaide.

From Ted?

No, from his missus. Ted died yesterday. In the sauna. He was tryin too hard to get his weight down. His heart just went. They reckon he was a decent jockey, though he rode em too hard too early. He’s dead, an that’s what I had to tell ya.

Well, Mother’ll be upset. Thank her for coming in.

She broke her leg, Rose. I didn’t get time to say it.

Ah, the Shifty Shadow strikes.

He was a good boy.

No he wasn’t, he was a bastard. Go home, Dad, I’m tired. My baby died.

She felt Quick looking at her in puzzlement, but she couldn’t look him back. She felt like she was made of steel. It was shiny and bitter and it shone all around like starlight. She was steel and Quick couldn’t know. No one could know.

The One

With a huge and terrible moan, Dolly reached the window and kicked it out with her plastered foot.

My baby!

She fell back on the floor, breaking her nails in the rug, foaming and spitting and squealing till she was hoarse. Her breasts flapped on her, and her nightie rode up to expose her naked, mottled body, her angry slash of a vagina, her rolling bellyfat and caesar scars.

They killed my baby! Him, he was the one I loved, you useless spineless two faced bastards! Heeee was the one. He was the one. He was the one. You can all go and fuckin die because I want him back. He was the one.

In the library the shadows danced. Oh, how they danced. Can’t you still see the evil stink coming through the cracks, Fish, the swirling rottenness of their glee turning to gas across the rails, the rooftops, the tree crowns of the city? Take your hands off your ears, Fish, and listen to it.

Two Florins

Rose just wouldn’t be comforted about the baby, and in the end Quick knew there was nothing he could do. In bad moments he wondered what it was in him that brought these disasters on people. Even his posting to Claremont seemed to bring no relief. For two months after Ted died and the miscarriage, Rose worked on at the switch, getting thinner all the time, looking darkeyed and ghostly when she got home. He cooked for her and she didn’t eat. She had little to say as they washed up together, and when he put on the blue for the night’s shift she picked listlessly at it as he straightened up.

A whole night of pinchin pervs in the public toilets, he’d say. Maybe I’ll get a lost dog or a burgled brooch. It’s tough out on the streets, love. Don’t you worry about me?

I just worry about how many bikes you’ll go through before you make commissioner, she’d say with a weak effort at a grin.

Everythin’ll be orright in the end, love.

Yeah. That’s what they say.

When Rose quit work and stayed home, Quick knew it wasn’t because she’d had enough of Bairds or that the company’d had its fill of her. She was just too weak and spiritless to get through the day any more. He could hear her moving aimlessly all day in the next room as he tried to sleep. She picked up every cough and cold passing through. Clothes hung on her as though she was made of wire. Quick did his shifts glumly, filled in break and enter reports, and rode that mongrel beast of a cycle round and round Claremont until summer came.

When it came down to it, Quick knew he was missing Cloudstreet. There was so much quiet now between Rose and him, and Mrs Manners in the front never made a living sound. The house didn’t heave and sigh the way Cloudstreet did; it wasn’t restless in any way at all, and there weren’t the mobs brawling through, the clang of the shop bell, the rattle of crates and smokers’ coughs, the tidal sounds of people stirring up and settling down. This was orderly, calm suburbia. This was merely a list of things missing. And the new house, their dream? Well, it went up bit by bit and Quick sometimes went out just to look at it, the brick box with its red tile roof same as all the other half-finished houses in the street. It looked empty and he’d lost his way with it somewhere. He couldn’t imagine them living in it. And Rose just didn’t want to talk about it.

One night in December when Quick had the late shift, he was working on the occurrence book at the spanking new Claremont station with only the Sarge asleep in the cells to keep him company, when in walked the old man with a fifty pound mulloway on his shoulder. Quick snapped the big ledger shut and stepped back.

Strike a light!

The old man dumped the great fish on the counter. It was silver and gillheaving, fresh from the river.

I just couldn’t wait to show someone, boy. And I knew there wouldn’t be another livin breathin soul as’d appreciate it like you would.

Dad, it’s beautiful.

Kept me windin a good half hour. Took him at the Brewery wall.

Just then, the fish convulsed with dying, shook scales and mucus all over the joint and coughed up a plug of blood.

Well, that’s it for him.

Beautiful.

Think we better … get it out, Dad?

Oh, gawd, yeah. Sorry. Back in a sec.

Quick wiped things down with the urn cloth and poured a cuppa for the old man who came back in, excitable as a kid.

Quiet?

Deadly, said Quick. I just wish somethin’d happen.

Wish for somethin nice to happen. There’ll be crook things all along the way.

Yeah, maybe. How’s Cloudstreet?

Oh, quiet as the grave. Your mother’s … outside a lot. The girls are seein fellas. Lon — well who knows what he’s doin. Dolly next door’s got rid of the limp but she’s hittin the sauce. Sam’s losin again.

How’s Fish?

Quiet, quiet. Lies on his bed all day with that wireless goin. Gets a bit rowdy some nights, talkin and singin and things. Says the house is angry. Good old Fish.

Yeah, old Fish.

Miss you, Quick. All of us.

It’s hard at the moment, Dad. Rose is so crook still. She’s wastin away.

I wasn’t meanin to bother yer.

Want another cuppa?

Nah. Lester looked around the smoke stained office with its rows of binder files, notices, mug shots, the old Imperial on the desk, the government ashtrays.

Too quiet, isn’t it?

That’s what I mean, said Quick.

No, I mean everythin. Cloudstreet, the town, the lot.

Quick shrugged, not understanding.

I sound like Sam Pickles, but I got a feeling. Oh. I almost forgot. Look.

Lester put two coins down on the bench.

Florins, Quick said.

1933.

The year Fish was born.

Have you kept em?

No, I only found em tonight.

Down the river?

In the fish.

What?

He coughed em out with the hook. Out they came, mintfresh. Like a sign. I’ll give em to Fish.

He won’t know what they are.

Who does? I’ll drill holes in em and he can hang em round his neck.

Dad, there’s a law against that.

Aw, there’s laws against everything and no justice at all. Take it from an old walloper. Look after yer missus, Quick.

Quick was alarmed at the old man’s sudden kiss and he was wiping his face as Lester shuffled out.

Weathering It Out

Sam Pickles went to work to earn his pay packet and on the weekends he delivered it faithfully to the bookies and came home broke but not greatly troubled. A long time ago he’d decided that this was to be a straight up and down life of bad luck, and besides the odd shift in the shadow, there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it except go on losing. If anything, he figured there was some strength in knowing the way things were — it gave a bloke security, something to believe in. People knew who he was. At the Mint he was the sentimental favourite — old Sam the Stump who’d been around since the war and wasn’t much use at anything except being a familiar part of the place. On the racetrack he was old Sam the Slump, the bloke whose luck was running at a temporary low which began at birth and would probably stay with him to the coffin. Everybody loved a loser, especially a loser of such romantic proportions. He was a cheerful little bloke, always with a wheezy laugh and a fag to give. You knew he was probably right when he said he’d have made a brilliant jockey if he’d thought of it in time, if his father hadn’t died, if the luck hadn’t gone nasty on him. And at work or on the track, you put up with him saying things like that because he never said them often, and as some lark said, he was too stupid to feel sorry for himself. Dolly was always completely shickered when he got in these days. She drank with a will and an energy he hadn’t seen for years. Snoring beside him in bed at night, she gave off a formaldehyde stink that got so bad he moved into Rose’s old room. He knew he didn’t have a chance trying to figure women out. They were always set on killing themselves. Now Rose was starving herself again like when she was a teenager. He never saw her, and young Quick seemed to be at a loss. One was bloating up like a fat spiritous pile of moans and the other was trying the disappearing act again. He was buggered if he knew what to do. He’d lost a son; it seemed fit that he’d lose the rest of them. Well, there was Chub, but Chub was too lazy to get off his arse and make any trouble; nothing would get rid of Chub. He was apprenticed to a butcher who’d become a depressed man.

By December, Dolly wasn’t even home when he got off the train. Some mornings she wasn’t even in bed. Things went missing from the house: rugs, silver, even the brass spittoon with the star of David on it that they’d brought down with them from Joel’s pub. The times he did see her she was sick and mean and Sam couldn’t find the will in him to go at her about all the things she was flogging, the way she looked, what was happening to her. He sat by the wireless, listened to the house cracking its knuckles and decided to weather it out.

One morning, with the hot hayfever easterly blowing in from the desert and whipping the dry grasses against the walls of the house, Sam got the fright of his life. It was light already and he’d finished his breakfast, and had only his hat to find before going off for work. He went through his bedroom, the kitchen, loungeroom, the ground floor hall without a sign of the damned thing, so he went upstairs and looked in Rose’s old room, remembering now that he’d left it on her dresser, old fool that he was. But it wasn’t in the room at all. There was a thumping in the walls like an erratic heartbeat, the kind he felt with a headache coming on, though when he went out into the corridor he knew it was actually someone pounding and it came from that no man’s land room at the end, the one he never much liked. He was getting late for work, but he was curious about that beating in the walls, and besides, he thought, it might be the old girl — there was no sign of her about.

The library door was open a crack and a dim glow showed. Sam went on down, and when he pushed the door open he saw the retarded Lamb boy with Sam’s own Akubra on his head, wearing nothing at all else except two silver coins on a chain round his neck. The boy stood against the wall staring back into the corner behind the door, and he was thumping the walls furiously. His nuts swung beneath his belly; his buck teeth were bared and there were tears on his cheeks.

Sam felt a bolt of panic. The boy didn’t even seem to see him. He stepped into the room whose atmosphere made his stomach twist, and when he turned he saw the most vicious-looking old bitch he’d ever seen in his life. She was white and dressed in some outfit from another time. There were lacy gloves in her hand that were beautiful, delicate as he’d ever seen. She seemed to be smiling; a sweet, frightening smile. Sure that he might shit himself at any moment, Sam Pickles took the boy by the shoulder. Fish went limp and weepy against him.

She won’t let me play! the boy sobbed in his man’s voice.

I know how it feels, son, Sam replied, certain at that moment that he’d finally laid eyes on Lady Luck herself. But when he looked back, the old lady was gone, and the only light in the room came from the hallway.

Is there someone up? Sam backed out of the room and called down the corridor.

A door opened. Mr Pickles? It was the Lamb girl Elaine, who always seemed engaged but not married. Fish? She poked her rollered head out into the hall. What’s happening? Where’s his clothes?

I think he’s a bit at sea, said Sam.

She won’t let me play, blubbered the boy. He was bigger than Sam and heavy.

Sam felt his joints tingling as if somewhere out of sight there was a small wire shorting.

Whirling Dark

What is it whirling dark across the rooftops and down the streets like a wind, like a hot rancid breath? Cloudstreet suddenly looks small, and the further up you go the flimsier it looks. It could blow away in a moment. All those rooftops could go like leaves, and across the world there’s men with circuitry and hardware, men with play lighting their eyes, fellows whose red faces flash like the buttons beneath their hands. All the rooftops of the world become leaves. They quiver and titter before the indrawn breath of brinkmanship and world play right through summer and winter. While down in the streets below their roofs, some people, the people I knew, the people I came to know better having left them behind, fidget before other withheld winds. Dolly drinking and hating up a storm, the shadows bulleting around the library like mullet in a barrel, Fish himself quaking with pent force and worry while across town in the orderly quiet suburbs, Rose Lamb meets the oncoming hayfever season the way she meets the Cuba crisis — with the windows down and the curtains drawn.

Lost Ground

Rose stopped reading newspapers, and put the radio in the linen press. She didn’t want to know about Cuba and all the horrors gathering. The world was a sad, miserable place and soon it’d be no place at all. Quick was off deluding himself in uniform, bees hummed mindlessly at the window, the sky was the colour of a suicide’s lips so she blotted it out altogether with paper on the panes. Oh, they were waiting for grandchildren over at Cloudstreet but they could bugger themselves as far as she cared. The girls from Bairds called round a couple of times, fat, whorish ignoramuses that they were, calling her Love and Petal all the time. They were gross, sweaty, powdercaked, and their nervous laughter made her want to scratch their eyes out.

The little bedsit was cramped and cheerless, perfect for the hard feeling that had come on her. For the first time since she was a girl Rose felt invincible, as though no one alive could alter her course. The little belly she’d had, which now seemed so gross in memory, was gone, and with it the flesh of her thighs and backside. In the mirror she looked lean and unpredictable; she liked what she saw, though she knew Quick could barely look at her. He despised it, this vomiting food after meals, though he’d exalted over it when there was a baby to cause it. It was puking from emptiness that he hated. Doing it for nothing.

All day she sat inside making and remaking the bed, arranging the cups in the kitchenette so their handles pointed exactly the same way. She boiled and reboiled the cutlery, and on all fours she searched for floor dirt. She didn’t touch her books, there was no order in books. When Quick came home she locked herself in the toilet because she couldn’t bear to see him deface order.

It was a shock to see the old man at the screen door one Saturday afternoon. He had his hat in hand, smelled of shaving soap, and had a dried out bunch of roses in his fist. She let him in and pulled her housecoat around her.

This is a surprise, she said unevenly. Shouldn’t you be at the races?

Well, he said, shouldn’t you be out doin somethin?

She shrugged.

You look awful.

Thanks.

You don’t have to, that’s what pisses me off, Rose.

You’ll want a cuppa.

Yeah. No milk.

I remember, Dad. I — m the daughter, remember.]

Yeah, I recall right enough. Small here, isn’t it? You gunna let me sit down?

Rose wiped a vinyl chair and pushed it his way.

There must be something wrong, said Rose.

I’m here about your Mum.

Aha. Can’t you manage a friendly visit?

We don’t exactly see you makin nuisance of yerself visitin Cloudstreet. Besides, it’d be a brave bastard who tried makin a friendly visit on you.

Rose felt the heat of anger gaining on her. Let’s just have a cuppa, shall we?

If you can keep a cup of tea down, that’ll be fine with me.

Don’t harp at me, Dad!

The old man took a seat and slung his hat over his knee. He looked a little changed, as though he’d decided something. And he looked older.

Yer mother’s losin control altogether.

She never had any self control. Rats have more discipline than old Dolly.

Jesus, Rose.

Well, what’s news?

News is she’s gettin old an scared. If she doesn’t lay off the slops a bit she’ll just die.

What dyou care? She’s only ever made you miserable.

She’s my wife, he said looking at her anew. Looking at her as though she was a snake underfoot.

I can remember a time, Dad, do you remember? When I was a girl, the miserable little girl I was, and I found you in the bathroom getting ready to slit your throat. She drove you that far. You remember that?

I remember, he said, looking at the floor. You came. I stopped. For you.

Rose poured his tea, wiped her hands over and over with an ironed teatowel.

She’ll stop for you, too, you know.

So you came for help?

Yeah. Sam let off one of those grins that she hadn’t seen since God knows when, since Geraldton and days when there were only air raids and Japs to worry about, and her fury subsided a moment, despite her.

Help? Dad, I cleaned up her vomit, washed her clothes, dragged her home from the pub every bloody night of my childhood. I replaced her, you know. I did her work. My childhood was taken from me, Dad. She hurt me all her life. Don’t you think I helped enough? Don’t you think you’ve got a bloody hide even comin to ask?

She’s grievin. It’s Ted, you know.

Ted, Ted, Ted! She only ever loved the one of us!

Well, for Chrissake, how do you think that makes me feel? You think you’re the only one? Nothin can fix that for us, Rose. But show some pity. She lost a child.

Well, she’s not the only one!

You never even knew yours. It’s not the same. She was Ted’s mother.

She was never a mother. She never loved me.

You wouldn’t let her, Rose.

Rose stared at him, mouth open.

Sam looked at his cooling tea.

You’ve lost her, that’s why you want me to come.

She’s been gone a coupla days.

She’s left you.

No, she’s left herself.

You still love her, don’t you?

Sam shrugged, wet-eyed and stiff in his seat. I got used to her. I dunno.

Well, I’m not crawling through the bars of any more pubs looking for her, Dad.

You won’t go with me?

Why?

It shames a man lookin for his wife.

Jesus, Dad! Haven’t you got used to the shame of it all? She’s made an idiot and a laughing stock out of you so often it’s like a joke now. Hasn’t it worn off yet?

I thought you’d come lookin. Just for me.

I always went for you, Dad.

Don’t try to be cruel to her, Rose. She’s had her chances, she’s nearly finished. Winnin out over someone like that isn’t much of a victory. She can only lose from now on in. She’s nearly sixty odd. She can only get old and die. You’re young. You can have more babies, things are ahead of you. Look at me. Whatever I’m gunna get in this life I’ve had, and damnnear all that’s been lost. You can bear it when you lose money and furniture. You can even grit yer teeth and take it when yer lose yer looks, yer teeth, yer youth. But Christ Jesus, when yer family goes after it, it’s more than a man can bear. A man’s sposed to have that at least to look forward to.

Rose watched him go out, dusting off his hat, striding down the steps with his elbows in the air and he was gone before the screen door came to with a slap and left her in a shrinking room.

Arrest

Night falls. All down Swan Street the dogs bark and children are hectored indoors. Alone in her two rooms Rose sits on the bed, picking at the candlewick bedspread with a great blankness expanding in her mind. She’s hungry, but the feel of food in her mouth just makes her retch. Quick is late off the afternoon shift but she’s not thinking of him anymore. For a while there, around five o’clock, when she realized that her flesh had come to feel as though soap had dried on it, she thought that perhaps she should go out and find a doctor because she was suddenly afraid of falling asleep and waking to find herself pinned to the wall by the faint grass-smelling easterly that murmured at the screen door, but the thought petered out somewhere and left her with a fear that seemed to have lost its source. And now, now she’s not thinking of anything at all. She’s even forgotten to be afraid. The candlewick bedspread moults under her hands.

She listens to her own breathing. It fascinates her, reminds her of things, so mesmeric. Girls. It’s a girl’s breath, that’s what she hears. And these two rooms don’t exist. Something bad is going to happen. All this breathing here in the hallway in front of 36. The Eurythmic Hotel when you’re eleven and a half years old. This isn’t a memory — she doesn’t recall this. The door of 36. Those sounds behind, Jesus Christ, she knows what that is. They’re fucking in there behind the door. Who is that? And anyway, what’s she waiting for? Listen to them go in there, snorting and snouting like … but I’m a girl, I don’t know this. I don’t … I … my God. Mum? There’s been an accident, an accident. Dad’s lost his fingers. And she’s in there huffing and puffing with someone else. Your mother’s on her bed under some stranger and you’re turning to steel right there.

A car pulls up noisily somewhere.

Rose begins to weep. I didn’t want to remember that! I don’t want that.

And now someone is running, someone close by.

I was a girl, she thinks; I shouldn’t have had to hear that. I shouldn’t have had any of it.

Rose? Rose?

A policeman at the door. He bursts inside like he owns the bloody place.

It’s not fair! she yells, Not me!

Rose?

The taxi floats down Stirling Highway. She sees the clock-tower of the uni lit in the far distance.

Rose, says Quick.

Yes?

Are you orright?

Looks like a fuckin scarecrow to me, says the taxi driver.

She’s also my wife.

Shit! Sorry, Constable. I thought it was an arrest. Gawd, I’m sorry.

Just drive.

Quick?

Yeah.

You putting me in the hospital?

Quick smiles. He looks beautiful in his uniform: No. Though I probably should. Look at you.

I’m ugly.

Not as ugly as me.

Where we going?

Cloudstreet.

Is everything alright?

We’ve found your mum.

Oh God.

I don’t wanna do this, Quick! Rose pleads, trying to slow him up in the corridor.

From a doorway, a woman’s voice comes screaming: You fuckin bastards! Get your stinkin hands outta me stockins or I’ll piss all over the lotta yer!

Quick looks pale and nervous himself. His tunic is crumpled from holding her in the taxi. Elaine drifts by squinting with strain.

I don’t know much about this stuff, Rose. I got the call and thought I’d better bring you. I thought you’d come.

The call from who?

Yer dad. Some bloke slipped a note in the mail box, I dunno, someone told him. I dunno.

Dad, you little mongrel, she murmurs. You gutless little runt.

Down the corridor the woman screams again. Aaargh!

You don’t know what this is like, Quick!

He shrugs.

You’ve been sheltered from this sort of stuff, damn it!

He nods. Yeah, I’m finding that out, orright.

No one should make me do this again. I’ve told you all that stuff. They shouldn’t make me.

Quick shook his head.

God, Quick, I’m married. I’m my own person.

She’s yer mother.

I can’t help that.

Neither can she. They said she wants you.

She can go to hell.

The voice is broken and hoarse now, pouring from that room. A man comes out sweating and closing a bag. The doctor. She’ll settle now, he says leaving.

I think she’s found Hell, someone says, by the sound of that.

Quick snatches up his cap. I’ve gotta go. Good luck. He turns on his boot heel and pushes his way through the doors.

Rose stands there with her hair about her like a storm-cloud, all the steel gone out of her.

The Girl with the Brown Fatness of Hair

Dolly saw the girl swimming through the crowd. It was hard to see because she herself was lying on the bar with men leaning on her and their drinks on coasters balanced on her belly, between her breasts, along her thighs. They were squeezing her for it, those men, milking her tits for beer, foaming up their glasses, reaching inside her camisole, forcing her legs apart to get at things and dragging out coins, furniture, dead babies and old bottles. Between her knees and through the smoke and laughter she saw the girl with the brown fatness of hair. There was a great ticking watch on the girl’s wrist, big as a saucer. Dolly heard it through the roaring mob and saw how it weighed the kid down. But the girl waded on doggedly. She was strong, you could see, and she was coming, and the laughter was drying up and the hands were coming out as they all started dying around her.

A long time after everyone left, Rose stood by the bed. The old girl sagged back onto the pillows with her wild hair spread out upon them full of silver streaks, tobacco washes. She looked incredibly old and tired, more haglike than any pantomine witch. It was hard to believe that something like this could give birth to you. The whole house went quiet till it was just grinding on its stumps, like a ship at anchor.

You wanted to see me, said Rose dully after a long time.

Dolly closed her eyes.

Rose sat down.

I’m tired.

Well I’m tired, too, so get on with it.

Don’t hate me.

Too late for that.

Why?

My whole life, Mother, that’s why.

Dolly blinked. What did I do that was so bad?

Rose smiled bitterly. You’ve gotta be joking. You stole from me. My childhood, my innocence, my trust. You were always a hateful bitch. A drunken slut. You beat us and shamed us in public. I hate you for all the reasons you hate yourself, and I wanted to kill you the way you wanted to kill yourself. Everything, you stole from me. Even when I was a teenager you competed with me, your looks against mine. Shit, even my grief you steal from me. You can’t imagine how I hate you.

You look sick, said Dolly.

I’m not sick. What is all this anyway? What’s the summons? What’ve you been doing? Don’t answer that, I don’t wanna know.

I was sad.

What?

About Ted.

Oh dear. Here we go.

I loved him.

Your favourite.

People have em, Rose. You always loved Sam more than me.

He earned it.

People don’t earn it.

They do with me. Listen, I’m going. This is making me want to vomit.

I wanted to talk to you.

I don’t want any boozer’s justifications and sympathy talk.

Come back tomorrow.

I’ve got my own life now.

Come back.

No.

Rose.

Why?

I want to talk, just to talk.

I’m busy.

Doing what?

I’m just busy.

Come tomorrow. Please. I’m beggin you to come back tomorrow.

Rose left. Lester drove her away. The house fell back against the night sky like a dying planet.

Go see her, love, said Lester.

Why?

I dunno. I can’t stand the hate. It’ll kill you. You’re one of us now and I couldn’t bear to lose you. Quick’s hurtin. We all are. Go on with your life, love. It’s all there is.

Mothers

In the morning, Rose went again but Dolly was asleep. She stayed in the house with Elaine and Oriel, narrowing her eyes at their noise and bustle, until Dolly woke.

She went in strangely robbed of her anger and unprepared. She felt jittery and sad and feeble in all the ways she’d planned against since her first ever period.

Dolly was sitting up in bed with pillows about her like sandbags around a machine-gun nest.

Hello, Rose murmured.

Hello, said Dolly. A wan grin had fixed itself on her face halfway between coming and going.

Better?

Feel like shit, but I reckon that’s better.

Rose stood by the window where she could see the peeling fence and the wall of weeds.

Look like you better sit down.

I’m alright.

You’ll fall over. Siddown.

Rose pulled the chair over to the bedside.

Dolly raised her eyebrows. When you gettin pregnant again?

I’m not thinking about it, Rose said, flushing. Besides I haven’t had a period for months.

You need to see a doctor.

That’s a laugh.

Rose looked at her skirt, the way her knees made sharp peaks beneath it. God, even the angles her body made were mean looking now.

Anyway, why do you ask? she murmured, trying to be calm.

I was plannin on bein a grandmother. This mornin. That’s when I decided. Be good for me, you know. Jesus, I’d spoil em rotten, I would, givin em lollies and fizzy drinks. Let em wreck the bloody place. Reckon I’d be the worst bloody granma a kid could have—

Why not, Rose heard herself leap in, you were already the worst mother.

Dolly didn’t even stop.

They’d love me. I’d let em swear their heads off, give em noisy toys, take em to the pictures an stuff em with fairy floss. I wouldn’t even make em wear clothes, I wouldn’t make em do anything as long … as long as they came to see me.

Rose saw the old woman’s mouth sloping away toward weeping, and she realized that she had no teeth. She’d never noticed before. Rose had no idea what her mother would say next, no idea of what she might let out herself.

Outside it was a summer’s day. That dry, wondrous heat of the west. Out there it would feel like the meeting of desert and sea, the heat behind, the dark coolness ahead. Rose thought about it. Yes, she could be down by the river now, with a baby, a brown sunny baby beside her on the sand. Water would lap like cat’s milk and the air be heady with the scent of peppermint trees. There would be nothing to do but feel important and proud, to have the form against your body, to take a hand in your mouth and bite down those long, soft baby fingernails like some protective she animal, snuffle, smell, bask.

You’re a grandmother already, aren’t you? Rose said, finding her knees before her again. What about Ted’s kids?

They’re a thousand miles away. I don’t know the girl. Don’t know anything about em.

Well, one day, maybe.

Oh, yeah, they’re gonna all get on the train an come an see Granma Dolly.

They’ve got money. Ted was a good jockey, they say. He rode winners.

Dolly laughed. Imagine bein around a man who rode winners.

They were quiet again a few long, awkward moments.

You reckon you’d have missed him more, if he was a sister?

What kind of question is that, Mum? I never had a sister.

Yeah, you wanted one, though, eh?

Rose looked at her mother whose white, puffy face was impossible to read just now. I suppose. I haven’t thought about it much. I don’t know if I ever really thought about it, but I guess it’s true enough. I used to watch those Lamb girls and … think of the things they could tell each other. Used to watch that Hat, the eldest one, playing marbles with the boys, and I decided that the only way she could do it was because she had other sisters and it didn’t matter somehow. She didn’t have to play the part of the girl.

You turned out sort of prissy, didn’t you.

I had to make myself something!

Don’t worry about sisters, then. They always look better from a distance. I had seven. Sisters! Jesus, sisters. You’re better off with brothers.

I just lost one, remember?

Well, he was lost to us a good while back.

God, you sound like a book.

I reckon you’d know. You turned out the bookworm. What did you ever get out of em, anyway?

Rose wrung her gloves and threw them onto the bed. Some idea of how other people lived their lives, Mum. A look at real people.

Ho, real people.

Like mothers. What mothers are supposed to be like.

Mothers! Sisters, mothers! You found out what a mother’s like. You won’t forget me in a hurry. Don’t go moanin about sisters.

The heat went out of them quickly, surprising Rose, who had a thought that had never once come to her as a child.

What was your mother like, then? she all but whispered.

Dolly pulled the sheet up her body and slid down the pillows. Rose could have sworn the bed was shaking.

I had seven sisters. Jesus, I loved my father. My mother was always far away when I was around. There always did seem to be too many girls.

But what was she like? Your mother.

You should never trust a woman.

I thought it was men you hated.

Me? No, men are lovely. Gawd, I was mad about men all me life.

Yes, said Rose.

It’s women I hate.

Daughters.

No, daughters are different, Dolly said with a grave, measured tone. It’s sisters I hate most. You should be grateful you never had any.

I don’t get it, Mum.

My mother was my grandmother. My father was my grandfather.

What?

The second oldest sister, the one who made me feel like rubbish all my life, that one was my mother. There we were. There we were.

Rose felt things falling within her, a terrible shifting of weights.

My God. My God. Mum!

The old woman lay flat on the bed, bawling silently, her mouth wrought into the ugliest hole. She’d seen that ugliness before, the huge wordless grief of babies, in Quick’s brother. There were no tears in the old girl’s eyes; it was as though she’d been dried out forever in there. Rose Lamb got up out of her chair, put a knee up on the bed, hoisted herself, and felt the sobs beating up at her from the body beneath. The sound her mother made taking breath was like a window being torn from its hinges.

Oh, Mum. You never told me. You never ever said. Don’t cry, Mum. Please.

Outside, it was a summer’s day. The house twisted its joists, hugging inwards, sucking in air, and the two women wept together on the sagging bed.

Tonic

By the end of 1962 it looked as though the world might go on. The news in the papers got better, Quick got something of a pay rise, and Rose got a period. For so long there’d been things to fear. That someone might push a button, that Dolly would kill herself, that there would be no money at the end of the month, that their new house would never be finished, that Rose’s body might beat her in the end. Before things brightened up a little, even Lester gave up saying: We had it harder in our day.

Rose was glad of those talks with her mother. She found soft parts still left in herself, soft parts in Dolly as well, and in a way she figured it saved her from herself. It was love really, finding some love left. It was like tonic.

Rose still went to see her mother every day or two and usually came back furious. The old girl sat out on her backstep feeding chunks of topside beef to magpies. She was often sober, always abusive, and after a time her cursing became almost soothing in its steadiness. Dolly bitched and whined about everything until Rose began to realize that half the time the old girl was bunging it on — she was play acting just to amuse herself. Sure, there was still heat in the old battleaxe, but not much of an edge. When Rose went round, Dolly made her a cup of tea. They’d feed the birds, the old woman would be abominable, feign deafness and raise a hedge of irritability between them, and Rose would go home.

Late in spring, Rose began to swim in the river at Peppermint Grove. She’d start out from the boatshed and swim right around the Mosman Spit. When no one was about she even tried a few bombies and tin soldiers off the jetty. She felt all the childish impulses of the Geraldton days, and she went home ravenous and kept her food down. With summer coming on, she woke in the mornings thinking of all the things she could do instead of listing the things she refused to do or was incapable of. Sometimes she felt all the blood rising in her skin, feeding her, overriding her will. She was alive despite herself. She got out the old books, spent entire mornings at the river in their worlds. In the evenings she planted little lovenotes to Quick around the flat: in his socks, pinned to his undies, between dusty packets of condoms. Poor Quick. How he’d waited for her all these months. It was that pigheaded Lamb patience, and you had to love him for it. She felt the shadow in her, this dark eating thing inside, like an anger, and sensed that it’d always be with her. But Quick would hold her up beyond reason, even when it went into stupidmindedness. It wasn’t just the fact that she knew he could do it for her that made her love him. It was her certainty that he would.

As the weather warmed toward summer, Rose and Quick spent their spare time floating dreamily on the river in the Lamb boat. They talked like teenagers, catching up, making up time, finding words for how they felt. Marriage had been no dream. They’d worked their guts out, lived through sickness and worry and still their neat little suburban house wasn’t ready for them. Rose thought about returning to work somewhere, but already she was staring at babies in the street again. Quick was promoted to riding the new BSA station motorcycle, an evil beast of a thing with enough compression to put you over the bars during a kickstart.

They came home from the river one day to find Lester Lamb waiting for them on the bonnet of an ancient Rugby, dressed in his threadbare suit and looking gorgeously pleased with himself. He showed them the car. It was a dusty, black old banger with tyres smoother than a baby’s bum and rust beneath the paint like a spreading cold sore. He showed them every angle, every virtue, including the side-blinds he’d made himself from old X-rays which gave a curious effect of mortality to an afternoon drive: you saw the world through compound fractures, you saw the river in an old soldier’s lungs, sky through the skulls of shellshocked corporals.

It’s yours, he said, you need a car.

We need a car, said Quick.

But this is more than a car, said Rose, it’s an experience.

By Christmas, Quick had that old scrumwagon Rugby up and running, Rose was pregnant again, and the house out in the suburbs was almost finished. Quick moonlighted in the day, driving trucks and hammering up cheap furniture in a warehouse while Rose took in ironing between river swims. Nights off they went dancing and made galahs of themselves at the Embassy and later drove out to Cottesloe Beach to make love under an upturned skiff.

We’re getting somewhere, Rose thought. Our own house, a baby, money in the bank. She had dreams of furniture, neat rugs, lino tiles, a TV, the smell of Pine-O-Clean. A clean, orderly, separate place with fences and heavy curtains. Their own world.

By Christmas it looked a dead cert.

He Does

Red Lamb was a nurse and she liked to shock poor old Elaine.

Geez, I hate men’s—

Red! Elaine winced, held up a hand.

Aw, Elaine, it’s better to be disgusted than ignorant. Now did you know that—

Red, I don’t need to know anything.

Crikey, what’s this?

Into the kitchen came Lon all grazed and blackeyed and sweating, and by a stroke of bad timing he was followed in by his mother who caught one look at his face and shoved him cheeksfirst into the big freezerbox of the old Frigidaire.

Ice’ll help, she said. What bully did this to you?

A man, blubbered Lon, a fullgrowed man. His voice sounded a longway off coming from the freezerbox.

What did he do? Now tell me, I’m yer mother.

Hit me. He hit me.

In public?

Only people.

Did you deserve some punishment? Oriel said, suddenly pensive. Red opened a bottle of mecurochrome the size of a stout keg and got together some swabs.

Lon?

There’s a girl pregnant, said Lon from on ice.

No one could tell if Oriel fainted a moment or what, but she leant on that fridge door something shocking. You could hear Lon Lamb screaming three stops down the line.

Lucky it’s only his head in there, Red said to the old man who’d come running; if it was me doin the business he’d be losin his play bits.

Lon was married inside a fortnight, and when the minister said: Do you Logan Fitzwilliam Bruce Lamb take this Pansy Mullet to be your lawfully wedded wife? Oriel murmured darkly: He does.

They took a room at Cloudstreet, Lon and Pansy, and filled it with rage and weeping.

Doomiest

Sam rolls awake in the night with his stump ringing with pain. It goes right through him, into his chest, down his side. Godalmighty, a heart attack, he thinks. But it goes on and on, emanating from pieces of him he no longer owns. No, he thinks, it’s bloody doom. Big, big doomy doomier, doomiest. It hurt so much that tears roll back into his ears and the house seems to laugh at him. He wants to go to sleep and not wake up in the morning.

Flames

In her dream Oriel saw the bush and the city burning. People ran from their squawking homes to the riverbank with the flames gaining behind them, but they stopped, afraid, at the water and let the fire consume them on the grassy slope above the river.

The New House

Quick looks the business in his black helmet and leggings as he hammers the BSA out north to the new subdivisions. His Dougie MacArthur sunglasses flap against his cheeks. He leans, throttles into the turns, flies like an angel.

The new house stands in a street of similar new houses and Quick props the bike and goes in for a look. It’s all there on its patch of rubbkstrewn dirt. If he’s honest, he’d like some weatherboard old joint to remind him of farm days, happy childhood days, or even of Cloudstreet, but he knows Rose wants it fresh, new, clean, apart. Yeah, soon there’d be kids in the street, and the sound of lawnmowers.

And then in the late afternoon gloom someone steps out from behind a wall and comes towards him. Quick knows him. Oh, he knows him. It’s the blackfella wearing nothing but a beach towel and a pair of rubber thongs.

Go home, says the black man. This isn’t your home. Go home to your home, mate.

Quick fronts him, emboldened by his uniform. This is a black man he’s talking to.

But the man lays five fingers spread on Quick’s chest. Go home. Quick turns. Already he’s alone.

Christmas

At Cloudstreet on Christmas Eve the timbers rattled like bones in a box. Lester’s marketfresh vegetables went brown in hours, and the milk curdled in the cans before the Lambs and Pickleses woke from vile, breathless dreams. A shitty smell came over the place and you’d swear there were more in the house than the headcount let on. Standing anywhere in Cloudstreet that day was like being in an overloaded ferry in a sou’wester. Oriel found herself needing the walls to keep her upright. The corridor was a lurching tunnel and the shop foetid. Sam woke and wished it was a work day so he could pack his gladstone and heave-ho. Dolly threw up her tea in the sink with spots in her eyes big as snarling faces. When you blinked, shadows ripped by. Out in the yard, the last of the shrivelled mulberries rained on Oriel’s tent like a bloodstorm.

The pig sang all through Christmas with Fish sitting by beneath the fig tree listening and mashing his fists. What’s he say, Fish? Can you pick it? Over and over, the same phrases. Carn, Fish, what’s with the pork?

Sam went out in the afternoon to find that his cockatoo was gone. Absconded bird. He went walking the streets calling Fair dinkum? Fair dinkum? All the old houses were coming down and salmon brick duplexes were going up in their place. The streets were full of jacked up FJs with foxtails and glasspacks. There seemed to be no children. When Sam came home birdless, Fish Lamb next door was bellowing and bawling and the piano was thundering.

On Christmas morning the house filled with foul and frantic shades and a howling set up in the surrounding streets. In the dawn the pig was nearly torn to pieces by a pack of dogs that jumped the fence while the lot of them slept on, resisting it as a dream.

Fish Lamb was strangely quiet. No hysterics. He lay on his bed and did not come out. Lester bandaged the pig, kissed its brow and prayed.

Summer Madness

And then the vile hot easterly blows them into summer proper, into a dry night-time madness that eddies under the eaves and shakes the rats out of every sleepout grapevine as a small man creeps through the back lanes between bin and gate and bloating fences itching with an inexplicable hatred. See him down there slinking along, snuffling and wheezing in your town, in your yards, your streets, and hating you, every whole one of you as you sleep moaning and turning beneath your sheet behind your flywire, past you as you sleep open on verandahs and on back lawns in the countrified manner you cling to. Oh, what hurt and malevolence glows in that shambling shape of a man. From beyond space and time I see him like a coal sputtering in the dark, rolling wherever the hot headachy desert wind blows him: West Perth, Dalkeith, Shenton Park, Subiaco, Mosman Park, coming by you, coming by you, coming for you. Against his chest he carries a rifle. For you all.

Bloody Mayhem

Quick wakes to the sound of a motor. It’s high morning. A motorbike running under his window.

Lamb? Lamb!

Rose wakes next to him. Quick?

Sounds like Murphy from the station. Orright! Wait a second!

Get out here, mate! Get on this bike! We’ve got all shit goin up!

Quick got to the door in his undies. Gday, Murph.

Get fuckin dressed, mate.

What’s up?

Bloody mayhem, that’s what.

Well, says Rose, spose this is what you’ve been waiting for.

But when Quick is gone and Rose goes out for a paper, she finds it’s worse than a bit of houseburning. The West is forecasting isolated thunder and broadcasting indiscriminate murder.

Heat of the Night

In the heat of the night with his barrel still reeking, the man with the hare lip and the cleft palate shifts through the dry night grass in someone’s backyard and comes upon a sleeper behind insect wire. A sleeper: lips opening and closing in the great vacant journey of sleep, his breath coming and going like the sea. At the back of the house. In the big country town that wants so much to be a city, there’s another sleeper and I can’t stop this. I’m behind the mirror and in different spaces, I’m long gone and long here but there’s nothing I can do to stop this. Every time it happens, on and on in memory, I flinch as that brow flinches with the cool barrel suddenly upon it. The sound goes on and on and matter flies like the constellations through the great gaps in the heavens, and I haven’t stopped it again. Lester, Rose, Red — I can’t stop it for you. When I’m Fish down there I just don’t know, and now that I’m what he became beyond it’s all too late. I see it, I see it, all of history, and it sets me hard as spirit.

Right in Our Bloody Backyard

It’s right in our bloody backyard, said the Sarge. Cottesloe, he shoots and wounds two in a car. Then he goes to a flat, puts a hole in a bloke’s forehead. An hour later he shoots a bloke on his doorstep in Nedlands when he answers the door. Then he kills a kid sleeping on a back verandah in the next street. The CIB are shitting themselves. Your namesake, Lambsy, up at Central, he’s like a cyclone.

What do we do? said Quick.

What we’re told, said the Sarge.

It’s madness, said Murphy.

Or evil, thought Quick.

Murder, Murder

Sam Pickles opened the West at lunchbreak, stinking of gold and silver and turpentine, DEADLOCK IN KILLER HUNT: STREETS STAY LIT. That’s it alright. The shadow over the whole town, SHARK KILLS WOMAN IN TWO FEET OF WATER. Jesus. There’s worse, RAIN DELAYS TEST PLAY.

The town is in a frenzy down there. This is what it means to be a city, they say, locking their doors and stifling behind their windows. On the streets at night no one moves. No one goes out. There’s a murderer out there and no one knows what he wants, where he is, who he is, and why he kills. This is Perth, Western Australia, whose ambitions know no limit. And the streets are empty.

Quick crept the back lanes of Nedlands through the long, hot, wet nights. The CIB boys fingerprinted everybody in the known world and the streetlights burned all night. Armed with his uniform, his handcuffs, torch and truncheon, Quick felt no fear, but he could smell it in the outhouses the length of every lane; it oozed from under the bolted doors, from every flue, vent and gully trap of the neighbourhoods he patrolled. He was alone out there with a gunman loose, and he wondered what evil really looked like, if its breath stank, if it could be stopped. The lanes were high with weeds and cast off junk. There was room, all the room in the world for a man to be abroad unseen. Quick didn’t blame them all in there, tossing and rolling awake through the summer.

I’m scared, Quick, said Rose. I don’t sleep all night. You can’t leave me here on my own. I’m going mad. I can’t even read. Even in the day, I’m frightened.

The new house is ready enough, I spose, he said, dubious.

I’d be alone there, Quick. I don’t want to be alone. Have you seen that street? There’d be no one to talk to. I can’t stand it while you’re on nights, love. I’ve got the baby. There’s some mad bastard out there and no one’s caught him.

We’ll think of something, love.

They’re like rats in a fire down there. See, across the desert the train comes groaning with emergency supplies of locks and mesh. The fingerprint files of the CIB look bigger than the Doomsday Book. There’s ulcers bursting, friendships and marriages lost. There’s a murderer out there, a cold blooded maniac. Don’t go out, they say. Ring three times, they say. Don’t come calling, they say, it’s too much for me, just don’t come calling, just leave us alone, leave me be, leave us, leave us, oh God it’s sweltering but don’t go outside!

And someone else dies, regardless.

As Cloudstreet tosses and throttles, a queer point of luminescence in all that gloom, with its downpipes crashing in the wind, its stonefruit falling dead from trees and the scarred and hurting pig shrieking warning across the whines of mosquito and the dead sobs in the walls, that man comes wheezing. He steps lightly by stubbornly opened doors and lifted windows, past the buckled shop shutters and the open till within, down the swept side path into the heartland where it smells of laundry and preserve bottling and woodwork and vegetables and the hard labour of people, down through it all with his heart a-dance, he comes wheezing. He sees a tent billowing softly in the night light. He bites his lips coming onward, bearing down, but out of the dark comes a pink blur, a squealing snarling creature that uproots him and sends him back in a tumble and he’s running, grabbing for the.22 before it can turn for another run, before he can find out what it is.

And in the street, right under the light as he comes running, is a man with black arms akimbo, just watching. The gunman stops, draws a bead, and loses him in his sights. Loses him from the street altogether. Someone’s calling out a foreign lingo. He bolts.

Rose shivers in her bed. We’re alright, she says to the baby. We’re okay. Oh, Quick, come home!

After a night of endless lonely trudging, of holeing up in ramshackle hollows and peering over back fences with thunder breaking the sky and the rain beating mud against his shins, Quick clocked off the shift and went down to the river to clear his head. In the dawn the sky was clearing and summery steam rose off the jetty piles, and out of the steam came the black man looking completely unsurprised.

Geez, said Quick, recognizing him fearfully. Haven’t you got a home to go to?

Not this side.

Quick looked across the river. Through the steam he thought he saw moving figures, dark outlines on the far bank.

Are you real?

The black fella laughed. Are you?

Quick kicked the muddy grass before him.

You’ve got a home to go to, Quick. Go there.

Quick regarded the man. He was naked, naked enough to arrest.

Go there.

Orright, said PC Quick, already on his way. When he turned back, high on the hill, he saw more than one black man. He saw dozens of them beneath the trees, hundreds like a necklace at the throat of the city.

Home

Sam and Oriel and Lester met in the Lambs’ kitchen at Cloudstreet before breakfast. It seemed to have occurred to them all at once.

Sam noticed that Oriel Lamb had the beginnings of a beard. Oriel Lamb still had a strange overwhelming parental power about her, and he imagined that crossing her would be like crossing luck itself. Sam felt himself shrinking in this engineroom of a kitchen whose walls throbbed with produce. From the window you could see the yard on the Lamb side, its terraces of flowers and vegies inside chicken wire, the stonefruit trees heavy, the redspattered tent sucking its cheeks in the morning wind.

This proposition’s just more of an idea, said Sam.

Yes? Yes?

Let’s get em back here.

Who?

Well, I worry about Rose.

That’s my idea! said Lester.

Quick and Rose? said Oriel.

She’s on her own too much, said Sam.

They’ve just built a new house, said Oriel.

She needs company, protection. She’s havin a baby remember.

Gawd, it’d be good havin a nipper round the place again, said Lester.

We’ll have one soon enough, said Oriel, thinking of Lon and Pansy.

They could have that big room at the top of the stairs.

Ugh, said Oriel.

Well? said Lester.

They’ll never come, said Oriel. Rose’s too proud.

Sam smiled.

And … and Quick too, she said trying uncharacteristically to be diplomatic, because any man could see the idea had taken root in her. No, no they’re too proud. They’ll never come home.

Quick and Rose arrived with the laden Rugby even before the Cloudstreet delegation set off.

Got a spare bunk? said Quick.

The families mobbed them on the verandah. It was a stampede, a door-flinging, board-bucking, fruit-dropping stampede down the corridors to reach them. Everyone grabbed hungrily at them, Rose with her big melon belly, Quick with his loose limbed nightshift body.

Just for a week or two, said Quick.

Yairs! Yairs!

It seems logical, said Quick through his teeth.

Aw, yairs.

I wasn’t worried really, said Rose.

Aw, nooooo!

Fish came last down the stairs, thumping his way through the house. Aarr! Quick en Rose! Arrrr!

Quick felt safe here, he felt within his boundaries. Happy? he asked Rose amid the din. Happy, she said.

The Walls

But the library is horrible. And besides, Rose gets a late recurrence of morning sickness. She swears it’s the windowless room. After long nights, Quick comes home to good old Cloudstreet and crashes into bed with shop noise below him and old Dolly cursing gravity and time out the back somewhere, but it’s not that which stops him sleeping. It’s the old misery pictures on the wall. When he lies down and the door is closed, the room dark, quiet and airless, two strange miserables burst off the walls and at each other’s throats. It’s exhaustion he thinks, and lack of air. That steely old hag and the darkeyed girl going at it, mute and angry like the pictures on his wall in his childhood sleep. So he goes back on shift shitweary and useless.

The Light in the Tent

Nights were long out in the tent with no wood and glass to sleep behind. Oriel knew there was only fabric between her and death, fabric and strength of character. She took to leaving a lit candle by her bed. It stood in a saucer on the old family Bible, its flame curtseying before the draughts. Thundery showers peppered the tentfly and above it, the mulberry shook itself like a wet dog. Canvas. She knew how thin canvas was, but she refused to be afraid. True, she could move inside until the killer was caught, as Lester and Quick said, but that would be a surrender to things that hadn’t even declared themselves and she knew that going inside would break her will.

Sometimes in clear patches of sleeplessness she stood at the flap and looked up at the old house and wondered why it still fought them so. Nineteen years, wasn’t it long enough to belong? But it had got worse lately, this illfeeling coming from the place, unless she was imagining it and any fool could tell you she wasn’t much for imagination.

All down the street and down every street men and women were sliding new bolts on their doors, locking windows, drawing curtains, dragging out dusty.22s and twelve gauges, opening bottles and whispering Hail Marys under the sheets while that candle burnt on the Bible in the tent behind Cloudstreet and that boxy little woman sat arms akimbo, waiting for something to show itself.

Only Streets Away

Only streets away a man with sinus trouble slips from yard to yard. Across a back verandah he creeps and a restless sleeping body catches his eye through a cool screen window. A sultry, sultry night. He slips a hand through the wire of the screen door, slides the bolt. The smell of lamb chops lingers still in the close air of the house. He’s inside. He’s decided something. This isn’t madness. He’s thought about it. He knows what rape and murder mean. He’s just come to like them.

Fish Wakes

Fish wakes. Rose hears him sobbing. And then muttering, the crazy foreign talk from the wedding, on and on, until she hears Lester stirring.

He Knows What Rape and Murder Mean

Yes, it’s a woman. Young. A short nightie rucked up in the heat. He steadies, drawing on all his skill. After all, he’s the Nedlands Monster, no less. Finds the cord from the bedlight. It’s so easy. And her breasts part as he slips it under her neck. She hardly makes a sound going off, throttling, writhing and choking and her legs spread in surrender so he goes to it on a spurt of triumph. He knows what rape and murder mean. He knows what he’s doing. They’re frightened of him. The whole city is quaking at the thought of him. This girl, even her dead body is afraid of what he’s doing, repulsed at the look of triumph on his face, recoiling at the face itself.

Oriel Hears

Oriel hears the boy blabbering and wailing up there. All the houselights are on. She’d go in there herself and claim order, but Fish doesn’t know her, doesn’t see her, can’t hear her and she isn’t that much of a glutton for punishment.

Businesslike

With his seed in her the dead girl’s gone all heavy. They’re gonna come looking for him. The police, the screaming, hurting family, the whole defeated city. You have to be a winner. Even the short and ugly and deformed, they have to win sometimes. He’s winning, beating them all. A little truckdriving bloke with no schooling, he’s killing them in their beds and they’re losing at last.

He drags the girl’s strangled and defiled body out into the lane. Finds a hole in a neighbour’s fence and stuffs her through, throws the nightie after her. Then back to the car, across the deadnight river to the missus and kids. Businesslike, that’s what he admires about himself.

Quiet

Oriel wakes from a doze and the candle is out. The house is quiet and there’s light coming from the rim of the sky. Quick will be home soon from the shift. With news, she can feel it.

Loaded House

Lester steps out of Cloudstreet, crosses the road and looks back at it. There’s something horrible about it lately. Something hateful, something loaded with darkness and misery. He doesn’t know how much more of it he can stand.

Morning

Quick stands exhausted by the river. The old town isn’t the same anymore, it’ll never be the same. The sun is streaming out over the hills and onto the terracotta roofs of the suburbs where they’ll all be waking up to the news. It’s happening out there, he thinks, and we can’t stop it, we can only clean up after him.

Quick moves along the bluffs above the river. He won’t let himself think it, but he knows he’s looking for that blackfella. He has to talk.

The City is Howling

The city is howling with outrage. They’re talking of bringing in the army, bringing across the Sydney homicide squad, Scotland Yard. The whole city goes mad with fear and outrage.

Dolly and Rose

Out on the backstep Dolly feeds the birds their raw meat. They eye her sideways and snatch it from her to back off to a distance and hack away.

Garn, she says, you’d tear me bloody eyes out if I didn’t come with a feed, wouldn’t you?

A diesel rumbles past heading somewhere on the tracks. The birds flinch, baulk and Dolly laughs.

Well, you gutless wonders! You’d eat ya children!

She sees them now pecking at her bloated body out in the desert by the tracks that lead nowhere and bring nothing. Rose comes down smiling. Good old Rose, good old Rosie.

Bastard of a Place

Sam latches his gladstone bag, pops a morning peppermint in his mouth and steps down off the verandah where Lester is lifting the shop shutters.

Bastard of a place, he thinks vaguely, not knowing which place he really means.

Hole in the Wall

Fish stands by and sees the shade ladies pressed flat against the wallpaper as Quick opens the wall up with a saw. Wood dust comes down and makes him sneeze. There’s plaster like frost upon the floor.

Slip us the crowbar, will you, Fish.

This?

Yep.

There’s sun coming!

Quick prizes boards away, knocks a cut beam aside, and a square of sunlight breaks into the room with a shudder and a riot of motes and spirits. Fish sees the shadows with their mouths wide in horror. He grips the saw, its handle still warm from his own brother Quick.

Well, look at that. You can see the backyard. Wave to Mum, Fish.

Fish looks gingerly out of the hole in the wall and sees some woman looking up from the flap of the tent.

Gawd, that’s better. Some fresh air. You can feel the difference already. It was enough to make a bloke wanna puke in here before. You don’t mind us using it, dyou, Fish? I mean I know it’s always been kind of like your own den.

Fish is looking at the shadows creeping around the edge of the walls.

Well, it’ll do till we get sorted out.

How’s it coming along? Rose calls, hauling herself up the stairs. It’s hard to recall so much light on the landing. It pours out of the old library instead of feebly trying to get in. She comes into the doorway and rests on the jamb looking flushed and loaded.

Well, that’s an improvement. When’s the window coming?

Dad’s bringing it on the truck this arvo.

Just finish the job, I hate half-finished things.

Speakin of half-finished things, Fish’s been askin about the baby. He wants to feel if it’s true.

Fish looks at his great barge feet.

Cmon, Fish, says Rose. Hands on.

Fish shuffles over. He keeps his head down and puts his smooth, pale man’s hands on her belly and smiles into his chest.

He’s in there.

Well, that’s what the doctor says. You could fool me.

The ladies won’t like it.

Oh, I think they’ll get used to being grannies, don’t you?

You happy? asks Quick.

It could be worse, Rose says. We’ll have a roof over our heads, even if it is the same old roof.

It’s gonna look great. We’ll bung our furniture in, splash on a bit of paint, and whacko-the-diddle-o.

It’s the whacko-the-diddle-o that I’m worried about, says Rose.

Dolly finds herself at the Cloud Street Station in the long lull between Saturday evening trains. A smudge-eyed dog comes up to her and whines, slopes away. The solitary palm tree over the roof of the ticket office submits itself to the wind, and Dolly feels her false teeth slipping in sympathy. Right now, she can’t remember ever having had her own teeth out in the first place. You wouldn’t say she’s drunk, that bulky, rumpled old woman on the bench there by the platform, though she’s got a smell of brandy about her, a whiff of the old Chateau Tanunda. She just seems a little confused.

Now and then she gets up and goes out to the edge to look down on the rails.

They go somewhere, the bastards, she murmurs. I always wanted to go somewhere.

A diesel hoots down the line and a man and a boy buy tickets and wait out in the evening sun beside her. She watches them, observes the way the boy hooks his finger into the edge of his father’s trouser pocket. Men. Don’t they love each other. They should be enough for each other. We’re not like that. I wouldn’t let a daughter do that. I wouldn’t. I just don’t think I could.

The train comes into the station blowing fumes all over her. Two or three people step down, newspapers rolled in their hands.

Doll, what’re you doin here?

Sam looks surprised but pleased to see her.

I’m sittin, that’s all.

Hey, I won meself fifteen quid.

Who on?

That mad bastard, the Monster. I bet he’d strike within the month.

You sick bastard.

It’s commonsense. Anyone who kills that many has to like it.

You should be put down.

I’ll take you to the flicks, eh? There’s Dean Martin and Sinatra at the Ambassador. Or Hatari, that sounds good.

I’m too old for the flicks.

Carn then, let’s get home, I’m stranglin for a cuppa.

I’ll give im lollies. I’ll spoil im filthy if only he comes to see his old granma.

Carn, old girl, you’re walkin with a winner.

No Man’s Land

Rose settled down to read on the bed in their new room, their new home. There was an autumn chill in the air and the smells of paint and putty. She was damp still from her shower; she shivered a little, climbed in under the covers with her mound hoiking up the bedspread before her. Strange being in the house again, coming back from the bathroom down the hallway, wrapped and steaming, feeling like a houseguest or a new lodger, all selfconscious and prudish. Wireless sounds, cooking, a song coming from somewhere, the clunking of doors and a chorus of floorboards. There were two kitchens, two livingrooms, two families, and now they lived in the middle, in the old room they called No Man’s Land.

It was a queer room, this. Even when she was alone in it the place felt close, crowded. Certainly it was better than it had been. Hell, she could remember a time when she wouldn’t even step inside the door. As a kid she’d hear music coming from here, Fish’s weird piano fugues, and she’d come to the door to watch him, but it took a lot to get her to come inside. Fish didn’t play in here at all now it was their room, though the piano was still there in the corner beside her dresser and the old sea trunk she stored her linen in. They’d even brought her old desk, the one the old man had bought her with winnings and never taken back to pay old debts. Quick had knocked up a few pine shelves for her John O’Haras, her Daphne du Mauriers and Irwin Shaws. No one touched that piano but sometimes Rose swore she could hear a note in the room. She listened hard at it when she set her mind to it in the middle of a sleepless bellyrolling night, and though she knew she heard a quiet unbroken sustained note in the air, she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the sound of silence ringing between the curtains and the sofa, in the new painted walls themselves.

Rose preferred the window open a little way and the curtains shucked back to ease her claustrophobia, even though she knew it meant having old Oriel monitoring them from her tent flap below. Quick seemed so damn happy to be back here, she could barely believe it. Being here relaxed him. He skylarked on the landing with his sisters, sat in the Pickles kitchen with Dolly like he’d been going in there all his life. She remembered the queer glow on him the morning he came off the shift with the idea to move back. He was glowing like a kid’s night lamp. Deep in, when she let herself think it, she was glad to be back, even though it was this place. True, she felt a little guilty about it; it seemed like a surrender to her and she’d made up her mind a long time ago to neither surrender nor go back. She’d been trying to escape this place so long, and now here she was, married to a Lamb, having his baby and living back in the thick of it. The old man’d put it down to the Shifty Shadow, but it was their decision. So here she was. She couldn’t say she was unhappy. Even this queer joint felt safer than a normal house, certainly it felt better than Mrs Manners’ lonely bedsit. She didn’t mind the noise that much; at least it was a sign of company and its protection. Oriel came up with pillowslips patched together from old pyjamas and made Rose do exercises that almost split her fanny to bits, but it didn’t seem so bad somehow. Autumn came on and then winter and Rose grew big, so big she was disgusted with herself, but in the mirror her face was the face of a living woman, not a girl threatening the world with her death. She thought about Dolly, poor Dolly who was weak now, and confused, and needing love. Maybe she owed the old girl some of this happiness. She’d sit in the sun with her again today, hold her hand. She smiled at herself in the mirror and made herself laugh, and Fish came in. She let Fish lay his hands on her. He squawked with joy when the baby kicked and rolled under the skin of her drum.

The ladies won’t like it, he laughed.

Quick came home grimfaced but he brightened at the sight of her.

I’m trying for a transfer to Traffic, he said.

Given up on fighting evil?

This bastard’s got us beaten.

Will they let you move?

He shrugged.

Well, I never liked you prowling about all night knowing you might run into him. Now there’s a baby to think of.

Yeah, he said, unconvinced of his own motives. Yeah.

Slipping

It’s well after two and cold as charity in the cowering streets of Nedlands when Quick hears the BSA howling through the streets. It’d be Murphy come looking for him for sure. Something’s up. A headlight swings into the street and Quick goes to meet it.

Get on, says Murphy.

What’s up?

Christmas, what do you think? Hold on.

When they get there, only a street away, the CIB have a car outside the house already and an ambulance is squealing down Broadway.

They go in and the body’s still there on a sofa, a hole in her forehead.

Babysitter, says the dick with the notebook. The baby was still asleep when the parents got home.

We’ve gotta do something, says Quick. Bugger it, we’ve gotta do something!

Yeah, says the dick, start by makin us a cuppa, willya?

Day after day, Quick feels himself slipping. It’s sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest. Willpower, he tells himself, willpower. But it’s useless. Even on lonely night patrols that week he sees misery pictures dancing in the darkness. Indo-Chinese, shark victims, President Kennedy’s dead baby, lynched negroes with newsprint faces. He’s beyond willpower. He’s getting hopeless like the Quick Lamb of old. They’re losing. There’s someone out there killing and doing evil and he’s losing the fight with them, and day by day it gets him further into despair.

Does the Poo Hurt?

Fish finds Quick weeping in the outhouse.

Does the poo hurt, Quick?

But Quick says nothing.

Fish stands by the old pen where the rugged survivor of a pig rubs against a post. He goes up to the dunny door.

Quick?

It’s orright, Fish.

Doan cry.

No.

The ladies like it.

Go back inside, mate. Leave me alone, orright?

Fish goes obediently.

Somethin’s Up

Somethin’s up, said Murphy. The CIB know somethin, they’re settin somethin up. Even the papers know about it.

Hmm? said Quick by the urn looking at his own handcuffs.

The weapon. The papers are goin quiet. We’ve got him rattled, the sick bastard.

I just wish it’d stop rainin, said Quick.

You wouldn’t notice yer own balls ringin vespers, said Murphy.

I could drive trucks, said Quick.

Jaysus, said Murphy.

Oh, see down there, Fish, see down there something happening at last. A tip, a copper’s hunch, an old couple coming across a.22 under a bush above the river. And the net closing.

On Sunday, Murphy was on the shift fresh from midnight mass.

They got him, he said.

Who’d you get it from, said Quick, the priest?

Father of seven, said Murphy, can you imagine?

Sure, mate.

I know a journo.

And I know a load of bollocks.

The Sarge came in: You hear the news, Lamb? They got him, the Monster.

Who told you, Sarge? said Quick.

Murphy knows a journo.

That’d be bloody right, said Quick. He just wouldn’t let himself believe it. No, they’d have this mad bastard hanging over their lives from here on in. He was here to stay.

Lamb? Lamb!

Sarge? What was that?

The phone was for you, you galah. You gone to sleep on us? Constable!

Sarge?

Get home.

Sorry, Sarge. It’s just I’m … It won’t happen again.

Go!

But Sarge!

Get him home, Murphy.

But why? Quick pleaded.

Because yer about to be a father.

It’ll be in the morning papers, shouted Murphy riding through the streets on the single sidebanger.

My baby? said Quick.

The bloody murderer, you nong.

Oh, him.

Him

Him. Already they’re bundling him into a paddywagon, disappointed at the size of him, the hopeless look of him ambushed and frightened and suddenly not winning. He’s just a frustrated man with a hare lip who’s gone back to his lifetime of losing, and the pathetic sight of him robs the detectives of the feeling they’d expected. The Nedlands Monster, the man who made the town a city, who had gallows written all over him. Him!

Wax Harry

All these months Rose has been rehearsing the whole business in her mind, the steady buildup of contractions, the developing stages, the orderly nature of nature, but what she finds when the contractions come is that this baby means business now and to hell with stages and order.

The house wakes inside a minute and Lester goes downstairs like a falling cupboard to finish up naked and grazed on the corridor rug below. Pansy comes down scowling, with Lon behind. Fish wanders out with his slug tilting gamely from his pyjama bottoms.

Get to a phone, Lon. Lester calls once his specs are in place. Tell Quick to come!

Rose stands up for a few musclecranks and decides that she won’t try the stairs alone. They are flurrying about down there like maggots in a Milo tin and she’s having this squeezebox routine every minute or so. She sits down, puts a pillow in her mouth and she can hear a motorbike coming already — or is it her pulse backfiring?

Quick comes hammering upstairs. I’ve gotta get her to the hospital!

Get the truck started! says Lester.

I’m not going in that bloody truck! yells Rose, putting her head to the wall where a vicious white old woman looks down aghast at what’s pinning her knees.

The Rugby’ll never start in time!

I’ll start the Harley! says Lon. She can go in the sidecar.

Oh. Gawd Aggie! Don’t bother. I’m having it right here and now.

Lie down, Rose!

I can’t.

Elaine gets her back on the bed.

Lester slips quietly off to get Oriel, but she’s inside already with her gown sleeves rolled up and her specs on awry. Sam stumbles into the corridor.

Fire?

Baby.

Oh, gawd. Dolly’s out to it.

Rose sees Oriel coming up the stairs two at a time with her mottley forearms swinging, her boots a-creak, and she’s never been so grateful to see her. Already Rose is bearing down. She can’t help but push.

Hot water, towels, boiled scissors and a laundry bucket! Oriel barks, and some purpose comes into the gathering.

Oohhhghm!

Rose feels herself lifted like a child. The library light comes on. There’s the bed.

Take a rest, love, you’ll tear your insides out. Fish, go to your room.

No.

Uughnnmmaah!

Let’s get this nightie off. Good Lord who made us — there’s the head.

Outside the Harley blurts up, sending out a volley of backfires.

No shoutin, no shoutin, the old woman says. We’ll frighten the creature.

Quick comes in with patched towels as Rose draws herself up on her knees and strains with the sound of air through the neck of a balloon. There’s gooseflesh big as acne on him. His mother’s down there making a footstool of herself, her hairy bum showing shockingly in the gap in the back of her gown. Rose has fistfuls of fabric at Oriel’s shoulder; she hoists with each burst of power.

Rose sees the stars and moon in the walls, the weft and weave of timbers behind the two strange spiritous women pressed away from her. It’s like she’s looking into the room on herself and Oriel because one is old and the other a girl, but the girl is black, bruise-coloured and the both of them are straining and it doesn’t make any sense at all without oxygen in your head. Fish is at the piano, fisting it out all of a sudden and the women fade and for a moment Rose is frightened it means she’s dying. They’re fading, fading.

Here we come!

Ohmygawd, said Quick, about to howl.

The Harley revs impatiently.

Fish lets off a burst of wild singing. It sounds like a flock of galahs passing or a man strangled in a cement mixer.

Get the cord, Quick, take the cord.

Gawd, the baby’s got his fingers crossed.

Ahhhh! goes the mob in the doorway.

You mean it’s a boy?

Wait a sec, love, we don’t—

He’s all there, orright.

Don’t worry, Sam calls shaky from the doorway mob. We all are, too.

Haah! goes Rose.

Lookathat.

Fish, cut it out!

The room goes quiet. The spirits on the wall are fading, fading, finally being forced on their way to oblivion, free of the house, freeing the house, leaving a warm, clean sweet space among the living, among the good and hopeful.

He’s lookin at me, says Fish, shambling over. Oriel reaches out with one bloody hand to push Fish’s dick back into his pyjamas.

Rose knows it’s only her, it has to be only her, but the house is shaking.

Give him here, give him here.

Cover her up.

Oh to hell with it, Rose says, now you’ve all seen me bits.

They all circle around like a two-up school, peering down.

Thank God, says Lester, weeping fit to sweep away his specs. Thank God, thank God.

He’s perfect, says Rose, and he’s gonna have sisters.

Pass the bucket, Elaine.

You’re not puttin im in the bucket? Sam protests.

She’s got a placenta to come, you ignorant man, Oriel says with a grin.

She hasn’t got her teeth in, thinks Lester grimly, she could’ve slipped her teeth in.

Wish Dolly could’ve seen it.

Shut up, Dad, and gimme a kiss.

After me, says Quick.

Don’t get slushy, says Elaine.

Red shoulda been ere, she’s the nurse.

Nah, she hates people’s bits.

She’ll be dark on us for doin it without her. She hates to miss out.

I don’t reckon I can go through with it, says Pansy.

Shoulda thought that when you were goin through with somethin else, Chub sneers.

Oriel glares and Chub backs off.

Make a pot, love, she says to Lester. And get the girl a drink.

He’s hungry, says Rose.

He’s lookin at me, says Fish. He knows me. He loves me.

We’ll call him Harry, Quick announces.

Not on your life.

Lookit the little larrikin. He’s a homebuilt Harry if I ever saw one.

Oop! Hold im Quick. I’ve got—

What? I can’t do — I don’t know.

Take him, you useless drongo, says Oriel.

Oooer, what’s that? someone calls.

And to think we were blessed farmers, Oriel mutters, catching the placenta in the bucket and swabbing Rose a moment.

He’s waxy, says Quick.

Wax Harry, Lester grins.

Put the kettle on, I said.

Put your teeth in.

What? Have I, oh I, my—

Wax Harry, says Fish.

Don’t be ridiculous, Oriel says.

Is it alive? The ragged voice cuts the room silent. Dolly swings on her heels in the doorway, face yellow and streaky.

Yes, says Rose. It’s a boy.

Well, Dolly says, squeezing out a silent belch. You can all just go out and leave her alone. I’m a grandmother. Good night.

The room sighs, the house breathes its first painless breath in half a century and outside the pig is going at it balls to the wall, giving it his all, like an angel in a pig’s body, like a bacon choir, like the voice of God Himself pouring up through the fruit trees, rattling the tin fence, shaking the old smells from the walls and the worry from the paintwork, till it spills out on the street where they’re already celebrating something else, something they’ve been waiting for in their beds all year.