Cloudstreet

III. Back in Time

BACK in time there was a big empty house. It was owned by a very respectable woman who had cheated several people in order to get it. The local Anglican priest was the only visitor she ever had, for she was lonely and a widow, though very rich. The priest secretly thought she was a nasty piece of work, but he also believed that there was good in every heart and it only needed to be nurtured. She had such an enormous house — six bedrooms and a library, with grounds full of fruit trees and fragrant shrubs — and in an inspired moment he put a proposition to her. She was lonely and bored, he said, why didn’t she open her house? To native women, perhaps. She could be the Daisy Bates of the city.

Somehow it took her fancy, the Daisy Bates bit, though she’d never met one of these natives. Missionary purpose came upon her like the flu. Girls were procured and the house filled. She aimed to make ladies of them so they could set a standard for the rest of their sorry race. She showed them how to make their beds and wash, how to dress and how to walk. She read aloud from the novels of Sir Walter Scott and she locked the house up at night. The mission girls climbed into bed with one another at night and cried. They had been taken from their families and were not happy. They crawled from windows but were tracked down and returned to the house. The widow showed them how to serve at table and wear hats in church. One evening she went into the library to find a girl dead on the floor from drinking ant poison. Before she evicted the rest of them, she made each of them come into the library and take a close look at the twisted death snarl of the poisoned girl. When she got the last one out the door and into the night, she gathered up all the linen and burnt it under the fruit trees in the backyard. Then she sent a neighbour to fetch a constable.

She was at the piano one evening a few weeks after, mulling over the possibilities for diversion, when her heart stopped. She cried out in surprise, in outrage and her nose hit middle C hard enough to darken the room with sound. Her nose was a strong and bony one, and there was middle C in that library until rigor mortis set in. The room soaked her up and the summer heat worked on her body until its surface was as hard and dry as the crust of a pavlova.

That’s how the vicar found her when he came visiting to tick her off about the girls. The smell knocked him over like a shot from a.303 and he ran out with a nosebleed that lasted seven days and seven nights. He didn’t die, but he lost his faith in humankindness and became a Baptist first and a banker second.

The house was boarded up, and it held its breath.

In 1923, after a racehorse called Eurythmic was put grandly out to pasture, a publican from the town of Geraldton bought the house without ever seeing it. He thought perhaps he’d retire to it in style sometime in the future. He was forty years old. Twenty years later, men were reading his Last Will and Testament to a small gathering of sunburnt people in the Ladies’ Lounge of the Eurythmic Hotel, Geraldton.

A House on Cloud Street

Sam Pickles couldn’t believe it, and the way everyone started filing out of the Ladies’ Lounge without looking him in the eye, it was clear that no one else could, either. The pub was to be sold and the money to go to the local branch of the Turf Club, except for two thousand pounds which was willed to one Samuel Manifold Pickles. And there was a house, a large house down in the city, left to the same Samuel Manifold Pickles with the proviso that it not be resold for the next twenty years.

Rose Pickles wandered through the quiet halls, along musty floor runners, into newly vacant rooms where only last month jockeys and sailors had lived. She tugged at her plait and smelt the sea on her flesh. After these weeks of hopeless waiting and expecting the worst she couldn’t decide whether she was happy or sad. She couldn’t help feeling that her life was over.

A few days later, the Pickles family packed three cardboard suitcases and a teachest and caught a train to Perth. That was the end of Geraldton. The bay, the pub, the Norfolk pines, the endless summer wind. No one cried; no one was game to.

It was evening when they reached the city and they caught the first taxi of their lives, to Cloud Street. Number One Cloud Street. When the driver piled them out they stared at the shadow back there in the trees. Somewhere, a train whistled.

Oo-roo!

Sam walked up on to the timber verandah with his mouth open in the dark. He put the key in the lock and felt Rose pushing him from behind.

Gwan, dad.

The door opened. A dozen cramped smells blew in their faces: lilac water, rot, things they didn’t recognize. Sam found a switch and the long, wide hallway suddenly jumped at them. They stepped inside to the grind and protest of the floorboards, moving slowly and quietly at first to open a door here, to peer there, exchange neutral high eyebrow looks, gathering boldness as they went, the four of them getting to a trot with their voices gathering and gaining, setting doors aslam, and moving to a full gallop up the staircase.

It’s bloody huge! said Sam.

Bloody strange if you ask me, Dolly muttered.

Where do we sleep tonight? Ted asked.

There’s twenty rooms or more, Sam said, just take your pick.

But there’s no beds!

Improvise!

I’m hungry.

Here, eat a biscuit.

With all the upper floor lights on, Rose walked through drifts of dust, webs and smells from room to room. She came to a door right in the centre of the house but when she opened it the air went from her lungs and a hot, nasty feeling came over her. Ugh. It smelt like an old meatsafe. There were no windows in the room, the walls were blotched with shadows, and there was only an upright piano inside and a single peacock feather. Not my room, she thought. She had to get out before she got any dizzier. Next door she found a room with a window overlooking the street, an Anne of Green Gables room.

Well, she thought, the old man had a win. Cloud Street. It had a good sound to it. Well, depending how you looked at it. And right now she preferred to think of the big win and not the losses she knew would probably come.

In a day or so they had the house on Cloud Street clean enough to live in, though Sam privately swore he could still smell lilac water. It was a big, sad, two-storey affair in a garden full of fruit trees. The windows were long, buckling sashed things with white scrollwork under the sills. Here and there weatherboards peeled away from the walls and protruded like lifting scabs, but there was still enough white paint on the place to give it a grand air and it seemed to lord it above the other houses in the street which were modest little red brick and tin cottages. It was big enough for twenty people. There were so many rooms you could get lost and unnerved. From upstairs you could see into everyone else’s yard, and through the trees to the railway line and the sea of sooty grass beside it. The garden was gone to ruin. The fish ponds were dry; orange, lemon, apple, mulberry and mandarine trees were arthritic and wild. Creeping rose grew like a nest of thorns.

Rose explored and found creaks and damp patches and unfaded rectangles on the walls where paintings had hung. There were rooms and rooms and rooms but it wasn’t the great shock it might have been had she not already lived at the Eurythmic all last year. She liked the iron lace in front and the bullnosed verandah. Some floors sloped and others were lumpy and singsong as you walked on them. Each of the kids had a room upstairs and hers looked out on the street with its white fences and jacarandas. It was musty, like the beach shack at Greenough Uncle Joel had let them use every Christmas. She knew she would even forget what Uncle Joel looked like in a year or two. She had loved him and she understood that she had to love this place too, despite how glum it made her, because it was his gift, and if it wasn’t for him they’d have nothing.

Rose cleaned the dead, windowless room herself because she knew that all the books from the beach house were coming on the train with the furniture, and this would be the library. She loved books, even to hold them and turn them over in her hands and smell the cool, murky breeze they made when you birred the pages fast through your fingers. A house with a library! But she got halfway through the job and quit. There were bolt holes like eyes in the walls where shelves had been, and the old piano groaned, and she didn’t like to think of being in there with the door closed. No, it wasn’t for books. The books could come in her room, and this room, well it could just stay closed.

Rain fell sweetly on the corrugated iron roof all morning, and in the afternoon a truck pulled up out front.

From her window Rose saw men bringing boxes in off the truck. She went downstairs like a wild thing, stirring the others out of the gloomy silence of scrubbing. Teachests and crates came in through the door, a fat old sofa from the Ladies’ Lounge of the Eurythmic, brass vases with the star of David on them, a cuckoo clock, mattresses and beds, a huge stuffed marlin, golf clubs, sixteen black and white photos of Eurythmic, each as big as a window. Rose opened crates and chests to find curtains, towels, sheets. Five crates were full of books. She dragged out an armful—Liza of Lambeth, Jude the Obscure, Joe Wilson’s Mates, Hints for the Freshwater Fishermen—they were greensmelling and dusty, but Rose was exultant.

Well, her mother said, appearing beside her, this old stuff’ll at least make it look like we’re not squattin here.

Look at these books! Rose sighed.

There’s nowhere to put them, said Dolly.

The old man came alongside. I’ll make some shelves.

Rose saw her mother’s eyes travel down to the stumps on his hand and back away again, and they went on upacking in silence.

Next morning they had their gear unpacked and the house was theirs, though they rattled round in it like peas in a tin. The cheque arrived from the trustees.

We’re rich! Sam yelled from the letterbox.

But next day was Saturday. Race day. And there was a horse called Silver Lining. Sam had great faith, what, with the shifty shadow being about with such goodwill and all. But the horse was legless.

Saturday evening they were poor again. Sam got home sober, in time to have Dolly push him down the stairs. He went end over end like a lampstand and put his head through the plaster wall at the turn. He pulled his head out, took the last few steps on foot, and shrugged at the kids who went outside without even bothering to shake their heads.

On the back step, Ted muttered. That’s our friggin luck. House and no money.

Ponds and no fish, said Chub.

Trees and no fruit.

Arm and no hand.

Rose turned on them. Oh, yer a pair of real cards. Real funny blokes.

Reckon it’s a friggin house o cards, I do, said Ted. The old girl’s the wild card and the old man’s the bloody joker.

Sam surprised them, coming up behind. There was blood dripping from his nose. They moved aside to let him by. Rose watched him walk all the way down to the back fence where he stood in the grass. From somewhere near came the roar of a football crowd. The old man just stood there in the wild grass with his hands in his pockets, and Rose went inside when she couldn’t watch it anymore.

Nights

The Pickleses move around in the night, stunned and shuffling, the big emptiness of the house around them, almost paralysing them with spaces and surfaces that yield nothing to them. It’s just them in this vast indoors and though there’s a war on and people are coming home with bits of them removed, and though families are still getting telegrams and waiting by the wireless, women walking buggered and beatenlooking with infants in the parks, the Pickleses can’t help but feel that all that is incidental. They have no money and this great continent of a house doesn’t belong to them. They’re lost.

At night Dolly hears the trains huff down the track loud enough to set the panes a-rattle in the windows. All night, all day, people seem to be going someplace else. Everyone else somewhere else. Some nights, even as autumn thickens and the chill gets into her, she gets out of bed and walks down the track to the station where, from the dark shelter of the shrubbery, she can watch people getting on and off trains; men and women in uniform, sharp-looking people who laugh and shove at each other like they don’t care who hears or sees. She hears their voices trailing off in the streets, sucked into the noises of steam and clank. Not many of them look as though they belong either, like the Yank marines honking their accents and tossing fags and nylons about, no, they don’t belong but they don’t give a damn.

Look at her, crouching there in the bushes.

Dolly always gets back in bed cold and angry and more awake than she was before. They’re poor, dammit, still shitpoor, even with a house as big as a church that they can’t bloody sell and maybe just as well. God she misses the wind and the flat plains and the bay and the dust. And that Catalina pilot, worthless bastard. No, she doesn’t really miss him; just the idea of him. She misses the idea of herself as well. Back in Geraldton people knew her. They all whispered behind their hands, all those tightarsed local bastards, behind their sniggering looks and their guts in their laps, but at least she was somebody, she meant something.

Now and then in the night, only some nights, she leans across Sam, lets her breasts fall on his back and kisses his neck to taste the salt on him. He still smells like home, like other times, better times, and she feels everything tighten up on her and hurt just a little. But he never wakes up.

And Sam?

Every night when his wife lies there sighing, as he pretends to be asleep, or when she runs her breasts and lips over him before giving up and creeping out, he just sets his teeth and holds onto himself and knows he doesn’t deserve what he’s got. Now and then, if he stays awake long enough, he can feel the floors move, as though the house is breathing.

He has to think of something, but he thinks of all the wrong things. All the useless warm memories. Like those Greenough summers. That summer Dolly and he left the kids asleep in the afternoons and swam across the river with a cold bottle of beer so they could pull each other down on the hard sand between the paperbarks and lick the salt away and peel cotton from each other without having to keep quiet. Sam Pickles remembers the heat of the day, the drumbeating of cicadas, her breasts in his fists, her thighs vising his ribs and the shellhollow smell rising from her as he bunted her into the sand, bucking them along as all the muscles of her pelvis clamped on him until they were almost in the water when the finish hit them like a hot wind down the valley. He poured beer down her back, cold beer between her breasts so it gathered in her navel so she laughed, shivered, went taut again and drew him down to suck his tongue from between his teeth. With her teeth in his flesh he knew there was a heaven and a hell.

Sam remembers. He feels a hot jet of sperm on his belly in the dark. Always, he thinks in disgust, always the wrong things to think of.

There they are. The man and his bung hand and the disgusted look, the darkhaired woman with the hips and the nervous racehorse gait, the two crewcut boys asleep, and the little girl looking prissy and lost. In the middle of the night she’s there poking her head out of the window as if to get her bearings.

Sam’s Big Idea

On the way home from school Rose walked ahead of Ted and Chub along the train line to be free of their stupid boys’ talk and just in case anyone thought they were her brothers. As she came into Cloud Street she noticed the place had started to look familiar: the long line of jacarandas, the rusting tin roofs, and the sagging picket fences. The first thing she saw, as always, was the big ragged front lawn and the gable peak of Number One nesting right up there in the treetops by the rail embankment.

She walked down the side path beneath the rotten canes of a grapevine and came upon the old man out in the backyard with a stranger who was hammering nails into a great sheet of tin. Down the middle of the yard, from the house to the back pickets, was a tin fence which cut the yard in half. The wooden frame was jarrah; it smelt of gum and was the colour of sunburn. The old man was holding a big green sheet of tin while the other man hammered clouts in. Rose cocked her head to read the red lettering that ran diagonally across it. LIVER. The whole fence was built of tin signs.

The old girl sat on the back step in her dressing gown with a smoke in her mouth and a look on her that said she didn’t want to know about any of it anymore.

Where’d this come from? Rose said, to the old man.

Aw, it just got there, he said with a grin.

Who’s this? She looked at the tall, darklooking bloke who paused in his work to smile at her. She hated his guts.

Now, mind yer manners. This is a bloke who knows a lot about horses—

Rose turned and left him. She ran past her mother who looked aside. Some strange kind of murderousness lifted in Rose Pickles and she just didn’t know what it meant.

She heard the boys coming down the long hall from the front, and she went to duck into a side door to avoid them, but the door was locked.

Hey! Chub called from the other end of the house. All these doors are locked.

She met the boys in the middle and they looked at each other.

They’re all locked, Ted said. All this side.

The three of them went out the back to watch the old man and the stranger nailing up the last of the tin sheets. There were two yards all of a sudden, the trees divided, and a big ugly fence with stupid writing on it.

He’s had his idea, their mother said. Someone’s given him his idea.

Rose Pickles ran upstairs to her room. The door was locked — they all were, on the sunny side of the house. She crossed the landing and found her things piled into a room across the way. With a snarl she kicked the door closed so hard the knob jumped out of the door, rolled across the boards and stopped, tarnished and dented, at her feet.

Next day, Sam Pickles came up from building the second privy. He’d built it out of more of those tin shop signs and Rose didn’t know what the hell to think as she sat on the back step with the last of the sun in her eyes, watching him come up from the back with little silver twists of tin filings on his trousers. Birds picked off the last of the muscats in the vine above her; she heard them quietly feed.

A tin bog, eh? She tried to sound casual, but there was fury in her voice.

Bet you’ve never seen anything like it, Rosebud.

He waved in the direction of the little tin shed. The door Said NO WADING.

A person like you shouldn’t even say the word ‘bet’, Rose said.

Her father pulled out a shilling and held it silverpink in the dusk light.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

Rose Pickles knocked it out of his hand and got up quick, ready for a hiding.

Even the Only Miracle that Ever Happened to You

From the flat bed of the old Chev with the tarp over him and his sisters, Quick Lamb saw the old sheds sink back into the grey maw of the bush. There was a big blue winter sky hanging over everything and it made him sick to see how cheerful the place seemed. There was dew on the flaccid wires of the fences and magpies were strung along them like beads. The truck shook and all the junk stacked on it quaked and rattled like it’d collapse on him at any moment. As they pulled out onto the limestone road, Quick saw someone else’s truck parked by the gate with the driver’s head averted politely. Their name was gone off the old kero tin letterbox, and as the place disappeared from view with the first wide-hipped bend in the road, Quick remembered the threepenny bit he’d left in the lightningsplit base of that old blackbutt tree by the gate. He’d stuck it in there one morning the week before he first started school, just to see if anyone’d find it and pinch it by the time he was grown up. Too late now, he thought. And anyway, it’s probably not even there anymore. I’m such a dumb kid. And he’d lost his postcard from Egypt, the one he got from his dad’s cousin, Earl. Back in ’43 he wrote a letter to cheer up a digger. He addressed it: Earl Blunt, EGYPT and it found him, just as he assumed it would. And a card came back, an exotic picture from another world. He’d stuck it somewhere secret and had bamboozled himself with his own cunning. He left it to the house, the farm, his old life.

As the mountain of limestone dust rose behind, the world went away, and there was only him and the wind flapping at the tarp and his sisters just not looking anyone in the eye.

Fish Lamb is flying. The trees pass in a blur as he glides low, and the glass is cold against his cheek. On the back of his neck, his mother’s hand feels like a hot scone.

Oriel Lamb says nothing. Her son Fish coos and turns an eye at her. Little Lon is asleep already in the other arm. Lester Lamb whistles an old church chorus and it seems, to Oriel Lamb, less than necessary. She turns the pages of the West Australian and finds the classified section.

When they roll down through the main street, no one even pauses in their business to wave. Some taffy kid is teasing a horse outside the post office. There’s a truck piled with spuds parked near the Margaret River bridge. But the Lambs pass on through without a wave given or got. There they go, someone mutters; the silly bastards.

You can’t stay in a town when everything blows up in your face — especially the only miracle that ever happened to you.

All day they travel. Their bones brittle up with the jolts. Limestone dust flies into the trees. Out of Capel, the smoke from a bushfire comes downwind in a spiritous column, like a train passing. Past the emaciated glitter of creeks, into the heat ahead, the bluewhite nothing of distance, they travel. The Lambs do not speak. For each of them, some old nightmare is lurking, some memory of flames or water or dark wind, the touch of something sudden. Upwind the land is black and bare, the sky bruised with smoke and the oil of eucalypts. No one says a damn thing. The tarp flaps, the junk rattles, and it goes on and on, me in Oriel’s arms, smelling her lemon scent, seeing the flickers in their heads, knowing them like the dead know the living, getting used to the idea, having the drool wiped from my lip.

There we are.

The Lambs of God.

Except no one believes anymore: the disappointment has been too much.

Number One

Right at the end of the day, at the very end of their choices, and at the bottom of the classified column, the Lambs roll into a street by the railway line and look about dejectedly. It’s Number One, says Oriel. They idle down the street, look for some scabby little bungalow until they’re running out of numbers: five, three … one. Number one? Number One is an enormous, flaking mansion with eyes and ears and a look of godless opulence about it, even now. Oriel Lamb flings the battered newspaper down and suddenly everyone’s talking at once.

Shut up!

The whole truck goes quiet.

Down on the tracks, a freight grunts along in the twilight with a spray of steam and smuts. They coast into the side of the road. From up the tree-lined street there’s the sound of someone booting a football into a picket fence. They hear water on lawns, the slap of a screen door. As it cools, the old Chev ticks and grumbles.

Go in, Lest.

Up on the second floor a blanket shifts at a window.

Quick leans around from the back. Looks flamin haunted.

Well, Oriel says without a smile, we’ll be hauntin it from now on. Go on, Lest, go in and tee it up. Tell em what we want.

With a sigh, Lester Lamb gets out and clutches his hat to his belly. He swallows the thick in his throat and stumps up to the gate, pauses, takes a breath, and goes all the way to the teetering verandah. Makes a fist. Knocks.

The door is answered by a woman. Lester Lamb takes a look and a step back, and he punishes his hat sorely. She’s got curls and lips and hips and everything, and she looks at him as though he’s a prop seller or just some other street hawker rubbish from nowhere, and when she says, Yeah? with a hip on the jamb, he’s looking for a way to get a word out.

Umm …

Jesus. Sorry mate. We’re poor, and stupid too. Try up the street a bit.

Lester takes a step forward, moving his hands.

You’re white as a ghost, she says, moving back.

The house.

She’s got a deep vee between her breasts, big as a drinking trough, and it makes him feel like a dumb animal.

Oh, you’ve come for that. I’ll get the hubby. Sam? Saaamm?

It’s limestone dust.

What?

The white on me. We came up from the country. Margaret River.

Knew a bloke from there once. Had hair growin out his nostrils.

Oh.

Saaam? Come down here, Sam. Stop buggerizin about!

My name’s Lester Lamb.

She bunches up her lips to make a hard little flower and just looks at him. From behind her, a small muscular man in a singlet appears. His blonde hair is ruffled and there’s a day’s growth on his jaw.

His name’s Lester Lamb.

There’s a moment of confusion as they’re forced to shake lefthanded. Lester sees the pink stumps and reads grief in the man’s face. He knows what it looks like. He only needs a mirror.

Come an have a look. You get half the house, half the yard, yer own dunny. The corridors are no man’s land, same as the stairs. Big bloody joint, eh.

A couple of boys stand at the head of the stairs, about the same age as Fish and Quick.

I got six kids, Lester says.

Cathlicks, eh?

No. No, nothing.

Can yez pay?

We’ll pay.

You’ll do.

Lester hears Lon crying out in the truck.

Mays well bring em in, the man says. My name’s Pickles. Then he guffaws. It’s gunna sound like a counter lunch — Lamb and Pickles.

Lester hears Oriel shushing them up out there, and he stands quiet for a moment in this big sagging joint, gives himself a second before calling them in.

Rose Pickles and her brothers saw them unloading the dust-white truck. They made a crowd standing about down there, and they looked so skinny and tired. They carried a big jarrah table in but no chairs. There were teachests, a clock, shovels and hoes, a couple of bashed old trunks. They all struggled and heaved up the stairs with that little woman barking instructions.

Cripes, Ted said. And I thought we looked like reffoes.

Rose opened the door a crack to see them piling gear into her old room. There were three girls, mostly older than her; the oldest looked bigknuckled and tough, the middle one walked around like she was dying slowly of some disease, and the youngest one looked pretty and mean.

Ted shook his head. Three more sheilas.

There’s three boys too.

One’s a slowbo, dja see?

Is not, said Rose.

Betcha.

If yer yer father’s son yull bet on anythin.

They listened to the thump and scrape of things moving in the other half of the house until their father came in.

Who are they? Rose said.

They’re called the Lambs.

Ted fell on the bed laughing. Gawd, we’re living with sheep!

The old man smiled. That’s their half now. They pay rent, so keep away.

Why dja do it? Rose said.

We’ve got no money, dick, Ted said.

The old man was by the window looking down at the truck. People across the road were peering from between curtains. He ran his puffy knuckles over the sill.

Time for youse to be in bed. You got school.

I hate the new school, Chub said.

It’s not new.

I hate it.

Get to bed.

Chub followed Ted out the door and they banged it shut.

You shouldna done this, Rose said.

I’m your father.

That night Rose Pickles lay and listened. A little kid cried, and one of the girls as well. Trains rolled thumping by. Lightning flared now and then, but there was no thunder.

A long time after the house went quiet, she heard a door open across the hall. She got out of bed and pulled the door the tiniest bit to see a boy in pyjamas at the landing window looking out at the starless sky. In a moment of light she saw his face turn her way. His eyes were black. He was beautiful.

Across the Corridor

That autumn the street seemed full. There were always Pickles kids and Lamb kids up one end of the street throwing boondies or chasing someone’s dog. Sometimes they squared off at one another like opposing platoons. Most times they acted as though the other group didn’t exist. Everywhere they went they made a crowd, albeit a quiet one considering neither tribe spoke to the other. People stared at them from passing trains. Neighbours winced in anticipation of gang fights.

The war got bogged down in Europe.

Oriel Lamb supervised the digging up of their half of the backyard and it was a sight to see all the Lambs down there on their knees in the black dirt planting seedlings of onion and cabbage and the withered, shoothairy fists of old potatoes. Lester Lamb tied rags and bottle caps in the almond tree to keep the birds away. Wire was unrolled to fence off a back corner and Quick Lamb built a fowlhouse from broken teachests and an old forty-four gallon drum he found under the house.

Fish Lamb stood beneath the almond tree and watched the rags fluttering on the frame.

Down the street Oriel Lamb met a neighbour who had some pullets for sale. They talked friendly for a while and Oriel Lamb came home with four hens and a rooster for the price of a smile.

Fish Lamb put his fingers in the wire, hooked them in as though it was all that held him up, and watched the white hens fatten and flutter in the warm sand.

In the park at the end of the street the flame trees and the Moreton Bay figs covered the grass with their broad, brittle leaves that Dolly Pickles kicked up in drifts as she walked alone when the children were at school and she was waiting for the copper to boil in the laundry or she just couldn’t stand to be in that big old place anymore, avoiding the plain gaze of that little Lamb woman as she went stiffbooted about her neverending business. Just the sound of those boots coming her way was enough to get Dolly looking for an exit. That woman was plain. Plain and plain bossy, and under Dolly’s roof.

During the day, with the children at school, the house on Cloud Street became relatively quiet except for Lon Lamb playing on the stairs and the occasional hissed quarrel from either side of the corridor.

The evenings were the most difficult because there was only one bathroom in the house and twelve people to be washed. Then there were children shouting and complaining and the halls were full of dark looks.

There, was an uneasiness about the whole place. The Lambs sat around their table on fruit crates and stools eating the food that Oriel cooked on the gas ring by the bucket they had for a sink. Sometimes in the quiet before a meal, when Lester Lamb stumbled quickly and uncomfortably through Grace, the house went quiet enough so they could plainly hear the crack of wood in the stove across the corridor. No one looked up. They’d just go on with their eyes grimly shut until the old man got through his halfhearted thanks so they could eat and talk and fill up the space that seemed to loom at them from all about. Across the way the Pickles family ate their chops and mashed spud quietly and it often looked as though they cowered at the cattle noises from across the hall. It was like an invasion had taken place. Sam Pickles shook Worcestershire sauce about and tried to be jolly, but the others brooded, sculpted their potato, raised an eyebrow.

It went on for weeks.

The Knife Never Lies

It’s a circle of silver blur on the table, almost solid with motion so that you’d swear you could see their laughing faces reflected in it as it spins. They drum their hands on the tabletop, the girls screaming and elbowing each other, Lon bouncing up and down on his chair, Fish clapping with a roar of glee as Quick closes his eyes and moans in dramatic apprehension. At the head of the table, Lester Lamb holds up his finger.

Remember, this is for who washes up tonight.

And this week! Red says, getting her pink elbows up in the air. All this week.

The knife never lies, you know, Lester says. It always knows best.

You shouldn’t teach em such heathen stuff, Oriel Lamb murmurs with a smile. The room smells of gas, lamb stew, mildew in the wallpaper. A fire of rotten pickets snaps and quavers behind them, beginning to warm this back bedroom that’s become their kitchen. Jars and bottles stand on shelves made from packing cases, and dented pots and baking dishes stand about in order.

It’s slowing down! Lon cries.

Now you can see the round ended old butterknife blade and the browning bone handle — hear it whirr.

Slowing.

It’s you, Hat.

Nah, it’s got plenty in it, yet.

Gaw.

Quick knows it’ll be him; he can almost feel the metal against his skin.

It’s you, Dad.

Nope. It’s gunna be Quick, Lester said. Lookit im. He’s gettin out the teatowel already, aren’t you, mate? Here it comes again.

Elaine!

Wait. Waaiit!

Oh, Gawd! Quick thumps the table.

Quick! Arrr, Quick gets the dishes!

The knife never tells a fib, but it can make a bib for a squib. Here’s one. Who’s got a pimple up their dimple?

Lester! Oriel turns to the stew.

They rollick and niggle and shriek and giggle and the knife goes round in the centre of the table. The fire has a hold on the room now and there is warm light between bodies and noise.

It’s … aaagh … it’s Eee-laine! Arr, pimple up ya dimple, Ee!

Is not.

Carn, Ee, fair cop, says Hat.

Yeah, says Quick, the knife doesn’t lie.

And the knife spins again and again, for Who is the Smartest, for The Ugliest Feet, for The Next Prime Minister, and when the knife predicts that little Lon will be the first to marry, they rock back in their chairs until the room is ready to burst with the racket.

Orright, Lester Lamb says. One more while Mum’s dishin up. Who’s gunna win the war for us?

Plates come steaming with stew, and cutlery chinks and chairs are all a-scrape, so no one but Fish sees the blade pointing at his chest in the moment before the old man snatches it away into his lap.

Say Grace, Lest, Oriel says as she finds her place.

The old man looks away from Fish and his face goes tough.

Good food good meat gettin late let’s eat.

Hat guffaws.

Lester. Oriel looks sideways at him.

I’m grateful. To you, love. It’s good food.

Oriel looks about to give him a lecture, but her heart isn’t in it.

I suppose the Lord understands, she says, picking up a fork.

Hope He does. Cause I don’t. I’m damned if I do. And neither do you, so let’s not be hypocrites and thank God.

No one is shocked. It’s been coming, this talk. Everyone just eats on until Lon regurgitates a long string of fat onto the tablecloth setting up a groan of disgust around the table.

Swallow a snake, mate? Lester says.

It’s the pimple from me dimple, Lon announces soberly.

When the kids were asleep, or at least bucketing around in their rooms, Lester and Oriel had only each other across the table and the quiet was unnerving. Here they were again, a little square box of a woman and her plank-lanky husband. They looked each other up and down.

Well, he said. We’re makin somethin here, I can feel it.

We need things, Oriel said.

Plenty.

Don’t smile me down, Lest.

There’s money left, love. We’re not hungry.

You need work.

I’ve been thinkin.

She sighed and folded her arms. I thought I smelt burnin rubber.

Thinkin about this place.

We need our own bathroom, we need a stove, the kids need clothes — they go to school like they haven’t got a mother. This place is temporary.

Yeah, I know.

Lester dropped a hunk of antgutted fencepost onto the fire. From above came the thumping of feet as the children got in and out of bed.

But I’ve cottoned onto somethin, he said. There’s no corner shop this side of the railway line.

I know, I’ve carried the groceries back from Subi — I should know. She held the needle to the light. It was a wonder how something sharp came down to nothing like that. She looked through the needle’s eye. So that’s the Kingdom of Heaven, she thought. So that’s all there was.

I’ve brained it out. We could do it.

What’re you talking about?

A shop. Our shop.

Oh, don’t be a fool, Lest. We can’t pay rent on a shop.

We already are. Right now.

Oriel put down her darning and raised herself in her chair. What’ve you done?

I’ve used me noggin.

She sighed and squinched her eyes shut. Explain.

The front room, we’ll use the front room out there for a shop. Gawd knows, there’s enough room. It won’t hurt us to use some of it for enterprise.

That’s a good word that sounds weak on your lips, Lester Lamb. Across the corridor, they’ll chuck all whatser — name about it.

They’re broke, darl. They’re poor as us. And lazy — look at em, waiting for the boat to come in. They need the money.

Oriel Lamb pursed her lips. It wasn’t such a bad idea, though she knew well enough who’d have to see it through.

We’ll pray about it, he said automatically. We’ll take it to the Lord. No, wait on … the knife never lies. Lester picked up the smeary butterknife and sent it spinning in the centre of the table.

If it points to me it’s a yes. To you and it’s a no.

She wondered if it wasn’t really the way things were, everything just happening by chance in this sorry world. That knife spinning. She thought about her poor dead brother and the ashes and bones of her mother and sister, of Fish, the farm and every other bad turn that led to this night in a strange street and a makeshift kitchen. The knife turned over slower, flashing like her thoughts and it was no surprise to see the bone handle toward her and the blade aiming at him.

How do you know it never lies? she asked, taking up the darning again. But he was off in the next room rummaging. The needlepoint broke her skin but she didn’t flinch. He’ll be off the idea by bedtime, she thought. He’ll be back onto the old vaudeville idea again, launching the Lamb Lyric Co., and the Lamb Family Octet onto the stages of the world. And out came Lester with a cap on the side of his head and the maw of the squeezebox hanging at his belly. She felt a great jam of confusion in her as he stood there smiling like an oaf.

What’ll it be?

Something I don’t know. Play me something I don’t know.

Enterprise

Dolly Pickles left it till the last seconds of closing hour before she scratched on a bit of lipstick and went downstairs to see for herself. People had been sidling past all day. They’d worn a track across the weeds since dawn, and the cratchety tinkle of that little bell had driven her spare, but she wasn’t going to go down there early and give her tenants the satisfaction of gloating. She didn’t know why she should loathe the Lambs so much; they’d been polite and friendly, but they were pushy and beelike, the lot of them, and that little woman spoke to you with her blunt fingers nearly pecking at your tits. She couldn’t help telling you how you should be doing things, what was a better way, a quicker way, the right this, the proper that. Not that she ever got personal, she was always talking general things, but Dolly felt it all get specific somewhere between the lines, as though that little magpie was letting you know what you could do to fix your life up. Oriel Lamb mouthed off a lot about work and stickability until you felt like sticking a bloody bility right up her drawers. That woman didn’t believe in bad luck the way Dolly did.

The house was dark as she went down the stairs and along the corridor to the front. The door was open. Kids were pushing billycarts in the street. Dolly Pickles strode out onto the verandah and looked back at the Lamb side of the house and laughed. The huge livingroom window was gone and a shutter stood propped open in its place opening up on a view of that grand old room full of pineboard shelves bowing with jars and jugs, the fireplace bristling with humbugs and bullroarers and toothbusters. Crates stood on the stained floral carpet loaded with second grade fruit and vegetables and the air was thick with midges and fruit fleas. A big Avery scale stood like a lighthouse in the middle of this fog and behind it Oriel and Lester Lamb. The sign along the counter said:

LAMB SMALLGOODS

quality nice — best price

They watched her laugh. She straightened her hair and lit a smoke to calm herself, leaned against the verandah post.

Well, how’s it doing, ducks?

Lester Lamb began covering the fruit with damp hessian bags and doing other closing down kind of things while the little box woman lit on her with that steely stare.

A shillin and ha’p’nny, Oriel Lamb said.

You’ll get rich if you keep it up. Dolly had meant it to be more friendly, more comradely, but she heard ridicule in her tone and watched Mrs Lamb brace up. Geez, I’m makin a friend here, she thought.

And you’ll have an income, Mrs Pickles.

Lester Lamb smiled weakly as though he was neutral in this, and he put the shutter down apologetically in her face.

W

E’RE

L

OCAL

.

it said:

W

E’RE

H

ONEST

,

it went on,

W

E’RE

H

ERE

.

And there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it, that was for sure.

Stickability

It wasn’t long before everyone on Cloud Street and anyone who lived near it knew about the Lambs’ new shop, and not long before they started to spend as much as they gawked. At dawn you’d see the little woman out there sending Lester and Quick off to the markets across the rails, and the whole still street would be full of the coughing of the truck and the reverberation of Oriel’s instructions. Nobody was ever left in doubt as to how many stones of spuds she thought necessary for a day’s trading, or how to feel the ripest watermelon or what to tell that man Boswell when he started trying to fence bad tomatoes onto them again. Even if you couldn’t see those meaty little arms and the sexless ashen bob and the sensible boots on her through your bedroom window and your morning blear, there wasn’t a chance you’d escape the sound of her sending the family about its business. People started to call her the sergeant-major and they observed the way the shop came to life at the sound of her drill yell.

Soon the place was a regular feature of the street, a pedestrian intersection, a map point. It was where you came to buy a West Australian and talk about the progress of the war with your neighbours. It was where you could smell that daft beanpole husband of hers baking his cakes, though, fair dinkum, you had to hand it to the coot, he could bake his way to Parliament if he set his mind to it. Though he thought gettin a rise was only what happened inside an oven. Kids mobbed in on Saturday mornings before the footy to buy up the pasties he made. All the Lamb girls would be there, rattling the till, climbing on ladders, shaking out tuppenny measures of jubes. They’d blush and scowl when their father came to the counter singing a loopy tune.

Whacka diddle di-do

How the heck could I know

She wanted my heart

for a billy cart

He accompanied himself with a jar of humbugs or a feather duster, and said whatever came into his head and changed the tune from verse to verse. Nothing seemed to suppress his good spirits in those weeks. Nothing could stop him singing except the sound of Oriel’s boots coming through the house behind the shop.

The house on Cloud Street took on a wonky aspect. It was still a big, old, rundown eyesore, but it seemed to have taken on an unbalanced life with all that activity and foment on the Lamb side, as though the place was an old stroke survivor paralysed down one side. The Pickleses didn’t seem to go out much, and if they did they got swallowed up and lost in the picture. They were weak in numbers and all the activity seemed to cause them to fade from vision.

Oh, you’re from next door the shop, love? people’d say to Dolly. You’n yer hubby rentin offa them, are yez?

Neighbours somehow got it into their heads that the Pickleses had come after the Lambs, and that stuck in Dolly’s guts. Locals took pity on the crippled hubby and all, but they couldn’t help but feel that the Pickleses weren’t made of the same stuff as their tenants. They didn’t have stickability. Now that was a word that moved camp along Cloud Street quickly that autumn. After a month or two no one could remember its introduction. But then neither was it easy to remember Cloud Street without the shop. After a time the shop was Cloud Street, and people said it, Cloudstreet, in one word. Bought the cauli at Cloudstreet. Slip over to Cloudstreet, willya love, and buy us a tin of Bushells and a few slices of ham. Cloudstreet.

The Dance

Quick Lamb tries to get on with his life. It’s been a happy one, being part of a mob, having farm fun and long dreamy days free of things. But it’s tough now, anchored to half a house, being a glorified boarder in a city he’s never even seen before. Maybe if he could get out into the paddocks more, out where air is stronger than memory so he could at least sometimes get shot of that terrible noiseless moment when he is walking along and Fish is just gone. He’d just kept walking and his brother, Fish — the handsome kid, the smart kid who made people laugh — Fish was under, and the net was just floating across him like the angel of death. He knows it should have been him, not Fish.

In this new house Quick has a room of his own for the first time in his life, and he’s not real sure how he likes it. The girls are all bunched together in a room the size of a dance hall down the front, and he knows they’d rather split up, being girls and all. He feels their looks in the corridor and gets the guilts. Besides, he’s not sure how he likes it, being alone. He wonders if maybe it’s a banishment, his quiet punishment for the Fish thing, but he reckons if it was that they were after, they’d bung him in with whiny little Lon. It’s a good, big room that he has, though he’s got nothing at all to fill it with. His iron bed stands like an exhibit in the middle with enough room to train a footy team on either side. It takes time to get the feel of it, what with his lonelysick wakefulness and the rumble and quake of the house going on all night like the bellyaches of a sleeping whale.

Down the back when he’s building the chookhouse, Quick finds a pile of newspapers and magazines someone’s tied up and thrown over the fence. Now and then he opens a paper and sees a blinded prisoner of war or a crying baby or some poor fleeing reffo running with a mattress across his back, and he’ll tear it out with care, take it up to his private room and pin it to the flaky wall to remind himself that he is alive, he is lucky, he is still healthy, and his brother is not. When he works on his spelling assignments he looks up and sees the gallery of the miserable; it grows all the time and they look down at him, Quick Lamb the Survivor, and he knows he deserves their scourging stares.

Now and then Fish comes into his room and looks about, wide-eyed and humming. Quick stiffs up with guilt, with sadness but sometimes he’ll touch his ruined brother just to hear his musical giggle. It’s the same giggle. It’s still Fish Lamb, his brother.

Fair dinkum, Quick Lamb hates himself.

But at night those cripples, the reffos, the starving weeping wounded on his walls wait till Quick is asleep and then they dance in their ragged borders, buckle paper and sag on their pins as they throw themselves into a weird joyous tumult over his bed. They never make a sound and he always sleeps through, but it happens all the same — men throw off their mattresses and soldiers tear away bandages and the dead rise out of the ground, inheriting the lonely quiet of the room until near morning, when they’re exhausted by happiness and freedom, and they resume their places for the dawn so that Quick Lamb might trap them again with his sorrow.

Props

Lester was closing up the shop amidst the long verandah shadows when a blackfella appeared on the step. It took him by surprise. He turned from the bolted shutters and the man was there. He was tall and thin, the colour of a burnt kettle, and he had a shoulderload of long dry branches.

Wanna buy props, Mister?

Oh. Oh. Props.

The black man’s hair stood like a deserted beehive. His feet were bare. His toes splayed on the ground like he was as much bird as he was man.

Gooduns. Not too much. Cut em meself.

Wait a minute, I’ll ask the missus. Lester turned and went to go in, but stopped. Listen, you might’s well come through yerself. She’ll be out the back. No use standin about out here.

The man hesitated.

Can leave the props just inside the door here, if you like.

The black man nodded. He unshouldered the sticks and stepped inside. Lester saw his eyes suddenly widen. The whites were porcelain and they seemed to vibrate. Something clicked in the man’s throat. Lester, stunned, watched him hold his pink palms out like a man with his hands against a window. He went back carefully, as if moving back in his own footsteps, his eyes roving about all the time from wall to ceiling to floor, and as soon as he was back over the threshold he turned and ran. Lester watched him go with his heart punching. The house grew quiet around him.

The props stayed just inside the door for two days until Oriel seized them and shoved her washing lines up with them.

The Lamb Girls

The time it took to fold a lace hanky, that’s all it took for Hat Lamb and Elaine Lamb and Red Lamb to know that they liked the city better than the farm. Cloudstreet was like somewhere out of the movies. All of them loved the staircase; they’d never even imagined a place with landings and banisters before. Hat liked sliding down with her skirt up around her ears, but Elaine wouldn’t contemplate that kind of activity, even though she was Hat’s twin. Elaine imagined sweeping down with hoops in her skirt and a bustle, to a cologne-smelling beau with his hat in his hand. Red, who was only twelve, just liked to spit from the landing and hit the sad little cactus in the terracotta pot in the hall.

People came into the shop and there were the Lamb girls, the unmistakeable Lamb girls with their dresses sewn from the same conglomerate of scrap material their mother seemed to tack together in bolts, and their severe hairdos and priceless complexions, their efficiency and sharpness. All of them knew how to count, and the twins had begun to take other forms of arithmetic as well, especially when soldiers came into the shop, bored and fatheaded. Sometimes Yanks came in flashing their big teeth, slapping on the accent thick as bread. They were boys with the voices of men, and it sent the Lamb girls absolutely troppo. Hat had a broad smile and she was starting to look like a woman. Elaine was already prone to ‘spells’ and she never smiled much for fear of seeming young and simple. Red was just a tomboy, she didn’t think about smiling or not smiling. There was a gap, now that Fish wasn’t being the ratbag of the family, and Red was out to fill it. She beat boys at cricket and she terrorized the bike sheds at school with the way she could throw a punch.

The Lamb girls didn’t speak to each other much, but when they did they all agreed that things were on the up.

Medicine

By May, when a chill had come into the nights and the street was subdued and indoorsy after dark with the Lambs’ chooks racked along their perch like mumbling hats, and the air so still you could hear the sea miles off and the river tide eating at the land, Lester and Oriel went to bed bonesore but grateful. It was a time when they talked like the old comrades they were, the way they’d bedtalked in those early farm years before the Depression when the kids hadn’t yet crowded them back into reputation and role.

You know what I miss? Lester said. The singin, that’s what I miss.

Talkin church again. Lester yull always miss singin, army, church or school.

Worldly songs are pretty, love, but the old church songs, they’re beautiful, you gotta say it.

Yairs, she said, it’s true enough. But we shouldn’t talk about it. It’ll only upset us.

Strike, we hold a grudge, Orry.

My oath, she grinned in the halfdark.

The house shifted on its stumps. Their new rooster crowed itself stupid ten hours short of daybreak.

Quick’s lookin blue, said Lester.

Well, Oriel murmured, that’s natural enough.

Blames himself, thinks we blame him.

Don’t we?

Lester turned onto his back to see the ceiling mottled with streetlight. I don’t know. I know it’s not his fault. Why would it be? It’s just what happened.

But do you blame him?

Lester said nothing.

We blame him, she said. And I blame you. And God.

It scares me, he said, hearin you think like that.

Me too, she said. I can’t help it. I’m a sinner, Lest.

Do you ever wish you were like her next door?

Oriel sniffed. Mrs Pickles? No. I couldn’t take ten minutes of it.

She’s hard as nails.

Hard as lard, you mean. I’m the one hard as nails.

Lester coughed out a laugh.

We can’t help it, Oriel said vaguely, none of us can.

You always said people can help anythin and everythin.

That was once.

What about Fish?

Least of all Fish.

No, no, I meant what are we gunna do with him?

We’ll give him the gentlest life we can, we’ll make it the best for him we know how.

Lester agonized. How do we know what’s best? How do we make him happy? What does he think?

Oriel thought about this. It’s like he’s three years old …

You know, Lester says, almost giggly with relief, we’ve never talked about him like this since it—

Lester be quiet, I’m thinkin.

He waited. Lester thought about poor old Fish, that skylarking ratbag turned brainless overnight. There’d been times he’d thought the kid was better dead than to have to live all his life as a child, but he knew that being alive was being alive and you couldn’t tamper with that, you couldn’t underestimate it. Life was something you didn’t argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death. Oriel began to snore. Lester gave up waiting and went off himself.

Having both watched parents hurried to the grave by medicine, Oriel and Lester weren’t chuffed about doctors. Neither had stepped inside hospital or surgery since childhood. The children were born wherever they were. Hat and Elaine in the kitchen at Margaret. Quick in the lockup of the police station, Red in the saddle room, and Lon was born at the side of the road in the shadow of the broken-axled Chev. Hard work and plenty of food, that kept the quacks away. And a bit of care, Oriel would say. She could fix most ills with a bit of this and that. She conceded that doctors were like governments: it was possible that they served some use though it didn’t pay to put them to the test.

But the ache of their doubt about Fish got hold of them and besides, it looked like victory in Europe and they were feeling optimistic, so they found themselves in a surgery across the tracks that week telling a quack their story.

He was a waistcoat and watch chain type and he spoke like the pommy officers Lester remembered from his days in the Light Horse. He put a light down Fish’s throat and then in his ears. It got old Fish giggling. The doc looked puzzled and amused. Oriel munched her lip. Lester kept his hands on the boy. Fish stood there with his shirt open and his eyes flicking all about.

What’s your name, boy? the quack asked.

Fish Lamb, said Oriel. Samson.

Fish, said Fish.

Mrs Lamb. I’ll ask and he’ll answer.

Very well.

Why do they call you Fish?

It’s the name, said Fish.

Hm. How old are you, Fish?

Nine.

Ten next month, said Oriel.

Mrs Lamb.

Can you count to nine?

Nine, said Fish.

Yes.

I’m big.

Indeed, said the quack. Fish, where do you live?

In the family. With Quick. Lestah.

Who is this? the quack asked, pointing to Lester.

Fish grinned. Lestah! My da.

And who is this, Fish?

The bright look stayed on Fish’s face, but it became a look of suspension.

Who is this lady?

Oriel set her teeth in a smile, her jaw tight enough to break.

Fish?

Lester, he doesn’t see me.

Who is she, Fish?

Please, Doctor, this—

Fish looked past her into the wallpaper, his features bright and distracted.

The water, said Fish.

On the wallpaper there were waves and jumping mullet and sails.

Queer, said the quack.

Oriel got a hanky out for the eyes.

How long was he under the water, you say?

Lester shrugged. A few minutes. He was caught up in the net and my lamp went out—

Yes, yes. And you revived him Mrs Lamb?

Oriel looked at Fish but couldn’t get his gaze. Yes. And I prayed.

The water, said Fish.

And you didn’t take him to a doctor, or a hospital?

We thought he was better, said Lester. A miracle, you know.

Hmm. Like Lazarus, eh, the quack muttered; Jesus wept.

But he’s retarded, said Oriel, it’s like he’s three. We had to potty train him again, start from scratch.

You mean he’s improved?

A bit, yes.

A boy would have more than this regression after an experience like that, said the quack. He shows no spastic tendencies at all.

He blacks out.

No speech impediment. He seems alert, aware, sane. This is not what happens. Now I—

Are you saying we’re liars? Oriel growled. Do you think we’d come here not telling the truth?

Mrs Lamb—

Because I am a woman whose word has been respected as long—

Oriel! Lester’s voice was shaky with momentary authority.

This boy seems traumatized. There’s nothing physically wrong with him. Are you sure he hasn’t been through a great shock of some kind that would explain his obvious … retreat?

He’s been alive and he’s been dead, said Lester. One of those was bound to be a shock.

Perhaps he was under a few seconds, enough to give him—

Minutes, said Oriel. No heartbeat. Another minute, two even, before I got him back.

You could think about a psychiatrist.

Lester swallowed. If his … his brain is damaged, can a shrink fix it?

No. He might help hysteria, trauma and so on. You could think about a specialized home for him …

Oriel picked Fish up in a swoop. There’s no home as specialized as mine, Mister!

Lestah! Lestah!

Mrs Lamb, sit down.

Come on, Lester.

Fish, asked the quack, where do you want to go?

The water, the water!

Oriel crashed through the waiting room like a fullback.

Fast! said Fish. Fast!

VE

While they slept, Sam Pickles nursing his tingling stump, Oriel Lamb snoring beneath her eyepatches, the house stumps grinding beneath them, the wallshadows flitting and dancing and swirling up a musty smell in the darkness, the war ended in Europe.

Before dawn, word was out at the Metro Markets where Lester heard it, dropped what he was doing and drove home, punishing the old Chev across tramlines and through stop signs until he throttled it, smoking and steaming, into Cloud Street. He went through the door like a stormtrooper.

Victory in Europe!

And the wireless was on somewhere.

Unconditional surrender!

VE Day.

Lester barrelled into the kids’ room. No school today! VE Day.

What? said Red, always snaky when woken.

VE Day!

Violet Eggleston? What’s she done, that dag?

Who?

What?

The war. The Krauts are out.

Oh.

What about the Japs? said Quick from the hallway.

The Japs are still in.

We’ll get em, said Quick.

Anyway. Hitler’s dead.

Hitler didn’t bomb Darwin, said Quick.

Tokyo’ll go, said Red.

Gawd, said Lester, what a mob of glumbums.

Wait’ll Violet Eggleston finds out, said Red, she’ll think it’s for her.

The kids climbed back into their beds. Next door the Pickleses were laughing. Well, thought Lester, that’s that then.

A Fish Forgets

Fish hears the winter rain hissing on the tin roof. When lightning flashes he sees the fruit trees without leaves down there in the yard. On still nights, cold nights, clear frosty nights, he hears the river a long way off across the rooftops and treecrowns. That’s something he does remember. But he forgets so much. He doesn’t remember being a real flamin character. He’s forgotten all his old ways, how people loved him, people’s names, his daily jobs. Before, he’d likely as not tie your shoelaces together while you weren’t noticing, but nowadays he can’t even get his own shoes on, let alone lace them. School learning has evaporated in his head, horseriding, stone-skipping, fartlighting, limericks, stars, directions, weather, rabbit trapping, beetle racing. From the outside, those are the things you can tell about him. Mostly, he just forgets to grow up. Already Lon is thinking of Fish as the baby of the family.

He knows Quick, Lester, Lon, Hat, Elaine and Red, but he can’t seem to place Oriel. Either that or he sees her and ignores her. He just looks through her like she’s not there, like she’s never been there.

It’s like Fish is stuck somewhere. Not the way all the living are stuck in time and space; he’s in another stuckness altogether. Like he’s half in and half out. You can only imagine and still fail to grab at how it must be. Even the dead fail to know and that’s what hurts the most. You have to make it up and have faith for that imagining.

Fish is still strong and beautiful. That Rose next door sees it. She watches him. Mostly Fish is quiet. He talks, but not much. He likes to stand around in the yard and see birds. He likes the way things move in the wind. Wind excites him. When he feels breeze on his face he smiles and says, Yes. Winter days now, he stands out in the westerly that blows down the tracks from the sea and it closes his eyes with its force.

Hello, wind!

He loves to sing. He knows ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, ‘Blessed Assurance’, ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’, whole strings of them. Lester brings out the accordion some nights after tea and Fish moans along. Music seems to make him feel good. Music and spinning things.

Knife never lies! he yells as Lester spins the butterknife. Fish claps his hands wide fingered.

Lester shows him how to spin a soup bowl, send it rocking across the table, standing up of its own momentum, whirring and blurring, making wind and sound for him. Fish becomes an expert at it. Quick and Hat and Red and Lon stand and watch him spin two, three, four at a time.

When he’s frightened or angry he falls down. He cries like a man. It makes the Lambs crazy with emotion to hear it.

Oriel doesn’t realize it, but she begins to dress Fish like an idiot, the way people clothe big sadfaced mongoloids. She hoiks his trousers up under his arms with a belt so long it flaps. She combs his hair straight down on his brow and shines his shoes till they mock him. The reason Oriel doesn’t notice is that Quick gets to him early after breakfast and drags the clobber round on him, messes him up like a boy, normal and slouchy. It makes old Fish giggle, Quick tugging at him.

Yer a boy, Fish.

Big boy.

My oath, says Quick.

Kitchentalk

Sometimes after tea there was no shopwork to be done so the Lambs’d loiter round the kitchen table, talking above the hum of Fish’s soup bowls with the new range all roar and glow. Hat at the sink. Oriel pulling out the darning. Lester picking the flourbits off his forearms.

Fine sink, this, Dad.

Yeah, but what about the other five? said Oriel.

A job lot, Lester said.

Your father has a nose for a bargain, Oriel said rolling her eyes.

We could make dunnies out of the rest, said Quick, a five holer.

Quick, stop that.

Lester laughed: We used to have a sixteen holer when I was in the army. That’s how they got the idea for the Lancaster bomber for this war. Saturation bombin.

What’d you do durin the last war, Mum? said Quick.

Oriel kept darning.

Hat raised her eyebrows: Mum?

Hm?

The Great War. What’d you do?

Waited. I raised six kids and waited for one of em to come back.

The kitchen fell quiet, all except for Fish’s whirring bowl. Lester tapped scum from his chromatic harmonica.

I didn’t know you were married before, said Elaine, lips aquiver.

Eee-laine, you nong, said Hat. 1914 to 1918. She’d hafta start havin em at age twelve to get six out, not to mention one off to war. She was born the year of Federation, 1901.

Well, said Lester. Margaret River School obviously taught Hat more than groomin and deportation.

They weren’t my children, said Oriel.

Well, I figured that, said Hat. Whose were they?

My father remarried after my mother died. His new wife already had a boy, Bluey, and they had a whole squad of babies after they married. Half-brothers and sisters. I brought them up. She taught at the bush school. She wasn’t much older than me, you know. And I wanted to be a teacher, but I never finished school. I raised her family.

Why?

Because, Quick, I loved my father.

Did he love you?

When I got burnt one day in a bushfire, in 1910, he killed his last pig, and took out its bladder and put it on my legs to heal the blisters. A whole beast, just so I wouldn’t scar. Not only was it his last pig, it was the last living thing on his farm but me.

I wouldn’t have wasted pork on this family, said Lester with a creasyfaced wink. Slice of polony, maybe. Pound of tripe, yeah.

Garn, Dad, yer all bluff.

Did I tell you about me and Roy Rene?

Arr!

Did he Mum?

Oriel finished a sock and threw it at Lon whose foot belonged to it. Yes, Yes. The Les and Mo Show.

At the Tivoli, said Lester, and then The Blue Room. Ooh, I was a lair then. All the best people’d sing me songs. I wrote for the best of em.

He was good, said Oriel, not dirtymouthed like Roy Rene.

Old Roy’s the best, said Lester.

Quick looked at the old girl. She caught him looking.

What? she said.

The one who went to war. The half-brother you were waitin for. Did he come back?

No.

Died of wounds in Palestine. The Holy Land. Shot by a Turkish airman at a well. He was a signalman. He was waterin horses. He always looked good with horses.

Did you know him, Dad? You were there.

I was only at Anzac, said Lester.

He was a genius with horses, said Oriel.

Horses were geniuses with me, said Lester. That’s why I was in the Light Horse. They were always lighter after they bucked me off.

You were a hero, said Quick.

Lester pumped the old harmonica to break the quiet, and because he knows, well as Oriel knows, that it’s just not true.

Cake

The day Quick turned twelve his father baked him a cake and wrote his name in icing and stuck twelve candles in it, and when the evening rush at the shop was over, the Lamb family came through from the counter to the kitchen to sit around the oval table and sing ‘Happy Birthday’. They’d just finished the singing and were into the three cheers when the cowbell rang up front and Oriel went to serve in the shop. She came back at a jog.

Lady wants a cake, Les. She’s desperate. She’ll give us a quid.

It’s too much. We haven’t got one.

Quick looked at the candles, still smoking.

It’s too much, said Lester.

Quick watched as his mother whipped out all the candles, smoothed the icing over with a knife and gathered the cake up under her arm to charge back down the corridor.

Birthday, Quick, said Fish.

Yeah, said Quick.

Suddenly, they all laughed — even Quick. It started as a titter, and went quickly to a giggle, then a wheeze, and then screaming and shrieking till they were daft with it, and when Oriel came back in they were pandemonius, gone for all money. But they paused like good soldiers when she solemnly raised her hand. She fished in her apron and pulled out a florin. Happy birthday, son.

You want change from this? said Quick.

That set them off again and there was no stopping them.

Tuba

Quick Lamb was surprised when his father joined the army. He was even more surprised to know he’d joined the army band. The old man came home one day with a full kit and tuba and spread it out in the bedroom behind the shop so they could all see it.

I thought I’d do my bit, Lester Lamb said. They wouldn’t take me in ‘39.

All the Lambs looked at it in wonder. Quick worried about the old man sometimes. They were bombing Tokyo. There couldn’t be a few weeks left of the war. Deep inside Quick knew his father was liable to do anything at all.

I used to be in the Salvos, Lester Lamb said. I’m orright on the old tub.

The tub? Quick said.

Tuba. Chew-ba.

Lester took up the dented instrument and sat. He honked out a couple of notes. It sounded like a tune, right enough. Like elephant farts.

Oriel said nothing. Lester let out a strangled oomph and the rooster down the back started screeching. Lon giggled and Fish smiled.

More, said Fish.

Don’t worry, said Oriel, there’ll be plenty more. More than plenty.

From then on, the old man was at band practice every afternoon and as the year got on towards Christmas Quick saw him less and less and he wondered more and more. His mother ran the shop and said nothing about it. The girls served. Hat and Elaine had finished school for good now. They were old enough to work for money. The shop went on. Quick went to school and did badly and came home. Sometimes he’d lie on his bed with Fish and just look at the ceiling and feel Fish against him. He missed the old Fish, especially at school. With Fish, people noticed you. But without him, at this new school, he was just a country kid whose shorts were too long, whose feet were horny from barefootedness. He was slow and dreamy and the teachers gave up on him quickly. When he came home and lay on his bed and looked up, he didn’t know what he saw; he couldn’t decide what he felt. Fish might come in and say Hello, Quick, and stand at the window watching the motes in the late afternoon sun, or maybe slouch in beside him on the bed and say, It’s the roof you’re looking at, Quick.

One afternoon, when they were lying there in the socksmelling heat, Fish dug him in the chest and asked: Are you happy, Quick?

Quick turned his head to look at those black eyes. For a moment it occurred to him that Fish might have been pretending to be slow this whole year and the thought made him sick and angry. But he looked close at Fish who began to giggle and he knew it wasn’t pretending.

I don’t know, he said. What about you?

When I feel good.

What about now?

Fish skewed his lower lip and considered. Aw, yeah.

When are you sad then?

When I want the water, Fish said.

What dyou mean?

Fish watched the motes diving and whorling.

What water, Fish?

The water, the water.

Fish got off the bed and went to the window. Quick watched him stand there with his yellow hair sticking up all over.

Science

Sam Pickles started the day with a smoke on the back step before he went out walking. You’d think he was a one-handed brain surgeon the way he concentrated on the task. The walk started out in July as the daily job hunt, but after a few weeks it just became the thing he did, the shape of his day. It kept his blood cool, eased the itch he slept and woke with. Luck was out there waiting on him, puckering at him. Joel always said that hard work makes good luck, but any man who made his fortune on a horse like Eurythmic was deeper into the mysteries than he knew. There was no work in that. A winner like that had the weight of the whole bloody universe behind it.

No, there was a change in the air by August, and Sam knew it; the winter sky the colour of sixpence, steady rent coming in from those tubahonking Lambs, the electricity in the stumps of his fingers. Walking, he held his crook hand in his good one and tried to read its message. Hours he walked, to clear his head of Dolly’s stormcloud humidity and Rose’s new hardset stares. The house vibrated with hustle these days, groaning laborious as a ship with those Lambs going at it night and day, singing, working, laughing, shifting boxes and furniture morning and night and their blasted rooster going off like a burglar alarm at all hours.

Those Lambs. No joke, it took his breath away to see them go at it. You’d think they were carrying the nation on their backs with all that scrubbing and sweeping, tacking up shelves and blackboards, arguing over the situation of jars, tubs, scales and till. Stinking dull work, the labour of sheilas at best, with all that smile and how do you do, sir, but you had to admire them for it. They were just scrub farmers green to town, a mob of gangly, puppet-limbed yokels but they moved in like they’d designed the house themselves. Making luck, the hardest donkey y acker there is. With that little woman pushing and harassing and haranguing. They’d never go hungry, that lot, but neither would they have it high on the hog. Their way was alright if that was as far as you could see, but Sam had his father’s blood. He was no donkey worker, he was more of a scientist. Not the kind to yoke himself for the long haul like that, he saw himself as the kind of man who read things on the wind, living from divining the big wins and taking the losses as expenses on the way. No guts, no glory. He could feel it in his wheezy old lungs, in his stumps. There was science in it, and science always wins through. His time would come. Hadn’t this subletting bizzo been a gamble and a win?

Alone in his room of an afternoon, Sam’d get down his two-up pennies and hold them in his palm. Dolly took the rent personally and she didn’t even let him get hold of enough to buy baccy. But, by crikey, his time was coming, she’d see.

No Wading

God, how she hated winter. Dolly Pickles stood in the weak sun of the backyard looking at her feet. Two flaky hens scratched nearby. Today, again, she felt angry for no reason. Sam was out looking for a job, the kids were at school and the place was quiet. She was waiting for the copper to boil so she could finish the washing.

All she needed was summer, and some sweet, healing, nipplepricking sun. Short of a good time, that’s all she needed to get by.

Green tufts of wild oats rasped at her shins. The sun’d make her young and hopeful and it wouldn’t matter that she was married to a crip. She wanted to be brown and oily on some beach, to feel the heat slowly building in her skin until she couldn’t bear it and had to run down to the shore and flop into the gutter between surf banks and have her flesh fizz and prickle with chill. But all she had was this winter feeling, this shittiness, this anger that she couldn’t place. And washing she hadn’t done on wash day. Herself next door always had the washing out at dawn washing day, as though she did it to shame everyone else, especially Dolly.

She wandered down through the long weeds of her yard and beneath the lilac tree to where she could see down the embankment to the railway. She heard someone next door straining in the little tin dunny. Up at the house Lester Lamb was singing and Dolly could see the slow kid with his nose pressed to a second floor window, so she knew it must be the sergeant-major who was on the privy. A thrill of mischief sparked in her. Here’s a lark. Hello wash day. She stuck her head over the pickets.

There sat Oriel Lamb with her knickers round her bumpy knees and her skirt hoiked avast. The little woman stiffened and closed her mouth.

I’ll go and get the ranger, Dolly said with a wicked grin.

Why’s that? Oriel Lamb asked, mustering some dignity in tone if nowhere else. She grabbed for the door.

Smells like something’s crawled up inside you and died.

The door slapped shut.

No WADING.

Dolly Pickles laughed until there wasn’t even any bitterness in it. And she was sober as a saint.

After the kids are asleep Dolly stands at the window with only her stockings on. There is no noise from next door, and the whole house is quiet. Sam lies on the bed, rolls a smoke, watching her. She looks out at the moon that rests on the fence.

We aren’t that old, she says.

Anyone with an arse like that isn’t real old. He licks the paper, tamps, then lights up.

Dolly rests an elbow on the sill. The grass is shin high out in their half of the yard. Bits of busted billycarts and boxes litter the place beneath the sagging clothesline.

I dunno what I’m doin, she says.

Do you ever?

She shrugs. Spose not. What about you?

He takes a drag. I’m a bloke. I work. I’m courtin the shifty shadow. That’s what I’m doin.

This is another life.

It’s the city. We own a house. We got tenants.

Do you remember Joel’s beach house?

Sorta question is that?

That was our life.

The late train rollicks up from Fremantle. It sends the long grass into rolling gasps and sighs on the embankment in the moonlight, and Dolly watches as Sam comes up behind her to fit snug against her rump. She feels the heat of his fag at her neck and his hand and his stump on the cold porcelain of her nipples, and the hot, glowing end of him getting up into her, making her twist and feint, grip the sill, see her nails bending in the wood. Dolly can smell the charge in him, it hisses against her stockings and bows her legs until it’s him that’s holding her upright, and so it goes, on and on, until out there in the moonlight she can see the river and the dunes and Joel’s shack, and the two of them on the beach rubbing the flesh of oysters into each other.

When Sam is asleep, Dolly gets up and pulls on a coat and creeps out of the house. The mob next door are long asleep. She goes down to the tracks and looks at them gleaming in the moony light; she can see her face in them, almost. She remembers riding out to the siding when she was a girl. She rode on the back of the saddle behind her father. Oh, she worshipped that man. He was strong and sunbrown and quiet. There was a way he had of laughing that made her feel like the world might stop right there and then, as if that laughter was enough for everyone and everything, and there was no point in anything else bothering to continue. She must have been six or so on that ride out to the siding where the great tin holding bins stood bending in the heat. The ground was blonde and rainstarved and after Dolly’s father had fixed up his business with the rail men he saw her standing by the buckled railway lines.

Those rails go all over the world. They go forever.

And she felt it was true. It was like they were electric with all knowledge, all places, all people.

Dolly squats by the cold rails here in the winter night.

She never did get to try those rails. She just got to be goodlooking and cheeky and by sixteen she found herself out on her back under the night sky with a long procession of big hatted men, one of whom, the youngest, the fairest of them, was sleeping up there in that saggy great house with his arms up behind his head, and his fingerless fist on her pillow. No, she never did find out about those rails. But nothing ever turns out like you expect. Like how your father ends up not being your father, and all.

Dogs get howling all down the way. Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there’s a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.

Bells

Rose woke up to the sound of bells. She opened her window and the world was mad with noise: church bells, tram bells, air raid sirens, train whistles, a rocket going up, klaxons and trumpets, dogs howling nutheaded at the sky. Cloud Street was filling and below, the shop was bursting with huggers and clappers who were opening bottles and crying out on the lawn where she could see them. The house shook and a thousand smells whirled through it with a bang of doors.

The war is over!

Ted came bursting in: The Japs! We creamed em!

It’s finished, listen to the wireless.

Rose rushed to the landing. Downstairs she saw that Mrs Lamb giving her mum a roast chook and a plate of fruit. The old man was breaking open a bottle of grog he’d got from who knows where. There were a couple of Yank sailors out in the hallway and that wet eyed Mr Lamb squeezing his accordion fit to wring blood from it.

She went down into it and couldn’t help but have a smile cracking her chops. She danced a barn dance with a Yank and got a smack across the bum passing the old man on the verandah.

Here, said Quick Lamb, holding out a jar of humbugs.

She went elbow deep for them.

Mum’ll kill us, he said.

Me! said the slow kid, the goodlooking one who was on the front step spinning a butter knife. The blade pointed at his chest. It’s meeee!