Cloudstreet

IV. Break in the Weather

THAT’S it, Sam thinks; that’s bloody it. The streets are still full of revellers as he heads for the station with his pennies in his pocket. This is the break in the weather, Sam my man. Come in bloody Spinner.

His teeth ache. His hair buzzes at its roots with power.

Wherever it is, I’ll find it.

Whoever it is, I’ll find em.

And I won’t be back till I do.

Makin Millions

A couple of days after VJ Day, when everyone was still crazy with peace fever, and the old man still hadn’t turned up and the old girl was getting vicious, Rose walked home from school with her booklumpy bag, wondering if he was gone for good and how she’d have to tough it out with the old girl. It was torture. Other kids swept past on junky grids, pulling wheelies and skids in the dirt, startling clumps of gossiping girls and sending small boys up trees in fright, but Rose walked straight and sensible as though nothing could touch her. Up ahead she saw the Lambs shagging along under the Geraldton wax that burst over the fences beside the station and hung full of bees and fragrance. Somewhere behind her, Ted was shouting at Chub not to be such a wanker and that he could flaminwell carry his own bag.

If the old man was gone another day, she reckoned, that Mrs Lamb’d be over with some advice quicksmart. She knew the fast, cheap, clean, sensible way of doing everything and she’d be dishing it out like the Salvos, and the old girl’d be pukin.

Rose stopped by the Geraldton wax. Geraldton. Already it seemed like something she’d dreamt up. She pulled a waxy blossom off its stem and took it with her.

Kids were milling round Cloudstreet buying penny-sticks, freckles, snakes and milkbottles in little white paper bags. Rose pushed through the congregation on the verandah, heaved open the big jarrah front door and went inside.

And there he was. Arms akimbo, like General Douglasflamin-MacArthur, the old man was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, polishing his stumpy knuckles and grinning fit to be in pictures.

You look like you lost a penny and found a quid, she said.

Sam held out his two-up pennies.

Where you been?

A bit of scientific work.

Oh, gawd. So what are you grinnin about, then?

I got ajob.

A job! How?

The shifty shadow, Rosie.

Arr!

True as me word.

How?

He rattled the pennies.

Two-up?

That’s right.

You gotta be jokin, Dad.

Plus a bit of the foldin. Sam slipped a pound note down the front of her pinafore.

Rose shivered, ready to burst from excitement, anger, disbelief, something.

I put a bloke so far in the red he had to pay in kind. He’s the union boss, Blackie Stewart. He owes me a job. Start Monday. I’ll be makin money.

Don’t get beyond yerself.

No, fair dinkum, I’ll be makin millions. It’s a job at the Mint.

I hope they don’t find out that you count on yer fingers, Rose said.

Sam started after her and she ran giggling through the door into the rangy mob of kids outside.

Cheeky blighter!

Rose stood in the yard and looked back at him and it didn’t seem so strange to love him.

Monday. Rose ran home from school and waited for Sam to show. Even the old girl seemed nervous, up there cooking his tea.

He came swinging his gladstone bag into the yard.

Well? she said.

They’re for water, Sam said.

What do you do? Rose asked as they went up the stairs.

Push a broom. Take turns looking for duds. Not a lot a fella with one hand can do, love.

They came into the kitchen.

Rose looked at the new penny he’d just taken from under his tongue. She couldn’t imagine money being made.

They just cook it, like yer ole lady cooks a batch a scones. Cept more regular and a bit softer.

Dolly hissed at him without malice.

Out they come, pennies, zacs, deaners, shillins. The place stinksa money. Ya feel it in yer hair and on yer clobber. Spend all day breathin in gold dust. Fair’s fair, the place is like a cake shop and the smell always gets ya hungry.

Chops are done, said Dolly.

They sat down to eat, and Sam told them all about the noise and the machines and the heat of furnaces and the bars on the windows and the colour the limestone had gone on the outside. He described the wheezy press and the smell of kero and the way all the blokes thought he’d lost his fingers on some secret mission in an unknown archipelago instead of from sleepiness and bad luck while carting birdshit. They called him Sam and got all serious in his presence. He saluted with his thumb and half finger and they didn’t laugh.

Rose saw it all as clear as if she’d been there herself. After dinner she worked on her geography, colouring maps and diagrams at the kitchen table while her parents smoked and talked in short, low bursts. Ted and Chub disappeared outside for a while. Everything was normal and right. There were dishes in the sink and the sound of kids playing in the street and the trains passing smutty wind. Something settled over the kitchen. Rose kept the colours inside the lines and all the patterns were proper, sensible and neat. Happiness. That’s what it was.

Winning

In spring Sam Pickles went back to the September races and started winning. All through October, and into November he bet on a gelding called Blackbutt and saw him place or win every time. Sam knew it didn’t make any sense at all that this horse should keep winning. But luck came from some other place, bringing weirdness and aid into the world and he didn’t question it. He kept every winning ticket in the hat band of his Akubra. He bought binoculars and a grey suit and you could spot him there amidst the soldiers and sailors and women, despite his smallness, because he looked like a punter, and more importantly, a winner. When they thundered around on the last turn, filling the air with sods and dust and great creaturely gasps of horsepower, Sam Pickles stood still with his teeth set and his blue eyes clear to see Blackbutt come home the money. His blood was charged, he felt the breath of magic on him. He came home with his pockets stuffed, his stump aching, and the kids grabbing at him on the stairs to feel success.

We’ve come a long way, he said to them. By crikey we have. Eh? Eh?

One afternoon when she got home, Rose found a desk in her room. It was dark and compact, built from jarrah, and in every drawer there were sharpened pencils, ink, paper and books. She stood there, smelling the wood and the varnish, the newness and shock of it. When she turned around he was at the door. Rose began to blubber. He laughed and knocked on wood with his fingerless fist. The boys ran in with their airguns and it was like an early Christmas.

All spring it went on. They had good shoes and black market meat, sly grog and shop toys. The Pickles kids looked out across the fence and saw the Lambs digging noisily in the garden in their patched clothes, their square ordinary bodies dark with sweat, and they felt they had gotten back the edge. Rose and Ted and Chub slept and only dreamt of more.

Dolly sat up in the evenings and drank stout with lemonade. When Sam came out of bed to get her she’d be soft and warm and quiet and she kissed him like she was sucking at something he had. He felt her legs fasten around his waist and her teeth in his neck as they ground up the bedclothes. Her breath was sweet and she cried out enough to make him breathless and frantic. He could have wept with triumph. But when he was asleep, skewed off on his own side of the bed with his arm across his eyes, Dolly would get up again with his mess coming all down her legs, and she’d go out and open another bottle and sit in the dark alone.

Fair Dinkum

Rose heard it first. The old man was coming in after work. The steak was spitting on the stove and the place smelled of pepper.

Fair dinkum!

Rose looked at her mother. It wasn’t the old man’s voice, but it sure was his gait they heard coming down the hall. They were his boots alright.

Fairrrrgh! Dink. Dinkum.

He’s drunk, Dolly said.

Rose saw a ladder in her stocking.

And then in he came with a damn bird on his shoulder. He looked radiant and proud and prettywell sober. The bird was just an ordinary pink cockatoo with those clear side-winding eyes behind a beak like an ingrown toenail. From Sam’s shoulder, the bird looked down at Rose and Dolly with an expression of hauteur.

Say hello to Stan, girls! said Sam, dropping his gladstone bag to the floor.

Gawd help us, said Dolly.

Fair flamin dinkum! said the bird.

Rose laughed and Stan lifted a clawed old foot in her direction.

I won im, Sam said.

What in, a mugs’ lottery?

Just a bet.

He’s a beaut, said Rose. What does he eat?

New pennies.

That’ll be cheap, said Dolly.

We can shake him out at Christmas, said Rose. Like a money box.

Fair dinkum! said Stan.

They laughed and laughed, but little did they know. Two days before Christmas Stan crapped out three ha’pennies and a shilling, enough to buy seed for months.

When those coins dropped out of him onto the kitchen table two days before Christmas, he cocked his head at all present. He fixed his eyes on them with irascible turns of his head.

Eh? he said. Eh? What?

Stan always paid his way.

In time the house absorbed the bird, though it could never fully absorb his irritable shrieks. Even the neighbours winced at it. Whenever he was about the house Sam took Stan on his shoulder. The rest of the time the bird side-stepped up and down the fence, cocking his head and dodging the honkynuts Lon Lamb shot at him with a rubber band. Sam Pickles liked to feel Stan’s claws in his shoulder. It made him look a little taller. Rose said it made him look like a pirate. Dolly said it made him look like a perch. Ted and Chub didn’t care. Stan bit them and they lost interest.

Stan’s wing was never clipped. He could always have flown away.

Quick Lamb’s Sadness Radar

Quick Lamb reads the paper every day and sees the long lists of the missing believed killed, and the notices in memorium for sons and fathers and brothers. The war’s over, he knows, but he picks up sadness like he’s got radar for it. The whole world’s trying to get back to peace but somewhere, always somewhere there’s craters and rubble and still the lists and the stories coming home as though it’ll never let itself be over. There’s families on this street who’ve lost men, and while they remember the war will still be on.

We’re lucky, he thinks; the old man was too old and I was too young. We’ve got food, coupons, a full ration book. We’re gettin away light.

Quick sees kids at school who are poor. The Lambs are patched and barefooted, but at lunchtime their mother always brings warm pies and pasties to the gate. Quick and Lon and Red meet up wordlessly and eat together. Through the winter Quick notices Wogga McBride sitting with his little brother Darren. Wogga McBride is in grade six, one below Quick. They have a queer way of eating their sandwiches: whatever it is they bring wrapped in vine leaves gets eaten under cover of their hands in a way so quick and deft that it’s impossible to know what it is they have. Maybe it’s Quick’s misery radar, but he can’t let it be. He watches them every day from the corner of his eye until it’s almost October, and by then he knows what he’s begun to suspect — Wogga McBride and his brother aren’t eating anything at all; they’re just pretending. Out of pride, they’re going through the motions of unwrapping, passing, commenting on, eating food that doesn’t exist.

Quick lies awake that night with shadows vibrating on his wall.

Next day at lunchtime, Quick leaves Lon and Red and takes a pastry over to Wogga McBride.

I’m full, Quick says. Want it?

The skinny blue kid takes it with a nod and Quick leaves it at that. From then he resolves to take food to Wogga McBride every day, but most days he forgets.

The McBrides live further down the tracks towards West Perth but they cross at the walkway just below the big house on Cloud Street. Quick gets into the habit of falling in behind Wogga and Darren McBride and following them until they jump the tracks and head down toward town to their place.

Not long before the holidays, Quick is behind the McBrides, straining to hear a bit of their rare conversation. He doesn’t know what he finds so fascinating about them. True, they have blue-mottled skin and legs like hinges, the way they fold inside the knee. There is a kind of weariness about them. Their hair lies flat against their birdlike skulls. To Quick they look like ghosts.

Quick tails them down Rokeby Road, through all the food smells and the odour of newness seeping out of the open doors and shopfronts. They skirt the football ground. Quick can’t hear them saying anything. A truck clatters by loaded with pumpkins. Quick has the feeling he should catch up with them, just bust into their ghostly tight aura and say g’day, but what if they don’t want him? They actually look like they don’t care about the world, not what people think of them or wonder about them. And yet there they’ll be at lunchtime palming pieces of nothing — of air — into their mouths. Aren’t they pretending so that others won’t think they’re poor? Geez, Quick understands that much pride. Or are they keeping up the fantasy for themselves? Do they feel less hungry, less lean and hopeless, if they pretend their bellies are full? This kind of thought bothers Quick in class and it’s on his mind this afternoon as he sticks close enough to hear the voices, but not so near that he can understand what they’re saying.

And they hardly ever laugh, that’s another thing, though it isn’t until late tonight that he thinks of it, and by then it won’t help to think at all.

Quick climbs the bank behind West Leederville Station with the wild oats parting before him. Wogga McBride and his little brother are at the top and heading down into the cut where he loses sight of them for a few moments. When he gets to the crest of the embankment he can see Railway Road and the date palms in front of the rich people’s places. A train is hauling out of the station going his way and he sees down the track, behind the wobbling carriages, the slant of his own roof. A dog is barking. Someone has the flag flying in the front yard across the tracks, there’s a war over somewhere. Quick feels the breeze coming up behind him, cool and southerly. He’ll never catch up with Wogga McBride today. They’ll be across the tracks in a moment. He’s twelve years old and primary school is almost over. Smuts rise and the rails groan. Down there Wogga McBride is fooling with the dog, some carpetbacked stray that’s got a hold of his school bag and he’s laughing. Laughing! The two boys prance around the brown dog up on its hind legs, twisting and feinting with the leather strap in its mouth. Quick can hear their virulent laughter. He wants to go down there with them and run that dog ragged with them. Oh, the laughter, even over the sound of the train.

And then Wogga McBride tears the bag free of the dog and sways back, shrieking with glee, and the sleeper catches his heel and he staggers and the engine smacks him with the sound of a watermelon falling off the back of a truck, and he’s gone.

Everything is screaming. The train punishes itself to a halt. Down there, Wogga McBride’s little brother stands with his mouth open and train noise coming out. There’s men jumping out and down, there’s screaming, alright. Screaming, screaming.

Quick hoists his bag and goes home and gets into bed and pulls the sheet over his head and stuffs his ears with notepaper.

Fish Waiting

What can you tell him, Fish? Right now, while you’re down there on that side of the water with your strange brain and your black, wide eyes. What do you understand enough to say? You stand there in the morning and the afternoon and see Quick all closed, white and hard. Motes rain down. The sun is alive. The whole house is shaking with sound. Why won’t he look at you? How do you bear it? How can you just stand at the end of his bed like that, with the patience of an animal? It’s like you’re someone else down there, Fish. Or does it just hurt me to think it’s not so?

Debts

Every morning the old man came up to see Quick and sit on the end of his bed and sigh. Quick lay under the sheet, smelling all the trapped stinks and odours, and through it he could see the shadow of the old man moving in front of the window.

How’d ya be, son? the old man said quietly. He seemed to know something was wrong, but he was stuck for some way of fixing it.

Quick was glad it was him coming up and not his mother. She’d be too busy getting the shop open for the day and anyway, she’d be liable to just hook him out of bed, kick him in the ring and send him on his way. He didn’t know why he was staying here in bed anyway; he just knew he didn’t want to get up and it had something to do with Wogga McBride.

The second day Lester had a better idea of what was wrong. Quick heard him rustling a newspaper theatrically, walking up and down, stopping now and then to say: It’s a flamin tragedy, Quick, an honest-to-the-Lord flamin tragedy.

Quick didn’t think about that wet teatowel snap of Wogga McBride disappearing. Neither could he let himself imagine what had happened after, how Wogga would have been dragged and ricked and torn and wedged and burst and broken. He thought about nothing like that. Quick thought about nothing at all. He listened to the grinds and groans of the house. Flies went about their mysterious business. Ticking noises came from in the walls. The cocky next door squawked and quipped. Below, the bell clonked on the shop door. Sometimes, when the hunger drifted over into dreaminess, he forgot he was Quick Lamb at all. It excited him to discover how quiet he was inside.

On the third day the old man came in and rustled a newspaper, and then Quick heard scissors going, hissing through paper.

A lot of sad people on the wall, Quick. What’re you doin with em? What’s it mean?

Quick said nothing.

Knocks me round to see you like this, boy. You’ll starve to death. Look at these poor sods — you don’t wanna be like them. You don’t need to be. You’ve got a roof over yer head, family — well, we’re not much I know, he chuckled. But, strike. Here—

Quick saw the shadow cross him and hover. He heard him thumbing a couple of tacks into the wall.

There. Another one. That’s yer schoolmate, if you really wanna feel miserable. They’re buryin im in Fremantle tomorrow. Be dressed by eight. After that we’ll go down the wharf for some fish and chips.

Quick set his jaws. He realized suddenly that he was aching; he was sore and tight in the guts and he stank.

No.

It’s for Fish. He’s worried.

No.

Quick heard the old man cross the room and slam the window down.

Christ Almighty, boy, if you care that much about someone from school, why don’t you care about yer own blood? You know damn-well your brother is busted in the head and he’ll never grow up right. The least you could do is let him be happy. Don’t torture him, Quick. And us. You don’t need to be like this — it’s a lie, a game, and yer not helpin anyone at all. Yer feelin sorry for yerself and it’s making me sick. Don’t pretend to Fish. And then the old man’s voice got quiet and dangerous. You and me understand about Fish. We were there. We were stupid enough to drown him tryin to save him. You remember that. We owe him things, Quick. We got a debt. All we can do now is let him be happy, let him be not too confused. I can sit here and talk and get nothin back for as long as it takes to get angry enough to swat your arse and send your mother up to deal with you. But Fish, he’ll wait. He’ll wait till you say something to him. Don’t you forget about Fish, boy. Not as long as you live, or your life won’t have been worth livin.

Quick heard the old man go out then. The door closed, and it was like the room was roaring. He’d never heard his father say words like that.

In the dark that night, Quick tried to pray, but nothing came. He knew it wouldn’t come for any of them anymore. He felt the hunger raving in him.

He woke and saw it. The people in all the pictures on the wall — they were dancing and there was Wogga McBride jitterbugging along the tracks. They were laughing, all of them. He’d never known such terror as coiled in him right then. He got out of bed, ran into Fish and Lon’s room and climbed into bed with Fish. He lay awake there with his brother’s sleeping body beside him until dawn. When the sun came up he began to weep. Fish woke.

What you laughin for, Quick?

The Kybosh

It was strange that Lester should get up before her on a nonmarket day. Oriel Lamb found a bowl and a teacup on the kitchen table, and that’s all. She sat down with a sigh and rested her head on the wood. It could only be bad. To be up early, to have gone somewhere without a word, to have taken the truck. The fresh summer sun tilted at the window. She saw the pale blue promise of heat out there. An engine whistle blew. Oriel looked at her hands. They were farmer’s hands. Women told her they were men’s hands. She watched the way they squared up to make fists. She rested them on the table. Her knuckles were like dirty blocks of ice.

There was something wrong with men. They lacked some basic thing and she didn’t know what it was. She loved Lester, but a lot of loving him was making up for him, compensating. He was never quite up to anything. She knew he was a fool, but it wasn’t the same thing. Her father had been the same. He was a kindly man, big and thin and softlooking, but without enough flint in him to make his kindliness into kindness. As a child she could tell that he thought well of people, but he never had the resolve to make his feelings substantial. He never did anything for anybody but himself. Like when he remarried. Oriel’s mother and sisters died in a bushfire that razed the farm and the house. Her father was so broken by the event, that after she was dragged alive from the half-collapsed cellar almost mad with fear and shock and guilt, and after he’d killed his last pig to fix her burns, it was she who nursed him. She always had the feeling he would have just faded away, had she not mothered him as they moved from property to property on neighbours’ charity until she’d earned enough from kitchen work and dairymucking to buy them a moth-eaten old tent to take back to their place and start again. She made it a home for them until the darkness stemmed in him long enough for him to think of going on with his life. And when he remarried he told Oriel it was to give her another mother, though she knew perfectly well it was to give himself another wife. Her stepmother was a strong girl, and though she hated her, Oriel knew she couldn’t help being strong when she had such a weak man to live with. Oriel continued to love her father, but she knew that loving a man was a very silly activity; it was giving to the weak and greedy and making trouble for yourself.

Even Bluey dying in Palestine. Killed because he was careless, the swaggering underage horseman from the colonies showing how young and fearless he was, and in her bitterest moments Oriel thought of it as a betrayal, that for Bluey there was loveliness but not love. If he’d loved her he would’ve come back made sure of it.

Lester came back alright. She danced with him at the Woodanilling victory dance, another strange boy gaunt with malaria. He laughed a lot, seemed bemused by the way Oriel fastened herself to him. That’s what men had, those bemused grins. She’d seen it in him all along, from courtship to the farms, the police force, the oddjobs, oh, the endless trail of oddjobs … she’d known it right along. But what could you do? Be like that poor wretch of a woman next door?

These days she wished she could take it to the Lord in prayer, but there was nothing there anymore and there was no choice but to grit and go on. She didn’t mind the army. The army was the nation and the nation gave her something to believe in. Him, too, that’s why he joined up again so suddenly when there wasn’t even a war on. But on a Saturday morning before anyone was up, he wouldn’t be at band practice, he’d be somewhere he shouldn’t be.

Elaine came downstairs with a headache already.

Where’s Dad?

He’s out on business.

To be sure, Elaine smirked.

Don’t wrangle with me this morning, my girl, or I’m liable to put the kybosh on your Saturday.

I’ve got a headache!

These days you are a headache. Put the kettle on.

Oriel Lamb tromped out the back to the privacy of the dunny and latched the door with great care. Whatever was going on with that husband of hers would need the kybosh put on, too. But today she wasn’t sure she was up to men.

Like a Light Shinin

The night before.

It’s dusk when Sam Pickles sees his tenant and neighbour come down from the back step into the yard. He’s been standing here a few minutes smoking and easing up. His clothes and his skin smell of metals and kerosene. These days after work his mouth tastes of copper. Out the back here by the splintery fence near the mulberry tree that towers on the Lamb side, it’s pleasant and cool and except for the muffled shouts of children in the house and the faraway carping of a dog, it’s quiet. Sam sees the other man stand still a moment with his hands in his pockets to look up at the pumpkin-coloured sky, then to spit and regard the ground at his feet with what looks like a great sobriety. He’s tall and thin; he’s beginning to stoop a little already, even though Sam guesses him to be about his own age. Maybe older, he thinks, maybe he’s forty — yes, come to think of it he’d be at least that. He looks like that cowboy cove, Randolph Scott. Since the night they arrived Sam has hardly spoken to his neighbours. They’re always working too damn hard to talk, and they’re not the sort of people to waste much time having fun.

Sam leans his elbows on the fence.

Gday, he calls.

Lester Lamb looks up from the ground, straight into the crown of the mulberry tree and then along the fence. His face changes when he recognizes who it is.

Oh. Gday there. Thought I was going daft. Sounded like you were in the tree.

Too tired to get up there.

Lester is coming down to stand beside him on the other side of the fence.

A man aches all over, Sam goes on.

Ah. Know how you feel.

Cepting I get all the ache down one side, you know, cause of this. He holds up his pruned hand. Lamb squints at it and murmurs a sympathetic sort of noise. See, Sam continues, I favour the other arm all the time. Makes it ache like buggery. Used to using both arms.

Lamb gives the stump a careful look.

They say you feel the pain, even when there’s nothing there. Told me that in the army.

Yeah. No lie. More an itch you get now and then, if you catch my drift, and a man goes to scratch it and there’s nothin to scratch. Sam sees his neighbour moving his mouth as if making up his mind whether or not to ask something, so he answers it anyway; a winch, says Sam. On a boat. Just bloody stupidity. And bad luck. You believe in luck, Mr Lamb?

Can’t say. Dunno. Didn’t used of. Anyway, call me Lest.

Orright, Lest. Call me Sam. Or landlord’ll do, if yer stuck for words.

They laugh and there’s a silence between them a while. So you do a lot of physical, then? Lester Lamb says, more confident now. Work, I mean.

Yeah. Well, not like before. This’s only from last summer. I’ve been on wharves and boats all me life. Funny, you know, I was a butcher’s apprentice four years and never even nicked meself. Now’m at the Mint. He laughs. Makin quids for everybody else.

Sam sees the look of respect come onto Lester’s face.

I’m a sort of utility man there, if you know what I mean. Lester clearly doesn’t and Sam feels chuffed. His neighbour seems to be reappraising him all of a sudden. You were in the army?

Last war, Lester says. I was a young bloke then.

Ah, I’ve got the asthma.

Right.

And the war wound.

Exactly.

You don’t believe in luck, you say.

Can’t say I’ve been persuaded by it.

Everythin’s easier to believe in when it comes a man’s way.

That’s true enough, I reckon, Lester says.

Sam pauses. He thinks about this. He feels like there’s gold in his veins but he’s not sure whether to tell.

I’m on a run, he says in the end.

How d’you mean?

Like I’m winnin. Luck. It’s like a light shinin on you. You can feel it.

Lester Lamb doesn’t look sceptical — not at all. He’s a farmboy, you can see it on him — honest as filth. The sun is gone and there’s only the faintest light in the sky, but Sam can still see the other man’s features. Cooking smells seep down to them, the sound of screaming kids, a passing train down the embankment.

I’ll show you, Sam says, with his heart fat in his neck. If you like.

Before dawn Rose heard the old man wheezing as he passed her door; she was suddenly awake. She lay still and listened. Her father’s boots on the stairs. Some whispering. She heard the front door sigh back on its hinges down there and she went to the window. Below, in the front yard, two silhouettes moved toward the Lambs’ truck, one short, the other tall. She knew who they were. Now they were pushing and shoving at the truck to get it rolling a little and it crept along flat old Cloud Street to the corner until it found the incline of Railway Parade and got up a good roll and was gone. Rose waited a few moments, heard the motor hawk into life and went back to bed. Whatever the old boy was up to was bound to be stupid, but she wouldn’t tell. Oh no. She’d been dead asleep the same as everyone else.

The smell of horses reminded Lester Lamb of a dozen things at once, almost all of them good. The worst thing he could associate horses with, apart from seeing rats eating up into their arses in Turkey, was having a stallion bite the back of his neck once when he was mending a fence. He turned on it and gave it a good whack between the eyes with the claw hammer and the damned thing fell on him and crushed the blasted fence for his trouble.

The track was quiet and dew-heavy in the early dawn, muffled in by the empty stands and sheds. Small lights showed in and around the stables. Horses neighed and spluttered. Timbers creaked from their weight. Men laughed quietly in little blear-eyed clumps and lit cigarettes. Sam Pickles led him down the soft dust of alleys between stables. Behind one shed a soldier and a woman were kissing. Lester saw a great swathe of flesh as the soldier slipped a hand up the woman’s leg. Sam whistled and the couple laughed, but Lester went prickly with embarrassment.

Sam stopped at a small tin hut and knocked. A little blue-chinned man opened up.

Gday, Sam. Pushin yer luck another furlong, eh?

Gis a coupla brownfellas, Macka, and somethin for the flask, orright?

Early start. Macka went in for a moment and came out with two big bottles of beer and a smaller bottle that could’ve been anything. Sam slipped him some money and they headed back down the alley. You could hear the gentle thrumming of hoofs on dirt. Out on the track a couple of trainers had horses just rolling along with a relaxed gait. Like men tuning cars, they had their heads cocked sideways or pressed into the great dark cowlings of flank, listening as they rode.

Never been here before, Lest?

No. Can’t say I have. The only time Lester had been at a racecourse before was back between the wars when there was a revival meeting out in the open one night. Families had driven and walked in from miles around to hear the gospel story and the man up front had shouted like an angel and glowed in the face as though he might go to flames any moment. They’d gone up the front, him and Oriel and the kids too, and the man had laid hands on them and Lester had felt the power. But that was a long time gone.

I’ve never really done any bettin before, neither.

Oh, you won’t be bettin today, old son, you’ll be investin in success, you’ll be baskin in the glory. You religious?

Lester looked out at the brown rising of the sun. No. Not really.

Shame. They have this sayin about getting tenfold of what you give. That’s what we’re gunna slip into today. This day, cobber. You and me.

Lester looked at the little husky fellow beside him. He’d never seen him so animated. Before, around the house, he’d just been this beaten down ghost of a bloke who looked like a loser from day one, with his bighipped wife brooding over him. He was a different man here, and Lester felt wound up in some kind of new excitement as he sucked on the beer bottle and felt the stuff go cold and brassy all the way down. Yeah, it was like having a light shining on you; it suddenly felt like everything was possible and none of it mattered a damn.

By noon they were drunk, which meant Sam was lucid with luck and laughter and Lester just couldn’t tell where his feet were anymore. They’d toured the stables. Sam had done some whispering and a lot of careful listening, and they’d spent an hour outside one door solemnly observing the equine snafflings of a horse called Blackbutt. He was a big haunchy stallion with eyes like cue balls, and he frightened the hell out of Lester.

This is our boy, Sam said. At the end of the day everything goes in his name.

Come on home, old Blackbutt! Lester said.

I only believe in one thing, Les, Sam solemnly uttered. Hairy Hand of God, otherwise known as Lady Luck. Our Lady, if she’s shinin that lamp on ya, she’ll give you what you want. There’s two other things people say are worth believin in — the Labor Party and God, but they’re a bit on the iffy side for my money. The ALP and the Big Fella, well they always got what I call a tendency to try an give ya what they think ya need. And what a bloke needs most is to get what he wants most. Ya with me?

Reckon so, Lester murmured, though he wasn’t sure. It sounded like baiting the Lord to him. Maybe he didn’t go along with it anymore, but he sure as shillings couldn’t get out of believing in it. You think we’ve drunk too much?

Ya still standin?

I think so, Lester laughed. Those big boats down there’re me shoes, unless I — m wrong, and I — m higher — n them, so—

Then he was on the ground and in horseshit. The clouds were cantering by and Sam Pickles was gargling with laughter, peering down at him.

You trip me?

Nope. Ya did it all on yer own. Never ask a flyin man whether he’s flyin or not.

Will I chuck up now?

If ya feel it’s important, Les, yes I spose you’ll get round to it.

Never drunk liquor before, really.

Yer feelin chunderish?

No. Well. Praps.

Think you’d like to get up out of the horse patties, Lest?

Yes, I think so.

Lester listened to him laugh a while as he planned by what means he’d get standing again. He didn’t feel a million quid, and he couldn’t comprehend how people made a life out of this sort of thing. He could feel the roll of tenners in his coat pocket, family money it was, and he was ashamed. He felt like a thief.

But in the afternoon, and all afternoon, Lester Lamb felt like a winner. It seemed the worst he could do was back a horse that’d only come in with a place and a close call, but after midday, with food in his belly and Sam Pickles beside him, wildeyed as an anchorite, bleeding tips from every well dressed passerby, Lester couldn’t lose. His pockets were bloated with money and he felt a kind of delirium coming on towards the last race of the day when Blackbutt burst from the barrier with the rest of them and was, for a moment, swallowed up in the flailing and dirt-spraying melee of the start. At the opening of this last race, Lester’s pockets were empty. It was all or nothing. It was the real test. He was sober now and it took all his will to hand over those solid little rolls to Sam who counted them out to the bookie. Men kicked in the dust and he heard women laughing and the bookie looked at them with one eyebrow cocked, only smiling after he’d given them their tickets.

Won’t be seein youse blokes again, today.

Reckon you will, mate, said Sam.

That’s a tired horse.

That’s a winner.

You know the odds.

I’m a punter, mate, Sam said with a smile. And I’ll be back with these, he held up the tickets, and I’ll see you smilin on the other side of yer face.

So when the heads and forelegs and riders’ arms exploded onto the track in a great solid mass of desperation, Lester Lamb had his lungs full and his fists closed. The mob surged and spread by the first turn. Grass sods and whip hands thickened the air.

For a while Lester couldn’t see who was where; he couldn’t even understand the gabble of the race caller over the PA. Out on the long stretch on the far side of the track, the mob was lengthening. Beside him, Sam Pickles was smiling beneath the binoculars. Lester noticed a lone seagull lazing in some curly updraft over the track. He knew he should have been home with his family. As the lead horses came into the turn, he began to yell like a lunatic. The horses’ eyes were like stones, their legs beat the ground. He heard their tortured grunts, the bellows rush of air in and out of them. Their manes sprayed and slapped. The knees of jockeys rode high into their necks and Lester heard the little shouts of riders goading one another. Three horses shouldered their way into the open and reached out with their great long shining bodies, their heads down ploughing wind, straining forward until the sound and heave of them infected the people at the post with a crazy, dancing abandon. Lester laughed and screamed and felt the crowd beating at his sides, and as the horses passed with a sound like a back alley beating, he heard the reedy cackle of Sam Pickles and little else. As the stragglers stumped past the post, the crowd was already sighing and it felt to Lester Lamb like the last finishing moments with a woman where heat suddenly turned to sweat and power became fatigue. It was like sex, alright, and he was thrilled and ashamed and he couldn’t have stopped laughing for all the love in heaven.

Blackbutt! the man with the PA yelled. It’s Blackbutt, by crikey!

Quick stands in the dusk and stacks pine crates on the verandah. He’s forgotten all about Wogga McBride’s funeral by now and what he’s wondering about now is where his old man is. It wasn’t eight o’clock this morning when his mother came roiling and spoiling upstairs to get him out of bed with the persuasive front edge of her boot. She had him yelping and hollering and on the banisters, laughing with fright and relief before he was even awake.

It’s not your fault you’ll grow into a man, Quick Lamb, she was saying all the way down, but it’s not mine either! Pull an oar or get off the boat!

Fish seemed delirious with joy at breakfast. The moment he saw Quick slide cowering into the kitchen, Fish set an empty bowl going on the table so it roared and rattled, rose and fell, like it was laughing at him.

And so here he is, pulling oar, even now it’s nearly dark and the old man still hasn’t turned up. Somewhere upstairs Fish is singing and the girls are talking low amongst themselves. Back in the kitchen, the old girl is thrashing a few shirts, drowning them in Velvet suds, wringing their necks and beating their headless bodies on the table, singing Throw out the Lifeline’ in the sweetest voice. The whole place is like a bomb ready to go off.

Rose pushed through the grey and khaki trouser legs of all those sour, stinking boozers in the public bar who shouted through their noses and made wings of their elbows and holes of their mouths, and she found the door and shoved against it.

Come back in five years! one of them yelled.

Geez, he’s not fussy.

Not a touch on her old girl, I reckon.

It took another heft against the door for it to swing open and let Rose Pickles out into the cool, clean night air, and when the door swung to behind her, the noise and smoke of the pub stayed inside.

She sat down against the wall, below the ugly roses in the leadlight window to feel how all her teeth met perfectly, jaw to jaw, and how, if she set them firm enough and kept up the pressure, little lights came into her head.

Damn her, damn her, damn her to hell and shit and piss and sick! She’s drunk again and loud and vile with her eyes full of hate and meanness, but I’ll get her out in the end. I’ll drag her home. I’ll kick her shins, bite her arse. I’ll get her out.

Dolly was rooted to her soft chair in the Ladies’ Lounge with all those wrinkled, smokefaced old girls who laughed like a flock of galahs and fluffed and preened and looked about with their black, still eyes, cold as anything. They rattled and prattled with gossip and rubbish, and yes, even their mouths were like horny beaks, and their tongues like dry, swollen fingers. Rose hated them, and she hated her mother with them. She should be home, heck someone should be home. Rose didn’t even know where the boys were — they’d shot through early on, and when her mother had gone off at opening time this morning, Rose had sat alone in her half of the house and listened to the Lambs blundering about nextdoor in the shop and in all the rooms, and after a while she couldn’t bear the way they just went on and worked and whistled and chiacked around as though nothing was up, so she went walking. It wasn’t far to Kings Park. The grasses were all brown with summer, nuts and seeds lay popping with the heat on the ground. Birds scratched around in the trees. Rose walked into the raw bush and found a place in the shade and just sat thinking nothing until the sun got so high it just drilled down through the leaves and into her skull. Sometimes she hated being alive.

But right now, out in the cooling street with no one coming past, she just felt all hard inside. She’d get the old girl out, even if she had to wait till closing time. She was hungry and angry, her heart felt like a fist, and she knew that if she took her time she was strong enough to do anything at all.

It was stone quiet when Sam and Lester got in. On the Pickles side it was quiet because Dolly was out like a bag of spuds on the bed, and the boys still weren’t home. Sam took one look at the blue anger in Rose’s face and went to run himself a bath.

Fair dinkum, said his bird.

Yeah. Fair dinkum, said Sam.

On the Lamb side no one was absent, but neither were they speaking. Lester came in with dinner in progress and barely an eye lifted to acknowledge his arrival, though Fish giggled, as if under instruction not to. Lester found no cutlery at his place and no plate warming in the oven. He put his rolls of money on the table and heard an intake of air from the girls.

In the till, Oriel said, wiping something off Lon’s chin. Money has no place at the dinner table. And so he left and had himself a shower, listening to the roar of the gas heater in the sleepout that had become the bathroom.

All night Cloudstreet ticked, but it didn’t go off.

The River

In the morning Quick discovers that the old man is full of whistle and laugh. The shop’s closed and he’s scrounging recruits for a trip to Fremantle.

Cam! he’s yelling, Cam, let’s go! We’ll drop a line from the wharf, we’ll buy fish n chips, we’ll get sunburnt, we’ll let the harbour know we’re there! Cam, we’ll absolutely Lamb the place!

Fish is at the breakfast table, spinning the knife.

Knife never lies, he says, and five times the blade comes to a stop pointing at him, and he laughs with wonder and looks at his distorted reflection in the blade. Hah, knife never lies!

Yeah, Fish, but you never ask it any questions, says Quick.

Ask no questions, get no lies, the old man says.

The girls sweep in and the old girl turns red-armed from the spitting stove and looks them all over.

Cam, Orry, the old man says to her.

Oriel levels a bristler of a stare at him: You gunna grace us with your company today?

Geez, love I’m gunna be fair bountiful with the company today. If it wasn’t Sunday you’d be wearin a new dress an silk stockens before lunchtime, so you’ll have to make do with a fambly day with only fish, food and fun to keep you from black despair. Whaddayereckon?

She says nothing, but she’s in the truck with the rest of them when they pull out with the gearbox squealing.

All the way down, they race the train to Fremantle, skylarking along in and out of traffic to bob over hills and see the engineer give them the thumb. The sky is blue as gas and the wind rifles through the holes and cracks that the Lamb truck’s made of. You can see this mob coming a long way — all hands and open mouths and unruliness.

Quick sits on the tray with his back to the cab. He can smell the salt as they pass Cottesloe. With one arm he holds Fish steady and he sits on the other hand to soften the jolts that go right up his bum every time the truck hits a hole in the limestone road. Quick feels himself today. His father is honouring the promise after all. They’ve missed the funeral, but they’re going to Freo all the same. For a while there he wasn’t sure what it’d mean if he didn’t.

The water beneath the wharf is green. Lank strands of algae lift and settle in it, staying fast to their roots on the wetblack piles that stretch to blurring like a forest away to beyond sight. The Lambs sit or scurry on the network of footways and landings that sit just out of the water, their light gut lines taut with lead and watersurge. Lon tortures blowfish and lets them inflate full and prickly so he can stamp on their bellies and hear the pistol shot it makes and the way the girls hiss at him for doing it. Lester plays a jig on his noseflute and doesn’t catch any fish. Red fools with the sinkers in the plywood box. Hat hauls in gardies and skippy, keeping a ruthless count. Elaine has her feet in the water and feels a headache coming on. Fish lies face down, cooing, peering through the plank cracks at the way the green mass rises to him and stops at the final moment. Quick takes a herring now and then and watches his mother who baits and casts with a determination that’s kind of frightening; she scowls at bites and sucks air in through her teeth as she jags and pulls in, spooling line neatly in her lap. There’s a tin bucket drumming with fish at her side. Now and then she clips Lon over the ear or looks flat at the old man who grins like a lizard and goes on looking happy and useless.

At noon the old man disappears and comes back with a great, sweaty parcel of fish and chips which they unravel and guts down with the cordial that the old girl has cooling in her bucket of fish. They’re all squinching the butcher’s paper up and dipping their hands in the water to wash off the grease when their mother addresses the old man in a quiet, level voice.

How much did you win, then?

The old man takes up his noseflute and starts into ‘Road to Gundagai’. His eyes bounce, his big flat feet clomp on the boards and then he stops.

A hundred and six quid.

What about him?

Sam?

The old girl’s eyes bulge as if to say ‘so it’s Sam now, is it?’

The old man grins: Two hundred.

She just baits up a hook and casts as if they haven’t even spoken.

In the afternoon the old man buys a boat. He walks up to a bloke in the fishermen’s harbour and offers him money. The old girl is still as a post. They’ve just been strolling — the lot of them — now that the fish have gone off the bite with the new tide, and he just comes out with it. The whole mob stops dead and watches. No one moves the entire time it’s going on, and when the old man goes off to get the truck they still don’t move.

The boat is a good sixteen foot, clinkerbuilt and heavy as hell. A big skiff sort of boat, and it takes about a second and a half for it to be obvious that it’ll never fit across the tray of the truck. The man who’s just sold the boat laughs and slaps his legs. He’s fat and red and his scalp is flaky. He’s not mean about it, he’s just a good humoured sort of bloke. Everyone stands around and looks at everybody else — except Fish who’s looking at the water, and the old girl who’s looking at absolutely nothing and no one, and in a moment the old man turns to Quick and says:

What about you row it home, boy?

Dead quiet.

On me own?

You can take someone.

Up the river, you mean?

The old girl goes and gets in the truck. The door slams so hard bits of rust fall off it.

Yeah, you could put in at Crawley. That’s not far from home.

Hat spits. It’s miles, Dad. Don’t be daft. She’s looking at him like he’s the most dickheaded human she’s ever encountered and it hurts Quick to see.

I can do it, he says.

Right. Good bloke, Quick. Who’s goin with him as first mate?

Fish, says Quick. I want Fish.

Quick sees the panic in the old man’s face and he knows he’s pushing it here, but he knows he’ll win. It’s man on man.

Orright. If he wants to. If yer careful.

And Quick smiles up a storm.

It was hard to believe how big the ships in the harbour were when you were creeping by at water level. Quick could see that it wasn’t lost on Fish who sat in the stern with his jaw halfway to his chest, the shadows of cranes and winches falling across his brow. The boat felt good to Quick. It sat well in the water, was dry inside and he felt it cut along just fine. In the rowlocks, the oars chafed quietly in a reassuring way. The truck and everybody was out of sight now and it was just him and Fish. He felt the blood running crazy in him. He was scared. Packin em, pooping himself nearly, with all that fat, green, dredged water and the walls the wharf and tankers made high above. He rowed and kept his eye on Fish and it was a surprise how soon the bridge came over them with its restless, chunky channel water bumping underneath. It was cold under there. Fish giggled as a train roared across and it took Quick’s mind off the confusion of tide and flow and how hard the water felt against the oars, how it was like rowing in gravel all of a moment. Then they were through into the afternoon sun again, with the river wider, gentler, with boats moored at the shallow edges of the channel where grass came down the banks to sandy beaches littered with wrecked bikes and prams amid up-washed mussel shells and tidal hedges of weed.

Orright? Quick asked Fish.

The river’s big.

My oath.

Quick watched the whorling wake behind him and felt good at how straight it was. He wasn’t too worried now; his bum felt good on the seat, the handles of the oars weren’t too big for him and he liked how they stretched out so far and kept balance right there in his palms.

Cracker boat, eh?

Yeah.

It’s ours Fish.

Whacko! yelled Fish. A gull dived across the stern, slapped the water and was gone.

Oriel Lamb shoved her hands into the dishwater and didn’t utter a sound. It was hot enough to cook in but she went ahead scouring and scrubbing, letting herself absorb its heat into her own until she felt fire behind her eyes. It was even making him sweat, she knew, him standing there dumb against the kitchenette, waiting for her to say something. She slapped dishes onto the draining board. Her hands were the colour of crayfish. He can wait, she thought; he can jolly-well, flaminwell, he can damnwell wait. But now that he was wiping sweat from his face with the teatowel there was a stubbornness coming on him. He was getting ready to wait and that twisted the heat up in her still more. She thought: people murder each other. Yes, it’s possible that you could just take up that meatskewer there and ram it into his lungs. Lord, she never thought it likely that he’d hold out like this, defy her, defy the whole burning rightness of her. And then he began to sing:

There’s a track winding back to an old-fashioned shack along the road to Gundagai—

She hefted the big china gravyboat and swung it with a backhand sweep that caught him square in the belly hard enough to beat the wind out of him, hard enough to knock him back against the kitchenette and slip and hit the floor bum first. Oriel put the gravyboat down on the draining board and the handle came away, still round her fingers.

Has my life been a waste? she said in a flat, still tone. Has it been that useless?.

But Lester said nothing. He sat there. It looked like he was making plans to get some air into him somehow and it gave her no satisfaction at all.

It didn’t feel so bad to have sore hands when you knew that you’d left East Fremantle behind and passed Rocky Bay, with all its puking foundries and limestone cliffs, for the long stretch through Melville and the sugar factory whose pipes came down to the water to send rainbows out into the channel. Quick saw yachts moored in flocks over on the Mosman shore and the great, long scar of the sandspit. Shags sat high on channel markers to watch them pass.

It’s a long way, Fish said. Is it a long way, Quick?

Yeah, mate. It’s a fair whack, orright.

Quick was starting to wonder if the old man was the full quid. He wasn’t sure if even a fullgrown man could do this. It was late. The sun was sitting low now, right back where they’d come from.

Can I do?

Do what? Quick asked.

Do the sticks. The rowers.

Quick rested a moment and felt the boat glide along upstream.

Orright. We’ll share. Then we’ll go faster, eh.

Fish damn near rolled them out of the boat in his excitement to get up there and it took all Quick’s will not to yell at him.

It was lucky they were headed in the long bellied arc around the Mosman spit because that was the only direction they were ever likely to go in, the way Fish was rowing. Quick pulled hard, but Fish seemed bent on digging all the water out of the river, hauling and grunting so they heeled around to port. Quick hoped Fish’d get bored by the time they needed a straight run, though he figured it’d be dark by then anyway.

Lester sparked up the truck in the dusk and pulled out into the street. Down on the tracks, an engine was hammering up from West Perth with the city lights behind. No one saw him go, he was sure. He felt prickly with nerves; his mouth tasted like sand.

Passing through Subiaco he dodged the late tram and heard the town hall clock ringing the hour, and then he steered the old rattler down along the sombre wall of bush that was Kings Park towards the University and the river.

Down at Crawley there were lights out on the river and fires on the beach. Lester parked the truck and went down through the boozing parties of prawners with their whingeing kids and boiling drums of water to where the grass ended and the peppermints gripped the bank above the sand and the thick stewy smell of the river was strong and plain in his face. He walked up and down, staring out into the darkness. Now and then he could see men in the water wading with nets, or kids with Tilley lamps and spears in the shallows hunting cobbler, but no sign of Quick and Fish. They had no light, no real idea. They could be anywhere, and it was his stupid fault. Panic was acid in his throat. Lord, what a fool he was; he wasn’t fit to have children, she was right.

He began to jog.

Out past Claremont, out past somewhere — Quick doesn’t know anymore — he just stops. He sits back and ships the oars and gives it away. Fish is curled at his feet, sleepy.

Well, Quick says. He sits a few moments. In the starlight he can make out Fish’s features. He has his eyes open. What you thinkin?

I can hear the water.

We’re on the river, you dill.

I can hear it.

Yeah. Quick twists about in his seat. Up on the hills there’s houselights and even the dimmed lamps of cars. You cold?

No.

I’m knackered.

You wanna sing, Quick? Let’s sing.

It’s quiet for a few moments and then they begin to sing, and once they start it’s hard to give it up, so they set up a great train of songs from school and church and wireless, on and on in the dark until they’re making them up and starting all over again to change the words and the speed. Quick isn’t afraid, and he knows Fish is alright. He lies back with his eyes closed. The whole boat is full of their songs — they shout them up at the sky until Fish begins to laugh. Quick stops singing. It’s dead quiet and Fish is laughing like he’s just found a mullet in his shorts. It’s a crazy sound, a mad sound, and Quick opens his eyes to see Fish standing up in the middle of the boat with his arms out like he’s gliding, like he’s a bird sitting in an updraught. The sky, packed with stars, rests just above his head, and when Quick looks over the side he sees the river is full of sky as well. There’s stars and swirl and space down there and it’s not water anymore — it doesn’t even feel wet. Quick stabs his fingers in. There’s nothing there. There’s no lights ashore now. No, there’s no shore at all, not that he can see. There’s only sky out there, above and below, everywhere to be seen. Except for Fish’s giggling, there’s no sound at all. Quick knows he is dreaming. This is a dream. He feels a turd shunting against his sphincter. He’s awake, alright. But it’s a dream — it has to be.

Are we in the sky, Fish?

Yes. It’s the water.

What dyou mean?

The water. The water. I fly.

Lester punishes the truck up and down the bays and bluffs, getting out to blunder along shelly beaches and call out to his sons, but all he flushes out are soldiers and openbloused schoolgirls who leap up and advise him to fuck off before murder is committed. It’s a warm night. Sweat gathers on him and the old truck is overheating. Lester’s making promises to himself now: he’ll never play the ponies again, no more grog, no more foolery and toolery. Street lights are out now and the prawners have long gone. The city is asleep and the quiet infuriates him. Up on the bluff over Claremont, he aims the headlamps out over the river across the masts of moored yachts and the bowed backs of sleeping shags. At Freshwater Bay he stands on the sand and listens to the sound of mullet jumping and prawns scattering before them. You’d think I’d learn about rivers, he thinks; you’d swear a man’d get smart. He remembers the sound of Fish thrashing under the net, how he was forcefed river until he was still and dead and trampled on by his own frightened kin. That funny, skylarking kid. That Fish.

God Almighty, it was hopeless. Now look, now he’s weeping; he’s on his face in the sand and he’s bawling.

Quick knows the planets from school but he can’t tell one from the other as they blur past like stones someone’s chucking at them. Fish sighs and tilts his wings in the bow. The boat’s vibrating the way it’d hum if they hit rapids and went chuting down over snowy water between rocks. Quick’d swear Fish is steering them. Even the anchor’s rattling against its little length of chain. Quick feels fatigue coming to claim him — he aches all through — but he strains to stay awake, to see, to see. Fish is up there gargling like a nut, talking to himself or something, and then in a moment he’s quiet and the boat is skimming, full of hiss and bounce and Quick knows straight away they’re back on the river.

The water! Fish cries in distress.

The river, Fish. We’re back on it.

Where’s the water go?

Were on it, mate.

No. It’s go.

Fish begins to whimper. Quick pulls him gently back into the bottom of the boat and holds him. Like a baby, he thinks, and he’s as big as me. He feels Fish’s head against his chest and the big, sad jerks he makes sobbing. All the excitement disappears. Quick knows the old misery again but he doesn’t let himself break. He gives in to sleep.

Lester found them at dawn, asleep and aground in the shallows along the foreshore at Nedlands. Old men, retired officer types, were smoking pipes and walking their great ugly hounds back on the grass, and the river was flat and without blemish. Lester pumped along the beach, seeing only the boat, and his vision started to blotch with fear. He wanted to pray, but it felt like vomit rising in him so he held it off.

When he came to the boat he saw them. They were wrapped in each other on the boards between the seats, all knees and elbows and skewed shorts. The oars were shipped, the rowlocks stowed. They’d damn near made it all the way to Crawley. Lester stood ankle deep in the cool water and let out a great roar of relief and wonder. Quick twitched and sat up. He looked about him. Then he looked at his father.

You orright? Quick asked.

Lester opened his mouth, but all he had was laughter. He couldn’t help himself. He was dancing in the sand. Fish woke and he and Quick exchanged glances. The old man chiacked on the beach and the sun hauled up over the hills.

They got home at nine. After pushing the truck through Nedlands, Shenton Park, and Subiaco.

Oriel met them on the verandah. It seemed the whole street knew they were coming up Railway Parade, and when they heaved in, she saw the three of them were singing. The Pickleses were looking from their windows and the early customers in the shop came out into the yard to watch. Quick and Fish and Lester came up chuckling and nudging and she felt the pit between them. They were foreigners, they were her blood but they were lost to her. Oriel hid her fists in her apron and felt ready to die.

No juice, love, Lester said. No juice, and no money.

She seized the boys and hooked them into her breast. She felt their blood, their breaths against her. She spoke over their heads.

No brains, Lester Lamb, she said. And no wonder.

Blisters had risen like fruit on Quick’s hands. She saw them. She pulled herself erect and looked about at those who’d gathered to watch. Her little green eyes sighted on them and the spectators shuffled, looked at their boots, looked back again to see that she hadn’t let up, and a couple moved off. No one spoke. The rest began to file away. Lester stood with his hands clasped together like a child. His daughters began shutting down the shop. Even the Pickleses above pulled their heads in.

I’m hungry, said Fish.

Burning the Man

Rose Pickles saw the bonfire out of her window with its rippling yellow mass making silhouettes of the Lamb girls as they tossed fruit crates onto the great spitting blaze to the sound of an accordion. Guy Fawkes night. She heard voices in the hall, the parade ground barking of Mrs Lamb becoming suddenly lowpitched and friendly enough to make her curious, so she went out to the landing and hung over the banisters.

Oh carm on, Mrs Pickles — look I’ll call you Dolly an be done with it. Lester’s gone out and bought all the gear for the kids — they’d love it. Carm on over. There’s spuds to go in the fire and cakes and everywhatall.

Mum? Rose called down. Her mother looked confused and embarrassed. She only had on a dressing gown and her hair was set beneath a tartan scarf. She looked awful, like anyone’s mum. It made her angry to have a pretty mother, but when she let herself go it was worse still.

Guy Fawkes night, said Dolly. I forgot.

Carm over to ours, eh?

Mum?

We haven’t got any crackers.

Rose got the boys off the floor of their room where they were making a wingless fly dance with a piece of matchstick and had them hammering down the stairs after her. Their mother stood there with one of her legs showing and watched them go out the door.

Firelight softened everyone’s faces as they stood around, poking at their scorching potatoes and singing to the accordion Mr Lamb strode around with. The boys fiddled at the fence, setting up strings of fizzers and penny bombs and Catherine-wheels until sparks leapt up into the clear black sky. Mrs Lamb brought out cocoa, lemonade, and leftover pasties with Rosella sauce. Mr Lamb organized a mass whistling of ‘God Save the King’ while he ate a lemon, right under their noses. The last one to plug on to the end was the winner. Chub hardly noticed the lemon, and though he whistled like an emphysemic lung he got the prize which was a box of broken cake pieces and half a jar of cream.

Rose screamed and giggled as the crackers went off and everyone gasped at the colours and the noise. She could hear her mum and dad laughing as the Catherine-wheels got going. She couldn’t remember when she felt so happy before. The yard was full of kids, full of shouting, full of orange light and smoke. The Lambs yelled a lot. Their boy, the slow one, bellowed with laughter and grabbed anyone’s hand who went past. Hens laid eggs in fright and a dog somewhere down the block barked until it was hoarse. The older Lamb girls were friendly even though they talked to Rose like she was much smaller, and even the redhaired one she didn’t like much was sharing things and cracking dumb jokes. The eldest boy, the one they called Quick, was alternately shy and boisterous and he kept asking which parent should be burnt first.

When they brought out the Guy Fawkes Rose clapped and exclaimed. It was stuffed with wild oats and dressed up in motheaten flourbags (because Mrs Lamb didn’t believe in wasting old clothes) and he had a pipe Mr Lamb had whittled from pine. Everybody yelled and cheered when Rose’s father helped Mr Lamb put the dummy on the fire, but when they sat to eat their black potatoes, the slow boy Fish began to cry and then to scream.

No. Burn the man. Don’t burn him. He’s the man.

At first they laughed. The Guy Fawkes’ head was tilting and one of his arms was gone. Flames shot out of his collar and he seemed to twist a little as the flourbags caught. But when Fish went crazy Quick Lamb and his mother took him inside and everything went quiet and strange and the party died.

Oh, you remember that alright. You see lights buzz and whizz up bangcrack. Everyone loving. Taters black an eaty. Here, Quick, look here! Lady and Lestah’s laughing with fire up they chin. Lon come runs with fizzer things laughing up he hair. Tummy full with laugh and taters. That girl, she laughs. Right up, the sky big an black, nightime after darking an not in bed, you know, not even close to bed.

Whacko! Quick say.

Whacko! Lestah say.

Whacko! Lady say.

Fish wants a whacko but out come the Man with arms out Jesus arms, stiffy an funny. But no! No, Lestah! Noooooo! They get him on the hot, gots him on the fire. Lestah, you burnin the Man, Quick you burnin the Man an now theys fire out his mouth and eyes. Now he’s head off alright. No. No. No. No. Quick? Yous burning He, the water Man. Ah, Fish mouth all black with hurt an they pullin an hookin on me and there cry tears an mess in me eyes. Legs hurtin up the stairs in the dark. House full of breathin. An Fish he cry like littles, like baby Lon in the truck. Theys pull me up goin hard in the hands. Everythin hurt. Theys open the door. The handle sees me in the dark. Fall down.

Quick drags his brother up the stairs. He can feel tears and snot and spit on him and he wishes he could just go to bed and die. Fish is still going, his voice busting with pressure, and his mother is pushing from behind.

It’s only grass, Fish, Quick says. It’s not a man.

You burn tha maaaann!

I’ll give you a hidin if you don’t slack off, son, his mum says, but Quick can tell there’s none of the usual iron in it.

The piano, Mum. Give him the piano.

I hate that room.

Let him in. He likes the piano.

They got Fish to the landing and steered him round to the door at the very back where no one went much, and as soon as the door was open and that sweet musty smell came out, Quick felt crook to his guts and his mother let go of Fish and stepped back. Quick held Fish by his belt and took him across the stained boards to the piano that stood against the wall. There were no windows here and it was the kind of place you’d rather not be in. Fish flicked up the cover and put his fists on the browning keys. Quick watched him beat out a horrible noise with his eyes all busted looking and wet and then left him there with the lights on behind the closed door.

Outside, on the landing, his mother was crying. She had her brow on the banister looking ugly and red so he put his hand on her back. But it was like she didn’t know he was there, and he didn’t say anything, so, after a while he went back downstairs. The thumping music drifted down over the flames and Mr and Mrs Pickles looked bored and edgy.

Quick’s dad did animal impressions for an hour and though the Pickles girl laughed, he felt shame and embarrassment.

That night, as they all lay in bed, tossing, askew, asleep, awake, the piano rang on. Middle C droned through the house, and though they all heard it, no one said a word.

Down into the Light, Samson Lamb

Sink and glide to where the light comes down like a vine. It’s all calling, softbottomed and the colour of food, the rich saucy look of a meal you’ll feast on forever, Samson Lamb, so down you fly, to the sky beneath, we are the firmament below and can’t you see the light coming up from the darkness, it seems to say. Cool goes to cold, but now there’s a heat to it, a joy here you didn’t expect, growing in you all the time so the thrashing back up there where the night sky growls down doesn’t matter anymore, and the true faces are smiling. See this, boy. The fish are coming to you; they are letting you aside. You will pass. This is joy. You don’t struggle. Go down into the light. Soft fat bubbles tickle you now. You begin to recognize. Oh, boy.

Oh.

Oh.

No. Not back.

No.

The Hand Again

School ended for the year, but even so, Rose sharpened all her pencils and kept her writing desk in good order. Each drawer was neat as a diagram inside: paper, nibs, clips, crayons, blunt scissors closed like a body in repose. It was the way she’d have her whole kitchen, if she ever had one to herself; her whole house. Maybe it wasn’t such a fantasy. She was learning to cook these days because the old girl was always too drunk and the old man was always late home. When they were home they were always fighting and tossing things at each other so dinner never got cooked. Rose knew how to grill chops and fry up eggs and bacon. She learnt how to boil cabbage till it looked and tasted like wet newsprint, the way the old man liked it. The boys always ragged her and took the piss these days, but they let up around six every night until she’d cooked them their chops and cabbage and mashed spud. She knew they couldn’t help being dills — they were boys. That’s why they were mean and clumsy. She knew they’d go hungry without her. Maybe they’d even starve. Rose felt tough sometimes. She felt best when she slapped the spud on their plates like it was mud and looked down at Chub and Ted like they were just helpless animals.

Now that the holidays were here, the three of them just mucked around in the house or out in the yard. There was always the river, so often they walked down to Crawley to the baths for a swim. The old man was at work and the old girl didn’t seem to care much what they did, these days.

Down by the tracks, the three of them dug a cubbyhole. Well, Ted and Rose dug. Chub just sat round looking like he might do something any moment. It was a kind of alliance forged in boredom, but they got the long trench dug. They made a rectangular chamber at the end hacked into the side of the embankment where trees grew and shielded them from view, and they roofed it with tin from dunny roofs in back lanes and shovelled sand back over so the whole thing was invisible. Ted was good at building things, Rose had to concede. He was good at pinching things, too. They pulled nails out of other people’s fences, knocked off the odd fourbetwo from wood heaps and even copped a shovel. It took a week. The final touch, a trapdoor, was the oven door from an old Kooka stove, and it opened out on a hinge and all. Inside, the sand was blackpacked, and Rose thought it smelled of chook feathers. It was quiet in there, and even with a candle you could only see a foot or two ahead. Rose could barely believe they’d done it. In the whole week there wasn’t a quarrel or even a bad feeling. Ted was funny, cracking bum jokes and teasing. He loved to make things join up. It made him happy, and Rose wondered if this was the first time she’d really seen him happy. They got on so well they didn’t even mind Chub walking up and down, pressing his lips together and doing absolutely ringall.

But it all went to the dogs in a hurry. The day it was finished Chub went in the trapdoor and climbed straight out again and wouldn’t go back in.

I don’t like it, he said.

Well if you’d done something to make it better, you wouldn’t need to complain, Rose said.

I don’t like the sand.

Shit, said Ted.

Then Chub ran off. Ted and Rose climbed in and lit candles and sat in the dead quiet of their bunker. Ted showed her the tin of Capstan tobacco he’d knocked off from a shop in Subi. She was outraged, but she wanted things to go well so she watched him take out his Tally-Ho papers and open the tobacco tin crouched down on his haunches with his loose shorts showing that revolting little thing of his hanging down. Then it was all over. Someone banged on the door, Ted snapped the tin shut in fright and screamed. The roof started caving in, and they spent an hour in Mrs Lamb’s kitchen watching her try to get Ted’s dick out of the Capstan tin. Some grownups stomped the cubby in, and Ted snarled at everyone that came near. Every time one of the Lamb kids passed they’d laugh their boxes off and Rose knew there’d be no fun before Christmas.

The old man lost big at the races. Things started to disappear from the house. Then the old girl disappeared from the house.

It’s the Hairy Hand, the old man said.

Rose couldn’t speak to him.

Poison

Dolly followed the rails. It had been a long time since a train had come by. The moon lit up the steel so it looked deadly cool, and now and then she had the feeling she could just lie down there and go to sleep and the whole world, the complete fucking mess, would just evaporate. She was drunk. She was stinking putrid drunk and she didn’t care, though she’d like to know where her left shoe was. Her mouth tasted like burnt sugar. They could all go to hell.

Remember those hot buckling rails up there, up north where childhood lived? Remember that? Coming back from that ride with your father who was, after all, not so much your father as your father’s father-in-law. Remember all your sisters hanging off the great long gate as it swung open to let you in? Can you still see your big-boned sister watching you pass, her eyes narrowed in the dust, the diamond engagement ring plain obvious on her hand? How far it was from the rails, that blanched stretch of dirt where you got down off the horse, and with your fingers in the wire, climbed up on that gate, to look her straight in the face and say absolutely bugger all. Remember the groaning of cows? The sound of your grandfather leading your horse away, the other sisters climbing down all quiet. Oh, God, there was poison in you, Dolly. Right then, if you’d spat in her face you’d have blinded her, killed her. So why didn’t you? Well, that’s the question, old darling, that’s the wonder.

It only took Dolly’s body a second to decide that it couldn’t go on. She dropped in the dry grass, even as she walked. The moon hung over her like a dirty Osram globe. She watched it till it was a sure bet it wouldn’t fall on her, and then she passed out.

Rose knew she’d be the one to find her. She set out early with this fact sitting on her back, and an hour down the rails towards Karrakatta she came on her. At first Rose didn’t know what to think. There was dew on her, and she smelt like she’d be dead. Rose stood and looked a while. The old girl’s feet were black and bare. Her skirt was twisted, foul. There was a pile of chunder next to her head, some dried like the glaze on a teapot, along her cheek.

Rose thought: If she’s dead, then I won’t have a mother.

She stooped to touch. Well. She still had a mother. But the old girl couldn’t be woken. Rose shoved, poked, slapped. In the end, she walked up to the station, and with the money the old man had given her, caught the 7.15 home.

Oriel Lamb had never seen anybody throw up like Mrs Pickles was throwing up. Yesterday she was hitting the wall and erupting into the air and Mr Pickles was cracking nervous jokes about her being an old geezer after all, but today it was black-green stuff coming up and no one was joking. Oriel poured water into her and sponged her down and left the shop to Lester. The poor woman’s flesh was the colour of pastry and cold to touch. It was like she’d been poisoned. The Pickles kids came and went. Mr Pickles was at work. The house was dim and in need of scrubbing and airing. Everywhere there were saucers full of fag ash, dirty clothes, unwashed plates and dust. Oriel Lamb sat at the foot of the bed to wait. It went on all day like the law of diminishing returns, Mrs Pickles puking and moaning, until in the end there was only her heart and lungs to eject before it could logically cease. But late the second day, Mrs Pickles eased back into sleep and Oriel knew it was finished. She got up and looked at the place and decided to finish the job.

Rose walks in and it smells different. Windows are open and curtains thrust aside. She goes into her mother’s room to find her sleeping. The room smells of phenyle. There is no dust on the dresser. The big tilting mirror is free of specks and splats. Down in the kitchen the dishes are done and there are nine fresh pasties on the draining board. The floor is still damp. Rose thumps upstairs and puts her head in the boys’ room. Their beds are made; their dirty clothes are gone, the window is up. The rug looks beaten within an inch of its life. She goes next door to her room and looks at the brushes and ribbons rearranged metrically on her dresser; she regards the remade bed and feels her jaw harden. In one movement she rips the bed clothes back and tosses them across the floor. Her eyes fatten up with tears, fury, shame.

Downstairs the old man is stamping around, back from work.

Four weeks to Christmas! he’s yelling. How’s the old girl?

Rose kicks the door shut and begins to destroy her room.

Summer

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the colour of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began the burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women.

Cloudstreet did a bottling trade on icecream. Lester Lamb half wore his arms off turning the churn and lifting the tombstone hunks of ice inside from the truck. Kids mucked around along fences; they sent dogs and grownups bellowing. They were mad with the nearness of Christmas. Oriel baked and served and held up trams getting all her children on, while Dolly Pickles, weak and gloomy, watched everyone pass in the street below until evening when Sam would come home with pennies behind his teeth and the dust of money in his skin and there’d be early watermelon and hot bread and open windows.

As the days cannoned on, and the heat got meaner, everybody did things crazier than normal. They bought things, they said things, they heard things, they moved things, they lost things, they joined things and left things. They were mad, loony, loopy with summer.

Red’s Method

Red Lamb the tomboy got sick of blokes swimming under the girls’ change sheds at the Crawley baths. They dived in around the piles like randy seals and merged in the shadows where all was green and perilous with barnacles, and they floated along silently, eyesup, to get a fisheye view of naked bums and boxes. Hat and Elaine were bigger and had hair on theirs and they did pretend to be outraged, but Red could tell their hearts weren’t in it. Climbing into her scratchy wool costume which stank of her own hammy crotchpong, she heard their half delighted screams of disgust and she knew boys were headed her way, so she spread her towel on the boards and stood quiet with her nose in the air until shrieks came from cubicles on the other side and she was safe.

As the heat grew that summer, so did her rage. She devised a scheme and took great delight in employing it, so much so that when it started to get results, when word got around and the boys backed off, she was kind of crestfallen. It worked very well, Red’s method. When she was changing in her cubicle and heard the trail of squeals coming her way, she’d whip off her bathers, squat on the boards, take good aim and build up a head of steam in her belly so that when some frecklefaced pair came sidestroking along beneath her she could piss right into their awestruck faces while bellowing her war cry ‘Death to Pervs!’ She could pee through the eye of a needle, Red Lamb.

Hat and Elaine went to their parents about it but did not get satisfaction. Lester and Oriel had always measured an eye for an eye.

Everything in the world seemed to happen just before Christmas.

Dolly Pickles decided never to speak to Oriel Lamb again.

Sam Pickles won a pig in a pub raffle and donated it to the Lamb family in gratitude for nursing his missus back to health.

The cockatoo bit Chub on the lip, got a taste for it and began an offensive that lasted all week. Chub took to wearing a box on his head. Here comes the Cardboard Kelly Gang, people said.

Ted Pickles kissed a girl on the sand at Pelican Point and she showed him a thing or two. It changed his life.

Rose Pickles read Jane Eyre and decided never to give it back to the public library. She scraped and rubbed to remove all signs of ownership from it, but each morning she woke to see the stamp still bright on the endpapers: CITY OF PERTH. In the end she cut it out, but it always grew back in her mind’s eye. She took it back and her old man paid the fine. They cancelled her membership.

Next door Fish struck up a friendship with the pig.

On a bad tip from Sam, Lester Lamb bought a clapped out racehorse to pull his new delivery cart.

Elaine had a migraine every day.

Hat became unofficial marble champion of Cloud Street. By Christmas Eve no one would play her because there were no marbles left to lose. Her mother said she was too old to play doogs in the street, but Hat loved to be a winner.

Red Lamb saw Ted Pickles with his hands inside Mary Modine’s bathers, and it didn’t change her life one bit.

Over the fence, Lon Lamb saw Chub Pickles being pursued by the pink cocky, and he laughed so loud he was wearing a bucket on his head within hours.

Quick caught nine dozen tailor out in the boat at Nedlands one day, and came back so burnt that he couldn’t chew, bend, sit or stand. He saw Rose Pickles watching Fish in no man’s land and knew she was in love with his brother.

Oriel Lamb went out and bought a tent. She bought a steel box and a padlock for the till and the accounts book and took to hiding them.

ThePig

The pig is down the back in a pen that’s just been tossed up for him by Sam and Lester, and Fish is standing there to look, to look. It’s late in the afternoon and all the birds are crashing back into the trees and the great summer sky is disrobing in swirls. The pig is pink and hairy with smart little eyes and a nose like a wet light plug.

He’s all yours, Sam says.

Preciate it, Lester says.

Better butcher im quick, I reckon. The council wouldn’t like it.

They wouldn’t like Cloudstreet beginnin to finish, says Lester.

Fish looks. The pig turns and looks back. The two men wander back up to the house and leave them alone. Fish scratches inside his shorts. The bristly animal flexes a shoulder. Shadows from the lilac tree, the lemon, the almond, fall across him like camouflage. It’s quiet.

Give us a squirt with the hose, wouldja? the pig says.

Fish looks at the pig and giggles. Orright.

He gets the hose, fumbles with the tap, and with his finger over the nozzle, he sprays the pig up and down until the ground in the pen turns miry and the pig is streaked with mud. From up the house Lester bellows.

Turn that water off, Fish! There’s a drought on!

Thanks anyway, cobber, says the pig.

Fish regards the pig a good while, forgetful of the hose water that drills into the dirt, bubbling up sand and sticks. The runoff makes a long spewy black rivulet that proceeds down the yard into the strawberries and the early corn.

Fish! Oy, Fish!

The pig winks and rolls in the bog. He kicks his legs up and his trotters clack together. The sun is low over the roofs of the neighbourhood. There is the smell of oncoming night, of pollen setting, the sound of kids fighting bathtime. Lester comes down, waving his hands.

Don’t drown the pig, Fish. We’re savin him for Christmas. We’re gunna eat him.

No!

I’ll drink to that, says the pig.

Lester stands there. He looks at Fish. He looks at the porker. He peeps over the fence. The pig. The flamin pig. The pig has just spoken. It’s no language that he can understand, but there’s no doubt. He feels a little crook, like maybe he should go over to that tree and puke.

I like him, Lestah.

He talks?

Yep.

Oh, my gawd.

Lester looks at his retarded son again and once more at the pig.

The pig talks.

I likes him.

Yeah, I bet.

The pig snuffles, lets off a few syllables: aka sembon itwa. It’s tongues, that’s what it is. A blasted Pentecostal pig.

And you understand him?

Yep. I likes him.

Always the miracles you don’t need. It’s not a simple world, Fish. It’s not.

The pig grunts, as though this fact is self evident. He heaves onto his side and regards Lester and Fish with detachment. He sighs and the sky squeezes out its last light. Mosquitoes are out already. Lester stands there in the twilight. Fish comes close and puts a finger through Lester’s belt loop. The pig clears its throat and begins to hum under its breath.

I won’t have the proceeds, the dividends of gambling in my yard or on my table, said Oriel, and she got down her notebook to quote at him.

If the rich gamble, they do it with money filched from the wage earner. If the poor, they play with their children’s bread. Where, indeed, is there a class that may gamble and rob none?

Mary Gilmore, she said.

Who?

Never mind.

We have to keep the pig, said Lester.

Why, pray tell?

It was a present. Sam’s grateful to you. Besides, Fish has taken a shine to it.

He shouldn’t have been put in the situation where he’d—

Oh, just be reasonable! Lester yelled, scaring himself with his boldness. The boy thinks the pig’s his friend.

Reasonable! You call that reasonable?

Oriel. Love.

Don’t you Oriel Love me.

There’s another thing.

There’ll always be another thing.

The pig talks.

Oriel put down her pen and closed the account book. She looked at him with an expression that signified that she’d reached the last knot on her rope.

It talks some foreign lingo.

Get the torch. Show me this pig.

The pig opened an eye at them when they came tromping and flashing lights down his way. He snouted up some dirt and sighed.

Gday, said Lester to the pig.

The pig sniffed.

Lester, if this is an old vaudeville joke your life won’t be worth seeing to its natural end.

It’s no joke, is it, me old pork mate?

But the pig said nothing; he just lay there with a bored and irritable look on his face and eyes like Audie Murphy.

It talks in tongues, Oriel.

You’ve been drinking. Let’s go inside before we strike up a conversation with the chooks. The pig goes.

But in her bed that night Oriel lay awake thinking of the pig her father had butchered to heal her burns as a sign of his love and it troubled her sorely.

The Horse

The animal world didn’t let up. A racehorse came to Cloud-street on a sure tip from Sam Pickles. It was a big bay gelding with feet like post rammers and a history of depression and emotional disturbance. A few days before Christmas Lester bought himself a hawker’s cart and harness to go into the delivery side of the business. He saw himself clopping through the suburbs ringing his bell, swinging his scales, rattling his blackboards, the cart laden with fruit and vegetables and his songs and jokes drawing women and children into the streets. It wasn’t the commerce of it that got his pea rattling (though he sold the idea that way to Oriel), it was the performance side of things; the singing and shouting, the jokes, stories, the eyes of the crowd on him.

He planned to hobble the horse on the grassy embankment at the side of the house, perhaps with a lean-to against the fence. Oriel gave him money and rolled her eyes, preoccupied with stranger things than him, and when he bought the horse he truly believed he’d backed a bargain.

But Lester, old lighthorseman that he was, should never have assumed that a depressed horse was a slow horse. The delivery business didn’t live a full day.

He harnessed the horse, loaded the cart with the best of Cloudstreet’s fare, and had only dropped his bum on the driver’s seat and taken up the reins when the horse took to the idea of liberal and rapid food distribution and took off for the streets of Subiaco with its head up and its tail down. Lester braced out the long, slithering ride down the embankment, the spinepowdering jolts of the wheels clearing the rails, and when he hit the street on the Subi side his hat was low on his brow and he looked indeed like a Randolph Scott. But at the first turn, when the cart got up on two wheels behind the slavering lunatic of a horse and the harness thwacked and twanged like a man’s braces he looked like any ordinary projectile waiting for gravity to have the last word. He landed in the dickey seat of a Packard parked outside the Masonic Hall. The horse went on without him and he followed its trail the rest of the day. Kids sat on fences eating apples, the occasional letterbox gripped a carrot in its teeth, and there were cauliflower sludge marks here and there, a Hansel and Gretel trail of lettuce leaves, beetroot and orange rind so thick that the city’s birds and half its scavenging children couldn’t obscure it. In the afternoon he found the horse grazing on roses in a yard near Lake Monger. It looked at him placidly with sated, longlashed eyes. He took it to the knackers and got two quid for horse, cart, and ten pounds of pureed tomatoes. When he got home, he found Oriel out the back, pegging a tent beneath the mulberry tree. The pig looked on, mute. A headless turkey hung from a hook on the fence. Water boiled on the kitchen stove.

Quick came up and stood beside him: I think the pig’s got away with it. How’s the horse?

The horse wasn’t so lucky.

Mum’s not happy.

They watched her hammering in pegs and tightening ropes on the tent. A bed stood endup against the trellis of the grapevine.

Can’t see why, Lester said. She likes turkey.

Quick looked up at his old man in wonder. Behind him three heads poked from the second floor window. Pickles heads.

Gday, Quick said.

Gday, Rose Pickles said.

The pig’s for next Christmas, Quick said.

The Pickles kids cracked up laughing.

Oriel Lamb straightened up, axe in hand, and everything went quiet. There was sweat on her upper lip. Somewhere inside, Fish Lamb was singing. He sounded like a colicky baby at midnight.

Fark! said the cockatoo in its cage.

Quick Lamb looked at his toes and pressed them tight together. It was no time to laugh.

The Tent Lady

On New Year’s Day, 1949, people gathered to watch Oriel Lamb move her things out to the white tent beneath the mulberry tree at Cloudstreet. They crowded into the second floor rooms overlooking the yard, and found cracks in the scaly picket fence; they climbed trees in yards all around and perved through pointed gum leaves at the little woman carrying bedclothes and fruitboxes out through the bewildered half circle of her family. No one missed the sight of Quick Lamb helping his mother out with the jarrah bed and the umps and bumps they made getting it in. There wasn’t a noise to be heard otherwise except for Fish Lamb slapping away at the piano in the centre of the house; everyone looked on in wonder, missing nothing. She had a desk, Tilley lamp, chamberpot, books, mysterious boxes. People gathered at the fences. When she had it all in shape, Oriel Lamb tied off the door flap and went back into the house to organize her family’s dinner, and the crowd went away murmuring that surely this was a day to remember.

She’s ad enough kids, said the women of the street.

She’s caught him out, said the blokes.

But the real reason remained a mystery, even to Oriel Lamb. It wasn’t actually one thing that’d moved her. The pig, the sound of middle C ringing in her ears, the sudden claustrophobia of the house, the realization that Fish didn’t even know her, and the feeling she had that the house was saying to her: wait, wait. She didn’t know, but, whatever else she was, Oriel wasn’t the sort to argue with a living breathing house.