Cloudstreet

V. A Combustible Material

By the time he was sixteen, Quick Lamb was taller than his father. He was a fairskinned, melancholy boy, slim and a little cagey around the ribs but robust in his own way. He loved to walk and to fish, to be out on the water in the shadow of the brewery or anchored out from the Nedlands jetty. It was so much more peaceful than the teeming house where there was always some fit of yelling, some quiet tussle, some jostling spectacle in progress. The sun tended to turn his skin to bark in an hour, so he rigged up a longshafted umbrella he’d found in a bin outside the university and fixed it to an old rod belt strapped to his waist and it gave him the feeling of rowing with a small cloud always overhead. He smeared his face and arms with zinc cream, and the overall effect failed to render him inconspicuous.

The river was broad and silvertopped and he knew its topography well enough to be out at night, though the old girl would have had a seizure at the thought. He never got bored with landmarks, the swirls of tideturned sand, armadas of jellyfish, the smell of barnacles and weed, the way the pelicans baulked and hovered like great baggy clowns. He liked to hear the skip of prawns and the way a confused school of mullet bucked and turned in a mob. From the river you could be in the city but not on or of it. You could be back from it out there on the water and see everything go by you, around you, leaving you untouched. Cars swept round Mounts Bay Road beneath Mount Eliza where Kings Park and its forest of war memorials presided over the town. With an easterly rushing in his ears, he often watched the toffs picnicking by the university. He saw their sporty little cars, their jingling bicycles, and he wondered what they were, those university people. They came into the shop now and then on a Saturday, stopping for some forgotten thing for the picnic hamper, or seeking out the icecream the old man was known for. Quick looked into their faces and wanted to know how they could bear so much school.

School just gave Quick Lamb the pip. He was too slow to get things right the first time and too impatient to force himself to learn. For a while he was an army cadet, a soldier under the command of mathematics teachers who exchanged the steel rule for the brass ended baton and who liked the sound of both on a set of knuckles. In the cadets Quick learnt to shoot and also to crap with the aid of one square of shiny paper. He loved the khaki serge of battledress and the smell of nugget in the webbing, and he loved to shoot because he was good at it. He could see a long way, pick things in the distance that others couldn’t, and the two hundred yard target seemed close to him, only a barrel length away. In the end, even Quick knew the only reason the school kept him on at all was to win rifle trophies for it. Sometimes, after a shoot, he’d see the whole world through a V. There was only ever one teacher Quick Lamb could talk with, but he was the sort of man who winced when you brought up your shoot scores, or rolled his eyes when you spoke warmly of a Bren gun. His name was Krasnostein and he had a limp. He taught history and he liked to have the class in an uproar of debate and discussion. He had the sort of dandruff that found its way into your books and papers and his teeth were like burnt mallee stumps. When he breathed on you, there was no telling how you’d behave.

Quick almost never spoke in class discussions. He could never get out what he wanted to say in time. Mostly he felt breathless and confused, sometimes furious with Mr Krasnostein who baited them all about the Anzacs and the Empire. Yet there was laughter allowed, even out-spokenness. After one class Krasnostein kept Quick behind. Itching with dread, Quick stood by the little man’s desk.

You have lovely handwriting, Mr Lamb, but I’m afraid your essay is anything but lovely.

Sorry, sir.

The teacher sucked his moustache and smiled. You must remember that the West Australian and the Western Mail are not final authorities on history. Nor is what you hear over the back fence. Do you know any Japanese people?

No, sir.

No, I thought not. They really are more than just combustible material, Lamb. Do you know any Jews?

No.

Well you do now.

Quick looked him up and about. He felt his chin fall.

Here, Lamb, take these and read them over the weekend. If you’d like to change your essay afterwards let me know.

Quick went out lightheaded and he didn’t even glance at the two bundles until he got home. In his room he opened the crumpled old magazine, a New Yorker from 1945. The whole thing seemed to be about Hiroshima, which he’d mentioned in his own essay. Between pages were loose photographs of what looked like burnt logs or furniture, but when he looked close he saw the features of people. He put it down and picked up the small pamphlet. It was called Belsen: a record. He picked it up without thought. Inside were long lists, and photographs of great piles of … of great piles. Quick went downstairs and out the back where the mulberry tree had stained the old girl’s tent the colour of a battalion field hospital. Fish was out there talking to the pig. Corn stood chest high down behind the chicken wire. Next door Mrs Pickles was laughing drunk again.

After dinner Quick went back upstairs. He looked at the brittle, faded pictures he’d stuck on his walls years ago. He’d forgotten about them. Years ago he’d thought them the saddest, most miserable things he’d ever seen in his life and he kept them there to remind him of Fish, how Fish had been broken and not him. But even that punishment had worn off. Now he sat with pictures in his lap that were beyond sadness and misery. This was evil, like Mr Bootluck the minister used to go on about at the Church of Christ. Here were all those words like sin and corruption and damnation.

That night Fish crawled into his bed and Quick felt him like a coal against his skin.

Mr Krasnostein was not at school on Monday. In his place they had a strapping blonde man called Miller who looked like a wheat farmer. His eyes were the colour of gas and he read to them from the Yearbook, 1942. Mr Krasnostein never returned. Quick kept the magazine and the little stapled book in his bag, tucking them inside the loose skirting board in his room when he got home. As he came out onto the landing he saw Rose Pickles by the window at the head of the stairs, and it struck him that her silhouette was just like something out of Belsen. He’d noticed she was getting thinner every week, and now, as she turned, her eyes stood out in her head enough to make him feel repulsed. Somehow it struck him as sickheaded for a pretty girl to starve herself like that.

Oh, it’s you, she said.

Quick said nothing at all. He was too choked up with disgust. He went down the stairs four at a time. He’d quit school — that’s what he’d do.

Bones

Rose watched him thump down the stairs, then she turned back to look out across the mulberry tree, but she couldn’t recall what it was that had caught her attention in the first place. Maybe it was just the yards, the fences containing other families, more secrets. She went back to her room and looked at herself once more in the mirror. AU her bones stood out. Her eyes crowded her face. She gave a grim smile and went down to cook the dinner.

Rose didn’t mind the sight of food these days, and she managed to cook for the family without trouble. But whenever she ate more than a few mouthfuls she vomited it straight back again, just like she knew she would. She cooked at six, regardless of who was there, and if no one came she left it on the table till morning, taking a carrot for herself and going upstairs to her homework or to lie on her bed planning ways of escape.

She didn’t go to collect the old woman from the pub any more. She’d stopped that a couple of years ago, when she was fourteen. No more sending messages through to the Ladies’ Lounge, never again the screaming and slapping out on the pavement, the leery beerwet grins of old men turning on their stools, the hands on her backside, the food thrown in her face. The night of her fourteenth birthday Rose went down to the Railway Hotel to collect her mother for the little party they’d arranged, and when she got to the nicotine sheened door, she just stopped and turned around and went home, knowing she didn’t care if the old girl came to her party or if she went to hell in a hurry.

Rose learnt to cook, wash the laundry and to clean the house. If the old man won at the races she didn’t have to mend her tights on the trolley bus to school — she’d wear perfect new ones — but in three years of high school there weren’t a dozen times she went with tights that didn’t need darning.

She poured every bottle of liquor she ever found in the house down the sink and she knew it was worth getting thumped for. She didn’t do it to curb the old girl’s drinking — she did it in glee, out of spite. It gave her the most marvellous, tingly feeling to see it going down the gurgler. If the boys and her father were home in time for dinner they’d often have Dolly lurching in the door for a scene, though more often than not the four of them would hear her coming, sweep up their plates and rush upstairs to eat in their rooms. If she still had the legs, Dolly might seek them out, bash at doors, and turn a meal over in someone’s lap, but mostly she’d get no further than the kitchen where she’d sit staring at whatever was available to be stared at until she fell asleep, mumbling.

Now and then Rose tried to see the whole business as hilarious; it was like being in the first chapter of a fairy tale about a sweet girl with a nasty but beautiful step-mother. But the pleasure wouldn’t stay with her more than a moment or two. There was too much shame, too much cowering under the neighbours’ eyes, too much agonizing embarrassment going to school with a black eye or a fat lip — no, it was too real.

Ted and Chub were lazy and careless like boys were, and they were no use at all. Ted was the old girl’s favourite. Rose often saw her patting and stroking him when she was half shickered. Ted didn’t seem to care what she did at all. And the old man — well the old man was the same as ever. He’d come home tired and quiet from the Mint and shrug his shoulders. On Saturdays he’d go out to Ascot and lose the week’s pay. Rose was clever enough to steal a bit of his pay each week, going through his shirts for the laundry, but it was never really enough. She bought groceries from next door and small household things in Subiaco, but the money never went far enough to buy the boys and her new things for school, or clothes, or small treats. If the old man had a win there’d be plenty for all, but mostly it was the bookies who had the wins.

This summer Rose had started to get thin. She went dark in the sun, and on the holidays she’d caught the train to Cottesloe Beach nearly every day and gone without lunch to pay for it. She looked light and lithe and the old man joked around about it.

One Sunday noon in the new year and the fresh decade when the summer days were cooling off toward autumn, the old girl surprised her in the bathroom and she had to grab for a towel to cover herself. Her mother was bleary and sore headed.

Yer gettin skinny. Look like a bloody skeleton. I hate it. People think we starve yer.

Rose said nothing. It pleased her somehow to know that it annoyed the old girl. She watched her smear on all the makeup she needed these days to look halfway decent. Dolly was getting old and puffy. Smoke was curing her brow and cheeks and she had to try very hard to look her best.

Their eyes met and Rose smiled menacingly before leaving the room.

From then on, Rose got thinner every day. The old woman went into rages and the old man bit his lip. She was sixteen and scaring herself.

A Desertion

At first Oriel Lamb thought that vaudeville was undignified. Since way back, since the Bible-believing days, she’d defended dancing and music, but getting up to make a fool of yourself and sing nonsense songs seemed morally dubious. It was hard to shake off the idea that Lester’s vaudeville act would somehow bring disgrace to them all. But when she saw how the old diggers loved it, how they stomped their crutches and held their bellies and sang along, she couldn’t see the harm in it.

It was hard to remember how he’d got into the whole business. Someone from the army band had been recruiting, or drunk, and suddenly Lester was up there on stage, one Saturday night, starting in on his noseflute before they’d even finished ‘God Save the Queen’. And now it was 1950, and the Anzac Club had Lester Lamb on the bill almost every Saturday night. Though she’d never let on, she was proud of him. Vaudeville was something he was good at, something legendary from his past that was actually true. Most Saturday nights she’d hear him from the club kitchen where she kept the urns boiling for tea and buttered pumpkin scones and set fresh Anzacs out on the club china. She could hear Lester on the Jew’s harp, comb and paper, the noseflute, and nowadays the ventriloquist’s dummy he’d bought in a pawnshop for a mysterious sum.

He’s a right card, the other women would say, a real bonzer.

A real dag, love. Oh, to have him round the house.

Oriel rolled her eyes. Women!

People knew the Lambs now, were a little afraid of them even. With or without the children they travelled to and from the club in a Harley and sidecar. Pedestrians always looked twice at the dummy whose jaws flapped alarmingly in the wind.

The Anzacs were what the Lambs believed in, the glorious memories of manhood and courage. The nation, that’s what kept the Lambs going. They were patriots like no others. The thought of World Communism put fear in their hearts. Oriel had dreams about Joe Stalin — she knew what he was about. They weren’t political, Lester and Oriel, but they were proud and they offered themselves to the nation.

It was at the Anzac Club one night that Quick came into the kitchen and told her he was leaving.

Go over to the sink and wash your mouth out with soap, Mason Lamb, she said, not pausing from kneading the oatmeal mixture for her next batch of Anzacs.

Quick leaned against the laminex counter and saw the gold flecks in it.

I’m going bush, Mum.

There’s a bar of Velvet just beside you.

I didn’t think you’d appreciate me doin a bunk and not explainin.

Up on stage, Lester was singing:

Chicory-chic chala-chala-

You’ve got no money.

Mum—

No trade.

— in a binanaker bollicka wollicka, can’t you see—

Mum—

We not good enough for you?

— chicory-chic is me!

I’m going.

Everyone was laughing and clapping, and now they were headed for the counter for tea and cakes. Oriel rushed to the urn and felt the steam in her face. She wanted to grab Quick now, swallow him in a hug and pin him to the floor. He couldn’t go, he was one of hers, he wasn’t old enough, he wasn’t ready. Men with broad-cracking grins and hat lines in the oil of their hair broached the counter and made clunky, well-meaning jokes to hurry her along. She was trapped.

I won’t have a scene, she said, turning to the urn again.

But Quick was gone.

Hat, Elaine and Red came in to help pour the tea. They were all giggle and guffaw, teased by old soldiers and a few not so old. Oriel brought up trays full of cups, each with the Anzac insignia, to be filled, and she went into a trance of composure.

Somehow the seven of them stay connected to the Harley as the old man sends it through the Terrace, whumping up onto the flat stretch along Kings Park Road and then sending them all blank with terror as he hangs a right into Thomas Street. Their collective wailing sounds like a siren. The wind burns Oriel’s eyes. She squeezes Lon between her and Lester on the pillion, and hears Fish laughing. The girls scream, cowering around Fish in the sidecar. As they hit the railway line the vibration silences the lot of them. Oriel feels like her bowels have suddenly risen into her ribcage. Lester’s already gearing down for Cloudstreet. The dummy’s arm rises in the wind. They look like an army in retreat.

Quick hears the piano thundering as he half falls, half runs downstairs. It’s not music, only noise, and it scares the hell out of him. He has a duffle bag on his shoulder which beats his back as he goes, and as he swings into the bottom hallway, Rose Pickles, coming out to see what all the noise is, takes it full in the face and goes down cold on the floor. He’s almost to the back door before he realizes, but as he turns to go back he hears the Harley gunning down Railway Parade, and so he stops and gets out the door to the yard and runs. Past the redspattered tent, the vegetables and chooks, up over the back fence and down the embankment along the tracks. The wild oats whip his legs and he bolts, sobbing in the dark.

Rose Pickles had herself almost upright before the Lamb mob came brawling in the door, fanning out like infantry, roomby-room, upstairs and down and she was trying to slip back in the kitchen doorway when Mrs Lamb finally noticed her and seized her.

Good Lawd! Les, get the medicine box. What happened love, quick tell me what happened. Oh, Quick.

Rose felt the little woman’s square head on her shoulder and then her whole boxy weight against her. She just wasn’t strong enough to support her, and Mr Lamb came downstairs the moment Rose teetered back into the kitchen with Mrs Lamb weeping on top of her.

Sam Pickles came running. He saw Rose and Oriel on the floor in the doorway. There was blood and both of them were bawling, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. Lester Lamb was there, too, standing like a man to whom feeling helpless is no great surprise. Their eyes met.

What — the bum dropped out of the world?

More or less, said Lester. More or less.

And the Pig Won’t TaIk

Fish goes down the back to the pig but the pig is saying nothing. The chooks pick and scratch in their sandy run. The ground is dry with the end of summer and the big house is quiet. No Quick. He’s gone. He didn’t say. You should say. A boy should say. He feels sick right in his middle. This is sad. Lestah says it’s the sad that makes the sick. It makes him hungry for the water again. Some nights he can’t sleep for the hungry in him, and in the mornings he just wants to be bad and put poo on the walls and eat sand like a baby. He doesn’t like the sound of them crying. He wants Quick. He doesn’t care what they want. He just wants to be bad. And the pig won’t talk.

That Ted Pickles

Sometimes Dolly Pickles looked at Ted and saw Sam, Sam from a long time ago, in another place. Ted was blonde and small with loutish good looks that girls fixed on in the street. Oh, she saw them looking, saw his arrogant nonchalance and the way it got them all biting their lips. And sometimes she felt a sting, just in watching, a spike in her throat, jealousy. Those firm, fresh-titted girls down there, hanging off the verandah cracking gum and looking sideways at him, Ted Pickles, who couldn’t give a stuff.

Yes, he was the young Sam alright, but harder, meaner. Maybe that’s what she’d always wanted from Sam — a little less understanding, a bit more steel, something in him with a fearful edge. Oh, that Ted. He was killin em.

Battalions

Oriel Lamb, being the sort of woman who resolved to do things, decided to make a recovery. She was off her food and nothing gave her the disgruntled satisfaction it once did, so in the weeks after Quick shot through, knowing that not even she could conquer grief by force of will, she decided on a lesser conquest. She would wipe out local competition.

No one had taken much notice of the big shop on the main road since it opened its doors after last Christmas. Certainly none of the Lambs. Business hadn’t dropped off at all. None of the neighbours mentioned the newcomer. But walking past one day, on one of her expeditions to buy cheap eggs in the neighbourhood, Oriel walked by the big, bright shop and saw it properly for the first time. She stood back and regarded the gaudy sign.

Ex-AIF indeed, she hissed aloud. A tall woman, unknown to her, passed with raised eyebrows and Oriel decided to keep her thoughts more to herself.

It’s a disgrace, she thought, to grovel to the customer like that, to wave your service to the King like it’s a flag. A good man’s above that kind of rubbish. Lester could paint:

He could wheedle just the same, but I’d be ashamed I would. You wouldn’t get me over the threshold. Why, Mr Pickles could have on his letter box:

to conjure sympathy. He’s not much of a man, Mr Pickles, but he’s enough of a man not to stoop to that. Why, she could have a sign herself:

Oriel swung her basket on the other side. She looked at G. M. Clay’s establishment, its nice window of tins and bottles, the clean glass, the cream and green painted bins of flour and sugar, and she knew that G. M. Clay had to be wiped out. Good Lord, she’d lost a brother in Palestine, and every Saturday night she served tea and swapped smiles with men who’d lost limbs and mates in New Guinea, been robbed of their health in Changi, lost their wives to Americans right here in Perth, WA and she wasn’t going to tolerate the presumption of a G. M. Ex-AIF-Clay.

Oriel recrossed the street and stepped into the shop. The bell tinkled sweetly on the door and the interior smelt orderly and hygenic. Shelves lined the walls. A brass set of scales stood on the counter, and beside it, a modern, enamelled Avery.

Oh, gday madam, a tidy looking man in a white apron said, coming from another room. What can I get you?

A dozen eggs, please.

Righto.

She counted out her pence and noted that they weren’t bad looking eggs.

Anything else?

No. Thank you, no. Where did you serve, Mr Clay?

Beg pardon?

In the Australian Imperial Forces. Where did you fight?

Oh, he laughed. You must be Mrs Lamb.

That’s right.

I hear you’re a friend of the Anzacs.

I believe in my country, she said, a new creed on her lips.

I was in the second AIF. Bougainville. New Guinea.

Infantry?

Signalman and runner, Mrs Lamb.

Oriel felt her resolve weakening. He was no pretender. Unless he was lying. The Kokoda trail, no soft spot. He was a well kept man and he had a well kept shop. He’d served his country.

What unit did your husband serve in?

Cavalry. The 10th Light Horse. At Gallipoli. Oriel said it with a hint of breathless pride, like a priest uttering an unassailable truth.

No, no, I mean this last war. I heard he enlisted before the end. Brave man, with all his kids and family responsibilities. What battalion?

There was a smile on his well-shaved face as he said this and Oriel Lamb felt the hard tissue of hatred under her skin.

He joined as a bandsman, Mr Clay, good day.

Oriel swung on her toes and headed for the door.

Thought it might have been the tentmakers platoon, she heard him whisper to someone else out of sight. The Padre’s Brave Twelve.

A woman’s laugh it was. From the back room. The bell jangled on the door. Outside Oriel shuddered with rage. She wanted to throw Clay’s eggs into the bin on the pavement, but nothing, not even war itself could induce her to waste good food.

A The Good Are Fierce

That woman had Lester waking, raking, caking, and baking at all hours, and he knew she meant business. He couldn’t really see the harm in advertising that you were an old soldier. He couldn’t help suspecting that he would himself if he didn’t have the shadows of history at his back. Only a man who was a liar or a bloke who’d acquitted himself well in the field would dare though. And Lester knew he was neither.

Out in the kitchen he rolled dough on the marble slab and heard the old girl bellowing commands. The girls were pulling their end, but he knew they wouldn’t stay with it long. His wife was a good woman, and he understood that. But he remembered what the minister at Margaret River used to say — the good are fierce. She’d outlast them all — she’d make damn sure of it. That’d be the way she’d want it. Half the bleedin day out finding the biggest eggs this side of the river, figuring out prices and margins, hammering the reps that sold to them, working deals, inventing pies for him to make, flavours for icecream, strategies for the coming winter campaign. She planned to stretch it right through spring and finish Clay off in the summer with Lester Lamb Icecream. And he knew she’d win. That was the best part, in his mind, that they’d clean Clay up with Lester’s own recipe.

It was hard, relentless work, though, and he always knew he’d rather be out fishing with Quick or spinning the knife at a lazy dinner table. His act was getting stale at the Anzac Club, and sometimes he thought maybe the fun had gone out of him. Fish was miserable and would hardly come out of his room some days.

There were nights when he went exhausted into his room to sit on his bed alone just to think about Quick. He knew Oriel’d be still shuffling in the shop up front or the light would be burning in the tent outside as she went over the accounts. Often, the only thing he could think of was that old Bible story of the prodigal son. Now he knew what it felt like to be abandoned and left hurt and confused. He wondered what it was he’d done to turn Quick away. He secretly hoped for an end to it like the return of the son in the story and it made him wonder if he wasn’t still half believing. Those Bible stories and words weren’t the kind you forgot. It was like they’d happened to you all along, that they were your own memories. You didn’t always know what they meant, but you did know how they felt. He still remembered a night back in the last century when his own father had carried him on his shoulders across a flooded creek. He could see the swirling darkness, hear the crashing of trees, and the fearful whinny of a horse. Rain fell. It beat his back. He felt his father’s whiskers against the bare flesh of his legs. He couldn’t remember where they went or who they were with or what happened before or after — only those seconds. The truthfulness of it tightened his bowel. Whatever it meant it was true, and he had the same pure, true feeling in his fantasy of Quick coming home and Lester himself killing a fatted calf and asking no questions. It’s not as if we have any friends, he thought. The kids are all we’ve got; they’re what we are.

A Mug’s Game

Dolly couldn’t stand the noise of the house. Day and bloody night it went, all through winter as though they were working shifts across there to wipe out Gerry Clay. No one walked down the big corridor, they always bustled. Things were shunted to and fro, and that Godawful woman’d be shouting and hissing to get things moving. Now it was spring and her hayfever was terrible. Her nose itched and her eyes swelled. At times she could do no more than spend the morning in the bath, just lying back in the tepid water until the vibrations in the walls next door drove her from the house.

Dolly was shaky and fragile with headaches, most mornings. She felt older than she was, and she could see it in the mirror the way the smoke and the grog were curing her, making the flesh on her face puffy and shredded with lines. Her teeth were yellow. Her bottom lip had begun to hang. It’d looked so good a few years ago when she could let it slip to a murderous pout that was rarely wasted. And her voice, she was going croaky. She didn’t sound like Lauren Bacall anymore. She sounded like an old mother, a copper boiler, a spudpeeler with a fag on her tongue. It wasn’t so bad in a crowd with a couple of beers under your girdle but, nowadays, with Sam losing and losing and losing on the horses, there wasn’t a lot of money to be drinking on. Dolly had to keep up the wit, the sass, the fun; she was singing for her supper, alright. She’d be happy, crack jokes, catch blokes looking her way. When they came her way she’d have a snappy line for them, she’d knock their hats sideways and shriek when their palms stung her backside on the way past. The blokes behind the bar always had a good word for her — What’ll it be, Doll? — though the barmaids narrowed their eyes a little against her in caution.

Hell, she didn’t care what anybody thought. Well, not everyone. She liked to be liked, and didn’t anyone? No one wants to be forgotten, have eyes glide past you without even seeing you there. No, she didn’t care … but bugger it … well she didn’t know. It was all too complicated. Everything was. Unless you were full as a goog. Then it was simple, then all of it was straight in a girl’s mind.

Now and then she’d find herself out the back lane against the fence with some sweetmouthed bloke whose name she could almost remember, a cove who wouldn’t mind if she kept talking while he ran his hands about. She’d press his head to her and feel how young she was, how hungry they were for her.

By spring it was the same bloke she’d weave out leaning against, come closing time. He was dark haired and hard jawed and handsome. He was a little pigeontoed, but there was muscle on him and she liked the way his hat brim snapped down over his nose. And there was something else exciting about him — he was a Catholic and dead scared of going to Hell.

Yer a bottler, Doll, he said the first night, pressing her up against the cool bricks. Bet yer old man’s a millionaire, the way you look.

Him? He hasn’t got a pot to piss in. Give’s a kiss, love.

He give you a good knock, now and then?

She felt his fingers up the back of her legs. If he did I wouldn’t be here. You’ve got a foul mouth, sport.

She felt her own mouth covered by his and his breath was hot at the back of her throat. He was after her, this one, and all the weights of boredom, the trying, the pushing out smiles were gone, and she had a happy, dark world to live in. She was always a little more sozzled than him, or maybe it was a lot more, she couldn’t tell and why should she care, and he always seemed a good sort when he came in late to the Railway Hotel. By the end of spring he started getting later, until he was hardly leaving himself time for a round before they went out the back, or down the embankment to the whispering grass. She saw him nearly every night of the week, and though she didn’t much think about him during the day, if she got stuck in the same room as Rose, that filthy-pretty skeleton, she’d bring him to mind to fight the sight of her off.

Rose looked frightening now, like a ghost, with those big eyes. Her wrists looked like twigs and she did nothing but stare. Dolly knew what it meant, that stare. You’re old and clapped out, it said, and you’re getting fat and your teeth are bad and you don’t do a bloody thing, and here I am, young and clean and sweet and I’m doing your jobs, old girl, and I’ll die from it and you’ll suffer. Dolly tried not to think about how she hated Rose these days. It was a wonder that it could happen, that a mother could turn like that from loving to hating. But when you find yourself getting more and more looks like that, those bland stares that set off cruel, guilty things in you, when you know all of a sudden that someone of your own flesh and blood can’t find a spark of worth to your name — then you harden up. They have to be blotted out. Rose was the enemy. It wasn’t the sort of thing you let yourself think about, but you knew.

Because she didn’t go anywhere except the pub, these days, it took Dolly a long time to know that Gerry was G. M. Clay — Ex AIF whose shop was only three blocks away. Sam and her had an account with the Lambs for their groceries against rent, so there was never any need for her to even step inside the shop that opened in the winter. Once she did know, though, she kept well away. G. M. Clay had a wife — she knew it from overhearing Oriel Lamb. If Dolly went anywhere at all in the day, she caught the train into the city where people were all strangers and a woman could go about without running into smiling neighbours.

By the beginning of summer, Gerry was looking crook.

Those bastards are king hittin me, he said, down by the rails. They couldn’t even drink at the Railway anymore, now that blokes were yacking about them, and it was hard to get a shout out of anyone at all.

And yer drinkin the till dry, Doll. This is a mug’s game.

That bitch. Oriel-bloody-Lamb.

She’s a fighter, orright.

Now and then a train came punching past to shower them with smuts and the smell of the ongoing and outgoing. Dolly felt the lack of grog, it was a heaviness on her. Gerry seemed weaker now, panicky, done in.

You know someone’s gunna spring us, dontcha.

Bloody hell, what’re you sayin, then?

I’m sayin I gotta be realistic. You too, Doll. We’re gunna get burnt sooner or later.

Oh, you can always toddle off to confession, she said, squeezing his leg.

Don’t chiack around about it. I’m serious.

She’s beaten you, mate.

Don’t even think she suspects.

No, not yours. That Lamb sheila. She’s got you busted and bleedin.

Jesus, Doll, she can’t lose. She’s got an army behind her. It’d be easier for me to pull up pegs and try somewhere else. Never thought I’d be shunted out by a woman running a place from the front room. And she lives in a friggin tent.

You sound frightened of her, said Dolly, lying back furious in the drying grass.

Aren’t you? You could toss her out of that place, you know. Aren’t you the landlords?

They’re what we live off. Their rent is what pays our way. We can’t.

Well, I’m flat out like a lizard drinkin and I can’t beat her. It’s got me buggered, Doll.

Dolly saw the stars spangled across the sky. The moon hung sallow in their midst. Something was shifting, she knew it. Any moment now, one of them’d go ahead and say what it took.

Across the Rails

Right that moment, on the other side of the rails, in a sea of wild oats, Ted Pickles tears a girl’s brassiere aside and lays his hands on her breasts. He’s thinking she looks like Martha Vickers in that flick Alimony, and she’s looking at him with narrowed eyes, a fag on her lip and her sweater up under her chin.

You’re a bastard, she says.

You’ve got nice tits, he says back.

A train comes squealing into the station and he kisses her neck, feels her go soft under him. Her nails dig into his arms and the grass flattens over them both in the train’s rush of wind.

All Money Down

In October the basic wage went up a quid, but the union wasn’t satisfied, it being way below the claim, though Sam couldn’t get angry — a pound was a pound. He knew that bastard Menzies would keep the screws on them as long as he lasted, and he looked like lasting forever. Anyway, the big knobs of the union didn’t seem much different from the enemy these days. You’d never pick em for workers, not in a month of Sundays, and a man’d be a fool to trust em an inch. The hell with em. It was spring and he’d be taking home a quid he didn’t have last week. And he needed the money. These days at the races, everything he backed came home hanging its arse like its back legs’d been sawn off. He hadn’t taken a win or a place since Christmas, though he figured it was all money down against the pot coming his way.

Sam didn’t mind the Mint work so much. It cheered him up to be around the money and he wouldn’t pretend it was otherwise. The whole place filled with the stink of melting and burning, the thump of the presses and the whang of steel gates. He oiled machines and wiped them down with cotton waste. He stood on the belt line spotting for duds and took the trollies back and forth. He had no enemies there, and though they were a foulmouthed bunch of bastards, he thought they were decent sorts. Everyone had little perks but no one’d tolerate serious diddling. Any dinkum thief found himself ushered into the shadowy part of the courtyard where a few words of advice would be delivered.

It was clear enough to Sam that the other blokes were uneasy about his stumpy hand. It wasn’t just their good nature that kept them off his back, they were frightened of having his luck rub off on them.

Sam took to sucking big round peppermints at work, and he always had one stuffed in his cheek when it came to going out through the gates each afternoon. The security bloke frisked them all and the gates opened for them, two by two. There weren’t many coins bigger than a peppermint and it was easy to take something out now and then for the kids, though they were getting old for it now. One time he came out with a Snowy River Scheme Commencement Medallion. It was a hell of a peppermint to be sucking, but he turned it appreciatively in his cheek as the security man checked his pockets.

Now the days were getting longer and the light was lasting, he’d walk up Hay Street in the evenings and hear the clock on the town hall toll the hour. He liked the walk in the warm five o’clock breeze better than the closepressed tram to the station. People would be hurrying along the pavements, calling, whistling, dropping things, skylarking. Pretty women would be spilling out of Bairds and Foys and Alberts. In Forrest Place, in the rank shade of the GPO, old diggers sat bathing in the breeze and swapping news pages. European fruit sellers, Baits and Italians, would be haranguing from the footpath with their sad faces weary as unmade beds, and along Wellington Street trolley buses would haul full loads of arms and legs up the hill. The sky would be fading blue. The station was sootrimmed and roaring with crowds. When a train came Sam swung up and stood in the doorway with his gladstone bag and hat in hand and he waited the three stops knowing he was young enough to be walking it, lazy enough, though, to know better.

The day the basic wage was upped a quid, he got out at his stop and a tall, thin, long-jawed woman stopped him on the platform.

You Mr Pickles? Sam Pickles?

Yeah. Yes that’s me.

Passengers faded from the platform, the train heaved itself round the bend. Two date palms down on the street waved solemnly.

You don’t know me, and I really don’t know you, and I’ve got nothin against you or anythin, but I think you should try to control your wife. She said it in a gaspy, short winded way, and her mouth was all atremble by the time she finished, but Sam felt so black with fury that he wasn’t in the least bit sympathetic.

And I think you should mind your own bloody business, lady.

He stuffed his Akubra on his head and went on, his bag butting against his knee.

Well it’s my business, too! she called out, thickthroated with sobs. It’s my husband I’m talkin about. I’ve got young-ens to look after and she’s got no right. It’s a mortal sin!

Sam went down the stairs with the fury going out of him. He walked along Railway Parade where the dandelions moved in the jaded light and by the time he had reached Cloudstreet there was only a dull soreness in him, something inevitable, something he knew he’d been resigned to for years.

Now Black Now White

Rose loves that weird boy, she knows it. She leaves the spuds boiling on the stove and the snags spitting on low heat to go upstairs to listen to him tinkling on the piano. If everything was like the books she reads it’d be sweet, miraculous music coming down from that bookless, windowless library up there, but its just jangly noise though Fish doesn’t thump it any more. Nowadays she can hardly get up the stairs without breaks, but she gets up without stopping this time, for fear of missing a look at Fish.

Breathless and giddy she stands at the half-open library door to watch him with his back to her, pushing the keys gently as if marvelling at the difference in them still — now black now white, first a finger, then a full hand spread. It’s horror movie music and she thinks of some poor sad movie monster hearing bittersweet music.

He’s big now, Fish. Fourteen and growing like a man. His hair is fair and long, half obscuring his little ears. These days his feet are on the ground when he plays.

Rose can’t see the look on his face. She’d expect it to be a glowing, rapt expression, but it’s grim and hardset. She listens to the thang-dung-dim-tink of his music and wants only to touch him, to be friendly, and yes, if she’s honest, to get a kiss. It’s ridiculous — she’s too old for him and he’s a slow learner and a tenant and a Lamb, for gawdsake, but he’s just the grousest looking boy, and his hot blue eyes make you go racy inside. Rose steps into the room and Fish stops without looking around. Just inside the door the sickest, foulest feeling comes over her. She knows it from before, the taste of that horrible rotten smell that comes not into your nose, but straight into your mouth, onto your tongue, sliding round on you, curdling your spit till you’re ready to vomit.

She races out and stumps downstairs, sick and hurting.

The old man is in the kitchen, turning his hat over in his hands like a man at a wake.

I turned the snags off, he says. The spuds look ready.

Sorry. I haven’t got any greens ready.

Don’t bother. Where’s the boys?

Dunno.

He doesn’t even enquire after the old girl. She watches him put his hat on a chair and roll his sleeves up in a distracted sort of fashion. Then he settles on her, looks hard at her. She blushes, still a bit shaky from the upstairs feeling.

Jesus, Rose, you look like a corpse these days. It’s a crime you know, he says quietly, a bloody crime.

I get fat.

You haven’t been fat since you were hangin off a tit. He smiles. Now you’ve grown yer own.

Rose turns to the stove and shakes the dark sausages round in the pan, seething with shame.

You have to start eatin again. It’s not a joke anymore, love.

I can’t, Dad.

Christ, you must be starvin hungry!

I am. But I can’t any more. I just toss it up again.

Bullshit, you’ve just talked yourself off yer tucker. Siddown an eat some with me. Cam, it’ll help. Some warmth comes back into his voice, as if he’s trying hard to hold himself back. Come on, love. You’ll bloody die if you don’t eat.

Dad, I can’t.

Rose gives him his snags and spuds and goes back to the stove.

Give yerself some.

Dad.

Put some on your plate. Go on.

Really, Dad, I—

Do it.

You don’t—

Do it, bugger you!

Rose comes to the table, puts her plate down shaky and frightened. It’s not like him, it’s just not him. She can’t smell grog on his breath, just the peppermints.

Eat it, he says. I’m not havin you starve to death in my own house. I didn’t go through a fuckin depression and a war to see my children turn their nose up at food—

Chub and Ted eat enough, those fat bastards—

Eat, Rose.

His fist is set on the table now, his fingerless chunk. Rose sees the pulse in his neck.

She spears a snag and bites it in half, chews recklessly and feels it slip down greasy and fine tasting.

All of it.

She can’t see him for waterblur now, but she eats and lets her cheeks run.

All of it.

But she’s up and running for the door with it all ramming upwards in her before she can even think about it. On the back step she feels her whole guts jerk and crank. White burns in her eyes and blood roars in her ears.

The house claps with the slamming of doors. Rose wonders if it was the food or the feeling of the library, or maybe both. She just wants to disappear.

You orright, love?

It’s Mrs Lamb coming up from the tent with a basket of beans.

Lord, you look like a shadow, Rosemary. Let me take you to a doctor. Mr Lamb’s got the truck out the front.

No, Rose gasps. No, it’s orright. Just the curse, I get like this when me time comes.

You look like your time’ll be here sooner than you think. Wait here and I’ll organize the truck.

Mrs Lamb.

Don’t move.

Rose waits till the little woman is gone right through the house and out the front before she bolts. She runs like a scarecrow, and it feels as pathetic as it looks.

Dusk

The library is empty. The walls flicker with a black, gleeful flinching of shade. A smell of shit and corruption rises out of the wood, causing the air to go fluid with sickness as the last notes of the departed boy ring in the room. And then the air stiffens. The shadows press in against themselves all of a sudden and dust motes freeze immobile in the air.

Down on the street, looking up with bloodshot eyes, a dark, woolly man stands with a stick, beating it slowly against his knee, humming under his breath until the dusk claims him and the library goes back to being vile and dark and fluid.

Night After Night

Sam Pickles walked the neighbourhood as if defying them all, daring someone to come up and try it on him. He’d kill them, he’d kill anything the way he was. Rose kept clear of him, dying before his bloody eyes. The boys had that arrogant chemical sense about them, as if they smelled a loser. And Dolly. Good old Dolly. Well the shadow was on him, the Hairy Hand of God, and he knew that being a man was the saddest, most useless thing that could happen to someone. To be alive, to be feeling, to be conscious. It was the cruellest bloody joke. In the dark, night after night, he raised his mangled fist to the sky and said things that frightened him.

Not a Brass Razoo

The warm weather came with November and Rose was glad of it. No more shameful holey tights, no more sleeping under old greatcoats for want of a decent blanket. The sun levering in through the kitchen window cheered her up so much she could hardly hear what the old girl was saying. It was noon. Dolly was up early. She had the look about her of a person who’d just been making grave decisions. It made Rose want to giggle, the way the old girl’s breasts slapped together like applause under her cotton nightie.

You know you’ll have to leave school, don’t you? Dolly was saying.

Rose felt the dreaminess evaporating.

What?

We haven’t got a brass razoo.

I wonder why. What you don’t drink, the old man gives to the bookies.

Don’t backchat me, girl, or I’ll give you one.

Rose sighed and looked out the window. She loved school. When she could avoid the humiliations of being poor, when she could sink back into the anonymous mass of the class, she did love it. She wanted to be a clever woman, to know poetry and mathematics, to go to Africa and discover something. She didn’t do too badly, either. Her marks were good, though they’d been slipping all year as she missed more and more days as the weakness came over her. It would have been easier if she had friends but she frightened kids off with her intensity, the hardness of her that no one would understand. A friend had to be true to death. Rose didn’t care for chums, she wanted sisters in blood and loyalty. She never went to the socials they organized with the boys’ school. Boys thought she didn’t laugh enough and her prettiness was turning to caricature the more she lost weight. Sometimes she thought she was dying and the thought strengthened her, cheered her up. It gave shape to things.

You’ll have to get a job. It’ll help us all out.

Oh, anything to help out, Mum. Should I still do the cooking and the cleaning, or will you be getting someone else in?

Dolly rose and came at her with a swinging fist and Rose felt a giggle coming up in her.

Leave off! the old man yelled from the doorway.

The old girl stopped.

Don’t you touch her, Dolly. Don’t you put a finger on her, or—

Or what, you weak mongrel?

The old man had his doublebreaster on, and the hat with the feather in it. The room smelled of shaving soap all of a sudden. He was dressed for the races.

Or you’ll be out on the street where you fuckin belong.

Rose got ready for a full tilt brawl. In a way it was a relief. There’d been a silence in the place for the last year or two, an aching, torniqueted quiet, and now it felt like coming to something. But Dolly just went past him and out the door. In the room next door the bedsprings groaned.

The old man smiled. Thought I was gunna get snotted, for a sec there. Get some clobber on and come to the races with me, eh? You can have a bet. I’ll buy ya bag a chips.

Rose shook her head. The old man shrugged.

Bag a lettuce leaves?

Carn Fish

Carn Fish, says Lester. Hop up and come out. It’s a nice day. You can take your shirt off and get some sun. Can’t lie on that bed all day. Carn, yev got legs and arms. And ears Fish, are you listening?

It’s a worry to see Fish like this, hardfaced, flat on his back, looking at the ceiling in a way you can never be sure about. He’s getting big now, and Lester can’t help but wonder what it’ll be like in a couple of years when the boy’s as big as him and brimming with all that aimless strength he’s storing.

When he can be got out of the room and downstairs he’ll sit at the kitchen table and spin a china bowl wah-wah-wah on the table with a joyless sort of concentration that draws all attention from around him. If you’re standing at the sink or stoking the stove or even going by the door, that wah-wahwah, the science, the balance of it, the way he can do it like that, it draws you over, and you stand and watch, see his big fingers wrap on the china and send it topping across the polished jarrah surface. But he can only do it when he’s not upset or agitated. When the boy is angry or frightened he can barely walk straight. It’s a sight, an awful sight, to see him bellowing mad. He actually looks blind with rage. He’ll stagger and stumble, lurch into doorframes and walls and not find his feet again. He’ll lie there kicking and rolling like a bull in a bog with the most bestial, furious, hurt noise a body could imagine.

It frightens Lon and even the girls get scatty when it happens. Oriel turns into a pillar box, and Lester feels his teeth trying to force each other back into his jaw. It’s a hard and unlovely thing to see, and they’re not alone in flinching from it. From out of time and space, those long glass planes of separation and magnitude, it’s impossible to witness again and again without grief and wonder. Across the planes all things still play themselves out, all fun and fear, all the silliness and quaking effort, all the bickering and twitching, all the people going about the relentless limited endeavour of human business, and the sight of your body rolling like that, bursting with voice and doubleness, reminds you that the worlds are still connected, the lives are still related and the Here still feels the pangs of history. Those who’ve gone before do not lose their feelings, only their bodies. I stare out from behind the sideboard mirror and see you there, Fish. I don’t forget.

Fish! Lester says down there. Fish, get up. Come on, boy. Please?

Wanna go in the boat with Quick.

Lester sighs and sits on the bed beside him.

Quick isn’t here, boy.

We see the stars. Up in the water.

Thank God he’s old enough still to take himself to the outhouse, Lester thinks. I couldn’t bear it if it was worse than this.

Quick’s gone away for a while, Fish.

I want the water, Lestah.

I’ll take you down to the river sometime, son, when your mother’s finished drivin Mr Clay off her mind. But even as he says it, it tastes like a lie. He knows Oriel will never let him near the river again.

In the boat. Up in the water.

Hey, listen. I know. You can have a boat in the back. That’s it, I’ll get you a boat to have here. Dyou like that, mate? With oars and everything. You can even go fishin. Waddyasay?

Fish looks at the ceiling.

What’s your name? Lester prompts.

Fish.

Fish who?

Fish Lamb.

What’s your proper name?

Samson.

Who’s your Mum?

…

Who’s your Mum?

…

Your Dad?

You, Less.

Sisters?

Red and Hattie and Lane.

Brothers?

Quick Lamb.

You forgot one.

…

You forgot one.

Fish Lamb.

One more. Small.

Lon. That Lon. The baby.

He’s eleven, Fish. Where dyou live?

Cloudstreet. The big house.

That’s right. You’re clever enough, cobber. Wanna sing a song?

The house sad, Lestah.

What? How dyou know that?

It talks.

Lester can’t suppress a chuckle.

Fish rolls onto his side and puts a hand carelessly across Lester’s thigh. The veins in his arm are dark and dense.

It hurts.

Lester kisses the boy.

Carn, I’ll spin the knife if you come down.

The knife never lies, says Fish.

Downstairs in the cool kitchen Lester spins the butter knife and watches the light of it in his son’s eyes. Oriel is banging up and down in the shop up front and Hat and Elaine are laughing at something.

This is for who’ll see Quick come in the door first, Lester says.

The blade turns and turns, slow, slower and Lester thinks — is this all there is to it? Just chance, luck, the spin of the knife? Isn’t there a pattern at all; a plan?

Me! Me! Lestah, it me!

Lester laughs without effort. He slaps Fish on the shoulder.

Okay, this is to see who’ll be Captain of the boat.

Me again.

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

Ah?

Just watch the knife.

The knife never lies.

Lester can’t help but wonder.

Ghostly Sensations

Sam’s surprised to find himself sitting on the lip of the bath tub opening and closing the razor like this. It’s amazing to him that his face should look so far past him, and all the tan gone out of it, his flesh looking like a patch of sand that seagulls have walked across. It’s cool in here, and he can smell the mortuary stink of phenyle on the floor. No, this is the big surprise, finding himself here, looking down the blade, snapping it back together like somebody altogether different. It’s odd what people will do, and what they might do, what he might do. He watches his Adam’s apple rise like a plum bob in his neck. Now look at that neck, he thinks.

Sam knows he’s not the sort to go round and put the frighteners on Gerry Clay. Well, that’s what he’s telling himself. Maybe I’m just too bloody gutless to go down there and beat the piss out of him, he thinks. But, Jesus, I’m hardly the onefisted cyclone, am I? What’m I gunna do, stump the bastard to death? Hammer im with ghostly sensations? Oh, but there’d be ways, no doubt.

A picket with a nail in the end.

A sock full of sand.

Acid, any amount.

Running the bastard over, only Sam doesn’t know how to drive a car.

Rat poison.

Arson.

Hired help.

There’s some manly comfort in knowing there’d be means and ways, but they’re the sort of comfort you get from knowing a bloke can always go back to Mother when life fails him. It’s there, alright, but the consequences will get you by the nuts.

And anyway, the anger isn’t there. That’s not what he feels. It’s more the hopelessness of knowing, some elemental, inevitable thing about it. It’s loss, that’s what. Not like losing money and friends and fingers. Geez, he thought, losin’s nothin new. I graduated with flying colours from that fuckin school, after all. But this, this losing hurts. The surprise of it, the absolute shock of it. Not to have her … doing all that, but for it to hurt like this. That’s the nasty part.

He looks at his bewildered white face in the mirror. He loves his wife. He’s forgotten all about that bit, and he looks like a man who’s woken to another century. The blade is open. He can see it through the blur of water, see it shaking, coming his way like a ray of light.

Rose stepped into the bathroom with goo on her hands and there he was. She stepped back a little to let her mind catch up. She saw the mirror tilted a little and peppered with flyspecks. Towels rammed moist to the edge of fermentation through the towel rack. A bar of Velvet like hard cheese in the basin. The old man wore a singlet and tufts of blonde hair feathered from beneath it. His grey trousers wrinkled. Stockinged feet catching lint at the heels. There was real silence here. The open blade of the razor had a cheery gleam, poised there at his unlathered neck wet from tears.

Time, he said. Time.

Rose pushed the door closed behind her and a ball of dust wheeled across the floor to his feet.

She saw the naked knuckles of his stump whitening in their hopeless effort to make a fist. He set the razor down with great care and began to breathe long and ragged.

A man needs to keep his whiskers down.

You need lather, Dad.

Rose went by him to the basin and washed her hands. She made a fair production of it; it took less time to shower. When she wiped her hands, she put her back to the wall and looked down upon him. She felt the blood doing its clock-work in her limbs. She got his direct gaze in passing and held it until it was clear he couldn’t look away. He looked small as a schoolboy, hopeless and frail like she’d never seen a person before.

It’s just that you feel sorry for yourself, sometimes, Rose. I’m a weak, stupid, useless bastard and that’s, that’s …

Rose grabbed his head and pulled it to her breast, felt his sobs like another heart against her ribcage. She felt pity and misery and hatred and she knew this was how it would always be.

He was right; he was all those things and worse, and he probably didn’t have much reason to close that cutthroat.

What are we all sposed to do? he said.

I dunno, she said, furious. I don’t know. I love you, Dad. You can’t do it to me. You can’t. I’d piss on your grave, I tell you I would.

Oh, you’re a hard bastard, he said with a sobbing laugh. You’re the fuckin business you are.

My oath, she said, kissing his head, steeling herself against tears, against weakness, against the great blackness behind her eyes.

You’re the one, he said, getting himself back. You’re the one, orright. You’re a good girl.

Yeah, Rose thought, I’m sixteen and I don’t eat and I fall down dizzy twice a day and now I’m pulled outta school. Oh, I’m the one.

You’ve grown up in a hurry, he said, pulling back from her and wiping his eyes on his singlet.

I wasn’t in a hurry.

But you’ve grown up.

Keep me in school.

There’s no money, love. We haven’t got a nail to hang our arses on.

It was warm in there now and the afternoon light had a twisting traffic of motes to bear.

Don’t hate me, he said.

I don’t. I pity you, Dad. Because you still love her.

And you don’t?

Oh, I stopped that years ago. It wouldn’t be myself I’d use a razor on.

Rose. People are … who they are.

Then they should change! People should do things for themselves, not wait for everyone else to change things for em!

You can’t beat your luck, love.

No, you have to be your luck. There’s nothin else, there’s just you.

Sam smiled, shaking his head. You’ll go a long way.

Yes, she thought. Africa. Paris. New York. A long way from this stinking old house and the smell of death and sick. Like a shot. One day.

The Vanilla Victory

Late in January, as summer got its teeth in and the front lawns of Cloudstreet turned the colour of underfelt and the stretches of new macadam began to bubble and boil, Oriel Lamb wiped out G. M. Clay with vanilla icecream. His morale was shot already, but she sent him packing with Lester Lamb’s Amazing Vanilla Double Cream. She hounded the ice man till he began to think he was on the payroll himself. She bought in supplies of milk like a company quartermaster. No one rested in the evenings as mosquitoes crowded against the screens in the breathless dark. They turned the churns, skimmed, sluiced, measured and poured. The girls bitched over whose turn it was to be at the ice chest stacking the tins to set. Hat was having time off to go dancing with a bloke up from the country and Oriel was working her hard to pay for lost time. Oriel Lamb liked the idea that their icecream contained a few parts sweat to each gallon of milk. Lester tested and tooled about, touching up his Amazing Vanilla Double Icecream signs. He’d rather not have been at war, but it was nice to see his name in print at any rate, and the nervous thrill it gave him to be backing a winner was enough to egg him on.

The people of Cloudstreet and beyond bought the stuff before it had time to set. Even before Christmas they’d gotten a taste for it and you could see people walking beneath the Jacarandas in the cool light of morning unrolling their West Australian with the deliberation of people trying to keep their minds off icecream. Neighbours would pass in the street, nod and grumble about Menzies and Korea, careful not to look each other in the eye and give away what they were really thinking. The Subiaco Junior Cricket team could not be found one Saturday morning, forfeiting a big match, and no one needed an explanation if they lived within a mile of Cloudstreet. Oriel Lamb began taking orders a week in advance. Every gallon of icecream bought entitled customers to tuppence off the price of sliced ham, a penny off the price of spuds, and a discount on cornflour to be personally negotiated.

Lester Lamb found himself bringing two truckloads of goods back from the metro market each dawn. Cloudstreet became an official tram stop out on the main road, and ladies swung down with wicker baskets right outside G. M. Clay-Ex AIF to walk down the blistering street and join the queues. They paid in advance, they fainted on the verandah, they pleaded. Lon sold lemonade to those waiting in the sun, and the Pickleses’ cocky shrieked Fair Dinkum regular as a timepiece.

When Oriel Lamb saw a woman buy eight quid’s worth of icecream one morning, a husband’s full weekly pay, she knew that the battle was over and it was time for law and order before looting broke out. G. M. Clay closed up shop and Lester Lamb tried to scale down production without immediate success. The iceman wept, as though he’d been relieved of his post. Angry letters, unstamped and nasty as a note from a church elder, turned up in the mailbox. But in the end Oriel called a halt and put up signs: NO MORE ICECREAM. CHEAP HAM.

It was January 19, 1951. The Lambs slept the sleep of the victorious.

In the morning Oriel went down to Cambridge Street, picking her way past enquiring shoppers, to see G. M. Clay. She’d decided to let him stay on. After all, he had a family to feed. By way of reparations, he would be compelled to paint out the Ex AIF part of his sign, and thereafter no more need be said. But when she knocked on the doors, only Mrs Clay was there.

What do you want? Mrs Clay looked at her in disbelief. She had the eyes of a weeper, and the morning light was not kind.

I came to talk to your husband, factually.

Well, e’s gone. That’ll deprive youse all of a laugh.

Where’s he gone to?

It’s a big state. Anywhere he likes, I’d say. He’s got all the money that was left. No flies on him, eh. Mrs Clay gave out a bitter little laugh. Her hands shook in her apron pockets.

I was here to offer him a settlement. What’s he left you to live on?

Nothin. Not a bent penny.

How long’ll he stay away?

Oh, he’s off for good. Told me to marry Father O’Leary if I needed a bit of—

The children?

Mrs Clay sobbed. She sounded like a dog choking on a string of bacon fat.

You need a job, Oriel Lamb said. She shifted on her sandals like a fighter. Come and work with us. There’s room in the house. You could bring the children.

Mrs Clay sagged against the door jamb and a squadron of sweaty kids hauled by on rattling bikes. Oriel Lamb watched her shuddering and sucking in breath every now and then.

Go away, said Mrs Clay. Just go now.

I’m offering you a job, a home.

And I’m telling you to go to Hell!

I’m … I’m sorry, said Oriel Lamb who had not said those words since 1911.

Go to Hell! Mrs Clay slammed the doors to.

Oriel Lamb walked home the long way, taking it in. Not for a moment had she thought … not by a long way … There was the offer and it was refused and a grey shame settled on her in the hard summer morning light.

There would have to be food parcels delivered daily.

A weekly allowance.

She’d see to it right away. She’d not let it pass. This was a sin. It was her, because of Quick. This was what the heart did to you. This was what happened when you lost a son, another son, and now she knew how it must have felt for that Sam Pickles waking one morning to see the bandages, to feel the tingling but know that there was only a space.

By the embankment, as the trains swept by, Oriel Lamb wept the sound of a slaughteryard and the grass bowed before her.

Mrs Lamb Weeps

Rose Pickles sometimes thought maybe she’d steal Fish Lamb and run away with him. She thought of the places they could hide outside Perth, little fishermen’s shacks behind dunes and estuary curves that they could sneak supplies into to live a quiet life in love. She still watched him out in the yard as he rowed the old dory hull with two sticks and looked up into the sun as though it was a pool of water. She’d meet him on the landing and breathe a kiss onto his ear in passing. She’d watch him standing at the window snapping his braces against his chest. He was gentle and soft and … But she knew it was a stupid, silly dream she had. Fish was barely more than a baby in the head and his looks were going as he got older. In a couple of years he’d be big and fat and brutish. Yes, he’d make terrible scenes in public places and have to be locked in his room, maybe even strapped to his bed. She wasn’t stupid enough to think it wouldn’t happen.

But look at him down there on the front fence with the hot easterly in his long hair. Didn’t it take half your sense away and all your breath?

Rose saw Mrs Lamb come blubbering down the street. Crying. Like a person. Mrs Lamb crying. Rose saw her fall against the gate grabbing at Fish who didn’t move, who just looked across the road where no one was, straight as a board with his mother’s arms around him. Oh, it hurt to watch, even after the surprise, it hurt to see.

Rose went downstairs exhausted with emotion, tired, brittle with feeling. She sat in the kitchen for an hour looking up jobs in the paper.

And then her own mother, missing all night, came in dressed to the gills and bleeding.

Bad, Worse, Worstest

Dolly stood at the sink and ran the water. She put the dishrag to her face and set her teeth. That was something, still having the teeth. Through the kitchen window she could see, with one eye at least, the fruit trees and the shadeless brown stretches, the tin fence and the powerful calm.

Good morning, she said to Rose.

Rose rustled her West Australian.

Dolly felt the hard chill between them. She turned, wringing blood out of the rag, and let her daughter see what Gerry Clay had given her as a parting gift. The whole side of her face was the colour of a stormcloud and rising angrier by the minute. Even now her left eye was closed. Her nose and lip bled a little still, and the knuckles of the hand holding up the rag were skinned raw. Rose looked up and took it in without expression. She didn’t even seem suprised, and in a way Dolly was grateful that there’d be no hysterics. There wasn’t much of a girl left in Rose, she knew. Dolly didn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed.

Want some ice?

Hngh! Got any icecream? Dolly felt tears coming and she was burning with a wild, unfocused hatred.

Rose went to the icebox and Dolly saw the brown sticks of her legs as she chipped at the block.

Ta.

She wrapped the ice in the rag and held it over her eye and before long her whole body seemed to have cooled, while all the time Rose looked on without moving. The old man’s cockatoo screeched out on the back step.

Ah, what a mess.

Rose said nothing. Dolly made her way to the table and sat down. It was no great shock that things should go from bad to worse to worstest. Right now, she couldn’t feel a thing, and this had to be the lousiest day of her life.

I used to wish you wouldn’t grow up to hate me, Rose. That’s what I used to think.

Rose’s lips were set together, as though she was exerting great control over herself.

And then you grow up an hate me anyway. Well, yer have yer hopes.

Rose folded the newspaper, then folded it again.

Hoping is what people do when they’re too lazy to do anything else.

People can’t do everything they wanna.

They just want some things more than others.

Dolly sighed.

Okay, so you hate me, let’s leave it at that. I’m sore.

Did you hate your mother?

Dolly got up. I need to lie down a while.

You didn’t answer.

Me whole face is fallin off.

I’m gonna love my children, I swear to God.

Lookit this. This is what you get from men.

Some men. Other men!

All men!

Dolly didn’t have the fight in her. Any other time she’d have been across the room, tearing and slashing, but she felt weak and giddy.

You shouldn’t hate me, she said, turning for the door. It doesn’t help. Ya shouldn’t do it.

Like you say, people can’t do everything they wanna. Anyway, I’m used to it now, Rose said, as Dolly went out the door, and then suddenly she was shouting: And besides, I’ve gotten to like it. Hating you is the best part of bein alive!

Climbing the stairs, Dolly had the old question come back. Bad mother, or no mother at all? Christalmighty, she should know the answer to that one by now.

A Closed Shop

The Lambs closed up shop and stayed indoors. The house was quiet. Outside cicadas rattled and the grass burnt in the summer sun.

We’ll go crabbin, said Lester, that’s what we’ll do. Down at the river.

River! said Fish, dropping his spinning bowl in a splintering crash.

Carn, love, said Lester. Orry? A feed of crabs’ll cheer you up. And the girls could do with a break.

Carn, said Hat.

Carn, said Elaine.

Carn, said Red.

Oriel poked dead limbs into the fire and sparks rose in the air like stars being born. Fish had cried himself to sleep tethered with a dressing gown cord to an old Moreton Bay fig and she could see the side of his face in the firelight. Whiskers had begun to show on his jaw. She smelt river mud and mothballs in the blankets spread on the grass. Mosquitoes hung around whining like an electric current. Out on the water Lester and the girls were laughing and the lamp swung wildly with the city lights steady behind.

She knew this scene. Her life always came back to the river. A long time ago she’d been baptized in a river. She’d kissed Lester Lamb by the river the first time long before that. And that night, that long, horrid night by the estuary at Margaret, when her men had walked on water and the lamp had gone out, that’s what had brought them here to this life with one son gone and one missing and a feeling in your chest that you didn’t know yourself anymore.

Whacko! Lester yelled, hoiking another crab into the tub. This is livin, girls.

The water was only shin deep. It was cool and the sandy bottom was ridged with tidal corduroy across which the big blue mannas were manoeuvring. Out here you could smell the fire on the beach. The sky was like a reflection of night water.

One more, Dad, and that’s it, said Hat, you’re fillin the tub.

Lester turned and saw in the light Red held up that it was true. The tin bathtub he had floating behind, tied to a belt loop, was nearly down to the gunwales and alive with the groping and grovelling of claws.

Orright. Last one.

I’m tired, said Elaine, shouldering her scoop net.

Red moved up alongside him with the lamp and Hat moved vigilantly with her elbows out, scoop ready. Lester was proud of the way he could bluff a crab one way and scoop him neatly in a back-handed gesture and send it flying into the tub.

The last crab of the night was a big gnarlclawed job, and Lester was caught off balance by all the competition. He scooped deep and tossed wide and Hat got the crab on the chest, its claw fixing firmly to her nipple beneath the old blouse. Lester could never have been prepared for the words she had to say. She jogged on the spot brushing at the squirming brooch of a thing until Lester swung the scoop to hit her fair in the chest. Hat went back in the water and the crab went back home.

When Red and Elaine and Lester got her upright, the four of them stood and listened to Oriel bellowing from the beach.

That crab was a rapist, said Red.

Red! Lester was shocked.

It’s disgustin, Red said. Even they’re the same. Ugh, males!

Hat rubbed herself and said a word that Lester would not repeat.

Oriel broke dead wood over her knee and threw it onto the flames. There was bread and butter, brown vinegar, chopped onions and tomatoes, and a drum steaming with boiled crabs. They ate, crushing glossy red claws, dragging long strands of meat from legs, and they laughed and watched the fire until Lester broke into song.

In Dublin’s fair city

Where the girls are so pretty

I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone—

Oh, here he goes.

She wheeled a wheelbarrow

Through streets broad and narrow

Crying ‘Cockles and mussels alive alive-oh’

Lester—

‘Alive, alive-oh

Alive, alive-oh-oh’

Fish called in his sleep. Quick? Quick?

Wherever the River Goes

With the cord of her dressing gown she ties you to the tree, Fish, even while you sleep because she knows what you’ll do. You don’t even see her, do you? But she sees you, boy, and she knows what you’ll be dreaming of here by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful the river. There’s always someone with their fingers in the belt loops of your pants. You’re aching with it while those dark angels laugh on the water without you. The river. Remember, wherever the river goes every living creature which swarms will live, and there will be many fish, for this water goes there, that the waters of the sea will become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes.

A dark man comes flying by your tree, you see the white of his eyes and tingle with rumours of glory. The city flickers and warbles along the banks of the Swan and in their homes, along their bars and fences the people go at it as if now is all there is, grabbing, holding, loading up for the short run, others before them, millions behind, not knowing that now is always and never, as from and to will be always and never.

I’m behind the water, Fish, I’m in the tree. I feel your pulse and see you dreaming of Quick out there in the wheat, and I see you coming. Your time will come, Fish, you’ll have a second of knowing, a man for a moment, and then it won’t matter because you’ll be me, free to come and go, free to puzzle and long and love, free of the net of time.

They’re eating, Fish. And Quick is shooting, and back home, tingling himself at the black man passing overhead like an owl, the pig is singing.

The Dark, the Dark

The pig lay in his grovel hole with the full darkness swimming over him. Up at the house on the lights out empty side there were flickers at the windows. The filthy porker stirred and caught the scent. His limbs quavered and his head went up. Curtains swished up there and that stink forced itself out through the cracks in the weatherboards. The hens shook and shat, shifting on the perch, and the rooster threw himself at the wire. A dog howled somewhere away off across wind that went slushy with the sounds of birds flying. The sound of choking and laughing up there in the empty Lamb side of Cloudstreet. The pig got to his feet and went quietly but unflaggingly: Keethro mutila gogma seak seak do, asra do, kum asra do …

The rooster crowed uncertainly and a Pickles slipper came lobbing out of the dark from across the fence, landing with a crash against the dunny door.

Girl on the Switch

Rose Pickles discovered that she really could talk. The moment the big rumplebosomed lady conducting the interview finished her question, Rose knew she had it in the bag. She was off like a shot. The talk that came out of her mouth was like a spiritual inspiration: she was snappy, polite, discreet, accurate and cheerful. Around her she could hear the emporium’s turbine hum. Even as she spoke she knew she’d be joining that sound, and she’d never felt so capable in all her life. After the interview she excused herself, fought her way through a battalion of naked mannequins and threw up in the toilet.

She started in the morning.

You should start as an office girl, said Mrs Tisborn, work your way up. But you can talk and you can think, and I’m prepared to try you out on the switchboard. Don’t be grateful and don’t be late. You may learn to be grateful in time, but you may never learn to be late.

Each morning, before the heat had hold of the day, Rose got up and lit the rocket heater in the bathroom, ate a piece of toast or a carrot, and took a shower. Next door was quiet that first week. Normally there’d be the drag of chairs and the little woman’s shouts, the whole crew thumping down the stairs to a dawn breakfast, but this week they were subdued. The shop was open again but things were calm. At the steamy mirror Rose nicked odd dabs of this and that from her mother’s makeup box and pulled on the only decent skirt and blouse she had. Her shoes were scuffed and daggy and she had no stockings to wear, but no one was going to make her wear those awful black tights again with the darning scars all over them like the swamp plague. The first morning she thought she looked fair, but the moment she walked into Bairds she knew she looked like a sick dog’s breakfast and she’d have to crack hardy till pay day.

She got the train into Perth station. In the cramped carriages men smelled of serge and peppermints; their hair was all at the top of their heads and their ears stood out like taxi doors. The women smelled of cologne and stale sweat even this early and they seemed tired and distracted. Rose saw the veins strangling in their calves, saw how their dresses dragged up, and the way the older women’s feet seemed gnarled and disturbed by shoes whose platform soles looked better suited to knocking in nails than walking on.

West Perth rolled by and then the dark verandahs of Roe Street. From up on the rails the city looked choked. Cars, trolley-buses, surging workers, the elbow to elbow clutter of commerce. It didn’t have the plain, windy spaciousness of Geraldton’s main street, but Geraldton was barely a town compared to this. Rose liked the idea of sending herself into this furious movement every morning, and besides Geraldton had just become a childhood memory.

She crossed into Forrest Place where all the men with pinned-back sleeves and crutches and RSL badges were gathering to bitch and sigh together. The GPO was sombre and imposing. Murray Street bristled with commencement of business. As Rose went into Bairds the overhead fans were turning already and floor staff were flurrying to beat the supervisor’s opening hour walk. It was a great womanly adventure, it seemed.

Behind the Staff Only door Mrs Tisborn was waiting. Rose went in and surrendered gladly to her training.

The switchboard was a fearsome altar of a thing that first week. Mrs Tisborn stood behind and hissed instructions while Rose searched for the right jack, the right hole, the right cord, the right number, the right moment. The headset clamped her skull and the mornings went on as though time was fiddling the books, but Rose learnt quickly and it wasn’t long before Mrs Tisborn’s violet breath was receding. Near lunchtime on the second day she could relax enough to comprehend who else was in the room, and at the break she met the Girls on the Switch — Darleen, Merle, and Alma.

Ole Teasebone given yer the runaround this mornin, love? What wuz yer name again?

Rose.

Yull be right. Yull put a hurdle in er girdle, won’t she loves? Eh, girls?

Rose found it difficult to distinguish Darken, Merle or Alma by voice alone because they sounded so alike. They spoke with a cackling kind of pegnosed lilt and laughed like they were being dug in the ribs by a shovel. They were roughmouthed and irritable, with the eyes of rouged cattle. They showed her where to get the best pie and chips in Murray Street, the very thought of which kept her off lunch in general, and they introduced Rose to the addiction of listening in. They were silly, dizzy scrubbers, and she liked them. They were the grousest ladies she’d ever met.

On the train home that Friday, she missed her station because something awful had come into her mind. The switchboard girls reminded her of her mother. The only thing that helped was their bovine bad looks and the fact that they laughed a lot. Just plug em in an shut up, Rose, that’s all yer need to know.

Yeah, she thought. That’s all I should need to know.

On pay day she gave the old man half her pay and he laughed and gave it back. On Saturday morning at teabreak, Rose bought herself a pair of Nightingale Seamless Stockings and a jar of Helena Rubenstein’s Estrogenic Hormone Cream. On the way home, the train carriage wasn’t big enough for her.

Geoffrey Birch Came Calling

Geoffrey Birch from Pemberton came calling for Hat. He was handsome and dull, with knees as big as soup plates, and Hat thought he was simply gorgeous. He took her to dances in his FJ Holden. He laughed at all of Hat’s wisecracking jokes. He loved her.

It disgusted Red, who imagined them smooching in that FJ down by the river. Elaine was sad and jealous. She liked having Hat around and she wanted a man.

Oriel flicked the shop lights off and on at midnight Fridays so Cloudstreet looked like a ship beacon and the FJ looked like a marauding enemy vessel.

Lester started putting a few bob aside for a wedding. He wondered if Geoffrey Birch knew he was courting the marble champion of the world.

And Hat? Hat was away with the fairies.

Jacks and Jills

Shove the jacks into the jills, says Alma at the switch. Rose blushes and laughs.

Good morning, Bairds, can I help you?

Bairds, good morning, sir, can I help you?

Can I help you?

Bairds.

Hello? Hello?

One moment.

I’m sorry, this is Bairds. Oh, you want beds!

Putting you through.

Jack into Jill! yells Darleen, and they all crack up.

Gawd, love, why don’t you feed yerself Good morning, Bairds.

Merle’s in love with a dwarf Bairds, good morning.

Good morning, Bairds yer a liar, she’s lyin.

Putting you through he’s shorter than Mum’s pastry!

Short ones’ve got fat thingies Good morning, Bairds.

Well she’s hardly the eye of the needle One moment madam.

Youse sheilas are gettin fouler every year Can you hold?

He’s never asked me, thank you, sir.

Disgustin Bairds.

Bairds.

Bairds.

Exhausted from not laughing, Rose ploughs through every day with a crazy happiness. She takes home pay and the pavement smell of the city. She puts on a bit of flesh. She eats. The world looks different.

Two Old Girls

One night at the Anzac Club while Lester was going dispiritedly through his routine, Oriel met a widow. You could tell she was a survivor, a leftbehind, by the far off look in her eyes and the way her tall, gaunt frame bent forward. Oriel could spot weakness and need a mile off.

Do you believe in Hell, Mrs Lamb? said the woman filling the urn.

Oriel gasped. It was like being struck in the face. Who are you?

Beryl Lee, Mrs. Hubby went down with HMAS Perth. I come down here to—

You’re lonely.

Beryl Lee subsided like a folding chair. Tears rolled down her face from her wild fargone eyes. Oriel held her close, felt the woman’s eyelashes against her shoulder.

You strike me as a Christian woman, sobbed Beryl Lee. That’s what I thought. That’s what they say.

If ever I should strike you Beryl, you’d think different.

Oh, Lawd, oh, Lawd.

People stood and watched. Even Lester gave up and stared from the stage. Two old girls, short and tall, hugging like kids.

Hell?

Hell is like this. It’s this cowering in the bottom of the cellar far from the smouldering trapdoor, between pumpkins and tubs of apples. It’s the smell of a karri forest rising into the sky and the bodies of roos and possums returning to the earth as carbon and the cooking smell falling through the dimness like this. Trees go off like bombs out in the light and the cauldron boils and spits all about. Hell is being six years old and wondering why you’re alone in the dark and no one else has come down yet. It’s the sound of your own breathing, the salty stink of your bloomers, the way the walls have warmed, the flickering cracks, the screams like a thousand nails being drawn, the hammering, throttling noises, the way the rats are panicking and throwing themselves against things. Hell is that shallowbreathing trance you slip into, the silence that goes on and on until it’s grown outside you and fallen on the world. Hell is when you hear noises in the world again, though nothing in yourself, and men’s voices make your throat cry so raw that light bolts into the cellar with a gout of ash and charcoal and the burning taste of air. Hell is when you’re dragged out past the black bones and belt buckles that are the others who never came down, out onto the powder white earth beneath the sky green as bile and swirling with vapours. Hell is the sight of your father’s face streaked with the ride, the twitching cast on him, the registration of facts. Hell. It’s only you left, and you’re awake.

Oriel woke and it wasn’t quite dawn. She lay there in the dimness until her heart settled back a little. With the edge of the blanket she wiped her eyes. Without washing, without making out her daily work plan, she left the tent ungowned and ran to the house, gumbling along like a spud crate to go room to room in the dim house checking that all of them were still there, that it wasn’t only her left again. All of them breathing in their beds, helpless and sweet in sleep. And Quick’s empty bed where she sat thinking while Fish snored.

Oh, how she hated to be a survivor, to be left. It had been a lonely girlhood for Oriel, even when her father remarried. She was a leftover from some other time, an embarrassment to him, a rival for her stepmother who wasn’t much older than her. But she learnt to be strong; she grew it in herself. When her halfbrother Bluey, who she loved like blood, left her on the dock at Albany, climbing the gangway and shouting back over his shoulder: Don’t worry, Or, I’ll bring a Turk back on the end of me bayonet! she knew she was pushing further into the kingdom of survivorhood. Her father was often away buying horses and there’d be only Oriel and her stepmother and the children. She grew steel in her.

Or.

Either, Or.

She could never find the choices. Even when Lester came by, there was no alternative. Things had gone so far, so much had not been said, the smouldering silence of the house was not something that could be chosen any longer. Besides, he made her laugh the way Bluey had. He was a character, a dag, and pretty soon she loved him.

Oriel went downstairs to where Lester slept. He snored like a teachest being dragged across an iron roof. There was no malice in that man, you had to give him that. She still loved him, the Randolph Scott look of him. Oh yes, yes, there was a Hell, there were Hells abounding, and if there wasn’t a Heaven then there was this, the sleeping, the helpless, those that were your own. She was a sinner, she knew, and proud, and angry at God to the point of hatred, but she knew that she’d made a fortress for her own and for whoever sought shelter there, and that it was good, worthy, and priceless.

Which gave her an idea.

Beryl.

Ted Shoots Through

Ted Pickles shoots through. He takes nothing with him but a comb and all his hormones. His mother weeps and puts a bottle of muscat through an upstairs window. Girls in tight sweaters and heels come by and Dolly screams at them.

Chub doesn’t notice.

Rose doesn’t care.

Sam doesn’t say.

And Then Comes Autumn, and Behind it, Winter

And then comes autumn, and behind it, winter when everything happens without anyone expecting it.

Beryl Lee moves in. Oriel senses that Hat will be gone soon and she’ll be shorthanded, so she offers Beryl a job. There is no shouting, no refusal. Oriel moves her into Quick’s room, moves Fish downstairs with Lester. Beryl mutters Hail Marys at all hours and it sounds like termites. She tears down Quick’s horrid magazine pictures, but at night they come back through the walls and dance.

Some nights Dolly wakes to the strangest hum in her ear. Rain comes with winter.

A postcard comes from Quick. I’m alright, it says, Love Quick. The postmark is smudgy. The picture on the card is of Wave Rock, that grey curling wall like a petrified lava breaker. The Lambs stare at it and keep their thoughts to themselves.

Lester adds up his age one evening and is surprised how old he is. I’m not young, he thinks. My whole life isn’t ahead of me. He buys a camera off a Balt at the growers’ market to make a record of things.

Chub Pickles announces he wants to be a jockey. At sixteen he weighs fourteen stone already. He likes to eat pork fat before it’s cooked, and he often casts a hungry eye at the pig across the fence.

The pig grumbles and shits irritably.

Geoffrey Birch pops the question and Hat goes spare.

The house sighs in the night but no one lets themselves listen. Except Fish.

The Man Who Came Knocking

Sam watched the flesh grow back onto his daughter. It was something to see, truly something. She looked like Ingrid Bergman with her woollen suit and that little cocked hat. It was the shadow coming good on him. When you were losing races like he was, with a kind of awesome genius for it, when you handled money all day, watched it go out by the bale smelling like schoolbooks and then had all weekend to distribute your own, magnanimously, to every bookie and crook on the track, you knew you had to be truly gifted with bad luck. Lately he’d surrendered to the notion that his would be an unlucky life, unlucky in epic proportions, and that any turn of good fortune would be a bolt from the blue. Expect bad luck, was his new creed, and now and then you’ll be surprised. It saved him from a lot of disappointment, and when he saw things like Rose these days, he went as silly as a two bob watch.

Things were quiet and uneventful in a losing way that winter. And then some big, hairy bastard came knocking. Sam thought it was a bookie’s man come to collect a debt, one of those minor outstandings he had brooding here and there. He stood there inside the flyscreen door and watched the way the fella’s gut rolled like a floundering zeppelin across his belt. The man who came knocking had a blue singlet on and wiry black hair growing down from his back along his arms and hands. Sam wondered if maybe it was the union but he couldn’t recall the last union man he’d seen who looked like a worker. He felt the rush of wind. The screen door snapped back in his face and he sat abruptly to watch the blood pour into his lap.

My daughter’s up the duff, Pickles, and your boy’s gettin married. Orright?

Widge wum? Sam said, pinching off his nose.

I’ve only got one.

Boy, boy. Widge boy are we talkid about?

Ted, Todd, whoever.

You bedder get the righd wum.

Sam felt himself rising by the lapels. The flywire was floating free of the door.

Don’t play funny buggers with me, mate. Don’t try comin the raw prawn here an now, orright? I’m not askin you any questions an I’m not makin requests here, get my drift, you cop my wallop?

That’s wod id was. I’ll lie down now.

Next door Sam heard thumping. He’d have a word about it tomorrow. It was eight o’clock at night already and still that Lester was thumping about. Or maybe it was his own headache starting up.

Sam crashed against the coat-rack and it toppled to the floor with him. Doors started opening and heads appeared. Even the thumping stopped.

You’re comprehendin me import here, I take it?

Well, he was from somebody’s union, talking like that. Sam saw the Lamb door open and bring forth Lester Lamb with his bloody meat cleaver.

Shite! the man who’d come knocking said. Let’s go easy in this particular vicinity. Shite!

Sam’s brain bubbled into life: He’s a mad bastard — be careful. Look at this, for Chrissake! Sam held up his stump and the man’s eyes grew in his face.

You just tell me where you live, add I’ll be roud wid my boy. We’ll sord it out.

But the man who’d come knocking had already backed through the hole in the screen door and was shuffling back across the verandah in his workboots. A wind was blowing. It seemed to sweep him away into the night.

He a friend of yours, Sam? Lester asked.

No, but you are, sport. Take a week’s free rent from me.

Pardon?

What would you’ve done with that hacker there? I mean if you were hard put.

I’m choppin ham bones, Lester said. For soup. If I was hard put for what? It’s cheaper than a bone saw.

Sam guffawed. Must be me with the brain damage.

The door’ll need fixin, said Lester.

Yep. I reckon so. Listen, can I borrer that cleaver sometime?

Course. What you cuttin?

Thinkin about what them Jews do. You know. Bar miss fart, whatever it is.

Circumcision? Lester went yellow. You?

No, not me, cobber. My eldest. And I tell ya, me hand’ll be none too steady. He’ll be sittin down to piss.

Lester wiped the blade on his apron.

Don’t have children, mate. Whatever you do.

No, Lester said, turning to leave. What?

The Big Country

All day Lester’s been remembering a small thing from childhood. He can’t think why, but it sets his limbs tingling. In his head it plays through and through. It’s dark and his back is pelted with rain. He holds onto his father’s ears and grips his neck between his knees. Water swirls all about, invisible in the night. His father hums above the torrent and a light swings somewhere ahead. Out in the darkness a voice is crying.

Lester goes back to breaking up bones for tomorrow’s lunch-time soup special. Fish comes in singing:

I woke, the dungeon flamed wif light,

My chains fell off, my heart was free-e-ee

I ro-o-ose, went fo-ororth, and

fo-o-ollowed Thee!

He walks round the kitchen putting his hands on things and looking at nothing in particular. He sings on to the end and begins again. Lester watches the gone look in his son’s eyes and finds himself joining in.

My chains fell off,

My heart was free,

I rose went forth and followed Thee!

Fish lapsed into silence.

Hello, boy.

Can I cook?

I’m busy makin the soup, Fish.

I wanna.

You ready for bed?

Nup.

You washed?

Nup.

You better get ready then.

Lemme cook?

I can’t stop. Listen, I’ll give you a recipe and you go from there.

Fish looks blankly at him.

Lester flusters up over the big soup pot: I’ll draw pictures. The pictures … here, come here, where’s that blasted pencil. What’s this?

Egg.

This?

Bottle.

Milk, alright. Jug of milk.

Milk.

This?

Bag.

That’s flour. Here, this white stuff.

Do the picture. Fish do the picture. Like yous.

That’s right, like I do it every day.

Lester gives him a bowl and a whisk and tries to leave him to it. Fish sings, tuneless and quiet, concentrating on the pictures. He fluffs flour about, gets butter all over his shirt, can’t keep his lips away from the milk jug. It’s me, thinks Lester: he’s being me. He’s watched me all this time.

Fish gets a big greasy dollop into a heart tin and looks back at Lester who’s forgotten the soup.

It’s a bonzer, says Fish, taking the business right down to Lester’s habitual finishing words.

It surely is, boy. We’ll put it in the oven while you have a bath.

Do stories?

I used to be crippled with stories, Lester thinks, loaded and hopeless with em. Now I can’t work up a decent joke.

Cmon, then, I’ll tell you stories while you’re in the bath.

The farm ones, Lestah.

Lester wipes his hands on his apron and pulls it off. He tidies down the bench, leads the boy down into the bathrom. He doesn’t remember the farm, he thinks sadly; a shame to have been robbed of it. He runs the water, throws busted packing cases into the fire box of the heater and undresses the boy. Fish smiles in his face. There’s bumfluff on his cheeks now. Lord, he’s nearly a man. There’s pulpy flesh growing on him; he’s fatting up and needs bigger trousers. At least he’s in long pants now. It’s less awful than it was.

Fish giggles in the water, balls afloat. The water barely reaches his waist. Any deeper and he’ll try to get under it. He can’t be left alone. Lester kneels by the tub with a bar of Velvet and a backache.

Stories!

Orright. Well. Well. Lester sighs. The skin on the back of his arms is flaky with cancers. He can’t think of anything.

Lest! Lestah!

There was this boy—

Lessst!

Orright, there was this boy. And he lived on a farm. Actually, this is me, it was a grape farm—

Lestaah! Fish juggled in the water. Lester soaped his pink chest and felt the tension in him, the impatience.

Orright, there was this boy called Fish.

Hah! Whacko!

And he lived on a farm with only his brother—

Quick! Whacko, Lest!

Yeah, with Quick. Everyone else was gone on holidays. One night it started to rain, see, and it came down like all of Heaven was tryin to get in the roof. It rained and rained and rained until the creek bust it banks. Pretty soon there was water in the kitchen an water in the lounge an water under the beds. So Quick wakes Fish up and tells him they gotta go. They have to try and make it into town. Now Quick is bigger than Fish. He helps him into his clothes and holds his hand as they wade out into the water. There’s rain peltin down and it’s dark. Quick puts Fish up on his shoulders and he strides out into the water. It’s a swirling torrent—

Yeah. And the water. Yairs. They go in the water. To the big country. Yeah.

Lester loses his breath. Fish leans back with his head against the end of the tub looking dreamy and gone. No, thinks Lester, that’s not what happens.

An people there for em, says Fish. There’s people there.

Oh, God.

Fish looks smiling upon him.