Cloudstreet

  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 shadow
s 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.