Run that past them, would you dear? An old pinkhaired woman said.
Rose stood among the men and heard Toby giggling nervously. She wanted to go. She was thinking of ways already.
Ah yairs, someone was saying, Katherine and Henrietta are alright in their way, but what we need is more Tobys, don’t you think?
Harumph!
Yairs.
My oath.
I mean I particularly like that bit where you liken the fallen beast to the Korean soldier.
Toby looked ashen: Um?
Ah yairs, and the stuff about the old barbed wire bridle.
Rose looked at Toby and sensed him knowing it. His lips gone almost brown in contrast to his face. He began to giggle. He’s never written a poem about barbed wire or war in his life, thought Rose. He’s a gossip columnist who writes sex poems.
Thought of a funny, Raven?
Toby tittered in some air: Did you like the bit where he whispers Homer in her ear?
General silence, then a slow rumble of amusement.
That’s it, thought Rose, knowing Toby knew it too. It’s a balls-up. They’ve got the wrong man, wrong poem. She wanted to go now. She couldn’t bear to see him humiliated like this, but neither could she be seen with him. She felt it so clearly here of all places; she despised him as much as pitied him.
You should let us have some comic work, Raven, said George Headley.
Toby’s giggle mounted another sentence: Well, well, well, actually I’ve been thinking of some very comic, funny, funny material inspired only today. Rose, tell them about where you live. Tell them about the lady in the backyard who lives in a tent. Tell them about the slow boy you used to love.
Rose shook in sick surprise. Toby went on in desperation.
You see, fellows, I’m working up this grotesquerie about … well there’s this shopgirl and a famous writer and …
Short story?
Oh, oh, oh longer.
Sounds promising.
Tell them Rose. Tell them!
Rose dropped the tray, felt the shower of bubble and glass fizz as she went. She went past elephant’s feet and dinky triangle sandwiches, through the deep darkness of the house while poor desperate Toby called, Tell them about my poems! Men roared and whaled with laughter and Rose heard Toby’s terrible miserable giggle outside the front door, across the glittering lawns and down the street as she went coatless and blank into the cold. The river was down there, black and moving. The river.
Silhouettes
Quick couldn’t get going again. After he got back with his family, he found that Cloudstreet had a hold on him, and though he couldn’t think why he should stay in the place, half falling down as it was now, empty of children and rarely the scene of much fun at all, with the old girl muttering to herself out in the tent half the night, the old man inside telling lies and glooming everyone up by trying to sound cheerful, Lon growing pimples and a snarl, Red with her beak always in a book confirming the frailties of Homo Sapiens, Elaine pinching her temples with a migraine and continuing a five year engagement with some bloke he’d never actually met, he kept his old room and helped out in the shop, drove the Chev which sounded these days like a chaffcutter, and watched the summer come, then autumn, winter, spring.
The kitchen floor kept him busy. One morning, the whole mob came down for breakfast and the floor had a list on it that caused the lighter chairs to slide down the hill into the stovefront and the sink. Quick got under the house with a couple of truck jacks to crank and pack it, but next day the slope was back. He jacked and packed three times, but each time the floor came back to an ideal walking surface for people with short left legs. In the end Red had the idea of nailing blocks on the floor and gluing chair and table legs to them on the down side, no slope, no sliding. In a week the old girl herself had taken on a new gait. She now walked more like a bosun than a sarmajor. The Lambs were a crook bunch to look at once they got their sealegs.
Fish lay on his bed with the crystal set, day and night. He said little. Sometimes he didn’t even come down to tea, and not even Lester could get him down. Oriel had lost power over him long ago, a defeat that you could read in her face every time Fish came shambling by.
Late in summer, Quick found the boat the old man had bought years ago, the one Fish and he had rowed from Freo when they were kids. It was still beached and upside down at Crawley, so he scraped it, patched it, caulked and painted it so that in the evenings he could row down to the narrows and put out lines for mulloway, flathead and bream. He was comfortable out there on the water, alone with the city lights and the quiet pressure of the outgoing tide. The river was a broad, muttering, living thing always suggesting things that kept his mind busy. Every important thing that happened to him, it seemed, had to do with a river. It was insistent, quietly forceful like the force of his own blood. Sometimes he thought of it as the land’s blood: it roiled with life and living. But at other moments, when a dead sheep floated past, when the water was pink with storm mud, when jellyfish blew up against the beaches in great stinking piles, Quick wondered if it wasn’t the land’s sewer. The city had begun to pile up over it as the old buildings went and the ugly towers grew. But it resisted, all the same, having life, giving life, reflecting it. On clear nights you could see lights in the hills and the scarp beyond the city. He remembered the wheatbelt, that great riverless domain, and recalled himself charging madly through the wheat. I was looking for this he thought. The river. Quick watched the few old battlers who still netted the river for a living, and it was from observing their silhouettes with pity and admiration that he came upon a job for himself. He’d supply the shop with fish! It was a good mile from Cloudstreet to the nearest fishmongers, and he’d seen all the Baits and Greeks moving in, these past few years, and the lengths those coves would go to just to buy a decent piece of fish. He went home and put the idea to Oriel who claimed it as one of her best, and the next day Quick was buying nets and setlines, looking out for a cheap seagull motor, and feeling pleased with himself. Actually everybody was happy. Quick felt like his own boss again, Oriel felt like everybody’s boss again, and everybody bossed. The fish sold. The shop prospered. Late of an evening, you’d see Sam Pickles down there, hat back on his head, gladstone bag in hand, weighing up a couple of pounds of crabs for himself. Geez, I forgot how much I miss the smell of fish every day, he’d say. I been in the city too long. I’m gunna up an orf one day, he’d say to nobody special. I’ll be orf like a shot.
Fish started coming out of his room late in the afternoons to watch Quick mend his nets over the frame he’d knocked up down the backyard. At first it was a surprise to see him. Fish poked his fingers into the mesh the first time, then left the net alone thereafter, but he continued to leave the wireless and come down to watch.
Can I come, Quick? he’d ask, sitting with his chin on his knees. He was big and rolylooking nowadays, and not handsome like he’d once been. Lips wet and turning; a squint of incomprehension that five-year-old boys learn to hide.
Not tonight, no.
When? How many sleeps?
Mum says no, Fish. She doesn’t want you on the river.
I like it.
Yeah, I know, cobber.
But I’m big!
Quick looked up from his work. Yeah, that’s true enough, I reckon.
Carn.
Carn what?
Carn, take me.
I just told you, Fish.
You did once. You took me one time. Remember? We goed in the stars.
Quick snapped an end off and put the net down. We were kids, Fish. We were asleep. It was a dream. And we were hungry, remember?
Strange, but he’d forgotten about that night. There were so many things he just didn’t think about.
We saw.
Nah.
And Quick knew he was lying. God Almighty, the things he’d decided not to remember, not to wonder about. Was it a family thing, this refusal to wonder? There were plenty of things to chew over if you let
yourself, if you’re the type. Things happen—when you’re a kid, or sick or asleep or maybe a bit stupid—they happen, and maybe it’s best to leave it there.
Fish would head off towards the pig who slouched up against the fence in his smelly enclosure, and Quick would hear him talking. To a bloody pig.
Some nights the old man would come out with him. Lester was unusually quiet out there on the river. It was a relief to have him quiet these days. At home, in the shop, he was painful with talk. He’d rattle like an Owen gun, whipping off chronic old jokes from his standup days at the Anzac Club, tell stories that couldn’t possibly be true or even listened to, but even on the river he got quietly philosophical in the wee hours.
I remember my first ever memory, he’d say. I was on my father’s shoulders in the dark. It was raining, and we were crossin a creek that had burst its banks …
Oh, Dad!
What?
That’s bullshit.
It’s not, the old man murmured with emotion.
You tell such lies, said Quick, trying to sound gentle.
I know. Lester began to weep: But that’s true. It happened. Even if it’s only a dream, I know it happened.
Hey, its orright.
I’m gettin old and stupid. I’m an old showoff and me family’s ashamed of me.
Come on, Dad, I’m sorry, orright?
I just miss the playin and singin. I don’t tell lies about anythin important. You know, boy, I just like stories.
You shoulda been a poet.
Henry Lawson. No, too sad for me. Old C.J., that’s who I shoulda been.
Who?
The Sentimental Bloke.
Oh.
The river ran slow beneath them while Lester blew his nose and Quick thought about his father’s life.
No one’s ashamed, Dad. Aren’t you happy? You’ve done things.
Yeah, I’ve done things, boy. And I’m happy when I don’t think about it.
About what?
Not measurin up.
To what?
Your mother. Oh, she’s good about it and all, but a bloke can’t avoid it. You know, I was in the cavalry at Gallipoli, but as a cook. No wounds. And she lost that brother. You can’t compete with a dead hero. You can’t beat the dead.
You don’t have to, they’re dead.
But they stay, Quick. That’s one thing you’ll learn. The lost will stay with you.
Quick listened to the water under the boards. It was a strange sensation, having your father talking to you more or less like you were equal.
Dad, why’s she out in that tent, then?
Oh, she’s got ghosts of her own.
Tired of ordinary mortals, I thought.
Well, people disappoint her.
She’s a queer bird, the old girl.
She’s a fighter, said Lester. She wants all the answers.
What do you want, Dad?
I just want to be liked. She doesn’t care about all that—well she tries not to. I always wanted to be loved, that’s all. When I was a kid I wanted to be a hero. Hah! Your mother came along and I wanted to be loved by her. And I was. Still am I reckon. I wanted people to think well of me. And I wanted to be loved by God.
Were you? All those things?
I figured I was. That’s how I saw it.
You don’t believe in yourself, Dad, that’s the trouble.
Does anyone?
Mum, I spose.
No, not even her.
So what … what dyou live for?
The old man laughed: The family, Quick. Your mother’n me always had that in common. Take away the family and that’s it, there’s no point.
Our family? Us. Come on!
It’s why I don’t shoot meself quietly in the head with the old Webley. If I did nothin else in me weak old life, Quick, I know I had a family and I enjoyed every bit of it. Hell, I made youse laugh, didn’t I? We had fun, all of us, didn’t we?
Quick thought about it. They lived like some newspaper cartoon—yokels, bumpkins, fruitcakes in their passed down mended up clothes, ordered like an army floorshow. They worked their bums off and took life seriously: there was good and bad, punishment and reward and the isolation of queerness. But there was love too, and always there was music and dancing and jokes, even in the miserable times after Fish drowned.
Quick? Boy? Didn’t we?
My oath, Dad.
You’re wastin yer brains out here on the river, son. You should be usin yer brains.
I like it, Dad. The water makes me happy, lets me think.
You need some ambition.
What big ambition did you have, apart from wantin to be a hero?
Nothin. I just wanted to be a good man.
That’s all I want.
Well, there’s time. A whole river of time, Quick. Easy to be a good man out here—there’s no one else to think of. Lester pointed to the lights above Perth water where the city hung and the suburbs began their outward roll. But up there, that’s the test.
Quick rowed on the slackening tide while the old man crooned a hymn from times back.
That year Quick worked the river from the narrows, where the bridge was going up, down to Blackwall reach where stolen cars and hot pistols were thrown from the cliff into the impossible deep, and even as far as East Fremantle in the shadow of the soap factory and the foundries where the channels ran full of fish, where now and then on the incoming tide, a body might be found, some wharfie, sailor, drunk and king hit. He got plenty of time out there alone to think, and by the beginning of winter, he knew that he really was wasting his time. The fish were selling, the shop was doing well, but he was operating inside a routine. He liked to be on the water, he liked the business of nets and line and fish, but he knew it was a postponement of something.
One afternoon, he gave in to Fish, smuggled him into the Chev before dusk with the wireless still chirping up in the fuggy room, and enough closing hour business in the shop to confuse things.
They drove down along the cliff at Peppermint Grove where in the last light of day, the great, lazy broadness of the river was exposed to them, turning light in insect movements, pricked white with the slackbellied yachts setting out for a twilight run around the Mosman Spit and Claremont water beyond. Fish gasped.
Haaaah! The water!
That’s the stuff, orright.
You good, Quick.
Ah, dry up, Quick said, smiling.
Haah.
You know the rules?
I have to have string.
I’ll tie your belt to the seat so you don’t fall out, and you have to wear this.
Quick pointed at the bouquet of plastic net buoys, each the size of a man’s head, that he’d strung together.
It’s like a hula belt.
What?
Just wear it. Not now, you nong, wait’ll I get you in the boat. I’ve gotta park the truck first. It was like being kids again, nicking off and going fishing. They moved east, upstream, working the banks and gutters all the way through Claremont where the houses were shabby and colonial, to Nedlands water where the lawns stretched up from the water to configurations of houselights you’d only expect to see on luxury liners. Just before midnight they came upon a batch of cobbler that were easy spearing in the shallows. Fish lay across the bow with a torch strapped to his wrist, peering down into the water, mystified by its loss of reflection. He could see down into the milling mobs of smelt and gobbleguts and the ribbed sand bottom until the batteries began to give out. Then he found the dark water more exciting and Quick noticed how precariously he hung over the side, was glad he’d made precautions.
You hungry? There’s some cold pies in the box. Cmon, we’ll take a breather for a while. Get back in the bottom, it’s cold. Where’s your beanie?
In my pocket.
Put it on, it’s cold.
Don’t boss!
Who brought you out in this boat? Whose boat is it?
It’s our boat, all of us. I remember.
&n
bsp; Well, so you do, thought Quick, ashamed.
Cmon, let’s have somethin to eat. The cobblers can wait.
Not lookin at them.
Just the water, eh?
Yep.
You’re a character, orright.
Fish got down in the bottom of the boat. A wind was springing up from seaward bringing in that chill Rottnest air. They ate cold meat pies, discards from the shop, and drank hot, sweet tea from the Thermos.
What’re we gonna do with ourselves, Fish?
Eat pies more. You go to sleep. I’ll watch.
You happy?
Yep.
Always?
I get happy sometimes. Not you.
Oh, me, I’m the original glumbum.
I like the water.
You remember what happened to you in the water, at Margaret?
Is it a story?
It happened, but it can be a story.
I know a story. The house hurts, you know.
What’s that?
A story.
There’s someone on the bank there.
Some people cry.
Shut up, Fish, someone is crying. It’s late to be out. Stay down.
In the story, Quick—
Shut up and stay down! he hissed.
Quietly, Quick punted them in under the shallow of the low wall that held the river back in storms. The keel ground along the shell grit at the edge, losing water. He was right. There was someone up there crying, but out of sight, in the lee of the wall.
Is everything orright up there? he called. There was a startled squeak, and a scrape of shoes on cement. A figure rose from behind the wall. Quick held the Tilley high, but succeeded only in blinding himself. He heard a honk of noseblowing.
Sorry, I didn’t mean—he stammered.
Quick Lamb, she said. That bloody house won’t leave us alone, will it?
Quick looked at Fish who was smiling fit to sin.
Hypothetical, as the Smartbums Say
She wipes her eyes again and looks at him with his puzzlement plainlit by the lamp swinging at his cheek. The brother is down in the boat, luminous in his own way, huge in sweater and cap.