Rose rushed to the landing. Downstairs she saw that Mrs Lamb giving her mum a roast chook and a plate of fruit. The old man was breaking open a bottle of grog he’d got from who knows where. There were a couple of Yank sailors out in the hallway and that wet eyed Mr Lamb squeezing his accordion fit to wring blood from it.
She went down into it and couldn’t help but have a smile cracking her chops. She danced a barn dance with a Yank and got a smack across the bum passing the old man on the verandah.
Here, said Quick Lamb, holding out a jar of humbugs.
She went elbow deep for them.
Mum’ll kill us, he said.
Me! said the slow kid, the goodlooking one who was on the front step spinning a butter knife. The blade pointed at his chest. It’s meeee!
IV
Break in the Weather
THAT’S it, Sam thinks; that’s bloody it. The streets are still full of revellers as he heads for the station with his pennies in his pocket. This is the break in the weather, Sam my man. Come in bloody Spinner.
His teeth ache. His hair buzzes at its roots with power.
Wherever it is, I’ll find it.
Whoever it is, I’ll find em.
And I won’t be back till I do.
Makin Millions
A couple of days after VJ Day, when everyone was still crazy with peace fever, and the old man still hadn’t turned up and the old girl was getting vicious, Rose walked home from school with her booklumpy bag, wondering if he was gone for good and how she’d have to tough it out with the old girl. It was torture. Other kids swept past on junky grids, pulling wheelies and skids in the dirt, startling clumps of gossiping girls and sending small boys up trees in fright, but Rose walked straight and sensible as though nothing could touch her. Up ahead she saw the Lambs shagging along under the Geraldton wax that burst over the fences beside the station and hung full of bees and fragrance. Somewhere behind her, Ted was shouting at Chub not to be such a wanker and that he could flaminwell carry his own bag.
If the old man was gone another day, she reckoned, that Mrs Lamb’d be over with some advice quicksmart. She knew the fast, cheap, clean, sensible way of doing everything and she’d be dishing it out like the Salvos, and the old girl’d be pukin.
Rose stopped by the Geraldton wax. Geraldton. Already it seemed like something she’d dreamt up. She pulled a waxy blossom off its stem and took it with her.
Kids were milling round Cloudstreet buying penny-sticks, freckles, snakes and milkbottles in little white paper bags. Rose pushed through the congregation on the verandah, heaved open the big jarrah front door and went inside.
And there he was. Arms akimbo, like General Douglasflamin-MacArthur, the old man was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, polishing his stumpy knuckles and grinning fit to be in pictures.
You look like you lost a penny and found a quid, she said.
Sam held out his two-up pennies.
Where you been?
A bit of scientific work.
Oh, gawd. So what are you grinnin about, then?
I got ajob.
A job! How?
The shifty shadow, Rosie.
Arr!
True as me word.
How?
He rattled the pennies.
Two-up?
That’s right.
You gotta be jokin, Dad.
Plus a bit of the foldin. Sam slipped a pound note down the front of her pinafore.
Rose shivered, ready to burst from excitement, anger, disbelief, something.
I put a bloke so far in the red he had to pay in kind. He’s the union boss, Blackie Stewart. He owes me a job. Start Monday. I’ll be makin money.
Don’t get beyond yerself.
No, fair dinkum, I’ll be makin millions. It’s a job at the Mint.
I hope they don’t find out that you count on yer fingers, Rose said.
Sam started after her and she ran giggling through the door into the rangy mob of kids outside.
Cheeky blighter!
Rose stood in the yard and looked back at him and it didn’t seem so strange to love him.
Monday. Rose ran home from school and waited for Sam to show. Even the old girl seemed nervous, up there cooking his tea.
He came swinging his gladstone bag into the yard.
Well? she said.
They’re for water, Sam said.
What do you do? Rose asked as they went up the stairs.
Push a broom. Take turns looking for duds. Not a lot a fella with one hand can do, love.
They came into the kitchen.
Rose looked at the new penny he’d just taken from under his tongue. She couldn’t imagine money being made.
They just cook it, like yer ole lady cooks a batch a scones. Cept more regular and a bit softer.
Dolly hissed at him without malice.
Out they come, pennies, zacs, deaners, shillins. The place stinksa money. Ya feel it in yer hair and on yer clobber. Spend all day breathin in gold dust. Fair’s fair, the place is like a cake shop and the smell always gets ya hungry.
Chops are done, said Dolly.
They sat down to eat, and Sam told them all about the noise and the machines and the heat of furnaces and the bars on the windows and the colour the limestone had gone on the outside. He described the wheezy press and the smell of kero and the way all the blokes thought he’d lost his fingers on some secret mission in an unknown archipelago instead of from sleepiness and bad luck while carting birdshit. They called him Sam and got all serious in his presence. He saluted with his thumb and half finger and they didn’t laugh.
Rose saw it all as clear as if she’d been there herself. After dinner she worked on her geography, colouring maps and diagrams at the kitchen table while her parents smoked and talked in short, low bursts. Ted and Chub disappeared outside for a while. Everything was normal and right. There were dishes in the sink and the sound of kids playing in the street and the trains passing smutty wind. Something settled over the kitchen. Rose kept the colours inside the lines and all the patterns were proper, sensible and neat. Happiness. That’s what it was.
Winning
In spring Sam Pickles went back to the September races and started winning. All through October, and into November he bet on a gelding called Blackbutt and saw him place or win every time. Sam knew it didn’t make any sense at all that this horse should keep winning. But luck came from some other place, bringing weirdness and aid into the world and he didn’t question it. He kept every winning ticket in the hat band of his Akubra. He bought binoculars and a grey suit and you could spot him there amidst the soldiers and sailors and women, despite his smallness, because he looked like a punter, and more importantly, a winner. When they thundered around on the last turn, filling the air with sods and dust and great creaturely gasps of horsepower, Sam Pickles stood still with his teeth set and his blue eyes clear to see Blackbutt come home the money. His blood was charged, he felt the breath of magic on him. He came home with his pockets stuffed, his stump aching, and the kids grabbing at him on the stairs to feel success.
We’ve come a long way, he said to them. By crikey we have. Eh? Eh?
One afternoon when she got home, Rose found a desk in her room. It was dark and compact, built from jarrah, and in every drawer there were sharpened pencils, ink, paper and books. She stood there, smelling the wood and the varnish, the newness and shock of it. When she turned around he was at the door. Rose began to blubber. He laughed and knocked on wood with his fingerless fist. The boys ran in with their airguns and it was like an early Christmas.
All spring it went on. They had good shoes and black market meat, sly grog and shop toys. The Pickles kids looked out across the fence and saw the Lambs digging noisily in the garden in their patched clothes, their square ordinary bodies dark with sweat, and they felt they had gotten back the edge. Rose and Ted and Chub slept and only dreamt of more.
Dolly sat up in the evenings and drank stout with lemonade. When Sam came o
ut of bed to get her she’d be soft and warm and quiet and she kissed him like she was sucking at something he had. He felt her legs fasten around his waist and her teeth in his neck as they ground up the bedclothes. Her breath was sweet and she cried out enough to make him breathless and frantic. He could have wept with triumph. But when he was asleep, skewed off on his own side of the bed with his arm across his eyes, Dolly would get up again with his mess coming all down her legs, and she’d go out and open another bottle and sit in the dark alone.
Fair Dinkum
Rose heard it first. The old man was coming in after work. The steak was spitting on the stove and the place smelled of pepper.
Fair dinkum!
Rose looked at her mother. It wasn’t the old man’s voice, but it sure was his gait they heard coming down the hall. They were his boots alright.
Fairrrrgh! Dink. Dinkum.
He’s drunk, Dolly said.
Rose saw a ladder in her stocking.
And then in he came with a damn bird on his shoulder. He looked radiant and proud and prettywell sober. The bird was just an ordinary pink cockatoo with those clear side-winding eyes behind a beak like an ingrown toenail. From Sam’s shoulder, the bird looked down at Rose and Dolly with an expression of hauteur.
Say hello to Stan, girls! said Sam, dropping his gladstone bag to the floor.
Gawd help us, said Dolly.
Fair flamin dinkum! said the bird.
Rose laughed and Stan lifted a clawed old foot in her direction.
I won im, Sam said.
What in, a mugs’ lottery?
Just a bet.
He’s a beaut, said Rose. What does he eat?
New pennies.
That’ll be cheap, said Dolly.
We can shake him out at Christmas, said Rose. Like a money box.
Fair dinkum! said Stan.
They laughed and laughed, but little did they know. Two days before Christmas Stan crapped out three ha’pennies and a shilling, enough to buy seed for months.
When those coins dropped out of him onto the kitchen table two days before Christmas, he cocked his head at all present. He fixed his eyes on them with irascible turns of his head.
Eh? he said. Eh? What?
Stan always paid his way.
In time the house absorbed the bird, though it could never fully absorb his irritable shrieks. Even the neighbours winced at it. Whenever he was about the house Sam took Stan on his shoulder. The rest of the time the bird side-stepped up and down the fence, cocking his head and dodging the honkynuts Lon Lamb shot at him with a rubber band. Sam Pickles liked to feel Stan’s claws in his shoulder. It made him look a little taller. Rose said it made him look like a pirate. Dolly said it made him look like a perch. Ted and Chub didn’t care. Stan bit them and they lost interest.
Stan’s wing was never clipped. He could always have flown away.
Quick Lamb’s Sadness Radar
Quick Lamb reads the paper every day and sees the long lists of the missing believed killed, and the notices in memorium for sons and fathers and brothers. The war’s over, he knows, but he picks up sadness like he’s got radar for it. The whole world’s trying to get back to peace but somewhere, always somewhere there’s craters and rubble and still the lists and the stories coming home as though it’ll never let itself be over. There’s families on this street who’ve lost men, and while they remember the war will still be on.
We’re lucky, he thinks; the old man was too old and I was too young. We’ve got food, coupons, a full ration book. We’re gettin away light.
Quick sees kids at school who are poor. The Lambs are patched and barefooted, but at lunchtime their mother always brings warm pies and pasties to the gate. Quick and Lon and Red meet up wordlessly and eat together. Through the winter Quick notices Wogga McBride sitting with his little brother Darren. Wogga McBride is in grade six, one below Quick. They have a queer way of eating their sandwiches: whatever it is they bring wrapped in vine leaves gets eaten under cover of their hands in a way so quick and deft that it’s impossible to know what it is they have. Maybe it’s Quick’s misery radar, but he can’t let it be. He watches them every day from the corner of his eye until it’s almost October, and by then he knows what he’s begun to suspect—Wogga McBride and his brother aren’t eating anything at all; they’re just pretending. Out of pride, they’re going through the motions of unwrapping, passing, commenting on, eating food that doesn’t exist.
Quick lies awake that night with shadows vibrating on his wall.
Next day at lunchtime, Quick leaves Lon and Red and takes a pastry over to Wogga McBride.
I’m full, Quick says. Want it?
The skinny blue kid takes it with a nod and Quick leaves it at that. From then he resolves to take food to Wogga McBride every day, but most days he forgets.
The McBrides live further down the tracks towards West Perth but they cross at the walkway just below the big house on Cloud Street. Quick gets into the habit of falling in behind Wogga and Darren McBride and following them until they jump the tracks and head down toward town to their place.
Not long before the holidays, Quick is behind the McBrides, straining to hear a bit of their rare conversation. He doesn’t know what he finds so fascinating about them. True, they have blue-mottled skin and legs like hinges, the way they fold inside the knee. There is a kind of weariness about them. Their hair lies flat against their birdlike skulls. To Quick they look like ghosts.
Quick tails them down Rokeby Road, through all the food smells and the odour of newness seeping out of the open doors and shopfronts. They skirt the football ground. Quick can’t hear them saying anything. A truck clatters by loaded with pumpkins. Quick has the feeling he should catch up with them, just bust into their ghostly tight aura and say g’day, but what if they don’t want him? They actually look like they don’t care about the world, not what people think of them or wonder about them. And yet there they’ll be at lunchtime palming pieces of nothing—of air—into their mouths. Aren’t they pretending so that others won’t think they’re poor? Geez, Quick understands that much pride. Or are they keeping up the fantasy for themselves? Do they feel less hungry, less lean and hopeless, if they pretend their bellies are full? This kind of thought bothers Quick in class and it’s on his mind this afternoon as he sticks close enough to hear the voices, but not so near that he can understand what they’re saying.
And they hardly ever laugh, that’s another thing, though it isn’t until late tonight that he thinks of it, and by then it won’t help to think at all.
Quick climbs the bank behind West Leederville Station with the wild oats parting before him. Wogga McBride and his little brother are at the top and heading down into the cut where he loses sight of them for a few moments. When he gets to the crest of the embankment he can see Railway Road and the date palms in front of the rich people’s places. A train is hauling out of the station going his way and he sees down the track, behind the wobbling carriages, the slant of his own roof. A dog is barking. Someone has the flag flying in the front yard across the tracks, there’s a war over somewhere. Quick feels the breeze coming up behind him, cool and southerly. He’ll never catch up with Wogga McBride today. They’ll be across the tracks in a moment. He’s twelve years old and primary school is almost over. Smuts rise and the rails groan. Down there Wogga McBride is fooling with the dog, some carpetbacked stray that’s got a hold of his school bag and he’s laughing. Laughing! The two boys prance around the brown dog up on its hind legs, twisting and feinting with the leather strap in its mouth. Quick can hear their virulent laughter. He wants to go down there with them and run that dog ragged with them. Oh, the laughter, even over the sound of the train.
And then Wogga McBride tears the bag free of the dog and sways back, shrieking with glee, and the sleeper catches his heel and he staggers and the engine smacks him with the sound of a watermelon falling off the back of a truck, and he’s gone.
Everything is screaming. The train
punishes itself to a halt. Down there, Wogga McBride’s little brother stands with his mouth open and train noise coming out. There’s men jumping out and down, there’s screaming, alright. Screaming, screaming.
Quick hoists his bag and goes home and gets into bed and pulls the sheet over his head and stuffs his ears with notepaper.
Fish Waiting
What can you tell him, Fish? Right now, while you’re down there on that side of the water with your strange brain and your black, wide eyes. What do you understand enough to say? You stand there in the morning and the afternoon and see Quick all closed, white and hard. Motes rain down. The sun is alive. The whole house is shaking with sound. Why won’t he look at you? How do you bear it? How can you just stand at the end of his bed like that, with the patience of an animal? It’s like you’re someone else down there, Fish. Or does it just hurt me to think it’s not so?
Debts
Every morning the old man came up to see Quick and sit on the end of his bed and sigh. Quick lay under the sheet, smelling all the trapped stinks and odours, and through it he could see the shadow of the old man moving in front of the window.
How’d ya be, son? the old man said quietly. He seemed to know something was wrong, but he was stuck for some way of fixing it.
Quick was glad it was him coming up and not his mother. She’d be too busy getting the shop open for the day and anyway, she’d be liable to just hook him out of bed, kick him in the ring and send him on his way. He didn’t know why he was staying here in bed anyway; he just knew he didn’t want to get up and it had something to do with Wogga McBride.
The second day Lester had a better idea of what was wrong. Quick heard him rustling a newspaper theatrically, walking up and down, stopping now and then to say: It’s a flamin tragedy, Quick, an honest-to-the-Lord flamin tragedy.
Quick didn’t think about that wet teatowel snap of Wogga McBride disappearing. Neither could he let himself imagine what had happened after, how Wogga would have been dragged and ricked and torn and wedged and burst and broken. He thought about nothing like that. Quick thought about nothing at all. He listened to the grinds and groans of the house. Flies went about their mysterious business. Ticking noises came from in the walls. The cocky next door squawked and quipped. Below, the bell clonked on the shop door. Sometimes, when the hunger drifted over into dreaminess, he forgot he was Quick Lamb at all. It excited him to discover how quiet he was inside.