Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

Come back in five years! one of them yelled.

Geez, he’s not fussy.

Not a touch on her old girl, I reckon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair dinkum, said his bird.

Yeah. Fair dinkum, said Sam.

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

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

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

The River

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

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

Fish is at the breakfast table, spinning the knife.

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

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

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

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

Cam, Orry, the old man says to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much did you win, then?

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

A hundred and six quid.

What about him?

Sam?

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

The old man grins: Two hundred.

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