Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the colour of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began the burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women.

Cloudstreet did a bottling trade on icecream. Lester Lamb half wore his arms off turning the churn and lifting the tombstone hunks of ice inside from the truck. Kids mucked around along fences; they sent dogs and grownups bellowing. They were mad with the nearness of Christmas. Oriel baked and served and held up trams getting all her children on, while Dolly Pickles, weak and gloomy, watched everyone pass in the street below until evening when Sam would come home with pennies behind his teeth and the dust of money in his skin and there’d be early watermelon and hot bread and open windows.

As the days cannoned on, and the heat got meaner, everybody did things crazier than normal. They bought things, they said things, they heard things, they moved things, they lost things, they joined things and left things. They were mad, loony, loopy with summer.

Red’s Method

Red Lamb the tomboy got sick of blokes swimming under the girls’ change sheds at the Crawley baths. They dived in around the piles like randy seals and merged in the shadows where all was green and perilous with barnacles, and they floated along silently, eyesup, to get a fisheye view of naked bums and boxes. Hat and Elaine were bigger and had hair on theirs and they did pretend to be outraged, but Red could tell their hearts weren’t in it. Climbing into her scratchy wool costume which stank of her own hammy crotchpong, she heard their half delighted screams of disgust and she knew boys were headed her way, so she spread her towel on the boards and stood quiet with her nose in the air until shrieks came from cubicles on the other side and she was safe.

As the heat grew that summer, so did her rage. She devised a scheme and took great delight in employing it, so much so that when it started to get results, when word got around and the boys backed off, she was kind of crestfallen. It worked very well, Red’s method. When she was changing in her cubicle and heard the trail of squeals coming her way, she’d whip off her bathers, squat on the boards, take good aim and build up a head of steam in her belly so that when some frecklefaced pair came sidestroking along beneath her she could piss right into their awestruck faces while bellowing her war cry ‘Death to Pervs!’ She could pee through the eye of a needle, Red Lamb.

Hat and Elaine went to their parents about it but did not get satisfaction. Lester and Oriel had always measured an eye for an eye.

Everything in the world seemed to happen just before Christmas.

Dolly Pickles decided never to speak to Oriel Lamb again.

Sam Pickles won a pig in a pub raffle and donated it to the Lamb family in gratitude for nursing his missus back to health.

The cockatoo bit Chub on the lip, got a taste for it and began an offensive that lasted all week. Chub took to wearing a box on his head. Here comes the Cardboard Kelly Gang, people said.

Ted Pickles kissed a girl on the sand at Pelican Point and she showed him a thing or two. It changed his life.

Rose Pickles read Jane Eyre and decided never to give it back to the public library. She scraped and rubbed to remove all signs of ownership from it, but each morning she woke to see the stamp still bright on the endpapers: CITY OF PERTH. In the end she cut it out, but it always grew back in her mind’s eye. She took it back and her old man paid the fine. They cancelled her membership.

Next door Fish struck up a friendship with the pig.

On a bad tip from Sam, Lester Lamb bought a clapped out racehorse to pull his new delivery cart.

Elaine had a migraine every day.

Hat became unofficial marble champion of Cloud Street. By Christmas Eve no one would play her because there were no marbles left to lose. Her mother said she was too old to play doogs in the street, but Hat loved to be a winner.

Red Lamb saw Ted Pickles with his hands inside Mary Modine’s bathers, and it didn’t change her life one bit.

Over the fence, Lon Lamb saw Chub Pickles being pursued by the pink cocky, and he laughed so loud he was wearing a bucket on his head within hours.

Quick caught nine dozen tailor out in the boat at Nedlands one day, and came back so burnt that he couldn’t chew, bend, sit or stand. He saw Rose Pickles watching Fish in no man’s land and knew she was in love with his brother.

Oriel Lamb went out and bought a tent. She bought a steel box and a padlock for the till and the accounts book and took to hiding them.

ThePig

The pig is down the back in a pen that’s just been tossed up for him by Sam and Lester, and Fish is standing there to look, to look. It’s late in the afternoon and all the birds are crashing back into the trees and the great summer sky is disrobing in swirls. The pig is pink and hairy with smart little eyes and a nose like a wet light plug.

He’s all yours, Sam says.

Preciate it, Lester says.

Better butcher im quick, I reckon. The council wouldn’t like it.

They wouldn’t like Cloudstreet beginnin to finish, says Lester.

Fish looks. The pig turns and looks back. The two men wander back up to the house and leave them alone. Fish scratches inside his shorts. The bristly animal flexes a shoulder. Shadows from the lilac tree, the lemon, the almond, fall across him like camouflage. It’s quiet.

Give us a squirt with the hose, wouldja? the pig says.

Fish looks at the pig and giggles. Orright.

He gets the hose, fumbles with the tap, and with his finger over the nozzle, he sprays the pig up and down until the ground in the pen turns miry and the pig is streaked with mud. From up the house Lester bellows.

Turn that water off, Fish! There’s a drought on!

Thanks anyway, cobber, says the pig.

Fish regards the pig a good while, forgetful of the hose water that drills into the dirt, bubbling up sand and sticks. The runoff makes a long spewy black rivulet that proceeds down the yard into the strawberries and the early corn.

Fish! Oy, Fish!

The pig winks and rolls in the bog. He kicks his legs up and his trotters clack together. The sun is low over the roofs of the neighbourhood. There is the smell of oncoming night, of pollen setting, the sound of kids fighting bathtime. Lester comes down, waving his hands.

Don’t drown the pig, Fish. We’re savin him for Christmas. We’re gunna eat him.

No!

I’ll drink to that, says the pig.

Lester stands there. He looks at Fish. He looks at the porker. He peeps over the fence. The pig. The flamin pig. The pig has just spoken. It’s no language that he can understand, but there’s no doubt. He feels a little crook, like maybe he should go over to that tree and puke.