Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

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 shadows 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.