Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

This is for who’ll see Quick come in the door first, Lester says.

The blade turns and turns, slow, slower and Lester thinks — is this all there is to it? Just chance, luck, the spin of the knife? Isn’t there a pattern at all; a plan?

Me! Me! Lestah, it me!

Lester laughs without effort. He slaps Fish on the shoulder.

Okay, this is to see who’ll be Captain of the boat.

Me again.

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

Ah?

Just watch the knife.

The knife never lies.

Lester can’t help but wonder.

Ghostly Sensations

Sam’s surprised to find himself sitting on the lip of the bath tub opening and closing the razor like this. It’s amazing to him that his face should look so far past him, and all the tan gone out of it, his flesh looking like a patch of sand that seagulls have walked across. It’s cool in here, and he can smell the mortuary stink of phenyle on the floor. No, this is the big surprise, finding himself here, looking down the blade, snapping it back together like somebody altogether different. It’s odd what people will do, and what they might do, what he might do. He watches his Adam’s apple rise like a plum bob in his neck. Now look at that neck, he thinks.

Sam knows he’s not the sort to go round and put the frighteners on Gerry Clay. Well, that’s what he’s telling himself. Maybe I’m just too bloody gutless to go down there and beat the piss out of him, he thinks. But, Jesus, I’m hardly the onefisted cyclone, am I? What’m I gunna do, stump the bastard to death? Hammer im with ghostly sensations? Oh, but there’d be ways, no doubt.

A picket with a nail in the end.

A sock full of sand.

Acid, any amount.

Running the bastard over, only Sam doesn’t know how to drive a car.

Rat poison.

Arson.

Hired help.

There’s some manly comfort in knowing there’d be means and ways, but they’re the sort of comfort you get from knowing a bloke can always go back to Mother when life fails him. It’s there, alright, but the consequences will get you by the nuts.

And anyway, the anger isn’t there. That’s not what he feels. It’s more the hopelessness of knowing, some elemental, inevitable thing about it. It’s loss, that’s what. Not like losing money and friends and fingers. Geez, he thought, losin’s nothin new. I graduated with flying colours from that fuckin school, after all. But this, this losing hurts. The surprise of it, the absolute shock of it. Not to have her … doing all that, but for it to hurt like this. That’s the nasty part.

He looks at his bewildered white face in the mirror. He loves his wife. He’s forgotten all about that bit, and he looks like a man who’s woken to another century. The blade is open. He can see it through the blur of water, see it shaking, coming his way like a ray of light.

Rose stepped into the bathroom with goo on her hands and there he was. She stepped back a little to let her mind catch up. She saw the mirror tilted a little and peppered with flyspecks. Towels rammed moist to the edge of fermentation through the towel rack. A bar of Velvet like hard cheese in the basin. The old man wore a singlet and tufts of blonde hair feathered from beneath it. His grey trousers wrinkled. Stockinged feet catching lint at the heels. There was real silence here. The open blade of the razor had a cheery gleam, poised there at his unlathered neck wet from tears.

Time, he said. Time.

Rose pushed the door closed behind her and a ball of dust wheeled across the floor to his feet.

She saw the naked knuckles of his stump whitening in their hopeless effort to make a fist. He set the razor down with great care and began to breathe long and ragged.

A man needs to keep his whiskers down.

You need lather, Dad.

Rose went by him to the basin and washed her hands. She made a fair production of it; it took less time to shower. When she wiped her hands, she put her back to the wall and looked down upon him. She felt the blood doing its clock-work in her limbs. She got his direct gaze in passing and held it until it was clear he couldn’t look away. He looked small as a schoolboy, hopeless and frail like she’d never seen a person before.

It’s just that you feel sorry for yourself, sometimes, Rose. I’m a weak, stupid, useless bastard and that’s, that’s …

Rose grabbed his head and pulled it to her breast, felt his sobs like another heart against her ribcage. She felt pity and misery and hatred and she knew this was how it would always be.

He was right; he was all those things and worse, and he probably didn’t have much reason to close that cutthroat.

What are we all sposed to do? he said.

I dunno, she said, furious. I don’t know. I love you, Dad. You can’t do it to me. You can’t. I’d piss on your grave, I tell you I would.

Oh, you’re a hard bastard, he said with a sobbing laugh. You’re the fuckin business you are.

My oath, she said, kissing his head, steeling herself against tears, against weakness, against the great blackness behind her eyes.

You’re the one, he said, getting himself back. You’re the one, orright. You’re a good girl.

Yeah, Rose thought, I’m sixteen and I don’t eat and I fall down dizzy twice a day and now I’m pulled outta school. Oh, I’m the one.

You’ve grown up in a hurry, he said, pulling back from her and wiping his eyes on his singlet.

I wasn’t in a hurry.

But you’ve grown up.

Keep me in school.

There’s no money, love. We haven’t got a nail to hang our arses on.

It was warm in there now and the afternoon light had a twisting traffic of motes to bear.

Don’t hate me, he said.

I don’t. I pity you, Dad. Because you still love her.

And you don’t?

Oh, I stopped that years ago. It wouldn’t be myself I’d use a razor on.

Rose. People are … who they are.

Then they should change! People should do things for themselves, not wait for everyone else to change things for em!

You can’t beat your luck, love.

No, you have to be your luck. There’s nothin else, there’s just you.

Sam smiled, shaking his head. You’ll go a long way.

Yes, she thought. Africa. Paris. New York. A long way from this stinking old house and the smell of death and sick. Like a shot. One day.

The Vanilla Victory

Late in January, as summer got its teeth in and the front lawns of Cloudstreet turned the colour of underfelt and the stretches of new macadam began to bubble and boil, Oriel Lamb wiped out G. M. Clay with vanilla icecream. His morale was shot already, but she sent him packing with Lester Lamb’s Amazing Vanilla Double Cream. She hounded the ice man till he began to think he was on the payroll himself. She bought in supplies of milk like a company quartermaster. No one rested in the evenings as mosquitoes crowded against the screens in the breathless dark. They turned the churns, skimmed, sluiced, measured and poured. The girls bitched over whose turn it was to be at the ice chest stacking the tins to set. Hat was having time off to go dancing with a bloke up from the country and Oriel was working her hard to pay for lost time. Oriel Lamb liked the idea that their icecream contained a few parts sweat to each gallon of milk. Lester tested and tooled about, touching up his Amazing Vanilla Double Icecream signs. He’d rather not have been at war, but it was nice to see his name in print at any rate, and the nervous thrill it gave him to be backing a winner was enough to egg him on.