Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

She’s comin, Quick! Fish has lost his shonky statesman composure. He begins to bob and grin.

Orright, I can see. Keep your hair on.

Fish reaches for his hair in surprise, though neither powers nor principalities could move that head of hair, such is its cargo of Brylcreem.

Dolly Pickles plots a course and tacks down the aisle to her seat at the front, great spinnaker of a hat resting at last. Chub rolls up beside her, wearing so much babyfat he might have hired it for the occasion. And then they come. Here they come. All that flaming gorgeous brown hair swinging visible under the veil, and the little nicotine stained man alongside, leading with his arm crooked, crippled hand on his hip.

Cor, says Fish.

Ssh, mate. She looks orright, eh.

Mister Pickles is small like a dog.

Rose comes smiling, wet-eyed and triumphant. She knows exactly what she’s doing, and it’s what she tells herself every few feet. It seems a ridiculous way to walk, this tightrope shuffle, and if she doesn’t take her mind off it for a moment, she knows she’s going to keel over. How priestly the priest looks coming down beside Quick with his sumptuous bits and pieces, and how Fish … how Fish … how is Fish making that noise, that sound?

Up the front, before the man in costume, Fish Lamb is singing, or saying, or something. He has the ring box in his hand that he shakes like a maracas and holds high as he sways and bobs, lobbing his head about on his shoulders, eyes closed, with complete assurance he goes on, stopping the bride in her tracks and setting dogs ahowl outside the windows. No one grabs him. They all believe it can’t go on. But he goes on, right on, until there’s a sweat on him and on everybody else, and he falls silent, then down, and in the end, asleep.

The organist finds his place and gets back on his trembly way. The bride steps up, white as her outfit, to meet the groom who wears a smile that looks borrowed.

They don’t exactly fill the RSL hall with their bodies, but some huge, pentup feeling makes the place seem crowded as families and friends, punters, customers, neighbours find their tables by way of chinky giltlettered namecards and sit down to the chook and two veg with gravy, jugs of beer, sherry and lemonade. They get through filthy telegrams, Lester’s speech turns into a string of the most awful, wonderful fibs and damnnear gets to the brink of vaudeville, Dolly gets shickered altogether on beerglasses of sweet sherry, while Elaine weeps and mopes; Hat and hubby talk about council rates and renovations; Red dances with strange blokes and swats their hands away heartily as she swoops round the floor. Chub eats. Sam dances with his daughter, nimble as a midget and pinches her back from blokes who cut in. Lon Lamb gets quietly stung by spiking his lemonade with sherry until in the end he’s camped down under the tablecloth, too un-coordinated to get off his back and avoid the sight of all those ladies scratching themselves discreetly under the table. At the very end, Quick and Rose lounge together, tired and jubilant with their clobber askew and their hair losing ground, while a very strange thing happens. Oriel Lamb hoists herself wearily from the chair she’s occupied all evening at her end of the bridal table, crosses the floor to where Dolly Pickles sits frightening a group of young men with the kind of jokes she knows, and asks her to dance. There’s no one else on the floor. The band sits around lighting fags and chatting up girls until Oriel catches the drummer’s eye. Quick sees his mother’s face: something massive has been summoned. Rose feels his grip on her tighten as her mother sits there losing resistance by the moment. The music strikes up quietly. Dolly puts out her cigarette. The lairs look horrified. Oriel Lamb takes her by the hand and waist and they move out onto the floor in a slow rhythm that sobers the entire place. The short, boxy woman slips around gracefully, holding the old beauty up, and turn by turn something grows.

They look so bloody dignified, says Rose. So proud.

As they wheel by like a miracle, there are spectators weeping.

Outside in the Chev, Fish Lamb is sleeping.

CLOUDSTREET was torpid with shock for days after the wedding. The Lambs worked in a strange calm; it was unlike them to be so quiet. Lester forwent the noseflute solos to schoolkids on the verandah. Oriel spoke in a low murmur. The Pickles side of the house, always quiet (except when Dolly was on a binge) became mute altogether. Dolly and Sam found the silence companionable at times and there were moments when their eyes actually lit upon each other in Rose’s absence.

But the quiet between them all went unnoticed on Cloudstreet because the Water Board started fooling with diggers and pipes, testing out their new machinery.

The sixties are here, said the supervisor with great enthusiasm.

Yeah, said Lester Lamb, thinking of his age.

You can’t turn back the clock.

No, said Lester, but you don’t have to wind it either.

Men are outside digging the street. Fish Lamb stands at the window tapping the butterknife against the panes — chink, chink, cachink — watching the black man across the street. A truck rolls by with a load of huge pipes. The black man is gone in the dust it leaves, and from behind Fish, across the corridor, comes the old keening noise again. He sits on Quick’s old bed and dust rises from the quilt. The house is trembling.

How Small Our Dreams Are

I want to live in a new house, said Rose. In a new suburb in a new street. I want a car out the front and some mowed lawn. I want a small, neat house that only we live in, Quick. I don’t ever want to live anywhere old, where people have been before. Clean and new, that’s what I want.

We’ve got no money, he said, as he drove them home from their honeymoon. They’d gone crabbing. Crabbing!

I’ve been working for years, Quick. I’ve been saving all this time.

And I haven’t even got a job. I never got paid for doin the fish.

We’ll see your mother about that tomorrow.

Ah …

Don’t be gutless, Quick. You should’ve been paid.

I need a job, he said. Two jobs if we’re sposed to have a house.

We’ll get you two jobs.

You’ll be quittin, I spose.

Rose laughed. She’d married a man who still wore the clothes his mother bought for him. He didn’t know his shoe size or what size underpants he took. He read nothing but pulp westerns, had never had an official job and probably didn’t even know what a union was. He’d never signed a cheque or had a bank account or paid tax. He’d had women before — that much a girl could tell — but he never spoke about them. He was good with his hands, could see long distances, stay awake for days if he wanted to and he woke at the smallest sound. He had a beautiful copperplate hand but wrote nothing at all. He took a girl crabbing for a week on her honeymoon and on the way home expected her to quit work.

No, Quick, I won’t be quitting.

Fair enough.

You want me to.

Girls like to.

Not this girl. This girl wants to buy a house. When we get back we’re going to State Housing to sign up.

Fair enough. I’ll need a job.

Two jobs.

Fair enough.

What’ll you do?

Quick pursed his sunburnt lips and peered over the steering wheel. Join the police force.

Oh, gawd no.

Me dad was a copper, you know. But he was only in it for the uniform.

Quick, she groaned with all her Pickles blood, why?