Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

Rose was glad of those talks with her mother. She found soft parts still left in herself, soft parts in Dolly as well, and in a way she figured it saved her from herself. It was love really, finding some love left. It was like tonic.

Rose still went to see her mother every day or two and usually came back furious. The old girl sat out on her backstep feeding chunks of topside beef to magpies. She was often sober, always abusive, and after a time her cursing became almost soothing in its steadiness. Dolly bitched and whined about everything until Rose began to realize that half the time the old girl was bunging it on — she was play acting just to amuse herself. Sure, there was still heat in the old battleaxe, but not much of an edge. When Rose went round, Dolly made her a cup of tea. They’d feed the birds, the old woman would be abominable, feign deafness and raise a hedge of irritability between them, and Rose would go home.

Late in spring, Rose began to swim in the river at Peppermint Grove. She’d start out from the boatshed and swim right around the Mosman Spit. When no one was about she even tried a few bombies and tin soldiers off the jetty. She felt all the childish impulses of the Geraldton days, and she went home ravenous and kept her food down. With summer coming on, she woke in the mornings thinking of all the things she could do instead of listing the things she refused to do or was incapable of. Sometimes she felt all the blood rising in her skin, feeding her, overriding her will. She was alive despite herself. She got out the old books, spent entire mornings at the river in their worlds. In the evenings she planted little lovenotes to Quick around the flat: in his socks, pinned to his undies, between dusty packets of condoms. Poor Quick. How he’d waited for her all these months. It was that pigheaded Lamb patience, and you had to love him for it. She felt the shadow in her, this dark eating thing inside, like an anger, and sensed that it’d always be with her. But Quick would hold her up beyond reason, even when it went into stupidmindedness. It wasn’t just the fact that she knew he could do it for her that made her love him. It was her certainty that he would.

As the weather warmed toward summer, Rose and Quick spent their spare time floating dreamily on the river in the Lamb boat. They talked like teenagers, catching up, making up time, finding words for how they felt. Marriage had been no dream. They’d worked their guts out, lived through sickness and worry and still their neat little suburban house wasn’t ready for them. Rose thought about returning to work somewhere, but already she was staring at babies in the street again. Quick was promoted to riding the new BSA station motorcycle, an evil beast of a thing with enough compression to put you over the bars during a kickstart.

They came home from the river one day to find Lester Lamb waiting for them on the bonnet of an ancient Rugby, dressed in his threadbare suit and looking gorgeously pleased with himself. He showed them the car. It was a dusty, black old banger with tyres smoother than a baby’s bum and rust beneath the paint like a spreading cold sore. He showed them every angle, every virtue, including the side-blinds he’d made himself from old X-rays which gave a curious effect of mortality to an afternoon drive: you saw the world through compound fractures, you saw the river in an old soldier’s lungs, sky through the skulls of shellshocked corporals.

It’s yours, he said, you need a car.

We need a car, said Quick.

But this is more than a car, said Rose, it’s an experience.

By Christmas, Quick had that old scrumwagon Rugby up and running, Rose was pregnant again, and the house out in the suburbs was almost finished. Quick moonlighted in the day, driving trucks and hammering up cheap furniture in a warehouse while Rose took in ironing between river swims. Nights off they went dancing and made galahs of themselves at the Embassy and later drove out to Cottesloe Beach to make love under an upturned skiff.

We’re getting somewhere, Rose thought. Our own house, a baby, money in the bank. She had dreams of furniture, neat rugs, lino tiles, a TV, the smell of Pine-O-Clean. A clean, orderly, separate place with fences and heavy curtains. Their own world.

By Christmas it looked a dead cert.

He Does

Red Lamb was a nurse and she liked to shock poor old Elaine.

Geez, I hate men’s—

Red! Elaine winced, held up a hand.

Aw, Elaine, it’s better to be disgusted than ignorant. Now did you know that—

Red, I don’t need to know anything.

Crikey, what’s this?

Into the kitchen came Lon all grazed and blackeyed and sweating, and by a stroke of bad timing he was followed in by his mother who caught one look at his face and shoved him cheeksfirst into the big freezerbox of the old Frigidaire.

Ice’ll help, she said. What bully did this to you?

A man, blubbered Lon, a fullgrowed man. His voice sounded a longway off coming from the freezerbox.

What did he do? Now tell me, I’m yer mother.

Hit me. He hit me.

In public?

Only people.

Did you deserve some punishment? Oriel said, suddenly pensive. Red opened a bottle of mecurochrome the size of a stout keg and got together some swabs.

Lon?

There’s a girl pregnant, said Lon from on ice.

No one could tell if Oriel fainted a moment or what, but she leant on that fridge door something shocking. You could hear Lon Lamb screaming three stops down the line.

Lucky it’s only his head in there, Red said to the old man who’d come running; if it was me doin the business he’d be losin his play bits.

Lon was married inside a fortnight, and when the minister said: Do you Logan Fitzwilliam Bruce Lamb take this Pansy Mullet to be your lawfully wedded wife? Oriel murmured darkly: He does.

They took a room at Cloudstreet, Lon and Pansy, and filled it with rage and weeping.

Doomiest

Sam rolls awake in the night with his stump ringing with pain. It goes right through him, into his chest, down his side. Godalmighty, a heart attack, he thinks. But it goes on and on, emanating from pieces of him he no longer owns. No, he thinks, it’s bloody doom. Big, big doomy doomier, doomiest. It hurt so much that tears roll back into his ears and the house seems to laugh at him. He wants to go to sleep and not wake up in the morning.

Flames

In her dream Oriel saw the bush and the city burning. People ran from their squawking homes to the riverbank with the flames gaining behind them, but they stopped, afraid, at the water and let the fire consume them on the grassy slope above the river.

The New House

Quick looks the business in his black helmet and leggings as he hammers the BSA out north to the new subdivisions. His Dougie MacArthur sunglasses flap against his cheeks. He leans, throttles into the turns, flies like an angel.