Tim Winton - Cloudstreet

The three of them went out the back to watch the old man and the stranger nailing up the last of the tin sheets. There were two yards all of a sudden, the trees divided, and a big ugly fence with stupid writing on it.

He’s had his idea, their mother said. Someone’s given him his idea.

Rose Pickles ran upstairs to her room. The door was locked — they all were, on the sunny side of the house. She crossed the landing and found her things piled into a room across the way. With a snarl she kicked the door closed so hard the knob jumped out of the door, rolled across the boards and stopped, tarnished and dented, at her feet.

Next day, Sam Pickles came up from building the second privy. He’d built it out of more of those tin shop signs and Rose didn’t know what the hell to think as she sat on the back step with the last of the sun in her eyes, watching him come up from the back with little silver twists of tin filings on his trousers. Birds picked off the last of the muscats in the vine above her; she heard them quietly feed.

A tin bog, eh? She tried to sound casual, but there was fury in her voice.

Bet you’ve never seen anything like it, Rosebud.

He waved in the direction of the little tin shed. The door Said NO WADING.

A person like you shouldn’t even say the word ‘bet’, Rose said.

Her father pulled out a shilling and held it silverpink in the dusk light.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

Rose Pickles knocked it out of his hand and got up quick, ready for a hiding.

Even the Only Miracle that Ever Happened to You

From the flat bed of the old Chev with the tarp over him and his sisters, Quick Lamb saw the old sheds sink back into the grey maw of the bush. There was a big blue winter sky hanging over everything and it made him sick to see how cheerful the place seemed. There was dew on the flaccid wires of the fences and magpies were strung along them like beads. The truck shook and all the junk stacked on it quaked and rattled like it’d collapse on him at any moment. As they pulled out onto the limestone road, Quick saw someone else’s truck parked by the gate with the driver’s head averted politely. Their name was gone off the old kero tin letterbox, and as the place disappeared from view with the first wide-hipped bend in the road, Quick remembered the threepenny bit he’d left in the lightningsplit base of that old blackbutt tree by the gate. He’d stuck it in there one morning the week before he first started school, just to see if anyone’d find it and pinch it by the time he was grown up. Too late now, he thought. And anyway, it’s probably not even there anymore. I’m such a dumb kid. And he’d lost his postcard from Egypt, the one he got from his dad’s cousin, Earl. Back in ’43 he wrote a letter to cheer up a digger. He addressed it: Earl Blunt, EGYPT and it found him, just as he assumed it would. And a card came back, an exotic picture from another world. He’d stuck it somewhere secret and had bamboozled himself with his own cunning. He left it to the house, the farm, his old life.

As the mountain of limestone dust rose behind, the world went away, and there was only him and the wind flapping at the tarp and his sisters just not looking anyone in the eye.

Fish Lamb is flying. The trees pass in a blur as he glides low, and the glass is cold against his cheek. On the back of his neck, his mother’s hand feels like a hot scone.

Oriel Lamb says nothing. Her son Fish coos and turns an eye at her. Little Lon is asleep already in the other arm. Lester Lamb whistles an old church chorus and it seems, to Oriel Lamb, less than necessary. She turns the pages of the West Australian and finds the classified section.

When they roll down through the main street, no one even pauses in their business to wave. Some taffy kid is teasing a horse outside the post office. There’s a truck piled with spuds parked near the Margaret River bridge. But the Lambs pass on through without a wave given or got. There they go, someone mutters; the silly bastards.

You can’t stay in a town when everything blows up in your face — especially the only miracle that ever happened to you.

All day they travel. Their bones brittle up with the jolts. Limestone dust flies into the trees. Out of Capel, the smoke from a bushfire comes downwind in a spiritous column, like a train passing. Past the emaciated glitter of creeks, into the heat ahead, the bluewhite nothing of distance, they travel. The Lambs do not speak. For each of them, some old nightmare is lurking, some memory of flames or water or dark wind, the touch of something sudden. Upwind the land is black and bare, the sky bruised with smoke and the oil of eucalypts. No one says a damn thing. The tarp flaps, the junk rattles, and it goes on and on, me in Oriel’s arms, smelling her lemon scent, seeing the flickers in their heads, knowing them like the dead know the living, getting used to the idea, having the drool wiped from my lip.

There we are.

The Lambs of God.

Except no one believes anymore: the disappointment has been too much.

Number One

Right at the end of the day, at the very end of their choices, and at the bottom of the classified column, the Lambs roll into a street by the railway line and look about dejectedly. It’s Number One, says Oriel. They idle down the street, look for some scabby little bungalow until they’re running out of numbers: five, three … one. Number one? Number One is an enormous, flaking mansion with eyes and ears and a look of godless opulence about it, even now. Oriel Lamb flings the battered newspaper down and suddenly everyone’s talking at once.

Shut up!

The whole truck goes quiet.

Down on the tracks, a freight grunts along in the twilight with a spray of steam and smuts. They coast into the side of the road. From up the tree-lined street there’s the sound of someone booting a football into a picket fence. They hear water on lawns, the slap of a screen door. As it cools, the old Chev ticks and grumbles.

Go in, Lest.

Up on the second floor a blanket shifts at a window.

Quick leans around from the back. Looks flamin haunted.

Well, Oriel says without a smile, we’ll be hauntin it from now on. Go on, Lest, go in and tee it up. Tell em what we want.

With a sigh, Lester Lamb gets out and clutches his hat to his belly. He swallows the thick in his throat and stumps up to the gate, pauses, takes a breath, and goes all the way to the teetering verandah. Makes a fist. Knocks.

The door is answered by a woman. Lester Lamb takes a look and a step back, and he punishes his hat sorely. She’s got curls and lips and hips and everything, and she looks at him as though he’s a prop seller or just some other street hawker rubbish from nowhere, and when she says, Yeah? with a hip on the jamb, he’s looking for a way to get a word out.

Umm …

Jesus. Sorry mate. We’re poor, and stupid too. Try up the street a bit.

Lester takes a step forward, moving his hands.

You’re white as a ghost, she says, moving back.

The house.

She’s got a deep vee between her breasts, big as a drinking trough, and it makes him feel like a dumb animal.

Oh, you’ve come for that. I’ll get the hubby. Sam? Saaamm?

It’s limestone dust.

What?

The white on me. We came up from the country. Margaret River.