Cloudstreet

by Tim Winton

  From her window Rose saw men bringing boxes in off the truck. She went downstairs like a wild thing, stirring the others out of the gloomy silence of scrubbing. Teachests and crates came in through the door, a fat old sofa from the Ladies’ Lounge of the Eurythmic, brass vases with the star of David on them, a cuckoo clock, mattresses and beds, a huge stuffed marlin, golf clubs, sixteen black and white photos of Eurythmic, each as big as a window. Rose opened crates and chests to find curtains, towels, sheets. Five crates were full of books. She dragged out an armful—Liza of Lambeth, Jude the Obscure, Joe Wilson’s Mates, Hints for the Freshwater Fishermen—they were greensmelling and dusty, but Rose was exultant.

  Well, her mother said, appearing beside her, this old stuff’ll at least make it look like we’re not squattin here.

  Look at these books! Rose sighed.

  There’s nowhere to put them, said Dolly.

  The old man came alongside. I’ll make some shelves.

  Rose saw her mother’s eyes travel down to the stumps on his hand and back away again, and they went on upacking in silence.

  Next morning they had their gear unpacked and the house was theirs, though they rattled round in it like peas in a tin. The cheque arrived from the trustees.

  We’re rich! Sam yelled from the letterbox.

  But next day was Saturday. Race day. And there was a horse called Silver Lining. Sam had great faith, what, with the shifty shadow being about with such goodwill and all. But the horse was legless.

  Saturday evening they were poor again. Sam got home sober, in time to have Dolly push him down the stairs. He went end over end like a lampstand and put his head through the plaster wall at the turn. He pulled his head out, took the last few steps on foot, and shrugged at the kids who went outside without even bothering to shake their heads.

  On the back step, Ted muttered. That’s our friggin luck. House and no money.

  Ponds and no fish, said Chub.

  Trees and no fruit.

  Arm and no hand.

  Rose turned on them. Oh, yer a pair of real cards. Real funny blokes.

  Reckon it’s a friggin house o cards, I do, said Ted. The old girl’s the wild card and the old man’s the bloody joker.

  Sam surprised them, coming up behind. There was blood dripping from his nose. They moved aside to let him by. Rose watched him walk all the way down to the back fence where he stood in the grass. From somewhere near came the roar of a football crowd. The old man just stood there in the wild grass with his hands in his pockets, and Rose went inside when she couldn’t watch it anymore.

  Nights

  The Pickleses move around in the night, stunned and shuffling, the big emptiness of the house around them, almost paralysing them with spaces and surfaces that yield nothing to them. It’s just them in this vast indoors and though there’s a war on and people are coming home with bits of them removed, and though families are still getting telegrams and waiting by the wireless, women walking buggered and beatenlooking with infants in the parks, the Pickleses can’t help but feel that all that is incidental. They have no money and this great continent of a house doesn’t belong to them. They’re lost.

  At night Dolly hears the trains huff down the track loud enough to set the panes a-rattle in the windows. All night, all day, people seem to be going someplace else. Everyone else somewhere else. Some nights, even as autumn thickens and the chill gets into her, she gets out of bed and walks down the track to the station where, from the dark shelter of the shrubbery, she can watch people getting on and off trains; men and women in uniform, sharp-looking people who laugh and shove at each other like they don’t care who hears or sees. She hears their voices trailing off in the streets, sucked into the noises of steam and clank. Not many of them look as though they belong either, like the Yank marines honking their accents and tossing fags and nylons about, no, they don’t belong but they don’t give a damn.

  Look at her, crouching there in the bushes.

  Dolly always gets back in bed cold and angry and more awake than she was before. They’re poor, dammit, still shitpoor, even with a house as big as a church that they can’t bloody sell and maybe just as well. God she misses the wind and the flat plains and the bay and the dust. And that Catalina pilot, worthless bastard. No, she doesn’t really miss him; just the idea of him. She misses the idea of herself as well. Back in Geraldton people knew her. They all whispered behind their hands, all those tightarsed local bastards, behind their sniggering looks and their guts in their laps, but at least she was somebody, she meant something.

  Now and then in the night, only some nights, she leans across Sam, lets her breasts fall on his back and kisses his neck to taste the salt on him. He still smells like home, like other times, better times, and she feels everything tighten up on her and hurt just a little. But he never wakes up.

  And Sam?

  Every night when his wife lies there sighing, as he pretends to be asleep, or when she runs her breasts and lips over him before giving up and creeping out, he just sets his teeth and holds onto himself and knows he doesn’t deserve what he’s got. Now and then, if he stays awake long enough, he can feel the floors move, as though the house is breathing.

  He has to think of something, but he thinks of all the wrong things. All the useless warm memories. Like those Greenough summers. That summer Dolly and he left the kids asleep in the afternoons and swam across the river with a cold bottle of beer so they could pull each other down on the hard sand between the paperbarks and lick the salt away and peel cotton from each other without having to keep quiet. Sam Pickles remembers the heat of the day, the drumbeating of cicadas, her breasts in his fists, her thighs vising his ribs and the shellhollow smell rising from her as he bunted her into the sand, bucking them along as all the muscles of her pelvis clamped on him until they were almost in the water when the finish hit them like a hot wind down the valley. He poured beer down her back, cold beer between her breasts so it gathered in her navel so she laughed, shivered, went taut again and drew him down to suck his tongue from between his teeth. With her teeth in his flesh he knew there was a heaven and a hell.

  Sam remembers. He feels a hot jet of sperm on his belly in the dark. Always, he thinks in disgust, always the wrong things to think of.

  There they are. The man and his bung hand and the disgusted look, the darkhaired woman with the hips and the nervous racehorse gait, the two crewcut boys asleep, and the little girl looking prissy and lost. In the middle of the night she’s there poking her head out of the window as if to get her bearings.

  Sam’s Big Idea

  On the way home from school Rose walked ahead of Ted and Chub along the train line to be free of their stupid boys’ talk and just in case anyone thought they were her brothers. As she came into Cloud Street she noticed the place had started to look familiar: the long line of jacarandas, the rusting tin roofs, and the sagging picket fences. The first thing she saw, as always, was the big ragged front lawn and the gable peak of Number One nesting right up there in the treetops by the rail embankment.

  She walked down the side path beneath the rotten canes of a grapevine and came upon the old man out in the backyard with a stranger who was hammering nails into a great sheet of tin. Down the middle of the yard, from the house to the back pickets, was a tin fence which cut the yard in half. The wooden frame was jarrah; it smelt of gum and was the colour of sunburn. The old man was holding a big green sheet of tin while the other man hammered clouts in. Rose cocked her head to read the red lettering that ran diagonally across it. LIVER. The whole fence was built of tin signs.

  The old girl sat on the back step in her dressing gown with a smoke in her mouth and a look on her that said she didn’t want to know about any of it anymore.

  Where’d this come from? Rose said, to the old man.

  Aw, it just got there, he said with a grin.

  Who’s this? She looked at the tall, darklooking bloke who paused in his work to smile at her. She hated his guts.

&nbs
p; Now, mind yer manners. This is a bloke who knows a lot about horses—

  Rose turned and left him. She ran past her mother who looked aside. Some strange kind of murderousness lifted in Rose Pickles and she just didn’t know what it meant.

  She heard the boys coming down the long hall from the front, and she went to duck into a side door to avoid them, but the door was locked.

  Hey! Chub called from the other end of the house. All these doors are locked.

  She met the boys in the middle and they looked at each other.

  They’re all locked, Ted said. All this side.

  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.

  Knew a bloke from there once. Had hair growin out his nostrils.

  Oh.

  Saaam? Come down here, Sam. Stop buggerizin about!

  My name’s Lester Lamb.
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br />   She bunches up her lips to make a hard little flower and just looks at him. From behind her, a small muscular man in a singlet appears. His blonde hair is ruffled and there’s a day’s growth on his jaw.

  His name’s Lester Lamb.

  There’s a moment of confusion as they’re forced to shake lefthanded. Lester sees the pink stumps and reads grief in the man’s face. He knows what it looks like. He only needs a mirror.

  Come an have a look. You get half the house, half the yard, yer own dunny. The corridors are no man’s land, same as the stairs. Big bloody joint, eh.

  A couple of boys stand at the head of the stairs, about the same age as Fish and Quick.

  I got six kids, Lester says.

  Cathlicks, eh?

  No. No, nothing.

  Can yez pay?

  We’ll pay.

  You’ll do.

  Lester hears Lon crying out in the truck.

  Mays well bring em in, the man says. My name’s Pickles. Then he guffaws. It’s gunna sound like a counter lunch—Lamb and Pickles.

  Lester hears Oriel shushing them up out there, and he stands quiet for a moment in this big sagging joint, gives himself a second before calling them in.

  Rose Pickles and her brothers saw them unloading the dust-white truck. They made a crowd standing about down there, and they looked so skinny and tired. They carried a big jarrah table in but no chairs. There were teachests, a clock, shovels and hoes, a couple of bashed old trunks. They all struggled and heaved up the stairs with that little woman barking instructions.

  Cripes, Ted said. And I thought we looked like reffoes.

  Rose opened the door a crack to see them piling gear into her old room. There were three girls, mostly older than her; the oldest looked bigknuckled and tough, the middle one walked around like she was dying slowly of some disease, and the youngest one looked pretty and mean.

  Ted shook his head. Three more sheilas.

  There’s three boys too.