Cloudstreet

by Tim Winton

He’ll have to come an see me.

  He’ll come.

  We’ll get free fish, I spose.

  I reckon it could be arranged.

  They’re gettin this place off us, bit by bit, said the old girl. We’re signin ourselves over.

  Give’s a kiss, Mum.

  Go to buggery.

  Grandeur, Almost

  In the end, after six weeks of tears and tizzes, Quick stands up there at the front of the church with Fish at his side and the family sweating behind him. In his hired suit, Fish looks like he could run the Liberal Party and make a killing. Quick can hardly believe he got his way. There’s organ music, the smell of mothballs and pious bookdust. He catches a glimpse of his mother’s magnificent look of forbearance and injury; her hair is bowled over in a frightful series of curls, hardly a monument to straightliving and modesty. It’s almost like a helmet she’s lowered on her scone for protection against passion. The old man beside her sits reedbent and curious, tie knot resting like a spare Adam’s apple at his throat. Quick can’t remember noticing his baldness as being so advanced. They look so old, the two of them. The knife never lies … should have spun the old knife, he thinks, just for a laugh. Though maybe we could do without predictions today.

  The high ceiling reaches into a cobwebby dimness with weak streaks of light blunting themselves against one another from opposite sides of the church. It’s almost grand, but a good compromise, he thinks, between pooftery High Church and shoebox Baptist.

  You got the rings? he whispers to Fish.

  Yairs. Fish pats his pocket.

  Need a wee?

  No. Not yet.

  Won’t be long now.

  Someone’s asleep in this house, too.

  Ssh, now. They’re here. Oh, gawd, they’re havin a barney out on the street.

  A few Lambs and Lamb customers twist their necks to see a moment of sparring between bride and mother before the organ lets loose with a volley of notes which sound like a call to order.

  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.

  IX

  The House is Trembling

  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 jo
b, 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?

  Don’t you read the paper?

  Of course I read the bloody paper.

  Evil.

  What?

  I want to fight evil.

  You’re not in a comic, Quick.

  He grinned: Why’d everyone leave it so late to tell me? Quick thought of his room at Cloudstreet, the victims dancing on his wall, all the things there were to be stopped. Now Rose snuggled against him as if to reassure herself. What a head of hair. How could he have lived so long in the same house with her without noticing? She was so passionate, so full of restless energy, and hardheaded—though not nearly as tough as she let on. Still, she was her own woman. He felt dumb around her, but not stupid.

  A copper, she said.

  I’ll sign up after State Housing.

  Right.

  I feel good about it already.

  Small dreams, chuckled Rose.

  Just a little bigger than us, I spose.

  The Day the Fifties Finished

  The day the fifties finished, Rose and Quick found a little flat behind a house in Mosman Park. It was owned by a Mrs Manners who lived up the front, and Rose hated it. It was all they could afford on Rose’s pay and the academy’s allowance while their little house was being built, but being so busy they were hardly ever there. It was old, and Rose hated old. And it was sharing and Rose never wanted to share again. They worked their guts out to pay for their little dream. At night Quick drove delivery trucks and Rose took in laundry, and on Sundays they drove north in Lester’s Chev to look at their sandy quarter acre and the piles of raw bricks. They kept clear of Cloudstreet, though at night Quick often lay awake thinking about it. He’d shake it off in time, he knew. Like Rose says, they’re them now, and we’re us. It’s natural.

  At the end of the year, the old Chev truck came clanking down Swan Street to pick Rose up, and though the idea of riding in it caused Rose’s cheeks to burn, she knew it was the only way she’d get to Quick’s graduation, and that maybe it was the best way, too, considering who Quick was and where he’d come from. Besides she had secret news to buoy herself with, and not even the Harley and sidecar would have been too much to bear.

  When Lester came shambling down the path in his five shilling scarecrow suit, Rose locked the door of the bedsit entrance and went out to meet him. He smiled, with his lower teeth in for the occasion, and gave her a nervous kiss on the nose.

  Well, love, you right? Let’s go an see em stick his number on.

  Constable Lamb, eh? It was ridiculous, she knew, but there was a fat fist of pride in her throat even saying the words. She’d gotten to love him in that little two room annexe off the weatherboard house. They worked and saved so hard that they barely spent any time together. They were hungry for each other. They saved their hopes as well as their money and in time they’d be moving to a new life. Sometimes Rose wondered if perhaps she wanted the house too much. Quick wasn’t like that. He was a boy really: awkward, flatfooted, naive, but he also had the outlook sometimes of an old man. He was calm, steadfast, longsighted and a little mean with money. She was ambitious all ways, she knew, even in the dangerous way. But Quick had more aim than ambition, and for that as much as the rest, she knew she needed him.

  Yairp, said Lester. Another flamin Constable Lamb.

  Rose followed the old man up to the truck, noticing how much he stooped these days, his tallness turning on itself.

  Did you like being a copper, Lester?

  I liked the horses. Didn’t like chasin people up, much. I was better with the horses.

  You sound like Dad. He’s better with the horses than he is with the betting, silly fool.

  Well.

  Oriel sat fidgeting in the cab, forcing a smile as they came. She shoved over to make room for Rose. Her hair was set, her skin looked raw and scrubbed and she smelt like a faintly mouldy towel.

  Hello, Oriel.

  The old woman scowled and accepted a kiss. She didn’t approve of first name terms with juniors and inlaws, but her son’s wife was a stubborn one, and Oriel knew it’d take time to win that battle. Besides, she hadn’t liked coughing up backpay for Quick. It went against family principles.

  I’ve plucked three pullets this morning, said Oriel. There’s lunch at our place.

  Lester winked behind the old girl and Rose pressed out a smile.

  The big day, she murmured.

  To think they knocked him back three times over a rash on his feet, said Oriel. He’s got my sensitive skin, poor soul. Well, he’s showed em.

  They drove down by the river, winding along the cliffs past the houses of the rich and Anglophile. Sun forced back banks of cloud, and the mottled waters of the Swan glittered across its wide, languid course through the city and its hungry suburbs. Rose felt the sun across her knees and believed that there was everything to look forward to.

  Yes, Rose thought, watching Quick step up to the dais to have his hand shaken by the Commissioner and the Minister, he looks bigger in uniform, filled out, solid. Quick stood his height, his cap set perfect on his head and the buttons on his tunic winking regimental, and up there beside the other flapeared youths, it was obvious that he was older, more a man. There he was, swearing allegiance to the Queen, the very mention of whom sent his mother into a fit of weeping beside Rose. Rose saw Lester’s quivery chin in the corner of her eye, and she wished she could be brave enough to reach across Oriel and hold the old softy’s hand.

  Did you give him clean underpants? Oriel snivelled.

  I even ironed them! Rose hissed.

  That’s my boy.

  No, Rose uttered silently, against her will, that’s my boy now.

  Well, said Quick on the back step where the smell of roasting chickens and spuds and pumpkin and parsnips wafted, I’m a cop.

  Rose leaned against the wall where the gully trap protruded and felt her breakfast rising relentlessly.

  Yeah. And a father, too.

  What?

  Which makes me a mother.

  Rose. You’re kiddin!

  No lie. Oh. Here comes the proof of the pudd—

  Toast and tea gouted up against the back wall, as Rose leant out, heaving.

  Whacko, said Quick, that’s fantastic!

  Thank you, said Rose, taking a breath and wiping her mouth with her hanky. Just something I learnt along the way.

  Flatfoot

  After a month of being a copper Quick Lamb discovered that in a shift he’d walk further than a whore, streetsweeper, salesman or vagrant and look more out of place in the windripped heart of the city than any of them. Up and
down he walked. People went to work, got off and on trams and trolleys, they parked cars, ate lunch, filled pubs and went home. Evil seemed to evaporate wherever he went. He was left to tidy up brothel queues in Roe Street, clear drunks from shop doorways and help old people to crosswalks. He felt like he’d joined the Boy Scouts. There was no swagger, no truncheon swinging, no Allo, Allo. He just stumped along, marked out for invisibility by his uniform, hoping guiltily for a spot of sin to come his way. On the city beat his only pinch was a drunken football coach flashing browneyes in the Ladies’ Lounge of the Savoy.

  When he was transferred to Nedlands he thought it was a dinkum shift of his fortunes, but he soon wised up. Nedlands was a political station. The MPs and business barons and the old school boys lived there and the station was open to keep watch on those bludgers’ property. The sergeant in charge was a depressed and hopeless man. He sent Quick out in the afternoons down Broadway and the Avenue to show the colours and hear the complaints of the toffs. Those days he just had his thoughts to keep him going. He’d plan the evening: get home before Rose, fix some grub, tell a few silly stories and gloat over her swollen belly. They let her work on at Bairds because on the switch she was invisible and couldn’t offend the customers. He’d think of fishing, of all his children and the life they would have.

  The Shifty Shadow

  Sam Pickles woke up before the winter dawn with his stump tingling and the smell of his dead father there under the blankets, and he lay awake, cold and sweaty, knowing that the Shifty Shadow had moved across him, and that today was no day to get out of bed. He turned on the bedlamp. This time he’d be no fool, bloody oath, he wouldn’t; not till what was going to come had come. Dolly slept beside him with her hair splashed grey and brown across the pillow, her face crushed and old in the lamp. The house was quiet but for the wind creaking it back on its haunches.

  Yer losin yer nerve, Sam, he thought, but yer must be smartenin up a bit all the same.