Cloudstreet

by Tim Winton

  Fish Lamb was strangely quiet. No hysterics. He lay on his bed and did not come out. Lester bandaged the pig, kissed its brow and prayed.

  Summer Madness

  And then the vile hot easterly blows them into summer proper, into a dry night-time madness that eddies under the eaves and shakes the rats out of every sleepout grapevine as a small man creeps through the back lanes between bin and gate and bloating fences itching with an inexplicable hatred. See him down there slinking along, snuffling and wheezing in your town, in your yards, your streets, and hating you, every whole one of you as you sleep moaning and turning beneath your sheet behind your flywire, past you as you sleep open on verandahs and on back lawns in the countrified manner you cling to. Oh, what hurt and malevolence glows in that shambling shape of a man. From beyond space and time I see him like a coal sputtering in the dark, rolling wherever the hot headachy desert wind blows him: West Perth, Dalkeith, Shenton Park, Subiaco, Mosman Park, coming by you, coming by you, coming for you. Against his chest he carries a rifle. For you all.

  Bloody Mayhem

  Quick wakes to the sound of a motor. It’s high morning. A motorbike running under his window.

  Lamb? Lamb!

  Rose wakes next to him. Quick?

  Sounds like Murphy from the station. Orright! Wait a second!

  Get out here, mate! Get on this bike! We’ve got all shit goin up!

  Quick got to the door in his undies. Gday, Murph.

  Get fuckin dressed, mate.

  What’s up?

  Bloody mayhem, that’s what.

  Well, says Rose, spose this is what you’ve been waiting for.

  But when Quick is gone and Rose goes out for a paper, she finds it’s worse than a bit of houseburning. The West is forecasting isolated thunder and broadcasting indiscriminate murder.

  Heat of the Night

  In the heat of the night with his barrel still reeking, the man with the hare lip and the cleft palate shifts through the dry night grass in someone’s backyard and comes upon a sleeper behind insect wire. A sleeper: lips opening and closing in the great vacant journey of sleep, his breath coming and going like the sea. At the back of the house. In the big country town that wants so much to be a city, there’s another sleeper and I can’t stop this. I’m behind the mirror and in different spaces, I’m long gone and long here but there’s nothing I can do to stop this. Every time it happens, on and on in memory, I flinch as that brow flinches with the cool barrel suddenly upon it. The sound goes on and on and matter flies like the constellations through the great gaps in the heavens, and I haven’t stopped it again. Lester, Rose, Red—I can’t stop it for you. When I’m Fish down there I just don’t know, and now that I’m what he became beyond it’s all too late. I see it, I see it, all of history, and it sets me hard as spirit.

  Right in Our Bloody Backyard

  It’s right in our bloody backyard, said the Sarge. Cottesloe, he shoots and wounds two in a car. Then he goes to a flat, puts a hole in a bloke’s forehead. An hour later he shoots a bloke on his doorstep in Nedlands when he answers the door. Then he kills a kid sleeping on a back verandah in the next street. The CIB are shitting themselves. Your namesake, Lambsy, up at Central, he’s like a cyclone.

  What do we do? said Quick.

  What we’re told, said the Sarge.

  It’s madness, said Murphy.

  Or evil, thought Quick.

  Murder, Murder

  Sam Pickles opened the West at lunchbreak, stinking of gold and silver and turpentine, DEADLOCK IN KILLER HUNT: STREETS STAY LIT. That’s it alright. The shadow over the whole town, SHARK KILLS WOMAN IN TWO FEET OF WATER. Jesus. There’s worse, RAIN DELAYS TEST PLAY.

  The town is in a frenzy down there. This is what it means to be a city, they say, locking their doors and stifling behind their windows. On the streets at night no one moves. No one goes out. There’s a murderer out there and no one knows what he wants, where he is, who he is, and why he kills. This is Perth, Western Australia, whose ambitions know no limit. And the streets are empty.

  Quick crept the back lanes of Nedlands through the long, hot, wet nights. The CIB boys fingerprinted everybody in the known world and the streetlights burned all night. Armed with his uniform, his handcuffs, torch and truncheon, Quick felt no fear, but he could smell it in the outhouses the length of every lane; it oozed from under the bolted doors, from every flue, vent and gully trap of the neighbourhoods he patrolled. He was alone out there with a gunman loose, and he wondered what evil really looked like, if its breath stank, if it could be stopped. The lanes were high with weeds and cast off junk. There was room, all the room in the world for a man to be abroad unseen. Quick didn’t blame them all in there, tossing and rolling awake through the summer.

  I’m scared, Quick, said Rose. I don’t sleep all night. You can’t leave me here on my own. I’m going mad. I can’t even read. Even in the day, I’m frightened.

  The new house is ready enough, I spose, he said, dubious.

  I’d be alone there, Quick. I don’t want to be alone. Have you seen that street? There’d be no one to talk to. I can’t stand it while you’re on nights, love. I’ve got the baby. There’s some mad bastard out there and no one’s caught him.

  We’ll think of something, love.

  They’re like rats in a fire down there. See, across the desert the train comes groaning with emergency supplies of locks and mesh. The fingerprint files of the CIB look bigger than the Doomsday Book. There’s ulcers bursting, friendships and marriages lost. There’s a murderer out there, a cold blooded maniac. Don’t go out, they say. Ring three times, they say. Don’t come calling, they say, it’s too much for me, just don’t come calling, just leave us alone, leave me be, leave us, leave us, oh God it’s sweltering but don’t go outside!

  And someone else dies, regardless.

  As Cloudstreet tosses and throttles, a queer point of luminescence in all that gloom, with its downpipes crashing in the wind, its stonefruit falling dead from trees and the scarred and hurting pig shrieking warning across the whines of mosquito and the dead sobs in the walls, that man comes wheezing. He steps lightly by stubbornly opened doors and lifted windows, past the buckled shop shutters and the open till within, down the swept side path into the heartland where it smells of laundry and preserve bottling and woodwork and vegetables and the hard labour of people, down through it all with his heart a-dance, he comes wheezing. He sees a tent billowing softly in the night light. He bites his lips coming onward, bearing down, but out of the dark comes a pink blur, a squealing snarling creature that uproots him and sends him back in a tumble and he’s running, grabbing for the .22 before it can turn for another run, before he can find out what it is.

  And in the street, right under the light as he comes running, is a man with black arms akimbo, just watching. The gunman stops, draws a bead, and loses him in his sights. Loses him from the street altogether. Someone’s calling out a foreign lingo. He bolts.

  Rose shivers in her bed. We’re alright, she says to the baby. We’re okay. Oh, Quick, come home!

  After a night of endless lonely trudging, of holeing up in ramshackle hollows and peering over back fences with thunder breaking the sky and the rain beating mud against his shins, Quick clocked off the shift and went down to the river to clear his head. In the dawn the sky was clearing and summery steam rose off the jetty piles, and out of the steam came the black man looking completely unsurprised.

  Geez, said Quick, recognizing him fearfully. Haven’t you got a home to go to?

  Not this side.

  Quick looked across the river. Through the steam he thought he saw moving figures, dark outlines on the far bank.

  Are you real?

  The black fella laughed. Are you?

  Quick kicked the muddy grass before him.

  You’ve got a home to go to, Quick. Go there.

  Quick regarded the man. He was naked, naked enough to arrest.

  Go there.

  Orright, said PC Qu
ick, already on his way. When he turned back, high on the hill, he saw more than one black man. He saw dozens of them beneath the trees, hundreds like a necklace at the throat of the city.

  Home

  Sam and Oriel and Lester met in the Lambs’ kitchen at Cloudstreet before breakfast. It seemed to have occurred to them all at once.

  Sam noticed that Oriel Lamb had the beginnings of a beard. Oriel Lamb still had a strange overwhelming parental power about her, and he imagined that crossing her would be like crossing luck itself. Sam felt himself shrinking in this engineroom of a kitchen whose walls throbbed with produce. From the window you could see the yard on the Lamb side, its terraces of flowers and vegies inside chicken wire, the stonefruit trees heavy, the redspattered tent sucking its cheeks in the morning wind.

  This proposition’s just more of an idea, said Sam.

  Yes? Yes?

  Let’s get em back here.

  Who?

  Well, I worry about Rose.

  That’s my idea! said Lester.

  Quick and Rose? said Oriel.

  She’s on her own too much, said Sam.

  They’ve just built a new house, said Oriel.

  She needs company, protection. She’s havin a baby remember.

  Gawd, it’d be good havin a nipper round the place again, said Lester.

  We’ll have one soon enough, said Oriel, thinking of Lon and Pansy.

  They could have that big room at the top of the stairs.

  Ugh, said Oriel.

  Well? said Lester.

  They’ll never come, said Oriel. Rose’s too proud.

  Sam smiled.

  And … and Quick too, she said trying uncharacteristically to be diplomatic, because any man could see the idea had taken root in her. No, no they’re too proud. They’ll never come home.

  Quick and Rose arrived with the laden Rugby even before the Cloudstreet delegation set off.

  Got a spare bunk? said Quick.

  The families mobbed them on the verandah. It was a stampede, a door-flinging, board-bucking, fruit-dropping stampede down the corridors to reach them. Everyone grabbed hungrily at them, Rose with her big melon belly, Quick with his loose limbed nightshift body.

  Just for a week or two, said Quick.

  Yairs! Yairs!

  It seems logical, said Quick through his teeth.

  Aw, yairs.

  I wasn’t worried really, said Rose.

  Aw, nooooo!

  Fish came last down the stairs, thumping his way through the house. Aarr! Quick en Rose! Arrrr!

  Quick felt safe here, he felt within his boundaries. Happy? he asked Rose amid the din. Happy, she said.

  The Walls

  But the library is horrible. And besides, Rose gets a late recurrence of morning sickness. She swears it’s the windowless room. After long nights, Quick comes home to good old Cloudstreet and crashes into bed with shop noise below him and old Dolly cursing gravity and time out the back somewhere, but it’s not that which stops him sleeping. It’s the old misery pictures on the wall. When he lies down and the door is closed, the room dark, quiet and airless, two strange miserables burst off the walls and at each other’s throats. It’s exhaustion he thinks, and lack of air. That steely old hag and the darkeyed girl going at it, mute and angry like the pictures on his wall in his childhood sleep. So he goes back on shift shitweary and useless.

  The Light in the Tent

  Nights were long out in the tent with no wood and glass to sleep behind. Oriel knew there was only fabric between her and death, fabric and strength of character. She took to leaving a lit candle by her bed. It stood in a saucer on the old family Bible, its flame curtseying before the draughts. Thundery showers peppered the tentfly and above it, the mulberry shook itself like a wet dog. Canvas. She knew how thin canvas was, but she refused to be afraid. True, she could move inside until the killer was caught, as Lester and Quick said, but that would be a surrender to things that hadn’t even declared themselves and she knew that going inside would break her will.

  Sometimes in clear patches of sleeplessness she stood at the flap and looked up at the old house and wondered why it still fought them so. Nineteen years, wasn’t it long enough to belong? But it had got worse lately, this illfeeling coming from the place, unless she was imagining it and any fool could tell you she wasn’t much for imagination.

  All down the street and down every street men and women were sliding new bolts on their doors, locking windows, drawing curtains, dragging out dusty .22s and twelve gauges, opening bottles and whispering Hail Marys under the sheets while that candle burnt on the Bible in the tent behind Cloudstreet and that boxy little woman sat arms akimbo, waiting for something to show itself.

  Only Streets Away

  Only streets away a man with sinus trouble slips from yard to yard. Across a back verandah he creeps and a restless sleeping body catches his eye through a cool screen window. A sultry, sultry night. He slips a hand through the wire of the screen door, slides the bolt. The smell of lamb chops lingers still in the close air of the house. He’s inside. He’s decided something. This isn’t madness. He’s thought about it. He knows what rape and murder mean. He’s just come to like them.

  Fish Wakes

  Fish wakes. Rose hears him sobbing. And then muttering, the crazy foreign talk from the wedding, on and on, until she hears Lester stirring.

  He Knows What Rape and Murder Mean

  Yes, it’s a woman. Young. A short nightie rucked up in the heat. He steadies, drawing on all his skill. After all, he’s the Nedlands Monster, no less. Finds the cord from the bedlight. It’s so easy. And her breasts part as he slips it under her neck. She hardly makes a sound going off, throttling, writhing and choking and her legs spread in surrender so he goes to it on a spurt of triumph. He knows what rape and murder mean. He knows what he’s doing. They’re frightened of him. The whole city is quaking at the thought of him. This girl, even her dead body is afraid of what he’s doing, repulsed at the look of triumph on his face, recoiling at the face itself.

  Oriel Hears

  Oriel hears the boy blabbering and wailing up there. All the houselights are on. She’d go in there herself and claim order, but Fish doesn’t know her, doesn’t see her, can’t hear her and she isn’t that much of a glutton for punishment.

  Businesslike

  With his seed in her the dead girl’s gone all heavy. They’re gonna come looking for him. The police, the screaming, hurting family, the whole defeated city. You have to be a winner. Even the short and ugly and deformed, they have to win sometimes. He’s winning, beating them all. A little truckdriving bloke with no schooling, he’s killing them in their beds and they’re losing at last.

  He drags the girl’s strangled and defiled body out into the lane. Finds a hole in a neighbour’s fence and stuffs her through, throws the nightie after her. Then back to the car, across the deadnight river to the missus and kids. Businesslike, that’s what he admires about himself.

  Quiet

  Oriel wakes from a doze and the candle is out. The house is quiet and there’s light coming from the rim of the sky. Quick will be home soon from the shift. With news, she can feel it.

  Loaded House

  Lester steps out of Cloudstreet, crosses the road and looks back at it. There’s something horrible about it lately. Something hateful, something loaded with darkness and misery. He doesn’t know how much more of it he can stand.

  Morning

  Quick stands exhausted by the river. The old town isn’t the same anymore, it’ll never be the same. The sun is streaming out over the hills and onto the terracotta roofs of the suburbs where they’ll all be waking up to the news. It’s happening out there, he thinks, and we can’t stop it, we can only clean up after him.

  Quick moves along the bluffs above the river. He won’t let himself think it, but he knows he’s looking for that blackfella. He has to talk.

  The City is Howling

  The city is howling with outrage. They’re talkin
g of bringing in the army, bringing across the Sydney homicide squad, Scotland Yard. The whole city goes mad with fear and outrage.

  Dolly and Rose

  Out on the backstep Dolly feeds the birds their raw meat. They eye her sideways and snatch it from her to back off to a distance and hack away.

  Garn, she says, you’d tear me bloody eyes out if I didn’t come with a feed, wouldn’t you?

  A diesel rumbles past heading somewhere on the tracks. The birds flinch, baulk and Dolly laughs.

  Well, you gutless wonders! You’d eat ya children!

  She sees them now pecking at her bloated body out in the desert by the tracks that lead nowhere and bring nothing. Rose comes down smiling. Good old Rose, good old Rosie.

  Bastard of a Place

  Sam latches his gladstone bag, pops a morning peppermint in his mouth and steps down off the verandah where Lester is lifting the shop shutters.

  Bastard of a place, he thinks vaguely, not knowing which place he really means.

  Hole in the Wall

  Fish stands by and sees the shade ladies pressed flat against the wallpaper as Quick opens the wall up with a saw. Wood dust comes down and makes him sneeze. There’s plaster like frost upon the floor.

  Slip us the crowbar, will you, Fish.

  This?

  Yep.

  There’s sun coming!

  Quick prizes boards away, knocks a cut beam aside, and a square of sunlight breaks into the room with a shudder and a riot of motes and spirits. Fish sees the shadows with their mouths wide in horror. He grips the saw, its handle still warm from his own brother Quick.