Cloudstreet (2 page)

He rolled a smoke and looked out beyond the Nissen huts and the water tower to where the dozers and trucks and oilsmeared engine blocks were waiting. A couple of scurvy-looking dogs sniffed about at the perimeter of the compound, finding leftover crayfish and abalone from last night’s meal. Well, he’d just have to square the day away. It was a dream, that’s all.

At the long trough outside his hut, Sam washed in the cool tank water, and as though to arm himself against such a shifty start to the day, he shaved as well. No one else was up yet. There was nothing to distract him. He got thinking about the old man again. When he looked at himself in the shard of mirror hanging from the water tank, that’s who he saw.

Sam’s father Merv had been a water diviner. He went round all his life with a forked stick and a piece of fence wire, and when he was sober he found water and fed the family on the proceeds. He was a soft, sentimental sort of man, and he never beat Sam. The boy went with him sometimes to watch that stick quiver and tremble like a terrier’s snout and see the old man tugging at his beard as he sang ‘Click Go The Shears’ and tracked back and forth across the sandy coastal plain. Sam followed him, loved him, listened to him talk. He believed deeply in luck, the old man, though he was careful never to say the word. He called it the shifty shadow of God. All his life he paid close attention to the movements of that shadow. He taught Sam to see it passing, feel it hovering, because he said it was those shifts that governed a man’s life and it always paid to be ahead of the play. If the chill of its shade felt good, you went out to meet it like a droughted farmer goes out, arms wide, to greet the raincloud, but if you got that sick, queer feeling in your belly, you had to stay put and do nothing but breathe and there was a good chance it would pass you by. It was as though luck made choices, that it could think. If you greeted it, it came to you; if you shunned it, it backed away.

Queer, now he thought of it, but Sam had spent his boyhood sharing a bed with the old man. And he
was
an old man, fifty, when Sam was born. At six every evening, his father retired with the
Geraldton Gazette
and a bottle, and Sam climbed in beside him to doze against that wheezy chest, hear the rustle of a turning page, smell the pipesmoke and the port. As a general tonic, the old man drank a bottle of Penfolds Invalid each evening; he said it gave him sweet sleep.

Sam’s mother slept in the narrow child’s bed in the next room. She was a simple, clean, gloomy woman, much younger than her husband. Even as a boy, he barely thought about her. She was good to him, but she suffered for her lifelong inability to be a man.

One morning Sam woke to a creeping chill and found the old man dead beside him. His mouth was open and his gums exposed. His mother came in to find him stuffing the old boy’s dentures in. He stopped rigid, they exchanged looks, and it appeared, with the upper plate left the way it was, that the old man had died eating a small piano. The townspeople wrote fond obituaries about Merv Pickles, water diviner. In the end they named the racetrack after him in tribute to his finding water there, and probably for having made it his second home. Without doubt, his faithful and lifelong loss to the bookies had probably underwritten the place for a good twenty years.

People had loved him. He was poor and foolish and people will always have a place in their hearts for the harmless. He loved to gamble, for it was another way of finding water, a divination that set his whole body sparking. Sam Pickles grew up on that racetrack, hanging around the stables or by the final turn where the Patterson’s Curse grew knee high and the ground vibrated with all that passing flesh. Old Merv had Sam down as a rider. He was small and there was something about it in his blood, but when Merv died the dream went with him. A gambler’s wife has ideas of her own. Fools breed a hardness in others they can’t know. Sam Pickles tried to knuckle down to his mother’s way. He came to love labour the way his father never did, but there was always that nose for chance he’d inherited, an excitement in random shifts, the sudden leaping out of the unforeseen. He did badly at school and was apprenticed to a butcher. Then one day, with the shifty shadow upon him, he shot through, leaving his mother without a son, the butcher without an arse to kick, and a footy team without a snappy rover for whom the ball always fell the right way. A lot of things had happened since that day. His luck had waxed and waned. Like a gambler he thought the equation was about even, though any plant, animal or mineral could have told him he was on a lifelong losing streak. Plenty of queer things had occurred, but he’d never before woken up smelling the old man. It could only mean something big. Even as a boy he’d known that his father’s soul had touched him on the way up. He knew that meant something big and quiet and scary as hell.

Men were stirring and cursing now, and the cook was spitting out behind the mess hall. They were hard men here—crims, fighters, scabs, gamblers—but the government didn’t seem to give a damn who they were as long as they filled quotas. They were here to mine guano for phosphate, and there was no shortage of that. Some places, a man could get thighdeep in the stuff if he wanted to. Dozers scooped it, trucked it and dumped it on barges. In Sam’s hut some wag had painted the motto on the door:
Give em shit
. And that’s what they did. Sam didn’t mind the work. It was better for his asthma than the wheat dust on the mainland wharf, where he’d been foreman. And the money was good. Right now he needed the dough, what with a wife and three kids to feed. In a single bad year he’d gambled away everything he’d ever owned and he figured he’d see the war out hauling birdcrap to make up. A man could always recover his losses.

These islands were the sort of place to put the wind up a man, though. He knew about all those murders and mutinies. The
Batavia
business. There’d been madness out on these sea rocks since whitefellas had first run into them. Under the night sky they glowed white and when you heard some blokes had found a man’s foot in a rubber boot, you wondered whether you weren’t living on some outpost of Hell itself. His cousin Joel had worked here as a crayfisherman before he made his pile on the horses. Joel said sometimes you heard the sound of men strangling women at night, but in the morning you always told yourself it was the birds nesting.

Give em shit, boys! the cook yelled as they left the mess hut.

Sam got down to the boat with a full belly and waited for his partner Nobby. Keep the day ahead of you, that’s what the old man used to say. Nobby rolled up to the wheelhouse and belched. He was a fat brand of man, balding, with bleached earhair and a great capacity for hatred. He had an ongoing grievance with everybody, all forms of life. As he came in, he made a sturdy beginning to the morning.

That fucken Wilson, I tellya—

Sam pushed past him and went astern to cast off the line.

A man’d be hardly blamed for murderin that barsted in is sleep—

He started the winch to draw an empty barge alongside.

It was Nobby who made the work hard. The sound of his voice was like something grinding away without oil or maintenance, and Sam had learnt to think across the top of it, to look into the water and think of coral trout, jewfish, baldchin, plan another night’s fishing, conjure up the sight of himself with a beer by the fire and a drumful of boiling crays. That’s what he was thinking of when the cable caught his glove and his hand was taken from him. His fingers were between the cogs before he could draw breath, and he felt his knuckles break in a second. Madness rose behind his eyes as Nobby fumbled with the gears, cursing him, cursing the winch, till he got him free and Sam tore the glove off, squealing, as four fingers fell to the deck and danced like half a pound of live prawns.

Sam was aloft. His body vibrated. Two men in flying suits played cards on his chest. His hand was in a block of ice. The airmen were playing gin rummy.

Orright, mate? We’ll land in a few minutes, doan worry.

I’m not worried, he shouted back over the sound of the engines. So this was what a Catalina looked like on the inside.

He thought he’d tell them a cautionary thing or two on the subject of luck, but one of them slapped down a card so hard that Sam felt the reverberations right down his arm and he fainted fair away.

From up here, with hindsight, you can see into every room in the town of Geraldton, through roof and fence and curtain, down alley and beach, along bars and breakwaters, and if you look hard enough you’ll see a schoolgirl hurrying home early to the back of the old pub to fetch her mother to the hospital. She clangs up the fire escape, pigeontoed but athletic. The rear of the pub looks like the back of a movie set but from the front, the place looks the real business.

Rose Pickles hammers along the corridor past numbered rooms till she reaches 36. It’s locked. She calls out to her mother but there is no reply, though she detects an intake of breath from behind the door.

Now that it’s all in the past, anyone can see the woman astride the bed with her dress up. The sweat on her skin. The Catalina pilot with his belt undone and his hat on the table. You can smell the beer on their breaths, you get so close. So close, you hear the blood in their fattened hearts. And out in the corridor you witness the terrible boiling dark in the schoolgirl’s head, the confusion, the feeling, the colour she can’t put a name to.

Her two brothers will be here soon. She goes out and waits on the fire escape. Afternoon sun cuts it way down from the reservoir of blue. Rose’s plaits tug the back of her head. She feels tough all of a sudden, and grown up. The boys can find their own way, she thinks, they can all find their own way. She batters down the fire escape. The metal tolls after she’s gone.

Dolly Pickles was a damn goodlooking woman. Anyone in town would tell you so. In some pubs they would know you so, and send a wave of winks down the bar that would always wash up at the far reaches of the Ladies’ Lounge. As she headed down to the hospital, she turned a few heads in the street and took in the salt breeze. When this town didn’t smell of salt it smelt of phosphate and wheat and rotting crayfish. She liked the stink of salt. Right now, with the rime of sex on her, she smelt of salt herself. Oh, those Yanks are somethin, she thought; Jesus Christ, they’re somethin.

Kids were bombing off the jetty as she passed under the Norfolk pines. The water was a flat bed of sunlight and the brownslick bodies of children bashed through into its blue underbelly. Leaning against a fence, a man shelled prawns and eyed her off. He wiped vinegar from his chin and smiled. She gave him a piss-off-useless flick of her hips and went on to the hospital.

Rose and the boys were there. The boys left off whispering by the window and stood straight. They were rangy, sundark kids. Rose was by the bed. She didn’t look up. Sam was asleep with his white fist bound up in a salute or a warning—she didn’t know which. A private room in the new wing. Government money, she thought. We couldn’t afford this.

Four fingers and the top of his thumb, Rose said.

Christ.

Dolly saw it was his right hand. His bloody working hand. A man could hardly pick his nose with a thumb and half a pointer. They were done for; stuffed, cactus. Thank you, Lady Luck, you rotten slut. It was probably time now to pack a bag and buy a ticket, but hell, there was the kids and everything. The whole town knowing. How would she live?

He bin awake?

Nup.

The boys, Ted and Chub, scratched themselves and pulled at their shorts.

We go down the jetty? He’s not gunna wake up.

S’posed to be in school, youse.

We’ll be back dreckly. Dad might be awake, eh.

Oh, ya mays well.

Don’t drown from cryin, Rose said, from the bedside.

Dolly stood in the room with her daughter. You had to watch this kid. She was getting to be a clever little miss. And she was Sam’s through and through. She was hot in the face like she was holding something back. Dolly wandered what she knew. She’s a kid. I’m a woman. The only thing we’ve got in common these days is a useless man. Dolly’d always gone for useless ones. But this was the living end.

The room smelt of new paint and phenyle. Dolly tried to spot a mirror but there was none.

The woman and the daughter do not speak. The crippled man does not stir. The breeze comes in the window and stops the scene from turning into a painting.

After her mother left, Rose sat by the bedside and watched him sleep. She hated him sometimes, he was so hopeless. At times she wanted to hit him, to pick up a lump of four-be-two and snot him with it. He was a grown man and yet he didn’t have a pinch of sense in him. But he wasn’t mean, like the old girl was turning mean. She had to put up with all these catastrophes, so maybe she had a right, but the old man still made you love him. They’d had good times together, all of them, but something sour was coming into everything, and it’d been happening all year. Everything was falling to bits. When the old man was home they fought and swore. The old girl hammered him night and day and he went out and lost money. Even now she didn’t know whether to put a cool hand on his brow or shake him by the throat. He looked so pale and busted. Oh, he’d made her laugh so many times, making a dill of himself to make her happy. He remembered what she liked, he told her adult things sometimes, and stories from his stockriding days. Rose saw through him; she knew he was always going to be useless, but she loved him. Hell, he was her father.

Sam began to snore. Rose pressed her lips together and waited.

No one in the pub had a conversation that night that didn’t somehow wander into the territory of the Pickles family and their doomed run of luck. They had to do it when the publican wasn’t about because he was a loyal relation. They wondered aloud about Sam’s future, and the evening was kept alive with conjecture. Luck was something close to any drinker’s heart here at the Eurythmic. The place was built and bought on it, named after the great horse that brought it. A photo hung above the bar of the dark gleaming horse with its white diamond brow staring out at them, as if reminding them of his beneficence. The brash, hearty talk rose into the residential rooms at the top of the broad banistered staircase. Rose and the boys listened to it until the closing swill got under way, and when the place was quiet they slipped downstairs to the big dining room and its smells of steak and cabbage.