Cloudstreet (27 page)

The warm weather came with November and Rose was glad of it. No more shameful holey tights, no more sleeping under old greatcoats for want of a decent blanket. The sun levering in through the kitchen window cheered her up so much she could hardly hear what the old girl was saying. It was noon. Dolly was up early. She had the look about her of a person who’d just been making grave decisions. It made Rose want to giggle, the way the old girl’s breasts slapped together like applause under her cotton nightie.

You know you’ll have to leave school, don’t you? Dolly was saying.

Rose felt the dreaminess evaporating.

What?

We haven’t got a brass razoo.

I wonder why. What you don’t drink, the old man gives to the bookies.

Don’t backchat me, girl, or I’ll give you one.

Rose sighed and looked out the window. She loved school. When she could avoid the humiliations of being poor, when she could sink back into the anonymous mass of the class, she did love it. She wanted to be a clever woman, to know poetry and mathematics, to go to Africa and discover something. She didn’t do too badly, either. Her marks were good, though they’d been slipping all year as she missed more and more days as the weakness came over her. It would have been easier if she had friends but she frightened kids off with her intensity, the hardness of her that no one would understand. A friend had to be true to death. Rose didn’t care for chums, she wanted sisters in blood and loyalty. She never went to the socials they organized with the boys’ school. Boys thought she didn’t laugh enough and her prettiness was turning to caricature the more she lost weight. Sometimes she thought she was dying and the thought strengthened her, cheered her up. It gave shape to things.

You’ll have to get a job. It’ll help us all out.

Oh, anything to help out, Mum. Should I still do the cooking and the cleaning, or will you be getting someone else in?

Dolly rose and came at her with a swinging fist and Rose felt a giggle coming up in her.

Leave off! the old man yelled from the doorway.

The old girl stopped.

Don’t you touch her, Dolly. Don’t you put a finger on her, or—

Or what, you weak mongrel?

The old man had his doublebreaster on, and the hat with the feather in it. The room smelled of shaving soap all of a sudden. He was dressed for the races.

Or you’ll be out on the street where you fuckin belong.

Rose got ready for a full tilt brawl. In a way it was a relief. There’d been a silence in the place for the last year or two, an aching, torniqueted quiet, and now it felt like coming to something. But Dolly just went past him and out the door. In the room next door the bedsprings groaned.

The old man smiled. Thought I was gunna get snotted, for a sec there. Get some clobber on and come to the races with me, eh? You can have a bet. I’ll buy ya bag a chips.

Rose shook her head. The old man shrugged.

Bag a lettuce leaves?

Carn Fish

Carn Fish, says Lester. Hop up and come out. It’s a nice day. You can take your shirt off and get some sun. Can’t lie on that bed all day. Carn, yev got legs and arms. And ears Fish, are you listening?

It’s a worry to see Fish like this, hardfaced, flat on his back, looking at the ceiling in a way you can never be sure about. He’s getting big now, and Lester can’t help but wonder what it’ll be like in a couple of years when the boy’s as big as him and brimming with all that aimless strength he’s storing.

When he can be got out of the room and downstairs he’ll sit at the kitchen table and spin a china bowl wah-wah-wah on the table with a joyless sort of concentration that draws all attention from around him. If you’re standing at the sink or stoking the stove or even going by the door, that wah-wahwah, the science, the balance of it, the way he can do it like that, it draws you over, and you stand and watch, see his big fingers wrap on the china and send it topping across the polished jarrah surface. But he can only do it when he’s not upset or agitated. When the boy is angry or frightened he can barely walk straight. It’s a sight, an awful sight, to see him bellowing mad. He actually looks blind with rage. He’ll stagger and stumble, lurch into doorframes and walls and not find his feet again. He’ll lie there kicking and rolling like a bull in a bog with the most bestial, furious, hurt noise a body could imagine.

It frightens Lon and even the girls get scatty when it happens. Oriel turns into a pillar box, and Lester feels his teeth trying to force each other back into his jaw. It’s a hard and unlovely thing to see, and they’re not alone in flinching from it. From out of time and space, those long glass planes of separation and magnitude, it’s impossible to witness again and again without grief and wonder. Across the planes all things still play themselves out, all fun and fear, all the silliness and quaking effort, all the bickering and twitching, all the people going about the relentless limited endeavour of human business, and the sight of your body rolling like that, bursting with voice and doubleness, reminds you that the worlds are still connected, the lives are still related and the Here still feels the pangs of history. Those who’ve gone before do not lose their feelings, only their bodies. I stare out from behind the sideboard mirror and see you there, Fish. I don’t forget.

Fish! Lester says down there. Fish, get up. Come on, boy. Please?

Wanna go in the boat with Quick.

Lester sighs and sits on the bed beside him.

Quick isn’t here, boy.

We see the stars. Up in the water.

Thank God he’s old enough still to take himself to the outhouse, Lester thinks. I couldn’t bear it if it was worse than this.

Quick’s gone away for a while, Fish.

I want the water, Lestah.

I’ll take you down to the river sometime, son, when your mother’s finished drivin Mr Clay off her mind. But even as he says it, it tastes like a lie. He knows Oriel will never let him near the river again.

In the boat. Up in the water.

Hey, listen. I know. You can have a boat in the back. That’s it, I’ll get you a boat to have here. Dyou like that, mate? With oars and everything. You can even go fishin. Waddyasay?

Fish looks at the ceiling.

What’s your name? Lester prompts.

Fish.

Fish who?

Fish Lamb.

What’s your proper name?

Samson.

Who’s your Mum?

…

Who’s your Mum?

…

Your Dad?

You, Less.

Sisters?

Red and Hattie and Lane.

Brothers?

Quick Lamb.

You forgot one.

…

You forgot one.

Fish Lamb.

One more. Small.

Lon. That Lon. The baby.

He’s eleven, Fish. Where dyou live?

Cloudstreet. The big house.

That’s right. You’re clever enough, cobber. Wanna sing a song?

The house sad, Lestah.

What? How dyou know that?

It talks.

Lester can’t suppress a chuckle.

Fish rolls onto his side and puts a hand carelessly across Lester’s thigh. The veins in his arm are dark and dense.

It hurts.

Lester kisses the boy.

Carn, I’ll spin the knife if you come down.

The knife never lies, says Fish.

Downstairs in the cool kitchen Lester spins the butter knife and watches the light of it in his son’s eyes. Oriel is banging up and down in the shop up front and Hat and Elaine are laughing at something.

This is for who’ll see Quick come in the door first, Lester says.

The blade turns and turns, slow, slower and Lester thinks—is this all there is to it? Just chance, luck, the spin of the knife? Isn’t there a pattern at all; a plan?

Me! Me! Lestah, it me!

Lester laughs without effort. He slaps Fish on the shoulder.

Okay, this is to see who’ll be Captain of the boat.

Me again.

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

Ah?

Just watch the knife.

The knife never lies.

Lester can’t help but wonder.

Ghostly Sensations

Sam’s surprised to find himself sitting on the lip of the bath tub opening and closing the razor like this. It’s amazing to him that his face should look so far past him, and all the tan gone out of it, his flesh looking like a patch of sand that seagulls have walked across. It’s cool in here, and he can smell the mortuary stink of phenyle on the floor. No, this is the big surprise, finding himself here, looking down the blade, snapping it back together like somebody altogether different. It’s odd what people will do, and what they might do, what he might do. He watches his Adam’s apple rise like a plum bob in his neck. Now look at that neck, he thinks.

Sam knows he’s not the sort to go round and put the frighteners on Gerry Clay. Well, that’s what he’s telling himself. Maybe I’m just too bloody gutless to go down there and beat the piss out of him, he thinks. But, Jesus, I’m hardly the onefisted cyclone, am I? What’m I gunna do, stump the bastard to death? Hammer im with ghostly sensations? Oh, but there’d be ways, no doubt.

A picket with a nail in the end.

A sock full of sand.

Acid, any amount.

Running the bastard over, only Sam doesn’t know how to drive a car.

Rat poison.

Arson.

Hired help.

There’s some manly comfort in knowing there’d be means and ways, but they’re the sort of comfort you get from knowing a bloke can always go back to Mother when life fails him. It’s there, alright, but the consequences will get you by the nuts.

And anyway, the anger isn’t there. That’s not what he feels. It’s more the hopelessness of knowing, some elemental, inevitable thing about it. It’s loss, that’s what. Not like losing money and friends and fingers. Geez, he thought, losin’s nothin new. I graduated with flying colours from that fuckin school, after all. But this,
this
losing hurts. The surprise of it, the absolute shock of it. Not to have her … doing all that, but for it to hurt like this. That’s the nasty part.

He looks at his bewildered white face in the mirror. He loves his wife. He’s forgotten all about that bit, and he looks like a man who’s woken to another century. The blade is open. He can see it through the blur of water, see it shaking, coming his way like a ray of light.