Cloudstreet (29 page)

Rose went downstairs exhausted with emotion, tired, brittle with feeling. She sat in the kitchen for an hour looking up jobs in the paper.

And then her own mother, missing all night, came in dressed to the gills and bleeding.

Bad, Worse, Worstest

Dolly stood at the sink and ran the water. She put the dishrag to her face and set her teeth. That was something, still having the teeth. Through the kitchen window she could see, with one eye at least, the fruit trees and the shadeless brown stretches, the tin fence and the powerful calm.

Good morning, she said to Rose.

Rose rustled her
West Australian
.

Dolly felt the hard chill between them. She turned, wringing blood out of the rag, and let her daughter see what Gerry Clay had given her as a parting gift. The whole side of her face was the colour of a stormcloud and rising angrier by the minute. Even now her left eye was closed. Her nose and lip bled a little still, and the knuckles of the hand holding up the rag were skinned raw. Rose looked up and took it in without expression. She didn’t even seem suprised, and in a way Dolly was grateful that there’d be no hysterics. There wasn’t much of a girl left in Rose, she knew. Dolly didn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed.

Want some ice?

Hngh! Got any icecream? Dolly felt tears coming and she was burning with a wild, unfocused hatred.

Rose went to the icebox and Dolly saw the brown sticks of her legs as she chipped at the block.

Ta.

She wrapped the ice in the rag and held it over her eye and before long her whole body seemed to have cooled, while all the time Rose looked on without moving. The old man’s cockatoo screeched out on the back step.

Ah, what a mess.

Rose said nothing. Dolly made her way to the table and sat down. It was no great shock that things should go from bad to worse to worstest. Right now, she couldn’t feel a thing, and this had to be the lousiest day of her life.

I used to wish you wouldn’t grow up to hate me, Rose. That’s what I used to think.

Rose’s lips were set together, as though she was exerting great control over herself.

And then you grow up an hate me anyway. Well, yer have yer hopes.

Rose folded the newspaper, then folded it again.

Hoping is what people do when they’re too lazy to do anything else.

People can’t do everything they wanna.

They just want some things more than others.

Dolly sighed.

Okay, so you hate me, let’s leave it at that. I’m sore.

Did you hate
your
mother?

Dolly got up. I need to lie down a while.

You didn’t answer.

Me whole face is fallin off.

I’m gonna love
my
children, I swear to God.

Lookit this. This is what you get from men.

Some men. Other men!

All men!

Dolly didn’t have the fight in her. Any other time she’d have been across the room, tearing and slashing, but she felt weak and giddy.

You shouldn’t hate me, she said, turning for the door. It doesn’t help. Ya shouldn’t do it.

Like you say, people can’t do everything they wanna. Anyway, I’m used to it now, Rose said, as Dolly went out the door, and then suddenly she was shouting: And besides, I’ve gotten to like it. Hating you is the best part of bein alive!

Climbing the stairs, Dolly had the old question come back. Bad mother, or no mother at all? Christalmighty, she should know the answer to that one by now.

A Closed Shop

The Lambs closed up shop and stayed indoors. The house was quiet. Outside cicadas rattled and the grass burnt in the summer sun.

We’ll go crabbin, said Lester, that’s what we’ll do. Down at the river.

River! said Fish, dropping his spinning bowl in a splintering crash.

Carn, love, said Lester. Orry? A feed of crabs’ll cheer you up. And the girls could do with a break.

Carn, said Hat.

Carn, said Elaine.

Carn, said Red.

Oriel poked dead limbs into the fire and sparks rose in the air like stars being born. Fish had cried himself to sleep tethered with a dressing gown cord to an old Moreton Bay fig and she could see the side of his face in the firelight. Whiskers had begun to show on his jaw. She smelt river mud and mothballs in the blankets spread on the grass. Mosquitoes hung around whining like an electric current. Out on the water Lester and the girls were laughing and the lamp swung wildly with the city lights steady behind.

She knew this scene. Her life always came back to the river. A long time ago she’d been baptized in a river. She’d kissed Lester Lamb by the river the first time long before that. And that night, that long, horrid night by the estuary at Margaret, when her men had walked on water and the lamp had gone out, that’s what had brought them here to this life with one son gone and one missing and a feeling in your chest that you didn’t know yourself anymore.

Whacko! Lester yelled, hoiking another crab into the tub. This is livin, girls.

The water was only shin deep. It was cool and the sandy bottom was ridged with tidal corduroy across which the big blue mannas were manoeuvring. Out here you could smell the fire on the beach. The sky was like a reflection of night water.

One more, Dad, and that’s it, said Hat, you’re fillin the tub.

Lester turned and saw in the light Red held up that it was true. The tin bathtub he had floating behind, tied to a belt loop, was nearly down to the gunwales and alive with the groping and grovelling of claws.

Orright. Last one.

I’m tired, said Elaine, shouldering her scoop net.

Red moved up alongside him with the lamp and Hat moved vigilantly with her elbows out, scoop ready. Lester was proud of the way he could bluff a crab one way and scoop him neatly in a back-handed gesture and send it flying into the tub.

The last crab of the night was a big gnarlclawed job, and Lester was caught off balance by all the competition. He scooped deep and tossed wide and Hat got the crab on the chest, its claw fixing firmly to her nipple beneath the old blouse. Lester could never have been prepared for the words she had to say. She jogged on the spot brushing at the squirming brooch of a thing until Lester swung the scoop to hit her fair in the chest. Hat went back in the water and the crab went back home.

When Red and Elaine and Lester got her upright, the four of them stood and listened to Oriel bellowing from the beach.

That crab was a rapist, said Red.

Red! Lester was shocked.

It’s disgustin, Red said. Even they’re the same. Ugh, males!

Hat rubbed herself and said a word that Lester would not repeat.

Oriel broke dead wood over her knee and threw it onto the flames. There was bread and butter, brown vinegar, chopped onions and tomatoes, and a drum steaming with boiled crabs. They ate, crushing glossy red claws, dragging long strands of meat from legs, and they laughed and watched the fire until Lester broke into song.

In Dublin’s fair city
Where the girls are so pretty
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone—

Oh, here he goes.

She wheeled a wheelbarrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying ‘Cockles and mussels alive alive-oh’

Lester—

‘Alive, alive-oh
Alive, alive-oh-oh’

Fish called in his sleep. Quick? Quick?

Wherever the River Goes

With the cord of her dressing gown she ties you to the tree, Fish, even while you sleep because she knows what you’ll do. You don’t even see her, do you? But she sees you, boy, and she knows what you’ll be dreaming of here by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful the river. There’s always someone with their fingers in the belt loops of your pants. You’re aching with it while those dark angels laugh on the water without you. The river. Remember, wherever the river goes every living creature which swarms will live, and there will be many fish, for this water goes there, that the waters of the sea will become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes.