Cloudstreet (31 page)

Shove the jacks into the jills, says Alma at the switch. Rose blushes and laughs.

Good morning, Bairds, can I help you?

Bairds, good morning, sir, can I help you?

Can I help you?

Bairds.

Hello? Hello?

One moment.

I’m sorry, this is Bairds. Oh, you want
beds
!

Putting you through.

Jack into Jill! yells Darleen, and they all crack up.

Gawd, love, why don’t you feed yerself Good morning, Bairds.

Merle’s in love with a dwarf Bairds, good morning.

Good morning, Bairds yer a liar, she’s lyin.

Putting you through he’s shorter than Mum’s pastry!

Short ones’ve got fat thingies Good morning, Bairds.

Well she’s hardly the eye of the needle One moment madam.

Youse sheilas are gettin fouler every year Can you hold?

He’s never asked me, thank you, sir.

Disgustin Bairds.

Bairds.

Bairds.

Exhausted from not laughing, Rose ploughs through every day with a crazy happiness. She takes home pay and the pavement smell of the city. She puts on a bit of flesh. She eats. The world looks different.

Two Old Girls

One night at the Anzac Club while Lester was going dispiritedly through his routine, Oriel met a widow. You could tell she was a survivor, a leftbehind, by the far off look in her eyes and the way her tall, gaunt frame bent forward. Oriel could spot weakness and need a mile off.

Do you believe in Hell, Mrs Lamb? said the woman filling the urn.

Oriel gasped. It was like being struck in the face. Who are you?

Beryl Lee, Mrs. Hubby went down with HMAS Perth. I come down here to—

You’re lonely.

Beryl Lee subsided like a folding chair. Tears rolled down her face from her wild fargone eyes. Oriel held her close, felt the woman’s eyelashes against her shoulder.

You strike me as a Christian woman, sobbed Beryl Lee. That’s what I thought. That’s what they say.

If ever I should strike you Beryl, you’d think different.

Oh, Lawd, oh, Lawd.

People stood and watched. Even Lester gave up and stared from the stage. Two old girls, short and tall, hugging like kids.

Hell?

Hell is like this. It’s this cowering in the bottom of the cellar far from the smouldering trapdoor, between pumpkins and tubs of apples. It’s the smell of a karri forest rising into the sky and the bodies of roos and possums returning to the earth as carbon and the cooking smell falling through the dimness like this. Trees go off like bombs out in the light and the cauldron boils and spits all about. Hell is being six years old and wondering why you’re alone in the dark and no one else has come down yet. It’s the sound of your own breathing, the salty stink of your bloomers, the way the walls have warmed, the flickering cracks, the screams like a thousand nails being drawn, the hammering, throttling noises, the way the rats are panicking and throwing themselves against things. Hell is that shallowbreathing trance you slip into, the silence that goes on and on until it’s grown outside you and fallen on the world. Hell is when you hear noises in the world again, though nothing in yourself, and men’s voices make your throat cry so raw that light bolts into the cellar with a gout of ash and charcoal and the burning taste of air. Hell is when you’re dragged out past the black bones and belt buckles that are the others who never came down, out onto the powder white earth beneath the sky green as bile and swirling with vapours. Hell is the sight of your father’s face streaked with the ride, the twitching cast on him, the registration of facts. Hell. It’s only you left, and you’re awake.

Oriel woke and it wasn’t quite dawn. She lay there in the dimness until her heart settled back a little. With the edge of the blanket she wiped her eyes. Without washing, without making out her daily work plan, she left the tent ungowned and ran to the house, gumbling along like a spud crate to go room to room in the dim house checking that all of them were still there, that it wasn’t only her left again. All of them breathing in their beds, helpless and sweet in sleep. And Quick’s empty bed where she sat thinking while Fish snored.

Oh, how she hated to be a survivor, to be left. It had been a lonely girlhood for Oriel, even when her father remarried. She was a leftover from some other time, an embarrassment to him, a rival for her stepmother who wasn’t much older than her. But she learnt to be strong; she grew it in herself. When her halfbrother Bluey, who she loved like blood, left her on the dock at Albany, climbing the gangway and shouting back over his shoulder: Don’t worry, Or, I’ll bring a Turk back on the end of me bayonet! she knew she was pushing further into the kingdom of survivorhood. Her father was often away buying horses and there’d be only Oriel and her stepmother and the children. She grew steel in her.

Or.

Either, Or.

She could never find the choices. Even when Lester came by, there was no alternative. Things had gone so far, so much had not been said, the smouldering silence of the house was not something that could be chosen any longer. Besides, he made her laugh the way Bluey had. He was a character, a dag, and pretty soon she loved him.

Oriel went downstairs to where Lester slept. He snored like a teachest being dragged across an iron roof. There was no malice in that man, you had to give him that. She still loved him, the Randolph Scott look of him. Oh yes, yes, there was a Hell, there were Hells abounding, and if there wasn’t a Heaven then there was this, the sleeping, the helpless, those that were your own. She was a sinner, she knew, and proud, and angry at God to the point of hatred, but she knew that she’d made a fortress for her own and for whoever sought shelter there, and that it was good, worthy, and priceless.

Which gave her an idea.

Beryl.

Ted Shoots Through

Ted Pickles shoots through. He takes nothing with him but a comb and all his hormones. His mother weeps and puts a bottle of muscat through an upstairs window. Girls in tight sweaters and heels come by and Dolly screams at them.

Chub doesn’t notice.

Rose doesn’t care.

Sam doesn’t say.

And Then Comes Autumn, and Behind it, Winter

And then comes autumn, and behind it, winter when everything happens without anyone expecting it.