Cloudstreet (36 page)

For a year or so Quick thought he had hold of himself. He could feel time passing without harm, and though his misery pictures danced on the caravan walls while he slept, they never woke him nor skipped into his dreams.

Earl and May fed him, worked him like a dog and told no one he was a Lamb. Locals still remembered those crazy Biblebashers and their fake miracles.

Winter bored on and he lived an orderly life in his slow, methodical way. He washed every day, cleaned once a week, and managed to see his awkward working hours out by thinking through the importance of every task. You could see it in the way he unlatched the tailgate as pigs pressed against it squealing, how he took his time at the weigh-bridge, how conscientiously he waved cars by him as he hugged the soft edges on narrow roads. And if you met him pulled into the rest bay beneath a stand of white gums along the Coast Road and you shared a smoke with him, he wouldn’t strike you as stupid. He’d seem overserious maybe, a little late off the mark when it came to getting a joke. You’d guess he was a bloke who hadn’t seen much but who was ageing somehow too quickly. There was nothing exceptional in him but for the fact that he could never seem to be ordinary. He had some mark on him, like a migrant or a priest. You could tell he was trying with you, trying to fit.

Quick Lamb drove without pausing. He caned himself with work and Earl and May could hardly believe their luck. He thought he was coping, but he was miserable, lost, drifting, tired and homesick as a dog. He didn’t think about it. He drove. He drove. He just drove.

That winter, some things happened, some incidents occurred.

Throttling the old bus rotten through the bends past Capel, crazy with sleeplessness, Quick lost his brakes on the hill before the rail crossing. The lights flashed red and he could hear the train’s diesel engine sounding its bullish horn down the tracks. He had nine ton of super on the back and now that it was mobile it wasn’t of a mind to stop. He went down through the gears like a man down a fire-escape, and when he hit rock bottom he could see the snout of the train flashing through the trees. All he had left was the handbrake and maybe the ditch at the roadside. The old knocker was hissing air and shrieking pads. The motor roared with quick comedown.

Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me, a bit of his brain said, Thy rod and Thy staff …

He was slowing, he knew it, he was pulling her back, but in the hundred yards that were left now he couldn’t expect a dead stop. He’d be rolling slowly, creeping right into the rush of freight cars.

The diesel snouted through, blurting and roaring, trucks nose-to-arse behind. The crossing lights flared. The lifeless bell tinged and tinged.

Quick hauled over to the scrub strip along the side of the road and felt logs and rubbish clawing underneath retarding him a little. He tried for reverse, but couldn’t get a grip on anything. And then he knew that all he had left was the angle he could hold and the fact that the last trucks were in sight.

Thy rod and Thy staff, he thought.

Now the wheels snicking along the tracks were all he heard as he dragged on the wheel and veered across the road to the other side where dirt lay in piles at the edge of the tracks. He ploughed it high and wide as the last truck came by and there was an almighty crack like the sound of a man’s neck breaking, and when he came back to knowing he was alive, he peered round to see his rearview mirror saluting him all the way down the tracks.

Yea, though I walk, he thought. Yea. Tho mine enemies rail against me.

He was bogged under nine ton of super and he could feel the paddock subsiding beneath him. Earl would not be impressed. Quick got out the shovel and started to dig. Right then he thought how sweet it would be to have Fish come rowing across the paddock to dip the gunwale of his fruitbox and haul him away from here.

Quick got Earl out of bed at four in the morning.

Geez, look at you. You bin sleepin with the pigs?

I just dug that bloody knocker out of a paddock. I want a couple of days off.

To do what?

Go fishin.

Earl yawned.

I nearly killed meself tonight.

Earl sniffed and scratched.

I nearly lost the truck.

It’s old. It’s insured.

I nearly lost nine ton of super.

Take the week. Use me boat. I’ll take it out of ya pay.

Earl’s Dory

At its mooring beneath the trees at the last bend before the river met the sea, Earl’s dory dwelt in a state of almost total submersion. It was so full of bird crap that there was less than an inch of freeboard and no gull could even so much as perch on it anymore without having the lot sink beneath the surface. That boat was crapped up to the gunwales, and it took Quick a whole Lord’s Day to bail the birdshit out, drag it up on the bank to roll over and scrape till it was clean enough to be tarred, caulked and painted. He spent the week on it, and in the afternoons he fished off the rocks with a bamboo rod and a jar of gents.

Late in the week, on Sunday, Quick took a couple of tin buckets full of overripe prawns and handlines, and in Earl’s newpainted dory he rowed round the bend to the great tear-shaped lagoon behind the sandbar. As he came into the flat shoaly stretch of water he met the memory of them all down here at dusk with the fire on the beach, the lantern, the net sluicing along. He set his jaw and kept rowing.

Mullet rushed in mobs across the ribbed bottom. A burnt out Ford stood back from the shore in the shade of trees. The surf rumbled beyond the bar. Quick did a lazy circuit resting one oar and pulling easy on the other. He had the feeling of movement going right through him. Water passed beneath, the trees up the bank rode by, but inside himself he felt something travel, the kind of transport he felt at the beginning of sleep when he sensed himself going out to meet its sky colour and the promises it held. He let go of the oars and just sat feeling queer. Someone walked in the shadows beyond the trees, or maybe it was a roo or just a stray cow turning. It caught his eye, whatever it was, and his insides queered up a little more. Presently, a broad, frisky school of mullet cracked the surface and bore round him, funneling down the tide ribs to the deep seaward slope of the bottom and he watched them go, that uniform mob, and felt cheered by their nerve.

The boat sat well in the water, evenly hipped and clean painted. In their rowlocks, the oars knocked and creaked with business. The working, operating feel of things pleased Quick Lamb. There was nothing more warming than the spectacle of something proceeding properly after a due amount of work. He was like that with rifles, with motors, drum reels, or some fancy madhouse’s new flushing toilet. If you didn’t know how they worked, then things weren’t worth having—something the old girl used to say.

He pulled across to the narrow point of the bottleneck where the river squeezed out in a cool tea-coloured trickle to the sea and the disturbance of the two bodies meeting caused a roily, chopbroken channel that led out through the surf to the deep beyond. Quick wedged his way into the channel, picked his moment after a set came through, and went like hell. He heard the squeaking and creaking and the airbrake sound of his breath, the bow lifting under him, pushing his bum cheeks together. The sensations were clear and momentous. The sight of foam cracking down the sides and rushing astern, the smell of salt and paint and his bait prawns on the turn. Above him, the sky like a fine net letting nothing through but light and strangeness.

About five hundred yards out, over a wide patch of sandy bottom, he dropped the hook and felt the boat hang back on it. He baited up and then it began. The first bite rang in his wrist like the impact of a cover drive, a bat and ball jolt in his sinews. From below, a skipjack broadsided and bore down on the hook in its palate, sending water springing from the line as it came up. Then he saw another lunging toward it, and when he hauled the fish into the boat, it was two fish, one fixed to the tail of the other. They thumped in the bottom round his ankles, the size of big silver slippers. He baited up again and cast out. He got a strike the moment the hooks hit the water, and then another, and when he saw the upward charge of the mob he felt something was happening that he might not be able to explain to a stranger. He dragged in four fish, two hooked and two biting their tails. He caught them cast after cast, sometimes three to a hook, with one fish fixed to the passenger fish. His hands bled and his arms ached. In his eyes the sweat rolled and boiled. Now the boat vibrated like a cathedral with all these fish arching, beating, sliding, bucking, hammering. In the water they bludgeoned themselves against the timbers, shine running off them in lurches, stirring the deep sandy bottom into a rising cloudbank until Quick was throwing out baitless hooks to drag in great silver chains of them. They shone like money. They slid and slicked about his knees. Quick Lamb’s breathing got to be a hacking just short of a cough, and in the end he stopped casting and lay back in the smother and squelch of fish as they leapt into the boat of their own accord.

The sun was a penny on each of his eyelids. Fish made space for him. They embraced him in their scaly way and he heard their mouths open and close. He felt them slide across his chest as his head sank into them, against his cheeks, along his lips with the briny taste of Lucy Wentworth’s business bits. He began to breathe them, stifle beneath them. He struggled up, began to row, and completed two neat circles before he remembered the anchor. He pulled the hook, coiled rope and chain and watched the lot sink into the mass of fish. He got sensible.

He picked a landmark to row for, and settled in for the long, methodical pull. Once, when he glanced across his shoulder to check his bearing, he saw the figure of a man walking upon the water and it made him laugh. He got sensible again and had another look.

The man seemed to come closer.

He’s on a shallow bar, thought Quick, getting desperately sensible.

He was black.

But everyone’s black at a distance, he thought.

Quick didn’t look anymore. He was fished up to the gunwales with about an inch of freeboard so that a decent lungful of air would send him under.

Just outside the surf line, the boatful of fish gouted up blood, died, and sank the boat. For a moment, Quick Lamb kept rowing because his head was still out of the water and he still had the family stubbornness in him.

When he got to shore, the blackfella was waiting for him in a pair of calico pants and a British battlejacket. Quick could see the waterline on his night blue ankles. The black man smiled. He seemed to be holding back a belly laugh.

Quick pushed past him and didn’t look back.

On the long, impossibly slow drive back to Earl and May’s with the prospect of breaking the bad news before him, Quick kept seeing figures. Along the road every mile or so, some mad bugger would jump out waving from behind a karri tree. Half the time it was that black bastard and the other half it was him. The old Dodge wheezed and Quick abused all comers. He flattened the accelerator but he still could have walked faster.

Nothing computes. Every moment, each vision and image elbows up to the next in Quick’s mind, bumping, sliding, rubbing hot and useless in him till he feels like his head is the groanstuffed hold of a ship in a gale. Out beyond the oily dark yard at twilight he climbs up into the plywood caravan, falls on his cot and lies there without knowing how the bloody hell it took him three hours to get back from a thirty-minute drive. He knows he’s not crazy, he’s convinced of it, and he’s right. But he’s not firing on all six, that’s for sure, because as he lies there, buckled and ready to stop breathing at any moment, he knows he can’t decide how he feels—enlightened or endangered, happy or sad, old or young, Quick or Lamb.

Sometime in the night, the misery pictures begin to vibrate above his head. Burnt babies, Koreans, old amputee diggers, a blind nun, they all jig on the wall, roll their eyes, hum like a turbine, sending Quick into an alertness even more discomforting and disabling.

He dreams he is asleep, and that in sleep he’s dreaming a dream: there they all are, down by the river laughing and chiacking about, all of them whole and true, with their own faces in a silver rain of light fused with birds and animals. Lester, Oriel, Hat, Elaine, Lon, Red, Fish, himself, and people he doesn’t know: women with babies, old people, men with their sleeves pinned, barefoot children, all moving behind a single file of other people the colour of burnt wood. Down at the river where the fish are leaping and the sea has turned back on itself and the trees shake with music.