Cloudstreet (51 page)

What do you think about all day?

I reckon I’m tryin to figure out what I lost. I keep figurin I’ve lost somethin somewhere.

Something to do with him? She points back over her shoulder where Fish sleeps in the bow.

I reckon my whole life is to do with him. It’s a sorta mess.

You really love him, don’t you.

Everyone loved him. He was the funniest, stupidest kid in the whole bloody world, an everybody loved him.

Jesus, Rose thinks, there’s fire in that hole.

He’s my brother.

Geez, I’ve got two of them, and I couldn’t say I even liked them.

You woulda loved him, Quick murmurs.

I probably did, Rose thinks: I reckon that’s probably the way it was.

What’re we doin out here in the cold, anyway? he says.

Talking.

You wanna go home?

She shakes her head.

Well, how’d you like to work while you talk?

Fair enough.

They set nets with numbing fingers as the city grows silent around them, all the streetlights out along the foreshore, houses darkened beyond. Pelicans flap and stir invisible. Now and then a mullet will jump, a prawn come skipping like a stone. Quick lets them drift along gutters with a handline out in case of a passing mulloway and Rose tucks herself down in the bottom of the boat beneath the greatcoat with small slugs of brandy to keep herself awake. She feels unaccountably happy and she knows it’s not just the Chateau Tanunda. For a long time, an hour maybe, they don’t speak at all. When she closes her eyes it feels like she could be anywhere. What happened earlier tonight is becoming hard to believe; the whole time with Toby, it’s receding so quickly as to be a little alarming. Listen to yourself now, she thinks. You even speak differently. He talks like someone out of
Dad ‘n’ Dave
and you try not to smile. Oh, you learnt well, Rose. Strange, but she can’t feel any anger. All her life she’s been angry, and now she can’t feel it, when she should feel it strong and hard like metal under her skin. For a while she debates the idea of telling Quick Lamb where she’s been, what she’s just come through, but one look will tell a girl he doesn’t need to know. Actually, he’s so damn incurious as to be a bit startling. She watches him with the line in his fingers, the low light of the lamp easy on his jaw, and sees how far back in him his mind is, how he has a strange tranquillity riding across the heat she saw a while ago with that brother business. It doesn’t seem like resignation, just some time-biding patience that’s new to her, not fierce like her determination to make something for herself, but firm all the same. Like an old, old man waiting for something he’s been promised.

Why do you get that look on your mug?

He stirs a little. I’m just fishin.

You reckon we’d be any good married to each other?

Gimme that bottle! he says.

Ssh! You’ll wake your brother.

Gissit!

In the end he reaches, grabs and hurls the bottle out across the water.

Jesus Christ! What’d you do that for?

Don’t talk like that, I don’t like it.

It’s
my
mouth, mate.

And yer sittin in my boat.

Rose hauls the smelly greatcoat hard about her. She’s still pretty bloody sober, thank you very much.

Just a question, you know. Hypothetical, as the smartbums say.

You’ve been around with smartbums—1 wouldn’t know.

So you know more than you let on.

It’s a house, not a—

Walls have ears.

Well, you should know, he says. We’re even louder than you are.

Oh, you noticed? It’s like living next to a cattleyard.

You’ve done orright from us.

And you from us, I’d have thought. Well, here we are showing our colours. No civil war, fair enough?

Fair enough.

You’re true blue, Quick Lamb.

Thanks, he says, with a sudden smile.

Now answer the question.

Dwellingplace

Rose and Quick burst into the empty dark library while the rest of the house sleeps. Fish is down the hall snoring. They close the door and cut into the stale dead air with their excitement. They could be children, they breathe so hard, standing apart from one another lit by only the glow of their faces and the heat of their breaths.

I just stumbled into Heaven, Rose says.

Quick just stands and smiles.

You believe in Fate?

He shakes his head.

This isn’t happening, she says.

Not yet.

They meet, two points of light sparking up the dark, their mouths gentle upon one another, shocked into sobriety in seconds. Around them the shades hover and hang, twitching.

I know you all of a sudden, she says.

We’re nuts, he said. We’re gunna be embarrassed afterwards.

No. We’re gonna be something else altogether. Come here, here. Here, Quick.

Then suddenly they’re going off like a bag of penny bombs, clawing at each other’s clothes, talking into skin and opening up while all about the fretting, bodyless shadows back off, mute and shaken in the face of passion, the live, good, heat of the young.

Rose’s shoulders slope sweetly under Quick’s hands, and she presses into his belly, finds his nipples at her fingertips as she takes him down to the jaded flowers of the library rug where they roll and warp as though they’re in some limitless spring paddock that’s heady with petals, and pollen and bellowing with sweet energy.

The girlshadow and the hagshadow go limp and open-mouthed, slipping down the walls torn by their halfness. They see the living find curves and dips in one another and hear electric whispers building in their space. Press against the walls, press against themselves, press against the barrier unseen that holds them here. It’s love pressing them, see how it distorts their meatless shadows into swatches of darkness, forcing them against the transparent skin of time.

Rose wraps him in her legs, knots over him with hands and mouth and hair, while Quick sprinkles her with sweat, shaking as he is, finding her just … just food for him. Across the knots of their discarded clothes they slide and clinch, he with fishblood and her blood on his fingers, she with brandy on her breath, both of them openeyed with a surprise that turns to recognition, and together they make a balloon of heat inside the cold nausea of that dead room whose timbers twist and creak; a new dwellingplace. Love rattles the wallpaper and darkness recedes into itself a fraction when they shout exultant into each other’s mouths.

After they’re dressed and gone, hurrying out into the daylit house with news for the world, their sudden love remains in the room, hanging like incense.

Outside Chance

Oriel Lamb had nothing to say. Her son stood at the flap of the tent in his undershorts with the creeping sun behind him, and she had nothing to say at all.

It’s probably a bit of a shock, he said.

Oriel stepped into her boots and took a Bex for the headache that could only be minutes away. She made her bed while he stood there, set things straight on her dresser, trimmed the wick of the lamp.

Mum?

Aren’t you cold?

Yeah, but—

Go inside and light the stove.

Just then someone started to laugh up in the Pickles side of the house, the kind of laugh that’d see a person in the casualty ward if it went on much longer.

Well, I see Mr Pickles has just been informed, said Oriel.

Don’t see what’s so funny, said her son.

The laugh toned down to a fitful giggle that sounded safe enough for the moment. A window on the ground floor slid up and Dolly Pickles put her head out; she looked truly vile with her hair imploded, a fag on her long bottom lip. She shook her head, pulled it and her dishwater bangs inside, and ground the window down again.

Go inside, Quick. I want to get dressed.

He went, she pulled the flap to, and sat on the bed, wrinkling it in a most unsatisfactory way.

Inside, Lester Lamb was looking for Quick. He knew damn-well that Fish had been out all night with Quick in the boat, and that the old girl would go mad, but he’d seen, too, the troughs full of fish still out on the truck with all the local cats fighting and gorging on them, and he knew he had to get to the boy before she did, because he just couldn’t imagine what’d happen if she saw.

He went quietly from room to room in the strangely subdued house which felt like a storm had been through while they were all asleep to leave the atmosphere thick and exhausted, until he got to the back door and saw Quick coming. He motioned to Quick to come quickly, the boy seemed eaten by dread all of a sudden.

You’ve left the fish out! he hissed.

Oh, gawd!

What’s the matter with you?

I’m gettin married.

Today?

No. It’s—

Good, well let’s get the fish in.

The cats yowled and spat as Lester and Quick heaved the troughs down and hauled them inside. The house was waking quicker than usual. Through the shop and into the kitchen they went.

It’s a good night’s worth, son.

I’m gettin married, Dad. I’m marryin Rose next door.

Good gawd!

The old man threw himself onto a chair which slewed on its joints and collapsed beneath him, sending him onto the floor on his back. Pieces of wood slid down the lino like broken tackle on a reeling ship.

She’s so … pretty, Lester said without breath. I’ve hurt me back.

It’s gunna be orright, Dad.

Let’s wait for the X-rays.

No, I mean—

Good Lawd! bellowed Oriel walking in on them. For pity’s sake, let’s be sensible about this!

He fell over, Mum.

Sit down over there!

Red burst in. Good on ya, Quick. I knew you weren’t completely useless. You don’t deserve her.

Elaine followed, white, peaky, outraged.

Well, Lon’s asleep as usual, said Quick, and Fish’ll be down drectly.

Who’s gunna declare the meeting opened, then? said Red, grinning.

I’ve hurt me back, said Lester.

I’ll second that, said Quick, delirious with apprehension.

Get off the floor, Lester, said Oriel.

The floor’s yours, Dad, said Quick. The meeting’s opened.

Oriel Lamb began to weep. It sounded like trains colliding.