Cloudstreet (54 page)

Sam Pickles woke up before the winter dawn with his stump tingling and the smell of his dead father there under the blankets, and he lay awake, cold and sweaty, knowing that the Shifty Shadow had moved across him, and that today was no day to get out of bed. He turned on the bedlamp. This time he’d be no fool, bloody oath, he wouldn’t; not till what was going to come had come. Dolly slept beside him with her hair splashed grey and brown across the pillow, her face crushed and old in the lamp. The house was quiet but for the wind creaking it back on its haunches.

Yer losin yer nerve, Sam, he thought, but yer must be smartenin up a bit all the same.

He hadn’t felt it as strong and mean on him since the last day at the Abrolhos, and he knew you didn’t need to be a gambling man to know that this kind of luck wasn’t about to be wagered on.

Morning arrived, the house came alive with business. Dolly slept on, Sam felt the weight of his head on the pillow. The tingling was gone, but there was still a trace of pipe tobacco and port breath in the room. He lit a cigarette and waited. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. In the end he slept.

Dolly scrapes along the creaky morning balustrade, wild with sobriety. Out in the street those jackhammers have started again. She hasn’t touched a drop in four days and you’d swear they had one of those jackhammers up her like a suppository. No, they wouldn’t believe you, no fear, no fear, no bloody fear they wouldn’t. You can’t get a jackhammer up there, but for God’s sake, you know someone’s smuggled one in. A drinkless sleep is murder—any friggin thing could happen, you could dream anythin! Forgot bein sober was so dangerous. A night’s sleep crawling with dreams like a girl couldn’t imagine, truly like you couldn’t begin to imagine. Oh, the years she’s slept peaceful as the dead with just the sweet purr of static in her ears. Now look at that. What I mean is now look straight at that—the crappy threadbare old rug is slippin in and out of the old library door, like a tongue from a slut’s mouth. Lessee, let’s!

Dolly throws open the library door to see the rug rolled up and shivering epileptic in the corner by the piano where the room is fugged up with the smell of hot bodies.

She staggers out, needing a drink, and knowing it’s no use going on with this stupid sobering up, passes the grey old lady with the firepoker at the landing and turns wondering too late. She goes down the stairs arse over, slopping more than she thumps, like a bag of yesterday’s fish, and as she goes, she knows for sure she’d have done it better drunk.

Oriel pulls the tent flap to, and in daylight, with a morning’s work ahead still, slips the old King James from the bottom of the drawer. Its brittle gilding comes off in her hands, settles in the hairs on her forearms. She opens it. There they are, all their names:

Lester Horace William, born 10/10/94, Eden Valley, SA.

Oriel Esther (nee Barnes) born 31/12/01, Pingelly, WA.

Each one of them, right on down to Lon, and in pencil, the names of a stillborn and two miscarriages: John, Edward, Mary. There they all are, the Lambs in Lester’s lovely old Gothic and it seems right and just. We’re here, Oriel thinks, calm again; we’re here orright.

She stiffens. There’s screaming from in the house. She goes out armed and empty handed. And not quite running.

Waiting in the hallway at casualty, Lester and Sam shuffled, folded arms, watched the pretty nurses go past. Sam lit a fag, coughing his bubbly little smoker’s hack, and offered it to Lester who surprised himself by taking a drag on it.

Thanks for bringin us, said Sam.

Ah, we’re relatives these days, said Lester.

I shoulda learned to drive a car. Never had one or drove one in me life. There’s simple things I just don’t know about.

What about women?

Sam chuckled. Women? Reckon I know more about cars.

Lester laughed. Which do you prefer?

Sam pursed his lips, reminding himself that he still had his own teeth: I’m partial to trams, meself.

No, dinkum. I’m askin.

Gimme a horse any day.

Over a woman?

By Christ, yeah.

What about Rose … Lamb?

She’s not a woman, she’s a daughter.

Lester laughed. And yer missus in there gettin her leg plastered? Lester felt reckless all of a sudden as though he might confess an old sin to Sam right here and now. But he held himself. We’ve already taken his daughter, he thought; I couldn’t do it to him now just to clean meself of it.

Dolly? No, Dolly’s a woman, orright. She always said she was too much woman for me.

Well, Oriel’s always been too much Oriel for anybody.

And when they wheeled Dolly out, plastered up like a swearing saint, Lester was singing:

Give me Oriel in my lamp, keep me burning,
Give me Oriel in my lamp, I pray.

I should be drunk! yelled Dolly.

I should be rich, Sam murmured.

And I should be home, said Lester, herding them out to the truck.

Thank Christ, said Sam. I really thought it was somethin serious.

A broken leg’s serious enough, said Lester.

It’s a bloody gift.

Steam

A long way off, in a cloud of steam like the ante rooms of Hell itself a small man falls naked to the sauna floor feeling his heart stutter. So many women have loved him and suffered him, but none so much as his mother. Sometimes he has dreams about her, the kind he doesn’t like to think of. She’s just like the girls he chats up and backs up. She’s just … steam steam steam steam steam steam!

The Blacks and Whites

Look at that, the house’s timbers clenching right there in wild daylight. There’s no wind, no subsidence in the ground, nothing to resist, but every joint bleats there for a moment as if the place is bracing to sneeze or expel or smother. The river runs louder than a train on the midday air and the lost dead are quaking like sunlight.

Fish Lamb clumps the piano, but all that comes from it is the thick unending drone of middle C and he’s not pleased. He knows the sound of his own music, and this is not it. The musty, windowless room is lit like a rainforest floor, the greenish colour shed by the two figures pressed against the wall on either side of him, and in the dimness he sees his own stubby hands thumping the blacks and whites as his fury grows. The floorboards let out a horrible sweet smell. Curling in a snarl, the old rug quivers. Nails vibrate in the walls, and Fish keeps on with some hardfaced determination, while around him the two women bare their teeth at each other, dark and light, light and dark, hating, hurting, hissing silently until Fish, the great trunk in suspenders, heaves up from the stool, whirls and becomes an angry, heavy, menacing man for a moment, and bawls at the walls.

I hate youse you stupids! This is my house!

When he is gone, the two faces are vicelipped, and still, and even the sound of middle C falters a moment before continuing on like an electrical current.

Steel

The last part of the ride home from the station is downhill and it’s the only time the old police bike is any use at all. Quick pedals in a fit of aftershift madness with the wind frigid on his face. He feels so good, it’s all he can do not to yell out and yodel jubilantly all the way to Swan Street. He swerves around a milk truck, nips the claws of an ageing labrador and takes the last corner leaning out like a sailor. Some people are at their gates, getting papers and pints, men have their hats on, walking home from bus and train, and the sun is breaking up in the sky. He gives the bell a stiff thumb and coasts down the side of the old brick house where the wireless is on and someone is sobbing. The sound of it shakes him and he’s off the bike before it’s stopped. It crashes into the empty garage the moment he opens the back door.

Call someone Quick, says Rose, on her knees by the stove. She’s dressed for work and white in the cheeks. Call someone. I’m losing the baby.

Mrs Manners! Mrs Manners!

Quick stumbles through boxes and chairs on the verandah on his way to the landlady’s door, but she has it open before he knocks. She’s a small, startled looking English-woman with spectacles and soft pink hands.

Whatever’s the matter, Constable?