Cloudstreet (60 page)

At Cloudstreet on Christmas Eve the timbers rattled like bones in a box. Lester’s marketfresh vegetables went brown in hours, and the milk curdled in the cans before the Lambs and Pickleses woke from vile, breathless dreams. A shitty smell came over the place and you’d swear there were more in the house than the headcount let on. Standing anywhere in Cloudstreet that day was like being in an overloaded ferry in a sou’wester. Oriel found herself needing the walls to keep her upright. The corridor was a lurching tunnel and the shop foetid. Sam woke and wished it was a work day so he could pack his gladstone and heave-ho. Dolly threw up her tea in the sink with spots in her eyes big as snarling faces. When you blinked, shadows ripped by. Out in the yard, the last of the shrivelled mulberries rained on Oriel’s tent like a bloodstorm.

The pig sang all through Christmas with Fish sitting by beneath the fig tree listening and mashing his fists. What’s he say, Fish? Can you pick it? Over and over, the same phrases. Carn, Fish, what’s with the pork?

Sam went out in the afternoon to find that his cockatoo was gone. Absconded bird. He went walking the streets calling Fair dinkum? Fair dinkum? All the old houses were coming down and salmon brick duplexes were going up in their place. The streets were full of jacked up FJs with foxtails and glasspacks. There seemed to be no children. When Sam came home birdless, Fish Lamb next door was bellowing and bawling and the piano was thundering.

On Christmas morning the house filled with foul and frantic shades and a howling set up in the surrounding streets. In the dawn the pig was nearly torn to pieces by a pack of dogs that jumped the fence while the lot of them slept on, resisting it as a dream.

Fish Lamb was strangely quiet. No hysterics. He lay on his bed and did not come out. Lester bandaged the pig, kissed its brow and prayed.

Summer Madness

And then the vile hot easterly blows them into summer proper, into a dry night-time madness that eddies under the eaves and shakes the rats out of every sleepout grapevine as a small man creeps through the back lanes between bin and gate and bloating fences itching with an inexplicable hatred. See him down there slinking along, snuffling and wheezing in your town, in your yards, your streets, and hating you, every whole one of you as you sleep moaning and turning beneath your sheet behind your flywire, past you as you sleep open on verandahs and on back lawns in the countrified manner you cling to. Oh, what hurt and malevolence glows in that shambling shape of a man. From beyond space and time I see him like a coal sputtering in the dark, rolling wherever the hot headachy desert wind blows him: West Perth, Dalkeith, Shenton Park, Subiaco, Mosman Park, coming by you, coming by you, coming for you. Against his chest he carries a rifle. For you all.

Bloody Mayhem

Quick wakes to the sound of a motor. It’s high morning. A motorbike running under his window.

Lamb? Lamb!

Rose wakes next to him. Quick?

Sounds like Murphy from the station. Orright! Wait a second!

Get out here, mate! Get on this bike! We’ve got all shit goin up!

Quick got to the door in his undies. Gday, Murph.

Get fuckin dressed, mate.

What’s up?

Bloody mayhem, that’s what.

Well, says Rose, spose this is what you’ve been waiting for.

But when Quick is gone and Rose goes out for a paper, she finds it’s worse than a bit of houseburning. The
West
is forecasting isolated thunder and broadcasting indiscriminate murder.

Heat of the Night

In the heat of the night with his barrel still reeking, the man with the hare lip and the cleft palate shifts through the dry night grass in someone’s backyard and comes upon a sleeper behind insect wire. A sleeper: lips opening and closing in the great vacant journey of sleep, his breath coming and going like the sea. At the back of the house. In the big country town that wants so much to be a city, there’s another sleeper and I can’t stop this. I’m behind the mirror and in different spaces, I’m long gone and long here but there’s nothing I can do to stop this. Every time it happens, on and on in memory, I flinch as that brow flinches with the cool barrel suddenly upon it. The sound goes on and on and matter flies like the constellations through the great gaps in the heavens, and I haven’t stopped it again. Lester, Rose, Red—I can’t stop it for you. When I’m Fish down there I just don’t know, and now that I’m what he became beyond it’s all too late. I see it, I see it, all of history, and it sets me hard as spirit.

Right in Our Bloody Backyard

It’s right in our bloody backyard, said the Sarge. Cottesloe, he shoots and wounds two in a car. Then he goes to a flat, puts a hole in a bloke’s forehead. An hour later he shoots a bloke on his doorstep in Nedlands when he answers the door. Then he kills a kid sleeping on a back verandah in the next street. The CIB are shitting themselves. Your namesake, Lambsy, up at Central, he’s like a cyclone.

What do we do? said Quick.

What we’re told, said the Sarge.

It’s madness, said Murphy.

Or evil, thought Quick.

Murder, Murder