Cloudstreet (61 page)

Sam Pickles opened the
West
at lunchbreak, stinking of gold and silver and turpentine,
DEADLOCK IN KILLER HUNT: STREETS STAY LIT.
That’s it alright. The shadow over the whole town,
SHARK KILLS WOMAN IN TWO FEET OF WATER.
Jesus. There’s worse,
RAIN DELAYS TEST PLAY.

The town is in a frenzy down there. This is what it means to be a city, they say, locking their doors and stifling behind their windows. On the streets at night no one moves. No one goes out. There’s a murderer out there and no one knows what he wants, where he is, who he is, and why he kills. This is Perth, Western Australia, whose ambitions know no limit. And the streets are empty.

Quick crept the back lanes of Nedlands through the long, hot, wet nights. The CIB boys fingerprinted everybody in the known world and the streetlights burned all night. Armed with his uniform, his handcuffs, torch and truncheon, Quick felt no fear, but he could smell it in the outhouses the length of every lane; it oozed from under the bolted doors, from every flue, vent and gully trap of the neighbourhoods he patrolled. He was alone out there with a gunman loose, and he wondered what evil really looked like, if its breath stank, if it could be stopped. The lanes were high with weeds and cast off junk. There was room, all the room in the world for a man to be abroad unseen. Quick didn’t blame them all in there, tossing and rolling awake through the summer.

I’m scared, Quick, said Rose. I don’t sleep all night. You can’t leave me here on my own. I’m going mad. I can’t even read. Even in the day, I’m frightened.

The new house is ready enough, I spose, he said, dubious.

I’d be alone there, Quick. I don’t want to be alone. Have you seen that street? There’d be no one to talk to. I can’t stand it while you’re on nights, love. I’ve got the baby. There’s some mad bastard out there and no one’s caught him.

We’ll think of something, love.

They’re like rats in a fire down there. See, across the desert the train comes groaning with emergency supplies of locks and mesh. The fingerprint files of the CIB look bigger than the Doomsday Book. There’s ulcers bursting, friendships and marriages lost. There’s a murderer out there, a cold blooded maniac. Don’t go out, they say. Ring three times, they say. Don’t come calling, they say, it’s too much for me, just don’t come calling, just leave us alone, leave me be, leave us, leave us, oh God it’s sweltering but don’t go outside!

And someone else dies, regardless.

As Cloudstreet tosses and throttles, a queer point of luminescence in all that gloom, with its downpipes crashing in the wind, its stonefruit falling dead from trees and the scarred and hurting pig shrieking warning across the whines of mosquito and the dead sobs in the walls, that man comes wheezing. He steps lightly by stubbornly opened doors and lifted windows, past the buckled shop shutters and the open till within, down the swept side path into the heartland where it smells of laundry and preserve bottling and woodwork and vegetables and the hard labour of people, down through it all with his heart a-dance, he comes wheezing. He sees a tent billowing softly in the night light. He bites his lips coming onward, bearing down, but out of the dark comes a pink blur, a squealing snarling creature that uproots him and sends him back in a tumble and he’s running, grabbing for the .22 before it can turn for another run, before he can find out what it is.

And in the street, right under the light as he comes running, is a man with black arms akimbo, just watching. The gunman stops, draws a bead, and loses him in his sights. Loses him from the street altogether. Someone’s calling out a foreign lingo. He bolts.

Rose shivers in her bed. We’re alright, she says to the baby. We’re okay. Oh, Quick, come home!

After a night of endless lonely trudging, of holeing up in ramshackle hollows and peering over back fences with thunder breaking the sky and the rain beating mud against his shins, Quick clocked off the shift and went down to the river to clear his head. In the dawn the sky was clearing and summery steam rose off the jetty piles, and out of the steam came the black man looking completely unsurprised.

Geez, said Quick, recognizing him fearfully. Haven’t you got a home to go to?

Not this side.

Quick looked across the river. Through the steam he thought he saw moving figures, dark outlines on the far bank.

Are you real?

The black fella laughed. Are you?

Quick kicked the muddy grass before him.

You’ve
got a home to go to, Quick. Go there.

Quick regarded the man. He was naked, naked enough to arrest.

Go there.

Orright, said PC Quick, already on his way. When he turned back, high on the hill, he saw more than one black man. He saw dozens of them beneath the trees, hundreds like a necklace at the throat of the city.

Home

Sam and Oriel and Lester met in the Lambs’ kitchen at Cloudstreet before breakfast. It seemed to have occurred to them all at once.

Sam noticed that Oriel Lamb had the beginnings of a beard. Oriel Lamb still had a strange overwhelming parental power about her, and he imagined that crossing her would be like crossing luck itself. Sam felt himself shrinking in this engineroom of a kitchen whose walls throbbed with produce. From the window you could see the yard on the Lamb side, its terraces of flowers and vegies inside chicken wire, the stonefruit trees heavy, the redspattered tent sucking its cheeks in the morning wind.

This proposition’s just more of an idea, said Sam.

Yes? Yes?

Let’s get em back here.

Who?

Well, I worry about Rose.

That’s my idea! said Lester.

Quick and Rose? said Oriel.

She’s on her own too much, said Sam.

They’ve just built a new house, said Oriel.

She needs company, protection. She’s havin a baby remember.

Gawd, it’d be good havin a nipper round the place again, said Lester.

We’ll have one soon enough, said Oriel, thinking of Lon and Pansy.

They could have that big room at the top of the stairs.

Ugh, said Oriel.

Well? said Lester.

They’ll never come, said Oriel. Rose’s too proud.

Sam smiled.

And … and Quick too, she said trying uncharacteristically to be diplomatic, because any man could see the idea had taken root in her. No, no they’re too proud. They’ll never come home.

Quick and Rose arrived with the laden Rugby even before the Cloudstreet delegation set off.

Got a spare bunk? said Quick.

The families mobbed them on the verandah. It was a stampede, a door-flinging, board-bucking, fruit-dropping stampede down the corridors to reach them. Everyone grabbed hungrily at them, Rose with her big melon belly, Quick with his loose limbed nightshift body.

Just for a week or two, said Quick.

Yairs! Yairs!

It seems logical, said Quick through his teeth.

Aw, yairs.

I wasn’t worried really, said Rose.

Aw, nooooo!

Fish came last down the stairs, thumping his way through the house. Aarr! Quick en Rose! Arrrr!

Quick felt safe here, he felt within his boundaries. Happy? he asked Rose amid the din. Happy, she said.

The Walls

But the library is horrible. And besides, Rose gets a late recurrence of morning sickness. She swears it’s the windowless room. After long nights, Quick comes home to good old Cloudstreet and crashes into bed with shop noise below him and old Dolly cursing gravity and time out the back somewhere, but it’s not that which stops him sleeping. It’s the old misery pictures on the wall. When he lies down and the door is closed, the room dark, quiet and airless, two strange miserables burst off the walls and at each other’s throats. It’s exhaustion he thinks, and lack of air. That steely old hag and the darkeyed girl going at it, mute and angry like the pictures on his wall in his childhood sleep. So he goes back on shift shitweary and useless.

The Light in the Tent

Nights were long out in the tent with no wood and glass to sleep behind. Oriel knew there was only fabric between her and death, fabric and strength of character. She took to leaving a lit candle by her bed. It stood in a saucer on the old family Bible, its flame curtseying before the draughts. Thundery showers peppered the tentfly and above it, the mulberry shook itself like a wet dog. Canvas. She knew how thin canvas was, but she refused to be afraid. True, she could move inside until the killer was caught, as Lester and Quick said, but that would be a surrender to things that hadn’t even declared themselves and she knew that going inside would break her will.