Cloudstreet (66 page)

Make a pot, love, she says to Lester. And get the girl a drink.

He’s hungry, says Rose.

He’s lookin at me, says Fish. He knows me. He loves me.

We’ll call him Harry, Quick announces.

Not on your life.

Lookit the little larrikin. He’s a homebuilt Harry if I ever saw one.

Oop! Hold im Quick. I’ve got—

What? I can’t do—I don’t know.

Take him, you useless drongo, says Oriel.

Oooer, what’s that? someone calls.

And to think we were blessed farmers, Oriel mutters, catching the placenta in the bucket and swabbing Rose a moment.

He’s waxy, says Quick.

Wax Harry, Lester grins.

Put the kettle on, I said.

Put your teeth in.

What? Have I, oh I, my—

Wax Harry, says Fish.

Don’t be ridiculous, Oriel says.

Is it alive? The ragged voice cuts the room silent. Dolly swings on her heels in the doorway, face yellow and streaky.

Yes, says Rose. It’s a boy.

Well, Dolly says, squeezing out a silent belch. You can all just go out and leave her alone. I’m a grandmother. Good night.

The room sighs, the house breathes its first painless breath in half a century and outside the pig is going at it balls to the wall, giving it his all, like an angel in a pig’s body, like a bacon choir, like the voice of God Himself pouring up through the fruit trees, rattling the tin fence, shaking the old smells from the walls and the worry from the paintwork, till it spills out on the street where they’re already celebrating something else, something they’ve been waiting for in their beds all year.

X

Long, Hot, Peaceful Days

S
UMMER
came again to Cloudstreet. Quick got his transfer to Traffic. During the long, hot, peaceful days, Rose took Wax Harry down to the river and lay in the creamy sand with him the way she’d promised herself she would. Harold Samson Lamb fisted sand and dead jellyfish into his mouth. He was dark haired and black eyed, outrageously uncircumcized and stubborn. He grew browner, healthier, gamer. When Quick came home from a shift he couldn’t wait to play with him so he took to waking him up at midnight, at six, whenever. Harry learnt to roll, to crawl. Jealous grandmothers sneaked him out to their own rooms to feast on him uninterrupted. The household spoiled him rotten.

The house was full of comings and goings. Repairs were planned, though nothing ever eventuated, and just the idea gave the place a fresh look. Out the front, the place looked like a dancehall parking lot. There was a Chev truck, the X-ray Rugby, an Oxford, an old Humber, a Harley and sidecar and Lon’s new FJ Holden that would never be paid for.

Dolly had a few bingo friends come round occasionally nowadays. She often dragged them up to the library to see her grandson where they left fag ash all over the rug and cooed with the most breathtaking sincerity. To Rose they were a worthless mob of old croakers—bar leaners and bus stop bores—but that they so clearly adored her mother was enough for her to put up with these incursions. Sometimes Quick sat out on the stoop with Dolly to feed the magpies their topside chunks. He’d come to the conclusion that she was a bit of a character. Whenever Dolly was around the baby Rose got nervous. She was frightened of Dolly dropping him, full as she was at least half of the time, and she imagined him blinded by her jutting cigarette embers, clawed clumsily by her yellowing nails. Rose drilled herself in the discipline of refraining from panic, and as if to reward her, Harry was safe always.

Lon and Pansy had a baby girl in the hospital. The corridor at Cloudstreet was full of their squalling and the baby slept through everything. They called her Merrileen-Gaye. Pansy was pregnant again before anyone was willing to believe it. She and Oriel did not speak, and very loud they were about it.

Some afternoons Rose helped out down in the shop. Someone was building a modern supermarket across the rails, but the Lambs’ place still won all trade, and no one believed it could be any different. Rose liked the smell of the shop, the crates of vegetables sloped back along one wall, the fatty cold meats, boiled sweets, the zinc odour of the bottle caps collecting in the bucket they’d send to the Blind School every Friday. She went down one afternoon looking for Harry and found herself serving in the afterschool lolly rush. A ha’ppenorth of umbugs, lady! Tuppence a pennysticks, missus! Please, please, a bag uv snakes! She fought with the lids of the great glass jars and felt the weight of kids pressing from the other side of the counter. Rose doled out generous serves and won hearts. Next day they asked for her. On the third day, left alone for an hour after the rush, she rearranged the jars in a more practical order and found them all firmly replaced next day. Elaine daydreamed all morning about her fiance who was stringing their engagement into its sixth year, and she found in Rose a willing ear, though she’d wait till Oriel was out of the shop before starting in on another story of real romance.

Lester came and went, as though distracted somehow. Rose sensed that he’d lost interest in the shop. He baked irregularly, made no icecream.

Within a week, Rose had feelings about the shop. If Harry was impossible and kept her from it, she regretted it. Oriel noticed.

They were wary of one another, Oriel and Rose. When Oriel came into the room she was all over it instantly, like a hot rash. She brought the place to attention just by entering it. Rose remembered the way she took command of a situation in a dozen crises—when Dolly was sick, when she herself was hurt, and she couldn’t think why the very strength of that woman’s actions felt so unforgivable. Her kindness was scalding, her protection acidic. Maybe it’s just me, thought Rose, maybe I can’t take it from her because my mother never gave it to me. What a proud bitch I am. But dammit, why does she always have to be right and the one who’s strong and the one who makes it straight, the one people come to? Why do I still dislike her, because she’s so totally trustworthy?

Geez, Rose, Elaine said offhandedly one afternoon in a quiet moment between the shelves, you remind me so much of Mum when she was young. I can see why Quick married you.

He didn’t, love, I married him, she said from some old reflex that took over in moments of terror.

Ha, ha! Just like Mum. You’re a ringer, Rose!

Rose choked.

Oriel wasted nothing and she despised waste in others. There was no point walking from the shop to the kitchen for one task if it could incorporate five more and save walking. Nothing was thrown away, nothing written off to chance. When Oriel sent you to the butcher’s she armed you with a diagram of the cut she wanted, the name, weight and a list of defects to watch for. There was one way of storing eggs, one way of sealing a preserve jar. There was a way of looking after your breasts, a better way of pinning a nappy and an inspired way to get the shit off them, and you couldn’t take solace in the possibility that she might be wrong because she never was. You’d hold out stubbornly with your own inferior methods until you got sick of yourself and gave in with relief. When she found you doing it the right way she’d lay a hot, square hand on you and congratulate you as though you’d just thought up that ingenious method yourself.

Yer a wonder, she’d say, Rose yer the real thing.

And Rose never knew whether to leap for joy or puke.

Fortune

Sam Pickles was starting to slow down at work, all the blokes at the Mint knew it. He looked weaker these days and that cough of his took up as much of his time as working did. The men who worked on the hosco knew he wasn’t worth his day’s pay any more but they wouldn’t see him laid off until the silly old bugger couldn’t walk in through the gates of a morning. They were used to seeing him round; they liked to hear tips from him of a Friday afternoon about the weekend’s punting. Stories had sprung up around him, that he’d lost his fingers in some covert commando exercise in the war. He’d been at the Mint so long the young bods figured there must be gold dust in his pores by now. All the stories of his legendary bad luck started to ring suspicious to the young crew.

Coming up for twenty years in the job, Sam still smuggled out duds, blanks and new releases, only nowadays they were for his grandson. No one checked him at the gate anymore, beyond the old question: Got any ingots in yer pockets, Sam? If he’d had any greed at all (some would have said any sense at all) he could have been making his pay ten times over.

Twenty years ago, Sam Pickles might have been invisible at the sorting table. Nowadays it was all: Gday, Sam, and What’s the dirt, Sam? How’s things today, Sam? They talked to him like he was management and they expected him to work about as little. The last few years he walked around all day with a smile on his face, and wondered why no one would believe he was that unlucky. He lost at the races every weekend, more or less without relief, and if he died tomorrow he wouldn’t have enough money to bury himself, but the blokes swore he was onto something somehow, and their admiration was infectious. When he got home of an evening, Rose and Harry’d be in the kitchen often as not, and he’d sneak the boy a peppermint, bring down his two-up pennies and toss them off the paddle for him to get a giggle. Rose would fuss over his cough, pour him a cup of tea, and he was hardpressed to feel unlucky.