Cloudstreet (9 page)

Whacka diddle di-do
How the heck could I know
She wanted my heart
for a billy cart

He accompanied himself with a jar of humbugs or a feather duster, and said whatever came into his head and changed the tune from verse to verse. Nothing seemed to suppress his good spirits in those weeks. Nothing could stop him singing except the sound of Oriel’s boots coming through the house behind the shop.

The house on Cloud Street took on a wonky aspect. It was still a big, old, rundown eyesore, but it seemed to have taken on an unbalanced life with all that activity and foment on the Lamb side, as though the place was an old stroke survivor paralysed down one side. The Pickleses didn’t seem to go out much, and if they did they got swallowed up and lost in the picture. They were weak in numbers and all the activity seemed to cause them to fade from vision.

Oh, you’re from next door the shop, love? people’d say to Dolly. You’n yer hubby rentin offa them, are yez?

Neighbours somehow got it into their heads that the Pickleses had come after the Lambs, and that stuck in Dolly’s guts. Locals took pity on the crippled hubby and all, but they couldn’t help but feel that the Pickleses weren’t made of the same stuff as their tenants. They didn’t have stickability. Now that was a word that moved camp along Cloud Street quickly that autumn. After a month or two no one could remember its introduction. But then neither was it easy to remember Cloud Street without the shop. After a time the shop
was
Cloud Street, and people said it, Cloudstreet, in one word. Bought the cauli at Cloudstreet. Slip over to Cloudstreet, willya love, and buy us a tin of Bushells and a few slices of ham. Cloudstreet.

The Dance

Quick Lamb tries to get on with his life. It’s been a happy one, being part of a mob, having farm fun and long dreamy days free of things. But it’s tough now, anchored to half a house, being a glorified boarder in a city he’s never even seen before. Maybe if he could get out into the paddocks more, out where air is stronger than memory so he could at least sometimes get shot of that terrible noiseless moment when he is walking along and Fish is just gone. He’d just kept walking and his brother, Fish—the handsome kid, the smart kid who made people laugh—Fish was under, and the net was just floating across him like the angel of death. He knows it should have been him, not Fish.

In this new house Quick has a room of his own for the first time in his life, and he’s not real sure how he likes it. The girls are all bunched together in a room the size of a dance hall down the front, and he knows they’d rather split up, being girls and all. He feels their looks in the corridor and gets the guilts. Besides, he’s not sure how he likes it, being alone. He wonders if maybe it’s a banishment, his quiet punishment for the Fish thing, but he reckons if it was that they were after, they’d bung him in with whiny little Lon. It’s a good, big room that he has, though he’s got nothing at all to fill it with. His iron bed stands like an exhibit in the middle with enough room to train a footy team on either side. It takes time to get the feel of it, what with his lonelysick wakefulness and the rumble and quake of the house going on all night like the bellyaches of a sleeping whale.

Down the back when he’s building the chookhouse, Quick finds a pile of newspapers and magazines someone’s tied up and thrown over the fence. Now and then he opens a paper and sees a blinded prisoner of war or a crying baby or some poor fleeing reffo running with a mattress across his back, and he’ll tear it out with care, take it up to his private room and pin it to the flaky wall to remind himself that he is alive, he is lucky, he is still healthy, and his brother is not. When he works on his spelling assignments he looks up and sees the gallery of the miserable; it grows all the time and they look down at him, Quick Lamb the Survivor, and he knows he deserves their scourging stares.

Now and then Fish comes into his room and looks about, wide-eyed and humming. Quick stiffs up with guilt, with sadness but sometimes he’ll touch his ruined brother just to hear his musical giggle. It’s the same giggle. It’s still Fish Lamb, his brother.

Fair dinkum, Quick Lamb hates himself.

But at night those cripples, the reffos, the starving weeping wounded on his walls wait till Quick is asleep and then they dance in their ragged borders, buckle paper and sag on their pins as they throw themselves into a weird joyous tumult over his bed. They never make a sound and he always sleeps through, but it happens all the same—men throw off their mattresses and soldiers tear away bandages and the dead rise out of the ground, inheriting the lonely quiet of the room until near morning, when they’re exhausted by happiness and freedom, and they resume their places for the dawn so that Quick Lamb might trap them again with his sorrow.

Props

Lester was closing up the shop amidst the long verandah shadows when a blackfella appeared on the step. It took him by surprise. He turned from the bolted shutters and the man was there. He was tall and thin, the colour of a burnt kettle, and he had a shoulderload of long dry branches.

Wanna buy props, Mister?

Oh. Oh. Props.

The black man’s hair stood like a deserted beehive. His feet were bare. His toes splayed on the ground like he was as much bird as he was man.

Gooduns. Not too much. Cut em meself.

Wait a minute, I’ll ask the missus. Lester turned and went to go in, but stopped. Listen, you might’s well come through yerself. She’ll be out the back. No use standin about out here.

The man hesitated.

Can leave the props just inside the door here, if you like.

The black man nodded. He unshouldered the sticks and stepped inside. Lester saw his eyes suddenly widen. The whites were porcelain and they seemed to vibrate. Something clicked in the man’s throat. Lester, stunned, watched him hold his pink palms out like a man with his hands against a window. He went back carefully, as if moving back in his own footsteps, his eyes roving about all the time from wall to ceiling to floor, and as soon as he was back over the threshold he turned and ran. Lester watched him go with his heart punching. The house grew quiet around him.

The props stayed just inside the door for two days until Oriel seized them and shoved her washing lines up with them.

The Lamb Girls

The time it took to fold a lace hanky, that’s all it took for Hat Lamb and Elaine Lamb and Red Lamb to know that they liked the city better than the farm. Cloudstreet was like somewhere out of the movies. All of them loved the staircase; they’d never even imagined a place with landings and banisters before. Hat liked sliding down with her skirt up around her ears, but Elaine wouldn’t contemplate that kind of activity, even though she was Hat’s twin. Elaine imagined sweeping down with hoops in her skirt and a bustle, to a cologne-smelling beau with his hat in his hand. Red, who was only twelve, just liked to spit from the landing and hit the sad little cactus in the terracotta pot in the hall.

People came into the shop and there were the Lamb girls, the unmistakeable Lamb girls with their dresses sewn from the same conglomerate of scrap material their mother seemed to tack together in bolts, and their severe hairdos and priceless complexions, their efficiency and sharpness. All of them knew how to count, and the twins had begun to take other forms of arithmetic as well, especially when soldiers came into the shop, bored and fatheaded. Sometimes Yanks came in flashing their big teeth, slapping on the accent thick as bread. They were boys with the voices of men, and it sent the Lamb girls absolutely troppo. Hat had a broad smile and she was starting to look like a woman. Elaine was already prone to ‘spells’ and she never smiled much for fear of seeming young and simple. Red was just a tomboy, she didn’t think about smiling or not smiling. There was a gap, now that Fish wasn’t being the ratbag of the family, and Red was out to fill it. She beat boys at cricket and she terrorized the bike sheds at school with the way she could throw a punch.

The Lamb girls didn’t speak to each other much, but when they did they all agreed that things were on the up.

Medicine