Making Laws for Clouds

Allen & Unwin's House of Books aims to bring Australia's cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation's most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia's finest literary achievements.

Nick Earls is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling novels
Zigzag Street
and
Bachelor Kisses, Headgames,
a collection of short stories, and several novels for young adults, including
After January
and
48 Shades of Brown,
which won the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for older readers in 2000.

His work has been published internationally in English and in translation, as well as being successfully adapted for film and theatre. He worked as a suburban GP and medical editor before turning to writing. Nick Earls lives in Brisbane.

HOUSE
of
BOOKS

This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Penguin Books Australia in 2002

Copyright © Nick Earls 2002

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Copyright Act 1968
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ISBN 978 1 74331 313 8 (pbk)
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Acknowledgements

The Night Sky from Battery Hill

The Stormy Deluxe

Making Laws for Clouds

This time I'd particularly like to thank Jessica Adams for inviting me to be part of the otherwise all-girl anthology,
Girls' Night In
. Somehow her Nick(ola) Earls joke led to the story that began this novel, and once the characters were in my head they wouldn't leave.

Girls' Night In
and its successors have how raised millions of dollars for the international aid agency War Child, and some of the royalties from this novel will go to War Child as well. War Child provides immediate, effective and sustainable aid to children affected by war in order to build peace, resolve conflict and empower future generations.

I'd also like to thank the people at Curtis Brown, Penguin and home who got behind me when I decided this story shouldn't stop before the nativity play, and should last the whole summer.

 

This is the best summer of my life. This is the summer my mother isn't always on the bus, and I used to dream about that.

No more of my mother burping and farting and creaking like an old house with all that gas in her. My mother cracking those lame boozy jokes no one gets and smelling something like old fish. She's a bit of an embarrassment.

My mother sits in the second row on the bus and takes up the whole seat, but mainly on account of her knees. They're quite far apart, so there's no room for anyone else. She sits on the window side, but her right knee gets most of the way to the aisle.

It's the chafing, her thighs chafing. That's what she says, and she says chafing's hell and she doesn't say anything about hell unless she means it. She says if they wanted to make hell hell they could forget the eternal fire and just go for a long hot summer with lots of chafing.

Summer's when the chafing's at its worst and she sits on the verandah sometimes, flapping the front of her dress to make a breeze, and she says it's raw as a skinned possum in there. That's usually when she calls the doctor. And, since it's summer, there's usually fungus involved and I'm off to the chemist to get a big tube of cream soon enough.

The first time she said ‘skinned possum' my brother Wayne cried. He's younger than me, and not good with surprises, even when they're just ideas. He had nightmares about the skinned possum up Mum's dress, in case it might come out and get him when he was asleep. It took me some talking to get him over it. Now he just asks her not to say it because it makes him want to spew. But lots of things make Wayne want to spew. All his life his stomach's been on the sensitive side. My mother's not too bad about that. We make allowances. She says I should always buy groceries with Wayne's stomach in mind, and not make a fuss about doing it. So, no peanut butter.

Enough about my mother. This is the best summer because she isn't always on the bus (except on Sundays), and that completely changes the seating arrangements. The regular seating arrangements go like this: front row – Tanika Bell and her mother (who always faces forward, and prays when we come up to intersections), second row – my mother, third row – me
and Wayne. I'm older, so I qualify for the window seat, but I give it to Wayne. I should be giving it to Wayne because of his tendency to get motion sickness, but that's just a good excuse. From the aisle seat of row three my mother isn't as much in the way, and you can talk to Tanika Bell. See the back of her head the whole way, talk to her sometimes.

So how much better is it when my mother's not there, and it's Wayne and me in the second row instead of her? Much much better. From the aisle seat of the second row, you can see every freckle on Tanika Bell's face when she turns around. And we don't have all my mother's noises to deal with.

I'm working right now and I should be concentrating, but it's Tanika Bell's face from one row back that I'm thinking about. Working and sweating in this foul summer heat, and the weeds get up knee-high overnight so there's always plenty to do to keep the roads looking the way they should. I stop for water and some petrol for the Whipper Snipper, then I'm into it again, putting a straight edge back along the Nicklin Way, taking out weeds and the new strands of grass that are pushing out onto the bitumen. That's ambition for you – grass thinking it can grow over bitumen, take over the Nicklin Way. That's four lanes of traffic and two of parking.

Things have been better here since Tanika Bell's
father came along and got the job of church caretaker and driver of the minibus. And much better since rehearsals started, since that means bus trips without my mother.

We are the Magi, Tanika Bell and me, two thirds of the Magi in the church nativity play. It's my first speaking part – Magus Three, the carrier of myrrh. But I've done three years as a shepherd (non-speaking), so it's fair enough. People know I've earned it. And people probably knew I was shitted off with being a shepherd by now too. If they looked they could tell. The second year I worked hard with that crook, and all it got me was another year as a lousy fucking shepherd. The third year I just made up the numbers, stood there with a broom handle that had had nothing done to it – nothing to make it look like a costume – and I made sure sheep never crossed my mind.

My mother kept making me go. She doesn't see that sometimes you've got to have something to live for to make you keep going back. Some understanding that you've got prospects.

I didn't want to put my name down this year, but my mother made me. ‘Not if I'm no lousy fucking shepherd again,' I said to her, and she said, ‘Righto, I'll talk to Father Steele.'

I think my mother's a pillar of the church – I read that expression in the paper once, and she's the right
size to be a pillar – so the talk with Steelo seemed to do the job. She came back and said they'd put me down for a Magus this year, along with Mattie Hartley and ‘that girl on the bus who talks too much'.

And I said, ‘I thought it was just you on the bus who talked too much,' mainly to cover the fact that my face had gone red and my heart had started thumping like a knocker on a door and something in my pants was showing some kind of interest in answering.

‘She'll have to wear a beard, of course,' my mother said. ‘But she's the right height for it, I suppose. Joe Bell's daughter.'

As if I didn't know who ‘that girl on the bus' might be.

And that's when, weeks out from Christmas, this started to look like it might be the best summer of my life. Forget the fact that Steelo makes us do the nativity play exactly the same way every year. Forget the fact that this is year three for me on the council road crew and summers are the worst time by far for doing this job. For me this year is different. I've been bumped up to Magus Three, and I've got dialogue with Tanika Bell.

I realise I've developed the thing my mother calls a ‘soft spot' for her but, trust me, it's a hard spot. It's a good thing these council work shorts are loose in the front or everyone on the Nicklin Way would know
exactly how I'm feeling about Tanika Bell right at this moment.

My mother – a woman all made up of soft spots – is pretty quick to pick them in other people, and give them a hard time about it. So it's best to keep my dealings with Tanika Bell totally professional when she's around. And to try to keep Tanika out of my mind when I'm at work, since this job involves some fierce equipment sometimes, and requires precision.

Tanika Bell has interesting teeth, some of which only look straight when she's turning round to talk over the seat. Sometimes in rehearsals she catches me looking at her mouth, and she shuts it. It's usually open, but in a way that I'd call thoughtful.

I pick up some Bundy rum on the way home, and three bottles of Diet Coke. The Bundy's on special and that's the best way to buy it, so I take two. I can always hide one until we need it. It's not such a long walk from the bottleshop to home, but it's too long for my mother to take on. I'm fit. Working for the council does that for you. I'm particularly fit in the legs.

Actually, it's handy that there's a bus to church, since I don't know how we'd get my mother there otherwise. We're early on the route, about a third of the way from the Bell's place at Battery Hill to the
Blessed Virgin at Wurtulla. We get on just before Mrs Vann, who embroiders flowers in the corners of her hankies and always smells of powder. Sometimes she gives us a batch of her date slice. She's definitely another pillar of the church. The stop after that's Mr Tooley, who tells lies about being a war veteran and goes to three churches for the food and one more for bingo. Then there's the Skerritts, who take three rows down the back on the right and always have wet combed hair that's turned frizzy before the trip home. The Skerritts' hair drives them close to mad.