Cloudstreet, Page 3

  He unravels the prawn net and shucks off his pants. His scrawny white legs bring a smile to him.

  I’ll take the boys.

  They’re not tall enough, Oriel Lamb says.

  Ah, the girls grizzle too much. Drives me mad.

  Put on yer shoes, or yull be stung. Don’t want any cobbler stings. Can’t stand your grizzlin.

  He laughs and remembers the last time he was stung, when they had to load him onto the flatbed and Hattie had to drive because no one else could, and they delivered him to the doctor in the main street naked and screaming like a breech birth.

  Orright, he says, lacing up the old brogues his father left him, no stings tonight. Give us a kiss then.

  With the two older boys, Mason and Samson, Lester Lamb wades out. He holds the lamp over the water while the boys drag the net; it makes a long triangle out behind them, narrowing down to a little sock in the end. Mason is eleven. They call him Quick because he is as unquick as his father. Samson is two years younger and the others call him Samsonfish, or just plain Fish, for his wit and alertness. Everyone loves Fish. Just by dunking a girl’s braids in an inkwell he can make her love him. He endears teachers to him by giving them lip. And in town, he’ll wait till dark and crap in a paper bag and set fire to it on someone’s doorstep so they come out screaming and stamping and get poofooted, only to melt into jolliness when they see it’s just Fish Lamb and his fun. Even his three sisters Hattie and Elaine and Red love him, and they hate boys to Hell and back.

  Quick knows that his brother Fish is smarter and better looking than him, and that people love him more, though Fish doesn’t catch fish as well as his name would suggest, because he’s always wisedicking around, talking too loud, being lovable.

  Don’t smile, Fish, Lester Lamb says. You’ll frighten the prawns away.

  Oi, Quick, look at Dad. He looks like a statue in a fountain with that light. Wants to be careful someone dunt come over an toss in a penny to make a wish.

  What would they wish for, ya reckon? Quick asks.

  Yeah, what? Lester Lamb asks.

  Prolly wish they could get their money back, I reckon.

  Cheeky blighter, Lester Lamb thinks as he wades with the light and lets the talk go away from him.

  On the beach, Oriel Lamb sees them dragging round the bend and back towards the beach. The fire coughs and she goes back to darning. She doesn’t hate being poor the way Lester does. She’ll cut garments down and cadge and patch to give things a second life, she’ll keep the farm swaying on its back trotters, but not be unhappy. She’s prouder than the British Empire. She’ll send the kids into town on old Mabel with a shilling between them and know they’ll spend it on sherbert and icecream and watch the outdoor flicks for free from a vacant bush. They’ll see Randolph Scott back to front through the old white sheet, and they’ll see the projector flicker and send out its bolt of light, and they’ll watch the townie kids eating popcorn out of paper cups, but they won’t for a moment think they’re poor. They’ll know they’re Lambs; they’ll know how to treat others with a mixture of pity and respect. And, what’s more, they’ll always come back with change.

  She looks up and sees Lester and the boys hauling the net up onto the beach. The water is flat behind them. She can almost see the trees etched out on the other bank, the paperbarks where the dunes begin. There is the sound of surf away across the sandbar. Little Lon is asleep at her feet. She wraps him in her cardigan and he seems no bigger than a kelpie curled up like that.

  The boys empty the lummocky mess of stuff into the light, and they fall to their knees to separate jellyfish, gobbleguts, smelt, weed and muck from prawns. In the light, the prawns’ eyes are cheap jewels in transparent bodies that warp and flick against the sides of the steel bucket.

  Fish skylarks up the beach. Quick whistles as Hat uncovers a fat cobbler, its glossy catfish body bending to show the sting behind its head.

  I’ll take em out again, Lester Lamb says.

  His wife shrugs and lets them go. Her blunt little hands are full of prawns.

  Oriel Lamb wipes her hands on her apron, looks up and sees her husband out on the water, his head illuminated and seemingly free of his body. Her men look like they are walking on water. Somewhere a fish breaks the surface.

  She leaps to her feet. Lord Jesus, something just falls through the bottom of her heart. She startles the others.

  Lest?

  Oh, the water has never been so quiet. Quick and Fish and their father move through it like it’s a cloud, an idea, just a rumour of water, and when Fish goes down there isn’t a sound. Quick feels the net go slack. Lester Lamb smells woodsmoke from the beach; he hears his heart paddling slowly along, but nothing else.

  Fish will remember. All his life and all his next life he’ll remember this dark, cool plunge where sound and light and shape are gone, where something rushes him from afar, where, openmouthed, openfisted, he drinks in river, whales it in with complete surprise.

  And Lester Lamb, turning in alarm at the shout from shore, came round too hard and swung the lamp into the water and left them in hissing darkness. Quick was yelling; he heard the boy beating the water.

  Quick staggered and fell over the net and squealed at himself trying to get off, to get it off. A pole glanced off his chin. He felt the net butt under him. Fish! He was on him; he was trying to come up under the net.

  Lester Lamb hoisted Quick out of the water and off the net. The sky was the colour of darkness, starless, mute. Everywhere, everything was net.

  He’s under it, get if off get if off! Quick was yelling.

  Lester Lamb could not see. He could only feel water and net and panic.

  Oh, I remember. Mesh against the face, the cage of down and up and the faint idea of light as the cold comes quicker now out of the tunnel, that strange cold feeling that’s no longer a stranger. Fish feels death coming unstuck from him with a pain like his guts are being torn from him. Fish is having his gizzard, his soul torn away and he feels his fingers in the mesh, reaching up for anything, his … someone’s … and then he’s away.

  Away.

  The net went still in Lester Lamb’s hands. A sound escaped him.

  Just pull! Quick yelled.

  What?

  Into the shallow. If he’s caught in the net, just pull him in!

  When they got into the shallows they saw the shadow trailing and they dragged it up the bank to the woman’s feet and the smell of cooking prawns. Lester Lamb saw his son’s fingers in the mesh of the net, still holding.

  He was dead and they knew it, but the woman beat the water out of him anyway. To little Lon, awake now with all the screaming, she looked like she was giving Fish a good hiding for his cheek.

  Quick heard her shouting at the Lord Jesus.

  Blessed blessed Saviour, bring him back. Show us all thy tender mercy and bring this boy back. Ah, Gawd Jesus Almighty, raise him up! Now, you raise him up!

  And Fish lay there in the mostly dark, eyes and mouth open, lurching like butcher meat as his mother set her fists to him:

  Lord Jesus

  Whump!

  Saviour Jesus …

  Whump!

  And she made sounds on him you only got from cold pastry.

  The old man on his knees weeping: Yairs, Lord, yairs!

  And the girls strangely quiet there on the sand with waterlap and prawnkick and the smell of mud and rottenness.

  Fish’s pain stops, and suddenly it’s all just haste and the darkness melts into something warm. Hurrying toward a big friendly wound in the gloom … but then slowing, slowing. He comes to a stop. Worse, he’s slipping back and that gash in the grey recedes and darkness returns and pain and the most awful sickfeeling is in him like his flesh has turned to pus and his heart to shit.

  Shame.

  Horror.

  Fish begins to scream.

  The great gout of river hit Oriel Lamb in the face and Lon laughed. Got back on his wet little bum and laughed. Fish started to geyser
away and Lon laughed again and they were all shouting enough to hide the awful, the sad, the hurt moan that Fish let out when the air got to his lungs. Never, never, was there a sadder, more disappointed noise.

  They brought him into town like that. From the pub verandah men saw the Lambs barrelling down the hill like mad bastards, and they heard them singing and shouting like they were ready for rape and revenge, and the sight of them rioting on the open tray of that Chev suddenly put people in the street.

  Lester Lamb swung into the darkened dirt yard of the Church of Christ and got ready to beat down the door. He had to get inside and turn on the lights, throw the windows open, find the minister, tell the people. Oriel Lamb, infant astride her hip, was singing and wildeyed. The horn was blowing and the headlamps tore the darkness.

  Out on the tray, as the graveldust caught them up and blotted out the world, the girls laughed like they were famous.

  Quick cradled Fish’s head in his lap. He felt the blood moving in his brother’s body. Fish’s eyes were open, unblinking.

  We got him back! Quick heard his father bellow to the drinkers across the road. Back from the dead. Fish Lamb is back! Praise the Lord!

  But Quick held his brother’s head in his hands and knew it wasn’t quite right. Because not all of Fish Lamb had come back.

  III

  Back in Time

  BACK in time there was a big empty house. It was owned by a very respectable woman who had cheated several people in order to get it. The local Anglican priest was the only visitor she ever had, for she was lonely and a widow, though very rich. The priest secretly thought she was a nasty piece of work, but he also believed that there was good in every heart and it only needed to be nurtured. She had such an enormous house—six bedrooms and a library, with grounds full of fruit trees and fragrant shrubs—and in an inspired moment he put a proposition to her. She was lonely and bored, he said, why didn’t she open her house? To native women, perhaps. She could be the Daisy Bates of the city.

  Somehow it took her fancy, the Daisy Bates bit, though she’d never met one of these natives. Missionary purpose came upon her like the flu. Girls were procured and the house filled. She aimed to make ladies of them so they could set a standard for the rest of their sorry race. She showed them how to make their beds and wash, how to dress and how to walk. She read aloud from the novels of Sir Walter Scott and she locked the house up at night. The mission girls climbed into bed with one another at night and cried. They had been taken from their families and were not happy. They crawled from windows but were tracked down and returned to the house. The widow showed them how to serve at table and wear hats in church. One evening she went into the library to find a girl dead on the floor from drinking ant poison. Before she evicted the rest of them, she made each of them come into the library and take a close look at the twisted death snarl of the poisoned girl. When she got the last one out the door and into the night, she gathered up all the linen and burnt it under the fruit trees in the backyard. Then she sent a neighbour to fetch a constable.

  She was at the piano one evening a few weeks after, mulling over the possibilities for diversion, when her heart stopped. She cried out in surprise, in outrage and her nose hit middle C hard enough to darken the room with sound. Her nose was a strong and bony one, and there was middle C in that library until rigor mortis set in. The room soaked her up and the summer heat worked on her body until its surface was as hard and dry as the crust of a pavlova.

  That’s how the vicar found her when he came visiting to tick her off about the girls. The smell knocked him over like a shot from a .303 and he ran out with a nosebleed that lasted seven days and seven nights. He didn’t die, but he lost his faith in humankindness and became a Baptist first and a banker second.

  The house was boarded up, and it held its breath.

  In 1923, after a racehorse called Eurythmic was put grandly out to pasture, a publican from the town of Geraldton bought the house without ever seeing it. He thought perhaps he’d retire to it in style sometime in the future. He was forty years old. Twenty years later, men were reading his Last Will and Testament to a small gathering of sunburnt people in the Ladies’ Lounge of the Eurythmic Hotel, Geraldton.

  A House on Cloud Street

  Sam Pickles couldn’t believe it, and the way everyone started filing out of the Ladies’ Lounge without looking him in the eye, it was clear that no one else could, either. The pub was to be sold and the money to go to the local branch of the Turf Club, except for two thousand pounds which was willed to one Samuel Manifold Pickles. And there was a house, a large house down in the city, left to the same Samuel Manifold Pickles with the proviso that it not be resold for the next twenty years.

  Rose Pickles wandered through the quiet halls, along musty floor runners, into newly vacant rooms where only last month jockeys and sailors had lived. She tugged at her plait and smelt the sea on her flesh. After these weeks of hopeless waiting and expecting the worst she couldn’t decide whether she was happy or sad. She couldn’t help feeling that her life was over.

  A few days later, the Pickles family packed three cardboard suitcases and a teachest and caught a train to Perth. That was the end of Geraldton. The bay, the pub, the Norfolk pines, the endless summer wind. No one cried; no one was game to.

  It was evening when they reached the city and they caught the first taxi of their lives, to Cloud Street. Number One Cloud Street. When the driver piled them out they stared at the shadow back there in the trees. Somewhere, a train whistled.

  Oo-roo!

  Sam walked up on to the timber verandah with his mouth open in the dark. He put the key in the lock and felt Rose pushing him from behind.

  Gwan, dad.

  The door opened. A dozen cramped smells blew in their faces: lilac water, rot, things they didn’t recognize. Sam found a switch and the long, wide hallway suddenly jumped at them. They stepped inside to the grind and protest of the floorboards, moving slowly and quietly at first to open a door here, to peer there, exchange neutral high eyebrow looks, gathering boldness as they went, the four of them getting to a trot with their voices gathering and gaining, setting doors aslam, and moving to a full gallop up the staircase.

  It’s bloody huge! said Sam.

  Bloody strange if you ask me, Dolly muttered.

  Where do we sleep tonight? Ted asked.

  There’s twenty rooms or more, Sam said, just take your pick.

  But there’s no beds!

  Improvise!

  I’m hungry.

  Here, eat a biscuit.

  With all the upper floor lights on, Rose walked through drifts of dust, webs and smells from room to room. She came to a door right in the centre of the house but when she opened it the air went from her lungs and a hot, nasty feeling came over her. Ugh. It smelt like an old meatsafe. There were no windows in the room, the walls were blotched with shadows, and there was only an upright piano inside and a single peacock feather. Not my room, she thought. She had to get out before she got any dizzier. Next door she found a room with a window overlooking the street, an Anne of Green Gables room.

  Well, she thought, the old man had a win. Cloud Street. It had a good sound to it. Well, depending how you looked at it. And right now she preferred to think of the big win and not the losses she knew would probably come.

  In a day or so they had the house on Cloud Street clean enough to live in, though Sam privately swore he could still smell lilac water. It was a big, sad, two-storey affair in a garden full of fruit trees. The windows were long, buckling sashed things with white scrollwork under the sills. Here and there weatherboards peeled away from the walls and protruded like lifting scabs, but there was still enough white paint on the place to give it a grand air and it seemed to lord it above the other houses in the street which were modest little red brick and tin cottages. It was big enough for twenty people. There were so many rooms you could get lost and unnerved. From upstairs you could see into everyone else’s yard, and through the trees
to the railway line and the sea of sooty grass beside it. The garden was gone to ruin. The fish ponds were dry; orange, lemon, apple, mulberry and mandarine trees were arthritic and wild. Creeping rose grew like a nest of thorns.

  Rose explored and found creaks and damp patches and unfaded rectangles on the walls where paintings had hung. There were rooms and rooms and rooms but it wasn’t the great shock it might have been had she not already lived at the Eurythmic all last year. She liked the iron lace in front and the bullnosed verandah. Some floors sloped and others were lumpy and singsong as you walked on them. Each of the kids had a room upstairs and hers looked out on the street with its white fences and jacarandas. It was musty, like the beach shack at Greenough Uncle Joel had let them use every Christmas. She knew she would even forget what Uncle Joel looked like in a year or two. She had loved him and she understood that she had to love this place too, despite how glum it made her, because it was his gift, and if it wasn’t for him they’d have nothing.

  Rose cleaned the dead, windowless room herself because she knew that all the books from the beach house were coming on the train with the furniture, and this would be the library. She loved books, even to hold them and turn them over in her hands and smell the cool, murky breeze they made when you birred the pages fast through your fingers. A house with a library! But she got halfway through the job and quit. There were bolt holes like eyes in the walls where shelves had been, and the old piano groaned, and she didn’t like to think of being in there with the door closed. No, it wasn’t for books. The books could come in her room, and this room, well it could just stay closed.

  Rain fell sweetly on the corrugated iron roof all morning, and in the afternoon a truck pulled up out front.