Cloudstreet (11 page)

It’s like Fish is stuck somewhere. Not the way all the living are stuck in time and space; he’s in another stuckness altogether. Like he’s half in and half out. You can only imagine and still fail to grab at how it must be. Even the dead fail to know and that’s what hurts the most. You have to make it up and have faith for that imagining.

Fish is still strong and beautiful. That Rose next door sees it. She watches him. Mostly Fish is quiet. He talks, but not much. He likes to stand around in the yard and see birds. He likes the way things move in the wind. Wind excites him. When he feels breeze on his face he smiles and says, Yes. Winter days now, he stands out in the westerly that blows down the tracks from the sea and it closes his eyes with its force.

Hello, wind!

He loves to sing. He knows ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, ‘Blessed Assurance’, ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’, whole strings of them. Lester brings out the accordion some nights after tea and Fish moans along. Music seems to make him feel good. Music and spinning things.

Knife never lies! he yells as Lester spins the butterknife. Fish claps his hands wide fingered.

Lester shows him how to spin a soup bowl, send it rocking across the table, standing up of its own momentum, whirring and blurring, making wind and sound for him. Fish becomes an expert at it. Quick and Hat and Red and Lon stand and watch him spin two, three, four at a time.

When he’s frightened or angry he falls down. He cries like a man. It makes the Lambs crazy with emotion to hear it.

Oriel doesn’t realize it, but she begins to dress Fish like an idiot, the way people clothe big sadfaced mongoloids. She hoiks his trousers up under his arms with a belt so long it flaps. She combs his hair straight down on his brow and shines his shoes till they mock him. The reason Oriel doesn’t notice is that Quick gets to him early after breakfast and drags the clobber round on him, messes him up like a boy, normal and slouchy. It makes old Fish giggle, Quick tugging at him.

Yer a boy, Fish.

Big boy.

My oath, says Quick.

Kitchentalk

Sometimes after tea there was no shopwork to be done so the Lambs’d loiter round the kitchen table, talking above the hum of Fish’s soup bowls with the new range all roar and glow. Hat at the sink. Oriel pulling out the darning. Lester picking the flourbits off his forearms.

Fine sink, this, Dad.

Yeah, but what about the other five? said Oriel.

A job lot, Lester said.

Your father has a nose for a bargain, Oriel said rolling her eyes.

We could make dunnies out of the rest, said Quick, a five holer.

Quick, stop that.

Lester laughed: We used to have a sixteen holer when I was in the army. That’s how they got the idea for the Lancaster bomber for this war. Saturation bombin.

What’d you do durin the last war, Mum? said Quick.

Oriel kept darning.

Hat raised her eyebrows: Mum?

Hm?

The Great War. What’d you do?

Waited. I raised six kids and waited for one of em to come back.

The kitchen fell quiet, all except for Fish’s whirring bowl. Lester tapped scum from his chromatic harmonica.

I didn’t know you were married before, said Elaine, lips aquiver.

Eee-laine, you nong, said Hat. 1914 to 1918. She’d hafta start havin em at age twelve to get six out, not to mention one off to war. She was born the year of Federation, 1901.

Well, said Lester. Margaret River School obviously taught Hat more than groomin and deportation.

They weren’t my children, said Oriel.

Well, I figured that, said Hat. Whose were they?

My father remarried after my mother died. His new wife already had a boy, Bluey, and they had a whole squad of babies after they married. Half-brothers and sisters. I brought them up.
She
taught at the bush school. She wasn’t much older than me, you know. And I wanted to be a teacher, but I never finished school. I raised her family.

Why?

Because, Quick, I loved my father.

Did he love you?

When I got burnt one day in a bushfire, in 1910, he killed his last pig, and took out its bladder and put it on my legs to heal the blisters. A whole beast, just so I wouldn’t scar. Not only was it his last pig, it was the last living thing on his farm but me.

I wouldn’t have wasted pork on
this
family, said Lester with a creasyfaced wink. Slice of polony, maybe. Pound of tripe, yeah.

Garn, Dad, yer all bluff.

Did I tell you about me and Roy Rene?

Arr!

Did he Mum?

Oriel finished a sock and threw it at Lon whose foot belonged to it. Yes, Yes. The Les and Mo Show.

At the Tivoli, said Lester, and then The Blue Room. Ooh, I was a lair then. All the best people’d sing me songs. I wrote for the best of em.

He was good, said Oriel, not dirtymouthed like Roy Rene.

Old Roy’s the best, said Lester.

Quick looked at the old girl. She caught him looking.

What? she said.

The one who went to war. The half-brother you were waitin for. Did he come back?

No.

Died of wounds in Palestine. The Holy Land. Shot by a Turkish airman at a well. He was a signalman. He was waterin horses. He always looked good with horses.

Did you know him, Dad? You were there.

I was only at Anzac, said Lester.

He was a genius with horses, said Oriel.

Horses were geniuses with me, said Lester. That’s why I was in the Light Horse. They were always lighter after they bucked me off.

You were a hero, said Quick.

Lester pumped the old harmonica to break the quiet, and because he knows, well as Oriel knows, that it’s just not true.

Cake

The day Quick turned twelve his father baked him a cake and wrote his name in icing and stuck twelve candles in it, and when the evening rush at the shop was over, the Lamb family came through from the counter to the kitchen to sit around the oval table and sing ‘Happy Birthday’. They’d just finished the singing and were into the three cheers when the cowbell rang up front and Oriel went to serve in the shop. She came back at a jog.

Lady wants a cake, Les. She’s desperate. She’ll give us a quid.

It’s too much. We haven’t got one.

Quick looked at the candles, still smoking.

It’s too much, said Lester.

Quick watched as his mother whipped out all the candles, smoothed the icing over with a knife and gathered the cake up under her arm to charge back down the corridor.

Birthday, Quick, said Fish.

Yeah, said Quick.

Suddenly, they all laughed - even Quick. It started as a titter, and went quickly to a giggle, then a wheeze, and then screaming and shrieking till they were daft with it, and when Oriel came back in they were pandemonius, gone for all money. But they paused like good soldiers when she solemnly raised her hand. She fished in her apron and pulled out a florin. Happy birthday, son.

You want change from this? said Quick.

That set them off again and there was no stopping them.

Tuba

Quick Lamb was surprised when his father joined the army. He was even more surprised to know he’d joined the army band. The old man came home one day with a full kit and tuba and spread it out in the bedroom behind the shop so they could all see it.

I thought I’d do my bit, Lester Lamb said. They wouldn’t take me in ‘39.

All the Lambs looked at it in wonder. Quick worried about the old man sometimes. They were bombing Tokyo. There couldn’t be a few weeks left of the war. Deep inside Quick knew his father was liable to do anything at all.

I used to be in the Salvos, Lester Lamb said. I’m orright on the old tub.

The tub? Quick said.

Tuba. Chew-ba.

Lester took up the dented instrument and sat. He honked out a couple of notes. It sounded like a tune, right enough. Like elephant farts.

Oriel said nothing. Lester let out a strangled oomph and the rooster down the back started screeching. Lon giggled and Fish smiled.

More, said Fish.

Don’t worry, said Oriel, there’ll be plenty more. More than plenty.

From then on, the old man was at band practice every afternoon and as the year got on towards Christmas Quick saw him less and less and he wondered more and more. His mother ran the shop and said nothing about it. The girls served. Hat and Elaine had finished school for good now. They were old enough to work for money. The shop went on. Quick went to school and did badly and came home. Sometimes he’d lie on his bed with Fish and just look at the ceiling and feel Fish against him. He missed the old Fish, especially at school. With Fish, people noticed you. But without him, at this new school, he was just a country kid whose shorts were too long, whose feet were horny from barefootedness. He was slow and dreamy and the teachers gave up on him quickly. When he came home and lay on his bed and looked up, he didn’t know what he saw; he couldn’t decide what he felt. Fish might come in and say Hello, Quick, and stand at the window watching the motes in the late afternoon sun, or maybe slouch in beside him on the bed and say, It’s the roof you’re looking at, Quick.