Cloudstreet (14 page)

We’ve come a long way, he said to them. By crikey we have. Eh? Eh?

One afternoon when she got home, Rose found a desk in her room. It was dark and compact, built from jarrah, and in every drawer there were sharpened pencils, ink, paper and books. She stood there, smelling the wood and the varnish, the newness and shock of it. When she turned around he was at the door. Rose began to blubber. He laughed and knocked on wood with his fingerless fist. The boys ran in with their airguns and it was like an early Christmas.

All spring it went on. They had good shoes and black market meat, sly grog and shop toys. The Pickles kids looked out across the fence and saw the Lambs digging noisily in the garden in their patched clothes, their square ordinary bodies dark with sweat, and they felt they had gotten back the edge. Rose and Ted and Chub slept and only dreamt of more.

Dolly sat up in the evenings and drank stout with lemonade. When Sam came out of bed to get her she’d be soft and warm and quiet and she kissed him like she was sucking at something he had. He felt her legs fasten around his waist and her teeth in his neck as they ground up the bedclothes. Her breath was sweet and she cried out enough to make him breathless and frantic. He could have wept with triumph. But when he was asleep, skewed off on his own side of the bed with his arm across his eyes, Dolly would get up again with his mess coming all down her legs, and she’d go out and open another bottle and sit in the dark alone.

Fair Dinkum

Rose heard it first. The old man was coming in after work. The steak was spitting on the stove and the place smelled of pepper.

Fair dinkum!

Rose looked at her mother. It wasn’t the old man’s voice, but it sure was his gait they heard coming down the hall. They were his boots alright.

Fairrrrgh! Dink. Dinkum.

He’s drunk, Dolly said.

Rose saw a ladder in her stocking.

And then in he came with a damn bird on his shoulder. He looked radiant and proud and prettywell sober. The bird was just an ordinary pink cockatoo with those clear side-winding eyes behind a beak like an ingrown toenail. From Sam’s shoulder, the bird looked down at Rose and Dolly with an expression of hauteur.

Say hello to Stan, girls! said Sam, dropping his gladstone bag to the floor.

Gawd help us, said Dolly.

Fair flamin dinkum! said the bird.

Rose laughed and Stan lifted a clawed old foot in her direction.

I won im, Sam said.

What in, a mugs’ lottery?

Just a bet.

He’s a beaut, said Rose. What does he eat?

New pennies.

That’ll be cheap, said Dolly.

We can shake him out at Christmas, said Rose. Like a money box.

Fair dinkum! said Stan.

They laughed and laughed, but little did they know. Two days before Christmas Stan crapped out three ha’pennies and a shilling, enough to buy seed for months.

When those coins dropped out of him onto the kitchen table two days before Christmas, he cocked his head at all present. He fixed his eyes on them with irascible turns of his head.

Eh? he said. Eh? What?

Stan always paid his way.

In time the house absorbed the bird, though it could never fully absorb his irritable shrieks. Even the neighbours winced at it. Whenever he was about the house Sam took Stan on his shoulder. The rest of the time the bird side-stepped up and down the fence, cocking his head and dodging the honkynuts Lon Lamb shot at him with a rubber band. Sam Pickles liked to feel Stan’s claws in his shoulder. It made him look a little taller. Rose said it made him look like a pirate. Dolly said it made him look like a perch. Ted and Chub didn’t care. Stan bit them and they lost interest.

Stan’s wing was never clipped. He could always have flown away.

Quick Lamb’s Sadness Radar

Quick Lamb reads the paper every day and sees the long lists of the missing believed killed, and the notices in memorium for sons and fathers and brothers. The war’s over, he knows, but he picks up sadness like he’s got radar for it. The whole world’s trying to get back to peace but somewhere, always somewhere there’s craters and rubble and still the lists and the stories coming home as though it’ll never let itself be over. There’s families on this street who’ve lost men, and while they remember the war will still be on.

We’re lucky, he thinks; the old man was too old and I was too young. We’ve got food, coupons, a full ration book. We’re gettin away light.

Quick sees kids at school who are poor. The Lambs are patched and barefooted, but at lunchtime their mother always brings warm pies and pasties to the gate. Quick and Lon and Red meet up wordlessly and eat together. Through the winter Quick notices Wogga McBride sitting with his little brother Darren. Wogga McBride is in grade six, one below Quick. They have a queer way of eating their sandwiches: whatever it is they bring wrapped in vine leaves gets eaten under cover of their hands in a way so quick and deft that it’s impossible to know what it is they have. Maybe it’s Quick’s misery radar, but he can’t let it be. He watches them every day from the corner of his eye until it’s almost October, and by then he knows what he’s begun to suspect—Wogga McBride and his brother aren’t eating anything at all; they’re just pretending. Out of pride, they’re going through the motions of unwrapping, passing, commenting on, eating food that doesn’t exist.

Quick lies awake that night with shadows vibrating on his wall.

Next day at lunchtime, Quick leaves Lon and Red and takes a pastry over to Wogga McBride.

I’m full, Quick says. Want it?

The skinny blue kid takes it with a nod and Quick leaves it at that. From then he resolves to take food to Wogga McBride every day, but most days he forgets.

The McBrides live further down the tracks towards West Perth but they cross at the walkway just below the big house on Cloud Street. Quick gets into the habit of falling in behind Wogga and Darren McBride and following them until they jump the tracks and head down toward town to their place.

Not long before the holidays, Quick is behind the McBrides, straining to hear a bit of their rare conversation. He doesn’t know what he finds so fascinating about them. True, they have blue-mottled skin and legs like hinges, the way they fold inside the knee. There is a kind of weariness about them. Their hair lies flat against their birdlike skulls. To Quick they look like ghosts.

Quick tails them down Rokeby Road, through all the food smells and the odour of newness seeping out of the open doors and shopfronts. They skirt the football ground. Quick can’t hear them saying anything. A truck clatters by loaded with pumpkins. Quick has the feeling he should catch up with them, just bust into their ghostly tight aura and say g’day, but what if they don’t want him? They actually look like they don’t care about the world, not what people think of them or wonder about them. And yet there they’ll be at lunchtime palming pieces of nothing—of air—into their mouths. Aren’t they pretending so that others won’t think they’re poor? Geez, Quick understands that much pride. Or are they keeping up the fantasy for themselves? Do they feel less hungry, less lean and hopeless, if they pretend their bellies are full? This kind of thought bothers Quick in class and it’s on his mind this afternoon as he sticks close enough to hear the voices, but not so near that he can understand what they’re saying.

And they hardly ever laugh, that’s another thing, though it isn’t until late tonight that he thinks of it, and by then it won’t help to think at all.

Quick climbs the bank behind West Leederville Station with the wild oats parting before him. Wogga McBride and his little brother are at the top and heading down into the cut where he loses sight of them for a few moments. When he gets to the crest of the embankment he can see Railway Road and the date palms in front of the rich people’s places. A train is hauling out of the station going his way and he sees down the track, behind the wobbling carriages, the slant of his own roof. A dog is barking. Someone has the flag flying in the front yard across the tracks, there’s a war over somewhere. Quick feels the breeze coming up behind him, cool and southerly. He’ll never catch up with Wogga McBride today. They’ll be across the tracks in a moment. He’s twelve years old and primary school is almost over. Smuts rise and the rails groan. Down there Wogga McBride is fooling with the dog, some carpetbacked stray that’s got a hold of his school bag and he’s laughing. Laughing! The two boys prance around the brown dog up on its hind legs, twisting and feinting with the leather strap in its mouth. Quick can hear their virulent laughter. He wants to go down there with them and run that dog ragged with them. Oh, the laughter, even over the sound of the train.

And then Wogga McBride tears the bag free of the dog and sways back, shrieking with glee, and the sleeper catches his heel and he staggers and the engine smacks him with the sound of a watermelon falling off the back of a truck, and he’s gone.

Everything is screaming. The train punishes itself to a halt. Down there, Wogga McBride’s little brother stands with his mouth open and train noise coming out. There’s men jumping out and down, there’s screaming, alright. Screaming, screaming.

Quick hoists his bag and goes home and gets into bed and pulls the sheet over his head and stuffs his ears with notepaper.

Fish Waiting