Cloudstreet (21 page)

The pig is down the back in a pen that’s just been tossed up for him by Sam and Lester, and Fish is standing there to look, to look. It’s late in the afternoon and all the birds are crashing back into the trees and the great summer sky is disrobing in swirls. The pig is pink and hairy with smart little eyes and a nose like a wet light plug.

He’s all yours, Sam says.

Preciate it, Lester says.

Better butcher im quick, I reckon. The council wouldn’t like it.

They wouldn’t like Cloudstreet beginnin to finish, says Lester.

Fish looks. The pig turns and looks back. The two men wander back up to the house and leave them alone. Fish scratches inside his shorts. The bristly animal flexes a shoulder. Shadows from the lilac tree, the lemon, the almond, fall across him like camouflage. It’s quiet.

Give us a squirt with the hose, wouldja? the pig says.

Fish looks at the pig and giggles. Orright.

He gets the hose, fumbles with the tap, and with his finger over the nozzle, he sprays the pig up and down until the ground in the pen turns miry and the pig is streaked with mud. From up the house Lester bellows.

Turn that water off, Fish! There’s a drought on!

Thanks anyway, cobber, says the pig.

Fish regards the pig a good while, forgetful of the hose water that drills into the dirt, bubbling up sand and sticks. The runoff makes a long spewy black rivulet that proceeds down the yard into the strawberries and the early corn.

Fish! Oy, Fish!

The pig winks and rolls in the bog. He kicks his legs up and his trotters clack together. The sun is low over the roofs of the neighbourhood. There is the smell of oncoming night, of pollen setting, the sound of kids fighting bathtime. Lester comes down, waving his hands.

Don’t drown the pig, Fish. We’re savin him for Christmas. We’re gunna eat him.

No!

I’ll drink to that, says the pig.

Lester stands there. He looks at Fish. He looks at the porker. He peeps over the fence. The pig. The flamin pig. The pig has just spoken. It’s no language that he can understand, but there’s no doubt. He feels a little crook, like maybe he should go over to that tree and puke.

I like him, Lestah.

He talks?

Yep.

Oh, my gawd.

Lester looks at his retarded son again and once more at the pig.

The pig talks.

I likes him.

Yeah, I bet.

The pig snuffles, lets off a few syllables:
aka sembon itwa
. It’s tongues, that’s what it is. A blasted Pentecostal pig.

And you understand him?

Yep. I likes him.

Always the miracles you don’t need. It’s not a simple world, Fish. It’s not.

The pig grunts, as though this fact is self evident. He heaves onto his side and regards Lester and Fish with detachment. He sighs and the sky squeezes out its last light. Mosquitoes are out already. Lester stands there in the twilight. Fish comes close and puts a finger through Lester’s belt loop. The pig clears its throat and begins to hum under its breath.

I won’t have the proceeds, the dividends of gambling in my yard or on my table, said Oriel, and she got down her notebook to quote at him.

If the rich gamble, they do it with money filched from the wage earner. If the poor, they play with their children’s bread. Where, indeed, is there a class that may gamble and rob none?

Mary Gilmore, she said.

Who?

Never mind.

We have to keep the pig, said Lester.

Why, pray tell?

It was a present. Sam’s grateful to you. Besides, Fish has taken a shine to it.

He shouldn’t have been put in the situation where he’d—

Oh, just be reasonable! Lester yelled, scaring himself with his boldness. The boy thinks the pig’s his friend.

Reasonable! You call that reasonable?

Oriel. Love.

Don’t you Oriel Love me.

There’s another thing.

There’ll always be another thing.

The pig talks.

Oriel put down her pen and closed the account book. She looked at him with an expression that signified that she’d reached the last knot on her rope.

It talks some foreign lingo.

Get the torch. Show me this pig.

The pig opened an eye at them when they came tromping and flashing lights down his way. He snouted up some dirt and sighed.

Gday, said Lester to the pig.

The pig sniffed.

Lester, if this is an old vaudeville joke your life won’t be worth seeing to its natural end.

It’s no joke, is it, me old pork mate?

But the pig said nothing; he just lay there with a bored and irritable look on his face and eyes like Audie Murphy.

It talks in tongues, Oriel.

You’ve been drinking. Let’s go inside before we strike up a conversation with the chooks. The pig goes.

But in her bed that night Oriel lay awake thinking of the pig her father had butchered to heal her burns as a sign of his love and it troubled her sorely.

The Horse

The animal world didn’t let up. A racehorse came to Cloud-street on a sure tip from Sam Pickles. It was a big bay gelding with feet like post rammers and a history of depression and emotional disturbance. A few days before Christmas Lester bought himself a hawker’s cart and harness to go into the delivery side of the business. He saw himself clopping through the suburbs ringing his bell, swinging his scales, rattling his blackboards, the cart laden with fruit and vegetables and his songs and jokes drawing women and children into the streets. It wasn’t the commerce of it that got his pea rattling (though he sold the idea that way to Oriel), it was the performance side of things; the singing and shouting, the jokes, stories, the eyes of the crowd on him.

He planned to hobble the horse on the grassy embankment at the side of the house, perhaps with a lean-to against the fence. Oriel gave him money and rolled her eyes, preoccupied with stranger things than him, and when he bought the horse he truly believed he’d backed a bargain.

But Lester, old lighthorseman that he was, should never have assumed that a depressed horse was a slow horse. The delivery business didn’t live a full day.

He harnessed the horse, loaded the cart with the best of Cloudstreet’s fare, and had only dropped his bum on the driver’s seat and taken up the reins when the horse took to the idea of liberal and rapid food distribution and took off for the streets of Subiaco with its head up and its tail down. Lester braced out the long, slithering ride down the embankment, the spinepowdering jolts of the wheels clearing the rails, and when he hit the street on the Subi side his hat was low on his brow and he looked indeed like a Randolph Scott. But at the first turn, when the cart got up on two wheels behind the slavering lunatic of a horse and the harness thwacked and twanged like a man’s braces he looked like any ordinary projectile waiting for gravity to have the last word. He landed in the dickey seat of a Packard parked outside the Masonic Hall. The horse went on without him and he followed its trail the rest of the day. Kids sat on fences eating apples, the occasional letterbox gripped a carrot in its teeth, and there were cauliflower sludge marks here and there, a Hansel and Gretel trail of lettuce leaves, beetroot and orange rind so thick that the city’s birds and half its scavenging children couldn’t obscure it. In the afternoon he found the horse grazing on roses in a yard near Lake Monger. It looked at him placidly with sated, longlashed eyes. He took it to the knackers and got two quid for horse, cart, and ten pounds of pureed tomatoes. When he got home, he found Oriel out the back, pegging a tent beneath the mulberry tree. The pig looked on, mute. A headless turkey hung from a hook on the fence. Water boiled on the kitchen stove.

Quick came up and stood beside him: I think the pig’s got away with it. How’s the horse?

The horse wasn’t so lucky.

Mum’s not happy.

They watched her hammering in pegs and tightening ropes on the tent. A bed stood endup against the trellis of the grapevine.

Can’t see why, Lester said. She likes turkey.

Quick looked up at his old man in wonder. Behind him three heads poked from the second floor window. Pickles heads.

Gday, Quick said.

Gday, Rose Pickles said.

The pig’s for
next
Christmas, Quick said.

The Pickles kids cracked up laughing.

Oriel Lamb straightened up, axe in hand, and everything went quiet. There was sweat on her upper lip. Somewhere inside, Fish Lamb was singing. He sounded like a colicky baby at midnight.

Fark! said the cockatoo in its cage.

Quick Lamb looked at his toes and pressed them tight together. It was no time to laugh.

The Tent Lady

On New Year’s Day, 1949, people gathered to watch Oriel Lamb move her things out to the white tent beneath the mulberry tree at Cloudstreet. They crowded into the second floor rooms overlooking the yard, and found cracks in the scaly picket fence; they climbed trees in yards all around and perved through pointed gum leaves at the little woman carrying bedclothes and fruitboxes out through the bewildered half circle of her family. No one missed the sight of Quick Lamb helping his mother out with the jarrah bed and the umps and bumps they made getting it in. There wasn’t a noise to be heard otherwise except for Fish Lamb slapping away at the piano in the centre of the house; everyone looked on in wonder, missing nothing. She had a desk, Tilley lamp, chamberpot, books, mysterious boxes. People gathered at the fences. When she had it all in shape, Oriel Lamb tied off the door flap and went back into the house to organize her family’s dinner, and the crowd went away murmuring that surely this was a day to remember.

She’s ad enough kids, said the women of the street.

She’s caught him out, said the blokes.

But the real reason remained a mystery, even to Oriel Lamb. It wasn’t actually one thing that’d moved her. The pig, the sound of middle C ringing in her ears, the sudden claustrophobia of the house, the realization that Fish didn’t even know her, and the feeling she had that the house was saying to her: wait, wait. She didn’t know, but, whatever else she was, Oriel wasn’t the sort to argue with a living breathing house.