Cloudstreet (24 page)

Sometimes Dolly Pickles looked at Ted and saw Sam, Sam from a long time ago, in another place. Ted was blonde and small with loutish good looks that girls fixed on in the street. Oh, she saw them looking, saw his arrogant nonchalance and the way it got them all biting their lips. And sometimes she felt a sting, just in watching, a spike in her throat, jealousy. Those firm, fresh-titted girls down there, hanging off the verandah cracking gum and looking sideways at him, Ted Pickles, who couldn’t give a stuff.

Yes, he was the young Sam alright, but harder, meaner. Maybe that’s what she’d always wanted from Sam—a little less understanding, a bit more steel, something in him with a fearful edge. Oh, that Ted. He was killin em.

Battalions

Oriel Lamb, being the sort of woman who resolved to
do
things, decided to make a recovery. She was off her food and nothing gave her the disgruntled satisfaction it once did, so in the weeks after Quick shot through, knowing that not even she could conquer grief by force of will, she decided on a lesser conquest. She would wipe out local competition.

No one had taken much notice of the big shop on the main road since it opened its doors after last Christmas. Certainly none of the Lambs. Business hadn’t dropped off at all. None of the neighbours mentioned the newcomer. But walking past one day, on one of her expeditions to buy cheap eggs in the neighbourhood, Oriel walked by the big, bright shop and saw it properly for the first time. She stood back and regarded the gaudy sign.

Ex-AIF indeed, she hissed aloud. A tall woman, unknown to her, passed with raised eyebrows and Oriel decided to keep her thoughts more to herself.

It’s a disgrace, she thought, to grovel to the customer like that, to wave your service to the King like it’s a flag. A good man’s above that kind of rubbish. Lester could paint:

He could wheedle just the same, but I’d be ashamed I would. You wouldn’t get me over the threshold. Why, Mr Pickles could have on his letter box:

to conjure sympathy. He’s not much of a man, Mr Pickles, but he’s enough of a man not to stoop to that. Why, she could have a sign herself:

Oriel swung her basket on the other side. She looked at G. M. Clay’s establishment, its nice window of tins and bottles, the clean glass, the cream and green painted bins of flour and sugar, and she knew that G. M. Clay had to be wiped out. Good Lord, she’d lost a brother in Palestine, and every Saturday night she served tea and swapped smiles with men who’d lost limbs and mates in New Guinea, been robbed of their health in Changi, lost their wives to Americans right here in Perth, WA and she wasn’t going to tolerate the presumption of a G. M. Ex-AIF-Clay.

Oriel recrossed the street and stepped into the shop. The bell tinkled sweetly on the door and the interior smelt orderly and hygenic. Shelves lined the walls. A brass set of scales stood on the counter, and beside it, a modern, enamelled Avery.

Oh, gday madam, a tidy looking man in a white apron said, coming from another room. What can I get you?

A dozen eggs, please.

Righto.

She counted out her pence and noted that they weren’t bad looking eggs.

Anything else?

No. Thank you, no. Where did you serve, Mr Clay?

Beg pardon?

In the Australian Imperial Forces. Where did you fight?

Oh, he laughed. You must be Mrs Lamb.

That’s right.

I hear you’re a friend of the Anzacs.

I believe in my country, she said, a new creed on her lips.

I was in the second AIF. Bougainville. New Guinea.

Infantry?

Signalman and runner, Mrs Lamb.

Oriel felt her resolve weakening. He was no pretender. Unless he was lying. The Kokoda trail, no soft spot. He was a well kept man and he had a well kept shop. He’d served his country.

What unit did your husband serve in?

Cavalry. The 10th Light Horse. At Gallipoli. Oriel said it with a hint of breathless pride, like a priest uttering an unassailable truth.

No, no, I mean this last war. I heard he enlisted before the end. Brave man, with all his kids and family responsibilities. What battalion?

There was a smile on his well-shaved face as he said this and Oriel Lamb felt the hard tissue of hatred under her skin.

He joined as a bandsman, Mr Clay, good day.

Oriel swung on her toes and headed for the door.

Thought it might have been the tentmakers platoon, she heard him whisper to someone else out of sight. The Padre’s Brave Twelve.

A woman’s laugh it was. From the back room. The bell jangled on the door. Outside Oriel shuddered with rage. She wanted to throw Clay’s eggs into the bin on the pavement, but nothing, not even war itself could induce her to waste good food.

A The Good Are Fierce

That woman had Lester waking, raking, caking, and baking at all hours, and he knew she meant business. He couldn’t really see the harm in advertising that you were an old soldier. He couldn’t help suspecting that he would himself if he didn’t have the shadows of history at his back. Only a man who was a liar or a bloke who’d acquitted himself well in the field would dare though. And Lester knew he was neither.

Out in the kitchen he rolled dough on the marble slab and heard the old girl bellowing commands. The girls were pulling their end, but he knew they wouldn’t stay with it long. His wife was a good woman, and he understood that. But he remembered what the minister at Margaret River used to say—the good are fierce. She’d outlast them all—she’d make damn sure of it. That’d be the way she’d want it. Half the bleedin day out finding the biggest eggs this side of the river, figuring out prices and margins, hammering the reps that sold to them, working deals, inventing pies for him to make, flavours for icecream, strategies for the coming winter campaign. She planned to stretch it right through spring and finish Clay off in the summer with Lester Lamb Icecream. And he knew she’d win. That was the best part, in his mind, that they’d clean Clay up with Lester’s own recipe.

It was hard, relentless work, though, and he always knew he’d rather be out fishing with Quick or spinning the knife at a lazy dinner table. His act was getting stale at the Anzac Club, and sometimes he thought maybe the fun had gone out of him. Fish was miserable and would hardly come out of his room some days.

There were nights when he went exhausted into his room to sit on his bed alone just to think about Quick. He knew Oriel’d be still shuffling in the shop up front or the light would be burning in the tent outside as she went over the accounts. Often, the only thing he could think of was that old Bible story of the prodigal son. Now he knew what it felt like to be abandoned and left hurt and confused. He wondered what it was he’d done to turn Quick away. He secretly hoped for an end to it like the return of the son in the story and it made him wonder if he wasn’t still half believing. Those Bible stories and words weren’t the kind you forgot. It was like they’d happened to you all along, that they were your own memories. You didn’t always know what they meant, but you did know how they felt. He still remembered a night back in the last century when his own father had carried him on his shoulders across a flooded creek. He could see the swirling darkness, hear the crashing of trees, and the fearful whinny of a horse. Rain fell. It beat his back. He felt his father’s whiskers against the bare flesh of his legs. He couldn’t remember where they went or who they were with or what happened before or after—only those seconds. The truthfulness of it tightened his bowel. Whatever it meant it was true, and he had the same pure, true feeling in his fantasy of Quick coming home and Lester himself killing a fatted calf and asking no questions. It’s not as if we have any friends, he thought. The kids are all we’ve got; they’re what we are.

A Mug’s Game

Dolly couldn’t stand the noise of the house. Day and bloody night it went, all through winter as though they were working shifts across there to wipe out Gerry Clay. No one walked down the big corridor, they always bustled. Things were shunted to and fro, and that Godawful woman’d be shouting and hissing to get things moving. Now it was spring and her hayfever was terrible. Her nose itched and her eyes swelled. At times she could do no more than spend the morning in the bath, just lying back in the tepid water until the vibrations in the walls next door drove her from the house.