Cloudstreet (25 page)

Dolly was shaky and fragile with headaches, most mornings. She felt older than she was, and she could see it in the mirror the way the smoke and the grog were curing her, making the flesh on her face puffy and shredded with lines. Her teeth were yellow. Her bottom lip had begun to hang. It’d looked so good a few years ago when she could let it slip to a murderous pout that was rarely wasted. And her voice, she was going croaky. She didn’t sound like Lauren Bacall anymore. She sounded like an old mother, a copper boiler, a spudpeeler with a fag on her tongue. It wasn’t so bad in a crowd with a couple of beers under your girdle but, nowadays, with Sam losing and losing and losing on the horses, there wasn’t a lot of money to be drinking on. Dolly had to keep up the wit, the sass, the fun; she was singing for her supper, alright. She’d be happy, crack jokes, catch blokes looking her way. When they came her way she’d have a snappy line for them, she’d knock their hats sideways and shriek when their palms stung her backside on the way past. The blokes behind the bar always had a good word for her—What’ll it be, Doll?—though the barmaids narrowed their eyes a little against her in caution.

Hell, she didn’t care what anybody thought. Well, not everyone. She liked to be liked, and didn’t anyone? No one wants to be forgotten, have eyes glide past you without even seeing you there. No, she didn’t care … but bugger it … well she didn’t know. It was all too complicated. Everything was. Unless you were full as a goog. Then it was simple, then all of it was straight in a girl’s mind.

Now and then she’d find herself out the back lane against the fence with some sweetmouthed bloke whose name she could almost remember, a cove who wouldn’t mind if she kept talking while he ran his hands about. She’d press his head to her and feel how young she was, how hungry they were for her.

By spring it was the same bloke she’d weave out leaning against, come closing time. He was dark haired and hard jawed and handsome. He was a little pigeontoed, but there was muscle on him and she liked the way his hat brim snapped down over his nose. And there was something else exciting about him—he was a Catholic and dead scared of going to Hell.

Yer a bottler, Doll, he said the first night, pressing her up against the cool bricks. Bet yer old man’s a millionaire, the way you look.

Him? He hasn’t got a pot to piss in. Give’s a kiss, love.

He give you a good knock, now and then?

She felt his fingers up the back of her legs. If he did I wouldn’t be here. You’ve got a foul mouth, sport.

She felt her own mouth covered by his and his breath was hot at the back of her throat. He was after her, this one, and all the weights of boredom, the trying, the pushing out smiles were gone, and she had a happy, dark world to live in. She was always a little more sozzled than him, or maybe it was a lot more, she couldn’t tell and why should she care, and he always seemed a good sort when he came in late to the Railway Hotel. By the end of spring he started getting later, until he was hardly leaving himself time for a round before they went out the back, or down the embankment to the whispering grass. She saw him nearly every night of the week, and though she didn’t much think about him during the day, if she got stuck in the same room as Rose, that filthy-pretty skeleton, she’d bring him to mind to fight the sight of her off.

Rose looked frightening now, like a ghost, with those big eyes. Her wrists looked like twigs and she did nothing but stare. Dolly knew what it meant, that stare. You’re old and clapped out, it said, and you’re getting fat and your teeth are bad and you don’t do a bloody thing, and here I am, young and clean and sweet and I’m doing your jobs, old girl, and I’ll die from it and you’ll suffer. Dolly tried not to think about how she hated Rose these days. It was a wonder that it could happen, that a mother could turn like that from loving to hating. But when you find yourself getting more and more looks like that, those bland stares that set off cruel, guilty things in you, when you know all of a sudden that someone of your own flesh and blood can’t find a spark of worth to your name—then you harden up. They have to be blotted out. Rose was the enemy. It wasn’t the sort of thing you let yourself think about, but you knew.

Because she didn’t go anywhere except the pub, these days, it took Dolly a long time to know that Gerry was G. M. Clay—Ex AIF whose shop was only three blocks away. Sam and her had an account with the Lambs for their groceries against rent, so there was never any need for her to even step inside the shop that opened in the winter. Once she did know, though, she kept well away. G. M. Clay had a wife—she knew it from overhearing Oriel Lamb. If Dolly went anywhere at all in the day, she caught the train into the city where people were all strangers and a woman could go about without running into smiling neighbours.

By the beginning of summer, Gerry was looking crook.

Those bastards are king hittin me, he said, down by the rails. They couldn’t even drink at the Railway anymore, now that blokes were yacking about them, and it was hard to get a shout out of anyone at all.

And yer drinkin the till dry, Doll. This is a mug’s game.

That bitch. Oriel-bloody-Lamb.

She’s a fighter, orright.

Now and then a train came punching past to shower them with smuts and the smell of the ongoing and outgoing. Dolly felt the lack of grog, it was a heaviness on her. Gerry seemed weaker now, panicky, done in.

You know someone’s gunna spring us, dontcha.

Bloody hell, what’re you sayin, then?

I’m sayin I gotta be realistic. You too, Doll. We’re gunna get burnt sooner or later.

Oh, you can always toddle off to confession, she said, squeezing his leg.

Don’t chiack around about it. I’m serious.

She’s beaten you, mate.

Don’t even think she suspects.

No, not yours. That Lamb sheila. She’s got you busted and bleedin.

Jesus, Doll, she can’t lose. She’s got an army behind her. It’d be easier for me to pull up pegs and try somewhere else. Never thought I’d be shunted out by a woman running a place from the front room. And she lives in a friggin tent.

You sound frightened of her, said Dolly, lying back furious in the drying grass.

Aren’t
you
? You could toss her out of that place, you know. Aren’t you the landlords?

They’re what we live off. Their rent is what pays our way. We can’t.

Well, I’m flat out like a lizard drinkin and I can’t beat her. It’s got me buggered, Doll.

Dolly saw the stars spangled across the sky. The moon hung sallow in their midst. Something was shifting, she knew it. Any moment now, one of them’d go ahead and say what it took.

Across the Rails

Right that moment, on the other side of the rails, in a sea of wild oats, Ted Pickles tears a girl’s brassiere aside and lays his hands on her breasts. He’s thinking she looks like Martha Vickers in that flick
Alimony
, and she’s looking at him with narrowed eyes, a fag on her lip and her sweater up under her chin.

You’re a bastard, she says.

You’ve got nice tits, he says back.

A train comes squealing into the station and he kisses her neck, feels her go soft under him. Her nails dig into his arms and the grass flattens over them both in the train’s rush of wind.

All Money Down

In October the basic wage went up a quid, but the union wasn’t satisfied, it being way below the claim, though Sam couldn’t get angry—a pound was a pound. He knew that bastard Menzies would keep the screws on them as long as he lasted, and he looked like lasting forever. Anyway, the big knobs of the union didn’t seem much different from the enemy these days. You’d never pick em for workers, not in a month of Sundays, and a man’d be a fool to trust em an inch. The hell with em. It was spring and he’d be taking home a quid he didn’t have last week. And he needed the money. These days at the races, everything he backed came home hanging its arse like its back legs’d been sawn off. He hadn’t taken a win or a place since Christmas, though he figured it was all money down against the pot coming his way.

Sam didn’t mind the Mint work so much. It cheered him up to be around the money and he wouldn’t pretend it was otherwise. The whole place filled with the stink of melting and burning, the thump of the presses and the whang of steel gates. He oiled machines and wiped them down with cotton waste. He stood on the belt line spotting for duds and took the trollies back and forth. He had no enemies there, and though they were a foulmouthed bunch of bastards, he thought they were decent sorts. Everyone had little perks but no one’d tolerate serious diddling. Any dinkum thief found himself ushered into the shadowy part of the courtyard where a few words of advice would be delivered.

It was clear enough to Sam that the other blokes were uneasy about his stumpy hand. It wasn’t just their good nature that kept them off his back, they were frightened of having his luck rub off on them.

Sam took to sucking big round peppermints at work, and he always had one stuffed in his cheek when it came to going out through the gates each afternoon. The security bloke frisked them all and the gates opened for them, two by two. There weren’t many coins bigger than a peppermint and it was easy to take something out now and then for the kids, though they were getting old for it now. One time he came out with a Snowy River Scheme Commencement Medallion. It was a hell of a peppermint to be sucking, but he turned it appreciatively in his cheek as the security man checked his pockets.

Now the days were getting longer and the light was lasting, he’d walk up Hay Street in the evenings and hear the clock on the town hall toll the hour. He liked the walk in the warm five o’clock breeze better than the closepressed tram to the station. People would be hurrying along the pavements, calling, whistling, dropping things, skylarking. Pretty women would be spilling out of Bairds and Foys and Alberts. In Forrest Place, in the rank shade of the GPO, old diggers sat bathing in the breeze and swapping news pages. European fruit sellers, Baits and Italians, would be haranguing from the footpath with their sad faces weary as unmade beds, and along Wellington Street trolley buses would haul full loads of arms and legs up the hill. The sky would be fading blue. The station was sootrimmed and roaring with crowds. When a train came Sam swung up and stood in the doorway with his gladstone bag and hat in hand and he waited the three stops knowing he was young enough to be walking it, lazy enough, though, to know better.