Cloudstreet (58 page)

Rose left. Lester drove her away. The house fell back against the night sky like a dying planet.

Go see her, love, said Lester.

Why?

I dunno. I can’t stand the hate. It’ll kill you. You’re one of us now and I couldn’t bear to lose you. Quick’s hurtin. We all are. Go on with your life, love. It’s all there is.

Mothers

In the morning, Rose went again but Dolly was asleep. She stayed in the house with Elaine and Oriel, narrowing her eyes at their noise and bustle, until Dolly woke.

She went in strangely robbed of her anger and unprepared. She felt jittery and sad and feeble in all the ways she’d planned against since her first ever period.

Dolly was sitting up in bed with pillows about her like sandbags around a machine-gun nest.

Hello, Rose murmured.

Hello, said Dolly. A wan grin had fixed itself on her face halfway between coming and going.

Better?

Feel like shit, but I reckon that’s better.

Rose stood by the window where she could see the peeling fence and the wall of weeds.

Look like you better sit down.

I’m alright.

You’ll fall over. Siddown.

Rose pulled the chair over to the bedside.

Dolly raised her eyebrows. When you gettin pregnant again?

I’m not thinking about it, Rose said, flushing. Besides I haven’t had a period for months.

You need to see a doctor.

That’s a laugh.

Rose looked at her skirt, the way her knees made sharp peaks beneath it. God, even the angles her body made were mean looking now.

Anyway, why do you ask? she murmured, trying to be calm.

I was plannin on bein a grandmother. This mornin. That’s when I decided. Be good for me, you know. Jesus, I’d spoil em rotten, I would, givin em lollies and fizzy drinks. Let em wreck the bloody place. Reckon I’d be the worst bloody granma a kid could have—

Why not, Rose heard herself leap in, you were already the worst mother.

Dolly didn’t even stop.

They’d love me. I’d let em swear their heads off, give em noisy toys, take em to the pictures an stuff em with fairy floss. I wouldn’t even make em wear clothes, I wouldn’t make em do anything as long … as long as they came to see me.

Rose saw the old woman’s mouth sloping away toward weeping, and she realized that she had no teeth. She’d never noticed before. Rose had no idea what her mother would say next, no idea of what she might let out herself.

Outside it was a summer’s day. That dry, wondrous heat of the west. Out there it would feel like the meeting of desert and sea, the heat behind, the dark coolness ahead. Rose thought about it. Yes, she could be down by the river now, with a baby, a brown sunny baby beside her on the sand. Water would lap like cat’s milk and the air be heady with the scent of peppermint trees. There would be nothing to do but feel important and proud, to have the form against your body, to take a hand in your mouth and bite down those long, soft baby fingernails like some protective she animal, snuffle, smell, bask.

You’re a grandmother already, aren’t you? Rose said, finding her knees before her again. What about Ted’s kids?

They’re a thousand miles away. I don’t know the girl. Don’t know anything about em.

Well, one day, maybe.

Oh, yeah, they’re gonna all get on the train an come an see Granma Dolly.

They’ve got money. Ted was a good jockey, they say. He rode winners.

Dolly laughed. Imagine bein around a man who rode winners.

They were quiet again a few long, awkward moments.

You reckon you’d have missed him more, if he was a sister?

What kind of question is that, Mum? I never had a sister.

Yeah, you wanted one, though, eh?

Rose looked at her mother whose white, puffy face was impossible to read just now. I suppose. I haven’t thought about it much. I don’t know if I ever really thought about it, but I guess it’s true enough. I used to watch those Lamb girls and … think of the things they could tell each other. Used to watch that Hat, the eldest one, playing marbles with the boys, and I decided that the only way she could do it was because she had other sisters and it didn’t matter somehow. She didn’t have to play the part of the girl.

You turned out sort of prissy, didn’t you.

I had to make myself something!

Don’t worry about sisters, then. They always look better from a distance. I had seven. Sisters! Jesus, sisters. You’re better off with brothers.

I just lost one, remember?

Well, he was lost to us a good while back.

God, you sound like a book.

I reckon you’d know. You turned out the bookworm. What did you ever get out of em, anyway?

Rose wrung her gloves and threw them onto the bed. Some idea of how other people lived their lives, Mum. A look at real people.

Ho, real people.

Like mothers. What mothers are supposed to be like.

Mothers! Sisters, mothers! You found out what a mother’s like. You won’t forget me in a hurry. Don’t go moanin about sisters.

The heat went out of them quickly, surprising Rose, who had a thought that had never once come to her as a child.

What was your mother like, then? she all but whispered.

Dolly pulled the sheet up her body and slid down the pillows. Rose could have sworn the bed was shaking.

I had seven sisters. Jesus, I loved my father. My mother was always far away when I was around. There always did seem to be too many girls.

But what was she like? Your mother.

You should never trust a woman.

I thought it was men you hated.

Me? No, men are lovely. Gawd, I was mad about men all me life.

Yes, said Rose.

It’s women I hate.

Daughters.

No, daughters are different, Dolly said with a grave, measured tone. It’s sisters I hate most. You should be grateful you never had any.

I don’t get it, Mum.

My mother was my grandmother. My father was my grandfather.

What?

The second oldest sister, the one who made me feel like rubbish all my life, that one was my mother. There we were. There we were.

Rose felt things falling within her, a terrible shifting of weights.

My God. My God. Mum!

The old woman lay flat on the bed, bawling silently, her mouth wrought into the ugliest hole. She’d seen that ugliness before, the huge wordless grief of babies, in Quick’s brother. There were no tears in the old girl’s eyes; it was as though she’d been dried out forever in there. Rose Lamb got up out of her chair, put a knee up on the bed, hoisted herself, and felt the sobs beating up at her from the body beneath. The sound her mother made taking breath was like a window being torn from its hinges.

Oh, Mum. You never told me. You never ever said. Don’t cry, Mum. Please.

Outside, it was a summer’s day. The house twisted its joists, hugging inwards, sucking in air, and the two women wept together on the sagging bed.

Tonic

By the end of 1962 it looked as though the world might go on. The news in the papers got better, Quick got something of a pay rise, and Rose got a period. For so long there’d been things to fear. That someone might push a button, that Dolly would kill herself, that there would be no money at the end of the month, that their new house would never be finished, that Rose’s body might beat her in the end. Before things brightened up a little, even Lester gave up saying: We had it harder in our day.

Rose was glad of those talks with her mother. She found soft parts still left in herself, soft parts in Dolly as well, and in a way she figured it saved her from herself. It was love really, finding some love left. It was like tonic.

Rose still went to see her mother every day or two and usually came back furious. The old girl sat out on her backstep feeding chunks of topside beef to magpies. She was often sober, always abusive, and after a time her cursing became almost soothing in its steadiness. Dolly bitched and whined about everything until Rose began to realize that half the time the old girl was bunging it on—she was play acting just to amuse herself. Sure, there was still heat in the old battleaxe, but not much of an edge. When Rose went round, Dolly made her a cup of tea. They’d feed the birds, the old woman would be abominable, feign deafness and raise a hedge of irritability between them, and Rose would go home.

Late in spring, Rose began to swim in the river at Peppermint Grove. She’d start out from the boatshed and swim right around the Mosman Spit. When no one was about she even tried a few bombies and tin soldiers off the jetty. She felt all the childish impulses of the Geraldton days, and she went home ravenous and kept her food down. With summer coming on, she woke in the mornings thinking of all the things she could do instead of listing the things she refused to do or was incapable of. Sometimes she felt all the blood rising in her skin, feeding her, overriding her will. She was alive despite herself. She got out the old books, spent entire mornings at the river in their worlds. In the evenings she planted little lovenotes to Quick around the flat: in his socks, pinned to his undies, between dusty packets of condoms. Poor Quick. How he’d waited for her all these months. It was that pigheaded Lamb patience, and you had to love him for it. She felt the shadow in her, this dark eating thing inside, like an anger, and sensed that it’d always be with her. But Quick would hold her up beyond reason, even when it went into stupidmindedness. It wasn’t just the fact that she knew he could do it for her that made her love him. It was her certainty that he would.

As the weather warmed toward summer, Rose and Quick spent their spare time floating dreamily on the river in the Lamb boat. They talked like teenagers, catching up, making up time, finding words for how they felt. Marriage had been no dream. They’d worked their guts out, lived through sickness and worry and still their neat little suburban house wasn’t ready for them. Rose thought about returning to work somewhere, but already she was staring at babies in the street again. Quick was promoted to riding the new BSA station motorcycle, an evil beast of a thing with enough compression to put you over the bars during a kickstart.

They came home from the river one day to find Lester Lamb waiting for them on the bonnet of an ancient Rugby, dressed in his threadbare suit and looking gorgeously pleased with himself. He showed them the car. It was a dusty, black old banger with tyres smoother than a baby’s bum and rust beneath the paint like a spreading cold sore. He showed them every angle, every virtue, including the side-blinds he’d made himself from old X-rays which gave a curious effect of mortality to an afternoon drive: you saw the world through compound fractures, you saw the river in an old soldier’s lungs, sky through the skulls of shellshocked corporals.