Cloudstreet (59 page)

It’s yours, he said, you need a car.

We need a car, said Quick.

But this is more than a car, said Rose, it’s an experience.

By Christmas, Quick had that old scrumwagon Rugby up and running, Rose was pregnant again, and the house out in the suburbs was almost finished. Quick moonlighted in the day, driving trucks and hammering up cheap furniture in a warehouse while Rose took in ironing between river swims. Nights off they went dancing and made galahs of themselves at the Embassy and later drove out to Cottesloe Beach to make love under an upturned skiff.

We’re getting somewhere, Rose thought. Our own house, a baby, money in the bank. She had dreams of furniture, neat rugs, lino tiles, a TV, the smell of Pine-O-Clean. A clean, orderly, separate place with fences and heavy curtains. Their own world.

By Christmas it looked a dead cert.

He Does

Red Lamb was a nurse and she liked to shock poor old Elaine.

Geez, I hate men’s—

Red! Elaine winced, held up a hand.

Aw, Elaine, it’s better to be disgusted than ignorant. Now did you know that—

Red, I don’t need to know anything.

Crikey, what’s this?

Into the kitchen came Lon all grazed and blackeyed and sweating, and by a stroke of bad timing he was followed in by his mother who caught one look at his face and shoved him cheeksfirst into the big freezerbox of the old Frigidaire.

Ice’ll help, she said. What bully did this to you?

A man, blubbered Lon, a fullgrowed man. His voice sounded a longway off coming from the freezerbox.

What did he do? Now tell me, I’m yer mother.

Hit me. He hit me.

In public?

Only people.

Did you deserve some punishment? Oriel said, suddenly pensive. Red opened a bottle of mecurochrome the size of a stout keg and got together some swabs.

Lon?

There’s a girl pregnant, said Lon from on ice.

No one could tell if Oriel fainted a moment or what, but she leant on that fridge door something shocking. You could hear Lon Lamb screaming three stops down the line.

Lucky it’s only his head in there, Red said to the old man who’d come running; if it was me doin the business he’d be losin his play bits.

Lon was married inside a fortnight, and when the minister said: Do you Logan Fitzwilliam Bruce Lamb take this Pansy Mullet to be your lawfully wedded wife? Oriel murmured darkly: He does.

They took a room at Cloudstreet, Lon and Pansy, and filled it with rage and weeping.

Doomiest

Sam rolls awake in the night with his stump ringing with pain. It goes right through him, into his chest, down his side. Godalmighty, a heart attack, he thinks. But it goes on and on, emanating from pieces of him he no longer owns. No, he thinks, it’s bloody doom. Big, big doomy doomier, doomiest. It hurt so much that tears roll back into his ears and the house seems to laugh at him. He wants to go to sleep and not wake up in the morning.

Flames

In her dream Oriel saw the bush and the city burning. People ran from their squawking homes to the riverbank with the flames gaining behind them, but they stopped, afraid, at the water and let the fire consume them on the grassy slope above the river.

The New House

Quick looks the business in his black helmet and leggings as he hammers the BSA out north to the new subdivisions. His Dougie MacArthur sunglasses flap against his cheeks. He leans, throttles into the turns, flies like an angel.

The new house stands in a street of similar new houses and Quick props the bike and goes in for a look. It’s all there on its patch of rubbkstrewn dirt. If he’s honest, he’d like some weatherboard old joint to remind him of farm days, happy childhood days, or even of Cloudstreet, but he knows Rose wants it fresh, new, clean, apart. Yeah, soon there’d be kids in the street, and the sound of lawnmowers.

And then in the late afternoon gloom someone steps out from behind a wall and comes towards him. Quick knows him. Oh, he knows him. It’s the blackfella wearing nothing but a beach towel and a pair of rubber thongs.

Go home, says the black man. This isn’t your home. Go home to your home, mate.

Quick fronts him, emboldened by his uniform. This is a black man he’s talking to.

But the man lays five fingers spread on Quick’s chest. Go home. Quick turns. Already he’s alone.

Christmas