Cloudstreet

by Tim Winton

  Sam was aloft. His body vibrated. Two men in flying suits played cards on his chest. His hand was in a block of ice. The airmen were playing gin rummy.

  Orright, mate? We’ll land in a few minutes, doan worry.

  I’m not worried, he shouted back over the sound of the engines. So this was what a Catalina looked like on the inside.

  He thought he’d tell them a cautionary thing or two on the subject of luck, but one of them slapped down a card so hard that Sam felt the reverberations right down his arm and he fainted fair away.

  From up here, with hindsight, you can see into every room in the town of Geraldton, through roof and fence and curtain, down alley and beach, along bars and breakwaters, and if you look hard enough you’ll see a schoolgirl hurrying home early to the back of the old pub to fetch her mother to the hospital. She clangs up the fire escape, pigeontoed but athletic. The rear of the pub looks like the back of a movie set but from the front, the place looks the real business.

  Rose Pickles hammers along the corridor past numbered rooms till she reaches 36. It’s locked. She calls out to her mother but there is no reply, though she detects an intake of breath from behind the door.

  Now that it’s all in the past, anyone can see the woman astride the bed with her dress up. The sweat on her skin. The Catalina pilot with his belt undone and his hat on the table. You can smell the beer on their breaths, you get so close. So close, you hear the blood in their fattened hearts. And out in the corridor you witness the terrible boiling dark in the schoolgirl’s head, the confusion, the feeling, the colour she can’t put a name to.

  Her two brothers will be here soon. She goes out and waits on the fire escape. Afternoon sun cuts it way down from the reservoir of blue. Rose’s plaits tug the back of her head. She feels tough all of a sudden, and grown up. The boys can find their own way, she thinks, they can all find their own way. She batters down the fire escape. The metal tolls after she’s gone.

  Dolly Pickles was a damn goodlooking woman. Anyone in town would tell you so. In some pubs they would know you so, and send a wave of winks down the bar that would always wash up at the far reaches of the Ladies’ Lounge. As she headed down to the hospital, she turned a few heads in the street and took in the salt breeze. When this town didn’t smell of salt it smelt of phosphate and wheat and rotting crayfish. She liked the stink of salt. Right now, with the rime of sex on her, she smelt of salt herself. Oh, those Yanks are somethin, she thought; Jesus Christ, they’re somethin.

  Kids were bombing off the jetty as she passed under the Norfolk pines. The water was a flat bed of sunlight and the brownslick bodies of children bashed through into its blue underbelly. Leaning against a fence, a man shelled prawns and eyed her off. He wiped vinegar from his chin and smiled. She gave him a piss-off-useless flick of her hips and went on to the hospital.

  Rose and the boys were there. The boys left off whispering by the window and stood straight. They were rangy, sundark kids. Rose was by the bed. She didn’t look up. Sam was asleep with his white fist bound up in a salute or a warning—she didn’t know which. A private room in the new wing. Government money, she thought. We couldn’t afford this.

  Four fingers and the top of his thumb, Rose said.

  Christ.

  Dolly saw it was his right hand. His bloody working hand. A man could hardly pick his nose with a thumb and half a pointer. They were done for; stuffed, cactus. Thank you, Lady Luck, you rotten slut. It was probably time now to pack a bag and buy a ticket, but hell, there was the kids and everything. The whole town knowing. How would she live?

  He bin awake?

  Nup.

  The boys, Ted and Chub, scratched themselves and pulled at their shorts.

  We go down the jetty? He’s not gunna wake up.

  S’posed to be in school, youse.

  We’ll be back dreckly. Dad might be awake, eh.

  Oh, ya mays well.

  Don’t drown from cryin, Rose said, from the bedside.

  Dolly stood in the room with her daughter. You had to watch this kid. She was getting to be a clever little miss. And she was Sam’s through and through. She was hot in the face like she was holding something back. Dolly wandered what she knew. She’s a kid. I’m a woman. The only thing we’ve got in common these days is a useless man. Dolly’d always gone for useless ones. But this was the living end.

  The room smelt of new paint and phenyle. Dolly tried to spot a mirror but there was none.

  The woman and the daughter do not speak. The crippled man does not stir. The breeze comes in the window and stops the scene from turning into a painting.

  After her mother left, Rose sat by the bedside and watched him sleep. She hated him sometimes, he was so hopeless. At times she wanted to hit him, to pick up a lump of four-be-two and snot him with it. He was a grown man and yet he didn’t have a pinch of sense in him. But he wasn’t mean, like the old girl was turning mean. She had to put up with all these catastrophes, so maybe she had a right, but the old man still made you love him. They’d had good times together, all of them, but something sour was coming into everything, and it’d been happening all year. Everything was falling to bits. When the old man was home they fought and swore. The old girl hammered him night and day and he went out and lost money. Even now she didn’t know whether to put a cool hand on his brow or shake him by the throat. He looked so pale and busted. Oh, he’d made her laugh so many times, making a dill of himself to make her happy. He remembered what she liked, he told her adult things sometimes, and stories from his stockriding days. Rose saw through him; she knew he was always going to be useless, but she loved him. Hell, he was her father.

  Sam began to snore. Rose pressed her lips together and waited.

  No one in the pub had a conversation that night that didn’t somehow wander into the territory of the Pickles family and their doomed run of luck. They had to do it when the publican wasn’t about because he was a loyal relation. They wondered aloud about Sam’s future, and the evening was kept alive with conjecture. Luck was something close to any drinker’s heart here at the Eurythmic. The place was built and bought on it, named after the great horse that brought it. A photo hung above the bar of the dark gleaming horse with its white diamond brow staring out at them, as if reminding them of his beneficence. The brash, hearty talk rose into the residential rooms at the top of the broad banistered staircase. Rose and the boys listened to it until the closing swill got under way, and when the place was quiet they slipped downstairs to the big dining room and its smells of steak and cabbage.

  Alone on her bed in 36, Dolly dreams.

  A faint breeze lifts her dress as she approaches the man by the fence with the prawns. He gives her a gaptoothed smile and she stops him. Children drop like jellybabies into the mouth of the sea. She takes a prawn, holds it in front of the man’s red nose, rubs it against his lips and takes it away. She puts her tongue out and rests the prawn on her tongue, draws it slowly into her mouth, and bites down. She cries out, and spits it into the man’s lap. It’s a human finger. There’s blood. She spits again and her front tooth lands on the man’s shirt and he scrambles up and knocks her to the grass and forces his tongue into her mouth. She feels their tongues meeting through the gaps in their teeth, vinegar between her legs.

  For a week Sam Pickles lay in bed and listened to the fans stir the soupy summer air. School was starting up again and the beach was quiet, but in the afternoons when the southerly blew, he could hear kids bombing off the jetty and shrilling like gulls, setting the loose boards rattling as they ran. He knew his kids’d be there with the rest of them, and maybe they’d be down there at night with heavy lines under the lights, waiting for samsonfish like the others. The days were long and he heard them out. He heard the jangle and crash of the wharf, the wind in the Norfolk pines, the clack of heels in the street, rattles and moans down the ward. He listened instead of looking because everything hurt to look at: the juicy fat bum of the nurse who changed his dressing, the sideways, preoccup
ied look on Dolly’s face when she visited, the angry bloodcrust on the stumps where his fingers had been. There was no use looking anymore. It all said the same thing.

  At night the lighthouse divided up the dark, and he let himself watch it because it was just time slipping away.

  One day a parcel came from the Abrolhos Islands, and the nurse with the juicy bum opened it for him and gasped. It was a preserve jar. In it, swimming in alcohol, were four fingers and the nub of a thumb. Someone had pasted a label on the glass which read: SAM’S PICKLES. He stared at it, then at the nurse, and laughed like a wounded dog. The nurse just looked at him lying there all gauzed and pale and handsome, laughing at his own fingers in a jar, and she wondered if he wasn’t the most stupid bugger she’d ever met in her life.

  When Sam came home from the hospital, Dolly had to say goodbye to the Catalina pilot and the smell of his cologne. The two rooms at the pub seemed crowded again, and the kids hardly came home except to eat and sleep. Dolly spent the days tidying up, sometimes even helping the cleaning girls to make beds in the other rooms. She couldn’t stand the sight of Sam sitting in the chair by the window with his stump on the sill. That was enough to make her busy. Afternoons, she pulled a few beers for Joel to show she was still grateful for the roof over their heads, and in the evening she drank more than a few to show anyone who cared to notice that she was still a woman and not a beggar. On Saturdays she went out to the racetrack and watched Joel’s horses win, and she looked into the faces of people who stared at her as though they couldn’t believe her husband was so unlucky. Men looked at her the way they look at horses. They were bolder now they knew her old man was a crip. She was fed up with this town. She knew it was time to make her own luck and piss off, but she just couldn’t get started. It’d be better when the summer was over, when the war was over. There’d be a better time, she knew.

  No money came in. No compo. Sam didn’t go on the dole. At night she lay beside him in bed, sensed his wiry weight spilling her towards him, and she tilted guiltily his way every time to scramble astride him and pull him into her, watch the harbour lights rise and fall through the window as she remembered the girlhood colour of moonlight on a paddock of stubble and the grind of dirt beneath her buttocks.

  At the sound of the air raid siren, Rose and the boys sprinted up the beach toward the trenches in the lee of the showers. Rose followed her brothers across the buffalo grass and over the sandbags as they leapt in. The Japs were coming this time. She heard the sound of an aero engine as she landed in the dark end, ankledeep in turds and newspaper. She crouched in the stinking mire as a plane went overhead, too high to see. They laughed in disgust until the all clear sounded and they ran back to the water and swam the poop off themselves.

  That afternoon, Rose bombed off the end of the jetty and got a jellyfish up her bathers that stung her navel until it looked like she’d been hit with grapeshot. Gutshot, the boys said.

  Later the same day Rose and her brothers found the foot of a Jap soldier washed up in a twotoed rubber boot on the back beach. It was so horrible they laughed and ran home. When they told their father, he looked more gutshot than Rose.

  In the evening Rose went down to the library with the old man. It was the first time he’d been out since the hospital. He walked slowly beside her as she carried her books and, under the Norfolk pines in the moonlight, she saw him stop and look out over the water. She took his wrist and held it gently.

  Doesn’t matter, Dad. You’re okay.

  He looked at her and she saw his teeth in the light of the moon. When he stood beside her at the library looking vague in the presence of all those books, she felt so sorry for him, so ashamed, so maternal.

  On the way home a man came out of a pub as they passed and gave Rose four big crayfish.

  Bastard, Sam said as they walked on.

  He gave us a present, Dad.

  I used to work for him. He’s hoping I’ll stay away and take the jinx with me.

  Rose smelt the freshcooked crays damp in her arms and felt tired and sunburnt. The welts from the stinger on her belly felt like a fresh tattoo. She thought she’d fall asleep walking.

  Some people are lucky, she heard him say. Joel, he’s lucky. Got a good business. His hayburners win. See, I got me ole man’s blood. Dead unlucky.

  Rose yawned. Until your luck changes.

  Luck don’t change, love. It moves.

  In the cool of winter, Sam Pickles began to give up the idea of being a crip, even though he’d grown accustomed, even attached to his new status. Joel set up a serious campaign in July to persuade him, to badger, niggle and nag him to get up out of room 36 and get on with his life.

  There’s no flamin use droppin yer bundle, he said, you’ll just have to cope with six-and-a-half fingers. You need a job and I need a payin guest. Catch my meanin?

  Dolly softened a little toward Sam, as though under direction, though she still drifted away at odd times to leave him smoking by the back window and staring out at the Catholics moving on the high ground. She came back vague and cheerful but he couldn’t work up any anger. For the kids, the novelty of having an old man who was wounded in the battle for birdshit had seriously faded. Even Rose looked at him these days as though she thought it was time he did something.

  The furious puckered pink scars on Sam’s hand subsided round the finger stumps—the colour of a monkey’s bum, some wag in the bar suggested. He’d learnt to button himself and roll a fag. Now he could look at the club on the end of his arm without having bile rise in him. He got restless. In the end, Joel ferreted him out. Fishing was the place to start.

  One July evening, as the sun dozed in the sea, he found himself standing on a lonely beach casting and winding, clumsy as a child, with the great dunes behind him turning brown. Haze began to shoulder in and render every form fluid. When he baited up, the gang of hooks always slipped sideways in the mulie and ended up buried in his palm. It was frustrating and silly, but he said nothing to Joel, and Joel said nothing back. As dark came, Sam got the hang of it, and found ways to use his bung hand. He got a half decent cast out now and then and was satisfied by the sound of bait hitting the water. They lit the lamp and shared a smoke. Sam began to feel a crawly, exhilarating sensation in his fingers—all his fingers. He burned and tingled and swore he could feel ten fingers gripping that rod. It was a lie, he knew, but he let the feeling take him in the dark. There was something momentous in it, he thought, like it meant something truly big. The shifty shadow, alright. But he was relaxed. He was with Joel whose luck ran like a fountain. He was a lightning rod for luck, that boy.

  He wasn’t at all surprised to hear Joel grunt and then shout. It was a big strike. Sam brought the lamp alongside and saw Joel’s cane rod arching halfway to the water. Line sang out and ran from the reel. They laughed like kids. Joel feinted and pulled, crabbing along the beach, to worry the fish, wear him down. Sam held the gaff and the light close by; he guffawed and stomped and felt like getting sickdrunk and dancing all night. He whooped and hooted as the great silverflanked mulloway came twisting in through the shore-break. Nah, it was no surprise at all. Not with Joel. He put down the light, swung the gaff into the fish’s gills and dragged it in. He turned to Joel and there was the surprise. Joel was on his knees clutching his heart. Sam Pickles stood and watched man and fish flap on the sand until neither moved. He stood there a long time after everything was still, letting it soak in. Joel, his only living relative beyond Dolly and the kids. His lucky, wealthy, generous, last relative. In whose pub his family was living. Sam’s feet turned stiff with cold. The facts racked themselves up like snooker balls. He was bereaved. He was unemployed. Minus a working hand. Homeless. Broke.

  A sea breeze blew.

  Sam tried to decide which he would drag back first, man or fish. It wasn’t going to be easy. The lamp burned low. He tried to weigh it up. He sat down to nut it out.

  II

  Fish Lamb Comes Back

  JUST near the crest of a hil
l where the sun is ducking down, the old flatbed Chev gives up the fight and stalls quiet. Out on the tray the kids groan like an opera. All around, the bush has gone the colour of a cold roast. Birds scuffle out of sight. There’s no wind, though the Chev gives out a steamy fart.

  You’ll have to back her up, Lest, the woman says to her husband. Go on, turn her around.

  Carn, Dad! someone calls from behind the cab.

  The man spits out the window, lets the brake off, and they roll back. He lets the clutch go, and with a jerk that sends the kids lurching all over the back, the motor grinds up again and the grey-blue bush is full of clatter.

  This time the truck goes up the hill in reverse and the kids elbow each other and feel a right bunch of dags heading up like that, but they’re the first to see the rivermouth, the oilstill river and roiling sea; it looks so like a picture they’re suddenly quiet.

  The engine idles, best it can.

  Whacko, one of them says.

  They shift around on the prawn nets and watch the sun hit the sea without a sound.

  Lester and Oriel Lamb are Godfearing people. If you didn’t know them you could see it in the way they set up a light in the darkness. You’ve never seen people relish the lighting of a lamp like this, the way they crouch together and cradle the glass piece in their hands, wide eyes caught in the flare of a match, the gentle murmurs and the pumping, the sighs as the light grows and turns footprints on the river beach into longshadowed moon craters. Let your light so shine.

  Around them their six children chiack in the sand.

  Get some wood, you bigguns, Oriel Lamb says. Hattie you look after Lon.

  The beach widens in the light of lamp and fire. The children see sparks rising like stars.

  These are farm people, though Lester Lamb has taken to being a policeman because the farm is on its last legs. Lester Lamb polices like he farms, always a little behind the moment. He’d quit the force if only his wife’d let him. Around town he’s known as ‘Lest We Forget’ and if he knew, it’d break his Anzac heart.