by Tim Winton
Knife never lies! he yells as Lester spins the butterknife. Fish claps his hands wide fingered.
Lester shows him how to spin a soup bowl, send it rocking across the table, standing up of its own momentum, whirring and blurring, making wind and sound for him. Fish becomes an expert at it. Quick and Hat and Red and Lon stand and watch him spin two, three, four at a time.
When he’s frightened or angry he falls down. He cries like a man. It makes the Lambs crazy with emotion to hear it.
Oriel doesn’t realize it, but she begins to dress Fish like an idiot, the way people clothe big sadfaced mongoloids. She hoiks his trousers up under his arms with a belt so long it flaps. She combs his hair straight down on his brow and shines his shoes till they mock him. The reason Oriel doesn’t notice is that Quick gets to him early after breakfast and drags the clobber round on him, messes him up like a boy, normal and slouchy. It makes old Fish giggle, Quick tugging at him.
Yer a boy, Fish.
Big boy.
My oath, says Quick.
Kitchentalk
Sometimes after tea there was no shopwork to be done so the Lambs’d loiter round the kitchen table, talking above the hum of Fish’s soup bowls with the new range all roar and glow. Hat at the sink. Oriel pulling out the darning. Lester picking the flourbits off his forearms.
Fine sink, this, Dad.
Yeah, but what about the other five? said Oriel.
A job lot, Lester said.
Your father has a nose for a bargain, Oriel said rolling her eyes.
We could make dunnies out of the rest, said Quick, a five holer.
Quick, stop that.
Lester laughed: We used to have a sixteen holer when I was in the army. That’s how they got the idea for the Lancaster bomber for this war. Saturation bombin.
What’d you do durin the last war, Mum? said Quick.
Oriel kept darning.
Hat raised her eyebrows: Mum?
Hm?
The Great War. What’d you do?
Waited. I raised six kids and waited for one of em to come back.
The kitchen fell quiet, all except for Fish’s whirring bowl. Lester tapped scum from his chromatic harmonica.
I didn’t know you were married before, said Elaine, lips aquiver.
Eee-laine, you nong, said Hat. 1914 to 1918. She’d hafta start havin em at age twelve to get six out, not to mention one off to war. She was born the year of Federation, 1901.
Well, said Lester. Margaret River School obviously taught Hat more than groomin and deportation.
They weren’t my children, said Oriel.
Well, I figured that, said Hat. Whose were they?
My father remarried after my mother died. His new wife already had a boy, Bluey, and they had a whole squad of babies after they married. Half-brothers and sisters. I brought them up. She taught at the bush school. She wasn’t much older than me, you know. And I wanted to be a teacher, but I never finished school. I raised her family.
Why?
Because, Quick, I loved my father.
Did he love you?
When I got burnt one day in a bushfire, in 1910, he killed his last pig, and took out its bladder and put it on my legs to heal the blisters. A whole beast, just so I wouldn’t scar. Not only was it his last pig, it was the last living thing on his farm but me.
I wouldn’t have wasted pork on this family, said Lester with a creasyfaced wink. Slice of polony, maybe. Pound of tripe, yeah.
Garn, Dad, yer all bluff.
Did I tell you about me and Roy Rene?
Arr!
Did he Mum?
Oriel finished a sock and threw it at Lon whose foot belonged to it. Yes, Yes. The Les and Mo Show.
At the Tivoli, said Lester, and then The Blue Room. Ooh, I was a lair then. All the best people’d sing me songs. I wrote for the best of em.
He was good, said Oriel, not dirtymouthed like Roy Rene.
Old Roy’s the best, said Lester.
Quick looked at the old girl. She caught him looking.
What? she said.
The one who went to war. The half-brother you were waitin for. Did he come back?
No.
Died of wounds in Palestine. The Holy Land. Shot by a Turkish airman at a well. He was a signalman. He was waterin horses. He always looked good with horses.
Did you know him, Dad? You were there.
I was only at Anzac, said Lester.
He was a genius with horses, said Oriel.
Horses were geniuses with me, said Lester. That’s why I was in the Light Horse. They were always lighter after they bucked me off.
You were a hero, said Quick.
Lester pumped the old harmonica to break the quiet, and because he knows, well as Oriel knows, that it’s just not true.
Cake
The day Quick turned twelve his father baked him a cake and wrote his name in icing and stuck twelve candles in it, and when the evening rush at the shop was over, the Lamb family came through from the counter to the kitchen to sit around the oval table and sing ‘Happy Birthday’. They’d just finished the singing and were into the three cheers when the cowbell rang up front and Oriel went to serve in the shop. She came back at a jog.
Lady wants a cake, Les. She’s desperate. She’ll give us a quid.
It’s too much. We haven’t got one.
Quick looked at the candles, still smoking.
It’s too much, said Lester.
Quick watched as his mother whipped out all the candles, smoothed the icing over with a knife and gathered the cake up under her arm to charge back down the corridor.
Birthday, Quick, said Fish.
Yeah, said Quick.
Suddenly, they all laughed - even Quick. It started as a titter, and went quickly to a giggle, then a wheeze, and then screaming and shrieking till they were daft with it, and when Oriel came back in they were pandemonius, gone for all money. But they paused like good soldiers when she solemnly raised her hand. She fished in her apron and pulled out a florin. Happy birthday, son.
You want change from this? said Quick.
That set them off again and there was no stopping them.
Tuba
Quick Lamb was surprised when his father joined the army. He was even more surprised to know he’d joined the army band. The old man came home one day with a full kit and tuba and spread it out in the bedroom behind the shop so they could all see it.
I thought I’d do my bit, Lester Lamb said. They wouldn’t take me in ‘39.
All the Lambs looked at it in wonder. Quick worried about the old man sometimes. They were bombing Tokyo. There couldn’t be a few weeks left of the war. Deep inside Quick knew his father was liable to do anything at all.
I used to be in the Salvos, Lester Lamb said. I’m orright on the old tub.
The tub? Quick said.
Tuba. Chew-ba.
Lester took up the dented instrument and sat. He honked out a couple of notes. It sounded like a tune, right enough. Like elephant farts.
Oriel said nothing. Lester let out a strangled oomph and the rooster down the back started screeching. Lon giggled and Fish smiled.
More, said Fish.
Don’t worry, said Oriel, there’ll be plenty more. More than plenty.
From then on, the old man was at band practice every afternoon and as the year got on towards Christmas Quick saw him less and less and he wondered more and more. His mother ran the shop and said nothing about it. The girls served. Hat and Elaine had finished school for good now. They were old enough to work for money. The shop went on. Quick went to school and did badly and came home. Sometimes he’d lie on his bed with Fish and just look at the ceiling and feel Fish against him. He missed the old Fish, especially at school. With Fish, people noticed you. But without him, at this new school, he was just a country kid whose shorts were too long, whose feet were horny from barefootedness. He was slow and dreamy and the teachers gave up on him quickly. When he came home and lay on his bed an
d looked up, he didn’t know what he saw; he couldn’t decide what he felt. Fish might come in and say Hello, Quick, and stand at the window watching the motes in the late afternoon sun, or maybe slouch in beside him on the bed and say, It’s the roof you’re looking at, Quick.
One afternoon, when they were lying there in the socksmelling heat, Fish dug him in the chest and asked: Are you happy, Quick?
Quick turned his head to look at those black eyes. For a moment it occurred to him that Fish might have been pretending to be slow this whole year and the thought made him sick and angry. But he looked close at Fish who began to giggle and he knew it wasn’t pretending.
I don’t know, he said. What about you?
When I feel good.
What about now?
Fish skewed his lower lip and considered. Aw, yeah.
When are you sad then?
When I want the water, Fish said.
What dyou mean?
Fish watched the motes diving and whorling.
What water, Fish?
The water, the water.
Fish got off the bed and went to the window. Quick watched him stand there with his yellow hair sticking up all over.
Science
Sam Pickles started the day with a smoke on the back step before he went out walking. You’d think he was a one-handed brain surgeon the way he concentrated on the task. The walk started out in July as the daily job hunt, but after a few weeks it just became the thing he did, the shape of his day. It kept his blood cool, eased the itch he slept and woke with. Luck was out there waiting on him, puckering at him. Joel always said that hard work makes good luck, but any man who made his fortune on a horse like Eurythmic was deeper into the mysteries than he knew. There was no work in that. A winner like that had the weight of the whole bloody universe behind it.
No, there was a change in the air by August, and Sam knew it; the winter sky the colour of sixpence, steady rent coming in from those tubahonking Lambs, the electricity in the stumps of his fingers. Walking, he held his crook hand in his good one and tried to read its message. Hours he walked, to clear his head of Dolly’s stormcloud humidity and Rose’s new hardset stares. The house vibrated with hustle these days, groaning laborious as a ship with those Lambs going at it night and day, singing, working, laughing, shifting boxes and furniture morning and night and their blasted rooster going off like a burglar alarm at all hours.
Those Lambs. No joke, it took his breath away to see them go at it. You’d think they were carrying the nation on their backs with all that scrubbing and sweeping, tacking up shelves and blackboards, arguing over the situation of jars, tubs, scales and till. Stinking dull work, the labour of sheilas at best, with all that smile and how do you do, sir, but you had to admire them for it. They were just scrub farmers green to town, a mob of gangly, puppet-limbed yokels but they moved in like they’d designed the house themselves. Making luck, the hardest donkey y acker there is. With that little woman pushing and harassing and haranguing. They’d never go hungry, that lot, but neither would they have it high on the hog. Their way was alright if that was as far as you could see, but Sam had his father’s blood. He was no donkey worker, he was more of a scientist. Not the kind to yoke himself for the long haul like that, he saw himself as the kind of man who read things on the wind, living from divining the big wins and taking the losses as expenses on the way. No guts, no glory. He could feel it in his wheezy old lungs, in his stumps. There was science in it, and science always wins through. His time would come. Hadn’t this subletting bizzo been a gamble and a win?
Alone in his room of an afternoon, Sam’d get down his two-up pennies and hold them in his palm. Dolly took the rent personally and she didn’t even let him get hold of enough to buy baccy. But, by crikey, his time was coming, she’d see.
No Wading
God, how she hated winter. Dolly Pickles stood in the weak sun of the backyard looking at her feet. Two flaky hens scratched nearby. Today, again, she felt angry for no reason. Sam was out looking for a job, the kids were at school and the place was quiet. She was waiting for the copper to boil so she could finish the washing.
All she needed was summer, and some sweet, healing, nipplepricking sun. Short of a good time, that’s all she needed to get by.
Green tufts of wild oats rasped at her shins. The sun’d make her young and hopeful and it wouldn’t matter that she was married to a crip. She wanted to be brown and oily on some beach, to feel the heat slowly building in her skin until she couldn’t bear it and had to run down to the shore and flop into the gutter between surf banks and have her flesh fizz and prickle with chill. But all she had was this winter feeling, this shittiness, this anger that she couldn’t place. And washing she hadn’t done on wash day. Herself next door always had the washing out at dawn washing day, as though she did it to shame everyone else, especially Dolly.
She wandered down through the long weeds of her yard and beneath the lilac tree to where she could see down the embankment to the railway. She heard someone next door straining in the little tin dunny. Up at the house Lester Lamb was singing and Dolly could see the slow kid with his nose pressed to a second floor window, so she knew it must be the sergeant-major who was on the privy. A thrill of mischief sparked in her. Here’s a lark. Hello wash day. She stuck her head over the pickets.
There sat Oriel Lamb with her knickers round her bumpy knees and her skirt hoiked avast. The little woman stiffened and closed her mouth.
I’ll go and get the ranger, Dolly said with a wicked grin.
Why’s that? Oriel Lamb asked, mustering some dignity in tone if nowhere else. She grabbed for the door.
Smells like something’s crawled up inside you and died.
The door slapped shut.
No WADING.
Dolly Pickles laughed until there wasn’t even any bitterness in it. And she was sober as a saint.
After the kids are asleep Dolly stands at the window with only her stockings on. There is no noise from next door, and the whole house is quiet. Sam lies on the bed, rolls a smoke, watching her. She looks out at the moon that rests on the fence.
We aren’t that old, she says.
Anyone with an arse like that isn’t real old. He licks the paper, tamps, then lights up.
Dolly rests an elbow on the sill. The grass is shin high out in their half of the yard. Bits of busted billycarts and boxes litter the place beneath the sagging clothesline.
I dunno what I’m doin, she says.
Do you ever?
She shrugs. Spose not. What about you?
He takes a drag. I’m a bloke. I work. I’m courtin the shifty shadow. That’s what I’m doin.
This is another life.
It’s the city. We own a house. We got tenants.
Do you remember Joel’s beach house?
Sorta question is that?
That was our life.
The late train rollicks up from Fremantle. It sends the long grass into rolling gasps and sighs on the embankment in the moonlight, and Dolly watches as Sam comes up behind her to fit snug against her rump. She feels the heat of his fag at her neck and his hand and his stump on the cold porcelain of her nipples, and the hot, glowing end of him getting up into her, making her twist and feint, grip the sill, see her nails bending in the wood. Dolly can smell the charge in him, it hisses against her stockings and bows her legs until it’s him that’s holding her upright, and so it goes, on and on, until out there in the moonlight she can see the river and the dunes and Joel’s shack, and the two of them on the beach rubbing the flesh of oysters into each other.
When Sam is asleep, Dolly gets up and pulls on a coat and creeps out of the house. The mob next door are long asleep. She goes down to the tracks and looks at them gleaming in the moony light; she can see her face in them, almost. She remembers riding out to the siding when she was a girl. She rode on the back of the saddle behind her father. Oh, she worshipped that man. He was strong and sunbrown and quiet. There was a way he had of laughin
g that made her feel like the world might stop right there and then, as if that laughter was enough for everyone and everything, and there was no point in anything else bothering to continue. She must have been six or so on that ride out to the siding where the great tin holding bins stood bending in the heat. The ground was blonde and rainstarved and after Dolly’s father had fixed up his business with the rail men he saw her standing by the buckled railway lines.
Those rails go all over the world. They go forever.
And she felt it was true. It was like they were electric with all knowledge, all places, all people.
Dolly squats by the cold rails here in the winter night.
She never did get to try those rails. She just got to be goodlooking and cheeky and by sixteen she found herself out on her back under the night sky with a long procession of big hatted men, one of whom, the youngest, the fairest of them, was sleeping up there in that saggy great house with his arms up behind his head, and his fingerless fist on her pillow. No, she never did find out about those rails. But nothing ever turns out like you expect. Like how your father ends up not being your father, and all.
Dogs get howling all down the way. Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there’s a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.
Bells
Rose woke up to the sound of bells. She opened her window and the world was mad with noise: church bells, tram bells, air raid sirens, train whistles, a rocket going up, klaxons and trumpets, dogs howling nutheaded at the sky. Cloud Street was filling and below, the shop was bursting with huggers and clappers who were opening bottles and crying out on the lawn where she could see them. The house shook and a thousand smells whirled through it with a bang of doors.
The war is over!
Ted came bursting in: The Japs! We creamed em!
It’s finished, listen to the wireless.
