Cloudstreet

by Tim Winton

  Toby smiled at someone over Rose’s shoulder and now and then she sensed an eyebrow raised.

  You know all these people?

  I know who they are and they know who I am. Some of us are friends, associates, old flames. I’m clubbish, you’d have to say; it’s my last concession to a bourgeois past.

  Rose tried not to panic.

  You okay?

  Rose strangled out a yes.

  You’re not nervous? Don’t be nervous. I’m quite safe, you know. Not respectable but I am able to restrain myself with a lady.

  Rose smiled. She ran her fingers along the checked tablecloth.

  What are you thinking? You want to go home?

  We’re different, said Rose.

  You don’t know a thing about me! he protested gaily.

  Then tell me. What do you do?

  Is a man only what he does?

  No, Rose said, only what he is, I spose.

  Well, Rose, you’re dead right. I’m a hack. A journalist on the Daily. I is probably what I does.

  You’ve been to university, or something, haven’t you?

  Ah, sharp lady.

  See, we’re different.

  So what?

  Rose smiled. You write, then?

  Well, you couldn’t call what I do writing, though I do scribble a bit in my own time. Do you read?

  Yes, she said breathlessly, I read.

  Thank God. Thank Jesus, Mary and Josephus, she reads! Rose, you’re a lovely girl. The moment I heard your snooty twang on the phone I knew it was love. See, we’re not so different.

  Rose laughed. Toby was so confident, his face so full of mad expression, his hands seemed to crackle with animation. He fitted the din and swirl of this place.

  The spaghetti came with wine and salad. Rose hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so she went to work. It was like eating kite string but the wine soon took the awkwardness out of it.

  Tell me who you read, he said with a lump of cheese camping on his chin.

  Oh, Gawd.

  Don’t be shy.

  I love books. My room is full of them. I read the whole Geraldton library end-to-end when I was a kid.

  Name some names.

  But Rose didn’t know names, she only remembered stories.

  You name some, she said.

  Toby grinned, closed his eyes: Hammett, Steinbeck, Hemingway, James Jones, Mailer, D. H. Lawrence. Xavier Herbert, Sillitoe, Camus …

  She let him go on and on in a winy whirl as people brushed by with friendly nods and vats of red sauce. Their duffle coats and minks flapped, their pockets jingled, their laughter blanketed Rose Pickles in, warm as all get-out.

  Rose had enough wine in her to keep calm as they jerked their way through the traffic to the Esplanade. The lights of the river seemed more beautiful than she’d seen them. The palm trees along the foreshore cast weird silhouettes.

  One of the world’s strangest towns, said Toby, aiming them down Riverside Drive.

  I wouldn’t know, said Rose.

  Perth is the biggest country town in the world trying to be a city. The most isolated country town in the world trying to be the most cut-off city in the world, trying desperately to hit the big time. Desert on one side, sea on the other. Philistine fairground. There’s something nesting here, something horrible waiting. Ambition, Rose. It squeezes us into corners and turns out ugly shapes.

  You must see a lot of things, said Rose, hating herself for sounding so wide-eyed.

  Too many things.

  Rose thought of morgues, cells, the steps of aeroplanes, the flash of camera bulbs. Her world was mundane and domestic in the high times. In the low times … she couldn’t even think of those times. The night wasn’t big enough for all those feelings.

  Toby jacknifed the Morris into a carpark across the river from Crawley. The university clock was lit and it stood above the trees, the lamps, the water.

  That’s nice, she said.

  No, he murmured. This is nice.

  Rose took the kiss and was surprised at how soft his skin was. She slid in close to him.

  Nice is a terrible, bourgeois word, said Toby catching a breath.

  Whatever, said Rose, whatever. She loved the smooching sound of the upholstery. She stopped being kissed and started kissing. She held his head, felt his hands on her back, in her hair.

  Just switching you through, she murmured, trying not to giggle.

  Rose Pickles, he said.

  His hand was between her breasts and she left it there as the river went by and by.

  Oh, Rose, you loved me. How you did. And there you go drifting by with the river, out on an eddy in a black, shiny Morris Oxford with a man who quotes D. H. Lawrence with his tongue in your ear and cheese on his chin. How you longed, how you stared at me those thundery nights when we all tossed and the house refused to sleep. It’s gone for you now, but for me the water backs into itself, comes around, joins up in the great, wide, vibrating space where everything that was and will be still is. For me, for all of us sooner or later, all of it will always be. And some of you will be forever watching me on the landing.

  Back at his flat, Rose falls on the bed thinking: dammitall I’m twenty-four years old, as her acre of tulle comes away and his hands run down her legs to peel her stockings; I want him. She feels the air cool on her shins and draws him down. He slides into her and it’s as hard as the recesses of her heart and wonderful, only unlike Rose Pickles’ heart it stops beating and lurching and loses its steel and lets her down into a sad melancholy quiet. Well, she thinks, I’m a woman. She wants to cry, but ends up feeling grateful.

  By the time summer came, Rose knew she was in love. Toby was clumsy and vague and she quickly discovered that he wasn’t the political scribe, the crime-chasing reporter she imagined, but the writer of a social column, a man with a notebook at a charity ball whose family name got him in the door. His real love was poetry and talk. He quoted Rimbaud by the river and Freud by the sea and Rose shut up and listened, let herself be taken along by the sheer force of him. He took her to clubs, to balls at the uni where people were stylish and confident in a way she’d never seen, and though he muttered critically in the dress circle, he took her to the pictures just to give her pleasure. They ate Italian food, Greek and Polish, drank at the Latin Quarter with Toby’s friends, and ignored all sports.

  The moment she left the yard at Cloudstreet the wide world fell wonderfully upon Rose. She always met him in neutral places out of shame, and never mentioned the big old house, the squealing, romping, toothy noise of those who sailed on in it. Toby read the London newspapers and talked of escaping Perth for a real culture: Bloomsbury, the Left Bank, or Sydney at a pinch. The two of them drove in the warming evenings with the windows down and the wind in their clothes and always found themselves by the river with lights drifting round them.

  Toby talked. Talked day and night about sex, about words to describe it, about how other cultures did it, about what it really meant. He gave her a plainwrapped Lady Chatterley and dared her to say the words. She dared him to bodysurf with her at Cottesloe Beach, but he stayed in the shade with an Evelyn Waugh. Rose sunbaked in her Jantzens and laughed at his passing commentary. The Norfolk pines reminded her of Geraldton. She dripped icecream on her Cole of California sundress. She read Scott Fitzgerald, discovered Henry Handel Richardson, and in the evenings cooked Toby meals in his flat and took him to bed where he was rarely as good as his word, though helpful enough in his way.

  After sex, Rose went melancholy and fanciful. On the pillow beside Toby, she even imagined herself married with children, with a house in the clean new suburbs and all of Toby’s clever friends around to make her laugh. She’d wear a cashmere sweater tied loosely round her neck, her hair would always be wet and combed back after swimming, her children would be sweetfaced and adored by every passing stranger.

  After lovemaking Toby went quiet, as though he’d suddenly and terribly run out of talk. He wrote poems, she discovered, wrote them
in his head while they lay there subdued. She didn’t understand them if ever he showed them to her on paper. They seemed ugly and nonsensical, and as he wrote more of them and had them roundly rejected by magazines in the East his moods darkened.

  She began to tell him about her life, but there were times when it was no use talking to Toby. With his friends it was no use saying anything at all. Every time she opened her mouth he’d scowl. She’d always put something into a conversation that would stop things dead. Toby’s friends painted and sculpted or wrote, though some just came around looking harried and thoughtful and did nothing at all. They knew everybody’s name, and certain names brightened their faces. They blew cigarette smoke like they were spitting. They spoke with their heads back and their eyes closed and their accents were Englishy. Rose didn’t mind them. Early in the evenings, when she was feeding them all, they showed an interest in her and once a woman painter suggested she go to night school to improve herself. She listened like a kid at a keyhole.

  Rose went to work bleary and sullen. The switch girls teased her. She’s a bloody inta-llec-shul now! they shrieked, but they let up on her and bought her salmon and onion sandwiches in Coles and fussed over her when she was tired.

  In the autumn Toby went into a long period of quiet, and after careful enquiry, Rose found that he was writing a book. He had hundreds of poems, hundreds, and she began to type them. In May, she was still typing. The poems were long scenes in which athletic men whispered Greek words into the ears of virgins.

  Is anyone going to buy and read this? Rose asked, late one Sunday, after another weekend of typing.

  Toby snorted. Probably not. Look what we’re up against. Oh, libraries’ll buy it.

  Good, said Rose.

  Is it?

  Isn’t it?

  He looked doubtful.

  In May, one Sunday evening, Rose stopped typing. I’m not a typist, she said. And you’re not a poet.

  You want to marry me, don’t you?

  Ambition, Toby, it makes us funny shapes. You said it yourself. Let’s go to the football next weekend. Stuff the poetry.

  Toby laughed.

  Forget it, she said, it was just an idea.

  An idea!

  Yes, the switchgirl gets an idea. Call me a taxi.

  I’ll call you a lot of things.

  I’m going home.

  Ah, the mysterious home. I always wanted to see where all these gothic strains come from.

  Rose left.

  For a few days it’s quiet between Rose and Toby. It rains in passionate bursts, usually when Rose is going to or from a train station. The girls at the switch are crazy and loveable, but she feels a stranger to them after these past months. She stays in at night and the house is almost tranquil except for the crying in the walls at night. She eats dinner with the old man and Chub, and with the old girl if she is out of bed in time. The kitchen smells of the pepper on the steaks, and of burning jarrah in the firebox. The Lamb mob seems quiet, subdued even. Sometimes she can hear the slow boy singing.

  He’s a clever bloke, this fella of yours? Sam asks one night between wireless shows.

  Oh, he’s clever enough, says Rose.

  Gets a fat pocket at the end of the week, I spose?

  Well, he gets more than me, Dad. He writes gossip during work hours and drivel in his free time.

  Sounds like the life to me.

  Oh, Dad, you silly bugger! she laughs.

  Rose leaves the room before she clouts him one.

  At the window by the landing Rose looks out on the backyard, lit softly by the lamp in the tent and the dunny light on this side that Chub’s probably left on, Chub who’s never had a job, Chub who eats and sleeps. It’s wet and lush out there, wild on the Pickles side of the tin fence, bountiful on the Lamb side. Rose unplaits her hair, and watches the shadow of the little woman in the tent. She’s been out there years now, and everybody in the street knows about it. No one knows why she’s there. She works all day in the shop and goes out there at night. It looks warm, the colour of that tent, and close and private. Yeah, she can see why a woman’d move out there to have some life of her own. It occurs to her that she hasn’t spoken to Mrs Lamb for a year, maybe two.

  There’s a creak on the boards behind her. She whirls around to see Red Lamb.

  It’s pretty hair you got.

  Rose looks at her. Red is a year older than her, but Rose has always thought of her as some years her junior. Her red hair is cut flat and short, and it occurs to Rose that if the girl waits long enough it’ll actually come into fashion, especially if she had a tendency to hang around at the Snakepit and be a widgie. But she can’t see it. Red has the look of a hopelessly sporty girl.

  Thanks. Thank you.

  Red steps up on the landing beside her and peers out through the rainspatter on the window.

  Your mum’s still up and about.

  She’s a saint, you know. There’s no one else like her alive.

  They stand a few moments like that, like two strangers waiting for a bus. Rose smells hard Velvet soap on Red.

  Well, good night, says Red.

  Yeah, g’night.

  Rose watches the shadow in the tent. Rain falls without a sound.

  In the night, Rose woke with cramps and had to stuff the pillow under her belly and lie like a baby on her front with her legs drawn up under. It was a horrible pain, the beginnings of a bad period, but she was grateful for it. Any period was a good period. Men had taught her that much. But it was severe alright. She’d get the old man to call her in sick in the morning. It’ll shock him, she thought, he doesn’t believe in missing work. Except to lie low. Well, maybe it’s the same. I’ll be lying low.

  Some girl was blubbering in the house again. There was no one here anymore as young as that voice. Sorry sport, she thought; I’ve got my own problems.

  At noon, the old girl came up in her dressing gown with a letter.

  It’s from Ted, she murmured. He’s in South Australia. He married that girl who was pregnant. He’s a jockey. Can you believe it—he doesn’t weigh nine stone. You orright?

  Rose nodded. Geez. I’m an auntie.

  And I’m a grandmother. Never even knew about the weddin. I love a weddin.

  Right there on the bed, the old girl got a weep on, and Rose found herself with an arm around her, patting the back of her head, smoothing the crumpled, smokestained bangs.

  I’m old, Dolly bawled. I’m old.

  She stayed there until she seemed exhausted by it all, and Rose laid her down on the bed.

  What’s wrong with you, anyway, love? Why you off work? Dolly murmured beside her on the pillow.

  Oh, the painters are in, that’s all.

  God was laughin when he made women.

  Rose lay there and listened to her mother fall asleep. She smelt of Guinness and lemonade. Rose put her hand on the old girl’s big arm and then she took it away again.

  When Rose woke, it was evening and she was alone. Someone came hammering on her door. The old man.

  Rose. Rose! There’s a bloke here!

  Oh my God.

  Says his name’s Tony.

  Oh, please, she thought.

  And then in came Toby himself, wildeyed and lurching.

  What the hell are you doing here?

  A poem! Someone’s taken one of my poems.

  Don’t spose you’re insured? said Sam in the corridor.

  Rose Pickles pulled the blanket over her head and laughed.

  I’ll bung the kettle on, said Sam.

  We’re invited to the editor’s house, said Toby.

  Now? said Sam.

  Tonight.

  Then I will put the kettle on.

  Put the bloody kettle on, Dad.

  Sam gave an awful wink and went on his way.

  How did you find … us? she said, trying to neutralize her tone.

  Oh, the girls on the switch. They remembered the street, though none of them knew the number of the house. Once I found the
street it was easy. Seems everybody knows this place. They were all talking about some woman with a tent? Anyway I found it.

  Rose pulled the blankets around her.

  You’ve been dark on me, Rose.

  Congratulations on the poem. Who took it, that poonce from the university?

  Oh, Rose, show some taste, some decorum.

  I said congratulations, didn’t I?

  You’re not the same girl I heard on the switch last year.

  Well, I know about Earl Grey tea now and I’ve read Rimbaud. And his … imitators.

  Nasty, nasty.

  Don’t bloody patronize me.

  Jesus, Rose, it’s my big day. I’m asking you out to a do. I’ve cracked it at last. They’re welcoming us in.

  That mob? I thought you were avante garde or whatever.

  Cmon, Rose. Be nice.

  Nice is an ugly word.

  You’re a sharp girl, Rose.

  And I type like a demon.

  Oh, don’t sulk. Cmon love. We’ll drink champagne and lose ourselves. I’m sorry for barging in on your … hide-away. Look pretty for me, alright? I’ll be by at eight.

  There was a photographer from the Daily waiting on the steps of the Dalkeith mansion when Toby and Rose arrived starched to the gills, and the coincidence was not lost on Rose.

  Who are these people, anyway?

  Oh, uni people, old money, the usual literary establishment.

  What’s the editor’s name again?

  George Headley. He’s edited Riverside since the ivy started growing.

  This must be important to you.

  Ah, she loves me.

  The door opened. Rose felt her shoulders sag in fear.

  Toby Raven, said Toby to the big silver man.

  And friend, said Rose.

  Welcome to our little nest. Come in my boy.

  Rose crept in behind Toby. A jazz combo played in the hallway. A buffet table filled the dining room and forced its trestled way into the huge, dark, heavy panelled livingroom. Leather furniture, jarrah bookcases, elephant’s feet, hatstands, squirish paintings on the wall squeezed Rose into her dress. From the huge windows she saw the slick lawns, the gleaming backs of cars, and below it all the lightmoving river.

  Out in the sunroom men had gone into a huddle, and spotting them, Toby bolted their way. Rose did her best to seem unhurried and unflustered. She found the wives and girlfriends in the kitchen and was immediately loaded up with a tray of beer and Porphyry Pearl.