Cloudstreet

by Tim Winton

  Well, fancy this.

  It’s Rose, says the slow brother, Fish, the one she used to watch through door cracks and curtains.

  From next door?

  She’s not happy, Quick.

  Any chance of a ride?

  Where to? says Quick.

  Oh, doesn’t matter.

  Here, hop in.

  And the moment she gets in the boat she can’t stop howling. She holds back on it like a carsick kid trying not to toss, but it only increases the tearing in her throat. Now and then she gets a glimpse of Quick rowing and the other one watching her, both looking like they don’t know whether to go on fishing, head home, or paddle her around till dawn. Now and then she gets her breath back and composes herself for a bit of polite chat, but she loses the lot at the last minute to end up head down in the stink of nets and pots and the mire of her own hanky. In the end she dozes, exhausted. When she wakes she sees they’ve been fishing again, but now the slow one is asleep up in the bow under a tarp. Horror-faced cobbler squirm around in a tub beside her, all with white patches where their stings have been torn out. She smells the heat of the lamp behind her, hears the dip of oars, and Quick Lamb’s orderly breathing. There’s a man’s greatcoat across her shoulders. Her backside is alive with pins and needles.

  Wanna fag? Quick asks.

  Thanks, I don’t smoke.

  Fair enough.

  Have I been asleep long?

  Oh, an hour, I reckon.

  Jesus.

  You must be pretty upset.

  How many cobblers have you got?

  Three dozen, maybe.

  Do you catch them on a line?

  Nah, we spear em with a gidgie in the shallows. Easy work when a bloke can get it. We’re just settin nets now.

  City lights drift by, but only the boat and the river move. Rose can hardly recall feeling as awful as this, though it’s a surprise that it’s not worse.

  I’ve got some Chateau Tanunda in that coat, if you want a swig, he says.

  No, it’s alright.

  No smokin and no drinkin—do your parents know about this?

  Spose it is a bit of a laugh, really.

  Think I’ll take a snort meself. Couldja find it?

  Rose gropes around inside the pockets with their crusty dried flecks of bait, pencil stubs, pieces of string and chips of Buttermenthol.

  Think I’ll have a splash myself, after all that, she says.

  He takes the bottle from her while she’s trying not to cough it all into the cobbler trough.

  Well, that’s cheered you up, he says with a laugh.

  It’s beautiful out here, she says, turning round to sit facing him. He stands, punting along with effort.

  It’s cold.

  Where are we going?

  I was about to consult you on that. Actually, I’m beginning to wonder meself. This hasn’t turned out a regular night, you see.

  Your brother.

  Yeah.

  What’s the story with him?

  He sighs. The dark water moves by like the black glass of a dream’s beginning. After a while she knows she’s upset him. God, what a clumsy bitch I am, she thinks.

  Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so blunt. It’s just that, well, your mob and mine never really talked much, did they. I’m sorry.

  Doesn’t matter.

  Is he out with you for any special reason?

  Oh, he’s been after me forever about coming. Mum an Dad worry. I smuggled him out. He’s knackered. Snores like a bugger.

  Rose reaches for the brandy again to take another pull, and the Lamb boy lets the oars drag a few moments passing it to her, watching her drink. The lamp is strapped in against the gunwale beside her; she puts a hand to it for warmth.

  What are you like, Quick Lamb?

  What sorta question’s that?

  Can’t you answer it?

  Rose watches his features straighten in offence, a moment, before easing back into the soft, boyish lines from a few seconds before.

  What’m I like? He takes up the oars again. Even in a coat and beanie he looks thin. A bit lost, I spose.

  The lost Lamb.

  Yeah, I feel sheepish about that.

  Neither of us is likely to get a show on the wireless, you know.

  Oh, I thought my joke was a bottler. It was yours that was on the nose. Gawd, yer smilin.

  Nah, it’s only a rumour.

  Why’d you ask the question?

  I don’t know. Actually, I was just wondering. We live in the same house, what is it, fifteen years now, and I suppose I don’t even know who you are. Hey, I remember that time years ago you clobbered me on the stairs with a bag—knocked me down, you rotten sod, you remember that?

  He just rows. No. Don’t think so.

  Well, you were in a hurry.

  You grew up pretty good lookin, Rose.

  Ta.

  Funny, the way he says it; it’s like there’s no intention behind the observation, as though he doesn’t mean it to be an embarrassing personal sort of thing, but just a general comment. Rose flushes, not because he’s said it, but for it’s plainness.

  How come you do this?

  Fishin? Reckon I’d do it after work anyway, if I had a routine job, and seein as I can’t figure out what the hell to do with meself, it’s pleasant enough and pays me way. I just haven’t got any ideas, you know, about what to do. Me old man was sort of restless, goin from thing to thing, the sorta bloke who needed the army but wouldna thought of it till the war came along. Spose that means we’re weak.

  No, I reckon it’s just normal.

  You look the ambitious type to me.

  You come from a big mob, remember. You’ve been sheltered a bit.

  He nods. Maybe you’re right. I never thought about it like that.

  Rose can’t help but laugh.

  What do you think about all day?

  I reckon I’m tryin to figure out what I lost. I keep figurin I’ve lost somethin somewhere.

  Something to do with him? She points back over her shoulder where Fish sleeps in the bow.

  I reckon my whole life is to do with him. It’s a sorta mess.

  You really love him, don’t you.

  Everyone loved him. He was the funniest, stupidest kid in the whole bloody world, an everybody loved him.

  Jesus, Rose thinks, there’s fire in that hole.

  He’s my brother.

  Geez, I’ve got two of them, and I couldn’t say I even liked them.

  You woulda loved him, Quick murmurs.

  I probably did, Rose thinks: I reckon that’s probably the way it was.

  What’re we doin out here in the cold, anyway? he says.

  Talking.

  You wanna go home?

  She shakes her head.

  Well, how’d you like to work while you talk?

  Fair enough.

  They set nets with numbing fingers as the city grows silent around them, all the streetlights out along the foreshore, houses darkened beyond. Pelicans flap and stir invisible. Now and then a mullet will jump, a prawn come skipping like a stone. Quick lets them drift along gutters with a handline out in case of a passing mulloway and Rose tucks herself down in the bottom of the boat beneath the greatcoat with small slugs of brandy to keep herself awake. She feels unaccountably happy and she knows it’s not just the Chateau Tanunda. For a long time, an hour maybe, they don’t speak at all. When she closes her eyes it feels like she could be anywhere. What happened earlier tonight is becoming hard to believe; the whole time with Toby, it’s receding so quickly as to be a little alarming. Listen to yourself now, she thinks. You even speak differently. He talks like someone out of Dad ‘n’ Dave and you try not to smile. Oh, you learnt well, Rose. Strange, but she can’t feel any anger. All her life she’s been angry, and now she can’t feel it, when she should feel it strong and hard like metal under her skin. For a while she debates the idea of telling Quick Lamb where she’s been, what she’s just come through, but one look will
tell a girl he doesn’t need to know. Actually, he’s so damn incurious as to be a bit startling. She watches him with the line in his fingers, the low light of the lamp easy on his jaw, and sees how far back in him his mind is, how he has a strange tranquillity riding across the heat she saw a while ago with that brother business. It doesn’t seem like resignation, just some time-biding patience that’s new to her, not fierce like her determination to make something for herself, but firm all the same. Like an old, old man waiting for something he’s been promised.

  Why do you get that look on your mug?

  He stirs a little. I’m just fishin.

  You reckon we’d be any good married to each other?

  Gimme that bottle! he says.

  Ssh! You’ll wake your brother.

  Gissit!

  In the end he reaches, grabs and hurls the bottle out across the water.

  Jesus Christ! What’d you do that for?

  Don’t talk like that, I don’t like it.

  It’s my mouth, mate.

  And yer sittin in my boat.

  Rose hauls the smelly greatcoat hard about her. She’s still pretty bloody sober, thank you very much.

  Just a question, you know. Hypothetical, as the smartbums say.

  You’ve been around with smartbums—1 wouldn’t know.

  So you know more than you let on.

  It’s a house, not a—

  Walls have ears.

  Well, you should know, he says. We’re even louder than you are.

  Oh, you noticed? It’s like living next to a cattleyard.

  You’ve done orright from us.

  And you from us, I’d have thought. Well, here we are showing our colours. No civil war, fair enough?

  Fair enough.

  You’re true blue, Quick Lamb.

  Thanks, he says, with a sudden smile.

  Now answer the question.

  Dwellingplace

  Rose and Quick burst into the empty dark library while the rest of the house sleeps. Fish is down the hall snoring. They close the door and cut into the stale dead air with their excitement. They could be children, they breathe so hard, standing apart from one another lit by only the glow of their faces and the heat of their breaths.

  I just stumbled into Heaven, Rose says.

  Quick just stands and smiles.

  You believe in Fate?

  He shakes his head.

  This isn’t happening, she says.

  Not yet.

  They meet, two points of light sparking up the dark, their mouths gentle upon one another, shocked into sobriety in seconds. Around them the shades hover and hang, twitching.

  I know you all of a sudden, she says.

  We’re nuts, he said. We’re gunna be embarrassed afterwards.

  No. We’re gonna be something else altogether. Come here, here. Here, Quick.

  Then suddenly they’re going off like a bag of penny bombs, clawing at each other’s clothes, talking into skin and opening up while all about the fretting, bodyless shadows back off, mute and shaken in the face of passion, the live, good, heat of the young.

  Rose’s shoulders slope sweetly under Quick’s hands, and she presses into his belly, finds his nipples at her fingertips as she takes him down to the jaded flowers of the library rug where they roll and warp as though they’re in some limitless spring paddock that’s heady with petals, and pollen and bellowing with sweet energy.

  The girlshadow and the hagshadow go limp and open-mouthed, slipping down the walls torn by their halfness. They see the living find curves and dips in one another and hear electric whispers building in their space. Press against the walls, press against themselves, press against the barrier unseen that holds them here. It’s love pressing them, see how it distorts their meatless shadows into swatches of darkness, forcing them against the transparent skin of time.

  Rose wraps him in her legs, knots over him with hands and mouth and hair, while Quick sprinkles her with sweat, shaking as he is, finding her just … just food for him. Across the knots of their discarded clothes they slide and clinch, he with fishblood and her blood on his fingers, she with brandy on her breath, both of them openeyed with a surprise that turns to recognition, and together they make a balloon of heat inside the cold nausea of that dead room whose timbers twist and creak; a new dwellingplace. Love rattles the wallpaper and darkness recedes into itself a fraction when they shout exultant into each other’s mouths.

  After they’re dressed and gone, hurrying out into the daylit house with news for the world, their sudden love remains in the room, hanging like incense.

  Outside Chance

  Oriel Lamb had nothing to say. Her son stood at the flap of the tent in his undershorts with the creeping sun behind him, and she had nothing to say at all.

  It’s probably a bit of a shock, he said.

  Oriel stepped into her boots and took a Bex for the headache that could only be minutes away. She made her bed while he stood there, set things straight on her dresser, trimmed the wick of the lamp.

  Mum?

  Aren’t you cold?

  Yeah, but—

  Go inside and light the stove.

  Just then someone started to laugh up in the Pickles side of the house, the kind of laugh that’d see a person in the casualty ward if it went on much longer.

  Well, I see Mr Pickles has just been informed, said Oriel.

  Don’t see what’s so funny, said her son.

  The laugh toned down to a fitful giggle that sounded safe enough for the moment. A window on the ground floor slid up and Dolly Pickles put her head out; she looked truly vile with her hair imploded, a fag on her long bottom lip. She shook her head, pulled it and her dishwater bangs inside, and ground the window down again.

  Go inside, Quick. I want to get dressed.

  He went, she pulled the flap to, and sat on the bed, wrinkling it in a most unsatisfactory way.

  Inside, Lester Lamb was looking for Quick. He knew damn-well that Fish had been out all night with Quick in the boat, and that the old girl would go mad, but he’d seen, too, the troughs full of fish still out on the truck with all the local cats fighting and gorging on them, and he knew he had to get to the boy before she did, because he just couldn’t imagine what’d happen if she saw.

  He went quietly from room to room in the strangely subdued house which felt like a storm had been through while they were all asleep to leave the atmosphere thick and exhausted, until he got to the back door and saw Quick coming. He motioned to Quick to come quickly, the boy seemed eaten by dread all of a sudden.

  You’ve left the fish out! he hissed.

  Oh, gawd!

  What’s the matter with you?

  I’m gettin married.

  Today?

  No. It’s—

  Good, well let’s get the fish in.

  The cats yowled and spat as Lester and Quick heaved the troughs down and hauled them inside. The house was waking quicker than usual. Through the shop and into the kitchen they went.

  It’s a good night’s worth, son.

  I’m gettin married, Dad. I’m marryin Rose next door.

  Good gawd!

  The old man threw himself onto a chair which slewed on its joints and collapsed beneath him, sending him onto the floor on his back. Pieces of wood slid down the lino like broken tackle on a reeling ship.

  She’s so … pretty, Lester said without breath. I’ve hurt me back.

  It’s gunna be orright, Dad.

  Let’s wait for the X-rays.

  No, I mean—

  Good Lawd! bellowed Oriel walking in on them. For pity’s sake, let’s be sensible about this!

  He fell over, Mum.

  Sit down over there!

  Red burst in. Good on ya, Quick. I knew you weren’t completely useless. You don’t deserve her.

  Elaine followed, white, peaky, outraged.

  Well, Lon’s asleep as usual, said Quick, and Fish’ll be down drectly.

  Who’s gunna declare the meeti
ng opened, then? said Red, grinning.

  I’ve hurt me back, said Lester.

  I’ll second that, said Quick, delirious with apprehension.

  Get off the floor, Lester, said Oriel.

  The floor’s yours, Dad, said Quick. The meeting’s opened.

  Oriel Lamb began to weep. It sounded like trains colliding.

  Well, it’s a step down from Tony from the uni, murmured Sam, rolling a fag philosophically, but he seems a good boy.

  That’s all he is, Dolly said in disgust. A good boy.

  Rose had never felt so much iron in her. There was this feeling of striding, of invincibility that she’d only ever had in dreams before. She shifted in her stance against the kitchen wall and felt the soreness still. There was nothing they could say, that anyone could say, to take this from her.

  You up the duff?

  Leave it out, Mum!

  They’ll think you are anyway. Six weeks is gunna look lovely.

  Not that having things look lovely has been your enduring obsession, Mother.

  I’m thinkin of you, you silly little bitch.

  Good, that makes two of us.

  They’ll hate it.

  You mean you hate it.

  That woman’ll tear you to bits.

  Chub came in.

  What’s all the yellin?

  I’m getting married to Quick Lamb in six weeks.

  Oh. There any bacon?

  It’ll be a bloody dry weddin, Sam said with a look of wonder.

  Not if we’re payin for it, it won’t, said Dolly. No flamin fear!

  Oh, murmured the old man. I forgot that. See, I knew I won that two-up money for something.

  You mean you’ve still got it? Dolly looked appalled.

  Under the mattress. Lost me nerve there for a while, I did.

  This is so funny, so bloody hilarious, said Dolly, not managing to sound amused. She wants our blessin, but she won’t ask for it.

  She’s proud.

  Stop smirkin like that, the both of yuz! said Dolly.

  What do you reckon, Dad?

  Oh, you know me, I’ll always back an outside chance.

  Rose kissed him and felt the urgency of his embrace until she could count the fingerless knuckles in the small of her back.