cloudstreet
TIM WINTON
SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION
For Sam Mifflin Sadie Mifflin Olive Winton and Les Winton with love and gratitude.
SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION
Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Tim Winton
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 2002
Originally published in Australia in 1991 by McPhee Gribble
SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 0-7432-3441-3
ISBN 13: 978-0-743-23441-2
eISBN 13: 978-1-439-18855-2
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to several people who kindly made working space available to me during the writing of this book: to Joe Sullivan and the late Peter Bartlett for Spencer’s Cottage; to Leonard Bernstein for the room at Vlihos; and to the Australia Council for the studio in Paris.
Thanks to Erica and Howard Willis for invaluable help, and to Denise Winton for years of hard work.
Some of this story was written with the aid of a fellowship from the Literary Arts Board of the Australia Council and a travelling scholarship from the Marten Bequest in 1987 and 1988.
Shall we gather at the river Where bright angel-feet have trod …
WILL you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water’s edge.
Twenty years, they all say, sprawling and drinking. There’s ginger beer, staggerjuice and hot flasks of tea. There’s pasties, a ham, chickenlegs and a basket of oranges, potato salad and dried figs. There are things spilling from jars and bags.
The speech is silenced by a melodious belch which gets big applause. Someone blurts on a baby’s belly and a song strikes up. Unless you knew, you’d think they were a whole group, an earthly vision. Because, look, even the missing are there, the gone and taken are with them in the shade pools of the peppermints by the beautiful, the beautiful the river. And even now, one of the here is leaving.
He hears nothing but the water, and the sound of it has been in his ears all his life. Shirt buttons askew, his new black shoes filling with sand, he strides along the beach near the river’s edge nearly hyperventilating with excitement. His tongue can’t lie still; it rounds his mouth, kicks inside like a mullet. He tramps through the footprints of the city’s early morning rambles and nightly assignations toward the jetty he’s been watching the past halfhour. He breaks into a run. His shirt-tail works its way out.
It’s low tide so he reaches the steps to the jetty without even wetting his shoes, though he would have waded there if need be, waded without a qualm, because he’s hungry for the water, he wants it more than ever.
Three cheers go up back there in the trees on the bank. But he’s running; seeing slats of river between the planks, with his big overripe man’s body quivering with happiness. Near the end of the jetty he slows so he can negotiate the steel ladder down to the fishing platform. He’s so close to the water. A great, gobbling laugh pours out of him. No hand in his trouser belt. The water to himself. The silver-skinned river.
He sits. He leans out over it and sees his face with hair dangling, his filthy great smile, teeth, teeth, teeth, and then he leans out harder, peering to see all the wonders inside. It’s all there, all the great and glorious, the sweet and simple. All.
Within a minute he’ll have it, and it’ll have him, and for a few seconds he’ll truly be a man. A flicker, then a burst of consciousness on his shooting way, and he’ll savour that healing all the rest of his journey, having felt it, having known the story for just a moment.
From the broad vaults and spaces you can see it all again because it never ceases to be. You can see that figure teetering out over the water, looking into your face, and you can see the crowd up on the treethick bank behind him finishing this momentous day off and getting ready to wonder where he is. And you can’t help but worry for them, love them, want for them—those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.
I
The Shifty Shadow is Lurking
ROSE Pickles knew something bad was going to happen. Something really bad, this time. She itched in her awful woollen bathing suit and watched her brothers and a whole mob of other kids chucking bombies off the end of the jetty in the bronze evening light. Fishing boats were coming in along the breakwater for the night, their diesels throbbing like blood. Back under the Norfolk pines gulls bickered on the grass and fought for the scraps of uneaten lunches that schoolkids had thrown there. The sun was in the sea. She stood up and called.
Ted! Chub! Carn, it’s late!
Ted, who was a year older than her, pretended not to hear, and he came up the ladder dripping, pigeontoed, and dived off again, holding one knee, hitting the water so that he made an artillery report—ker-thump—and a great gout of water rose up at her feet.
She got up and left them there. They can do what they like, she thought. Rose was a slender, brown girl, with dark straight hair, cut hard across her forehead. She was a pretty kid, but not as pretty as her mother. Well, that’s what everyone told her. She wasn’t vain, but it stuck in her guts, having someone telling you that every day of your life. Probably in a minute or two, when she got home, someone’d tell her again, someone in the public bar or the Ladies’ Lounge. They’d be all swilling for closing time and there’d be a great roar of talk, and she’d try to slip upstairs without getting caught up. She wasn’t in the mood for it this evening. Yeah, something terrible was up. Not the war, not school, but something to do with her. She didn’t know if she could bear any more bad luck. In one year they’d lost the house, the old man had been through two jobs and all the savings, and now they were living in Uncle Joel’s pub.
Rose had never felt a shadow like this before, but she’d heard the old boy go on about it often enough. Well, she wondered, I bet he’s squirmin out there now, out on the islands, feelin this dark luck comin on. She stopped under the trees and looked back out over Champion Bay. The boys were silhouettes now. She still heard their laughter. The sea was turning black. Yeah, he’d be squirmin. And if he wasn’t, he should be.
Sam Pickles was a fool to get out of bed that day, and he knew it ever after. In the sagging, hammocky cot he caught the scent of his father, the invalid port and tobacco, the closeness in the sheets of him, and he woke with a grunt. He jerked upright and looked about the dormitory hut. Other men were sleeping in the half-light before dawn with their salt-white boots paired beneath them, their photos and empty bottles awry on bedside benches, and another hard stupid day of labour hanging ahead of them in the twilig
ht. Sam knew, as anybody will know, that when you wake up on a summer morning fifty miles out to sea on an island made entirely of birdshit and fag-ends, where only yesterday the rubbershod foot of a Japanese soldier was washed up, and you turn in your bed and smell your dead father right beside you, then you know the shifty shadow of God is lurking. And Sam knew damnwell that when the shifty shadow is about, you roll yourself a smoke and stay under the sheet and don’t move till you see what happens. When the foreman comes in to kick your arse, you pull the sheet up over your head and tell him you’re sick enough to die, to give up women, gambling, life itself. And if you’re smart you’ll let him blow and bellow, but you’ll hang onto that bed till you hear whose missus is dead, or who’s won the football raffle, or what poor bastard’s the proud father of twins, or whose mob it is that’s won the war. You stay right there till the shadow’s fallen across whoever’s lucky or unlucky enough, and then when it’s all over, you go out and get on with your business. Unless you’re just plain bloody stupid and think you can tell which way the shadow’s fallen. Then you’ll think: nah, this one hasn’t got me number on it. Today’s not me day. It’s someone elses. And you may or may not be right.
Sam Pickles, who thought today wasn’t his day to be worried, and who happened to be dead wrong, just waited for the odour of his old man to leave him, and then cocked his head, whistled through his teeth at the shiftiness of it all, and slid off the cot. Tiny crabs scuttered across the boards away from him. He went and stood on the stoop and saw the ocean, flat as sheetmetal. He headed for the thunderbox with gulls, terns, shags and cockroaches watching him come. The toilet was built on a catwalk hanging off the edge of the island. The seat was only eight feet above the water on a low tide, and on a high tide you were liable to experience what some welltravelled soul called nature’s bidet. Or a shark might go for your heart the long way.
Out there, with his bum hanging over the still lagoon, Sam Pickles told himself today was just a day—more work, more sweat, and salt, diesel, guano. Some talk of the war, maybe, and a game of cards in the evening. He looked at his hands which were white with work. Every time he looked at them he knew he was a small man, small enough to be the jockey his father once wanted him to be. What a thing, hoping for smallness in a son. Well, he was small, in more ways than he cared to think about, but Sam never was a jockey.
He rolled a smoke and looked out beyond the Nissen huts and the water tower to where the dozers and trucks and oilsmeared engine blocks were waiting. A couple of scurvy-looking dogs sniffed about at the perimeter of the compound, finding leftover crayfish and abalone from last night’s meal. Well, he’d just have to square the day away. It was a dream, that’s all.
At the long trough outside his hut, Sam washed in the cool tank water, and as though to arm himself against such a shifty start to the day, he shaved as well. No one else was up yet. There was nothing to distract him. He got thinking about the old man again. When he looked at himself in the shard of mirror hanging from the water tank, that’s who he saw.
Sam’s father Merv had been a water diviner. He went round all his life with a forked stick and a piece of fence wire, and when he was sober he found water and fed the family on the proceeds. He was a soft, sentimental sort of man, and he never beat Sam. The boy went with him sometimes to watch that stick quiver and tremble like a terrier’s snout and see the old man tugging at his beard as he sang ‘Click Go The Shears’ and tracked back and forth across the sandy coastal plain. Sam followed him, loved him, listened to him talk. He believed deeply in luck, the old man, though he was careful never to say the word. He called it the shifty shadow of God. All his life he paid close attention to the movements of that shadow. He taught Sam to see it passing, feel it hovering, because he said it was those shifts that governed a man’s life and it always paid to be ahead of the play. If the chill of its shade felt good, you went out to meet it like a droughted farmer goes out, arms wide, to greet the raincloud, but if you got that sick, queer feeling in your belly, you had to stay put and do nothing but breathe and there was a good chance it would pass you by. It was as though luck made choices, that it could think. If you greeted it, it came to you; if you shunned it, it backed away.
Queer, now he thought of it, but Sam had spent his boyhood sharing a bed with the old man. And he was an old man, fifty, when Sam was born. At six every evening, his father retired with the Geraldton Gazette and a bottle, and Sam climbed in beside him to doze against that wheezy chest, hear the rustle of a turning page, smell the pipesmoke and the port. As a general tonic, the old man drank a bottle of Penfolds Invalid each evening; he said it gave him sweet sleep.
Sam’s mother slept in the narrow child’s bed in the next room. She was a simple, clean, gloomy woman, much younger than her husband. Even as a boy, he barely thought about her. She was good to him, but she suffered for her lifelong inability to be a man.
One morning Sam woke to a creeping chill and found the old man dead beside him. His mouth was open and his gums exposed. His mother came in to find him stuffing the old boy’s dentures in. He stopped rigid, they exchanged looks, and it appeared, with the upper plate left the way it was, that the old man had died eating a small piano. The townspeople wrote fond obituaries about Merv Pickles, water diviner. In the end they named the racetrack after him in tribute to his finding water there, and probably for having made it his second home. Without doubt, his faithful and lifelong loss to the bookies had probably underwritten the place for a good twenty years.
People had loved him. He was poor and foolish and people will always have a place in their hearts for the harmless. He loved to gamble, for it was another way of finding water, a divination that set his whole body sparking. Sam Pickles grew up on that racetrack, hanging around the stables or by the final turn where the Patterson’s Curse grew knee high and the ground vibrated with all that passing flesh. Old Merv had Sam down as a rider. He was small and there was something about it in his blood, but when Merv died the dream went with him. A gambler’s wife has ideas of her own. Fools breed a hardness in others they can’t know. Sam Pickles tried to knuckle down to his mother’s way. He came to love labour the way his father never did, but there was always that nose for chance he’d inherited, an excitement in random shifts, the sudden leaping out of the unforeseen. He did badly at school and was apprenticed to a butcher. Then one day, with the shifty shadow upon him, he shot through, leaving his mother without a son, the butcher without an arse to kick, and a footy team without a snappy rover for whom the ball always fell the right way. A lot of things had happened since that day. His luck had waxed and waned. Like a gambler he thought the equation was about even, though any plant, animal or mineral could have told him he was on a lifelong losing streak. Plenty of queer things had occurred, but he’d never before woken up smelling the old man. It could only mean something big. Even as a boy he’d known that his father’s soul had touched him on the way up. He knew that meant something big and quiet and scary as hell.
Men were stirring and cursing now, and the cook was spitting out behind the mess hall. They were hard men here—crims, fighters, scabs, gamblers—but the government didn’t seem to give a damn who they were as long as they filled quotas. They were here to mine guano for phosphate, and there was no shortage of that. Some places, a man could get thighdeep in the stuff if he wanted to. Dozers scooped it, trucked it and dumped it on barges. In Sam’s hut some wag had painted the motto on the door: Give em shit. And that’s what they did. Sam didn’t mind the work. It was better for his asthma than the wheat dust on the mainland wharf, where he’d been foreman. And the money was good. Right now he needed the dough, what with a wife and three kids to feed. In a single bad year he’d gambled away everything he’d ever owned and he figured he’d see the war out hauling birdcrap to make up. A man could always recover his losses.
These islands were the sort of place to put the wind up a man, though. He knew about all those murders and mutinies. The Batavia business. There’d been madne
ss out on these sea rocks since whitefellas had first run into them. Under the night sky they glowed white and when you heard some blokes had found a man’s foot in a rubber boot, you wondered whether you weren’t living on some outpost of Hell itself. His cousin Joel had worked here as a crayfisherman before he made his pile on the horses. Joel said sometimes you heard the sound of men strangling women at night, but in the morning you always told yourself it was the birds nesting.
Give em shit, boys! the cook yelled as they left the mess hut.
Sam got down to the boat with a full belly and waited for his partner Nobby. Keep the day ahead of you, that’s what the old man used to say. Nobby rolled up to the wheelhouse and belched. He was a fat brand of man, balding, with bleached earhair and a great capacity for hatred. He had an ongoing grievance with everybody, all forms of life. As he came in, he made a sturdy beginning to the morning.
That fucken Wilson, I tellya—
Sam pushed past him and went astern to cast off the line.
A man’d be hardly blamed for murderin that barsted in is sleep—
He started the winch to draw an empty barge alongside.
It was Nobby who made the work hard. The sound of his voice was like something grinding away without oil or maintenance, and Sam had learnt to think across the top of it, to look into the water and think of coral trout, jewfish, baldchin, plan another night’s fishing, conjure up the sight of himself with a beer by the fire and a drumful of boiling crays. That’s what he was thinking of when the cable caught his glove and his hand was taken from him. His fingers were between the cogs before he could draw breath, and he felt his knuckles break in a second. Madness rose behind his eyes as Nobby fumbled with the gears, cursing him, cursing the winch, till he got him free and Sam tore the glove off, squealing, as four fingers fell to the deck and danced like half a pound of live prawns.