Won’t be seein youse blokes again, today.
Reckon you will, mate, said Sam.
That’s a tired horse.
That’s a winner.
You know the odds.
I’m a punter, mate, Sam said with a smile. And I’ll be back with these, he held up the tickets, and I’ll see you smilin on the other side of yer face.
So when the heads and forelegs and riders’ arms exploded onto the track in a great solid mass of desperation, Lester Lamb had his lungs full and his fists closed. The mob surged and spread by the first turn. Grass sods and whip hands thickened the air.
For a while Lester couldn’t see who was where; he couldn’t even understand the gabble of the race caller over the PA. Out on the long stretch on the far side of the track, the mob was lengthening. Beside him, Sam Pickles was smiling beneath the binoculars. Lester noticed a lone seagull lazing in some curly updraft over the track. He knew he should have been home with his family. As the lead horses came into the turn, he began to yell like a lunatic. The horses’ eyes were like stones, their legs beat the ground. He heard their tortured grunts, the bellows rush of air in and out of them. Their manes sprayed and slapped. The knees of jockeys rode high into their necks and Lester heard the little shouts of riders goading one another. Three horses shouldered their way into the open and reached out with their great long shining bodies, their heads down ploughing wind, straining forward until the sound and heave of them infected the people at the post with a crazy, dancing abandon. Lester laughed and screamed and felt the crowd beating at his sides, and as the horses passed with a sound like a back alley beating, he heard the reedy cackle of Sam Pickles and little else. As the stragglers stumped past the post, the crowd was already sighing and it felt to Lester Lamb like the last finishing moments with a woman where heat suddenly turned to sweat and power became fatigue. It was like sex, alright, and he was thrilled and ashamed and he couldn’t have stopped laughing for all the love in heaven.
Blackbutt! the man with the PA yelled. It’s Blackbutt, by crikey!
Quick stands in the dusk and stacks pine crates on the verandah. He’s forgotten all about Wogga McBride’s funeral by now and what he’s wondering about now is where his old man is. It wasn’t eight o’clock this morning when his mother came roiling and spoiling upstairs to get him out of bed with the persuasive front edge of her boot. She had him yelping and hollering and on the banisters, laughing with fright and relief before he was even awake.
It’s not your fault you’ll grow into a man, Quick Lamb, she was saying all the way down, but it’s not mine either! Pull an oar or get off the boat!
Fish seemed delirious with joy at breakfast. The moment he saw Quick slide cowering into the kitchen, Fish set an empty bowl going on the table so it roared and rattled, rose and fell, like it was laughing at him.
And so here he is, pulling oar, even now it’s nearly dark and the old man still hasn’t turned up. Somewhere upstairs Fish is singing and the girls are talking low amongst themselves. Back in the kitchen, the old girl is thrashing a few shirts, drowning them in Velvet suds, wringing their necks and beating their headless bodies on the table, singing Throw out the Lifeline’ in the sweetest voice. The whole place is like a bomb ready to go off.
Rose pushed through the grey and khaki trouser legs of all those sour, stinking boozers in the public bar who shouted through their noses and made wings of their elbows and holes of their mouths, and she found the door and shoved against it.
Come back in five years! one of them yelled.
Geez, he’s not fussy.
Not a touch on her old girl, I reckon.
It took another heft against the door for it to swing open and let Rose Pickles out into the cool, clean night air, and when the door swung to behind her, the noise and smoke of the pub stayed inside.
She sat down against the wall, below the ugly roses in the leadlight window to feel how all her teeth met perfectly, jaw to jaw, and how, if she set them firm enough and kept up the pressure, little lights came into her head.
Damn her, damn her, damn her to hell and shit and piss and sick! She’s drunk again and loud and vile with her eyes full of hate and meanness, but I’ll get her out in the end. I’ll drag her home. I’ll kick her shins, bite her arse. I’ll get her out.
Dolly was rooted to her soft chair in the Ladies’ Lounge with all those wrinkled, smokefaced old girls who laughed like a flock of galahs and fluffed and preened and looked about with their black, still eyes, cold as anything. They rattled and prattled with gossip and rubbish, and yes, even their mouths were like horny beaks, and their tongues like dry, swollen fingers. Rose hated them, and she hated her mother with them. She should be home, heck someone should be home. Rose didn’t even know where the boys were—they’d shot through early on, and when her mother had gone off at opening time this morning, Rose had sat alone in her half of the house and listened to the Lambs blundering about nextdoor in the shop and in all the rooms, and after a while she couldn’t bear the way they just went on and worked and whistled and chiacked around as though nothing was up, so she went walking. It wasn’t far to Kings Park. The grasses were all brown with summer, nuts and seeds lay popping with the heat on the ground. Birds scratched around in the trees. Rose walked into the raw bush and found a place in the shade and just sat thinking nothing until the sun got so high it just drilled down through the leaves and into her skull. Sometimes she hated being alive.
But right now, out in the cooling street with no one coming past, she just felt all hard inside. She’d get the old girl out, even if she had to wait till closing time. She was hungry and angry, her heart felt like a fist, and she knew that if she took her time she was strong enough to do anything at all.
It was stone quiet when Sam and Lester got in. On the Pickles side it was quiet because Dolly was out like a bag of spuds on the bed, and the boys still weren’t home. Sam took one look at the blue anger in Rose’s face and went to run himself a bath.
Fair dinkum, said his bird.
Yeah. Fair dinkum, said Sam.
On the Lamb side no one was absent, but neither were they speaking. Lester came in with dinner in progress and barely an eye lifted to acknowledge his arrival, though Fish giggled, as if under instruction not to. Lester found no cutlery at his place and no plate warming in the oven. He put his rolls of money on the table and heard an intake of air from the girls.
In the till, Oriel said, wiping something off Lon’s chin. Money has no place at the dinner table. And so he left and had himself a shower, listening to the roar of the gas heater in the sleepout that had become the bathroom.
All night Cloudstreet ticked, but it didn’t go off.
The River
In the morning Quick discovers that the old man is full of whistle and laugh. The shop’s closed and he’s scrounging recruits for a trip to Fremantle.
Cam! he’s yelling, Cam, let’s go! We’ll drop a line from the wharf, we’ll buy fish n chips, we’ll get sunburnt, we’ll let the harbour know we’re there! Cam, we’ll absolutely Lamb the place!
Fish is at the breakfast table, spinning the knife.
Knife never lies, he says, and five times the blade comes to a stop pointing at him, and he laughs with wonder and looks at his distorted reflection in the blade. Hah, knife never lies!
Yeah, Fish, but you never ask it any questions, says Quick.
Ask no questions, get no lies, the old man says.
The girls sweep in and the old girl turns red-armed from the spitting stove and looks them all over.
Cam, Orry, the old man says to her.
Oriel levels a bristler of a stare at him: You gunna grace us with your company today?
Geez, love I’m gunna be fair bountiful with the company today. If it wasn’t Sunday you’d be wearin a new dress an silk stockens before lunchtime, so you’ll have to make do with a fambly day with only fish, food and fun to keep you from black despair. Whaddayereckon?
She says nothing, but she’
s in the truck with the rest of them when they pull out with the gearbox squealing.
All the way down, they race the train to Fremantle, skylarking along in and out of traffic to bob over hills and see the engineer give them the thumb. The sky is blue as gas and the wind rifles through the holes and cracks that the Lamb truck’s made of. You can see this mob coming a long way—all hands and open mouths and unruliness.
Quick sits on the tray with his back to the cab. He can smell the salt as they pass Cottesloe. With one arm he holds Fish steady and he sits on the other hand to soften the jolts that go right up his bum every time the truck hits a hole in the limestone road. Quick feels himself today. His father is honouring the promise after all. They’ve missed the funeral, but they’re going to Freo all the same. For a while there he wasn’t sure what it’d mean if he didn’t.
The water beneath the wharf is green. Lank strands of algae lift and settle in it, staying fast to their roots on the wetblack piles that stretch to blurring like a forest away to beyond sight. The Lambs sit or scurry on the network of footways and landings that sit just out of the water, their light gut lines taut with lead and watersurge. Lon tortures blowfish and lets them inflate full and prickly so he can stamp on their bellies and hear the pistol shot it makes and the way the girls hiss at him for doing it. Lester plays a jig on his noseflute and doesn’t catch any fish. Red fools with the sinkers in the plywood box. Hat hauls in gardies and skippy, keeping a ruthless count. Elaine has her feet in the water and feels a headache coming on. Fish lies face down, cooing, peering through the plank cracks at the way the green mass rises to him and stops at the final moment. Quick takes a herring now and then and watches his mother who baits and casts with a determination that’s kind of frightening; she scowls at bites and sucks air in through her teeth as she jags and pulls in, spooling line neatly in her lap. There’s a tin bucket drumming with fish at her side. Now and then she clips Lon over the ear or looks flat at the old man who grins like a lizard and goes on looking happy and useless.
At noon the old man disappears and comes back with a great, sweaty parcel of fish and chips which they unravel and guts down with the cordial that the old girl has cooling in her bucket of fish. They’re all squinching the butcher’s paper up and dipping their hands in the water to wash off the grease when their mother addresses the old man in a quiet, level voice.
How much did you win, then?
The old man takes up his noseflute and starts into ‘Road to Gundagai’. His eyes bounce, his big flat feet clomp on the boards and then he stops.
A hundred and six quid.
What about him?
Sam?
The old girl’s eyes bulge as if to say ‘so it’s Sam now, is it?’
The old man grins: Two hundred.
She just baits up a hook and casts as if they haven’t even spoken.
In the afternoon the old man buys a boat. He walks up to a bloke in the fishermen’s harbour and offers him money. The old girl is still as a post. They’ve just been strolling—the lot of them—now that the fish have gone off the bite with the new tide, and he just comes out with it. The whole mob stops dead and watches. No one moves the entire time it’s going on, and when the old man goes off to get the truck they still don’t move.
The boat is a good sixteen foot, clinkerbuilt and heavy as hell. A big skiff sort of boat, and it takes about a second and a half for it to be obvious that it’ll never fit across the tray of the truck. The man who’s just sold the boat laughs and slaps his legs. He’s fat and red and his scalp is flaky. He’s not mean about it, he’s just a good humoured sort of bloke. Everyone stands around and looks at everybody else—except Fish who’s looking at the water, and the old girl who’s looking at absolutely nothing and no one, and in a moment the old man turns to Quick and says:
What about you row it home, boy?
Dead quiet.
On me own?
You can take someone.
Up the river, you mean?
The old girl goes and gets in the truck. The door slams so hard bits of rust fall off it.
Yeah, you could put in at Crawley. That’s not far from home.
Hat spits. It’s miles, Dad. Don’t be daft. She’s looking at him like he’s the most dickheaded human she’s ever encountered and it hurts Quick to see.
I can do it, he says.
Right. Good bloke, Quick. Who’s goin with him as first mate?
Fish, says Quick. I want Fish.
Quick sees the panic in the old man’s face and he knows he’s pushing it here, but he knows he’ll win. It’s man on man.
Orright. If he wants to. If yer careful.
And Quick smiles up a storm.
It was hard to believe how big the ships in the harbour were when you were creeping by at water level. Quick could see that it wasn’t lost on Fish who sat in the stern with his jaw halfway to his chest, the shadows of cranes and winches falling across his brow. The boat felt good to Quick. It sat well in the water, was dry inside and he felt it cut along just fine. In the rowlocks, the oars chafed quietly in a reassuring way. The truck and everybody was out of sight now and it was just him and Fish. He felt the blood running crazy in him. He was scared. Packin em, pooping himself nearly, with all that fat, green, dredged water and the walls the wharf and tankers made high above. He rowed and kept his eye on Fish and it was a surprise how soon the bridge came over them with its restless, chunky channel water bumping underneath. It was cold under there. Fish giggled as a train roared across and it took Quick’s mind off the confusion of tide and flow and how hard the water felt against the oars, how it was like rowing in gravel all of a moment. Then they were through into the afternoon sun again, with the river wider, gentler, with boats moored at the shallow edges of the channel where grass came down the banks to sandy beaches littered with wrecked bikes and prams amid up-washed mussel shells and tidal hedges of weed.
Orright? Quick asked Fish.
The river’s big.
My oath.
Quick watched the whorling wake behind him and felt good at how straight it was. He wasn’t too worried now; his bum felt good on the seat, the handles of the oars weren’t too big for him and he liked how they stretched out so far and kept balance right there in his palms.
Cracker boat, eh?
Yeah.
It’s ours Fish.
Whacko! yelled Fish. A gull dived across the stern, slapped the water and was gone.
Oriel Lamb shoved her hands into the dishwater and didn’t utter a sound. It was hot enough to cook in but she went ahead scouring and scrubbing, letting herself absorb its heat into her own until she felt fire behind her eyes. It was even making him sweat, she knew, him standing there dumb against the kitchenette, waiting for her to say something. She slapped dishes onto the draining board. Her hands were the colour of crayfish. He can wait, she thought; he can jolly-well, flaminwell, he can damnwell wait. But now that he was wiping sweat from his face with the teatowel there was a stubbornness coming on him. He was getting ready to wait and that twisted the heat up in her still more. She thought: people murder each other. Yes, it’s possible that you could just take up that meatskewer there and ram it into his lungs. Lord, she never thought it likely that he’d hold out like this, defy her, defy the whole burning rightness of her. And then he began to sing:
There’s a track winding back to an old-fashioned shack along the road to Gundagai—
She hefted the big china gravyboat and swung it with a backhand sweep that caught him square in the belly hard enough to beat the wind out of him, hard enough to knock him back against the kitchenette and slip and hit the floor bum first. Oriel put the gravyboat down on the draining board and the handle came away, still round her fingers.
Has my life been a waste? she said in a flat, still tone. Has it been that useless?.
But Lester said nothing. He sat there. It looked like he was making plans to get some air into him somehow and it gave her no satisfaction at all.
; It didn’t feel so bad to have sore hands when you knew that you’d left East Fremantle behind and passed Rocky Bay, with all its puking foundries and limestone cliffs, for the long stretch through Melville and the sugar factory whose pipes came down to the water to send rainbows out into the channel. Quick saw yachts moored in flocks over on the Mosman shore and the great, long scar of the sandspit. Shags sat high on channel markers to watch them pass.
It’s a long way, Fish said. Is it a long way, Quick?
Yeah, mate. It’s a fair whack, orright.
Quick was starting to wonder if the old man was the full quid. He wasn’t sure if even a fullgrown man could do this. It was late. The sun was sitting low now, right back where they’d come from.
Can I do?
Do what? Quick asked.
Do the sticks. The rowers.
Quick rested a moment and felt the boat glide along upstream.
Orright. We’ll share. Then we’ll go faster, eh.
Fish damn near rolled them out of the boat in his excitement to get up there and it took all Quick’s will not to yell at him.
It was lucky they were headed in the long bellied arc around the Mosman spit because that was the only direction they were ever likely to go in, the way Fish was rowing. Quick pulled hard, but Fish seemed bent on digging all the water out of the river, hauling and grunting so they heeled around to port. Quick hoped Fish’d get bored by the time they needed a straight run, though he figured it’d be dark by then anyway.
Lester sparked up the truck in the dusk and pulled out into the street. Down on the tracks, an engine was hammering up from West Perth with the city lights behind. No one saw him go, he was sure. He felt prickly with nerves; his mouth tasted like sand.