You look sick, said Dolly.
I’m not sick. What is all this anyway? What’s the summons? What’ve you been doing? Don’t answer that, I don’t wanna know.
I was sad.
What?
About Ted.
Oh dear. Here we go.
I loved him.
Your favourite.
People have em, Rose. You always loved Sam more than me.
He earned it.
People don’t earn it.
They do with me. Listen, I’m going. This is making me want to vomit.
I wanted to talk to you.
I don’t want any boozer’s justifications and sympathy talk.
Come back tomorrow.
I’ve got my own life now.
Come back.
No.
Rose.
Why?
I want to talk, just to talk.
I’m busy.
Doing what?
I’m just busy.
Come tomorrow. Please. I’m beggin you to come back tomorrow.
Rose left. Lester drove her away. The house fell back against the night sky like a dying planet.
Go see her, love, said Lester.
Why?
I dunno. I can’t stand the hate. It’ll kill you. You’re one of us now and I couldn’t bear to lose you. Quick’s hurtin. We all are. Go on with your life, love. It’s all there is.
Mothers
In the morning, Rose went again but Dolly was asleep. She stayed in the house with Elaine and Oriel, narrowing her eyes at their noise and bustle, until Dolly woke.
She went in strangely robbed of her anger and unprepared. She felt jittery and sad and feeble in all the ways she’d planned against since her first ever period.
Dolly was sitting up in bed with pillows about her like sandbags around a machine-gun nest.
Hello, Rose murmured.
Hello, said Dolly. A wan grin had fixed itself on her face halfway between coming and going.
Better?
Feel like shit, but I reckon that’s better.
Rose stood by the window where she could see the peeling fence and the wall of weeds.
Look like you better sit down.
I’m alright.
You’ll fall over. Siddown.
Rose pulled the chair over to the bedside.
Dolly raised her eyebrows. When you gettin pregnant again?
I’m not thinking about it, Rose said, flushing. Besides I haven’t had a period for months.
You need to see a doctor.
That’s a laugh.
Rose looked at her skirt, the way her knees made sharp peaks beneath it. God, even the angles her body made were mean looking now.
Anyway, why do you ask? she murmured, trying to be calm.
I was plannin on bein a grandmother. This mornin. That’s when I decided. Be good for me, you know. Jesus, I’d spoil em rotten, I would, givin em lollies and fizzy drinks. Let em wreck the bloody place. Reckon I’d be the worst bloody granma a kid could have—
Why not, Rose heard herself leap in, you were already the worst mother.
Dolly didn’t even stop.
They’d love me. I’d let em swear their heads off, give em noisy toys, take em to the pictures an stuff em with fairy floss. I wouldn’t even make em wear clothes, I wouldn’t make em do anything as long … as long as they came to see me.
Rose saw the old woman’s mouth sloping away toward weeping, and she realized that she had no teeth. She’d never noticed before. Rose had no idea what her mother would say next, no idea of what she might let out herself.
Outside it was a summer’s day. That dry, wondrous heat of the west. Out there it would feel like the meeting of desert and sea, the heat behind, the dark coolness ahead. Rose thought about it. Yes, she could be down by the river now, with a baby, a brown sunny baby beside her on the sand. Water would lap like cat’s milk and the air be heady with the scent of peppermint trees. There would be nothing to do but feel important and proud, to have the form against your body, to take a hand in your mouth and bite down those long, soft baby fingernails like some protective she animal, snuffle, smell, bask.
You’re a grandmother already, aren’t you? Rose said, finding her knees before her again. What about Ted’s kids?
They’re a thousand miles away. I don’t know the girl. Don’t know anything about em.
Well, one day, maybe.
Oh, yeah, they’re gonna all get on the train an come an see Granma Dolly.
They’ve got money. Ted was a good jockey, they say. He rode winners.
Dolly laughed. Imagine bein around a man who rode winners.
They were quiet again a few long, awkward moments.
You reckon you’d have missed him more, if he was a sister?
What kind of question is that, Mum? I never had a sister.
Yeah, you wanted one, though, eh?
Rose looked at her mother whose white, puffy face was impossible to read just now. I suppose. I haven’t thought about it much. I don’t know if I ever really thought about it, but I guess it’s true enough. I used to watch those Lamb girls and … think of the things they could tell each other. Used to watch that Hat, the eldest one, playing marbles with the boys, and I decided that the only way she could do it was because she had other sisters and it didn’t matter somehow. She didn’t have to play the part of the girl.
You turned out sort of prissy, didn’t you.
I had to make myself something!
Don’t worry about sisters, then. They always look better from a distance. I had seven. Sisters! Jesus, sisters. You’re better off with brothers.
I just lost one, remember?
Well, he was lost to us a good while back.
God, you sound like a book.
I reckon you’d know. You turned out the bookworm. What did you ever get out of em, anyway?
Rose wrung her gloves and threw them onto the bed. Some idea of how other people lived their lives, Mum. A look at real people.
Ho, real people.
Like mothers. What mothers are supposed to be like.
Mothers! Sisters, mothers! You found out what a mother’s like. You won’t forget me in a hurry. Don’t go moanin about sisters.
The heat went out of them quickly, surprising Rose, who had a thought that had never once come to her as a child.
What was your mother like, then? she all but whispered.
Dolly pulled the sheet up her body and slid down the pillows. Rose could have sworn the bed was shaking.
I had seven sisters. Jesus, I loved my father. My mother was always far away when I was around. There always did seem to be too many girls.
But what was she like? Your mother.
You should never trust a woman.
I thought it was men you hated.
Me? No, men are lovely. Gawd, I was mad about men all me life.
Yes, said Rose.
It’s women I hate.
Daughters.
No, daughters are different, Dolly said with a grave, measured tone. It’s sisters I hate most. You should be grateful you never had any.
I don’t get it, Mum.
My mother was my grandmother. My father was my grandfather.
What?
The second oldest sister, the one who made me feel like rubbish all my life, that one was my mother. There we were. There we were.
Rose felt things falling within her, a terrible shifting of weights.
My God. My God. Mum!
The old woman lay flat on the bed, bawling silently, her mouth wrought into the ugliest hole. She’d seen that ugliness before, the huge wordless grief of babies, in Quick’s brother. There were no tears in the old girl’s eyes; it was as though she’d been dried out forever in there. Rose Lamb got up out of her chair, put a knee up on the bed, hoisted herself, and felt the sobs beating up at her from the body beneath. The sound her mother made taking breath was like a window being torn from its hinges.
Oh, Mum. You ne
ver told me. You never ever said. Don’t cry, Mum. Please.
Outside, it was a summer’s day. The house twisted its joists, hugging inwards, sucking in air, and the two women wept together on the sagging bed.
Tonic
By the end of 1962 it looked as though the world might go on. The news in the papers got better, Quick got something of a pay rise, and Rose got a period. For so long there’d been things to fear. That someone might push a button, that Dolly would kill herself, that there would be no money at the end of the month, that their new house would never be finished, that Rose’s body might beat her in the end. Before things brightened up a little, even Lester gave up saying: We had it harder in our day.
Rose was glad of those talks with her mother. She found soft parts still left in herself, soft parts in Dolly as well, and in a way she figured it saved her from herself. It was love really, finding some love left. It was like tonic.
Rose still went to see her mother every day or two and usually came back furious. The old girl sat out on her backstep feeding chunks of topside beef to magpies. She was often sober, always abusive, and after a time her cursing became almost soothing in its steadiness. Dolly bitched and whined about everything until Rose began to realize that half the time the old girl was bunging it on—she was play acting just to amuse herself. Sure, there was still heat in the old battleaxe, but not much of an edge. When Rose went round, Dolly made her a cup of tea. They’d feed the birds, the old woman would be abominable, feign deafness and raise a hedge of irritability between them, and Rose would go home.
Late in spring, Rose began to swim in the river at Peppermint Grove. She’d start out from the boatshed and swim right around the Mosman Spit. When no one was about she even tried a few bombies and tin soldiers off the jetty. She felt all the childish impulses of the Geraldton days, and she went home ravenous and kept her food down. With summer coming on, she woke in the mornings thinking of all the things she could do instead of listing the things she refused to do or was incapable of. Sometimes she felt all the blood rising in her skin, feeding her, overriding her will. She was alive despite herself. She got out the old books, spent entire mornings at the river in their worlds. In the evenings she planted little lovenotes to Quick around the flat: in his socks, pinned to his undies, between dusty packets of condoms. Poor Quick. How he’d waited for her all these months. It was that pigheaded Lamb patience, and you had to love him for it. She felt the shadow in her, this dark eating thing inside, like an anger, and sensed that it’d always be with her. But Quick would hold her up beyond reason, even when it went into stupidmindedness. It wasn’t just the fact that she knew he could do it for her that made her love him. It was her certainty that he would.
As the weather warmed toward summer, Rose and Quick spent their spare time floating dreamily on the river in the Lamb boat. They talked like teenagers, catching up, making up time, finding words for how they felt. Marriage had been no dream. They’d worked their guts out, lived through sickness and worry and still their neat little suburban house wasn’t ready for them. Rose thought about returning to work somewhere, but already she was staring at babies in the street again. Quick was promoted to riding the new BSA station motorcycle, an evil beast of a thing with enough compression to put you over the bars during a kickstart.
They came home from the river one day to find Lester Lamb waiting for them on the bonnet of an ancient Rugby, dressed in his threadbare suit and looking gorgeously pleased with himself. He showed them the car. It was a dusty, black old banger with tyres smoother than a baby’s bum and rust beneath the paint like a spreading cold sore. He showed them every angle, every virtue, including the side-blinds he’d made himself from old X-rays which gave a curious effect of mortality to an afternoon drive: you saw the world through compound fractures, you saw the river in an old soldier’s lungs, sky through the skulls of shellshocked corporals.
It’s yours, he said, you need a car.
We need a car, said Quick.
But this is more than a car, said Rose, it’s an experience.
By Christmas, Quick had that old scrumwagon Rugby up and running, Rose was pregnant again, and the house out in the suburbs was almost finished. Quick moonlighted in the day, driving trucks and hammering up cheap furniture in a warehouse while Rose took in ironing between river swims. Nights off they went dancing and made galahs of themselves at the Embassy and later drove out to Cottesloe Beach to make love under an upturned skiff.
We’re getting somewhere, Rose thought. Our own house, a baby, money in the bank. She had dreams of furniture, neat rugs, lino tiles, a TV, the smell of Pine-O-Clean. A clean, orderly, separate place with fences and heavy curtains. Their own world.
By Christmas it looked a dead cert.
He Does
Red Lamb was a nurse and she liked to shock poor old Elaine.
Geez, I hate men’s—
Red! Elaine winced, held up a hand.
Aw, Elaine, it’s better to be disgusted than ignorant. Now did you know that—
Red, I don’t need to know anything.
Crikey, what’s this?
Into the kitchen came Lon all grazed and blackeyed and sweating, and by a stroke of bad timing he was followed in by his mother who caught one look at his face and shoved him cheeksfirst into the big freezerbox of the old Frigidaire.
Ice’ll help, she said. What bully did this to you?
A man, blubbered Lon, a fullgrowed man. His voice sounded a longway off coming from the freezerbox.
What did he do? Now tell me, I’m yer mother.
Hit me. He hit me.
In public?
Only people.
Did you deserve some punishment? Oriel said, suddenly pensive. Red opened a bottle of mecurochrome the size of a stout keg and got together some swabs.
Lon?
There’s a girl pregnant, said Lon from on ice.
No one could tell if Oriel fainted a moment or what, but she leant on that fridge door something shocking. You could hear Lon Lamb screaming three stops down the line.
Lucky it’s only his head in there, Red said to the old man who’d come running; if it was me doin the business he’d be losin his play bits.
Lon was married inside a fortnight, and when the minister said: Do you Logan Fitzwilliam Bruce Lamb take this Pansy Mullet to be your lawfully wedded wife? Oriel murmured darkly: He does.
They took a room at Cloudstreet, Lon and Pansy, and filled it with rage and weeping.
Doomiest
Sam rolls awake in the night with his stump ringing with pain. It goes right through him, into his chest, down his side. Godalmighty, a heart attack, he thinks. But it goes on and on, emanating from pieces of him he no longer owns. No, he thinks, it’s bloody doom. Big, big doomy doomier, doomiest. It hurt so much that tears roll back into his ears and the house seems to laugh at him. He wants to go to sleep and not wake up in the morning.
Flames
In her dream Oriel saw the bush and the city burning. People ran from their squawking homes to the riverbank with the flames gaining behind them, but they stopped, afraid, at the water and let the fire consume them on the grassy slope above the river.
The New House
Quick looks the business in his black helmet and leggings as he hammers the BSA out north to the new subdivisions. His Dougie MacArthur sunglasses flap against his cheeks. He leans, throttles into the turns, flies like an angel.
The new house stands in a street of similar new houses and Quick props the bike and goes in for a look. It’s all there on its patch of rubbkstrewn dirt. If he’s honest, he’d like some weatherboard old joint to remind him of farm days, happy childhood days, or even of Cloudstreet, but he knows Rose wants it fresh, new, clean, apart. Yeah, soon there’d be kids in the street, and the sound of lawnmowers.
And then in the late afternoon gloom someone steps out from behind a wall and comes towards him. Quick knows him. Oh, he knows him. It’s the blackfella wearing nothing but a beach towel and a pa
ir of rubber thongs.
Go home, says the black man. This isn’t your home. Go home to your home, mate.
Quick fronts him, emboldened by his uniform. This is a black man he’s talking to.
But the man lays five fingers spread on Quick’s chest. Go home. Quick turns. Already he’s alone.
Christmas
At Cloudstreet on Christmas Eve the timbers rattled like bones in a box. Lester’s marketfresh vegetables went brown in hours, and the milk curdled in the cans before the Lambs and Pickleses woke from vile, breathless dreams. A shitty smell came over the place and you’d swear there were more in the house than the headcount let on. Standing anywhere in Cloudstreet that day was like being in an overloaded ferry in a sou’wester. Oriel found herself needing the walls to keep her upright. The corridor was a lurching tunnel and the shop foetid. Sam woke and wished it was a work day so he could pack his gladstone and heave-ho. Dolly threw up her tea in the sink with spots in her eyes big as snarling faces. When you blinked, shadows ripped by. Out in the yard, the last of the shrivelled mulberries rained on Oriel’s tent like a bloodstorm.
The pig sang all through Christmas with Fish sitting by beneath the fig tree listening and mashing his fists. What’s he say, Fish? Can you pick it? Over and over, the same phrases. Carn, Fish, what’s with the pork?
Sam went out in the afternoon to find that his cockatoo was gone. Absconded bird. He went walking the streets calling Fair dinkum? Fair dinkum? All the old houses were coming down and salmon brick duplexes were going up in their place. The streets were full of jacked up FJs with foxtails and glasspacks. There seemed to be no children. When Sam came home birdless, Fish Lamb next door was bellowing and bawling and the piano was thundering.
On Christmas morning the house filled with foul and frantic shades and a howling set up in the surrounding streets. In the dawn the pig was nearly torn to pieces by a pack of dogs that jumped the fence while the lot of them slept on, resisting it as a dream.