Quick, I don’t even know what it means anymore. If it means being alone, I don’t want it. If I’m gunna be independent do you think I need a husband? And a kid? And a mother and father, and inlaws and friends and neighbours? When I want to be independent I retire. I go skinny and puke. You’ve seen me like that. I just begin to disappear. But I want to live, I want to be with people, Quick. I want to battle it out. I don’t want our new house. I want the life I have. Don’t be disappointed.
Quick took a suck on the brandy. Disappointed? Love, I’m putrid with … with happiness. I’ve been wantin to tell you for months.
He rolled a big dry mallee root onto the fire and a carnival of sparks went up reeling. Kangaroos thumped through the wheat invisible. The earth smelt golden.
Why did they call you Quick? I never knew.
Come on, I told you plenty of times.
In the night Quick woke with the moon white on his face, and Fish was awake beside him, kissing him on the cheek.
What’s the matter, Fish? You cold?
The moon was all over his face, or it seemed to be until Quick saw that moony light was coming off Fish himself.
There was a long, steady rustling in the wheat, rhythmic as the sound of sleep. Quick thought of a herd of roos grazing, but it came closer and was too musical to ignore. He propped himself on an elbow and saw a line of figures moving between the trees. Fish sat up beside him and let out a gasp of delight. Quick shook Rose awake and saw the black widening of her eyes. They were children, naked children. Placid faced, mildly curious, silent but for their footfalls, rising from the ground like a mineral spring, following the faint defile of the land to a gravity beyond them, faces and arms, eyes and legs travelling in eddies, some familiar somehow in the multitude that grew to a vast winding expanse, passing them with a lapping sound of feet. Rose sniffed, awake, but none of them spoke anymore, not even Wax Harry who watched curious as the tide of naked children swirled around them, dizzying, heady, making a vortex, an indrawing whirl deeper than exhaustion, until the stars were low enough to touch their eyes heavy, and the great adventure of sleep took them back. The children parted the wheat like the wind itself and took all night to pass.
Soon
Can you see, Fish, see me close as a whisper in the tidespace your longing has made? Pouring through a tiny crack we are, running to the sea which will not fill with us for we came from it and return to it, and this moment they have seen us too, your gift to them, the man, the woman, the baby, a gift bought with pain and shortening. Soon you’ll be a man, Fish, though only for a moment, long enough to see, smell, touch, hear, taste the muted glory of wholeness and finish what was begun only a moment ago down there where the fire crackles by the bank and those skinny girls are singing, where the light is outswinging on the water and your brother laughing. The earth slips away, Fish, and soon, soon you’ll be yourself, and we’ll be us; you and me. Soon!
Stayin
Quick and Rose drove home wild as kids, roaring down the scarp into the city with a happy madness up their noses like lemonade bubbles. Harry and Fish roistered in the back with the fractured light upon their faces.
Quick pulled onto the front lawn at Cloudstreet as Elaine was opening the shop and the first dogs were gathering to beg out in front of the big old hemiplegic looking joint. The X-ray Rugby burst open with them all tumbling out wild as kindergarteners at lunchtime—Rose, Harry, Fish, Quick—taking Elaine so much by surprise that she dropped the shutter and damnnear brought down the wall with it. Windows opened, and the house grew heads. Roosters crowed up a panic, and dogs began to bark.
You’re not due home, said Elaine who tried not to shout.
We’re havin a picnic, said Quick. To celebrate.
What picnic? said Sam, hoisting his gladstone, fingering his work hat. Celebrate what?
Bush fever, said Lester, wiping flour from his arms.
What’s this foolishness? roared Oriel, emerging from the shop. It’s Wednesday morning, work to be done.
They’re celebratin, said Sam.
All of us, said Quick.
We’re staying, said Rose.
No, we’re stayin, said Lester.
You’re stayin? asked Oriel, lifting the shop shutter again. The heavy old tin flap quivered in her hands as she scrutinized Rose, the girl who took her son from within.
Long as it takes, said Rose.
To do what? As it takes to do what?
To get old and die. To count the angels on the head of a pin, I dunno. To get sick of it. A day, a week, a Test Match, a session of parliament, a decade, I don’t know.
Oriel’s fingers gave out and the shutter crashed to with a whang that sent a couple of weatherboards fluttering down from the top storey in sympathy.
Till the bloody walls come down, Oriel!
A dozen slack jaws wind up smiles as dust rises from the verandah.
Picnic, you reckon? says Lester.
Dolly goes inside for a hat.
Twenty years, said Quick.
What the hell, said Sam, throwing down his gladstone bag.
Don’t stand there, youse bludgers! yelled Oriel. Pack the Chev, lock the shop, grab a hamper. Let’s go to the river. Let’s do it right for once!
Moon, Sun, Stars
On the long grassy bank beneath the peppermint trees and the cavernous roots of the Moreton Bay figs, they lay blankets and white tablecloths which break up in the filtered sunlight and they sprawl in their workclothes and stockings, rollers in, buns half out. Out of the crates come hams, cold chickens, lettuce salad, hardboiled eggs and asparagus, potato salad and shredded carrot, chutney, bread, a jar of anchovies and a vat of pickled onions. Lemonade, Coke, ginger beer, squeezed juices and a hip flask of Chateau Tanunda. A collective groan goes up at the sight of the white linen napkins that Dolly hauls out.
A weddin present, she says. Could never think of a decent bloody reason to get them dirty.
The university clock chimes and a rowing team slides past with the sun in its eyes. A formation of pelicans rises bigbodied from the water, the sweet coppery water where jellyfish float and blowfish bloat and the slow wheeling schools of mullet divide and meet without decision.
And another crowd has gathered. I can see them in the shade of the trees, the river of faces from before, the dark and the light, the forgotten, the silent, the missing who watch Lester dance his silly longlegged jig while half choking on his roast chook. They hear his accordion burring like a deck of cards and see Sam feeling its wind in his face. Ah, to Sam it smells like fortune itself. The Lambs and the Pickleses begin to dance, Oriel and Dolly, Red and Elaine, and even Chub is up off his arse and dancing. Quick and Rose have Harry between them like a sail in the wind, now Lon is up with Pansy and the dance spreads, a mad, yokel twenty-year dance that sets the shadows moving in sight behind them where a black man leaves the trees like a bird and goes laughing into the sun with a great hot breeze that rolls the roof of the sky and tilts the leaves above them till the gathering is dizzy with laughter, full and gargling with it. And someone else is going, his sweaty hands are flexing. He hears nothing but the water. The sound of it has been in his ears all his life and he’s hungry for it.
Mind you, the world goes on regardless. In Fremantle Gaol they’re cutting a man from the scaffold and taking the bag from his head still afraid, still hating him enough to deny him his final wish—to be buried beside his drowned son. Oh, yes, the world goes its way, don’t worry.
But here, here by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful the river, the Lambs and the Pickleses are lighting up the morning like a dream. Students stop to watch. Council workers grin and nudge each other. It’s a sight to behold. It warms the living and stirs the dead. And speeds the leaving.
Because there, down along the jetty, fat and barefoot, runs Fish Lamb with a great slack grin on his face shining with chickengrease and liberty. His shirt tail is out and so is his tongue. The boards rattle and ring with nails and years and spikes and barnacle c
hatter and dried bait leaps behind him. Below, the water flexes and falls silver brown gold black. Birdshadows fall across him. His trousers rattle with knucklebones, pretty stones and pennies to make running music, going music, blood music in his temples and ears till right out at the end he finds the steps and the landing, the diving board in its sheath of guano. And the water.
The water.
And the mirror it makes.
Ah, the water, the water, the water.
Beneath the trees, in the midst of the dance, someone stirs, comes running, comes shouting alarm.
A bird turns out of the sun.
Fish leans out and the water is beautiful. All that country below, the soft winy country with its shifts of colour, its dark, marvellous call. Ah, yes.
The man stops running before he even reaches the jetty. Quick makes himself stop and already he’s crying.
Fish goes out sighing, slow, slow to the water that smacks him kisses when he hits. Down he slopes into the long spiral, drinking, drinking his way into the tumble past the dim panic of muscle and nerve into a queer and bursting fullness. And a hesitation, a pause for a few moments. I’m a man for that long, I feel my manhood, I recognize myself whole and human, know my story for just that long, long enough to see how we’ve come, how we’ve all battled in the same corridor that time makes for us, and I’m Fish Lamb for those seconds it takes to die, as long as it takes to drink the river, as long as it took to tell you all this, and then my walls are tipping and I burst into the moon, sun and stars of who I really am. Being Fish Lamb. Perfectly. Always. Everyplace. Me.
SUN poured careless into the quiet yard where vegetables teemed in the earth and fruit hung, where a scarfaced pig sang sweetly at the sky and a small congregation amassed in the light. Beneath the ancient mulberry tree whose blood stained the soil around her, a square little woman unpegged and folded a tent, taking it corner to corner, minding its brittle, rimed fabric, smacking the dust from it. Another woman stepped forward, tottering a little. She crossed the long gash in the ground where yesterday there’d been a fence, and she took a corner of the tent herself. The little boxy woman and the big blowsy woman folded end to end till the tent was a parcel that they hefted to their shoulders across the greensmelling grass, and then they went inside the big old house whose door stood open, pressed back by the breeze they made in passing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Winton was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1960. He has lived in France, Ireland, and Greece, and currently lives in Western Australia with his wife and three children. He began publishing his fiction as a teenager and his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/ Vogel Award in 1981. Since then he has won the Miles Franklin (twice), the Banjo Prize, the Deo Gloria Award, and the Wilderness Society Environment Award. in 1995 his novel The Riders was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tim Winton’s work is published in twelve languages and has been successfully adapted for stage, screen, and radio. His most recent novel, Dirt Music, confirms his status as the preeminent Australian novelist of his generation.
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Tim Winton, Cloudstreet
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