LAMB SMALLGOODS
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They watched her laugh. She straightened her hair and lit a smoke to calm herself, leaned against the verandah post.
Well, how’s it doing, ducks?
Lester Lamb began covering the fruit with damp hessian bags and doing other closing down kind of things while the little box woman lit on her with that steely stare.
A shillin and ha’p’nny, Oriel Lamb said.
You’ll get rich if you keep it up. Dolly had meant it to be more friendly, more comradely, but she heard ridicule in her tone and watched Mrs Lamb brace up. Geez, I’m makin a friend here, she thought.
And you’ll have an income, Mrs Pickles.
Lester Lamb smiled weakly as though he was neutral in this, and he put the shutter down apologetically in her face.
W
E’RE
L
OCAL
.
it said:
W
E’RE
H
ONEST
,
it went on,
W
E’RE
H
ERE
.
And there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it, that was for sure.
Stickability
It wasn’t long before everyone on Cloud Street and anyone who lived near it knew about the Lambs’ new shop, and not long before they started to spend as much as they gawked. At dawn you’d see the little woman out there sending Lester and Quick off to the markets across the rails, and the whole still street would be full of the coughing of the truck and the reverberation of Oriel’s instructions. Nobody was ever left in doubt as to how many stones of spuds she thought necessary for a day’s trading, or how to feel the ripest watermelon or what to tell that man Boswell when he started trying to fence bad tomatoes onto them again. Even if you couldn’t see those meaty little arms and the sexless ashen bob and the sensible boots on her through your bedroom window and your morning blear, there wasn’t a chance you’d escape the sound of her sending the family about its business. People started to call her the sergeant-major and they observed the way the shop came to life at the sound of her drill yell.
Soon the place was a regular feature of the street, a pedestrian intersection, a map point. It was where you came to buy a West Australian and talk about the progress of the war with your neighbours. It was where you could smell that daft beanpole husband of hers baking his cakes, though, fair dinkum, you had to hand it to the coot, he could bake his way to Parliament if he set his mind to it. Though he thought gettin a rise was only what happened inside an oven. Kids mobbed in on Saturday mornings before the footy to buy up the pasties he made. All the Lamb girls would be there, rattling the till, climbing on ladders, shaking out tuppenny measures of jubes. They’d blush and scowl when their father came to the counter singing a loopy tune.
Whacka diddle di-do
How the heck could I know
She wanted my heart
for a billy cart
He accompanied himself with a jar of humbugs or a feather duster, and said whatever came into his head and changed the tune from verse to verse. Nothing seemed to suppress his good spirits in those weeks. Nothing could stop him singing except the sound of Oriel’s boots coming through the house behind the shop.
The house on Cloud Street took on a wonky aspect. It was still a big, old, rundown eyesore, but it seemed to have taken on an unbalanced life with all that activity and foment on the Lamb side, as though the place was an old stroke survivor paralysed down one side. The Pickleses didn’t seem to go out much, and if they did they got swallowed up and lost in the picture. They were weak in numbers and all the activity seemed to cause them to fade from vision.
Oh, you’re from next door the shop, love? people’d say to Dolly. You’n yer hubby rentin offa them, are yez?
Neighbours somehow got it into their heads that the Pickleses had come after the Lambs, and that stuck in Dolly’s guts. Locals took pity on the crippled hubby and all, but they couldn’t help but feel that the Pickleses weren’t made of the same stuff as their tenants. They didn’t have stickability. Now that was a word that moved camp along Cloud Street quickly that autumn. After a month or two no one could remember its introduction. But then neither was it easy to remember Cloud Street without the shop. After a time the shop was Cloud Street, and people said it, Cloudstreet, in one word. Bought the cauli at Cloudstreet. Slip over to Cloudstreet, willya love, and buy us a tin of Bushells and a few slices of ham. Cloudstreet.
The Dance
Quick Lamb tries to get on with his life. It’s been a happy one, being part of a mob, having farm fun and long dreamy days free of things. But it’s tough now, anchored to half a house, being a glorified boarder in a city he’s never even seen before. Maybe if he could get out into the paddocks more, out where air is stronger than memory so he could at least sometimes get shot of that terrible noiseless moment when he is walking along and Fish is just gone. He’d just kept walking and his brother, Fish — the handsome kid, the smart kid who made people laugh — Fish was under, and the net was just floating across him like the angel of death. He knows it should have been him, not Fish.
In this new house Quick has a room of his own for the first time in his life, and he’s not real sure how he likes it. The girls are all bunched together in a room the size of a dance hall down the front, and he knows they’d rather split up, being girls and all. He feels their looks in the corridor and gets the guilts. Besides, he’s not sure how he likes it, being alone. He wonders if maybe it’s a banishment, his quiet punishment for the Fish thing, but he reckons if it was that they were after, they’d bung him in with whiny little Lon. It’s a good, big room that he has, though he’s got nothing at all to fill it with. His iron bed stands like an exhibit in the middle with enough room to train a footy team on either side. It takes time to get the feel of it, what with his lonelysick wakefulness and the rumble and quake of the house going on all night like the bellyaches of a sleeping whale.
Down the back when he’s building the chookhouse, Quick finds a pile of newspapers and magazines someone’s tied up and thrown over the fence. Now and then he opens a paper and sees a blinded prisoner of war or a crying baby or some poor fleeing reffo running with a mattress across his back, and he’ll tear it out with care, take it up to his private room and pin it to the flaky wall to remind himself that he is alive, he is lucky, he is still healthy, and his brother is not. When he works on his spelling assignments he looks up and sees the gallery of the miserable; it grows all the time and they look down at him, Quick Lamb the Survivor, and he knows he deserves their scourging stares.