Now and then Fish comes into his room and looks about, wide-eyed and humming. Quick stiffs up with guilt, with sadness but sometimes he’ll touch his ruined brother just to hear his musical giggle. It’s the same giggle. It’s still Fish Lamb, his brother.
Fair dinkum, Quick Lamb hates himself.
But at night those cripples, the reffos, the starving weeping wounded on his walls wait till Quick is asleep and then they dance in their ragged borders, buckle paper and sag on their pins as they throw themselves into a weird joyous tumult over his bed. They never make a sound and he always sleeps through, but it happens all the same — men throw off their mattresses and soldiers tear away bandages and the dead rise out of the ground, inheriting the lonely quiet of the room until near morning, when they’re exhausted by happiness and freedom, and they resume their places for the dawn so that Quick Lamb might trap them again with his sorrow.
Props
Lester was closing up the shop amidst the long verandah shadows when a blackfella appeared on the step. It took him by surprise. He turned from the bolted shutters and the man was there. He was tall and thin, the colour of a burnt kettle, and he had a shoulderload of long dry branches.
Wanna buy props, Mister?
Oh. Oh. Props.
The black man’s hair stood like a deserted beehive. His feet were bare. His toes splayed on the ground like he was as much bird as he was man.
Gooduns. Not too much. Cut em meself.
Wait a minute, I’ll ask the missus. Lester turned and went to go in, but stopped. Listen, you might’s well come through yerself. She’ll be out the back. No use standin about out here.
The man hesitated.
Can leave the props just inside the door here, if you like.
The black man nodded. He unshouldered the sticks and stepped inside. Lester saw his eyes suddenly widen. The whites were porcelain and they seemed to vibrate. Something clicked in the man’s throat. Lester, stunned, watched him hold his pink palms out like a man with his hands against a window. He went back carefully, as if moving back in his own footsteps, his eyes roving about all the time from wall to ceiling to floor, and as soon as he was back over the threshold he turned and ran. Lester watched him go with his heart punching. The house grew quiet around him.
The props stayed just inside the door for two days until Oriel seized them and shoved her washing lines up with them.
The Lamb Girls
The time it took to fold a lace hanky, that’s all it took for Hat Lamb and Elaine Lamb and Red Lamb to know that they liked the city better than the farm. Cloudstreet was like somewhere out of the movies. All of them loved the staircase; they’d never even imagined a place with landings and banisters before. Hat liked sliding down with her skirt up around her ears, but Elaine wouldn’t contemplate that kind of activity, even though she was Hat’s twin. Elaine imagined sweeping down with hoops in her skirt and a bustle, to a cologne-smelling beau with his hat in his hand. Red, who was only twelve, just liked to spit from the landing and hit the sad little cactus in the terracotta pot in the hall.
People came into the shop and there were the Lamb girls, the unmistakeable Lamb girls with their dresses sewn from the same conglomerate of scrap material their mother seemed to tack together in bolts, and their severe hairdos and priceless complexions, their efficiency and sharpness. All of them knew how to count, and the twins had begun to take other forms of arithmetic as well, especially when soldiers came into the shop, bored and fatheaded. Sometimes Yanks came in flashing their big teeth, slapping on the accent thick as bread. They were boys with the voices of men, and it sent the Lamb girls absolutely troppo. Hat had a broad smile and she was starting to look like a woman. Elaine was already prone to ‘spells’ and she never smiled much for fear of seeming young and simple. Red was just a tomboy, she didn’t think about smiling or not smiling. There was a gap, now that Fish wasn’t being the ratbag of the family, and Red was out to fill it. She beat boys at cricket and she terrorized the bike sheds at school with the way she could throw a punch.
The Lamb girls didn’t speak to each other much, but when they did they all agreed that things were on the up.
Medicine
By May, when a chill had come into the nights and the street was subdued and indoorsy after dark with the Lambs’ chooks racked along their perch like mumbling hats, and the air so still you could hear the sea miles off and the river tide eating at the land, Lester and Oriel went to bed bonesore but grateful. It was a time when they talked like the old comrades they were, the way they’d bedtalked in those early farm years before the Depression when the kids hadn’t yet crowded them back into reputation and role.
You know what I miss? Lester said. The singin, that’s what I miss.
Talkin church again. Lester yull always miss singin, army, church or school.
Worldly songs are pretty, love, but the old church songs, they’re beautiful, you gotta say it.
Yairs, she said, it’s true enough. But we shouldn’t talk about it. It’ll only upset us.
Strike, we hold a grudge, Orry.
My oath, she grinned in the halfdark.
The house shifted on its stumps. Their new rooster crowed itself stupid ten hours short of daybreak.
Quick’s lookin blue, said Lester.
Well, Oriel murmured, that’s natural enough.
Blames himself, thinks we blame him.
Don’t we?
Lester turned onto his back to see the ceiling mottled with streetlight. I don’t know. I know it’s not his fault. Why would it be? It’s just what happened.
But do you blame him?
Lester said nothing.
We blame him, she said. And I blame you. And God.
It scares me, he said, hearin you think like that.
Me too, she said. I can’t help it. I’m a sinner, Lest.
Do you ever wish you were like her next door?
Oriel sniffed. Mrs Pickles? No. I couldn’t take ten minutes of it.
She’s hard as nails.
Hard as lard, you mean. I’m the one hard as nails.
Lester coughed out a laugh.
We can’t help it, Oriel said vaguely, none of us can.
You always said people can help anythin and everythin.
That was once.
What about Fish?
Least of all Fish.
No, no, I meant what are we gunna do with him?
We’ll give him the gentlest life we can, we’ll make it the best for him we know how.
Lester agonized. How do we know what’s best? How do we make him happy? What does he think?
Oriel thought about this. It’s like he’s three years old …
You know, Lester says, almost giggly with relief, we’ve never talked about him like this since it—
Lester be quiet, I’m thinkin.
He waited. Lester thought about poor old Fish, that skylarking ratbag turned brainless overnight. There’d been times he’d thought the kid was better dead than to have to live all his life as a child, but he knew that being alive was being alive and you couldn’t tamper with that, you couldn’t underestimate it. Life was something you didn’t argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death. Oriel began to snore. Lester gave up waiting and went off himself.
Having both watched parents hurried to the grave by medicine, Oriel and Lester weren’t chuffed about doctors. Neither had stepped inside hospital or surgery since childhood. The children were born wherever they were. Hat and Elaine in the kitchen at Margaret. Quick in the lockup of the police station, Red in the saddle room, and Lon was born at the side of the road in the shadow of the broken-axled Chev. Hard work and plenty of food, that kept the quacks away. And a bit of care, Oriel would say. She could fix most ills with a bit of this and that. She conceded that doctors were like governments: it was possible that they served some use though it didn’t pay to put them to the test.