They just cook it, like yer ole lady cooks a batch a scones. Cept more regular and a bit softer.
Dolly hissed at him without malice.
Out they come, pennies, zacs, deaners, shillins. The place stinksa money. Ya feel it in yer hair and on yer clobber. Spend all day breathin in gold dust. Fair’s fair, the place is like a cake shop and the smell always gets ya hungry.
Chops are done, said Dolly.
They sat down to eat, and Sam told them all about the noise and the machines and the heat of furnaces and the bars on the windows and the colour the limestone had gone on the outside. He described the wheezy press and the smell of kero and the way all the blokes thought he’d lost his fingers on some secret mission in an unknown archipelago instead of from sleepiness and bad luck while carting birdshit. They called him Sam and got all serious in his presence. He saluted with his thumb and half finger and they didn’t laugh.
Rose saw it all as clear as if she’d been there herself. After dinner she worked on her geography, colouring maps and diagrams at the kitchen table while her parents smoked and talked in short, low bursts. Ted and Chub disappeared outside for a while. Everything was normal and right. There were dishes in the sink and the sound of kids playing in the street and the trains passing smutty wind. Something settled over the kitchen. Rose kept the colours inside the lines and all the patterns were proper, sensible and neat. Happiness. That’s what it was.
Winning
In spring Sam Pickles went back to the September races and started winning. All through October, and into November he bet on a gelding called Blackbutt and saw him place or win every time. Sam knew it didn’t make any sense at all that this horse should keep winning. But luck came from some other place, bringing weirdness and aid into the world and he didn’t question it. He kept every winning ticket in the hat band of his Akubra. He bought binoculars and a grey suit and you could spot him there amidst the soldiers and sailors and women, despite his smallness, because he looked like a punter, and more importantly, a winner. When they thundered around on the last turn, filling the air with sods and dust and great creaturely gasps of horsepower, Sam Pickles stood still with his teeth set and his blue eyes clear to see Blackbutt come home the money. His blood was charged, he felt the breath of magic on him. He came home with his pockets stuffed, his stump aching, and the kids grabbing at him on the stairs to feel success.
We’ve come a long way, he said to them. By crikey we have. Eh? Eh?
One afternoon when she got home, Rose found a desk in her room. It was dark and compact, built from jarrah, and in every drawer there were sharpened pencils, ink, paper and books. She stood there, smelling the wood and the varnish, the newness and shock of it. When she turned around he was at the door. Rose began to blubber. He laughed and knocked on wood with his fingerless fist. The boys ran in with their airguns and it was like an early Christmas.
All spring it went on. They had good shoes and black market meat, sly grog and shop toys. The Pickles kids looked out across the fence and saw the Lambs digging noisily in the garden in their patched clothes, their square ordinary bodies dark with sweat, and they felt they had gotten back the edge. Rose and Ted and Chub slept and only dreamt of more.
Dolly sat up in the evenings and drank stout with lemonade. When Sam came out of bed to get her she’d be soft and warm and quiet and she kissed him like she was sucking at something he had. He felt her legs fasten around his waist and her teeth in his neck as they ground up the bedclothes. Her breath was sweet and she cried out enough to make him breathless and frantic. He could have wept with triumph. But when he was asleep, skewed off on his own side of the bed with his arm across his eyes, Dolly would get up again with his mess coming all down her legs, and she’d go out and open another bottle and sit in the dark alone.
Fair Dinkum
Rose heard it first. The old man was coming in after work. The steak was spitting on the stove and the place smelled of pepper.
Fair dinkum!
Rose looked at her mother. It wasn’t the old man’s voice, but it sure was his gait they heard coming down the hall. They were his boots alright.
Fairrrrgh! Dink. Dinkum.
He’s drunk, Dolly said.
Rose saw a ladder in her stocking.
And then in he came with a damn bird on his shoulder. He looked radiant and proud and prettywell sober. The bird was just an ordinary pink cockatoo with those clear side-winding eyes behind a beak like an ingrown toenail. From Sam’s shoulder, the bird looked down at Rose and Dolly with an expression of hauteur.
Say hello to Stan, girls! said Sam, dropping his gladstone bag to the floor.
Gawd help us, said Dolly.
Fair flamin dinkum! said the bird.
Rose laughed and Stan lifted a clawed old foot in her direction.
I won im, Sam said.
What in, a mugs’ lottery?
Just a bet.
He’s a beaut, said Rose. What does he eat?
New pennies.
That’ll be cheap, said Dolly.
We can shake him out at Christmas, said Rose. Like a money box.
Fair dinkum! said Stan.
They laughed and laughed, but little did they know. Two days before Christmas Stan crapped out three ha’pennies and a shilling, enough to buy seed for months.
When those coins dropped out of him onto the kitchen table two days before Christmas, he cocked his head at all present. He fixed his eyes on them with irascible turns of his head.
Eh? he said. Eh? What?
Stan always paid his way.
In time the house absorbed the bird, though it could never fully absorb his irritable shrieks. Even the neighbours winced at it. Whenever he was about the house Sam took Stan on his shoulder. The rest of the time the bird side-stepped up and down the fence, cocking his head and dodging the honkynuts Lon Lamb shot at him with a rubber band. Sam Pickles liked to feel Stan’s claws in his shoulder. It made him look a little taller. Rose said it made him look like a pirate. Dolly said it made him look like a perch. Ted and Chub didn’t care. Stan bit them and they lost interest.
Stan’s wing was never clipped. He could always have flown away.
Quick Lamb’s Sadness Radar
Quick Lamb reads the paper every day and sees the long lists of the missing believed killed, and the notices in memorium for sons and fathers and brothers. The war’s over, he knows, but he picks up sadness like he’s got radar for it. The whole world’s trying to get back to peace but somewhere, always somewhere there’s craters and rubble and still the lists and the stories coming home as though it’ll never let itself be over. There’s families on this street who’ve lost men, and while they remember the war will still be on.
We’re lucky, he thinks; the old man was too old and I was too young. We’ve got food, coupons, a full ration book. We’re gettin away light.
Quick sees kids at school who are poor. The Lambs are patched and barefooted, but at lunchtime their mother always brings warm pies and pasties to the gate. Quick and Lon and Red meet up wordlessly and eat together. Through the winter Quick notices Wogga McBride sitting with his little brother Darren. Wogga McBride is in grade six, one below Quick. They have a queer way of eating their sandwiches: whatever it is they bring wrapped in vine leaves gets eaten under cover of their hands in a way so quick and deft that it’s impossible to know what it is they have. Maybe it’s Quick’s misery radar, but he can’t let it be. He watches them every day from the corner of his eye until it’s almost October, and by then he knows what he’s begun to suspect — Wogga McBride and his brother aren’t eating anything at all; they’re just pretending. Out of pride, they’re going through the motions of unwrapping, passing, commenting on, eating food that doesn’t exist.