In the till, Oriel said, wiping something off Lon’s chin. Money has no place at the dinner table. And so he left and had himself a shower, listening to the roar of the gas heater in the sleepout that had become the bathroom.
All night Cloudstreet ticked, but it didn’t go off.
The River
In the morning Quick discovers that the old man is full of whistle and laugh. The shop’s closed and he’s scrounging recruits for a trip to Fremantle.
Cam! he’s yelling, Cam, let’s go! We’ll drop a line from the wharf, we’ll buy fish n chips, we’ll get sunburnt, we’ll let the harbour know we’re there! Cam, we’ll absolutely Lamb the place!
Fish is at the breakfast table, spinning the knife.
Knife never lies, he says, and five times the blade comes to a stop pointing at him, and he laughs with wonder and looks at his distorted reflection in the blade. Hah, knife never lies!
Yeah, Fish, but you never ask it any questions, says Quick.
Ask no questions, get no lies, the old man says.
The girls sweep in and the old girl turns red-armed from the spitting stove and looks them all over.
Cam, Orry, the old man says to her.
Oriel levels a bristler of a stare at him: You gunna grace us with your company today?
Geez, love I’m gunna be fair bountiful with the company today. If it wasn’t Sunday you’d be wearin a new dress an silk stockens before lunchtime, so you’ll have to make do with a fambly day with only fish, food and fun to keep you from black despair. Whaddayereckon?
She says nothing, but she’s in the truck with the rest of them when they pull out with the gearbox squealing.
All the way down, they race the train to Fremantle, skylarking along in and out of traffic to bob over hills and see the engineer give them the thumb. The sky is blue as gas and the wind rifles through the holes and cracks that the Lamb truck’s made of. You can see this mob coming a long way — all hands and open mouths and unruliness.
Quick sits on the tray with his back to the cab. He can smell the salt as they pass Cottesloe. With one arm he holds Fish steady and he sits on the other hand to soften the jolts that go right up his bum every time the truck hits a hole in the limestone road. Quick feels himself today. His father is honouring the promise after all. They’ve missed the funeral, but they’re going to Freo all the same. For a while there he wasn’t sure what it’d mean if he didn’t.
The water beneath the wharf is green. Lank strands of algae lift and settle in it, staying fast to their roots on the wetblack piles that stretch to blurring like a forest away to beyond sight. The Lambs sit or scurry on the network of footways and landings that sit just out of the water, their light gut lines taut with lead and watersurge. Lon tortures blowfish and lets them inflate full and prickly so he can stamp on their bellies and hear the pistol shot it makes and the way the girls hiss at him for doing it. Lester plays a jig on his noseflute and doesn’t catch any fish. Red fools with the sinkers in the plywood box. Hat hauls in gardies and skippy, keeping a ruthless count. Elaine has her feet in the water and feels a headache coming on. Fish lies face down, cooing, peering through the plank cracks at the way the green mass rises to him and stops at the final moment. Quick takes a herring now and then and watches his mother who baits and casts with a determination that’s kind of frightening; she scowls at bites and sucks air in through her teeth as she jags and pulls in, spooling line neatly in her lap. There’s a tin bucket drumming with fish at her side. Now and then she clips Lon over the ear or looks flat at the old man who grins like a lizard and goes on looking happy and useless.
At noon the old man disappears and comes back with a great, sweaty parcel of fish and chips which they unravel and guts down with the cordial that the old girl has cooling in her bucket of fish. They’re all squinching the butcher’s paper up and dipping their hands in the water to wash off the grease when their mother addresses the old man in a quiet, level voice.
How much did you win, then?
The old man takes up his noseflute and starts into ‘Road to Gundagai’. His eyes bounce, his big flat feet clomp on the boards and then he stops.
A hundred and six quid.
What about him?
Sam?
The old girl’s eyes bulge as if to say ‘so it’s Sam now, is it?’
The old man grins: Two hundred.
She just baits up a hook and casts as if they haven’t even spoken.
In the afternoon the old man buys a boat. He walks up to a bloke in the fishermen’s harbour and offers him money. The old girl is still as a post. They’ve just been strolling — the lot of them — now that the fish have gone off the bite with the new tide, and he just comes out with it. The whole mob stops dead and watches. No one moves the entire time it’s going on, and when the old man goes off to get the truck they still don’t move.
The boat is a good sixteen foot, clinkerbuilt and heavy as hell. A big skiff sort of boat, and it takes about a second and a half for it to be obvious that it’ll never fit across the tray of the truck. The man who’s just sold the boat laughs and slaps his legs. He’s fat and red and his scalp is flaky. He’s not mean about it, he’s just a good humoured sort of bloke. Everyone stands around and looks at everybody else — except Fish who’s looking at the water, and the old girl who’s looking at absolutely nothing and no one, and in a moment the old man turns to Quick and says:
What about you row it home, boy?
Dead quiet.
On me own?
You can take someone.
Up the river, you mean?
The old girl goes and gets in the truck. The door slams so hard bits of rust fall off it.
Yeah, you could put in at Crawley. That’s not far from home.
Hat spits. It’s miles, Dad. Don’t be daft. She’s looking at him like he’s the most dickheaded human she’s ever encountered and it hurts Quick to see.
I can do it, he says.
Right. Good bloke, Quick. Who’s goin with him as first mate?
Fish, says Quick. I want Fish.
Quick sees the panic in the old man’s face and he knows he’s pushing it here, but he knows he’ll win. It’s man on man.
Orright. If he wants to. If yer careful.
And Quick smiles up a storm.
It was hard to believe how big the ships in the harbour were when you were creeping by at water level. Quick could see that it wasn’t lost on Fish who sat in the stern with his jaw halfway to his chest, the shadows of cranes and winches falling across his brow. The boat felt good to Quick. It sat well in the water, was dry inside and he felt it cut along just fine. In the rowlocks, the oars chafed quietly in a reassuring way. The truck and everybody was out of sight now and it was just him and Fish. He felt the blood running crazy in him. He was scared. Packin em, pooping himself nearly, with all that fat, green, dredged water and the walls the wharf and tankers made high above. He rowed and kept his eye on Fish and it was a surprise how soon the bridge came over them with its restless, chunky channel water bumping underneath. It was cold under there. Fish giggled as a train roared across and it took Quick’s mind off the confusion of tide and flow and how hard the water felt against the oars, how it was like rowing in gravel all of a moment. Then they were through into the afternoon sun again, with the river wider, gentler, with boats moored at the shallow edges of the channel where grass came down the banks to sandy beaches littered with wrecked bikes and prams amid up-washed mussel shells and tidal hedges of weed.