Hat and Elaine went to their parents about it but did not get satisfaction. Lester and Oriel had always measured an eye for an eye.
Everything in the world seemed to happen just before Christmas.
Dolly Pickles decided never to speak to Oriel Lamb again.
Sam Pickles won a pig in a pub raffle and donated it to the Lamb family in gratitude for nursing his missus back to health.
The cockatoo bit Chub on the lip, got a taste for it and began an offensive that lasted all week. Chub took to wearing a box on his head. Here comes the Cardboard Kelly Gang, people said.
Ted Pickles kissed a girl on the sand at Pelican Point and she showed him a thing or two. It changed his life.
Rose Pickles read Jane Eyre and decided never to give it back to the public library. She scraped and rubbed to remove all signs of ownership from it, but each morning she woke to see the stamp still bright on the endpapers: CITY OF PERTH. In the end she cut it out, but it always grew back in her mind’s eye. She took it back and her old man paid the fine. They cancelled her membership.
Next door Fish struck up a friendship with the pig.
On a bad tip from Sam, Lester Lamb bought a clapped out racehorse to pull his new delivery cart.
Elaine had a migraine every day.
Hat became unofficial marble champion of Cloud Street. By Christmas Eve no one would play her because there were no marbles left to lose. Her mother said she was too old to play doogs in the street, but Hat loved to be a winner.
Red Lamb saw Ted Pickles with his hands inside Mary Modine’s bathers, and it didn’t change her life one bit.
Over the fence, Lon Lamb saw Chub Pickles being pursued by the pink cocky, and he laughed so loud he was wearing a bucket on his head within hours.
Quick caught nine dozen tailor out in the boat at Nedlands one day, and came back so burnt that he couldn’t chew, bend, sit or stand. He saw Rose Pickles watching Fish in no man’s land and knew she was in love with his brother.
Oriel Lamb went out and bought a tent. She bought a steel box and a padlock for the till and the accounts book and took to hiding them.
ThePig
The pig is down the back in a pen that’s just been tossed up for him by Sam and Lester, and Fish is standing there to look, to look. It’s late in the afternoon and all the birds are crashing back into the trees and the great summer sky is disrobing in swirls. The pig is pink and hairy with smart little eyes and a nose like a wet light plug.
He’s all yours, Sam says.
Preciate it, Lester says.
Better butcher im quick, I reckon. The council wouldn’t like it.
They wouldn’t like Cloudstreet beginnin to finish, says Lester.
Fish looks. The pig turns and looks back. The two men wander back up to the house and leave them alone. Fish scratches inside his shorts. The bristly animal flexes a shoulder. Shadows from the lilac tree, the lemon, the almond, fall across him like camouflage. It’s quiet.
Give us a squirt with the hose, wouldja? the pig says.
Fish looks at the pig and giggles. Orright.
He gets the hose, fumbles with the tap, and with his finger over the nozzle, he sprays the pig up and down until the ground in the pen turns miry and the pig is streaked with mud. From up the house Lester bellows.
Turn that water off, Fish! There’s a drought on!
Thanks anyway, cobber, says the pig.
Fish regards the pig a good while, forgetful of the hose water that drills into the dirt, bubbling up sand and sticks. The runoff makes a long spewy black rivulet that proceeds down the yard into the strawberries and the early corn.
Fish! Oy, Fish!
The pig winks and rolls in the bog. He kicks his legs up and his trotters clack together. The sun is low over the roofs of the neighbourhood. There is the smell of oncoming night, of pollen setting, the sound of kids fighting bathtime. Lester comes down, waving his hands.
Don’t drown the pig, Fish. We’re savin him for Christmas. We’re gunna eat him.
No!
I’ll drink to that, says the pig.
Lester stands there. He looks at Fish. He looks at the porker. He peeps over the fence. The pig. The flamin pig. The pig has just spoken. It’s no language that he can understand, but there’s no doubt. He feels a little crook, like maybe he should go over to that tree and puke.
I like him, Lestah.
He talks?
Yep.
Oh, my gawd.
Lester looks at his retarded son again and once more at the pig.
The pig talks.
I likes him.
Yeah, I bet.
The pig snuffles, lets off a few syllables: aka sembon itwa. It’s tongues, that’s what it is. A blasted Pentecostal pig.
And you understand him?
Yep. I likes him.
Always the miracles you don’t need. It’s not a simple world, Fish. It’s not.
The pig grunts, as though this fact is self evident. He heaves onto his side and regards Lester and Fish with detachment. He sighs and the sky squeezes out its last light. Mosquitoes are out already. Lester stands there in the twilight. Fish comes close and puts a finger through Lester’s belt loop. The pig clears its throat and begins to hum under its breath.
I won’t have the proceeds, the dividends of gambling in my yard or on my table, said Oriel, and she got down her notebook to quote at him.
If the rich gamble, they do it with money filched from the wage earner. If the poor, they play with their children’s bread. Where, indeed, is there a class that may gamble and rob none?
Mary Gilmore, she said.
Who?
Never mind.
We have to keep the pig, said Lester.
Why, pray tell?
It was a present. Sam’s grateful to you. Besides, Fish has taken a shine to it.
He shouldn’t have been put in the situation where he’d—
Oh, just be reasonable! Lester yelled, scaring himself with his boldness. The boy thinks the pig’s his friend.
Reasonable! You call that reasonable?
Oriel. Love.
Don’t you Oriel Love me.
There’s another thing.
There’ll always be another thing.
The pig talks.
Oriel put down her pen and closed the account book. She looked at him with an expression that signified that she’d reached the last knot on her rope.
It talks some foreign lingo.
Get the torch. Show me this pig.
The pig opened an eye at them when they came tromping and flashing lights down his way. He snouted up some dirt and sighed.
Gday, said Lester to the pig.
The pig sniffed.
Lester, if this is an old vaudeville joke your life won’t be worth seeing to its natural end.
It’s no joke, is it, me old pork mate?
But the pig said nothing; he just lay there with a bored and irritable look on his face and eyes like Audie Murphy.
It talks in tongues, Oriel.
You’ve been drinking. Let’s go inside before we strike up a conversation with the chooks. The pig goes.
But in her bed that night Oriel lay awake thinking of the pig her father had butchered to heal her burns as a sign of his love and it troubled her sorely.
The Horse
The animal world didn’t let up. A racehorse came to Cloud-street on a sure tip from Sam Pickles. It was a big bay gelding with feet like post rammers and a history of depression and emotional disturbance. A few days before Christmas Lester bought himself a hawker’s cart and harness to go into the delivery side of the business. He saw himself clopping through the suburbs ringing his bell, swinging his scales, rattling his blackboards, the cart laden with fruit and vegetables and his songs and jokes drawing women and children into the streets. It wasn’t the commerce of it that got his pea rattling (though he sold the idea that way to Oriel), it was the performance side of things; the singing and shouting, the jokes, stories, the eyes of the crowd on him.