Red, I don’t need to know anything.
Crikey, what’s this?
Into the kitchen came Lon all grazed and blackeyed and sweating, and by a stroke of bad timing he was followed in by his mother who caught one look at his face and shoved him cheeksfirst into the big freezerbox of the old Frigidaire.
Ice’ll help, she said. What bully did this to you?
A man, blubbered Lon, a fullgrowed man. His voice sounded a longway off coming from the freezerbox.
What did he do? Now tell me, I’m yer mother.
Hit me. He hit me.
In public?
Only people.
Did you deserve some punishment? Oriel said, suddenly pensive. Red opened a bottle of mecurochrome the size of a stout keg and got together some swabs.
Lon?
There’s a girl pregnant, said Lon from on ice.
No one could tell if Oriel fainted a moment or what, but she leant on that fridge door something shocking. You could hear Lon Lamb screaming three stops down the line.
Lucky it’s only his head in there, Red said to the old man who’d come running; if it was me doin the business he’d be losin his play bits.
Lon was married inside a fortnight, and when the minister said: Do you Logan Fitzwilliam Bruce Lamb take this Pansy Mullet to be your lawfully wedded wife? Oriel murmured darkly: He does.
They took a room at Cloudstreet, Lon and Pansy, and filled it with rage and weeping.
Doomiest
Sam rolls awake in the night with his stump ringing with pain. It goes right through him, into his chest, down his side. Godalmighty, a heart attack, he thinks. But it goes on and on, emanating from pieces of him he no longer owns. No, he thinks, it’s bloody doom. Big, big doomy doomier, doomiest. It hurt so much that tears roll back into his ears and the house seems to laugh at him. He wants to go to sleep and not wake up in the morning.
Flames
In her dream Oriel saw the bush and the city burning. People ran from their squawking homes to the riverbank with the flames gaining behind them, but they stopped, afraid, at the water and let the fire consume them on the grassy slope above the river.
The New House
Quick looks the business in his black helmet and leggings as he hammers the BSA out north to the new subdivisions. His Dougie MacArthur sunglasses flap against his cheeks. He leans, throttles into the turns, flies like an angel.
The new house stands in a street of similar new houses and Quick props the bike and goes in for a look. It’s all there on its patch of rubbkstrewn dirt. If he’s honest, he’d like some weatherboard old joint to remind him of farm days, happy childhood days, or even of Cloudstreet, but he knows Rose wants it fresh, new, clean, apart. Yeah, soon there’d be kids in the street, and the sound of lawnmowers.
And then in the late afternoon gloom someone steps out from behind a wall and comes towards him. Quick knows him. Oh, he knows him. It’s the blackfella wearing nothing but a beach towel and a pair of rubber thongs.
Go home, says the black man. This isn’t your home. Go home to your home, mate.
Quick fronts him, emboldened by his uniform. This is a black man he’s talking to.
But the man lays five fingers spread on Quick’s chest. Go home. Quick turns. Already he’s alone.
Christmas
At Cloudstreet on Christmas Eve the timbers rattled like bones in a box. Lester’s marketfresh vegetables went brown in hours, and the milk curdled in the cans before the Lambs and Pickleses woke from vile, breathless dreams. A shitty smell came over the place and you’d swear there were more in the house than the headcount let on. Standing anywhere in Cloudstreet that day was like being in an overloaded ferry in a sou’wester. Oriel found herself needing the walls to keep her upright. The corridor was a lurching tunnel and the shop foetid. Sam woke and wished it was a work day so he could pack his gladstone and heave-ho. Dolly threw up her tea in the sink with spots in her eyes big as snarling faces. When you blinked, shadows ripped by. Out in the yard, the last of the shrivelled mulberries rained on Oriel’s tent like a bloodstorm.
The pig sang all through Christmas with Fish sitting by beneath the fig tree listening and mashing his fists. What’s he say, Fish? Can you pick it? Over and over, the same phrases. Carn, Fish, what’s with the pork?
Sam went out in the afternoon to find that his cockatoo was gone. Absconded bird. He went walking the streets calling Fair dinkum? Fair dinkum? All the old houses were coming down and salmon brick duplexes were going up in their place. The streets were full of jacked up FJs with foxtails and glasspacks. There seemed to be no children. When Sam came home birdless, Fish Lamb next door was bellowing and bawling and the piano was thundering.
On Christmas morning the house filled with foul and frantic shades and a howling set up in the surrounding streets. In the dawn the pig was nearly torn to pieces by a pack of dogs that jumped the fence while the lot of them slept on, resisting it as a dream.
Fish Lamb was strangely quiet. No hysterics. He lay on his bed and did not come out. Lester bandaged the pig, kissed its brow and prayed.
Summer Madness
And then the vile hot easterly blows them into summer proper, into a dry night-time madness that eddies under the eaves and shakes the rats out of every sleepout grapevine as a small man creeps through the back lanes between bin and gate and bloating fences itching with an inexplicable hatred. See him down there slinking along, snuffling and wheezing in your town, in your yards, your streets, and hating you, every whole one of you as you sleep moaning and turning beneath your sheet behind your flywire, past you as you sleep open on verandahs and on back lawns in the countrified manner you cling to. Oh, what hurt and malevolence glows in that shambling shape of a man. From beyond space and time I see him like a coal sputtering in the dark, rolling wherever the hot headachy desert wind blows him: West Perth, Dalkeith, Shenton Park, Subiaco, Mosman Park, coming by you, coming by you, coming for you. Against his chest he carries a rifle. For you all.
Bloody Mayhem
Quick wakes to the sound of a motor. It’s high morning. A motorbike running under his window.
Lamb? Lamb!
Rose wakes next to him. Quick?
Sounds like Murphy from the station. Orright! Wait a second!
Get out here, mate! Get on this bike! We’ve got all shit goin up!
Quick got to the door in his undies. Gday, Murph.
Get fuckin dressed, mate.
What’s up?
Bloody mayhem, that’s what.
Well, says Rose, spose this is what you’ve been waiting for.
But when Quick is gone and Rose goes out for a paper, she finds it’s worse than a bit of houseburning. The West is forecasting isolated thunder and broadcasting indiscriminate murder.
Heat of the Night
In the heat of the night with his barrel still reeking, the man with the hare lip and the cleft palate shifts through the dry night grass in someone’s backyard and comes upon a sleeper behind insect wire. A sleeper: lips opening and closing in the great vacant journey of sleep, his breath coming and going like the sea. At the back of the house. In the big country town that wants so much to be a city, there’s another sleeper and I can’t stop this. I’m behind the mirror and in different spaces, I’m long gone and long here but there’s nothing I can do to stop this. Every time it happens, on and on in memory, I flinch as that brow flinches with the cool barrel suddenly upon it. The sound goes on and on and matter flies like the constellations through the great gaps in the heavens, and I haven’t stopped it again. Lester, Rose, Red — I can’t stop it for you. When I’m Fish down there I just don’t know, and now that I’m what he became beyond it’s all too late. I see it, I see it, all of history, and it sets me hard as spirit.