Well, her mother said, appearing beside her, this old stuff’ll at least make it look like we’re not squattin here.
Look at these books! Rose sighed.
There’s nowhere to put them, said Dolly.
The old man came alongside. I’ll make some shelves.
Rose saw her mother’s eyes travel down to the stumps on his hand and back away again, and they went on upacking in silence.
Next morning they had their gear unpacked and the house was theirs, though they rattled round in it like peas in a tin. The cheque arrived from the trustees.
We’re rich! Sam yelled from the letterbox.
But next day was Saturday. Race day. And there was a horse called Silver Lining. Sam had great faith, what, with the shifty shadow being about with such goodwill and all. But the horse was legless.
Saturday evening they were poor again. Sam got home sober, in time to have Dolly push him down the stairs. He went end over end like a lampstand and put his head through the plaster wall at the turn. He pulled his head out, took the last few steps on foot, and shrugged at the kids who went outside without even bothering to shake their heads.
On the back step, Ted muttered. That’s our friggin luck. House and no money.
Ponds and no fish, said Chub.
Trees and no fruit.
Arm and no hand.
Rose turned on them. Oh, yer a pair of real cards. Real funny blokes.
Reckon it’s a friggin house o cards, I do, said Ted. The old girl’s the wild card and the old man’s the bloody joker.
Sam surprised them, coming up behind. There was blood dripping from his nose. They moved aside to let him by. Rose watched him walk all the way down to the back fence where he stood in the grass. From somewhere near came the roar of a football crowd. The old man just stood there in the wild grass with his hands in his pockets, and Rose went inside when she couldn’t watch it anymore.
Nights
The Pickleses move around in the night, stunned and shuffling, the big emptiness of the house around them, almost paralysing them with spaces and surfaces that yield nothing to them. It’s just them in this vast indoors and though there’s a war on and people are coming home with bits of them removed, and though families are still getting telegrams and waiting by the wireless, women walking buggered and beatenlooking with infants in the parks, the Pickleses can’t help but feel that all that is incidental. They have no money and this great continent of a house doesn’t belong to them. They’re lost.
At night Dolly hears the trains huff down the track loud enough to set the panes a-rattle in the windows. All night, all day, people seem to be going someplace else. Everyone else somewhere else. Some nights, even as autumn thickens and the chill gets into her, she gets out of bed and walks down the track to the station where, from the dark shelter of the shrubbery, she can watch people getting on and off trains; men and women in uniform, sharp-looking people who laugh and shove at each other like they don’t care who hears or sees. She hears their voices trailing off in the streets, sucked into the noises of steam and clank. Not many of them look as though they belong either, like the Yank marines honking their accents and tossing fags and nylons about, no, they don’t belong but they don’t give a damn.
Look at her, crouching there in the bushes.
Dolly always gets back in bed cold and angry and more awake than she was before. They’re poor, dammit, still shitpoor, even with a house as big as a church that they can’t bloody sell and maybe just as well. God she misses the wind and the flat plains and the bay and the dust. And that Catalina pilot, worthless bastard. No, she doesn’t really miss him; just the idea of him. She misses the idea of herself as well. Back in Geraldton people knew her. They all whispered behind their hands, all those tightarsed local bastards, behind their sniggering looks and their guts in their laps, but at least she was somebody, she meant something.
Now and then in the night, only some nights, she leans across Sam, lets her breasts fall on his back and kisses his neck to taste the salt on him. He still smells like home, like other times, better times, and she feels everything tighten up on her and hurt just a little. But he never wakes up.
And Sam?
Every night when his wife lies there sighing, as he pretends to be asleep, or when she runs her breasts and lips over him before giving up and creeping out, he just sets his teeth and holds onto himself and knows he doesn’t deserve what he’s got. Now and then, if he stays awake long enough, he can feel the floors move, as though the house is breathing.
He has to think of something, but he thinks of all the wrong things. All the useless warm memories. Like those Greenough summers. That summer Dolly and he left the kids asleep in the afternoons and swam across the river with a cold bottle of beer so they could pull each other down on the hard sand between the paperbarks and lick the salt away and peel cotton from each other without having to keep quiet. Sam Pickles remembers the heat of the day, the drumbeating of cicadas, her breasts in his fists, her thighs vising his ribs and the shellhollow smell rising from her as he bunted her into the sand, bucking them along as all the muscles of her pelvis clamped on him until they were almost in the water when the finish hit them like a hot wind down the valley. He poured beer down her back, cold beer between her breasts so it gathered in her navel so she laughed, shivered, went taut again and drew him down to suck his tongue from between his teeth. With her teeth in his flesh he knew there was a heaven and a hell.
Sam remembers. He feels a hot jet of sperm on his belly in the dark. Always, he thinks in disgust, always the wrong things to think of.
There they are. The man and his bung hand and the disgusted look, the darkhaired woman with the hips and the nervous racehorse gait, the two crewcut boys asleep, and the little girl looking prissy and lost. In the middle of the night she’s there poking her head out of the window as if to get her bearings.
Sam’s Big Idea
On the way home from school Rose walked ahead of Ted and Chub along the train line to be free of their stupid boys’ talk and just in case anyone thought they were her brothers. As she came into Cloud Street she noticed the place had started to look familiar: the long line of jacarandas, the rusting tin roofs, and the sagging picket fences. The first thing she saw, as always, was the big ragged front lawn and the gable peak of Number One nesting right up there in the treetops by the rail embankment.
She walked down the side path beneath the rotten canes of a grapevine and came upon the old man out in the backyard with a stranger who was hammering nails into a great sheet of tin. Down the middle of the yard, from the house to the back pickets, was a tin fence which cut the yard in half. The wooden frame was jarrah; it smelt of gum and was the colour of sunburn. The old man was holding a big green sheet of tin while the other man hammered clouts in. Rose cocked her head to read the red lettering that ran diagonally across it. LIVER. The whole fence was built of tin signs.
The old girl sat on the back step in her dressing gown with a smoke in her mouth and a look on her that said she didn’t want to know about any of it anymore.
Where’d this come from? Rose said, to the old man.
Aw, it just got there, he said with a grin.
Who’s this? She looked at the tall, darklooking bloke who paused in his work to smile at her. She hated his guts.
Now, mind yer manners. This is a bloke who knows a lot about horses—
Rose turned and left him. She ran past her mother who looked aside. Some strange kind of murderousness lifted in Rose Pickles and she just didn’t know what it meant.