Well, you gutless wonders! You’d eat ya children!
She sees them now pecking at her bloated body out in the desert by the tracks that lead nowhere and bring nothing. Rose comes down smiling. Good old Rose, good old Rosie.
Bastard of a Place
Sam latches his gladstone bag, pops a morning peppermint in his mouth and steps down off the verandah where Lester is lifting the shop shutters.
Bastard of a place, he thinks vaguely, not knowing which place he really means.
Hole in the Wall
Fish stands by and sees the shade ladies pressed flat against the wallpaper as Quick opens the wall up with a saw. Wood dust comes down and makes him sneeze. There’s plaster like frost upon the floor.
Slip us the crowbar, will you, Fish.
This?
Yep.
There’s sun coming!
Quick prizes boards away, knocks a cut beam aside, and a square of sunlight breaks into the room with a shudder and a riot of motes and spirits. Fish sees the shadows with their mouths wide in horror. He grips the saw, its handle still warm from his own brother Quick.
Well, look at that. You can see the backyard. Wave to Mum, Fish.
Fish looks gingerly out of the hole in the wall and sees some woman looking up from the flap of the tent.
Gawd, that’s better. Some fresh air. You can feel the difference already. It was enough to make a bloke wanna puke in here before. You don’t mind us using it, dyou, Fish? I mean I know it’s always been kind of like your own den.
Fish is looking at the shadows creeping around the edge of the walls.
Well, it’ll do till we get sorted out.
How’s it coming along? Rose calls, hauling herself up the stairs. It’s hard to recall so much light on the landing. It pours out of the old library instead of feebly trying to get in. She comes into the doorway and rests on the jamb looking flushed and loaded.
Well, that’s an improvement. When’s the window coming?
Dad’s bringing it on the truck this arvo.
Just finish the job, I hate half-finished things.
Speakin of half-finished things, Fish’s been askin about the baby. He wants to feel if it’s true.
Fish looks at his great barge feet.
Cmon, Fish, says Rose. Hands on.
Fish shuffles over. He keeps his head down and puts his smooth, pale man’s hands on her belly and smiles into his chest.
He’s in there.
Well, that’s what the doctor says. You could fool me.
The ladies won’t like it.
Oh, I think they’ll get used to being grannies, don’t you?
You happy? asks Quick.
It could be worse, Rose says. We’ll have a roof over our heads, even if it is the same old roof.
It’s gonna look great. We’ll bung our furniture in, splash on a bit of paint, and whacko-the-diddle-o.
It’s the whacko-the-diddle-o that I’m worried about, says Rose.
Dolly finds herself at the Cloud Street Station in the long lull between Saturday evening trains. A smudge-eyed dog comes up to her and whines, slopes away. The solitary palm tree over the roof of the ticket office submits itself to the wind, and Dolly feels her false teeth slipping in sympathy. Right now, she can’t remember ever having had her own teeth out in the first place. You wouldn’t say she’s drunk, that bulky, rumpled old woman on the bench there by the platform, though she’s got a smell of brandy about her, a whiff of the old Chateau Tanunda. She just seems a little confused.
Now and then she gets up and goes out to the edge to look down on the rails.
They go somewhere, the bastards, she murmurs. I always wanted to go somewhere.
A diesel hoots down the line and a man and a boy buy tickets and wait out in the evening sun beside her. She watches them, observes the way the boy hooks his finger into the edge of his father’s trouser pocket. Men. Don’t they love each other. They should be enough for each other. We’re not like that. I wouldn’t let a daughter do that. I wouldn’t. I just don’t think I could.
The train comes into the station blowing fumes all over her. Two or three people step down, newspapers rolled in their hands.
Doll, what’re you doin here?
Sam looks surprised but pleased to see her.
I’m sittin, that’s all.
Hey, I won meself fifteen quid.
Who on?
That mad bastard, the Monster. I bet he’d strike within the month.
You sick bastard.
It’s commonsense. Anyone who kills that many has to like it.
You should be put down.
I’ll take you to the flicks, eh? There’s Dean Martin and Sinatra at the Ambassador. Or Hatari, that sounds good.
I’m too old for the flicks.
Carn then, let’s get home, I’m stranglin for a cuppa.
I’ll give im lollies. I’ll spoil im filthy if only he comes to see his old granma.
Carn, old girl, you’re walkin with a winner.
No Man’s Land
Rose settled down to read on the bed in their new room, their new home. There was an autumn chill in the air and the smells of paint and putty. She was damp still from her shower; she shivered a little, climbed in under the covers with her mound hoiking up the bedspread before her. Strange being in the house again, coming back from the bathroom down the hallway, wrapped and steaming, feeling like a houseguest or a new lodger, all selfconscious and prudish. Wireless sounds, cooking, a song coming from somewhere, the clunking of doors and a chorus of floorboards. There were two kitchens, two livingrooms, two families, and now they lived in the middle, in the old room they called No Man’s Land.
It was a queer room, this. Even when she was alone in it the place felt close, crowded. Certainly it was better than it had been. Hell, she could remember a time when she wouldn’t even step inside the door. As a kid she’d hear music coming from here, Fish’s weird piano fugues, and she’d come to the door to watch him, but it took a lot to get her to come inside. Fish didn’t play in here at all now it was their room, though the piano was still there in the corner beside her dresser and the old sea trunk she stored her linen in. They’d even brought her old desk, the one the old man had bought her with winnings and never taken back to pay old debts. Quick had knocked up a few pine shelves for her John O’Haras, her Daphne du Mauriers and Irwin Shaws. No one touched that piano but sometimes Rose swore she could hear a note in the room. She listened hard at it when she set her mind to it in the middle of a sleepless bellyrolling night, and though she knew she heard a quiet unbroken sustained note in the air, she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the sound of silence ringing between the curtains and the sofa, in the new painted walls themselves.
Rose preferred the window open a little way and the curtains shucked back to ease her claustrophobia, even though she knew it meant having old Oriel monitoring them from her tent flap below. Quick seemed so damn happy to be back here, she could barely believe it. Being here relaxed him. He skylarked on the landing with his sisters, sat in the Pickles kitchen with Dolly like he’d been going in there all his life. She remembered the queer glow on him the morning he came off the shift with the idea to move back. He was glowing like a kid’s night lamp. Deep in, when she let herself think it, she was glad to be back, even though it was this place. True, she felt a little guilty about it; it seemed like a surrender to her and she’d made up her mind a long time ago to neither surrender nor go back. She’d been trying to escape this place so long, and now here she was, married to a Lamb, having his baby and living back in the thick of it. The old man’d put it down to the Shifty Shadow, but it was their decision. So here she was. She couldn’t say she was unhappy. Even this queer joint felt safer than a normal house, certainly it felt better than Mrs Manners’ lonely bedsit. She didn’t mind the noise that much; at least it was a sign of company and its protection. Oriel came up with pillowslips patched together from old pyjamas and made Rose do exercises that almost split her fanny to bits, but it didn’t seem so bad somehow. Autumn came on and then winter and Rose grew big, so big she was disgusted with herself, but in the mirror her face was the face of a living woman, not a girl threatening the world with her death. She thought about Dolly, poor Dolly who was weak now, and confused, and needing love. Maybe she owed the old girl some of this happiness. She’d sit in the sun with her again today, hold her hand. She smiled at herself in the mirror and made herself laugh, and Fish came in. She let Fish lay his hands on her. He squawked with joy when the baby kicked and rolled under the skin of her drum.