Cloudstreet (5 page)

She was at the piano one evening a few weeks after, mulling over the possibilities for diversion, when her heart stopped. She cried out in surprise, in outrage and her nose hit middle C hard enough to darken the room with sound. Her nose was a strong and bony one, and there was middle C in that library until rigor mortis set in. The room soaked her up and the summer heat worked on her body until its surface was as hard and dry as the crust of a pavlova.

That’s how the vicar found her when he came visiting to tick her off about the girls. The smell knocked him over like a shot from a .303 and he ran out with a nosebleed that lasted seven days and seven nights. He didn’t die, but he lost his faith in humankindness and became a Baptist first and a banker second.

The house was boarded up, and it held its breath.

In 1923, after a racehorse called Eurythmic was put grandly out to pasture, a publican from the town of Geraldton bought the house without ever seeing it. He thought perhaps he’d retire to it in style sometime in the future. He was forty years old. Twenty years later, men were reading his Last Will and Testament to a small gathering of sunburnt people in the Ladies’ Lounge of the Eurythmic Hotel, Geraldton.

A House on Cloud Street

Sam Pickles couldn’t believe it, and the way everyone started filing out of the Ladies’ Lounge without looking him in the eye, it was clear that no one else could, either. The pub was to be sold and the money to go to the local branch of the Turf Club, except for two thousand pounds which was willed to one Samuel Manifold Pickles. And there was a house, a large house down in the city, left to the same Samuel Manifold Pickles with the proviso that it not be resold for the next twenty years.

Rose Pickles wandered through the quiet halls, along musty floor runners, into newly vacant rooms where only last month jockeys and sailors had lived. She tugged at her plait and smelt the sea on her flesh. After these weeks of hopeless waiting and expecting the worst she couldn’t decide whether she was happy or sad. She couldn’t help feeling that her life was over.

A few days later, the Pickles family packed three cardboard suitcases and a teachest and caught a train to Perth. That was the end of Geraldton. The bay, the pub, the Norfolk pines, the endless summer wind. No one cried; no one was game to.

It was evening when they reached the city and they caught the first taxi of their lives, to Cloud Street. Number One Cloud Street. When the driver piled them out they stared at the shadow back there in the trees. Somewhere, a train whistled.

Oo-roo!

Sam walked up on to the timber verandah with his mouth open in the dark. He put the key in the lock and felt Rose pushing him from behind.

Gwan, dad.

The door opened. A dozen cramped smells blew in their faces: lilac water, rot, things they didn’t recognize. Sam found a switch and the long, wide hallway suddenly jumped at them. They stepped inside to the grind and protest of the floorboards, moving slowly and quietly at first to open a door here, to peer there, exchange neutral high eyebrow looks, gathering boldness as they went, the four of them getting to a trot with their voices gathering and gaining, setting doors aslam, and moving to a full gallop up the staircase.

It’s bloody huge! said Sam.

Bloody strange if you ask me, Dolly muttered.

Where do we sleep tonight? Ted asked.

There’s twenty rooms or more, Sam said, just take your pick.

But there’s no beds!

Improvise!

I’m hungry.

Here, eat a biscuit.

With all the upper floor lights on, Rose walked through drifts of dust, webs and smells from room to room. She came to a door right in the centre of the house but when she opened it the air went from her lungs and a hot, nasty feeling came over her. Ugh. It smelt like an old meatsafe. There were no windows in the room, the walls were blotched with shadows, and there was only an upright piano inside and a single peacock feather. Not my room, she thought. She had to get out before she got any dizzier. Next door she found a room with a window overlooking the street, an
Anne of Green Gables
room.

Well, she thought, the old man had a win. Cloud Street. It had a good sound to it. Well, depending how you looked at it. And right now she preferred to think of the big win and not the losses she knew would probably come.

In a day or so they had the house on Cloud Street clean enough to live in, though Sam privately swore he could still smell lilac water. It was a big, sad, two-storey affair in a garden full of fruit trees. The windows were long, buckling sashed things with white scrollwork under the sills. Here and there weatherboards peeled away from the walls and protruded like lifting scabs, but there was still enough white paint on the place to give it a grand air and it seemed to lord it above the other houses in the street which were modest little red brick and tin cottages. It was big enough for twenty people. There were so many rooms you could get lost and unnerved. From upstairs you could see into everyone else’s yard, and through the trees to the railway line and the sea of sooty grass beside it. The garden was gone to ruin. The fish ponds were dry; orange, lemon, apple, mulberry and mandarine trees were arthritic and wild. Creeping rose grew like a nest of thorns.

Rose explored and found creaks and damp patches and unfaded rectangles on the walls where paintings had hung. There were rooms and rooms and rooms but it wasn’t the great shock it might have been had she not already lived at the Eurythmic all last year. She liked the iron lace in front and the bullnosed verandah. Some floors sloped and others were lumpy and singsong as you walked on them. Each of the kids had a room upstairs and hers looked out on the street with its white fences and jacarandas. It was musty, like the beach shack at Greenough Uncle Joel had let them use every Christmas. She knew she would even forget what Uncle Joel looked like in a year or two. She had loved him and she understood that she had to love this place too, despite how glum it made her, because it was his gift, and if it wasn’t for him they’d have nothing.

Rose cleaned the dead, windowless room herself because she knew that all the books from the beach house were coming on the train with the furniture, and this would be the library. She loved books, even to hold them and turn them over in her hands and smell the cool, murky breeze they made when you birred the pages fast through your fingers. A house with a library! But she got halfway through the job and quit. There were bolt holes like eyes in the walls where shelves had been, and the old piano groaned, and she didn’t like to think of being in there with the door closed. No, it wasn’t for books. The books could come in her room, and this room, well it could just stay closed.

Rain fell sweetly on the corrugated iron roof all morning, and in the afternoon a truck pulled up out front.

From her window Rose saw men bringing boxes in off the truck. She went downstairs like a wild thing, stirring the others out of the gloomy silence of scrubbing. Teachests and crates came in through the door, a fat old sofa from the Ladies’ Lounge of the Eurythmic, brass vases with the star of David on them, a cuckoo clock, mattresses and beds, a huge stuffed marlin, golf clubs, sixteen black and white photos of Eurythmic, each as big as a window. Rose opened crates and chests to find curtains, towels, sheets. Five crates were full of books. She dragged out an armful—
Liza of Lambeth
,
Jude the Obscure
,
Joe Wilson’s Mates
,
Hints for the Freshwater Fishermen
—they were greensmelling and dusty, but Rose was exultant.

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.