Cloudstreet (73 page)

And another crowd has gathered. I can see them in the shade of the trees, the river of faces from before, the dark and the light, the forgotten, the silent, the missing who watch Lester dance his silly longlegged jig while half choking on his roast chook. They hear his accordion burring like a deck of cards and see Sam feeling its wind in his face. Ah, to Sam it smells like fortune itself. The Lambs and the Pickleses begin to dance, Oriel and Dolly, Red and Elaine, and even Chub is up off his arse and dancing. Quick and Rose have Harry between them like a sail in the wind, now Lon is up with Pansy and the dance spreads, a mad, yokel twenty-year dance that sets the shadows moving in sight behind them where a black man leaves the trees like a bird and goes laughing into the sun with a great hot breeze that rolls the roof of the sky and tilts the leaves above them till the gathering is dizzy with laughter, full and gargling with it. And someone else is going, his sweaty hands are flexing. He hears nothing but the water. The sound of it has been in his ears all his life and he’s hungry for it.

Mind you, the world goes on regardless. In Fremantle Gaol they’re cutting a man from the scaffold and taking the bag from his head still afraid, still hating him enough to deny him his final wish—to be buried beside his drowned son. Oh, yes, the world goes its way, don’t worry.

But here, here by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful the river, the Lambs and the Pickleses are lighting up the morning like a dream. Students stop to watch. Council workers grin and nudge each other. It’s a sight to behold. It warms the living and stirs the dead. And speeds the leaving.

Because there, down along the jetty, fat and barefoot, runs Fish Lamb with a great slack grin on his face shining with chickengrease and liberty. His shirt tail is out and so is his tongue. The boards rattle and ring with nails and years and spikes and barnacle chatter and dried bait leaps behind him. Below, the water flexes and falls silver brown gold black. Birdshadows fall across him. His trousers rattle with knucklebones, pretty stones and pennies to make running music, going music, blood music in his temples and ears till right out at the end he finds the steps and the landing, the diving board in its sheath of guano. And the water.

The water.

And the mirror it makes.

Ah, the water, the water, the water.

Beneath the trees, in the midst of the dance, someone stirs, comes running, comes shouting alarm.

A bird turns out of the sun.

Fish leans out and the water is beautiful. All that country below, the soft winy country with its shifts of colour, its dark, marvellous call. Ah, yes.

The man stops running before he even reaches the jetty. Quick makes himself stop and already he’s crying.

Fish goes out sighing, slow, slow to the water that smacks him kisses when he hits. Down he slopes into the long spiral, drinking, drinking his way into the tumble past the dim panic of muscle and nerve into a queer and bursting fullness. And a hesitation, a pause for a few moments. I’m a man for that long, I feel my manhood, I recognize myself whole and human, know my story for just that long, long enough to see how we’ve come, how we’ve all battled in the same corridor that time makes for us, and I’m Fish Lamb for those seconds it takes to die, as long as it takes to drink the river, as long as it took to tell you all this, and then my walls are tipping and I burst into the moon, sun and stars of who I really am. Being Fish Lamb. Perfectly. Always. Everyplace. Me.

S
UN
poured careless into the quiet yard where vegetables teemed in the earth and fruit hung, where a scarfaced pig sang sweetly at the sky and a small congregation amassed in the light. Beneath the ancient mulberry tree whose blood stained the soil around her, a square little woman unpegged and folded a tent, taking it corner to corner, minding its brittle, rimed fabric, smacking the dust from it. Another woman stepped forward, tottering a little. She crossed the long gash in the ground where yesterday there’d been a fence, and she took a corner of the tent herself. The little boxy woman and the big blowsy woman folded end to end till the tent was a parcel that they hefted to their shoulders across the greensmelling grass, and then they went inside the big old house whose door stood open, pressed back by the breeze they made in passing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Winton was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1960. He has lived in France, Ireland, and Greece, and currently lives in Western Australia with his wife and three children. He began publishing his fiction as a teenager and his first novel,
An Open Swimmer,
won the
Australian
/ Vogel Award in 1981. Since then he has won the Miles Franklin (twice), the Banjo Prize, the Deo Gloria Award, and the Wilderness Society Environment Award. in 1995 his novel
The Riders
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tim Winton’s work is published in twelve languages and has been successfully adapted for stage, screen, and radio. His most recent novel,
Dirt Music,
confirms his status as the preeminent Australian novelist of his generation.

Look for Tim Winton’s emotionally charged
Dirt Music
—now available from Scribner.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents