When he got to shore, the blackfella was waiting for him in a pair of calico pants and a British battlejacket. Quick could see the waterline on his night blue ankles. The black man smiled. He seemed to be holding back a belly laugh.
Quick pushed past him and didn’t look back.
On the long, impossibly slow drive back to Earl and May’s with the prospect of breaking the bad news before him, Quick kept seeing figures. Along the road every mile or so, some mad bugger would jump out waving from behind a karri tree. Half the time it was that black bastard and the other half it was him. The old Dodge wheezed and Quick abused all comers. He flattened the accelerator but he still could have walked faster.
Nothing computes. Every moment, each vision and image elbows up to the next in Quick’s mind, bumping, sliding, rubbing hot and useless in him till he feels like his head is the groanstuffed hold of a ship in a gale. Out beyond the oily dark yard at twilight he climbs up into the plywood caravan, falls on his cot and lies there without knowing how the bloody hell it took him three hours to get back from a thirty-minute drive. He knows he’s not crazy, he’s convinced of it, and he’s right. But he’s not firing on all six, that’s for sure, because as he lies there, buckled and ready to stop breathing at any moment, he knows he can’t decide how he feels — enlightened or endangered, happy or sad, old or young, Quick or Lamb.
Sometime in the night, the misery pictures begin to vibrate above his head. Burnt babies, Koreans, old amputee diggers, a blind nun, they all jig on the wall, roll their eyes, hum like a turbine, sending Quick into an alertness even more discomforting and disabling.
He dreams he is asleep, and that in sleep he’s dreaming a dream: there they all are, down by the river laughing and chiacking about, all of them whole and true, with their own faces in a silver rain of light fused with birds and animals. Lester, Oriel, Hat, Elaine, Lon, Red, Fish, himself, and people he doesn’t know: women with babies, old people, men with their sleeves pinned, barefoot children, all moving behind a single file of other people the colour of burnt wood. Down at the river where the fish are leaping and the sea has turned back on itself and the trees shake with music.
This Side
I can feel it even this side of the mirror, that’s how intense it is, so strong I can sense it this far away, as far as light from a lamp, as time from a clock. Quick’s calling out like a wounded bird, seeing, seeing.
And Fish hears it from his bed in Cloudstreet where everyone’s asleep except Oriel whose lamp suddenly flickers. Lester is snoring with his teeth on the table and his arms across the boy and beneath his arm Fish stirs, hearing, beginning to hurt.
Fish begins to cry, to cry the best he knows how, and Lester starts awake.
Fish?
The boy goes on and on, teeth clenched, limbs hard as plaster, sending out his note until Lester fears he might smother him with a pillow to keep himself sane.
That cry goes on and on, through walls and walls. Shadows shake and quail openmouthed on the ceiling, the unhappy dead caught like wallpaper and groaning silently at the sound of knowing. It wakes the living and shakes even the happy dead. Even now it makes me shiver.
Load of Pigs
When Earl and May found him next day, Quick was lit up like a sixty watt globe and he wouldn’t stop crying. They brought him inside, bathed him and made him drink iced water, hoping the fluorescence would ease off. But by evening Quick’s long, bony body was giving off a light all the more clear in the dusk and he wouldn’t say a word. A doctor was out of the question with Earl and May — hell, doctors could get you in a lot of trouble, and besides if word got out about him glowing, then people’d know he was a Lamb and they’d never hear the end of it. Earl was all for letting him sleep it off, but by midnight when the boy was burning white hot, May put her foot down. Quick Lamb needed his own. Warm up a truck, she said. We’re goin to Perth.
Earl had a load of pigs in the knocker out the front that he’d been hosing down all day while they tried to decide what to do with Quick. He thought of taking just the prime mover, but he couldn’t bear to waste a trip. He’d take the pigs and cut his losses.
When they loaded the boy into the cab he lit up the dash and sent the swine into a shitting frenzy. May held him and Earl drove. Night deepened. Passing cars flashed their lights in alarm.
And a black angel, said Quick, a couple of hours north. It was all he said that night.
That woman’ll be angry at us, Earl said.
Doesn’t matter, love, said Mary.
She’ll be all over us like an angry wart.
What can we do?
She’ll think it’s a way of gettin an invite to the weddin.
She’s a mother, Earl.
Now doan start cryin.
At least she’s a mother.
They looked at each other in the glow of their relative and tried to stay calm. The old diesel hammered them in their seats. Quick saw everything in the headlights — every-damn-thing.
VII. Madhouse
SEVEN o’clock and the place is like a madhouse! Since five, when he woke up, Fish has been laughing like a bird, and now Lester’s trying to dress him while the women fight it out in the next room. Oriel turns her lamp out and comes inside to supervise the dressing. She’s weary and can’t make herself any excitement for the day. Dew drips from the flaccid gutters, catching the first hints of sun now and then as it falls to the grass. Dogs and roosters stir and territorialize on the westerly. This morning Cloudstreet looks like a scabby old steamer resting at her moorings in the quiet time before the seas quicken and unsettle her.
Out in the garden, the pig is muttering in tongues: Gwalia logoreemi muluth dooloomoos speptie …
Rose Pickles, freshly showered and peering at the steamy mirror, pens on the Dawn Heat lipstick with plenty of speed and nerve as Sam fries bacon and eggs for himself down the corridor, and over the sound of spitting fat comes Dolly’s straighteight snoring.
The floors rumble across the way. It’s a non-opening Saturday today. The Lambs are killing the pig, that’s for sure. Well, not literally. The pig is as safe as parliament, but they’re bunging it on for young and old because today Hat Lamb’s marrying that handsome dill from Pemberton, the one who always wears tweed and whose brogues could house a family. Today they’re giving one away, and Rose Pickles could spit, she’s so cheesed. It’s something she wouldn’t miss for quids, but there’s a morning at the switch to be got through, there’s Mrs Tisborn to be borne, there’s more than she can stand to think of, and she’s gonna miss it.
If you hook me again, Elaine Lamb, someone yells next door, I’m gonna knock your block into ya frock, ya hear me?
Someone begins to sob.
Rose pauses, strains to hear.
Settle down!
Rose stifles a laugh to keep listening. It’s like they’re all in the same room.
You be careful, and you show some patience or the whole cricket match’ll be cancelled!
You can’t—
We’re payin for it if we’re stayin for it, so you button your lip and let your sisters dress you. You’re not playin doogs now. This a weddin for grownups. Anymore gripin and you’re not invited.
But it’s my wedding!
Bumslash! It’s your marriage. The weddin belongs to us. Behave yourself.
Oh, maarm!