Free Cloudstreet by Tim Winton Page B

butterknife. Fish claps his hands wide fingered.
    Lester shows him how to spin a soup bowl, send it rocking across the table, standing up of its own momentum, whirring and blurring, making wind and sound for him. Fish becomes an expert at it. Quick and Hat and Red and Lon stand and watch him spin two, three, four at a time.
    When he’s frightened or angry he falls down. He cries like a man. It makes the Lambs crazy with emotion to hear it.
    Oriel doesn’t realize it, but she begins to dress Fish like an idiot, the way people clothe big sadfaced mongoloids. She hoiks his trousers up under his arms with a belt so long it flaps. She combs his hair straight down on his brow and shines his shoes till they mock him. The reason Oriel doesn’t notice is that Quick gets to him early after breakfast and drags the clobber round on him, messes him up like a boy, normal and slouchy. It makes old Fish giggle, Quick tugging at him.
    Yer a boy, Fish.
    Big boy.
    My oath, says Quick.
    Kitchentalk
    Sometimes after tea there was no shopwork to be done so the Lambs’d loiter round the kitchen table, talking above the hum of Fish’s soup bowls with the new range all roar and glow. Hat at the sink. Oriel pulling out the darning. Lester picking the flourbits off his forearms.
    Fine sink, this, Dad.
    Yeah, but what about the other five? said Oriel.
    A job lot, Lester said.
    Your father has a nose for a bargain, Oriel said rolling her eyes.
    We could make dunnies out of the rest, said Quick, a five holer.
    Quick, stop that.
    Lester laughed: We used to have a sixteen holer when I was in the army. That’s how they got the idea for the Lancaster bomber for this war. Saturation bombin.
    What’d you do durin the last war, Mum? said Quick.
    Oriel kept darning.
    Hat raised her eyebrows: Mum?
    Hm?
    The Great War. What’d you do?
    Waited. I raised six kids and waited for one of em to come back.
    The kitchen fell quiet, all except for Fish’s whirring bowl. Lester tapped scum from his chromatic harmonica.
    I didn’t know you were married before, said Elaine, lips aquiver.
    Eee-laine, you nong, said Hat. 1914 to 1918. She’d hafta start havin em at age twelve to get six out, not to mention one off to war. She was born the year of Federation, 1901.
    Well, said Lester. Margaret River School obviously taught Hat more than groomin and deportation.
    They weren’t my children, said Oriel.
    Well, I figured that, said Hat. Whose were they?
    My father remarried after my mother died. His new wife already had a boy, Bluey, and they had a whole squad of babies after they married. Half-brothers and sisters. I brought them up. She taught at the bush school. She wasn’t much older than me, you know. And I wanted to be a teacher, but I never finished school. I raised her family.
    Why?
    Because, Quick, I loved my father.
    Did he love you?
    When I got burnt one day in a bushfire, in 1910, he killed his last pig, and took out its bladder and put it on my legs to heal the blisters. A whole beast, just so I wouldn’t scar. Not only was it his last pig, it was the last living thing on his farm but me.
    I wouldn’t have wasted pork on this family, said Lester with a creasyfaced wink. Slice of polony, maybe. Pound of tripe, yeah.
    Garn, Dad, yer all bluff.
    Did I tell you about me and Roy Rene?
    Arr!
    Did he Mum?
    Oriel finished a sock and threw it at Lon whose foot belonged to it. Yes, Yes. The Les and Mo Show.
    At the Tivoli, said Lester, and then The Blue Room. Ooh, I was a lair then. All the best people’d sing me songs. I wrote for the best of em.
    He was good, said Oriel, not dirtymouthed like Roy Rene.
    Old Roy’s the best, said Lester.
    Quick looked at the old girl. She caught him looking.
    What? she said.
    The one who went to war. The half-brother you were waitin for. Did he come back?
    No.
    Died of wounds in Palestine. The Holy Land. Shot by a Turkish airman at a well. He was a signalman. He was waterin horses. He always looked good with horses.
    Did you know