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