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Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Cloudstreet, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Chance, Choice, and Personal Responsibility
Family vs. Independence
Trauma and Guilt
Religion and the Supernatural
Shared Humanity
Summary
Analysis
Many years ago, a very large house was owned by a wealthy widow. The only frequent visitor to the house was an Anglican priest, who was determined to see the goodness in the widow’s heart despite her callous nature. He suggested that she open her house to native young women, and she took his advice. She kept several girls in her house and taught them manners and etiquette that she considered important. But the girls had been taken from their families and were miserable, and eventually one of them took her own life by drinking ant poison. After the widow found the girl’s body in the library, she dismissed the rest of the girls from the house. A week later, the widow’s heart stopped while she played the piano in the library, and her nose hit the middle C key as she slumped forward, dead.
This bit of backstory marks the first appearance of the house on Cloud Street where most of the novel takes place. The house’s sordid history gives it an aura of foreboding before any of the main characters even arrive there, as it’s implied that the house (or at least the library) could be haunted by the two women who died there. This history also continues the ongoing theme of tragic death (or near-death, in Fish’s case) that hangs over the opening chapters of the novel. The trauma experienced in the house years ago echoes the trauma that the Lamb and Pickles families have recently experienced.
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The widow’s enormous house sat empty and abandoned for years, until Sam’s brother Joel bought the property with some of the money he’d won from gambling, thinking that he could retire there someday. In his last will and testament, Joel left the house to Sam, along with 2,000 pounds. According to the will, Joel’s pub is to be sold at once, but the house cannot be resold for the next 20 years. The house is in the city of Perth, on Cloud Street, and now it’s the only place the Pickles family can move into.
Joel’s last will and testament gives the Pickles family one final bit of Joel’s good luck in the form of a place to live. The will’s stipulations about the house not being sellable for 20 years reveals how well Joel knew his brother, as Sam would have been likely to sell the house immediately and gamble away the money otherwise. Even after Joel’s untimely death, the Pickles family still finds themselves in debt to Joel and his nearly-perfect luck.
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After leaving the pub and the town of Geraldton behind, the Pickles arrive at Number One, Cloud Street. It’s a massive old place, with enough room for 20 or more people to live in relative comfort. But despite its size and sense of faded grandeur, it feels somewhat unnerving and needs a lot of work to start feeling like a home. They get the house clean enough to live in within a day, and it isn’t long before furniture from the pub starts arriving. As the family tries to get comfortable in the musty old place, Rose resolves to make the room with the piano into a library, but she soon changes her mind as she finds the windowless room to be too stuffy and unsettling. She puts the books in her own room instead.
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Eventually, the check for the 2,000 pounds arrives in the mail, but Sam almost immediately loses it all on gambling, as he believes that the Shifty Shadow is on his side now. Dolly is furious with him for making the family poor again, and she’s still struggling to come to terms with his injury. She often wanders out to the nearby train station and watches the strangers go about their unknown business, jealous of their seemingly happy and exciting lives. As the whole world seems to move and go on adventures around her, Dolly feels trapped in her own life with Sam. Both of them sadly remember happier days between them, and the entire Pickles family feels lost and out of place in their new home.
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One day, after coming home from school with her brothers, Rose finds her father in the backyard, working with a stranger to erect a tin fence that splits the yard in half. She also finds that the door to her room has been locked, and all of her things have been moved to a different room. Many of the other rooms on the same side of the house have been locked, and Rose soon discovers that her father has decided to rent out half of the house to another family, as a means of income. Rose confronts Sam as he finishes building a second privy on the other side of the yard. He keeps a chipper attitude about their new soon-to-be tenants, but she can’t forgive him for doing this.
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The Lamb family piles into their truck and heads for Perth, feeling as though they can no longer live in their hometown of Margaret River. The “miracle” of Fish’s return hasn’t been what they expected, and everyone in the town seems to treat them with pity or scorn. No one waves to them as they leave, and they don’t wave back; the Lambs feel unwelcome here, and it’s time for them to move on. The incident with Fish has even shaken their faith in God. Fish isn’t the same, and their disappointment has taken a heavy toll.
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The Lambs arrive at Number One, Cloud Street. Lester awkwardly introduces himself to Dolly at the front door, and it isn’t long before all eight of the Lambs are piling into their half of the massive house. Lester promises that they’ll pay the rent, and he mentions that they aren’t religious. The Pickles children have various reactions to the Lamb children as they move in under Oriel’s strict supervision. Ted mentions that Fish seems like a slow kid. But that night, as a thunderstorm rages outside, Rose catches a glimpse of Fish watching the rain by the window, and she thinks he's beautiful.
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The Pickles family and the Lamb family try to get used to living under the same roof over the next few weeks. Each family lives on one side of the house, and the hall in the middle is considered neutral territory: a “no man’s land.” The two families largely try to ignore each other, but tension occasionally builds between them. There’s only one bathroom to share among the twelve of them, and Dolly begins to resent Oriel for seeming bossy and constantly working. Oriel has her children help her start a vegetable garden in their side of the yard. This standoffishness continues, as the Pickleses feel like their home has been invaded.
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Just before dinner one night, the Lambs spin a knife on the table and ask it who’s doing the washing tonight, who’s the smartest, who’ll be married first, and so on. Whoever it points to when it stops spinning is the knife’s answer, and Lester and the children joke that “the knife never lies.” After this game, Oriel asks Lester to say Grace and bless their food, but Lester is flippant on the subject of God, thanking his wife for the meal instead. Later that night, Lester suggests the idea of opening a shop of their own in the front room of the house, as there isn’t another general store nearby. Oriel is skeptical at first, but Lester spins the knife again to decide whether or not they’ll try it. Oriel wonders if everything is based on luck, as if the whole world is like a spinning knife game.
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The Lambs soon open a shop in the front room. Dolly comes down to see them set it up, and it’s difficult for her to hide her resentment about the Lambs’ work ethic and Oriel’s bossiness. Oriel always seems to know the proper way of doing things, and Dolly feels insecure in comparison, as if she’s constantly being judged. The entire Pickles family begins to fade into the background of the household as the Lambs’ shop quickly grows in popularity. Oriel keeps her children working in the shop constantly. They sell food and general goods, and it isn’t long before the shop is common knowledge in the neighborhood. Eventually, “Cloudstreet” becomes the common name for the shop and the house in general.
During this period, Quick Lamb struggles with guilt and regret, feeling that it should have been him instead of Fish who almost drowned. He still blames himself for the incident, and Fish’s behavior depresses Quick. Fish had been funny, clever, and lovable, but now he’s slow, distant, and childlike despite his age; his near-death experience has taken most of his original intelligence and personality away from him. Quick finds pictures of prisoners of war and other miserable people in the newspaper and hangs them on his bedroom wall as a constant reminder that he’s the lucky one; he survived with his mind intact, unlike his brother. At night, the people from the pictures fly off the wall and dance over Quick’s bed while he sleeps.
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As Quick struggles with his self-hatred, the Lamb girls find themselves excited to live in the city instead of the country. They enjoy the feeling of living in a large house with landings and banisters, and they quickly become recognizable by everyone in the neighborhood. With their distinct hairstyles and dresses made by Oriel from scrap material, their popularity grows as people see them working in the shop. Hattie seems to grow up quickly, Elaine tries to look mature around boys, and Red lets herself become the boyish rascal of the family now that Fish no longer fills that role. All three of them enjoy talking to the boys who visit the shop.
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One night, Oriel and Lester lie in bed and reflect sadly on Fish’s condition, Quick’s depressed mood, and their own loss of faith. Lester wonders if Quick blames himself for what happened to Fish, and Oriel admits that she blames Quick, Lester, and God. But she nonetheless tries to give Fish a happy life despite knowing that he’ll have the mind of a child his whole life; she balks at the idea that she could live a despondent, inactive life like Dolly Pickles. Lester knows that there have been times when he’s thought it would have been better for Fish to die than to live his whole life as a child. But he also knows that he can’t meddle with life, as life and death is all there is.
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Despite their general distrust of doctors, Lester and Oriel take Fish to a doctor to have him examined, hoping to shed some light on his condition. The doctor seems a bit confused as he examines Fish and asks him questions. He asks Oriel questions about how long Fish was underwater, insisting that Fish’s behavior isn’t normal for a child who’s experienced what Fish has been through. Oriel becomes angry at the implication that she’s lying to the doctor, and she storms out of the room with her son when the doctor suggests the possibility of putting Fish in a “specialized home” where he could receive psychiatric help. On her way out, Oriel insists that there’s no home more specialized than her own.
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Some time later, Lester hurries home to announce the good news to the rest of the Lamb family: World War II has ended in Europe. His children joke around about it and remind him that the fighting’s not over yet, and Lester is bemused by their attitude. Meanwhile, Fish’s development is still stunted, and it’s clear that he’s forgotten almost everything he had learned before the accident. He seems to remember everyone in his family except for Oriel, as he often looks right through her and hardly ever acknowledges her existence. Even young Lon considers Fish to be the baby of the family, and Fish often has childlike screaming episodes. Fish loves spinning the knife and the sound of the river, and Rose still finds him beautiful.
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During a slow work day, the Lambs sit around the kitchen table while Oriel darns socks, and Quick asks Oriel what she was doing during World War I. She answers that she waited for a child to come home from the war, clarifying that she practically raised her stepmother’s children. The “child” she was waiting for was her stepbrother, who didn’t survive the conflict. She tells Quick that she loved her father, and she knows that he loved her. She recalls a time when he killed the last pig on his farm and used its bladder to help heal her blisters after she’d been burned in a bushfire. Lester also recalls his memories of the old war days, when he was a musician.
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On Quick’s 12th birthday, Lester makes him a cake and spells Quick’s name on it in icing. As they sit around the table about to dig into it, Oriel rushes in and tells them that a lady in the shop wants a cake urgently, and she’ll pay a quid for it. Lester says they don’t have one, but Oriel grabs the birthday cake, removes the candles, wipes Quick’s name off, and rushes back to the shop with it. The incident makes everyone laugh, starting with a quiet giggle but quickly building to an uncontrollable pitch.
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The Lamb family carries on with their lives at Cloudstreet. Lester joins the army band as a tuba player, and since Tokyo is being bombed, Quick is sure that the war is almost over. As Christmas approaches, Hattie and Elaine finish school and grow old enough to earn a wage. Quick performs poorly at school, as he’s distracted and misses the days when being Fish’s brother meant something back in their hometown. People paid attention to Quick back then, but now he feels unimportant and doesn’t know how to feel when he gets home. During a conversation about happiness, Fish explains that he’s sad when he “wants the water.”
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Meanwhile, Sam Pickles feels a change in the air and tries to read the signs of what the Shifty Shadow is trying to tell him. He reflects on the Lambs’ constant hard work and respects them for it despite how their busy presence irritates him and Dolly. But he knows that he isn’t cut out for a life of hard work; he considers himself to be more like his father, sensing changes in luck and fate and acting accordingly to reap the benefits of his own intuition. He tells himself that his time will come, trying to find reassurance in the fact that letting the Lambs live at Cloudstreet was a gamble that has paid off.
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Dolly finds herself feeling bitter and angry as winter comes. With the house unusually quiet, she walks around in the backyard and teases Oriel over the tin fence, enjoying a bit of mischief. That night in their bedroom, Sam and Dolly reminisce about their past together, missing their more romantic days as Dolly observes that they aren’t even that old yet. After Sam falls asleep, Dolly walks out to the nearby railway tracks and thinks about her more distant past, reflecting vaguely on how she loved her father even though he wasn’t really her father. She feels that no one can really control the direction their life takes.
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That same night, people far away “turn to shadows and powder in an instant,” and the war is over. Rose awakens to the sound of bells the next morning as everyone in the house and the neighborhood joyously celebrates the end of the war. Ted bursts into her room and breaks the good news. Amid the raucous celebrations, she dances with strangers in the hallway and takes a handful of humbugs from Quick. Fish spins the knife on the front porch and exclaims with glee when it stops spinning to point at him.
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