Cloudstreet: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Cloudstreet is quiet for days after the wedding, except for the noise of construction workers digging in the street outside to install new water pipes. On the way back from their honeymoon, Quick and Rose discuss their plans for the immediate future. Rose insists she wants a new house of their own that no one’s ever lived in, as she’s tired of old houses. Quick points out that they’ll need a lot more money, and he resolves to find a job or two. Despite Rose’s protests, he has his sights set on becoming a policeman. He thinks about all the unfortunate people in photos on his wall, and he likes the idea of fighting evil.

Quick and Rose sign up for a place at the State Housing center, but they choose to live in a small flat until they’ve saved enough money and until their new house has been built. The flat is behind a house owned by a woman named Mrs. Manners. Rose doesn’t like how old the flat is, but they’re usually too busy to spend much time there anyway. Rose continues working at Bairds, while Quick makes deliveries in the truck as he trains to become a constable. Rose and the Lambs attend Quick’s graduation ceremony and watch with pride as he officially becomes an officer of the law. Afterwards, Rose lets Quick know that she’s pregnant.

Quick soon realizes that his career as a police officer isn’t as exciting as he’d expected it to be. He doesn’t encounter any violent or serious crime on the streets, and he guiltily starts to wish that some real evil would come along so that he could stop it. Instead, he merely patrols the uneventful streets and handles minor tasks, feeling more like a boy scout than a constable. Rose keeps working at Bairds, even during her pregnancy. As they’re both so busy, the two of them are eager to reach a point where they can see each other more often. Quick imagines all their future together, and Rose is still keen on having their own house.

Sam wakes up one morning and feels an intense tingling in his stump, knowing for certain that the Shifty Shadow is lurking. He learned his lesson from last time and doesn’t get out of bed, feeling that this round of bad luck is stronger than any he can remember. Later that morning, Dolly falls down a flight of stairs and breaks her leg. Oriel is out in her tent, staring at the names of three of her children who were stillborn or miscarriages, which she’s written in her Bible. She hurries to the house when she hears Dolly’s screams, and Dolly has her broken leg plastered at the hospital.

That same day, a small man in a sauna somewhere falls over and dies of heart failure. Meanwhile, Fish pounds on the piano keys in the library, but no matter which keys he presses, the piano only emits a loud, booming middle C, over and over again. He has an angry outburst and throws the stool at a pair of hateful ghosts. He tells them he hates them, and that this is his house. This gives the dark spirits a moment of pause after Fish leaves the room, but the droning middle C noise continues all the same.

That night, Quick rushes home on his police bike, as Rose seems to be having a miscarriage. He quickly asks Mrs. Manners for help and stops his neighbor’s car so he can use it to rush Rose to the hospital. After the miscarriage, Rose wakes up in the hospital to see Sam and Quick in the room with her. Sam bears even more bad news: Ted died of heart failure today in the sauna, after pushing himself too hard. Rose has an oddly calm reaction to this news and to the fact of her own miscarriage. She steels herself and tries to keep a strong attitude, as she doesn’t want Quick or her father to know how much she’s hurting. Back at Cloudstreet, Dolly is devastated by the news of Ted’s death, and the shadows in the library dance.

In the months following Ted’s death and the miscarriage, Rose becomes more gaunt, tired, and withdrawn, despite Quick’s attempts to comfort her. She keeps working at Bairds until she becomes too tired and listless to make it through a workday anymore. Quick wonders if he’s the one who’s bringing all this misfortune on the people around him. Lester visits him at the police station one night and shows him a massive fish he’d just caught. Lester tells Quick that Cloudstreet has become unusually quiet, and he shows him two silver coins that he found in the fish. They’re both from the year Fish was born, and he plans to give them to Fish as a gift. Before leaving, he tells Quick to take care of Rose.

Sam continues working at the mint and losing most of his money to gambling as usual, but he feels strangely reassured by his losing streaks, as he knows and accepts that his chaotic life is governed by the whims of luck. Dolly is almost never home anymore, but he doesn’t have the heart to get angry with her. One morning, while looking for his lost hat before heading out for work, he finds Fish in the library. Fish is wearing nothing but Sam’s hat and a pair of silver coins fashioned into a necklace, and he’s banging his fists into the wall and crying out. Sam is even more terrified when he catches a glimpse of a pale, severe old woman watching him, but she soon disappears. Fish tells Sam that “she won’t let him play,” and Sam fetches Elaine to try and calm her brother down.

As her physical and mental health deteriorates, Rose falls back into her old habit of vomiting up most of the food she tries to eat, and she can feel herself becoming cold and bitter. She’s surprised to see Sam show up at the flat one day, and she’s angry to learn that he’s here to enlist her help in finding Dolly, who’s been missing for a few days. Rose refuses, reminding her father of how Dolly robbed her of her childhood, as Rose constantly had to drag Dolly back home from pubs and clean her up. Sam fights back and tells Rose not to be needlessly cruel to a woman whose life is already practically over. He reminds Rose that she’s young and still has her whole life ahead of her, and he describes the pain of losing his family in his own old age.

Lying miserably in her bed later, Rose flashes back to noises she heard behind the door of her mother’s room, way back when they lived in Joel’s pub. She realizes with disgust that Dolly had been having sex with the pilot that had brought Sam back home after the accident that claimed his hand. As she regrets recalling this memory, Quick rushes in and brings her to a taxi. Rose asks if he’s bringing her to the hospital. He says he probably should, but he explains that they’re going to Cloudstreet, as Dolly has been found and taken there. Someone told Sam about it and Sam contacted Quick, who assumed Rose would want to come along and see her mother.

As Dolly’s drunk yelling echoes through Cloudstreet, Rose furiously tells Quick that she doesn’t want to go through with this. Rose insists that she’s her own woman now and she doesn’t want anything to do with Dolly anymore. Quick awkwardly tries to change her mind, telling her that Dolly wants her. After Quick leaves, Dolly sees Rose enter the room through a haze of hallucinations. After Dolly’s episode wears off, Rose angrily confronts her about the childhood innocence she stole from her, and refuses to sympathize when Dolly asks Rose not to hate her. Nonetheless, Dolly implores Rose to visit her again tomorrow, just to talk. Lester also encourages a second visit, warning that Rose’s hatred is self-destructive, and he couldn’t stand to lose her.

Rose visits Cloudstreet the next morning and waits around the house until Dolly wakes up. Rose feels strangely timid and unprepared this time, as if most of her anger has left her. She sits by the bed as Dolly asks when Rose will be pregnant again, fantasizing about having grandchildren and spoiling them. She asks Rose if she would have cared about Ted more if he'd been a sister rather than a brother. Dolly tells Rose she’s lucky to have never had sisters, and she finally shares the truth with her daughter. One of Dolly’s sisters was also her mother; Dolly was born of incest. Shocked, Rose comforts her distraught mother, and the two women weep on the bed together.

Gradually, things start getting better. Rose continues to visit Dolly every day or two, and she realizes that her mother is often just cursing and nagging to entertain herself, without any real malicious intent behind it. Being able to love Dolly again and feeling love in return feels like a healing tonic for Rose, who starts eating and becoming healthy again. Quick and Rose spend more time together, and Lester gets them a car. Rose is pregnant again by Christmas, and she imagines a brighter future for them, with their own house (which is still being built) and a steady income. Their prospects look better than ever.

At Cloudstreet one day, Lon walks into the kitchen with a black eye and a bruised face. Oriel asks him what happened, and he tells her that another man hit him in public. Immediately suspicious, Oriel asks if he deserved it, and Lon admits that he’s gotten a girl pregnant. Oriel reacts in shock, while the Lamb girls tease him. He’s married to the pregnant girl, Pansy Mullet, within two weeks. At the wedding, Oriel mutters “he does” when the priest asks Lon if he takes Pansy as his lawfully wedded wife. Lon and Pansy start living in a room in Cloudstreet, and they seem miserable together.

Sam, Oriel, and Quick each seem to receive an ominous premonition. Feeling something bad coming isn’t unusual for Sam, but as he feels his stump tingling painfully in bed one night, he knows that whatever dark event is approaching feels like doom. Oriel, meanwhile, has a dream of the city burning. She sees people fleeing from the flames towards the river, but they stop at the water, afraid, and are consumed by the fire chasing them. Quick visits the new house being constructed for him and Rose, and he encounters the mysterious Black man he’s seen many times before. The man tells Quick that this is not his home, and that he should go back to his real home. Quick turns to leave and the man disappears.

After a hot and muggy Christmas, a hateful and merciless killer begins stalking the streets of Perth at night, murdering innocent people seemingly at random. Another officer named Murphy brings Quick up to speed about what had happened the night before: the murderer shot a total of five people in various parts of town and killed most of them, including a sleeping child. Murphy calls it madness, but Quick thinks he’s finally dealing with pure evil. Sam reads about the killings in the newspaper and figures the Shifty Shadow is hanging over the whole town now. The town becomes tense, and no one goes out at night. No one can guess at the killer’s motives, or where he might strike next.

The police force increases their efforts and Quick patrols the streets at night, but they come no closer to catching the murderer. Quick and Rose’s new house is practically ready for them to move in, but Rose is too afraid of the killer to move yet, knowing that she’ll be on her own most of the time. Quick tries to reassure her, but the police make little progress on the case, and someone else is killed despite everyone’s increased level of caution. The killer approaches Oriel’s tent one night, but he’s scared off by the mad squealing of the pig in the dark. During a night of patrolling, Quick encounters the strange Black man again, who tells him to go back to his real home. Quick glimpses dozens of Black men beneath the trees on his way home.

Sam, Lester, and Oriel meet in the Lambs’ kitchen one morning, all of them seeming to have had the same idea at once. They agree that they should try to get Quick and Rose to live at Cloudstreet again, if only for a little while, so that they’ll be safer from the killer. To their surprise, Quick and Rose show up of their own accord and ask to stay for a while before the parents can even put their plan into motion. Quick feels safer among family, but he and Rose sleep in the disquieting, windowless library, where Quick often sees the two ghosts hating each other in the dead of night and assumes he’s hallucinating from exhaustion.

Oriel sits in her tent at night and knows there’s only a bit of fabric between her and her potential death, but she doesn’t let herself be afraid. She hears Fish sobbing and wailing inside the house, but she knows that Fish doesn’t perceive her, and she feels that going inside at night would be a surrender on her part. She still feels unwelcome in the house for a reason she can’t quite place. A few streets away, the murderer kills a young woman in her bed and defiles her body, taking twisted joy in fully knowing that what he’s doing is depraved. He feels like he’s finally “winning.” He heads home to his wife and kids after pushing the girl’s body into a neighbor’s yard.

An exhausted Quick stands by the river that morning and thinks that the town will never be the same after all this killing. He’s frustrated that they can’t seem to catch the murderer, only clean up after him. In spite of himself, he’s looking for the Black man, desperate for some help. The town reacts furiously to the news of the latest murders. One day, Quick saws a large window into the wall of the library, finally letting some light and fresh air into the usually stuffy and sickening room. Fish sees the two ghostly women staring at the new window in horror, and he tells Rose that “the ladies won’t like” her new baby. Rose and Quick assume he’s talking about Dolly and Oriel. Dolly visits Sam at the train station on his way home from work.

As autumn comes around, Quick and Rose are still living at Cloudstreet, having truly made themselves at home there again. To her surprise, Rose feels happy living there, despite it feeling like a surrender after all her plans of moving far away and having nothing to do with Cloudstreet or her family anymore. She feels safe and comfortable amid the noise and bustle of the big house, and she still enjoys spending time with Dolly. Quick seems happy as well, though he’s still troubled by the police’s lack of progress on the murder case. The killer soon strikes again, murdering a babysitter this time, and Quick feels himself slipping into a depressingly familiar sense of despair and hopelessness. He knows he’s losing the fight against evil every day.

The police receive a tip and successfully set a trap for the killer, catching him at last. Quick can hardly let himself believe it when Murphy breaks the news to him, as Quick had let himself believe that the killer would be giving them trouble forever. Shortly after hearing of the murderer’s capture, the sergeant tells Quick to hurry home, as Rose is giving birth. On the drive to Cloudstreet, Murphy says it’ll be in the papers, and Quick distractedly asks if he means the birth. But Murphy was talking about the murderer’s capture, which turns out to be strangely disappointing for the officers who haul him to jail. They expected to feel like they defeated a monster, but the killer looks like nothing more than a small, scared, frustrated man who’s no longer winning.

Quick arrives at Cloudstreet as fast as he can and offers to take Rose to the hospital, but she tells everyone not to bother starting up a vehicle, as she feels like she’s about to have the baby right now, in their room. Oriel hurries upstairs to help Rose give birth, and Rose has never been happier to see her. The two families and the two ghosts tensely watch while Fish sings and babbles. The birth goes off without a hitch, and Dolly is a grandmother. Quick suggests that they call the newborn boy Harry, to Rose’s laughing disagreement. The two spirits fade from the house as Rose gives birth, released from their bindings forever. The house itself seems to breathe a sigh of relief as the families celebrate the birth and the town celebrates the killer’s capture.