The Book of Emmett (11 page)

Then one night, straight from a counter tea at the pub, Emmett strides into the ward, pissed and booming. His clothes, his hair and even his skin hold the reek of countless cigarettes and the sweat of blokes and the slaughterhouse smell of pubs.

On his face tonight, Emmett's got the look. It brooks no argument. He's got it all sorted RIGHT out. Peter can't see much, given he can't move his head, but hearing is more than enough. He wonders what the other kids in the ward will make of this.

Emmett gets up close. ‘Listen mate, don't worry,' he whispers real loud leaning in to the boy, placing his big hard hand on Peter's bandaged head. A coil of nicotine circles two fingers. ‘It will be all right. I've had a word to the big bloke about you. Upstairs. Told him I wanted my son to walk. We worked it right out. Said he'd fix it.' It takes some time for Peter to realise that Emmett must be talking about God.

Emmett's all stubble and bloodshot eyes. The newspaper, as ever, is folded to the form guide and stands straight up in his pocket. Hot beer fumes fan out from him and the boy actually breathes them in gratefully. Today he doesn't mind them, they smell familiar, remind him of home.

Emmett sits beside him, awkward on the little chair. He crosses his legs, the steel-capped boots incongruous and baleful on the shining hospital floor. He's uncomfortable and hot in his bulky work jacket with its squeaky leather sleeves. The newspaper slips to the floor. He retrieves it absently.

He remembers when he was in hospital as a child. How he liked that it was all so clean. Whiteness surrounded everything and the nurses smiled. It was real nice.

He drifts for a minute then something occurs to him and he brightens with the idea. Leans forward. He asks the boy if he's eating. His voice lowers gravely. ‘Because you know boy, there's only one rule in life and you know what that is. You don't eat, you don't shit! You don't shit – you die! Simple rule boy. Remember that one.'

He's pleased with having recalled the rule. Not a bad rule, he thinks, off the top of me head, not bad at all, and success relaxes him. Some of the other kids in the ward are tittering at Emmett but he doesn't notice.

And then, in the pause between acts, some of the air seems to leave him and he sags with all these efforts he must make. It's as if he's not inflated anymore, not so hard, and Pete, though he can't see his face, feels it again, the mouldy sadness that circles the old man.

No one else seems to be in on Emmett's God-bothering. The doctors skirt around the bed reading charts and the nurses whisper to each other. They don't seem to have been told that Emmett has fixed it. For days they wait for the swelling to subside with Peter not moving. Days coming and going with other children enduring pain in the ward. Louisa, Rob, Anne and Jess visit and shuffle by his bed like some kind of lost tribe.

But it turns out that Peter's neck is all right and he is discharged. Brokenly, walking slow and careful as something newborn, he gets from the hospital to the Holden. In the car, safe from prying ears, Emmett changes the gears and claims credit. Peter shifts his fledgling legs and prepares to listen.

‘Makes a difference a little chat with the big bloke,' he says with a nod. Peter can turn his head a bit now. The streets move past them as though they're on a conveyor belt. He sees his father in profile eternal against the landscape. ‘Yeah Dad, it's a good thing you sorted it out,' he says, closing his eyes and leaning his head gently back on the car seat.

On the night of the first school dance Louisa is in a state of grim excitement. Never the most popular girl at school, she's smart and secretive, a watcher with ambition, but tonight she is determined to go to the dance, damned if she isn't. She's going. And she is going to enjoy it. She's just turned sixteen.

Anne brings home a crepe jersey dress the pale blue of eyelids. It's an old order left hanging on a rail in the storeroom for some time. Anne gets it for nothing which makes Louisa happy and it looks nice enough. It's long and swishes on the floor when she turns and it ties her up in the back like a present. Louisa washes her hair the night before. It's long and dark and shiny. She's all ready, she's just got to do tea.

Emmett's in the kitchen when she pushes through the fly-wire door into the kitchen. This doesn't look great. She carefully puts her bag down by the door. ‘Get the fuck out of here, can't you see I'm busy,' he says almost casually and turns away, dismissing her.

She reads the mood off the map of his voice, not too bad tonight, might be able to move past it and get done the things that need doing without a brawl. And that's what might have happened, but for the smell of beer. The smell of it is a net, capturing and forcing itself upon her. She fights the urge to gag.

Emmett is pouring himself what he loves to refer to as a cleansing ale in the hub of the kitchen and she's the girl at the edges with things to do. But tonight is different. Tonight, the future begins. Louisa will not be diverted from her task. She needs to be busy and yet here again blocking her is beer, the old enemy with its yeasty yellowness tearing at her nostrils. The smell that means chaos.

She has a little time up her sleeve, she believes she will be right with time, even allowing for being careful of the old man's mood and yet, there it is, the strangest thing, tonight of all nights, she feels like pushing at the boundary.

Even years later she will not want to name the thing that pushed her to take Emmett on, but now it's a secret she can't open. Truth is, sometimes Louisa wants to serve herself up to the big thing, to just
have it done,
to finish it. This is the coward within speaking and should not be encouraged but the hero within, tired of heeding the moods of the monster, also needs restraint.

Some things are better left unnamed but if she named it, she'd call it the suicide impulse and it will always be a force inside her. And if she's feeling kindly toward herself when she thinks about the night of the dance, she might say that perhaps she was just being brave, that she had a heart as full of courage as a soldier facing the enemy in a muddy trench. The soldier heading into death. The ones they build statues for. But she doesn't often feel kindly.

Still, Emmett, it must be said, was pretty mild in his greeting so she knows he's not in the war zone yet, the zone of no return. Louisa reckons she can read him like she can read the battered barometer by the front door. Go a bit further, push it kid, the hero says.

So she pushes in behind him and drags the spuds out of the cupboard near his knees standing at the kitchen bench as if he's at the pub. And she plonks them on the bench behind him. He turns to her, knees just bent, glass in hand, as slow and as watchful as a big cat.

‘I thought I told you to fuck off,' he says quietly, raising the menace a notch. He's surly now and broody, aiming his anger squarely at her, a warning because this is when he's most dangerous. In the beginning.

Still, for some mad reason she pushes on, thinking she has space and time but really she's crossing the tracks with the train bearing down. His eyes become darker when the storm is rising within, but it doesn't seem this way yet. She still reckons there's a bit of give there and believes, foolish confident girl, that she's correctly reading the mood. She has time to stop and to listen, even to back off and be compliant. And yet she does not do that.

It's time to stop listening. Time to think of Daniel and of where he went, of what the loss of him has done to them. Time to let the rage out. Time to lift her head, to watch the rhino charge. Take it head on. It's her job to prepare the tea and she'll bloody well do it, put the potatoes on and get the meat ready. Get things underway for the meal, for yet another bog standard meal.

Will it be one of those meals where silence folds over the kitchen and, heads bowed as if in prayer, they push the food into their mouths fast and stare at the scraps on the blue plates? All the kids have counted the cracks on those plates and can tell anyone who wants to know the average number on each (between thirty and fifty).

But tonight will be different because suddenly Emmett is coming at her and she's not moving. She will not be bullied. Something has spilled within her and something has been released. Louisa is coming out.

He tells her to wait 'til he's bloody-well ready and calls her a fucking little bitch and again says, ‘Fuck off Louisa, just fuck off.' And she says, barely troubled it seems, ‘No. No. I'm going out tonight. Now, I'm doing my jobs. You have to move.'

And the words slip out of her mouth as easy as a breath and she's amazed at herself because she just keeps going when she should have stopped but there it is, loud and clear in her bumpy schoolgirl voice and she says, ‘Fuck off yourself, why don't you? You bloody great bully...'

Words you might say to anyone if you're mad enough but not words to speak to Emmett Brown. Though she doesn't fear, her body fears for her and her scalp prickles and her heart thumps and sweat starts up but she pays no attention to these details because she's entirely ready.

When he punches her face, it's almost a relief. She feels his knuckle meet her teeth and both lips split and swell. Bright blood rains down on her school dress and this takes no time, but to Louisa the moment has grace. She seems to be recording each instant and then, in that heavy space, she rips into him like an animal, grunting with sheer effort.

She hates touching him, it feels too personal and his skin is like scales, crusty and brown to the tide mark of the shirt that she rips open. She sees that the skin underneath is fish-white and that his eyes are yellow from years of grog and neglect. She sees it all in close-up, like she's never seen him before.

He stinks of sour sweat and his hair is long and stringy, but still dark enough to make him seem young. But if she has to, she will touch him, she will. She will be free of him even if she has to kill him. It's become so simple.

So, she enters into the roaring, the ripping and the spitting blood. Enters the arena with the old man and remembers the taste of blood and notes with the usual amazement that it tastes of salt, and while the thought passes through her that we are made of the sea, he beats the shit out of her.

There's no deciding. There's nothing, it's just a fight and she gives it every bit of herself, shovels into him like a boxer and he hits her over and over and while she loses the fight, she knows she's won.

He rips out a clump of her hair. She thinks she's doing no damage but she must be because he lurches back like a bear shambling across the room. He rests one hand on the table and looks shocked. They're both breathing hard. Blood runs from her swollen mouth like a stream.

And then, in a pause that might have been in a spotlight, they step away from each other in the kitchen where the light filters through the lattice that braces the fernery where the plants are mostly dead, where a tarp flaps in the corner, where the washhouse barely contains piles of dirty clothes and the lazy copper sits roundly waiting for someone to take charge. Surrounded by all of these normal things.

But here in the kitchen, their hearts beat hard and she watches him intently. She's astonished to see that she's dragged his watch from his wrist and she holds it in her hand and it swings like a scalp. He stands back, abashed. She puts the watch on the bench and notices that her hands are shaking so much they seem to be levitating and then, strangest of all ... he's leaving.

He grabs a tea towel and holds it to the rakes her short nails have made on his arm and then he limps away up the passage to his bedroom. She wipes her mouth with her hand and then wipes the blood on her torn school dress even as she knows torn school dresses don't matter anymore.

She returns to the bench to do her work. Her hands are trembling but she peels the five potatoes and manages to cut them and put them in the pot. Then she goes to her room. She doesn't cry. She is elated. She reckons she's killed him in her heart. There's a curious calm. And a lightness.

Outside in the sideway between their house and Stan's next door where the moss inches along the fence, the mauve light is absorbing the day. She lays the watery blue dress out on the bed and thinks it looks like the person she will become, calm and clear and clean.

She sits down on the floor and rests her back on the bed. When she touches her mouth, it's huge and no longer hers. The lace curtain lifts with the scraps of wind that make it through her window.

At the dance that night she wears the blue dress. Her face is much noted by the other kids but not to her. No one asks her to dance, though she hasn't expected that. Why would anyone ask the dour serious girl to dance? The girl whose long dark hair falls forward and covers much of her face. A girl who might even be pretty if she smiled.

Rob is there in another clump of kids, as popular and funny as ever. They steer themselves away from each other as if they're barely acquaintances.

At the entrance to the gym under a banner announcing
The Footscray High Senior Social,
her best friend, Gail Godwin, puts an arm around her shoulders and Louisa feels a rush of heat in her eyes and instantly it seems the salty tears bite into her lip. People being nice, thinks Louisa, will always get you.

Gail dances with Louisa's favourite boy, the darkly handsome Steve Christou, and tonight Louisa even gets pleasure from seeing them together. Such things as jealousy seem irrelevant now.

Bad Company belting out ‘It's All Right Now' through the big square amps gets her moving tentatively on the boundary line of the gym on the yellow basketball lines. She allows herself to think that it's becoming all right now but Steve, the boy she has cultivated in her dreams, well, at this moment he seems so very young.

Louisa does have friends, mostly others like her, standing at the fringes. Gail ‘Goddie' Godwin is not one of these. She's popular in a heart-swelling way, at least to Louisa. She loves watching kids swarm around Goddie. Makes her feel like something's going right. They sat next to each other at primary school on that first morning and have remained mates.

In the last year of school Louisa works Friday nights and Saturday mornings selling shoes in an arcade in the city she loves. She also loves the lights and the money and the shoes. She got the job when she was sixteen by walking up and down Bourke Street with Goddie asking every shop if they had a vacancy. Taking it in turns to be rejected, it was amazing how fast they got used to the word ‘no'. Since she started working, she has not asked for money from her mother and this is a source of pride. Not a farthing, not a brass razoo, she tells Goddie with delight.

But now at seventeen she has another job. It's Louisa's responsibility to take Jessie to her crèche and to pick her up every day. She boards the bus with her two-year-old sister as women board buses laden with bags of groceries, sighing and feeling every atom of their weight.

She has given up trying to look cool for the boys on the bus and now they are as distant as mountain ranges but just as appealing.

Each day she sits Jessie beside the window and sometimes she engages with the child; mostly though, she ignores her and tries to read some novel or another from the school library. She reads
The Catcher in the Rye
and wonders bitterly how Holden Caulfield would go looking after a two-year-old.

She reads
Slaughterhouse 5
and sometimes on the bus she looks up, seeing Footscray and thinking of Dresden. She reads a book on British rock and roll and pinches it from the library because she wants to be droll and knowledgeable like the author, Nik Cohn.

Rainy days, she draws pictures of cats and dogs on the steamy windows for the child. She's almost always aware that she was delivered a burden when this child was born, but it takes too long to work out that it isn't the child's fault.

At the bus stop nearest to the school, the other kids streak ahead while she tows Jessie down Morrison Street. There are days when the weather opens itself upon them. The wind and the sun and the rain and the cold and high indigo skies, each of them shadows Louisa and Jessie.

In a thunderstorm one day with the bruised sky heaving from ocean-green to purple, Louisa pushes Jessie under her coat and runs through the lashing rain. Every drop that lands scalds as if it's boiling and they run all the long way to the crèche and Jessie loses a shoe.

Often though, if they're early, they nick across to the mangy paddock opposite where a raddled old swayback horse lives. They name the horse Chester because of his chestnut colour. Jessie loves him until he mistakes her fingers for grass and nips her with his great yellow teeth. Louisa holds the sobbing child and feels her distress in her own body.

At the crèche, Louisa deposits the rashy two-year-old – her cheeks look like they've been sandpapered – with a goodbye kiss and a wave. Then she walks the last bit down towards the school, listening to the broadcast of Jessie's anguish for longer than she would believe possible.

Squatting at the end of the street, Footscray High is a pile of drab grey concrete bricks with a sagging tin roof and a gathering of scraggly shrubs making some kind of effort to be a garden.

She swings her bag over her shoulder and decides there will come a day when she will not have to look after babies. And a day when she will be free of her family. Free to be herself. But she always remembers acutely, as if pricked by a pin, that she has to collect Jessie at three-thirty sharp. Or else her mother will have to pay more – and this cannot be.

On the bus on the way home, the little girl is tired and wants her mum. Louisa holds the child's hand as if she is chained to her. At the service station, she gets off first and Jessie jumps down the big steps all on her own and into her sister's arms and Louisa swings her in a big arc that silently speaks of love.