The Book of Emmett (13 page)

Ten cadets are hired by the national newspaper
The Antipodean
because apparently, they want new blood. When Louisa realises she's the only girl, she tells herself it's no great sign of anything. Must have needed one and I showed up, she thinks, but still, there's a creeping sense of unease.

Louisa's first sin as a journalist is that she's inclined to be slow on the uptake and her second is paralysing shyness, two big disadvantages. Hiding both brings certain challenges. On a tour of where they will work, she's startled by the typewriter that will be hers. Oh dear, she thinks recoiling, never reckoned on typing, but at least the shyness keeps her quiet.

And being the only girl in the office puts her into an uncomfortable place. If she stretches her arms out above her head, men dart looks at her. If she stands up to get copy paper, their magnet eyes follow.

At first she thinks they must be bored, or maybe they're kind and they want to help. It takes a while for her to see that to men she's just ripe fruit, and to realise that the men watch all women with the same ardent intent. The secretaries know all about it.

Even men with families do it but they look at her sadly, as if remembering something. Louisa, never slow to rile where men are concerned, would really like to kill them. These men who are never satisfied, they have their lives, so what's she got to do with them? And what's with all the perving? Apart from the hang-dog looks, there's something about them that reminds her of Emmett, but maybe it's just their evident seeping dissatisfaction with their lives. Does
he
look at women like this? She finds the answer without strenuous research and recalls that, yeah, Emmett always did have trouble with women.

It became apparent to her when she was about twelve. He called her into his room. She'd heard his voice down the tunnel of the passageway and been shocked that he would call her.

Though she felt guilty that she must have done something wrong and now would be found out, she went straight towards the door anyway like the condemned. She knocked on it. Opened it to a surly ‘enter'.

The big desk stretched before him and the blinds cut into the hot light pouring through the window and though Louisa was subdued, a steady tremor ran through her and she held her hands behind her back to still them. Her bowels felt loose, her mouth was a desert and the dizziness was there yet again.

‘I've called you in here, young Louisa,' her father began, leaning back on the chair until it cracked and strained before he snapped it back up, ‘to tell you something important. Are you ready to hear something important?' His voice lifted with every word.

‘Yes Dad,' she said, her heart sinking.

‘This thing I have to tell you is about...' and he leaned towards her as if he might whisper or bite but decided instead to shout, ‘...BLOOD.' At the word, she flinched and her skin prickled. He paused and drank some beer to settle himself and then he launched into it again.

‘The fact is that pretty soon you will find that there is blood coming from between your legs. You are already twelve or so. Each time it comes it won't last for long but, and remember this, Louisa, this is nothing to worry about. Do you hear me?' His megaphone voice hummed through her.

Louisa was looking hard at the floor. Possibly he was trying to comfort her, but why was he talking about such a thing? She tried to block him out. What had she done to deserve this? He drained his last inch of beer and continued. ‘All women have it. Some make a great big deal about it. But YOU will not do that.

‘Some women spend their lives whingeing about such things. That's all they do. They are nothing more than bitches. They seem to like to make people unhappy,' he said with a kind of sad bitterness, leaning back again on the creaking chair into the stale, stinking bedroom.

‘But that's another matter. The blood, well, that just means you're growing up. And sadly Lou, we all have to do that. So just to recap: blood – when it shows up, don't panic. Now, off you go.'

Like a zombie, Louisa reached for the door handle but knew it would be a mistake not to show appreciation. ‘Thanks Dad,' she mumbled in a small voice.

‘My pleasure. Anytime. Shut the door. Properly.'

By the time she gets her first serious pay cheque, the job has really achieved something for her mother and herself. Louisa is able to leave Wolf Street and Anne will have her room.

Louisa finds a place in Windsor with Gary Turner, one of the other cadets. The flat is across the river, it's full of nooks and looks down onto a road full of unceasing traffic. Gary's looking to move from way out in Nunawading where he's number four in a family of eight kids.

He's short and gingery with speckled skin, a pinched face and pale eyes and he picks her up from home with her boxes and watches her saying her goodbyes to Anne and the kids. Says nothing while she weeps in the car all the way there.

In the flat, there's a scungy old mattress on the floor, a chest of drawers and a sideboard. A tree scratches the window. ‘You haven't got a bed, have you?' Gary asks after they put down the boxes in her room.

‘Nah,' she says, ‘not yet, can't afford it yet. You?'

‘Yeah,' he says, ‘I'm taking the one from home.'

So she gets the mattress and that night they get Chinese food and eat sitting on the mattress but even the dim sims taste different from Footscray dimmies and she loses her appetite; and though he tells her about each of his brothers and sisters in long detail, she can't even begin to speak of her family.

The first night the tree taps on the window and wakes her. She's not scared, only relieved that she's finally free of Emmett. The kind of peace she feels within her is so profound, it's as if she's stepped into another universe where you're allowed to breathe deeply; but when she thinks of her mother and the boys and Jess she realises that guilt is the price of freedom. She's abandoned them and knowing it doesn't help, so most nights she runs down to the phone box on the corner to ring them but they can't talk when Emmett's home.

‘Hi Mum,' she says the first night they do talk. It's raining and the windows are waterfalls and she's wet and shivering. ‘I'm good yeah, I miss you. I'm learning shorthand. Not very good yet. Gary's great, says to say hi. I got a new Joni Mitchell record. I'll take the train over on Saturday.'

Jessie clamours at the phone and says, ‘Hello Louie' and then clams up and won't let go of the phone and then, when it's about to be snatched away, she says, ‘Frank's good,' and Anne takes the phone back and the child's bitter crying engulfs everything until Louisa is weeping too. She manages to make out that Pete's gone fishing and Rob's not home either.

She wants to ask Anne if Emmett's hit her lately, but she can't bring herself to come out and say this and Anne would never tell her off her own bat so the question sits between them like a ghost. That night, she weeps, running all the way home down the dark street, passing through pods of light from the street lamps, the spare coins leaving circles in her hand.

With Gary she enters into a life of perfection. She imagines living with him and her mum and Jess and the boys and then things really would be perfect. They cook cannelloni and soak beans for stews with chicken and green olives. They listen to so much Dylan they are word-perfect. They read e.e. cummings and Virginia Woolf and every single newspaper they can find while they compete for by-lines. And keep tally. And they travel to work on the train looking over the pages of
The Ant
at each other.

She only discovers he's gay one Saturday when he comes out and says it when they are building a bookshelf out of big grey bricks and planks hauled to the flat strapped precariously to the roof of his Beetle. It's been going so well up until now. ‘Gay?' she says, astonished, but retying her ponytail to gain time.

‘Yeah,' he smiles, ‘I like boys, you know, better than girls.'

Louisa's eyes are stretched wide. ‘But how do you know?'

He reaches his hand over to hers and says, ‘Louie, I've always known.'

She finds this impossible to believe. He looks abashed or something, she thinks, but then he's laughing and she's at least smiling because the truth is that Louisa is stunned at the very idea of people being gay. This has never been discussed at home but then she knows she didn't learn much of use at home apart from how to spell ornithorhynchus (the biological name for platypus), what hedges are best for and how to stay clear of Emmett.

And she has harboured such strong notions about young Gary Turner that it feels awfully foolish to have missed something like this. Still, she must not show it. ‘But Rhett,' she says grinning and bunging on a lame, syrupy Southern accent, ‘you still love me don't you?' And he smiles, relieved that she's laughing and grabs her in a headlock, ‘Always, my dear, always.'

They talk all day with the planks and the books scattered around them and understanding settles into them and she reckons she could get addicted to peace. She might marry him whether or not he's gay, not give him any damn say at all.

They finish the bookcase late in the afternoon and he goes off to the kitchen to make soup while she settles down to read about Gerald Durrell growing up in Corfu. Later, in the evening, they eat minestrone soup from blue bowls as the little birds settle into the tree outside the window.

On the train one morning, he calls her Mrs Turner and she calls him Mrs Brown. ‘You wish,' he laughs and she finds herself thinking that yeah, she really does wish.

At work a reporter named Wayne Goade spends much time caressing her with his eyes. He's got a high thready voice and he looks a bit like Van Morrison, pudgy with fairish hair and smudgy little granny glasses. Pity he doesn't make music like Van Morrison.

He's married and lives outside the city at a distant muddy place with his wife, Jan, and two little girls named Star and Venus. Louisa meets them when he brings them in to work. They seem to be sick a lot. They cough constantly and straw-coloured sludge edges from their noses. She shrinks away from them and goes back to thinking about by-lines, her favourite subject. How can she get more? Or even any would be good.

Wayne looks for gaps in her day and employing stealth and cunning, pounces on her. He sits on the edge of her desk and tries to make her laugh. Drinks in the freckle above the left corner of her lip. Wonders about the pale scar that runs from her mouth.

It seems he longs to touch her and sometimes takes the opportunity when he's ushering her into the lift or towards the coffee machine, guiding her by the small of her back. These small touches last him weeks.

In that whole year, there's never a time when Louisa's not lighting up his life and it doesn't matter to him the slightest little bit that his feelings are not reciprocated. Louisa thinks Wayne is a creepy dork.

But the photographer Michael Abbey is something else. With his dark wavy hair and neatly clipped beard he reminds her of Queen Mary's lover Lord Darnley or at least the actor she saw playing him on a BBC production she watched with Turner.

If Wayne Goade had been a fly on the studio wall one wet Friday evening when Louisa and Michael Abbey are both rostered on for late stop, the unfolding action would have felled him. Mercifully, Wayne is spared the sight of Louisa losing her virginity to Michael Abbey.

Michael and Louisa are in the office on that quiet winter's evening, sitting around waiting for news that even if it happened they had little intention of using. A massacre might get a run in the big pages of
The Ant
(how many dead and who were they?), a bushfire (number of lives and houses) or perhaps a huge accident (say the Westgate falling down again). But not much else would get in this late.

Rain slides down the windows which look onto the side street and at the end of the lane homeless people huddle inside big boxes with sheets of sagging plastic draped like canopies over their camps. It briefly crosses Louisa's mind that Emmett will end up in a camp like this.

Near the jaws of the mighty black presses downstairs, mobs of printers play poker. From the office window she can see the slap of cards and the piles of money and the men laughing and the calling. From a distance, these men seem interesting. Their hands and faces are black and the cards flare and match the whites of their eyes and glow in the gloom. Sitting on milk crates, they roar and laugh and gamble and tease. More fun than sitting upstairs waiting for blasting phone calls from Mick Fan, the latest hack to be made night news editor just because he lives in Sydney.

Up here in the newsroom, nothing much is happening and that's fine by everyone but Sydney. Michael Abbey leans back on his chair with his feet up on Louisa's desk. He's Keeping Louisa Company while she knits a scarf of many blues.

But she can only knit straight, anything else is way beyond her, and she believes she's making progress purely because the thing is growing. Abbey watches for longer than she reckons would be interesting for anyone, let alone a man, and by degrees it makes her nervous. And then there it is, her wrist is prickling.

She drops a couple of stitches in a row trying to scratch the wrist and is curiously embarrassed. Her fingers grow sweaty, which tangles the yarn all the more. Finally, Abbey stands up and says, ‘Come into the studio. I'll take a few pics of you.'

‘What for?' she says and laughs, her fingers knotted in the blue wool.

In his measured, sensible voice he says, ‘Well, there's nothing much else to do and you can't knit, my dear girl. That is very obvious.'

She feels her heart beat in its solid familiar way and it seems to her in a flashing moment that this is the time to change things. So she laughs and balls up the wool, spears it with the needles and follows him.

A radiator in the corner of the studio is sending out orange rays like a small sun. She wonders why the heater's already on and hovers in the doorway. She feels like a lamb with a wolf and there's that familiar feeling of finality. It reminds her of the feeling she got with Emmett sometimes, the sense that the thing, whatever it was, would happen and she would not be able to stop it. That another will would prevail. The fatalism of the everyday.

‘Sit down on the couch, my dear, while I see to this.' He gestures to the couch and then returns to fooling around with the camera, clicking and winding and polishing.

He moves the camera closer and takes many pictures of her face, coming over sometimes to turn her head or lift her hair and once he says, ‘You are very beautiful, young Louisa Brown.'

‘Come off it,' she says laughing and flushing scarlet, her wrist quivering away like a trapped bird.

‘No, I won't come off it. These pictures will be perfect and they will show your beauty and you will always have them.' Then he sits down beside her and kisses her mouth slow and tender as if she were beloved and says, ‘I could take some really lovely pictures of you if you would take your clothes off.'

She looks at him as if he's an alien and notices that his eyes are the green of leaves.

‘No way in the wide world,' she says, and it comforts her that she can still think. She wonders why he reckons she's special and realises it's because he wants something of her; but still, this suggestion of beauty is engrossing. She should have left then but a feeling like concrete keeps her there. Beauty is a sticky, seductive notion.

He takes pictures for a long time while outside the rain falls dark and slow. Inside it is warm and Michael is thrilling, his eyes, his hands.

She never thinks of it as losing her virginity to Michael Abbey. She sees it more as a gift to herself and to someone who, for that moment, seems to care for her. He shows her how to hold him and he's tender. This is the most you can ever ask of men, she reasons, that they seem to care.

They clean up the bit of blood on the couch with copy paper. When tears appear he holds her and strokes her hair and then the phone rings and it's Mick Fan on the speaker screaming, ‘What the fuck is going on down there? Where's the hourly update?' he also wonders whether it's a bloody morgue in Melbourne and Michael Abbey and Louisa, both half-dressed in the studio, have to laugh at that one.

After she assures Mick Fan that she will get his updates to him soon, she finds her tears have dried and that Michael is getting dressed and time is back in its envelope.

The next day Louisa feels the weight of a bruise within. Feels that her pelvis has carried something heavy. She knows she won't be the same and yet she's pleased about it, pleased that girl is folding into the wind. Now she is really an adult and that means she's further from home. She realises she could have made a more careful choice but what's done is done. Childhood is over. Let the future begin.

On Monday, Wayne's hanging around as usual and after taking a surreptitious peak, clears off briefly when Michael gives her the folio of pictures. Louisa remains friendly with Michael for years but they never make love again. He never offers to help with her knitting and he never offers to leave his girlfriend.

Louisa edges at her father with little squares of ten-paragraph stories cut from the paper and stuffed into a manila folder and later, with Abbey's photos. Perhaps she hopes that these things might tame him.

On the Saturday she takes the headshots home, she finds Emmett alone at the kitchen table, a glass of VB and the form guide open out before him. It's a glassy kind of day and she's enjoyed the walk from the station past all the houses she knows with a terrible intimacy. Every step is charted. And every inch of change noted.

Stepping into the kitchen is like walking back in time. She falters when she sees him looming at the table suddenly right there before her, absorbing all space. But today he recovers fast from this unexpected privacy theft. ‘Louie, the baby girl come to visit the old man!' He sounds up but he looks old. The grey cardigan is strained across his stomach and the darkness of the years is disclosed under his eyes.

‘Everyone's out mate,' he says gruffly, then remembers his manners, ‘but I'm glad you dropped in. Bit of a chinwag eh? Would you like an ale?'

‘No,' she snaps, appalled that he would offer her beer. ‘Dad, it's ten-thirty!' she adds, with a kind of umpire's reason in her voice. She's surrounded by the stench of booze, the old rival but experience says shallow breathing will defeat it.

Briskly, she gets her coat off and puts the kettle on and soon a chaste mug of tea seethes before her and she asks, ‘So how ya bin?' and he says well enough and looking her over brightly says, ‘You look pretty swank today, Miss Louie.' Now that she's got money she dresses well and today she's got her new short brown boots under her Levis and a short tweed jacket and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with small pink roses all over it.

As ever, compliments leave her puzzled and silenced so she slides the folder across the table at him and it nudges the form guide and that's not a good thing, could annoy him. She decides to ignore it.

He straightens the newspaper carefully, even reverently, and then opens the folder and pushes the pictures out over the table. When he looks up he smiles like an old man. ‘Hmmm. You know Lou, you look like a movie star,' he decides. ‘Reckon I could have this one? Spare your old man one photo?'

She agrees and as he holds it, the alcoholic tremor works itself in him and a loose fragment of pity hits her and she thinks, you poor old quivery thing, and closes her eyes for a second to steady herself. Emmett, in his grey cardigan and unironed blue work shirt, collar up on one side, scans the photo like there might be an answer in it. ‘I know!' he says, jubilant and clears his throat. ‘I know who it is you look like. That little girl in
Romeo and Juliet
from the film, that's who you look like.' Louisa says nothing. It's Emmett she looks like, not some movie star.

So they fall back on book talk for a while and Emmett gets interested because he loves matching books and people. ‘I tell you who you should read. D.H. Lawrence. A wonderful writer and a true voice for mine.' He's getting misty now as he often does about his special writers.

Louisa starts to bristle. She hasn't read much Lawrence but it's 1977 and the accepted thinking says that Lawrence is a male chauvinist pig. She decides to share this with her father even though her knowledge of Lawrence is extremely limited. She brushes her hair back with a hand, her voice lifts a notch and she heads into the breach. ‘Come
off
it. He's nothing but a misogynist. Why on earth would I read that crap?' she demands. ‘You must be joking.'

Emmett is astonished at the attack. Bloody kids, he thinks, a man's trying to be sociable and gets it wrong yet again. He has no wish for bloody tension today so he says, ‘Don't do your block now Louie. Bit prickly today, eh? Strike me. You kids have got an answer to every bloody thing in the world.' He laughs, scratches his head, messing up his hair so he looks slightly crazy, and can't disguise a longing look over at the form guide.

He doesn't give up on the books though but when he suggests Mailer, Louisa stands up abruptly and with a haughty look snatches up all the pictures, including the one she's given him, and shoves them in the folder. She gets her coat and heads home, glad that home is no longer where he lives. It's two trains away and the pictures are balanced on her knees in the manila folder and all the way she can't decide whether she's a bitch or whether she hates her father. Both true she allows.

And on that departing train, she realises there's no going back. Whatever home was it's all finished and I don't know what I'm doing or where I'm going, she thinks, grabbing at her hair and pulling it over her shoulder.

On the dirty old Saturday train, a knot of leering youths is looking for trouble and a woman with almost no hair reads a fat pot-boiler. The shipping containers are low but they'll build up again. Things come and go. Life sucks and then it's fine. Emmett is disconcertingly pleasant and then he's a shit again. Stuff happens. She looks around the train and thinks, these people are all making it. Pretend you know what you're doing, and keep going. She holds that thought all the way to Flinders Street.