The Book of Emmett (21 page)

When she closed up the shop, Anne put up white nylon lace curtains in the windows out the front. The nylon washes so well, she thinks, and I can see out, but no one can see in. Not during daylight hours anyway. It won't be long now till Emmett's birthday and that means he'll finally be gone, out of the garage and away to the bush. Early retirement and a great fat cheque.

She wonders whether maybe he's got a girlfriend or something. He's rarely there and when he is, he doesn't seem part of the place, he still sits in the garage slaving away at those bloody probabilities. Honestly, if he'd only turned his mind to something useful or even sensible, God, imagine the difference. Still, it's water under the bridge now. Nothing is going to change Emmett. Not one solitary thing.

Anne says none of this worries her at all. He has ceased to be a concern, though she will admit to herself that the sooner he goes, the better and her life will go on with the hum of electricity in the wires out the front. Most mornings she's out there getting the graffiti off the pink-tiled wall between her place and the Indian restaurant next door with the kind of energy the young might envy.

She's absolutely determined that order will prevail. Yet change is everywhere and it springs upon her. The local bank branch closes up and the library branch is gone and so is the swimming pool, the post office is now a shop and the old weatherboard Presbyterian Church is a Chinese Christian Centre.

The fish-and-chip shop is run by a Korean named Mr Kim whom Anne admires for his scrupulous cleanliness; every Friday she gets her tea from him. Once, she gave one of his African customers a dollar when he couldn't buy a piece of flake because he was short. When she handed the coin to him, he looked like he was about to be struck. He held the glowing coin in his palm and was dumbfounded. So was Anne by her unexpected generosity.

The next wave of people pushes through the old suburb. Within a stone's throw, there are two Indian clothes shops, an Indian hardware and a video and grocery store with little speakers out the front, sharing tinny music with the street. The subcontinent has moved to West Footscray. ‘Well,' explains Anne to her old friend Maria who lives in Melton, ‘the Vietnamese snaffled Footscray long ago.'

Emmett eternally believes he's got a chance with Lady Luck. He's in the garage crunching his numbers one sulphurous Sunday afternoon. When the boys arrive for a working bee, he emerges and greets them effusively. ‘Mate,' he says to Pete, hugging him and gives Rob a quick pat on the shoulder, which Rob doesn't fail to notice. Then he's off back to his room. ‘Be out in a tick and give you a hand,' he shouts through the open door. ‘I'm onto a big one now. The numbers are coming out just right.'

It's so hot the sky pulses at them and after two hours Pete sticks his head under the hose and heads off to find Emmett in his old Bonds T-shirt and checked boxers, snoring like a hammer drill.

He stands in the doorway gazing in for quite a while and then he shuts the door softly and goes back to work. ‘Dad's taken a sickie,' he says.

Sweat eases things between Rob and Pete. They have long held a deal about helping each other with big jobs. Problem is, Rob does most of the asking. Pete reckons his time will come.

Today the topic is property values. Everyone's doing up the old places and making a fortune. Easy money. ‘So there you go. Isn't that just typical,' Rob says sourly to Pete as they shovel under the hot sun. ‘The Browns lose out again, but look on the bright side, some things stay the same and we've still got the worst house in the street. Ha!'

It grates that Wolf Street, with its Edwardian trim of three mingey tulips would now be worth far more than the shop. Behind it the petrol station is boarded up and hazard signs sag across the fractured concrete and the cyclone fencing, and down the road there's a bar called Glide or Slide or something evocative. People sit in the sun and smoke and talk on mobile phones and read the broadsheet and drink expensive coffee with far too much milk.

Can this really be Footscray? Louisa wonders, noting with slight concern taut little houses that used to be dumps. She's driving over to help the boys with a bit of backyard blitzing. She's easing herself back in slowly and decides that a bit of physical work might be a good idea.

Tom and Beck are in the back seat bickering over the Play Station, and she ignores them resolutely with new determination won from her clinic. Her psychiatrist, Dr Emmeline Mackenzie, is a big woman with sad, oyster eyes whose silver crew cut hinges on her cow's lick and gives her the look of an elderly schoolboy. Louisa has never known anyone so composed.

She's trying to become like Dr Mackenzie, so she tells herself she's looking forward to seeing her brothers. Will Jess show up? Regardless of the good doctor, she hopes not, can't face the Princess today. But walking down the narrow sideway between the two shops she feels the vibe between Rob and Pete and realises there's a sulk underway and would you believe it, poor old Jess is nowhere in sight.

‘Mum should never have moved to the bloody shop,' Rob hisses at Pete as they shovel up the old tree roots they've dug out of the backyard. They are planning to pave but it's a pure fact that work without pay tends to make him real irritable.

‘Stop whingeing Rob. Only makes it worse. This was your idea anyway,' Pete retorts, dragging the shovel back to the beginning of the pile again and wiping the sweat off his face. His dirty hair stands at attention.

‘I'm trying to talk to you, you perfect bloody saint, but that's clearly impossible.' Rob waits his turn at the pile and they go on grimly in silence. Louisa walks in and says, ‘G'day you lot,' and grabs the shovel. ‘I'll have a go, you go get a drink,' she tells Rob who lets go of it and heads for the kitchen. Tom and Beck, ears flapping like flags, follow him inside. A pair of ducklings.

‘How is he?' she asks Pete. ‘Grumpy as all shit,' Pete says, wiping his face, and they laugh just that bit too loud and she thinks, great, now Robert will think we're laughing at him. ‘C'mon Rob, you bludger,' she yells, ‘we need you out here.' In the kitchen Rob is engrossed in the classified housing ads. The kids sitting beside him twiddle the PlayStation in turns.

Anne ages like a leaf. She goes from being green and strong to lighter, frailer and dry. If you'd told her that, she'd laugh. She likes old autumn leaves, well, she likes most old things. Louisa visits once a week.

They sit at the blackwood table and have a mug of tea. Louisa thinks she comes for tea and grievances. It's always teabags, which really grates on Louisa who hates them but imagines Anne doesn't know this since she never says. All pure foolishness. Anne knows most things. She leaves Lou's teabag in longer to make the tea strong.

Anne's hands are knotted with arthritis and she warms them around her flowery mug. Light shines off the porridge-coloured bricks next door and the glare is cast in. From where she's sitting, you can just see a triangle of sky between the fence and the bricks.

Their conversations ramble around lightly like the spring breeze and they touch on most things – the interpretation of the roses, easy recipes, getting the best out of children, missing bin night and what to do when it happens, worries at work, bills, weight, television – but really they're talking about knowing each other. About the way between them.

Anne often speaks about her parents, George and Rose. ‘They look after me, I know they do, and they are always with me,' Anne says in her enduring way. This, as ever, slightly annoys Louisa. Maybe it's just jealousy, maybe she wishes she had these kind of stories too but Louisa has never felt anyone looking out for her.

Anne remembers how her father, apart from the six years he was at the war, would bring Anne and Rose vegemite on toast and a cup of tea in the mornings. He'd put the toast under the griller while the kettle was boiling to keep it warm.

So how then, Louisa wonders privately with a long nurtured sense of outrage, did you allow Emmett to be our father when you had such a father?

Louisa pushes away at the story of her family but the mystery of Emmett is the layer that separates them. Anne wonders why her kids will never let it go but she doesn't ask them, she wouldn't hurt them for all the world. The blessing of these children is in every part of her.

When Louisa presses into the dark landscape Anne will say, ‘I don't know why I didn't leave him, but I had little children and he would have come after us and where would I have gone? There were no single mother's pensions then, and I'm glad young women have them now. I couldn't have taken you kids home to Mum and Dad, it would not have been fair, there were so many of you and he was dangerous.'

And Louisa gets heated sometimes when talk turns to Emmett. She grips her mug and the hot tan liquid moves a bit too fast. She looks up at the herbs Anne has placed near the fingers of sunlight just missing the window ledge. They've grown gangly reaching for the light. Listening to her mother sometimes requires an act of will and subjugation of her instinct.

‘My way of handling him was to ignore him. His terrible displays. It was the only way, anything could make it worse. I could take what he dished out. I was tough.'

It takes Louisa some effort to speak against her mother but one day she does. Louisa says, ‘That's true Mum, you were tough and you are tough now, but we were not tough. We were little kids.'

Louisa looks out into Dr Mackenzie's garden and the tall white anemones move in the breeze. She begins with simplicity. ‘My father was overbearing. He's still alive but he's sick and old.' She holds her hands in her lap until they start to feel hot and fat. Where do you begin with the story of Emmett? The elastic silence stretches around them. Dr Mackenzie is prepared to wait.

And then Louisa blurts, ‘It feels like our childhood wasn't acknowledged. That because we survived, well, most of us did, then it's all right.'

‘What do you mean “most of us”?' Dr Mackenzie asks. She has a notebook on her lap and her big hand is jotting steadily. Louisa wants to stop her from writing. Writing makes things real.

And so the welling arises in her and her voice goes its own way again. ‘There was another one of us.' She coughs to clear the past but it doesn't work. ‘He was named Daniel. My brother Peter's twin. He fell over one night running from Dad and he hit his head, fractured his skull actually, and he died.' The doctor writes and then lets her eyes rest on Louisa who weeps for much longer than is sensible, considering this happened so long ago and also that money is being paid and the clock is ticking. And then she smiles at the truth of her being her mother's daughter regarding money, and Dr Mackenzie passes her a box of tissues. Louisa can't stop taking them, she takes at least eight. She wants so much.

When Rob first hears that Louisa will need to take medication all her life to guard against her depression, he's not astonished. He's felt the weight of such anchors within him too. But knowing this hasn't done a thing for Louisa. She's sick to death of the family looking at her as if she's not herself and it irks her that they think they might all get it too, as if it were the flu. All they think about are themselves, she thinks. All anyone thinks about.

Rob was particularly annoying when he slipped into his pet theory that whatever Louisa has, Emmett had too. She wants nothing to do with Emmett. ‘Do you think I'm like him?' she asks incredulously. He doesn't answer. She realises she shouldn't have said anything to him, it only fuels discussions later. She can just see Jessie and Anne getting stuck into a bit of character analysis on the side. She decides to say as little as she can to anyone.

Visiting Dr Mackenzie each week and talking about Emmett are the fastest hours of her life. The doctor tells Louisa it would be a mistake to turn her hate for her father back onto herself, and Louisa is clobbered by the realisation that Dr Mackenzie thinks she hates Emmett. ‘Oh no. I don't hate him,' she spits out baldly. ‘I've only told you part of it, he wasn't all bad.' Then she revises and ends up saying, ‘But since I was a child there have been plenty of times when I've just wanted to lie down on the road and let him run me over.' And she groans at her own ineptitude and imprecision.

The doctor writes fast again and, while she does, Louisa tries to correct impressions. Feels like her old interview subjects must have felt. ‘It wasn't,' she begins, ‘it was just...'

So she starts to hold back on detail. The main thing she wants to settle is guilt about leaving Jessie, which still affects her. Talking to Jess is not easy. Emmett isn't curable. ‘You need to think about why you felt so responsible,' she hears the doctor say, ‘and then you will have your answer.' And then it's the end and Louisa tries to keep Dr Mackenzie talking, but she just rises with her sad smile and opens the door because the fifty minutes are up.

Outside, walking to the train, she recalls in a flash of resistance that she felt responsible because she was. How's that supposed to help? she wonders, watching the city pass and recoiling from the gaudy, suggestive billboards as if they were an assault.

Some days it seems too far. Some days Emmett fears he won't get to retirement. He wants it too much. You just can't want things, he thinks, some bastard will always try to stop ya. Days he drives to work wondering whether he'll even live that long. Probably cark it right before the payout, he tells himself, and wouldn't that be just bloody typical? He's got a cold and the headaches just keep coming.

If he makes it to the appointed day he plans to move away from the shop, from Anne, from every single bloody thing he knows. He wants to be clean again, to be new somewhere with people who don't know him. And the bush is where he was born. If he'd stayed there maybe things wouldn't have got so stuffed up. Ah, who knows, he sighs, weaving through the back streets on his way to work, past all the sardine houses jammed together. All this would surely drive anyone mad he reckons.

He's not fussy where he ends up, bush people are much of a muchness to him. Just wants somewhere small, somewhere with a couple of paddocks and a whole lot of sky. He doesn't need his family, believes they're better off without him. When they look at me, he reckons, they see too much.

Eventually, Emmett retires to Deakin, a small town of about five hundred people nestled near the granite mountains rising abruptly from the plains near Ballarat. He's been there a while in the crooked little house with three small paddocks. And he so loves all that sky and every inch of it his.

Rob calls Ballarat the ‘Prague of the South' and he believes he's onto something with that description because, though he's never been to Prague, he's seen pictures. ‘Moving up near Ballarat eh Dad? Not a bad idea, it's a gracious city, not unlike Prague, I hear.'

‘What in the name of Christ
are
you talking about?'

Rob's mouth goes dry. ‘Prague, you know, in Czechoslovakia, I was just saying they had something in common.'

‘Jesus, spare me the crap will ya? It's just Balla-bloody-rat,' Emmett smirks around the room at the others and blows a spray of foam off his beer.

Rob and Louisa stay well away from Deakin. Had enough of the old man to last them forever. Jessie too, though she does write him a letter when he first moves in and in it she lists his faults in exact, concise and lawyerly prose. Everything from violence and drinking to his abuse of Anne and his meanness with money. Jessie feels better for having written it.

Emmett gets out the magnifying glass and reads the letter, all of it, and is proud of the way she put things, bloody well-educated, he thinks. Who would have thought little Jess had it in her? Turned out to be the smartest of the lot. What she actually says is highly exaggerated in his view, but still, you've got to respect anyone who can write a letter like that.

On Sunday nights Peter calls Emmett and they talk, about firewood and cattle and fences and kids, though when mention is made of his grandchildren, Emmett phases out. With grandchildren, he reckons the trick is to compress them all into one bottler, a halfway decent kid. It's the only way.

‘Dad, it's coming up to your sixtieth and I think we should do something special for it. What d'ya reckon?'

Emmett's had a good day messing around in his vegie garden. He likes talking to Pete, he reminds him of someone. ‘Yeah, ripper mate, what do
you
reckon?' ‘Well,' says Peter. ‘I could help you with it if you like. I'll come up early that morning.' Emmett puts the phone down wondering what that was all about. And when the day arrives even the birthday is long forgotten.

The morning of the big day he's in the kitchen in his tattered old boxers and saggy grey singlet. His legs are thin as sticks and white and nearly hairless but the ghost of the beer belly is still evident. He's standing there in the middle of the kitchen trying to work out where in hell the bloody teapot's gone when he hears a thump at the door.

As ever, his first response to surprise is fury. Unexpected bangs on the door drive him crazy. All visitors risk being sent packing. At the first knock he pretends it's a figment of his imagination but this makes things worse because, encouraged by silence, people just bang louder.

It takes him a while to get to the door because his feet are sore lately and he's hobbling and when at last he opens it, he sees a grinning Louisa balancing a huge box stuffed with food. ‘Happy birthday Dad,' she says, stepping neatly over Clancy the dog, ankle-high and just the right height to skittle people. Behind her Peter is yelling, ‘Happy birthday you old bastard,' and carrying a couple of bags of ice. ‘Louisa,' Emmett says following her, ‘what are you doing here?'

Peter called her last night to ask if she could help with Emmett's birthday. ‘You're the only one who can really cook,' he points out diplomatically and smiling, and seeing she taught him how to cook in the first place, she reckons this is a hide. ‘We can use the van, I've got it all packed up. And I'll come down with you to set up the spit. Okay?'

Though she couldn't explain it to herself, agreeing came easy. Doing it for Pete, she rationalises, make him happy, but there's something else too, something about birthdays. She remembered the time Emmett took her into Myers to buy her a book for her birthday and then to a little Chinese joint for lunch and they got the book out and started it right there in the red glowing restaurant, Emmett whispering different voices for the characters. It was
A Christmas Carol
by Dickens and it was the first time she'd ever been sorry when the food arrived. When they put the book in the bag, it seemed the best of her father went away with it.

The morning of Emmett's birthday Peter went to his local deli as soon as it opened and bought six fat loaves of soft Greek bread, all doughy and dense as sponges. ‘This bread could be made by the gods themselves, of clouds,' Con the baker told him, pushing the floury loaves into bags. Peter smiled and agreed.

Greeks remind him of Emmett. Dad always loved wogs, he remembered putting the bread on the passenger seat, their food, their language; he thought they made us a better country, yet why did he call them wogs? Right and wrong, how come he was always so right and so wrong? Fair dinkum, you'd have to be a genius to work him out, Pete mused as he drove over to pick up Louisa.

Peter also organised for Nev the butcher in Deakin to get hold of a lamb. It turns out to be a whopper, at least a two-tooth, in fact, the thing's verging on sheep size.

The spit is in the back of the van and a box of supplies with extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, dried Greek oregano, sea salt and twelve lemons.

Pete steps outside into the fresh air with the ice bags, puts them down while he cleans the leaves and sticks out of the old bath in the hay shed. This takes a while because there's some kind of tarry blackness there too, a remnant of some other dubious thing, but he gets it all out and in the end he sits the beer and lemonade in the clean bath and pours the ice around it, loving the crunch and hiss.

Then he gets a nice low coalfire glowing in the half-gallon drum and sets up the spit over it. Tests the thing and after a while yells to Louisa, ‘And yes, Houston, we have lift-off!' It's windy now but he realises it's always windy in Deakin. He watches the curtain of air sweep across the open plains, herding gum leaves before it and making washing on lines reach ever outwards like supplicants. At Emmett's old prop clothesline, he takes down a tangled shirt and a pair of trousers that might have been there for months and carries them into the house rolled into a ball.

Emmett means to help but mostly he scratches his head because he doesn't remember where things are but today he's not getting mad about it. He's all right today. Normally not knowing is just the sort of thing that sets him right off. On the tele Louisa finds a calming game of distant cricket and he's drawn in. He mutes the TV and listens to the ABC broadcast on the wireless. There's a little delay between the picture and sound, but he's not watching all that carefully anymore and this way he avoids the hot noise flare of the ads. Before too long, he's dozing in his chair.

Louisa has cake tins and an electric mixer plus all the ingredients for Victoria sponges, including strawberries and cream, and she gets stuck into making a birthday cake. Baking – but in truth, all cooking – settles Louisa. She likes the magic of creation from variable ingredients, likes the mixing and the tasting. Best part of cooking, she believes, is feeding people.

Cakes are special though and deeply satisfying. But no one is harder on herself and her creations than Louisa. She's after perfection and yet when it does come, perfection is not triumphant, it's simply benign and welcome.

The rest of the family are used to her comforting hobby and mostly they oblige her when she hovers holding hot spoons to their lips and asking them to judge. But ultimately her efforts are wasted because most of Emmett's scenes began at the table and they all have a complicated relationship with food. They eat fast and seldom notice how wonderful it is. For the Browns, food is eternally something to be bolted.

They wrap dozens of potatoes in foil and bury the big silver spuds in the coals and while the cakes are cooking, Louisa makes Emmett a tomato and onion sandwich and a cup of tea.

The tomato, a round flat Adelaide she's grown herself, is rich with flavour and still somehow holds the hot smell of summer that emerges from the best tomatoes at the first cut. She scatters salt and white pepper on it and when Emmett bites into the sandwich he taste the richness of love, the love that would last him, and it's so unexpected it makes him shy.

‘Not a bad tomato Lou
,'
he says, glancing up at her away from the TV, ‘not bad at all.'

Peter and Louisa clean the table, scrubbing it with sleeves up. They lay the animal out and place rosemary mixed with slivers of garlic (sliced and peeled by Emmett with much comment and complaints about ‘fiddly bloody wog tucker') in the small cuts. They rub it down with oil as though they were massaging a sportsman. Both of them sprinkle dried oregano over the lamb. And then outside they hook the animal onto the spit and stand back watching the dull orange coals do their work. Soon the rising smell calls everything to it and Clancy, drooling, sits beside them intently watching the roasting meat.

‘Would not call a king me bloody Uncle Bill
,'
Emmett says and Peter laughs. ‘No, me neither Dad. Not today.' Half the people who used to work with Emmett don't make it to Deakin for the big day. Most can't be bothered with him and none of his duck-shooting mates show up either.

Jessie makes a late appearance with Warren who looks lost and puzzled and, as he always does around Jessie's family, left right out. He perches on the arm of a chair and closely examines the label on his beer bottle until Anne takes pity on him and they talk about school.

Rob and Louisa watch from the wings under a ravaged hibiscus, discussing Emmett with the air of experts. Having the old lion in their sights in the open with the protection of others around them is a kind of completion.

There's plenty of beer of course and Emmett's invited his mates around from the pub; there's Reg and big fat Nev brings some special pork sausages he's been working on. The barbie is tamed for the snags. Nev thought a bit of chilli would add that certain zing but as usual he overdoes it. The snags are so spicy that people are gasping like stranded fish and some nick ice from the bath to slide into their burning mouths.

But turning sixty isn't all fun. Emmett and Rob nearly collide on the back step. Emmett happily flourishes the barbeque tongs like a conductor. He snaps them together and tells Rob to lighten up, that it's his birthday. ‘Mate, you've got a face as long as a fiddle. It's a man's birthday. You're standing there like a stunned mullet! Cheer bloody up! That's a order.' And he snaps the tongs again.

Rob flinches. ‘And what's so great about that? We supposed to be happy that you were born?' As soon as he says it, he's sorry for the remark. He blames the wine. He hadn't meant to reveal anything.

Emmett decides he can't blame the poor bastard but it's about time the boy woke up to the fact that life is shit for everyone, not just for him. Wouldn't mind telling him me own story one day, he thinks, and in the same breath realises it would not make one iota of difference.

So he snaps the tongs again and heads back to the barbie to turn the snags for the hundredth time. Peter carves the lamb and places the fragrant meat upon the bread and the guests fall upon the food like the starving multitudes and for a brief moment Louisa and Pete look at each other and they smile.

Then casually, as if expected, a gleaming red CFA fire truck decked out in blue and white streamers for Emmett's old footy team arrives out the front. Reg leans on the horn
.
‘Get in you old bastard,' he roars when an astonished Emmett opens the gate. ‘You, son, are going for your birthday ride!'

Emmett is both appalled and charmed. ‘Well, bugger me,' he gasps, hanging onto the saggy gate. His face crumples and he nearly cries, but he tells himself to be a man and so he roars with laughter and throws his arm around the nearest person and that happens to be Rob.

On being engulfed by Emmett, Rob stiffens but this doesn't worry his father. He just drags him out the gate to sit on the back of the truck, their legs swinging, Rob's reluctantly. Jessie climbs aboard too. Pete handballs a new leather footy at them and Rob marks it, giving it to Emmett who at last has something else to hold. Louisa and Anne, standing beside the fence like pillars of another life, are shocked. This is not the Emmett they know.

And slowly, gingerly, the truck draws away as if it has something special on board. The Browns wave to each other, relieved that Emmett has cooperated. There's a bit of waving and then the fire truck bumps off into the wide empty country street.