The Book of Emmett (3 page)

When she comes back to the wooden seat, Anne clasps Louisa's hand in her own knotty hands. Louisa knows this is clearly the worst speech she's ever given but by now it doesn't even matter. There is a wrenching going on within her. Some kind of old pain is finding its way out right there in the little chapel at Gilberts and while she's shuddering with grief, she is also honestly beyond caring. That her children won't see it is the only thing that matters.

Beside her Jessie is sobbing steadily, her shoulders rocking. The tissues in her hand are a mesh of snot and tears. She barely raises her head. Peter doesn't want to speak. Says he can't think of anything that hasn't been said. The odd tear slides down his face as he sits with an arm around Jess.

Outside the hot north wind pounds the ragged little funeral parlour and whips under the overpass. The palm tree out the front stoops before the wind and sheds papery fronds that curl on the hot concrete. Eva Cassidy is singing ‘Fields of Gold' as Louisa and Rob and Peter and Jessie carry Emmett's coffin down the length of the chapel, and the music gives them strength.

Apparently there are those who believe that women shouldn't carry coffins. Well, thinks Louisa, here they bloody do. She looks across at her sister and is glad at last that there's another woman in the family. They feel each other supporting their father and now that the load is shared, he seems a lighter man.

Turning right with the coffin isn't easy. There's some mild straining and the sweat flows. Outside, the silver hearse shaped like a bullet is ready to take Emmett away. They wait for the back to open and then in a slipping moment the coffin is lowered and swallowed by the wide mouth of the shining vehicle and then the door comes down and Emmett Brown is stowed away forever.

Outside Rob slips his sunglasses back on and waits for Anne to emerge. He studies the sky intensely. Notes that the dust storm is edging closer. A blotchy Louisa reckons the coffin in the hearse seems far too final for something connected to Emmett.

She looks over at her mother and her brothers and Jessie, slim and tawny as a lioness today, and thinks, well, freedom opens many doors and we will be free of him. She walks over to Rob and Peter and puts an arm around each brother. There's a space in them where the tears have been sheltering. Each of them feels exposed, there's been too much crying today and all feel weakened by the display. The worst of it is that they know people believe they've been weeping for their father and that they are simply bereaved by his death.

The truth is something else. Louisa closes her eyes and sees a flash of him in the kitchen, the light streaming in, making them fill his beer glass and God help them if they spilled a drop. Beating them, terrorising them, humiliating or exalting them – and she still doesn't know which was worse.

And the sad irony is that she realised this wasn't love only when she was far too old to have such doubts. She feels a pulse of rage at the pathetic man in the coffin. And then recalls his shaggy grey head, sees him old and stumbling in the hostel before he died, and once again pity for the poor old bastard takes the place of rage.

And she realises how tainted is anything connected with Emmett. Themselves included. With their arms around each other, their heads down, the four of them so different, yet so united by their father. They feel the strength of each other. They meet eyes and recognise their oldest grief – for a stolen childhood.

Before the hearse moves off, Peter reaches out and puts his hand on the back of the thing. He doesn't want to let him go, wants to keep Emmett with him, and he couldn't explain it even to himself but he understands there will be no slowing this completion. A wash of boiled afternoon sun is sifting through the gauzy dust as the hearse moves off slowly and makes its way towards the crematorium at Altona, further west again. As it climbs Mount Mistake, Peter is the only one of them to be glad that the old man will have one last view of his great, flat, baking city before the darkening sky closes over them, but then Peter has a forgiving nature.

Louisa's first memory is of a plate of food lifting through the kitchen then ramming into a wall and sliding down slowly with the suction of a squid. Other times the plate would leap off the wall and smash into a tangle of sharpness and food. Apparently Emmett doesn't like pumpkin. Or bastard chops. Can't you get it through your head that he's sick to fucking death of chops?

‘For God's sake!' he roars, ‘Can't a man have a decent fucking meal ready for him you pathetic bitch? Is that too much to ask after a hard fucking day at work? You slave your guts out every fucking day and you come home to this putrid slop.' You can see he's briefly pleased with something and if Louisa were older she would reason that it was probably the word ‘putrid', an excellent choice if harsh in this context. Still, he wastes no time gloating about good words now because he's in full flight, holding her small mother by the face.

‘Is this good? No. What is this? I don't know, I don't...' The smacking sounds are loud and hard. Her mother is on her knees. Louisa is nearly two and Rob about one. The screaming that goes with the throwing has been eliminated and the plates slide in a resounding silence. The child has stopped hearing. Her eyes are doing all the work now, pulling in images like a satellite dish. She must stay quiet, stay small and stay near her brother. She must not watch the hurting.

Right from the very beginning she understands that one day Emmett will kill her or one of them or all of them and then it'll be their own fault. The certainty of it edges into her life. He is the paw of the bear on her head, heavy with the promise of its nature.

Friday nights are pay nights. Summer is grass green and it's the blue of high skies and it's the honey colour of sun. Days are spent in the envelope of yard in the housing commission place where the sea of grass waves high above their heads because Emmett doesn't like to mow.

Children chasing and squealing and playing Blackfoot, their game of stalking lizards and each other. Playing hard and laughing and chasing each other until all are breathless and sagging like spent sacks onto the grass to laugh and then again to play some more. To make soup with flowers with the sun falling around them like a cloak of light.

There are only two Brown kids and all the other kids are from down the street. They're allowed into the Brown yard but never into the house. Emmett doesn't like other people's brats. They are gathered around the bucket making daisy-weed soup when Emmett appears at the corner coming in from the street with a big box balanced on his shoulder like a greengrocer.

‘Come on you mob,' he yells loud and happy tonight. ‘Come and see what I got.' He's been to see his old mates at the market. When he was young he lived near there and worked its long aisles sweeping and scrounging. There was no choice, he said, either you gave the family a chop-out or you went back to the orphanage.

Anne makes a space on the table. The screen door swings and the Brown children surge in on the wave of their father and there on the table is the biggest box of fruit they've ever seen. The neighbour kids watch for a while at the wire door but soon they are pulled away like small ghosts.

A bristly pineapple and a watermelon like a striped sub marine and grapes as green as eyes and apples and cherries so dark and hard, all spill out of the box. The kids and Anne and even Emmett make earrings out of the cherries and eat some until their teeth turn red. Then Emmett takes out the big knife and swings it down into the watermelon and the slicing, sucking sound as he pulls it out is tidal. He cuts them slices bigger than their faces. They spit shiny black pips into the box and then Emmett is cutting pears and serving thin slices skewered onto the tip of the knife like a priest offering communion.

Rob, his mouth full of cherries, says, ‘Dad, you should work at the market and we can always have fruit like this forever, wouldn't that be good?' Emmett pats the boy's head, his hair so short his skull is visible. He smiles, his teeth still dark from the cherries.

Emmett explains it to the kids in the square little kitchen. Nan's rose plate is stuck high on the wall, Louisa thinks, like a portal to a better world. ‘Words,' her father says, ‘are
the
key to life. There is nothin' they can't do.' He glares at Rob, daring him to move. Rob, the boy who has trouble keeping still, looks down and boldly decides to fidget with his fork.

When Emmett moves his searchlight gaze from him, Rob sneaks the fork off the table and under his leg, just to see if he can get away with something, anything. Sometimes Louisa feels winded by the high daring of her little brother. Why would you risk it?

They understand Emmett loves words. Always has. He wanted to be a poet but he has to work for a living supporting these ungrateful brats instead. They all know he's read Jack London's book
The Call of the Wild
so many times that he can practically recite the thing from cover to cover. They don't have a copy of it in the house so they can't read it themselves, but boy do they know the story. Triumph over adversity – all the best stories have it. That, and a hero, you gotta have a hero. Emmett's drummed it all into them.

Emmett doesn't write poems anymore. His words are cast into the amber liquid. These days he reasons he'll just make the kids clever and this will reflect well. So on good days Emmett the quizmaster tosses questions around and waits for the kids to catch them and open them up as though they were boxes of treasure.

‘What is a hedge?' he asks one night after tea when the plates are pushed back and the blue laminex table cleared enough for questions and elbows. This is a night when there will be a bit of entertainment. The question hangs and the silence stretches and eyes dart between the children. Competition is king and which kid is the smartest? Louisa or Rob?

The kids, at six and seven, are astounded and stumped by the word ‘hedge'. Nothing grows around the housing commission but weeds.

‘That's one for ya,' Emmett laughs and pushes back his hair and when he laughs there's that eyetooth, sharp and yellow.

‘Hedge! Come on now! Think about it,' Emmett urges and the word hangs above them solid and impregnable. Louisa thinks it's a word like ‘edge' and Emmett says ‘maybe' and ‘you may well be right my dear'. Rob, still fooling with the fork, will not be outdone by Louisa smarming up to Emmett. That the old man sometimes likes her makes her someone to beat. He hatches an answer. ‘A hedge is something green,' he declares and Emmett says that together they are completely one hundred bloody per cent right and he suspends the moment for a long time and spins it out until you can hear time moving away in inches with each tick of the clock.

And then, all theatre, he says that yes it is so, that ‘a hedge is indeed a green edge, an edge of green'. The kids are pleased but you wouldn't know it. They're both subdued, Louisa with worry and Rob with sharing victory. She hisses to Rob to put the stupid fork away.

The twins, Peter and Daniel, are in their wicker carrycots on the floor, cooing and batting away time as if it's nothing at all and Louisa wishes she was still a baby, safe from questions.

Rob decides Louisa is acting like Lady Muck, typical pain-in-the-neck- know-all-girl, and she's watching with owl eyes. Patient, waiting, willing Emmett not to change, to let this night finish without incident.

The boy hates her encompassing stare. Sometimes it seems not to be aimed at you, though most often it is. Still, he reckons, she's a worthy rival because she can pursue you without seeming to hunt and she's always alert. Always ready to get you and always wishing for a better Emmett.

In this wish they're united, but Rob doesn't leave it at wishing. He places his own hopes on time. On being a grownup. Then Emmett will be gone and there will be just him and his mum.

‘Watch out Rob,' Lou hisses urgently, spitting on her finger and smearing the red territory of a mozzie bite on her leg, ‘and listen. Might be a story coming.'

Louisa understands the way to be. Be silent until he wants to speak to you and then be polite. Your eyes should not be boastful. Hold yourself inside. She doesn't share her understanding with Rob, there's no way he'd listen anyway, he's too full of himself for listening.

But a peaceful night is not on the agenda. Not long after the triumph of the hedge definition, the fork inevitably stabs Rob in the leg and he leaps away from the table with a revealing scream. A little row of blood beads stands out from his thigh. That's it, game over.

Emmett leans over, his long arm heavy in the yellow kitchen, and swats the boy hard as he passes, so hard that he reels back. Louisa, standing appalled beside the chair, is belted across the face for good measure.

The walls of Wolf Street are coated with old smoke from the fire when the couch went up a while ago. Grandpa George thought it was the fireplace and put a match to it. Pretty soon smoke was rolling out from the house and Stan Williams from next door, a big soft pillow of a man, just happened to be getting home late from his Red Cross meeting. He was a volunteer.

When he saw the hot mesh of smoke emerging, he ran round the back and pushed through the door of the smoky house. Choking, he grabbed Louisa, who seemed to always be at her grandparents' house in those days, and pulled her out of bed. He surged down the front with the child in his arms like a hero emerging from the surf.

Outside in the street Nan and Pa sat on kitchen chairs with blankets across their shoulders. The red of the fire truck throbbed through the night and smoke, a slinking animal, just kept slipping through the door.

Because of the fire, Grandpa George went to live at the big mental home in the parched paddocks further west at Sunbury and Nan stayed on at Wolf Street alone. Anne took the kids to Sunbury on Sundays.

To get there they'd walk the long paths through brown paddocks. The paths were shaded from the white hot sun by corrugated iron strips and after many turns they'd find Pa standing alone among many in a vast room, bruised from thumps from other patients.

Though his pants were held up with braces, he'd lost so much weight they sagged like a half-mast flag. His eyes were gaps. Even in photographs it was apparent that he was fading out. When the kids held his hands they could have been holding moths.

He died at Sunbury and Nan forgot about eating and survived on smokes alone. So in 1969, Emmett and Anne and Louisa and Rob and the twins Peter and Daniel moved into Wolf Street, West Footscray. They brought their beds, their noise, their fights and not much else.

The Maribyrnong River pushes inland from the ports on the marshy edges of the horse-head-shaped Port Phillip Bay deep into Footscray. If you rise up above, you'll see that the city works on a grid and also, that there are so few trees, it's a blasted landscape.

Regardless of trees, Emmett believes Footscray is a better bet than the housing commission and Wolf Street has the advantage that the War Service loan on Nan's house is cheaper. More money for booze and the ponies.

Although Wolf Street is to the west of the river, on warm evenings when the kids are playing kick-to-kick on the deserted Total service station behind the house, they imagine that in the lull between kicks and in the spaces of silence when cars are not roaring down Williamstown Road, they can just about hear tug boats moving about in some blue distance. It's highly doubtful the Browns can hear any boats. Still, they persist in the illusion. Such fancies make life better. And though they seldom discuss them, they uphold them with each other.

Number fifty-five Wolf Street is one in a row of boxy wooden places that line both sides of the long narrow street. It has four rooms, two on each side divided by a skinny passageway. First is the lounge room where in winter Emmett stokes the fire until the throbbing orange of it forces the kids and their cushions back like retreating seals. Next comes Emmett and Anne's room, then Nan's, and the kids are in the last room. The kitchen runs along the back and is connected to a small bathroom with a sliding door. A lean-to fernery slouches up against the kitchen and the washhouse and toilet hang onto that. There's no electric light and no windows and sitting on the throne in the dunny in the dark, the kids' feet swing high and loose.

A modified Hills hoist dominates the yard. An amateur inventor once lived at fifty-five, a bloke named Herb Hawkins, long since dead. Herb took it into his head to improve upon the clothesline with a hydraulic lift device (a hose) attached to the tap beside the house. The water was meant to push up the clothesline and save all the effort of winding. Possibly it once worked but when the Browns live there it doesn't, and now tilts heavily to one side.

Since the hydraulics packed up (oozing for weeks like a wound) the clothesline offers no lift at all and so remains fixed. Sheets can't go on the low side because they drag in the dirt. Still, the frame of the thing is sturdy enough for kids to swing on and as a wizzy-giver it's unbeatable.

The kids aren't allowed inside much when Emmett's around, so the backyard and the street are theirs. For a little yard, there's a lot going on. In one corner is the big shed which is seldom used by adults anymore since Emmett made beer and most of the bottles exploded.

Now the big shed is calm though slightly creepy and the kids reckon there may be someone buried inside in a shallow grave, just going by the atmosphere. A curtain of spiders' webs hangs over the crooked little window.

The dog who became Frank was hidden in there for six days until his scratching and howling got him discovered and turfed out by Emmett who raged red-faced that he refused to take on any more bloody dogs ... or kids. ‘They shit everywhere and bite people and then a man has to sort the whole bloody mess out. NOT HAVING IT!'

But the dog was never really impressed by Emmett. He just sat there in the shed watching and even seemed bored, as if he'd seen better displays. He propped outside on the concrete and scratched himself lazily. And the kids had seen worse displays about less, so they weren't without hope either.

For two days the dog sat at the front gate of number fifty-five without food. He took a bit of water from the gutter when he could find it but it seemed he had chosen his family and that was it. In the end, coming home from work one day, Emmett saw him there, invited him in for a feed of Rice Bubbles and gave him a name.

‘Francis Xavier O'Hooligan,' Emmett declared in the kitchen that night standing beside Frank as the dog enthusiastically knocked back his Rice Bubbles, ‘is a Catholic dog.' Pause, while the kids absorbed the detail. ‘And as such, will need to be treated with respect and affection. These Micks get touchy if you don't love 'em,' he explained sagely to the kids, drawing on his time in a Catholic orphanage but not saying so. ‘They are very fond of a bit of ceremony,' he said. ‘Love a bit of a fuss.'

The kids thought their father was off and raving again and they knew that the dog was unlikely to have a religion, but listening was the way of peace, and they were deeply glad to have the sane and wise Frank on board.

The little shed was where Pa used to finish off cricket bats, planing them patiently and knocking them in with a wooden mallet. It was even said that some of his bats had been used by test cricketers.

And when he was working, the knocking of wood on wood rang out in hollow circles. Pa once worked at a little bat factory down the road in Seddon. He made a bat for Rob but it got pinched which was said to be Rob's own fault, yet no one suffered more at the loss of the mystical bat than Rob. He yearned for it, dreamed about it. Emmett called the boy pathetic for losing the bat and said he ought to be whipped but right at that moment, he couldn't be bothered. He did say that giving the boy a bat was a waste. ‘Never be much of a batsman, would ya anyway? Never be much good at anybloodything.'

Still when the boy made his first century in the schoolyard Emmett was mildly aroused. He was stacking the week's beer supply into the fridge leaving not much space for anything else. Bending over, he was illuminated by the fridge light and for a while it seemed he might even be impressed. But then flipping the lid off the first for the day, he dismissed it as schoolboy cricket and not worth a pinch of shit.

After Pa died each of the kids claimed the little shed at various times – the boys for a fort with sticks poking through the windows like weapons. For a while the war theme was uppermost and they made hand grenades out of tins stuffed with oily rags and chucked them out onto the petrol station where Dimitri, the transcendently dark bloke who ran the servo, kicked them aside or chucked them back. The bombs made a racket on the tin roof and his curses were like nothing they'd ever heard.

In time, another project beckoned, making a machine or a kite or a billycart. Rob was always in charge but Peter and Dan, three years younger, were usually the inspiration. Louisa was neither invited nor interested but when the boys tired of the shed, she inherited it. Tried to make a home of it and put up pictures of flowers laboriously cut from faded magazines and draped scraps of her mother's fabrics at the window.

A moat of concrete surrounds the house and beyond the shed the backyard is a square of dust and weeds dominated by the clothesline skeleton and a skinny apple tree grown from a core Louisa buried in the dust and watered. Sometimes Rob mows the patch of weeds with the rusty hand-mower.

The front of the house faces west and cops the full force of the afternoon sun as it heaves into the lounge room and the front bedroom. On summer afternoons the venom in that sun feels personal, but somehow the narrow sideway stays cool with fishbone ferns and moss unfurling slow and green in shallow furrows along the fence.

Anne tries to soften the old house by putting pale pebbles around the one established plant at Wolf Street, a barbed old mother-in-law's tongue jutting victoriously from the triangle garden bed under the lounge-room window. But unfortunately, the pebbles reflect sunlight upwards into the room like a searchlight and make it hotter. The pointy plant grows bigger and sharper.

Anne lays black plastic under the pebbles to suppress the oxalis and kikuyu but soon, with the pure resolve of freedom fighters, the weeds surge through the plastic and engulf the pebbles until she admits defeat and gardens no more. A hanging basket that once held red petunias still swings with ghostly menace on the verandah now, heavy with dry dirt.

On the house, the paint has been shed down to the naked slug-coloured wood but for the kids even paint has its uses. It's possible in idle moments to conscientiously ease off long shreds of it and then to scrunch them into younger ones' heads so that it looks like they have appalling dandruff with the added bonus that it's very hard to remove.

All the neighbourhood kids agree that the Browns live in the worst house in the street and some even say it's haunted. Johnno Johnson from Louisa's grade rides past regularly on his sister's bike yelling, ‘Ghostie ... Woooooo Louisa Brown lives in a ghost house.' After the second time he does it Louisa is convinced this can only mean he likes her. Therefore, she reasons, he must be cracked.

Soon after the move to Wolf Street, the Brown kids discover a hedge down the street and they find out what hedges are best for: hiding in. It's a big, shaggy cypress hedge on a corner. The apex is deep and comfortable and in there, in that dry little room, the roots of the hedge push down into the earth, protecting the children like the ankles of giants.