The Book of Emmett (16 page)

Rob is waiting for Louisa to have a cup of coffee with him. The weather's been patchy lately and he's had to cancel work because of storms; still, he thinks and allows himself a smile, it's swings and roundabouts with storms, there's plenty of work after they've done their worst. Insurance jobs are always the best kind, no doubt about that.

The café is in Linen Street, North Melbourne, near the market. It's halfway between both their houses and they meet there for convenience and maybe, if they'll only admit, for their father's sake. He lived in Linen Street as a child with his Nana and his uncles. In North Melbourne they feel the child their father once was, feel the possibility of his life before it was lost.

There's something Rob needs to say to Lou and it won't be easy. He orders a short black to give him strength and knocks it back in a hot speedy gulp. How do you say such a thing? he wonders, looking up at the sky. How do you tell your sister that you think it's a mistake for her to have children, for any of us to.

It gnaws at him and now she's gone and married this Keele bloke, something is bound to happen. There's something about her that says secrets and something just a little too happy for his liking.

The truth of it is, he reckons, after long thinking on the subject, that considering the childhood they survived, none of them can possibly become a decent, let alone an excellent, parent. And for Rob that is the only sort anyone should be: wonderful. But how're you supposed to get it right when you've got so little to go on?

He gears himself up for the talk. Knows she won't appreciate it. What woman would? he supposes. Though he will never really think of Louisa as a woman, she's a sister to her core, so that excludes her from the woman issue. Rob has his own complicated relationships to worry about, but one thing he's sure of: he will
never
have children. It wouldn't be fair. It would be gross irresponsibility.

He sees her striding down the street before she sees him. She's wearing a new cream coat and her dark hair is long and shiny. Okay, he decides, she looks well enough. Possibly, she even looks good. He likes the big brown boots but he won't tell her.

She kisses him and he seems to flinch so she punches his upper arm and ruffles his hair which he straightens immediately with both hands. ‘You are a dag Robbie boy,' she says and orders a decaff cappuccino which would have given him a clue if he had truly been awake.

They try to catch up at least once a month at this café and when they do, eyes privately held behind sunglasses, they talk in snatches with their frothy coffee before them.

As usual, she starts, ‘How are you then, how's things?' He stirs his second coffee for a long time and says they're fine and she thinks, oh dear, it's going to be one of those days when talking to him is like pulling teeth. Poplar trees whisper beside them and further along, plane trees line Linen Street like green soldiers. Traffic is orderly and cars slip by like ants heading inside before rain. The market isn't far and the occasional call of the stall-holders reaches them.

Emmett inevitably comes up. Louisa has heard from Anne that he's having blistering headaches. Shockers that keep him down for days. Rob's not impressed. ‘Oh well,' he says, trying to make his face show some concern, ‘bound to happen with the booze
plus
he's getting old and he's hardly a poster boy for taking care of yourself.'

And then flatly out of nowhere it seems, he snaps, ‘You know Louie, I hate the old man and I will never feel any pity for him. I hate his fucking guts. He was a brutal bastard, the worst, the worst...' And Louisa thinks, No, not today, I don't want to hear it. Today is a clear good day.

Rob sips his coffee and though she agrees with him, Louisa tries to talk him out of the hate ‘because hate just eats into you', she says like some American talkshow host. And so then, of course, the talking slows because just for once Rob would like to hear someone agree with him, just this one time would do. Not someone who tells him about their experience the minute he tells them of his own. No, he'd just really like to be heard.

‘Say it,' he urges, leaning in, ‘just say it, just say you know what I mean and don't try to talk me out of what I'm feeling. Give me some credit Lou.' Louisa doesn't feel like agreeing, so they grind to a halt. Rob peevishly scratches at the new beard he's grown because he can't be bothered shaving. It's bloody itchy and he decides it will have to go. The sun slides in and glints on the cups.

And then again, baldly out of nowhere, like an actor walking onto a stage for his big moment, Rob stretches his neck, lifts off his sunglasses and tosses them on the table and says, ‘You know, I don't think it's a good idea to have children.' Louisa thinks it's payback time and looks at him. He lets the statement sit in the chasm between them and pauses, sipping busily at his coffee. There, he's said it, now he takes a big hot swallow. ‘
I for one,
would not be rushing into it.'

Louisa is already pregnant with Tom and while Anne has guessed, no one else has. She hadn't expected it, but John is enthusiastic, which seems a good thing. She feels the world of possibility expanding within her. She thinks for a moment she might say something to Rob but then she feels a boiling anger followed by a kind of pity. Still, she wouldn't mind sticking it to him. Thinks he knows it all, flashes through her but she takes hold of herself, smiles and says, ‘Surely, Robert, it's got to be a personal decision. What are you going to do mate, have us all sterilised?'

‘Ha!' he laughs far too loud, ‘Ha! Good idea! Excellent! Yeah, I'll book us all in, there must be some doctor around here who'd be willing to give us a family rate.' And he keeps up the ruthless, biting laugh.

‘You are such an idiot,' she says, leaning back in the chair to get a better look at him. ‘One out of the box. Don't you realise we had a wonderful mother, not just an insane father?'

She's at the point in pregnancy when perfection is not only possible, it's likely and she places her hand across her stomach and holds it there, protecting the peanut that will become her child. The breeze picks up and the poplars begin to scatter their small gold leaves and some are cast in Rob's hair and rest there unheeded, like coins. Rob is too careful, she thinks, and what a damn shame he had to be male, he'll never know this feeling because this really is hope, and it's the best thing in the world.

And she realises that because he's male, the shadow of Emmett falls heavily on him while she's got Anne, a mother above all mothers. However you work it out, sadness follows them around like a faithful dog, she thinks. And Robert, poor Robert, could use a little mercy. She looks up from her coffee to smile at him but he's scanning the poplar with his clever eyes.

Settled in upstairs at the shop with her mum, it's not long before Jessie has trouble even remembering Wolf Street but she doesn't tell this to anyone because the girl can't afford to get left out of anything else, even memories. After settlement takes place at Wolf Street, Emmett and Peter move into the shop and that's something else to get used to. The bloody goods trains passing by the back fence whenever they like, shaking everyone up with their low sad horns, and sometimes, lying in their beds, the Browns can even hear the mournful sounds of cattle as the trains slow down. Living at the shop is a tight fit and they're on top of each other again, but thankfully Emmett is hardly ever there. The pub beckons.

Peter's doing some course or other but the truth is he's always out with his mates, the crazy Argentinians he met down at the angling club, having barbies at their place and cooking up massive meat feasts and playing music that forces people to dance. Before too long though, the crowding gets to him and he moves out with Rob to a terrace in North Melbourne. Twice a day he feeds rainbow lorikeets in the backyard. He loves to watch as the ball of dappled colour falls upon the old tin pie dish.

And then there's Jessie, the last survivor, stuck at the shop like a mouldy leftover that's slipped down the back of the fridge. Doesn't talk much at home, mainly because no one wants to hear what she has to say, and these days she doesn't care one way or another whether her mother's home or not.

It's much remarked upon that Jessie doesn't look like the rest of the Browns. Where's the olive skin, the dark waves of hair and the blue eyes? In the future, she'll dye her hair the colour of mahogany, get the freckles zapped and with the aid of make-up she'll look much like the other Browns, the ones she's not real keen on at the moment.

Now she's whippet-thin with pale freckled skin, red-gold hair and hands as small as a six-year-old's. Anne often wonders why Jessie is the only real rebel in the family. She'd worked so hard when the others were young and they'd all been reasonable, supportive and mostly obedient. Now, here she is giving Jessie all this attention and it's not working. The endless, involving mystery of kids.

‘The House of Norma' is where the ladies of Footscray go to shop but given there aren't many ladies left around the place these days, it's gone a bit too quiet and no-sales days become regular landmarks in the takings book. Jess reckons Anne might as well not be there because she spends all her time out in the shop magging on to horrible old bats who never buy anything anyway and money is always in short supply and the truth is that the big shopping mall being built down the road is doing ‘Norma' right in the eye. Plus interest rates are through the roof.

Jessie reckons won't be long now and they'll be broke again. And then soon enough Anne'll be back at the tannery. She took on that job when Jess was little because they paid women equal wages and she lasted six months, tanning hides. Carting buckets of dye and cleaning down the skins with brooms loaded with bleach.

Anne never told the kids she vomited most meal breaks at the awful sight of the skinned animals. Didn't seem any point telling anyone, who would care anyway? And she didn't see it ever changing. In the end she went back to dressmaking even though it didn't pay as much. Maybe it was true, she thought, money isn't everything.

When Jess comes home from school down the shop sideway and sees Frank's old kennel leaning on the fence she always feels a pulse of loneliness because she reckons that scrappy, shaggy old dog with his scabs and his hidden brown eyes really was her mother and her father.

All the best things had Frank in them. The time Emmett and Jess went up to Clark's grocery to get his beer and Frank led the way and took a wrong turn in the shop and knocked down a stack of tins and people were slipping over and yelling and Frank was charging around barking and kids were laughing and someone asked Emmett if Frank was his dog and he said, ‘Never seen him before mate,' and winked at Jess as he hefted his carton of beer up onto his shoulder. Outside in the drizzly morning Frank was calmly waiting for them, having a relaxed scratch.

And the Christmas morning he brought home a hot stuffed roast chook he'd pinched and laid it at Emmett's feet in the backyard, and Emmett gingerly cut the string from the oven-hot bird and took the rosemary out and gave the chook back to him. ‘He's copped some poor old wog's Chrissie dinner.' Emmett roared with delight. And it seemed to Jess that this was a sign that things would be better and that, as Frank ate his stolen chook, it seemed a kind of happiness fell upon them and they knew it and held it.

But then in the end, Frank developed a cancer the size of a football on his side and the vet said it was over. He would have to be put down. Before that last trip to the vet, Emmett went down to the butcher shop and picked out a pale pork chop as round as a moon for the old dog. He heated up the barbie, lovingly standing around waiting for the right temperature, and then cooked the meat up nice and slow and cut it up and cooled it and then fed it to him slowly, by the mouthful.

Frank seemed to know what was coming and let them all say goodbye with the patience he had always shown. But when Emmett carried him to the car, even then Jessie wasn't impressed by her father's tenderness, she saw right through it. All fraud.

Still, she knelt beside Frank all through his last meal and she's practically crying now just thinking about it, but holds back when she remembers her recent application of mascara. That day Emmett had cried too, though it seemed to be by chance and no one mentioned the tears that slid straight down his face.

Emmett brought Frank's body back from the vet still wrapped in the striped towel Louisa won for being Most Improved Swimmer in Grade One. And even then Jessie thought, ‘God, bloody Louisa, the Paragon has to be in everything.' Emmett buried the dog under the kennel and now Jessie sees that even his name is fading. She'd re-paint it if she was a good person, but since she isn't, that lets her off.

Emmett's been sleeping in the garage at the shop for a while now because he never could stand the cramped little rooms upstairs. Being up there felt exactly like he was choking. All of them jammed in there together, three little rooms in a row, exactly like a prison.

So he decided on the garage and hired a bloke to line the walls with ply and then painted them peacock blue himself (with help from Anne of course) and the big green desk was installed under the louvre window. He likes it out there and for Emmett, there's something about being able to piss outside your door onto the weeds that just lifts a man out of the mean little suburbs and takes him somewhere else. Gives him some dignity.

Retirement emerges from the misty future and he can almost taste it. Until that day arrives, he's waiting for every other to pass. They mean nothing until he tears them off. When he does retire, he knows it will set him free.

He plans to buy a little house somewhere deep in the bush, it doesn't matter where. Then, in the bush, things will right themselves. They will. He knows it. Just a bit of space, that's all a man wants. Anne will keep going with the shop but she'll visit him at his rural paradise. Sometimes, though, the days seem so long.

One Saturday morning Anne finds Emmett asleep in the backyard. The Browning shotgun is cradled in one arm and a whisky bottle stands by waiting for the next call on it. He's shot the weeds beside him and despite this, they look surprisingly alive, though the dirt could have been ploughed.

For a small tender second she thinks he's dead, that he's shot his head instead of the dirt and a kind of hot relief surges through her. But even when she's thinking it, she realises there's no blood, so it's not real. And when she kneels beside him, kindness, her old saboteur, takes over.

‘Now Emmett,' she says patting his cheek, ‘this is no good my poor old friend, we cannot have this.' When she does rouse him and gets him sitting up, the poor wretch he has become is evident and she is saddened. He dribbles like a baby. She half carries him into the kitchen and gets his scrambled frame onto a chair. Then she makes a cup of tea with lots of sugar and she calls her doctor and speaks of Emmett as if he's a child. He feels safe sitting in the kitchen despite the awful, unending sadness. His tea shakes as he sips it. Anne, he thinks, has become his mother. He's crying. He puts out his hand to touch hers but she's busy organising on the phone.

Emmett is admitted to Turramurra House for a six-week course of rehabilitation for alcoholism. He has many visitors. After week three, Jessie says to a fragile red-eyed Emmett, ‘Well, I suppose I'll have to get to know you now Dad. I've never known you sober. You're probably a different person to the one I know.' He agreed and smiled but wariness would never leave Jess.