The Book of Emmett (22 page)

It's late April, autumn is feeling its power and the pinoaks that line the road to Deakin are becoming as red as the fires of January. Under each of the pinoaks lies a little brass plate inscribed with the name and rank of a man who died in the First and Second World Wars and this is where Emmett goes to talk. He's long given up on God so now he goes to have a yak to the dead soldiers. Reckons his own disappeared old man might even be one of them. Took off when he was a baby. Would you believe, on the night of the baby show too. The night when he'd won most beautiful baby in the whole bloody show; just shows the worth of a pretty bloody face. He laughs and takes a sip from his stubby.

He's sitting in the little striped aluminum chair he brings down here and Clancy's running around chasing myxo bunnies while he talks to the old boys and you know what, he doesn't bignote at all to them, not like he used to with God. No need these days. When he first heard the news about the workings of his brain, it felt like something he'd known, something from way back. Had to be. And it didn't surprise him because life works that way (you pay for every single bloody thing).

It was not long after the ride on the fire truck, a day when he was truly happy, that he got the news that he had a form of dementia that is rapid and irreversible. He'd suspected for a while that something was going on upstairs. He knew he was losing his brains. And he reckoned he deserved it. Served him right. Abso-bloody-lutely.

He's stilled by terror as they slide him like a tadpole into the mouth of the imaging machine. He doesn't even hear the technician telling him not to move. He is not connected to his body, he's entered limbo. His left eye twitches. He'd rather be in a pub brawl any bloody day. That Emmett's brain is not normal is not a surprise to any member of the family. But it's a while before anyone explains precisely how bad things are.

Another test in Ballarat reveals more but he must wait to see the specialist in Melbourne. That is the day he knows with perfect certainty that he's departing. He walks away from the hospital hoping a bus will run him over, but he has no luck and he smiles to himself that truly he was never a lucky bastard.

How fast will it be? he wonders, cracking the windows to let the heat out of the car. He drives past the red trees and feels tears pushing at him. On the way home he buys a slab of light beer as a gesture to wellness.

It turns out that Emmett's brain is a sieve of leaking blood vessels. He's had too many small strokes to count. His memory is draining away even as they speak to him. The brain is largely scar tissue. This will be a fast decline. It won't be long before he won't know himself. And yet, for one precious month, he tells no one but the soldiers.

By winter, his chooks have been eaten by foxes and Mrs Thompson the cat has shot through, he hopes to a better place. Clancy was not so lucky, he was run over and a neighbour brought his body back to Emmett and they buried him under the lilac.

He looks at his budgie, Hooley Dooley in the little cage, and decides the time has come so he takes him out to the paddock swinging in his wire cage and releases the little bird. It's one of his last deliberate acts. He watches the small blue speckled wings rising into the blueness with a kind of tearing pain. And though he will never remember it, at the time he believes he's going with Hooley to live in a corner of the sky.

Still, he starts a new diary because he reckons it might save him. ‘Diaries give you a new start,' he says aloud to himself. He's always believed in the power of words, and in the diary he asks questions he can read to Anne when she rings to check on him each night. One of them is, ‘What is the name of that island where Pete worked? It's shaped like a ... you know.' He draws a diamond but can't say what shape it is. Anne tells him it's Tasmania. By the time he reads the questions out, he's lost interest in the answers.

Anne measures the days of her life by the TV guide. She has her favourites and one of them is the TV judge, a tough old girl who whips hopeless dills right into gear. She's got it all worked out. Possibly Anne sees something of herself in the judge. Tiny, frugal and sensible, but not without a smidgin of compassion.

She still sews for her friends and old customers, the gold light from the desk lamp funnelling upon her. The whirring of the machine is the current between the past and the present. Anne has sewed her way through life, joining one day to the next, her head bent over her labours, her hands smoothing each day through the jaws of the old machine.

She does her best thinking when she sews and some of her thoughts surprise her. To be old is not the way she thought it would be. People listen to you less and even look at you less. But you don't stop being yourself just because you've lived a long time. You get wiser and quieter and less hopeful. Much less.

When Emmett comes home sick, lost and frail, holding the little airline bag he used to take to work, she tells him to put it on the stool.

‘Sit down Emmett. Over there on that chair, yes that one.'

‘I don't want to get in your way.'

‘You won't,' she says, and gets up from the machine. Rob comes in carrying a box of kitchen things from Deakin.

Emmett seems to retreat and Anne watches the decline with a painful honesty about her history with him. She lost interest in him for a long part of the marriage when she believed he was insane. She's not happy about the way things went. But madness is madness and who was going to help the family?

Now she realises that it might have been better to get the kids out of there but at the time she just kept going, plodding through each day not expecting much. Never expecting things to be better. To survive a day was a triumph.

Yet still she remembers the good more than the bad and maybe good comes from the same place as the bad. Who knows? Maybe it's the place where there is no control. And, honestly, Emmett always knew joy more than anyone.

After Daniel died she couldn't bear to be near him, well, he just made her skin crawl. He was more horrified than anyone about Daniel's death. Wallowing around thinking it was all about him, but then Emmett never noticed anyone but himself. So in the way that time moves, slowly and without argument, she gave up on him. Drifted away, didn't question him, hoped he'd move and in a way he did, he moved to the pub.

Now he's sick and back here again and she sees that within the terrible man and even within the pathetic man there's another one, a gentler one. Was he always locked up within Emmett? He wanders from room to room picking things up and putting them down. He smiles at her when she brings him food.

He sits in the yard near the lemon tree, with her little dog beside him. The weather passes through the day. Waiting, just waiting. Seeing this Emmett brings back something of her first love and makes it harder, but then none of it is easy and she thinks maybe I should have told the kids how hard things can be. But they wouldn't like to hear it, she decides. Who on earth would?

Food provides the answer to most of Louisa's questions. She often cooks for Anne and for Emmett as if it will just do the trick. She nourishes her herbs and finds a butcher who can prepare the cuts of meat she likes. She goes to the old market once a week and with real discipline buys the best produce she can afford. Often she meets Peter there and they take pleasure in the place.

‘Have you ever seen a more beautiful peach?' she asks him on a summer Saturday as they stand before an altar of fruit. ‘Let's buy one each for breakfast.' It seems a good idea but the dribbling is excessive and they end up dripping and laughing and flicking each other with peach juice. She tries to dry her hands on him but he gets sick of it and they look for a tap.

After she's towed Anne's ancient jeep to all their favourite stalls, they get coffee, strong and hot, and sit near the small lane that fronts onto the big junction at the top of the market. The lane reminds Louisa of a telescope that looks out to the world beyond. Everything is limpid. People pass in the slowness of their lives and she sees them perfectly.

It isn't far from where Emmett worked as a child and the ghost of him lives here. She imagines him running around, laughing with his mates, a little scavenger let loose to feast on the body of the market. Let loose from the orphanage to his grandma's place opposite the market.

The child who became their father. Wonders again what really happened there. How would you ever know? But the stuff she's heard about orphanages in those days is not good.

She sent away for a Senate report on children who grew up in orphanages and when
Forgotten Australians
arrived she read it in a night. Stories of children with urine-soaked bedclothes tied to them, of beatings and starvation, and she thinks of those children now when she looks at her rapidly disintegrating father.

A coffee machine is revealed though a hole in the wall and the chugging and grinding of beans rips at her ears. In no time, Pete's back with the coffee. Chairs are in short supply and people juggling mugs and rolls bursting with sausage and onion often come chair-hunting. Peter is willing to give the chairs at their table to anyone. Around their feet, drab sparrows as round as hearts stab at the ground with their needle beaks. A couple of bolder ones land on the table in search of crumbs.

Somehow they've started to talk about Emmett, not something they usually do. Pete says that before Daniel died, he once asked Emmett if he loved him, and he laughed. He remembers the mouth opening up like a void. ‘And that yellow eyetooth of his, God, I wondered whether he'd swallow me.'

He wished he could have had another father and such wishes took up acres in his heart. Long before he understood Emmett, or at least thought he did, he was held by what he'd seen and what he didn't understand, would never understand. When he decided Emmett was just a poor crazy man, mental for sure, he got over it. But he was lonely; after Daniel was gone, he had no one.

There are things Emmett did that the others don't know about and Peter will never tell them. Some things shouldn't be shared, how does it help? He reckons the others are dealing with enough of their own stuff anyway.

He's also a bit ashamed of the way he gathered his information. For a long time he was the watcher in doorways, listening as a kind of witness to his mother's weeping, waiting until he could hear her no longer, thinking that at least when it was quiet she had some peace. Then he'd go back to bed, his heart so heavy he ached with holding it.

‘Most kids have some kind of monster in their past,' he says now, trying to lighten things. He's rolled up the paper tube that held the sugar into the tiniest scrap. He looks up and smiles at her. He won't dwell. The monster is sleeping in Peter's memory, though he's always on the lookout for it, you'd be a fool not to expect it back.

Louisa has not forgotten a single thing her father did either. Indeed, she has indexed them within herself and has a kind of inventory, but somehow she comes to the same decision as Peter. She must let it be. She explains Emmett to herself the best way she can. He must have been sick. Since she worked that out, the world seems less bleak.

But she doesn't tell Peter what she's decided, even though he has arrived at the same place. Neither is wholly comfortable with it, and neither has told Robert what they think.

They halt these talks, slowing down and looking around, and before too long they're discussing the pair of free-range rabbits she just bought. She's considering working some prunes and maybe bacon into the red wine braise she's planning for Anne and Emmett tonight. Pete says, ‘How about a bit of mashed parsnip with that? The old man loves a bit of parsnip.' And he grabs the handle of the jeep and is off to a pyramid of parsnips further down the aisle while Louisa gets her coat on.

As they age, they all look more like Emmett. The wide face, the big eyes, the cheekbones, they might even be Slavic. But who cares anyway? As Emmett would once have said, ‘We're all of us just plain old bastards like every bloody one else in the world. No one is anything special and that includes the Queen her Royal self.'

These days when he walks, Peter keeps his head down a little and there's a subtle stoop to his back. You can only see it from the right angle, but his thinness tells you all about it.

He likes plain clothes, square jackets with deep pockets. Shoes with thick treads that he wears until the uppers collapse. His hair is fading gently rather than going grey. When he lifts his face though, he's mostly smiling. And when he smiles hard, his eyes nearly disappear into the creases.

He lives with Lily in a cream weatherboard house in Flemington not too far from the river. All the trim, after much negotiation, is indigo. There are two windows at the front and a small verandah. Round the back, the park washing up to the back fence is rimmed with peppercorn trees. Peter used to regard them as weeds until Anne said she liked them and then he began to see the stringy beauty of them. He often likes things his mum likes. It seems that she knows the best things.

He works from home servicing Apple Macs. He's a computer technician with his own practice and he fits work around home duties. He cooks dinner every night and sometimes he still rings Louisa to talk about food. ‘Tried the new season's asparagus yet? I got some really fat stalks the other day at the market...' Or ‘Rocket pesto. What do you know about it?'

When anyone's in trouble Pete is on the phone talking a bit of calm into the situation. When Jess briefly wanted to leave Warren once years ago, it was Pete she combed through it with.

‘He's such an old man, he just sits and corrects and he lectures me about whether or not I clean up the kitchen properly or not. He can just go jump, I've had him.'

‘You're joking Jess,' he said to her, incredulous. ‘You're not going to leave him 'cause he wants you to clean up after yourself, you're not really that mad, are you? Warren's got a lot going for him.' And then he listened while Jess talked herself into staying with Warren.

And Anne calls Peter when Emmett goes walkabout. He has the knack of finding the old bloke and that's true enough, though he's not deluding himself. She probably calls the others too but he's the only one who can spare the time. To Pete it doesn't matter much who finds Emmett, he's sick to death of the competitions with siblings, there's always one of them better at something than the others, always bloody will be.

The truth is, he finds Emmett three out of the five times he has bolted and the police get to him the other times. The first couple of times Emmett nicks off Anne is nearly hysterical, not at all like the most serene woman in the world. This day the side gate wasn't shut and Emmett has strolled out.

Peter grabs his coat, hops into the kombi and though he floors it, it still takes a while to move. He's heading from the Maribrynong River over to Footscray. The sky is a darkening dome and in the park the peppercorns are whipped by the cold wind.

Anne has called the police and is waiting in the kitchen in case, by some miracle, Emmett comes home. She's given the description to the young policewoman, a lass named Constable Schultz, who she tells Louisa, is really kind.

The Constable reads the description back to Anne: ‘Elderly man, blue eyes, silver hair, wearing bottle-green cardigan, checked blue shirt and navy trousers with black braces, wearing Adidas running shoes. He has a Parker pen inscribed with
Emmett Brown
.' And it takes Anne a few seconds before she is able to speak.

Driving through Flemington, it hits Peter that Emmett will go home to the market. He doesn't ask how he knows stuff like this, he's just glad he does. He realises the knowledge is the same as when you're fishing; you just click into the larger consciousness and then you listen and it comes.

He knows he'll find the old man, but it takes longer than he imagined. He trawls those streets around the market for some time. It's not a market day so there are barely any people. A stray sheet of newspaper flaps like a bird past towers of stacked-up crates. And further off, way up in the grey, pigeons are swinging around in the clean wind. The sky is heavy with low-slung cloud.

It feels like there might be a downpour and though the drought is eternal and every single human being in the city is praying for rain, Peter prays it won't. The thought of Emmett getting drenched is not good. Poor old bastard wouldn't know what was going on.

He decides he'll see the old man better in the little lanes where the car can't pass, so he parks at a meter, fishes in the ashtray for a gold coin and then runs off with the coin in his hand, such is his panic.

It's at least another half an hour of scouring the streets around the market before he catches sight of Emmett, barefoot and moving surprisingly fast. Peter jogs up behind him and draws up level before he puts his hand on his shoulder and says, ‘G'day Dad, where you heading on a grey old day like today?'

Emmett seems angry when he turns towards Pete. ‘No time for that', he says crossly.

He's lost the dental plate that held in the false teeth (most of the teeth on one side went years ago in a fight) so a dark gap looms. He scowls and says urgently, ‘I'm bloody late for tea. Nana'll kill me.' Pete agrees that he's late too and this works. ‘You too, poor bugger eh?' Emmett says, and they both laugh as if it's the funniest thing they've ever heard.

Peter steers him over to the crates, gets him to sit down on one. Emmett tells Pete he has to see Chook and Eric, his mates. Peter doesn't know what he's talking about, so he asks him where his shoes are. Emmett doesn't hear him but he's jiggling his bloody feet around as if the ground were on fire. Little creeks of blood have sprung up everywhere on them.

Pete finds some jellybeans in his pocket and he pops a red one into his father's mouth. Emmett narrows his eyes and gets ready to eject and then the taste of sugar speaks, and he smiles a little sideways smile.

He chews the lolly vigorously on his good side then Peter puts his arm around him and guides him to the car. He's walking slowly now as if the air is all gone from his tyres. Getting him into the car scares him and he rises moth-like against the window. The glass confuses him. Is it there or what?

He doesn't like to sit, but Peter is patient and finally gets the seatbelt on him and he settles. At a phone box, he calls Anne and tells her he's found him and he hears her tears, though no mention is made. Emmett keeps trying to touch his bleeding feet and gets blood on his face.

They plough through the packed, pushing traffic and Peter thinks of distance and time and how it is so long ago and so far away from the days when Emmett was well. Who'd have thought dementia would improve anyone? Peter reflects. He cleans Emmett up with a bit of spit on the tail of his shirt before they go in.