The Book of Emmett
Page 9
When the moment comes, she gets past him as fast as all speed but the laughing man with the big open mouth and the loose eyes haunts her. And as she runs all the way to school, she sees that whatever this is, it’s not personal, it has nothing to do with who she is, it’s just what she is that matters.
Though he’s wildly fascinated, Rob pretends not to believe a word she says. ‘Tell me again about the socks and about his dick, about his eyes,’ he says, sitting on the back step that hot afternoon and when she does, and he laughs so much, she thinks he might choke. He loves such stories about anything seamy and enjoys seeing her embarrassed. It’s not that funny but who else is there to tell?
When it rains, the troughs in the middle of the lanes run with grey water. The kids straddle them casually. Sometimes other kids push out into the lane from flimsy gates and join them on their way. Rarely a car might want to pass.
Frank sometimes deliberately stops to rouse up dogs behind fences and their fits of barking get him a nudge in the guts and a warning to get moving. ‘Get on Frankie, get on,’ they’ll say as they move forward like shepherds towards a paddock.
When Peter, with a stick in his hand and a bag on his back, remarks to Louisa that he wishes he could just go somewhere else. ‘I want to live where no one can get you,’ he says. ‘Where is that Lou? Where can no one get you? Is it London?’
She looks at his lightly freckled face. Like Daniel’s but not identical, she always thinks he’s smarter than Dan. She’s holding Daniel’s hand which is red with chilblains and she says, ‘There’s nowhere Pete that I can think of that’s safe except maybe being a grown-up, reckon that might be where you get safe, but that’s not really a place is it, little mate?’
Homewards the journey is much the same. Frank waits outside Mr Hessian’s shop. This is where, if there’s any money, they call in to buy a Redskin or some other durable lolly. When they see each other in the street or at Hessian’s they act casual, as if they are strangers, and they never share lollies though they might swap, sometimes even generously, if the mood takes them, and if it doesn’t, it’s no skin off anyone’s nose. Walking home, they stretch out, watch the cobalt sky with clouds like trailing smoke, chew their Redskins and take as long getting there as they can. No one ever wants to be first home.
Frank walks on ahead, carelessly leaps low fences and craps on scraps of lawn. When he does, the kids don’t know him. Up the sideway into the fernery is the worst part and their scalps tighten as the alertness locks in. When they get there, they suss the joint out. Is he home? Second one home always whispers the same question, what’s the mood? The answer varies.
He might be there and then, how will he be that day? Quietly, they take their bags and hope to pass through into the passageway that leads to the bedroom. Even after all these years, smoke from the fire still clothes the passage walls. Leftover smoke that can never bear to leave this home of theirs.
They pray the mood is good because when Emmett needs to be alone not much will save them. Wander past and they risk a swipe that will leave them bruised.
The Browns are hidden children. Mostly good at school though Rob teeters on the edge of delinquency. How far can you go? he wonders. The differences between home and school taunt him. It’s amazing how daring a boy can be at school compared to home. How far can he go? Pretty damned far, it seems.
He touches his teacher Miss Summer’s bum as she bends over in front of him one day and is strapped for it, both at school and by Emmett, which is far worse. But while they regularly refer to him as insolent in the staffroom, not many of the staff think about pushing things further. The boy often has a subdued quality that seems against his nature. There’s something strange there, something broken.
Louisa, Daniel and Peter are quiet, attentive and grateful to be at school; like children of a cult, they are sworn to secrecy. They are no trouble, eyes guarding privacy and always keeping the distance between other people and themselves.
They walk the world with secrets nailed to their hearts. Images of their mother being slammed into a wall and of seeing her head held above a boiling pot of food are seared into them. Crying is a matter of course in their house. Things they do not want others to know determine the way they are.
And they hide the truth of Emmett carefully. Sometimes other kids at school notice, perhaps they see the bruise on Rob’s neck where he’d picked him up ... there are always clues and other kids understand without words.
Ronnie Whitehead, a pale boy with honey eyes, sits beside Louisa during lunch for a week after her face and eye are bruised. Ronnie’s kindness feels like a life raft, or pieces of bread left out in a fairy story. He gives her a way to not feel alone. He shares his geography book when she leaves hers at home, doesn’t say anything, just pushes it between them.
The ones whose fathers terrorise them are a club. And though they hug the secret of themselves tight, they don’t need to feel ashamed because all this cruelty, well it’s just tradition. Just fathers handing on the past.
15
Mysteries bother Louisa. The first is a simple thing really, but it makes so much difference to them. How does he get home so early? The answer is that at work he bluffs and sulks and is occasionally brilliant and he knows exactly when to lay low. He survives for years on this strategy. He nicks off early and arrives home before the kids as if he doesn’t know they’ll be there, as if he expects them to have cleared off. He often gets there just in time to greet them.
Anne is always later than Emmett because she doesn’t leave until five o’clock and it takes her twenty minutes to walk home. Louisa never works out how he gets home in time to plague them but sometimes when he’s boozing he doesn’t come home at all and these are times to relish. It’s only when he has no money that he drinks at home.
The other mystery that plagues her with its tangling stickiness is why their mother doesn’t take them away from the old man. But she never works out the answer to this one either, except that her mother is busy, too busy to be leaving anyone. She works all day sewing fine clothes for wealthy women up at the big green factory.
Some days Louisa combines her two questions and after she’s put the potatoes on and cleaned the kitchen, she sets off to walk to her mother’s work considering that she might miss the old man and mulling over the idea that maybe Mum will leave him one day. She stretches out her skinny knock-kneed legs along Wolf Street, hoping that she’s got the time right so she doesn’t miss Mum.
On days when she’s mixed up the times she’ll still be sitting on the step waiting for Anne when all the other workers file past her, a laughing stream of women released from their machines.
Her mum’s Maltese friend, Maria, with her wild curly hair and chocolate eyes, stops and pats her back and picks up her chin and holds her face and smiles and says, ‘Darling girl, your mama, she go. She first to leave tonight. You miss her.’ Louisa jumps up and hides the tears rushing at her over the kindness of Maria and the missing of her mother, and takes off towards the footy ground. This is the way Anne walks. Louisa knows it.
Some days she catches Anne striding down the street in her high heels and the joy of finding her mother alone explodes within her. Anne can make her feel more alive than anyone in the world, just by the way she says, ‘Louie, darling,’ and spending time alone with her is like walking into a green sanctuary.
Other days, in that forlorn stretch between five and six, Louisa will miss her and trail into the house to find the spuds she’s prepared either burned black and stinking of seared metal or not yet on. Both bad scenarios.
Louisa is always careful to be very, very good but still, she gets it wrong sometimes. She recalls her face near Emmett’s knees, the belt coming down again and again, and looking up, seeing the white crust of sweat circling his armpit on his shirt and smelling the animal of him, like meat. She never understands why they all don’t just run away but she could never run anywhere without the rest of them, so she’s stuck.
16
At first she doesn’t understand there’s something wrong with him and later she puts his rages down to worries at work, thinks that if she gives him no reason to be upset, then the smoothness of life will continue.
It takes a year or so for that unquiet feeling she first had about him to re-emerge. She will never forget that day with Marge and Ray down at the beach when he had the tantrum because his foot got wet; but why, she wonders, did she go ahead with him after that? What was wrong with her? She had the chance to get away and missed it.
She’s in bed next to Emmett listening to him snore. He sounds like a rusty gate caught in the wind and he takes up all the air. The booze makes him snore. She’s lucky to have a small corner of the bed.
She remembers when he didn’t snore, in the days when he was tender and when he seemed the cleverest man. It slips her mind that he was handsome, but she knows he must have been. Handsome. Never remembers this because it might lead to the idea that she loved him. Truth is, if there was good sex, it went away so fast it might have been imagined. Now, the best you can say about it is that it’s fast. These days Anne thinks of sex with pure revulsion. And anyway, is Emmett still within that snoring man? Is this really Emmett sawing at the air beside her? Can that really be him? No, she thinks, it cannot be.
Anne doesn’t believe in crying, doesn’t indulge in what she thinks of as weakness. She just moves her face forward onto the cool cotton of the pillow. But whether she believes in weeping or not, tears seep down the pillow to make a pocket of rain.
The rhythm in Emmett’s snoring drones on and then all of a sudden she realises with a stab of panic that she has to be at work by eight-fifteen. Work, thuds her heart in the language she most understands, work. Must sleep, she thinks. Must not let the sawing cut into her head.
And then, in a moment of clarity as clear as light, she cannot be in the same room as this man another second. She pushes herself up and with the practised habit of a ghost, puts her hand on her dressing gown, shrugs it on in the dark and quietly moves to her babies, drawn to them as though they hold every answer.
The relief of sleeping with the babies is a consolation she can’t live without. Settling in around their soft warm limbs and feeling their small breaths, she believes there’s no comparison to the purity of her children and their perfection is her blessing.
She tries to drift off but her mind is stuck in the groove of how she let Emmett into her life. Maybe she said yes to him because he was smart, smarter than anyone she’d ever met, and she wanted brains for her children.
She’s stroking Peter’s small head absently as a way of settling herself. She had wanted her kids to be cleverer than the others and cleverer than herself. Can that have been wrong? And if it was, who will know?
Anne sometimes remembers that she was beautiful in a way that made her look like the young Queen of England, refined and poised and somehow vulnerable, with her wide smiling mouth and innocent eyes. She could’ve married Des Peck, the gawky young plumber, and lived happily ever after in Newport but then Emmett called her Bambi. He saw the purity.
Her father never liked Emmett, he thought he was strange and dangerous and told her so. She never knew what her mother thought because they never discussed it.
At first she loved him so deeply it amazed her and she was his willing pupil. He read books to her while they were in bed on the weekends before Louisa was born. The girl who left school at fourteen to become an apprentice dressmaker was thrilled with what he knew and how he’d taught himself so much. He spoke about writing with reverence. He read The Grapes of Wrath to her and they were both in tears. Such a book. Then they tore through all of Jules Verne because the future appealed to Emmett. He loved the idea that it would be better then, that people wouldn’t be slaves in factories, that their kids would be educated and if they were educated then they’d be rich and if they were rich, they’d be happy.
She doesn’t think about what went wrong and doesn’t allow herself the time to be disappointed. Anyway, all the women she knows are smarter and better than their husbands, that’s just the way it is, and most of them take a belting now and then. She just gets on. She has only enough money to make it each week and it seems there are just so many kids.
She has to work, that’s all there is, but she thanks God for it because without work she would be lost.
17
July seventeen was a mid-winter’s night and the air in the fernery was frosty and nearly visible. The killing of Daniel was not intentional; it just happened that Daniel slipped over that bad night. You can’t run that fast at five and you have to know how to behave. Daniel forgot and he panicked. Poor little bugger with his cow’s lick and his matchbox car collection.
Daniel had been five years old for just four days when he died. He was already a schoolboy at four-and-a-half and he was as bright and shiny as the silver stars the teacher put on his drawings. He was proud of Rob’s old school bag and he barracked for the Dogs and dreamed of playing cricket for Australia.
Louisa often wonders whose fault it was and finally decides it might have been hers. She never discusses this with Rob or with anyone else. That cold night when Anne knelt beside Daniel and picked him up in her arms she knew he was dead but the idea seemed too immense to be real. The hospital would bring him back to them because that’s what they did. She knelt over him on the lino, holding and rocking him in her arms for a longest ache of time. When the ambulance came she had to be forced to let go of the child.
Emmett didn’t think the hospital would help because he knew in that deep secret way that this was the truth that he would always live with. So Emmett was distraught and it didn’t help at all. Anne looked at him as he settled into the horror of the knowledge and thought briefly, how many people can you look after in your life? And her weeping was silent and endless and then Daniel claimed her attention forever. Daniel in her arms stilled. The child who went away.
The ambulance men took him to hospital and there he was pronounced dead, his mother standing beside him holding his hand, lost and broken.
Later it occurs to her that Emmett always hated the kids just because they are kids. That he wants their place. Wants to always be the child, the eternal child. Is jealous of their time in the place of children. That’s the why of it but it doesn’t help, not at all. The reality is that the taste of sorrow lasts long and is bitter and heavy and never leaves you. Its sourness takes over and handles everything.
***
Rob and Louisa reckon Emmett ended up killing Daniel just the same as if he’d taken down the old Browning shotgun wrapped in the ragged grey blanket on top of the wardrobe and shot him.
Rob also thinks it’s got a lot to do with him. If that sounds like rubbish, tough ... it was his job to keep his brothers and sister safe and he failed. He could’ve stopped him, somehow diverted him you know, changed the mood or even made it worse so it would be aimed square at himself. He knows it. The world, he believes, knows it too. Daniel, he reckons, probably knew it, but all that knowing doesn’t change a single bloody thing.
The way Rob sees it, the old man scared the boy to death; he’d done this before, to all of them. Daniel was running from him, but this time he slipped and his head hit the corner of the wall and blood came from his ear and his mouth and he just died. Doesn’t take long to die.
Louisa had charged out there in the instant she heard Daniel hit the wall. She saw Emmett go berserk that night. He’d thrown his plate at the wall again, the curly tails of the chops snuggled into themselves, the peas scattering. Mashed potatoes making hills like clouds. Just crazy again for no reason, but the difference was that Daniel was outside in the toilet when Emmett got home and couldn’t get back in.
He waited and waited and
then he thought it was all right but his timing was all wrong because he was only a little kid and he couldn’t get past Emmett, the wild beast in the kitchen fuming about ‘bloody rats of kids always under your bloody feet when you’re trying to get some tea for yourself because your useless wife hasn’t done it for you. Bloody little bastards and who knows whose they are anyway, who knows?’