The Book of Emmett

by Deborah Forster

  Strangest thing is, Rob concedes, there had been much worse times and none of them had died. And then there’s this small moment and it catches Dan forever. How do you work it out? Rob was in the bedroom reading The Phantom, keeping the other kids awake with the light and knowing it but not caring one bit, and then Daniel needed to go to the dunny and it was obvious that Rob should have taken him because he was scared of the dark but Rob didn’t do it, did he?

  Louisa sleeping in Nan’s old room knew he’d gone out there and was waiting for him to come back. She’d heard him nick out and then heard Emmett come home and she knew the boy waited and waited till he thought it was safe to run past. Louisa still says she should have gone out to get him.

  ‘How’d ya know the old man would go off?’ Rob asks her later when they talk it over in the shed. With the flatness of old knowledge, she says, ‘Bad things just happen around here and you’ve got to expect it. Be mental not to.’

  Rob wonders where his mother was and he’s always wondered that. He decides she was probably hiding in the front room watching IMT. Graham Kennedy, the man with the bug eyes, was her hero and if she didn’t concede that he was funny, then he sure was naughty. Best not to go near the old man after a night at the pub and she’d already put the kids to bed.

  Emmett didn’t go to gaol for killing Daniel. At the hospital a wide, pale man named Dr Steele listened to the story that Daniel was running around the corner after going to the toilet because he thought he’d get into trouble for being out of bed at nine-thirty at night and slipped and hit his head on the wall. Signed the death certificate and said it was an unfortunate accident.

  Emmett wept when the police interviewed him, but it was all just a formality. The constables lifted their big shoes softly in the little kitchen and scratched down the details with their restive ballpoints, keen to get away from a place burdened with such sadness.

  And the pain of Daniel’s death goes on and on like something alive and growing in all of them. Rob doesn’t believe that Daniel actually died that night. Maybe he just ran away. Daniel is withdrawn from them like all hope.

  Peter is left trailing around after the big kids, lost and halved. He takes Daniel’s school bag every day. He aches with a nameless pain. He keeps his eyes down. He will not hold Louisa’s hand on the way to school. He drops back and Frank walks with him. He throws stones at anything that moves and takes no pleasure when he hits something. Once he hits a white cat and it limps away and he cries again. Every single thing is wrong. Every night Rob hears him crying. There doesn’t seem to be anything to say. Yet the little boy keeps going. In the end he decides he wants to be a fisherman because Daniel liked the sea so much.

  And Louisa finds it only gets worse after Daniel’s death. Her silence is loud, but then she never spoke much anyway. Rob calls her Sourpuss Sally to get her going, get her mad.

  Once he dares her to break an egg on his head and when goaded by taunts that she’s weak and pathetic she does it, breaks the egg and feels shocked at herself. He remembers the shiny egg slipping over the cliff of his forehead. He laughs so much he inhales raw egg but Louisa doesn’t laugh. She walks away and leaves the mess for him. It is as if nothing matters anymore. Daniel is between everyone.

  Emmett is never home much now, he comes in drunk late after they are all in bed and even he is quieter, and the peace of that time is Daniel’s legacy. Anne just keeps working away sewing all day, making food and cleaning, washing and seeing to the kids.

  In time, Rob and Peter talk at night of ghosts and of Emmett. And later Peter tells Rob about his nice teacher Miss Wood, who smells somehow buttery, and that he follows her around when she’s on yard duty, staying back so she won’t notice.

  One school night they’re in bed waiting for sleep. They hear the shadowy canned laughter track steal away in waves from the tele in the lounge. Then Peter strangely announces, as a kind of declaration of intent, ‘I like fishing best in the whole world. All I want to do is walk into the sea and stay there with the fish.’

  Rob burrows into the bed and punches the pillow a bit. ‘Oh yeah,’ he says deeply unimpressed and beginning to wish he had his own room. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because that’s the safest place you could be. Under the water nothing can get you.’

  ‘What about air, mate, breathing, you know? Humans like air.’ There’s a silence between them for a bit.

  ‘I won’t have to breathe. It’ll be special. I’ll be like the fish, I’ll be able to.’

  Rob sighs, moves a leg to the cold bit of the bed. ‘What about the sharks then, what about that?’

  Peter is quiet. The full moon illuminates the room and makes crosses on the wall from the checks in the curtains. ‘Sharks won’t want me anymore. I’ll be safe. Daniel will stop them. Daniel won’t let things hurt me.’

  Rob hears Peter’s breathing become regular. He looks up into the soft dark and waits for it to take him.

  18

  Anne keeps the new pregnancy to herself for most of it and then with three months to go, Emmett reveals all with a guess. One night in the kitchen he grabs her, puts his hand on her slightly swollen abdomen and with a leer declares, ‘I think you’re hiding a baby in there, I think you are,’ and laughs as if he’s funny.

  Anne swats his hand away and keeps on doing the dishes. ‘I reckon you’re about six months gone,’ he says standing at the kitchen bench as if he’s in a bar, ‘definitely. No ifs or buts.’ He knocks back half the glass and comes up for air.

  The kids are cleaning up the table after tea and Rob is gob smacked by the revelation. Can’t stop looking at his mother, stands at the bin scraping his plate for ages. Louisa can’t look at her at all. Peter doesn’t seem bothered.

  Outside playing cricket with a tennis ball in the mean little backyard in the width of the summer evening, they talk it over. ‘Why do we have to have another kid?’ Rob says outraged but keeping his voice down. ‘God Almighty! Just another bloody mouth to feed.’

  ‘I can’t believe she’d let this happen,’ Louisa hisses back through clenched teeth. The ball thuds into the house when she misses it. They all turn to look through the fernery to see if Emmett will charge out like a bull elephant because the ball’s hit the house but no, he can’t be stuffed tonight. She picks up the ball and hurls it at Rob harder than need be. ‘It’s bloody insane.’

  ‘Watch it dickhead,’ he says, stepping aside to avoid the arrowing throw.

  Pete’s batting. ‘I don’t care,’ he says while Rob searches for the ball in the weeds down by the shed, ‘what difference does it make anyway? We used to have Daniel remember?’

  They ignore him. ‘You’re just a little shit anyway,’ Rob says, grabbing the bat and chucking the ball at Lou. ‘What would you know anyway? You little midget. And bowl properly Louisa, no grubbers.’

  In the privacy of Louisa’s room, they drop the front. ‘What’s going on? This is just mad. Why would anyone want to have another kid in this family?’ Rob says, keeping his voice down. Sitting on Lou’s bedroom floor, they lean on the bed, their legs straight out before them. Louisa feels a bank of anger welling in her. Textbooks spread out around them. She pushes the door shut with her foot.

  Above them the light shade moves in the breeze from the window, an illuminated rice-paper planet. It seems Rob is so affronted by the idea of the baby that his hair stands up and his eyes seem huge. ‘We are shit here and nothing works,’ he says. ‘It’s all fucked up, you know it is. Mum’s never here, always out working to support us and he’s a pig and we’re gonna have to look after it. You know it’s true.’ Louisa is looking down at the grey floor. Things, it seems, have turned on them again.

  Her voice is not like her when she says, ‘We got no choice Rob. None. We have to help her.’ She’s peeling away at the edge of her ruler with her thumbnail.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says, laying his head against the wall. There’s so much he doesn’t get. Stuff it, he thinks, I can’t bloody fix it.

 
In the next few weeks he starts swearing more and it makes him feel older. Louisa is strangely ashamed about the pregnancy. She’s old enough to be the baby’s mother. She tells no one at school.

  ***

  The baby, when it comes, is sickly, a small whitish droplet prone to rashes. Her eyes are as pale as a dawn sky and her small hands remind Peter of hermit crabs when they move and starfish when they’re still. She even carries a whiff of the sea about her. She’s not yet a Brown but an ocean creature come to stay. She does not open her mouth unless it is to cry and then the thinness of the cry reminds them of wire.

  She stays in hospital a month after she’s born to get her weight up. Anne and the kids visit her once a week on a Saturday morning. They dress up and take the bus because Emmett might need the car but it seems a bit like visiting a cemetery, a place where there’s reverence for life but no joy. At each visit Anne holds the baby briefly while the kids look on.

  As the baby stays on there, eventually leaving her becomes hard for all of them. Pete gets to pick her name out of Rose or Jessie; he goes for Jessie just because he likes it. He cries the second time they leave. In her dense plastic lens of a cradle, she’s as alone as a small planet. They stand beside her lined up like the kids from The Sound of Music and silently wish her well.

  And then it’s determined that Jessie needs an operation on her stomach and things, it seems, just get worse. The sallow quality of her skin has something to do with her immature liver. The Brown kids stream out the hospital feeling like an endangered species.

  But after a few more weeks, little Jessie comes home to a house that’s almost forgotten she’s been born. In Louisa’s room, a cradle has been tucked behind the door and she’s been throwing her clothes over it for a while.

  The first night Jessie cries for what seems to Louisa to be the whole night. She rocks the cradle and waits for her mother to come and get the child. She tries to turn the baby over. She picks her up and pats her back. Tries to hear the rain on the tin roof. She can hear nothing but Jessie protesting with the searing cries of the newborn. She can see why: she’d com plain too if she ended up here. The years yawn between them.

  Anne’s back at work and sits at the industrial sewing machine in the kitchen, her back hooked, and sews plastic suits for fat women to wear while they exercise. The radio is tuned in loud to the doom of commercial talkback. The baby lies on a quilt in a cardboard box at her mother’s feet.

  When they come home from school, the kids take over the baby and carry her around, give her a bottle and talk to her. Quieten her. It’s as if they are workers or parents rather than kids. They do what their mother can’t do. They wash nappies in the red bucket until they want to cry but there’s absolutely no point in that.

  Jessie’s in with Louisa until they build the sleep-out for the boys. They all try to keep her quiet because of Emmett. He craves peace even while he’s the greatest obstacle to it. He sits in the jaundiced light of the kitchen with his beer in the evenings on his own, weeping and laughing in turns, cornering them if they pass. He cannot relax because his life is lived on a wire. The loss of Daniel will not retreat.

  Some days though he can be joyful with Jessie and he might pick up the baby in her holey singlet and sagging nappy and dance to a song on the radio, the baby soaring and laughing in his arms. When this happens, the kids stand a respectful distance with small smiles, feeling shy of this good father throwing the cackling baby in the air. Happiness is always worth watching even if it raises questions. Did he love them once too? Louisa’s not fooled. No, she thinks with her stagnant heart. Or he wouldn’t act like he does.

  Rob and Louisa try not to like Jessie but it doesn’t work. Rob ends up loving the little bugger while Louisa holds out longer. Pete likes her well enough from the first day he sees her. ‘She looks,’ he says as they all stand around the bassinet, ‘just like a potato.’ And they laugh with an unnamed relief that he seems happy.

  Even when she’s older and she thinks back on Jessie as a baby, Louisa recalls that time exactly. She can smell the petrol station behind them and the fumes from the tankers edging into the kitchen and the tap dripping into the sink and Anne wiping the table in big arcs with the battered pink wettex catching crumbs with the cup of her hand and always, always there’s her ghost smile.

  And she knows that things began to change then. That Rob started to go feral and the gap between them widened because Rob started to pick on Peter, always teasing him over something, and Louisa had to stop it. She doesn’t understand even now how you can become the thing you most hate.

  ‘Why do you torment Pete?’ she screams at Rob one afternoon when they’ve both retired bloody. ‘How could you even want to hurt someone younger than you? Hasn’t there been enough of this shit in this house to last forever?’

  He smirks, holds up his middle finger and slams out the door.

  19

  Peter walks across the main road behind the house after tea one night when tangerine clouds are stretched out like string. He’s been thinking about fishing for a while now.

  Getting away from the others, and from the bully Rob has become and always from the looming Emmett. Yeah, he’s cutting out, going fishing, but first he’s got to wait for the bus to Williamstown. He sits down in the gutter with Danny’s old bag beside him.

  The tin flag of the bus-stop sign holds itself in the air and he edges up a bit towards it on the gutter so he’s looking at the back of his own house across the road.

  The houses opposite remind him of teeth. The service station makes a gap like a missing one and standing out boldly is the back of number fifty-five. He can see most of the yard. And there’s something hanging on the clothesline. Looks like Emmett’s second work pants. Legs kick up in the breeze now and then. From this distance, the house looks small and exhausted from the effort of containing the Browns under the harsh eye of Emmett, and watching the house makes the boy uneasy. He feels like an animal separated from the herd.

  He chews the inside of his cheek, a habit he’s gotten into lately. There’s something about it that reminds you that you’re here. Then he peels a couple of flakes of dry skin off his lips, seeing how long he can get them. Draws a bead of blood. He chews on the skin around his cuticles and there’s not much left of his small white nails. In a while an old red bus lumbers into view and grinds to a halt before him. Inside, he balances like a surfer as it takes off grudgingly, all gears straining. He pays the driver, and then weighed down by the frozen bait he makes his way down.

  The bus is tight with people coming home from work. Like most of the grown-ups he knows, they’re pretty sour. His rod pokes them a bit and they scowl. He pulls it back and hangs on in the middle of the bus. He’s not that tall yet but he sees out the window okay. He imagines that the houses they pass pull themselves back from the line of the road. He likes the look of most houses. Likes the safety he reckons he sees there.

  Peter has the same crew-cut as Rob’s but his skin is paler and he’s still prone to little skirmishes of hives. He’s bigger than Rob at this age and this makes make him popular with Emmett. But it isn’t just his size that Emmett likes. There’s something about Pete that everyone likes. A kind of stillness. A listening. Pete doesn’t ever talk much but he’s got something that Louisa thinks of as kindness; but then you can’t say that about boys.

  20

  By the time he gets down to the pier at Williamstown it’s getting late and it doesn’t seem so much like spring anymore. He hurries to the fenced-in part of the foreshore and beyond it he can see the pier. He’ll have to go over the top. He makes his way past the colossal petrol tanks with ladders up the sides and AMPOL and MOBIL printed in car-sized letters all over them. He climbs the cyclone fence and at the top drops his bag onto the sandy dirt on the other side. It skids.

  The pier stretches out in front of him, a wooden road over still water. The place smells of seaweed and petrol. Love that smell, he thinks, smiling. The sea shimmers like beaten tin and far away
the city rises out of the haze. The sky is verging on white and a string of seabirds pulls across it. He takes a deep breath. This is the only place he can hear himself. Everything ebbs away.