Bad Company belting out ‘It’s All Right Now’ through the big square amps gets her moving tentatively on the boundary line of the gym on the yellow basketball lines. She allows herself to think that it’s becoming all right now but Steve, the boy she has cultivated in her dreams, well, at this moment he seems so very young.
24
Louisa does have friends, mostly others like her, standing at the fringes. Gail ‘Goddie’ Godwin is not one of these. She’s popular in a heart-swelling way, at least to Louisa. She loves watching kids swarm around Goddie. Makes her feel like something’s going right. They sat next to each other at primary school on that first morning and have remained mates.
In the last year of school Louisa works Friday nights and Saturday mornings selling shoes in an arcade in the city she loves. She also loves the lights and the money and the shoes. She got the job when she was sixteen by walking up and down Bourke Street with Goddie asking every shop if they had a vacancy. Taking it in turns to be rejected, it was amazing how fast they got used to the word ‘no’. Since she started working, she has not asked for money from her mother and this is a source of pride. Not a farthing, not a brass razoo, she tells Goddie with delight.
But now at seventeen she has another job. It’s Louisa’s responsibility to take Jessie to her crèche and to pick her up every day. She boards the bus with her two-year-old sister as women board buses laden with bags of groceries, sighing and feeling every atom of their weight.
She has given up trying to look cool for the boys on the bus and now they are as distant as mountain ranges but just as appealing.
Each day she sits Jessie beside the window and sometimes she engages with the child; mostly though, she ignores her and tries to read some novel or another from the school library. She reads The Catcher in the Rye and wonders bitterly how Holden Caulfield would go looking after a two-year-old.
She reads Slaughterhouse 5 and sometimes on the bus she looks up, seeing Footscray and thinking of Dresden. She reads a book on British rock and roll and pinches it from the library because she wants to be droll and knowledgeable like the author, Nik Cohn.
Rainy days, she draws pictures of cats and dogs on the steamy windows for the child. She’s almost always aware that she was delivered a burden when this child was born, but it takes too long to work out that it isn’t the child’s fault.
At the bus stop nearest to the school, the other kids streak ahead while she tows Jessie down Morrison Street. There are days when the weather opens itself upon them. The wind and the sun and the rain and the cold and high indigo skies, each of them shadows Louisa and Jessie.
In a thunderstorm one day with the bruised sky heaving from ocean-green to purple, Louisa pushes Jessie under her coat and runs through the lashing rain. Every drop that lands scalds as if it’s boiling and they run all the long way to the crèche and Jessie loses a shoe.
Often though, if they’re early, they nick across to the mangy paddock opposite where a raddled old swayback horse lives. They name the horse Chester because of his chestnut colour. Jessie loves him until he mistakes her fingers for grass and nips her with his great yellow teeth. Louisa holds the sobbing child and feels her distress in her own body.
At the crèche, Louisa deposits the rashy two-year-old – her cheeks look like they’ve been sandpapered – with a goodbye kiss and a wave. Then she walks the last bit down towards the school, listening to the broadcast of Jessie’s anguish for longer than she would believe possible.
Squatting at the end of the street, Footscray High is a pile of drab grey concrete bricks with a sagging tin roof and a gathering of scraggly shrubs making some kind of effort to be a garden.
She swings her bag over her shoulder and decides there will come a day when she will not have to look after babies. And a day when she will be free of her family. Free to be herself. But she always remembers acutely, as if pricked by a pin, that she has to collect Jessie at three-thirty sharp. Or else her mother will have to pay more – and this cannot be.
On the bus on the way home, the little girl is tired and wants her mum. Louisa holds the child’s hand as if she is chained to her. At the service station, she gets off first and Jessie jumps down the big steps all on her own and into her sister’s arms and Louisa swings her in a big arc that silently speaks of love.
25
Just because they’re about the same size and both have long dark hair, people say that Goddie looks like Louisa. Some even call them twins. But they never notice that Goddie has brown eyes and a fringe and Louisa has blue eyes and no fringe. People, Louisa decides, are not very alert.
One dull summer morning at school Goddie slides in next to Lou. The surface of the desk has been carved with compasses then inked with so many names it feels like braille. The window allows in the muted breeze.
‘Hey,’ she says, not waiting for an answer, ‘Louie, guess what Lou? This week at Festival Hall, oi, are you listenin’? On Friday, this Friday yeah, there’s gonna be a grouse concert, all sorts, you know, Spectrum and Dingo and Daryl Braithwaite and tons of others. Come on, you gotta go out sometimes. You know you love your old Dazzling Dazza. Only three mingy bucks to get in...’
Louisa smiles, thinks Goddie’s hair looks nice today swinging in its great fat ponytail, falling like a dark river. She has already decided she should get out more, and thanks to the shoe shop she has the dough.
‘Yeah, I’d love to,’ she says to Goddie’s wide smile and they open their geography books. Today they’re studying the structures of clouds and await the enervating Mr Champion with his whopping hooked nose and his soothing talk of cumulous and nimbus and stratus and the secrets of clouds, of the possibilities of all things.
Though Louisa is slow to trust, she trusts Gail because in primary school they bonded over theft. They nicked roses for the teacher from the big house with the garden. If the roses hung over the fence, Louisa reasoned, they were fair game. So she positioned Gail as lookout while she plundered the blooms.
But breaking the stems was harder than she thought and mostly Gail stood there guarding but sometimes, under pressure, she fled yelling, ‘Look out, the lady’s coming...’ They stayed friends. Louisa would always forgive panic.
***
Friday night rolls by and it’s a rainy one. They take the green bus to Festival Hall, passing through the lowlands between Footscray and North Melbourne, both seriously con stricted by their jeans.
Gail reckons she knows one of the roadies who can get them up the front. Louisa doubts this but goes along with it anyway. They stand awkwardly round the back near the band entrance. Long needles of rain hit them and, damply, they edge closer to the wall. The roadies with their showy mullets and their astonishingly tight pants stream by like a chain of worker ants holding colossal speaker boxes above their heads.
Louisa isn’t looking out and the corner of one of the speakers jags into her head. She’s knocked backwards and Gail grabs her before she falls and says, ‘God, mate. You all right?’ Lou nods, but she’s dazed and Gail peers at her for a bit and says, ‘Carn, let’s give this away and go up the front, I can’t see the bloke I know anyway, bloody dill’s not here.’
Gingerly, Louisa touches her torn scalp and following Gail she thinks, not that much blood, not too much damage. They sit up the back next to a couple of blokes drinking VB from bottles in paper bags. The blokes offer them some and Gail goes ahead. Louisa wouldn’t touch the stinking beer if you paid her but restrains herself from saying so. The singers move onto the stage and the sound engulfs her. Dazza, past his satin phase, is all the better for it and Dingo is unbelievable.
The rain has slowed after the concert and the stars are out and the night feels as clean as tomorrow. With their ears full of music, they talk way too loud. They wait ages for the bus, in the flawless night raving away about the concert, and in the end they climb up into the empty bus and are transported back to the music by the static that still hums around them.
By Monday morning, Louisa’
s head is as tight as a drum and there’s a throbbing red lump where the speaker corner got her. Time to show her mother. She’s in her school uniform, bending her head over her mother’s knee when Emmett walks in. ‘Show me,’ he demands and she says, ‘It’s all right Dad, it’s nothing at all really.’
‘Well,’ he declares primly, standing back from the wound with some distaste, ‘it’s obvious you’ve got yourself into some strife here. Someone’s probably raped you as well as bashed you.’
Louisa always suspected Emmett was nuts and now here again is solid proof. Anne says, ‘Hang on a minute Emmett, Louisa’s told you what happened.’ But he keeps going, winding himself tighter and tighter. ‘You’d better be honest with us now girl, or there’ll be consequences.’ By now he’s turning scarlet and the pulse in his neck is throbbing and she notices that his hands are so fat, his fingers look like sausages. She forces herself to concentrate on yet another bizarre scene in the kitchen. But her head hurts.
She examines him through her long-seasoned bitterness and her eyes narrow and this is the moment, the real moment, when she knows there’s nothing to fear here anymore. Her father is insane and that’s it. That’s all this is. ‘You’re cracked Dad, you know that? You are completely cracked. You should be in a bloody mental home. Do us all a favour and for God’s sake, find one.’ She has her hand on her head, holding the sore spot.
But Emmett isn’t all that riled. ‘Piss off then,’ he sneers nastily, stepping back from her. ‘If you’re not worried about getting your bloody silly self raped, then neither am I.’ She sees his big ugly face but knows that since the fight he’s damned wary of her. Knows without any doubt that she will go for him.
Anne is once again furiously silenced and Louisa knows the dance is just about done. She slams out the back door, head throbbing like an engine. Not much longer to go, she tells herself on the way to school, hauling little Jessie behind her like a boat.
All day she thinks there must be a way of getting out of this. In the library at lunchtime her English teacher, Miss Burton, a woman with cat’s-eye glasses and a halo of curls, takes the chair next to her. Miss B has a passion for the novels of Jean Rhys, and Louisa has been stuck on the same page of Wide Sargasso Sea for a while now, unable to think of anything but her head. Miss B asks if anything is wrong. ‘Louisa my dear, you know you can always ask me for anything.’
And it’s as if there’s a drummer inside her head thumping away. She can’t concentrate on the book, and though she can hardly bear to touch her head, that’s all her hand wants to do. She hesitates and says to herself, you gotta know when you need help and here is a good, kind woman who will help.
She bends her head down toward the teacher and parts her hair tenderly away from the swollen infected lump. And then she looks up into the teacher’s eyes and hoping it’s trust she sees there, says, ‘Dad thinks I was raped and that I won’t own up to it. It’s not true of course. A speaker box got me on the head,’ and this sounds so silly she laughs, but then she feels heavily sad and pushes away a loose tear and says, ‘I think my father’s mad,’ and it’s a relief to speak of such things.
Miss Burton doesn’t say anything but her face is a picture of sorrow. She pats Louisa’s arm and leans in close and whispers, ‘Come to my desk after school, my dear, I know a good doctor.’
The teacher takes Louisa out to her green sports car and they drive past the packs of kids surging through the gate like shoals of sardines. Miss Burton waits while Louisa picks up Jessie from the crèche and the child perches on her knee in the car in a startled state of suspended excitement, little white hands grabbing fistfulls of her uniform and mouth sucking in all that whooshing air.
The doctor says there’s a cyst underneath the swelling that was caused by the gouge but not to worry, everything will heal. She prescribes antibiotics and Miss Burton pays for them and even buys Jessie a little ragdoll in a patchwork pinafore at the chemist.
When she drops Louisa and Jess off at Wolf Street the teacher pats her shoulder. ‘You know, dear girl, it won’t last forever.’ Louisa and Jessie stand outside the gate for a time watching the sports car disappear down the winter-dark, rail-thin street.
26
In the last year of high school Louisa decides she might as well become a journalist. It’s all a bit of a scramble driven by Miss Burton. Louisa wonders if a journalist is the same thing as a reporter. She’s heard of Clark Kent and Lois Lane so reckons she’s probably well on the way. If she’d known the Pommy author Nik Cohn was one, she would have jumped at it.
‘You’ve got a good deal of curiousity in you, young Louisa,’ Miss B says, beaming. It’s lunchtime on a windy day in early summer. A knot of teenage girls gathers on the next bench. They’re using their knees as plates and carefully laying potato chips on buttered white breadrolls then stuffing the chip bags into crevices in the seats. Some bags escape and lift across the yard in the wind like wonky stray birds.
Louisa’s on her own under a worn-out gum, hidden by a long fringe of leaves and consuming Catch 22. The chattering girls might not even be there. When Miss Burton slides in beside her, glasses glinting in the bright day, Louisa, always easily startled, gasps as if she’s been attacked and the teacher tries to recover from fright to friendliness. The scabby grey bitumen stretches around their feet.
‘Journalism,’ Miss Burton announces enthusiastically, still breathless from striding out to find Louisa. She likes this word. This is a special word. ‘They’re looking for cadets now in the city. You could do this, my girl. It’s a job for a special girl.’ And smiling, she passes a square of newspaper ad to her and her smile feels like love.
Louisa holds the little square of grey print and it flutters like a living thing. Sounds as good as anything and she’d like to please Miss Burton seeing as how she thinks she might love her. She puts the ad inside the book. Later, walking to the bus with Jessie’s small hand in hers, she wonders, ‘How do you get to be like Miss Burton?’
Jessie is babbling about seeing the horsie but by now they’re well past the horse in the thistly paddock and they head towards the red bus that seems to stream up and down the big road endlessly, and today the world seems all blue sky with a raft of passing cloud.
One of the clouds has slipped from the others and is forming a ladder and this makes her smile. Could it be the ladder leading her out of here? Rubbish, she scolds herself, as if the sky’s got anything to do with anything.
She touches her sister’s baby head for comfort and realises that university is the only way to climb out of here to become like Miss Burton. But then seldom do journalists go to university. Ah, you don’t always get what you want and a job is what you need, she tells herself.
Jessie has been at swimming lessons and the metal smell of chlorine folds around her. ‘Did you have a good swim today Jess?’ Louisa asks as they sit on the bus. ‘Nah,’ says Jess staring out the window holding onto her bag of wet towel, ‘I want Mum.’
Lou touches her head again and thinks, I know you do, and she wipes Jessie’s trailing nose with the corner of her school dress. ‘Carn little Jess, you’re all right matey,’ she says and rests her arm around the child’s slight shoulders. If she ever has children, Louisa decides, she will be with them every bloody minute of every bloody day.
***
Nothing can be real about her possible life as a journalist until she tells Anne. In the kitchen that night before her mum gets home, she goes about her chores. The louvre windows are open and she can see into next door’s yard where white sheets flap on the line.
She begins to feel a sense of portent and when this happens her right wrist prickles. It prickles now and she feels change is moving towards her and even though she wants it, it scares her rigid. She decides to delay telling her mother because she knows that when she tells this part of her story, it will happen in short time and then she will be gone and the time of Emmett will be over and the newness, what will it be?
She sets the blue laminex
table with knives and forks and salt and pepper. Rob stumbles up the fernery steps and bursts into the kitchen. The day has dredged away and the gloom says maybe it will rain. He flicks a switch and the stick of light on the ceiling blinks on reluctantly.
The Book of Emmett Page 13