‘God, Louisa, you’re fooling around in the dark here, always sitting in the dark, what’s the bloody matter with you?’ He slides his bag up the passage out of the way.
‘Get stuffed Robert,’ she says casually and gets herself a bit of bread, holds it in her palm and forces a small river of tomato sauce onto it and eats it before the sauce can escape.
Rob can tell Emmett isn’t around because she’s relaxed. There’s not much sign of Emmett these days. They have entered into an island of time when he’s always at the pub.
Rob wrenches the fridge door open and stands there gazing in as if it will answer everything. ‘What’s for tea?’ he asks, lulled by the bright void and stilled by the cool air.
‘Chops,’ Louisa says, poking at them, curled and spitting in the pan, ‘It’s always bloody chops, dill boy. Haven’t you noticed?’
He grabs three slices of bread from the plastic bag on the bench, wads them up and stuffs them into his mouth and heads out to the sleep-out. ‘How long?’ she hears the words exiting past the bread but doesn’t bother replying.
Later that night after tea, the others scatter to enjoy the lounge room and the tele in the absence of Emmett. They could get used to this. Telling Anne, the idea of herself as a journalist takes hold and begins to grow. She’s drying the dishes. ‘Miss Burton thinks I’d be good at it,’ she finds herself saying, getting stuttery at the idea. ‘News papers, you know, you can be a sort of a writer.’
Anne draws in a long breath. She’s got a smoke going beside her in the mosaic ashtray Louisa made in grade four. The smoke is drawn upward as if by a genie. Anne smiles her beautiful smile. ‘Write to them Lou. Write them a good long letter all about yourself,’ she says, her hands in the sink moving in and out of the grey water, passing out plates and knives and forks.
She finishes up and dries her hands on the tea towel Louisa is holding and picks up the ad from the bench, squinting as she scrutinises it. She grabs her smoke and takes a long contented drag. ‘Write all about everything,’ she says, still smiling and handing it back. ‘They will not be able to resist you.’
27
Ten cadets are hired by the national newspaper The Antipodean because apparently, they want new blood. When Louisa realises she’s the only girl, she tells herself it’s no great sign of anything. Must have needed one and I showed up, she thinks, but still, there’s a creeping sense of unease.
Louisa’s first sin as a journalist is that she’s inclined to be slow on the uptake and her second is paralysing shyness, two big disadvantages. Hiding both brings certain challenges. On a tour of where they will work, she’s startled by the typewriter that will be hers. Oh dear, she thinks recoiling, never reckoned on typing, but at least the shyness keeps her quiet.
And being the only girl in the office puts her into an uncomfortable place. If she stretches her arms out above her head, men dart looks at her. If she stands up to get copy paper, their magnet eyes follow.
At first she thinks they must be bored, or maybe they’re kind and they want to help. It takes a while for her to see that to men she’s just ripe fruit, and to realise that the men watch all women with the same ardent intent. The secretaries know all about it.
Even men with families do it but they look at her sadly, as if remembering something. Louisa, never slow to rile where men are concerned, would really like to kill them. These men who are never satisfied, they have their lives, so what’s she got to do with them? And what’s with all the perving? Apart from the hang-dog looks, there’s something about them that reminds her of Emmett, but maybe it’s just their evident seeping dissatisfaction with their lives. Does he look at women like this? She finds the answer without strenuous research and recalls that, yeah, Emmett always did have trouble with women.
It became apparent to her when she was about twelve. He called her into his room. She’d heard his voice down the tunnel of the passageway and been shocked that he would call her.
Though she felt guilty that she must have done something wrong and now would be found out, she went straight towards the door anyway like the condemned. She knocked on it. Opened it to a surly ‘enter’.
The big desk stretched before him and the blinds cut into the hot light pouring through the window and though Louisa was subdued, a steady tremor ran through her and she held her hands behind her back to still them. Her bowels felt loose, her mouth was a desert and the dizziness was there yet again.
‘I’ve called you in here, young Louisa,’ her father began, leaning back on the chair until it cracked and strained before he snapped it back up, ‘to tell you something important. Are you ready to hear something important?’ His voice lifted with every word.
‘Yes Dad,’ she said, her heart sinking.
‘This thing I have to tell you is about...’ and he leaned towards her as if he might whisper or bite but decided instead to shout, ‘...BLOOD.’ At the word, she flinched and her skin prickled. He paused and drank some beer to settle himself and then he launched into it again.
‘The fact is that pretty soon you will find that there is blood coming from between your legs. You are already twelve or so. Each time it comes it won’t last for long but, and remember this, Louisa, this is nothing to worry about. Do you hear me?’ His megaphone voice hummed through her.
Louisa was looking hard at the floor. Possibly he was trying to comfort her, but why was he talking about such a thing? She tried to block him out. What had she done to deserve this? He drained his last inch of beer and continued. ‘All women have it. Some make a great big deal about it. But YOU will not do that.
‘Some women spend their lives whingeing about such things. That’s all they do. They are nothing more than bitches. They seem to like to make people unhappy,’ he said with a kind of sad bitterness, leaning back again on the creaking chair into the stale, stinking bedroom.
‘But that’s another matter. The blood, well, that just means you’re growing up. And sadly Lou, we all have to do that. So just to recap: blood – when it shows up, don’t panic. Now, off you go.’
Like a zombie, Louisa reached for the door handle but knew it would be a mistake not to show appreciation. ‘Thanks Dad,’ she mumbled in a small voice.
‘My pleasure. Anytime. Shut the door. Properly.’
28
By the time she gets her first serious pay cheque, the job has really achieved something for her mother and herself. Louisa is able to leave Wolf Street and Anne will have her room.
Louisa finds a place in Windsor with Gary Turner, one of the other cadets. The flat is across the river, it’s full of nooks and looks down onto a road full of unceasing traffic. Gary’s looking to move from way out in Nunawading where he’s number four in a family of eight kids.
He’s short and gingery with speckled skin, a pinched face and pale eyes and he picks her up from home with her boxes and watches her saying her goodbyes to Anne and the kids. Says nothing while she weeps in the car all the way there.
In the flat, there’s a scungy old mattress on the floor, a chest of drawers and a sideboard. A tree scratches the window. ‘You haven’t got a bed, have you?’ Gary asks after they put down the boxes in her room.
‘Nah,’ she says, ‘not yet, can’t afford it yet. You?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I’m taking the one from home.’
So she gets the mattress and that night they get Chinese food and eat sitting on the mattress but even the dim sims taste different from Footscray dimmies and she loses her appetite; and though he tells her about each of his brothers and sisters in long detail, she can’t even begin to speak of her family.
The first night the tree taps on the window and wakes her. She’s not scared, only relieved that she’s finally free of Emmett. The kind of peace she feels within her is so profound, it’s as if she’s stepped into another universe where you’re allowed to breathe deeply; but when she thinks of her mother and the boys and Jess she realises that guilt is the price of freedom. She’s abandoned them and know
ing it doesn’t help, so most nights she runs down to the phone box on the corner to ring them but they can’t talk when Emmett’s home.
‘Hi Mum,’ she says the first night they do talk. It’s raining and the windows are waterfalls and she’s wet and shivering. ‘I’m good yeah, I miss you. I’m learning shorthand. Not very good yet. Gary’s great, says to say hi. I got a new Joni Mitchell record. I’ll take the train over on Saturday.’
Jessie clamours at the phone and says, ‘Hello Louie’ and then clams up and won’t let go of the phone and then, when it’s about to be snatched away, she says, ‘Frank’s good,’ and Anne takes the phone back and the child’s bitter crying engulfs everything until Louisa is weeping too. She manages to make out that Pete’s gone fishing and Rob’s not home either.
She wants to ask Anne if Emmett’s hit her lately, but she can’t bring herself to come out and say this and Anne would never tell her off her own bat so the question sits between them like a ghost. That night, she weeps, running all the way home down the dark street, passing through pods of light from the street lamps, the spare coins leaving circles in her hand.
***
With Gary she enters into a life of perfection. She imagines living with him and her mum and Jess and the boys and then things really would be perfect. They cook cannelloni and soak beans for stews with chicken and green olives. They listen to so much Dylan they are word-perfect. They read e.e. cummings and Virginia Woolf and every single newspaper they can find while they compete for by-lines. And keep tally. And they travel to work on the train looking over the pages of The Ant at each other.
She only discovers he’s gay one Saturday when he comes out and says it when they are building a bookshelf out of big grey bricks and planks hauled to the flat strapped precariously to the roof of his Beetle. It’s been going so well up until now. ‘Gay?’ she says, astonished, but retying her ponytail to gain time.
‘Yeah,’ he smiles, ‘I like boys, you know, better than girls.’
Louisa’s eyes are stretched wide. ‘But how do you know?’
He reaches his hand over to hers and says, ‘Louie, I’ve always known.’
She finds this impossible to believe. He looks abashed or something, she thinks, but then he’s laughing and she’s at least smiling because the truth is that Louisa is stunned at the very idea of people being gay. This has never been discussed at home but then she knows she didn’t learn much of use at home apart from how to spell ornithorhynchus (the biological name for platypus), what hedges are best for and how to stay clear of Emmett.
And she has harboured such strong notions about young Gary Turner that it feels awfully foolish to have missed something like this. Still, she must not show it. ‘But Rhett,’ she says grinning and bunging on a lame, syrupy Southern accent, ‘you still love me don’t you?’ And he smiles, relieved that she’s laughing and grabs her in a headlock, ‘Always, my dear, always.’
They talk all day with the planks and the books scattered around them and understanding settles into them and she reckons she could get addicted to peace. She might marry him whether or not he’s gay, not give him any damn say at all.
They finish the bookcase late in the afternoon and he goes off to the kitchen to make soup while she settles down to read about Gerald Durrell growing up in Corfu. Later, in the evening, they eat minestrone soup from blue bowls as the little birds settle into the tree outside the window.
On the train one morning, he calls her Mrs Turner and she calls him Mrs Brown. ‘You wish,’ he laughs and she finds herself thinking that yeah, she really does wish.
29
At work a reporter named Wayne Goade spends much time caressing her with his eyes. He’s got a high thready voice and he looks a bit like Van Morrison, pudgy with fairish hair and smudgy little granny glasses. Pity he doesn’t make music like Van Morrison.
He’s married and lives outside the city at a distant muddy place with his wife, Jan, and two little girls named Star and Venus. Louisa meets them when he brings them in to work. They seem to be sick a lot. They cough constantly and straw-coloured sludge edges from their noses. She shrinks away from them and goes back to thinking about by-lines, her favourite subject. How can she get more? Or even any would be good.
Wayne looks for gaps in her day and employing stealth and cunning, pounces on her. He sits on the edge of her desk and tries to make her laugh. Drinks in the freckle above the left corner of her lip. Wonders about the pale scar that runs from her mouth.
It seems he longs to touch her and sometimes takes the opportunity when he’s ushering her into the lift or towards the coffee machine, guiding her by the small of her back. These small touches last him weeks.
In that whole year, there’s never a time when Louisa’s not lighting up his life and it doesn’t matter to him the slightest little bit that his feelings are not reciprocated. Louisa thinks Wayne is a creepy dork.
But the photographer Michael Abbey is something else. With his dark wavy hair and neatly clipped beard he reminds her of Queen Mary’s lover Lord Darnley or at least the actor she saw playing him on a BBC production she watched with Turner.
If Wayne Goade had been a fly on the studio wall one wet Friday evening when Louisa and Michael Abbey are both rostered on for late stop, the unfolding action would have felled him. Mercifully, Wayne is spared the sight of Louisa losing her virginity to Michael Abbey.
Michael and Louisa are in the office on that quiet winter’s evening, sitting around waiting for news that even if it happened they had little intention of using. A massacre might get a run in the big pages of The Ant (how many dead and who were they?), a bushfire (number of lives and houses) or perhaps a huge accident (say the Westgate falling down again). But not much else would get in this late.
Rain slides down the windows which look onto the side street and at the end of the lane homeless people huddle inside big boxes with sheets of sagging plastic draped like canopies over their camps. It briefly crosses Louisa’s mind that Emmett will end up in a camp like this.
Near the jaws of the mighty black presses downstairs, mobs of printers play poker. From the office window she can see the slap of cards and the piles of money and the men laughing and the calling. From a distance, these men seem interesting. Their hands and faces are black and the cards flare and match the whites of their eyes and glow in the gloom. Sitting on milk crates, they roar and laugh and gamble and tease. More fun than sitting upstairs waiting for blasting phone calls from Mick Fan, the latest hack to be made night news editor just because he lives in Sydney.
Up here in the newsroom, nothing much is happening and that’s fine by everyone but Sydney. Michael Abbey leans back on his chair with his feet up on Louisa’s desk. He’s Keeping Louisa Company while she knits a scarf of many blues.
But she can only knit straight, anything else is way beyond her, and she believes she’s making progress purely because the thing is growing. Abbey watches for longer than she reckons would be interesting for anyone, let alone a man, and by degrees it makes her nervous. And then there it is, her wrist is prickling.
She drops a couple of stitches in a row trying to scratch the wrist and is curiously embarrassed. Her fingers grow sweaty, which tangles the yarn all the more. Finally, Abbey stands up and says, ‘Come into the studio. I’ll take a few pics of you.’
‘What for?’ she says and laughs, her fingers knotted in the blue wool.
In his measured, sensible voice he says, ‘Well, there’s nothing much else to do and you can’t knit, my dear girl. That is very obvious.’
She feels her heart beat in its solid familiar way and it seems to her in a flashing moment that this is the time to change things. So she laughs and balls up the wool, spears it with the needles and follows him.
A radiator in the corner of the studio is sending out orange rays like a small sun. She wonders why the heater’s already on and hovers in the doorway. She feels like a lamb with a wolf and there’s that familiar feeling of finality. It reminds her
of the feeling she got with Emmett sometimes, the sense that the thing, whatever it was, would happen and she would not be able to stop it. That another will would prevail. The fatalism of the everyday.
The Book of Emmett Page 14