She leaves The Ant with barely a backward glance and spends short days typing in destinations to faraway places, pleased that someone is going somewhere. And her boss, the very round Mr Christos Conti, is understanding of families. You even look a little bit Greek, he says and she smiles.
***
On Sundays, they go over to Anne’s for a roast. No one does a roast like Anne, Pete reckons, her food tastes so clean and each flavour distinct. The irony of Louisa being a travel agent is not lost on anyone. Rob delights in reminding Pete, ‘The joke is that she’s the worst traveller, possibly on the face of the earth. Gets lost going to the shop to buy a bottle of milk and gets sick as soon as you start moving.’
Pete laughs. ‘Yeah, remember all the times she got carsick? Well, she always did. You don’t remember anything. That’s why she got to sit next to the window. I thought it was an excellent strategy since I was stuck in the bloody middle and then, it got worse, I was always having to nurse Jessie. Sorry, Jess.’
And Jess, who is cutting bread, waves the bread knife at him in a friendly, forgiving way.
‘Which time would that be?’ Rob wonders. ‘That time she heaved when we were going to Maryborough. She must have eaten corn. There was an awful lot of corn in it. Dad made her get out and he took a photo of her covered in sick.’
‘Shut up Robert,’ says Jessie plonking herself down.
‘Pretty funny heh?’ Pete says sourly and takes his plate over to the sink, washes it, then says he has to be off. He kisses Anne on the cheek and waves to the rest as if he barely knows them.
Rob won’t be long heading off either. He’s definitely off the family at the moment. There’s something stilted these days that he can’t put his finger on but then the rest of his life is not working out that well either. He’s had two partners in eleven years, one a horticulturist and the other a hairdresser, and neither lasted.
Still, he thinks, you never know your luck in the big city. He swings by and rents a couple of political thrillers at the video shop and he’s off home to his house behind the hedge. It’s not a cypress, couldn’t quite manage that, it’s a lilly pilly, a native that ripens with purple berries that spurt.
38
Beckett Keele is born after a day and night of monumental struggle. A cap of fine dark hair hugs her small round head and her eyes are the midnight blue of memory. Louisa sees Emmett’s eyes in them and, though the power of his reach lives in them, when she holds the child he is transformed into purity. If this is love, she thinks, then here it is again.
A few days after they get out of hospital, Peter buys a soft pink rabbit for Beck as a welcome for being born. He already has something for Tom. It’s a blustery Saturday afternoon and the occasional leaf and stick brushes up against the window; it feels like the end of something though he realises his feelings are often early, long before the actual event, and even when it happens you’re never sure whether that moment of recognition was about endings or beginnings.
Louisa’s living room is cluttered with teetering stacks of folded nappies and impossibly small baby clothes. Tom’s toys are strewn around carelessly. Last night’s pizza box is open on the coffee table and Pete has a nibble at a crust that’s a serious danger to teeth while Louisa tries to settle the baby. Maybe he should make a cup of tea, he considers. He would really like one but somehow the room is like an inertia trap that has taken him into itself, so he stays still and watches it all like a bemused spectator.
Outside, the choppy wind hurries through a clump of swaying gum trees down at the park and then the moaning begins. It seems there might be a storm. There’s no sign of John even in the room, not a book or a coat, nothing.
‘He’s at a poetry reading,’ Louisa says curtly. Having given up on putting the baby to bed, she’s folding a nappy longways to place on Pete’s shoulder – Beck spills after she’s been fed. ‘I’ll get us a cup of tea,’ she says but then sits down as if she’s forgotten the next step in tea-making requires walking to the kettle.
Peter holds the baby gingerly, as if she might explode, and Tom is enticed away from his uncle’s knee and over to his mother by the absence of that rotten baby and by the idea of showing Mum his new red matchbox car.
‘One of Dan’s,’ Pete says and Louisa feels tears stabbing at her. ‘Are you sure? No use keeping them for nothing, better to see young Tom enjoy them.’ She tries a smile at her brother but it’s not quite there because exhaustion has claimed her. People always say their babies are so good, they just sleep all night. How come hers never do? Typical, she thinks as she lays her head back on the couch and sees a tree outside bending before the convincing wind, the granite clouds huge behind it.
She closes her eyes but tears fall straight down her face anyway, at the thought of Daniel, at the hole John has left in her life, at this endless consuming weariness. The cat moseys on over and settles up against her leg. Tom waves the toy in her face, saying ‘car Mummy car’ over and over, and then Peter realises he’s never seen anyone so tired. That you could even be so tired.
He gets up carefully and, with the gentlest movements he can manage, places the fragrant sleeping baby into her basket and mimes ‘shoosh’ to Tom. He pushes the snoozing cat down from beside Louisa and the cat stands, affronted by this startling displacement. Peter then puts an arm around his sister, who wakes instantly, and he says, ‘Louisa, rest. I’ll look after the kids.’
He steers her into the bedroom, finds a blanket piled on the floor, covers her with it and pulls the blind down then goes outside to Tom and Beck. ‘Now young Thomas,’ he says, ‘dishes are our first priority.’ At the sink with Tom beside him, he feels the strength of something beginning.
***
Mr Conti, Louisa’s new boss, is as short and wide as a tram. His face is completely round. He is so short he can’t reach the top shelf near his desk and he keeps a little wooden box for that purpose. He combs the last strands of his dark hair across his shiny brown scalp and, obediently, they stay put all day.
He calls her Luisa and it sounds exotic. He has no time for computers which are just starting to revolutionise the industry because he prefers the old methods of forms and phone calls. He thinks they should work civilised hours and that they should always take care to be accurate. His loyal clients come to him because of his old-fashioned ways.
He runs the family company like a benevolent dictator. Gives the staff access to every junket that comes in but never takes them for himself and neither does Louisa because of the kids. His wife, Eleni, with her dark eyes and her host of gold rings, shows up occasionally at the agency as do their three daughters, Paula, Maria and Kylie, so named when Eleni thought something more Australian was required. Kylie Conti has a thatch of dyed blonde hair with dark seeping through at the roots like soil.
The girls are always jetting off here and there. Jetlag is an excuse to stretch on the couch where the customers should sit. Louisa reckons this is the way work should be, plenty of giving and taking. You do your job and you get it right. There’s no need to be the smartest or the rudest or the funniest and no need to have your copy dissected or spiked by ambitious dolts. No need to compete for favour with worn-out editors. Especially when everyone is better at most things than you are.
Stepping into the office in the mornings is like walking onto a Greek island. Greek coffee, hot and thick, becomes her favourite kind. She works hard and learns well, even picks up rudimentary Greek, and the girls are there to help her when she strays. Eleni brings her trays of moussaka and in time Louisa returns the favour; her own is declared almost as good. When she works on Saturday mornings, she brings Tom and Beck with her and the Greeks cherish them. How did she get so lucky?
Some days, she has lunch with Gary who’s still at The Ant, he’s on industrial relations now and she notices a certain hardness creeping into him. He always keeps her waiting because he’s so busy and when he strides into their Malaysian restaurant, The Golden Noodle, he pecks her cheek rather than hugs her, which
leaves her feeling cheated.
He asks after John but not Tom or Beck, even though he must see John at the office, and then launches into the current gossip (affairs and promotions) with a seriousness of intent as if journalists are the only people worth talking about.
Warren Silk, his new partner, is an arts journo on the local broadsheet and he reminds Louisa of Mel Gibson. She once interviewed Mel, and on arriving back declared to the office that ‘men don’t get more handsome than that’. And so it is with Woz.
‘How’s Woz?’ she asks, thinking of Mel. Gary’s hopping into a plate of lemony seafood noodles and says tersely, ‘Haven’t seen a lot of him. He works so much it’s becoming a joke and then he plays water polo or he’s off at gallery openings. There’s always something going on.’
‘You sound like the wife,’ she laughs, trying to keep her voice light. She’s diligently picking out the tasty bits from a seafood mee goreng but she’s not hungry. ‘For some men, there’s always somewhere more interesting than home,’ she adds, and pushes away a curly piece of squid that looks like elastic.
Though he agreed to be Tom’s godfather, Gary is not fussed about even hearing the details of motherhood. He does his duty though and on each of Tom’s birthdays he’s arrived with a different children’s classic carefully wrapped and ribboned. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Tom was two and at three, Kidnapped.
Gary seems to regard being a parent as a diversion from Louisa’s real life. She believes the colour in his eyes fades when she talks about her family. His own spare time goes into getting fit and these days he has biceps like Sylvester Stallone. Louisa could not believe they were real until she touched them one summer afternoon. ‘Didn’t know you had it in you,’ she gaped, and he grinned like a boy.
He thought she was insane to leave journalism. ‘How could you just chuck it all away?’ he asked her incredulously. ‘How?’ He was honestly mystified. Journalists were his world and gossip was its fuel. He was cynical, funny, bitchy, very well-informed, and made you feel anything was possible; and she thought, he’s definitely lost interest in me. Perhaps the price of admittance to his world was a press pass. Ah, Mr Turner, where have you gone?
Walking back to work after lunch, it seems to Louisa that Gary and maybe even John are being swept away from her. That she is here in the middle of a wide prairie, alone, tending to things, checking the walls of the house and trying to get things to grow. And growing her kids.
39
Beck is named for Samuel Beckett, her father’s favourite playwright. She grows into a dark-haired, olive-skinned plump little girl who loves water, is mostly grubby, and is very fond of her special penguin cap. Tom is a quiet boy with deep blue eyes who has the look of his uncles about him.
When Beck’s eighteen months old, John opens the door to the bedroom and Louisa is reading in the lamplight. Once again, he’s home late but at least he’s still got his tie on. He drags it off absently, like a man letting go. He’s been at a lot of poetry readings lately. He’s out most nights. He’s so busy. She’s heard there are poetry groupies galore. Doesn’t believe a word of it.
‘Lou,’ he says, standing in front of the chest of drawers with his back to her while he watches her in the mirror.
‘Yeah,’ she says, reading hard and resisting the current of her husband’s attention.
‘I’ve got something to tell you and you’re not going to like hearing it.’
She seems to drag herself from the page, but really she hasn’t absorbed a word since he walked in. She sits up straighter, arranges the covers and knows immediately that what he will say will change every single thing.
She’s always expected that he will leave her, that it wasn’t really love, and here is the truth. If you wait long enough, it comes. She wonders whether she might intervene, put up her hands and stop the words, put her mouth against his, but no, it doesn’t seem so.
‘You see, the thing is,’ he says, stumbling forward with resolve and red eyes, ‘I’ve fallen in love with someone else.’ He seems to hope that she will show him a little mercy because he’s in love. He hasn’t planned it, you see, this thing has just befallen him.
‘What did you say?’ she asks thinly.
‘I’ve fallen in love with someone else.’
‘Fallen?’
‘Yeah, fallen. I’ll move out.’
‘Who did you fall in love with?’
‘Her name is irrelevant.’
‘Not to me, mate, and I’m guessing her name is not irrelevant to you or you wouldn’t be doing this.’
‘Well, I don’t want to get into that.’ And then the rage is released.
‘You unbelievable, you complete fucker,’ she cries, and it feels exactly like her heart has been torn out.
The emotions that flash through her are as familiar as family. Fear returns like an old enemy who knows its way around, but there’s a kind of release and she seems to be becoming Emmett and she runs at him stumbling from the bed in the ugly duckling pyjamas and hits him around the head but he holds her hands away from her until, sobbing like the girl she always held at bay, she sinks into the bed.
She cannot think. Nothing works. This pain has halved her. She lies there while he sits beside her, tentatively stroking her back with an involuntary kindness that even she can’t stand. At each touch she feels a little more dead. She can see nothing, nothing but her children, and they are all there is.
It takes a while for her voice to remember how it works, but when it does, she says nastily, ‘Well, fuck off then. We don’t need you around here.’ And that’s all it takes. He packs a bag, stuffing in socks and underpants, his T-shirts and carrying his other stuff on hangers. And he leaves. In an effort to seem normal, Louisa switches off the light and gets into bed with Beck and there she stays, awake all night.
It takes many months for Louisa to recall who she is. Her mother and the babies are what get her through. Slowly, she comes to see that she will survive John Keele but it takes longer to understand how she is changed.
***
‘How come Louisa always gets on better with men than women?’ Jessie asks Anne one day while they’re hanging out washing in the yard behind the shop. There’s not that much washing anymore, and they’re both aware of it. ‘She drove her own husband away by never talking to him. Remember last Christmas? She barely looked at him. She spends more time talking to Rob than anyone else and Rob doesn’t give a stuff, he just can’t stand John, so anything that gets up his nose is fine by him. He’s a stirrer, but what’s her excuse? I tell you, I pity those kids.’
Anne cannot be expected to choose between her children. To her they are equal in every way. Ah, let’s be honest a minute, she thinks and smiles to herself, Jessie was always the favourite of my heart, but that will go to the grave with me. And so it follows that she cannot let Louisa go undefended.
‘Well as for Mr John Keele, he was no great shakes, nothing but a gutless wonder really,’ she begins. ‘He didn’t even have the guts to try to work it out, no, he just kept up the little dalliances. He’s long had a roving eye and it seems to me they were never really suited. Louisa had to do all the work with him. He’s one of those men who wants a woman to do all the running. She has to come up with all the moves, but only after he approves. You know where the house will be, and she must keep the children happy and bring up all the topics they talk about. He will never contribute. Then she’s got to entertain him and make a home for him, cook for him, bring in half the income, give him children and then keep them quiet so he can pursue his great dream and you know what? Louisa’s a more talented person and a better one than he will ever be.’ Anne savagely pegs a tea towel and it flutters, a stained and captured flag snagging occasionally on a brave red geranium that climbs the wall of the garage. Anne continues. This is a theme she’s given much thought to.
‘She got tired of it all and who can blame her? In the end, if you’re doing everything, then you may as well do it on your own, that’s the
mistake I made, staying there under the thumb all those bloody years. Once there are children my girl, every single thing changes and some men do not cope well with the changes. And by the way, did you know Mr Keele used to dye his hair?’
The Book of Emmett Page 19