The Book of Emmett

by Deborah Forster

  Jess is not hugely bothered by any of this news, as far as she’s concerned people can have whatever hair colour they like. Anyway, she still likes John Keele but she’s got the sense to shut up about that and she always had a sneaking feeling that he liked her better than Lou and maybe he did. ‘Oh,’ she says limply, dropping a dry yellow towel into the dirt and Anne says impatiently, ‘Give it to me, give it a good shake. And did you know if you fold it in half on the line, the fluffiness increases?’ But Jess is lost to her, she’s kicking away a pile of cat shit, shoulders slumped. Her mother grabs the towel and shakes it vigorously. Jess wishes she didn’t have to hear any of this. Bugger Louisa, Mum’s always on about her.

  The truth is, Jess will always strive to find a way to feel left out because that’s where she’s comfortable, but now she wants her mother to agree that Louisa excludes her and always has. She strides over to the plastic seats and hurls herself into one so hard the leg buckles and has an adolescent sulk, years late.

  Absently, Anne asks, ‘What did she do love, what was it that upset you?’ as she follows her back into the yard with the clothes basket on her hip, and a ripple of impatience shoots through her, though it’s got nothing to do with her girls. It’s those rotten little birds at it again, disturbed all her mulch, chucking it around willy-nilly.

  Triumphantly, Jess believes she’s finally captured her mother’s attention. ‘She just ignores me, she always has, and she seems to love the boys. What’s so special about them? They’re not fussed on her. She just bars you, that’s all. Never asks a question, doesn’t give a stuff what I’m doing. Looks through you. It’s always only about herself. Doesn’t even talk about the kids much. You have to drag it out of her.’

  Anne wishes that Jessie could see past herself for just five minutes but she says, ‘Louie and the boys have a special bond. Before you were born they were very close, especially after Daniel died, and I think if you look hard you’ll see that it’s not men she prefers, it’s her brothers.’

  Though it’s true, Anne thinks, she’s always been a bit on the odd side has our little Louie. She smiles and gets up to go in, that’s enough now. Time for a cup of tea.

  40

  Louisa stays on in North Melbourne in the smallest, cheapest house going. It’s a dusty old weatherboard in dire need of a paint, a single-fronter about as wide as a bus and sandwiched between four others. A milk bar on the corner seems to be collapsing onto itself. Only the signs hold it up.

  The faded red of an old softdrink sign makes her think of Emmett. She hears him say, ‘Lolly water, will rot your teeth, but look at ya, plenty of bloody teeth,’ and laughs as if it’s funny. Thinks of him waiting for retirement and trying out sobriety. She thinks of the only time he visited her here. Two babies and Emmett and how tenderly he nursed Beck. How he taught Tom to shake hands. Before he left, he slipped her a hundred dollars and kissed the babies as if he loved them and she wept into Beck’s soft hair afterwards because she missed him, well, because she missed the him he was today.

  Down the street where Tom plays cricket there’s a park, dry now in the drought, the grass powdery and loose. The boy sleeps in the front room in a sweaty shrine to cricket. When Pete calls him the next captain of Australia, Tom’s eyes shine. In the evening, he often sits on the verandah roof waiting for his mother to come home and, seeing her at a distance, stands up and yells ‘Mum’ until she sees him against the blue, a slim boy with dark hair and a shining face. She wonders at the beauty of him. As she gets closer he readies himself for the ritual of the throw.

  Louisa prides herself on her ability to catch a tennis ball. She grew up believing that catching a ball was her one skill. So now the pressure is on Tom. Too close, he thinks, and it’s cheating, too far and she’ll miss. So when he lets the faded bare ball go sailing across to her, the onus is on himself to get it right. He usually does and Louisa carries the ball to him while he scrambles down from the roof and kisses his mother and takes her bags. And she is relieved again that he looks nothing like his father or her. He looks like himself, she thinks, and this makes her happy.

  Beck has a tiny tacked-on cupboard of a room. Black hairpins are scattered across the floor like insects and posters of pouting boy singers in eye make-up and torn jeans line the walls. Louisa has the stuffy middle room with a paper blind and flimsy lace curtains losing the battle to clench back the western light from the rickety casement window. Even on dull days, the window is illuminated.

  At the back, a pine-lined family-room and kitchen takes up the width of the house. A sage green leather three-seater and a matching chair were bargains from the Brotherhood shop. Mao, their grey tabby, named by Beck when she was two, seems to shed everywhere. The television dominates the room and it’s always a relief when the kids aren’t there so she can shut the damn thing off. It takes all her money to keep the family going.

  She cooks the kids’ dinner and most nights picks up something fresh on the way home. Then she helps with the homework and puts a load of washing through, does the bills and maybe, if it’s a good night, watches a crime show on tele where some poor woman is murdered and avenged by cops while she nods off with a glass of cask wine in her hand and Mao beside her purring. The comfort he offers is inestimable.

  Jess sometimes rings way too late. She’s a lawyer now, working at a women’s refuge in Sunshine, and she needs to talk about some case or other. When the phone rings past nine-thirty Louisa treats it as if it can see her. She lets it ring until it leaves her alone or else she swoops on it to stop the attack of it. If it’s Jess, the drama of her workday spills into the living room until Jess gives up and lets Louisa seek the refuge of her bed. ‘I’m just so tired,’ she hears herself saying again and hates herself for it.

  This house sometimes reminds her of Wolf Street but the real difference is her beautiful garden. Louisa makes gardens grow with a kind of magic. Her herbs are bright and fragrant. Her roses flop and fold and smell like wine and when she cuts a bunch and puts them in Nan’s vase on the table, for that single moment life is perfect.

  Her kids don’t see their father much because John Keele finds it unsettling but they don’t seem to mind. His new partner, Katie Slattery, is a blonde PR person who looks after John as if he were a baby or a genius, which makes the kids uncomfortable. ‘She puts salt on his food and gets him drinks and kisses him on the mouth,’ Beck reveals in hushed tones after one visit. She pulls her mouth down, pretending to be sick, ‘And she calls him babe.’ Tom grabs his basketball and slams outside to punish the ring. Beck puts her hand on Louisa’s shoulder.

  John has moved to an arty part of the country and Katie visits on weekends to tend to him. In a shack up there he’s writing poem cycles based on the Iliad. Apparently he’s putting them into an Australian context. It’s his life’s work and he can’t contribute financially to the kids because, well, this is art we’re talking about here. ‘Ha,’ snorts Louisa when she reads this in his latest letters.

  Some nights, Rob comes over after the kids are in bed and they eat potato chips or chunks of apples and cheddar and talk with the TV muted and the world silently flying by on the screen. He tries never to talk about John but that’s not possible. He believes that he alone, out of the whole family, saw through him but he doesn’t want to say, ‘I told you so.’ What would be the point of that? Perhaps some kind of maturity is finding its way into Robert.

  So these visits get off to a quiet start because all Louisa can think about is betrayal and she needs to work it out slowly as if it were a splinter. But there are many forms of betrayal and even if it begins without regard to him, most roads lead to Emmett. With Rob and Louisa it’s as if everything is a hurdle till they can talk about the time of him.

  So after his weekly dose of John Keele poison, Rob is slumped on the old green couch. His hair is still carrying sawdust from an elm he took down today, and his eyes are full of sighs. He doesn’t recall anything tonight, he’s tired, he’d rather just watch the news, catch up on oth
er people’s miseries, anyone’s is better than their own.

  But something about theft on the television takes them back to the time they were robbed. They’d put Anne’s purse in the back of the billycart and taken it down to the shop for the milk and smokes. Some boys saw it and took the purse and the kids ran but couldn’t catch up so they went home and Emmett put them in the car and took off after the thieves. ‘Bloody cops and robbers. I was terrified when we went cross-country over those paddocks. What was the old bastard thinking?’ says Rob, biting into his apple so hard Louisa is hit by a speck of juice and flinches.

  ‘Yeah, scary. Then when he caught them. God, I thought he’d kill ’em, but he took them to the cop shop. It was fun too though, dontcha reckon?’ Louisa says wiping off the apple ricochet with the back of her hand.

  ‘S’pose ... That’s the weird thing.’

  ‘Remember the story in the local paper, “Louts rob children”?’ By now they are cackling with laughing and then it reaches the point of convulsion and Rob mixes up drinking with eating and manages to get a bit of apple stuck and needs to have his back thumped. Louisa is gulping with laughter but Rob is wiping away tears. ‘Don’t know how much more of this reminiscing I can take,’ he says wheezy and red. ‘Bloody dangerous.’

  ‘And the time we got lost on the bus?’ she continues, the energy of the laughter and of the memory lifting her. She’s pouring a grassy, pale wine for them and it occurs to her it’s as if she saves herself for talking to him.

  Louisa will not be swayed from the past. ‘Come on, this is a good story! You know,’ she insists, ‘we were coming home from the pictures on a Saturday morning, the pictures at the Grand, and Auntie Betty from next door was on the lolly counter. God, life could get no better, a free bag of lollies clutched in your filthy little hand as you tore through the dark picture theatre, utter bliss.’

  And suddenly Rob is in. He gulps at the cold wine. ‘Yeah,’ he smiles, ‘we caught the red bus after the pictures in Footscray, but it must have been the wrong red bus and we sat on up the back, bouncing along the wrong way but not sure. Nothing looked right, we were holding hands like Hansel and Gretel. By the time the driver turned into the depot, we were the only ones left in the bus.

  ‘And when the bus driver saw us there, he walked down the back and asked where did we want to get off? And I started crying and you recited our address to him and he said, “Right,” and then he drove us home. Remember? All the way in that big red bus. It was like a dinosaur turning around in the court. Mum was out the back doing the washing and she came out wiping her hand on a tea towel, I remember her standing there. Totally amazed.’

  Caught in the web of memory, shaking their heads, they wonder how they could have been let out to catch buses on their own at that age. ‘That’s nothing,’ says Louisa, ‘they didn’t know where I was for four Sundays in a row.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Rob says calmly, ‘Lying Louie. Always the liar.’ Louisa flicks him, barely spilling a drop, and continues seamlessly.

  ‘No, you idiot, I ran away and joined Sunday School, probably because Dad banned it. You didn’t want to come, you never were big on religion.’ They both grin at that one. ‘And I would have been only six or seven because we still lived at the housing commission. I told them my name was Louisa Black. I loved all the stories, but really it was the food for morning tea. You know, saveloys and fairy bread. Never seen anything like it, but the Christmas party was the end. I made a total pig of myself with the party pies and then, to top it off, choked on the red lemonade and then it bloody well came back down through my nose all over my dress. Unbelievable mess. The end of my religious education, too ashamed to go back. But I learned something out of the whole shameful experience, you cannot snort red lemonade.’

  She puts her hand on his shoulder and is glad he is her brother.

  Sometimes the talk goes on too long until they can’t pull out of the quicksand of it. So they must ration the past.

  After the memories have closed down for the night, they sometimes read each other bits of things they love and Louisa these days goes for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It makes them laugh and she loves the bits about Norway and reading it, she sees northern fields on long summer nights when the skies are pea-green curtains and stars are swirling.

  And Rob, in a voice carrying weird echoes of Emmett, reads mostly from his trade journal, The Arborialist, so that Louisa braces herself for rambling descriptions of tree structure. Strong laterals are frequently mentioned, and she often nods off.

  41

  It takes years for Louisa to admit there’s something wrong in the deepest part of herself, that the darkness she sees may be within her. Mostly she’s okay, but then years later, she’s not. One day it seems she isn’t going to work, but she explains this to herself by deciding that she deserves a sickie here and there and that her boss will understand. Mr Conti is a prince among men, she thinks, a prince. Oh, to have such a father, calm and kind and fair.

  When the darkness first comes, she just feels heavy and sadder, as though someone has turned her down and she can’t see how. Sometimes she thinks about things that she hasn’t meant to think about. For instance, about John and the kids and that it’s become too hard. The kids are moving away from her and, while she wants this, she also wants them back. The intricacies of her children’s lives, their fights and their dreams, are lost to her.

  There is too much to do. Can’t do everything. She wants to go away. She wonders where the tough girl she was has gone. The one who stood up to Emmett, who could stand up to anyone; but then she remembers she only stood up to the old bastard once and boy, did it cost her. Used it up, that’s what I did, I used myself up, she decides.

  Each morning, if she can, she makes the kids’ lunches. Puts a few little packets and a couple of pieces of dubious fruit into brown bags. Vegemite sandwich for Beck and peanut butter for Tom. She’s having trouble remembering even that. Useless at work, she thinks. Utterly useless. She leaves the two lunches on the bench for them and goes to her room where the gloom and the stale air are comforting.

  She sits on her mother’s little wooden chair, and it feels like her mother has her arms around her. Nothing is the thing that most appeals. It’s the mirror image of something. Emptiness swarms around her and when she gets tired of sitting she goes to the bed and lies down. She pulls her arms and legs in and becomes a lump.

  She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with this because it seems so natural, a slide into another reality. She’s always been a bit like this, a bit of a loner, and now it’s inescapable.

  People have been telling Louisa she should get out more all her life. But she never knew what it meant and still doesn’t. She’d still be herself wherever she was. There can be no escape.

  If she’s awake in the little room she stares at her summer-brown hands, the wedding ring still on the left hand, even after all this time; or she looks at the walls and tries to think about nothing. When thoughts come she sends them away. It isn’t long before the most persistent thought is about death. Then comes ways that might get her there.

  Food tastes like cardboard and nothing makes sense when she reads and nothing interests her. And in the end she can’t talk much either. Words won’t form. She’s shutting down.

  When the phone rings, she leaves it echoing throughout the house looking for attention, the ringing coming and going like a memory. If she picks it up, she can’t get a word out anyway. One day she hears Mr Conti tell her to take some time off to fix herself up. He puts her on half pay for a few weeks and she doesn’t think any further.

  In the afternoon, the children let themselves into the house and scrounge around for something to eat, a stale Salada, an old apple. Once Beck knocks on the door of Louisa’s room. She’s about ten and her dark hair is in plaits, just like her mother’s used to be. She knocks at the door with a picture of the world she made at school and when she hears nothing, she opens it. When Louisa sees Beck, she believes s
he’s seeing herself. The child moves into the room bringing the stiff painting and stands beside her mother in the little chair and lays the world on her knee. She puts her hand on her mother’s head and pats her hair while Tom is a shape in the doorway.

  42

  Rob often visits Louisa on Saturdays. They read the papers together, drink coffee, dunk biscuits and whinge about the conservative government, but really, all governments are entitled to their scorn. Lately, he’s missed a few Saturdays because Lou doesn’t seem entirely with it at the moment and he hasn’t wanted to delve into why. Then, there’s the kids and he’s been helping a lot lately and if she starts to rely on him, he decides, it will end in tears because I am not to be relied upon.