The Book of Emmett

by Deborah Forster

  This bright Saturday morning is different. Bizarrely, John Keele decided in advance that he wanted the kids for the weekend. His parents were interested in them or something. So today when Rob walks round the back, he finds things very quiet and he’s surprised. Not that he’s looking forward to seeing Tom and Beck, he’s just forgotten they were at their father’s.

  Rob doesn’t love them, actually he barely knows them, with their limbs like stalks and their eyes like a deer’s. Kids! Who needs bloody kids, he wonders, getting the spare key out of the hide-a-rock that looks so pathetically plastic. Inside, he drops a swag of newspapers on the table, fills up the kettle, flicks it on with a glance at Beck’s latest drawing on the fridge and sees with a strange rush of pleasure that she has drawn her Uncle Robert up a tree. He has a closer look. The girl has talent, he muses, then pushes on through the house looking for Louisa.

  By now he’s thinking that Lou must have nipped down the shops but he looks around anyway and pops his head into her room. When he opens the door, he sees she’s on the bed and apologises, assuming she’s asleep. But then something makes him look again, and he sees the empty bottle beside her and that she’s unconscious on the sagging smelly bed with her mouth spilling white froth. He feels a wave burst within him and he drops beside his sister.

  He cannot understand that she had wanted to be dead. His heart is pounding. He needs to wake her up now. ‘Lou, LOUISA, WAKE UP,’ he shouts way too loud, shaking her and he turns her on her side and then she’s sick everywhere and there’s so much white foam. He wipes her mouth with his hand. No, he thinks, this is not over Louisa.

  ‘No, no,’ he says to her softly and urgently, ‘No, Louie it’s all right, it’s quiet now. It’s really all right. The kids are with their father and they’re all right. He will look after them. You’ll be right, we’ll get you better.’ He just keeps talking because it seems the right thing. There’s no telling how long she’s been unconscious.

  With shuddering fingers he grabs his mobile and rings an ambulance and runs to open the front door, ready for them. Louisa moans and Rob sits beside her. He puts a towel over the vomit and cleans up around her mouth with a wet face washer from the bathroom and while he’s doing that, it crosses his mind that he’s never cleaned anyone’s face before and then, persistently, that Louisa looks like Emmett.

  In an ambulance with the siren cutting through the bright morning like a sword the paramedics take her to the hospital and Rob goes with her. He sits up the front looking out on the shiny day with the kind of fear he hasn’t felt since Daniel died. He finds he’s crying and his breathing comes in swells.

  At the hospital, they take her away from Rob and push a tube down her throat and pump charcoal into her and the nurses say things like, ‘You’ll be right love.’ Between themselves they wonder lightly about the story of this one.

  She can’t speak because of the tube and she can’t really hear because everything is clouded, but there’s something she recalls and it’s a sort of questioning from within that goes something like how could you even mess this up? Useless. Useless. Rob sits outside the swinging doors holding his arms to make himself be still.

  He’s in the ward when she’s wheeled in on the narrow bed but she turns her head away from him to the window. Still, he sits there and without turning to him she says in her hoarse voice, her throat raw from the tube, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

  He puts his hand on her sweaty head, ‘No one,’ he says. ‘Ever.’

  She’s transferred to a psychiatric hospital and ends up being there for six months. Clinical depression has her in its grip. She doesn’t eat unless people stand over her. She doesn’t talk unless she absolutely must. She stares. She’s gone away. Rob moves into Louisa’s house and the kids live with him because it suits everyone.

  Louisa’s children tell no one about their mother. They visit her with Rob on Saturdays and always come out wildly brushing away tears. Rob takes them for a medicinal burger afterwards. Kindness has caught him up in itself and the weeks pass by slowly as if they are all on a boat on a frozen glacier.

  At first they look at Rob as though he’s an alien, this gawky, skinny, jokey uncle who eats apples, core and all, and who puts tomato sauce on everything and who loves dim sims with a passion.

  Peter and Jess bring dinner on Tuesday nights, but it’s soon clear that Jess is hopeless at food so Pete does it all. He settles on lamb roasts and cooks them like Anne’s, the flavours clean and separate and the gravy light and shiny. Jess and Rob help the kids with their homework while he cooks. And a kind of pattern emerges.

  One night they start upon word definitions and Jess asks them to define ‘cadaver’. Rob groans about ‘my macabre little sister’, but the kids love it and a dictionary is produced to clear up misunderstandings. Rob takes over as quiz master and their haul of words includes ‘immense’ and ‘dogged’ and ‘going Dutch’ and ‘drop kick’, as in ‘What exactly is a drop kick, Peter?’

  When the kids are in bed, they drink wine or tea and settle back into being together. One night Jess says, ‘We’ve got to show the kids that they will survive this, that it’s possible. We did. We knew we would. And they will too and so will Louisa.’

  ‘Yeah,’ say her brothers, each thinking how clever she is and not saying it and then Pete says, ‘I didn’t always know I’d survive. I have to say there were times when I thought I was gone but somehow you don’t give up even when it seems obvious that you should. Even when you know the chances are that you are totally fucked. These kids have each other and that helped me, knowing you were all there going through it too.’

  Rob laughs from the couch, ‘You’re glad we suffered too, are you? Little shit.’ Later he says, ‘You know, doing the homework with them tonight, it kind of reminded me of Emmett, and he was always a bastard but there is a real truth about him and it was that he wanted us to get an education, remember that? And I want these kids to get one too. It is crucial, but how do you get kids to know that?’

  ‘I reckon they know,’ Jess comments, ‘they’ll be right as long as Louisa is. Can you imagine what our lives would have been like without Mum?’ she asks, tucking her feet under herself in the armchair. ‘She was all that stood between us and the shit heap. Having her there and knowing she loved us, that was everything.’

  There are murmurs from the brothers and then Peter stands up and says firmly, ‘Let’s not turn this into another Emmett session. Let’s just not, I’m far too tired to enter into it,’ and he makes a start on the dishes.

  43

  Over the months, four different drugs fail on Louisa and as they fail she spirals into another place and becomes a more wasted version of herself. So the hospital tries shock treatment. A buckling picture of a smiling dolphin looks down from the ceiling above the treatment table in the ECT suite. It’s there to give patients something to linger on while they embrace the nightfall of anaesthesia. She knows she saw it and that’s a comfort because, while it saved her, her memory never fully recovers from shock treatment.

  In time she gets used to waking in the recovery room and hearing Rozzie, her favourite nurse, move around slowly and carefully, calling each patient by name, gently, like a mother.

  ‘Louie are you there, my dear? Back with us yet?’ and touches her cheek and rearranges the white cotton blanket and then floats away to tend to the others. She hums softly to the old hits playing low on a little radio. She sings for the lost ones who wash up here in the recovery room after ECT, the ones whose brains have badly let them down. Often on hearing her, Louisa wants to weep with joy, partly because after ECT she’s so damned bright she’s nearly normal, and partly because kindness, wherever you find it, is a visit from angels.

  After the recovery room, she wakes up again later in a ward, one side of her hair stiff with the gel that conducts the shock, her doctor sitting in the chair beside her writing his notes. ‘You’re just having a snooze,’ he tells her and, in a while, he’s gone. In a day or two the treatment wea
rs away and the slide begins again, the gradual tapering.

  Emmett comes alone to the hospital one Wednesday afternoon. He’s driving a white Commodore these days and he’s rapt about finding a shady car park. Ah, the little things, he thinks. He walks fast through the brilliant day, not noticing the crepe myrtles in bloom, their redness like a memory of hearts. He’s not interested. He’s looking forward to the pub later. Tell the truth, he’s not completely convinced about this depression business. Nothing a drink wouldn’t fix, he reckons, hitching up his trousers and thinking about the counter lunch that awaits him at the North Star.

  Emmett’s nervous about this kind of place though and doubtful about the whole shebang and when he comes upon Louisa in room 602, he’s thinking about telling her to get her act together. But then he sees her and something overcomes him and he kneels before her chair and wraps his arms around her and begins to weep on the top of her head. He can’t make himself stop.

  With her weary eyes and her slow blood, Louisa wonders what’s going on here. Time is still so slow and having Emmett here is outside of everything. After a while, Emmett looks at her and remembers to wipe his face and with two hands out behind him staggers back to find the bed. He has called into her house on the way and picked a rose from the climber out the front and popped it in his shirt pocket where it has been a bit crushed. Thought she might like to see something of her own and he lays the pearly thing on her knee.

  Though Louisa isn’t talking, she still looks at people and now she studies him. He doesn’t look like much but she still can’t completely place him. She’s not glad he’s here. The thing about fathers is beyond her.

  ***

  She’ll always remember the day Rob and the kids came to get her at the hospital. Though there are many outpatient treatments to go, it still feels like a milestone. And that last day seeing Beck in her pretty dress and Tom looking serious with his hair all combed and Rob, the big goose, in his denim jacket with a bunch of straggly pink carnations for her, seeing them lifts her but not too high, she hopes. As they walk out to the carpark together, she’s reminded precisely of what she almost lost. What nearly went away.

  At home she walks inside the house gingerly as if she might break. But in time she finds she’s able to talk more and even to eat again.

  Mr Conti has helped where he can. One Friday night he thrusts an envelope with five hundred dollars at her. He stands at the front door, hand out, and says in his choppy accent, ‘For you dear Luisa and for your babies,’ and he kisses her hand and is gone. And then there’s the dole.

  She needs ECT as an outpatient, at first twice a week, and Rob, still sleeping on the couch in the battered pine family room, drives her to the hospital at six-thirty on Monday and Friday mornings and picks her up a few hours later. His business is floundering, but he is able to do a fair bit when she doesn’t need him.

  Louisa can’t remember much about the trips to the hospital in the morning, but she never forgets the emptiness that surrounds her as she walks across the carpark at dawn and that void is always the most recognisable part of the experience.

  And yet, even though she believes it will not end, in time she does recover. She has ECT once a week, then once a fort-night, then only when the doctor thinks she needs it. And now a new medication is working.

  And the lifting is so gradual, she barely notices but there’s a day when she’s leaving the house to go to work and she sees the sky and it’s as if it hadn’t been there all that time, as if it had run away.

  She never forgets the way the sky opens up over her that day. The structure of clouds, she thinks, and remembers geo graphy lessons and how mastery over the names of clouds exalted her, that these are, well, alto-somethings. She smiles. She feels so new at being alive, as if even her skin is newborn.

  To see the world again, to have her eyes working again after all this time is enough to last her forever. The small surrounding things make her feel alive. To think what she has missed, but she stops herself because that road, with blame hiding in every corner, will lead her the wrong way.

  For part of that first day she feels she’s come back but she keeps it a secret, even scared to smile outright at the force of it. It’s okay, she reckons, they think I’m nuts anyway. She’s been away and she’s lucky to be back. Never wants to go there again. People climb mountains and sail solo around the world because they’re looking for a challenge. Ha! she thinks, they ought to trying climbing back after such a depression but sponsorships would probably be out of the question, she speculates shrewdly.

  44

  Saturday morning and Jessie sips her tepid coffee, the thin blackness of it settling in around her mouth like a crust. Her translucent skin is fine and the lines around her mouth fall easily into a scowl, possibly from smoking. She doesn’t wear make-up and she’s very thin. Why, she thinks, should I wear make-up? Just to conform to gender stereotypes? Don’t get her started.

  She’s lived with Warren David Davis, a secondary school English teacher, for eight years now. They live in a pale weather board house in Kensington on a street full of other houses much like it. Louisa used to call it Lifesaver Street because the houses sitting shoulder to shoulder are the colours of a packet of Lifesavers. Pink tea roses with bronze leaves nod at the picket fence. Jess and Warren have two small scruffy dogs, Bert and Podge, as well as a cat named Sacheverall or some other wacky thing. Louisa has always called it Puss just to shit Jess and that seems to work.

  Jess met Warren at a party in Elwood on a rainy night and they bunched up in a corner of a leaky verandah with the smokers and got talking about their ideas for living.

  These days they have an understanding, they each work hard at their own saving of the world and they let the other be. She used to call him Warren David when they were in the first phase of love, which has long since slipped away.

  He wears his greying hair longish possibly, she thinks, because he believes it keeps him looking young. But Jess reckons he’s just plain wrong. He’s pin-thin like her with skin like creased linen.

  Jessie realises there’s something of Emmett in Warren’s passion for words but she doesn’t dwell on it. Besides, he’s so different in every other way. He’s enough for her. He’s gentle, reliable and he’s kind. Even does the washing properly and without arguments.

  Though he believes he loves Jessie, Warren doesn’t love Jessie’s temper especially when it’s aimed squarely at him. Or when anything that comes to hand gets thrown at him – picture frames, vases, bunches of keys. He loves her for her work but just as much for the sorrow she’s seen because it’s something deep and old, something he could really help with.

  And he’s struck to stillness by the stories of her life. Sometimes when she talks about her family, especially her father Emmett, he is silenced. Words can’t find their way out of him when Jessie speaks about Emmett.

  At first he was amazed by the stories of Emmett’s behaviour and decided the man must have been mentally ill. That time he dragged the little Jessie from her bed, cracking her head on the floor, leaving her concussed with a huge swelling egg on her temple, left his heart thudding and she hadn’t even told him about the other kids.

  But then other times he hears love in Jessie’s voice when she speaks of him, and it puzzles him. How can you love a monster? Why would you?

  When she’s with her brothers and sister and they’re talking about Emmett, then he knows she’s lost to him, but he doesn’t mind one bit. Seeing her happy and involved and buoyed up by them is a relief. Took him a whole year to work out that whatever is wrong with Jessie is wrong with them all and it’s well beyond his simple healing.

  But love is a strange beast. He’s always thought Emmett Brown was a pompous bore, a chronic alcoholic and probably manic depressive. Sounds simple when you say it fast but give it a lifetime, and make him your father, and it’s a whole different thing.

  ***

  That Saturday morning in the hollow of quiet that descends on people without
children, Jessie watches the seeds and she sees the shape of the wind moving them, the hills and the valleys. The seeds might seem to have one flight in them but they lift themselves again and again like helicopters into the breeze and then discarded, they mount up near the back door as she imagines snow might in Canada. She always wanted to go to Canada. Neil Young comes from there. When she first heard that thin voice singing ‘Harvest’, she was gone and Canada was sanctified.