The Book of Emmett

by Deborah Forster

  ‘Mum should never have moved to the bloody shop,’ Rob hisses at Pete as they shovel up the old tree roots they’ve dug out of the backyard. They are planning to pave but it’s a pure fact that work without pay tends to make him real irritable.

  ‘Stop whingeing Rob. Only makes it worse. This was your idea anyway,’ Pete retorts, dragging the shovel back to the beginning of the pile again and wiping the sweat off his face. His dirty hair stands at attention.

  ‘I’m trying to talk to you, you perfect bloody saint, but that’s clearly impossible.’ Rob waits his turn at the pile and they go on grimly in silence. Louisa walks in and says, ‘G’day you lot,’ and grabs the shovel. ‘I’ll have a go, you go get a drink,’ she tells Rob who lets go of it and heads for the kitchen. Tom and Beck, ears flapping like flags, follow him inside. A pair of ducklings.

  ‘How is he?’ she asks Pete. ‘Grumpy as all shit,’ Pete says, wiping his face, and they laugh just that bit too loud and she thinks, great, now Robert will think we’re laughing at him. ‘C’mon Rob, you bludger,’ she yells, ‘we need you out here.’ In the kitchen Rob is engrossed in the classified housing ads. The kids sitting beside him twiddle the PlayStation in turns.

  ***

  Anne ages like a leaf. She goes from being green and strong to lighter, frailer and dry. If you’d told her that, she’d laugh. She likes old autumn leaves, well, she likes most old things. Louisa visits once a week.

  They sit at the blackwood table and have a mug of tea. Louisa thinks she comes for tea and grievances. It’s always teabags, which really grates on Louisa who hates them but imagines Anne doesn’t know this since she never says. All pure foolishness. Anne knows most things. She leaves Lou’s teabag in longer to make the tea strong.

  Anne’s hands are knotted with arthritis and she warms them around her flowery mug. Light shines off the porridge-coloured bricks next door and the glare is cast in. From where she’s sitting, you can just see a triangle of sky between the fence and the bricks.

  Their conversations ramble around lightly like the spring breeze and they touch on most things – the interpretation of the roses, easy recipes, getting the best out of children, missing bin night and what to do when it happens, worries at work, bills, weight, television – but really they’re talking about knowing each other. About the way between them.

  Anne often speaks about her parents, George and Rose. ‘They look after me, I know they do, and they are always with me,’ Anne says in her enduring way. This, as ever, slightly annoys Louisa. Maybe it’s just jealousy, maybe she wishes she had these kind of stories too but Louisa has never felt anyone looking out for her.

  Anne remembers how her father, apart from the six years he was at the war, would bring Anne and Rose vegemite on toast and a cup of tea in the mornings. He’d put the toast under the griller while the kettle was boiling to keep it warm.

  So how then, Louisa wonders privately with a long nurtured sense of outrage, did you allow Emmett to be our father when you had such a father?

  Louisa pushes away at the story of her family but the mystery of Emmett is the layer that separates them. Anne wonders why her kids will never let it go but she doesn’t ask them, she wouldn’t hurt them for all the world. The blessing of these children is in every part of her.

  When Louisa presses into the dark landscape Anne will say, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t leave him, but I had little children and he would have come after us and where would I have gone? There were no single mother’s pensions then, and I’m glad young women have them now. I couldn’t have taken you kids home to Mum and Dad, it would not have been fair, there were so many of you and he was dangerous.’

  And Louisa gets heated sometimes when talk turns to Emmett. She grips her mug and the hot tan liquid moves a bit too fast. She looks up at the herbs Anne has placed near the fingers of sunlight just missing the window ledge. They’ve grown gangly reaching for the light. Listening to her mother sometimes requires an act of will and subjugation of her instinct.

  ‘My way of handling him was to ignore him. His terrible displays. It was the only way, anything could make it worse. I could take what he dished out. I was tough.’

  It takes Louisa some effort to speak against her mother but one day she does. Louisa says, ‘That’s true Mum, you were tough and you are tough now, but we were not tough. We were little kids.’

  ***

  Louisa looks out into Dr Mackenzie’s garden and the tall white anemones move in the breeze. She begins with simplicity. ‘My father was overbearing. He’s still alive but he’s sick and old.’ She holds her hands in her lap until they start to feel hot and fat. Where do you begin with the story of Emmett? The elastic silence stretches around them. Dr Mackenzie is prepared to wait.

  And then Louisa blurts, ‘It feels like our childhood wasn’t acknowledged. That because we survived, well, most of us did, then it’s all right.’

  ‘What do you mean “most of us”?’ Dr Mackenzie asks. She has a notebook on her lap and her big hand is jotting steadily. Louisa wants to stop her from writing. Writing makes things real.

  And so the welling arises in her and her voice goes its own way again. ‘There was another one of us.’ She coughs to clear the past but it doesn’t work. ‘He was named Daniel. My brother Peter’s twin. He fell over one night running from Dad and he hit his head, fractured his skull actually, and he died.’ The doctor writes and then lets her eyes rest on Louisa who weeps for much longer than is sensible, considering this happened so long ago and also that money is being paid and the clock is ticking. And then she smiles at the truth of her being her mother’s daughter regarding money, and Dr Mackenzie passes her a box of tissues. Louisa can’t stop taking them, she takes at least eight. She wants so much.

  When Rob first hears that Louisa will need to take medication all her life to guard against her depression, he’s not astonished. He’s felt the weight of such anchors within him too. But knowing this hasn’t done a thing for Louisa. She’s sick to death of the family looking at her as if she’s not herself and it irks her that they think they might all get it too, as if it were the flu. All they think about are themselves, she thinks. All anyone thinks about.

  Rob was particularly annoying when he slipped into his pet theory that whatever Louisa has, Emmett had too. She wants nothing to do with Emmett. ‘Do you think I’m like him?’ she asks incredulously. He doesn’t answer. She realises she shouldn’t have said anything to him, it only fuels discussions later. She can just see Jessie and Anne getting stuck into a bit of character analysis on the side. She decides to say as little as she can to anyone.

  Visiting Dr Mackenzie each week and talking about Emmett are the fastest hours of her life. The doctor tells Louisa it would be a mistake to turn her hate for her father back onto herself, and Louisa is clobbered by the realisation that Dr Mackenzie thinks she hates Emmett. ‘Oh no. I don’t hate him,’ she spits out baldly. ‘I’ve only told you part of it, he wasn’t all bad.’ Then she revises and ends up saying, ‘But since I was a child there have been plenty of times when I’ve just wanted to lie down on the road and let him run me over.’ And she groans at her own ineptitude and imprecision.

  The doctor writes fast again and, while she does, Louisa tries to correct impressions. Feels like her old interview subjects must have felt. ‘It wasn’t,’ she begins, ‘it was just...’

  So she starts to hold back on detail. The main thing she wants to settle is guilt about leaving Jessie, which still affects her. Talking to Jess is not easy. Emmett isn’t curable. ‘You need to think about why you felt so responsible,’ she hears the doctor say, ‘and then you will have your answer.’ And then it’s the end and Louisa tries to keep Dr Mackenzie talking, but she just rises with her sad smile and opens the door because the fifty minutes are up.

  Outside, walking to the train, she recalls in a flash of resistance that she felt responsible because she was. How’s that supposed to help? she wonders, watching the city pass and recoiling from the gaudy
, suggestive billboards as if they were an assault.

  47

  Some days it seems too far. Some days Emmett fears he won’t get to retirement. He wants it too much. You just can’t want things, he thinks, some bastard will always try to stop ya. Days he drives to work wondering whether he’ll even live that long. Probably cark it right before the payout, he tells himself, and wouldn’t that be just bloody typical? He’s got a cold and the headaches just keep coming.

  If he makes it to the appointed day he plans to move away from the shop, from Anne, from every single bloody thing he knows. He wants to be clean again, to be new somewhere with people who don’t know him. And the bush is where he was born. If he’d stayed there maybe things wouldn’t have got so stuffed up. Ah, who knows, he sighs, weaving through the back streets on his way to work, past all the sardine houses jammed together. All this would surely drive anyone mad he reckons.

  He’s not fussy where he ends up, bush people are much of a muchness to him. Just wants somewhere small, somewhere with a couple of paddocks and a whole lot of sky. He doesn’t need his family, believes they’re better off without him. When they look at me, he reckons, they see too much.

  ***

  Eventually, Emmett retires to Deakin, a small town of about five hundred people nestled near the granite mountains rising abruptly from the plains near Ballarat. He’s been there a while in the crooked little house with three small paddocks. And he so loves all that sky and every inch of it his.

  Rob calls Ballarat the ‘Prague of the South’ and he believes he’s onto something with that description because, though he’s never been to Prague, he’s seen pictures. ‘Moving up near Ballarat eh Dad? Not a bad idea, it’s a gracious city, not unlike Prague, I hear.’

  ‘What in the name of Christ are you talking about?’

  Rob’s mouth goes dry. ‘Prague, you know, in Czechoslovakia, I was just saying they had something in common.’

  ‘Jesus, spare me the crap will ya? It’s just Balla-bloody-rat,’ Emmett smirks around the room at the others and blows a spray of foam off his beer.

  Rob and Louisa stay well away from Deakin. Had enough of the old man to last them forever. Jessie too, though she does write him a letter when he first moves in and in it she lists his faults in exact, concise and lawyerly prose. Everything from violence and drinking to his abuse of Anne and his meanness with money. Jessie feels better for having written it.

  Emmett gets out the magnifying glass and reads the letter, all of it, and is proud of the way she put things, bloody well-educated, he thinks. Who would have thought little Jess had it in her? Turned out to be the smartest of the lot. What she actually says is highly exaggerated in his view, but still, you’ve got to respect anyone who can write a letter like that.

  On Sunday nights Peter calls Emmett and they talk, about firewood and cattle and fences and kids, though when mention is made of his grandchildren, Emmett phases out. With grandchildren, he reckons the trick is to compress them all into one bottler, a halfway decent kid. It’s the only way.

  ‘Dad, it’s coming up to your sixtieth and I think we should do something special for it. What d’ya reckon?’

  Emmett’s had a good day messing around in his vegie garden. He likes talking to Pete, he reminds him of someone. ‘Yeah, ripper mate, what do you reckon?’ ‘Well,’ says Peter. ‘I could help you with it if you like. I’ll come up early that morning.’ Emmett puts the phone down wondering what that was all about. And when the day arrives even the birthday is long forgotten.

  ***

  The morning of the big day he’s in the kitchen in his tattered old boxers and saggy grey singlet. His legs are thin as sticks and white and nearly hairless but the ghost of the beer belly is still evident. He’s standing there in the middle of the kitchen trying to work out where in hell the bloody teapot’s gone when he hears a thump at the door.

  As ever, his first response to surprise is fury. Unexpected bangs on the door drive him crazy. All visitors risk being sent packing. At the first knock he pretends it’s a figment of his imagination but this makes things worse because, encouraged by silence, people just bang louder.

  It takes him a while to get to the door because his feet are sore lately and he’s hobbling and when at last he opens it, he sees a grinning Louisa balancing a huge box stuffed with food. ‘Happy birthday Dad,’ she says, stepping neatly over Clancy the dog, ankle-high and just the right height to skittle people. Behind her Peter is yelling, ‘Happy birthday you old bastard,’ and carrying a couple of bags of ice. ‘Louisa,’ Emmett says following her, ‘what are you doing here?’

  Peter called her last night to ask if she could help with Emmett’s birthday. ‘You’re the only one who can really cook,’ he points out diplomatically and smiling, and seeing she taught him how to cook in the first place, she reckons this is a hide. ‘We can use the van, I’ve got it all packed up. And I’ll come down with you to set up the spit. Okay?’

  Though she couldn’t explain it to herself, agreeing came easy. Doing it for Pete, she rationalises, make him happy, but there’s something else too, something about birthdays. She remembered the time Emmett took her into Myers to buy her a book for her birthday and then to a little Chinese joint for lunch and they got the book out and started it right there in the red glowing restaurant, Emmett whispering different voices for the characters. It was A Christmas Carol by Dickens and it was the first time she’d ever been sorry when the food arrived. When they put the book in the bag, it seemed the best of her father went away with it.

  ***

  The morning of Emmett’s birthday Peter went to his local deli as soon as it opened and bought six fat loaves of soft Greek bread, all doughy and dense as sponges. ‘This bread could be made by the gods themselves, of clouds,’ Con the baker told him, pushing the floury loaves into bags. Peter smiled and agreed.

  Greeks remind him of Emmett. Dad always loved wogs, he remembered putting the bread on the passenger seat, their food, their language; he thought they made us a better country, yet why did he call them wogs? Right and wrong, how come he was always so right and so wrong? Fair dinkum, you’d have to be a genius to work him out, Pete mused as he drove over to pick up Louisa.

  Peter also organised for Nev the butcher in Deakin to get hold of a lamb. It turns out to be a whopper, at least a two-tooth, in fact, the thing’s verging on sheep size.

  The spit is in the back of the van and a box of supplies with extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, dried Greek oregano, sea salt and twelve lemons.

  Pete steps outside into the fresh air with the ice bags, puts them down while he cleans the leaves and sticks out of the old bath in the hay shed. This takes a while because there’s some kind of tarry blackness there too, a remnant of some other dubious thing, but he gets it all out and in the end he sits the beer and lemonade in the clean bath and pours the ice around it, loving the crunch and hiss.

  Then he gets a nice low coalfire glowing in the half-gallon drum and sets up the spit over it. Tests the thing and after a while yells to Louisa, ‘And yes, Houston, we have lift-off!’ It’s windy now but he realises it’s always windy in Deakin. He watches the curtain of air sweep across the open plains, herding gum leaves before it and making washing on lines reach ever outwards like supplicants. At Emmett’s old prop clothesline, he takes down a tangled shirt and a pair of trousers that might have been there for months and carries them into the house rolled into a ball.

  Emmett means to help but mostly he scratches his head because he doesn’t remember where things are but today he’s not getting mad about it. He’s all right today. Normally not knowing is just the sort of thing that sets him right off. On the tele Louisa finds a calming game of distant cricket and he’s drawn in. He mutes the TV and listens to the ABC broadcast on the wireless. There’s a little delay between the picture and sound, but he’s not watching all that carefully anymore and this way he avoids the hot noise flare of the ads. Before too long, he’s dozing in his chair.

  Lo
uisa has cake tins and an electric mixer plus all the ingredients for Victoria sponges, including strawberries and cream, and she gets stuck into making a birthday cake. Baking – but in truth, all cooking – settles Louisa. She likes the magic of creation from variable ingredients, likes the mixing and the tasting. Best part of cooking, she believes, is feeding people.