The Book of Emmett

by Deborah Forster

  Cakes are special though and deeply satisfying. But no one is harder on herself and her creations than Louisa. She’s after perfection and yet when it does come, perfection is not triumphant, it’s simply benign and welcome.

  The rest of the family are used to her comforting hobby and mostly they oblige her when she hovers holding hot spoons to their lips and asking them to judge. But ultimately her efforts are wasted because most of Emmett’s scenes began at the table and they all have a complicated relationship with food. They eat fast and seldom notice how wonderful it is. For the Browns, food is eternally something to be bolted.

  They wrap dozens of potatoes in foil and bury the big silver spuds in the coals and while the cakes are cooking, Louisa makes Emmett a tomato and onion sandwich and a cup of tea.

  The tomato, a round flat Adelaide she’s grown herself, is rich with flavour and still somehow holds the hot smell of summer that emerges from the best tomatoes at the first cut. She scatters salt and white pepper on it and when Emmett bites into the sandwich he taste the richness of love, the love that would last him, and it’s so unexpected it makes him shy.

  ‘Not a bad tomato Lou ,’ he says, glancing up at her away from the TV, ‘not bad at all.’

  Peter and Louisa clean the table, scrubbing it with sleeves up. They lay the animal out and place rosemary mixed with slivers of garlic (sliced and peeled by Emmett with much comment and complaints about ‘fiddly bloody wog tucker’) in the small cuts. They rub it down with oil as though they were massaging a sportsman. Both of them sprinkle dried oregano over the lamb. And then outside they hook the animal onto the spit and stand back watching the dull orange coals do their work. Soon the rising smell calls everything to it and Clancy, drooling, sits beside them intently watching the roasting meat.

  ‘Would not call a king me bloody Uncle Bill ,’ Emmett says and Peter laughs. ‘No, me neither Dad. Not today.’ Half the people who used to work with Emmett don’t make it to Deakin for the big day. Most can’t be bothered with him and none of his duck-shooting mates show up either.

  Jessie makes a late appearance with Warren who looks lost and puzzled and, as he always does around Jessie’s family, left right out. He perches on the arm of a chair and closely examines the label on his beer bottle until Anne takes pity on him and they talk about school.

  Rob and Louisa watch from the wings under a ravaged hibiscus, discussing Emmett with the air of experts. Having the old lion in their sights in the open with the protection of others around them is a kind of completion.

  There’s plenty of beer of course and Emmett’s invited his mates around from the pub; there’s Reg and big fat Nev brings some special pork sausages he’s been working on. The barbie is tamed for the snags. Nev thought a bit of chilli would add that certain zing but as usual he overdoes it. The snags are so spicy that people are gasping like stranded fish and some nick ice from the bath to slide into their burning mouths.

  But turning sixty isn’t all fun. Emmett and Rob nearly collide on the back step. Emmett happily flourishes the barbeque tongs like a conductor. He snaps them together and tells Rob to lighten up, that it’s his birthday. ‘Mate, you’ve got a face as long as a fiddle. It’s a man’s birthday. You’re standing there like a stunned mullet! Cheer bloody up! That’s a order.’ And he snaps the tongs again.

  Rob flinches. ‘And what’s so great about that? We supposed to be happy that you were born?’ As soon as he says it, he’s sorry for the remark. He blames the wine. He hadn’t meant to reveal anything.

  Emmett decides he can’t blame the poor bastard but it’s about time the boy woke up to the fact that life is shit for everyone, not just for him. Wouldn’t mind telling him me own story one day, he thinks, and in the same breath realises it would not make one iota of difference.

  So he snaps the tongs again and heads back to the barbie to turn the snags for the hundredth time. Peter carves the lamb and places the fragrant meat upon the bread and the guests fall upon the food like the starving multitudes and for a brief moment Louisa and Pete look at each other and they smile.

  Then casually, as if expected, a gleaming red CFA fire truck decked out in blue and white streamers for Emmett’s old footy team arrives out the front. Reg leans on the horn . ‘Get in you old bastard,’ he roars when an astonished Emmett opens the gate. ‘You, son, are going for your birthday ride!’

  Emmett is both appalled and charmed. ‘Well, bugger me,’ he gasps, hanging onto the saggy gate. His face crumples and he nearly cries, but he tells himself to be a man and so he roars with laughter and throws his arm around the nearest person and that happens to be Rob.

  On being engulfed by Emmett, Rob stiffens but this doesn’t worry his father. He just drags him out the gate to sit on the back of the truck, their legs swinging, Rob’s reluctantly. Jessie climbs aboard too. Pete handballs a new leather footy at them and Rob marks it, giving it to Emmett who at last has something else to hold. Louisa and Anne, standing beside the fence like pillars of another life, are shocked. This is not the Emmett they know.

  And slowly, gingerly, the truck draws away as if it has something special on board. The Browns wave to each other, relieved that Emmett has cooperated. There’s a bit of waving and then the fire truck bumps off into the wide empty country street.

  48

  It’s late April, autumn is feeling its power and the pinoaks that line the road to Deakin are becoming as red as the fires of January. Under each of the pinoaks lies a little brass plate inscribed with the name and rank of a man who died in the First and Second World Wars and this is where Emmett goes to talk. He’s long given up on God so now he goes to have a yak to the dead soldiers. Reckons his own disappeared old man might even be one of them. Took off when he was a baby. Would you believe, on the night of the baby show too. The night when he’d won most beautiful baby in the whole bloody show; just shows the worth of a pretty bloody face. He laughs and takes a sip from his stubby.

  He’s sitting in the little striped aluminum chair he brings down here and Clancy’s running around chasing myxo bunnies while he talks to the old boys and you know what, he doesn’t bignote at all to them, not like he used to with God. No need these days. When he first heard the news about the workings of his brain, it felt like something he’d known, something from way back. Had to be. And it didn’t surprise him because life works that way (you pay for every single bloody thing).

  It was not long after the ride on the fire truck, a day when he was truly happy, that he got the news that he had a form of dementia that is rapid and irreversible. He’d suspected for a while that something was going on upstairs. He knew he was losing his brains. And he reckoned he deserved it. Served him right. Abso-bloody-lutely.

  ***

  He’s stilled by terror as they slide him like a tadpole into the mouth of the imaging machine. He doesn’t even hear the technician telling him not to move. He is not connected to his body, he’s entered limbo. His left eye twitches. He’d rather be in a pub brawl any bloody day. That Emmett’s brain is not normal is not a surprise to any member of the family. But it’s a while before anyone explains precisely how bad things are.

  Another test in Ballarat reveals more but he must wait to see the specialist in Melbourne. That is the day he knows with perfect certainty that he’s departing. He walks away from the hospital hoping a bus will run him over, but he has no luck and he smiles to himself that truly he was never a lucky bastard.

  How fast will it be? he wonders, cracking the windows to let the heat out of the car. He drives past the red trees and feels tears pushing at him. On the way home he buys a slab of light beer as a gesture to wellness.

  It turns out that Emmett’s brain is a sieve of leaking blood vessels. He’s had too many small strokes to count. His memory is draining away even as they speak to him. The brain is largely scar tissue. This will be a fast decline. It won’t be long before he won’t know himself. And yet, for one precious month, he tells no one but the soldiers.

  By win
ter, his chooks have been eaten by foxes and Mrs Thompson the cat has shot through, he hopes to a better place. Clancy was not so lucky, he was run over and a neighbour brought his body back to Emmett and they buried him under the lilac.

  He looks at his budgie, Hooley Dooley in the little cage, and decides the time has come so he takes him out to the paddock swinging in his wire cage and releases the little bird. It’s one of his last deliberate acts. He watches the small blue speckled wings rising into the blueness with a kind of tearing pain. And though he will never remember it, at the time he believes he’s going with Hooley to live in a corner of the sky.

  Still, he starts a new diary because he reckons it might save him. ‘Diaries give you a new start,’ he says aloud to himself. He’s always believed in the power of words, and in the diary he asks questions he can read to Anne when she rings to check on him each night. One of them is, ‘What is the name of that island where Pete worked? It’s shaped like a ... you know.’ He draws a diamond but can’t say what shape it is. Anne tells him it’s Tasmania. By the time he reads the questions out, he’s lost interest in the answers.

  49

  Anne measures the days of her life by the TV guide. She has her favourites and one of them is the TV judge, a tough old girl who whips hopeless dills right into gear. She’s got it all worked out. Possibly Anne sees something of herself in the judge. Tiny, frugal and sensible, but not without a smidgin of compassion.

  She still sews for her friends and old customers, the gold light from the desk lamp funnelling upon her. The whirring of the machine is the current between the past and the present. Anne has sewed her way through life, joining one day to the next, her head bent over her labours, her hands smoothing each day through the jaws of the old machine.

  She does her best thinking when she sews and some of her thoughts surprise her. To be old is not the way she thought it would be. People listen to you less and even look at you less. But you don’t stop being yourself just because you’ve lived a long time. You get wiser and quieter and less hopeful. Much less.

  When Emmett comes home sick, lost and frail, holding the little airline bag he used to take to work, she tells him to put it on the stool.

  ‘Sit down Emmett. Over there on that chair, yes that one.’

  ‘I don’t want to get in your way.’

  ‘You won’t,’ she says, and gets up from the machine. Rob comes in carrying a box of kitchen things from Deakin.

  Emmett seems to retreat and Anne watches the decline with a painful honesty about her history with him. She lost interest in him for a long part of the marriage when she believed he was insane. She’s not happy about the way things went. But madness is madness and who was going to help the family?

  Now she realises that it might have been better to get the kids out of there but at the time she just kept going, plodding through each day not expecting much. Never expecting things to be better. To survive a day was a triumph.

  Yet still she remembers the good more than the bad and maybe good comes from the same place as the bad. Who knows? Maybe it’s the place where there is no control. And, honestly, Emmett always knew joy more than anyone.

  After Daniel died she couldn’t bear to be near him, well, he just made her skin crawl. He was more horrified than anyone about Daniel’s death. Wallowing around thinking it was all about him, but then Emmett never noticed anyone but himself. So in the way that time moves, slowly and without argument, she gave up on him. Drifted away, didn’t question him, hoped he’d move and in a way he did, he moved to the pub.

  Now he’s sick and back here again and she sees that within the terrible man and even within the pathetic man there’s another one, a gentler one. Was he always locked up within Emmett? He wanders from room to room picking things up and putting them down. He smiles at her when she brings him food.

  He sits in the yard near the lemon tree, with her little dog beside him. The weather passes through the day. Waiting, just waiting. Seeing this Emmett brings back something of her first love and makes it harder, but then none of it is easy and she thinks maybe I should have told the kids how hard things can be. But they wouldn’t like to hear it, she decides. Who on earth would?

  50

  Food provides the answer to most of Louisa’s questions. She often cooks for Anne and for Emmett as if it will just do the trick. She nourishes her herbs and finds a butcher who can prepare the cuts of meat she likes. She goes to the old market once a week and with real discipline buys the best produce she can afford. Often she meets Peter there and they take pleasure in the place.

  ‘Have you ever seen a more beautiful peach?’ she asks him on a summer Saturday as they stand before an altar of fruit. ‘Let’s buy one each for breakfast.’ It seems a good idea but the dribbling is excessive and they end up dripping and laughing and flicking each other with peach juice. She tries to dry her hands on him but he gets sick of it and they look for a tap.

  After she’s towed Anne’s ancient jeep to all their favourite stalls, they get coffee, strong and hot, and sit near the small lane that fronts onto the big junction at the top of the market. The lane reminds Louisa of a telescope that looks out to the world beyond. Everything is limpid. People pass in the slowness of their lives and she sees them perfectly.

  It isn’t far from where Emmett worked as a child and the ghost of him lives here. She imagines him running around, laughing with his mates, a little scavenger let loose to feast on the body of the market. Let loose from the orphanage to his grandma’s place opposite the market.

  The child who became their father. Wonders again what really happened there. How would you ever know? But the stuff she’s heard about orphanages in those days is not good.

  She sent away for a Senate report on children who grew up in orphanages and when Forgotten Australians arrived she read it in a night. Stories of children with urine-soaked bedclothes tied to them, of beatings and starvation, and she thinks of those children now when she looks at her rapidly disintegrating father.

  A coffee machine is revealed though a hole in the wall and the chugging and grinding of beans rips at her ears. In no time, Pete’s back with the coffee. Chairs are in short supply and people juggling mugs and rolls bursting with sausage and onion often come chair-hunting. Peter is willing to give the chairs at their table to anyone. Around their feet, drab sparrows as round as hearts stab at the ground with their needle beaks. A couple of bolder ones land on the table in search of crumbs.

  Somehow they’ve started to talk about Emmett, not something they usually do. Pete says that before Daniel died, he once asked Emmett if he loved him, and he laughed. He remembers the mouth opening up like a void. ‘And that yellow eyetooth of his, God, I wondered whether he’d swallow me.’

  He wished he could have had another father and such wishes took up acres in his heart. Long before he understood Emmett, or at least thought he did, he was held by what he’d seen and what he didn’t understand, would never understand. When he decided Emmett was just a poor crazy man, mental for sure, he got over it. But he was lonely; after Daniel was gone, he had no one.

  There are things Emmett did that the others don’t know about and Peter will never tell them. Some things shouldn’t be shared, how does it help? He reckons the others are dealing with enough of their own stuff anyway.

  He’s also a bit ashamed of the way he gathered his information. For a long time he was the watcher in doorways, listening as a kind of witness to his mother’s weeping, waiting until he could hear her no longer, thinking that at least when it was quiet she had some peace. Then he’d go back to bed, his heart so heavy he ached with holding it.

  ‘Most kids have some kind of monster in their past,’ he says now, trying to lighten things. He’s rolled up the paper tube that held the sugar into the tiniest scrap. He looks up and smiles at her. He won’t dwell. The monster is sleeping in Peter’s memory, though he’s always on the lookout for it, you’d be a fool not to expect it back.

  Louisa has not forgo
tten a single thing her father did either. Indeed, she has indexed them within herself and has a kind of inventory, but somehow she comes to the same decision as Peter. She must let it be. She explains Emmett to herself the best way she can. He must have been sick. Since she worked that out, the world seems less bleak.