Chook reaches over a white hand, still flecked with plaster, and puts it on her head. He pats her hair softly as if she were a child. This is so affecting, a wave of feeling for him washes up in her heart.
He offers to help Anne in any way he can and she’s grateful, but she never calls him again. She thinks of Wendy and their girls and she doesn’t want to be taking up their time. She’s just glad he knows.
***
When Emmett goes into the hostel, there’s often a note in the visitor’s book saying that M. Sash had called in. When he comes, Chook always brings a piece of fruit, a pear or a peach or if it’s winter, a thick-skinned navel orange. Peeling it, the spiky citrus smell springs into the stale air like a song.
Though Emmett stares ahead resolutely as if he’s concentrating, Chook firmly believes that Emmett remembers the smell of oranges from when they were boys at the market, tossing them around against the grey gully of winter. Chook divides the fruit into segments and sets the pieces out on a flowery plastic plate he brings along. And then, with the patience of the humble, Chook places a fragment of orange into Emmett’s papery hand and guides it up to his mouth.
He waits the long minutes until it’s time for the next piece. Sometimes it doesn’t get to the mouth. Emmett throws it away. When this happens, Chook places the next piece into Emmett’s mouth. Sometimes he spits it out. Sometimes he chews it. He looks solidly ahead. Whatever happens, Chook wipes his old mate’s mouth with the bit of paper towel he brought along and then he wets it at the tap and cleans him up before he sets Emmett free to roam the corridors once more.
54
Woolamai Hostel is built on the principle of a circle, never Louisa’s favourite shape, and now, in a fog of confusion, she’s lost again and doing laps of the beige place. Imagine how the patients must feel, she thinks furiously, aiming her rage at the anonymous designers of the joint. Instead of giving these poor people a signpost, a big red lamp or a pot plant, no – they make it all beige. Of course they bloody do.
Most of the inmates are in for dementia. She passes knots of them standing near the main desk. One old man is groping an old woman’s sagging breasts and her face is as empty as a clean plate. Nothing. The old man rubs himself against the old woman’s behind and as he bumps at her, she holds on to the wall to steady herself.
Louisa wants to go over and slap the old man away but no one else seems to notice or mind and so she thinks she might be imagining things. Anyway, there’s not one single staff member around and Louisa is once again a reluctant witness.
Women and men, she sighs, seething at her quailing heart , at the cold fear the sight raises in her. At the sadness it stirs, knowing she should do something. You are still a gutless wonder, she scolds, forcing herself to look away. Another patient, a tubby little woman named Nancy, startles her, appearing into the void of memory. She gently touches Louisa’s hair. ‘Do you know Mrs Golightly?’ she asks, ‘I do. I know her...’ Louisa feels stinging tears spring up. Wintry tears for Nancy and for the old lady she didn’t help, for every single thing.
She tries to get a grip on herself and her memories but they well up like flood waters. Everyone tells her she lives in the past and she thinks well, so bloody what? You live where you want to and I’ll live where I want to . It’s mainly her brothers and sister who chide her about it. They can all get stuffed anyway. She finds she’s muttering ‘get stuffed’ and thereby proves that she is truly losing it.
She presses on through the pale sealed circle, through the sour piss-seasoned air, searching for Emmett as if he has the answer, and the very idea of this is so insane she utters a harrumph without even meaning to.
Some days she finds her dad standing by a wall pulling at his cardigan. Memory is sharper than reality because whenever she first sees Emmett at the hostel, she irrevocably believes this can’t be him. A mistake. Cannot be him, someone has taken him and replaced him. Emmett is huge and terrifying and smart and cruel. He can’t be this poor old bloke fiddling with his buttonhole.
And then her eyes adjust to the truth that the first one is gone and in his place is this poor scrap who walks miles round and round all day every day, walks until he can walk no more. Getting him to sit down seems to cause him pain.
She is always astonished by what she feels. Understanding love is hard for her, she’s never really grasped the concept. And Emmett should be hated by all of them. How could he not be? And yet, seeing her mother with him, she is again humbled by love.
On each visit to Woolamai, Anne takes a picnic of things Emmett used to like: fruitcake and his own mug and good strong coffee. Little square ham and mustard sandwiches cut up as small as stamps and placed into his mouth.
‘Love doesn’t come into it,’ Anne says dismissively, ‘he was my mate and I spent most of my life with him and here he is now and he’s suffering and if I can make him one little bit happy, then I will. He is a human being and he gave me my kids and now he is a poor old thing.’
Once Emmett seems to wake from the place that holds him and with the old blue look, he says, ‘My baby girl. Little Louie.’ Then he is drawn away by the light on the wall and she thinks she must have heard wrong and wants him to say it again; but she’s too surprised to speak and her voice stalls. She’d thought he was gone, now here he is again. In that little sentence, all the sorrow and all the sweetness of him come flooding back. Her father knew her. Despite everything, he knew.
She leaves Emmett and Anne and walks to the window, leans on it looking out at the red dahlias reaching for the sky. She turns towards her parents and it seems that they explain everything about her. She wants to laugh and to cry out in their defence, ‘It’s not your fault.’ But that would be mental so she just wipes her eyes and heads back over to them.
Louisa watches while her mother feeds her father and is astonished by the quality of tenderness in the face of memory. The monster has become the lamb and through it all her mother has maintained her humanity.
55
Louisa has taken the morning off because Anne needs someone with her today. ‘Lou,’ she’d said low and even when Louisa told her that today she didn’t care about the old man or how sick he was, ‘he’s still your father.’
So she asks Mr Conti and he waves his heavy hand at her in answer and says, ‘Make it up another time dear girl.’ She heads over to the shop, picks up Anne in the dented green Mazda 121 she calls Olive and drives to the hostel. She’s decided her new policy is that if she’s going to do something she will not begrudge it. This is Policy number 5431. She is trying to be more positive. Maybe it will help. Dr Mackenzie thinks it will.
They enter the hostel and loop the building looking for him. He’s nowhere. They ask at the staff desk and are told to their astonishment that he’s locked in his room. The key is passed to them.
Flinging the door open they see Emmett lying in pain on the pencil bed, in that stinking room. And this is far more than they bargained for. It’s an outrage. Louisa feels the bile rising and thinks she might heave and fights it down.
In that small cave of a room, the tight hot smell of urine fastens Louisa to the foot of the bed. To see her father, to see anyone, like this is shocking. Poor old bastard lying there in his own piss, I can’t believe it, and this is supposed to be a civilised bloody country. Anne takes the chair over and sits next to Emmett.
Louisa flings the window open as if there’s a fire. Then she strides to the front desk and bails up the matron. ‘Emmett Brown is really sick,’ she says raising her voice, ‘and blind Freddie could see that.’
But casual cruelty is a way of life for Matron Knight, a wide woman with a long pointy nose and the startled look of a rabbit. With an affronted expression, she peers up from her ledger at Louisa.
‘I face immense funding problems and since Mr Brown became doubly incontinent, his care category has increased. We have staff shortages every day, it’s not a job people are reliable about. Besides,’ and she turns back to her ledger, pen scanning figures, ‘I thought he’
d benefit from a day in his room.’
Louisa hears something about funding and wishes she were Emmett in the old days because chucking a mighty tantrum would feel real good right now. She looks at the matron as though she’s never seen anything like her but decides restraint is required. ‘I’ll be in Dad’s room. I’ll speak to you there.’ Tearing along down the beige corridors, she feels time slowing, even while her heart is thudding like an engine.
In a while, Matron Knight cracks open the door to Emmett’s room and peeps in timidly. She thinks it’ll be safe to step in and when she does, Louisa goes for her. ‘What do you think you’re doing here, leaving a sick old man locked up, all alone like this? It’s not human. What are you, some kind of a sadist?’
This is a pretty long speech for Louisa and now she’s lost for words, except for one more thing. But, her voice has gone on her again. ‘We want to see a doctor,’ she croaks, assuming this will be a simple matter, but nothing, it seems, is simple when it comes to hostel etiquette and procedure.
Matron Knight is ready for this one and smiles patiently. ‘The doctor was here yesterday and he saw your father and decided it was nothing serious.’
Louisa stands up and in her new boots is about a foot taller than Matron Knight. They look like a sideshow act. Trump the old witch, go on she urges herself, and says, ‘Okay, I’ll pay for it myself, I don’t care, just get the doctor here.’ Matron exits with as much grace as she can muster.
The tentative air slips in through the window and Drysdale’s image of The Drover’s Wife, the one Emmett cut from a calendar and Anne framed, hangs sideways. Louisa straightens it. Emmett periodically clutches his stomach.
The walls of Louisa’s life are high, and this day she holds her emotions tightly to herself because Anne won’t appreciate her tears. This is the first time Louisa’s seen Emmett in a while. She hasn’t been able to stand it. She hasn’t brought Tom and Beck because she can’t explain this to them. Seeing Emmett being subtracted from the world before your eyes is harder than she would ever have believed.
The last time she brought the kids had not worked. She had told them that Grandad was not the way he used to be, that he’d changed, that his brain was sick. Even so the kids were excited to see him because Emmett always made them feel special.
Tom, at fifteen, stood tall, with blue eyes and long dark curls and Beck, though she was olive skinned, looked very like him. She was almost thirteen. Louisa had been keeping them away from Emmett since he’d gone into the hostel, because she found it as much as she could handle on her own. But now it was holidays and, because they had no extra money for going away, here was a Saturday they were all free and the kids wanted to see him.
As soon as she walked in with them, she knew her strategy had been wrong. She should have introduced them to the deterioration more gently. Emmett was staring by a wall and Tom walked over and put his hand out to shake hands as they always did. Emmett didn’t see him. So Tom dropped his arm and came back over to his mother looking hurt and puzzled, and Louisa thought, this is too much for them. The stranger with the staring eyes frightened Beck. She could see nothing of the funny old Grandad and the tough adolescent veneer she was pursuing dropped from her like a curtain. She began to cry.
Dealing with the kids’ sadness over their grandfather made sense of Anne’s need to quickly get back to normal after her Nan died. But Louisa reflected that perspective is always hard won. And driving away from Woolemai with the silent children, she decided they’d seen enough reality to last them a very long time.
Now Emmett is old and skeletal and he knows no one and is all but dead and time just keeps marching on. The pity of it all wells and she turns away to look at The Drover’s Wife and recognises the lost eyes of her father.
Finally Dr Edward Roote appears in the small room. He positions himself at the foot of Emmett’s bed as if he’s a contagious proposition. Anne holds Emmett’s hand. It lays there like a dead fish until the cramping pains come and then he clutches at his stomach.
Louisa feels herself reddening in the face of authority, something that hasn’t happened since high school, but quite firmly she says to Dr Roote, ‘My father needs to go to hospital now and if you don’t arrange it, then I’ll put him in the car and take him there myself.’
The doctor is a thin young fellow with ears like small fine wings. His eyebrows and his hair are so light as to be no colour at all though palest green is hinted at. ‘I examined, err’ – and here he consults his clipboard and scans until he finds the name – ‘Mr Brown, is it? Err yes, yesterday, and he had a mild cold. There is no need for further treatment.’
For a man clearly so unsure of himself, Dr Roote is pretty arrogant, Louisa decides. She controls her anger. ‘I don’t care about yesterday,’ she says quietly. ‘I care about now.’
The doctor glances at her with his clam-like eyes and fiddles with his pen and scans yesterday’s notes again. He reminds Louisa of one of the gilded youths in Banjo’s ‘The Man from Ironbark’, the ones whose ‘eyes were dull, whose heads were flat’ and who ‘had had no brains at all...’ Just recalling the lines makes her want to flatten this little creep and fight for her father. The class system, she thinks, alive and bloody thriving.
Once again she says, ‘I don’t care about yesterday,’ an undertow in her voice. ‘Today is what matters. Look at him. He needs medical attention now and you are clearly not giving it to him.’ She considers calling him an appalling dolt but thinks better of it; that would just be indulgent.
Dr Roote fudges some more and blinks and steps back, then in a few hollow seconds completely caves and scurries off to ring the ambulance. It’s a victory that doesn’t feel like one.
Louisa puts her hand on Emmett’s head and his hair is baby hair now and suddenly the grief is pouring out of her. She has to go outside to compose herself. It’s been a while since she stopped having shock treatment but she’s still reasonably fragile, she’s coming to terms with the new medication and she’s still on anti-depressants and she still sees Dr Mackenzie. She stands near the door with the sad old lost people wandering around and lets out a breath.
An old woman touches her face and Louisa sees that she only has one shoe and her cardigan is hanging off her. Just under her mouth a clump of whiskers sticks out like a paintbrush. Sometimes everywhere you look makes you sad and she reminds herself that sometimes sad is normal, sad happens to us all. Sad isn’t the end.
And in a while the paramedics plough their shining trolley up the hall and into Emmett’s room. The ambulance men are bald blokes with flushed faces and big polished cheeks, one a head shorter than the other, and they pick Emmett up gently as if he were a baby and tuck him in on the trolley.
They call him mate and shake his flapping hand as though they mean it. They pat his shoulder and let Anne hold his hand and pretty soon Emmett looks better already and then they put a brave red rug over his legs.
As they leave, Louisa shuts the door on the stinking little cave. The tender paramedics have made her teary again but then she’s a great sook. She strides ahead to lead the way to the ambulance, up front where she can get some privacy. Her father groans again and Anne walks besides Emmett still holding his hand.
Ambulances are common at Woolamai and they provide a break in the day but today nobody’s that fussed and most miss the exit of Emmett. One old woman waves as they pass and then there’s Nancy who waves at everybody. At the ambulance Emmett looks straight at Louisa and salutes and she salutes back. And then the old man’s laughing with the paramedics. She puts her arm around Anne’s shoulders. They laugh. Emmett always did love a fuss.
56
In the wrap of greyness pushing through the long windows of the Geriatric Ward, Jessie holds Emmett’s hand and digs out faeces, hardened and trapped like fossils, from beneath his nails. God, she thinks, who would ever have thought it?
Emmett doesn’t move. He’s not aware of anything but pain. He’s resting between bouts of the clamping cramps
that seize him. His liver is dying and his brain is almost gone. He will be aware when spasms take him and hold him. And then he will be helpless, will fix faces with the look of a child in agony. Help does not come.
The doctors avoid him, to them it’s just waiting. The nurses tolerate him; some are sensitive and some are not. One, a tall woman with zany purple glasses named Sue, remarks on the beauty of his eyes while changing his adult nappy. ‘When you were a young man, it’s Emmett isn’t it? With eyes so blue you could have had all the girls,’ she says, chatting to Anne as much as to herself to ease the time it takes to tend to an incontinent, rigid old man.
The Book of Emmett Page 26