Jessie and Anne remain standing like sentinels beside the unravelling bed watching the performance. Anne, in a jumper the colour of stones, smiles her weary smile and says, ‘He did all right,’ and in that insect second Jessie wonders again about the life between her parents.
‘Strange isn’t it ,’ the nurse continues as if anyone cares, ‘how things turn out. Once a handsome young man and now poor old fellow, eh Emmett?’ Long pause before she blathers on. ‘I like that name. Is it American?’ And she turns to the shell of the wasted man none too gently and pats his translucent stick of a thigh. And Jessie wants to kill her for one rough gesture.
Anne tells her it was his father’s name and it comes from the Bible, Old Testament. And Jessie adds, wildly over-the-top, ‘Then it must be American!’ Her fizzing anger is lost on everyone and disintegrates into the stale stillness of the hospital. She turns to the window and feels even more wretched and realises she doesn’t get it. She’d always thought the death of Emmett would be something to celebrate, so why does she feel bad? Emmett clenches again with the pain and Anne touches his hair.
The clenching lasts and he begins to sweat. He moans and mutters, ‘Get away get away get away,’ and ‘piss off’. He clutches the sheet up under his chin and it’s not possible to ignore his suffering.
The nurse moves across to Edith in the bed across the aisle. Edith is a whale of a woman with a voice that penetrates skulls like a flat violin. She’s watching The Bold and the Beautiful with genuine enthusiasm. A forgotten plastic jug of urine that looks oddly like orange cordial stands on her bedside table. Jessie considers tipping it all over the floor or maybe even over Edith, just for some kind of release.
In the milky light of the hospital at dusk, the big window by Emmett’s bed frames the west of the city. Clouds are pushed together like smoke and the idea of rain is raised again.
Seeing Emmett in this state stirs something in Jessie. The illness makes him look dismantled and watching him in such devastation makes her want to cry. The bile the thought of him brings up is at odds with this particular poor old bloke. And why, she asks herself, does she now think of the good things?
She wills herself to remember the bad bits. The pushing of her mother, the beltings, the slaps, the lewd language. The fights. It isn’t hard. She looks into those moody clouds and thinks of one of the nights at tea, of the terrifying presence of Emmett Brown throwing his plate or the teapot at the wall or at them, or mocking them for their pathetic pronunciations of hate. How he laughed when they said they hated him and he mocked them with : You ate me do you? Well now, that would be something to see, and roared laughing as a child fled, sobbing with a mouthful of cold mashed spud dropping, dropping. The taste of tears and cold potato were complimentary but it wasn’t one he would ever know. He’d down the beer in one gulp and against the stripe of light on the ceiling and through the glass, the amber liquid illuminated the giant man.
And so Jessie has him back. Has him all locked away again, all square. Emmett the bastard, not Emmett the poor old bugger.
57
Apparently when hospitals call people to tell them their loved one is gravely ill, it means they have already died, but at the time of Emmett’s death, the Browns don’t know that. Anne hears this titbit much later on talkback radio, where she gets most of her information.
Jessie is at work the day he dies and Anne rings to say the hospital has called. It’s a bit over a week after Christmas and she’s volunteered to go in because the women she works with have family and there are plenty of other people to look after her own mob. Anne says, ‘Dad’s very sick, darling. Dad’s dying. Do you want to go to the hospital?’
‘Will I pick you up?’ Jessie asks her. The boys will go straight there. When Jessie gets to the shop Anne is sitting with her hands clenched in front of her on the old wooden table. She seems to have fallen into a rift in time.
***
Rob and Pete can’t find the damned entrance to the hospital carpark. They’re driving like maniacs in Rob’s ute, hurtling around corners and coming to jerky stops at traffic lights that change just as their breath starts to slow. The bright smell of sawdust surrounds them.
Peter looks over at Rob and sees his hands on the steering wheel and recognises Emmett’s hands. His own are the same, though maybe not as brown. These are the exact hands that thrashed them when they were kids. That hurt their mother. That showed them how to knot ties. That made beer that exploded in the shed. That sheared their dog Frank in summer. That showed them how to bat. The legacy that lives within the genes lives within the mind. Nothing is withdrawn.
Then he remembers how the Footscray gardens run down the hill like something green spilled into the brown river. On hot nights sometimes Emmett took them there and everything felt alive. Funny to remember the good things, Peter considers, just while they’re getting lost.
Earlier he had been glad they were lost because it meant it wouldn’t happen. He had the street directory on his knee in an effort to help but still it took so long threading through the sluggish traffic that Rob snapped and chucked a U-ey and nicked through the back streets. Finally, they find the carpark entrance, leave the car illegally parked and sprint to the lift. Peter remembers hesitating there for a second and then Rob sees the curving concrete stairs and he’s gone, taking them two at a time. He follows, moving fast, but soon he’s beginning to breathe hard.
They fly down the corridor, find a nurse and Rob says urgently, ‘Where is Emmett Brown?’ She says a room number and waves them towards a ward and they burst in, rush to the side of the bed and stand there panting and sweating.
The sun is slanting in. In the next bed, Edith, the whale-woman is snoring. The pink cotton curtain between the two beds is half-drawn and the day is rapidly moving past.
***
The last thing Emmett sees is a rural scene in France. A haystack and a farmhouse and green trees and some chooks pottering around in a print at the end of his bed. His eyes are still settled on it when his sons get there. By the time they arrive Emmett is yellow, hands clutching his chest.
It’s just before twelve o’clock and it seems he’s been dead quite a while. Peter reaches over and closes Emmett’s eyes and takes his cold hands in his own. He would like to make them warm so he pulls the sheet up over the old man but keeps hold of Emmett’s hand.
He looks around for Rob who by now is surging toward the nurses like a force unleashed to blast them for leaving Emmett to die alone. ‘NOBODY should have to die alone,’ he yells. And the nurses are sorry. Nothing is their fault, they are so few and so busy. And then it hits him that Emmett’s life is over. There’s no turning back. He stops fighting as if someone has turned him off. Next door Edith snores on, ploughing the deep fields of sleep.
Peter puts his hand on Emmett’s head and waits for Anne and Jessie. He feels such a weight holding his heart down. He can barely raise his head but he sees the window and through it the west is spread out like a map. He knows his face is wet by the freshness of the air touching it.
Rob comes back and sits in the chair in the corner and a skin of anger, like something alive, revives and settles on him and he imagines the anger is to do with the hospital leaving his father to die alone.
He knows he’s crying but he doesn’t wipe his face. Caring doesn’t edge into his thinking at all. He stares ahead, tries normality but it doesn’t fit. He even wants to laugh but the feeling passes. Though he’s still, his heart is racing. They stay beside their father for long minutes guarding him, tending him.
58
Since she broke her hip, Anne has slowed right down. It has been replaced and the new part works well, it’s just that she’s well down on speed. She and Jessie get to Emmett within half an hour of the call from the hospital. Footscray, as Emmett always said, is not far from anywhere.
They wait for the lift because Anne is not able to take the stairs. When they reach Emmett, Rob is in the chair and Peter is close to Emmett with his hand resting on
his head.
Rob says quietly, gently, ‘He’s dead Mum, there’s no rush.’
Jessie feels the world shooting by and she reaches out to hold the bed. Anne puts her hands to her mouth and Rob steers her to the chair but she’s not ready for that. She walks to Peter and takes the sheet away and she leans over and kisses Emmett on his cheek. Then she raises the sheet, and still looking down into that mysterious face she says, ‘Louisa. We will have to tell Louisa.’
59
When Emmett dies, Louisa is in Venice. It’s reliably beautiful, glinting with echoing lights across black water. At the moment of his death the light is yellow in this hollow of Europe because she’s in an ancient church lighting a candle for him of all people. Faded paintings of saints look down on her. Outside the church, it rains the languid rain of Europe.
Much later she works out that the moment of the candle is about when he died. At the time though, she thought, isn’t it pleasant wandering around Venice all on your own? Dodging pigeons as you walk through the salty breath of the city and gazing for much too long into the windows of handmade paper shops.
And she thanks Mr Conti for sending her here. He’d decided that now she was settling back into her life, a little trip to the most beautiful place in the world would do her good and it seemed that Emmett was stable. She and Anne had even picked out a nursing home for him.
***
That night, after she’s been asleep for a while, there’s a strange ringing and the phone call is from Rob, who in the swimming void of the phone line says, ‘It’s happened Lou. Yes, it’s happened. Dad died today.’
And she breathes steadily as she holds the heavy Italian phone and remembers the times hiding in the shed or under the hedge when the two of them had prayed for this death, when they thought he’d kill them unless God intervened. But nothing had happened because God was never where you wanted Him and that was the only, the always truth. Even when you prayed for a death, it didn’t come and now here it is in Venice on the Dosodura at the shadow of dawn on a rainy morning.
Emmett’s voice is the past, she’s in this watery place full of old beauty and luminous shops and she has to get home and face it. The death of the tyrant. The chain of memory is thick and strong but reality doesn’t seem to belong.
A gulf of distance defines Australians. Breathe deep because getting there will take a long time. She takes the water taxi (hang the expense) to the airport at five am and sees the sky become faintly glassy as the boat skips over the choppy sea. At the airport, lights like torches line runways and every other column is red.
Rain falls in circles on the polished tarmac and Louisa stands in the bus taking her to the departure gate, the travel agent going home. As the bus moves, she leans into the curves holding the freezing metal pole.
She knows her father has died but it’s not real. To herself she chants, my father has died, and moves aside politely for more Italians wedging themselves onto the bus at every stop. Most of her life she hated him and now she weighs hate in her heart and finds it light on. So was this really hate? Some questions lie in the air unclaimed.
She has the knowledge of the oceans between here and home, and the knowledge that the hate has her in a holding pattern stills her. The balances are out and she’s heading the long way home. Into the distance she sees her water taxi moving away and feels towed with it. Go back, a voice inside tells her, run away, hide in Venice and never come out, but she shakes her head.
And besides, she doesn’t get it. How can you hate so much and then, when you hear about the death, feel swept up by the sea of sorrow? Because it wasn’t real, comes to her, and because hate is a waste of time. Big thoughts when you feel small.
She sees a water taxi’s hull reflecting the lagoon and she holds it because it stops the image of Emmett as an old man in the hospital, demented, liver rotted, a lost man who wanted to be a poet but who gave up on everything because, apart from Anne, not one person ever helped him or believed in him. He hated the way the world treated him but never found of a way of changing it. The idea of loss does laps in her head. Love and hate are plaited together.
On the bus, she feels elated to be free of him and then heartbroken in quick succession as if she were riding a merry-go-round. Light lies in gold stripes across the ground and other buses heading to planes going to other places pass with Louisa’s reflection in their eyes. A man on the bus says: ‘Ciao Aussie’ and she wonders if it’s that obvious, and then she remembers the little Australian flag the kids got her to sew on her backpack.
She smiles at the man and wants to tell him she’s lost her father but then decides that she doesn’t, she says farewell to rude Europeans in fur coats, preening themselves and smoking wherever they want to and slamming change down on counters when you have your hand out ready to receive it.
She thinks, goodbye Italy, I won’t be back, and smiles to know that they won’t miss her. She sees the moss green islands in the lagoon between the tarmacs and remembers Emmett’s vegie garden, the one thing he truly seemed to love apart from beer and occasionally her mother.
Take it out and look at each piece of it. Weep for the tyrant, the poor old tyrant bastard, hear him again in her secret corner. Hear him in the good times reading The Man From Snowy River on long hot nights in the warm heart of the southern city when the cicadas call greenly and the light stretches out thinly all the way down to Tassie.
She hears her mum’s voice on the phone after Rob saying, ‘Darlin’ the truth is, Dad’s face wasn’t good at the end. He went yellow. Must have been the liver disease that got him.’
She wonders what will get her . What will get Mum? What will get her children? What gets us all? She wants to be home, to lay her hand on Australia and unwrap her sorrow for her father.
60
The funeral has been hard. They’ve all cried too much and now there are many people they don’t know, people who know Anne mostly. Anne, it seems, is popular in Footscray, known and loved by all. So after the funeral a swarm descends on the shop looking for sandwiches and cups of tea.
One man stops Louisa near the kitchen and begins to tell her about rigging a yacht. She has a tray of antipasto in her hand. The man is shorter than Louisa and is clean shaven but for a snow-white neck beard. His face is the colour of corned beef. He tells her about rigging a sail. He didn’t know Emmett. He eats a few olives and holds onto the pips.
One of the Deakin farmers talking to Rob says he always remembers Emmett describing Ballarat as the Prague of the South. ‘Amazing man,’ he says ‘knew so many things. Learned, he was. I was much taken with his brilliance.’ Rob nods and sips his tea. A smile moves across his mouth and he says, ‘It was truly individual wasn’t it?’
Louisa looks over at Rob standing near the front of the shop holding a mug of tea and watching the street. She turns away but when she looks for him again he’s shot through and left his tea making a ring on Emmett’s desk.
Then Jessie arrives and the yacht man pops his pips into his pocket and places a sundried tomato on a piece of bread with infinite care and he turns his attention to her with the force of something magnetised and she listens to how sails are rigged with grudging gratitude because it saves her from thinking.
Louisa slips outside and finds Rob sitting in his car with the airconditioning on, the sun glinting off the dirty window. She gets in. ‘You all right?’ she asks, not expecting anything.
Rob says, ‘I don’t know. I thought it would be over when he died. Thought I’d feel released. Still feel stuck in the shit of it all.’ In the stale churning air of the car, the heat is still barely tamed and Louisa looks washed out. He reckons they should go back into the wake, such as it is. ‘C’mon,’ he says.
‘Yeah, but I just want to say one thing. I want to say that we are free now. The day has come. Finally.’
He still has his hand on the keys in the ignition and thinks, Not for me, I won’t be free of this bastard for a very long time and neither will you. But if it makes you
feel better to imagine it, then go right ahead. Yet all he says is, ‘Yeah Louie, finally eh?’
The Book of Emmett Page 27