The Book of Emmett (18 page)

Beck is named for Samuel Beckett, her father's favourite playwright. She grows into a dark-haired, olive-skinned plump little girl who loves water, is mostly grubby, and is very fond of her special penguin cap. Tom is a quiet boy with deep blue eyes who has the look of his uncles about him.

When Beck's eighteen months old, John opens the door to the bedroom and Louisa is reading in the lamplight. Once again, he's home late but at least he's still got his tie on. He drags it off absently, like a man letting go. He's been at a lot of poetry readings lately. He's out most nights. He's so busy. She's heard there are poetry groupies galore. Doesn't believe a word of it.

‘Lou,' he says, standing in front of the chest of drawers with his back to her while he watches her in the mirror.

‘Yeah,' she says, reading hard and resisting the current of her husband's attention.

‘I've got something to tell you and you're not going to like hearing it.'

She seems to drag herself from the page, but really she hasn't absorbed a word since he walked in. She sits up straighter, arranges the covers and knows immediately that what he will say will change every single thing.

She's always expected that he will leave her, that it wasn't really love, and here is the truth. If you wait long enough, it comes. She wonders whether she might intervene, put up her hands and stop the words, put her mouth against his, but no, it doesn't seem so.

‘You see, the thing is,' he says, stumbling forward with resolve and red eyes, ‘I've fallen in love with someone else.' He seems to hope that she will show him a little mercy because he's in love. He hasn't planned it, you see, this thing has just befallen him.

‘What did you say?' she asks thinly.

‘I've fallen in love with someone else.'

‘Fallen?'

‘Yeah, fallen. I'll move out.'

‘Who did you fall in love with?'

‘Her name is irrelevant.'

‘Not to me, mate, and I'm guessing her name is not irrelevant to you or you wouldn't be doing this.'

‘Well, I don't want to get into that.' And then the rage is released.

‘You unbelievable, you complete fucker,' she cries, and it feels exactly like her heart has been torn out.

The emotions that flash through her are as familiar as family. Fear returns like an old enemy who knows its way around, but there's a kind of release and she seems to be becoming Emmett and she runs at him stumbling from the bed in the ugly duckling pyjamas and hits him around the head but he holds her hands away from her until, sobbing like the girl she always held at bay, she sinks into the bed.

She cannot think. Nothing works. This pain has halved her. She lies there while he sits beside her, tentatively stroking her back with an involuntary kindness that even she can't stand. At each touch she feels a little more dead. She can see nothing, nothing but her children, and they are all there is.

It takes a while for her voice to remember how it works, but when it does, she says nastily, ‘Well, fuck off then. We don't need you around here.' And that's all it takes. He packs a bag, stuffing in socks and underpants, his T-shirts and carrying his other stuff on hangers. And he leaves. In an effort to seem normal, Louisa switches off the light and gets into bed with Beck and there she stays, awake all night.

It takes many months for Louisa to recall who she is. Her mother and the babies are what get her through. Slowly, she comes to see that she will survive John Keele but it takes longer to understand how she is changed.

‘How come Louisa always gets on better with men than women?' Jessie asks Anne one day while they're hanging out washing in the yard behind the shop. There's not that much washing anymore, and they're both aware of it. ‘She drove her own husband away by never talking to him. Remember last Christmas? She barely looked at him. She spends more time talking to Rob than anyone else and Rob doesn't give a stuff, he just can't stand John, so anything that gets up his nose is fine by him. He's a stirrer, but what's her excuse? I tell you, I pity those kids.'

Anne cannot be expected to choose between her children. To her they are equal in every way. Ah, let's be honest a minute, she thinks and smiles to herself, Jessie was always the favourite of my heart, but that will go to the grave with me. And so it follows that she cannot let Louisa go undefended.

‘Well as for Mr John Keele, he was no great shakes, nothing but a gutless wonder really,' she begins. ‘He didn't even have the guts to try to work it out, no, he just kept up the little dalliances. He's long had a roving eye and it seems to me they were never really suited. Louisa had to do all the work with him. He's one of those men who wants a woman to do all the running. She has to come up with all the moves, but only after he approves. You know where the house will be, and she must keep the children happy and bring up all the topics they talk about. He will never contribute. Then she's got to entertain him and make a home for him, cook for him, bring in half the income, give him children and then keep them quiet so he can pursue his great dream and you know what? Louisa's a more talented person and a better one than he will ever be.' Anne savagely pegs a tea towel and it flutters, a stained and captured flag snagging occasionally on a brave red geranium that climbs the wall of the garage. Anne continues. This is a theme she's given much thought to.

‘She got tired of it all and who can blame her? In the end, if you're doing everything, then you may as well do it on your own, that's the mistake I made, staying there under the thumb all those bloody years. Once there are children my girl, every single thing changes and some men do not cope well with the changes. And by the way, did you know Mr Keele used to dye his hair?'

Jess is not hugely bothered by any of this news, as far as she's concerned people can have whatever hair colour they like. Anyway, she still likes John Keele but she's got the sense to shut up about that and she always had a sneaking feeling that he liked her better than Lou and maybe he did. ‘Oh,' she says limply, dropping a dry yellow towel into the dirt and Anne says impatiently, ‘Give it to me, give it a good shake. And did you know if you fold it in half on the line, the fluffiness increases?' But Jess is lost to her, she's kicking away a pile of cat shit, shoulders slumped. Her mother grabs the towel and shakes it vigorously. Jess wishes she didn't have to hear any of this. Bugger Louisa, Mum's always on about her.

The truth is, Jess will always strive to find a way to feel left out because that's where she's comfortable, but now she wants her mother to agree that Louisa excludes her and always has. She strides over to the plastic seats and hurls herself into one so hard the leg buckles and has an adolescent sulk, years late.

Absently, Anne asks, ‘What did she do love, what was it that upset you?' as she follows her back into the yard with the clothes basket on her hip, and a ripple of impatience shoots through her, though it's got nothing to do with her girls. It's those rotten little birds at it again, disturbed all her mulch, chucking it around willy-nilly.

Triumphantly, Jess believes she's finally captured her mother's attention. ‘She just ignores me, she always has, and she seems to love the boys. What's so special about them? They're not fussed on her. She just bars you, that's all. Never asks a question, doesn't give a stuff what I'm doing. Looks through you. It's always only about herself. Doesn't even talk about the kids much. You have to drag it out of her.'

Anne wishes that Jessie could see past herself for just five minutes but she says, ‘Louie and the boys have a special bond. Before you were born they were very close, especially after Daniel died, and I think if you look hard you'll see that it's not men she prefers, it's her brothers.'

Though it's true, Anne thinks, she's always been a bit on the odd side has our little Louie. She smiles and gets up to go in, that's enough now. Time for a cup of tea.

Louisa stays on in North Melbourne in the smallest, cheapest house going. It's a dusty old weatherboard in dire need of a paint, a single-fronter about as wide as a bus and sandwiched between four others. A milk bar on the corner seems to be collapsing onto itself. Only the signs hold it up.

The faded red of an old softdrink sign makes her think of Emmett. She hears him say, ‘Lolly water, will rot your teeth, but look at ya, plenty of bloody teeth,' and laughs as if it's funny. Thinks of him waiting for retirement and trying out sobriety. She thinks of the only time he visited her here. Two babies and Emmett and how tenderly he nursed Beck. How he taught Tom to shake hands. Before he left, he slipped her a hundred dollars and kissed the babies as if he loved them and she wept into Beck's soft hair afterwards because she missed him, well, because she missed the him he was today.

Down the street where Tom plays cricket there's a park, dry now in the drought, the grass powdery and loose. The boy sleeps in the front room in a sweaty shrine to cricket. When Pete calls him the next captain of Australia, Tom's eyes shine. In the evening, he often sits on the verandah roof waiting for his mother to come home and, seeing her at a distance, stands up and yells ‘Mum' until she sees him against the blue, a slim boy with dark hair and a shining face. She wonders at the beauty of him. As she gets closer he readies himself for the ritual of the throw.

Louisa prides herself on her ability to catch a tennis ball. She grew up believing that catching a ball was her one skill. So now the pressure is on Tom. Too close, he thinks, and it's cheating, too far and she'll miss. So when he lets the faded bare ball go sailing across to her, the onus is on himself to get it right. He usually does and Louisa carries the ball to him while he scrambles down from the roof and kisses his mother and takes her bags. And she is relieved again that he looks nothing like his father or her. He looks like himself, she thinks, and this makes her happy.

Beck has a tiny tacked-on cupboard of a room. Black hairpins are scattered across the floor like insects and posters of pouting boy singers in eye make-up and torn jeans line the walls. Louisa has the stuffy middle room with a paper blind and flimsy lace curtains losing the battle to clench back the western light from the rickety casement window. Even on dull days, the window is illuminated.

At the back, a pine-lined family-room and kitchen takes up the width of the house. A sage green leather three-seater and a matching chair were bargains from the Brotherhood shop. Mao, their grey tabby, named by Beck when she was two, seems to shed everywhere. The television dominates the room and it's always a relief when the kids aren't there so she can shut the damn thing off. It takes all her money to keep the family going.

She cooks the kids' dinner and most nights picks up something fresh on the way home. Then she helps with the homework and puts a load of washing through, does the bills and maybe, if it's a good night, watches a crime show on tele where some poor woman is murdered and avenged by cops while she nods off with a glass of cask wine in her hand and Mao beside her purring. The comfort he offers is inestimable.

Jess sometimes rings way too late. She's a lawyer now, working at a women's refuge in Sunshine, and she needs to talk about some case or other. When the phone rings past nine-thirty Louisa treats it as if it can see her. She lets it ring until it leaves her alone or else she swoops on it to stop the attack of it. If it's Jess, the drama of her workday spills into the living room until Jess gives up and lets Louisa seek the refuge of her bed. ‘I'm just so tired,' she hears herself saying again and hates herself for it.

This house sometimes reminds her of Wolf Street but the real difference is her beautiful garden. Louisa makes gardens grow with a kind of magic. Her herbs are bright and fragrant. Her roses flop and fold and smell like wine and when she cuts a bunch and puts them in Nan's vase on the table, for that single moment life is perfect.

Her kids don't see their father much because John Keele finds it unsettling but they don't seem to mind. His new partner, Katie Slattery, is a blonde PR person who looks after John as if he were a baby or a genius, which makes the kids uncomfortable. ‘She puts salt on his food and gets him drinks and kisses him on the mouth,' Beck reveals in hushed tones after one visit. She pulls her mouth down, pretending to be sick, ‘And she calls him babe.' Tom grabs his basketball and slams outside to punish the ring. Beck puts her hand on Louisa's shoulder.

John has moved to an arty part of the country and Katie visits on weekends to tend to him. In a shack up there he's writing poem cycles based on the
Iliad.
Apparently he's putting them into an Australian context. It's his life's work and he can't contribute financially to the kids because, well, this is art we're talking about here. ‘Ha,' snorts Louisa when she reads this in his latest letters.

Some nights, Rob comes over after the kids are in bed and they eat potato chips or chunks of apples and cheddar and talk with the TV muted and the world silently flying by on the screen. He tries never to talk about John but that's not possible. He believes that he alone, out of the whole family, saw through him but he doesn't want to say, ‘I told you so.' What would be the point of that? Perhaps some kind of maturity is finding its way into Robert.

So these visits get off to a quiet start because all Louisa can think about is betrayal and she needs to work it out slowly as if it were a splinter. But there are many forms of betrayal and even if it begins without regard to him, most roads lead to Emmett. With Rob and Louisa it's as if everything is a hurdle till they can talk about the time of him.

So after his weekly dose of John Keele poison, Rob is slumped on the old green couch. His hair is still carrying sawdust from an elm he took down today, and his eyes are full of sighs. He doesn't recall anything tonight, he's tired, he'd rather just watch the news, catch up on other people's miseries, anyone's is better than their own.

But something about theft on the television takes them back to the time they were robbed. They'd put Anne's purse in the back of the billycart and taken it down to the shop for the milk and smokes. Some boys saw it and took the purse and the kids ran but couldn't catch up so they went home and Emmett put them in the car and took off after the thieves. ‘Bloody cops and robbers. I was terrified when we went cross-country over those paddocks. What was the old bastard thinking?' says Rob, biting into his apple so hard Louisa is hit by a speck of juice and flinches.

‘Yeah, scary. Then when he caught them. God, I thought he'd kill 'em, but he took them to the cop shop. It was fun too though, dontcha reckon?' Louisa says wiping off the apple ricochet with the back of her hand.

‘S'pose ... That's the weird thing.'

‘Remember the story in the local paper, “Louts rob children”?' By now they are cackling with laughing and then it reaches the point of convulsion and Rob mixes up drinking with eating and manages to get a bit of apple stuck and needs to have his back thumped. Louisa is gulping with laughter but Rob is wiping away tears. ‘Don't know how much more of this reminiscing I can take,' he says wheezy and red. ‘Bloody dangerous.'

‘And the time we got lost on the bus?' she continues, the energy of the laughter and of the memory lifting her. She's pouring a grassy, pale wine for them and it occurs to her it's as if she saves herself for talking to him.

Louisa will not be swayed from the past. ‘Come
on,
this is a good story! You know,' she insists, ‘we were coming home from the pictures on a Saturday morning, the pictures at the Grand, and Auntie Betty from next door was on the lolly counter. God, life could get no better, a free bag of lollies clutched in your filthy little hand as you tore through the dark picture theatre, utter bliss.'

And suddenly Rob is in. He gulps at the cold wine. ‘Yeah,' he smiles, ‘we caught the red bus after the pictures in Footscray, but it must have been the wrong red bus and we sat on up the back, bouncing along the wrong way but not sure. Nothing looked right, we were holding hands like Hansel and Gretel. By the time the driver turned into the depot, we were the only ones left in the bus.

‘And when the bus driver saw us there, he walked down the back and asked where did we want to get off? And I started crying and you recited our address to him and he said, “Right,” and then he drove us home. Remember? All the way in that big red bus. It was like a dinosaur turning around in the court. Mum was out the back doing the washing and she came out wiping her hand on a tea towel, I remember her standing there. Totally amazed.'

Caught in the web of memory, shaking their heads, they wonder how they could have been let out to catch buses on their own at that age. ‘That's nothing,' says Louisa, ‘they didn't know where I was for four Sundays in a row.'

‘Bullshit,' Rob says calmly, ‘Lying Louie. Always the liar.' Louisa flicks him, barely spilling a drop, and continues seamlessly.

‘No, you idiot, I ran away and joined Sunday School, probably because Dad banned it. You didn't want to come, you never were big on religion.' They both grin at that one. ‘And I would have been only six or seven because we still lived at the housing commission. I told them my name was Louisa Black. I loved all the stories, but really it was the food for morning tea. You know, saveloys and fairy bread. Never seen anything like it, but the Christmas party was the end. I made a total pig of myself with the party pies and then, to top it off, choked on the red lemonade and then it bloody well came back down through my nose all over my dress. Unbelievable mess. The end of my religious education, too ashamed to go back. But I learned something out of the whole shameful experience, you cannot snort red lemonade.'

She puts her hand on his shoulder and is glad he is her brother.

Sometimes the talk goes on too long until they can't pull out of the quicksand of it. So they must ration the past.

After the memories have closed down for the night, they sometimes read each other bits of things they love and Louisa these days goes for
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
It makes them laugh and she loves the bits about Norway and reading it, she sees northern fields on long summer nights when the skies are pea-green curtains and stars are swirling.

And Rob, in a voice carrying weird echoes of Emmett, reads mostly from his trade journal,
The Arborialist,
so that Louisa braces herself for rambling descriptions of tree structure. Strong laterals are frequently mentioned, and she often nods off.