Mysteries bother Louisa. The first is a simple thing really, but it makes so much difference to them. How does he get home so early? The answer is that at work he bluffs and sulks and is occasionally brilliant and he knows exactly when to lay low. He survives for years on this strategy. He nicks off early and arrives home before the kids as if he doesn't know they'll be there, as if he expects them to have cleared off. He often gets there just in time to greet them.
Anne is always later than Emmett because she doesn't leave until five o'clock and it takes her twenty minutes to walk home. Louisa never works out how he gets home in time to plague them but sometimes when he's boozing he doesn't come home at all and these are times to relish. It's only when he has no money that he drinks at home.
The other mystery that plagues her with its tangling stickiness is why their mother doesn't take them away from the old man. But she never works out the answer to this one either, except that her mother is busy, too busy to be leaving anyone. She works all day sewing fine clothes for wealthy women up at the big green factory.
Some days Louisa combines her two questions and after she's put the potatoes on and cleaned the kitchen, she sets off to walk to her mother's work considering that she might miss the old man and mulling over the idea that maybe Mum will leave him one day. She stretches out her skinny knock-kneed legs along Wolf Street, hoping that she's got the time right so she doesn't miss Mum.
On days when she's mixed up the times she'll still be sitting on the step waiting for Anne when all the other workers file past her, a laughing stream of women released from their machines.
Her mum's Maltese friend, Maria, with her wild curly hair and chocolate eyes, stops and pats her back and picks up her chin and holds her face and smiles and says, âDarling girl, your mama, she go. She first to leave tonight. You miss her.' Louisa jumps up and hides the tears rushing at her over the kindness of Maria and the missing of her mother, and takes off towards the footy ground. This is the way Anne walks. Louisa knows it.
Some days she catches Anne striding down the street in her high heels and the joy of finding her mother alone explodes within her. Anne can make her feel more alive than anyone in the world, just by the way she says, âLouie, darling,' and spending time alone with her is like walking into a green sanctuary.
Other days, in that forlorn stretch between five and six, Louisa will miss her and trail into the house to find the spuds she's prepared either burned black and stinking of seared metal or not yet on. Both bad scenarios.
Louisa is always careful to be very, very good but still, she gets it wrong sometimes. She recalls her face near Emmett's knees, the belt coming down again and again, and looking up, seeing the white crust of sweat circling his armpit on his shirt and smelling the animal of him, like meat. She never understands why they all don't just run away but she could never run anywhere without the rest of them, so she's stuck.
Anne is beautiful in a way her daughter will never be. A brown-haired blue-eyed girl whose quietness Emmett believes is his own private haven. He needs the healing she offers and by degrees she becomes the mother he never had, whether she wants that or not.
At first she doesn't understand there's something wrong with him and later she puts his rages down to worries at work, thinks that if she gives him no reason to be upset, then the smoothness of life will continue.
It takes a year or so for that unquiet feeling she first had about him to re-emerge. She will never forget that day with Marge and Ray down at the beach when he had the tantrum because his foot got wet; but why, she wonders, did she go ahead with him after that? What was wrong with her? She had the chance to get away and missed it.
She's in bed next to Emmett listening to him snore. He sounds like a rusty gate caught in the wind and he takes up all the air. The booze makes him snore. She's lucky to have a small corner of the bed.
She remembers when he didn't snore, in the days when he was tender and when he seemed the cleverest man. It slips her mind that he was handsome, but she knows he must have been. Handsome. Never remembers this because it might lead to the idea that she loved him. Truth is, if there was good sex, it went away so fast it might have been imagined. Now, the best you can say about it is that it's fast. These days Anne thinks of sex with pure revulsion. And anyway, is Emmett still within that snoring man? Is this really Emmett sawing at the air beside her? Can that really be him? No, she thinks, it cannot be.
Anne doesn't believe in crying, doesn't indulge in what she thinks of as weakness. She just moves her face forward onto the cool cotton of the pillow. But whether she believes in weeping or not, tears seep down the pillow to make a pocket of rain.
The rhythm in Emmett's snoring drones on and then all of a sudden she realises with a stab of panic that she has to be at work by eight-fifteen. Work, thuds her heart in the language she most understands, work. Must sleep, she thinks. Must not let the sawing cut into her head.
And then, in a moment of clarity as clear as light, she cannot be in the same room as this man another second. She pushes herself up and with the practised habit of a ghost, puts her hand on her dressing gown, shrugs it on in the dark and quietly moves to her babies, drawn to them as though they hold every answer.
The relief of sleeping with the babies is a consolation she can't live without. Settling in around their soft warm limbs and feeling their small breaths, she believes there's no comparison to the purity of her children and their perfection is her blessing.
She tries to drift off but her mind is stuck in the groove of how she let Emmett into her life. Maybe she said yes to him because he was smart, smarter than anyone she'd ever met, and she wanted brains for her children.
She's stroking Peter's small head absently as a way of settling herself. She had wanted her kids to be cleverer than the others and cleverer than herself. Can that have been wrong? And if it was, who will know?
Anne sometimes remembers that she was beautiful in a way that made her look like the young Queen of England, refined and poised and somehow vulnerable, with her wide smiling mouth and innocent eyes. She could've married Des Peck, the gawky young plumber, and lived happily ever after in Newport but then Emmett called her Bambi. He saw the purity.
Her father never liked Emmett, he thought he was strange and dangerous and told her so. She never knew what her mother thought because they never discussed it.
At first she loved him so deeply it amazed her and she was his willing pupil. He read books to her while they were in bed on the weekends before Louisa was born. The girl who left school at fourteen to become an apprentice dressmaker was thrilled with what he knew and how he'd taught himself so much. He spoke about writing with reverence. He read
The Grapes of Wrath
to her and they were both in tears. Such a book. Then they tore through all of Jules Verne because the future appealed to Emmett. He loved the idea that it would be better then, that people wouldn't be slaves in factories, that their kids would be educated and if they were educated then they'd be rich and if they were rich, they'd be happy.
She doesn't think about what went wrong and doesn't allow herself the time to be disappointed. Anyway, all the women she knows are smarter and better than their husbands, that's just the way it is, and most of them take a belting now and then. She just gets on. She has only enough money to make it each week and it seems there are just so many kids.
She has to work, that's all there is, but she thanks God for it because without work she would be lost.
July seventeen was a mid-winter's night and the air in the fernery was frosty and nearly visible. The killing of Daniel was not intentional; it just happened that Daniel slipped over that bad night. You can't run that fast at five and you have to know how to behave. Daniel forgot and he panicked. Poor little bugger with his cow's lick and his matchbox car collection.
Daniel had been five years old for just four days when he died. He was already a schoolboy at four-and-a-half and he was as bright and shiny as the silver stars the teacher put on his drawings. He was proud of Rob's old school bag and he barracked for the Dogs and dreamed of playing cricket for Australia.
Louisa often wonders whose fault it was and finally decides it might have been hers. She never discusses this with Rob or with anyone else. That cold night when Anne knelt beside Daniel and picked him up in her arms she knew he was dead but the idea seemed too immense to be real. The hospital would bring him back to them because that's what they did. She knelt over him on the lino, holding and rocking him in her arms for a longest ache of time. When the ambulance came she had to be forced to let go of the child.
Emmett didn't think the hospital would help because he knew in that deep secret way that this was the truth that he would always live with. So Emmett was distraught and it didn't help at all. Anne looked at him as he settled into the horror of the knowledge and thought briefly, how many people can you look after in your life? And her weeping was silent and endless and then Daniel claimed her attention forever. Daniel in her arms stilled. The child who went away.
The ambulance men took him to hospital and there he was pronounced dead, his mother standing beside him holding his hand, lost and broken.
Later it occurs to her that Emmett always hated the kids just because they are kids. That he wants their place. Wants to always be the child, the eternal child. Is jealous of their time in the place of children. That's the why of it but it doesn't help, not at all. The reality is that the taste of sorrow lasts long and is bitter and heavy and never leaves you. Its sourness takes over and handles everything.
Rob and Louisa reckon Emmett ended up killing Daniel just the same as if he'd taken down the old Browning shotgun wrapped in the ragged grey blanket on top of the wardrobe and shot him.
Rob also thinks it's got a lot to do with him. If that sounds like rubbish, tough ... it was his job to keep his brothers and sister safe and he failed. He could've stopped him, somehow diverted him you know, changed the mood or even made it worse so it would be aimed square at himself. He knows it. The world, he believes, knows it too. Daniel, he reckons, probably knew it, but all that knowing doesn't change a single bloody thing.
The way Rob sees it, the old man scared the boy to death; he'd done this before, to all of them. Daniel was running from him, but this time he slipped and his head hit the corner of the wall and blood came from his ear and his mouth and he just died. Doesn't take long to die.
Louisa had charged out there in the instant she heard Daniel hit the wall. She saw Emmett go berserk that night. He'd thrown his plate at the wall again, the curly tails of the chops snuggled into themselves, the peas scattering. Mashed potatoes making hills like clouds. Just crazy again for no reason, but the difference was that Daniel was outside in the toilet when Emmett got home and couldn't get back in.
He waited and waited and then he thought it was all right but his timing was all wrong because he was only a little kid and he couldn't get past Emmett, the wild beast in the kitchen fuming about âbloody rats of kids always under your bloody feet when you're trying to get some tea for yourself because your useless wife hasn't done it for you. Bloody little bastards and who knows whose they are anyway, who knows?'
Strangest thing is, Rob concedes, there had been much worse times and none of them had died. And then there's this small moment and it catches Dan forever. How do you work it out? Rob was in the bedroom reading
The Phantom,
keeping the other kids awake with the light and knowing it but not caring one bit, and then Daniel needed to go to the dunny and it was obvious that Rob should have taken him because he was scared of the dark but Rob didn't do it, did he?
Louisa sleeping in Nan's old room knew he'd gone out there and was waiting for him to come back. She'd heard him nick out and then heard Emmett come home and she knew the boy waited and waited till he thought it was safe to run past. Louisa still says she should have gone out to get him.
âHow'd ya know the old man would go off?' Rob asks her later when they talk it over in the shed. With the flatness of old knowledge, she says, âBad things just happen around here and you've got to expect it. Be mental not to.'
Rob wonders where his mother was and he's always wondered that. He decides she was probably hiding in the front room watching
IMT.
Graham Kennedy, the man with the bug eyes, was her hero and if she didn't concede that he was funny, then he sure was naughty. Best not to go near the old man after a night at the pub and she'd already put the kids to bed.
Emmett didn't go to gaol for killing Daniel. At the hospital a wide, pale man named Dr Steele listened to the story that Daniel was running around the corner after going to the toilet because he thought he'd get into trouble for being out of bed at nine-thirty at night and slipped and hit his head on the wall. Signed the death certificate and said it was an unfortunate accident.
Emmett wept when the police interviewed him, but it was all just a formality. The constables lifted their big shoes softly in the little kitchen and scratched down the details with their restive ballpoints, keen to get away from a place burdened with such sadness.
And the pain of Daniel's death goes on and on like something alive and growing in all of them. Rob doesn't believe that Daniel actually died that night. Maybe he just ran away. Daniel is withdrawn from them like all hope.
Peter is left trailing around after the big kids, lost and halved. He takes Daniel's school bag every day. He aches with a nameless pain. He keeps his eyes down. He will not hold Louisa's hand on the way to school. He drops back and Frank walks with him. He throws stones at anything that moves and takes no pleasure when he hits something. Once he hits a white cat and it limps away and he cries again. Every single thing is wrong. Every night Rob hears him crying. There doesn't seem to be anything to say. Yet the little boy keeps going. In the end he decides he wants to be a fisherman because Daniel liked the sea so much.
And Louisa finds it only gets worse after Daniel's death. Her silence is loud, but then she never spoke much anyway. Rob calls her Sourpuss Sally to get her going, get her mad.
Once he dares her to break an egg on his head and when goaded by taunts that she's weak and pathetic she does it, breaks the egg and feels shocked at herself. He remembers the shiny egg slipping over the cliff of his forehead. He laughs so much he inhales raw egg but Louisa doesn't laugh. She walks away and leaves the mess for him. It is as if nothing matters anymore. Daniel is between everyone.
Emmett is never home much now, he comes in drunk late after they are all in bed and even he is quieter, and the peace of that time is Daniel's legacy. Anne just keeps working away sewing all day, making food and cleaning, washing and seeing to the kids.
In time, Rob and Peter talk at night of ghosts and of Emmett. And later Peter tells Rob about his nice teacher Miss Wood, who smells somehow buttery, and that he follows her around when she's on yard duty, staying back so she won't notice.
One school night they're in bed waiting for sleep. They hear the shadowy canned laughter track steal away in waves from the tele in the lounge. Then Peter strangely announces, as a kind of declaration of intent, âI like fishing best in the whole world. All I want to do is walk into the sea and stay there with the fish.'
Rob burrows into the bed and punches the pillow a bit. âOh yeah,' he says deeply unimpressed and beginning to wish he had his own room. âWhy's that?'
âBecause that's the safest place you could be. Under the water nothing can get you.'
âWhat about air, mate, breathing, you know? Humans like air.' There's a silence between them for a bit.
âI won't have to breathe. It'll be special. I'll be like the fish, I'll be able to.'
Rob sighs, moves a leg to the cold bit of the bed. âWhat about the sharks then, what about that?'
Peter is quiet. The full moon illuminates the room and makes crosses on the wall from the checks in the curtains. âSharks won't want me anymore. I'll be safe. Daniel will stop them. Daniel won't let things hurt me.'
Rob hears Peter's breathing become regular. He looks up into the soft dark and waits for it to take him.