10
There’s something sacred about the races. They are a continuum and their currency is hope. Emmett studies the form all week and by Saturday he’s ready. Sussed it right out. Bloody organised. To the kids, the form guide, that perfectly folded paper, is the divine document and the key to their futures. At Wolf Street it’s the Bible.
They’re proud that this is the thing Emmett devotes himself to because when he eventually wins, they’ll stop being poor. And then things will get better. Their father will be happy, their mother will not have to work so hard and then they’ll be allowed to breathe like other kids. Money will make everything better. But despite all the quiet they give him, the wide berth, the tiptoeing and the nervous, watchful looks they shoot him in passing, it hasn’t happened yet.
Like horses, the Brown kids notice with their skin; the ripples along a flank that show a fly has landed, the waves beneath flesh. They’re as alert as antennas to their father’s mood.
‘I told ya he wouldn’t win anything today. He didn’t have enough time on the probabilities. Still, I tell ya, he’s a bloody amateur,’ Rob says casually as Louisa joins him to sit in the dirt and lean against the back fence.
‘Race four already and bloody nothing.’ He pulls a weed and casually wrings its neck.
Louisa sighs; she agrees but can’t admit that the day will end like all the others, with the old man getting comprehensively pissed and aggro over anything. How can you allow that so early?
‘Day’s not over yet, it’s only race four and he reckons to Mum he’s got something special in the sixth, and you know the System doesn’t just have to work on the trifecta.’ Saying it she looks sad and somehow crushed as if she doesn’t believe a word. The System can be independent of those races, she insists.
‘Well, the trifecta’s finished and that’s where all the real bucks are, you know that,’ says Rob, the bitter realist.
‘Are not,’ she says more fiercely than she feels.
‘Are so,’ Rob says and quickly sneaks in with, ‘are so to infinity,’ then he snickers, his shoulders moving with pleasure. Louisa says nothing, knowing he’s right, and in frustration digs her big toe into the dirt.
The sun is a lemon and she can feel it tightening her skin, hatching hot freckles. Rob’s in the same shorts, always looking a bit undersized because although he’s small for his age, his clothes look small too. He wears a checked western shirt with some red in it, short sleeves too high on his arms and his greyish hair is crew-cut.
Louisa’s dress is navy polyester/rayon/nylon with bobbles like warts strewn over the pattern of flowers that will never fade. She stretches the dress over her knees into a tent. Emmett has seen to it that she has not yet cut her hair. He likes girls to have long hair. It seems purer. Though he doesn’t know it, the truth of it is that Anne and Louisa conspire in this and about once a month Anne snips off Louisa’s split ends with her dressmaker’s scissors. Louisa’s dark hair is plaited and secured at each end with rubber bands.
Occasionally she paints her face with their paintbrush tips. Hairs escape the plaits horizontally. She examines the constellation of freckles on her left forearm, noting again that it’s the Southern Cross. This has to be a good omen.
Rob lets go a fart, a long fat bubble, in a peaceful kind of way and laughs at the sound of it. ‘A bit more choke and you would have started,’ Louisa says amiably as she leans away to avoid the blister of smell. She punches him lightly on the arm, calls him a pongy old dog.
He replies with ‘cow’ delivered in the same friendly way, and pushes her ankle with his foot. The sun soaks into them. The fart is absorbed by the still day. The air is loaded with the smell of the petrol station behind them on the main road and the rubbish bin not far up. Idly, she thinks again it’s a good thing all the smokers are inside. That pasty dishevelled Irish Catholic dog, Francis Xavier O’Hooligan, snores and flinches on the concrete. They are suspended in the aspic of the day waiting for their father to make it rich.