15
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, ‘Darling 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, ‘Louie, 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.