2

Louisa’s first memory is of a plate of food lifting through the kitchen then ramming into a wall and sliding down slowly with the suction of a squid. Other times the plate would leap off the wall and smash into a tangle of sharpness and food. Apparently Emmett doesn’t like pumpkin. Or bastard chops. Can’t you get it through your head that he’s sick to fucking death of chops?

‘For God’s sake!’ he roars, ‘Can’t a man have a decent fucking meal ready for him you pathetic bitch? Is that too much to ask after a hard fucking day at work? You slave your guts out every fucking day and you come home to this putrid slop.’ You can see he’s briefly pleased with something and if Louisa were older she would reason that it was probably the word ‘putrid’, an excellent choice if harsh in this context. Still, he wastes no time gloating about good words now because he’s in full flight, holding her small mother by the face.

‘Is this good? No. What is this? I don’t know, I don’t...’ The smacking sounds are loud and hard. Her mother is on her knees. Louisa is nearly two and Rob about one. The screaming that goes with the throwing has been eliminated and the plates slide in a resounding silence. The child has stopped hearing. Her eyes are doing all the work now, pulling in images like a satellite dish. She must stay quiet, stay small and stay near her brother. She must not watch the hurting.

Right from the very beginning she understands that one day Emmett will kill her or one of them or all of them and then it’ll be their own fault. The certainty of it edges into her life. He is the paw of the bear on her head, heavy with the promise of its nature.

Friday nights are pay nights. Summer is grass green and it’s the blue of high skies and it’s the honey colour of sun. Days are spent in the envelope of yard in the housing commission place where the sea of grass waves high above their heads because Emmett doesn’t like to mow.

Children chasing and squealing and playing Blackfoot, their game of stalking lizards and each other. Playing hard and laughing and chasing each other until all are breathless and sagging like spent sacks onto the grass to laugh and then again to play some more. To make soup with flowers with the sun falling around them like a cloak of light.

There are only two Brown kids and all the other kids are from down the street. They’re allowed into the Brown yard but never into the house. Emmett doesn’t like other people’s brats. They are gathered around the bucket making daisy-weed soup when Emmett appears at the corner coming in from the street with a big box balanced on his shoulder like a greengrocer.

‘Come on you mob,’ he yells loud and happy tonight. ‘Come and see what I got.’ He’s been to see his old mates at the market. When he was young he lived near there and worked its long aisles sweeping and scrounging. There was no choice, he said, either you gave the family a chop-out or you went back to the orphanage.

Anne makes a space on the table. The screen door swings and the Brown children surge in on the wave of their father and there on the table is the biggest box of fruit they’ve ever seen. The neighbour kids watch for a while at the wire door but soon they are pulled away like small ghosts.

A bristly pineapple and a watermelon like a striped sub marine and grapes as green as eyes and apples and cherries so dark and hard, all spill out of the box. The kids and Anne and even Emmett make earrings out of the cherries and eat some until their teeth turn red. Then Emmett takes out the big knife and swings it down into the watermelon and the slicing, sucking sound as he pulls it out is tidal. He cuts them slices bigger than their faces. They spit shiny black pips into the box and then Emmett is cutting pears and serving thin slices skewered onto the tip of the knife like a priest offering communion.

Rob, his mouth full of cherries, says, ‘Dad, you should work at the market and we can always have fruit like this forever, wouldn’t that be good?’ Emmett pats the boy’s head, his hair so short his skull is visible. He smiles, his teeth still dark from the cherries.