26

In the last year of high school Louisa decides she might as well become a journalist. It’s all a bit of a scramble driven by Miss Burton. Louisa wonders if a journalist is the same thing as a reporter. She’s heard of Clark Kent and Lois Lane so reckons she’s probably well on the way. If she’d known the Pommy author Nik Cohn was one, she would have jumped at it.

‘You’ve got a good deal of curiousity in you, young Louisa,’ Miss B says, beaming. It’s lunchtime on a windy day in early summer. A knot of teenage girls gathers on the next bench. They’re using their knees as plates and carefully laying potato chips on buttered white breadrolls then stuffing the chip bags into crevices in the seats. Some bags escape and lift across the yard in the wind like wonky stray birds.

Louisa’s on her own under a worn-out gum, hidden by a long fringe of leaves and consuming Catch 22. The chattering girls might not even be there. When Miss Burton slides in beside her, glasses glinting in the bright day, Louisa, always easily startled, gasps as if she’s been attacked and the teacher tries to recover from fright to friendliness. The scabby grey bitumen stretches around their feet.

‘Journalism,’ Miss Burton announces enthusiastically, still breathless from striding out to find Louisa. She likes this word. This is a special word. ‘They’re looking for cadets now in the city. You could do this, my girl. It’s a job for a special girl.’ And smiling, she passes a square of newspaper ad to her and her smile feels like love.

Louisa holds the little square of grey print and it flutters like a living thing. Sounds as good as anything and she’d like to please Miss Burton seeing as how she thinks she might love her. She puts the ad inside the book. Later, walking to the bus with Jessie’s small hand in hers, she wonders, ‘How do you get to be like Miss Burton?’

Jessie is babbling about seeing the horsie but by now they’re well past the horse in the thistly paddock and they head towards the red bus that seems to stream up and down the big road endlessly, and today the world seems all blue sky with a raft of passing cloud.

One of the clouds has slipped from the others and is forming a ladder and this makes her smile. Could it be the ladder leading her out of here? Rubbish, she scolds herself, as if the sky’s got anything to do with anything.

She touches her sister’s baby head for comfort and realises that university is the only way to climb out of here to become like Miss Burton. But then seldom do journalists go to university. Ah, you don’t always get what you want and a job is what you need, she tells herself.

Jessie has been at swimming lessons and the metal smell of chlorine folds around her. ‘Did you have a good swim today Jess?’ Louisa asks as they sit on the bus. ‘Nah,’ says Jess staring out the window holding onto her bag of wet towel, ‘I want Mum.’

Lou touches her head again and thinks, I know you do, and she wipes Jessie’s trailing nose with the corner of her school dress. ‘Carn little Jess, you’re all right matey,’ she says and rests her arm around the child’s slight shoulders. If she ever has children, Louisa decides, she will be with them every bloody minute of every bloody day.

Nothing can be real about her possible life as a journalist until she tells Anne. In the kitchen that night before her mum gets home, she goes about her chores. The louvre windows are open and she can see into next door’s yard where white sheets flap on the line.

She begins to feel a sense of portent and when this happens her right wrist prickles. It prickles now and she feels change is moving towards her and even though she wants it, it scares her rigid. She decides to delay telling her mother because she knows that when she tells this part of her story, it will happen in short time and then she will be gone and the time of Emmett will be over and the newness, what will it be?

She sets the blue laminex table with knives and forks and salt and pepper. Rob stumbles up the fernery steps and bursts into the kitchen. The day has dredged away and the gloom says maybe it will rain. He flicks a switch and the stick of light on the ceiling blinks on reluctantly.

‘God, Louisa, you’re fooling around in the dark here, always sitting in the dark, what’s the bloody matter with you?’ He slides his bag up the passage out of the way.

‘Get stuffed Robert,’ she says casually and gets herself a bit of bread, holds it in her palm and forces a small river of tomato sauce onto it and eats it before the sauce can escape.

Rob can tell Emmett isn’t around because she’s relaxed. There’s not much sign of Emmett these days. They have entered into an island of time when he’s always at the pub.

Rob wrenches the fridge door open and stands there gazing in as if it will answer everything. ‘What’s for tea?’ he asks, lulled by the bright void and stilled by the cool air.

‘Chops,’ Louisa says, poking at them, curled and spitting in the pan, ‘It’s always bloody chops, dill boy. Haven’t you noticed?’

He grabs three slices of bread from the plastic bag on the bench, wads them up and stuffs them into his mouth and heads out to the sleep-out. ‘How long?’ she hears the words exiting past the bread but doesn’t bother replying.

Later that night after tea, the others scatter to enjoy the lounge room and the tele in the absence of Emmett. They could get used to this. Telling Anne, the idea of herself as a journalist takes hold and begins to grow. She’s drying the dishes. ‘Miss Burton thinks I’d be good at it,’ she finds herself saying, getting stuttery at the idea. ‘News papers, you know, you can be a sort of a writer.’

Anne draws in a long breath. She’s got a smoke going beside her in the mosaic ashtray Louisa made in grade four. The smoke is drawn upward as if by a genie. Anne smiles her beautiful smile. ‘Write to them Lou. Write them a good long letter all about yourself,’ she says, her hands in the sink moving in and out of the grey water, passing out plates and knives and forks.

She finishes up and dries her hands on the tea towel Louisa is holding and picks up the ad from the bench, squinting as she scrutinises it. She grabs her smoke and takes a long contented drag. ‘Write all about everything,’ she says, still smiling and handing it back. ‘They will not be able to resist you.’