31
Though she’s out of there now, out of the daily round of it all, Louisa assumes that Emmett is much the same and no one tells her different because once you leave, the group closes around those who remain. She can see this.
But regardless of Emmett, change is on its perfect swooping course and not even a year after Louisa leaves, Anne decides she needs to be around more for Jessie.
The local rag has long been a solace for her. It means half an hour to herself and any child who interrupts her at it gets short shrift. She often gets a snack to go with her read and in summer it’ll be a nice tomato cut up fine and dosed with a dash of vinegar, salt and white pepper. With her tomato diced in a dainty dish, she retires to the kitchen table for a detailed perusal of the local, and she always finishes with a smoke.
Today, a tiny speck of an ad says there’s a shop for rent on the road to Footscray about a mile away backing onto the railway line; but still, people get used to trains. She pores over the ad. ‘The House of Norma’ has been on Williams Road in West Footscray for at least thirty years and now it’s for sale. A ladies’ frock salon, she reads, frocks, hmm yeah, I could sell frocks till the cows come home. This will do me, she thinks, I’ll have my own income and I’ll be there for Jessie. Two birds, with one stone.
When it’s time to tell Emmett, she’s hollowed by fear but he stuns her by being sensible. It’s one of his reversals when he behaves just like a normal person. ‘Reckon you can make a go of it, do ya?’ he asks quietly, even reverently. They’re sitting on the back step after tea. ‘Time to change,’ he says, ‘best for all of us.’
That late summer night as Emmett and Anne talk, the crickets sing in the hard grey dirt of the yard and they catch a glimpse of a pocket of indigo sky tucked between their roof and next door’s. She explains her strategy slowly to Emmett and the possibilities reveal themselves one at a time like emerging stars.
They could strike it rich here, he thinks, feeling heat in the idea, she’s a bloody handy dressmaker, can talk to anyone and she’s got a business head on her shoulders. Could definitely be a goer. ‘I’ll be in it,’ he declares, ‘definitely.’ They shake hands and respectfully, he kisses her cheek.
They decide he will stay on at Wolf Street with Peter while they sell up and Anne will go straight to the shop. After the sale of Wolf Street, they’ll buy the shop and all live there. She’ll get Jessie settled in at the state school down the road and get the shop going. All sorted.
Emmett’s nearly fifty now and as dull as an old boxer. His hair is whispery grey and the circles under his eyes are muddy. Even the blue of his irises seems to have drained away and his fingernails are ridged and chalky. He drinks as much as he ever did, but it takes less to get to forgetting. He’s drinking whisky now and only the dream of early retirement keeps him going. Five years to go, he thinks, just five rotten years.
Apart from working and drinking, he grows tomatoes and he’s just about perfected a new feed for them which he calls rocket fuel. He soaks seaweed in the old yellow bucket until it’s so ripe it feels like you’re dicing with death just to breathe. Then he mixes in blood and bone. Labels the side of an old cordial bottle and splashes it around liberally to produce Grosse Lisse tomatoes as big as bulls’ hearts.
The afternoon they collect the kelp down at Willy back beach long stays in Anne’s mind. She’s living at the shop but comes back on the weekends to help keep Wolf Street decent. She has work to do but he wants her to come with him, and won’t take no for an answer.
It’s a wide open day and she can see at least three shades of blue in it, and the bay is as flat as a pan. She sits on the bluestone wall watching him awkwardly stumbling around on the rocks collecting seaweed that looks like hessian strips and stuffing them into the yellow bucket. It’s the one they made the Christmas pudding in all those years ago and each of the kids got a stir for luck and Emmett called Rob a stirrer and laughed and Rob threw the spoon at him and it all ended in tears. Time in a bucket.
Anne’s not speaking to Emmett today. He might not be so rough anymore, she thinks, but he’s still a pig and a bore and she lets her silence do the talking.
Yabbering on and on as he drove to the beach with the car slicing down the narrow road through this bluest day, Emmett told her over and again about his bloody seaweed stew.
‘It’s the best stuff, Annie,’ he boasted and turned to her and his big face filled all space. ‘Annie, you listening to me? This stuff is the goods, I’ll give you the drum on that. Jim, the old wog bloke at work, the cleaner, you know old Jim, the one whose kids are so smart? I told you all about them. One of them’s an engineer and the other I can’t remember what he does, might be something at Holden over in Broadie. Any way, he gets a new car every second year whatever he bloody does, lucky bastard ... well anyway, this is his recipe. Swears by it. And you know these wogs, they can grow any bloody thing.’
He burbled on and on and who cares? thought Anne. What difference can any of it ever make? Raving on about tomatoes and other people and not about normal things like his own kids or fixing up the house or even cutting back on the grog.
He’d insisted she come down here to Willy. It’s not as if she didn’t have plenty of other things to do at the shop or even over in Wolf Street. The laundry there looks like a Chinese joss house and the ironing pile is starting to smell. Centipedes dart at you when you shake the clothes out. But even these days it’s better not to say no flat out. Always keep your head down.
And then down there at the beach while she’s having a quiet smoke, she sees him at a distance and he seems like a speck of a man and not much at all. There’s a clarity that falls on you some days. You wait for it and when you wait, it doesn’t show and then, here you are sitting at the beach not waiting and it’s there. Just there, plain and beautiful. He’s just a man and not much of a one at all really, a small man out there under the increasingly fleecy sky against the disc of bay.
She gets up from the bluestone fence and dashes out her smoke not even regretting that it’s only halfway through and takes herself across the rocks, careful on her wafer-thin thongs, over to where Emmett is industriously loading up with seaweed, sighing and groaning and enjoying a sly fart into the wind. When she gets near enough he says in an injured tone, ‘A man wouldn’t mind a bloody chop-out now and then,’ and he reminds her of each one of her children.
The sun is gentle and the wind whips her hair under her sunglasses and into her eyes. She lets it be. She grabs hold of a long strip of seaweed and he gets hold of the other end and he laughs, lets it fall to Anne and she picks up the rubbery strip and drops it into the bucket. And she smiles, but just to herself.
The days of Wolf Street are numbered. There’s been a change in Emmett, a slow sagging decline that on good days Rob sees as a kind of apology that comes with a kind of ease. But Emmett is still as changeable as the future. And so there’s no surprise when one day in this peaceful period, Robert must tell his father the truth.
It’s been a happy Saturday afternoon, the sky outside holding the pearl light of winter and the moon already hanging like a white penny, while inside the Browns are laughing and talking. Rob is working these days at a factory where they recycle old car batteries that leak acid like dirty rivers. It’s gruelling and filthy but he’s getting strong, making some dough and starting to see himself as a man. ‘You’ve got muscles on your muscles, Robbie boy,’ Anne tells him one day after work and he allows himself a smile.
Dreams of science degrees have washed away with his childhood, but they weren’t his dreams anyway. One day he will do his horticulture degree but now he just wants money so he can get away. The work at the factory is tough and it’s made him hard. But he still needs more money for his trip so, a couple of nights a week, he serves drunks just like his father at The Standard, a dark ungainly triangle pub on the junction in Foot scray. It’s always filled with shoals of drunks. And he watches them with a cool reckoning. Human sponges, he thinks, sucking everyone in.
Even though lunchtime at Wolf Street is noon, hours later, in a little act of defiance, Jessie’s making herself a sandwich. No one will notice her because no one ever does. From the barren old fridge, she’s wrangled a slice of Stras and now she’s after the tomato sauce. She’s planning on meat with sauce, so she keeps her movements quiet and creeps around. She’s nine and round as a speckled egg. The bread is stale, so she toasts it and knows the noise of the toaster will annoy her father. He darts a look at her every now and then, as if she were a blowfly he means to squash.
In the hub of the kitchen, Emmett is expansive. The footy drones out of the radio and is turned down because North is losing. All afternoon it’s been one VB after another and, now that he’s fully tanked, he reckons Jessie shouldn’t be here. She’s bloody infuriating, cramping his damn style with the boys who, now they are adults, are finally innaresting. She has her hand on the food, knife underneath, ready to cut it in half when he lets loose with, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing over there? Why the fuck didn’t you eat at lunchtime? Useless fool of a child. What is the matter with you? Bloody pest of a girl, always have been. Go on. Get out of there, bloody idiot child...’ He flicks his wrist at her as if she were a dog while he drinks with the other hand. And, over the glass with his practised hard look, for good measure he hisses, ‘Piss off outta here now. Consider yourself warned.’
In the scheme of things, it isn’t much. There’s been worse. But for Rob at this moment, Jess and her little sandwich stand for everyone. He’s been hearing this shit since the day he was born. The sediment of it is in his bones. And hearing the crap has poisoned him. So now he doesn’t think. He pushes himself up and stands, leaning hard on the table to brace the shaking in his hands, in his heart, and quietly but loud enough says, ‘I’ve had you, Dad. Had you forever. Just do us all a favour and shut your mouth for once. You don’t care about us. You never loved any one of us, so why don’t you just piss off and let us get on with our lives?’ His eyes are wide, fists clenched and his heart is driving blood through him. It’s as if he’d taken a lift to the next floor and now he’s there.
Oh oh, thinks Jessie, pushing herself back into the corner between the stained cupboards and the dull sink with the scungy pink wettex neatly under the plug. Fear lifts in her but there is something else, and she doesn’t know what it’s called. When she’s older she’ll call it elation. Now she thinks with astonishment, ‘someone stood up for me’. Her delight is short-lived.
The scene unfolds, Emmett comes charging at Rob and the chair falls behind him as he pushes forward. He roars, ‘You fucking little dickhead. Who do you think you are? You are nothing, boy. Absolutely...’ And Rob sees his broken father held by an eternity of defeat.
The old man shoves Rob in the chest but Rob, now grown tall, blocks him and Emmett staggers. Over in the corner, Jessie still holds the knife in the shadow of her hand so hard the bone handle prints into her palm. She’s stopped breathing but she’s utterly ready.
Emmett and Rob stare at each other for a second or two and that small slice of time burns away. Then Rob grabs the tea towel on the table and chucks it at his father, and the cloth lands on Emmett’s head, checked and floppy as an Arab’s headgear. Rob looks at the old man and, in that tiny moment of disgrace, a smile passes through his eyes and he says, ‘Think you’re bloody King Farouk, don’t ya...’ And then, screen door slamming, he’s gone.
Jessie watches her brother leaving. Sees her father raising his glass to his lips, sees the amber of it and the shaking hand. Her heart is loud within her and her eyes are running with stealthy tears. She edges past Emmett, ducking down out into the yard, thinking, you’re a bully, nothing more and you know what? Robbie’s found out about you and you’re finished. And she weeps till she doesn’t know who she’s weeping for. As she climbs the peppercorn tree, she pushes the bread and butter knife up her sleeve.
Up here she can see the Uncle Toby’s silos. She’s still shaking as the coldness of the day moves into her. There is, lurking within, the unusual idea of stabbing her father. The image of it is there, but not the reality, which she is glad of. She wonders what she would have done if he’d hurt her mum or either one of her brothers or, she admits grudgingly, even Louisa, but she doubts she would ever have the guts to go through with it. And sitting there on the pitted branch of the raggy peppercorn tree, a goods train passes between the silos and the back fence and she watches it being absorbed into the cold cottony afternoon and still her tears fall and as she touches the dent in her palm left by the knife handle, it’s then that Jessie realises who she is and who she loves, and this gives her hope. She wipes her eyes and has a go at carving the letter ‘R’ into the gnarled tree limb and after a while, she realises this is not a knife to have done damage to anyone.