35

Settled in upstairs at the shop with her mum, it’s not long before Jessie has trouble even remembering Wolf Street but she doesn’t tell this to anyone because the girl can’t afford to get left out of anything else, even memories. After settlement takes place at Wolf Street, Emmett and Peter move into the shop and that’s something else to get used to. The bloody goods trains passing by the back fence whenever they like, shaking everyone up with their low sad horns, and sometimes, lying in their beds, the Browns can even hear the mournful sounds of cattle as the trains slow down. Living at the shop is a tight fit and they’re on top of each other again, but thankfully Emmett is hardly ever there. The pub beckons.

Peter’s doing some course or other but the truth is he’s always out with his mates, the crazy Argentinians he met down at the angling club, having barbies at their place and cooking up massive meat feasts and playing music that forces people to dance. Before too long though, the crowding gets to him and he moves out with Rob to a terrace in North Melbourne. Twice a day he feeds rainbow lorikeets in the backyard. He loves to watch as the ball of dappled colour falls upon the old tin pie dish.

And then there’s Jessie, the last survivor, stuck at the shop like a mouldy leftover that’s slipped down the back of the fridge. Doesn’t talk much at home, mainly because no one wants to hear what she has to say, and these days she doesn’t care one way or another whether her mother’s home or not.

It’s much remarked upon that Jessie doesn’t look like the rest of the Browns. Where’s the olive skin, the dark waves of hair and the blue eyes? In the future, she’ll dye her hair the colour of mahogany, get the freckles zapped and with the aid of make-up she’ll look much like the other Browns, the ones she’s not real keen on at the moment.

Now she’s whippet-thin with pale freckled skin, red-gold hair and hands as small as a six-year-old’s. Anne often wonders why Jessie is the only real rebel in the family. She’d worked so hard when the others were young and they’d all been reasonable, supportive and mostly obedient. Now, here she is giving Jessie all this attention and it’s not working. The endless, involving mystery of kids.

‘The House of Norma’ is where the ladies of Footscray go to shop but given there aren’t many ladies left around the place these days, it’s gone a bit too quiet and no-sales days become regular landmarks in the takings book. Jess reckons Anne might as well not be there because she spends all her time out in the shop magging on to horrible old bats who never buy anything anyway and money is always in short supply and the truth is that the big shopping mall being built down the road is doing ‘Norma’ right in the eye. Plus interest rates are through the roof.

Jessie reckons won’t be long now and they’ll be broke again. And then soon enough Anne’ll be back at the tannery. She took on that job when Jess was little because they paid women equal wages and she lasted six months, tanning hides. Carting buckets of dye and cleaning down the skins with brooms loaded with bleach.

Anne never told the kids she vomited most meal breaks at the awful sight of the skinned animals. Didn’t seem any point telling anyone, who would care anyway? And she didn’t see it ever changing. In the end she went back to dressmaking even though it didn’t pay as much. Maybe it was true, she thought, money isn’t everything.

When Jess comes home from school down the shop sideway and sees Frank’s old kennel leaning on the fence she always feels a pulse of loneliness because she reckons that scrappy, shaggy old dog with his scabs and his hidden brown eyes really was her mother and her father.

All the best things had Frank in them. The time Emmett and Jess went up to Clark’s grocery to get his beer and Frank led the way and took a wrong turn in the shop and knocked down a stack of tins and people were slipping over and yelling and Frank was charging around barking and kids were laughing and someone asked Emmett if Frank was his dog and he said, ‘Never seen him before mate,’ and winked at Jess as he hefted his carton of beer up onto his shoulder. Outside in the drizzly morning Frank was calmly waiting for them, having a relaxed scratch.

And the Christmas morning he brought home a hot stuffed roast chook he’d pinched and laid it at Emmett’s feet in the backyard, and Emmett gingerly cut the string from the oven-hot bird and took the rosemary out and gave the chook back to him. ‘He’s copped some poor old wog’s Chrissie dinner.’ Emmett roared with delight. And it seemed to Jess that this was a sign that things would be better and that, as Frank ate his stolen chook, it seemed a kind of happiness fell upon them and they knew it and held it.

But then in the end, Frank developed a cancer the size of a football on his side and the vet said it was over. He would have to be put down. Before that last trip to the vet, Emmett went down to the butcher shop and picked out a pale pork chop as round as a moon for the old dog. He heated up the barbie, lovingly standing around waiting for the right temperature, and then cooked the meat up nice and slow and cut it up and cooled it and then fed it to him slowly, by the mouthful.

Frank seemed to know what was coming and let them all say goodbye with the patience he had always shown. But when Emmett carried him to the car, even then Jessie wasn’t impressed by her father’s tenderness, she saw right through it. All fraud.

Still, she knelt beside Frank all through his last meal and she’s practically crying now just thinking about it, but holds back when she remembers her recent application of mascara. That day Emmett had cried too, though it seemed to be by chance and no one mentioned the tears that slid straight down his face.

Emmett brought Frank’s body back from the vet still wrapped in the striped towel Louisa won for being Most Improved Swimmer in Grade One. And even then Jessie thought, ‘God, bloody Louisa, the Paragon has to be in everything.’ Emmett buried the dog under the kennel and now Jessie sees that even his name is fading. She’d re-paint it if she was a good person, but since she isn’t, that lets her off.