36

Emmett’s been sleeping in the garage at the shop for a while now because he never could stand the cramped little rooms upstairs. Being up there felt exactly like he was choking. All of them jammed in there together, three little rooms in a row, exactly like a prison.

So he decided on the garage and hired a bloke to line the walls with ply and then painted them peacock blue himself (with help from Anne of course) and the big green desk was installed under the louvre window. He likes it out there and for Emmett, there’s something about being able to piss outside your door onto the weeds that just lifts a man out of the mean little suburbs and takes him somewhere else. Gives him some dignity.

Retirement emerges from the misty future and he can almost taste it. Until that day arrives, he’s waiting for every other to pass. They mean nothing until he tears them off. When he does retire, he knows it will set him free.

He plans to buy a little house somewhere deep in the bush, it doesn’t matter where. Then, in the bush, things will right themselves. They will. He knows it. Just a bit of space, that’s all a man wants. Anne will keep going with the shop but she’ll visit him at his rural paradise. Sometimes, though, the days seem so long.

One Saturday morning Anne finds Emmett asleep in the backyard. The Browning shotgun is cradled in one arm and a whisky bottle stands by waiting for the next call on it. He’s shot the weeds beside him and despite this, they look surprisingly alive, though the dirt could have been ploughed.

For a small tender second she thinks he’s dead, that he’s shot his head instead of the dirt and a kind of hot relief surges through her. But even when she’s thinking it, she realises there’s no blood, so it’s not real. And when she kneels beside him, kindness, her old saboteur, takes over.

‘Now Emmett,’ she says patting his cheek, ‘this is no good my poor old friend, we cannot have this.’ When she does rouse him and gets him sitting up, the poor wretch he has become is evident and she is saddened. He dribbles like a baby. She half carries him into the kitchen and gets his scrambled frame onto a chair. Then she makes a cup of tea with lots of sugar and she calls her doctor and speaks of Emmett as if he’s a child. He feels safe sitting in the kitchen despite the awful, unending sadness. His tea shakes as he sips it. Anne, he thinks, has become his mother. He’s crying. He puts out his hand to touch hers but she’s busy organising on the phone.

Emmett is admitted to Turramurra House for a six-week course of rehabilitation for alcoholism. He has many visitors. After week three, Jessie says to a fragile red-eyed Emmett, ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to get to know you now Dad. I’ve never known you sober. You’re probably a different person to the one I know.’ He agreed and smiled but wariness would never leave Jess.