4

The walls of Wolf Street are coated with old smoke from the fire when the couch went up a while ago. Grandpa George thought it was the fireplace and put a match to it. Pretty soon smoke was rolling out from the house and Stan Williams from next door, a big soft pillow of a man, just happened to be getting home late from his Red Cross meeting. He was a volunteer.

When he saw the hot mesh of smoke emerging, he ran round the back and pushed through the door of the smoky house. Choking, he grabbed Louisa, who seemed to always be at her grandparents’ house in those days, and pulled her out of bed. He surged down the front with the child in his arms like a hero emerging from the surf.

Outside in the street Nan and Pa sat on kitchen chairs with blankets across their shoulders. The red of the fire truck throbbed through the night and smoke, a slinking animal, just kept slipping through the door.

Because of the fire, Grandpa George went to live at the big mental home in the parched paddocks further west at Sunbury and Nan stayed on at Wolf Street alone. Anne took the kids to Sunbury on Sundays.

To get there they’d walk the long paths through brown paddocks. The paths were shaded from the white hot sun by corrugated iron strips and after many turns they’d find Pa standing alone among many in a vast room, bruised from thumps from other patients.

Though his pants were held up with braces, he’d lost so much weight they sagged like a half-mast flag. His eyes were gaps. Even in photographs it was apparent that he was fading out. When the kids held his hands they could have been holding moths.

He died at Sunbury and Nan forgot about eating and survived on smokes alone. So in 1969, Emmett and Anne and Louisa and Rob and the twins Peter and Daniel moved into Wolf Street, West Footscray. They brought their beds, their noise, their fights and not much else.

The Maribyrnong River pushes inland from the ports on the marshy edges of the horse-head-shaped Port Phillip Bay deep into Footscray. If you rise up above, you’ll see that the city works on a grid and also, that there are so few trees, it’s a blasted landscape.

Regardless of trees, Emmett believes Footscray is a better bet than the housing commission and Wolf Street has the advantage that the War Service loan on Nan’s house is cheaper. More money for booze and the ponies.

Although Wolf Street is to the west of the river, on warm evenings when the kids are playing kick-to-kick on the deserted Total service station behind the house, they imagine that in the lull between kicks and in the spaces of silence when cars are not roaring down Williamstown Road, they can just about hear tug boats moving about in some blue distance. It’s highly doubtful the Browns can hear any boats. Still, they persist in the illusion. Such fancies make life better. And though they seldom discuss them, they uphold them with each other.

Number fifty-five Wolf Street is one in a row of boxy wooden places that line both sides of the long narrow street. It has four rooms, two on each side divided by a skinny passageway. First is the lounge room where in winter Emmett stokes the fire until the throbbing orange of it forces the kids and their cushions back like retreating seals. Next comes Emmett and Anne’s room, then Nan’s, and the kids are in the last room. The kitchen runs along the back and is connected to a small bathroom with a sliding door. A lean-to fernery slouches up against the kitchen and the washhouse and toilet hang onto that. There’s no electric light and no windows and sitting on the throne in the dunny in the dark, the kids’ feet swing high and loose.

A modified Hills hoist dominates the yard. An amateur inventor once lived at fifty-five, a bloke named Herb Hawkins, long since dead. Herb took it into his head to improve upon the clothesline with a hydraulic lift device (a hose) attached to the tap beside the house. The water was meant to push up the clothesline and save all the effort of winding. Possibly it once worked but when the Browns live there it doesn’t, and now tilts heavily to one side.

Since the hydraulics packed up (oozing for weeks like a wound) the clothesline offers no lift at all and so remains fixed. Sheets can’t go on the low side because they drag in the dirt. Still, the frame of the thing is sturdy enough for kids to swing on and as a wizzy-giver it’s unbeatable.

The kids aren’t allowed inside much when Emmett’s around, so the backyard and the street are theirs. For a little yard, there’s a lot going on. In one corner is the big shed which is seldom used by adults anymore since Emmett made beer and most of the bottles exploded.

Now the big shed is calm though slightly creepy and the kids reckon there may be someone buried inside in a shallow grave, just going by the atmosphere. A curtain of spiders’ webs hangs over the crooked little window.

The dog who became Frank was hidden in there for six days until his scratching and howling got him discovered and turfed out by Emmett who raged red-faced that he refused to take on any more bloody dogs ... or kids. ‘They shit everywhere and bite people and then a man has to sort the whole bloody mess out. NOT HAVING IT!’

But the dog was never really impressed by Emmett. He just sat there in the shed watching and even seemed bored, as if he’d seen better displays. He propped outside on the concrete and scratched himself lazily. And the kids had seen worse displays about less, so they weren’t without hope either.

For two days the dog sat at the front gate of number fifty-five without food. He took a bit of water from the gutter when he could find it but it seemed he had chosen his family and that was it. In the end, coming home from work one day, Emmett saw him there, invited him in for a feed of Rice Bubbles and gave him a name.

‘Francis Xavier O’Hooligan,’ Emmett declared in the kitchen that night standing beside Frank as the dog enthusiastically knocked back his Rice Bubbles, ‘is a Catholic dog.’ Pause, while the kids absorbed the detail. ‘And as such, will need to be treated with respect and affection. These Micks get touchy if you don’t love ’em,’ he explained sagely to the kids, drawing on his time in a Catholic orphanage but not saying so. ‘They are very fond of a bit of ceremony,’ he said. ‘Love a bit of a fuss.’

The kids thought their father was off and raving again and they knew that the dog was unlikely to have a religion, but listening was the way of peace, and they were deeply glad to have the sane and wise Frank on board.

The little shed was where Pa used to finish off cricket bats, planing them patiently and knocking them in with a wooden mallet. It was even said that some of his bats had been used by test cricketers.

And when he was working, the knocking of wood on wood rang out in hollow circles. Pa once worked at a little bat factory down the road in Seddon. He made a bat for Rob but it got pinched which was said to be Rob’s own fault, yet no one suffered more at the loss of the mystical bat than Rob. He yearned for it, dreamed about it. Emmett called the boy pathetic for losing the bat and said he ought to be whipped but right at that moment, he couldn’t be bothered. He did say that giving the boy a bat was a waste. ‘Never be much of a batsman, would ya anyway? Never be much good at anybloodything.’

Still when the boy made his first century in the schoolyard Emmett was mildly aroused. He was stacking the week’s beer supply into the fridge leaving not much space for anything else. Bending over, he was illuminated by the fridge light and for a while it seemed he might even be impressed. But then flipping the lid off the first for the day, he dismissed it as schoolboy cricket and not worth a pinch of shit.

After Pa died each of the kids claimed the little shed at various times – the boys for a fort with sticks poking through the windows like weapons. For a while the war theme was uppermost and they made hand grenades out of tins stuffed with oily rags and chucked them out onto the petrol station where Dimitri, the transcendently dark bloke who ran the servo, kicked them aside or chucked them back. The bombs made a racket on the tin roof and his curses were like nothing they’d ever heard.

In time, another project beckoned, making a machine or a kite or a billycart. Rob was always in charge but Peter and Dan, three years younger, were usually the inspiration. Louisa was neither invited nor interested but when the boys tired of the shed, she inherited it. Tried to make a home of it and put up pictures of flowers laboriously cut from faded magazines and draped scraps of her mother’s fabrics at the window.

A moat of concrete surrounds the house and beyond the shed the backyard is a square of dust and weeds dominated by the clothesline skeleton and a skinny apple tree grown from a core Louisa buried in the dust and watered. Sometimes Rob mows the patch of weeds with the rusty hand-mower.

The front of the house faces west and cops the full force of the afternoon sun as it heaves into the lounge room and the front bedroom. On summer afternoons the venom in that sun feels personal, but somehow the narrow sideway stays cool with fishbone ferns and moss unfurling slow and green in shallow furrows along the fence.

Anne tries to soften the old house by putting pale pebbles around the one established plant at Wolf Street, a barbed old mother-in-law’s tongue jutting victoriously from the triangle garden bed under the lounge-room window. But unfortunately, the pebbles reflect sunlight upwards into the room like a searchlight and make it hotter. The pointy plant grows bigger and sharper.

Anne lays black plastic under the pebbles to suppress the oxalis and kikuyu but soon, with the pure resolve of freedom fighters, the weeds surge through the plastic and engulf the pebbles until she admits defeat and gardens no more. A hanging basket that once held red petunias still swings with ghostly menace on the verandah now, heavy with dry dirt.

On the house, the paint has been shed down to the naked slug-coloured wood but for the kids even paint has its uses. It’s possible in idle moments to conscientiously ease off long shreds of it and then to scrunch them into younger ones’ heads so that it looks like they have appalling dandruff with the added bonus that it’s very hard to remove.

All the neighbourhood kids agree that the Browns live in the worst house in the street and some even say it’s haunted. Johnno Johnson from Louisa’s grade rides past regularly on his sister’s bike yelling, ‘Ghostie ... Woooooo Louisa Brown lives in a ghost house.’ After the second time he does it Louisa is convinced this can only mean he likes her. Therefore, she reasons, he must be cracked.

Soon after the move to Wolf Street, the Brown kids discover a hedge down the street and they find out what hedges are best for: hiding in. It’s a big, shaggy cypress hedge on a corner. The apex is deep and comfortable and in there, in that dry little room, the roots of the hedge push down into the earth, protecting the children like the ankles of giants.