47
Some days it seems too far. Some days Emmett fears he won’t get to retirement. He wants it too much. You just can’t want things, he thinks, some bastard will always try to stop ya. Days he drives to work wondering whether he’ll even live that long. Probably cark it right before the payout, he tells himself, and wouldn’t that be just bloody typical? He’s got a cold and the headaches just keep coming.
If he makes it to the appointed day he plans to move away from the shop, from Anne, from every single bloody thing he knows. He wants to be clean again, to be new somewhere with people who don’t know him. And the bush is where he was born. If he’d stayed there maybe things wouldn’t have got so stuffed up. Ah, who knows, he sighs, weaving through the back streets on his way to work, past all the sardine houses jammed together. All this would surely drive anyone mad he reckons.
He’s not fussy where he ends up, bush people are much of a muchness to him. Just wants somewhere small, somewhere with a couple of paddocks and a whole lot of sky. He doesn’t need his family, believes they’re better off without him. When they look at me, he reckons, they see too much.
Eventually, Emmett retires to Deakin, a small town of about five hundred people nestled near the granite mountains rising abruptly from the plains near Ballarat. He’s been there a while in the crooked little house with three small paddocks. And he so loves all that sky and every inch of it his.
Rob calls Ballarat the ‘Prague of the South’ and he believes he’s onto something with that description because, though he’s never been to Prague, he’s seen pictures. ‘Moving up near Ballarat eh Dad? Not a bad idea, it’s a gracious city, not unlike Prague, I hear.’
‘What in the name of Christ are you talking about?’
Rob’s mouth goes dry. ‘Prague, you know, in Czechoslovakia, I was just saying they had something in common.’
‘Jesus, spare me the crap will ya? It’s just Balla-bloody-rat,’ Emmett smirks around the room at the others and blows a spray of foam off his beer.
Rob and Louisa stay well away from Deakin. Had enough of the old man to last them forever. Jessie too, though she does write him a letter when he first moves in and in it she lists his faults in exact, concise and lawyerly prose. Everything from violence and drinking to his abuse of Anne and his meanness with money. Jessie feels better for having written it.
Emmett gets out the magnifying glass and reads the letter, all of it, and is proud of the way she put things, bloody well-educated, he thinks. Who would have thought little Jess had it in her? Turned out to be the smartest of the lot. What she actually says is highly exaggerated in his view, but still, you’ve got to respect anyone who can write a letter like that.
On Sunday nights Peter calls Emmett and they talk, about firewood and cattle and fences and kids, though when mention is made of his grandchildren, Emmett phases out. With grandchildren, he reckons the trick is to compress them all into one bottler, a halfway decent kid. It’s the only way.
‘Dad, it’s coming up to your sixtieth and I think we should do something special for it. What d’ya reckon?’
Emmett’s had a good day messing around in his vegie garden. He likes talking to Pete, he reminds him of someone. ‘Yeah, ripper mate, what do you reckon?’ ‘Well,’ says Peter. ‘I could help you with it if you like. I’ll come up early that morning.’ Emmett puts the phone down wondering what that was all about. And when the day arrives even the birthday is long forgotten.
The morning of the big day he’s in the kitchen in his tattered old boxers and saggy grey singlet. His legs are thin as sticks and white and nearly hairless but the ghost of the beer belly is still evident. He’s standing there in the middle of the kitchen trying to work out where in hell the bloody teapot’s gone when he hears a thump at the door.
As ever, his first response to surprise is fury. Unexpected bangs on the door drive him crazy. All visitors risk being sent packing. At the first knock he pretends it’s a figment of his imagination but this makes things worse because, encouraged by silence, people just bang louder.
It takes him a while to get to the door because his feet are sore lately and he’s hobbling and when at last he opens it, he sees a grinning Louisa balancing a huge box stuffed with food. ‘Happy birthday Dad,’ she says, stepping neatly over Clancy the dog, ankle-high and just the right height to skittle people. Behind her Peter is yelling, ‘Happy birthday you old bastard,’ and carrying a couple of bags of ice. ‘Louisa,’ Emmett says following her, ‘what are you doing here?’
Peter called her last night to ask if she could help with Emmett’s birthday. ‘You’re the only one who can really cook,’ he points out diplomatically and smiling, and seeing she taught him how to cook in the first place, she reckons this is a hide. ‘We can use the van, I’ve got it all packed up. And I’ll come down with you to set up the spit. Okay?’
Though she couldn’t explain it to herself, agreeing came easy. Doing it for Pete, she rationalises, make him happy, but there’s something else too, something about birthdays. She remembered the time Emmett took her into Myers to buy her a book for her birthday and then to a little Chinese joint for lunch and they got the book out and started it right there in the red glowing restaurant, Emmett whispering different voices for the characters. It was A Christmas Carol by Dickens and it was the first time she’d ever been sorry when the food arrived. When they put the book in the bag, it seemed the best of her father went away with it.
The morning of Emmett’s birthday Peter went to his local deli as soon as it opened and bought six fat loaves of soft Greek bread, all doughy and dense as sponges. ‘This bread could be made by the gods themselves, of clouds,’ Con the baker told him, pushing the floury loaves into bags. Peter smiled and agreed.
Greeks remind him of Emmett. Dad always loved wogs, he remembered putting the bread on the passenger seat, their food, their language; he thought they made us a better country, yet why did he call them wogs? Right and wrong, how come he was always so right and so wrong? Fair dinkum, you’d have to be a genius to work him out, Pete mused as he drove over to pick up Louisa.
Peter also organised for Nev the butcher in Deakin to get hold of a lamb. It turns out to be a whopper, at least a two-tooth, in fact, the thing’s verging on sheep size.
The spit is in the back of the van and a box of supplies with extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, dried Greek oregano, sea salt and twelve lemons.
Pete steps outside into the fresh air with the ice bags, puts them down while he cleans the leaves and sticks out of the old bath in the hay shed. This takes a while because there’s some kind of tarry blackness there too, a remnant of some other dubious thing, but he gets it all out and in the end he sits the beer and lemonade in the clean bath and pours the ice around it, loving the crunch and hiss.
Then he gets a nice low coalfire glowing in the half-gallon drum and sets up the spit over it. Tests the thing and after a while yells to Louisa, ‘And yes, Houston, we have lift-off!’ It’s windy now but he realises it’s always windy in Deakin. He watches the curtain of air sweep across the open plains, herding gum leaves before it and making washing on lines reach ever outwards like supplicants. At Emmett’s old prop clothesline, he takes down a tangled shirt and a pair of trousers that might have been there for months and carries them into the house rolled into a ball.
Emmett means to help but mostly he scratches his head because he doesn’t remember where things are but today he’s not getting mad about it. He’s all right today. Normally not knowing is just the sort of thing that sets him right off. On the tele Louisa finds a calming game of distant cricket and he’s drawn in. He mutes the TV and listens to the ABC broadcast on the wireless. There’s a little delay between the picture and sound, but he’s not watching all that carefully anymore and this way he avoids the hot noise flare of the ads. Before too long, he’s dozing in his chair.
Louisa has cake tins and an electric mixer plus all the ingredients for Victoria sponges, including strawberries and cream, and she gets stuck into making a birthday cake. Baking – but in truth, all cooking – settles Louisa. She likes the magic of creation from variable ingredients, likes the mixing and the tasting. Best part of cooking, she believes, is feeding people.
Cakes are special though and deeply satisfying. But no one is harder on herself and her creations than Louisa. She’s after perfection and yet when it does come, perfection is not triumphant, it’s simply benign and welcome.
The rest of the family are used to her comforting hobby and mostly they oblige her when she hovers holding hot spoons to their lips and asking them to judge. But ultimately her efforts are wasted because most of Emmett’s scenes began at the table and they all have a complicated relationship with food. They eat fast and seldom notice how wonderful it is. For the Browns, food is eternally something to be bolted.
They wrap dozens of potatoes in foil and bury the big silver spuds in the coals and while the cakes are cooking, Louisa makes Emmett a tomato and onion sandwich and a cup of tea.
The tomato, a round flat Adelaide she’s grown herself, is rich with flavour and still somehow holds the hot smell of summer that emerges from the best tomatoes at the first cut. She scatters salt and white pepper on it and when Emmett bites into the sandwich he taste the richness of love, the love that would last him, and it’s so unexpected it makes him shy.
‘Not a bad tomato Lou ,’ he says, glancing up at her away from the TV, ‘not bad at all.’
Peter and Louisa clean the table, scrubbing it with sleeves up. They lay the animal out and place rosemary mixed with slivers of garlic (sliced and peeled by Emmett with much comment and complaints about ‘fiddly bloody wog tucker’) in the small cuts. They rub it down with oil as though they were massaging a sportsman. Both of them sprinkle dried oregano over the lamb. And then outside they hook the animal onto the spit and stand back watching the dull orange coals do their work. Soon the rising smell calls everything to it and Clancy, drooling, sits beside them intently watching the roasting meat.
‘Would not call a king me bloody Uncle Bill ,’ Emmett says and Peter laughs. ‘No, me neither Dad. Not today.’ Half the people who used to work with Emmett don’t make it to Deakin for the big day. Most can’t be bothered with him and none of his duck-shooting mates show up either.
Jessie makes a late appearance with Warren who looks lost and puzzled and, as he always does around Jessie’s family, left right out. He perches on the arm of a chair and closely examines the label on his beer bottle until Anne takes pity on him and they talk about school.
Rob and Louisa watch from the wings under a ravaged hibiscus, discussing Emmett with the air of experts. Having the old lion in their sights in the open with the protection of others around them is a kind of completion.
There’s plenty of beer of course and Emmett’s invited his mates around from the pub; there’s Reg and big fat Nev brings some special pork sausages he’s been working on. The barbie is tamed for the snags. Nev thought a bit of chilli would add that certain zing but as usual he overdoes it. The snags are so spicy that people are gasping like stranded fish and some nick ice from the bath to slide into their burning mouths.
But turning sixty isn’t all fun. Emmett and Rob nearly collide on the back step. Emmett happily flourishes the barbeque tongs like a conductor. He snaps them together and tells Rob to lighten up, that it’s his birthday. ‘Mate, you’ve got a face as long as a fiddle. It’s a man’s birthday. You’re standing there like a stunned mullet! Cheer bloody up! That’s a order.’ And he snaps the tongs again.
Rob flinches. ‘And what’s so great about that? We supposed to be happy that you were born?’ As soon as he says it, he’s sorry for the remark. He blames the wine. He hadn’t meant to reveal anything.
Emmett decides he can’t blame the poor bastard but it’s about time the boy woke up to the fact that life is shit for everyone, not just for him. Wouldn’t mind telling him me own story one day, he thinks, and in the same breath realises it would not make one iota of difference.
So he snaps the tongs again and heads back to the barbie to turn the snags for the hundredth time. Peter carves the lamb and places the fragrant meat upon the bread and the guests fall upon the food like the starving multitudes and for a brief moment Louisa and Pete look at each other and they smile.
Then casually, as if expected, a gleaming red CFA fire truck decked out in blue and white streamers for Emmett’s old footy team arrives out the front. Reg leans on the horn . ‘Get in you old bastard,’ he roars when an astonished Emmett opens the gate. ‘You, son, are going for your birthday ride!’
Emmett is both appalled and charmed. ‘Well, bugger me,’ he gasps, hanging onto the saggy gate. His face crumples and he nearly cries, but he tells himself to be a man and so he roars with laughter and throws his arm around the nearest person and that happens to be Rob.
On being engulfed by Emmett, Rob stiffens but this doesn’t worry his father. He just drags him out the gate to sit on the back of the truck, their legs swinging, Rob’s reluctantly. Jessie climbs aboard too. Pete handballs a new leather footy at them and Rob marks it, giving it to Emmett who at last has something else to hold. Louisa and Anne, standing beside the fence like pillars of another life, are shocked. This is not the Emmett they know.
And slowly, gingerly, the truck draws away as if it has something special on board. The Browns wave to each other, relieved that Emmett has cooperated. There’s a bit of waving and then the fire truck bumps off into the wide empty country street.