5

Matchbox cars are the most prized toy. The boys covet them, hoard them and steal them from each other. One Saturday morning when Anne is at the shops, a hushed scuffle breaks out over a little red matchbox truck. It’s hushed because Emmett is working at his statistics in the front room and the kids are in the passageway in front of their room. Daniel starts wailing because Rob has pinched his favourite matchbox.

‘Give it back to me, you know it’s mine, you know it’s my best one,’ the four-year-old cries thinly, loudly, and for far too long. Emmett sends a little warning through the door of his room. ‘You are starting to give me THE IRRITS,’ he shouts into the pool of temporary silence.

And then Rob comes back to life. ‘Nick off,’ he jeers softly to Daniel, ‘it’s mine wormhead and you can go jump.’ He holds the red truck up at full stretch in his dirty hand and smirks at his little brother. Peter and Louisa emerge. ‘Sshhh,’ Louisa whispers and then hisses loudly, ‘JUST SHUT UP!’ No one listens. Then somehow Daniel’s tears get fuller and Peter steps in to help with a brave and bold, ‘Give it to him! You rat, you rotten rat!’ And all of a sudden Rob loses his temper and hurls the matchbox hard at Peter and it clips the top of his head and cuts him.

The boy puts his hand up and with a throb of panic, feels the slippery stickiness of blood. ‘Oh!’ he yells and gets ready to yell it again. Instead he begins to cry in earnest and spins around in search of an adult and at that exact moment Emmett bursts out of the bedroom like a big grey hurricane.

There are times when the kids see him as the Tasmanian Devil, the tornado from the cartoons. There are days when he seems to whirl and froth, to have too many arms. Today he stands there considering for a moment and then decides. He swoops down and grabs Rob by the back of his shirt and drags him all the way down the passageway to the bathroom.

The other kids are still knotted together near the bedroom doorway watching their brother being hauled away by their father. They long remember his toes pointing up as he is pulled away. His eyes are locked to Louisa’s but they all witness the crying boy who knows what’s coming. It’s a long way down that passage when you know what’s coming.

Emmett throws the boy into the bathroom and takes off his belt and then he belts his son until he’s exhausted and the boy is just a sobbing lump on the floor. It takes a long time. Each time the belt lands, they hear it cut into him and then they hear the boy who hates tears, they hear him sob.

They wait outside the sliding bathroom door, a little posse of dread. When Emmett steps out like a man who’s done his business, Rob is slumped in a heap against the bath, crying and bleeding. They huddle back against the wall, waiting for the shock to leave and release them. Peter and Daniel believe it’s their fault and hold each other, and the grief of causing such a thing weighs heavy.

At the sight of her brother’s face, Louisa feels her stomach rise. It’s swollen beyond recognition. He’s not making a noise and yet tears still flow from his closed eyes. Maybe he’s unconscious. Louisa doesn’t know. He’s been sick on the floor. She picks him up and half carries him to the bedroom. The twins hover like duplicate ghosts.

Rob is shivering and crying and so is she, but she must think, not give in. She runs back to the bathroom and gets a face washer hot under the tap and wrings it out tight. She finds the Dispirin bottle and makes him a half glass full of it and gets him to drink it. Red welts rise up all over him and blood drops steadily from his mouth and nose. Carefully, she touches his cheek with the hot face washer and he closes his eyes. ‘Lou,’ he murmurs, ‘we’ll have to kill him. I think we will.’

The twins sit on the other bed close together, still shaking. Louisa climbs onto the bed and holds her brother. ‘Don’t think about him now,’ she says, ‘you’re alive, just be glad.’

In the back of his throat Rob makes a noise. ‘Not glad,’ are the words she later understands him to have said.

Then Peter and Daniel come over and weld themselves to the older kids and Louisa sees that Rob is still holding the red matchbox car in his small filthy hand. He must have picked it up before Emmett descended.

Rob sees himself as an astronaut stepping onto the biscuity moon. In 1969 this is not an original idea but after the moon landing, even in Australia, such things seem possible.

Louisa tells him he’s mental to even think about it, be damn lucky to get a decent job much less one as an astronaut. And while he sees what she is driving at, he won’t let her stop his dreams. He nurtures them and collects bits of junk to make air hoses for space suits and hooks them up to the old washing-machine tank in the shed. For a while he even calls it mission control.

He likes to think surrounded by the length of the sky, all that emptiness seems welcoming to him after the crowded little place they live in, and he loves to get up high on the fernery roof. Up there he feels safe.

One side of his room is wallpapered with vintage cars. Anne had thought about doing the whole room but it might have looked too much and besides there was the cost to consider, wallpaper is quite pricey you know. On the other side of the room his younger brother Peter is dreaming of fishing, his favourite thing. Rob doesn’t know what he sees in it. Peter sleeps in the bottom bunk under the balding blue candlewick bedspread and Daniel is up top.

Peter whimpers a bit when he sleeps, always has, but tonight, a Tuesday night in July, he’s having a good dream of fishing at a beach where it’s sunny and still and the fish, beautiful little silver flatties, are lining up to be dragged in. Daniel snores. The ashy moon filters through the gingham curtains.

It’s about four am when Emmett appears at Rob’s bedside and shakes him awake. ‘Get up boy. We’re going fishing,’ he says low and dark and then stalks out. What? Rob says to himself, wondering if he’s really seen his father. He unglues his eyes, sticky from the depth of sleep. He knows not to argue. In the other beds Peter whinnies on, happy enough with the night, and Daniel is silent now.

Blinking and stumbling, Rob gets himself into the glary kitchen in his school pants and green moss-stitch jumper that Nan knitted years ago for Louisa. Emmett is a hulking dark shape sitting at the table fully dressed in his work coat and boots. ‘Get your shoes on boy,’ he says, and Rob stuffs his feet into his school shoes. He doesn’t bother with laces or socks. These are the only shoes he owns and without socks they hold his feet loosely.

When they step outside into the dark mid-winter morning past Frank curled outside the back door, it’s so cold the dog doesn’t move. He could be made of stone.

The Browns’ car is a 1964 EH Holden, white with red bench seats and white piping. It’s Emmett’s pride and joy and not more than five years old. Sitting out there all night in wintry Wolf Street, it might as well be refrigerated.

With each breath, steam rolls from Rob’s mouth onto the windows. Emmett is hurling something into the boot and the boy has no clue what it might be. He slams the boot down and then he’s back, a big man heaving himself into the car, making the seat drop with the weight of him and lifting the child up with a puff.

Emmett causes the mist to grow thicker on the windows but the demister is on the blink so he rubs a porthole in the glass in front of him and pushes the car into gear. With a protest and a lurch from the frozen engine that hasn’t had long enough to warm, they are away and sliding down the thin street like a barge on a canal.

Rob doesn’t know where they’re going. He looks at the street lights slipping past and he thinks, this is it. He’s going to kill me and dump me. Must be. Well, it makes sense, seeing as how he hates me. I’m a runt.

He sneaks little sideways looks at Emmett sitting hunched in his big blanket of a jacket. Holding the steering wheel lightly and staring into the cautious morning, he thinks Emmett looks like an Indian from a Western.

The father smokes steadily and the haze of it swims around and the orange tip of the cigarette lingers in the corner of the boy’s eye. Disapprovingly, the boy thinks that he might cry and this will prove he’s a weakling, which he thinks is true but he knows it will be the end of him if he does cry. So he fiercely looks down at his white legs as the light changes outside the car and he studies those legs very carefully.

And the legs in the short pants are thin as stems. Scabs drift across the knees and shins, healing at different rates. The newest are still raw and tight but others have set as hard as lids. The oldest scabs are at the wafer stage, light and thin and nearly ready to flick. He draws comfort in thinking about picking his scabs, but he doesn’t try it in the car. The old man wouldn’t like that.

Emmett doesn’t speak and that’s all the boy hears, and anyway he doesn’t know what to say to his father. He’s filled with a circle of thoughts and most of them involve dying. At least it’s going to be over, he says to himself. He hates me, hates me, I’m too small, I wish I was bigger. He’d like me then, maybe. Nah, I’m just too bad. It’s the end now. He’s going to get rid of me, maybe then things will get better for the others.

He says such things to himself again and again with the rhythm of the road as it cuts through the milky light of morning. Tears stall on his eyelids and then slip sideways and he wills them not to fall. The boy holds his own hands all the way through the sleeping city just for the warmth they offer.

On that school morning after three hours driving out along the coast, they pull off the bitumen at a bleak and empty beach. The sky is steel grey and the wind has picked up and is whipping the stinging sand in the carpark against them, and the beach has a malignant feel.

Rob stands beside the car door shivering in his short pants and pulling his sleeves over his hands. Emmett steps out of the car and stretches himself lazily as if he were a lion penned up too long. From the boot he gets out a bag of bait and a couple of broken-down rods and turns to the beach.

Like a stray dog, Rob follows his father down the track until the sea is revealed, so much of it spilling over the sand. He sees a lot of sky, maybe too much, and it’s all grey this morning. Emmett strides across the pale horizon like a dark god and the boy follows at a distance, trudging through sand, shivering, and thinking about what will happen next. Blood, he reckons, there’ll be lots of it.

Then Emmett stops and throws down the gear, snaps the rods together, drags some bait out of a bag and weaves frozen tubes of octopus onto the hook. With a practised arm he begins casting.

Should the boy do what the old man is doing? He doesn’t know. He sits at a distance from Emmett and takes in the Southern Ocean through his mirror eyes and decides it looks cold. What lives under there? Sharks. I bet there’s an awful lot of sharks he concludes.

After a while, somehow, he begins to feel calmer and time edges in and settles him and he thinks of the kids at school, sees them sitting at their desks and then outside running and playing and kicking the footy. Probably for the first time in his life he wishes he was at school.

He burrows his hands and his feet, even in their shoes, into the cold sand because it’s warmer under there than the air. He wishes he’d found a pair of socks before they left.

Emmett fishes for ages, whipping the line through the air again and again and into the sea until the bait is gone and the tide has changed. He catches nothing. Then suddenly he turns and walks back to the car and Rob follows.

On the drive home to Footscray Emmett is silent just as he was all the way there, but it does seem to Rob that going home doesn’t take nearly so long and he reckons he probably isn’t going to get killed today so he relaxes and breathes, looks at the houses and thinks about what he might have missed at school.

When they pull up in Wolf Street, Rob sees Peter and Louisa and Daniel further down the street playing kick-to-kick, dodging the parked cars with the other kids. They wave to him, Louisa with the ball under her arm. ‘C’mon Robbie! Come and have a kick!’ she yells all out of breath. But he isn’t in the mood and just shakes his head and follows his father inside.

Once in the house he slips away from Emmett but not before he’s told to get him a beer. In his bedroom, the boy crawls under his bed and there among the fluff and old toys he cries silently for so long, his arms wrapped around himself, that in end he is gathered by sleep.