50

Food provides the answer to most of Louisa’s questions. She often cooks for Anne and for Emmett as if it will just do the trick. She nourishes her herbs and finds a butcher who can prepare the cuts of meat she likes. She goes to the old market once a week and with real discipline buys the best produce she can afford. Often she meets Peter there and they take pleasure in the place.

‘Have you ever seen a more beautiful peach?’ she asks him on a summer Saturday as they stand before an altar of fruit. ‘Let’s buy one each for breakfast.’ It seems a good idea but the dribbling is excessive and they end up dripping and laughing and flicking each other with peach juice. She tries to dry her hands on him but he gets sick of it and they look for a tap.

After she’s towed Anne’s ancient jeep to all their favourite stalls, they get coffee, strong and hot, and sit near the small lane that fronts onto the big junction at the top of the market. The lane reminds Louisa of a telescope that looks out to the world beyond. Everything is limpid. People pass in the slowness of their lives and she sees them perfectly.

It isn’t far from where Emmett worked as a child and the ghost of him lives here. She imagines him running around, laughing with his mates, a little scavenger let loose to feast on the body of the market. Let loose from the orphanage to his grandma’s place opposite the market.

The child who became their father. Wonders again what really happened there. How would you ever know? But the stuff she’s heard about orphanages in those days is not good.

She sent away for a Senate report on children who grew up in orphanages and when Forgotten Australians arrived she read it in a night. Stories of children with urine-soaked bedclothes tied to them, of beatings and starvation, and she thinks of those children now when she looks at her rapidly disintegrating father.

A coffee machine is revealed though a hole in the wall and the chugging and grinding of beans rips at her ears. In no time, Pete’s back with the coffee. Chairs are in short supply and people juggling mugs and rolls bursting with sausage and onion often come chair-hunting. Peter is willing to give the chairs at their table to anyone. Around their feet, drab sparrows as round as hearts stab at the ground with their needle beaks. A couple of bolder ones land on the table in search of crumbs.

Somehow they’ve started to talk about Emmett, not something they usually do. Pete says that before Daniel died, he once asked Emmett if he loved him, and he laughed. He remembers the mouth opening up like a void. ‘And that yellow eyetooth of his, God, I wondered whether he’d swallow me.’

He wished he could have had another father and such wishes took up acres in his heart. Long before he understood Emmett, or at least thought he did, he was held by what he’d seen and what he didn’t understand, would never understand. When he decided Emmett was just a poor crazy man, mental for sure, he got over it. But he was lonely; after Daniel was gone, he had no one.

There are things Emmett did that the others don’t know about and Peter will never tell them. Some things shouldn’t be shared, how does it help? He reckons the others are dealing with enough of their own stuff anyway.

He’s also a bit ashamed of the way he gathered his information. For a long time he was the watcher in doorways, listening as a kind of witness to his mother’s weeping, waiting until he could hear her no longer, thinking that at least when it was quiet she had some peace. Then he’d go back to bed, his heart so heavy he ached with holding it.

‘Most kids have some kind of monster in their past,’ he says now, trying to lighten things. He’s rolled up the paper tube that held the sugar into the tiniest scrap. He looks up and smiles at her. He won’t dwell. The monster is sleeping in Peter’s memory, though he’s always on the lookout for it, you’d be a fool not to expect it back.

Louisa has not forgotten a single thing her father did either. Indeed, she has indexed them within herself and has a kind of inventory, but somehow she comes to the same decision as Peter. She must let it be. She explains Emmett to herself the best way she can. He must have been sick. Since she worked that out, the world seems less bleak.

But she doesn’t tell Peter what she’s decided, even though he has arrived at the same place. Neither is wholly comfortable with it, and neither has told Robert what they think.

They halt these talks, slowing down and looking around, and before too long they’re discussing the pair of free-range rabbits she just bought. She’s considering working some prunes and maybe bacon into the red wine braise she’s planning for Anne and Emmett tonight. Pete says, ‘How about a bit of mashed parsnip with that? The old man loves a bit of parsnip.’ And he grabs the handle of the jeep and is off to a pyramid of parsnips further down the aisle while Louisa gets her coat on.