59

When Emmett dies, Louisa is in Venice. It’s reliably beautiful, glinting with echoing lights across black water. At the moment of his death the light is yellow in this hollow of Europe because she’s in an ancient church lighting a candle for him of all people. Faded paintings of saints look down on her. Outside the church, it rains the languid rain of Europe.

Much later she works out that the moment of the candle is about when he died. At the time though, she thought, isn’t it pleasant wandering around Venice all on your own? Dodging pigeons as you walk through the salty breath of the city and gazing for much too long into the windows of handmade paper shops.

And she thanks Mr Conti for sending her here. He’d decided that now she was settling back into her life, a little trip to the most beautiful place in the world would do her good and it seemed that Emmett was stable. She and Anne had even picked out a nursing home for him.

That night, after she’s been asleep for a while, there’s a strange ringing and the phone call is from Rob, who in the swimming void of the phone line says, ‘It’s happened Lou. Yes, it’s happened. Dad died today.’

And she breathes steadily as she holds the heavy Italian phone and remembers the times hiding in the shed or under the hedge when the two of them had prayed for this death, when they thought he’d kill them unless God intervened. But nothing had happened because God was never where you wanted Him and that was the only, the always truth. Even when you prayed for a death, it didn’t come and now here it is in Venice on the Dosodura at the shadow of dawn on a rainy morning.

Emmett’s voice is the past, she’s in this watery place full of old beauty and luminous shops and she has to get home and face it. The death of the tyrant. The chain of memory is thick and strong but reality doesn’t seem to belong.

A gulf of distance defines Australians. Breathe deep because getting there will take a long time. She takes the water taxi (hang the expense) to the airport at five am and sees the sky become faintly glassy as the boat skips over the choppy sea. At the airport, lights like torches line runways and every other column is red.

Rain falls in circles on the polished tarmac and Louisa stands in the bus taking her to the departure gate, the travel agent going home. As the bus moves, she leans into the curves holding the freezing metal pole.

She knows her father has died but it’s not real. To herself she chants, my father has died, and moves aside politely for more Italians wedging themselves onto the bus at every stop. Most of her life she hated him and now she weighs hate in her heart and finds it light on. So was this really hate? Some questions lie in the air unclaimed.

She has the knowledge of the oceans between here and home, and the knowledge that the hate has her in a holding pattern stills her. The balances are out and she’s heading the long way home. Into the distance she sees her water taxi moving away and feels towed with it. Go back, a voice inside tells her, run away, hide in Venice and never come out, but she shakes her head.

And besides, she doesn’t get it. How can you hate so much and then, when you hear about the death, feel swept up by the sea of sorrow? Because it wasn’t real, comes to her, and because hate is a waste of time. Big thoughts when you feel small.

She sees a water taxi’s hull reflecting the lagoon and she holds it because it stops the image of Emmett as an old man in the hospital, demented, liver rotted, a lost man who wanted to be a poet but who gave up on everything because, apart from Anne, not one person ever helped him or believed in him. He hated the way the world treated him but never found of a way of changing it. The idea of loss does laps in her head. Love and hate are plaited together.

On the bus, she feels elated to be free of him and then heartbroken in quick succession as if she were riding a merry-go-round. Light lies in gold stripes across the ground and other buses heading to planes going to other places pass with Louisa’s reflection in their eyes. A man on the bus says: ‘Ciao Aussie’ and she wonders if it’s that obvious, and then she remembers the little Australian flag the kids got her to sew on her backpack.

She smiles at the man and wants to tell him she’s lost her father but then decides that she doesn’t, she says farewell to rude Europeans in fur coats, preening themselves and smoking wherever they want to and slamming change down on counters when you have your hand out ready to receive it.

She thinks, goodbye Italy, I won’t be back, and smiles to know that they won’t miss her. She sees the moss green islands in the lagoon between the tarmacs and remembers Emmett’s vegie garden, the one thing he truly seemed to love apart from beer and occasionally her mother.

Take it out and look at each piece of it. Weep for the tyrant, the poor old tyrant bastard, hear him again in her secret corner. Hear him in the good times reading The Man From Snowy River on long hot nights in the warm heart of the southern city when the cicadas call greenly and the light stretches out thinly all the way down to Tassie.

She hears her mum’s voice on the phone after Rob saying, ‘Darlin’ the truth is, Dad’s face wasn’t good at the end. He went yellow. Must have been the liver disease that got him.’

She wonders what will get her . What will get Mum? What will get her children? What gets us all? She wants to be home, to lay her hand on Australia and unwrap her sorrow for her father.