60

The funeral has been hard. They’ve all cried too much and now there are many people they don’t know, people who know Anne mostly. Anne, it seems, is popular in Footscray, known and loved by all. So after the funeral a swarm descends on the shop looking for sandwiches and cups of tea.

One man stops Louisa near the kitchen and begins to tell her about rigging a yacht. She has a tray of antipasto in her hand. The man is shorter than Louisa and is clean shaven but for a snow-white neck beard. His face is the colour of corned beef. He tells her about rigging a sail. He didn’t know Emmett. He eats a few olives and holds onto the pips.

One of the Deakin farmers talking to Rob says he always remembers Emmett describing Ballarat as the Prague of the South. ‘Amazing man,’ he says ‘knew so many things. Learned, he was. I was much taken with his brilliance.’ Rob nods and sips his tea. A smile moves across his mouth and he says, ‘It was truly individual wasn’t it?’

Louisa looks over at Rob standing near the front of the shop holding a mug of tea and watching the street. She turns away but when she looks for him again he’s shot through and left his tea making a ring on Emmett’s desk.

Then Jessie arrives and the yacht man pops his pips into his pocket and places a sundried tomato on a piece of bread with infinite care and he turns his attention to her with the force of something magnetised and she listens to how sails are rigged with grudging gratitude because it saves her from thinking.

Louisa slips outside and finds Rob sitting in his car with the airconditioning on, the sun glinting off the dirty window. She gets in. ‘You all right?’ she asks, not expecting anything.

Rob says, ‘I don’t know. I thought it would be over when he died. Thought I’d feel released. Still feel stuck in the shit of it all.’ In the stale churning air of the car, the heat is still barely tamed and Louisa looks washed out. He reckons they should go back into the wake, such as it is. ‘C’mon,’ he says.

‘Yeah, but I just want to say one thing. I want to say that we are free now. The day has come. Finally.’

He still has his hand on the keys in the ignition and thinks, Not for me, I won’t be free of this bastard for a very long time and neither will you. But if it makes you feel better to imagine it, then go right ahead. Yet all he says is, ‘Yeah Louie, finally eh?’