8

Emmett is a linesman. He works for the Postmaster General as a grade two technician and hankers after the idea of making it to a grade three. Probably won’t happen, he concedes.

In the end Emmett accepts that it’s his lot at work to fix faults in all weather on all days. Management, with its cushy rewards, will never be for him. Somehow he just doesn’t have a way with people.

Much of his work is done outdoors connecting up phone lines to houses and fixing faults way up high. He’s an outdoor man and the sun has turned his forearms the colour of oak, but in the secret territory under his shirt, he’s as white as scars.

Once he brings home a bird that landed unwisely on a power line junction and got zapped with thousands of volts. It sits on the table, hard and black, a cricket ball with a beak. ‘That,’ he says wearily, taking off his sweaty smudged hard hat and setting it down next to the bird, ‘is what happens if you fuck around with electricity. Get me a beer, Dan.’ The kids all long to touch the bird. This will come, but for now the theatre of the moment must unfold. The withholding of information.

But he’s not really in the mood today. Peter, huge eyes level with the table edge, stares ardently at the black bird. Emmett rubs his hair roughly and laughs, ‘You’ll be right mate, just stay away from bloody power lines, that’s all I’m saying.’ He hands the bird to them by order of age and each child weighs it reverently before passing it on. After they’ve all held it, the bird goes to a shelf on the olive green dresser with the square biting latches and there it perches, scanning their lives for years.

To make up for the disappointments of work, Emmett con centrates on his Famous and Completely Original System. Its mathematical probabilities are multi-purpose and are meant to deliver winning lottery tickets and horses. It’s a broad strategy based on records of winnings which he keeps with a kind of religious fervour. Despite there being little evidence of his genius, he’s convinced.

Some days, a row of seagulls line up on the picket fence out the front of Wolf Street, idly peering in through the venetians like bored patients in a waiting room. Somehow though, the sea gulls can be forgiven because they bring with them the good feeling that the sea knows them, even in Footscray. When one of the kids opens the gate, the birds lift lazily, hover, and then come right on back again.

Day after day, the crooked stripes of light cleave through the wonky blinds and Emmett sits in that irradiated bedroom absorbing his smokes and his beer and sweating out sour alcoholic funk as he slaves away on his probabilities, nutting out all those numbers at the big green desk, firmly believing he’s working for his family.

While beer is the only true constant in his life, for a man who doesn’t believe in much, God crops up a lot. When things are going well with the stats, he talks to himself. You bloody little bee-uty. God, he says, is in all things! And he smiles and chucks beer down as if he were a man standing on the edge of a cliff tossing everything he owns into the abyss. When his confidence swells his heart is a billowing red balloon rising slowly. He’ll show the rotten bastards.

But when the figures don’t line up, the tone changes to fury and again he appeals to God. Jesus wept, a man is doing his best here and I just keep coming up against it. Why can’t you give a bloke a break? I don’t ask for much in this fucking bastard of a world, he snarls to himself and hurls his pencil down, draining the glass and glaring at the poxy little seagulls perving on him out there, thinking, a man oughta grab the bloody shotgun.

Emmett reckons probabilities explain the laws of the universe. ‘ This is the big one,’ he tells Rob one day at a backyard barbie at Wolf Street when the boy is a bit older. ‘This is how you understand every bloody thing there is mate. Everything. This is the rule that applies to all things and let me tell you, nothing, not one paltry thing, is random.’

Rob doesn’t say anything because he thinks everything is random, especially Emmett. He smiles and just to be polite and keep him in the good zone asks, ‘And how does it work Dad?’

Emmett waves his hand airily, and foam from his beer slops on his faded orange Hawaiian shirt, always a summer favourite. ‘Bugger,’ he says, brushing absently at it. He’s drunk a fair whack by now and isn’t in the mood for detailed explaining. Besides, his grasp on the concept isn’t entirely finalised and he doesn’t want to risk making a total arse of himself. ‘I’ll explain it all to you one day son and that will be my legacy to you. One day, you too will understand the universe.’

Grouse, thinks Rob. This’ll make me the only person in the whole world who understands the universe (apart from that well-known genius, Emmett Brown). But he keeps his opinions to himself and slips off to get a sausage from the barbie. He wraps the charred thing in white bread and douses it with tomato sauce and is ready to sink his teeth in when Emmett intervenes with, ‘Wouldn’t shout in a shark attack would you mate?’ and Rob looks at him blankly. ‘Dense too,’ sighs Emmett. ‘Get us one of those will you mate? Plenty of dead horse on it,’ and lowers himself into a weather-beaten deckchair propped skittishly near the house.

Rob does so and on handing the snag over manages to spurt sauce all over Emmett’s foot which looks disturbingly naked in its thong. But Frank, snoring on the concrete, is up in a flash and obligingly licks up the sauce in under a second so real harm is averted.

Emmett aims a mild swipe at the boy with his other foot. ‘Useless fucking idiot child,’ he mutters benignly and asks the air conversationally, ‘Why would you have them?’ And he leans back with snag in one hand and beer glass in the other and he lets the sun warm his face. Probabilities can wait.

Emmett is firmly convinced that one day he’ll make it big with these probabilities and it’s only a matter of time. It will happen. One day he’s going to be a rich bastard, he tells himself as the amber fluid flows through his veins like a yellow river, and then he’ll be happy. He just knows it.