The Book of Emmett (6 page)

There's something sacred about the races. They are a continuum and their currency is hope. Emmett studies the form all week and by Saturday he's ready. Sussed it right out. Bloody organised. To the kids, the form guide, that perfectly folded paper, is the divine document and the key to their futures. At Wolf Street it's the Bible.

They're proud that this is the thing Emmett devotes himself to because when he eventually wins, they'll stop being poor. And then things will get better. Their father will be happy, their mother will not have to work so hard and then they'll be allowed to breathe like other kids. Money will make everything better. But despite all the quiet they give him, the wide berth, the tiptoeing and the nervous, watchful looks they shoot him in passing, it hasn't happened yet.

Like horses, the Brown kids notice with their skin; the ripples along a flank that show a fly has landed, the waves beneath flesh. They're as alert as antennas to their father's mood.

‘I told ya he wouldn't win anything today. He didn't have enough time on the probabilities. Still, I tell ya, he's a bloody amateur,' Rob says casually as Louisa joins him to sit in the dirt and lean against the back fence.

‘Race four already and bloody nothing.' He pulls a weed and casually wrings its neck.

Louisa sighs; she agrees but can't admit that the day will end like all the others, with the old man getting comprehensively pissed and aggro over anything. How can you allow that so early?

‘Day's not over yet, it's only race four and he reckons to Mum he's got something special in the sixth, and you know the System doesn't just have to work on the trifecta.' Saying it she looks sad and somehow crushed as if she doesn't believe a word. The System can be independent of those races, she insists.

‘Well, the trifecta's finished and that's where all the real bucks are, you know that,' says Rob, the bitter realist.

‘Are not,' she says more fiercely than she feels.

‘Are so,' Rob says and quickly sneaks in with, ‘are so to infinity,' then he snickers, his shoulders moving with pleasure. Louisa says nothing, knowing he's right, and in frustration digs her big toe into the dirt.

The sun is a lemon and she can feel it tightening her skin, hatching hot freckles. Rob's in the same shorts, always looking a bit undersized because although he's small for his age, his clothes look small too. He wears a checked western shirt with some red in it, short sleeves too high on his arms and his greyish hair is crew-cut.

Louisa's dress is navy polyester/rayon/nylon with bobbles like warts strewn over the pattern of flowers that will never fade. She stretches the dress over her knees into a tent. Emmett has seen to it that she has not yet cut her hair. He likes girls to have long hair. It seems purer. Though he doesn't know it, the truth of it is that Anne and Louisa conspire in this and about once a month Anne snips off Louisa's split ends with her dressmaker's scissors. Louisa's dark hair is plaited and secured at each end with rubber bands.

Occasionally she paints her face with their paintbrush tips. Hairs escape the plaits horizontally. She examines the constellation of freckles on her left forearm, noting again that it's the Southern Cross. This has to be a good omen.

Rob lets go a fart, a long fat bubble, in a peaceful kind of way and laughs at the sound of it. ‘A bit more choke and you would have started,' Louisa says amiably as she leans away to avoid the blister of smell. She punches him lightly on the arm, calls him a pongy old dog.

He replies with ‘cow' delivered in the same friendly way, and pushes her ankle with his foot. The sun soaks into them. The fart is absorbed by the still day. The air is loaded with the smell of the petrol station behind them on the main road and the rubbish bin not far up. Idly, she thinks again it's a good thing all the smokers are inside. That pasty dishevelled Irish Catholic dog, Francis Xavier O'Hooligan, snores and flinches on the concrete. They are suspended in the aspic of the day waiting for their father to make it rich.

Emmett has fixed the black Bakelite telephone to the sticky yellowing wall in a rare act of home improvement and hastily jotted phone numbers surge upwards and outwards from it like arteries leaving a heart. Cards from tow-truck drivers are shoved into the back of the phone and by now they're as light and curled as autumn leaves.

Towies are respected around Wolf Street. They're tattooed outlaws who carry with them the allure of those who get away with stuff. Rob is deeply attracted. He sees something of the Wild West and the cowboy in the way they show up out of nowhere, screaming to a halt in their loose creaky trucks and then set about plainly sorting things out, roping wrecks as if they're ornery bulls and dragging them off into the distance, all the time roaring with laughter at their private jokes.

When they show up,
Bonanza
comes to Footscray. Rob thinks about being a towie one day but never says anything because Emmett has other plans for the boy. He's already decided what each of them will do for a living. Rob is to be a scientist and Louisa, a doctor. The rest he isn't concerned with as long as they bring him credit. Privately he thinks; a man just can't stay innarested in all these bloody kids.

Whether or not he'd make it to being a scientist, Rob fancies himself an inky illustrated towie. He loves the way they are, every single thing about them: their lack of fear, their maleness, their answers to problems, their handlebar moustaches and especially their clothes, the rusty-looking jeans and thick belts with buckles the size of ashtrays. Dressed like that, he thinks, you'd have to be safe.

Fifty-five Wolf Street is on a blind corner with Murphy Street and small prangs are a constant. The accidents come at the cusp of the day when the traffic hots up. Following the screech of tyres and the smash comes the astonished stillness as drivers register the accident. The silence settles briefly and spreads out in circles until gradually, shocked or furious voices emerge from that muffled hollow.

Inside the house at the first sound of the screech, someone will yell, ‘Quick! Ring the towies!' And kids pounce on the phone as if it's taking off. The number is dialled and the name Brown is delivered to the operator with a kind of formal solemnity and then the comfortable thought spreads through them like warm pee in a cold swimming pool: they might get the spotter's fee! But being resolute realists they know the fee still might go to one of the rotten neighbours.

Still, they live in hope and after a decent interval, they amble outside to inspect the damage, looking real casual and sporadically concerned, though never greatly so because there's seldom blood.

Outside, the last rags of the day are pulling away from the clenched little pub. And inside the air is layered with shelves of smoke. Rafts of it surround the men like low cloud but they don't even notice. It's not far off six now and the swill is in full swing.

Emmett is drinking in a school of five and each of the five has five glasses lined up before them on the sawdust floor. Their legs make pillars of support for the beer and though they spit and joke and laugh, they don't spill a drop. It's just another afternoon at the Station Hotel in Paisley Street.

And then a little salesman named Jimmy Collins comes in flogging encyclopaedias and gets the royal treatment from the blokes. ‘Look at the little runt poofta,' someone says casually and Emmett turns a lazy eye toward the newcomer.

Jimmy pushes his little wire glasses up his nose and tries out a smile. He's wearing a thin, knitted tie and a tweed jacket, aimed at making him look intelligent. He's a law student working part-time at selling. He carries a leather satchel and a red sample book. Emmett notices the book straight away even though he's well into a diatribe against governments, all of them. ‘Only people you can ever trust,' he declares, ‘are union boys like us.' And he raises his glass, smiling, remembering something fine about unity.

Smoke trails from his fag. His audience agrees with every word he's saying and that's as it should be but still, there's something about the salesman bloke with the books. Something niggles.

Jimmy, hunched at the bar, is thinking about pushing off, pubs are never very productive anyway and this one looks hopeless, but what do you expect in Footscray? he asks himself. Plus he can hardly breathe with all the smoke in here and he hawks unproductively a couple of times, trying to dredge his sinuses. He's had a cold for weeks now and it's wearing him out.

‘Gimme a look at that mate, will ya?' Emmett yells and Jimmy smiles and hands over the encyclopaedia, half expecting this bloke to spread beer over the sample or even rip it and wipe his arse on it, all for a bit of a joke. Still, better the book than me, he thinks resignedly.

Emmett puts his beer down on the floor, parks the fag between his lips and squinting through the smoke, he cracks open the pages to the story of the oak tree. As he scans it, he knows he will buy it for the kids. Doesn't matter how much. ‘What you asking for these books? How many of the bastards are there anyway?'

The salesman tells him a figure but Emmett's not listening, he's reading and thinking about showing the books to the kids. This is the answer. The idea of knowledge makes him feel different. His bloody kids will
be
different. They
will
have the lot, the whole fucking shebang, and they won't end up like this poor excuse for a mob.

He doesn't want to close the book but he hands it back to the little bloke. ‘I'll sign up.' The others in the school pretend not to have heard. They reckon Brown's well on the verge of the loony bin anyway, talks way too much about any bloody thing and he's always had knobs on himself. And through the whole transaction they drink as though they are holding back the tide.

A book arrives every two months till there are ten of them but the hire purchase agreement takes years to complete. Emmett pays for it all himself. Every penny. When he tells Louisa to come and hear a story or to do some investi-gate-ing in these here books, she feels the difference in him. Here he is, she thinks. Dad is here, the real one.

The
Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia
is red leatherette. Shining gold words on the front. He hands a book to her and she holds it and believes in possibility. They all come to have favourite volumes. Nine years old and there are some truths she knows that aren't in any book.

The music of words draws Emmett towards poetry, which he knows in his heart with a searing clarity is the highest art form. He believes that the great poets Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson can make anyone weep and this, he believes, is the greatest skill. These blokes weave actual beauty with the skill of angels.

On the league table of Art and Beauty his second art form has to be music. Few, he reckons, come close to the big two, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. He plays the
1812 Overture
on an LP on the old red velvet-fronted radiogram in the front room and it leaves him speechless and shaken. ‘Listen to this kids!' he roars over the soaring music. ‘This is what life is about!'

Caprice Italien
is called for when his mood is elevated and then the music bounds out of the room and waves itself like big flags from the windows of the little house.

And when he's really up, Tchaikovsky is Chockers and Beethoven is the Big B. ‘Kids ... cop a load of this! You bloody beauty Chockers!' he cheers and their hearts sink because there's much to fear when
Caprice Italien
goes on. No mood that wheels so high can remain in flight.

The thin wooden walls squeeze in and out and the music surges forth, dissolving in circles of distance. Across the road, the Quails, a family of one mother, five boys and a collie named Wedge, flinch at the onslaught of Emmett's music.

One night sitting on the swaying train coming home from work, Emmett reads a story about Rudolf Nureyev and a new production of
The Nutcracker Suite
and with a gathering resolve, decides this is something for him. He's long had a bit of a soft spot for Russians (he deeply approves of the Russian Revolution) and since the music was written by one Russian and performed by another, he determines that this Nureyev bastard will have to be seen.

He decides to take the two big kids because they need something decent to remember when they're old. They're getting older by the day and there isn't that much that defines their childhood, he thinks. (He excludes himself from the definition even though Emmett will be the only thing they will ever remember with any clarity.) To his mind, the things you can talk about when you're older are seen at the footy and cricket. For instance, he's always barracked for North Melbourne, the mighty Shinboners, and he remembers with a shining reverence Saturdays at Arden Street with thousands of others. Could never play himself, just born bloody clumsy, much to his own bitter disappointment, because he always felt he should have been brilliant. Would have been good at being brilliant.

The really sad part though is that the kids missed out on Bradman and this is a tragedy, pure and simple. All they have is Bill Lawry and true, he is a Victorian, but sadly, and he believes Bill would be the first to agree, he's no Bradman.

Emmett had never seen Bradman himself because he spent most of his young life working or stuck in orphanages and then there was the question of finances – tickets to the cricket cost money and he had zero. But at his Nana's, when he could, he listened to the radio all through the long winter nights when the Australians played the Poms in England. Listened to every last ball.

But he is prepared to concede that there's more to life than cricket and footy. He'll take these kids of his to see this Russian cove and Margot Fonteyn, who he's heard is also pretty damn spectacular even if she is an ageing Pommy prima ballerina.

It's winter and in the unremembered night, the weather hurls itself upon the house. The following morning, a Saturday, Emmett calls them into the kitchen to tell them they will go to Her Majesty's Theatre in the city to a matinee this very afternoon. Football will be given up for one week.

Rob squirts a little sideways look at Louisa but says nothing. It's final. ‘And you will enjoy this!' Emmett booms at them.

After much scrounging through the clean-washing pile, Anne finds a cardigan to go with Louisa's best dress. Rob wears shorts and the duck-egg blue jumper that is imprinted in Louisa's memory as the only one the boys own. Anne, Daniel and Peter wave goodbye and off they set, both wearing school shoes and striding after Emmett, who sets a cracking pace, to the train station.

It is an intermittently bright, cold day and the roads are all slick after the night rain and Emmett is wearing the khaki coat he brought into the marriage. The sky is massed with heavy towering clouds, charcoal and indigo and the deep green of storms at sea. Sometimes it rains, but they walk through it as if they were waterproof, as if they were pilgrims unconcerned with the everyday.

Emmett sits opposite Rob and Louisa on the train and looks both menacing and handsome. There is to be no mucking around. In his low grainy voice as though he were imparting a secret, he says, ‘This is your big chance to witness something important here. Now I want best behaviour, that certainly goes without saying.' He leans in and fixes them with his dark eyes, ‘But you can have a bit of fun too, it's the theatre and that's what people do when they go out, they enjoy themselves.

‘You,' and he glares at Rob who seems to shrink under the hot beam, ‘will have to concentrate bloody hard. Are you with me?' He leans further forward and taps the boy on his bare mottled knee, ‘because I don't want to have to say anything to you.'

He sits back quickly with his hands deep in his pockets and flaps his coat up around his legs. Rob says evenly, ‘Yes Dad,' and Louisa pushes her gaze out the window towards the stacks of containers so she can't catch his eye. The sky continues to be iron grey and dense with rain but occasionally the sun shoots through the clouds like a cannonball.

While she's excited, Louisa isn't feeling optimistic about the ballet. Rob will mess this up, she thinks solidly, the habit of gloom already long ingrained.

Emmett continues the lecture. ‘Now this Rudolf Nureyev bloke we are going to see, and old Mrs Fonteyn too, they are very special. Rob, pay particular attention to the leaps, they're as good as anything you'll see down at the football ground. Don't be put off by the tights son, that is not important.

‘This is about the blending of music and the human body. This is an art. Right, we're off at the next stop,' he says, and bounds to his feet and pushes the door open before the train has fully stopped. The wind whips his hair about and his coat-flaps stream and he's riding into the station like a valkyrie.

In the city Emmett strides along the wet street with the children nearly running to keep up. Rob does try to trip Louisa at one point (he deliberately stands on her loose shoelace and she knows it was deliberate because he laughs) and she staggers forward and grabs Emmett's coat but he isn't mad, he flicks a small smile at her.

Louisa considers kicking Rob but common sense gets the better of her. Rob smirks. By the time they get to the theatre, excitement is pulsing through the puffing, sweaty children.

Emmett strides over to the ticket box to buy the tickets. The kids perch on a round red buttoned seat in the foyer, eyes swallowing the magic of the place. People cluster and chat, laugh and gossip and the kids are entranced.

It soon becomes clear, however, that something is wrong. Here comes that underwater moment when you begin to drown and your legs work like engines but can't save you. No matter how hard they try to pretend that everything is all right, it isn't. Something right here in this shining theatre is going all wrong. Emmett is taking too long and the kids know with sickly sinking hearts that there's a major stuff-up underway and when he strides back to them his face is a thunder cloud.

‘I'm short by two quid,' he says curtly, quietly, and it dawns on the kids that he doesn't have enough money to buy the tickets. Isn't it always the case? Money holds the keys to the game.

‘Could you sell your wallet Dad, since it's empty?' Rob ventures helpfully.

Emmett looks at him as if he might snap him in half, and then he withdraws his eyes from the boy and says wearily, ‘Shut up Robert,' and slumps on the round seat. He leans his head back and closes his eyes. His grey face sags.

The kids look at each other warily. They have not often encountered a defeated Emmett. Usually he shields himself from the reality of defeat with anger. This is very bad, they think simultaneously. Will there be an explosion? In public? Right here? They look around like mice in a room full of cats.

In a while, when most of the well-heeled have drifted into the theatre, Emmett gets up and the kids follow a few steps behind, heads down, shuffling like Japanese ladies. Emmett decides he'll at least buy them some Fantales, and standing in front of the lolly counter, he feels around for his wallet.

Then for some reason he pushes his hand into the inner breast pocket of his coat and amazingly, he pulls out a ten-pound note. He holds up the money as if it were a miracle from God, which it possibly is, and he laughs and whoops and roars, ‘By God, the Browns are going to the bloody ballet!'

He buys the tickets
and
the Fantales and they go inside, only a little bit late, to watch Nureyev and Fonteyn fly across the stage like angels.

On the train home Emmett can see old Rudolf as a very plausible full forward for North and he and Rob rave about this for a while. Emmett doesn't tell them the music made him weep because he thinks this is beyond the pale. But Louisa saw him wiping his eyes and was astonished. She files it away to discuss with Rob later.

Louisa and Rob remember the train ride home. Sealed in there with him in the red rattler, shaking across the flat industrial acres and looking out from the dark windows, they can still see that leaping Russian and hear the music that spoke of otherness.

Near to Middle Footscray Station Emmett leans across to Louisa and whispers, ‘You understand beauty, young Louie, and beauty will always console you.' Louisa smiles and doesn't know what to say to her father so she says, ‘I'd like to be a dancer like Nureyev or even be like old Mrs Fonteyn, that wouldn't be too bad.' The sheer delight of having all this good attention from him is making her dizzy. Emmett nods sagely and sitting back on the vandalised train seat says, ‘Anything is possible.'

He looks reflective as he watches the light bounce off the blocks of containers outside. ‘Nureyev is very good but if you want a real artist, look no further than Frank Sinatra, a Yank, true, but what an artist. And of course, there's always Banjo.' He sits back and grins and Louisa thinks she sees happiness in him. The rarest thing in the world.

Soon, they're at their station and he's bustling them off the train with ‘Get a move on, Robert, you dilatory boy!' And then the train is gone and they're walking in his footsteps, following him home through the thin, darkly shining streets.