The Book of Emmett Read Online Free PDF

volunteer.
    When he saw the hot mesh of smoke emerging, he ran round the back and pushed through the door of the smoky house. Choking, he grabbed Louisa, who seemed to always be at her grandparents’ house in those days, and pulled her out of bed. He surged down the front with the child in his arms like a hero emerging from the surf.
    Outside in the street Nan and Pa sat on kitchen chairs with blankets across their shoulders. The red of the fire truck throbbed through the night and smoke, a slinking animal, just kept slipping through the door.
    Because of the fire, Grandpa George went to live at the big mental home in the parched paddocks further west at Sunbury and Nan stayed on at Wolf Street alone. Anne took the kids to Sunbury on Sundays.
    To get there they’d walk the long paths through brown paddocks. The paths were shaded from the white hot sun by corrugated iron strips and after many turns they’d find Pa standing alone among many in a vast room, bruised from thumps from other patients.
    Though his pants were held up with braces, he’d lost so much weight they sagged like a half-mast flag. His eyes were gaps. Even in photographs it was apparent that he was fading out. When the kids held his hands they could have been holding moths.
    He died at Sunbury and Nan forgot about eating and survived on smokes alone. So in 1969, Emmett and Anne and Louisa and Rob and the twins Peter and Daniel moved into Wolf Street, West Footscray. They brought their beds, their noise, their fights and not much else.
    ***
    The Maribyrnong River pushes inland from the ports on the marshy edges of the horse-head-shaped Port Phillip Bay deep into Footscray. If you rise up above, you’ll see that the city works on a grid and also, that there are so few trees, it’s a blasted landscape.
    Regardless of trees, Emmett believes Footscray is a better bet than the housing commission and Wolf Street has the advantage that the War Service loan on Nan’s house is cheaper. More money for booze and the ponies.
    Although Wolf Street is to the west of the river, on warm evenings when the kids are playing kick-to-kick on the deserted Total service station behind the house, they imagine that in the lull between kicks and in the spaces of silence when cars are not roaring down Williamstown Road, they can just about hear tug boats moving about in some blue distance. It’s highly doubtful the Browns can hear any boats. Still, they persist in the illusion. Such fancies make life better. And though they seldom discuss them, they uphold them with each other.
    Number fifty-five Wolf Street is one in a row of boxy wooden places that line both sides of the long narrow street. It has four rooms, two on each side divided by a skinny passageway. First is the lounge room where in winter Emmett stokes the fire until the throbbing orange of it forces the kids and their cushions back like retreating seals. Next comes Emmett and Anne’s room, then Nan’s, and the kids are in the last room. The kitchen runs along the back and is connected to a small bathroom with a sliding door. A lean-to fernery slouches up against the kitchen and the washhouse and toilet hang onto that. There’s no electric light and no windows and sitting on the throne in the dunny in the dark, the kids’ feet swing high and loose.
    A modified Hills hoist dominates the yard. An amateur inventor once lived at fifty-five, a bloke named Herb Hawkins, long since dead. Herb took it into his head to improve upon the clothesline with a hydraulic lift device (a hose) attached to the tap beside the house. The water was meant to push up the clothesline and save all the effort of winding. Possibly it once worked but when the Browns live there it doesn’t, and now tilts heavily to one side.
    Since the hydraulics packed up (oozing for weeks like a wound) the clothesline offers no lift at all and so remains fixed. Sheets can’t go on the low side because they drag in