The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster

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.
    â€˜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