54

Woolamai Hostel is built on the principle of a circle, never Louisa’s favourite shape, and now, in a fog of confusion, she’s lost again and doing laps of the beige place. Imagine how the patients must feel, she thinks furiously, aiming her rage at the anonymous designers of the joint. Instead of giving these poor people a signpost, a big red lamp or a pot plant, no – they make it all beige. Of course they bloody do.

Most of the inmates are in for dementia. She passes knots of them standing near the main desk. One old man is groping an old woman’s sagging breasts and her face is as empty as a clean plate. Nothing. The old man rubs himself against the old woman’s behind and as he bumps at her, she holds on to the wall to steady herself.

Louisa wants to go over and slap the old man away but no one else seems to notice or mind and so she thinks she might be imagining things. Anyway, there’s not one single staff member around and Louisa is once again a reluctant witness.

Women and men, she sighs, seething at her quailing heart , at the cold fear the sight raises in her. At the sadness it stirs, knowing she should do something. You are still a gutless wonder, she scolds, forcing herself to look away. Another patient, a tubby little woman named Nancy, startles her, appearing into the void of memory. She gently touches Louisa’s hair. ‘Do you know Mrs Golightly?’ she asks, ‘I do. I know her...’ Louisa feels stinging tears spring up. Wintry tears for Nancy and for the old lady she didn’t help, for every single thing.

She tries to get a grip on herself and her memories but they well up like flood waters. Everyone tells her she lives in the past and she thinks well, so bloody what? You live where you want to and I’ll live where I want to . It’s mainly her brothers and sister who chide her about it. They can all get stuffed anyway. She finds she’s muttering ‘get stuffed’ and thereby proves that she is truly losing it.

She presses on through the pale sealed circle, through the sour piss-seasoned air, searching for Emmett as if he has the answer, and the very idea of this is so insane she utters a harrumph without even meaning to.

Some days she finds her dad standing by a wall pulling at his cardigan. Memory is sharper than reality because whenever she first sees Emmett at the hostel, she irrevocably believes this can’t be him. A mistake. Cannot be him, someone has taken him and replaced him. Emmett is huge and terrifying and smart and cruel. He can’t be this poor old bloke fiddling with his buttonhole.

And then her eyes adjust to the truth that the first one is gone and in his place is this poor scrap who walks miles round and round all day every day, walks until he can walk no more. Getting him to sit down seems to cause him pain.

She is always astonished by what she feels. Understanding love is hard for her, she’s never really grasped the concept. And Emmett should be hated by all of them. How could he not be? And yet, seeing her mother with him, she is again humbled by love.

On each visit to Woolamai, Anne takes a picnic of things Emmett used to like: fruitcake and his own mug and good strong coffee. Little square ham and mustard sandwiches cut up as small as stamps and placed into his mouth.

‘Love doesn’t come into it,’ Anne says dismissively, ‘he was my mate and I spent most of my life with him and here he is now and he’s suffering and if I can make him one little bit happy, then I will. He is a human being and he gave me my kids and now he is a poor old thing.’

Once Emmett seems to wake from the place that holds him and with the old blue look, he says, ‘My baby girl. Little Louie.’ Then he is drawn away by the light on the wall and she thinks she must have heard wrong and wants him to say it again; but she’s too surprised to speak and her voice stalls. She’d thought he was gone, now here he is again. In that little sentence, all the sorrow and all the sweetness of him come flooding back. Her father knew her. Despite everything, he knew.

She leaves Emmett and Anne and walks to the window, leans on it looking out at the red dahlias reaching for the sky. She turns towards her parents and it seems that they explain everything about her. She wants to laugh and to cry out in their defence, ‘It’s not your fault.’ But that would be mental so she just wipes her eyes and heads back over to them.

Louisa watches while her mother feeds her father and is astonished by the quality of tenderness in the face of memory. The monster has become the lamb and through it all her mother has maintained her humanity.