Free The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster

their father’s mood.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Well, the trifecta’s finished and that’s where all the real bucks are, you know that,’ says Rob, the bitter realist.
    â€˜Are not,’ she says more fiercely than she feels.
    â€˜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.

11
    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