Henry’s Daughter

Joy Dettman was born in Echuca in Victoria and now lives in Melbourne.

Joy, a mother of four, is a full-time writer and a published author of several award-winning stories and the highly acclaimed novels
Mallawindy
,
Jacaranda Blue
,
Goose Girl
,
Yesterday's Dust
and
The Seventh Day
.

About the Author

Also by Joy Dettman

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chain of Events

Ifs and Effs and Stuff

The Brothers

Aunty Eva

The Birthday Party

The Freedom Fighter

A Best Friend

Tonsillitis

Christmas Tinsel

Survival

Leaving Home

Ridiculous

European Carp

Waiting for Friday

Alan's Gone

The Last Straw

Child Henry

Grand Larceny

Falling Down

Brother Stranger

Brick Walls

In the Pen

One Thousand Calories

Emotional Blackmail

The Visitors

Doing an Eva

The Final Day

Wally Johnson

Our Own Faces

Decisions, Decisions

Yowies and Songs

Halfwit Hulk

Black Slime

Paint and Forgery

The Hope Chest

Paint

Mick's Mate

The Countdown

The Accidental Metaphor

Two Women

Life Force

It's hard to know how some bad ideas get started. This one sort of bubbled and boiled around in Lori's brain this morning until it seemed sensible. It wasn't sensible. It's not even twelve o'clock yet and she's already eaten her Vegemite sandwich and all she's got left is a muesli bar and an apple and she's wishing she was at school instead of wandering around looking at footpaths.

It's all Greg and Vinnie's fault. They started it. They were half killing each other instead of going to bed that night last week, and Mavis, who is Lori's mother, got herself all riled up trying to make them stop, then the next thing you know she's yelling, ‘Someone grab me a clean towel. Quick!'

She's pretty cool about having babies, due to oodles of practice; there is none of this pushing
and sweating and blowing that you see on television. Anyway, Matthew Charles sort of slipped out about ten seconds later, even though he wasn't due to slip out until March. He was supposed to be a girl too, but he turned out another boy. Mavis wasn't too happy about that.

Lori wasn't happy that he came in February, because it's a pure rotten month to get born in, it's too close to Christmas when
everyone is still sick of buying presents. She's already had eleven Februaries to learn about that, and now she has to share her month with Matthew Charles.

But, even if she doesn't get good presents, Henry, Lori's father, never, ever forgets her birthday.

He never forgets anything, like paying bills, like writing to the twins every single month – you'd think it was written on the calendar
with invisible ink. That first Sunday of every month, out comes Henry's writing pad, out comes his envelope. The last one he wrote, he was putting a stamp on when Mavis said, ‘Did you tell them they've got a new brother?'

Henry looked up, sort of startled, then he shook his head, so Mavis snatched the letter and added her own bit to the bottom, like, ‘tell your Aunty Eva that if she'd like to
extend her happy family, we have another one up for auction. Only one week old, full new warranty, reserve price fifty thousand'. The words all squeezed in before Henry's ‘Love from your Dad'.

Henry wouldn't post it, of course, so Mavis gave Greg a whole five dollars and he posted it. Which isn't fair. He's spoilt rotten. He's always getting money.

Anyway, Matthew Charles never stopped bawling
and Greg and Vinnie never stopped fighting, and Martin, who is nineteen and the oldest brother, said at the dinner table last night that he'd had enough of living in a madhouse and that he was moving in with Karen, his girlfriend. Mavis told him he was not moving in with Karen, his girlfriend, because he was too bloody young. They were having one of their blazing rows that can go on all night when
Greg and Vinnie started killing each other again, in the bedroom, and one of them broke the top window.

So that was Thursday night and today is Friday, Lori's eleventh birthday.

And not Henry, not one single solitary person, said happy birthday when she got out of bed this morning. And no one, not even Henry, gave her one single solitary present.

So Lori got this mad idea to give herself a
birthday present, wag school and spend the entire day searching the streets for dropped money and maybe find enough to buy a bike from the op shop.

She lives in Willama. It used to be a farmers' town with a butter factory and a cannery, sawmills everywhere and a clothing factory – heaps of places where people could work. These days most people work in shops and motels, due to Willama has turned
into a tourist town. In summer the main street is stuffed full of tourists who have heaps of money to waste. Sometimes they drop a bit. One day Lori found five dollars.

Not today, though. It's been a long morning of walking around staring at footpaths and all she's found so far is five cents. She's thinking bigger now. She's at the ATM, in front of the Commonwealth Bank where Henry gets Mavis's
money – which the government gives her because of all her kids – and she's watching the tourists hit a few buttons and make the notes roll out. Her fingers are crossed and she's hoping that someone might drop a fifty-dollar note and not notice they dropped it, when Nelly, her neighbour from over the road, grabs her arm.

‘You're wagging it, Smithy,' she says. ‘I'll tell your father on you.'

‘It's my birthday, Nelly, and everyone forgot it.' Lori has known Nelly forever and she knows she probably won't dob, due to she's cool – not young-cool, pretty-cool; she's actually old and skinny and grey and she reminds you of one of those cats that look as if they've been hit in the face with a working boot that has left its tread marks behind. She hasn't got a husband, never had one and never wanted
one, she says, which might be sour grapes but it mightn't be.

Her house, which is opposite Henry's vacant block, is always getting a coat of paint, and her garden has always got flowers. She spends her life up ladders with a paintbrush or digging in her garden, hiding under her big hat so she can be as cheeky as she likes to everybody and no one can see her face. Like, most of the neighbours
call Henry Mr Smyth-Owen, which is probably because he's not a really neighbourly sort of man, but Nelly calls him, and all of his kids, Smithy. Also, she can swear as good as the high school kids if something riles her up. Lori loves Nelly. She's her best friend.

Mavis can't stand her and Nelly can't stand Mavis either. They are from two different planets, Nelly all wrinkled up like a deflated
balloon and Mavis like one of those giant balloons, blown up so tight that if you tried to make a wrinkle in it, it would burst.

‘Your pants are falling off you,' Nelly says. ‘It's time you learned to sew and started doing a few things for yourself, Smithy.'

‘They were Mick's. His brace wears out that leg.' Lori looks at her jeans. The seam is flapping from knee to ankle. ‘They're air-conditioned,
Nelly.'

‘Bring them over after school and you can run them up on the machine,' Nelly says. She's always doing stuff for Henry, like sewing up splits in pants, and she's always trying to make Lori learn to do girl stuff, like use the machine or learn to knit. Nelly makes all her own dresses and knits her own cardigans. She even makes Mavis's tent dresses. She does it for Henry. He gives her eggs
every week, and vegetables, and they have long talks at the fence. It's a pity Henry didn't marry Nelly, then they both could have grown their flowers and lived happily ever after, because except for her bad language and Henry's posh pommy voice, they are like the same, the same age, fifty-seven, and they've probably got a matching amount of wrinkles.

Nelly walks two steps into the bank, sees
the queue and walks out again. She's got no patience with banks. Lori is poking at the buttons of the ATM and nothing is happening.

‘You like that thing,' Nelly says.

‘They press a few buttons then wait for the money to come out. Can you do it?'

Nelly takes a card from her purse, and a slip of paper. ‘Looks like I'll have to do it today. Every man and his dog is in Willama and the bank has
got two bloody tellers open – and if they were moving any slower they'd be flyblown.' She's looking through the door, then back to the machine, she's tapping her foot, looking in her purse as if there might be some money hiding in there. There isn't, so she fronts up to the machine as if it's one of Spud Murphy's dogs, snarling and dragging his chain, and she offers it her plastic card, then changes
her mind, digs in her purse again. ‘Last time I tried to use the bloody thing it swallowed my card, so make yourself useful, Smithy. Read those numbers for me.' She hands Lori a slip of paper.

‘Is that, like, your secret code number?'

‘Yeah. Now read it slow when I tell you or the mongrel will pinch my card again,' Nelly says, changing her glasses for reading glasses.

Lori reads the numbers
while Nelly prods them in. At first it won't give her any money, just starts beeping like it's calling for the cops, then it spits out her card, but on the second try, two twenty-dollar notes roll out.

‘How come it knows how to give you the right money?'

‘Computers.' She says it like it's a dirty word. ‘The whole world is run by their bloody computers, Smithy.' Nelly pokes the money, her card
and pin number in her purse and swaps over her glasses. ‘Come on, and I'll buy you an ice-cream for your birthday.'

‘You don't have to. I didn't tell you it was my birthday so you'd – '

‘I didn't ask if I had to, Smithy.'

Lori follows her neighbour into a restaurant-cum-takeaway, right in the centre of town. The lady behind the counter knows her, and knows she should be at school. Everybody
knows her. When you grow up in a town and your mother is sort of notorious for obesity and having kids, then you get born notorious – which isn't fair. Rotten Wendy Johnson from school has got a gorgeous mother who wears tight jeans and dangly earrings and works at the school canteen and gives Wendy a lunch order every single day. Also, Wendy got a new bike for Christmas.

‘Chin up, Smithy. Spit
in the eye of the world and tell it you're as good as the next one,' Nelly says, handing her a double-header cone of vanilla and chocolate.

‘Ta. You're cool, Nelly, but you didn't have to buy me a big one.'

‘Think big and you'll grow big.' Nelly mustn't have learned about thinking big until she finished growing, because she sure didn't grow big. Lori is almost as tall as her, and she's not super
tall for eleven.

‘Have a lick.' She offers the ice-cream. Nelly shakes her head. ‘Thanks heaps. So, where are we going now?'

‘I'm going shopping, and you're going to school. It'll be lunchtime. They won't have noticed you're missing.'

‘Yes they will, and anyway, Kelly Waters and her gang said they'd get me after school today. That's half why I'm wagging it.'

‘Tell your teacher on the little
buggers.'

‘Tell her! I told you before about her! That teacher hates my guts, Nelly. Anyway, it's not cool to dob on them.'

‘What did you do to them?'

‘Nothing . . . much.' Lori looks away, stares at a dark-skinned woman. She's got a brand-new baby and it's bawling. This one gets picked up and patted on the back. Matthew Charles just keeps bawling until someone sticks a dummy in his mouth.
‘I wonder if she got stolen,' Lori whispers.

‘Who?' Nelly doesn't know how to whisper.

‘That lady with the baby. You know. You know about how all the Aborigine babies got stolen by the white people in the old days. Did your family steal any?'

‘They had enough trouble feeding their own. I reckon I might have grown a bit bigger if some bugger had stolen me and fed me on something other than bread
and dripping and stewed quinces. Now, that's enough talk out of you. You get yourself back to school or I'll be telling your father tonight.'

‘I'm going.' Lori walks off in the right direction, licking ice-cream and not allowing one drip to escape, but she keeps checking over her shoulder until Nelly disappears into a shop, then she turns and wanders back the way she came.

The main street is
long and most of the buildings are pretty old, but if you keep walking down past the shops and a few posh houses, you get to the really old part of town, which is the reason why all the tourists come here, so it's an excellent place to find dropped money, due to tourists queue up here and pay heaps just to walk through old houses and jails and blacksmiths' shops full of old junk.

Most weekends
and holidays the caravan parks and motels are full of tourists and at Christmas time Henry says the main street gets like Bourke Street, Melbourne. Lori doesn't know Bourke Street, but she knows Spencer Street Station from when Mavis and Henry took her and Mick and Jamesy to Melbourne one day so they could bring the twins back home, but couldn't get them. Since that day, when Henry says the town
is like Bourke Street, Lori changes the picture to Spencer Street Station, which is what her rotten schoolteacher says, like if you write that something is the same as something else, then it has to be a thing everybody knows, or it's wasting words. Such as, when Wendy Johnson says that Mavis is a humpback whale, well, everyone knows what a humpback whale looks like, but if Kelly Waters calls Mavis
a fat white gubba, no one, except the Aborigines, have got a clue what a
gubba
looks like.

The old coach and horses are working today. They are beautiful horses but they have a boring life, just clip-clop down to the bridge, turn around and clip-clop back and all the tourists get so excited to be riding in a coach and seeing a few old buildings, a few grey trees and a lot of dirty river that
Lori can see any old day of the week. She leans against a wall, licking all the sweetness from her fingers when the last of the cone is gone and watching the tourists queue so they can get the next ride when the coach comes back.

And she sees it. A dollar coin lying in the dirt as if no one wants it. She pounces, snatches it as a tall tourist lady, dressed up like a fashion model advertising
anorexia, is about to step back on it. She's with two boys and a rangy old dame who looks more like a guy except she's got boobs. Anyway, they give Lori a look they'd give a used condom, then the old grey one snarls something that shows all of her giant yellow teeth while the younger one sucks her mouth into a shrivelled tut-tut. She steps away, lets the old dame and two boys keep her place in the
queue.

Lori is staring at those two tourist boys – twin boys. She's got the dollar gripped in her hand but she's standing there, mouth open, staring.

It's them! What the hell are they doing up here?