Henry’s Daughter (13 page)

‘For Christ's sake, will you let us help you, Mavis? Let us cook the kids a decent meal and
clean this bloody house up for you. You can smell it from halfway up the street. And Vinnie has to go to school. And you've got to keep those two little kids off the bloody street. One of them is going to get run over.'

Mavis does the usual, tells them to get out, but she eats their food, eats Weet-Bix and keeps on eating them until the milk is all gone. She roasts their potatoes at midnight
and Lori can smell them roasting in her dreams, in which Henry is cooking them. Then the dream turns into a terrible nightmare because he's not in the kitchen, he's in that hole and he's turned all green and she's in there with him. She wakes up screaming, and she's out of bed, and she's never going to sleep again in case that dream comes back.

She creeps out to Mavis, needing to cry so bad her
whole body is shaking with it, needing to hold on to someone who is warm and alive. And she tries, creeps close, touches Mavis's arm.

‘Get back to your bed and get out of my bloody sight,' Mavis says.

Lori gets out of everyone's sight, gets out of her own sight. She rides down to the river and she stays there. She's sitting on the clay bank when the sun comes back to Australia and she's still
sitting there when it starts packing its bags for England. She's just sitting there, watching the grey water flow.

Alan finds her. She's not going to talk to him, never, ever again. He howls and runs off, and a bit later Nelly comes walking down that track, catches Lori playing with her vegetable knife, sees her hide it beneath her sock. She sits down on the dirt like she's a kid, doesn't mention
the knife.

Lori stares at the grey water, letting the sun-flecked ripples blind her eyes and silence the world – but nothing can silence Nelly. She doesn't care if she's talking to a zombie, she keeps doing it, keeps sitting there until the sun gets so low it starts painting the tops of the trees red. She's saying anything that comes into her head, like it doesn't matter if Lori is listening
or not. She's saying stuff about how the world is full of grief and always has been. She's saying that in the olden days, people talked it out, talked to the butcher, and the grocer, the postman, and their neighbours, so they didn't need grief counsellors filling their heads with airy-fairy shit that screws them up worse than ever. Then she starts talking about Henry's singing, and how she always
used to go out and weed her garden when he was singing in the shed, just so she could listen to his song.

She says she knows that Lori loved Henry, knows how much she's missing him. ‘But like it or not, he's gone, Smithy, and he's not coming back. All the kids are missing him and they are getting worried about you. You've got to eat to live, and you need to walk past twice to cast a shadow these
days. You're going to end up getting sick.'

She just talks and talks until the sun is gone and the mosquitoes start biting, and the European carp are plopping around in the river. Lori hits a mosquito, feels the satisfying wet squash, grinds it into her shoulder, and zombies probably don't feel mosquitoes biting, and zombies probably don't feel so full up with raging anger that they want to scream
sixteen F words at Nelly, one after the other after the other.

‘You're breaking young Alan's heart, Smithy, and you're not being fair to any of those boys. They've got to deal with losing their dad – '

‘Don't you say that fucking word to me,' Lori yells. It makes Nelly flinch, like maybe a snake bit her. She shuts up for a second.

It sort of makes Lori flinch too, but inside. She's never said
that F word, not out loud, but it sort of felt like it came out by itself, like it was the only word strong enough to let out some of the chewed-up hurting that's eating her insides. Anyway, who cares? Nothing is the same as it was before. The whole world has changed and that F word is coiled up ready on her tongue and waiting its chance to strike again. ‘No fucking thing in this whole fucking
world is fucking rotten fucking fair, Nelly.'

‘Too true, Smithy. It's a fucked-up unfair fuck of a world, and once we learn that then we're halfway to growing up.' She pats Lori's shoulder, leaves her arm sort of loose around her shoulder for a long time, then she gets up and walks off home. Lori sits on, saying F words to the stars, and the moon, to the river of water rustling by, to the mosquitoes
she murders, until Mick comes limping down the track.

‘Full moon,' he says, standing there on his good leg. It's a hard walk for him even when he can see where he's walking, and it's a harder walk back due to the rise. He needs a new brace. Mavis has received letters about it, which she's got no interest in, like she's got no interest in the bill letters with the windows.

‘Why did you walk all
the way down here for?'

‘I felt like it,' Mick says.

‘You did not. You can hardly walk with that stupid fucking thing. You're just checking up on me, that's all. Nelly told you where I was and you thought I was going to drown my fucking self, didn't you?'

‘Alan couldn't drown you that night. Good swimmers can't drown, and stop saying that. You sound stupid.'

‘Get on my fucking bike,' she says
and she dinks him home.

Home? That's a fucking joke.

Mavis doesn't go to bed at night. She makes custards and pancakes while the television goes on and on, then when the kids get up and start whingeing for breakfast, she goes to bed to get away from them. Vinnie looks after the little ones during the day, mostly.

Not on Thursday. Lori and Mick ride around the corner into Dawson Street and see Timmy and Neil being hunted home by
Bert Matthews, who is holding bawling Matty under the armpits, holding him at arm's length due to he smells. Lori tries to take him, but Bert doesn't want to give him up. Anyway, what happens next isn't good; Mavis has to get out of bed to take delivery of Matty at the front door.

He hasn't got any clean nappies. Lori finds a cot sheet and Mavis is trying to pin it on but Matty won't lie still.
His poor little bum is red raw from crawling around in that shitty nappy all day and he's only a baby, and the safety pin Mavis is trying to use isn't big enough. She's yelling, maybe embarrassed about Bert Matthews bringing him home, or maybe because of the terrible smell, then she starts slapping into his poor little sore bum, just holding one of his legs up and slapping so hard, like she's loving
it.

She's always looked like a monster. Well, she's turning into one now. That's what she's doing.

‘You leave him alone.' Lori snatches Matty's top half, slides him across the table. ‘You leave him alone. It's not his fault that Henry's dead.' Mavis throws the cot sheet at her, and the pin, then she goes back to bed.

It's Matty who makes Lori stay around that rotten house, not Mick or Alan.
It's poor little bawling Matty, who is still bald and still can't walk. He traps her. She takes him over to Nelly's and borrows some antiseptic cream, uses half the tube on his poor sore bum, then she sends Jamesy to the supermarket to get Donny to buy a big pack of cheap disposable nappies and some cream for a sore bum.

Jamesy is such a weird sort of kid; he's lost Henry too but he's never said
one word about it. He always spent a lot of his life sitting on Nelly's fence, and that's where he's living these days, when he's not at school. He just sits there quiet and smiling his twisted grin, watching the house over the road, like he's waiting for it to fall down.

And it's falling. It's falling. It's caving in fast. Someone has dropped a bomb on their little country. No proper meals at
night, no clean clothes for school, no clean beds to sleep in, unless Martin and Donny take the washing to the laundrette. Everything that was isn't any more.

Donny gives up first. He's got himself a job at a supermarket in Albury. ‘I'm sorry, kids. I'm sorry,' he's saying. They're all standing at the front fence, except Greg, except Martin. ‘I can't do anything, can't watch this any more and
not be able to do anything. It's killing me. No one can do anything with her, and it's killing me, and killing Martin too. I'm sorry.' He gives Mick some money then he turns and walks away. Lori knows he's howling. He's hardly stopped howling since Henry died.

Martin goes a month later. Everyone has known for ages that he wanted to move in with Karen. It's like getting that flat was a halfway
station and now he's moving on, thinner, weaker since Henry died. Smaller, pale, he never smiles.

‘Don't go leaving yet. She'll come out of it after a bit. She always comes out of her mad moods after a bit,' Vinnie says.

‘I can't afford to keep paying the rent and paying her bills too. I can't do it. And if me and Donny aren't around, then the welfare might have to step in and do something with
her. I can't, kids. She's off the planet.' He takes the electricity bill so he can pay it before he goes. The electricity people are threatening to cut off the power. Martin doesn't know about the woodman's bill because he just knocks at the door and asks for his money.

It's about two weeks later when the cops come knocking on the door. They've got Greg with them because he got caught in a stolen
car. The lady cop wants to speak to his mother, who has walked up to the hotel. Vinnie tells the cop where to find her, and Mavis comes panting home, not worrying about Greg's stolen car, just looking for some lollies she hid on top of the cupboard over the sink. Vinnie ate them. He's the only one tall enough to see up there. She goes crazy, like they are the last lollies left in the world and
she's got to have them.

‘Give me some money and I'll get you some more,' Vinnie says. She doesn't want other lollies, she wants the ones he ate and she's going to claw them out of him. She gets a grip on his face and she rakes it with her nails, from his brow to his cheek.

‘I should have scratched your eyes out instead of combing your bloody hair, you bastard,' she screams.

‘You've gone crackers.
You never combed my hair in your life. You were too busy combing little Greggie's hair. You've gone around the twist, Mavis.' He's backing off, though, fending her off. He gets out to the front verandah but she's still after him, screaming crazy stuff about redheaded bastards, like she pure hates his guts.

Spud Murphy is out at his gate, watching, listening. Bert Matthews is watering his nature
strip. Nelly is weeding her lawn.

Poor Henry. He would have hated this. Proud Henry.

Not too proud to hang himself, to let all the neighbours and his kids see him hanging there. Not too proud for that.

‘Where am I supposed to go?' Vinnie yells, one hand holding his eye in – probably.

‘Get out of my sight, you perverted bastard, before I scratch the other one out.'

Night comes before Vinnie
creeps inside, his face white except for her claw marks and his eye. Mick lifts the closed eyelid and what is behind it looks like a blob of blood. She's probably cut his eye with her beautiful long fingernails. He'll probably go blind in that eye.

The little kids are in bed, Mavis is staring at the television, Mick is leaning against the bedroom door, pale and silent. ‘She'll forget about it
in the morning,' he says.

‘She won't bloody be here to forget about it. She'll be dead in the morning. They mightn't be able to do anything with her, but I will,' Vinnie says, still holding his eye in. ‘I'll do her. Knock her bloody crazy head off, Mick. That will cure her.'

Then Greg comes to the door, stands behind Mick. He's supposed to go to court in a couple of weeks and Mavis is supposed
to go with him, which she won't be able to do unless she hires a furniture van and a forklift to get her into it. ‘Want to fuck off out of this shit hole,' he says. ‘I got a car but it needs fucking petrol.'

Vinnie looks at him. ‘The bank's shut.'

‘Won't be tomorrow, moron.' They are talking another language. They are talking about something the kids don't understand. ‘We got enough in it to
get over the border.'

‘I'm coming.' Vinnie is hurting, he's shaking and he can't find his other boot to leave home in. It's probably under one of the beds, but he's gone way past the stage of thinking straight as well as seeing straight.

‘You ought to go up to the hospital and see if your eye is all right,' Mick says.

‘I'll cut her bloody mad eating head off if I hang around here, Mick. I know
I will. I'll get the axe and cut her bloody head off.'

Greg is grabbing stuff, tossing it into the back seat and boot of Mrs Roddie's little Datsun, which he's backed up against the verandah. She always leaves that car on the street since she got her new fence and gates, due to she can't be bothered opening her new gates. He's got her keys too. Maybe she left them in her car, or maybe he pinched
them from her house. She's old and goes to bed with the chooks and it's after midnight.

‘Move it, you fucking moron,' Greg says, grabbing a pillow and blanket.

Vinnie finds a pair of worn-out sneakers, grabs his own pillow and blanket, his old school bag and he's out, in the car. He's going, and he's not even old enough to leave school.

They drive east, Lori and Mick standing at the gate, watching
until the tail-lights disappear into the dark. Gone off to someplace, just as far away from Mavis as Mrs Roddie's old Datsun will take them.

Half of the beds are empty. The brick room is empty. Henry's world is disintegrating.

D-i-s-i-n-t-e-g-r-a-t-i-n-g
.

Lori takes the vegetable knife from her sock and puts it back in the cutlery drawer.

Foggy mornings, misty days and the year just keeps on getting older, colder. The house is cold, school is cold, life is cold. It's ridiculous.

Lori likes that word, uses it a lot. She tells Crank Tank she's ridiculous. Tells Mick he's ridiculous wanting to go to school, because Mavis has gone mad and the whole world has gone mad and he's pretending it's normal – like hiding condensed
milk in the potting shed is normal, like it's quite normal hiding the bread Martin buys in Nelly's freezer.

And Alan, he's ridiculous too; he's spending half his life crying and saying it's his fault about Henry. And how can Lori agree that it is? He'll probably go out and hang himself too, or he'll die of coughing; Willama germs are attacking him again so Lori can't start attacking him. She
gets him a Panadol, makes him gargle with salty water.

He's given his germs to Matty already, and now he's trying to share them with everyone else, like coughing them all over the school lunches Mick is trying to make with frozen-solid bread, which they should have got out of Nelly's freezer last night but forgot to do.

That's the trouble with kids trying to run a house; they don't know how
to do stuff, and they don't understand that fixing one problem makes two more worse things happen. Like Jamesy, he let the half-starved chooks out of their pen so they could eat grass and rotten apples on the vacant block, but they preferred Henry's garden, ate everything above the ground then they headed for the laundry and pecked holes in two big plastic bags of rice Henry had stored in there, which
no one knew he'd stored there until they started treading in it when they tried to do some washing.

Rice doesn't seem to agree with chooks. A few of them die from overeating it, but a few start laying eggs again. The kids find them in the laundry, on the east verandah, in the potting shed. Mavis uses them for her custard, when she's got milk. She uses the kids' condensed milk one night because
she knew all the time where Henry used to hide it, so there is no condensed milk to put on the porridge and the kids don't like it much even with milk; Mick's porridge is either burned or half cooked.

He and Lori go together to get Mavis's money from the bank now and they do the shopping together, and always buy heaps of porridge, not that anyone ever liked it much, but Mavis hates it. There
is not much she hates, except baked beans and vegetables. They buy heaps of home brand baked beans. Anyway, after the condensed milk disappears from the shed, they have to start leaving it at Nelly's place with the bread and margarine. Mavis calls them thieves. Maybe they are thieves. They feel like thieves, ridiculous ones, hauling stuff backwards and forwards over that road.

Lori gets the whip
around her ears one night when she tells Mavis that she's acting like a nutcase who should be locked up in a nuthouse. That whip hurts like hell and leaves a mark, like she's been branded from her ear across to her nose, which is a good enough reason for not going to school. What's the use, anyway? She's an alien at that high school, wandering some lost planet, ten trillion miles from the sun.

Of course, then Mick can't go to school either so they end up stuck in the house all day, and it stinks of Mavis and Matty, who is now sicking up every time he coughs. It's Friday when he ends up in hospital. He's really sick, and no one knows it until Lori carries him over to Nelly early in the morning when she is freezing cold but he is red-hot burning up and can't breathe. Bert Matthews drives
him and Nelly up to the hospital, which needs Henry's Medicare card but no one can find it.

Martin comes to the fence that night; he still brings food and money on Fridays, and what's the use of bloody Fridays? ‘Matty could have died,' Lori says, accusing Martin for nicking off to rotten Karen and her posh house. ‘He's got pneumonia and he could have died. And we can't find the Medicare card
and living like this is ridiculous.'

He comes back on Saturday and he's got more food and two mobile phones, which he got on some cheap deal, two for the price of one. He gives one to Mick so he can get in touch if there's an emergency.

‘Hide it,' he says.

That's another case of fixing one problem and making it double. Henry had the phone cut off when the pizza place started doing home deliveries.
Henry knew what he was doing, because Mavis is like a dinosaur dog that knows there's a brontosaurus bone buried someplace and she wants to party. She upends the house searching for that phone but she can't find it – until Alan, silly, trusting, coughing Alan, gets the phone from inside a boot, from under a sock, from under Mick's bed, and he gives it to her so she can ring the hospital and
check on Matty.

She checks on Matty, then she checks if the pizza place still does home deliveries, then the phone goes into her pocket and no one is going to get it back. Which sort of proves that she's not really nuts, just insane.

It starts in for real then. She rings a taxi to buy her a carton of cigarettes, and she always smokes more when she has a whole carton. She rings up the bank and
asks about chequebook accounts. A man comes to bring her the forms. The kids have seen him before at the bank.

‘In your housebound situation it will be more convenient for paying the bills,' he says.

Paying what bills? The rates haven't been paid since before Henry died, and if Martin hadn't paid the electricity, they wouldn't have any lights.

Martin picks Matty up from the hospital a few days
later, with his bottle of antibiotic medicine, so Mick tells him about the phone.

‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit. What am I going to do, Mick? What can I bloody well do?' He pushes Matty into Lori's arms. ‘Keep him warm, Splint. Give him that eye-dropper full four times a day,' he says and he walks back to his ute saying ‘shit'.

The postman delivers Mavis's book of cheques, plus a bank card and
a heap of other stuff in a black wallet. The letter says that the bank is delighted to open up its vault for their rich friend Mrs Mavis Smyth-Owen – not in those exact words, but that's what they've done, because the Willama taxi drivers start making a fortune. Mavis is ringing them and talking to drivers at the front door every night; they are delivering stuff and driving away with her cheques.

Martin doesn't come the next Friday so Mick asks Mavis if she could please write out a cheque for the supermarket so he can get some food. She won't. She won't even write a cheque for Henry's woodman when he drops off a final load then comes to lean a while at the back door. Mavis owes him a heap of money, because for months he's been taking pity on her. That's what he says. And he says that he's
not into subsidising those who have got the money to waste on cigarettes, so until he gets paid what he's owed, there won't be any more wood delivered. She tells him what he can do with his pity and his wood. It sounds splintery.

No baked beans left at Nelly's, the porridge is all gone but there is plain flour and Jamesy finds two eggs in Henry's potting shed. Mick makes pancakes and the kids
eat them with tomato sauce, but by Saturday night the tomato sauce is gone and they're sick of pancakes so they go out to the laundry and half fill a saucepan with rice, which has almost as many black bits in it as white. There were always mice in that laundry and now the rotten chooks have opened up holes in the bags and the bloody mice have got in.

Then it's Sunday. They ring Martin on Nelly's
phone and find out why he didn't come on Friday. He's on his way home from Melbourne. He took Karen down to see a show and to buy her an engagement ring.

‘Put Nelly on,' Martin says, and he sort of sighs.

Nelly talks for a long time, and it must be costing her a fortune to talk so long to a mobile phone, but later, when she hangs up, it probably costs her even more because she makes toasted
sandwiches and packet soup and syrup dumplings, which they eat with ice-cream. Her food tastes so good and there is so much of it but Lori and Mick feel bad. They are beggars now. They are bludgers. Henry hated bludgers.

And that's life. And the weather keeps getting colder and there's not even any hot water because there's no wood for the stove. Alan can't live without hot water; he takes Matty's
pram over the road to the bush and picks up enough wet wood to get the fire going. Then it's every day. It's finding wood, it's finding food, and it's waiting for Mavis to use up all her cheques so she has to send Lori and Mick to the bank again.

Except that doesn't happen. The stupid bank sends her a new chequebook before the old one is even finished.

Tuesday. Long way to Friday. Mavis is smoking,
staring at the television and her green tent is filthy. She doesn't see Mick when he limps into the kitchen, tries to rub the frown lines from his brow, tries to rub the ache from his back.

‘We need money for food,' he says, waits, his good foot on the floor, one hip high, the other low. He's grown so tall. If he doesn't get a new brace soon, his hip and back bones are going to grow so crooked
he won't be able to walk at all. He moves, blocks her view of the television.

‘Get out of my way, you twisted bloody little thief,' she says, and she stuffs two mints in her mouth, moves her head so she can see around him.

He moves too. He's going to make her look at him. ‘You're the thief,' he says. ‘You're getting money from the government so you can look after your children and you're not
looking after them. How much money do you think you'll get when they put us all in homes?'

He turns to walk away, and Mavis puts out a foot and trips him. Oh sure, she tries to grab his arm when he starts to fall, but it's too late for that. Mick's got no balance, he never did have any balance and she knows it. Everybody knows it and that's why no one is allowed to thump him. His braced leg goes
one way and he goes the other, goes down hard. There is a sort of non-Mick-like moan, a sort of surprised turn of his head and then he's flat out on his stomach and he's not moving.

Jamesy picks up the broom. It's not much good for sweeping, most of its hair is gone, but it's good enough for what he wants it for. He's smiling and belting at Mavis with it, belting at her shoulders and trying to
get her head, belting her fat thighs while Alan runs for Nelly.

She calls the ambulance then comes running into the kitchen, finds Mick sort of fainted, still on the floor, finds Jamesy with his weapon and he's not retreating, finds Mavis, standing back, wild eyed and staring at the floor where Lori is kneeling, trying to put Mick's braced leg back in a straight position and he isn't helping;
he's ghost white and floppy, his eyes sort of opening, then closing again. Nelly tries to wake him up with a wet tea towel, and when she can't, she tries to lift him, but it's like he's dead.

Lori just holds him, both arms around him. She's heart-jumping, head-crawling, sick scared. This is Mick. This is pure good person lovable Mick who never hurt anyone in his whole life. This is Mick and he's
hurt bad.

The little ones are howling, Matty is coughing and howling. Nelly ignores them, turns on Mavis and goes at her like a sardine with a dirty mouth attacking a humpback whale. She's still going at it when the ambulance men walk into the shambles of Henry's kitchen.

They get Mick's brace off, get him on a stretcher, start asking questions.

Mick fell over. Mavis didn't see it. His boot
must have slipped.

Nelly is saying something different and peppering what she's saying in her usual way.

Nelly is a lying, troublemaking old bitch, Mavis says. Always has been.

The ambulance men don't know who to believe, due to what Nelly is yelling sounds like she might be a pure troublemaking old bitch. The men look from one to the other, look at Lori.

She has to sleep in this house tonight.
Where will she sleep if she tells that Mavis tripped Mick? Where will the little ones sleep?

The ambulance men will call the cops and the cops will take the kids away and put them in homes so Mavis doesn't abuse them. That's what police do on television. Lori has seen too much television, read too many newspapers, stood outside too many doors. And she's heard Martin and Nelly talking about kids'
homes. If she dobs now, that's it, so she stands, her back against the door, stands dumb, stands shaking her head.

Jamesy is staring at her. Alan is coughing and staring at her. The little kids are crying and staring at her as the ambulance men take Mick away.

One by one they have left her. It started at Christmas with Henry. One by one until all of the big ones are gone. Now Lori is the biggest;
she's twelve and three months and all the kids are staring at her as if she's really the biggest.

Big happened too fast. She's not big enough.

Her ears are ringing and her head feels as if someone put a bike pump in her ear and blew her head up so it's twice its size. She's hot and she's cold and a thousand thoughts are darting backwards and forwards between her ringing ears and she can't make
one darting thought join up with the next. She's got to ride up to the hospital. Stay with Mick. Can't leave the little ones. Should have said something. Should have told on Mavis.

Henry! Henry! Henry!

Matty is crying, pulling himself up on her jeans, reaching his little arms up. She looks at him, lifts him, walks outside with him.

Henry!

Late. Winter, after five o'clock late. Cold. Ice coming
up from the cold earth. Smell of winter's wind cold. Too cold for Matty, but she's walking off to the river with him on her back, his little hands choking her, his little bum wetting her. She's walking, head down, not seeing, not feeling, not thinking.

Alan and the other kids follow her, so she turns up another track, runs from them, but you can't be Cathy Freeman when you're wearing a Matty
backpack. The kids keep running after her, all the way to the bridge.

Someone must have been fishing up there because a European carp has been tossed up on the bank. They're like pest fish, those carp, no good for anything except messing up the river. It's a big one, though. Lori stands, watching it flap, gasp for air, try not to die. A lot of carp get tossed on the bank and Henry used to say
it was cruel to let them flap themselves to death. She always kicks them back in the water; the poor things want to live so much.