Henry’s Daughter (26 page)

The old wardrobe that has lived forever in front of the lounge-room fireplace almost flattens Lori when they're trying to turn it on its side so they can get it out the door. It's huge and heavy and it takes them half of Sunday morning to rehouse it in Mick's room – against the dangerous wall, beside the other wardrobe, so he's now got almost matching wall-to-wall wardrobes,
which he glues and screws to the floor, wall and each other, which might slow Mavis down if she ever comes through those weatherboards. This means they have to move Mick's bookshelves into the passage, which also means that they'll have to put a globe in the passage light so people can see what book they're looking for, which means another coat of paint for that passage ceiling. It's never-ending
once you start on cleaning up a house, and that's why people don't start doing it.

The lounge room is big once all the junk has been cleared out, but the carpet looks terrible, stained and faded into odd rectangles and blotches, white paint spills and bits of stuck-on wallpaper. Eddy won't have a bar of it, or of trying to scrub it clean.

‘Pitch it,' he says, and he and Jamesy start ripping
it up before anyone can stop them. They find wide, dark-stained boards beneath it, like the floor in the bunk room, and like the bunk room floor, it washes clean after about ten buckets of water.

They start on the fireplace then, start wiping away years of dust, picking dust off in furry clumps. They find a few dusty books and Henry's old wallet with his driver's licence and seven dollars in
it, which he lost, like, years ago, then had to get a new licence. They find a hired video that got lost one year, an old dummy melted into the wood. They find a really nice glass or crystal vase and two dollars twenty in coins, and also Martin's old swimming trophy, but best of all, beneath the dust and junk and cobwebs, they find the mantelpiece and a long oval mirror which hasn't got a crack in
it.

It's a true lost treasure. It's something grand and it belongs to them.

‘It's an antique,' Eddy says, up on a chair, reaching high to drag down an old shirt someone must have pitched up there; he uses it to dust the carved bits of wood, right at the top. ‘How come no one ever noticed this room, never knew about this fireplace?'

‘We knew it was there. Henry put the wardrobe in front to stop
the wind blowing down the chimney,' Mick says. ‘The top was always there. You papered around it. You saw it.'

‘I didn't know it was there,' Jamesy says. He's climbing too, wiping at it. ‘Look at those fancy carved bits around the frame.'

‘If we had a bit of furniture polish we could get those scratch marks off. Mum got a really bad mark out of the dining room table with a bottle of furniture
oil.' Eddy's hand is running over the timber, sort of loving it, then he heads for the laundry to find an old bottle of O-Cedar oil he's seen in there someplace, and he finds it – probably left there by the last person who owned this place. They spend the next hour sloshing it on panelled walls and fireplace, spilling it on the floor, then taking turns at sitting on an old pillow while someone drags
it around and around the lounge room, rubbing the oil in. They use so much of the stuff that they have to go out on the verandah to dodge the smell.

Their suite is still a bit damp and one chair leg still wobbly. Mick fixes it by screwing it in and it's solid as a rock, which they discover in the hour it takes to haul that suite inside and move it around until it looks just right. The couch is
against disintegrating curtains, hiding the worst of the bottom bits. The two chairs are in the corners, one each side of the fireplace. It looks seriously excellent – except for the curtains.

‘We need new curtains, a classy picture for over the mantelpiece and a shade for the light globe,' Eddy says.

‘I'll order a chandelier tomorrow,' Lori says. ‘And a Rembrandt.' She's been studying famous
artists at school this term.

It's when she's cooking Mavis scrambled eggs that she thinks of Henry's potting shed and remembers an oval picture frame the last owner left in there, and she's over the fence, running through the rain to retrieve it, wiping off a hundred years of dust and spiders. Lori always liked that old oval frame, which is still intact, even the glass is intact, and the hanging
wire. Even the photograph is intact.

‘That's an antique, or the old dame in it is,' she says, presenting it to Eddy.

They hang that hard-faced old dame high over their mantelpiece and she glowers down at the group now testing their lounge suite, and maybe they know why whoever dumped her in the shed dumped her there. She's making this room feel freezing cold, or that damp suite is.

Eddy wants
to light a fire. Lori and Mick tell him he'll set the chimney alight and he'll burn their new lounge room and them too.

‘We've got to dry out the couch. My bum's wet,' he says and he goes out back and gets a huge block of wood that's always been too hard to cut. It's soaking wet and so is he, but he gets some dry kindling and a pile of newspaper and he's setting light to the lot. That block sputters
itself dry then the flames catch on and the fire starts tossing out heat. It doesn't even smoke.

Late now, bedtime late; no one wants to leave that fire, but they get rid of the little ones, tuck them in tight, tell them an old fairy tale that ends with ‘and they lived happily ever after, now go to sleep'. When Lori returns to her place on the couch she's got the box of photographs from the top
of Henry's wardrobe. They sit close, shuffling photographs like cards, just looking at them.

There's one of a beautiful girl with a mop of long, fluffy hair.

She's holding a rose.

‘Who's that?' Jamesy says.

‘I don't know. Probably from Henry's England. She might be an old girlfriend or something,' Lori says.

‘It's Mavis,' Alan says.

‘Crap.'

‘It is. When she was seventeen,' Eddy says. ‘We've
got a big one of that same photo in St Kilda. It's coloured. The rose is orange. It matches her hair.

They all hush as they pass the photograph around and stare at it. Martin would have known Mavis when she looked like this, Lori thinks. Martin would have remembered her like this. That's why he used to get so mad about her being fat. He could remember what was lost.

It is her. Lori can see it
now she knows. She can see it in the eyes and the hand holding the rose. ‘My God!'

Mick finds a photograph of Henry, the one Lori has always loved. He doesn't look much older than Martin, and he looks a bit like Martin – except he's dressed old-fashioned posh. ‘That was taken before he left England.'

‘When he was happy,' Lori adds. He looks happy, looks so young and . . . and like the whole
world belongs to him.

‘If we want pictures on the walls, we should get these copied,' Alan says. ‘They can make copies of old photographs. I saw some before and afters in that photo shop window.'

‘It would cost a fortune.'

‘Probably no more than a carton of cigarettes used to cost. We can afford to have our own face looking down at us instead of that hard old dame's. She spoils the frame,'
Alan says. ‘What's the use of hanging up other people's ancestors?'

Our own face? He can't mean Mavis's face, he must mean Henry's, Lori thinks. He's looking at both.

They sit on, and decide which one they'll have – if it doesn't cost too much. Lori says she wants Henry – though she'd like to give her vote to Mavis; it's a gorgeous photo. She always thought it was one of Henry's old girlfriends,
always used to wish that he'd married her. And he did – sort of.

‘They must have looked good together when they were young,' Eddy says. ‘If I had my computer and scanner I could make those two photos into one.'

‘You haven't got your computer and Mavis probably wasn't even born when that photo of Henry was taken. Eva is fourteen years older than her and Henry was twenty years older.'

‘What was
she doing nicking off with him for? He was old enough to be her father.'

‘Maybe she had a father fixation,' Lori says.

They talk frame costs, and Mick, who is on day-watch duty tomorrow and Tuesday, says he'll go and check out how much two photos and one frame would cost, and see if the shop can put one of the photos in the old dame's frame. With Eddy starting full-time school, they plan to
each take two sick days per fortnight to do day-watch, but not the same days each fortnight, just in case the school starts to smell a rat.

Jamesy makes cocoa all round and he drops off a mug at Mavis's window, plus two diet crackers with Vegemite. No Valium. They are going to have to cut her off Valium or ring up Martin, get him to phone the doctor and see if he'll give them another prescription
– or try to get Donny to go to the doctor and cry nerves.

‘We'll have to move the television in here,' Jamesy says.

‘If the little kids are watching television in here the suite will get wrecked.' This room sort of belongs to Eddy. He created it, so they agree that the television can stay in the kitchen. ‘Next time those social workers come, we'll sit them down in here and give them a cup of
tea,' he says.

They laugh, picture it. Picture a coffee table. They'll have to get a coffee table like Nelly's, and a small plastic lacy cloth to hang diagonally over it.

Eddy starts playing the welfare dame, Henry's old reading glasses perched on his nose, then Jamesy takes off the man, keeps lifting his eyebrows. The two of them get a real act going. ‘Mmm. We're here for another visit, Mrs
Smyth-Owen. I've brought along the “Mother of the Year” medal for you. Mmm. Oh my, but haven't you got the lounge room looking just lov-er-ly. Oh, what a lov-er-ly warm fire, and what's that stink?'

‘Mmm. What stink? Oh, you mean the O-Cedar oil.'

‘Mmm. Marvellous stuff. Have you tried bathing the children in it, Mrs Smyth-Owen? Wonderful stuff. It kills head lice and foot odour with one application.'
Eddy warms his hands, then dusts a chair with a tea towel before he sits down, the towel over his shoulders, his arms folded and holding that tea towel close, like the lady was wearing her jacket over her shoulders that day and sort of hugging it close. They are great actors. They ape the duo's expressions, and the audience love it. They are laughing fit to choke, which only makes Eddy
and Jamesy go at it harder. It's better than television.

They want Alan to play Mavis, accept the medal, but Alan is sitting back, content to be entertained. He's quieter than his twin and it's plain obvious that he still believes in miracles. ‘We can have our own face on the wall,' he said. He was looking at the photo of Mavis, all right. It's like he looks on her as their own now.

Eddy tries
to make Lori play Mavis, but her mind has been away, sort of saying over and over, our own face, our own face.

‘Nick off, moron,' she says.

Eddy weaves it into his act, so that all Lori has to say is some insult and Eddy makes it sound as if she's doing a Mavis. They are choking with laughter, and Lori is getting more inventive, getting caught up in his game.

‘Shush,' Alan says. ‘I think I
heard her laugh.'

‘You're dreaming,' Lori says, but they shush for a long time; they hear the wind and the old house creaking and groaning, like it knows it's lost its chance to fall down, like it knows it's going to have to stand up for maybe a few years more. They hear Spud Murphy's dogs barking and the television in the brick room blaring.

Then that laugh again.

They haven't heard Mavis
laugh since she laughed at Henry that Christmas Day. They listen, hope it was her. Probably only the television. They wish she was thin, and back to beautiful like she was in the photograph – which would be twice as gorgeous as Wendy Johnson's mother. They wish Mavis was sitting in the new lounge room, laughing with them. The room is silent and all eyes stare at the fire or at the hard-faced dame
above the fire and Lori's mind wanders far away.

She's looking at the photographs of her English grandparents. They are just people, strangers. There is nothing of them in her, not her eyes, not her mouth, not her hair, or her body. There is no more of her in them than in that old dame on the wall, but she could see there was a bit of seventeen-year-old Mavis in her – the curly hair, the hands,
the eyes, a bit of the chin.

You can't borrow ancestors. You can't make yourself look like them. Okay, you can learn new ways from borrowed ancestors, maybe better ways, you can learn to speak like them, but you can't be
of
them. She thinks of Henry. He was like a shadow that came out of nowhere, came out of Lily and a boy called Henry. Just a shape of life, floating on air. His borrowed family
caught that shadow, tied it down and kept it safe; they gave Henry their name, left him their money and their photographs when they died, but it was like they'd taken his . . . his moorings with them when they died, like he had nothing to hold on to except a borrowed name, so he just floated away again.

She springs upright in her chair and stares at the dame on the wall, suddenly understanding
why Aborigines, raised by white people, need to go back and find their own. It doesn't matter if they were actually stolen from their mother's breasts or just given away by their mothers, and it doesn't matter if the white people who looked after them were good, bad or indifferent, because it's not about that.

It's about the life-force elastic connecting people back to someone they know they
belong to. Someone of their own. So some of them had more European ancestors than Aboriginal, but like poor little
child Henry
, most of those European ancestors didn't hang around long enough to even see the babies they left behind. Everyone needs someone of their own to cling to, even if it's only one of your own people's faces looking down at you from a wall. If Henry had had a photo of Mary
or old Woden the Indian, or fourteen-year-old Lily or even the boy called Henry, he would have known there was some life-force thing that went back, and back, and back forever. He wouldn't have given up and killed himself, because if elastic stretches back then it has to go forward too, right?