Henry’s Daughter (29 page)

‘She'll love us when we get her down to a normal size,' Eddy says. ‘I wonder if she'll look a bit like that photo when she's thin?'

‘Come off the grass! She's nearly forty, and what's going to happen to all her spare skin? She'll deflate like a balloon, go all wrinkly,' Jamesy says, offering another fish. A big one.

Spring is here and the fishermen are at it again. More carp for dinner. It's good for Mavis. Fish is low in fat and high in protein and fish fat never turns into people fat. That's what they said on television the other night – if you can believe anything on television.

‘We've got enough fish. Alan's already got three,' Eddy says.

‘So now we've got four. We'll fillet it before we put it in the
freezer so we can fry it in breadcrumb batter like we did that last one. There was nothing wrong with it.'

‘Skin is like elastic,' Mick says, looking at the fish. ‘It stretches and shrinks to fit. And it's a living thing. Cells keep changing.'

‘So, you reckon that maybe Mavis's new cells will get the message as they keep replacing themselves, and she'll sort of start pulling into shape?' Alan
says.

‘She needs exercise. It says in the book that she should increase her exercise gradually.'

‘How do you make her get exercise?'

‘Give her some dumbbells to throw at us,' Jamesy says, throwing the fish head at Eddy. Eddy takes the mark and the fish head is tossed back hard.

They sit a while and talk about the diet book that says walking is the best exercise.

‘We could get her one of those
treadmills we saw in that junk mail,' Mick says.

‘Too big to throw.' Jamesy tosses the fish's tail at Eddy, follows it with the head.

‘Not for her! And quit pitching that. I stink of fish. I'm sick of fish. I want roast lamb and mint sauce.'

‘And caviar. And a computer.'

‘A decent treadmill would cost a fortune,' Eddy says.

‘It doesn't have to be a decent one.'

‘She'd break the back of
a cheap one. You'd be better off buying a computer for me.'

‘We've got to pay the electricity bill this week.'

‘And get the sawmill to deliver a couple of truckloads of mill-ends so they've got all summer to dry out.'

‘I wonder if Eva would pack up my computer and send it up on the bus.'

‘You've got a nerve,' Alan says.

‘Alice has got her laptop and Eva can't use a computer. Anyway, if they
are going to rent the house then they'll have to put the furniture in storage, so what's the difference in storing the computer up here?'

‘You've still got a nerve asking her.'

They stand then, and together brush the dust and sand from the seats of their pants while Neil paddles in the last of the speedboat's waves and the tourists' lights start glowing from across the river.

‘Shush, everyone,'
Lori says. ‘Stay low for a minute.' She gathers a handful of clods, then scrambles down the steep clay bank to hide amid the exposed roots of a giant gum while the speedboat docks and two men get out. A third is backing a 4WD down to the water.

The light is almost gone. They won't see her. Her hands cupping her mouth, she lets rip a bloodcurdling yodel and follows it with a hail of clods.

And
the two guys stop connecting
Flighty
to the boat trailer. They turn to the river and, God, Lori wishes she could hear what they're saying. She can't. The river is too wide here, but they sure are looking for her, so she lets loose another yowie challenge.

It's been a long time since she's done that, but she hasn't forgotten how. Martin taught her that call. He used to do it all the time when
he was about fourteen, and some tourist wrote to the newspaper once, saying he'd heard a strange animal, and had actually seen it, racing through the trees.

Mick remembers. ‘Come on, you stirrer,' he says. ‘We have to feed Mavis.'

Just one more, one super special one, because those men are still looking across the river, and the third man is out of his 4WD and he's got binoculars. She's crouching
low in her yowie nest, collecting clods, and she's giggling. Maybe this is the last time she'll play the yowie. You can't do this sort of thing when you're grown up, and tonight she's got this powerful grown-up feeling growing in her heart. Maybe it's just relief, but it's sort of like the weight of the world has suddenly lifted itself off her shoulders. Maybe she's just happy.

And the cry goes
out across the river, long and threatening. That one will make the newspaper for sure.

Mick is straddling his five-dollar bike with the training wheels, bought at the market the day of the lounge suite. He's added some pipe to the seat and to the handlebars so he can sit in comfort; he put two motor mower wheels on where the trainer wheels used to be, and a prop on the front wheel for his bad
leg. He made it a fixed-wheel, only one pedal due to he only uses one foot, though half the time he just scoots it along using his good foot and wearing out his boot. It used to take ages for him to walk home from the bend but now he leads the way. If he doesn't make it to university, he'll probably become a famous inventor.

They feed Mavis more eggs, but in an omelette this time, and with two
slices of toast, then she gets tinned pineapple and a dot of low-fat ice-cream.

‘That ice-cream is sort of thanks for getting rid of Eva and Alice for us,' Lori says.

‘I hate their guts,' Mavis replies. ‘And yours too, you little bitch. And if you call that ice-cream, then I don't. Give me a decent dollop I can at least taste, and open that bloody door.'

‘Not till you stop hating everyone's
guts – and hating your own.' Lori says.

They are down to their last eight Valium tablets and their last Aropax repeat. They are out of fluid pills, have been for three weeks. Mavis doesn't seem to be missing them, so they take her off Valium too. The weight is falling off her and she must know it. She's wearing her new bird material tent and it looks almost like a dress, even if the birds are upside down at the front,
and the sleeves are too long and the skirt dips down to the floor at the sides. Maybe she'll be okay without her Valium now. She'll have to be okay because they need those last few for emergencies.

She's not okay. She starts doing her block, and it keeps getting worse. She's yelling for her cigarettes, yelling out for Bert Matthews to open the door. They get Henry's old transistor radio, hook
it on the fence between Mavis and Bert – he might be half deaf but his wife isn't. The radio runs out of power before Mavis. Alan heads off to get new batteries while they crush two of Donny's executive pills and mix them with jam. It tastes rotten. They live with her yelling for two days and it's not getting any better, so it's back to Valium coffee, two a day, and two will only go into eight four
times.

It never rains but it pours. They get a letter from Mr Watts saying that Eddy's computer will be arriving by rail, but when they go to collect it they find it's all packed up in a huge box with
fragile
and
this way up
written all over it. It's too big to go in the pram so they have to ring Martin to pick it up. He turns up the next night, the computer box in the rear of the ute, which
has been painted and has got new bucket seats.

And stuck-up Karen is sitting in one of them!

She's blonde and little and she's got one of those pug noses that give you a view halfway up her nostrils. She wrinkles it at Martin when she sees the house, and sneers down it at the mess of kids swarming around Martin's ute that almost looks brand new – which he's parked out on the street instead of
in the drive.

‘Nice to finally meet all of my new brother-in-laws,' she says – and she's not so smart. ‘I hope you don't expect me to remember all of your names.'

Stuck-up bitch. ‘Ya only got one sister-in-law, luv. If ya try really, really hard, ya might be able ta remember her name,' Lori says, putting on a good dose of Bert Matthews's yobbo drawl. Which probably isn't a very nice thing to
do, or to say, but Lori feels like being mean tonight. The Valium packet is empty.

They get the box out of the ute and carry it to the verandah, then Lori walks inside. Martin starts coming after her. She turns fast, can't get out, he's blocking the door.

‘You're getting to be a sarcastic, smart-mouthed little bugger, Splint, and it doesn't suit you,' he says.

‘Well, stiff bickies.'

‘She's
my wife – '

‘Yeah, well, now I know why I wasn't good enough to go to her wedding, don't I? She looked at us as if we were a mob of dead-beat yobbos with AIDS. And I saw the way she looked at you when she saw the house. And you wouldn't even be here in this street if we hadn't begged you to pick up Eddy's computer. You're ashamed of us too, now that you've got Miss Piggy.'

‘If I didn't care
about you, you snitchy, mean-mouthed little bitch, then Mavis would be out and running amok, and you kids would be split up. I'm caring about you by staying away, by keeping my mouth shut about what you've done in there – and you know it, too.'

‘I don't know it. And she is running amok. We're out of bloody Valium.'

‘Then why didn't you ring me?'

‘What are you going to do about it? Take her
out to the farm and give us a break for a week or two?'

‘I can ring the bloody doctor. Get a new prescription, you smart-mouthed little bitch.'

‘And he'll come around and give her a check-up. Cool.'

‘Would you want to come around if you were him?' Lori shrugs, hears Eddy ripping open that box on the verandah. She's just dying to get a look at the computer. ‘You'd better get control of that
tongue, Splint, before it starts controlling you. Don't turn into her. One of her is more than enough.'

The doctor is willing to prescribe, sight unseen. He writes the prescriptions for Valium and Aropax and fluid pills, plus repeats, so it's back to apricot jam and Aropax, three Valium coffees a day and a fluid pill twice a week. They'll never be able to let her out of that room. They'll be
stuck here feeding her Valium till they're sixty-five.

But life gets back to near normal, except for Eddy. He's in another time zone. No one can talk to him for days, and no one can eat at the kitchen table either. They've got to buy a computer desk and Eddy wants a good one, a new one. He's been saving for a computer so he goes out and spends the lot on a desk so posh they allow it to live in
the lounge room. And woe betides any kid not in high school who goes within a metre of it without supervision.

If Eddy is in computer heaven, so are the high school teachers. All the Smyth-Owen homework is now printed out on a laser printer. ‘Presentation excellent', one teacher writes on Mick's essay, and he gets a B+.

Time is creeping up towards October when they lay-by a cheap treadmill and
a heap of other Christmas presents at Kmart. The lady in the lay-by office looks at them as if they are kids, because their stuff is costing a pile of money. Lori flashes Mavis's supermarket note for cigarettes, which says she's housebound, and they've got a hundred dollars in cash for the deposit, so after a bit it turns out okay.

Lori is cooking two chickens, bought on special at the supermarket.
They were near their use-by date, but didn't look or smell off. She made onion and mixed herb sandwiches, then poked them inside the chickens, as practice for Christmas, which is going to be a really good Christmas this year. She's putting a great pile of frozen chips in the oven and the smell that comes out is so good she can hardly wait for the chips to get hot because it smells just like
Henry's roast chicken.

Alan is sitting at the table, reading, Eddy is down the town, trying to find out how much it would cost to get the phone reconnected so he can get up on the Internet, Mick is on the computer finishing off an assignment which has to be in tomorrow and he wants another B+, when Vinnie walks in the front door. He's either drunk or stoned out of his brain because he doesn't
even notice their lounge room!

Lori runs in from the kitchen, leaving her chickens sizzling.

‘Greg's done a bunk with the cops on his heels,' Vinnie giggles. ‘He's into heroin for real now and he's been nicking stuff from houses. Got caught trying to flog a DVD player so he had to piss off to some place.'

He's unpacking his stuff on the couch. He's got the DVD player – or another one. He's
got two classy cameras, a man's gold watch and two lady's watches all tangled up with one T-shirt, three stiff and stinking socks, the remote control for the DVD and half a six-pack of beer. And he's not even old enough to buy it.

The kids stand and stare at him. He was always a bit rotten, but never totally rotten. He sure looks rotten now. He's only a year older than Mick – like, sixteen –
but he's huge and he's probably still wearing the jeans he left home in, probably hasn't washed them since he left home, either. They don't reach his socks, and the bum is worn through and flashing flesh – he's too much flesh to contain. And he's had his head shaved. And he's rolling a smoke and it's not tobacco, which isn't going to help a brain that needed all the help it could ever get.

And
he's in the house for two bloody minutes and already Lori can smell his stinking feet. Nothing she can do about him or his feet. He's too much. Too big. His head is damn near level with the top of the doorframe. She might think she's grown up but she knows her limitations so she leaves the boys to it, heads for the kitchen and the jar of Vicks, smears two worthy dabs up her nose then returns to
the passage, leans near the lounge-room door, breathing that old familiar air and not liking it.

She puts his beer in the fridge when he tells her, too, doesn't nag him about the stolen junk he's tossed onto their couch; it's a no-no leaving junk on the couch. She's silent, listening to news of Greg and cops and court, listening to tales of smashed-up cars, until she smells hot chips, and Mick,
wanting to get on with his assignment, turns back to his keyboard.

‘Greg nicked one of those briefcase ones from a car. It had games on it,' Vinnie says, leaning over Mick, poking at keys. And five pages of Mick's assignment, which took him five hours to type in, is lost in cyberspace.

Mick is computer illiterate; he doesn't have a clue, just panics, yells for Lori because Eddy isn't around.
The computer has cried ‘barley' and the screen is flashing blue with black stripes. Lori turns it off at the power point.

‘He said not to do that, Lori!'

‘It's all we can do. It will keep it in there somewhere, Mick,' she says. ‘Did you name it?'

‘I was just going to save it when he did something that disappeared it.'

‘You were supposed to give it a name.'

‘It wasn't finished!'

Then Eddy
comes home, sees the hulk before he sees his computer, hears Mick's lament. ‘She's cool,' he says. He glances at the culprit, doesn't say, ‘Who are you? How are you? Your feet stink,' though he probably recognises him as another family member by that stink. ‘We've got rules in this place. What you don't understand, you don't touch, moron.'

Eddy doesn't know it, but Vinnie has already had too
much of that ‘moron' thrown at him. He shoves Eddy towards the fireplace and, not expecting things to get physical, Eddy's feet sort of tangle as they connect with the hearth. He falls forward, slams face first into the antique mantelpiece which he loves so much. And he's down.

Lori backs off, backs out of the lounge room. Big country dropping bombs again, wiping the little country out, and just
when it was starting to get up on its feet.

She stands at the door, again planning murder by Valium, watching Eddy get up slow. She's seen him playing the clown, seen him all closed up and hurting when Eva was here, but she's never seen him knocked down before. There is something new playing behind those blue eyes. They are cold, like chill-out freezer cold, so cold they're almost glowing hot.
Vinnie might be half a metre taller and half a ton heavier, but he could have bitten off more than he can chew by touching that precious computer. Eddy is wiping at his eyebrow, at his bloody nose, but his eyes above his bloody nose are saying, Vinnie, you're a goner.

Maybe Vinnie sees it. He sniggers and backs off. Eddy sits down, sits quiet, dripping blood onto his keyboard, Mick looking over
his shoulder. ‘Don't worry about it now,' Mick's saying, ‘someone grab him some toilet paper,' he's saying, but he's looking at his notes, leafing through his notes, sweating, praying, wanting Eddy to worry, to drip blood onto the keyboard, sweat blood out of that keyboard, only find that missing file.

Vinnie looks bigger in the narrow passage than he did in the lounge room. He sort of swaggers
into the kitchen, Lori behind him, certain he's going to grab a chicken, hot from the oven. He sniffs at the chicken and chips smell, looks at the blue walls, the ceiling, then goes to the fridge while Lori closes the back door, stands with her back against it. Alan's book is on the table, but he's taken off some place.

‘That's it, you've got it,' Mick yells from the lounge room.

‘Of course
I got it, and it's now called
Halfwit Hulk
.' Eddy yells those words, then he's up and out the front door. Mick walks through the kitchen and out the back door. He doesn't even look at Vinnie.

Lori starts hacking up the chickens, digging out stuffing that smells like Henry's chicken stuffing but looks like oily herb and onion sandwiches. She hears noise from out the back which she recognises as
Mick's drill. He knows it's time to eat. They all know, and they're usually inside helping out when it's time to eat, not fixing stuff.

Vinnie is sitting watching her dish food out onto assorted plates. He's drinking beer and smoking his stuff and she can't take the plastic lace tablecloth off to set the table. He's all over it and dropping his ash all over it and the floor. She always takes
her cloth off when they eat, but she gives up trying today. It's going to be ruined. Everything is going to be ruined. She cuts a few slices of breast meat for Mavis, removes the skin, counts out ten chips for her, fills the plate with broccoli, carrots and beans, all boiled up together in one saucepan. She adds a squeeze of lemon juice and a spoonful of cottage cheese, then shares the remaining chips
between the rest of the plates while Vinnie helps himself to a chip or ten.

The little kids can smell chips from a kilometre away. They are in and sitting, waiting, but the big ones, from Jamesy up, are still sawing and drilling.

Lori is passing out the plates when she gets the giggles, because she knows what they are doing. She bets she knows, and when they finally come in and shut that door,
she's dead certain she knows; they are giggling too, but on the inside.

No one has fed Mavis. Vinnie hasn't even asked about her but he's going to be asking soon. She's smelling the food, yelling for her food. God, don't let her give the game away. Not yet.

Vinnie sinks what's on his plate then pinches two chips from Neil, pinches chicken from Timmy, tries to get Jamesy's drumstick but misses
out, and he doesn't like missing out, so he grabs a handful of Matty's chips on his way to the fridge for more beer.

Mick goes to his room, turns his light on, nods to Eddy, who picks up Mavis's plate, then they both disappear out back, close the door behind them.

‘What the bloody hell is going on?' Mavis yells. It's muffled but Vinnie hears her, flinches. Maybe he's not so big, after all.