Henry’s Daughter (32 page)

‘I don't like anythink what's
green,' Neil says. ‘And I don't like celery.'

‘Fish and chips,' Vinnie says, looking in the fridge. Eggs, eggs and more eggs.

‘No. And you're all mad,' Lori says. She takes out her favourite baking pan, sloshes in some oil and starts cracking eggs, tossing in leftover boiled rice, shaking in pepper, salt, a dash of tomato sauce, a can of the mixed vegetables Donny brought up months back. A bit
of a stir, a bit of milk, a handful of cheese to cover the mess and she slides the pan into the oven. ‘As if we could paint a whole roof! It's not even worth discussing. Someone do something useful. Toast. Chuck a bit of salad on a plate for Mavis and get those little kids bathed. Food will be ready in half an hour.'

They eat a lot of eggs in the next week, they eat them fried, baked, boiled
and scrambled, eat them in stale-bread puddings, eat them cold with salad while the boys talk paint. Lori just ignores them – until Mick gets converted and goes up to the paint shop, starts talking roof paint. By the weekend Vinnie is sick of eggs; he wants meat, so he commits murder, and it's tough chook for Sunday dinner. Two tough chooks. They've got too many chooks, anyway. The poor buggers are
as crowded as battery hens in that pen.

‘You should have boiled the bloody things,' Mavis yells when they feed her a chewy old boiler's breast. ‘You can't roast old chooks, you boil them, you silly little buggers.'

Vinnie has a second go at murder, and this time two young roosters lose their heads. The kids are living high off the land.

Lori still won't agree to talk roof paint, and Mick won't
agree to doing it unless they do it properly, use the paint recommended by the paint shop man, which must be made out of crushed-up emeralds because it costs a fortune.

It's funny, really, how you talk so long about the
if
,
if
,
if
, until that
if
sort of starts to turn into a
how
and even
when
. They buy the paint next pension day and wheel it home in a shopping trolley.

Spud Murphy sees them
on the roof that evening, trying to hang on with their toenails while they clean it down, due to the man at the paint shop told Mick they'd have to clean it before any paint goes on. Spud offers his roof ladders. ‘And don't break the bloody things,' he says.

Mick gives him a dozen eggs; the chooks have gone egg-laying crazy, probably because they've got a bit more room to lay in. Anyway, the
roof ladders get hauled up and hooked over the roof's peaks; they make washing that roof dead easy, no more sliding down as they work with hose and broom.

Henry always used to say that many hands made light work. On Saturday they rise with the sun, aware that by midday the roof will fry the lot of them like eggs in a pan. Ten hands start slopping, brushing and rolling their precious emerald-studded
paint on the west side while Mick waits below, filling up jam tins with more paint and passing them to Neil, who's standing halfway up the ladder, which doesn't give the painters an excuse to stop. Vinnie is playing boss, walking that roof like a circus performer and pointing out the missed spots; maybe he's found something he can do better than them.

Mavis becomes a secondary consideration that
weekend. They give her a fried sandwich for tea on the Saturday, though she doesn't get fed until nine-thirty. They started on the east roof as soon as the sun skipped over to the west, and they kept on painting until there was no light left to see where they were putting it. The sandwich is loaded with oil, but all the cooks are too damn tired and sore to cook anything, and they've got to get
up at dawn again tomorrow, and the only thing Mick can cook is fried sandwiches, and who's counting calories?

Mavis's eyes sort of light up, almost like in the photograph on the lounge-room wall. It's months since she had anything that might qualify as junk food, and she always loved bread and grease. She could eat a loaf of sliced bread and a tub of margarine in one sitting in the old days,
and she loved fried sandwiches. This one is cheese and tomato and she eats it like a lady, then licks her fingers, like it was so good. So good. Her eyes are looking right at Lori when she hands the plate back. She's got big eyes. They don't look old. She's got eyelashes too, darkish brown and long like the twins, not sandy stubby ones like Donny's.

‘Make me another one,' she says.

‘You get
diet yoghurt tonight,' Lori yawns. ‘Then you can have an apple.'

‘Peel the bloody thing then,' Mavis says.

The kids are painted green and burnt scarlet by the time they get a second coat on, but the roof looks as if it's laughing down at the tired old weatherboards, which are crying out now for their share of love. They've got to do it. They've got to paint those boards even if they're not worth
painting.

‘Youse have done a real good job on the roof,' Bert Matthews says. ‘I might hire youse to do mine.' He's joking, though Vinnie doesn't know it.

‘We've got to do the walls, then you're on.'

‘Could we get them done by Christmas? Then invite Martin and Donny to dinner,' Lori yawns.

‘Christmas. We forgot to pay something off our lay-by this week,' Mick says.

‘Pay them next week and
we'll pick it up. I'm going to bed.'

Eddy adds Eva's money to the cigarette jar on Friday; bills still have to be paid. They pick up their lay-by on Saturday, hire a disabled taxi and get the Kmart guys to load the treadmill in. The taxi driver is not too happy having to help Vinnie get it out, but he does. Eddy gives him a dollar tip. Lori gives him two more.

They eat old boiler soup, full of Mick's carrots, onions and
zucchini on Sunday, and it's all right, too.

Nails, Mick writes on his list. A lot of the old boards are loose. Fill-A-Gap. A lot more boards have got splits. Sandpaper. No one writes down that other word. No one mentions that unmentionable stuff. There is a new dirty word in this house.

Paint
.

One of the kids only has to whisper it, and it makes them all flinch. They look at hands where old
blisters have dried. Lori cut her finger on one of the brushes when she was painting the roof and it still hasn't healed. Maybe she's willing it not to heal, but Alan gets her a bowl of hot salty water. Henry used to say salt killed germs better than antibiotics. It fixed his tonsils. He hasn't had one cold this year. She sighs and sits soaking her hand, then sticks on a bandaid.

The window frames
have to be scraped down, Nelly says, due to there is a bit of flaky paint left on some of them. The twins and Jamesy get stuck into them with kitchen knives and sandpaper while Mick hammers nails and screws screws into sagging weatherboards. Vinnie is working behind him, filling cracks with Fill-A-Gap.

Christmas is breathing down their necks when they buy a ton of cheap outdoor acrylic and two
more tubes of Fill-A-Gap then shout themselves a taxi ride home.

‘How's Mavis going?' the driver asks.

‘Good,' Mick says, which is true – when she gets fed on time and they don't give her baked beans – even if it does sound like a lie.

Every taxi driver in Willama knew Mavis's address and they are probably missing her more than most. ‘She's not getting out these days, eh?'

‘She can't get out
– ' Neil starts.

‘Neil! Remember Vinnie?' Lori says. It's enough to silence the blabbing little bugger, who has already said enough to convince the taxi driver that the new talk going around town is fact. Mavis Smyth-Owen has grown herself in.

The kids have decided to do the verandah posts, bargeboard, doors and window frames lemon. They've all been looking at houses, trying to decide what colour
to put with the white and green. They settle for lemon. There is an old house down near the high school which is white, green and lemon and looks sort of sedate, serene. It's got a similar roof to their house, a similar verandah too, similar sort of lacy woodwork between the verandah posts, which is going to be a pure pain in the bum to paint. They'll let Vinnie paint that, and the fancy woodwork
around the little roof gable.

Nelly offers her trestle ladders with the board you can put between them to stand on, then she stands on it herself one day while the kids are at school. She's an excellent painter, so is Vinnie. The kids get home and those two have already got a coat of paint on the front of the house and it's like, wow!

Nothing is happening at school except a couple of excursions
that no one, other than Neil, is going on. They cost money. The rest of them wag it, but even with Nelly helping it still takes over a week to get two coats of paint on, and get those boards looking okay, and okay is good enough to look perfect from Nelly's side of the road. They are sick of the stink and the brushes and blisters, sick of climbing up and down ladders, and they are never touching
another paintbrush if they live to be a hundred, and that's all there is to it. Until they come home from school on that final day and find Vinnie has been around the house filling up previously unsighted cracks with Fill-A-Gap, marring the near perfection of their paint job.

‘What did you have to go and do that for?' It's like the joint cry of the damned.

He's spent too much time with Mick
lately; he's starting to sound like him. ‘If a job's not worth doing right, then don't bloody do it at all, I say.' They attack Vinnie, four on one, and they get his Fill-A-Gap gun, get him down and sit on him, try to shove its nozzle up his nostrils, fill up a few of his brain gaps.

But he's probably right. One more coat. Mick thinks he's right, so it's more
effing paint
first thing in the morning.
They'll get it done before Christmas Day or bust. And oh boy, when the third coat is on, it looks better than okay, and that wooden lacework looks so posh. Even the trellis looks better.

The neighbours are hanging around in droves. Even the ones they don't know are going for walks at sundown so they can stare at the Smyth-Owen place. It's like, Christ, what's happened down here? You can read
it in their eyes.

‘That old girl is looking bloody good,' Bert Matthews says. He's on the front verandah, wriggling a loose board – not the one that attacked Eva's shin; she broke it. He starts nosing around the windows then, pretending he's checking the paintwork, but he's actually trying to get a look inside. ‘Do youse want a hand putting a few boards on your v'randah? I used to do a bit of
chippie work in me day.'

‘Not yet, thanks,' Mick says. ‘That's for after Christmas.'

‘How's your tomatoes going this year?' Bert asks, heading towards the back yard, wanting to get a look through the kitchen window, get a look at Mavis.

The wire hinges are off the gate. It's leaning back against the fence, due to the inconvenience of lifting ladders over it, or carrying them through the house,
so Bert continues his constitutional down to the back yard.

‘Got any ripe yet?'

‘A few.' Mick follows him.

‘How you doing in there, Mavis?' Bert yells at the kitchen louvres.

‘None the better for your asking, Bert Matthews,' she yells back, and she almost sounds like her old self, sort of cheeky.

Whether it's right or wrong, what they are doing to her is working. She's as tame as a lamb lately,
and shrinking every day. It's sort of scary – the hoping is. And the watching and the waiting is scary too, like, will she go off her head again, start yelling again? And when will she go off her head again?

She shrank heaps while they were working on the house and didn't have time to feed her regularly, or look at her too often. There was so much of her that, for a while, the bit that came off
wasn't obvious, but she's getting down to people size now, and it's so obvious, it's sort of almost too wonderful, almost like an
if
that came true.

Martin nearly drops dead when he comes around late on Christmas Eve. Donny comes too. Lori wanted the boys home for Christmas dinner to eat home-grown chook, which tastes heaps better than bought chook. She wanted those boys to drive up Dawson Street
by daylight, really see the house. Of course, they couldn't come; Donny is going to Jackie's place and Martin and Karen are having dinner with her parents. But they're here now, and they have brought a ton of presents and drinks and lollies, so it's like a party.

Anyway, Martin is just plain flabbergasted, even by what he can see in the half dark. ‘I'm flabbergasted. I'm bloody speechless. Who
did it?'

‘We did.'

Donny is so impressed he doesn't believe they did it, like maybe the town people did it for them, or the Salvation Army.

‘We did it all – except the guttering. Except the front, which Nelly did for us. Ask Spud Murphy, ask Nelly. Ask anyone.'

The boys can't stop looking at stuff long enough to sit down and have the party. They look at the outside by torchlight, they look
at the lounge room, at the Christmas tree, then they go back outside to shine the torch all over. They get to Mavis's window and Donny returns to the kitchen.

Martin doesn't. He's standing there, staring at her. And he's totally floored. He says that too, says it to Mavis, like, ‘I'm floored. I am wipe-out stupefied, Mavis. You're a shadow of your former self.' Lori hasn't had time to make new
tents, and the upside-down bird one Mavis is wearing hangs on her like a sack.

‘I'm flabbergasted,' Martin says. His head is inside the window and Lori is standing with him, as proud of the transformation of Mavis as she is of the house. ‘They've given you a new lease on life,' he says, as if he wants her to talk to him, to say something that's not, ‘Get out, you bastard.'

She doesn't say a
word, just turns her back and lifts her skirt to him, gives him a good view of her rear, but she's got her op-shop grey boxer shorts on which flap around her knees, so it's not too gross.

‘That's looking pretty good too,' he says. And she still doesn't scream.

Then he's back in the kitchen and shaking his head. ‘You bloody kids. How did you do it?' Vinnie starts sort of big-noting himself, but
Martin is not taking much notice. He's looking at Mick, he's looking at Lori.

‘Eddy nagged us into doing the painting,' Lori says, and Donny looks at Alan.

‘Him,' Alan points a thumb.

‘I'm floored,' Martin says for the umpteenth time, and finally they have their party because Donny has to leave soon.

‘Got any prescriptions you want filled?'

They shake their heads, look at the presents he's
left in supermarket bags on the floor. Look at the food he brought. Two huge frozen chickens, which is coal to Newcastle, but he's also brought a pile of other stuff.

‘Ta for everything,' Lori says. She gives Donny three pairs of socks from beneath the Christmas tree. She's had an ongoing affair with new socks since Eddy came home and burned the stiff ones. Martin gets his socks too, but he stays
on, stays for hours after the little ones have been put to bed.

They get to talk Valium. ‘I suppose I can ring the doctor again, but sooner or later he'll want to come round. What do I say to him if he wants to come around?'

‘Tell him she's much better, that she's off the Aropax and she doesn't want to see anyone until she's lost some more weight,' Eddy says.

‘No. Don't tell him she's lost
weight or he'll really want to come around. Just say to him that she's well, but she still needs Valium, in case of emergencies.'

That old doctor is no masochist; he writes another two scripts.