Henry’s Daughter (35 page)

Mavis knows something is wrong. She jerks out of her chair, looks from face to face, her eyes wide, startled. ‘Is he all right?' she says. Maybe she heard them calling for Matty. Mick tells her that Eva is dead.

She shakes her head, stares at the faces, then follows everyone through to the kitchen. Fast. Easy.

Lori makes a cup of tea. It's something to do when there isn't anything
else you can do. Jamesy snatches the sugar, replaces it with the sugar substitute granules while Mavis sits down at her old place at the table. She's silent, and they're silent. Eddy is pale. He hasn't moved from his chair. They are watching him, watching her, watching Vinnie creep back, stand in the passage doorway.

Mavis's eyes are roving the walls. Clean. White. They are finding the curtains,
the new vinyl floor. It's like she's not sure if she's dreaming this, dreaming she's out. She's sort of disorientated – Rip Van Winkle, slept for thirty years. She can't recognise the new world, and the kids can't recognise her shape at the end of the table, either. It's not the same world and she's not the same shape. She's around nineteen stone now. That's big, sure, but she's tall, so it's
not as big as it sounds.

She moves forward on her chair. It's the same chair, but it feels strange beneath her; they know it by the way she moves it forward, moves it back. Then she opens her mouth. ‘Dead? Eva?'

‘You got a letter from Mr Watts. We opened it.'

‘How? Where? When?' She wants information fast, doesn't look at the letter.

Alan does the talking, does it quiet, matter-of-fact. He
tells her Alice is dead too.

‘Alice? What the hell happened to them?'

‘A bus smash,' Lori says and they all nod, watch Mavis, half afraid of what they've done to her, half proud. She's back in their kitchen and she's wearing her tracksuit pants but not the top; she's changed it for a man's tartan shirt. Lori offers a mug of tea, offers a choc-mint biscuit. Mavis accepts the mug, looks at the
biscuit long but doesn't take it.

‘She's only fifty-three. She's . . . I don't believe it.'

‘The funeral is on Friday. Watts is coming up to get us on Wednesday,' Alan says.

‘We'll have to go, Mave. She had no one else.' Eddy slides the letter towards her, and she stares at this son she's barely known since he was two years old. She turns to Alan, stares at him, and back to Eddy. Then the mug
is down and she's reading.

It's a short typewritten letter. She reads it twice to make it go in. She looks at the blank back. Looks for more. No more, so she places it on the table. Looks at the walls again, then at her op shop shirt, at the leg of her op shop tracksuit pants.

‘What were they doing in bloody Argentina?' she says.

Eddy shakes his head. ‘The last we heard, they were in Paris.
They must have gone for a holiday.'

‘She's only fifty-three.'

‘Fifty-four next month,' Eddy says.

‘June,' she says. ‘In June. They named her Eva June.' She stares at Eddy. ‘Same date as Timmy. She was twenty-eight when she married Henry. I was a crazy mixed-up fourteen. He taught me to play chess. My father was dead. I had no one.' She's looking around her now, her big frightened eyes staring
at faces and finding Vinnie, who is still leaning against the doorjamb. ‘You're the bloody living, spitting, breathing image of him – the perverted bastard,' she says.

Everyone looks at Vinnie. ‘Not my fault, is it?' he says. ‘And I don't go around raping kids, anyway.' There was no wall between him and Mavis on that crazy pot-smoking night; he heard most of her ravings up close and very personal.

Mavis rubs her eyes, sighs in a breath and pushes her long, daggy hair back. She's got Eddy's eyes, or Eddy has got hers. They're identical today, scared, can't find a place to look where it's safe from other eyes. Maybe they want to tell everyone to fuck off so they can cry in peace.

She sure looks as if she wants to cry. So she didn't like Eva, but losing her is like one too many changes in
a whole world of change. Maybe she doesn't know what to do with freedom either. She's sitting on that chair, afraid to move from it. She's been dieting hard, walking her treadmill hard these last weeks, but now she's out and the world is pressing on her so she's sitting, staring at that choc-mint biscuit.

She lifts her hand, and they all think she's going for that biscuit, but she just stares
a while at that hand, then pushes her sleeve up, studies her arm.

The hand looks good again and it's exactly like Lori's, even the long, strong nails. The wrist looks good, even the elbow, then the sag starts. She checks out her leg, her foot. She kicks off her slipper, looks at her toes as if she hasn't seen them for years, then she puts the slipper on. It's too big and worn flat, worn out and
filthy.

She doesn't know where she should look, or who she should look at. It's like she's thinking, who am I? Half of my hard built layers of protection have gone missing and I can almost see myself, and I'm too scared of what I'm going to see.

Her couch is on the junk heap. There's an enlarged photo of a young Henry hanging on a clean white wall where her couch used to be. Her eyes find it,
lock onto something safe. ‘He was too good for this world. She should have left him in his England. I thought he was so bloody old when she brought him home. A gentle, decent man, your father.'

Matty starts giving the no-swearing lecture, but Lori cuts him off. ‘That one was taken before he came to Australia,' she says.

‘I know when it was taken.' The voice sounds like Mavis, but the mouth it
comes out of doesn't look right any more. It's trembling with wanting to cry, but wanting to talk more than cry. ‘I didn't know it then. Didn't know until after Donny was born that I'd been sleeping with my stepfather. Eva was your grandmother – my bloody mother. She had me two weeks before her fourteenth birthday.'

Her mouth is losing the battle. She tries to hold it steady with her fingers
but tears are flooding down, wetting those fingers. ‘Christ!' she says. And her palms swipe at those tears. ‘Why should I cry for her? She hated me, and for half my life I didn't know why she hated me. I didn't find out until the old bitch died, and she hadn't left me one cent in her will.'

She sniffs, sucks a breath. ‘I went to Watts . . . planning to break the will.' Her nose is running. Alan
passes her a wad of toilet roll, which is cheaper than tissues. She blows her nose, wipes her eyes. ‘I found out I was the old bitch's grandchild, and that redheaded bastard I'd loved had fathered me with his own daughter.'

She blows her nose again, sucks air. ‘It was probably true. I don't know if it was true or not but it was in the will, written in black and white. That crazy old bitch had
been determined to get in one last punch from the grave.'

The kids are standing quiet. Nothing they can say to that. Can't say it's probably not true, so can't say anything.

‘Eva told me and Henry the details that night, and she laughed while she was telling us. Her mother tried to drown me in the kitchen sink the day I was born. She'd dug a hole for me in the garden, but my father came home
and caught her. He made that pair of mad bitches raise me. Bought the house in St Kilda, moved them down from Brisbane, moved his business.'

She shakes her head, lifts her chin, looks at Vinnie and laughs, laughs and drips tears. ‘As big as a god, he was. I thought he was God when I was a kid.' She bites at her trembling lip, swipes at her tears, then that chin lifts again. ‘I had to take what
love I could get in that bloody house, and I loved a perverted, child-raping bastard.'

‘You weren't to know,' Vinnie says. ‘He didn't do nothing to you, did he? So how were you to know?'

‘I should have known. They hated him. There had to be some reason. But they couldn't make a move without him, the pair of whingeing, clinging, dependent bitches. They swallowed their pills, gave their parties,
and greeted their guests with him at their side.'

She's drowning in tears now, they're running down her face, the wads of toilet paper building on the table. ‘I didn't know I shouldn't love him. Nobody told me.'

‘Because it probably wasn't true. That's why they didn't tell you,' Lori says. ‘They couldn't lie about him while he was alive to defend himself, could they?'

‘I've got his red hair.
I've got his height.'

‘So has Vinnie, and his father was a quarter Indian and a sixteenth Aboriginal. You're out of your brain, Mavis, believing one word that Eva said. She was a total nutcase.'

Mavis puts her head down then, bawls all over the new plastic tablecloth, bawls so hard she's shaking everyone up with her tears. The little kids get scared and start howling in sympathy. Mick nods to
Jamesy, a sort of get-rid-of-them nod. This stuff isn't G-rated.

He, Lori and Vinnie have heard most of this tale before and they know there's worse stuff to come. Like how Mavis slept with anything in pants, how she'd had two abortions by the time she was seventeen. They know that Eva and her mother accused her of sleeping with Henry too, when all they were doing was playing chess. And if they
lied about that then they'd lie about anything, like Eva lied in that letter – which Lori has still got; she had it laminated, and stuck it on the wall in Mavis's bedroom, and she'd better get rid of it before Mavis reclaims that room.

Lori steps back, glances at Henry's photograph. That's probably pretty much how he looked when he first slept with Mavis, how he looked when he came home early
from the club and found out about Eva and Alice. He left the house that night and so did Mavis, but not together. She was living on the street until she was three months' pregnant with Martin, then she went to Henry's office, wanting him to help her get another abortion. He wouldn't let her do it. All life was precious to Henry – except his own.

There is a lot of R-rated material in Mavis's past
and maybe it all has to come out sooner or later too, but this isn't the time or the place to release it. Lori walks fast from the room and the little ones follow her, and follow her back to the kitchen when she returns with the maroon dress. They don't know what is going on here, but the bogyman is out of that brick room and she's crying and it's scary. They don't want to be too far from Lori's
knee; even Neil is tailing her.

She's got the op shop bra and some brand-new stretchy knickers from Kmart. She's got a clean towel. ‘Do you reckon you might feel better after a hot shower, Mavis?' she asks.

Mavis lifts her head, bawls some more, but she's not moving. Lori takes her arm, tenses for that well-remembered elbow jab.

No jab. Mavis stands, allows herself to be led.

They walk to
the passage door and Vinnie makes way, steps into the bunk room. Mavis thinks she still has to sidle through the doorway sideways, but Lori keeps hold of that arm, a soft thing above the elbow. Maybe the cells are still young enough to find a new shape. Maybe the skin is elastic enough to get a new memory. Maybe Mavis is young enough to –

Together they walk into the lemon bathroom with its stencilled
black and gold pattern around the top of the white tiles. Eddy did it; he said the white tiles were boring. It's a big bathroom and it looks surface posh, even if the black and white checked vinyl does run downhill and shake a bit underfoot. They bought a new shower curtain and hung part of the old plastic lace tablecloth at the window, which looks like really expensive curtain material –
as long as you don't touch it.

Mavis isn't seeing any of it. She's standing looking at the floor she last saw wooden, wet. She's not doing anything. Tears are still running.

Have they broken her, killed the inside of her?

Lori sets the shower. ‘Do you reckon you can manage by yourself, Mavis?'

She shakes her head, shakes out more tears, so Lori waits while the shirt comes off. She puts it
in the laundry basket. Mavis sits on the edge of the bath to take off her tracksuit pants and boxer shorts. She's not modest, never was, never will be. Lori's face is turned away, but Mavis takes her arm as she steps up and into the bath. Steps up and over. Just like that, like anyone else would do it. Doesn't even use the metal handles the people fixed up for her that time. She's sort of surprised
that she's done it too. She looks at the bath then and at the heavy plastic shower curtain that cost heaps but works well – doesn't stick to you while you're trying to wash. She sniffs, lifts her determined chin and looks at the window while the water is running all over her. Lori pulls the curtain across and stands outside, passing in the shampoo, picking up the soap, passing the cloth, passing
more shampoo.

Mavis stays in the shower a long time, longer even than Eddy. Maybe she doesn't know how to turn the taps off. In the end Lori reaches in, turns them off, passes a towel, tries not to look at the clean, the pink, the new. She gets a second towel for Mavis's long hair, then offers deodorant, baby powder, offers the bra.

Mavis looks at it. It's big, but she shakes her head. Lori
keeps offering it. They are not talking. Perhaps Mavis has forgotten how to put a bra on, but Lori is familiar with them, so they get it on and tighten the straps, lifting up what hasn't been lifted up in years.

The stretch knickers stretch to fit, but they fit. Lori wants everything to fit, prays everything will fit, but when Mavis looks at the offered dress, she frowns. It's got fancy maroon
and gold buttons to below the waist, and she stands there undoing them, six of them, like she's scared too that it won't fit. Scared to try it. Lori helps lift it over the wet hair, and she lifts the hair free, she finds a sleeve, guides a soft arm in. It's not so hard to do, like dressing a big Matty. She does up the buttons, scared the second one won't do up across the bra, but the dress is big,
it's plenty big and, God, how fine it looks, and how good the shape of Mavis in a bra.