Henry’s Daughter (10 page)

The kitchen extension stole
less than half of the back verandah, and it was a big verandah. The cement truck comes early, drives onto the vacant block and all the boys are shovelling cement, putting down a cement slab floor on the second half of the verandah, right from the kitchen wall to the corner then up the side of the east verandah. It's going to be a big room, and they'll need more bricks, Martin says.

Then a few
bricks that don't get bought start finding their way home and no one knows where they came from. From Greg, of course. He's pinching Henry's old car at night and he's bringing it home full of bricks. He gets away with it half a dozen times before Henry finds a brick under his seat and works out how all the different coloured grit is getting into his car, and also the girl's bra.

‘I'll have no
thieves living beneath my roof. Take those bricks back,' he says.

‘You take 'em back, you geriatric old bastard,' Greg says. It's not the first time he's called Henry that, but it's the first time he's said it in front of Martin, so Martin hits him for it, not for the bricks. He's a bit pleased about the bricks, even if he won't admit it. Greg comes back fighting, kickboxing, so Martin hauls
off and punches him, really punches him, like a prize fighter punch, right in the face. He's got good muscles, due to his brick lifting. Greg goes down.

‘No more,' Henry sort of cries. ‘No more of this violence, boys.' He picks up his car keys; he's got two sets, and he holds a set in each hand, and he's walking away, shaking his head. He takes his car keys to bed and he probably cries.

Greg's
got a bloody nose and his thick lips are thicker, but he's wiping at his nose, wiping at a mouth that's saying worse than geriatric old bastard, and his eyes above the bloody mouth are threatening to murder Martin. Lori is holding one of the stolen bricks and she wants to hit Greg in the face with it, belt him so hard he goes into a coma for ten years until he gets some sense.

‘Thieving, spoilt-rotten,
nicking mongrel,' she yells.

Greg eyes her up and down. He's standing there, his nose running blood. There is stuff out there he wants. He's got used to getting what he wants. He uses about fifty F words on Lori, then he walks off, slinging more F words and even the C one over his shoulder.

Mrs Roddie's tall brick fence is one house down from Bert Matthews; Lori has been walking it for years,
and it's been cracked and leaning for years. Greg gets rid of some of his frustration on it, and Mrs Roddie gets a few C and F words too, which get her so riled up she comes down and belts on the front door, all hyped up to get into Henry.

Martin talks to her. He walks her home, offers to repair the fence. He's apologising all over the place and she ends up saying she's been wanting to get a
new fence and a gate she can lock for years. She won't report Greg if the boys will wreck the rest of her old fence and cart the bricks away for her.

‘Not a problem,' Martin says.

They wreck it in a day and bring the bricks home in the wheel-barrow. They don't match, but none of the bricks match anyway, and who cares? There are thousands of them now, and a new job cleaning old mortar off bricks
with flat shovels.

Mick lost his back verandah bike shop and had to move it to the east side. Stuck around the corner in the wind, he's been feeling a bit lonely, so he leaves his bike building and starts cleaning bricks. He's truly excellent with his hands. He's sitting on a drum, bad leg stuck out front, cleaning bricks by the dozen and stacking them instead of just tossing them down like everyone
else.

It's peaceful again for a week with Greg gone missing, but he eventually gets hungry and turns up at the high school one lunchtime, begs Mick's Vegemite sandwiches. Mick gives them to him, and that night he's waiting with Mick when Henry drives down to pick him up. Of course, Henry brings him home. Of course, Henry sits him down at the kitchen table and does his old lecture, talks for hours
and hours, trying to teach him some sense of values.

Some chance. He's valueless. He's got a syringe under his mattress. Mick saw it. He sleeps under Greg.

There is a sort of hush in the house when he walks in, quiet as a disease-carrying rat. Vinnie has been working hard on the brick cleaning, he's been going to school too, keeping out of trouble; it's like he's got no will of his own, like
he becomes whoever he's spending time with. He's spending time with the two big boys now, so he's acting like them, sort of ostracising Greg, so Greg starts sticking close to Mick, trying to get him onside. If he wants to go over the town he says to Mick that he'll dink him around to talk to his bike shop friend. Mick loves going out, loves that bike shop and the old bloke who runs it and gives Mick
free nuts and bolts and things as well as advice. He calls Mick ‘the professor'. Anyway, Greg mustn't have been able to get what he wanted. He comes home in a pure rotten mood, calling Mick Professor Pullit. Mick doesn't care. He had a good day.

It's funny, really, what starts to happen. It's like a seed has to get planted in Henry's garden before it can grow, and that Professor Pullit name has
somehow got itself planted deep in Mick's head where it can get its roots well down into virgin soil. He starts growing like a weed and his face starts changing, like his nose is growing and his chin is getting longer, and he starts practising his spelling!

Everyone is at the dinner table, eating Henry's stew and grey cabbage and half raw carrots, when Mick says he's going to be a trade schoolteacher
when he grows up. Of course, everyone, except Henry, nearly kills themselves laughing. All Henry says is, ‘We're going to have to think about a new brace for that leg, Michael.'

Mick looks scared, rubs his head. He's had enough of doctors and hospitals and new braces to last him a lifetime. ‘It's all right,' he says.

Poor Mick, as if he could ever be a schoolteacher. His writing is worse than
Lori's. He's a reader, but due to his crippled leg, he learned to read too young, so his eyes got used to reading great lumps of words instead of single words, sort of racing ahead to get the important bits out. When you read that way it doesn't matter how the words are spelt, the brain just skips over spelling, just ignores it totally while it scoops the good stuff off the top. Lori is a pretty
rotten speller, but Mick is worse, and that's because they are the best readers, except Alan, who doesn't count; he's best at everything. Anyhow, unless you need to write a word down, who needs spelling?

Teachers do, even trade teachers. That's what Henry says . . . or not exactly, but he says a teacher has to finish high school then go to university. ‘But you can do it if you have the dream,
Michael.'

Who'd want to be a rotten teacher anyway?

Mick would. He's got his one good heel dug in deep and he's not proud either. He borrows Jamesy's spelling list and Alan's and Lori's and he studies them, then gets Alan to listen to his spelling at night in the bedroom, and later, when the Willama germs start leaving Alan alone, those two boys sit on the verandah building a bike and practising
spelling. Nobody bothers them out there except Henry, who takes sweaters and coats out for Alan, and worries about his tonsils and his heart and calls him ‘my boy'.

‘Threatened.'

‘T-h-r-e-t-e-n-d,' Mick says, tightening up a nut.

‘It's got an a in it, Mick,' Alan says. He's holding the bit that Mick has got the bolt through. Lori is a window away, standing on the edge of the bath, listening
to them going though her spelling list.

She uses the word in a school essay and it's about the only word more than four letters long that she gets right.

‘Spell ancient,' Alan says one afternoon.

‘A-i-n-sh-a-n-t,' Mick tries hard.

‘A-n-c-i-e-n-t,' Alan corrects.

Lori is green jealous that Alan is spending so much time with Mick and she's double green jealous that Mick is making him a bike
– and she just knows that he's wrong about ancient. It's got an s-h in it for sure, and she's caught him out wrong for once. She walks around to Mick's bike shop and tells him so.

Alan shakes his head, sort of gentle. Sometimes she wishes he'd be a smartarse again so she could really give it to him. She gets Henry's dictionary down from the top of the bookcase and looks for ancient with an s-h,
which she can't find. She could ask Henry but he's sort of lost interest in everything except work and keeping Greg away from that nest of druggies. If anyone asks Henry anything at all, he just looks at them like he can't see them properly, or maybe he can't believe he's responsible for this mess of people. He shrugs, shrugs a lot, shrugs his shoulders until they get transplanted up to his ears.

‘Greg! Gregory! Where are you?'

In the end Lori finds ancient, spelt like Alan said it was. How can a ten-and-a-half year-old head remember how to spell every word that's ever been written when she can't remember from one day to the next how to spell d-i-s-s-a-p-p-o-i-n-t-e-d?

She uses ancient when she has to write an apology to Kelly Waters for eating her banana. She uses something else too
that she found in the dictionary, due to she doesn't deserve to have to write a stinking apology anyway. She was searching that dictionary for Gubba or Gubber when she came on Gueber, which gave her an excellent idea for her apology letter. She writes heaps too, writes almost two pages and gives them to her teacher.

That rotten teacher doesn't care. She sends Lori out of the room again, and she's not standing in the passage like an idiot so she goes home because it's too wet to go walking and there are no tourists around anyway.

Martin is at home again.
His boss never makes him work in the rain but he's working in it. He's laying a row of bricks around the outside of the cement slab, leaving just enough room between where the kitchen ends and where his bricks start, making a narrow passage from the back door to the back yard so people can still get out to the loo and laundry. He's also leaving enough room between the side brick wall and the
vacant block fence so Mick can get his bike bits through.

‘What are you doing at home, Splint?'

‘I hate school, and I'm telling that teacher I'm black, because it's not fair.'

‘And I'll murder you if you do. That won't be fair either.'

‘I hate you too. And I hate Kelly Waters. I hate everyone.'

‘Right. Now get back to school or I'll dob to Henry. And you know I will. Run.'

She goes, but
she doesn't run.

The next day it's still raining and one of Martin's brickie mates comes around and they both work in the rain. Those walls go up like magic. When Lori gets home the next afternoon she finds a new room with three and a quarter multicoloured brick walls. The quarter bit is the bit that used to be the east verandah, so the bricks stop when they hit the outside weatherboard wall
of the big boys' bedroom. Martin and his mate have sort of tied that quarter brick wall to the wooden one with strips of twisted metal, then filled in the space between bricks and boards with mortar and a bit of timber. It's nearly finished, and thank God for that much! Mavis is sick of the mess and the boys are sick of spending their money.

Then Vinnie comes home from school one night with a
green loo on his shoulder. The new owners are renovating some old house over the railway line and they threw that old loo in the dump bin. He goes back for the seat and the bit that holds the water and everything, and there is nothing wrong with it. Rich people must have to worry their brains out trying to find stuff to spend money on.

‘We'll put it in the bathroom,' Martin sighs. Queuing up
for that outside loo in the mornings is a major problem.

‘There's always someone showering in there,' Donny says. ‘What if you build a brick loo on the back of Splinter's room?'

‘I thought we could just put it in the far corner of Splint's room,' Vinnie says.

‘It's illegal,' Henry mutters. No one hears him. ‘Gregory! Greg! Where are you?'

September gets finished and daylight saving will be
starting up again soon and Lori's new room gets a ceiling but still needs a window and door. The green loo has been tossed out the back with the rest of the junk – until Vinnie comes home from school one afternoon with its matching hand basin. It's got a few chips but it isn't cracked.

‘What if we put the loo behind the door and the basin opposite, then build a bit of wall between it and Splint's
bit? The room's long enough,' he says.