Henry’s Daughter (12 page)

He coughs and checks the oven, silent now. The room is too quiet. Only the sizzle of chicken, the quiet rattle of the kettle lid and Alan's voice from the verandah. ‘Disappointed has got a double p, not a double s, Mick.'

Henry lifts his head, smiles, and Lori almost cries with wishing he might smile like that when he hears her voice. ‘That boy has a brilliant mind.'

‘Brilliant,
my arse.'

‘A bad choice of words, my dear, though it is looking excessively brilliant today.'

He's gone mad! What the hell is he trying to do? This is
so
not good. Mavis hates people laughing at her, loathes people making fun of her weight, and Greg's laughing again.

Donny gets up from the table, gives him a filthy look. ‘So, what did you get for Christmas, Mavis?' he says.

‘Oh, fuck off,'
she says. ‘And stop trying to change the subject. He started this. I didn't start it, but he knows that I can finish it, don't you, Henry?'

‘You started something you can't finish with Alan. I'll be flying with him to London while I'm off work. I've been in touch with Watts. He's looking after the details.'

‘I'd like to see you try that,' Mavis says.

‘What can we offer him here?' he says.

‘His mother, his family, that's what. And as soon as that other one is back on Australian soil, I'll get him home too. That queer bitch doesn't give a shit about those kids. She's never given a shit about anyone other than herself – and you know it better than most. And after what she did to me, you think I'd let her raise my kids? Now you shut up with your maudlin bullshit, and get some dinner on
the table.'

‘Martin isn't here yet,' Henry says.

‘That's his funeral. He knows what time we eat.'

But Henry is not doing as he is told today. He's going to wait for Martin. He's losing his onions – or something.

Lori watches Mavis spilling over the table. She's not happy now and her useless, plump, pretty little hands with their long strong fingernails touch the bread plate. They polish her
knife on the white tablecloth which Alan found down the bottom of the sheet cupboard. He and Lori set the table and it was like bringing their cubbyhouse play inside and making it real. Martin will get a surprise when he walks in and sees this table.

They hear the old ute rattle into the drive and Lori and Alan stand together, wait together beside their table, eager for Martin to see what they've
done, wanting his approval. They miss him. All of the little ones miss him.

‘So what are you waiting for now, you miserable old bugger?' Mavis says.

‘Have a slice of bread while you're waiting. Have two. Eat the entire loaf, my dear. I bought three.'

Donny's eyes widen and Lori turns to Henry, wanting to kick him in the shins and wake him up. This was going to be a good day, like a party with
Donny and Martin home and Mavis over the moon about being pregnant. Just because he's feeling miserable, he doesn't have to make everyone else feel miserable.

Donny wants him to shut up too. He gets a bottle of beer from one of his bags he's put in the freezer, then he fills four glasses. Henry hands one to Mavis, touches his glass to hers. ‘Merry Christmas, my dear.' It sounds like a curse.

Mavis eyes him, drinks her beer, doesn't like it much. She snatches a slice of bread, spreads it thick with margarine, pushes it into her mouth, washes it down with more beer. She's going to fix his bad mood by getting a better one of her own. She spreads another slice, punishing Henry, her eyes wanting him to comment. He won't look at her. It's like a play without words until Martin stops looking
at Lori's new bike and finally walks in, loaded up with presents.

‘Jesus,' he says. ‘Am I in the right house? I must have gone to Nelly's place.' He's looking at the tablecloth. ‘Better take my presents and go, eh?' He says this to Alan, and Alan giggles. Then he starts handing out colourful parcels. He gives Mavis a big box wrapped in Christmas paper and Lori knows it's chocolates, which she
also knows he bought on special at Donny's supermarket then hid in the bottom of his wardrobe. They'll be past their use-by date and probably smell of dead socks, and it's the worst thing he could do today, just the worst, but he's been mad at Mavis since he offered to pay for a Jenny Craig diet for her birthday and she told him to buy her some chocolates.

Everyone is opening their presents,
but when Martin gives Lori her parcel, he ruffles her hair, which, thanks to him and Mavis, Henry won't cut short. Her head is covered by a nest of curls. ‘I wouldn't open it in here, Splint,' he whispers, winks.

She picks a hole in one end, feels her face begin to burn, and she's out in the brick room, the bolt rammed home, before she rips the paper off. It's two training bras and two pairs
of matching knickers and a book on ‘growing up' – as if she needs that around this place, as if she hasn't known about that stuff since she was six. She waits in the brick room until Martin knocks on the door.

‘Do they fit?' he says. ‘Karen's mother picked them out for you.'

‘Shut up.'

‘Dinner's on, and Mavis is looking at your roast potatoes. You got two.'

Lori opens the door and Martin ruffles
her hair again; he likes doing that now that there's some hair to ruffle.

‘Quit that, and ta,' she says. ‘I need the knickers,' and she takes her present to her room, places it in her drawer then takes her place at the table, at Martin's side. He elbows her, and she elbows him back. It's good having him home, hearing his laugh and feeling sort of safe at his side. Henry has shut up picking on
Mavis, so it's going to be a good Christmas after all.

Glasses fill and empty. All the kids are giggly and having fun. Donny bought a box of crackers, and he pulls one with Jamesy, who gets a purple hat; he puts it on and looks more like an old gnome than usual. Martin gave Mick a handyman book, and some electronic stuff to put together and Mick is sitting there jiggling his good foot; he can't
wait to get to his electronics. Alan got
Jurassic Park
. He's smiling a lot, as if he sort of belongs now. Maybe he won't want to fly to London with Henry. Lori doesn't want him to go. He's turned into a brother, like equal favourite brother with Mick and Martin and Jamesy.

He's funny with Mavis, though. He still doesn't talk to her much, doesn't call her anything. It's like she's not his mother,
though Henry is his father. He's sitting beside Matty, who is in the highchair, happy and playing with a squeaking toy he got from Martin and sucking hard on his dummy, having a great time.

Alan looks at Henry, keeps looking at him like he's got a special present hidden under the table and he's waiting for the right time to give it to him, waiting for a silence. He's eating slow, watching, chewing.

There aren't going to be any silences here today, so he coughs, makes a silence, says, ‘Can you pass the salt, please, Dad.'

Henry sort of half jumps up from his chair, spills his beer. There is an expression in his eyes no one has seen before and that
Dad
word put it there. It's too rare. It's a baby word that dies fast in this house. Tears fill up Henry's eyes and one falls onto his chicken
leg as he passes the salt without looking up from his plate.

Dad. That word has silenced the room. Everyone is looking at Henry, watching his face sort of get tight with holding in pain, like he's holding all of that pain in his mouth so he can't eat. He glances at Mavis and his face gets tighter. The plates on the table are still half full but Mavis's plate is empty and she's ripping the cellophane
from her stale chocolates.

Then Greg says, ‘Can I have a beer, Daddy?'

When that Dad word came out of Alan's mouth, it sounded like diamond, like begonia, like ‘Oh, My Papa', something precious and . . . Greg makes it dirty, though Mavis doesn't see the dirt. She lets loose with a laugh, like Greg is her favourite again. Then they are both laughing, both saying Daddy this and Daddy that, making
the word hurt worse than a whip around the legs.

Vinnie has been sitting at sniggering Greg's side, just eating, eating slow but steady. He's an awful slow mover, like thunder grumbling in the clouds, moving around slow and getting nowhere due to the bit that makes the action happen being so high up; he probably needs a second brain in his hip to move his lower bits.

Then something happens,
like bang! And Vinnie is greased lightning striking, and it's striking Greg. He gets elbow jabbed in the soft part of his belly and when he gasps forward, Vinnie gives him a better elbow jab right under the jaw – knocks him clean off his chair. Then the slow washes over Vinnie, he turns back to his plate slow, goes back to eating slow – as if he hasn't done a thing.

Henry's not eating. He's up.
He's looking at Greg's mouth, which is bleeding. Everyone is looking at Greg, then sort of darting-eyed to Henry, who is standing there swallowing spit. Greg is probably swallowing blood, but he's up and he's picking up his chair. He's going to kill Vinnie, who sort of smiles, gets his feet under him. If there's any killing done here today, he's big enough to do it.

‘Try it, you piece of dog
shit,' he says, sort of slow.

Greg tosses his chair at the stove, walks, and Mavis starts laughing. ‘Oh, Merry Christmas, Daddy,' she says, and she stuffs another chocolate into her mouth. ‘Merry Christmas, Daddy dear, and a ho, ho, ho.'

Henry stand there. He cries.

‘Haven't you stuffed enough of his guts down your throat already, you thoughtless bitch?' Martin says. He doesn't know what has
been going on here today. Why couldn't he just keep his big mouth shut? Why couldn't he just –

‘What bloody guts?' Mavis says, watching Henry's soft brown eyes leak silent tears. ‘Fuck your tears,' she says. ‘I've seen too many of your bloody tears. What about the tears I've cried? You had it all, and what did I have? Do you want me to tell the kids what I had, Daddy, what I've got, Daddy?' Then
her hand reaches for the nearest plate and she tosses it at the wall, tosses a second plate after the first. Food and china spray everywhere.

She's screaming that ‘Daddy' word now, she's looking for more ammunition. Jamesy is hanging onto his plate; little Neil lost his, and he's crying instead of pulling faces. Donny reaches for him, plucks him away from danger. It's too late. It's just terrible.
It's the end of something or the beginning of something worse than Lori has ever known.

Mavis is up. ‘Wipe that bloody stupid grin off your face,' she yells and she slugs Jamesy with a backhand, sends him toppling off his chair, then she's got her whip and she's moving in on Martin, who is trapped behind the table, Lori on one side, Jamesy and his fallen chair on the other.

Lori dives under
the table, clearing a pathway as Martin snatches the whip, jerks it from Mavis's hand like it is so easy, like why didn't he do it before?

‘You cruel bitch,' he says, and he whacks her around the thighs with her whip. She picks up the box of chocolates, throws them at him. She's not backing off.

Neil, all the little ones are crying. And Alan. He knows he started this with his ‘Dad'. He started
everyone wanting Henry's
more
. That's what he did. ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.' He's shaking, a forkful of beans poised halfway to his mouth. It's shaking too. Matty is screaming around his dummy. ‘Get out!' Mavis is screaming. ‘Get out of my house and don't you ever come back. Don't you set foot inside that door again. Get out. Get out, all of you.' Her face is red, her chin
nub white, chocolate saliva drizzling from the corner of her mouth, framing that little circle of her chin.

‘Look at yourself. Take a good look at yourself in a mirror, why don't you, Mavis? You look like something a bloody dinosaur might have regurgitated. You disgust me,' Martin yells, and Henry is gone.

Mavis screams, grabs the tablecloth, sends the plates to the floor.

Jamesy, now under
the table and still grinning his twisted grin, is picking up spilled chocolates, putting them into Donny's supermarket bag. Vinnie picks up an empty beer bottle. Lori grabs the cordial bottle before it all spills out as Jamesy starts scooping up roast potatoes and chicken and dropping them into another plastic bag. Vinnie grabs a loaf of bread and the margarine, then they have to run because Martin
and Donny are heading out the door and Mavis is going to be ready to get into someone else.

Lori follows the brothers to the river. Alan has got Matty on his back and Matty is hanging on, sucking hard on his dummy and squeaking his toy.

They have Christmas dinner by the river. They pour cordial into Vinnie's empty beer bottle and fill it with river water, share sips. They eat roast potato and
spit out the china chips. They make chicken sandwiches for the little ones, using fingers for knives, they gnaw on chicken bones, suck on melted chocolates, make them last for a very long time. And they stay away from that madhouse for a longer time swimming in the clothes they wear.

The vacant block is full of neighbours when they get home, and the chooks are all squawking like crazy.

Henry
is hanging by a length of clothesline wire in his chook-pen. There is a piece of silver tinsel dangling from his shoe, stuck there by chook dung.

There is a new red mound in the cemetery and it doesn't even have a name. Henry has gone to heaven and Willama has gone to hell.

In the vegetable garden the weeds grow taller than the onions. No one can weed like Henry. No one cooks stews and cabbage, no one helps Mavis wash her hair and it's greasy, daggy, dirty. Everyone throws junk on the floors that no one sweeps. Greg is with
the druggies, Vinnie sits and stares while Mick limps around and around the house instead of fixing bikes. It's like everybody has been struck dumb. Except the little kids. They just cry. All day they cry.

No more Henry to make their world a not too bad place.

How did he do so much? How come no one saw what he did and how he did it? It just got done. Lori misses him. Misses following him around.
Misses his songs. Misses his stews. Misses seeing him and his rusty old working clothes.

Mavis is howling crazy with missing Henry, she's so crying-crazy she tries to cook stuff, but instead of a big stew and vegetables, she tries to make a light sponge cake like she used to make for Henry. She burns it, then gets so screaming-crazy with missing Henry that she throws the cake and the tin at the
west window and breaks it. There's nothing to eat for tea and no glass in the window to keep the flies out either.

Donny brings food around after work. He gets the broken glass out and sticks some cardboard over the gap with sticky tape before he starts cooking sausages and potatoes. Mavis knows she's mostly to blame for Henry but all the time she's trying to push the guilt onto Martin, so she
yells at Donny, tells him to get out, to go home to his bloody flat and to bloody Martin, who might just as well have cut the clothesline wire and got the drum for Henry to stand on. ‘Get out. Get out!'

Donny walks off howling again, leaves Mavis howling, leaves the little kids and Alan howling. And when is that howling going to end?

Vinnie finishes cooking the sausages, and he doesn't burn
them either; he mashes the potatoes, mashes them fluffy, but the kids can't sit down and eat them at the table because Mavis is at it again. She's making pastry this time and using the good butter. She's making an apple pie and making a mess. She's standing at the table, shaking and bawling and rolling pastry, salting it with her tears, she's swollen eyed and half blind with bawling but she's decorating
her pie with perfect curly strips of pastry; it looks and smells so good when it's cooked, but it's not big enough to go around. It wasn't for the kids, anyway. She made it for Henry. He used to love her apple pies

She tries to get stuff in the washing machine one day but she can't bend over to pick things up and she's never used the new washing machine. Doesn't know what buttons to push so it's
better for the washing machine if she doesn't try, better if she doesn't cook, better if she just sits and smokes and bawls.

And that's how it goes for the week after Henry's funeral, which Mavis couldn't go to because she can't get in and out of cars. She's feeling guilty too because she couldn't go, and she's feeling a fool because she actually thought she was going to go.

She talked to Nelly
and got her to make a new dark tent, and she forgot her pride and asked the undertaker man to hire a disabled taxi with a special lifting thing for wheelchairs. She couldn't sit in the wheelchair, and couldn't heave herself into the van. Couldn't stand on the lifting thing with Vinnie and Donny and some of the undertaker men trying to balance her. She tried, though, while the neighbours stared;
then she got bright red in the face, bawled and walked inside, walked in circles, looking terrible in her new dark green tent. Nelly bought the material and it looks like a camping tent.

Henry always called Lori little lost Lorraine. Now she's truly lost. She went to that funeral, but it wasn't like it was real – just play-acting while everyone is sort of waiting, holding time still, until Henry
comes back and gets things right again.

She knows he's dead. She saw him hanging there. In her head she knows he's not coming home. She watched the big boys carry him from that church; saw him go down into that hole.

But she still sees him. All the time she sees him – in the shadows near his potting shed, and she hears his car coming, and she sees the passage curtain move like he's going to
come through and he'll be wearing his old tartan dressing gown.

He can't come through because he's dead.

No more haircuts, no pats on the head, no more clean knickers folded in the drawer. Just a house without Henry, and Lori can't stand to be in that full-up empty crying place so each morning she gets some flowers from Nelly's garden, rides out to the cemetery on her new bike and sits on the
cool grey marble of ‘Barbara, beloved wife of Howard,' and she stares at that raw mound. Sits for hours some days, letting the hot sun burn her, watching the flowers wilt.

She is sitting there the day an Aboriginal family come to bury a son. It was in the papers. He went to Melbourne and died of a drug overdose.

The Aborigines used to bury their dead in the sand dunes but this family is using
the cemetery, having the same old words spoken for him as were spoken for Henry. Lori stares at the family and the minister, stares as the coffin goes down, down that hole. Forever and ever and ever amen.

Henry used to say, ‘The urban Aborigine claims his mother's culture but he buys his food at the supermarket, buries his dead in the white man's cemeteries.'

Cold, dead place, the white man's
cemetery. Better if Henry were buried high on some sand dune in Western Australia where the wind could blow clean. Better not to be locked in a cheap wooden box, beneath a ton of dirt. He shouldn't be here in this dead place.

That Aboriginal family are bawling their eyes out. And what's the use of bawling? Tears won't make dead people come back to life, will they? She watches the family leave,
arms around each other, holding each other as they walk by Henry's mound and she recognises one lady. She's the one who had a baby girl when Mavis had Matty. And those girls – she knows two of them from school. They stare at her, give her a dirty look because she's staring at them, then they whisper, and their mother turns her head, stops walking. She's dark, and her face is shiny with crying; she's
not slim and not fat either – just a mother with red eyes.

‘Go home, love,' she says. ‘No good sitting here. They're not coming back.' Then she says the words that Lori has been thinking. ‘This is a dead place.'

Go home? What for? Too many strangers at that house these days, and they keep on coming. It's better sitting in a dead place than being at home.

No school to go to, even. January has
just come and there is the whole of January before school goes back. Nothing to do except ride her bike all over the place, and end up out at the cemetery or down at the river.

Then two men come to the house one day and one buys Henry's car for five hundred dollars. Donny wanted to buy it for four hundred because that's all he's got left in the bank since the funeral. Mavis wouldn't let him have
it, so the old car drives away with a stranger in Henry's worn-out seat.

It looks so bad, cruel, sad. Henry's gone. Now his car has gone.

That crying January is almost over when Mavis gets on a disability pension. She can't believe her first payment. The kids can't believe it. She's got nine dependent children, if you include one out-of-work sly-eyed druggie who has come home again, because
Mavis is going to be making more money than Henry could ever make, more money even than the Prime Minister – almost. That pension sure stops her crying but it starts her eating. Every day for that first week, Greg or Vinnie get takeaway for lunch, takeaway for dinner, piles of chips and potato cakes, dim-sims and pizzas. Everyone loves junk food. The little ones think it's picnics twice a day.

Then school is due to start again and Vinnie is not going to go and that's that. He say this to Martin and Donny when they come around on the Saturday with a few books and pens and stuff – and a ridiculous high school dress and new shoes for Lori. They buy a pile of stuff to make the school lunches too. Except Mavis eats most of it, so after that the boys keep what they buy at the flat, and on school
mornings Donny brings the lunches around before he goes to work. He always did make the best sandwiches, like meat and salad and even mayonnaise.

Lori's school uniform is ridiculous; the skirt keeps trying to get caught in the bike chain. She hates dresses. Hates the leather shoes that burn her feet. Hates high school worse than she hated sixth grade. Now there are a dozen teachers to hate her
instead of just one. It's like she's in some crazy nightmare and she can't wake up. She hasn't got the right school books, the ones she has got were Mick's and Vinnie's and probably Greg's, and they are past their use-by date. She's always in trouble for not having the new edition, and she's lost all the time because she has to change rooms all day. Can't concentrate on anything. Can't keep her
mind in the classroom even when she finds the right one. Keeps looking out the window, wanting the day to be over so she can go to the cemetery, which is not far from the high school.

Mick hates going there; he tells her it's no use going there every day, but he can't fight for what he wants so he sits on the back of her bike and goes where she takes him, then he waits with her bike, his face
pale, his freckles looking like coffee granules scattered over pale paper.

‘It's no use, Lori,' he says.

Nothing is any use, is it? Even the flowers. One day she brings Henry one of his own flowers from the potting shed, a beautiful orange thing, almost as big as a saucer, but it gets crushed in her school bag and it's nearly dead by the time school is over. She still waters his pots most nights,
and Alan still waters them but they don't do it together.

Lori can't stand being anywhere near Alan. Like, if he hadn't said, ‘Pass the salt, Dad,' then Mavis and Greg wouldn't have started laughing and Martin wouldn't have –

A
c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-i-c
chain got started by that
effing
word and it killed Henry, and if Lori goes anywhere near Alan, then she's going to scream that at him, so she's
staying away from him. And Mavis too. She was old enough to know better. And mongrel Greg too, who is always looking at Lori with his druggie eyes, like looking at her stupid boobs in their stupid bra that make them even more obvious because they are getting more obvious. She looks like an
effing
girl in that
effing
dress.

She's got Henry's smallest vegetable knife, though. She takes it to bed
with her, puts it under her pillow. She'll get Greg if he comes near her. She'll cut his eyes out, cut something off so he won't go looking for any girls. Ever. She takes that knife with her when she goes to the river, just in case he follows her. It's not a big knife. The handle is wood and it fits down the inside of her shoe and the blade stays hidden beneath her sock, but it means she can't go
barefoot any more.

The pension gets paid into the bank each fortnight, so if they run out then they know exactly when there will be more coming. Mavis signs withdrawal forms which Greg takes to the bank and they give him the money, like they used to give her child allowance money to Henry, except Greg keeps some of it. Mavis doesn't care. Actually, she doesn't seem to care about anything. Like,
she always used to nag the kids about going near the busy road up at the corner, and now she sends little Neil to the milk bar for chocolate and bags of lollies and even cigarettes, and he has to cross over that road. Mick and Vinnie tell him not to go or he'll get run over, but Neil likes going because he always gets his own bag of lollies. Mavis is going to turn him into another Greg if she's
not careful.

Anyway, because of Vinnie not going to school, the people start coming after Mavis again, official people in posh cars, who sort of high-step over the mess. A counselling lady from some church or something comes to talk to Mavis about bereavement and the normal cycle of grief and she arranges for another lady to come one day a week to help clean the house, just until Mavis is able
to cope with her situation. That cleaning lady, who is almost twice as old as Mavis, takes one look at the kitchen, which is the best room, and decides to retire, leave Willama, maybe leave Australia even.

The whole house is starting to look like a dog's sicked-up breakfast, and who cares? Not Lori, she's never there except to sleep. Due to having to stay away from Alan and Mavis and Greg, it's
easier if she stays away from everyone, pretends she can't see or hear them if they talk to her, like she's dead, except she's one of the bike-riding, walking dead, a modern-day zombie.

She starts doing it with the teachers, and when Crank Tank, who is her English and her social science teacher, asks her why she still hasn't got the right book, Lori just looks straight through her. And when she
gets sent to the vice principal, she looks through her too, then instead of going to her next class, she goes to the cemetery and comes back later to dink Mick home.

There is a new lady with Mavis and her counsellor today. She's a dietitian and she's going to get Mavis on a diet. Mavis is doing her glandular thing, as if she thinks people can't see the lolly papers on the floor and the block
of chocolate in her tent pocket with her Minties – as if she thinks she's fooling anyone.

Maybe she is. Those ladies sit at the table working out a diet plan full of fruit and celery and carrots, the stuff Mavis calls rabbit food, and Mavis nods, looks at the clock, nods, walks them to the door, watches them leave in two cars, then she's off, walking up to the hotel for a counter meal or two.
She goes there a lot since she got the pension.

Martin and Donny are still bringing food around, but it's not fair that they have to pay for it seeing as Mavis is now filthy rich. That's what Martin says. He can't get anywhere near inside the house, but he stands at the back door, trying to talk sense.