Henry’s Daughter (22 page)

‘I bet he doesn't bloody well know how you're doing it.'

‘Someone had to do something. You just ran off and married stuck-up Karen, who we're not good enough for.' Lori has got the scripts on the table and Mick is sorting through them, finding Valium that might not be out of date, placing the silverfish-nibbled
ones to the side. He finds an Aropax with a heap of repeats and he hands one of each to Martin, who sort of looks at Mick, looks at Lori, runs his fingers through his hair.

‘You can't do this, Splinter.'

‘You said she looks better. We're trying to save her life, and we're not asking you to do anything except get some prescriptions filled. What's illegal about that?'

‘I'm not getting involved,
that's what.'

‘You can get pills for your own housebound mother!' She's not going to listen to him ever again. He left everyone for bloody Karen, and now he's got a wife who is too good to even bring around to this dump for a visit – not that Lori wants her to visit, not that she wants anyone to visit, not right now, but she could have before. The prescriptions are on the table, she pushes them
at him. ‘Get the Aropax. And this one is her fluid pills. This one is the Valium. Her pension number is already on . . . on the Aropax. That one. See?'

‘How long have you had her in there?'

‘Since I came home the second time,' Eddy says.

‘And she's staying in there until she's small enough to get out the window,' Jamesy adds.

‘Or until someone makes us let her out – and it's not going to
be you.' Lori's eyes have got that brick wall look. Martin can't hold them. He looks back to the green door, shakes his head.

‘She was killing herself with cigarettes and food. Everyone could see it,' Mick says. ‘The last time the men came to get her on her feet, the doctor said she'd probably had a heart attack and the next one would kill her.'

‘And what were you planning to do with us when
she was dead?' Lori adds. ‘As if we don't know.'

Martin looks from Mick's quiet eyes to the brick wall eyes of this sister, that half wild little skin-headed bugger who has gone and turned into something else while he wasn't watching. He shakes his head, takes the scripts and puts them in his pocket. He takes out a fifty. Offers it to Lori, or Mick.

‘We don't need your money.'

‘Since we stopped
her smoking, we've got pots of it,' Jamesy says.

‘Shii-iit!' Martin sounds just like Eddy. ‘Shiiiiit.' He's still offering the fifty, so Eddy takes it.

‘So, how much weight do you think she's lost?'

‘Christ knows.'

‘What did she used to weigh?' Eddy is folding the note, long and slim. Lori thinks he's going to put it in his pocket but he reaches for the ex cigarette money jar and slides it
in with the other fifties.

Martin is watching him, staring at the jar. ‘She reckoned she was close to thirty stone once, I know that much. I think that was before Timmy was born – or Neil. It was probably Neil. God knows what she was that last time I saw her. God knows. Thirty-five – forty.'

‘What's that in kilograms?'

‘Multiply it by seven then take away a bit,' Alan says.

‘Shiiiiit,' Martin
says.

‘If a person who is, say, eighty kilograms can expect to lose half a kilo a week on a thousand calories a day, like it says in the book, then a person who weighs three times as much is going to lose three times as much each week, isn't she?' Alan says.

‘Shii-iit.' Martin shakes his head.

‘Stop saying that. We're trying to teach Neil not to swear. He's getting into awful strife with his
swearing and pulling faces at everybody at school. We got a letter for Mavis again this week.' Lori takes the cornflakes packet from Neil, pushes it back into the hole in the wall, sticky-tapes it in so the little ones can't make that hole through to Mick's room any bigger than they've already made it. All the little kids do it. They miss their television.

‘Christ!' Martin says.

‘Is Christ good
to say at my teacher?' Neil asks.

For once in her life Mavis is innocent, but she doesn't get to read Eva's letter. She's been in lock-down mode since mid March and now it's late May, when the seasons do their annual swap-over.

It's raining cats and dogs the night Donny calls in. He wouldn't believe it when Martin told him what they'd done so he's got to see
it for himself. He comes to the front door, finds it locked, knocks, yells at the lounge-room window, so they let him in and he looks a bit out of place. He's grown thicker around the shoulders, his hair is longer and he's wearing a pigskin suede black jacket. Also, he drove up in a near new car.

‘Look what the cat dragged in,' Lori says.

‘You're thinner than her, Splint, but you're still a
chip off the old block.' And he's still pretty much the same even if he does look different. He sits with them in the kitchen and tells them about Martin's wedding, but mainly about a bridesmaid called Jackie, and maybe they know why he's looking so pleased with himself. He doesn't talk about Mavis, but he has a quick peep through the window when they give her the medicated cocoa and a diet cracker
for supper. She doesn't see him, and he doesn't tell the kids that what they're doing is illegal either. It's a while since he's seen her but he doesn't say she's dropped a ton, which is a bit disappointing.

Then he's leaving and he asks if they need anything, offers money. Eddy exchanges the money for a Valium prescription.

Donny isn't too sure about this kid who looks like Alan but isn't Alan.
‘Better if you get them done in town, Splint. Use that money to pay for them.'

‘We've already got Martin to get a heap filled here. They are getting out of date.'

‘They mightn't do them in Albury.'

‘Tell them your mother is staying with you for a week and she forgot her pills and she found these old scripts in her purse,' Eddy says, putting the fifty in the cigarette money jar. He's money hungry
and he's got an answer for everything; he'd make a good politician, Lori thinks. Edward Smyth-Owen, MP.

‘They'll think I'm a druggie, that I pinched her prescription.'

‘Not if you dress like that, they won't. Druggies can't afford two-hundred-dollar jackets,' Eddy says, quick as a wink.

Donny looks at his jacket, looks guilty, then leaves the way he came. But he comes back a week later, still
wearing his jacket and loaded down with supermarket bags, as well as a packet of Valium. He also brings a set of dusty bathroom scales – and what the hell does he think they're going to do with them? Ask Mavis to hop on, please?

‘She's not talking to us. We don't go near her. What are they supposed to be for?'

‘My mate's mother was chucking them out – '

‘So you thought we could give them to
Mavis so she could chuck them at us,' Jamesy says while Lori unpacks tins of food, which were probably also being chucked out. Mick is playing with the scales, turning the button on the end. ‘They only go up to a hundred and forty kilograms,' he says.

‘Scales go around twice, don't they?' Donny claims them, steps on, almost gets to seventy. Eddy stands on Donny's feet, and they clinch, Alan climbs
on Donny's back while Eddy hangs in there, and maybe it skips over the ‘140' before the boys fall in a heap.

‘You'll end up as tall as her,' Donny says. ‘You're getting to look like her too, Splint, now that you've got a bit of hair.'

‘Go ahead, make my day, Quack-quack.'

They laugh. Even Donny laughs. He was always Quack-quack, like Mick was Pullit, and Jamesy was Gnome Face. They can remember.
Martin . . . well, it started with an F and it rhymed with Martin. Vinnie was Moron. Greg? No one ever bothered to give Greg a nickname – other than ‘mummy's boy', which he was.

They sit then, eat popcorn – Eddy is a whiz at making popcorn – and they talk about the old days, get to talking about Henry and his potting shed, his nightly songs.

‘Could he really sing?' Eddy asks. They look at him
with disdain, like he's got the stinking audacity to question some precious God-given fact.

‘Of course he could sing. He was better than those three tenors put together,' Lori says, and Eddy nods, goes quiet for a bit then gets up and goes to the shower. He stays in there until Donny has to leave.

Mavis doesn't reply, doesn't know she's supposed to reply, though if she saw that letter she might like to reply and name her own price.

So life goes
on and it's so good, it's frightening.

Donny pops in some Sunday nights and he always brings his supermarket bags full of food, and most Fridays they meet Martin at McDonald's. He won't come near the house now, won't set foot in Dawson Street, probably won't even drive over the railway line, due to he's petrified that someone is going to find out about Mavis and he'll end up in jail, and his
father-in-law, who is a hard-headed, silly old bugger, so Martin says, will have his guts for gaiters. He buys them dinner on Friday nights and always gives them fifty for their jar. He's making piles of money and he's got nothing to spend it on, except a new ute, but he pure refuses to get rid of his old one, due to his father-in-law keeps on nagging him to get rid of it.

It's good talking to
him out of that house, like they learn heaps more about Karen, who is an only child. She's got her own hairdressing salon and a posh new car, and she and Martin live for free at her parents' farm. That's how Martin got to know her; he and his boss built their new mansion and it took them six months to build it too, because Karen's father kept changing his mind about stuff.

‘Imagine being an only
child with rich parents,' Lori says.

‘It has its fringe benefits,' Eddy says with a sort of yearning in his voice.

One day he'll go back, be an only child with fringe benefits. One day. Every time Mavis gets a letter from Eva, the kids watch him. They know he's thinking about going. But he doesn't go, though he's calling their house purgatory now instead of pigpen.

They're so careful. Neil
has been warned to behave at school because if the teachers smell a rat, they'll send more than letters for Mavis; they'll send the cops around to let her out and things will go back to the bad old days, and nobody wants the bad old days back, do they?

Neil makes a face, Timmy shakes his head and Matty says, ‘Dow,' shakes his head too, and sucks hard.

The nights are too cold or wet to do much
walking, but Mavis's ex cigarette money is crowding the jam jar. They count it one night and discover they've got more than enough for a little television advertised in the wet junk mail, so they buy it, wheel it home in Matty's pram and plug the old video player into it, then Jamesy goes up the manhole to connect a new cable. And the television works and, God, it's good to have the shows back again.
The little kids would sit in front of that box all day if the twin on house duty let them. They do one wet Thursday.

Mick and Lori come home from school and find them still sitting in their pyjamas. Eddy has been repairing the wall, mutilated by Mavis's couch. He's sealed it with the cornflakes packet and pasted over the lot with newspaper. It looks solid enough and Eddy reckons he's going to
paint it if it ever dries.

They cut Mavis down to five Valium, then to four per day, which she takes in coffee now. Donny bought them a huge tin-full and no one else wants to drink the stuff. It's, like, months out of date. Anyway, things have settled into a routine; Mavis still yells, yells double when they give her salads, but only things like, you wait, you little bastards. Those sorts of
things. She doesn't yell as much as she used to and she hardly ever yells for cigarettes.

The kitchen door is still off its hinges but the kitchen is warm enough. Mick had tons of wood delivered before the rains came, and they've hung an old blanket over the doorframe and another one as an outside door for the little passage between the kitchen and the brick room. Those blankets keep the cold
out almost as well as two doors, except when the wind is blowing in from the south, but the stove never goes out, so warmth has crept through the house.

Wow! Phew! Relief! They're going. Eddy claims the two letters, reads them over and over then tosses them
onto the table. The decision to go or to stay now taken out of his hands, he's looking more than a bit stunned.

‘I hope she doesn't stop paying the money into my bank account,' he says.

She doesn't. When the fifty arrives on Friday, he relaxes, stops looking towards Melbourne and starts talking a bit more like a human being – like he even stops calling the loo a toilet.

So there are no more
letters for Mavis; now there are weekly postcards coming addressed to Masters E and A Smyth-Owen. Some of them even contain weird money, and the ten pounds from England turns into almost thirty Australian dollars! Eddy is rich again. Alan won't touch Eva's money.

Lori has claimed that last letter and she spends a lot of time attempting to decipher its contents, coming to the conclusion that Mavis
probably led a wild life before she pinched Henry, and maybe, if Grandmother's illness was caused by Mavis, she might have been old when Mavis was born and probably never got over having her – either that or she wanted her to be a boy and she turned out a girl. The ‘born of corruption' could mean Mavis's father was a mongrel. But it's all supposition. There's nothing concrete.

She learns heaps
about Europe from Eva's cards, like she finds out where some of the countries actually are because Eddy buys a huge map and sticks it on the kitchen wall with Blu-tack so the kids can track Eva and Alice from Greece to Egypt to Germany. They stick the postcards up with Blu-tack, and Neil wants to stick up the pictures he draws at school. He's excellent at drawing, though one of his pictures looks
suspiciously like a giant locked in a brick box.

‘What's that one about, Neil?' Lori asks.

‘That's a grizzly bear with a sore head in . . . in a cage,' Neil says.

‘With red frizzy hair! Grizzly bears don't have red frizzy hair. And cages have got bars, not bricks. Don't you draw any more of those grizzly bears at school.'

‘I drawed one at school and my teacher put it on the wall.'

 

He was
always a troublemaking little bugger. Right from day one, the kids knew that if anyone was going to throw a spanner in the works, it would be Neil. And he's done it! The stupid little twit pinches a full packet of Valium, which Donny dropped in late on Sunday night, and which got left on the kitchen table. Anyway, Neil takes it to school for ‘show and tell' and all hell breaks loose.

Jamesy gets
called to the office. Neil has had a great ‘show and tell' time. He's told how Mavis is locked in the loo, and she can't get out, and Eddy puts her to sleep with these magic pills so she can't yell at everyone and kill them.

‘Who is Eddy?' Jamesy asks.

There must have been some phoning between schools because the high school Smyth-Owens get called to the office. It's on the intercom, and the
last time that happened it was for a family who had to go home, due to their grandfather died. Everyone looks at Lori as she leaves the classroom, like they are thinking her mother is dead. Lori is thinking something worse than that. She's thinking her mother is out.