Henry’s Daughter (34 page)

Mavis keeps on walking and the treadmill keeps on working. It wasn't expensive; things don't have to cost a fortune to be worth owning – like the house. It's old and the floors shake a bit and a grown-up probably would have replaced a heap of the boards before they painted it, but it's a good old house and it looks so dignified, so peaceful, like an old lady who has
lived a hundred years, like she's seen so much that nothing is going to surprise her now. She just sits there at the end of the street, looking out at the world, sort of accepting of all things, and not even worrying about what is going to happen next week or next year. She's been there, done that, now she's just enjoying her old age.

So Easter comes and so do the tourists, and school breaks
up for two weeks, which will be the last of the good-weather holidays for a while – and the teachers know it. They hate kids enjoying holidays so they give out heaps of assignments. A lot of kids complain, not just Lori, but the rotten teachers are all clones, all taught to justify big assignments by saying they are preparation for the hard years of eleven and twelve. As if Lori is even thinking of
doing years eleven and twelve.

Eddy does most of two assignments; Lori adds a bit, just to make Eddy's words sound less like his words and more like her own, but the third assignment is on multiculturalism, and she just refuses to go along with what Eddy is writing. Pure refuses.

‘Give old Crank Tank what she wants and you'll get what you want,' he says.

‘That might be how you got around Eva
and Alice, but it's not what I do. I'm not putting my name to that cow-crap.'

‘Do it yourself then,' Eddy says and he walks off to spend a bit of time doing his stencilling on the bathroom tiles. Lori closes the computer and goes out to Henry's potting shed to water his plants. Some of the plants are still alive and looking well. She's been doing a no-no, hitting them with soapy water – God's
creatures or not, they are getting a bath and they don't like it. Henry's exotic flowers are thanking her for it, though.

Holidays go too fast. They always did and they always will, and on the final night she still hasn't written one single word of that bloody multicultural assignment. It's late, after midnight, and she can't sleep; she keeps thinking about Henry and Mavis and the house and what
they hadn't done to the house, and why Mavis and Henry hadn't done it. And she's thinking about how she sort of loves that dear old house now; even though it had been neglected for so long, all it needed to bring it back to life was a little bit of love. She loves what they've done, and she's so proud of it, and she wishes she could invite Leonie home sometimes – or Mick could invite Paul.

Can't.

They've got to let Mavis out. It's like locking her in is locking them in too, locking the kids away from living like normal people. But if they let her out, what's going to happen to the house? What's going to happen to the bankcard? What's going to happen to the kids and to Mavis's diet?

They'll have to do it, though.

‘God.' If only she was sixteen, and if she had ten thousand dollars in the
bank. ‘If,' she says. ‘Big
eff
.' She rolls onto her back, listens to the house sounds. A window rattling, the roof creaking, the fridge humming. She knows this house, knows all of its sounds – hasn't slept one night of her life under any roof except this roof. Doesn't want to, either. Doesn't want to go to Western Australia, doesn't want to go to England, just wants this dear old green roof, though
there is no way she is going to sleep under this roof tonight; her head is working overtime.

And she still has to do that bloody assignment. She has to write something or old Crank Tank will do her block. What if she uses the bit Eddy wrote and just tones it down? What did he write, anyway?

She gets out of bed, starts up the computer and finds the file. And she's not handing that in! So she
won't hand anything in, and old Crank Tank can do what she likes, and too bad. She had Lori in year seven and she hated her then, spent most of her life sending her to the principal, and she hasn't undergone radical brain-altering surgery in the years since, so too bad. When a teacher starts out hating you, they hate you forever and that's all there is to it.

The decision made, Lori creeps out
to the kitchen, pours a glass of milk, drinks it while she walks out back to the brick room window to see what Mavis is up to. She's not up to much. The light is off, the television off and she's snoring.

Strange night sounds. Sound of breathing, sound of Matty's little cough. Sound of a bed squeaking as someone rolls over in the bunk room. It's like a whole house full of sleep. She tiptoes from
room to room, listening at doors. Dark in and dark out tonight, except for the glow from the computer. She creeps into the lounge room to turn it off, but instead sits down and selects what Eddy wrote and deletes it. Just a blank screen now. Nothing. She stares at the screen, then her fingers take off. She can touch-type – actually, she can type faster than Eddy, who can't touch-type.

Maybe what
she ends up writing is brought on by some lack of sleep induced semi-coma, but when all the words are out of her head and on the screen it's after two o'clock and she sort of likes what she's written and isn't quite sure why she likes it, but she runs the spell check then prints it out – without letting Eddy add even one comma; she adds a few with a black pen, probably puts them all in the wrong
places, but at least those commas are her own, as the words are her own, and at least it's done and she's got something to give old Crank Tank tomorrow. Now maybe she'll be able to sleep.

So school goes back and the tourists go home and it's nice when they've all gone back where they belong and the town starts settling down to normal. There's a different feel about Willama after Easter, like
it's snuggling down quiet for the winter, drawing the fog blankets close around its ears.

Teachers might demand that assignments are handed in on a certain day, but that doesn't mean they have to hand them back on a certain day. Probably too busy making red lines all over Lori's.

She shouldn't have done it. Shouldn't have handed it in. Should have done it the way Eddy said. Just give the people
what they want, he said. And that's bullshit. People aren't clones yet, so why should they all think like clones, write like clones?

But she shouldn't have handed it in. She hadn't mentioned multiculturalism, not once. She'd written about families and houses, and of taking care of your own house and the people who live in your house, and how, if all of the brothers and sisters live by the same
rules, and everyone does their share and they don't try to take more than their fair share, then there are no family wars.

She had ended up going back to the beginning, like Eddy always does. She'd written how many brothers and sisters can sleep safe at night in a proud house, and how some of them may be big and some may be small, some dark, and some redheads, but when the lights are out
at night then you can't tell which heads are red and which ones are dark because all you can hear is their breathing.

That's about all she wrote. And the whole thing will probably be red lined, and too bloody bad.

Finally the Crank Tank hands it back and she sort of looks at Lori, like, what are you? She's pretty old, pretty fat and pure cranky, so Lori ducks her head, shrugs, looks first for
the red lines; she always looks first for those red lines. And there are a few and a few red question marks and commas too, but written right on the bottom of the last page, also in red, is ‘An excellent metaphor. Well thought out, Lori'. And in a little red circle, A – .

Old Crank Tank gave it an A – .

She gave it an A – !

Lori can't stop looking at that A – , and it looks heaps better than
the A she got for the assignment Eddy did for her. She's never before got an A – , not in the whole of her life, not for work she's done herself. Maybe if she really tried, she could scrape through this year. Nobody gives out medals for being dumb. And school is not so bad, it's not really rotten bad like it used to be. And some of the teachers don't hate her. The sports teacher actually likes
her, due to Lori always wins the swimming, and the high jump, only because she's got long legs. She's fast at running too – though she doesn't run so fast now when Paul is chasing her. It's nice having a sort of boyfriend.

She's got two girlfriends, real, true friends she can say anything to, Leonie and a new one, Shana, who originally came from India. Her family moving to Willama was like .
 . . like fate, and the way she and Lori sort of clicked from that very first day – even if her father is a doctor. It was like maybe Henry, wherever he is, or his ancestors, sent Shana to Willama as some sort of sign.

She's really dark, darker than most tribal Aborigines. Anyhow, she and Lori and Leonie are pretty much inseparable these days.

They are sitting, eating lunch and talking about
Crank Tank and their marks for the assignment, which gets them onto talking about where their ancestors came from originally. Leonie's came from England centuries ago. She even had a convict relative who got sent out here in chains in the early eighteen hundreds, and just for stealing one lousy rabbit. All of Shana's people came from parts of India.

Then it gets to Lori's turn and she goes quiet,
sort of considers giving up Henry's BIG secret. But how would they react? It would probably sound as if she was trying to do a Kelly Waters, go black, just so Mick could go to university for free – though Henry would prefer to see him sitting on a drum digging sewerage ditches.

But deep in some place inside, her liver or her kidneys, or maybe in her heart, there's this need to claim that lost
part of who she is – not just the Aboriginal part, but the Indian part too, and the white boy part, that
boy Henry
who worked for Mr Howie. And one day she's going to do it. When she's old enough. She's going to find Lily, or find some of her other kids, not necessarily to claim them, just to know that they are out there.

‘Where did your people come from, Lori?'

Lori looks up, looks at Leonie.
‘Australia? Where else is there?'

‘I mean before. Everyone came from some place.'

‘Just call me the united nations, the end result of non multiculturalism, which happens when you're too busy surviving to worry about culture and all that other religious cow-crap.'

‘Get off your soapbox.'

‘Yeah.' The wind is blowing, tossing her hair, but the sun is hot on her legs, turning them brown, turning
Leonie's red. ‘I'm German mainly, on my mother's side, plus Scottish, a bit of Irish, English. I've got a good dose of Indian on my father's side, plus Aboriginal and only God knows what else – my father was adopted when he was a year old so nobody knows much about him.'

‘So you're an Aborigine?'

‘If a few tablespoons of black blood turns you black. I've probably got a whole litre of Indian
blood but I haven't noticed it turning me into a Hindu yet.' She looks Leonie in the eye. ‘Why didn't you say, oh, so you're a German? I've got a double dose of that – probably at least three litres.'

‘Yeah, well, it didn't turn you into a blue-eyed blonde, did it?'

‘Heil Hitler,' Lori says and she clicks her heels.

They laugh, and so much for Henry's BIG secret.

It's late May and the nights are cold. Last year's winter tent is miles too big for Mavis so Lori attacks it, turns it into a dressing gown and replaces it with the huge green tracksuit she bought from the op shop. And Mavis gets it on too. She looks a sight, because the top isn't long enough, but she also looks proud of herself, sort of struts as she gets off the treadmill and
comes to the window for her dinner.

They're going to have to let her out. Every day now Lori knows that what they are doing is so wrong. What if Paul or Leonie came around one day and no one was home and they climbed over that gate and found Mavis locked in? Lori was only a stupid kid when she bolted that door, but she's not a kid any more

Paul kissed her the other night, on the front verandah,
in the dark, like a proper television-boyfriend kiss. And it was like the night Alan nearly drowned her, like she needed air but couldn't get any, which might have been due to his nose getting in the way of her nose, or maybe she just held her breath when she shouldn't have, but her legs felt like jelly snakes afterwards. Anyway, that's another story.

Mavis is the one Lori is worrying about today;
she's metamorphosing before everyone's eyes, like Eddy is always saying. And . . . and she actually called Lori ‘Lorraine' for the first time in yonks instead of smartarsed little bitch or worse. She stuck her head out of the window and called out, ‘Lorraine. Come over here a minute.'

And when Lori went over, Mavis said really quiet, ‘I've started again. Have you got any . . . ?' It was just
about women's business, but it was like they were the only two women in a whole world of men.

‘Don't need 'em,' Lori said, then she went to the supermarket by herself and got what Mavis wanted.

‘You should need them by now. What's wrong with you?' Mavis said, taking the two small packets.

‘Who cares?'

Today Lori is standing watching Mavis wash her hair in the hand basin. She's stripped down
to her op shop tracksuit pants and a too tight T-shirt, and she's no pretty sight. All of the spare skin around her waist and back and upper arms is saggy. Her stomach is the worst bit, and her hair, which is long and terrible. She used to have really nice hair. Her face has never been ugly and it's not wrinkling up, except maybe around the eyes and a bit around the neck, but if she had eye make-up
and lipstick –

Eddy comes out the back and Lori moves away from the window. ‘She's washing her hair,' she whispers, wanting to protect Mavis. Last year she wouldn't have cared who looked in that window and saw that saggy skin. ‘We have to open that door, Eddy. We've become the new tyrants. Power to the masses. It's a replay of the French Revolution.'

‘Cut off her head,' Eddy says, and mimes
knitting. Lori elbows him, walks into the kitchen.

Then Alan buys in. ‘She's the colour of bread dough. She needs sun. She'll get sick soon, then what are we going to do? People need sun.'

‘Redheads don't,' Eddy says.

Alan is all for letting her out. He's softer than Eddy, who is still full of cheek and this sort of frenetic energy. If he's not working, he's at his computer, like his brain
can't turn the power off. Mick, who is raking ash out of the fire, isn't buying into the conversation.

‘She'll be okay now,' Alan says. ‘I bet she'll want to stay on her diet.'

‘She'll want the bankcard,' Jamesy says. He's also got a thing about money.

‘And as soon as she gets her hands on money, she'll start stuffing. As long as she's got no, like, temptation, she's not tempted.' Vinnie speaks
from experience. They listen to him too. He was tempted a couple of times by Mavis's Valium, so Lori keeps the new packet hidden in her room. What he doesn't see, he doesn't want.

‘Let her climb out the window if she wants to get out,' Jamesy says. His memory is long; he saw too much of the bad Mavis and can't remember enough of the good. But there was good. There was the comedian and, earlier
than that, there was the woolly maroon cardigan and delicious stews and apple pies and – there was good. ‘She'll be able to walk anywhere she wants to walk when she's out. She'll go walking up to the pub for counter meals and she'll be laughing with Wally Johnson and the other blokes and she'll probably end up having more babies.'

Five sets of eyes turn to Jamesy. Why hadn't anyone else thought
about that? He's grown up this year, and he's grown even older in the head. He's eleven, going on sixty, but he's got them all thinking of more babies and maybe understanding a bit why Henry hanged himself.

Lori looks for Matty, the last of them. And God Almighty, he's got to be the last. Can't take any more shitty napkins, any more kids on her back. ‘Where is he? Matty? Where did he go?' she
says.

‘He was under the table a minute ago.'

They check under the table. ‘Matty,' Vinnie calls out back. ‘Matty! Where are you? That little bugger is turning into an escape artist.' Vinnie heads for the front door, calling through the house. ‘Matty? Are you in here? Matty!'

‘Matty! Will you answer when you're called?' Lori is in the back yard, adding her bellow to Vinnie's, and she reminds
herself of Mavis.

He's climbed the gate again but Vinnie has got him, so Lori walks back to the kitchen. ‘What do you really reckon, Mick? Like, this isn't living like normal people, is it?' she says, harking back to her previous subject.

Mick shrugs, looks at the kitchen floor where he lay helpless on the day of the dislocated leg. There is brand-new black and white checked vinyl on the floor
and it still smells new. The kitchen walls and ceiling are white, the cupboards black. It has been changed and they did it. He pulls out the stove's ashtray, empties it into Henry's metal bucket to sprinkle around his garden. Snails and slugs hate ash. He read that in a gardening book, bought new the other day. And he had the money to buy that book. He can remember what it was like when they didn't
have money. He can remember life in this house before he dislocated his leg.

‘I know what I want to do, but I dunno what we ought to do. I know she likes what's happening with the scales. She looks excited now when she tells us what she weighs. I dunno, Lori. Maybe Vinnie is right; she knows herself better than we do.'

Around the table there is a joint relieved exhalation. This house is run
on democratic lines; the subject has been raised, the decision reached, life, as they prefer it, will continue a while longer.

Then Vinnie is back, Matty under his arm and sucking on an envelope, which is addressed to Mavis. It's from Eva's solicitor because his name is on the front.

‘They're into it again. I didn't think they were coming back until September.' Eddy rips off the wet end, opens
the well-sucked contents, but as he reads, the blood drains from his face and his hand moves to his mouth. ‘They're dead,' he says, sort of quiet, breathless. ‘They're both dead.'

‘Don't muck around, you moron.'

‘They're both dead. A bus smash. In Argentina. They're dead.' He's standing, shaking, looking around him like he wants to run and he has no place to run to.

‘They're in Paris.' Alan
takes the letter, reads, shakes his head and reads it again, then he shudders, turns to Eddy. ‘What were they doing in Argentina? What – '

And the kids know it's true and many eyes grow wide and they all stare at Eddy.

‘They're flying their . . . they are bringing them home tomorrow, it says.' Alan is beside his twin, a smidgen taller than his twin, and heavier. They still look the same to strangers
but they are not the same, not their eyes, not their expressions, not their responses to this news, either. Alan doesn't know what he should feel, what he should do. He's jumpy, shrugging his shoulders, looking out towards the river. Eddy is ghost white and shaking. His power has been turned off.

‘We get everything plus Watts as trustee,' Alan says, ready to head for the bush. ‘It says he's coming
up here to get us.'

‘You own that house!' Lori breathes and she reaches for the letter, scans it. Alice and Eva are dead, all right, but all Lori can think about is houses. She's got a house fetish. But her own brothers, her own two brothers, own that posh house she once saw. Cool, calm, green. Ocean waves in the distance. She's not a very nice person; a nice person would be saying something
different, but she's not saying it. ‘You own that posh house? The letter says you two are joint beneficiaries. You're rich!'

The twins don't look like joint beneficiaries. They don't look joined. Eddy looks as if he's coming unjoined fast.

‘Get him a drink of water, someone,' Mick says. ‘Sit him down before he falls down.'

Alan gets the water and he drinks it, then he remembers what he's supposed
to be doing and fills the glass again, offers it to his twin. Eddy sits, drinks, shakes. This news has hurt him but it hasn't hurt Lori. She didn't like those two dead women and she knows a lot more about Eva since Mavis's pot-smoking night, so she actually hates her now, and her mother. They were two rotten heartless people – and old Alice? Well, she was just a rangy, mangy old stranger. Thousands
of strangers get killed and you might feel a bit sorry for the families, but you can't get heartbroken about the dead one.

‘What does Mavis get?' Jamesy asks.

‘Her mother hated her, left her nothing. She used to put her in this big pantry they had, and lock the door,' Vinnie says. ‘And Mavis used to sit there in the dark and eat all the sugar and stuff. She was going on about all sorts of muck
the night she got into my grass.'

Mick has stopped scraping ash out of the stove. He's standing, rubbing at his frown, rubbing ash on his face. Some tribe somewhere does that when someone dies, Lori thinks.

Alan claims the letter. ‘Watts says that he'll be up here on Wednesday. He's expecting us to go back there!'

‘We'll have to go back. For the funeral. That's all.' Eddy is sitting statue
stiff, his eyes sort of red, shaky – not crying, but his mouth is, and it's working hard at making those words try to come out near normal.

‘So we don't have to stay there, with Watts, as our guardian?' Alan is at the door, looking out at freedom. He'll give up his inheritance if it means giving up his freedom.

Eddy's hand shakes as it reaches again for the letter. He licks his lips, gets a
few deep breaths in, then reads it again, reads it slow, Mick leaning over his shoulder. They're all grouped around Eddy, stuck for something to say. Dumb.

‘If I hadn't left, they would have still been alive,' Eddy says.

‘Crap. When your time is up, it's up, even if lightning has to come in that bloody window to get you,' Vinnie says with conviction. He's been there, done that. He's tried most
stuff but he couldn't afford heroin. He's been at Greg's side when they crashed a stolen car with the cops right on their tail, and he got out, jumped a fence and ran. He got hit by a baseball bat one night when he went into a takeaway to buy a pie and chips and Greg decided on the spot to rob it. Vinnie didn't get his pie, but he got away, lived to run another day. And he didn't lose the sight
in his eye, either, when Mavis tried to scratch it out that night. Close shaves have made him a fatalist, made him good up ladders too, and at walking around roofs like a circus performer.

They watch him open the fridge, take out the milk, think of drinking it from the bottle, watch him change his mind, pour a spurt into a mug, drink it. He even puts the lid back on, puts the milk away, puts
the mug in the sink. They're house-training him. Slow.

Then everyone is doing things. Picking up things, looking for something to say. Nothing much anyone can say except, ‘Poor old Eva.'

‘Poor ole Eba,' Matty says. It raises a few smiles, though they are wiped away fast. This is no time for smiling.

It's time to start cooking a stew, but somehow it doesn't seem the right thing to do. Nothing
is the way it was. It's weird. Like, what do we do now? Like, this isn't what was supposed to happen. Where do we go to from here? It's like when you read one of those books where for five hundred pages the author has been setting you up to expect the story will end with the hero getting murdered, then suddenly, on the second-last page, the whole plot changes. The murderer goes off to the jungle
and gets eaten by a giant python and the hero wins the lottery. It's not that you aren't pleased for the hero, it's just that it doesn't feel real so you don't believe it, and you pitch the book at the wall.

‘We've got to tell Mavis,' Mick says.

People to tell, like when Henry hanged himself. But it's not a bit like when Henry hanged himself because none of this is happening to Lori.

It's happening
to Eddy, though. He's got that scared, lonely, empty feeling, like she had when Henry died, and she knows it. And he's got all the guilt too, and that chewed-up hurting inside that won't go away. He's sitting at the table, playing with his empty glass, turning it around and around in circles. A few tears are wetting his eyes, but they're not leaking out.

Alan isn't hurting. He's stalking the
room, backwards and forwards, from the window to the door, from the door to the window. Maybe he cried all of his tears for Eva when he first came home, so he's walking, stalking, thinking, like, God, when does life settle down to fishing and reading? Like, God, what's going to happen to me next?

‘We've got to tell Mavis,' Mick says again.

‘We've got to let her out,' Lori adds.

‘Shit,' Vinnie
says and he looks up at the cupboard, to where the Valium used to live. ‘Shit,' he says again and he heads for the front door.

Lori goes to the green door. She slides the bolt.

It's happening. It's happening.