Henry’s Daughter (9 page)

What with his fractions and stuff he gives her a lot to think about; also, having him home has stopped the kids, white and black, from picking on her. Alan is a wide-eyed wimp, but he's a tall wimp, and Jamesy,
who isn't tall, isn't a wimp. It's like Alan has filled up the gap in the family, like eleven and eight have got themselves welded together by Alan's ten. Mavis did a good thing getting him home. She says she's going to get the other one too, though Eva sure won't be gullible enough to bring him up here again.

Alan is a bit soft in the head, due to all the schoolwork stuffed in there; he likes
doing weird stuff, like getting Jamesy and Neil to help build a cubbyhouse from the pile of bricks which Martin always reckoned he was going to use one day to build himself a bungalow. Everyone knows that his one day will never come now, because of Karen, so they can use his bricks if they want to.

They build the cubby under the peppercorn tree, which is behind the chook-pens at the back corner
of Henry's vacant block where the fences and the low branches make it private. Lori starts carting bricks too. She's just doing it to keep Alan happy. That's what she says to Mick, which isn't the truth, because she's having fun doing it, building it big, building lines of bricks for walls with gaps for doors. It's like Alan knows how to make magic in his head as well as fractions, and his magic
is rubbing off on Lori.

They make brick chairs and tables with the old palings the fence man tossed onto the junk heap when he built the new fence at the back. They get some old sheets from Henry's rag-bag for tablecloths, and plastic knives and forks from Mavis's Chinese takeaway, and they pick a few flowers and put them in a jar of water and sit it on their table. It's like they've got their
own house to go to. For the first time in her life, Lori plays tea-parties, fills Coke bottles with water and eats wormy apples. The magic gets so good sometimes that the water really tastes like Coke.

Maybe Alan is helping to turn Lori into a girl. But her chest bumps aren't getting any bigger and she hasn't got any hair under her arms and she still makes Henry cut her hair like the boys, so
on the outside she still looks like a boy.

Then May is finished and overnight the rains come to turn dust into mud. To get to the loo or to the cubbyhouse they walk though mud, and Henry's floors are covered in it. He mops a lot and the rain keeps on falling, like it's been storing it up for months. The sides of the roads turn into lakes and getting from one footpath to the next is slippery.

Some days when they walk to school in the rain, Alan talks about Eddy and home, but it's funny, because it's not people things he seems to miss; what he misses most is being driven to school, and going to the cinema with Eddy, and flying in aeroplanes to Queensland for the holidays, and even to America once. And he really misses his drawer full of soft socks. The missing is getting less, though.
He loves little Matty, tickles him and makes him gurgle, and Timmy, who used to spend half his life staring at Matty or wandering over the road to squat in Nelly's garden, now follows Alan around like a pup.

Also, Alan has discovered Henry – not the house Henry, but the singing, potting shed Henry. He tells Lori that he can remember Henry being his father before, even remember him singing before
when he used to fly over from London to visit them.

‘He never did fly over from London,' Lori says.

‘He did so,' Alan says. ‘He did fly over, heaps of times, because I can remember him singing.'

‘He didn't ever live in London since you got born. He lived here and he used to always be going to Melbourne on the bus until after you were five. Mavis even went sometimes if you were in hospital.'

‘He lived in London. He wrote to us from there, all the time.'

‘He wrote to you from Willama and I saw him do it, every month. Like on the first Sunday of every month. I even posted some of the letters. Him and Mavis have been here in this house since Mick was born. You were even born here, in this house – or one of you came out in this house. The other one came out at the hospital.'

‘We did
not come out of her.'

‘You did so, and you're not even Alan anyway. You're Edward, because everyone could only ever tell you apart by the moles on your bums and your mole was on the other side, so you're Edward.'

‘You're making it all up . . . like you did when you said Henry's mother was Princess Lily and she owned a diamond and ruby mine.'

‘I didn't make up about you getting born here.'

‘You did. Henry always lived in London, because my mother said so.'

‘Eva is a liar, and she's not your mother. She pinched you from us because Henry was her husband first, but Mavis pinched him from her. And they lived all over the place, like gypsies, until Mick got born with his crippled leg,' Lori says. She wants Alan to believe her, but he's still shaking his head. He can't believe her because
if he does, then that makes his mother not his mother, and if Eva isn't his mother then Mavis might be.

‘He lived in London,' he says, his eyes staring at his muddy shoes. ‘He lived in London, because he wasn't ever happy in Australia, and he used to get on the plane and fly over the ocean to see us. And Eddy and I got born in London, and we lived with Henry until we got bad hearts and Henry
brought us to Australia because the weather was better and we needed a caring mother to make us well. And I heard Eva say that to Mrs Howard from school. So there.'

‘What a bloody lie that is! You got born right here, and your hearts were messed up from the day you got born and you lived here in this house for two years – when you weren't in the hospital half dying. And Eva hasn't got any right
to get you back and she hasn't got any right to keep Eddy either – and that's why she keeps writing letters and trying to buy you off Mavis. And Mavis is keeping all of her letters too, and she's going to show them to a judge one day for evidence and he'll make Eva give Eddy back. And you go and ask Henry if you don't believe me, because I'm not wasting my breath any more on talking to idiots who
believe in lies.'

Alan goes with her each night now to listen to Henry's potting shed songs. They are watching him re-pot some lumpy looking bulb thing when Alan asks about London and how many times Henry flew over from London.

Henry, being a totally good person, couldn't tell a lie to save his life. He tells Alan the truth, while making excuses for Eva instead of rubbing in what a liar she
really is.

Lori rubs it in later.

June can get bitter, killer cold in Willama so the tourists stay away, which is good, but the old house isn't so good; it's sort of damp and freezing cold. It's got two open fireplaces, one in the middle boys' bunk room and one behind a big old wardrobe in the lounge-room bedroom. Henry says it's too dangerous to light open fires, which might burn the house down, so the brothers
crowd into the kitchen at night, where the breeze seeping through the louvres is no longer called a breeze, but a draught. Alan sits in the draught one night and he gets sick.

‘Uncle Henry,' he says. He can't call him just Henry, and no one else calls him Dad, so he has found his own special name. ‘Uncle Henry, my throat is very sore this morning. I think it's my tonsillitis. Eddy and I always
get it in the winter.'

Henry looks at the diseased strawberry tonsils blocking Alan's throat. ‘Give him a Panadol, Martin, and keep him inside today. Make him a salt and water gargle every four hours or so,' he says, and he washes his hands of the matter and goes back to cutting a thousand Vegemite sandwiches. Mavis doesn't like Vegemite so all the kids get Vegemite sandwiches for school lunches.

Henry looks sick too. He's got a terrible cough and it's making him greyer and smaller every day but he still goes to work. Martin is a bricklayer and brickies never work when it's raining. He was planning to go out to see Karen and now he's going to be stuck at home all day with Mavis. He's not happy.

Donny rides off to the supermarket; Greg and Vinnie ride off towards the high school, though
they probably won't get that far. Henry drops Mick off before he goes to work and Lori and Jamesy walk to school in the rain.

Alan's sore throat is only the start of a bad winter, because every homeless germ in Willama comes looking for him; they chase him until they catch him. He's always sick, always in bed, and Lori misses arguing with him. Henry just gets him better with his salt and water
gargle and his Panadol and Alan goes out and soaks up some more germs. They live on him, and slowly he starts sharing them with the rest of the family.

Henry is worried about Alan's old heart thing – there is a huge scar right down the middle of his chest. He doesn't worry about the other kids. Like Lori, they got born tough, got born into tough. He gets the boys to help clean up the house and
he gets the doctor to come. Alan's heart is okay, it's his tonsils; they may have to come out, the old doctor says. He gives Henry a prescription for antibiotics, which work fast, and Alan goes back to school. A week later some flu germs track him down and he brings them home to share with Mavis.

When she gets sick, she gets sick, and there is a lot of her to get sick. She's hacking and coughing
and smoking and she can't even eat. It's killing her. She's sick as a dog and madder than a hornet on heat and maybe she even loses a bit of weight, but by the time July is over, she's making up for lost time. Her bad, mad, eating, no-sleeping mood has come back, like in triplicate.

The doctor comes again to Alan, but he's more worried about Mavis. He says she has to diet or her heart will give
up, so Henry tries to make her diet, like he's serving her steamed fish and vegetables at night and he's keeping his fridge and pantry bare, and when Greg gets bribed to buy her a huge mess of fish and chips one night, Henry takes them, wastes them, puts them in the stove and lets them burn.

Mavis throws a screamer. It's a bit later when she puts her best tent on, puts on her make-up and walks
off to the hotel for a counter meal. It's not far away, just around the corner and down a bit from the milk bar.

Every night then she's walking off to the hotel as soon as Henry gets home from work. She drinks wine there too, because one night she comes home laughing, not average laughing, but over the top laughing. For a while Lori thinks that her mad eating mood is over, but it's not – it's
just a different type of mad mood. Anyway, that night she gets out Henry's typewriter and writes to Eva, says that they want to go through with the deal. Two ten year olds for one hundred thousand dollars and ten per cent of the shares Eva inherited. Bargain rates, never again to be repeated. Mavis reads her letter to everyone. She doesn't sign it with her MSO squiggle, though, she signs Henry's
name and tries to do his long skinny signature, and she's laughing so much that the kids can't help laughing with her. Henry is not laughing and he's not going to post that letter.

Greg does, though, and gets five dollars to do it.

Poor Henry, he coughs and pleads, shrugs and coughs, cooks and coughs.

Then two days later Mr Watts writes back in one of those yellow Express Post envelopes. Henry
opens it, his hands shaking and sweating because he thinks there is going to be a court case over selling the twins, but all the letter says is that Eva and Alice have rented out the St Kilda property and have gone to London for twelve months. Henry let Eva get passports for the twins so they could go to Disneyland when they were seven, so Eva has flown away and stuck Mavis with a kid who can't
take her without antibiotics.

She starts getting into Henry for not bringing those twins home five years ago, gets into him for letting Eva get passports, gets into Henry by writing another mad letter. She writes truly excellent letters. All the kids laugh when she reads them out. They'd make a cat laugh. She writes to Lori's teacher one day and that teacher is not laughing – neither is Henry,
because her name is Mrs Cripps and Mavis spelt it with an ‘A'.

‘You're behaving like a fool,' he says. ‘And worse than that, you've made a fool of that child.' He coughs and cleans, coughs and shrinks a little more each day.

Mr Watts sends another Express Post envelope. He says Eva is prepared to pay seventy-five thousand dollars and five per cent of the shares; however, the house has been
leased until May of next year. Eva will not be back in Australia until then, whatsoever and how-for-so-ever, or whatever, if Mavis is prepared to sign the papers, Eva is prepared to pay Alan and Henry's airfares to London where the final signatures can be added to the document.

And Henry has had enough of Mavis. He's going to London whether she signs or not. He applies for renewal of his passport,
rings Mr Watts about Alan's passport, gets the doctor around again. It's that doctor who throws a spanner in the works, says that at the moment Alan is not up to a twenty-four hour flight to London, nor is Henry. Alan has got a middle ear infection and Henry can't shake his bronchitis, which isn't bronchitis, it's emphysema, due to growing up in wet England or to Mavis's smoking like a chimney.
The doctor prescribes a heap of antibiotics for him and a week off work. Alan gets more antibiotics and eardrops and Mavis gets more Valium and some new antidepressant tablets because she's probably got post-natal depression or whatever.

Henry takes his pills and he pleads with Mavis to take hers. That's exactly what she wants, because when he looks worried about her, she knows her eating is
doing some good, so she eats more. Eats anything. When there's only flour and eggs in the house, she makes pancakes and stands in front of Henry eating them, even if she's got no jam to put on them. He hides condensed milk in the old trunk in the laundry. She finds it, and follows him around, eating it with a spoon and telling him what he can do with the antidepressant pills, which doesn't sound comfortable.
She sends Greg to the bank for withdrawal forms, then sends him back to get the money out – and gives him ten whole dollars for doing it. Then she walks off to the milk bar and comes back with half a dozen blocks of chocolate and she stuffs the lot, her big eyes sort of flirting with Henry while she's stuffing chocolate into her mouth, hurting him, making him care – trying to make him
care. You can see her getting bigger with each block. You can see Henry caring less.

All the chocolate comes through her milk, into Matty, and straight out the other end. His nappies are terrible. Martin tells her she is making Matty sick with her stuffing, but he may as well tell her she's won the lottery, so he and Donny buy a tin of baby formula and Henry gets a doctor's certificate for another
week off work. He feeds Matty formula, won't let Mavis near him.

Mavis doesn't care. She didn't want another boy.

By mid August her tents are too tight and Henry looks as if he's taking diet pills. He's hanging on, just hanging in there. He's doing what he can; he's back at work and he's coughing, sucking on an inhaler and coughing and trying to make Greg and Vinnie go to school. He can't sing,
he's got no breath. He's looking after Alan, and he's mopping the floors and sweeping up Mavis's butts and making up Matty's formula each night, lining the bottles up in the fridge. He's trying to keep things together, hanging in there by his teeth and toenails, but the rest of him is a floppy, grey, coughing rag.

Then Greg gets expelled from school. He's been pinching stuff out of the other
kids' lockers. Everyone in the house, except Henry and Mavis, have always known that Greg is a spoilt-rotten thief, so now it's official.

Greg starts sleeping all day and roaming all night, or some days he just roams all day and all night until Martin or Henry track him down some place and bring him home fighting. Then one night the police bring him home. Seeing a policeman at the door breaks
up the last of Henry's heart. He cries. He's the only glue holding this madhouse together, but Greg and Mavis are doing their level-best to rip that glue apart.

Martin comes up with an idea. He tells Greg he'll pay him ten dollars a week to stay at home, rip up the back verandah floorboards and dig the foundations for the room Martin has been planning to build on the back. Martin, bricklaying
since before he was sixteen, has been hoarding leftover bricks for that room since he started work.

Greg thinks about it. He's also thinking about nicking off to Melbourne so he can get a special allowance for abused kids, because Martin and Donny are abusing him when he tries to sneak out at night. Donny says he'll give Greg five dollars a week – that's fifteen – that's a fortune.

‘But you're
going to work for it,' Martin says. ‘And you're not going near the town unless you're with Vinnie or Mick.'

‘That fucking pair of morons? Who'd want to be seen dead with them?' Greg sneers.

Mick is no moron, though Vinnie might be. Stick a ring through his nose and you can lead him anywhere, get him to do anything. Like, Henry can even get him to help do the washing on Saturdays, can get him
to mix Matty's bottles, cook sausages, boil rice.

Martin starts wrecking floorboards, showing Greg how to do it while he stands back leaning but not learning much. He gets a few boards up that first week and gets paid, then he nicks off. And good riddance to bad rubbish.

That back verandah roof propped, the floor half wrecked, little kids running out the kitchen door and disappearing down the
gap – well, there's no stopping now. Vinnie says he'll work for five dollars a week. He's only fourteen but he towers over Martin, is taller than Donny, and heavier. He's going to be a giant, and every inch he grows, Mavis hates him more – and Matty is getting to look a bit like him too, which might be why Mavis prefers Timmy. The fact that she's showing some interest in Timmy could mean she's coming
out of her mad mood, though.

The boys should get a permit from the council, Henry says, but Martin reckons that the back yard is a junk heap anyway, so a bit more junk won't be noticed. And they own the block next door, don't they, so who is going to complain? Henry hasn't got the energy to argue. It's like he's done with trying to do the right thing. He shrugs, coughs. He shrugs and coughs so
much and so often his shoulders are sort of growing forward, crowding his ears.

The digging out for the slab is something new to talk about. It makes a hell of a mess but it takes over the kitchen talk. Martin tells everyone that the new room will be for Splinter, because she's growing up and they'll need to get her out of the lounge room soon. Because he's sleeping with Karen, he probably knows
about girl stuff, and he's sort of in awe of the changes going on in Lori. She's got two hairs under her left arm now and the boils on her chest have got lumps under them, which might be breast cancers.

‘Don't cut her hair, Henry. Let it grow a bit,' Martin says one night when Lori pushes in for a trim. She misses out on Henry's gentle touch and she hates Martin for a while. Martin and Donny
are always staring at her lately, like it's a shock to them, like they really forgot there were girl parts under the shorts and jeans.

She is looking different, and it's not just because her hair is growing frizzy, and it's not just because of her little green apple boobs either. She's heaps taller and she's getting hips and a waist and her bum is getting a girl shape. All the brothers hammer
on the bathroom door now when she's in the shower, instead of barging in like they used to, so she gets the idea that she ought to lock that door.

Greg being kicked out of school was what Lori's rotten schoolteacher calls a catalyst, which is like one thing making something else happen. It's made a chain of things happen, actually – like, it's got Mavis out of her mood, it's getting the brick
room built, and it's turned Greg into a druggie.

Vinnie said so. He said he saw him down the town with a girl who is on drugs and so is her mother, and he said that Greg and the girl did their block because Vinnie wouldn't do something. Vinnie won't say what it was they wanted him to do, just that he got attacked by them and another girl, and in the main street, because he wouldn't do it. Anyway,
once Henry finds out where Greg is living, he gets the police to bring him home and scare him into staying there.

It doesn't work. He's never home, except when Henry is home, and who cares? And maybe Mavis has finally woken up to what a rotten mongrel he really is. She's sort of ignoring him, but she's good again, back to her normal eating – which isn't really normal.