Henry’s Daughter

by Joy Dettman

  Lori carries Matty home and he’s asleep on her shoulder before they get there. She pours the last of the baby Panadol into him, pins a cot sheet on for a napkin, finds his spare sweater on the floor and tucks him into his filthy blankets, then crawls into her own bed, thinks of Mick, thinks the kids didn’t have any dinner – instead of thinking of Henry, stuck in that hole.

  Maybe she’s hungry, because she dreams of Nelly’s sultana cake and Jamesy is cooking it beside the river but the sultanas are fish eyes.

  European Carp

  The next day Mavis gets a phone call to say that Mick is being sent to Melbourne. His crippled leg has been dislocated and the doctor wants a specialist to look at it.

  People come around in packs, cops, the old doctor, a guy with verandah eyebrows, heaps of people, because Mick might have been dislocated but he’s still trying to fix up Mavis from his hospital bed. He’s been dobbing and though Mavis might be stark raving crazy, she’s sane enough to realise she’s in trouble. She starts bawling for Henry.

  ‘You poor woman,’ the doctor says. He’s going to organise some help for her in the house, get the counsellor to call again. He’s going to get her on some new pills. He’s writing his prescriptions again. He’s going to play hell with a broomstick, and it is a pity Jamesy didn’t knock her bloody mad head off with his broomstick last night.

  ‘The older boys left me when their father died,’ she sobs. ‘I’ve never been able to do anything with Michael. His father gave in to his every demand. He’s always at me, always wanting money.’

  Lori’s mouth gets jammed full of dobbing words, until the police lady and the doctor start talking about emergency care for the children – just for a while. And it’s pure blackmail, that’s what it is. It’s like on the television when people are blackmailed into keeping their mouths shut. There is no way out of this.

  ‘Gregory will be home tomorrow. He is the only one I can lean on.’

  ‘Where is he, Mrs Smyth-Owen?’

  ‘He took off,’ Jamesy says.

  ‘He’s staying with my sister in Melbourne.’

  ‘He took old Roddie’s car and he took Vinnie with him too,’ Neil says.

  The lady cop looks at Neil, believes him. She knows all about Gregory Smyth-Owen, who didn’t turn up for his court appearance. She also knows about Mrs Roddie’s missing Datsun. Mavis probably knows that she’s opened her mouth and put her foot right in it so she grasps her stomach, sits down hard on the couch. ‘It’s the baby,’ she says. ‘I’m losing it.’

  The doctor didn’t know there was going to be another baby. He looks at the kids, sort of counts them. He’s old, his face worn, his glasses thick. He sighs, doesn’t want to know about this baby, but he checks Mavis’s blood pressure, tries to find a heartbeat.

  The lady cop is tough; she doesn’t give a damn about new babies. She wants Eva’s address and gets it too before she leaves. She and the doctor walk outside for some fresh air and Lori follows them, watches the lady leave, watches the doctor step on a broken floorboard which jumps up, tries to get his shin. He dodges in time. He’s not blind – just can’t see anything he doesn’t want to see.

  ‘Matty and Alan are sick,’ she says. She’s standing half in and half out the door.

  He turns, looks down at that floorboard then directly at her, and as their eyes make contact, for a split second she sees deep behind his glasses, reads what’s there. That doctor knows exactly what happened to Mick, knows that Matty and Alan are sick too, and the rest of the kids neglected. He can’t fix it, so he’d prefer not to see it, but he follows her back into chaos, looks at Alan’s throat, listens to Matty’s chest, writes two more prescriptions, then leaves, taking note of that broken board, stepping high.

  Lori gets the medicine from the chemist. She hands Alan his bottle, doses Matty with a double dose then puts both bottles safe on top of the kitchen cupboard with Mavis’s Valium and Aropax.

  There are two packets of Aropax and six of Valium with only a few tablets missing from each packet. Lori packs them, one on top of the other, thinks of crushing them all up, mixing them with condensed milk and leaving it on the table for Mavis to eat from the tin or use in her custard – or maybe crush them and put them in the custard powder, which is yellow, about the same colour as Valium – like, only leave enough custard powder in the packet for one last serve.

  But things get a bit better that week. The district nurse and two cleaning ladies come and everyone is busy and tripping over kids and when Mavis is all pink and glowing clean, her hair long and fluffy, the nurse cleans up the little kids and the cleaning ladies go out to the laundry where they have a great time looking disgusted while cleaning up a mountain of mouldy clothes.

  Alan doesn’t go to school, due to his tonsils and cough, and Jamesy doesn’t come home from school. Lori thinks he’s left home too, but he turns up late and he’s got three European carp in his school bag. One of the cleaning ladies tells Jamesy to take the fish outside but the other one tells her that a small European carp is okay to eat.

  ‘You have to bleed them while they are fresh, though, cut their tails off and let them hang, then freeze them for a few days.’

  Jamesy is listening. ‘Why?’ he asks.

  ‘I dunno, really. Someone told me to, love. Then I thaw them, give them a good soak in salty water, stick a few slices of lemon and onions inside them, pour over a bit of oil and salt and pepper and a few herbs, wrap them in foil and cook them in the oven. You wouldn’t even know you were eating carp.’

  Jamesy borrows the wood axe from the Salvation Army bloke who is out there cutting up old boards and stuff from the junk heap, and he tops and tails his fish, doesn’t try to cook them because someone has done a heap of food shopping for Mavis and she’s up and boiling a packet of spaghetti and she’s got a jar of sauce and even grated cheese to put on it so Jamesy puts his carp in the freezer, wrapped up in supermarket bags.

  Nearly every day he adds a fish to the freezer, because Mavis has been shocked into action, scared she’ll lose her kids and her pension; every night she’s heating up pies or something, because that social worker man is checking on her and shopping for her.

  It lasts for two weeks then the police lady gives up looking for Greg, and the social worker man stops knocking at the door, and the district nurse stops coming to help Mavis shower because a man has been working in the bathroom and he’s put metal handles on the tiles so Mavis has got something to hang on to. Only one young cleaning lady comes now, twice a week.

  She’s there one day when Lori rides home from school mid afternoon; she got sent to the vice principal again and decided not to go. It’s mid winter and wet. The house is freezing because there is no wood for the stove, and maybe that’s why Mavis is still in bed. Anyway, the home-help lady finds the three little kids running around half naked, coughing and runny nosed. She’s sick of this mess, anyway, so she starts doing her block as she works her way towards Mavis’s door, where she stops picking things up, leans, looks at the hump of quilt and pillows.

  ‘If you’d get off your fat backside and do a bit of work, you’d be better off, Mrs Smyth-Owen,’ she says, starting slow. ‘And so would those poor bloody little kids. You’re like a bloody queen bee, you are, laying around in your hive, laying eggs and letting the poor bloody workers run around after you. Yeah, well, I just stopped running, Mrs Smyth-Owen. Find yourself another fool.’

  No more clean kitchen. No more frozen pies and spaghetti, due to the social worker man fixed it up with the supermarket so Mavis can phone in her order then give the delivery man a cheque when he delivers. Mavis isn’t phoning the supermarket, or not often, but she’s back to phoning her taxi friends.

  It’s Jamesy who gets the stove going, then he takes two frozen-stiff carp from the freezer, sticks them in a cold oven. After an hour or so those fish sort of boil in their juices and they taste like that one smelt down at the river.

  Waiting for Friday

  The less and the less keep
s on getting less but it won’t end. School is just a place Lori goes to wait for the day to be over so she can go to bed, hoping the next day will forget to come, but a new day comes, and it starts all over again. It’s like there is an old clock somewhere that has to work its way down to the end. She can almost hear it tick-tock-ticking in her head.

  Martin still comes on Friday nights with his food, and money for Nelly, so she can get stuff to cut the school lunches. She makes really good sandwiches, even puts a whole banana in Lori’s bag sometimes, and that might be enough to keep kids alive. It’s not enough to keep kids wanting to stay alive – like seeing Martin on Fridays isn’t enough. Fridays are useless.

  Lori’s bike is useless too. Something has gone wrong with the bit that drives the chain and she can’t fix it, and Vinnie’s old bike has got a puncture, so on Friday she walks to school in the rain, which is better than staying at home. Weeks back she lost her parka or some other kid pinched it. And the hem Nelly took up on her uniform has come down and it’s not too long, even with the hem down. Her bones don’t know that it’s no use growing – or her boobs.

  Alan sounds as if he’s dying of consumption. He’s in bed, coughing a duet with Matty in a bottom bunk, the other two little ones sound asleep on the other bottom bunk, only the tops of their heads visible beneath a mound of blankets.

  So tired, she wants to go to bed too, get this day done. All the time, she’s tired. Tired and cold, and tired of waiting for Martin on Fridays. Tired of him coming around and beeping his horn out front and expecting her to run out through the rain, listen to him. Tired of him thinking Friday is enough. Tired of his voice sounding like it always used to sound, like, we’ve set the date for our wedding, Splint. Cool. Like, look what I’ve got you tonight, Splint, chicken and chips. Super cool.

  ‘Mick’s okay, Splint. He’ll be down there for a while yet, though. They let me talk to him today, and he said they are fitting him with a new brace. He’s needed a new brace for ages.’ She stares at the dashboard, and at the rip in the vinyl. It looks like an eye staring back at her. ‘Talk to me, Splinter.’

  She looks at him, shakes her head, thinks how she always wanted to be one of the big kids. So she’s the biggest. What is she supposed to do about it? What does he expect her to say? Alan’s sick? That’s old news. Who wants to read last week’s newspaper? The news isn’t going to change. She’s sitting, smelling that chicken and chips, and in some stupid kid place inside her head she’s thinking, yummy, chicken and chips for tea, but there is a new place in her head that is thinking other things, like writing tomorrow’s news in big black headlines: MURDER BY VALIUM AND CONDENSED MILK. MURDER BY CUSTARD.

  ‘Is it so bad, Splint?’

  ‘Is it so bad, Splint? Has getting engaged to that fucking stuck-up rotten idiot turned your brain into bug stew or something?’

  He sort of sits back, shocked, like she’s slapped his face. Then he slaps her face, so she thumps him with her closed fists, and she starts yelling stuff and she can’t stop yelling and she can’t stop thumping him either. She’s yelling about cooking European carp and Henry’s rotten onions, and she’s yelling about school books and her parka and about the letters that keep coming from the bank because they gave Mavis too many cheques, and she writes out too much money on her cheques. And she’s yelling about how the bank doesn’t like it when Mavis writes out more cheques than they can pay, so they charge her more fees. She’s thumping Martin, thumping his head, his shoulders, any place she can make contact. ‘And there’s no wood for the fucking fire, and we’re fucking freezing, and Mick wrote, and he’s living in a hostel, not at the fucking hospital, and he won’t ever come home again, because who’d want to come home to this fucking place? And you come here on Fridays and you say is it so bad, Splint? You’re as fucking mad as Mavis. You’ve both gone round the fucking twist.’

  He tries to grab her wrists to stop her thumping, and it’s raining outside the ute, but it’s wetter inside because Martin is making it wetter. He’s bawling now, and she didn’t know that he still knew how to bawl, so she stops thumping him.

  ‘What’s the use?’ she says. ‘What’s the use of your fucking Fridays?’

  ‘No use, Splint,’ he says, wiping his nose with his wrist, wiping his eyes with his thumbs, sniffing, sort of sobbing breaths. Then he picks up his parcel of chips and chicken which has steamed up all the windows and he gets out of the ute and walks towards the house. He never goes inside. Hasn’t been inside for weeks. ‘I’ll keep her busy while you get some food into the kids.’

  He keeps her busy, all right. If the rain wasn’t so heavy, all the neighbours would be out on the street watering their gardens tonight, listening to just how busy he’s keeping her. But it is raining, cats and dogs. It’s flooding Willama. The verandahs are pouring waterfalls down to the mud while chicken and chips are pouring into sleepy little bellies. They have their dinner in the bunk room with Alan, who even stops coughing long enough to eat some chicken, so maybe he’s not dying yet. They stay in the bunk room until Martin drives away, then Lori gets scared and she drags the chest of drawers across the room, pushes it against the door so Mavis can’t get in and kill them for eating all the chicken and chips.

  But Martin comes back and Lori has to move the barricade and let him in. He’s got cough medicine, and Panadol, disposable napkins, cornflakes and milk for breakfast. Alan takes a Panadol then drinks cough medicine from the bottle. He goes straight to sleep, and when Matty coughs, Martin gives him half a Panadol crushed up in cough medicine. He stops coughing and starts snoring. Neil coughs, because he wants some, then Timmy. They get half a Panadol and a suck on the medicine bottle and they are all druggies and who cares, because the sound of no coughing is so bloody good.

  Almost like a proper family, all together in the bunk room, Lori in one bottom bunk with Timmy; Jamesy and Neil up top, Alan and Matty curled up together and Martin sleeping alone. It’s warm in that room. It’s almost safe in that room.

  The next morning it’s not safe.

  They go to Nelly’s, and Martin phones the bank manager, who he knows well because he helped build his house. It’s Mrs Smyth-Owen’s account. Privacy laws and that crap. That was a waste of time. Nelly tells Martin to cut out the middle man, go direct to the taxi people, tell them not to answer Mavis’s phone calls.

  And he’s off, his ute roaring up the street. He goes to the pizza place, goes to the fish and chips place, goes to the hotel on the corner and it takes him the whole day almost, and he’s supposed to be taking Karen to a friend’s place for dinner but he doesn’t even ring her. He eats dinner with the kids at Nelly’s before he gets around to ringing Karen.

  She tells him it’s all off. She’s taken his ring off. She’ll post it to him. She’s packed his bags too and they are standing out in the rain ready for him to take home to his family, who he obviously loves more than he loves her.

  He’s breaking up. He’s the last of the past and sanity, and he’s going insane. He’s sitting at the window. ‘I love her, Nelly,’ he’s saying. ‘I love the way her family live and I want it. I want to go back there and never see this fucking street again.’ That’s what he says. He never uses that word. Maybe he learned it from Lori last night because he’s sure using it now. He’s parked his ute in the street, and he’s looking out from Nelly’s window, looking at the rain so the kids can’t see his eyes. ‘I love the kids too, Nelly, but there’s nothing more I can do for them. They’d be better off in a home.’

  Then Nelly sends the kids back to the kitchen so she and Martin can start plotting. Lori can hear them. Martin is going to call the social worker on Monday morning, first thing Monday morning.

  Lori opens the door, stares at them, until Martin looks at her eyes.

  ‘It will be better than that, Splinter.’ He points at the house over the road, wipes his eyes with his thumbs.

  Lori doesn’t say yes, doesn’t say no, just thinks of little Matty getting adopted by some stranger and carted of
f to England, thinks of Jamesy someplace where they’ll try to treat him like a little kid when he’s always been an old man since the day he was born, just an old man laughing at the world with his lopsided grin. She thinks of Mick, who will have no place to come home to, if they ever let him come home. How can getting split up be better? But doesn’t she want someone to look after her? Isn’t that what she wants? Doesn’t she want her head to stop feeling blown up and thinking mad thoughts?

  No. Not if it means getting put in a home.

  Then Mavis is out front looking around for Martin. She’s got the wood axe but she’s not thinking about chopping wood. And when she can’t find Martin to kill, she starts killing his ute’s headlights. She must have tried to call a taxi and got an earful instead. Martin is out the door running. He gets in the ute and backs away, his head outside in the rain, taunting Mavis, telling her to have a go. He’s keeping enough distance between her axe and his ute, though. She’s yelling and he’s yelling louder, taking that war out to the street, up the street, due to she’s following him, and maybe he wants her to follow him and drop dead or something.

  The house is empty.

  No time to think about it. Lori is out in the rain and across the road, she’s in Mavis’s room, looking for the chequebook. It’s the big, bad bogyman, it’s the monster that came into this house and finished things off. It’s in a black wallet thing; she knows what it looks like but she can’t find it. She’s looking in the wardrobe, feeling along the top of the wardrobe. It’s not there. She’s looking in all the sensible places, then she stops, stops thinking sensible, thinks Mavis. She looks under Mavis’s pillows and it’s there, and it’s got all sorts of stuff in it and even a little pen.

  She runs with it through the kitchen, grabs the telephone charger. Runs into the brick room and bolts the door, then she rips the cheques out of the book and flushes them one after the other down the loo.