Henry’s Daughter

by Joy Dettman

  These kids? Alice? No contest.

  And Eva?

  He’s on his feet now and holding the back door wide, looking out at freedom, but he can’t go over the fence, leave the decision for another day. There might not be another day. Won’t be for Lori and Mick if Eva opens that green door. He’s looking at that in-your-face door. Mavis is going to yell out any minute now, then Eva will let her out.

  Or will she? Maybe not. Probably not. But even if she doesn’t open the door, she’ll call the cops on her mobile and they’ll open it. Kids can’t lock their mothers up and feed them on rabbit food, even if it is for their own good. Okay, so he did it, but he wasn’t so involved with this place back then. It was just a game, like, can I beat the odds? A longer game – a more interesting game.

  It’s not a game now. It has become his glorious quest and he has to shut that back door. Eva isn’t dumb, and old Alice is whippet smart. But if he shuts the door he’s locked in with both of them and he’ll cave in and go. He always did around these two. It was easier. Just give them what they wanted and he got what he wanted. Got anything he wanted.

  But does he want to go back to being who he was before? Empty. Lonely.

  No. No, he doesn’t want that. Okay, that’s one definite.

  There is a lot of stuff he wants in St Kilda. Plenty that he doesn’t want. Here he’s accepted – needed, even – and he wants to get this house painted on the outside – paint it white, paint its roof red – wants to do a lot of stuff. But more than that, he wants this mob. They are the only ones who ever filled up that empty, lonely place inside him. They need him too. They like him – most of the time. And they like him for who he is, not for who he’s pretending to be.

  But what about his computer?

  He can use the ones at the library when he’s desperate, and he’s been looking at second-hand computers; they get some real cheap deals at the computer shop, and the guy who runs it says he’ll have some good ones in a month, the whole works for four and a half hundred – which would be better than nothing.

  Still, if he doesn’t go back, Alice will probably make sure that account at the bank is closed. She’s the boss and she uses money like a weapon.

  He really wants his computer. He had so much stuff on it.

  But does he want it enough to go back to being chained up like a stray pup and retrained into rolling over, playing dead on cue, and never even getting a pat on the head for doing it? Eva might be big on words and external stuff, but that’s pretty much all she is big on. Alan used to say she was plastic coated, strong plastic coated, so you break your fingernails trying to get at what is inside. Up here no one can afford plastic. Up here their skin is exposed. You can touch them, cuddle the little kids, tickle them and make them laugh.

  And Mavis. What is actually inside her skin? There is so much of it no one could ever get in. Not now. But he’s going to get her skinny. Yeah, and beautiful again. That’s his glorious quest. He didn’t know Henry, can’t ever know Henry now, but he can get to know his natural mother – when she’s thin and beautiful. He wants that, needs that more than needing his computer. It would be like his coming home had made her beautiful again, like he was something special for once.

  Old Alice is still nagging. He’s not listening, but God, he loathes that nagging mouth. It’s all teeth. He can’t stand to look at it, but he’s looking now, watching those teeth. His stomach is turning over, and his brain is like lightning flitting from one side of the argument to the other while the fried sandwich he’s eaten is trying to come up and choke him. He keeps swallowing it back down, looking at Alice’s stained carnivore teeth, working up some aversion therapy as he closes the back door. Slowly.

  Lori is standing, hands on her hips, wondering what took him so long. The little kids have stopped eating. Matty fishes for his dummy string, places his sucking tool in his mouth, stares big eyed at Alice’s teeth.

  ‘If he wants to stay with us, he can,’ Lori says, and Mick nods, eggs her on. ‘He’s our brother, and we didn’t know him till February. And he doesn’t legally belong to you anyway. He legally belongs to Mavis and to us.’

  ‘Go out to that car, boy. Your mother has been upset long enough by this business.’ Eddy turns to his mother. ‘After all your mother has done for you. If not for your mother’s care you would have died. You wouldn’t be here now to defy her.’

  ‘Mavis is his mother,’ Lori says, and she wonders what’s come over Mavis, like why isn’t she yelling, belting the door down now? And Eddy, he’s dumb. Those buggers have got out their old lobotomy scalpel and they are cutting him again.

  ‘I have been a mother to you, darling. The best mother that I knew how to be.’

  Maybe she was too. Maybe she just didn’t know how.

  ‘You’re breaking your mother’s heart, boy.’

  They are throwing that ‘mother’ word around as if it’s expendable. They are throwing it so hard it starts to sound like it’s something else. It’s sounding like a word no one knows the meaning of.

  Mother?

  Sister and brother. That sounds real. That sounds good.

  Eddy is staring at Lori, he’s shaking his head, and she’s worried. She steps closer because he looks as if he’s going to start bawling . . . or . . . maybe just head for the shower for an hour. His back is to the closed door. His eyes are sort of pleading – help me, someone, convince me – so she tries.

  ‘Why can’t we all be one family? Why can’t you just come here and sit down and visit like other aunties do? Why do we have to be like . . . enemies?’

  ‘Hold your tongue, miss,’ Alice snaps, but Eva accepts the invitation and she sits, puts her head down on the plastic tablecloth and turns on plastic tears.

  ‘No one understands what she did to me. No one will ever understand what I went through for her. She stole my childhood,’ Eva sobs.

  Eddy walks towards Eva, and Alice sees that those tears are winning the day. She grasps his arm.

  And he’s going. He’s looking at Eva, looking like he always does before he has one of his showers. He’s looking at Lori, sort of hopeless now, sad and shaking his head, like, what else can I do?

  Until Neil runs at Alice and kicks her ankle. ‘You leave our brother alone, you bully duck,’ he yells.

  That sure breaks the spell, and breaks Alice’s concentration. She hasn’t heard that one before, and she’s never been attacked by a face-pulling six year old before either. She releases Eddy’s arm.

  He’s stepping back, and back, his eyes that never leak are leaking bad. Neil isn’t retreating. He’s standing in front of Alice, his legs spread wide, his face belligerent, and he’s never looked more like Mavis.

  Eddy wipes his nose with his wrist, then with the same hand points to the enlarged photograph of a young Henry, which now hangs on the kitchen wall. ‘That’s my father,’ he says, his voice breaking, and near breaking Lori’s heart. ‘That’s my own father and he’s dead. Alan knew him, and all these kids knew him, and I didn’t. And I can’t ever know my own father because of you, Mum.’

  ‘You know it is what he wanted, darling. He planned so much more for you than . . . than this.’

  ‘Well, it’s not what I wanted!’ he yells. ‘Did anyone ever ask me if I wanted to know my own father?’ Eva is dabbing at her eyes, but Eddy is crying for real now. ‘You lied to me. All my life you lied to me, and all the time my own father was only a few hundred kilometres away and I could have known him like Alan did. And now he’s dead and it’s not bloody fair.’ He’s bawling hard, and it looks weird on him. Lori didn’t know he could bawl.

  ‘Watch your tongue, boy,’ Alice snaps. It’s the wrong attitude because it makes Eddy upgrade his language.

  ‘This is none of your fucking business. You’re nothing to me, you’re a nagging old bitch. I hate the sight of you, and I always did.’ He’s breaking the no-swearing rule, but that’s okay, and he’s almost as loud as Mavis, his nose is red and he’s sloshing tears everywhere, and th
at’s okay too, because those tears are fighting tears.

  ‘Yeah. And if you tell lies, then you get put in the lock-up with Mavis, and you have to eat fucky celery,’ Neil yells.

  Eddy’s head damn near rotates a full circle and his tear taps turn off fast. He wipes his nose with his wrist, grabs hold of Neil, muffling his blabbing little mouth before it says more. Lori is heading for the back door.

  ‘You know that Henry placed both of you in my care,’ Eva says. ‘You know he had plans for his darling boys.’

  Lori is beside Eddy and Neil, ready to stifle the little twit, throttle him if necessary. ‘Yes, well our mother never wanted either of them to be with you, did she? She said she wouldn’t trust you to raise rabid Rottweilers. And our father is dead now, so Mavis is the boss of this house and she wants the twins to stay here. She’s even got the papers to put them back on her dependants list,’ Lori says. ‘And if you cause any more trouble, she’s going to take out a restraining order, because that’s what the department of . . . of welfare for children and supporting mothers said to do. And they said that they’d give her any help she needs to do it too.’

  Eva is on her feet. She doesn’t like the sound of that.

  ‘You’ll be sorry, boy. There will be no more money paid into that account,’ Alice says.

  Eddy, still holding on tight to Neil, lifts his chin. ‘I’m not your boy, and this isn’t about fucking money, and you keep out of this – ’

  ‘Yeah, ’cause we got plenty of fucky money,’ Neil yells. ‘We got a jar full of fucky money, so there.’

  Eddy is shaking, but he’s holding Neil against him like a vice. Lori doesn’t know if he’s trying to shut him up or just trying to soak some fight from the feisty little coot. Mick is standing silent, scared. Jamesy and Timmy are sitting at the table, sharing Alan’s sandwich because it doesn’t look as if he’s coming back to get it.

  ‘One day Mavis may be sorry for the harm she has done to those who loved her.’

  ‘Loved her? You lying bitch.’ They hear that bawl from the brick room and from Mick’s room up the hall. Alice steps back. Eva steps forward. They look from door to door. ‘Get out of my house or I’ll come in there and throw you out, or call the cops to do it for me, you apology for a bloody mother, you lying, child-abusing, queer bitch.’

  They hear the toilet flush. Alice walks fast to the passage door. There is thumping coming from the room beside the kitchen. An ogre stomping in high heels. The kids know what it is. It’s Mavis belting into Mick’s timber wall with the loo brush.

  ‘Get out to that car, Edward,’ Alice’s teeth snarl.

  ‘Get yourself a chihuahua. It will stay small enough to kick around,’ Eddy says.

  Alice leaves, via the front door. Eva stands on, watching the back door. The noise is coming from behind the back door, but when she moves to follow Alice, the footsteps seem to be heading for the passage.

  ‘How can you tolerate . . . this, my darling boy? How can you tolerate her? After what you have been accustomed to.’

  ‘How can you stand kissing those teeth?’ Eddy says. He’s getting mean now, and he’s looking mean, and Eva doesn’t like it. She flinches and her high-heeled sandals trip-trip-trip down the passage.

  ‘I’m taking out a restraining order against you tomorrow,’ Mavis screeches, and it’s too clear. Maybe she’s broken through Mick’s wall.

  The kidnappers move out to the verandah. They don’t know which floorboards to watch out for and Eva goes through one. And she’s down, sprawled flat, one leg knee-deep in the verandah. Even the old house is fighting for Eddy. Maybe it heard him thinking about white paint.

  Lori isn’t far behind them. She closes the front door, except for a crack. You can see a lot through a crack in a door, hear a lot. She’s listening as Alice lifts Eva’s leg out. Her pantihose is ripped to shreds, her shin bleeding and she’s bawling for real now.

  ‘Look at the hovel. It should be condemned, and she’s in there laughing at me. She’s not going to beat me, Alice. Let her take out her restraining order. Let her take it to the courts. No court in the land would fail to see that those boys would be better off with me.’

  ‘It’s immaterial to me, lass. If that’s what you want to do, then we’ll do it together, but she knows too much. The media will tear you to shreds.’ Eva is sitting on the edge of the verandah, already torn to shreds. Alice is lifting her skirt, tying a man’s handkerchief around her shredded shin.

  ‘Hop in the car, lass.’

  ‘That stinking, filthy hovel. Do I need stitches?’

  ‘It’s just a scratch. Hop in the car, lass.’

  ‘I want them. I am their mother.’ She’s a bawling banshee! Alice sits beside her, puts her arms around her, hold her while she bawls.

  Henry never put his arms around Mavis, comforted her when she bawled. Henry never touched anyone, except when he cut their hair. He never really said nice things – never said much at all, when you come to think of it, and when he did talk, like he did at Christmas, it wasn’t conversation, just sort of . . . sort of self-indulgent.

  Growing up is too hard. It makes you see things, understand things that you don’t really want to understand. Like those two women. They look like a loving couple sitting there.

  You get pictures in your head about things when you are a kid, Lori used to think all lesbians had short hair, muscles and were all about thirty. These women are old and they’ve been together since forever, so Mavis says. They were together when Mavis was a little kid, back in the seventies. Mavis used to say Eva only married Henry because her mother was starting to wake up to what was going on with Alice in the bungalow and Eva got scared Grandmother Hilda would leave all her money to a lost dogs home.

  These days it doesn’t matter much if you’re gay or straight, but those two are still playing it like it’s 1970. Maybe they started a lie and now they are trapped in it and Eva has to have those twins so she can keep that trap locked fast.

  Why didn’t Henry get those twins back? What was wrong with him? He of all people should have known that kids need to know their own families or they get lost. She thinks of Eddy, the way he was clinging to Neil, as if he was trying to soak up some of Neil’s life force to make himself strong. She thinks about wild little bugger Neil too, fighting hard for Eddy. That’s what a family is, it’s caring about each other and fighting for each other, being there for each other. And maybe holding people close when they cry, making them feel better.

  Eva is feeling a bit better. She’s looking at the house and wanting to kill the sister who ruined her childhood then stole her husband with her gaping legs.

  Mavis used to tell a different story – like, she told Martin one night that Henry had been too dumb to see what was going on with Eva and Alice until the night he came home from the club where he used to sing, due to it catching on fire, and he caught Eva and Alice together in the bungalow. Mavis found him trying to hang himself from a tree branch that wouldn’t hold his weight. It snapped and Henry snapped and that’s the night Martin got started. Mavis was seventeen and still at school. Henry was thirty-seven. She was probably one of those wild free-love kids. She used to talk a lot a few years back, talk about the city and parties and sleeping on the beach all night.

  Alice lights a cigarette. ‘We certainly have more freedom without them, Eva. There’s no denying that.’

  ‘What sort of mother would send her sons to England to live with relatives? What will people think of me?’

  ‘You worry too much about what people think, lass. We’re old enough to let them think what they like.’

  ‘We could . . . go to . . . England. We always intended to travel when you retired, didn’t we? Go to Paris, remember, darling?’

  ‘Live like the natives for a year, lass.’

  ‘When we were young. God, I must look a sight.’

  ‘Never to me, lass. Never to me.’

  ‘If she takes out a restraining order, the media will get on to it. Lord knows h
ow much she’ll tell them.’

  ‘She’ll make certain that we have the television hounds baying at the door.’

  ‘I couldn’t live with it. Not after all these years. I couldn’t, darling.’

  ‘It’s up to you, always up to you, but I’ll tell you now, I’m getting too damn old for this.’ She puffs smoke, blows it fast through her nostrils. ‘How’s that leg feeling now?’

  ‘Throbbing. We’ll have to go somewhere, buy a bandage and disinfectant. That filthy hovel! I should get a tetanus injection.’

  ‘Get the doctor to look at it when we’re home.’

  ‘You’re so good to me.’ Eva is wriggling out of her pantihose, trying not to lift her dress too high, then they are off, and she tosses them at the front door, gives the house one more murderous look and, leaning heavily on Alice, limps to the car. ‘We will go to Paris, darling. We will. We’ll rent the house, and by the time we get back, the boys will be more than ready to come home. You see if I’m wrong.’

  Mick comes to stand behind Lori as the car moves away. They watch it turn, watch it to the corner, watch it until Timmy comes to pull at Lori’s shirt.

  ‘Eddy’s wun off cwying,’ he says.

  Yowies and Songs

  They find Alan down at the river, three decapitated, de-tailed carp strung on a stick he’s propped between two tree branches. Eddy is down there too. No court jester now, he’s sitting on a high clay bank, his head on his knees, Alan standing off, watching his fish, watching Eddy and looking relieved, like, phew. So that’s over.

  He glances at Lori. ‘Phew,’ he says, then he wanders off and she takes his place leaning against the tree, looking at the fish. They are small. The small ones are best.

  She’s looking at Eddy too and he won’t lift his head. Maybe he’s sorry already that he’s stuck here with them. She doesn’t want him to be sorry so she walks to his side, thinks she’d like to say something nice to him, make him feel better. Cuddling and touching people were pretty much alien in Henry’s time, but she’s learned how to cuddle the little kids and make them feel better when they cry. She can’t cuddle Eddy, but she could probably find something nice to say, if she tried. She sits beside him on the clay, not too close, sits for a long time, tossing pebbles and small clods into the river and trying hard to think of something nice to say.