by Joy Dettman
‘Alan can remember Henry from when he used to go down to visit you. I bet you can too.’ Eddy shakes his head, wants her to go away. She’s not going. ‘He used to sing a song about you and Alan, and Alan says he can remember him singing it in Melbourne.’
Eddy shakes his head, sniffs, a fuck-off sniff. His eyes are red and his nose is stuffy and he is feeling like a howling fool. She knows this but she won’t go.
‘You were like his hidden treasures, you know. I always thought of you as Henry’s twins, not Mavis’s. Nearly every night when he was watering his flowers he’d sing this song. I can’t sing it, but it was something like, “My precious sons, my boys, you are the best of me. My precious sons, my joy, you’ll live the rest for me”.’ She talks the words, surprised she remembers them, and she knows that she keeps turning the son and boy into plural, but she wants Eddy to think that that song was about him and Alan – whether it was or not. He sniffs, lifts his head, looks at the sky but won’t look at her. She keeps on talking, just like Nelly kept talking that night she found Lori sitting almost in this exact same place. ‘He must have sung that song to you when he went down for visits – if Alan can remember it.’
‘I didn’t know Henry! Leave me alone, will you?’
‘I remember heaps of stuff from when I was five. I remember stuff from when I was three.’
‘Cool for you! Now fuck off.’
‘I bet you remember him. Anyway, you saw him that day you came here for dinner.’
He turns to her then and his face is hurting, like Henry’s face used to hurt, and his mouth is trembling; he’s going to start bawling again in a minute. ‘That day we came here he looked like a grandfather and he belonged to you kids, not us. And no one told us he was our father, anyway. Eva just told us we were going to visit Aunty Mave and her children. I didn’t know who Henry was that day and I can’t remember him singing. All I remember of my father is . . . is maybe a shadow of him coming into the bedroom at Eva’s then going out, so fuck off, will you, and leave me alone.’
She shrugs, doesn’t move. ‘Henry, the little shadow, coming and going? That’s all he was, really – to all of us. A stooped little shadow, coming and going and never stopping long enough for anyone to touch it. He was always doing things. Every time we saw him he was cooking, cleaning, cutting hair. The only time you could get near him was when he was cutting your hair. He had to touch you, move your head. I used to keep putting my chin down, just so he’d have to keep lifting it up. And I used to make him cut my hair about every three weeks, so I could be close to him. And in the potting shed, sometimes I could creep right up close when he sang, sort of breathe his used-up air.
‘My precious sons, my boys, no more I fear the pain, though summer’s gone for me, I know you’ll warm the rain . . . ’ She’s singing the words now, just singing soft. She can hold a tune, though her voice is thin compared to Henry’s, but in her head it’s like his powerful voice is singing along with her, leading her on, telling her the words she doesn’t think she knows until she gets to them, and then they’re there, waiting and ready.
‘Fear the pain?’ Eddy is actually looking at her.
‘Yeah. It was about a man who was dying. He used to sing a lot of songs about dying. He probably always had a death wish.’
He looks at the sky for a long time, sniffs. ‘I remember someone singing a song about fearing the pain and winter rain. I always had an earache and tonsillitis in the winter and I thought it was about summer being over and the pain starting up again.’
‘I told you so, you smartarse. Henry was probably the only person in the whole world who ever sang that song.’ She slaps at a nonexistent fly on Eddy’s back, like she used to swat nonexistent mozzies on Henry, and she does it so the smartarse bit won’t hurt; leaves her hand on his back too, rubs it a bit, just for a second. ‘None of us wanted you to go back with Eva. We couldn’t cope here without you. Two days and we’d be back to living in a pigpen.’
He’s not ready yet to talk. He’s feeling embarrassed about his tears, and it hurt him to hurt Eva. Maybe life force can trickle over into an aunt – not that Lori has ever felt the trickle, and Eva is always so doused in perfume, there’s not a chance of homing in on any family scent. For a long time they sit quiet, watching the others muck around and yahoo through the trees.
‘How about Neil, eh?’ Eddy says.
‘That wild little bugger! I think he must have been born wild, like Greg.’
‘I don’t know Greg, and I don’t know the other one either.’
‘Vinnie.’
‘I’m not part of this family and I’m not part of Eva and Alice. I’m no one. And I didn’t ask to be given away.’
‘You weren’t given away, it’s just that you nearly died up here. Mavis never gave you away – just let Henry rent you out for a while, like Eva rents her house. She knows she can get that house back whenever she wants it and Mavis was always planning how to get you back. She tried all the time – until she got too fat to do anything about anything. And Henry . . . I don’t know. Maybe he had too many kids. Maybe he just gave up.’
‘You mob were lucky, growing up with your own parents.’
‘You didn’t miss much, Eddy,’ she starts, then bites her tongue. ‘Of course you missed knowing Henry, but as far as knowing him and Mavis together, like proper parents, then you were lucky to miss some of that. I never ever saw him hold her or kiss her like husbands do on television. Not once. Alice kissed Eva and she held her when she cried and she petted her, said all the right things.’
‘Henry must have thought Mavis was okay. They had enough kids.’
‘Henry didn’t want the babies – or not the ones I can remember coming. Having babies was Mavis’s thing, just a part of her civil war. Every baby she had she got fatter. Or maybe her fat was a war against Henry.’ She shrugs. ‘Who knows why she had us? We could have been like her private revolution against the government . . . sort of a financial-based takeover. She always got money from the government – even before Henry died, not heaps, like now, but an allowance for each kid she had.’
They are quiet for a long time, thinking their own thoughts, then Eddy says, ‘I didn’t think much about fathers until we went to London. We rented a flat there and old Alice used to sleep in Mum’s bed. Mum said it was because there weren’t enough beds and we couldn’t find a big flat.’ He shrugs, looks at the sky. It’s changing colour. Night is coming. ‘I missed Alan like crazy, but he wasn’t missing me.’
‘He was so. He screamed for you for about two months.’
‘You’re cow-crapping. All he wanted when he came back to us was you lot.’
‘Cow-crap nothing! He screamed blue murder for you. “I want my Eddy. I want to go home”. It was pure awful. Don’t tell him I told you, but he used to wet the bed too, and he wouldn’t eat anything, and he spent his first winter here catching every bug invented.’ They are quiet then for a long time and Lori doesn’t like the quiet. ‘What’s England like, anyway?’ she says.
‘Wet.’ He smiles a bit, then shrugs. ‘I saw a lot of stuff.’
‘Like what? Castles and cathedrals and daffodils?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s all Henry used to tell me about England. And snow, and green fields and old villages and houses with thatched roofs.’
‘I saw that. And I saw Mum kissing Alice one day, sort of taking her shirt off kissing.’ He shakes his head. ‘And I heard stuff. She had a baby once. I heard her and Alice talking about it and thought for a while she was talking about having me and Alan. It wasn’t about us. It was another one.’
‘What did she do with it?’
‘Adopted it out, I suppose. That’s what they did in the old days.’
‘So somewhere out there we’ve got a cousin, floating around like Henry and never knowing his own people?’
‘I suppose so. That’s what screwed Mum up, I think. She was probably raped or something. She hated that baby’s father, went on and on about h
im hurting her. That’s . . . that’s when I got obsessed by fathers, started wondering about mine – wondering if she’d hated him too. I started watching kids with their fathers. Mum had always told me and Alan that our father lived in London, and I was in London, so I told her I wanted to see him. Nagged her about it. She wouldn’t produce him. Nothing made any sense over there. The stuff I heard . . . you don’t know much when you’re ten.’
‘I know. And no one will tell you the answers you need. Like, when I was about ten, I actually asked Henry what gay meant, and he said happy. I knew that wasn’t right so I asked Martin. He was about eighteen, and he said it stood for get rid of all yobbos, which was a government undercover conspiracy to control overpopulation of the lower classes, and that I shouldn’t go around asking anyone else what that word meant or the FBI would come looking for me.’ Eddy laughs, and it’s so good to hear him laugh, Lori laughs with him.
‘Gay women still want kids. That won’t stop overpopulation,’ he says.
‘Yeah, but they sure have a lot more trouble doing it. And just think of China for a minute. Like, for years married couples over there have only been allowed to have one baby and they all want sons so they abort the girls. There won’t be enough girls for those sons to marry, so they’ll have to go gay. No wife, no baby.’
‘They’ll clone themselves.’
‘They’ll still need a woman to incubate it.’
They’re mucking around now and their theories are becoming more absurd, until Lori yells out to Matty, ‘Stay away from the water, Matty. You do as you’re told, or next time we’ll leave you at home with Mavis.’
Matty is going on three, a redhead, but he’s a brownish red, closer to Mick’s colour. He needs a haircut, too; he’s starting to look like a girl with his mop of curls, but he looks cute. His blue-grey eyes wide above his dummy, he walks to her side, looks towards home. Mavis makes a good bogyman. She sure scared Eva away.
Lori brushes the curls from his eyes, lifts him onto her lap. ‘He’s going to be another Mick. He’s not as smart as Timmy was at the same age – ’ She stops short, didn’t mean to say that out loud, but she knows in her heart that Mick is better with his hands and his nuts and screws than with his books, even if he does wear them out with studying.
‘You’ve got a brain in your head. You could do a lot better at school if you studied a bit,’ Eddy says.
‘Who wants to? Anyway, I’m dumb, ask old Crank Tank. She hates me.’
‘She thinks you’re a big-mouthed smartarse.’
Lori is seeing something new in Eddy tonight. It’s like he’s ten years older, almost as old as her. It’s been a hard day, and on such days she ends up feeling about thirty. It’s been interesting, though, talking to him alone, learning more about him, but the talk is over because Mick crawls up the bank and flops down beside them.
Alan wanders up. ‘Burned your bridges now,’ he says. ‘I hope I didn’t sort of . . . make you do it . . . if you didn’t want to do it, that is.’
‘I’m a Sticksville convert, Sticksville.’
A speedboat races by. They watch it, read the name on the boat. Flighty. It’s sure flying. The brothers wave while Lori scratches her name in the clay with a twig. Lori Smyth-Owen.
It’s a borrowed name. Henry didn’t have his proper name to give her. Maybe he was Henry Woden, but Lori Woden sounds ridiculous – so does Lori Smyth-Owen. It’s plastic-coated tourist stuff, something to take home from your holiday and shove in a drawer. She scrubs out the hyphen and the Owen with her twig.
Lori Smyth. Martin calls himself Smyth. She likes it. It sounds more like her – no bullshit, and maybe not so dumb, just a big-mouthed smartarse. She liked what Eddy said, and she likes it that he likes her and the kids better than Eva’s money. She feels older somehow, and more proud tonight than she’s ever felt before. In part it’s because of what Eddy said, and also part of it is knowing she was able to care about him, sit with him and find the right words to start making him feel better.
‘I suppose we should get back and cook Mavis a nice dinner – for helping us out.’
‘Have to keep her metabolism running, the book says. Regular food.’
But they sit on, looking at the sun sinking down behind the trees, sinking down in the west. Henry’s west.
‘What got into her today? Why didn’t she yell for help?’
‘She hates Eva more than she hates us, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘She’ll love us when we get her down to a normal size,’ Eddy says. ‘I wonder if she’ll look a bit like that photo when she’s thin?’
‘Come off the grass! She’s nearly forty, and what’s going to happen to all her spare skin? She’ll deflate like a balloon, go all wrinkly,’ Jamesy says, offering another fish. A big one.
Spring is here and the fishermen are at it again. More carp for dinner. It’s good for Mavis. Fish is low in fat and high in protein and fish fat never turns into people fat. That’s what they said on television the other night – if you can believe anything on television.
‘We’ve got enough fish. Alan’s already got three,’ Eddy says.
‘So now we’ve got four. We’ll fillet it before we put it in the freezer so we can fry it in breadcrumb batter like we did that last one. There was nothing wrong with it.’
‘Skin is like elastic,’ Mick says, looking at the fish. ‘It stretches and shrinks to fit. And it’s a living thing. Cells keep changing.’
‘So, you reckon that maybe Mavis’s new cells will get the message as they keep replacing themselves, and she’ll sort of start pulling into shape?’ Alan says.
‘She needs exercise. It says in the book that she should increase her exercise gradually.’
‘How do you make her get exercise?’
‘Give her some dumbbells to throw at us,’ Jamesy says, throwing the fish head at Eddy. Eddy takes the mark and the fish head is tossed back hard.
They sit a while and talk about the diet book that says walking is the best exercise.
‘We could get her one of those treadmills we saw in that junk mail,’ Mick says.
‘Too big to throw.’ Jamesy tosses the fish’s tail at Eddy, follows it with the head.
‘Not for her! And quit pitching that. I stink of fish. I’m sick of fish. I want roast lamb and mint sauce.’
‘And caviar. And a computer.’
‘A decent treadmill would cost a fortune,’ Eddy says.
‘It doesn’t have to be a decent one.’
‘She’d break the back of a cheap one. You’d be better off buying a computer for me.’
‘We’ve got to pay the electricity bill this week.’
‘And get the sawmill to deliver a couple of truckloads of mill-ends so they’ve got all summer to dry out.’
‘I wonder if Eva would pack up my computer and send it up on the bus.’
‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Alan says.
‘Alice has got her laptop and Eva can’t use a computer. Anyway, if they are going to rent the house then they’ll have to put the furniture in storage, so what’s the difference in storing the computer up here?’
‘You’ve still got a nerve asking her.’
They stand then, and together brush the dust and sand from the seats of their pants while Neil paddles in the last of the speedboat’s waves and the tourists’ lights start glowing from across the river.
‘Shush, everyone,’ Lori says. ‘Stay low for a minute.’ She gathers a handful of clods, then scrambles down the steep clay bank to hide amid the exposed roots of a giant gum while the speedboat docks and two men get out. A third is backing a 4WD down to the water.
The light is almost gone. They won’t see her. Her hands cupping her mouth, she lets rip a bloodcurdling yodel and follows it with a hail of clods.
And the two guys stop connecting Flighty to the boat trailer. They turn to the river and, God, Lori wishes she could hear what they’re saying. She can’t. The river is too wide here, but they sure are
looking for her, so she lets loose another yowie challenge.
It’s been a long time since she’s done that, but she hasn’t forgotten how. Martin taught her that call. He used to do it all the time when he was about fourteen, and some tourist wrote to the newspaper once, saying he’d heard a strange animal, and had actually seen it, racing through the trees.
Mick remembers. ‘Come on, you stirrer,’ he says. ‘We have to feed Mavis.’
Just one more, one super special one, because those men are still looking across the river, and the third man is out of his 4WD and he’s got binoculars. She’s crouching low in her yowie nest, collecting clods, and she’s giggling. Maybe this is the last time she’ll play the yowie. You can’t do this sort of thing when you’re grown up, and tonight she’s got this powerful grown-up feeling growing in her heart. Maybe it’s just relief, but it’s sort of like the weight of the world has suddenly lifted itself off her shoulders. Maybe she’s just happy.
And the cry goes out across the river, long and threatening. That one will make the newspaper for sure.
Mick is straddling his five-dollar bike with the training wheels, bought at the market the day of the lounge suite. He’s added some pipe to the seat and to the handlebars so he can sit in comfort; he put two motor mower wheels on where the trainer wheels used to be, and a prop on the front wheel for his bad leg. He made it a fixed-wheel, only one pedal due to he only uses one foot, though half the time he just scoots it along using his good foot and wearing out his boot. It used to take ages for him to walk home from the bend but now he leads the way. If he doesn’t make it to university, he’ll probably become a famous inventor.
