Henry’s Daughter

by Joy Dettman

  They feed Mavis more eggs, but in an omelette this time, and with two slices of toast, then she gets tinned pineapple and a dot of low-fat ice-cream.

  ‘That ice-cream is sort of thanks for getting rid of Eva and Alice for us,’ Lori says.

  ‘I hate their guts,’ Mavis replies. ‘And yours too, you little bitch. And if you call that ice-cream, then I don’t. Give me a decent dollop I can at least taste, and open that bloody door.’

  ‘Not till you stop hating everyone’s guts – and hating your own.’ Lori says.

  Halfwit Hulk

  They are down to their last eight Valium tablets and their last Aropax repeat. They are out of fluid pills, have been for three weeks. Mavis doesn’t seem to be missing them, so they take her off Valium too. The weight is falling off her and she must know it. She’s wearing her new bird material tent and it looks almost like a dress, even if the birds are upside down at the front, and the sleeves are too long and the skirt dips down to the floor at the sides. Maybe she’ll be okay without her Valium now. She’ll have to be okay because they need those last few for emergencies.

  She’s not okay. She starts doing her block, and it keeps getting worse. She’s yelling for her cigarettes, yelling out for Bert Matthews to open the door. They get Henry’s old transistor radio, hook it on the fence between Mavis and Bert – he might be half deaf but his wife isn’t. The radio runs out of power before Mavis. Alan heads off to get new batteries while they crush two of Donny’s executive pills and mix them with jam. It tastes rotten. They live with her yelling for two days and it’s not getting any better, so it’s back to Valium coffee, two a day, and two will only go into eight four times.

  It never rains but it pours. They get a letter from Mr Watts saying that Eddy’s computer will be arriving by rail, but when they go to collect it they find it’s all packed up in a huge box with fragile and this way up written all over it. It’s too big to go in the pram so they have to ring Martin to pick it up. He turns up the next night, the computer box in the rear of the ute, which has been painted and has got new bucket seats.

  And stuck-up Karen is sitting in one of them!

  She’s blonde and little and she’s got one of those pug noses that give you a view halfway up her nostrils. She wrinkles it at Martin when she sees the house, and sneers down it at the mess of kids swarming around Martin’s ute that almost looks brand new – which he’s parked out on the street instead of in the drive.

  ‘Nice to finally meet all of my new brother-in-laws,’ she says – and she’s not so smart. ‘I hope you don’t expect me to remember all of your names.’

  Stuck-up bitch. ‘Ya only got one sister-in-law, luv. If ya try really, really hard, ya might be able ta remember her name,’ Lori says, putting on a good dose of Bert Matthews’s yobbo drawl. Which probably isn’t a very nice thing to do, or to say, but Lori feels like being mean tonight. The Valium packet is empty.

  They get the box out of the ute and carry it to the verandah, then Lori walks inside. Martin starts coming after her. She turns fast, can’t get out, he’s blocking the door.

  ‘You’re getting to be a sarcastic, smart-mouthed little bugger, Splint, and it doesn’t suit you,’ he says.

  ‘Well, stiff bickies.’

  ‘She’s my wife – ’

  ‘Yeah, well, now I know why I wasn’t good enough to go to her wedding, don’t I? She looked at us as if we were a mob of dead-beat yobbos with AIDS. And I saw the way she looked at you when she saw the house. And you wouldn’t even be here in this street if we hadn’t begged you to pick up Eddy’s computer. You’re ashamed of us too, now that you’ve got Miss Piggy.’

  ‘If I didn’t care about you, you snitchy, mean-mouthed little bitch, then Mavis would be out and running amok, and you kids would be split up. I’m caring about you by staying away, by keeping my mouth shut about what you’ve done in there – and you know it, too.’

  ‘I don’t know it. And she is running amok. We’re out of bloody Valium.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you ring me?’

  ‘What are you going to do about it? Take her out to the farm and give us a break for a week or two?’

  ‘I can ring the bloody doctor. Get a new prescription, you smart-mouthed little bitch.’

  ‘And he’ll come around and give her a check-up. Cool.’

  ‘Would you want to come around if you were him?’ Lori shrugs, hears Eddy ripping open that box on the verandah. She’s just dying to get a look at the computer. ‘You’d better get control of that tongue, Splint, before it starts controlling you. Don’t turn into her. One of her is more than enough.’

  The doctor is willing to prescribe, sight unseen. He writes the prescriptions for Valium and Aropax and fluid pills, plus repeats, so it’s back to apricot jam and Aropax, three Valium coffees a day and a fluid pill twice a week. They’ll never be able to let her out of that room. They’ll be stuck here feeding her Valium till they’re sixty-five.

  But life gets back to near normal, except for Eddy. He’s in another time zone. No one can talk to him for days, and no one can eat at the kitchen table either. They’ve got to buy a computer desk and Eddy wants a good one, a new one. He’s been saving for a computer so he goes out and spends the lot on a desk so posh they allow it to live in the lounge room. And woe betides any kid not in high school who goes within a metre of it without supervision.

  If Eddy is in computer heaven, so are the high school teachers. All the Smyth-Owen homework is now printed out on a laser printer. ‘Presentation excellent’, one teacher writes on Mick’s essay, and he gets a B+.

  Time is creeping up towards October when they lay-by a cheap treadmill and a heap of other Christmas presents at Kmart. The lady in the lay-by office looks at them as if they are kids, because their stuff is costing a pile of money. Lori flashes Mavis’s supermarket note for cigarettes, which says she’s housebound, and they’ve got a hundred dollars in cash for the deposit, so after a bit it turns out okay.

  Lori is cooking two chickens, bought on special at the supermarket. They were near their use-by date, but didn’t look or smell off. She made onion and mixed herb sandwiches, then poked them inside the chickens, as practice for Christmas, which is going to be a really good Christmas this year. She’s putting a great pile of frozen chips in the oven and the smell that comes out is so good she can hardly wait for the chips to get hot because it smells just like Henry’s roast chicken.

  Alan is sitting at the table, reading, Eddy is down the town, trying to find out how much it would cost to get the phone reconnected so he can get up on the Internet, Mick is on the computer finishing off an assignment which has to be in tomorrow and he wants another B+, when Vinnie walks in the front door. He’s either drunk or stoned out of his brain because he doesn’t even notice their lounge room!

  Lori runs in from the kitchen, leaving her chickens sizzling.

  ‘Greg’s done a bunk with the cops on his heels,’ Vinnie giggles. ‘He’s into heroin for real now and he’s been nicking stuff from houses. Got caught trying to flog a DVD player so he had to piss off to some place.’

  He’s unpacking his stuff on the couch. He’s got the DVD player – or another one. He’s got two classy cameras, a man’s gold watch and two lady’s watches all tangled up with one T-shirt, three stiff and stinking socks, the remote control for the DVD and half a six-pack of beer. And he’s not even old enough to buy it.

  The kids stand and stare at him. He was always a bit rotten, but never totally rotten. He sure looks rotten now. He’s only a year older than Mick – like, sixteen – but he’s huge and he’s probably still wearing the jeans he left home in, probably hasn’t washed them since he left home, either. They don’t reach his socks, and the bum is worn through and flashing flesh – he’s too much flesh to contain. And he’s had his head shaved. And he’s rolling a smoke and it’s not tobacco, which isn’t going to help a brain that needed all the help it could ever get.

  And he’s in the house for two bloody minutes
and already Lori can smell his stinking feet. Nothing she can do about him or his feet. He’s too much. Too big. His head is damn near level with the top of the doorframe. She might think she’s grown up but she knows her limitations so she leaves the boys to it, heads for the kitchen and the jar of Vicks, smears two worthy dabs up her nose then returns to the passage, leans near the lounge-room door, breathing that old familiar air and not liking it.

  She puts his beer in the fridge when he tells her, too, doesn’t nag him about the stolen junk he’s tossed onto their couch; it’s a no-no leaving junk on the couch. She’s silent, listening to news of Greg and cops and court, listening to tales of smashed-up cars, until she smells hot chips, and Mick, wanting to get on with his assignment, turns back to his keyboard.

  ‘Greg nicked one of those briefcase ones from a car. It had games on it,’ Vinnie says, leaning over Mick, poking at keys. And five pages of Mick’s assignment, which took him five hours to type in, is lost in cyberspace.

  Mick is computer illiterate; he doesn’t have a clue, just panics, yells for Lori because Eddy isn’t around. The computer has cried ‘barley’ and the screen is flashing blue with black stripes. Lori turns it off at the power point.

  ‘He said not to do that, Lori!’

  ‘It’s all we can do. It will keep it in there somewhere, Mick,’ she says. ‘Did you name it?’

  ‘I was just going to save it when he did something that disappeared it.’

  ‘You were supposed to give it a name.’

  ‘It wasn’t finished!’

  Then Eddy comes home, sees the hulk before he sees his computer, hears Mick’s lament. ‘She’s cool,’ he says. He glances at the culprit, doesn’t say, ‘Who are you? How are you? Your feet stink,’ though he probably recognises him as another family member by that stink. ‘We’ve got rules in this place. What you don’t understand, you don’t touch, moron.’

  Eddy doesn’t know it, but Vinnie has already had too much of that ‘moron’ thrown at him. He shoves Eddy towards the fireplace and, not expecting things to get physical, Eddy’s feet sort of tangle as they connect with the hearth. He falls forward, slams face first into the antique mantelpiece which he loves so much. And he’s down.

  Lori backs off, backs out of the lounge room. Big country dropping bombs again, wiping the little country out, and just when it was starting to get up on its feet.

  She stands at the door, again planning murder by Valium, watching Eddy get up slow. She’s seen him playing the clown, seen him all closed up and hurting when Eva was here, but she’s never seen him knocked down before. There is something new playing behind those blue eyes. They are cold, like chill-out freezer cold, so cold they’re almost glowing hot. Vinnie might be half a metre taller and half a ton heavier, but he could have bitten off more than he can chew by touching that precious computer. Eddy is wiping at his eyebrow, at his bloody nose, but his eyes above his bloody nose are saying, Vinnie, you’re a goner.

  Maybe Vinnie sees it. He sniggers and backs off. Eddy sits down, sits quiet, dripping blood onto his keyboard, Mick looking over his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it now,’ Mick’s saying, ‘someone grab him some toilet paper,’ he’s saying, but he’s looking at his notes, leafing through his notes, sweating, praying, wanting Eddy to worry, to drip blood onto the keyboard, sweat blood out of that keyboard, only find that missing file.

  Vinnie looks bigger in the narrow passage than he did in the lounge room. He sort of swaggers into the kitchen, Lori behind him, certain he’s going to grab a chicken, hot from the oven. He sniffs at the chicken and chips smell, looks at the blue walls, the ceiling, then goes to the fridge while Lori closes the back door, stands with her back against it. Alan’s book is on the table, but he’s taken off some place.

  ‘That’s it, you’ve got it,’ Mick yells from the lounge room.

  ‘Of course I got it, and it’s now called Halfwit Hulk.’ Eddy yells those words, then he’s up and out the front door. Mick walks through the kitchen and out the back door. He doesn’t even look at Vinnie.

  Lori starts hacking up the chickens, digging out stuffing that smells like Henry’s chicken stuffing but looks like oily herb and onion sandwiches. She hears noise from out the back which she recognises as Mick’s drill. He knows it’s time to eat. They all know, and they’re usually inside helping out when it’s time to eat, not fixing stuff.

  Vinnie is sitting watching her dish food out onto assorted plates. He’s drinking beer and smoking his stuff and she can’t take the plastic lace tablecloth off to set the table. He’s all over it and dropping his ash all over it and the floor. She always takes her cloth off when they eat, but she gives up trying today. It’s going to be ruined. Everything is going to be ruined. She cuts a few slices of breast meat for Mavis, removes the skin, counts out ten chips for her, fills the plate with broccoli, carrots and beans, all boiled up together in one saucepan. She adds a squeeze of lemon juice and a spoonful of cottage cheese, then shares the remaining chips between the rest of the plates while Vinnie helps himself to a chip or ten.

  The little kids can smell chips from a kilometre away. They are in and sitting, waiting, but the big ones, from Jamesy up, are still sawing and drilling.

  Lori is passing out the plates when she gets the giggles, because she knows what they are doing. She bets she knows, and when they finally come in and shut that door, she’s dead certain she knows; they are giggling too, but on the inside.

  No one has fed Mavis. Vinnie hasn’t even asked about her but he’s going to be asking soon. She’s smelling the food, yelling for her food. God, don’t let her give the game away. Not yet.

  Vinnie sinks what’s on his plate then pinches two chips from Neil, pinches chicken from Timmy, tries to get Jamesy’s drumstick but misses out, and he doesn’t like missing out, so he grabs a handful of Matty’s chips on his way to the fridge for more beer.

  Mick goes to his room, turns his light on, nods to Eddy, who picks up Mavis’s plate, then they both disappear out back, close the door behind them.

  ‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ Mavis yells. It’s muffled but Vinnie hears her, flinches. Maybe he’s not so big, after all.

  ‘Where is she?’ he says.

  ‘Doing the washing,’ Lori replies, quick as a wink.

  There is the sound of metal being nailed now and more muffled yelling from Mavis. Alan gets up, Jamesy follows him out. They close the back door.

  Vinnie is watching that door, staring at it, sort of expecting Mavis to come through; he’s still drinking his beer, though, and the little ones are watching him drink, watching him roll a smoke.

  ‘Go outside and play,’ Lori says. They don’t move, just stare at Vinnie as if he’s flown in from Mars. His eyes are glassy and he’s rubbing at his bald head. Lori wipes her tablecloth. She’ll have to take it outside, spray it with Mr Muscle then hose it clean. Or buy another one.

  Then Henry’s radio starts playing on the fence and Mick and Eddy come back to the kitchen. This time they leave the door open.

  It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen soon the way Vinnie is putting away the beer. It’s going to happen and they can’t wait for it to happen. Mick’s eyes are smiling but he’s whistling softly, stopping his mouth from smiling. Eddy is just leaning on the sink, wiping at the taps with the dishrag.

  Vinnie gets up, flicks Eddy’s ear, calls him moron, calls him Sadie, the Cleaning Lady. Eddy doesn’t say a word, just keeps wiping at the taps until Vinnie swaggers by him and out to the brick room. Alan and Jamesy are leaning, one on either side of that bolted door. They watch Vinnie pull the bolt, step inside to use the loo, then Alan pushes him in the small of the back, Jamesy slams the door, and Alan rams the bolt home.

  ‘How about that, you great, ugly, bald-headed, computer-crashing moron mongrel?’ Eddy yells. And he’s sure getting to sound more like Willama.

  ‘How about that, shit-for-brains?’ Jamesy adds.

  ‘You’re dead. You’re stone dead. You just d
on’t know it yet. Shit!’ Vinnie screams. He’s found Mavis and she’s not doing the washing, but Mick’s drill is drilling again. He’s got three lengths of four-by-two front fence railing which he’s already cut to length and drilled. Now he’s screwing them to the doorframe, and no one is forcing him to screw them either. He’s screwing them fast, using long screws, strong screws, barricading that door which Vinnie is throwing himself at.

  He’s not going to get through, but it’s probably better for the little ones if they don’t hear what is going on behind that door, so they leave the dishes in the sink and go over the railway line to town, eat ice-cream at McDonald’s.

  Black Slime

  The kids come home late – but not late enough. Mavis is vomiting, and moaning. They hear Vinnie. ‘I told you. I warned you, you mad bitch.’

  ‘You’ve killed me, you bastard.’

  ‘Shiii-eeet,’ Eddy says. ‘He’s bigger than I thought he was.’

  ‘You took it. I didn’t make you smoke it.’

  ‘She’s got into his stuff,’ Lori says. She tosses the little ones in the bath, closes all the doors because Mavis is punctuating her bouts of vomiting now with calls on God to save her. It’s sort of funny – from the other side of the door – sort of non-Mavis.

  ‘How long will it last? How long?’ Mavis is begging Vinnie to say five minutes, but he doesn’t; he never could tell a lie.

  ‘I dunno, I told you. A few hours, that’s all. And don’t you thump me again, or I’ll thump you back. I didn’t make you do it. You lay off of me, you mad bitch.’

  There’s more vomiting, and more calling out for God’s help. They have to get the little kids out of hearing range because the bathroom isn’t out of hearing range.

  ‘Get into bed. All of you. Quick.’

  ‘Vinnie was bad, so he got put in with Mavis,’ Neil says, his eyes staring at that door.

  ‘That’s what happens, see. I told you. Now you get into bed with the little ones and tell them a story, then go to sleep. All of you.’