Henry’s Daughter

by Joy Dettman

  In the brick room the noise goes on for hours. Mavis is losing it – she’s lost it. She’s talking crazy stuff, screaming at Vinnie like he’s someone else, like she’s somewhere else.

  ‘We’ll have to get the doctor,’ Mick says. ‘I’m going over to Nelly’s.’

  ‘We can’t get the doctor. Wait.’

  It doesn’t get any better. Mavis is bawling and talking and Lori is finally learning some stuff about Mavis’s father. She’s crowding that door, learning a lot and wishing Vinnie would stop his bawling so she could learn more.

  It sounds terrible. There is stuff coming out of Mavis that no one knew she had in her, like she’s a tap blocked up with gunk and it’s turned on and pouring out black slime. ‘I loved you, you perverted bastard. You were all I had to love. They didn’t tell me. Nobody told me what you’d done.’

  There is stuff about her mother trying to kill her too, but Lori can’t make head nor tail of that bit. Like, ‘Why didn’t you let the crazy old bitch drown me at birth instead of slicing my life away, bit by bit?’

  They set the radio volume louder and it pretty much cancels what Mavis is screaming. Mick walks out to the street, looks at Nelly’s house, now in darkness. Jamesy and Alan head for the potting shed to sample the noise level there while Lori and Eddy remain at the green door. They are getting a word or two when the music stops and the announcer cuts in; they are looking at each other, sort of wide eyed, when Mick comes back.

  ‘Someone is going to call the cops in a minute. You can hear the noise up at the corner. We’re going to have to turn the radio off. It’s just making it worse, Lori; it sounds like a mob of druggies brawling at a party, and half the neighbours are out at their gates looking down this way.’

  They turn the music down, wait, pray for silence – and don’t get what they pray for. Mavis is going on about combing her father’s hair. There’s no sound at all from Vinnie. Maybe she’s killed him. They turn the light off, hoping the lack of light might shut her up.

  It doesn’t. It gets her screaming. ‘Help me. Somebody open the door.’ They think she’s back in the present until she starts screaming for Daddy. Like, ‘Help me, Daddy. It’s dark, Daddy. I want Daddy.’

  They run, turn the light on fast. ‘I was only a baby,’ she’s sobbing, and it’s plain cruel awful. ‘I didn’t know why they hated me. They lived with you, you perverted bastard. They covered up for you and let me love you.’ She’s a demented thing, howling like they’ve never heard her howl before. She’s raw inside, chewed up and raw and her guts are full of black slimy gore that keeps spilling out. Lori is getting scared. She’s never heard of plain grass doing that to people. Maybe it was spiked and she’s overdosed. Maybe Vinnie had some of Greg’s heroin or something mixed in with it.

  They check on the little ones and they’re out cold, all three curled together in Mavis’s ex central sag. It looks like a whole bundle of little heads, close and safe. Their door is closed tonight. The bunk room boys give up and go to bed, close their door too. Mick and Lori walk a while, but they’re tired. They go to Mick’s room, close his door, just to keep the noise in, then they sit on the beds, listening through the wall, through the open wardrobe doors, through the hole Mick drilled for the power board and extension cord. They learn a lot. Maybe they learn enough.

  At three they know that Vinnie is still alive. ‘Lie down and sleep it off, for Christ’s sake,’ he moans.

  Lori takes his advice, lies down on Neil’s bed. Maybe she dozes, but it’s dawn before Mavis stops bawling and flakes, which allows them to turn Mick’s light off and grab a few hours of sleep.

  All quiet on the southeastern front come morning, apart from Mavis’s raucous, flat on her back, chain-saw snore. They get out of the house early. It’s Jamesy’s day on house-watch duty, and it’s not safe to let Neil go to school today. He’s sure to dob. It’s not safe to stay in the house today either, so Jamesy and the little ones head for town with the high school kids. They’ve got money for lunch at McDonald’s.

  ‘Everybody will meet up at the little park beside the post office at four, so no dawdling,’ Lori says. ‘Don’t go home. Don’t go anywhere near the house. If we open that door now, then that’s the end. We’ve just got to ride it out. Nothing else we can do.’

  There is no way to get food into the brick room because Mick has also barricaded the window with his four-by-two’s and he’s hammered a sheet of corrugated iron over the barricade, hung the shade cloth over the iron to disguise it. The prisoners are in lock-down mode. With the light off, maybe they’ll sleep all day. They’ve got tap water, so they won’t dehydrate. Mick is going to work out some way to feed them tonight – anyway, a day of fasting can cleanse the system, the old diet book says, and by the sound of the slime coming out of Mavis last night, she sure needs some deep cleansing.

  It gets to four o’clock, but it’s a slow day. Jamesy and the little kids are tired out with looking for something to look at. They’re waiting at the park, and together the kids walk home, creep to the barricaded window. The brick room is silent, its occupants either dead or sleeping.

  They wait until five. Dead silence. Mick drills two holes between the central boards of the green door. It’s pitch dark in there, the occupants wouldn’t know night from day. He gets Eddy’s torch, shines its beam through one hole while peering through the other. And he sees Mavis’s leg move. He gets a better angle and sees Vinnie on the couch. He’s intact.

  ‘His chest seems to be rising and falling,’ Mick says, drilling more holes, to a pattern, then an ancient keyhole saw, which might have belonged to Jesus before Mick bought it at the market, works hard to cut out an eight by twenty centimetre slot. A terrible stink pours out.

  ‘Nothing we can do about it. Mavis has got soap and stuff. Let them clean up their own mess.’

  By six-thirty there are sounds of movement behind that door, sounds of the loo flushing, so they turn the light on. Lori has made two medicated custards; there is no way they can get a mug of cocoa through. She knocks on the door, offers a slim, sealed circular bowl through the slot. The cellmates are slow to move. Mavis comes, takes the bowl, tries to take the slim, square bowl as well.

  ‘Is that you, Vinnie?’

  ‘Bloody no, you rotten little mongrels. Let me out,’ Vinnie yells back.

  ‘Let him take his custard, Mavis, or you don’t get your drink.’

  Then Vinnie is at the door and he’s not interested in the custard or the extra spoon. He’s throwing himself at the door, threatening murder.

  An eye to the slot, Lori watches Mavis slurp her custard, clean the bowl with the edge of her finger. Then she does something very interesting. She grabs Vinnie’s arm and sort of throws him away from the door so he slams against her bed. And boy, she looks about as sprightly as old George Foreman! She looks as if she could go a round or two without dropping dead!

  ‘Last night didn’t do her any physical harm,’ she says to Eddy, who is waiting with a plastic cordial bottle, soft enough to dent. ‘But how she can eat in there, I don’t know. It stinks like something’s dead.’

  ‘Throw out your dead. Throw out your dead,’ Eddy keens, his hands cupping his mouth to the slot. He gets Mavis’s custard container, no lid, shoved in his face. He tries to force the bottle through but it won’t go, so Mick has to cut out a bit more wood in the middle of the slot. Mavis snatches the bottle neck the next try, and she tugs, fractures the plastic and wastes half the slimmer’s cordial but, more important, wastes the dissolving orange flavoured vitamin in it. They cost a fortune.

  ‘Share what’s left, Mavis,’ Lori yells. ‘And give us back the lid of your custard dish or you won’t get any dinner tonight. And both of you, you clean up that mess in there. I can smell sweat and sick and stinking feet from out here so it must be ten times as bad in there.’

  They leave them to share or not to share and Lori puts the unused medicated custard into the fridge. Vinnie might eat it later, and if he won’t, Mavis will. It’s ob
vious that he’s losing the war. He’s big, but Mavis has got a psychological advantage.

  That night the fence radio is playing and the neighbours are out watering their gardens. They’ve missed their entertainment. The language coming from the pen is more normal today, though Vinnie is doing a bit of pleading to be let out. It sounds so okay out on the street that Lori takes the opportunity to walk over and catch up with Nelly, who is weeding her front lawn and getting an earful.

  ‘Vinnie came home drunk and smoking marijuana. Mavis is keeping him in the house,’ she says. It’s true enough. She stands looking towards the house that used to look about as bad on the inside as the outside. For some reason it now looks really terrible from across the road. No wonder Karen turned up her pig-nose at it.

  ‘How is she?’ Nelly asks, sort of fishing for details.

  ‘She was okay until Vinnie came home. He’s stirred her up again – the only thing that settles her down a bit is music.’

  ‘Well, it’s not settling me down, I can tell you that much. I can’t stand that thump-thump-thump jungle beat crap.’

  ‘We’ll change the station.’

  They have a good talk later, and Nelly tells Lori how to make syrup dumplings, which are easy. The kids have them for dinner. Mavis and Vinnie get a container of Donny’s tinned sausages and vegetables, and toast, or maybe Mavis gets the two meals. And who cares if she’s over her thousand calories?

  Three days later and their new selection of slot-sized containers with lids are coming out of the brick room with the lids on. Vinnie is tame. There is no more calling Mavis a mad fat bitch – he’s promising to leave the house and never to set foot in Willama again. He’s promising to take Greg’s stolen DVD player and the other stuff to the cops and give evidence against him; he’s promising he won’t touch Eddy’s computer and he’s slurping his medicated custard like a lamb. They are giving them one Valium each, twice a day, and they’re counting the rest at night, and it’s so much trouble medicating the two of them and making sure the right one gets the toast with the Aropax that they give up, take Mavis off her antidepressants. She doesn’t sound a bit depressed. Maybe she’s enjoying the company. Maybe they should have got her a dog or something months back.

  Eddy reckons Vinnie had speed pills, and Mavis is having a go at them. She’s, like, on a high. She’s Speedy Gonzales with a foul mouth.

  ‘Bringing bloody drugs into my house, feeding me bloody drugs, you skin-head little bastard.’ She’s got the adjective wrong. ‘Sit down and shut up or I’ll finish you off now and save the bloody hangman the trouble in a few years time. I should have drowned you at birth.’

  ‘You tell him, Mave,’ Eddy eggs her on. ‘You tell him.’

  ‘He’s exactly what she needed, a bit of exercise to tighten up the flab,’ Jamesy says. ‘He couldn’t have come home at a better time. I mean, if we’d given her that treadmill for Christmas, she probably would have broken her neck the first time she used it, but a few weeks of this, and by Christmas she’ll be ready for it.’

  They squirt air-freshener in through the slot, push in a clean tent for Mavis and one of Henry’s singlets and a pair of his underpants for Vinnie. They poke in the thinnest towels and try poking a worn blanket through, but even with Mavis pulling, it won’t go. Vinnie has got the tartan one from the couch, and Mavis’s winter blanket cape, and she must have donated one of her pillows to him. The kids know they should have thought about blankets and pillows – they should have thought to toss a mattress in before they barricaded the door – even built a feeding hatch. Nothing much they can do about it now. If they make the slot any bigger, it will weaken those central boards, Mick says.

  They spend a lot of time away from the house and when they’re home, turn the television volume up a notch. They serve the prisoners three slim meals a day and life goes on.

  Paint and Forgery

  Vinnie has been in the pen for almost two weeks, his hair is spiky and he’s looking a bit more like the boy who left home, though he’s not taking as well to forced incarceration as Mavis. He’s wearing her blanket cape, complaining of the cold on a day that reads thirty degrees on the verandah, so it must be forty in their windowless cell.

  ‘He’s got some bloody virus,’ Mavis yells.

  They make her a triple dose of medicated cocoa, served in a long, slim slot-sized plastic container with a screw-on lid which they bought from Kmart, specifically for hot drinks, and through the slot they watch her drink it, and watch Vinnie, on her bed, looking half dead. The coffee doesn’t zap her, but they wait until she’s nodding off on her couch, looking relaxed and staring at the television before they unscrew the four-by-two barricades and pull the bolt. She thinks about getting up, then sighs, decides against it, as Lori and the three mobile boys race in and half carry the eager Vinnie out and into the bathroom. He’s pale and he’s shaking and he’s hardly got the strength to walk, let alone threaten, or thump.

  The twins and Jamesy strip him, get him into the water where they soak him for an hour, pour buckets of water over his head, and disinfectant over his feet. It’s not so easy getting him out. They pull the plug, wipe him off where he sits, get him into Henry’s singlet and underpants, then spray his feet with vinegar. He falls out of the bath in the end, but they get him up, walk him to Neil’s bed. And he’s in it – no help required. Neil can move into the bunk room and stop being one of the little ones.

  ‘We don’t have thieves, liars, drunks and druggies, or any fighting in our house nowadays. Can you get that into your thick head?’ Lori says, standing over Vinnie, soluble aspirin jumping and fizzing in a glass.

  The bed is clean and soft. Vinnie sinks down into heaven.

  ‘We don’t have stinking feet, or clothes chucked on the floor. If you stay, you soak your feet in Condy’s crystals every night for a week and you change your socks every single day and spray the inside of your shoes with vinegar.’ He nods, wants to die, but he nods. He’s ready to drink vinegar, eat his socks boiled up with European carp and Condy’s crystals. ‘As soon as you’re fit again, you mow the lawn, chop wood and help us paint the house.’

  ‘White,’ Eddy adds.

  ‘Right,’ Vinnie whispers.

  ‘And you look after the little kids for us while we go to school. They’re the rules. Spit your death and hope to die and I’ll give you some aspro.’

  He sneezes, sprays the room, which is as close as they’re going to get to a spit; she gives him his soluble aspirin which zap him for twelve hours solid.

  The barricade comes off the cell window and the air coming out of that room is murder. Mavis isn’t complaining, she’s looking pleased to be able to spread herself, so they try her on two soluble aspirin in orange juice with her breakfast – just in case she’s got Vinnie’s virus, and also to see if aspirin might actually work as a substitute for Valium.

  But she’s acting different, sort of tame – tame for Mavis, that is.

  ‘Have you got any bloody newspapers in this place?’ she yells.

  They tell her they’ll get her some, but in the meantime, would she like to read the forms the pension people sent a while back? Maybe she’d like to fill them in and put the twins on her dependants list.

  She doesn’t say yes, but she doesn’t say no either. They leave a packet of chewing gum, the pension papers and a biro when they leave her lunchtime salad and boiled egg. She yells out later, asks them when those redheaded little buggers came back, so they tell her February. She yells out again: ‘What bloody month is it, you crazy little shits?’ They tell her, and when they pick up her salad plate the papers are under it, filled in and signed, and she’s got Vincent Andrew on it too. She’s forgotten what year it is – or maybe she can get an allowance for a sixteen year old. She’d probably know. She used to know all the pension stuff better than Centrelink.

  In appreciation, they give her pink sausage stew for dinner with a decent-sized boiled potato and a pile of carrots and cabbage. She looks pleased with it, looks sort
of pleased with herself. It’s probably only about the pension papers; she always did like getting money out of the government. And so what? It’s a bit less for them to waste on Canberra and overseas trips.

  Vinnie is on aspirin, slimmer’s cordial and executive stress vitamin pills for five days and when he’s finally out of bed he’s pale and quiet, and he looks as if he’s shrunk a bit. Henry’s singlets almost fit him but his trousers just about reach Vinnie’s shins. Lori lops the legs off two pairs, turns them into long shorts, which don’t do a lot for his freckled tree-stump legs; he’s not going to want to step outside the house, and hasn’t got any shoes to step out in. Eddy pitched his stinking sneakers, and all the other stuff he wore home, in the green bin. They probably stank up the whole dump when the garbage was emptied.

  ‘Good hash. Better than Henry’s,’ Vinnie says, eating Lori’s minced steak stew like it is nectar of the gods, forking up the mashed potatoes and silverbeet, wiping his plate clean with bread, his eyes looking peaceful, sort of tame, as if they know they’ve come home. It’s probably a long time since Vinnie has felt safe.

  ‘So, do you want to stay here or not? Make up your mind now,’ Lori says, like, hit him while he’s weak, before he gets big again.

  ‘Yeah. All right. I’ll stay.’

  ‘No stirring Mavis up, no pinching the little kids’ food and no nicking off and coming home again when you feel like it, because we won’t take you back a second time.’

  ‘Yeah. Okay.’

  ‘What size shoes do you wear?’

  ‘Twelves, I think. I used to.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can get you a pair from the op shop.’

  He nods, eats syrup dumplings and ice-cream, looks at Timmy’s plate when his own is empty, but he shakes his head, places his spoon down.

  He shakes his head a lot in the next few days, especially when Mavis bellows from her pen. But she’s not bellowing much at all and she’s only getting half a Valium twice a day. She’s doing the crosswords in the Herald Sun and she doesn’t even look much like Mavis, except for her daggy red hair. Her features are sagging something awful, like her bulging tyre cheeks have long gone and her multiple chins have sagged into a neck which disappears beneath her faded curtain material dress. That dress sort of floats over the humps and bumps now, and at some angles, when she turns her head fast, she’s even got a jaw. Maybe Lori knows why she never totally lost her nubby little chin; it was always attached to a very determined jaw.