Henry’s Daughter Read online

  ‘That’s what we are, just pests. Why don’t you and Martin spray us with pest killer?’ Lori says. Shouldn’t have said that, but her stomach is feeling all churned up with something she doesn’t understand, maybe with wanting that pudding. She’s wanting something, a little bit of something – maybe a tiny taste of Henry’s more. She doesn’t move, just keeps dripping tears and watching that street, watching Mavis plod on to the corner, then turn that corner and disappear.

  She comes back too, and there is the glow of a cigarette moving to her mouth. Lori is still sitting there, her eyes still dripping, her shoulders heaving and she can’t stop them doing it. It’s not that she’s bawling, not out loud.

  Nelly comes to stand beside her and have a bit of a stare. ‘She’s all right, Smithy.’

  ‘She hasn’t got any money. Martin told that hotel not to give her stuff.’ The words don’t come out right, they sort of heave themselves out in shaky sobs.

  ‘They know her, Smithy. They’ll look after her.’

  ‘Henry made us all into beggars, Nelly.’

  Nelly wipes tears from Lori’s cheek, brushes her hair back from her face, kisses her while she’s holding Lori’s face between warm hands. ‘We’re flogging a dead horse here, love, and it’s time we all admitted it. This is screwing up the little ones, and it’s not doing you any good. You’re my best mate, Smithy. The best one I ever had, and we’ve got to start thinking of what’s best for everyone now.’

  ‘It will be better for you and Martin if we get put in homes.’

  Nelly doesn’t deny that. ‘It will force somebody’s hand – make them do something about her. And it won’t be as bad as it sounds for you kids, either. Homes aren’t like they used to be in the old days. You’ll have three good meals a day and warm beds to sleep in. You’re missing too much school and this is the only time you’ve got to set yourself up for some sort of future. You’re a smart kid, Smithy. You can’t just drop out of school the day you turn fifteen, end up wasting your life.’

  ‘It runs in the family, Nelly.’

  ‘You poor little bugger,’ Nelly says.

  They stand together, Nelly’s arm around her as they watch Mavis try to heave herself up to the verandah. She can’t do it. Her tents always creep up at the back when she walks and that green one has crept up high tonight. The people at the hotel would have seen what Lori is seeing. They probably laughed at her. She doesn’t look real, she’s like one of those blow-up advertising toys that shops tie onto their roofs, like she’s got a valve in her navel and someone connected a tractor tyre pump to it and inflated her.

  That baby inside her must be a monster thing. It was supposed to come out in August. That’s what the doctor said, late August, and now it’s September, time for the seasons to do their changeover, but the year is sort of jammed like it’s got no place to go.

  ‘She can’t get in, Nelly.’

  ‘We might have to get someone to help her up, Smithy.’

  For half an hour Lori and Nelly stand at the window watching Mavis cling to that verandah post. Then the rain starts falling again and Lori sees Jamesy running across the road. She goes after him.

  ‘He left me without cigarettes, the bastard,’ Mavis says, drips from the spouting turning to trickles, falling on her hair, running down her back. ‘He made me walk up there and beg for one lousy packet of cigarettes.’

  ‘Nelly said she’d buy your smokes,’ Lori says.

  ‘That old bitch can shove her charity.’ The trickle of water is a running tap now. Soon it will be a waterfall. ‘Bloody interfering old bitch, she knows exactly what she can do with her charity.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Jamesy says, and it’s like he’s so far away from getting it that he’s forgotten you need to give her plenty of space. He’s standing on the verandah, right up close, staring at her, his lopsided grin fixed to his face with superglue.

  Mavis never did like being stared at and she just hates being laughed at. Lori is backing off and she wants Jamesy to back off too. He’s not backing, and it’s like that grin doesn’t even want to be stuck to his face tonight, though he couldn’t move it even if a bus came down Dawson Street, knocked the last of Henry’s fence flying, ran right up on the verandah and squashed Jamesy flat as a pancake against the front door; his smile would just get squashed flat too.

  Then he says, sort of quiet, ‘Who do you think fed us tonight, Mavis? That’s taking Nelly’s charity, isn’t it, seeing as you’re the one who gets the pension money for all of us kids? Or do you think you’re getting all that pay to be the local freak show?’

  Mavis makes a superhuman effort. She gets one foot onto the verandah and Lori grabs Jamesy’s arm, drags him by that arm back over the road.

  ‘Where do you think we’re going to sleep tonight, you moron?’

  ‘I got her inside, didn’t I?’ Jamesy grins.

  They creep home late, Matty asleep in Lori’s arms, and they tiptoe into the bunk room, close the door and slide the chest of drawers hard against it. Little ones in the lower bunks, Jamesy and Lori in the upper, opposite, their two heads close to the window where the wind, leaking between plastic and broken glass, is whistling a cheeky tune.

  Child Henry

  The kids are woken early by her banging around. She’s wrecking the house, searching again for her chequebook and her telephone charger. She’s tossing all of Henry’s books and papers and photos around, leaving junk where it falls. She can’t find her chequebook but she finds an old withdrawal form and takes it out to the kitchen.

  Lori picks up some of the junk, mainly the photographs. Henry’s photograph is there. It was taken before he left England. There’s also one of his parents, Daniel and Kathleen, and a really nice one of a girl, probably one of Henry’s old girlfriends. She puts them back in their box, back safe on top of Henry’s wardrobe.

  In the kitchen, Jamesy is looking at two typewritten pages he has slipped from a brown envelope and Lori knows what it is.

  ‘You’re not allowed to read that,’ she says, claiming one page.

  Jamesy shrugs, grins. ‘He didn’t have to be dead. He didn’t die of old age, did he?’ he says, like, so why shouldn’t I look at his stupid secret papers if I want to?

  She shrugs, glances at the typewritten words that give up Henry’s BIG secret.

  Who was he, anyway? Who was he really? He could sing. He could cut hair. He could spell every word in the world, but was he anyone real?

  Male child [Henry] of European appearance. Pneumonia, severe ear infection. Possible hearing loss. Approximately one year old. Underweight [eleven pounds]. Deserted by his mother, Lily [fourteen/fifteen], whereabouts unknown.

  Child’s father. European. [Henry. No surname.] Worked for Mr Howie. Left the area before the child was born.

  Mary. Grandmother. Pregnant. [Quarter cast Aborigine. Light complexion.]

  Grandfather. Woden. [Afghan/Indian.] Sixty plus. Twelve children counted. Camp squalid.

  That’s who Henry was. That’s all Henry had behind him. A Mary, a Woden – no surname. A Lily, whereabouts unknown, and a boy called Henry who worked for Mr Howie. Poor little boy baby with Matty’s pneumonia and Alan’s ear infection. Poor little lost Henry no-name.

  Lori puts the papers in the stove. Henry had no use for these papers, and as sure as Bert Matthews grows wormy little apples, Martin doesn’t want them. And Mavis is not going to have them. Lori lights one corner with a cigarette lighter, watches it flare.

  Child [Henry] sort of glows red for a moment then turns to ash. And Henry is gone.

  ‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ she whispers, and she rounds up the kids, herds them over the road for breakfast, and this morning she pure hates doing it. Hates eating Nelly’s Weet-Bix, eats one fast, then she and Jamesy go to school and leave the little ones watching Nelly’s television.

  School is useless; the high school teachers might just as well be talking Chinese for all that gets through. Lori is thinking of Child Henry, which leads her to thinking o
f his funeral and the boys carrying him from the church. Vinnie and Donny up front and crying, Martin and Greg down the back, stone faced. That makes her sad, so she forces herself to think about Mavis’s coffin. Who will carry it from the church? Not the boys. They’ll have to hire a forklift and drive it down the church aisle.

  She giggles, sees a forklift trundling down the aisle and giggles more. The teacher tells her to stop or to leave the room. She nearly gets control, until she pictures the forklift crying big drips of black oil, then doing a back-flip and turning its wheels up. It cracks her up, like totally.

  Old Crank Tank can get madder than most of the teachers, and she gets so mad, she sends Lori to the vice principal again, who is sick of the sight of Lorraine Smyth-Owen. Lori decides to give her a break and go home early.

  It’s raining again and before she’s left the school grounds she looks like a drowned rat, her long hair dripping around her face and down her neck. She walks up back streets, forgoing the shelter of shop verandahs so she can dodge the stares in the main street. Everyone stares. Everyone knows her, thinks, she’s one of them. She considers going to the supermarket where Donny used to work. It’s on the next corner and it would be warm in there – but too many people would stare, or feel sorry for her, so she keeps walking, turns down another back street.

  Her socks are soaking wet, due to there are holes worn right through the soles of her shoes so they squelch with every step. Her head down, she’s looking at those squelching shoes – and she sees it!

  She wasn’t even looking for money. She nearly stepped right over it. It’s like fate turned her shoes down this street. She never comes down this way because no tourist would be seen dead down here, but she snatches that coin not caring who dropped it. No one is staring at her. No one around. Nothing much in this street – except the op shop.

  It’s Henry! He made her come this way, and that two dollars is a sign from him because it was practically out front of the op shop where he used to do heaps of shopping. She used to come here with him sometimes and find hidden treasures.

  No one is in the op shop except the saleslady, so Lori walks in, wanders around a bit, then sort of casually asks if they might have an old parka for two dollars, please.

  The saleslady is one of those white permed hair grandmothers. She looks at Lori’s sweater that’s halfway up her back, and at her wet dress hobbling her knees, then she goes to a bin and she takes out a navy parka with a hood, and she says, ‘Do you think this might fit you, love?’

  ‘Is it two dollars?’

  ‘Twenty cents is near enough,’ the lady says.

  Lori takes off her wet sweater and tries the parka. It’s big but it’s warm. She stands looking at a smaller parka in the same bin. ‘Are all those . . . are all of those items twenty cents?’

  The lady nods. ‘Take whatever you need, love.’

  ‘What about shoes?’

  ‘Twenty cents.’

  Most of the shoes are dressy ladies’ shoes. Lori isn’t game to take off her own shoes to try any of them but she finds a pair that look as if they’d fit. They’ve got little heels and buckles instead of laces and they are brown instead of black. They’ll do. She finds a pair of sneakers that should fit Jamesy and some tracksuit pants for him, and it’s like the old treasure hunt with Henry, and she keeps finding treasures until she’s spent the whole two dollars. Two other ladies walk into the shop then, so Lori has to go. She offers the bundle she’s been holding in her arms, and the coin, hot from her hand. The grandmother lady smiles, stuffs everything into two plastic bags. She doesn’t want to take the coin. ‘Have you got a winter uniform, love?’

  ‘No. Yes. But . . . but it’s at the dry-cleaner’s at the moment,’ Lori lies. She pushes the coin across the counter, runs. Pity is hard to take and lying isn’t good when someone is being nice to you.

  That lady must know all about fake pride, and she must have known who Lori was too, because she comes to the front door of the house about two hours later and she’s got a cardboard box of stuff that looks good enough to sell, but she says the shop boss was going to throw it out and she thought that maybe Lori would be able to use some of it. There’s a high school winter skirt and sweater, and they look almost new and they are going to fit Lori whether they want to or not. There is a pair of sandals and a heap of old-fashioned underwear, three bras even, and shirts, and socks.

  Lori piles the treasure into her drawers then she takes the cardboard box to the kitchen, rips it to bits and gets some chips from the wood heap, gets the fire going just in case Martin comes tonight. Jamesy brings in a few rotten pickets from the front fence and half a fence-post they can just wriggle into the firebox. It’s soaking wet and it juts out a bit so they can’t close the firebox door, but they feed their fire with junk mail, keep it hissing.

  It’s funny watching that fire come alive on the wood. It starts small, a tiny little flame that just keeps going, just keeps smouldering blue around that hissing fence-post, until it catches one side, gets a bit of colour, then wood starts to glow and the fence-post stops hissing. You can feel the heat. She picks up a cigarette box, tosses it in and watches it burn. Her face is getting warm. She thinks of the uniform and those brown buckle shoes, she thinks of the two-dollar coin, thinks of giggling at school.

  Maybe that giggle started up a chain of . . . of hope. Like she saw the funny side of things, and if you can see the funny side and laugh at it, it doesn’t hurt so much. Jamesy has always known that. He probably even knew that the first day of his life when he decided to slip out of Mavis while she was in the old loo and he nearly got drowned.

  The fire grows and Martin doesn’t come. They watch for him on the verandah. It’s Nelly’s bingo night and Martin knows it, and it’s six o’clock and why doesn’t he come?

  Because rotten Karen won’t let him, that’s why.

  Lori goes out to the laundry, scoops up rice from the least ripped plastic bag and stands a long time, picking out the black bits, stands for a longer time washing the rice, which makes the black bits rise to the top so she can rinse them away, and when she thinks it’s clean enough she puts it on the stove.

  ‘Run over to Nelly and say Martin said to borrow a tin of condensed milk and some sultanas, Jamesy. Don’t say we want to borrow it or she won’t go to bingo.’

  Mavis smells that food when it’s ready and comes from her bed. There are six plates and spoons ready on the table, but she goes for the saucepan.

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ Lori yells, runs at Mavis, bumps her so she has to grab the wall instead of the saucepan. And Lori has got the rice.

  ‘Run,’ she yells.

  The kids are well trained since they came home from emergency care. They run while Lori faces Mavis across the table, spoons one dollop of the mixture into one plate, then dodges left, but runs right, right out to the brick room, gets half the kids in and bolts the door. Jamesy goes after Matty, who ran too far; he lifts him in through the window then comes in behind him while Mavis belts on the door.

  She won’t get in. Lori knows just how strong that green door is. That’s not Mavis banging on the door anyway. That’s a bogyman who hates everyone’s guts.

  They’ve only got the big stirring spoon between five so they sit in a circle on Greg’s old mattress and take turns at passing that spoon, dipping it into the saucepan, eating rice and sultanas and sweet, sweet milk. It’s a spooky game in the dark while outside the rain pelts down and the bogyman belts on the door. The little kids love it, and the rice fills everyone up, tiptop full. They couldn’t stuff in any more if they tried, but Jamesy and Neil are trying hard. Those two are not going to leave one scrape for the bogyman in that saucepan. Not one scrape.

  She’s on her couch when they come out, and she doesn’t say a word, but behind her eyes a serial killer show is playing. There is hot water in the pipes, though; that stove heats the hot water service fast if you give it decent wood to burn. Lori pushes the fence-post in deeper, then she runs a bath and puts
the three little ones in with some dish-washing detergent and all of their dirty clothes.

  Little kids are funny things. It doesn’t take much to make them happy. A tummy full of rice and a warm bath are enough. They are laughing and stomping and flopping down, blowing bubbles and making noises like washing machines, having a really good time, and they come out shiny and pink and the washing even comes out a bit cleaner. Lori hangs it over chairs in front of the stove.

  She’s keeping well clear of Mavis, keeping the table between them, when she sees the withdrawal form on the table.

  It’s been made out for two hundred dollars. And it’s signed with that MSO squiggle.

  Grand Larceny

  They sleep late, stay warm in bed until Mavis starts thumping at their door, yelling about that withdrawal. Then they dress fast, in shoes and socks and parkas too, and they all go out the window, Lori first to take the little ones, Jamesy last so he can lift them over the sill. Lori won’t let them go to Nelly. She takes them to Henry’s potting shed and instead of flowers, she finds an old hen there, sitting on nine eggs. Silly old hen doesn’t know it’s not the old days. She’s trying to hatch chickens, just as if Henry is still around to feed them.

  It’s got to be about ten o’clock and the little kids are grizzling. They still expect such things as breakfast at breakfast time.

  ‘Shut up.’ Lori is watering Henry’s pots because some have green shoots poking up from dry dirt.

  ‘Nelly has got a big new box of Weet-Bix,’ Neil says.

  ‘We’re not beggars. Shut up and just wait a minute, will you?’

  She’s not sure what she’s waiting for. Maybe a sign from Henry. Maybe those green shoots are his sign. Maybe she’s just waiting until she’s hungry enough. Her stomach isn’t hungry. It’s rolling, paining. She’s got that withdrawal slip in her parka pocket, but that’s not what she wants to do. Can’t get the nerve to do what she wants to do. It’s not legal.