by Joy Dettman
Hum of voices from that house. Baby crying in that house. Slam, bang, whiz of television in that house. The noise cowers Henry. He stops midway across the vacant block and looks towards the dying sunset. England is sort of west, sort of northwest; he’s probably wanting to be there and not standing on a vacant block with Lori.
‘There’s a mozzie eating you,’ she says, slapping at his arm, and maybe there was a mosquito and maybe there wasn’t, but that slap reclaims his attention. He pats her head, smiles a small smile but doesn’t look at her, doesn’t say happy birthday.
That western sky is like another land tonight, like all the colour has faded now except for this golden highway that is leading away over the cloud-mountain horizon.
‘There is more than this, little lost Lorraine,’ he says.
‘What more, Henry?’ She draws her eyes away from the west, squints to see his face.
‘I don’t quite know. You’ll have to find it for me, little one.’
He looks older, more sad tonight with wanting more, and she understands that sad, wanting feeling. She wants more, wants a bike, wants a lot of things.
‘That’s like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Henry,’ she says. ‘I mean, if I don’t know what you want me to find for you then it’s like . . . like I’ll be searching in a blindfold, like feeling for the right place with my hands, but even if I find the right place, I won’t know that I’ve found it.’ She slaps at his hand. It’s too dark now to see if there is a mosquito there or not, but it’s reason enough to touch him.
He pats her head and for a moment his long chin lifts, just a little bit. ‘Henry! Henry! You said you were going to cut the kids’ hair tonight. They’re tripping over it,’ Mavis yells from the back verandah, and Henry sighs, shrugs, his chin and shoulders low as his feet move him along the track they have worn through the brittle grass. His eyes, Lori’s eyes, watch those traitor feet. They are walking him to Mavis.
Lori stands on alone listening to the night sounds, and to the old house tut-tutting and sighing, like the poor old roof is taking a breather after a hard day’s work, grateful for the shade of night and soaking it up, gaining strength for tomorrow. It’s a tall roof with silly little gables – a roof on a roof. It looks good now the light has gone. It looks taller, stronger, like it might stand up for another day.
‘Eleven. I’m eleven.’
It’s a weird feeling, being eleven, a bit like this time of day, sort of balancing on the edge of the dark time before tomorrow. Or . . . or like when she walks along the top of old Mrs Roddie’s brick fence, which is next door to Bert Matthews’s place. That fence is too narrow to walk on, but Lori walks it anyway, every day, on her way to school. There’s a concrete footpath one side and prickly rose bushes on the other, so she has to keep moving fast to keep her balance. Sometimes she falls off before she gets to the end.
A long shuddering sigh shakes her, and it almost sounds like Henry’s sigh.
Yesterday, when she was ten, the world was bigger. Tonight even the horizon looks as if it’s moved closer, like there’s not so much space between her and what is out there waiting. Yesterday there wasn’t much to worry about, really, except if she’d get a bike for her birthday – and about her rotten teacher. She always worries about her.
Today has been a long, worrisome kind of day and now she’s got another worry. One day she has to ride that sunset highway until she finds Henry’s more, because somewhere out there, somewhere beyond the river, beyond the roads, and way over that horizon, far, far away from Willama, there is . . . more.
Henry said so, and he knows everything – almost everything.
The Brothers
Matthew Charles is going to be another redhead but he’s not going to need a haircut for a long time; all of the redheads start out bald and this one hasn’t got a hair on his head. Mavis calls him Number Twelve. Henry has to think of all the names and he sure comes up with some weird ones – like Lorraine Louise, Michael James, Vincent Andrew. None of those posh names last long. Matthew Charles has already been turned into Matty – and he’s bawling again.
Lori is inside now, hiding behind the dusty brown curtain Henry hung when he took the kitchen door off, due to it took up too much space. Making space is important in this house.
The kitchen is packed wall to wall with brothers. They stand, lean, sit, crowded into this kitchen like drinking straws jammed into the straw-holder at McDonald’s. Lucky the room is nearly big enough to hold everybody, which it wasn’t until last year when Martin and the builder he works for knocked out the back wall and window then made half of the back verandah into part of the kitchen. They put down a new bit of chipboard floor, filled in the verandah part with boards and louvre windows, then Martin and Henry painted the kitchen and got new vinyl for the floor. It’s the biggest and best room in the house now. It also gets a breeze from three sides, from the old west window, the south wall that is mainly louvres, and also the back door which faces east. Everyone lives in the kitchen. They have to. It’s the only room not full up with beds. It stinks, though, due to too many brothers with too many smelly feet.
The quiz show is on and everyone is watching it, so Lori lifts the curtain and walks by the stove, which is pretty much beside the brown curtain. Henry hasn’t totally forgotten about Lori; her dinner is being kept hot over a saucepan of water, the saucepan lid covering the plate. She juggles the plate to the sink, which is on the west wall, not far from the stove, where she grabs a fork before reaching into the cupboard up top for Henry’s jar of Vicks VapoRub. The investigators, before they examined that dead body in Silence of the Lambs, dabbed a smear of something strong into each nostril, and it works too. Lori smears Vicks up her nostrils and the stink of dead feet and diseased sneakers disappears like magic while she forks up mushy potatoes, silverbeet and stew, which tastes like all of Henry’s stews – pretty rotten.
Mavis is feeding the baby and Henry’s scissors are snip-snip-snipping at Jamesy’s hair. Neither of them look at Lori, and if Jamesy had dobbed on her about wagging it, Mavis would be yelling and Henry would be looking disappointed. He’s just cutting carefully around Jamesy’s ears.
Jamesy turned eight in July and he’s the image of Lori, so everyone says. He’s one of the dark-curly-haired ones with the brown eyes and suntanned skin and no freckles. His nose is pointy and his chin is pointy and he spends a lot of time grinning with one side of his mouth, even when there is nothing much to grin about.
Henry cuts a lot of hair. Lori runs her fingers through her crewcut. Last week she nagged and nagged Henry to keep cutting it shorter, for swimming, she said, but half of the wanting it shorter came from wanting to be close to him. While he’s cutting and combing, his gentle hands touch her head and her face, and she gets huge jolts of his life force running through her.
Her fingers creep to the new swellings on her chest. She first noticed them yesterday and she hoped she’d wake up this morning and find they’d gone away. They haven’t gone. She doesn’t want to turn into a girl and be stuck in the middle of all of these brothers. Different.
If that new baby had been a girl . . . If.
‘Big eff,’ she whispers.
‘What did you say, Lorraine?’ Mavis sort of yells and the baby jumps and loses his grip, starts his bellowing again.
‘If. Big if is all I said.’
‘I’ll give you big if. I know what you were thinking, and where have you been to this hour?’
‘Wendy Johnson and her mother took me to McDonald’s and shouted me some chips and an ice-cream for my birthday,’ Lori says, and wishes it was true, and wishes that her hair would grow faster so Henry could cut it more often.
The mention of her birthday shuts everyone up, though. They all look at her, like, oh my God, what’s the date today?
‘Pass me the paper,’ Mavis says. She wants proof of today’s date.
The paper always gets put on top of the fridge. Lori reaches for it, passes it to Donny, who swaps it with Mavis
for Matty, who is refusing to drink any more. He probably got full in the first two gulps, anyway. Donny puts him in the pram and stands rocking it while Mavis buttons the shoulder of her tent.
Lori stares at her, allowing her eyes to slip out of focus, until all she can see is the round face and the cloud of red hair, which Henry cuts so all the curls stand up tall. She has a pretty face and not one wrinkle, except where the corners of her mouth get dragged down around her nubby little chin.
‘I thought it was tomorrow. We’ll have a cake tomorrow,’ Mavis says, glancing at the top of the paper.
Everyone looks sort of relieved and goes back to whatever they were doing. Except Martin. He reaches out a hand, brushes Lori’s spiky curls. ‘Sorry, Splint. Blame the new bawler. He went and upset the apple cart.’
Martin and Donny are pretty much grown up, like they’ve got jobs so they pay for their own haircuts. Martin has got medium dark curly hair and a lot of it; he’s almost getting to be good looking. He’s nineteen and a quarter, and a qualified bricklayer; he’s got an old Ford ute that spends its life driving backwards and forwards to where Karen lives, which is about forty kilometres away, on a posh farm, in a mansion – so Martin says. He’s ironing his shirts and jeans tonight because he’s going out to spend the weekend with her and her parents. He’s never once brought her to this place; she’d run a mile if she saw this madhouse. That’s what he said to Donny.
Donny will turn eighteen in June. He’s good with babies and he’s got the bawler quiet but he’s getting impatient to use that iron. He works at the biggest supermarket, which means he has to iron a shirt every day. It’s worth it, though. He gets a discount on food and this house goes through an awful lot of food. He’s half a head taller than Martin, but skinny, and he’s not even nearly good looking, just a blotch of pale skin and freckles, pale eyes, stubby eyelashes and stubby red hair. He’s never had a girlfriend and the way he looks he probably won’t ever get one, like his hair is about half a centimetre long and it shows all the bumps on his head so he looks ridiculous.
The next three brothers are at high school. They get Henry haircuts and two of them don’t like it. Greg was fifteen in December, Vinnie will be fourteen in April and Mick turns thirteen in June. Those three must have come out of Mavis like bullets, sort of bang, bang, bang – probably she was getting desperate to have a girl.
Anyway, it’s pretty easy for people to remember which of the middle-sized brothers is which. Greg has always been Mavis’s pet because he was her Christmas present and he used to be cute. He’s medium sized with medium dark brown hair and he’s spoilt rotten. However, since he turned fifteen, that spoilt rotten inside him is working its way to the outside, because lately he’s looking pure pimply putrid. He’s a thief and he’d kill you for a stick of chewed-up chewing gum.
Vinnie you have to feel a bit sorry for. Mavis says he was hiding behind the door when brains were handed out, and she could be right. He’s the dead spit of Mavis’s father – curly carrot-red hair, hands and feet twice as big as everyone else’s, and a year ago he started growing into his hands and feet and he hasn’t stopped since. He’s huge for nearly fourteen, like giant huge. Already he’s nearly taller that Donny. He can be pretty rotten; like he’d pinch the last chip off your plate, though he hasn’t got enough brains to be as devious rotten as Greg.
Mick? Well, some people are rotten and some are beautiful and that’s all there is to it. Mick is pure beautiful, even though he has got a crippled leg. He speaks soft, like Henry, and he’s gentle, like Henry; Mick should have been the girl. He’s even got a beautiful face, sort of freckled but neat sprinkled freckles, not blotchy, and he’s got these gorgeous big blue-grey eyes and one of those mouths that always look as if they are going to say something nice about someone, which is not common in this house.
Lori is Number Six, like she’s the comma that you put in the halfway mark of a sentence then forget why you put it in there. Probably she only got put in so people could take a breath between reading the names of all the brothers.
Thirteen months after Lori, the twins turned up with messed-up hearts. They spent most of their time sick and seeing doctors or living at the hospital, so when they were two Henry did that deal with Aunty Eva, then spent most weekends going backwards and forwards to Melbourne. He was happier then, younger then; he hasn’t been to Melbourne for years now, so everybody has pretty much forgotten about those twins, except Henry. They’ve sort of become his other family, kept safe from the mess of people he’s made in Willama.
The next three brothers are Jamesy, Neil and Timmy. They are pretty easy to remember too. Everyone calls Jamesy Gnome Face; he’s always been Gnome Face since he turned up a year and four months after the twins. He got born old, got born knowing that no one was going to pick him up if he cried so he didn’t bother crying, and due to all the talk in the house still being about if the twins were going to live or die, Jamesy pretty much grew himself up until one day he climbed out of the pram and squatted under the kitchen table. That’s where he stayed too, sort of grinning at the stupid world with his lopsided mouth.
Something must have happened then, though Lori can’t remember what it was – maybe Mavis had a dog or something – anyway, there is a huge space of no babies between Jamesy, who is eight, and Neil, who is four, and a pure little redheaded, face-pulling bugger of a kid. Timmy came next, he’ll be two in June. He’s not a redhead and he’s not dark yet, but he will be. And now there’s the new one, the bald-headed bawler who hasn’t shut up for more than five minutes since he stuck his head out and saw Mavis, and who’d blame him? That’s what Martin said.
‘When are you going to learn to iron, Splint?’
‘Oh, yeah, cool,’ Lori replies. She’s found a space between the television and the fridge, where she’s leaning, smearing more Vicks up her nose, watching the iron work hard. Martin is better at laying bricks. He and Donny always call her Splint or Splinter, like, chip off the old block. And she’s not like Mavis. She’s not a bit like her.
The television is on an angle, positioned for Mavis’s couch, which is against the east wall. She’s smoking and answering the quiz questions before the contestant. Mostly she gets them right too, and when she does, she wriggles, and each wriggle makes her couch dig a deeper hole through the plaster wall, like it’s trying to burrow its way into Martin and Donny’s bedroom. It’s a double-seater couch that seats only one, and lucky for it, its frame is all metal. It used to have a brown and green pattern on the material, which you can still see in places though it’s mostly worn away.
‘Get some more wood, please, Vincent,’ Henry says.
‘Can’t you let the stove go out tonight, Henry?’ Vinnie moans, sort of slow. He does everything slow – except pinch your food; he does that fast. He and Greg and Mick sleep in the west bedroom, and the kitchen chimney, a double one, has its other half in their room, which might be good in winter but it’s not good in summer because the heat from the stove goes through that chimney and turns the middle-sized boys’ room into a sweatbox.
No one listens to Vinnie – just looking at him is sort of overpowering lately. Henry is pretty much scared to look at him, in case he’s grown out of his shoes or his trousers again. Anyway, that stove never goes out, due to it being one of those combustion things you can close up so they just keep licking at wood and heating up water that crawls through pipes from the stove to the hot water service in the roof. This house needs plenty of hot water.
Vinnie gets the wood then takes the hair-cutting chair. Greg, who went out with him to help get wood, doesn’t come back. He’s not going to get an old-fashioned Henry haircut; Mavis will end up giving him money to have a proper one like she did the last time, which isn’t fair.
Nothing is really fair in this house. Like, Henry works all day then comes home and works half the night. Mavis can’t do anything except have babies. She used to be a good cook but he’s a rotten cook. He boils rice to a gluey glug, turns green cabbage into grey r
ag, boils beans watery, and mince stews greasy; they all taste the same, of onions and carrots and curry, and he forgets to put salt in it half the time. He uses a lot of onions and carrots because he grows his own. He grows pumpkins too, and broad beans that taste like chaff and look like kidneys that died of some terrible disease. His silverbeet is pure poison, due to his eyes aren’t good enough to get the bugs off before he cooks it, so half the time he cooks them too.
Martin calls silverbeet ‘bug stew’ since he found a cooked earwig on his plate one night. He might look a bit like Henry on the outside but he’s more like Mavis on the inside; he can be funny, and also he can be tough. Like on Mavis’s birthday, like, he can remember her before she got fat, he said, ‘Knowing what a gorgeous chick you used to be a few years back, how could you eat your way to that?’ Then he offered to buy her a Jenny Craig diet.
‘Buy me a box of chocolates,’ she said.
Anyway, the next day Martin cut out this newspaper advertisement that is a cartoon man, made out of tractor, truck and car tyres, then he drew frizzy red hair on it with a biro and he stuck it on the fridge. Mavis thumped him a good one for that.
She’s getting meaner with her thumps lately, and she’s also getting bigger, or maybe her thumps are getting meaner because she’s getting bigger. She never stops eating, even when she’s smoking. She’s always got a packet of lollies in her pocket and every time she lights a cigarette she pops a lolly in her mouth. Maybe she doesn’t like the taste of cigarettes.
Through slitted eyes Lori stares at her, making the image unclear, just the chewing chin which gets lost in the swallowing throat, except for a little round bulge where her chin used to be. It’s like that chin is so determined it refuses to give up and roll down. Everything else has rolled down – until you get to her wrists and her ankles. Mavis’s feet aren’t fat, or her hands. She’s got pretty hands, with nice nails. If you could cut her off at the chin then halfway down her shins and around her wrists and just look at those bits, you could get an idea of what Martin can remember.