Henry’s Daughter

by Joy Dettman

  ‘And you better stay out there too,’ Mavis screeches after him. ‘We’re going to need your bloody bed.’ Then she goes into her bedroom and actually goes to bed and it’s not even eight o’clock. She doesn’t even have a sandwich. She must be worn out.

  Donny makes good sandwiches. The kids eat, they drink their mugs of half milk and half tea then, without being told, they go to bed. Lori zaps her two five-dollar notes under her pillow. She’s dreaming a gorgeous dream about a beautiful house when something wakes her up right in the middle of the best bit of the dream.

  The world is almost cool and it’s silent and she doesn’t know what woke her. She listens. The baby isn’t bawling and it’s still dark outside, like it’s the time-space between when the sun falls down in England and rises in Australia, an unreal, sweet-smelling time. The front door is always left open on hot nights, and the windows. She can smell the mint growing wild in Nelly’s garden, and even the roses and the red geranium. Sweet smells are so delicious.

  Then she sees what woke her. It’s a tiny flame, just on, then off. It’s a cigarette lighter. She freezes in her bed. It’s not Mavis, because if she was up she’d have all the lights on. It’s mangy old Alice and she’s pulling Lori’s sheet back. She’s either half blind, or dark red hair and dark brown looked the same by a cigarette lighter’s small flame. It’s out now but she’s found the right-sized arm and she’s pulling on it. ‘Up you get, boy,’ she whispers, trying to drag Lori from her bed. ‘On your feet now. Hop to it.’

  ‘I’m the wrong one, Aunty Alice,’ Lori whispers back.

  Alice drops the arm, and she’s gone. Lori yawns, hears a car door close soft, hears the car creep away, then she rolls over, yawns again and wonders why she ruined her chance of being kidnapped to television land where nobody sweats and you get to live in a house like the one in her dream.

  If Alice had dropped in an hour later, she would have found the right body with no trouble at all. It’s barely daylight when the Valium wears off and the twin goes off like a mad alarm clock. Henry is up, giving the baby a bottle. He always gets the dawn shift with babies.

  No more sleeping is going to get done in this house. Soon everyone is up, scratching ribs, yawning and going about the business of trying to find something for breakfast. There’s no milk left and the milk bar doesn’t open for an hour. No one except Henry ever gets up this early on Sunday anyway. Donny doesn’t start work until eight-thirty.

  ‘Use some of the condensed milk in the shed. It’s under my begonias, behind a packet of potting mix,’ Henry says. He gives the baby weak condensed milk when Mavis is asleep, hides emergency rations in his potting shed with his strange flowers because Mavis really likes condensed milk. She can open a tin and sit there eating it with a spoon as if it’s yoghurt.

  ‘I want my mother,’ the twin wails. He won’t eat his breakfast. He stands in the kitchen bellowing. ‘I want to go home. I want Eddy.’

  And they finally know which one he is. They all start calling him Alan. Like, come and see the new baby chickens, Alan, or come and play under the sprinkler, Alan. He sure needs that sprinkler. He’s hot as fire, but he won’t move from the kitchen. He’s red in the face and sort of panting, but he won’t even sit down.

  ‘He’s Alan,’ Henry tells Mavis when she gets out of bed, due to Matty is also throwing a screamer and Timmy, who never bawls, is bawling with him. Neil isn’t, he’s sitting under the table with Alan, making demon faces at him. Jamesy has left home. He’s sitting on Nelly’s front fence. Lori wanders over the road and sits with him, smells mint, smells roses and waits, waits for the waiting to end.

  It doesn’t. By lunchtime, more sandwiches, Henry is looking pasty grey and exhausted. He didn’t take the twin to the motel while Mavis was asleep. He could have. He knows he should have, but he knows life wouldn’t have been worth living if he had, though he’s not too sure this morning that it’s worth living anyway.

  The little kids are still howling in sympathy with Alan, and Henry is trying to plug Matty’s wail with a dummy, but Matty keeps spitting it out. Henry gives him to Mavis then he walks out back, walks in circles like a little grey shadow.

  ‘I want to go home. I want my mother. I want Eddy,’ Alan screams, and won’t eat his sandwich. ‘I want my Eddy,’ he wails while the sun moves across the iron roof and Matty bawls and won’t drink from Mavis. She’s howling too. She sort of tosses the baby at Lori, then goes outside to walk in circles.

  Lori plugs one bawl with a dummy, holds it in so Matty can’t spit it out while she stares at that twin, wishing she could plug his mouth with a dummy.

  ‘I want to go home.’ Alan’s voice grows husky as the day wears into night. He’s done so much screaming there’s barely a croak left in his throat.

  Donny comes in from work, he’s got a pile of shopping, even ice-cream, which Alan won’t look at – he’s got to be retarded. Anyway, Donny and Mavis try the old Valium in condensed milk trick but Alan’s stomach isn’t up to it. He gags, vomits on the kitchen floor.

  He’s burning hot, dry retching between croaks, and Henry is worried. They fight Alan’s funeral clothes off, get him into a cool bath and find out he’s Eddy, due to the mole being on the left cheek of his backside instead of the right. Stupid Eva has gone and got them mixed up. It’s too late now. While they’re talking about it, Alan fights his way out of the bath and runs for the space beneath the kitchen table and he’s stark wet naked, and no one runs around naked in this house after they’re about three years old.

  Henry is trying to get some underdaks on him, but that twin is slippery when wet, and he’s kicking back now. No one is going to save him so he has to save himself.

  ‘We’ll have to get the doctor to you, Alan,’ Henry says. That threat works well on the rest of the brothers, it’s usually enough for them to shake off appendicitis or even pneumonia, but it just makes Alan scream with new hope, makes him dart backwards like a yabby, get his borrowed underdaks on, pull on his borrowed yellow shirt. He’s getting ready for the doctor. God, give him a score of doctors. God, give him a brain transplant, just transplant him out of this place. He wants trousers. They haven’t given him trousers. He wants his expensive shoes. Jamesy is wearing them.

  Mavis has had enough of Henry’s eyes accusing her every time they meet head on. The fridge is a gold mine and she keeps digging into it. She gets out the ice-cream, starts looking for a spoon and not worrying about a bowl. Henry tries to take it from her, but she snatches up her whip. One way or another, she’s going to clear her kitchen and eat that ice-cream.

  ‘Will you stop your gluttony! Can’t you see what you’ve done here? Can’t you see what you’ve done to this boy?’

  ‘You did it, not me. You let them stay there when I begged you to bring them home. Two years ago I begged you and Martin to go down there and get them for me, but you wanted them to stay with the queer bitch, didn’t you? You wanted something better for them than me, didn’t you? I’m just a vile-mouthed, obese, eating bitch, aren’t I? You wanted something better for yourself than me too, didn’t you? Why don’t you go back to the bitch and try it three in a bed? I don’t need you. I don’t need any man. You’re all perverted bastards anyway. Get! Get out of my sight. Go and sing your love songs to her, like you used to, and give her “Mumma” while you’re about it.’

  Henry walks outside and the twin screams louder.

  ‘For God’s sake, will you shut up,’ Mavis moans. He wouldn’t know how, even if he could hear her. ‘Have some ice-cream,’ she says. ‘Here. Look.’ She offers him a spoonful.

  He won’t accept it and won’t shut up and Mavis is sweating and pale and sort of shaking, but she’s eating ice-cream, shovelling it in fast. She tries a different tack. ‘One more peep out of you and you’ll get the whip around your bum,’ she warns. ‘Do you understand me, Alan? You’re home, where you should have been five years ago, and you’re going to stay home with your family. Do you understand me? We are your family.’

 
; ‘I want my mother.’ He’s staring at her, screaming at her.

  ‘I am your mother, not that lying, money-hungry bitch. This is your home. All of these kids are your brothers, for Christ’s sake.’ She thinks she’s explaining things but he hasn’t got a clue what she’s talking about.

  ‘I want my own brother,’ Alan screams.

  Lori watches, listens from the doorway, seeing this twin as a hostage in some mad old war that has been going on since Eva and Grandmother Hilda first set eyes on Mavis. Maybe she was supposed to be a boy and she turned out a girl. Lori doesn’t know why that war got started but now some poor innocent little country has gone and got itself caught up in it and it’s going to get bombed; it’s going to get wiped off the planet.

  That peculiar feeling has come back, that weird eleven year old, lonely knowing feeling – like she’s a girl whether she wants to be or not. Like those twin boils under her T-shirt are going to turn into great Mavis boobs one day and she can’t stop them doing it no matter how much she flattens them with Neil’s singlets. And it’s like, this is a female war, and only females can fight in it, so she has to fight for that little country’s freedom or he’s going to be dead. She’s just got no choice . . . except her legs won’t move her to do anything. Her head is running wild with making mad pictures which she can’t keep in a straight line. They are all curving around things, curving into something different while her skin gets cold and goosebumpy, and the inside of her head sort of swells up like it will explode with doing nothing.

  Then Mavis has had enough of Alan screaming for Eva and not her. Her whip flicks at Alan’s round bare legs. It probably doesn’t hurt that much, but his scream is cruel, his air-intake scream more awesome than his air-out scream while his bare feet stamp the floor, running, running, running to nowhere.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, leave that poor little bugger alone, Mavis,’ Donny yells and he grabs at the whip. Mavis is out of control now. She’s bawling, shaking, screaming crazy stuff. She aims the whip at Donny and gets him a beauty around the ears. He grabs the end, pulls on it; he might be taller than her, but he’s a nine-stone weakling trying to pull a tractor.

  Henry tries to hold her whipping arm. Mavis shakes him off. She’s so powerful when she goes into her bad, mad, eating-mood place. All you can do is run from her when she’s in that place.

  Lori doesn’t think about what happens next. It’s as if her thinking has stopped stone dead. Just her feet are thinking. They move her forward, closer to the action.

  Then she’s 007 racing into a war zone, she’s grasping an arm, and Alan’s feet, already running on the spot, keep moving behind her. They are out the back door, over the fallen lattice, up the west verandah, out on the road while Mavis bulldozes through the front door with Donny and Henry behind her.

  The neighbours are watering their gardens again, glad of a bit of entertainment; there hasn’t been a thing worth watching on television since before Christmas. Lori looks at the shapes hiding behind shrubs, behind gates. With Alan still half naked, there is nowhere to go except bush. She swerves, heads across the road and towards the river, dragging him behind her. She could climb up a tree and Mavis would never get her, but Alan probably doesn’t know what a tree is. Lori keeps dragging him down the hard clay track.

  Henry hasn’t followed them, or Donny; those two won’t bring this fight out of the house. Mavis is following, slow but dogged. She’s still yelling too.

  They hide behind a gum tree, but when they see that she’s still coming, Alan starts forward again, dragging Lori by the hand. The river is before them, Willama West and the caravan park full of tourists on the other side, and suddenly those tourists are no longer the enemy, but safe territory. Lori waits. Mavis will give up soon.

  No way. Not today. Eva might have won the battle of their mother’s money but she’s not going to win the war of the twins. Mavis fought hard to get him and she’s not losing him now.

  Lori leads Alan down to the water’s edge and he’s more than willing; he drags her in, thigh deep, then deeper still because Mavis’s bellow is hitting the river, sort of bouncing around, coming from all sides. It sounds as if there are six yowies pursuing them when one is more than plenty. Alan, too scared to look behind, keeps pulling on Lori’s hand until her feet lose their grip on the sandy floor. He goes under, and comes up spitting water, his arms wrapped around her.

  ‘Swim,’ she says. He’s not swimming. His hands are grasping at her hair. Nothing there to grasp. He grasps her ears. ‘Swim, you moron!’ Her last word becomes lost in bubbles because they are both under, and suddenly the familiar old river becomes an alien, dragging thing.

  She cancels out Willama West, fights her way up, looks back at the home bank. Got to get him back to it. She’s been swimming since she was three; the only thing she wins at school is the swimming, but his weight is too much, and his grip is stopping her arms from moving. She’s dragged under again, dragged deep. This time she lashes out with a foot, connecting with the softness of his stomach. That breaks his grip. But the current snatches him, takes him.

  Fear driving her, her arms reach, her fingers reach, and her feet. One brushes the smoothness of bare leg, and her ankle hooks on while her hands grasp. She surfaces. He comes up bum first, and when she rights him with a hand in his hair, he bellows, gags on water while she searches the bank, hoping Mavis is still coming after them. She might float, might make a raft.

  Gripping the collar of his borrowed shirt, holding his head high, she shakes him, slaps him, and all the while the current is carrying them downstream. He bellows and gags and his hands grasp what they can while his legs lock up her own.

  She is tiring, and when they go down for the third time she knows they’re in trouble; the current has taken them too far from the bank. She hammers Alan’s head with a clenched fist, hammers until her air is gone and her lungs are bursting.

  Short war. Freedom fighter massacred. Little country wiped out. No bombs necessary.

  But this is Henry’s twin, his hidden treasure. She can’t let him drown. She drags one foot high. Kicks. It catches Alan in the throat. Beyond caring, she kicks him below the belt, just for good measure. And he stops fighting her. Rolling onto her back then, she exchanges her hold for a headlock. He is limp, easy to control. Almost floating.

  Dead men float. On television they call them floaters. Maybe she’s drowned him already. She’s thinking of Henry as they float towards the bridge. He’ll never forgive her. She took Alan into the river when she should have just kept running, gone bush, introduced him to a tree. The stupid moron, she thought he’d be able to swim. Everyone can swim.

  Got to trust the river now, not fight its current. That’s what Martin tells all the little kids. Never try to fight the current. Never panic if you think you’re in trouble, just go with the flow and keep your cool. Let the river carry you.

  Using one arm only and kicking slow, she goes with the current; it supports her, carries her down to the bridge where it sweeps her into the shallows. She’s surprised when her feet touch bottom, though they are useless, tired, scared feet. Her legs tremble as she drags Alan ashore and he’s a dead weight once landed. On her knees, panting, she gets most of him out of the water and calls it good enough, rolls him onto his stomach.

  ‘Wake up.’ She sits on his back, hoping to squeeze the water from his lungs. Her heart is racing like crazy. She’s trying to think, and she’s sucking air while her jelly limbs cry out for help.

  ‘Wake up, you idiot.’ The school showed everyone how you give people the kiss of life. She probably knows how. She might have listened, and maybe she’ll try it – for Henry. But she doesn’t have to because the last thump down on his back did the trick. He bucks her off then vomits and splutters out half the river, which at least got some water into him, because when he takes up his wail again, it’s strong, like he’d never even been dehydrated.

  ‘I want my brother.’

  Lori rolls onto her stomach, shaking her head in d
isgust. ‘Can you say any bloody thing else at all? You nearly drowned both of us, you moron.’

  ‘I want my mother,’ he screams.

  ‘Mavis is your mother, so shut up or you’ll get what you want.’ Grasping a handful of his wet hair she points his nose first towards the river and the dark trees beyond, then towards the town lights. ‘Which way do you want to go?’

  ‘I want my – ’ he starts. He’s sitting up now, his head swivelling, then one hand points to the lights. ‘I want . . . that way.’ Any way that doesn’t lead back to that giant lady and her whip has got to be the better way.

  Lori helps him to his feet when her own legs feel strong enough and for once she understands exactly how Mick’s bad leg must feel. Hers are as wobbly as jelly snakes.

  ‘Where was Aunty Eva and Alice staying?’ she says, taking hold of his hand and leading him towards the town.

  ‘Where were they staying.’ He stresses the were, like he’s correcting her! The bloody smartarse, posh-talking, howling, useless little mongrel! She should have let him drown for laughing at her birthday cake. Should have. She hates people laughing at her and hates it more if people correct her speech. She knows what’s correct. Henry always says things the correct way, just everyone else doesn’t, so why bother?

  She drops his hand. ‘Find them yourself then, you laughing, bawling smartarse.’

  He takes her hand again and holds on tight. ‘I don’t know where. It’s a motel and it’s got a swimming pool.’

  ‘They’ve all got swimming pools.’

  ‘No, they haven’t, because my mother asked on the phone.’

  ‘You’re a pure smartarse, that’s what you are. And they nearly all have got swimming pools. What’s its name? Is it in the town or out of the town?’

  ‘It’s . . . it’s . . . down the road to home, but after you drive off the freeway.’

  ‘Willama doesn’t have freeways. We’ve got roads. Come on. And you whinge one more time, or try and be a smartarse once more, and I’ll take you back to Mavis.’