Henry’s Daughter (6 page)

Mick walks in and Eva stares at his rubber leg in its metal contraption. Her mouth and cheeks screw into their puckered pout as she watches his throwing walk.

Then the twins stand. Together. Walk to
her chair. Together. ‘How much longer do we have to stay here?' one says, and the other one adds, ‘When are we going to the party?' No wonder Henry wanted to kiss them. They talk like posh poms.

Eva aims a single kiss between the two clean heads. ‘Be good, darlings.' She's not real. She's a television actress mother who always wears beautiful clothes and never gets them sweaty.

Lori is feeling
sweaty. Mavis made her put on her best T-shirt, but underneath it she's wearing a singlet that belongs to Neil. It's skin tight and cutting into her armpits, but flattening those pink bumps. She's standing in her favourite spot beside the fridge, looking down at those bumps and thinking maybe she should stick a pin in them and let the infection out. That's what Greg does to his pimples, except
for every one he squeezes, he gets two more.

Henry wipes sweat from his forehead with a tea towel as he counts plates, counts chairs. ‘Get the old stool from the verandah, boys, and the little chair from our bedroom, then set the table.'

It's an extension table, metal legs and wood-coloured laminex on top. It's long enough. Martin and Vinnie organise knives and forks while Henry scrapes saucepans,
scraping out every bit to the mess of plates all lined up on the sink and bench, and when they are packed with vegetables and chicken, the boys pass them around the table.

Lori takes her position on the old stool, which is against the west wall. She likes to sit with her back to a wall. Vinnie hands her a plate of chicken scraps and cabbage, a mound of orange pumpkin, watery beans, watery gravy
– and only one quarter of a roast potato!

She looks at the other plates. The solicitor has got two big bits of potato. He got the extra one that was supposed to be for her birthday, and she knows it, and she hates his stupid little moustache and his stupid glasses that make his eyes look like cheap chipped marbles. All the little ones only got one quarter of a potato. Even Mick only got one quarter,
yet he's going on thirteen. It's a big quarter though, bigger than Lori's.

Bloody solicitor. Mavis always says that they are thieves, and this one is a roast potato thief. She watches him pick up his fork, stab her potato, cut her potato, tuck it underneath his moustache. And she hopes he chokes on it, hopes it burns all the way down to his ferret belly. She eats her beans while counting potatoes
and bits of chicken, working out exactly what bits are not on this table.

Mavis hasn't got a lot of food on her plate, only a quarter of a potato, a small piece of chicken breast and beans, no pumpkin, no cabbage. She won't eat vegetables. She's already told Eva that the doctor said her weight is glandular so she has to prove it by not eating too much. There are three pieces of potato missing,
and a whole chicken thigh and drumstick. They'll be on a plate in the fridge, all covered with foil and ready to go back in the oven to get heated up as soon as Eva has gone.

‘Is there nothing the doctors can
do
for you,
darling
?' Eva says, taken in by what is on Mavis's plate.

‘Not a thing,
dear
.' Watch it. Mavis is getting plain sick of hearing that fake ‘darling'.

Lori glances from sister
to sister as she makes a puddle out of her cabbage, pumpkin and gravy then swallows the mess down fast. The meat goes down next; she saves the potato for last because she loves roast potato, loves it next best to crisp chips from the takeaway, loves it, loves it, and hates the solicitor, who is staring glassy-eyed at Mavis, like he's never seen anyone as big as her. No one has, except on television,
and so what? That's her funeral. And it might be soon if she doesn't lose some weight, or that's what the doctor said after Matty got born.

‘Have you seen a
doctor
recently, darling?' Eva asks.

‘I've got a two-week-old baby,
dear
.' There's that ‘dear' again.

‘What did he say?'

‘He can't talk yet. As you know, my kids are all smart but they're not that smart.' She's winding up. You can tell
by her eyes. They are getting that excited look.

‘He said that her heart will give out, that she'll be dead before she's forty,' Martin says.

‘Unless she has her stomach clamped,' Lori adds, mouth full.

Martin nudges her. She elbows him back. They are elbow to elbow, sharing the outdoor stool from the verandah.

Mavis's eyes narrow; she places a sliver of chicken in her mouth and her throat
muscles try to get it, toss it down but she forces herself to chew, keep chewing. ‘It's a genetic condition, passed down the male line – as you well know,
dear
.'

Eva looks down at her plate, cuts a lump of potato and puts it in her mouth. It's scalding hot and she can't spit it out onto her plate, which Henry says is bad manners, so she swallows it, gasps, swallows hard again, helps herself to
a slice of bread, eats it dry, breathes deeply, letting in some air which is almost as hot as the potato. At least that changed the subject away from stapled stomachs. The doctor also said tubes tied, and Valium tablets for sleeplessness, because Henry dobbed. He told about how Mavis does most of her eating at night.

The plates are emptied fast, except Eva's plate. It's still half full, and that's
wasted chicken, and wasted potato. Then Henry puts a supermarket apple pie on the table, with one candle stuck in its middle, and everyone sings ‘Happy Birthday' – except the twins. They look at each other, cover their mouths and start laughing. Eva tries to hush them with her eyes and when she can't, she takes two envelopes from her purse, hands one each to the boys. They hand them to Lori,
but the little mongrels are still laughing.

She doesn't even say ‘Ta,' just gives those two a dirty look. Maybe those envelopes have got money in them, not just cards, and she'd like to open them and look but she's not going to give those laughing little mongrels the satisfaction of seeing her accept their money.

Anyway, Henry is cutting the pie into wedges, then cutting a second one, serving
it with ice-cream. Nelly from over the road always has ice-cream in the freezer and cones in her cupboard, but Mavis can polish off four litres while she watches
Play School
, so Henry only ever buys it when he's going to serve it all out. He doesn't even leave a lick for later and Mavis's big eyes threaten to murder him because he's only given her a tiny wedge of pie and a baby dollop of ice-cream.

Lori eats her giant serve slow, dipping from the outside, working in, licking the spoon clean between each dipping while she watches Mavis sling her serve down; she can't pretend to chew ice-cream.

Tea is poured into a mess of cups and mugs. Martin passes Eva a chipped cup, notices the chip, snatches it back and replaces it with an unchipped mug. He hands the chipped cup to the solicitor, who
sees chip, thinks germs, turns the cup, holds it in his left hand and drinks from the unchipped side. Alice pushes her chair back, lights a cigarette just to keep Mavis company, then she's puffing smoke and drinking her tea, not caring about the crack in her mug one bit, due to her being used to biting heads off dead rats.

The ferret glances at Eva. He's in shock, shocked silent. It's plain obvious
he just wants to get those papers signed and get the hell out of this place. Henry offers him more tea. No, thank you. He eases his chair back.

Eva glances at her watch. That solicitor is probably charging her by the hour. ‘Well, goodness me. Just
look
at the
time
,' she says. ‘If you could get the
papers
out now, Mr Watts.'

‘You're still gullible, Eva, still greedy. Gullibility and greed don't
mix well.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Thanks for bringing them home. You can go now,' Mavis says, helping herself to one of Lori's envelopes, ripping it open. There's a five-dollar note in it. Lori rips the other one open, finds another five, but Eva's chair is squealing back from the table, her eyes darting to Alice, to the solicitor; their eyes are sort of saying ‘we told you so'.

‘We agreed last
night, Mavis.' Eva lowers her voice. ‘The divorce, and the adoption papers. You said you wanted – ' She turns to Henry, who is standing behind his chair, swallowing spit. ‘You said you wanted – '

‘Spit it out. We've got no secrets in this house – unlike some.'

And Henry finds his voice. ‘Go outside now, boys. All of you, outside. You can finish the dishes later. Take Alan and Edward with you.'

‘They're staying right where they are, Henry!' Mavis stamps her foot and the rafters shake and any termites who might have been thinking of moving in for a quick chew pack their bags and run. The brothers stay and the twins stay.

‘I don't
understand
. You said . . . you
said
, Mavis, you
said
you'd
sign
, that you have no
desire
to disrupt – '

Lori scoffs the last spoonful of ice-cream, wipes the
rim of her plate clean with her finger, her eyes watching the play.

‘I'd be up for child abuse signing those poor little buggers over to you.'

‘She will sign, Eva. You will, Mavis. I've got nothing here to offer those boys.'

‘You've got me,' Mavis says. ‘And I'm a lot more than “nothing”, Henry.'

‘They'll visit us twice a year, Mavis. That's what we agreed last night. We'll still watch them
grow.'

‘Ah, go outside and sing your bloody love songs to your chooks. You can't see what's right in front of your own eyes, for Christ's sake.'

Mr Watts reaches for his briefcase but Mavis is fast when she wants to be. She pounces on it, tosses it out to the verandah. He and Neil follow his case.

‘We can do a lot for those boys,' Alice finally breaks her silence, and Mavis turns to her. Almost,
but not quite, looks at her.

‘I know exactly what you can do, you bloody old bull dyke. Exactly. And I know how you do it too. You weren't invited to my house, now get out of it, and take your girlfriend with you. I wouldn't trust you pair to raise a Rottweiler with rabies.'

Voices are running together. The brothers move away from the sink, take up positions on the safe side of doors. The twins,
who don't know a thing about survival, have got a chair and they are sticking to it. They look bored, lean heads on hands at the table, see Alice walk away, pleased to walk away. Lori hears the car motor, then the car horn. Beep-beep-beeeep-beep.

‘I'll pay you fifty thousand. Fifty thousand dollars, Mavis. That will make a lot of difference to your lives. Think of it. Think of your children.'
She's talking fast now. She's sounding more normal.

‘It's too little, too late, you cold-eyed, lying bitch. And I am thinking of my bloody kids. Now get out of my house before I have to throw you out.'

Eva ups the price. It's like when the house down the street got sold at auction. ‘I'll give you a cheque in your hand now, Mavis. Sixty-five thousand.'

‘I'm not too sure of the going price of
child's flesh these days,
dear
. Have you had an appraisal recently?'

Henry is standing there with a saucepan full of hot water, and by the look on his face, he's thinking of letting Mavis have it. ‘They don't know us,' he wails.

‘Then it's past bloody time they got to know us, isn't it?' Mavis roars. She's getting mad. She's on her feet and looking for a weapon. ‘And if it hadn't been for that
screwed-up bitch, they would have known us five years ago when we went down there to bring them home. Get her out of here, Henry, before I have to do it myself.'

Eva starts towards the twins. Mavis blocks her with her bulk and Eva backs off.

‘We're booked into the motel for the night, Henry. We'll discuss this again in the morning. Come, boys.'

‘They're staying where they belong. It's you
who is leaving.'

‘Oh, you know me better than that, darling.' That ‘darling' sounded like a curse word, but every word coming out of the sisters' mouths is a curse. ‘You certainly know me better than that.'

Then Mavis is a combine harvester coming to mow Eva down. ‘I know you too bloody well, don't I? And that's the trouble. I know you and that old bitch were too money hungry to leave that house
and find a bit of bloody pride. I know you hated my guts from the day I was born, too. I know a lot about you, Eva.' The harvester has picked up a slashing blade from the bench. ‘Get! Before I shove this through the bloody bankbook you call a heart.'

Eva is at the brown curtain. Through it she can see the passage leading to the open front door, but she's not going anywhere until her possessions
are out, and those twins are on the far side of Mavis and her carving knife.

‘You have the audacity to call this hovel a house. Do you really think you can take those boys away from me now, bring them back to
this
, let them rot here with the rest of you? Dear God. You don't know me at all, Mave.'

‘Do you want me to tell the kids what I do know?'

‘You're repulsive. You're an insult to womanhood.
If Mother could see what you've come down to, she'd roll over in her grave.'

‘And if it had been up to me, she wouldn't have had a bloody grave to roll over in. I would have left her to fossilise on the garbage dump like the hard old piece of pill-popping shit she always was. Get out!'

Words are flying backwards and forwards now, words dredged from the past Lori can no longer follow, though
she's trying hard. The twins, fingers jammed into their ears, are looking from Eva to Mavis, from Mavis to Henry. Then the harvester heads for them and they've got enough sense to get out of the way. They go under the kitchen table with Neil and Timmy.