Read Online Henry’s Daughter by Joy Dettman - Free Book Online Page A

‘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 feelingsweaty. 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, exceptfor 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 potatoesand 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.
    â€˜Is there nothing the doctors can do for you, darling ?’ Eva says, taken in by what is on Mavis’s plate.
    â€˜Not a thing, dear .’ Watch it. Mavis is getting plain sick of hearing that fake ‘darling’.
    Lori glances from sisterto 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.
    â€˜Have you seen a doctor recently, darling?’ Eva asks.
    â€˜I’ve got a two-week-old baby, dear .’ There’s that ‘dear’ again.
    â€˜What did he say?’
    â€˜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 tellby her eyes. They are