Exclusive extract from the June Great Read, Henry’s Daughter (Macmillan $30) by Joy Dettman.
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 ness 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 scaling 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 every 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, dripping 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 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.’
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