Mahalia (10 page)

Matt remembered what his mother had said about letting Mahalia get to know Emmy's parents and he telephoned them and arranged to visit. Her mother sounded surprised, but suggested they come the next day.

Eliza helped him to get Mahalia ready. She tried her out in a top she'd found at an op shop. It was a black T-shirt that said
girls kick ass
in white letters. But it was a little on the large side still and didn't give the effect that Eliza thought was appropriate, so she settled for a pink shirt with buttons down the front.

‘Do you take her to see her grandparents often?' she said.

‘This is the first time', he said, ‘since Emmy went away. And before that, hardly ever. They didn't approve of us having her.'

Eliza wiped away some grime from Mahalia's mouth and kissed her on the forehead.

‘Why are you taking her to see them, then?'

‘Well, because I want her to know the people she's related to.' He thought of Otis's easy-going family. This visit with Emmy's parents mightn't work out but he wanted to try. ‘She's got a whole life to live. It can't just be her and me all the time.'

Eliza looked up at him quickly, then reached out for the brush and tidied up Mahalia's scanty hair.

‘What are they like?'

Matt thought about it. ‘Ordinary. Fairly old. I never know what to say to them.'

Eliza put a pink headband with a bow on top around Mahalia's head. ‘There, don't you look gorgeous!' she said, sitting back and gazing admiringly at Mahalia, who grinned back and clapped her hands together.

Matt and Mahalia took the bus to the brick suburb on the hills above the town. He remembered the neat brick house, the flower gardens with rock borders. He'd tripped over a garden border once when he went there late to climb in through Emmy's bedroom window. It had been the room of a little girl, with dolls and fake flower arrangements and a frilly bedcover.

Emmy's mother met them at the door; she must have been watching for them. ‘Hello, Matt. Hello, Mahalia! What a big girl you are getting to be.' Mahalia hid her face.

Emmy's father came down the side of the house, wiping his hands on a rag. He had retired, and one of his hobbies was tinkering with an old Austin he'd bought. He took Matt to see it, and Matt dutifully leaned inside the car to take a look, Mahalia on his hip. The car smelt of ancient leather and cracked varnish.

Inside the house, Matt sat in the living room with Mahalia on his knee. Through the hatch into the kitchen he saw Emmy's mother hesitate over the china cups and saucers and decide upon the informality of mugs. She brought them in on a tray and placed them out on the wooden coffee table with coasters under them, and set down a plate with cream biscuits neatly arranged.

Mahalia was bored. She grizzled against his shoulder and hid her face when she saw Emmy's mother looking at her. Matt would have liked to pick her up and show her objects around the room to amuse her but he didn't like to take the liberty in someone else's house. Besides, there were pictures of Emmy there, and that would have been awkward. No one had mentioned her at all.

Matt took a sip of tea and smiled at them both. ‘She's got teeth,' he said, not able to think of anything else to say and putting his finger into Mahalia's mouth as if to demonstrate.

‘She'd probably like to chew on something,' said Emmy's mother, disappearing into the kitchen to get a crust of bread. Matt sat Mahalia on the floor while she ate it. Emmy's father ate a biscuit thoughtfully and said finally that he ought to be getting back to his car.

Emmy's mother seemed to relax a bit after he'd gone. She held out her arms to Mahalia; Mahalia grinned at her and blew her a bubble. Emmy's mother went out and came back with a teddy bear, small enough for Mahalia to hold easily. She took it and bit it immediately on the head.

Matt said that they ought to be getting back. They went out to say goodbye to Emmy's father, who offered to drive them back in the Austin. ‘The bus is fine,' said Matt. ‘Anyway, I need to shop on the way home.'

He surged along the road to the bus stop, feeling that he'd made an escape.

Mahalia began not sleeping at night.

She didn't seem to have anything really wrong with her. Perhaps her teeth – you could never tell. From here on it seemed to be all teething.

She would wake, and cry, and he'd change her and rock her and walk her, and she'd fall asleep, only to wake half an hour or fifteen minutes later. Her cries wrenched him awake, and each time it became harder and harder to get up to her.

It wasn't like the time when Matt couldn't sleep, the time he walked her through the streets, walking off his demons, the time when the black dog followed them. Now it was Mahalia who didn't want sleep, and Matt longed for it.

He would kill, he thought desperately, for sleep.

Eliza appeared, exhausted and rumpled, at his door one night, and said, ‘Do you think she's going to sleep,
ever
?' and then went off again, to put her head under her pillow.

Sometimes Mahalia woke and didn't cry. She could pull herself upright using the bars of her cot now, and she stood there and called out to him until he answered, and got up and took her into his bed. But she wanted to stay up and play. Their light was on and off all night.

During the day he was like a zombie, staring at nothing, not hearing what people said to him. He shopped for food in a daze. Sleep obsessed him. His body ached for it. When Mahalia slept, finally, sometimes during the afternoon, Matt lay on the bed and willed the world not to make a sound that might wake her. He hated any outside noise with a passion.

Though it was spring, the world threw cold, wet, windy mornings at them. With Mahalia awake and grizzling, Matt tore himself from the black warmth of the blanket covering his head and took her downstairs for breakfast. The house was dark and silent and damp, the worn lino gritty with dirt. Food was short. Matt discovered an egg in the door of the fridge and made some pancakes with powdered milk and the rest of a packet of wholemeal flour he found at the back of the cupboard. They were heavy and flat and chewy, but Mahalia picked them up in her fingers and ate them with great hunger and enjoyment. Her exclamations of delight did little to cheer him up in the grottiness of his morning.

Later, he picked up all the spare change he had lying around his room and decided to get the last ten bucks from his account to buy food for the rest of the week. He dressed Mahalia in a green nylon jacket with a hood; it was still too big and the long sleeves annoyed her. As he fastened the clips in the front she tried to squirm out of it. ‘You want to stay dry, don't you?' he said. ‘Come on, you've gotta stay dry', roughly tugging it down and pulling the strings of the hood closed so tightly that her little face looked trapped.

The pleasure Mahalia had felt at her rubbery pancake breakfast had gone; she started to grizzle as he strapped her into the stroller and continued to whine as they went out the door and down the street towards town. Wind blew a light spray of raindrops across their faces; Matt tried to shut his ears to her grizzles by concentrating on everything else around him. A car with a faulty muffler burbled along the street; a bicycle whizzed past, its wheels spraying water. Matt put his head down against the rain and watched his feet pound the dirty footpath, and Mahalia's pathetic cries became a monotonous complaint inside his head, reminding him of his deficiencies as a father. They had rotten food and lived in a grotty old place. He had to wheel her out through wind and rain to flatten his bank account in order to eat. Matt's foot slipped on a dog turd. He scraped the soles of his sneakers off on the wet gutter but the stench followed him down the street. A red apple with several bites taken from it lay in his path and he kicked it aside. The footpath ended at a laneway and Matt jolted the stroller down into the roadway so violently that Mahalia began to wail.

‘Shut up, Mahalia! Give us a break!' Matt gripped the stroller and the handles bit into his fingers. He lurched the stroller to one side and shook it.

Mahalia was crying softly now, a pitiful sound, lonely and bewildered. Matt knelt down in front of her and stared into her face with dismay. A line of clear snot ran from her nose onto her upper lip. Her face was damp from tears and the rain; he wiped it gently with his sleeve.

Mahalia stopped crying and stared into his face. Her eyes were round and dark and steady.
We're in this together
her look said.

‘Yeah, mate,' he said quietly. ‘Let's get this shopping out of the way.'

10

Virginia looked after Mahalia one night so that Matt could get some sleep. She slept in his room, so that Mahalia would have the familiarity of her own place.

Matt crawled into Virginia's bed and conked out.

He awoke in the night when he heard Mahalia's voice, wakeful and happy, talking to Virginia, babbling, imitating the sounds Virginia made, having a conversation with her. He went back to sleep.

In the morning Virginia staggered into the kitchen with a rueful expression. ‘Boy, that kid can stay up. I think we should try and change her sleeping pattern or something. She just doesn't want to sleep at night, that's all. Just where does she get her energy from? – that's what I want to know.'

And yet there were times on balmy nights when the house was still and Mahalia slept solidly and certainly, when Matt felt that the house bellied out and contained them all in a firm, floating globe.

He thought of the way his hands would cup Emmy's pregnant belly in sleep. It was a natural object: a pear, an egg, a drop of water grown heavy and about to fall. It was architectural: a vault, a dome, a container filled with promise.

So the old shop held them and rocked them. He imagined the walls curving outwards, the building becoming so globular and light that it could float. When the wind blew it rocked and groaned and stretched its timbers like a ship at sea. He would see it from outside at night, the lights shining out like beacons. Inside it was filled with light and shadows, and Eliza's purposeful footsteps, and Mahalia's soft, milky breath.

Eliza watched him. He could feel it. She watched him through the back door as he hung out Mahalia's clothes on the line, sitting at the kitchen table, her feet on the rungs of a chair next to her, her hand stilled in the act of pulling back the heavy weight of hair. She turned her head away at his approach and got to her feet, disappearing up the stairs.

‘Do you want to take Mahalia up to the swings?' she said one day, her head in the fridge, rummaging for food.

‘Okay.'

The park was at the end of a narrow street near their place. Mahalia kicked her legs eagerly and rocked the stroller back and forth as they went. She had grown out of the sunhat Eliza had originally found for her, and now she had another one, ferreted out at St Vinnies by Matt this time. It was securely held by a tie under her chin: he had learnt a thing or two about buying clothes for a baby by now.

They walked down the street slowly, enjoying the rambling country feel of the place. Inhabited almost entirely by people like themselves, it was a place where untidy lives were lived temporarily and happily.

The timber houses had ancient, flaking paint and stood high off the ground to keep out of floods, for the river was close by. They'd been filled in underneath just anyhow with old doors and windows, to use the extra space. For months after a flood the underneath of the house would stink of river mud. The gardens surrounding all the houses were wild and there were no fences between them.

Eliza paused between two of the houses where there was a path leading into the garden. ‘Do you want to come in and look?'

‘I don't know,' said Matt. ‘Wouldn't it be intruding?'

‘They won't mind.' Eliza shook her head and smiled at Matt's hesitation. She unstrapped Mahalia from the stroller and carried her up the tangled path, ducking her head to avoid branches.

‘Permaculture, right?' said Matt.

Everything grew in this garden, all mixed together. Paths rambled round beds filled with flowers and herbs and vegetables, all heavily mulched with straw. There were fruit trees growing amongst the vegetables, citrus and mangoes and pawpaw, and rainforest trees as well. Eliza bent down to pick a cherry tomato from a bush, and she squeezed the juice into Mahalia's mouth.

‘Yum, eh, Mahalia?' She turned her head to say to Matt, ‘I used to live here – for a while.'

‘It's like the Garden of Eden,' said Matt. ‘Why did you leave?'

Eliza grimaced. ‘Luurve,' she said, in an exaggerated way, as if that explained everything. ‘I mean, I was in love here. It didn't work out.'

‘Aren't you afraid . . .'

He was about to say,
of running into him here
. But she understood, without him needing to finish the sentence.

‘He left too.'

‘Oh.' Matt found himself not wanting to run into an old love of Eliza's, even if it
was
over.

Eliza smiled and waved to some people in the garden behind the house next door, which was a continuation of the garden they were in, and led Matt around the house and out onto the street again. The park was only a short stroll away now.

They were the only ones that day in the dappled park. Mahalia was still too small to sit on a swing by herself, so Matt took a seat and held her on his lap, pushing it gently forwards and back with his feet. Mahalia laughed, and urged him forward with pushing movements of her body. It surprised him how strong she could be. She willed things; knew what she wanted to do.

‘I'll probably feel sick in a while,' he said. ‘I've never been able to take swings.'

‘Oh, then I'll take over,' said Eliza. ‘Just say when you'd like me to take her.'

She sat on the swing next to them, her long legs pushing her higher with each arc, till Matt thought she might go right over the top of the swing. It made him dizzy to watch.