Mahalia (9 page)

Matt formed a sentence in his mind that he thought he could speak if he got up the courage. Something had been worrying him for some time. ‘They couldn't – you know – take her away?'

It was something he dreaded. Such things, he'd felt up to now, were better not voiced. But he'd known all along that there were other people who might make a claim on Mahalia, and he needed to know the possibilities.

‘Of course not,' she said. ‘Emmy left her with you. And you're her father, you have the most claim on her – you and Emmy. You're not neglecting her, so they'd have no grounds to take her. Anyhow, I don't think they'd want to. Raise a baby. At their age?'

After a while he said, ‘And what about Emmy? If she decided she didn't want to be with me but she wanted Mahalia back?'

His mother hesitated, looked down at the surface of the table and then back at his face. ‘That would be more difficult,' she said. ‘She's Mahalia's mother.'

Eliza bought herself an old bicycle. Matt would see her riding round town in shorts and Blundstone boots, with shopping bags full of vegetables over the handlebars. She rode effortlessly and quickly, bike wheels whizzing over the roads, unaware of anyone looking at her. People were drawn to her look of careless confidence, and then they looked at her long legs and clever, dreamy, lion's face.

Matt got used to the bicycle in the front room. He looked forward to seeing it there. He would come through the front door, dragging Mahalia's stroller over the threshold and think,
Ah! Eliza's home!

In the kitchen Eliza sat at the table and shelled peas. She sat with her legs apart, using her skirt as a receptacle for the shells. Her neck, bare because her hair was caught up in a knot on top of her head, bent forward over the task.

Matt washed dishes.

‘It's probably none of my business, but,' said Eliza, ‘I can't help wondering . . . did you intend to have a baby so early in your life?'

‘Not really,' Matt replied. ‘It just sort of happened.'

He thought, then, that a lot of his life had just
sort of
happened
to him. But now that Mahalia was here, he wanted her – the part of his life that concerned her, at least – to be deliberate.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘Don't most people just let things happen to them? Do you think your parents meant to have you?'

‘I don't know,' said Eliza. ‘I was the last one. Maybe . . .'

She shrugged. ‘I haven't asked them. They never seem to speak to each other, and I don't have a lot to say to them either. I think I was a final thought. Or as people say, “a mistake”.‘

Matt turned back to the sink. He didn't like to think of Mahalia as
a mistake
. It was true that she was unintended, but they'd decided to keep her, hadn't they? They'd said that they'd
just love her, okay
?

As he worked Matt listened for Mahalia, in case she woke. He finished washing the dishes and sat down at the table. Eliza handed him a pod that she'd split open, and he took it and licked the peas out with his tongue. She watched him, and handed him another, just like that, casually, as though they'd known each other for years and didn't need to talk. The peas were sweet and cool on his tongue, and some were so tiny and unformed that they popped in his mouth. It was like eating pale, green fish eggs, flavoured like grass.

Once, Emmy jumped into the Richmond River fully clothed. She was there, beside him, on the grassy bank, and then suddenly she was in the water. The water she'd jumped into closed over her.

And then she was coming up for air, her mouth gasping like a fish, her hair streaming out behind her.

The Richmond River was a treacherous place, old and dirty. There were snags under the water, old tree branches with limbs supplicating like drowned men; dead dogs sometimes; old wharves covered in vines, their timbers rotten and spongy.

As she climbed out of the water, the freckles on her back showed through the wet thin cotton of her shirt. She laughed when Matt rubbed her arms, which were covered in goose bumps even though she swore she wasn't cold.

She said she did it out of curiosity. To see what it felt like.

She laughed.

Matt hadn't ever imagined that Emmy would jump into the river out of sheer curiosity. Once, he'd felt that he and Emmy were the one person. But he was wrong.

Matt wanted to look after Mahalia without help from anyone, even though he knew his mother would love to take her for a day or two, and Charmian would be happy to have her there as part of the shifting throng of children she cared for from time to time. He didn't want to ask for any help at all. And he hadn't. He felt it would be a sign of failure to ask for help.

He loved Mahalia. Of course he loved her. But he got tired, and bored sometimes. Eliza might sing to her in a spare moment and Virginia sit and play or spoon food into her mouth, but in the end caring for Mahalia was always his responsibility.

One day, when everyone else was out and the house seemed full of ghosts again, Matt wandered about restlessly. He had put Emmy's letter away under his clothes; it haunted him, but he couldn't bear either to read it again or destroy it. He hadn't felt able to reply.

Late-afternoon sunlight made particles of dust dance down the stairs, and it was so still that even the windchimes had taken a break. Mahalia was asleep. Her hands were flung in an attitude of abandon beside her face, which was as fat and shapeless in sleep as an old man's. Her eyelids flickered; perhaps she was dreaming.

Matt wandered out to the back yard and squatted down to look at Eliza's herbs. He reached out and pinched a leaf of a musky plant, putting it to his nostrils.

It was Friday night, the time when people went out to see their friends, ate food they hadn't had to cook, had a few drinks. Sometimes Matt experienced a great hunger, a need for
a good feed
, and he felt that need most urgently now. There was no decent food in the house. He craved bacon, and eggs, something greasy and salty and filling. There was nothing in the house that would satisfy that kind of hunger.

He got up quickly and went up to check on Mahalia. She hadn't had her after-lunch nap today, and had fallen asleep at last in the late afternoon. She was breathing quietly, her face abandoned to sleep. It wouldn't take him long to nip out to the corner shop and get some food to cook.

He hesitated. He'd never left her alone before, and he knew he shouldn't. Anything could happen while he was away. It wouldn't, but it could. But the shop was only a minute away. He pulled on a jacket and left the house quietly, pulling the door shut as stealthily and guiltily as a thief.

But once out, alone and unburdened for the first time since he could remember, his thoughts turned to the cheap burgers at the pub up the road. He could get a takeaway and be away just a few minutes more than if he'd gone to the shop. It would be a fast mission – a mission for a hamburger. A bacon and egg burger. Saliva spurted shamefully into his mouth at the thought.

‘Hey . . . mate!' It was Janno, one of the friends who'd melted away after Mahalia had been born. ‘Hey, come and sit down. We're all here . . .'

Matt let himself be drawn away from the food counter to the beer garden at the back, thinking
Just a moment. I'll say hello
to everyone and just get back.
And he found his back slapped, and then he was sitting down, and everyone was laughing and someone put a beer in front of him and he took a sip.

And he drank the whole beer, thinking all the time
Just
one more minute.
And then he was told how someone had a car and it was a
real beast
and someone else had a motorbike.
Filthy!

And somehow it was good just to laugh and forget about things for a while, and he did, and then his beer was finished and someone was suggesting that he have another one . . .

But he got to his feet, and dragged himself away to their good-natured jeers and catcalls, but reluctantly, because he wanted to stay and drink and just
forget!
for once . . .

The streetlights were on, must have flickered on while he was inside, unaware of how dark it was getting. He ran up the dark road, food forgotten, thinking of the dark house, his thoughts dark and pounding through his head.

When he got there the house wasn't dark; there was someone there, and Mahalia was screaming, and her screams sounded all the way down the stairs. Virginia carried her, talking to her and patting her back, but she wouldn't stop crying.

Mahalia's face was damp and accusing, and she lunged from Virginia's arms to his. Her eyes were swollen and mottled, and her breath came in gasps.

‘Hey, mate, what happened?' said Virginia. ‘I got home a minute ago and she was screaming her head off and the house was dark and she was alone . . .'

She stopped herself from saying more.

‘You know,' she told Matt, ‘if you wanted to go out for a while you should have asked when I got back. You just have to ask, you know.'

Matt held Mahalia's cheek against his face.
I'm sorry, sorry,
sorry
said his heartbeat.

9

On a day in the middle of spring, an ordinary day when he woke to the predictable rattle of the windchimes and Eliza singing in the bathroom, a day when Virginia's throaty laugh could be heard somewhere downstairs, when the front door slammed in the wind and someone shouted something unintelligible outside, Matt finally put Mahalia into her stroller in the middle of the afternoon and walked out into a world marked unexpectedly by wonder.

The last couple of weeks had been wet and gloomy after a rainy, influenza-filled winter, but today there was a breeze that blew the scent of orange blossom and jasmine through the air, and every single person Matt passed smiled at him and at Mahalia, and he had a feeling of undifferentiated sensuality and – yes! – sexiness, that was directed at no one in particular but rather at the whole world.

Everyone was affected by the unexpected warmth, the scent of flowers that filled the streets, and by the luck of being alive at this particular moment in this particular place. People sat and chatted to their friends in outdoor cafes, and Matt saw plenty of people that he knew, but he only stopped for a moment to say hello to them, for he was heading off to find Eliza at the Con.

There were two girls with baskets full of cellophane-wrapped rosebuds, giving them out, free, in the street, as a promotion for a florist. ‘Gee, thanks!' people said, and walked on. Young people, kids like Matt with no money, said to each other, ‘Hey, are they giving them out for nothing?' and ran to get one.

‘Get me one too!' yelled their friends.

One of the girls stopped to offer one to Matt, smiling at Mahalia (
everyone
smiled at Mahalia!): he accepted it and walked on, feeling enchanted, walking on air.

Outside the red-brick building of the Con, Matt came across Charmian standing in the street, puffing on a cigarette, her legs as sturdy and solid as a tree deeply rooted in the ground. Her belly stuck out confidently with such a
don't
care!
look and with such an air of belonging exactly to that spot that Matt waltzed up to her and handed her the rosebud, gallantly, though at the back of his mind he'd been saving it for Eliza.

She thanked him with great seriousness, and tickled Mahalia under the arms. Mahalia squirmed back in her stroller, almost curling up into a ball with pleasure. Then Charmian gestured towards an old Falcon station wagon parked in the street with a FOR SALE sign on the back and asked Matt what he reckoned they'd want for it. ‘I have no idea,' he said, and then he thought about it. ‘Couple of thousand?'

‘But Charmian, you don't drive,' he added, just as Alan drove up, tooting and grinning at Matt, to pick up his sister. Charmian dropped the cigarette in the gutter, stamped on it ineffectually, and got into the car and was borne off, with a wave of her rosebud.

In the grounds of the Conservatorium the currawongs threw notes into the air and caught them, keeping them afloat like balloons in a game at a child's party. It was a melancholy sound, though it shouldn't be. He was reminded of Emmy; it was the magic of the day that did it, the feeling that nothing else existed but this exact moment. He longed for her to be there and share it with him. Her face, which now so often eluded him, was called up sweetly and distinctly: the freckles scattered across her cheeks like a trail of fuzzy stars, and the way she stared so earnestly into his eyes just before she kissed him.

Matt heard music from the street, where a busker in front of the health-food shop played on a flute, and it was so sharp and clear and elusive that it reminded him of Emmy all over again. After his unsuccessful attempt to write a song about Elijah he'd never tried a song with words again, until one day, smitten with love for Emmy, he'd composed a piece of music on his guitar for her. But a bass guitar was the wrong instrument for her; it was too deep and rhythmic and plodding. This flute he heard now, it captured just the right quality. It was floating, elusive, enigmatic, and when you thought you'd worked out where the music was going it seemed to take a deep breath and move off in an entirely different direction.

As Matt stood there, stricken by memories, Eliza came striding down the steps of the Con, hand-in-hand with the man he'd seen her with before – Kent, or Brent, or Trent. Talking avidly to him, laughing with amazement, full of the happiness that seemed to have come upon everyone that afternoon, she didn't see Matt and Mahalia waiting there for her under the trees.

‘I need to tell you a secret,' Emmy had whispered to him one day. She tore up a fig, all leather and gritty seeds. ‘I reckon I'm adopted, but they won't say.'

Her evidence? She was an only child; and they were old when they had her; and married for years before that. She said she was not at all like them – she
had
to be adopted. She was defiant. She hated them because they wouldn't say. She had not asked, but she resented, anyway. ‘It is up to them to tell me!' she hissed, standing up and going over to the edge of the river. And she jumped into the water. She came up gasping. That was when she said, ‘I wanted to see what it felt like.'