Mahalia (13 page)

The man saw Matt looking at him. He grinned at Matt and said, ‘That's a beautiful baby you've got there!'

‘Thank you,' said Matt. ‘You too!'

A little way further on, Matt stopped the stroller and knelt down in front of Mahalia, looking into her face. ‘Hey, Mahalia, hey,' he said, softly and happily. ‘Looks like you've got your old man back, ay?'

They went home down the laneway of the house that had the oranges and the mandarins. Matt jumped over the fence, bold now, and he and Mahalia ate mandarins directly under the tree, their faces held up to the spring sunshine.

12

The back door was always open and it seemed to have always been summer. Matt sweated even at night, lying sleepless in the heat, slapping at mosquitoes. But there were compensations. Scents wafted from other people's yards, and there was a mango tree over the back with heavy clusters of white flowers. It was a magical time when miracles seemed bound to happen.

The front door, too, was left open most of the day now. Matt put up a wooden barricade so that Mahalia couldn't crawl out onto the street. She used it to pull herself up and stood at the barricade waving to passers-by. People stopped to talk to her, and she charmed them with her smile and the conversations she carried on in her own language.

One night when Eliza was out somewhere, Matt and Virginia went down to the pub on the corner for a good feed. They sat out in the beer garden and Matt was content to let Virginia rave on to him, with the fairy lights in the trees and the sound of the recorded music and the voices and laughter, until Mahalia fell asleep under his feet with her bottom in the air.

Then he wasn't sorry either to pick her up and sling her, still sleeping, against his shoulder, and walk the short distance home with Virginia. He put Mahalia into her cot and washed some of her clothes by hand and hung them on the veranda outside his room. With his belly still pleasantly full of steak and onions and mashed potatoes, he lay down on his bed and wrote to Emmy.

We are living in a house with nice people
, he said.
Mahalia is
crawling like anything and she can pull herself up if she hangs on to
something. She can move about by holding on to bits of furniture. I reckon
she'll be walking soon
.

But the contentment that allowed him to begin a letter to Emmy left him as soon as he wrote those words, for they made him realise how much of Mahalia she was missing out on. He screwed up the piece of paper and began again, a
nothing
letter, he thought, as he folded it into an envelope and addressed it.

Then the feeling of longing to see Emmy again came upon him suddenly, as it always did. It lay treacherously in wait, coming when he least expected it, at times when he was feeling halfway happy and content with his life. It was a feeling of such loss and longing that it was sweet, in the way revenge is meant to be sweet, and he wallowed in it, and let memories of her fill his head.

Late that night, when all the world was quiet and Matt still hadn't fallen asleep, he got out of bed and went onto the balcony, the summery air on his face. He stood and gazed through the lattice-work into the street.

The streetlight hung golden, beset by fluttering moths. The silence was broken by a car squealing past, and the yap of a dog. The windchimes tinkled, slow and insistent, gathering in the wind to an excited rattle.

Matt imagined that the house had stored sounds during the day, to release them into his mind in the dead of night. He imagined he heard the sound of Eliza singing, slow and throaty, or Virginia's laugh, turning involuntarily into a cough. Mahalia's voice was there too, her ‘da . . . da', a wondering sound at the magic of her own language.

He stood gazing and remembering till he forgot himself with delight, to be brought back by the sound of Mahalia, waking.

On Christmas Day Matt went up to his mother's. She had invited people over as usual and made it into a real celebration, with wonderful food and lots of music.

Emmy had sent a present for Mahalia to his mother's address. Matt didn't feel celebratory when he helped Mahalia open it. It was a plush horse, and of course, she loved it. He hadn't written to Emmy of the horses down the road and his letter hadn't mentioned any of the important stuff of their everyday lives, but she'd picked just the right thing.

There was a note for Matt in with the present.
I'm thinking
of you both heaps
, it said.

Matt had taken it outside to read, and he crumpled it quickly and shoved it deep inside the compost heap.

Some mornings Matt slept so heavily that almost nothing could wake him except Mahalia. He was wired for the sound of her voice; sometimes a cough in the night could wake him, and he would lie there long after she'd gone back to sleep, floating half-awake in the darkness.

Eliza's friend from the Conservatorium, whose name Matt finally got into his head was Kent, came to visit, and Eliza took him to her room, where Matt heard the maddening murmur of their voices for hours, and too much laughter. Kent finally left before midnight, but was back again the next day. He stopped on his way through the house to listen to Matt and Otis jamming (Matt still on Alan's old
heap of shit
, as Otis affectionately liked to call it) in the front room. ‘Hey, you boys aren't bad,' he said. ‘You should do something with your music. Get a band together, or something.'

Otis grinned and dismissed the idea. ‘Yeah, man. As if.'

‘Neither of you plays bass, do you?' said Kent. ‘Our player's leaving in a month or so.'

‘He does,' said Otis, nodding towards Matt. ‘But his guitar's out of action for a while.‘

‘Well, if it gets into action, think about it,' said Kent, looking into Matt's eyes as if he meant it. His eyes were dark and frank and kind; he had a maturity about him that made Matt feel too young. Unhappily, Matt could too easily see why Eliza wanted to spend time with him. The planes of his face which his shaven head accentuated, his muscular body and his careless confidence showed already the kind of man he'd matured into. There was nothing fuzzy or unformed about him at all. Matt fiddled with the tuning of the crap guitar so as to avoid blushing.
Him
, in a band, when it was Otis who was the real musician.

Mahalia had been standing at the barricade to the street and wailed when Eliza and Kent stepped over it on their way out.

Eliza turned and bent down to her face and kissed her. ‘See you later, honey bun!'

Matt's mother had given Mahalia a book for Christmas. It was called
On the Way to the Barn
and it was full of farm animals. She soon learned to snort like a pig and moo like a cow. She liked the horse the best, and she patted it, the way she patted the horses in the paddock up the road.

Eliza liked to read it to her. She bundled Mahalia up into her arms and carried her off to her room and into her bed. Matt came to the door one night and stood there uncertainly, until Eliza patted the bed on the other side of her, inviting him to join them.

Matt couldn't help but be aware of Eliza beside him. He smelled faintly her perspiration from the hot day. It wasn't an unpleasant odour. He closed his eyes and listened.

‘What kind of noises can you make today? Can you moo like a cow, grunt like a pig?' Mahalia and Eliza mooed and grunted. With his eyes closed, the voices seemed strange, as if they were coming to him a long way through a tunnel. Finally they faded, and Matt slept.

‘I'll read
you
a story,' Eliza told him one night, when Mahalia was asleep.

They lay on her bed together, at a safe distance.

‘My mum used to do this,' said Matt. ‘Read to me.‘

Eliza smiled to herself and began.

She read him a story from her childhood. It was called
The Day Boy and the Night Girl
, and it was about two children who were raised by a witch, the boy never to see the night, and the girl never knowing what the day was. The boy was never allowed up after sunset and the girl was kept in an underground room and slept in the day, while at night her only light was a dim lamp hanging from the ceiling.

One night, when she was grown-up, she found her way outside and thought that it was daylight (for she had heard of it) because the moon was so bright. And the boy, now grown also, defied the witch and stayed out after dark, but he was terrified of it. They met, and helped each other to escape the witch, and taught each other to live at the other time of day.

Eliza finished reading and they lay there, side by side, still not touching. It seemed that the magic and mystery of the story had entered their world. A breeze came through the window, carrying sounds from the house behind them. A child called, ‘Mum? Can I sleep outside tonight? In my tent?'

‘I think I'm a night boy,' said Matt. ‘I love the night. I think it's beautiful.'

‘Then I'm a day girl,' said Eliza.' I love sunshine. It helps my herbs to grow.'

Matt lay stretched out on her bed, his hands behind his head. He smiled to himself. He felt comfortable, and at peace.

‘How about telling
me
a story?' said Eliza. She rolled over onto her side, her head propped on one elbow.

‘All right,' said Matt. ‘I'll tell you the story of how Mahalia got her name.'

When Matt had gone to stay with his father for the first time (the only time!), he'd asked himself
why
and
how
. How come his mother, a person who got her fingernails grubby with earth, who had built her own improvised house, who said, ‘Lipstick rots your brain,' came to be with a man whose toaster wasn't sullied with one single crumb (or not for long).

But there was a day in that long week, a day when both of them had lost all the will to go out and pretend to have a good time with each other, when his father said, ‘You tell me you're interested in blues, listen to this. It's not blues. It's gospel.'

And his father had put on a record of a woman singing, and the sound poured into Matt's eardrums and scratched them and filled them with treacle all at once. It was high and ecstatic music. It
swung
with feeling. It was the most joyful sound Matt had ever heard.

When it had finished, Matt's father sat quietly, and the silence that filled the room was different to any silence that Matt had ever experienced, and there was such a look on his father's face. It was a look that Matt had forgotten until now, but which suddenly all added up. It was a look of passion, and it made him alive and irresistible.

‘That was Mahalia Jackson,' his father said. ‘Always remember that name.'

And he said the words in a whoop of joy: ‘MA–HA–LI–A. M
A–HA–LI–A
!'

When Matt told Eliza the story of his visit, and how his father had never really been in his life, she sat up and listened, watching his face the whole time. ‘I didn't know he mattered so much to you,' she said, when he had finished.

‘Everyone's father matters,' he said, turning away.

There were small miracles everywhere. Matt saw them, with his easy, optimistic outlook and his eye for the singularity of things.

The kids down the side street where he walked Mahalia to the park stuck a whole packet of incense sticks in two rows in the dirt outside their ramshackle wooden house and lit them. The cheap floral odour permeated the air, and the smoke drifted about in skinny lines from each stick, and Matt smiled to see the kids hobbling about in bare feet in their stony front yard, admiring the effect.

He saw a flock of sparrows on the rim of a garbage bin, jumping first one way and then another, a moving posy of birds, a circlet of brown feathered flowers.

And in the grounds of the Conservatorium where Eliza sang, he saw, from down the street, how two gigantic old fig trees rode the wind like a pair of galleons, their leaves an enormous ballooning sail against a darkened storm-cloud sky. Magpies tossed themselves in and out of the high branches, carolling to each other. Matt stopped to look.
Well,
shit
, he said to himself, and he picked Mahalia up out of her stroller. ‘Look, Mahalia, can you see those trees? You'll go a long way before you see trees like that again.'

Mahalia waved her arms at the sky. Her mouth was like an O.

‘Gain,' she said, ‘gain,' like a maestro commanding a performance.

‘No, Mahalia, you mightn't see a sight like that again,' said Matt. Because he knew that you never always looked. The trees might be like that again but he might never again notice them.

Mahalia was growing so fast that each day brought something new she could do, something he would never see again. He marked each day off in his mind, the date emblazoned in his heart, wanting to make the most of it, remembering how Emmy had said that it was a sin to let days pass unregarded. He allowed his mother to take photographs of Mahalia without protesting that she was fussing too much. He understood for the first time why people wanted to capture moments on film. However imperfectly the camera might record it, a snapshot was something, an aid to the memory. And he thought that one day Emmy might want to see them.

Mahalia had grown into such a
person
that it shocked Matt at times, the force of her will, her desire, her determination to do things. Mahalia was unstoppable, she was like a weight rolling downhill, gathering in momentum.

The day she took her first steps Matt realised there were moments so fleeting and so memorable that a photograph could never do them justice.

He was sitting in the front room downstairs browsing through a magazine while Mahalia played. She had pulled herself up onto the barricade at the door, and amused herself by throwing things out onto the footpath. She threw her cup with the spout and lid. She threw one of her teddies, and she threw the board book her grandmother had given her. Then she started to cry, for she realised she wanted them back. Matt was about to haul himself up to fetch them for her when a woman walking past stopped and picked Mahalia's things up and gave them back to her, one by one. ‘There, is that what you want?' she said. Mahalia smiled, showing her teeth, and the tears that clung to her face looked superfluous now. She threw all her things onto the floor and waved to the woman as she continued down the street.