Mahalia (17 page)

Because Matt was there, Otis's fingers reached out for his guitar, and he sat playing chords while Matt listened silently. Otis was still looking fit and sharp. ‘Do any good', said Matt ‘with that girl you were interested in?' and Otis laughed, shame-faced. ‘What girl?' he said, and then, ‘Nah, no good. Forgotten about her already.'

‘Emmy came back,' said Matt. ‘She's staying with her mother.'

Otis took this in silently, and Matt was pleased he didn't ask more, had known he wouldn't, that was why he'd been able to mention it.

‘Try out for that band?' Now it was Otis's turn to be nosey. Matt told him about Mahalia's spectacular vomit and Otis chuckled.

‘The guys were okay about it,' said Matt. ‘Pretended it didn't matter. I left straight after. Still feel bad.'

‘Good case?'

‘Old Gibson Les Paul.'

Otis winced.

‘Dark red crushed velvet lining.'

‘Man, man . . .'

Matt felt happier after seeing Otis, and afterwards went to wait for Eliza at the Conservatorium. Whiling away the time, deliberately not thinking of Emmy, he sat out under the big camphor-laurel tree and watched people come and go. A short sturdy girl in a striped top and beret paced back and forth and talked into a mobile phone. A man in a Hawaiian shirt unlocked his bicycle, got onto it, and wobbled off, adjusting his sunglasses. A three-legged dog hopped along after its dreadlocked owners, with that hopeful expectant look that dogs have. It was a well-dressed dog, wearing a bandana rakishly around its neck; the triangle of the scarf hung down and concealed the scar where the missing leg should be. Its owners had bought fish and chips for tea. ‘D'you want to eat down by the river?'

‘Yes, let's!' They got into their kombi van with their dog and drove off.

Matt watched them go. Everyone was purposeful and knew what they were doing except him.

‘Dog!' said Mahalia urgently, pointing after the departing van.

‘Yes, that's a dog,' he said automatically.

Mahalia considered for a while and then she had another thought. ‘Horse!' she exclaimed, and pointed into the distance.

‘Yep, we'll go and see the horse another day. Maybe tomorrow, eh? They're still your favourite animal, aren't they? Your mum likes horses.' From now on, he realised, whatever was decided, Emmy would be a fact of their life. He saw no point in not mentioning her.

He strapped Mahalia back into her stroller. If Eliza didn't come out soon he'd leave, and make his way home by himself.

But then she came down the steps, wheeling her bicycle rapidly with a sort of
whooshing
motion that threatened to run away with her when she reached the bottom. She steadied herself and saw Matt standing there. Smiling, and without a word, she fell into step with him, wheeling her bike along the footpath beside Mahalia's stroller.

They passed a young guy only a bit older than Matt. Like Matt, he was thin, dressed in thin, poor, op-shop clothes. He wheeled an old bicycle with a toddler in a bike seat on the back. The child wore a helmet, and peered out from it like a little soldier. The father bumped the bicycle deliberately up and down as he walked. ‘Is that bouncy?' he asked.

‘Yes!' said the child happily.

‘I thought it might be!'

‘I could get a kid's seat and helmet for Mahalia,' said Eliza. ‘Then she could come riding with me. Should be able to pick something up at a garage sale.'

‘Yeah!' said Matt. Then he had another thought. ‘Or I could bring my old bike in from my mum's place, put a kid seat on that. I've been meaning to for ages. That'd get us around a bit easier, instead of the stroller.' He still hadn't been to try for his learner's permit.

They went home across the rattly metal walkway on the bridge and looked down at the slow weedy water. Matt cooked dinner and they ate it sitting on the edge of Eliza's herb garden. They left some for Virginia, who would probably come home late, starving hungry, and rave on in her jittery way while spooning food straight from the pot.

‘Hey, come for a walk, I'll show you something,' said Eliza, jumping up and holding her hand out to pull Matt to his feet. He carried Mahalia on his hip and they went down the lane till they came to the house with the permaculture garden, the place that Matt liked to think of as the ‘Garden of Eden'. Eliza walked up the side and beckoned him to follow. The ground was damp from rain that morning.

‘I noticed this the other day. The rose apples are ripe.' Eliza led him to a spreading tree with an umbrella-like canopy. She reached up and plucked a yellow fruit about the size of a small plum and tore it in half. ‘Taste this.' Matt tasted, and his taste buds recoiled. It was like eating perfume.

‘It's like Turkish delight,' said Eliza. ‘That rosewater taste. That's why it's called a rose apple. It's a kind of lilly-pilly, I think.' She offered some to Mahalia, but Mahalia turned her head away and wouldn't try it.

Eliza took Mahalia from Matt and held her, singing, softly at first, and then louder, improvising a song around Mahalia's name, looking into the baby's eyes and swinging her on her hip. Mahalia started to sing too, a soft tuneless sound,
la la la
.

Matt glanced up at the wooden house that towered above them on stilts. Eliza had lived here once, and had been sad here, yet she could still come back and enjoy the place.

‘You said you were in love here,' said Matt. ‘How did it go wrong?'

Eliza reached for another rose apple. ‘I'm not exactly sure. You get together with someone and it's wonderful at first and then it's just little things, isn't it? You find you're not so compatible any more. At least, that's the way it was with me. I was so
in love
at the start that when the end came I felt that I'd been hit by a truck.'

16

With Emmy back, but nothing resolved, Matt tried to get on with his everyday life, scrappy and aimless as it was. He didn't like to let Mahalia out of his sight now, but he let Virginia take her out shopping with her, as she used to do. Why should things be different now?

But after they'd been gone from the house only a little while Matt longed to see Mahalia so much that he went out to see if he could find them. He hunted for them in the supermarket, peering down every aisle, his stomach a knot of irrational anxiety. He caught sight of Virginia's lanky body ambling along behind a trolley, her cap pushed up to the top of her head. Alarmed because he couldn't see Mahalia in the cart, he loped up the aisle, dodging shoppers, till with relief he saw her. She was pushing the trolley, singing a tuneless song as she went, and it went this way and that, bumping into people, steadied occasionally by Virginia, who grinned and apologised to the people they'd bumped into.

Virginia halted when she saw Matt and her face registered an instant realisation of why he was there.

‘Hey,' said Matt. ‘Fancy running into you two.' He picked Mahalia up and hefted the pleasing weight of her in his arms.

‘Yeah,' said Virginia, grinning at him generously, allowing him to save face. ‘Had to come in for something, did you?'

It seemed he was always losing her. Emmy took Mahalia to stay with her and her mother for the day. She came in her mother's car. ‘You can drive?' said Matt.

Emmy smiled at him with that old smile, happy with herself. ‘Charlotte taught me,' she said. When he looked uncomprehending she added, ‘My godmother? When I stayed with her?' Then she laughed, and strapped Mahalia into the baby seat in the back, and with a smile and a wave and a backwards glance at him she ducked behind the wheel, started the engine, and drove off.

With Mahalia gone, Matt disgusted himself by getting drunk. He met Elijah, who had a fortuitous bottle of Bundy rum swinging from his fingers and his dog Jess following faithfully at his heels. They drank way too much, down by the river, and when Emmy delivered Mahalia back late in the afternoon he hoped she couldn't smell his breath. He spewed it all up some time in the middle of the night. ‘Mate, just look at you,' said Virginia, shaking her head in the doorway of the bathroom. She helped clean him up and put him back to bed.

A few days later Emmy took Mahalia to stay the night with her. It would be the first night they'd spent away from each other. Matt felt Emmy was a stranger as she waited in his room while he packed up some of Mahalia's things. She still hadn't talked to him about what she wanted to do.

Emmy went out with Mahalia on her hip and a bag filled with her clothes. He listened desolately to her footsteps sounding all the way down the stairs and then, impulsively, ran after them and caught them up. Emmy looked up at him enquiringly.

‘You'd better take her sunhat' he said, pulling it down from a cluster of hats near the door.

Emmy took it and her eyes met his briefly and frankly. ‘Look, Matt, I should tell you something. I'd like Mahalia to come and live with me.'

Her face must have registered his dismay. She hesitated, and said, ‘Think about it, yeah?‘

The front door closed behind them.

Emmy's words beat a rhythm in his head. He went over and over them until they ceased to have any meaning. He paced the streets, seeing nothing. He didn't bother eating that day.

To distract himself he went out that night to a pub where Eliza was singing with a band. He didn't drink. He was stone-cold sober in a surge of people tipping back beer and spirits. The smell of alcohol nearly made him sick again.

‘Don't worry about the other day,' said Kent, appearing in the crowd and slapping Matt on the shoulder. ‘And Brian, he's cool – said he was about to replace the old lining in that case anyway. We're rehearsing again next week, so come round. Maybe you could get a babysitter?' Matt nodded, but playing in a band was the last thing on his mind.

Eliza's face was different on the darkened stage. Her face always had that look of intimacy when she sang, that
lostness
to the world that Otis had when he played the guitar, but tonight it seemed to Matt to be especially for him. He stood still and gazed at her from the edge of the room. Seeming to sense him, she swung around and looked him straight in the eyes for a moment, smiling. Then she turned away again, back to the room, and closed her eyes for a long time, listening only to the sound of her own voice.

Matt pushed his way outside, where his sober head reeled under the stars and the familiar summer air breathed upon his face like a faithful dog.

He went home; the house was silent. The back yard was lit only by the light shining out from the kitchen. Matt crouched in the sandpit and ran Mahalia's little cars around and around. He huddled into himself, made himself into a squatting, unthinking, hurting ball.

He'd sat there a long time, dazed and sad, when footsteps sounded in the kitchen.

‘Matt? You home?'

‘Yeah.' He stood up. Eliza was in the doorway, stark against the light from inside the house.

‘All alone in the dark?' she said.

It was a long time until Matt spoke. He didn't trust his voice.

‘Emmy wants Mahalia,' he said.

She understood at once. ‘What are you going to do?' She went to put an arm round his shoulder but he pushed away from her.

He went to his room, full of desperate energy, and took all of Mahalia's clothes, jumbled as they were on the floor and in washing baskets, and folded them into a pile in a corner of the room. He stacked up her books and toys next to them, and stripped her cot of sheets.

He had no idea why he was doing this. He was packing her up. Tidying her away. Imagining the place without her. The windchimes on the veranda rattled without pause. The sound sent an itch of irritation right through him and he marched out and reefed them down and tossed them aside.

He went to Mahalia's tidied-away things and crouched in front of them, reaching out suddenly with desperate hands and scattering them everywhere.

All this he did in complete silence. He could hear only his own breath, panting softly.

He thought of living without her and a wave of pain passed up through his body in a ripple. He wanted to run somewhere to stop himself thinking, but had no idea where he could go.

So he switched off the light and lay in the dark, his breath coming in quick, deep gasps. He listened to the sound of his own breath as if it belonged to someone else. He heard Eliza come up the stairs and go to the bathroom. The door of her room closed quietly.

Matt curled into a ball with his face in the pillow. His eyes flooded with hot tears, and there came a strange, high sound, a kind of squeak, that he knew was coming from himself. He listened to it as if it had nothing to do with him at all. The sound changed to a sob; he felt his whole body was an instrument for the sound and the pain that played through him. He swallowed it all inside himself until he could bear it no longer.

He found himself standing in his dark room; the lights from the street threw moving shadows across it.

And then he was at Eliza's door. It had not been properly closed and he pushed it gently open. The room was moonlit and silent.

But she was not asleep. She sat up in bed and said, ‘Matt, what's wrong?'

He stood there, his eyes squeezed shut. He was still making sounds that seemed not to belong to him.

Eliza threw back the sheet. ‘Oh, Matt . . .'

He felt her hands grip his elbows from behind and lead him to the bed where she sat him down on the edge. She didn't put on the light, but moved swiftly to her bedside table where she lit a squat yellow candle. He could smell melting wax, and the room was suffused with a warm glow, as if she had lit a tiny sun. He was aware that the noise he'd been making had stopped.

Though it was a warm night he was shivering. He saw Eliza's concerned face and the white satin of her nightdress as she plucked a red and black checked rug from an armchair and wrapped it round his shoulders. He huddled into it. She knelt in front of him. In the light from the candle he imagined for a moment that it was a lion kneeling there. He reached out to touch her face, expecting fur.