Mahalia (19 page)

‘Yes,' said Matt. George nodded, as if he was unsurprised by this.

Anton hadn't said a word while they ate, and now he got up from the table, with a stricken expression on his face, and went outside onto the veranda. Matt saw him through the window. He went to a veranda post, and, very slowly and rhythmically, started to hit his head against it.

George shook his head and looked at Matt. ‘He's got his troubles all right. Doesn't say anything about them. I've seen him knock his head against trees, tear at his hair. But it passes. It passes.'

George set Mahalia down onto the floor and got up to refill the teapot. ‘I don't know. He came to live in the shed a while back – asked me if he could fix it up. I try to be kind to him – what else can you do?'

George looked at his carefully set table, with the neat cloth and the bone china crockery set out just so. He said, ‘My wife, Marge, she died two years back. But I keep things up. You have to keep going.'

He refilled Matt's cup. ‘You can't drop your bundle,' he said. ‘Can you?'

The days were long, and by the time Matt got back to the van there were still hours of light left. He looked at the sky. It seemed that the rain would stay away. Matt dumped the chokoes and pumpkin onto the table. They could eat pasta with vegetables for dinner, borrow a few tomatoes from Kevin's garden. Even after the huge afternoon tea Matt was hungry again, and tired after the walk back with Mahalia in his arms.

He took her up to Kevin's bathtub, ran some water in, and popped her in for a proper bath, with soap, washing her hair as well. ‘You can't drop your bundle, Mahalia,' he told her. She grinned back at him and hit the water with the palms of her hands, sending it spraying up into her face.

He wrapped her snugly in a towel he found on Kevin's clothesline. Wherever they were, this was their routine. Bath, then food. It was what he knew. It was what he was good at. He didn't know what he'd do without the weight of her in his life. He whispered his old refrain to her as he towelled her dry.
Bundle of joy. Ball and chain . . .

Kevin came out of the house with a package in his hands. ‘Hey, mate,' he said. ‘Charlie killed that pig of his, gave me all these chops. Can you use some?'

Matt cooked them on an improvised barbecue while it was still light. He sat Mahalia on a log where she wriggled impatiently. He'd slicked her hair down with a comb and she looked scrubbed and tidy. But she couldn't sit still long. She hopped off the log and began running around, still full of energy.

‘Hey, Mahalia!'

She stopped, and turned to look at him.

‘We'll go back tomorrow, hey? Tell your mum that she and I can share looking after you.'

When the chops were cooked, Matt put them onto two plates and cut Mahalia's meat up into strips. They ate them with their fingers. Mahalia chewed at each mouthful of meat till there was no juice left in it, then spat it out onto the side of her plate.

‘It's good, eh? This is the sort of feed we needed.'

Mahalia looked back at him seriously, her fingers poised in the act of picking up the next juicy morsel. It reminded him of the way she'd looked at him when she was born, as if she knew everything. She'd reminded Matt of one of those long-distance swimmers – of that girl who kept getting into a shark-proof cage and swimming all the way between Florida and Cuba. Her face puffy and covered with white, waxy stuff, Mahalia looked as if she'd come a long way. When she looked into Matt's eyes she seemed as wise as someone who'd been alive for thousands of years.

Now she was thirteen months old. And in that time he felt she'd taught him just about everything he knew.

18

Emmy came over the crest of the hill in the middle of the morning, shielding her eyes from the light with her arm. Matt turned to watch her approach; she squinted from the sun, or from shyness. He was caught by surprise by her unexpected arrival, and didn't know what to say.

Nor did she. They stood staring at each other, shocked by their sudden proximity alone in a place where they'd held so many hopes.

Mahalia's voice, urgent and surprised, came from inside the van. ‘You'd better come in,' said Matt. The words had an ordinary sound to them, and he said them in a way that wasn't hostile, but he wished they sounded a little more welcoming.

Mahalia was exclaiming about a blue butterfly she'd noticed trapped against the window. Matt pushed the window open and the butterfly blundered its way out. Mahalia cried, her mouth turned down with the disappointment of her loss. ‘Shh,' he said, picking her up and starting to sing one of the songs that Eliza often sang to her. Unwittingly, it called up Eliza to him, with her strong determined walk and her voluptuous way of commanding the space in the kitchen.

‘You've learned to sing,' said Emmy. Her voice sounded strange. Matt handed Mahalia to her, and smiled, his way of making her welcome. Mahalia made no effort to struggle or to get away; Emmy was familiar to her now. She looked up into Emmy's face and smiled, putting her finger to the corner of her mother's mouth. ‘You funny little thing,' Emmy said softly, as if to herself. And then, more loudly, turning Mahalia round to face her squarely, she said, ‘You're a funny little thing. Do you know that?'

‘I thought I might find you here,' she said to Matt. ‘That Eliza girl said you'd just packed up and gone; she didn't know where you'd be. But I kind of guessed.

‘It seems a long time since we lived here,' said Emmy, her voice wistful. She sat down on the bed and leaned back instinctively, her fingers remembering, and discovered a pair of star-shaped earrings in the corner of the shelf above the bed. She'd always put them there when she slept. She stared at them sadly and then tucked them into the pocket of her jeans. ‘Funny . . .' she said.

‘What?'

Emmy lay back and closed her eyes. She shrugged. ‘Nothing.'

Matt sat down beside her. Mahalia bounced up and down on Emmy's stomach, laughing, the butterfly forgotten. Emmy, her eyes still closed, winced, but made no effort to push her away.

Emmy was so close Matt could see the buttery texture of her skin, smooth and pale beneath the freckles. Her hip bones protruded above the waistband of her jeans, her stomach a concave hammock between them. He was reminded of how frail she always seemed, her bones too evident under her skin. He felt he could reach out and touch her but he didn't dare. It had been too long now.

He remembered how she used to whisper to him in the night, in the dark, when she thought he was asleep. Her mouth against his back. So soft that she thought he didn't hear.
I love you
, she'd said, so faintly the words were like an expelled breath. When he was with her he'd become as transparent as glass. The words had drifted onto his back and fogged it up, like a warm breath on a cool window.

Having her so close again was almost unbearable. He remembered things he'd tried for months not to think of.

The first time they'd made love (the sky through the trees, a twig against his buttock, an ant crawling along his arm, but who was noticing?), Matt had stopped suddenly and looked at Emmy, and said brightly, ‘Hey, do you want to have a baby?'

He'd meant it as sarcasm, as a warning, as a hint that perhaps they should
use something
, but Emmy's face was serious when she said, ‘I don't mind.'

Emmy's face, when he was close to her like that, was different to the face he'd known before. It was her original face, the face she'd had before she'd even existed, before there was any world for her to exist in.

‘I don't mind,' she'd said, and from then on, though they didn't speak of her, Mahalia was searched for beneath their questing fingers, underneath their skins. Mahalia was something they could
do
with their bodies that no one else (or no one, not even themselves) had any control over.

Once Matt found his body patterned with the imprint of grass, he had lain so long with Emmy asleep on top of him, her head on his shoulder – a whole afternoon. A tick wandered along her thigh, drawn perhaps by the whiteness of her skin and the warmth of her naked body.

They were both so thin that their hip bones clashed. Emmy tasted saltily of the sea that he felt sure she must come from in another life, and when he stroked her freckled back he imagined colours playing beneath her skin, rose pink and sky blue, moving in waves, and a silvery iridescence pulsating in time with her breath.

He was relieved when she slid away from him and off the bed, to stand in the doorway of the caravan. She went outside, and he followed a few moments later with Mahalia and found her looking out towards the distant hills. The rain had cleared the air and made everything sharply defined – the hills, the high wisps of white cloud, and the leaves on the trees. Even Emmy's face in profile was so clear against the blue of the sky that Matt felt he could reach out a finger and run it down the outline that separated Emmy from the rest of the world.

When they lived here in the van, Emmy had rubbed her expectant belly with oil; he remembered the shape of it, heavy, like a raindrop about to fall. Or like a piece of fruit, her bellybutton the place where the stalk had come away. They had both been expectant then, expectant with hope and full of idealism.

Now, against the clarity of the sky, she said: ‘I was too young. We were both too young. We shouldn't have had her.'

Tears spurted suddenly and unexpectedly into Matt's eyes, blinding him. ‘Don't
say
that,' he cried out, ‘Don't
say
that!
' Mahalia, startled by the anguish in his voice and the sudden tension in his body, started to wail. Matt turned his face away so that Emmy couldn't see him; his nose was dripping suddenly and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

‘I'm sorry,' said Emmy. ‘I'm really sorry.'

Matt said, ‘I'm not. I'm glad we had her.' His love for Mahalia was so pure and heavy that he thought he'd faint.

He caught hold of one of her feet; she stopped crying and her toes curled up with pleasure as he grasped her foot firmly. The weight of her in his arms reassured him. ‘Let's sit down,' he said.

He and Emmy sat cross-legged on the ground, facing each other. Mahalia squirmed out of Matt's grasp and went away to explore.

‘There's no chance of us getting together again, is there,' said Matt. It wasn't a question.

Emmy shook her head. ‘It's gone past that.'

‘I know.' Still, Matt felt sad. He glanced across to where Mahalia was picking up stones and looking at them. She was the one he had to think of now.

‘You should have seen her, the first time she walked,' he said. ‘I might easily have missed it, but I was there.' He smiled at the memory. ‘She was holding herself up with this bloody washing basket and pushing it along. And then she saw me and let go . . .'

He felt the beginnings of tears in his eyes but he blinked them away. He refused to cry.

‘I'm sorry I missed all that,' said Emmy. ‘But I'm back now.'

Matt nodded his head grimly, staring at the ground as he spoke. ‘I just want you to explain,' he said slowly, ‘why you went away.'

‘I'll try,' said Emmy.

‘Going down to stay with Charlotte – you know – my godmother – really helped me. I could tell her things I couldn't even tell you.'

Matt looked up at her. ‘Like what?'

A defensive expression appeared on her face; Matt was startled to see that she was afraid to tell him.

‘What?' he repeated gently.

Emmy's expression became determined. ‘Well, like when Mahalia was born I felt really ashamed because I didn't fall in love with her the way you did. She was just this little bundle that cried and ate and pissed and wanted too much from me. And you're supposed to love your baby, aren't you? Everyone says so. But Charlotte reckons that's just a myth. She said she didn't fall in love with her second baby till he was about a year old. Lots of women feel like that, she says.'

‘And now you feel better about her and you want her back,' said Matt hoarsely. Emmy didn't reply.

‘Well,' he said, ‘I'm sorry you got depressed and couldn't handle having her. And I'm sorry I couldn't help you more at the time but you never really said what you were feeling. I don't know. I thought you were just tired from looking after her or something, and I tried to do my bit.' He got to his feet and went over to look out at the valley laid out below.

‘So what will you do with yourself?' he asked, turning his head. ‘Any plans?'

‘Yeah!' Emmy came over to him, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. ‘I want to go back to school. Do Year 12.' She swept her arms out wide, embracing the whole valley that stretched below them like a model landscape. ‘And then – the sky will be my limit – I could go to uni, become a vet, or a famous racehorse trainer . . .

‘I'll live with my parents for a while,' she said, more soberly, ‘while I finish school. Staying with Charlotte – my godmother – was great. Helped me work out a lot of things. Do you know what? I was wrong in thinking I was adopted. Charlotte says that Mum and Dad tried for ages to have a baby, and then finally, when Mum was forty-two, and had given up all hope, she got pregnant. Charlotte says that's why they always fussed over me too much and made me feel stifled. I always hated how
old
they were compared with everyone else's parents . . .'

She caught sight of Mahalia, who was sitting on the ground putting stones into an old plant pot she'd found.

‘Hey, Mahalia!' Emmy called. Mahalia looked up, and Emmy ran across to her and crouched in front of her. With a mischievous look on her face, Emmy began to tickle Mahalia's bare sole, and then walk her fingers up Mahalia's leg. ‘Incy-wincy spider, coming to get you . . .'

Mahalia watched, smiling, mesmerised. Matt felt the familiar wave of pain pass through his body and reach the top of his head. Emmy could charm anybody. And if she thought she could just come back and take Mahalia away from him . . .