Mahalia

by Joanne Horniman

  Someone will see, he thought, as she kissed him for the third time, the wind whipping their hair, in full view, he imagined, of the whole of Lismore.

  ‘Don’t be silly. No one ever looks up here. No one cares about this tower. Only me, and I’m up here, aren’t I?’

  2

  His mother’s house was a patchwork, made up of bits and pieces: odd items of timber, doors, windows – more doors and windows than any house needed, collected from second-hand building yards. Despite the surfeit of doors elsewhere – doors that led nowhere, just plugged a gap in the wall – the living room opened straight out onto the veranda with no door at all, just a wide gap. When it was rainy or cold Matt had to shut the door of his room to stop the draught blowing in. From the outside, the house looked like a collection of old windows and doors that someone had left in a pile to see if it could rearrange itself into the semblance of a house of its own accord, and somehow it had. Somehow it all worked.

  Matt felt that his life was like that. In optimistic moments he felt that he and Mahalia had all the bits there and somehow they’d make something of it one way or another, even if it did get a bit draughty sometimes.

  And at other times he wasn’t so sure.

  Matt had left school a year ago. There was never a time that he remembered liking it, not even in kindergarten.

  Not that he wasn’t smart. Growing up in the bush in the house that his mother had cobbled together from odds and ends, he knew the names of all the birds that came to the garden by the age of four, those of a dozen rainforest plants at five; he could read then too, and write tyrannosaurus and sort the shells they’d collected at the beach into their different types. At six he went to school and learned how profoundly boring it could be.

  He met Emmy at the age of fifteen, and they became a team, nicking off from school together to spend the day lying on the river bank, or hitching over to the beach at Byron Bay. They loved the way the long stretch of beach was different every single time, the way the colour of the water changed with changes in the sky, and they always found shells and strange bits and pieces the sea had thrown up. Matt put them in his pockets and they started their own collection of beach treasures, each of them a memento of a particular day. Emmy said you should never let a day pass unnoticed, that it should be memorable and particular and special. She said it was a sin to let time pass unheeded and unregarded, to waste it like that.

  After Matt left school, Social Security sent him to countless courses designed to give him life skills and build his self-esteem, but what he wanted was a job of the kind that didn’t exist any more: a job where you didn’t need any book learning and where you could get by on good honest toil.

  He planted trees in reforestation projects and helped stabilise riverbanks, but all that was left at the end of these short-term jobs was the dole – again.

  When Emmy left, he had to declare on his form that he had separated from his partner. And he found himself on the single supporting parent’s pension.

  There was the inevitable interview with the social worker; hours spent with Mahalia strapped in her possum pouch on his chest while he waited to be dealt with. He paced and rocked her, murmuring soft words. He watched numbers flash onto a screen and checked them against his docket. His head screamed at the mindless daytime TV; the monitor was placed on a bracket up near the ceiling so that no one could get away from it. He sat in one of the detestable grey plastic chairs and stared at the grey walls, and somehow his feelings transferred themselves to Mahalia, for she stiffened her body and screamed and screamed under the fluorescent lights.

  Finally it was all over. He had said all the right things, and he had smiled (he couldn’t help himself; it was part of his nature to smile). He said his mother could help him with the baby. But all the time he felt sure he didn’t need help, just the money necessary for them to stay alive. In the end that was all that was forthcoming anyway.

  Matt’s mother had the bluest of eyes, and still wore her hair long, adding henna to soften the appearance of white strands in the black. One of her friends trimmed it for her. ‘Now that you’re forty, maybe you should think of cutting it short.’

  His mother looked stricken. ‘I will one day. But not yet. Not yet.’

  Her hair was her only vanity. She wore no make-up, and dressed always in shorts or jeans and men’s shirts she bought at op shops. Even at work she got away with a tidy variation of her uniform, as she called it.

  She said that lipstick rotted your brain.

  If she wasn’t wearing her gumboots they were on the back veranda, caked in mud. Her fingernails were often filthy with earth from gardening, or oil from the engine of her ute. She slashed lantana and planted trees and vegetables.

  She and Matt had been alone all their lives. His father hadn’t wanted children, so she’d brought Matt up by herself, with no contact really, no support. ‘Though I wouldn’t have minded if he’d wanted to take part in you,’ she’d said. She made it sound like a bushwalk she’d invited someone to.

  Matt had felt the loss. It was such a lonely house, with just the two of them, even though his mother had filled it with music and flowers and the beautiful things she made. Matt had missed the ordinariness of daily contact with a father. He determined when he was very young that he would see his own children grow up.

  His mother had done everything she could to see that he didn’t miss out. She took him to ovals and taught him to kick a soccer ball around. He remembered her running and running, her black hair flying out behind her, leaping and kicking at the ball, her legs in long red and green football socks. She brought home books on paper aeroplanes, and they sat at the kitchen table together folding and experimenting. Matt had the best paper aeroplanes of any kid he knew.

  There were friends, lots of friends, and people who stayed with them for extended periods. There were men who stayed the night in his mother’s bedroom sometimes, but none had been allowed to share their life. There were men who were just friends. One of them, Peter, had taught him to play the guitar. But as far as Matt could see, these men weren’t much different from his mother: they struggled with cantankerous vehicles and slashed and planted and watered in their spare time. They always had half-completed houses with many pairs of muddy gumboots on the veranda.

  When Emmy and Matt knew they were going to have a baby, they went to her parents and told them they intended to keep it.

  Keep Mahalia, as it turned out.

  Emmy’s parents as good as told them they were mad. Evil, even, to consider it. Which Matt supposed was why Emmy wouldn’t have anything to do with them, afterwards.

  ‘But what can you offer a baby?’ they said. ‘You have no job, no money, no prospects, nothing. You’re too young. You really should think about what you’re doing. You can have it adopted. There are thousands of couples who could give a baby a good home.’

  ‘But we want it,’ Emmy told them, ‘and it’s ours, and we’ll love it, and that’s more than a lot of babies have. We’ll give it love.

  ‘We’ll just love it, okay?‘

  When Emmy had first gone away Matt had watched anxiously for a sign that Mahalia sensed it. But he’d been so numb himself that he couldn’t be sure. Now, at his mother’s place, he still felt subdued and watchful. He listened to the sound of the rain on the roof and felt that the world was muffled and enveloped by it.

  His mother stood on the veranda for a long time. Earlier, just before nightfall, she’d waited for the first bats to come flying out of the forest, watching them stream in a thickening dark cloud towards the horizon on their nightly quest for food. Every now and then one would turn back and fly against the tide, and then just as suddenly resume the forward journey. The sight of her watching their vigorous hopeful flight saddened Matt; he thought she brooded too much about the world. Leaning on the rail, she stared out at mist and cloud. She held her hand, palm upwards, out to receive the rain.

  When Matt was much younger and he saw her sad like that, he would put his
arms round her and kiss her, and that always made her happy again. Now he stood awkwardly on the veranda in the pale light from the living room with Mahalia in his arms. He said, ‘D’you want to come and kiss her goodnight? We’re going to bed now.’

  That night Matt slept beside Mahalia in his childhood bed, a bed full of comforts and memories. His mother had come in to kiss Mahalia goodnight, and he remembered how, even quite recently, when he was about fourteen or fifteen, she used to come and sit on the edge of his bed and chat, before he went to sleep – not about heavy stuff, just about what they’d both been doing during the day, and funny stuff, like the time a young kookaburra had crashed into one of the windows and nearly knocked itself out, and how embarrassed it had looked, while it sat there recovering before it flew away.

  But tonight his mother had stood uncertainly in the doorway of the room before going, looking as if she wanted to say something only she wasn’t sure what, and it was she who’d looked embarrassed.

  Matt put Mahalia next to the wall, so she couldn’t fall out. He missed Emmy beside him at night, the way she curled into the shape of his sleeping back. He longed for the earthy smell of her hair when he woke next to her in the morning. His whole body hurt with missing her, and that was something new to him. He hadn’t known that the lack of someone could be felt like a real, physical ache.

  Mahalia slept like someone gathering strength to get on with her life. Her fists were bunched up beside her face, her eyes tightly closed. It was sleep with purpose.

  Matt lay awake staring into the dark for a long time, his hands behind his head. Outside, it still rained lightly, sounding like whispers on the iron roof. He knew that someone else in his situation – a young man with his life ahead of him – would leave the baby with his mother. But he wanted Mahalia. He had always wanted her. He felt that he’d wanted her even before he had known of the possibility of her. There was nothing else to do but to care for her; he had helped look after her from the start anyway. But it was different on your own. Already he felt the lack of someone to turn to, to say should we . . . or perhaps . . .

  Matt was the one who was always thinking about how they should care for her. Emmy, who used to be so decisive, would always say vaguely, ‘If you like . . .’ or ‘I don’t mind . . .’, so he ended up making the decisions, even about stupid little things, like buying cream to put on the rash on Mahalia’s bottom, or giving her extra water in a bottle on a hot day.

  Matt slept at last. Like Mahalia, he needed to gather strength to get on with his life. She woke in the night, as she always did, and he switched on a light and stumbled out to warm a bottle. He held her in his arms and fed her in the dark, propped up in the warm bed; her eyes were dark in the night, and she sucked with the same intensity that she put into everything. When Mahalia was new-born she had looked as helpless as a squirming kitten, and Emmy had whispered to him, ‘I never want anything to harm her. I feel so scared for her.’

  But Mahalia had a tenacious capacity for life; she fed and grew and learned. When Matt was alone with her in the dead of night like this he felt a great surge of feeling for her. We’re in this together her serious gaze told him, and he was grateful that she was in his life. Whatever happened, he didn’t want to wish her away.

  Mahalia stopped sucking and he knew she’d fallen asleep again. He pulled the bottle gently from her mouth, wiped a drop of milk from her chin, and snuggled her down beside him. A gum tree stroked its branch across the window. A wind had come up, and it sighed through the trees. His room, which he’d had since he was a child, and was still full of his childish stuff, smelt of baby now, sweet and milky, a soft skin smell.

  The next morning Matt woke bleary-eyed to find Mahalia beside him, cooing, on her stomach for the first time. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you can roll over, can you? I’ll have to be sure you can’t roll off a bed from now on.’

  He changed her nappy, and she immediately rolled onto her stomach again, lifting up her neck from the bed and kicking her legs like a swimmer.

  ‘Clever Mahalia,’ he said. ‘Clever, clever Mahalia.’

  3

  It rained for two weeks.

  Mahalia noticed the rain, he was sure. She lay in her cot in the mornings and listened to it falling on the roof, babbling to it. ‘Goo,’ Matt said to her. ‘Ka,’ she replied. He picked her up and went out onto the veranda, and she blinked and looked at the stream of water falling over the edge of the roof. She could turn her head round now, and look at things she wanted to see.

  ‘It’s bloody wet, that’s what it is, Mahalia,’ he said. ‘Still, better get used to it, this is what the weather’s like in this neck of the woods.’ He liked using phrases like neck of the woods. They made him feel connected to the old times. Matt liked old blokes; he liked sitting and having a yarn with them. Having a yarn. That was another phrase they used. And grub, and tucker. All good words. Old words.

  Mahalia coughed. It wasn’t a real cough, just the cough she’d discovered she could use to attract Matt’s attention. Not that she needed it at this moment.

  ‘You’re a little bullshit artist,’ he said, and tickled her under her arms. She laughed and squealed, and jerked her body away from him so suddenly that he almost dropped her.

  ‘How about a bath?’ he said. ‘I know it’s wet outside, but you pong.’

  Matt sat Mahalia on the floor, where she could hold herself upright by leaning forward and resting her weight on her hands. He gave her a plastic cup to look at, and she picked it up with one hand and put it to her mouth, experimentally. He warmed some water on the stove and tipped it into her bath, testing the temperature with his elbow.

  Mahalia loved a bath. She had learned that she could splash the water with the palm of her hand; it made her squeal with excitement and delight. She played with the soap, and squelched it through her fingers.

  When the bath was over, Matt towelled her, dusted her with powder, and dressed her in a clean jumpsuit.

  ‘There you go – good as new.’

  She loved to crumple paper, so he sat her on the floor and handed her the one-page letter he’d written to Emmy. Mahalia crushed it and put it to her mouth and slobbered over it, as he’d known she would. It was one way of solving the problem of what to do with the letter. He couldn’t seem to find the right words.

  On Mahalia’s second day of life, when they were alone with her, Emmy and Matt unwrapped their baby from the sheet that swaddled her tightly and removed her clothes in order to look at her properly. They had both seen her when she was born, of course, but that had been a time when they were dazed and exhausted and unable to take in the miracle of her.

  Unwrapped, she became a squalling, red-faced bundle of jerking limbs. Her feet were tiny and wrinkled and untried against the earth. Matt cupped her face with his large, tender, wondering hands and massaged the side of her face gently till she stopped crying. He lifted her up and cradled her against his chest.

  ‘Your mother came,’ said Emmy. ‘Thank goodness she didn’t go on like all the relatives visiting in the hospital. “Oh, who do you think he looks like? He’s got Uncle Stan’s nose, and Auntie Vera’s chin!’’ ’ Matt knew she was hiding her disappointment that his mother had been the only relative to visit.

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Matt.

  ‘She said that she’s beautiful. And that we’ll be all right,’ said Emmy, nodding in a satisfied way. Watching Matt with her, she’d said shyly, ‘I wonder what she’ll think of her father’s music?’

  Matt remembered this as he sat in his mother’s house listening to the rain and playing his guitar. It was an electric bass guitar, and played without amplification the strings made a deep resonant rhythm that Mahalia liked. He sat her on the floor in front of him and she grabbed hold of her feet and made sounds of her own to accompany his music.

  One day the sky cleared and Matt took the opportunity to get out of the house, leaving Mahalia with his mother. He strode up the road, feeling pleasure in being able to stretch his leg
s with vigorous exercise, get some air into his lungs. It was the first time in ages he’d been anywhere without Mahalia strapped to him, and at first he revelled in the freedom. But the road was long and tedious, with no outlook, only endless forest, and there came a point where he’d had enough, and he hurried back to see Mahalia, feeling the absence of her now as a loss.

  The house was empty when he returned, but the radio was playing, and, guessing where his mother might be, he went at once to the place at the edge of the garden where she’d worn a narrow path into the rainforest. It was her own private, secret track, almost invisible. The wait-a-while vine whipped out long jagged strands and caught at his clothing, sticking like Velcro. Extricating himself, he needed to push through the forest for only a few minutes till he came to the fig tree.

  His mother was leaning against it, with Mahalia strapped to her front in the carry pouch. It was a tree that had a trunk like a human torso, muscled, stretching up through the canopy, where its branch arms reached out into the light. It was the archetypal rainforest tree, the stuff of calendars and postcards but no less remarkable for that.

  She looked round as he approached her, and smiled. Without speaking, they started to walk out of the forest together, their footsteps padding on the damp leaves and crackling the occasional vine.

  Matt had once overheard her saying to a friend, ‘Any kid worth its salt rebels against its parents sometimes,’ and he wondered, now, if he had rebelled. Only by having Mahalia so young . . . otherwise, he’d felt the burden of being the only child of a single parent. When she was feeling sad he was the only one there to cheer her up. Once she had sat with her cheek on her hand at the kitchen table, silent and thoughtful and seemingly unreachable. He’d crept to their newly made composting toilet, one in which tiger worms ate everything they put into it. Pulling out the tray at the back, he discovered the first lovely silty remains of their castings.