Eliza sat up and tossed her hair back from her face in a swift, practised movement.
‘Do you want the singing lesson?’
Matt measured milk powder into Mahalia’s bottle. ‘You mean the optional free singing lesson that comes with the room?’
Eliza laughed. ‘Yeah, well, I thought it might be an added inducement. It’s not the most attractive place to live, but I like it.’
‘I don’t sing.’ He settled Mahalia onto his lap, where she lay back sucking on her bottle.
‘Oh, go on. You play the guitar, right? So you must sing along with it sometimes.’
‘I sound like someone being strangled.’
But instead of protesting that he must be exaggerating, as many people would have, she said, ‘You’re probably not using the right techniques.’
Matt shook his head. ‘I’d never keep it up. But I could play my guitar while you sang. It’s a bass, though.’
‘Yeah, I know, I’ve heard you playing in your room. Interesting to sing along with. I’ll improvise.’
Matt handed Mahalia to Eliza while he fetched his instrument. Mahalia wasn’t yet shy of strangers, and Eliza smiled at her so winningly that Mahalia smiled and smiled back, with her milky, gummy mouth, and wouldn’t drink any more of her bottle. So Eliza sat her up on her knee and got her a crust of bread to chew. When Matt came back with the guitar they were both sitting there eating bread and butter.
‘She needs to chew,’ said Eliza. ‘Now that she’s got some teeth. Give her gums something to work on too. Do you have an amp?’
Matt shook his head. ‘My friend Otis does, and I plug it in when I go to his place.’
‘That’s okay. You won’t drown me out then.’
Matt didn’t think it would be possible to drown Eliza out. He’d heard how she could belt out a song. ‘How come you know so much about babies?’ he said.
‘My sister. I’ve been an aunt since I was twelve.’ She glanced at Matt’s guitar case, on which Otis had lettered BLUES IS THE MUSIC THAT HEALS. ‘Who said that?’
‘John Lee Hooker, I think.’
‘Mahalia Jackson wouldn’t have agreed. She said that blues are the songs of despair. Gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing gospel you have a feeling there’s a cure for what’s wrong.’
Matt wasn’t used to people talking this way: putting forward ideas unafraid of what people would think. ‘How old are you, anyway?’ he said.
‘Twenty-two.’
She handed Mahalia to Matt, who sat her on the floor and gave her some plastic containers to play with. Then he tuned his guitar for a bit, and when he was ready he picked out a soft, low rhythm that Eliza improvised to, making her voice deep and growly. They went on until Eliza started laughing so hard she had to stop.
‘So you’re at the Con,’ said Matt, after he’d relished the silence that filled the kitchen when they’d finished the song. ‘What’s it like?’ He put away his guitar and picked up Mahalia, sitting her on his knee.
‘Oh, it’s fantastic!’ said Eliza. ‘Wonderful! It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. But I never thought I’d have the chance to be a full-time singing student. When I left school, I did what I was only mildly interested in.’
‘What was that?’
‘I became a hairdresser.’ Eliza grimaced, and laughed. ‘Yes, look at me now – I just let my hair grow out long and frizzy the way Nature intended it. Cut it myself when it gets too unruly.
‘But to spend most of my day singing . . . it’s a dream come true. Have to pinch myself sometimes. All those years I spent making tea for customers and sweeping hair from the floor and snipping away . . .’ She did an exaggerated shudder. ‘I never want to do it again. I waitress now, to get money, rather than do that again.’ Her voice was puzzled. ‘I always kind of liked fiddling with people’s hair, when I was a kid. But not as much as singing. Funny, isn’t it?’
Eliza reached out for an orange from a bowl, peeled it with her hands, and ate it, a segment at a time, not worrying about the juice that covered her fingers. ‘D’you mind me asking,’ she said, ‘how come you’re looking after Mahalia on your own? I mean, it’s a bit unusual.’
Matt took a breath. This was the question people would always ask. ‘Oh, Emmy found it really hard with a baby and she needed a break.’ He grasped Mahalia’s foot and counted her toes off, one at a time, wiggling them as he went. She laughed and kicked her legs, because it tickled.
He hadn’t even explained to himself how come yet.
Eliza noticed his awkwardness and left it alone. She said, ‘That song I was singing on my way down the stairs . . . I didn’t think . . . I didn’t mean to be tactless . . . motherless child could be interpreted as someone without a mother country. It could be about the Negroes longing for Africa. Or for heaven.’
She held out her arms to take Mahalia, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for Matt to hand her over for a while. She said, ‘Sometimes I think we’re all a long way from home.’
Matt wrote to Emmy at last. Mahalia is well, he said, and we are both missing you. We are living in town, but when you come back we could get a place in the bush and have horses.
Then he screwed the letter up, switched off the light, and lay watching the shadows on the ceiling. Mahalia was sleeping in her cot; he heard her snuffle and sigh. He strained to listen to her breath. Sometimes he suffered from such anxiety for her that he feared that she would simply stop breathing one night; he’d heard that some babies do. If she coughed in her sleep, he woke and listened, afraid that she might be getting sick.
There were flickering shadows from the streetlight, and a car roared past. Gusts of wind rattled the chimes on the veranda. Mahalia woke and started to cry, a sad, sorry-for-herself cry; Matt picked her up at once and buried his face in the sweet-smelling down on top of her head. He changed her nappy, and took her downstairs to warm a bottle, and she settled down at last in the darkness to serious, intent drinking.
Afterwards, still unable to sleep, Matt rugged them both up and settled Mahalia into her stroller and set off for a long walk. These walks were becoming a habit for him.
They passed other night walkers, and exchanged curt greetings.
‘G’devening.’
‘G’devening.’
Matt’s voice was always gruffer than he felt. He passed through the main street, where kids in hotted-up cars loitered after the pubs had shut, and girls with short skirts leaned against cars, just hanging out, not wanting to go home.
A black dog followed them, joining them from a shadowy gateway not far from where they lived. It was like a spirit-dog at first, keeping a distance from them so that Matt could imagine that it was a hallucination, an imaginary dog. And then it came closer, huffing a warm doggy breath near the backs of his knees and glancing up at him with that craven devotion that dogs assume. Voucher, Matt called it, and the dog pricked up its ears as if this were a name it could recognise.
Matt walked for hours along suburban streets and along the river bank that he and Emmy had once made their own. Life went on, all through the night. He saw aimless kids in track pants and beanies wandering with nothing to do, drawn together by some kind of fellow feeling, diverging in a wandering orbit for a while and then accidentally-on-purpose bumping into each other, rattling against each other, looking for something, or for trouble, whichever came first. He saw police cars cruise by, and, once, a woman cowering in the bushes outside her house with her children while a drunken husband ranted and raved inside. He saw lovers, lingering hand-in-hand or parked in cars, not wanting to part, or with nowhere else to go. He was part of that aimless, night-time other-life, because he didn’t want to lie sleepless listening to Mahalia’s breath and thinking of Emmy. He walked rhythmically, listening to the whisper of the stroller’s wheels on the pavement, the sighs from Mahalia as she slept, the click of the dog’s claws following on the concrete. The silence was broken by the slam of a car door, a raised voice, or a car roaring past. Some
times Mahalia woke, and Matt became aware of her eyes staring darkly out into the night before the lids drooped again and closed. Plump-jowled, her head lolled to the side. Matt walked, and every footstep, every creak and movement of his shoes said Emmy, Emmy, Emmy.
In the white room with bare walls and tall windows of frosted glass, Emmy had slept and slept.
Nothing seemed to ease her tiredness, not even when they put Mahalia over to bottle feeding and Matt got up to her at night. In the morning he woke to Mahalia’s voice, and took her into bed with them, where she and Matt lay beside the sleeping Emmy and looked at the white light coming through glass as beaded as a cold bottle.
It was a white, dazzling room with splintered sunlight.
‘What will you do?’ said Emmy, sitting at the table, her feet still in bedsocks.
Matt shook his head. He had no idea. She meant for a job, and he felt defeated already. He’d left school too soon and there seemed nothing he wanted to do anyway.
Through the wall they could hear the old woman whose half-house they rented moving about making tea. Her kettle screamed and was choked off. Matt got to his feet and grabbed his guitar.
‘Got to go and see Otis,’ he said, kissing Emmy on her cool forehead and slipping guiltily down the wooden stairs at the back of the flat.
When he got home later it was twilight on a chilly overcast afternoon and the flat was dark and silent. Emmy was in bed; she woke when he came in, and was as dazed as a sleepwalker. Mahalia’s cot was empty.
There was a sound like a mouse at the back door, a kind of humble furtive scratching. It was Jean, the old woman they rented from, with a sleeping Mahalia bundled in her arms. ‘I thought I heard you come in, dear,’ she said. ‘Tell Emmy she was as good as gold all afternoon.’ Matt took his baby from her, ashamed of his absence, determined that no near-strangers would be asked to look after Mahalia ever again.
It wasn’t long after that that Emmy said, ‘I think I need to go away for a while.’ It was more decisive than anything she’d said in a long time.
The wheels of Mahalia’s stroller whirred along the lamp-lit pavement. It was down there, down that street they’d just passed, that they’d all lived together.
When they approached home, the dog peeled off into its own yard and disappeared like an apparition. Matt manoeuvred the stroller in through the front door. There was a pale light in the sky; he’d walked longer than usual and it was almost morning. He settled Mahalia into her cot, and she sighed heavily and rolled over onto her side. Matt felt his bed was woefully empty of Emmy. He tried to imagine what she might be doing, and feeling. Did she miss him, or Mahalia? Matt tried to imagine her. It was becoming harder and harder. He couldn’t think of the whole Emmy, just bits and pieces that came into his memory, suddenly, and painfully.
Emmy had a shoal of freckles on her body. She was speckled like a trout. Sometimes Matt had imagined that her skin would suddenly burst into colour, a colour that moved and shifted like a tide, waves of blue and pink.
7
Matt woke late, coming up into the light like a diver from the sea. The windchimes rattled, a hollow reedy knock that came and went with the gusts of wind. But that wasn’t what had woken him. There was a steady pounding at the front door. He scooped a drowsy Mahalia up from her cot and went down to open it.
‘Hey, I’m Virginia.’ The person at the door turned from surveying the street, smiled, and held out her hand, looking shyly from under a baseball cap. Matt took the hand, and shook it. He had been uncertain at first whether she was a man or a woman. She was dressed in androgynous clothing, cord pants and a tracksuit top, and she was tall and thin and somewhat stooped.
‘Virginia?’ he said stupidly, still half-asleep.
‘I’ve come about the room? Gee, did I wake you? It’s such a big place and I wanted someone to hear . . .’ She gestured nervously with a thin hand. ‘Is the room still for rent?‘
‘Um, yeah, no one’s taken the room yet, but Eliza, she’s the one you should see. I think she’s probably gone already . . . But maybe you should come in anyway,’ he offered, and Virginia stepped inside.
‘Hey, this your baby? She’s beautiful.’ Virginia had teeth that protruded at the top, and an endearing way of bobbing her head and peering out from under her cap. Mahalia grasped a finger of Virginia’s outstretched hand; she was better at waking up than Matt, and always ready for company.
Virginia spoke quickly, hardly pausing between sentences. ‘See, I’m living over at the van park. I came up from Sydney – I’m meant to be doing this TAFE course, but it’s so boring – it’s not really what I want to do. Anyway, thought I’d be better off in a house, and the room here’s cheaper than the van?’ The ends of her sentences often went up into a question.
‘Hey, I’m talking all the time, you got to stop me,’ she said, with a dismissive wave of her hands. They were in the kitchen now, and Matt had put the kettle on. ‘Yeah, I’d love a cup of tea.’
Virginia stopped talking and took a long look at Matt. She lifted up the baseball cap and pushed her hair behind her ears. The action accentuated her long face, the face of a faithful hound, stolid and rather dreamy.
‘I just don’t want to live with junkies again,’ she said. ‘Got a room a while back and we all got chucked out by the agent a few weeks later. I was givin’ the other people my rent every week and they were shooting it up. You’re not mixed up with that stuff? Sorry, but I just want to be careful.’
Matt shook his head.
Virginia shifted her weight from foot to foot and looked away from Matt’s face. ‘Anyway, maybe I should come back when this Eliza’s home.’
‘Don’t you want to see the room?’
‘Yeah. Oh, yeah, okay.’ Matt led her up the stairs. ‘I really like it round here, you know? That pub on the corner has really cheap meals. I eat there when I can – couldn’t cook it myself for what they sell it for there . . .’
Dave’s old room was small, and looked over the square of back yard and Eliza’s vegetable garden. A pumpkin vine grew over the back fence, and it had a butternut pumpkin on it. Virginia peered out through the back window as she talked. ‘See, I really wanted to do this media course at the Uni, but they didn’t let me in. Said I hadn’t done enough school, but all I want to do is make films, you know?’ She shook her head at the impossibility of it all. ‘So now I’m doing this TAFE course, trying to get my Year 12 certificate. Maybe I’d be better off just getting myself a camera, making films on my own.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, when they were back in the kitchen again. She looked bashful. ‘Look, I talk too much, you gotta stop me. Maybe you can tell that girl that I came by. Eliza, was it? Yeah. Maybe I’ll come back later? Anyway, look, I’ve gotta go, gotta go, I’ll see you round the place, eh?’
She took off, clumping out through the front room. Matt heard the door close behind her.
Mahalia started to grizzle for her bottle, so Matt sat her on the worn lino so that he could prepare it. ‘Gotta get you a highchair, mate,’ he said. ‘You can’t spend your life grovelling round everyone’s feet.’
Matt hocked his guitar. The money he got from the pension was never enough. Sometimes it simply disappeared on him and he didn’t know where it had gone. He tried making lists of what he spent it on. Food, powdered baby formula, rent, power, disposable nappies when he was feeling lazy, chocolate bars to keep his energy up. He saw how easy it was for money to go. It all added up.
He thought he could do without the guitar for a while. He would save to get it out of hock. Or he’d come up with a job, soon. A part-time job at least. Anyway, if he lost it, he’d get another guitar. One day.
But it seemed like a bit of himself disappearing when he handed the black case over the counter, BLUES IS THE MUSIC THAT HEALS lettered in Otis’s writing on the side, the white paint so thick it was textured like an oil painting.
Matt discovered that waiting room was an accurate description of the outer public area of a doctor’s s
urgery. He waited and waited there one day with Mahalia, after her bogus, attention-getting cough turned into a real one. Her nose continually ran with thick yellow snot, and she didn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time. Matt hadn’t slept for three nights by the time he waited in the waiting room, patting Mahalia on the back and talking to her in an attempt to stop her pathetic cry.
It was a grey miserable room on a grey miserable day, a rainy spring day that felt like winter. The chairs had hairy grey seats and every one of them was occupied. Matt preferred to stand and move about with Mahalia curled against his shoulder. He listened to the coughs and noticed the hairy patterns on people’s jumpers, the hairiness of their winter coats. His world had turned into a grey, hairy, coughing, sniffling, waiting one.
All the doctor could do was reassure him that Mahalia didn’t have an infection, and all that could be done was to make her more comfortable. He wrote down the names of things Matt could get at the chemist to ease her congestion. He was a kind man, with a waiting room full of coughing patients he couldn’t do much for.
Matt took Mahalia to visit Otis. He really wanted Charmian to fuss over Mahalia for a while, and look after her for him, and she did.
‘How’s my baby girl?’ said Charmian. ‘Not feelin’ too well, eh?’ She rubbed Mahalia’s chest with baby eucalyptus rub that she kept for her grandchildren. Mahalia’s grizzles subsided; she arched her back and stuck her tummy out, squirming with pleasure as Charmian’s plump hands continued to massage her chest.
‘Your Auntie Charmian’ll make you better.’
Otis tossed a cap onto his head and grinned at Matt. He squinted into the mirror in the hallway and changed the angle of it, flashing his eyes at his own reflection. Otis had thinned down lately; he went running with his father and rode his bike around just for the exercise. There were hollows in his cheeks that hadn’t been there before.
Mahalia Page 5
