Matt had wished he’d brought his guitar, so at least he could show his father he could do something. His irrational desire to win this man’s approval confused him, and left him resentful, and even more determined not to sit in a room all his life reading books and pushing pens, as he put it to himself.
And when Matt got home, the thing he most wanted to ask his mother (but didn’t, because he feared hurting her feelings) was why and how they had ever got together long enough to have him.
11
At this stage of his life Matt felt there should enter an old carpenter or stonemason or some sort of positive male role model who would apprentice him and help him make something of himself.
But such a person wasn’t going to materialise. As Matt walked the streets of Lismore, pushing the stroller in front of him, going into shops to search out the scrappy food that kept them alive, he saw only people like himself, people getting by and making do. But life had a tenacious streak, and optimism always asserted itself.
‘Hey, you’ve got a beautiful baby!’ said a woman in an overcoat with matted orange fur like a teddy bear that had been loved too much. It wasn’t cold, but she wore a coat anyway, and with her hands in her pockets, she fanned the flaps at the front of the coat as she walked.
That made Matt smile. He gave a skip and ran the stroller extra fast, and Mahalia clutched the side of the stroller and urged it forward with her body, as if she were riding a horse.
He bathed Mahalia, dressed her neatly for another visit to Emmy’s parents, packed a bag: some nappies and spare clothes and her plastic drinking cup with the lid and two teddy bears and a rattle that Charmian had given her.
Emmy’s parents had put a baby car seat in the back of their car, and as Matt leaned inside and plopped her onto the cosy wool seat cover Mahalia laughed and thought it was a game. He clicked her into the seatbelt and tickled her under the arms. But when he stepped back and closed the door she realised that she was being abandoned; she squealed with rage and pushed her chest forward, puffing it up against the restraining belt. She held out her arms to him and cried, and Matt, at the last moment, raced round to the other side of the car and wrenched open the back door.
‘You don’t mind if I come?’ he said. Emmy’s mother’s face was reflected in the rear-vision mirror. He couldn’t make out her expression but he flashed her a smile. His hand rested comfortingly on the top of Mahalia’s head. ‘I don’t think she’s ready to go by herself yet.’
It seemed a long visit. In between the ritual of morning tea and lunch they sat and watched Mahalia’s antics and talked awkwardly about her. There wasn’t a lot to say.
Mahalia could pull herself up by holding onto a piece of furniture and she stood clutching the sofa and beating her hand proudly against the seat. She always knew when she had achieved something and liked other people to notice it too.
At lunch, she picked up her food delicately between her index finger and thumb and put it fastidiously in her mouth and chewed with great enjoyment. She seemed to sense that they were visitors, for she didn’t throw things on the floor for Matt to pick up endlessly as she did at home.
She sat for ages on the living-room floor and put clothes pegs into a tin, and then took them out again, seeming never to tire of it, looking up and laughing at Matt and at Emmy’s mother every so often to show them she knew how clever she was.
They sat and watched her, embarrassed and dismayed by the possibility of conversation. Finally Matt thought that perhaps he could decently end the visit, and he offered to catch a bus back, but Emmy’s mother insisted that she drive them, and Mahalia sang all the way home.
If sometimes Matt experienced his life as robust and full and expectant, there were other times when all seemed to be fragility. Then the weathered boards of the old shop appeared as thin and tenuous as his life. There was a flimsiness to it; it could be torn down in an instant. At these times Matt felt vulnerable, lay curled on his bed trying not to think how he could manage it all, and was tugged reluctantly back to the world by Mahalia’s wail as she woke.
There were days without money that could stretch into weeks. When the rent and power bills were due no one in the house had any spare cash. Eliza ate when she went to her coffee-shop job, and it didn’t seem to matter to Virginia whether she ate or not; her thin body seemed to be able to exist without the benefit of food, but Matt always needed to eat, and he wouldn’t let Mahalia go without.
The times when he and Elijah used to go bush and live off the land had been good training for him. There wasn’t much that Matt didn’t regard as food. He and Elijah had eaten hairy mussels from the creek that tasted of mud, and old catfish so oily and strong-tasting that he almost gagged on them. They’d munched on lilly-pilly fruits, some as delicious as apples and others with a taste like eucalyptus oil. If the worst came to the worst, Matt thought, he’d head into the bush and kill something. He wouldn’t ask his mother for help; he always let on that everything was fine.
There was a tangled garden that beckoned to him as he walked down a back lane near their house each day, where the trees were full of mandarins and oranges and lemons. They lay on the ground, ignored and abandoned, which led him to believe that no one picked them or wanted them. The place seemed deserted. Matt’s mouth tingled at the thought of all that sweet juicy fruit going to waste. One day he went round the front of the house and opened the rusty gate, unstrapped Mahalia from her stroller and went up the three splintered wooden steps to the front door.
No one answered his knock, though the front windows were wide open. Old cotton curtains hung limply behind them; there was no movement from inside the house. Matt went round the back and the fruit was there for the taking. He sat Mahalia under the tree, and with his heart racing, started picking. Even after he’d filled the canvas shopping bag he always wore over his shoulder, no impression had been made on the glut of fruit on the trees.
Matt returned a few days later, then again, and again, and never saw a soul, and the fruit was all the sweeter for having been bestowed on him like that.
It was time, Matt thought, to be serious about getting a job. He asked Eliza to cut his hair.
Her professionalism showed. She was a bold and decisive cutter of hair. None of that tentative lifting and combing, a few strands off here and there the way some people did. Her hair-cutting was as assertive as her walk, as intended as the songs she sang. In no time at all Matt’s hair was in a neat straight bob. He pushed it behind his ears and examined himself in the mirror.
‘It makes you look younger.’
‘Does it?’ Matt was anxious. ‘Too young?’
‘Not too young. Really, though, it looks good.’
Virginia walked through the room and whistled, ‘What do you think, Mahalia, doesn’t he look great?’
Matt smiled at himself in the mirror. He was clean-cut. He looked fine.
Matt asked Charmian to baby-sit each morning and went, full of hope and fear, to places where machinery ground and sparked and men in overalls walked purposefully back and forth with bits of metal and spare parts. Matt had a sense that something mysterious and hidden was taking place there; if only he could gain an entry to that secret world of work, everything would be all right for him and Mahalia.
He went to sandwich bars and retail outlets. There was nothing. No one wanted him – no one but Mahalia, it seemed, who squealed with pleasure each day when he appeared at Charmian’s back door.
Every day he hauled out his neatest clothes.
Who are you trying to fool? he asked himself after his twenty-eighth knockback. He felt humiliated; it was harder and harder each time to front up to a place. Some people were friendly, but couldn’t help him – ‘No, mate, no, sorry, we’ve got all the people we need!‘– while others looked him over suspiciously, or simply had no time for him.
‘I reckon if it’s gunna happen, it’ll happen,’ said Virginia, making him a coffee in the kitchen on the afternoon when he’d more or less given up.
> ‘Yeah? What kind of talk is that from you?’
‘You’re right. I’m bullshittin’. Just tryin’ to make you feel better.’ Virginia laughed with a shamed face, showing her teeth. She pulled her cap down over her eyes and looked at him bashfully. ‘Maybe when Mahalia’s older. You could go to TAFE or somethin’. Don’t they have someone down at Centrelink to help single parents get jobs?’
In the dim light in the kitchen, mosquitoes had already started hovering, anticipating nightfall. They nudged his feet and he ignored their prickling until he remembered the possibility of Ross River fever and slapped them away. He got up to light a coil, and when the smoke from the coil wound past her Mahalia tried to catch it.
Early one cool morning, Matt searched for Eliza at the Con, up and down stairs, following the blue carpet worn on the treads. There was a smell in his nostrils of cool, clean early morning. Dim light, filtered by camphor-laurel trees, dappled the corridors. Somewhere a man warbled like Tarzan, a primitive sound, made for fun. The place seemed even more silent when he’d finished.
Matt hurried, holding Mahalia close to his chest. She was silent and awestruck by his urgency. Her mouth gaped like a little fish’s.
He found Eliza in a classroom where students were gathering. She looked around at his approach.
‘Can you take Mahalia? I’ve been offered a job. They want me to start right now!’
‘Well, I’ve got to be here today!’ But she took Mahalia when he handed her over.
‘She’ll be no trouble. Look, I’ve left her stroller outside, and there’s some nappies in a bag in the back of it. She’ll eat anything – just give her something to drink and a mouthful of your lunch.’
‘Matt!’
‘Please. It just came up, and I wasn’t even looking – I had Mahalia with me. At that vego cafe down the street. Kitchen hand. Someone just left and they want someone fast. If you get time later you can drop her at Charmian’s.’
‘I don’t even know Charmian!’
Matt was already out the door.
Matt worked all day, and he found that you could sweat from simply slicing vegetables and juicing oranges and washing up, if you did it hard enough and fast enough and long enough. When they needed more people serving on the tables, he wiped his face with his apron and went out and took orders. And after lunch it only slowed down a little:
there was the washing-up and more slicing and grating to make cakes for the next day. There were no labour-saving devices, no slicers or food processors or dishwashing machines.
At five o’clock he was whacked, but he hurried home to Mahalia.
‘How was she?’ he asked breathlessly, arriving in the kitchen where Eliza was setting out food on the tray of her highchair. Mahalia greeted him with a squeal and a wave of her arm.
Eliza gave him a surly look. ‘Okay. I had to come home from the Con, though, and miss a whole day’s classes.’
‘You could’ve sat her beside you on the floor.’
‘Yeah. Right. And you could’ve sat her on the floor of the cafe while you worked. She needs attention, Matt, you know that. She kept wanting me to pick her up and talk to her. She wanted food all the time. Her nappy needed changing.’
Matt stared at Eliza. ‘You’re angry at me.’
‘You just didn’t think.’
‘But, hey, I needed this job. I had to take it straight away or someone else would have. I’ll get someone else for tomorrow.’
She shot him a look and stomped off up the stairs.
He could hear her running a shower, but tonight no songs came belting through the house. Matt sat down next to Mahalia and helped her with her meal. She babbled her baby talk and he replied to her, but in a subdued way, because he was so tired, and sad too, in a way he couldn’t fathom. He’d been working so fast and furiously he’d had no time to think of her, but now they were together he was aware that he had missed her. What had she done today?
He lifted her out of her highchair and went out and watered Eliza’s herbs, holding Mahalia on one hip as he worked. Someone came and stood at his elbow. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘thanks, Eliza, for doing that for me today.’
He looked down at her, sideways, and she smiled reluctantly before walking back into the house.
Matt sliced and shredded. Fast. And faster. He couldn’t go fast enough. He dropped food on the floor. Broke a plate.
The cafe buzzed at him through the bead curtain. It was only eleven o’clock. A fly hovered around his face and he waved it away. He pressed oranges onto a juicer. Liquid dripped from the cutting board. He slid on the wet floor, his shoes making a muddy mark, righted himself like a skier, but pain shot down his back.
He mopped the floor.
He sweated into the dishwater, wiped his forehead, and then went out to take more orders.
At last, in the middle of the lunchtime rush, Matt ‘s knife slipped and he cut his hand, right in the fleshy ball below his thumb. A gash, sudden and deep, welled blood, and he was thrown a teatowel. ‘Wrap it tight.’
There were no bandages in the first-aid box.
Matt worked on, and the teatowel showed bright blotches, like flowers.
After work he went to pick up Mahalia from Charmian’s. ‘She been grizzling all day. Wanting ‘er dad. What’s wrong with your hand?’
‘I cut it. Thanks, Charmian. Look . . .’ Matt wrestled some money from his pocket with his good hand, but Charmian waved it away. ‘No. No need to pay me. But Matt, I can’t do this all the time. And I’ve got to go away tomorrow. Down to Kempsey, me old auntie’s died. I’ll be away a while. Month or so, prob’ly.’
Matt thanked her again and took Mahalia and his hand home. His hand felt like that to him, something he was carting around separate to himself.
When he got home he unwrapped it gingerly, and showed it to Eliza. ‘You’d better take that to the hospital. Looks like it needs stitches to me.’ She held out her arms for Mahalia, who cried at being separated again from Matt so soon. Exhausted, he spent some of his precious pay on a taxi.
At the hospital Matt bought a cold can of Coke from a machine and alternately sipped it and pressed it onto his cut through the cloth, hoping the cold would give relief. His hand throbbed and he sat and watched as people came and went. He felt faint from lack of food. He’d found there is no time to eat when you work at a cafe.
A young man was brought in with a motorcycle injury. Another came in, raving, saying his teeth were hurting. He was told to wait, and he sat, telling imaginary people to shut the hell up. He jumped up and went outside; Matt saw him pacing with a cigarette, gesturing to the invisible people who haunted him. Then he stormed in and went to the desk again, muttering to himself and glaring at the people waiting in the room.
At last it was Matt’s turn.
‘When did this happen?’ said the doctor.
‘About twelve-thirty.’
‘It needs stitches. You should have come in earlier.’
Matt winced as the doctor cleaned it.
‘Is this a work injury?’
‘No,’ said Matt. ‘I did it at home.’
The doctor looked unconvinced. Matt thought of the cash the cafe owner had given him. There’d be no record of his working – no worker’s compensation. It was lousy money. But enough. Enough to do the work again the next day.
His hand took seven stitches.
At home he lay in bed in the dark and listened to Mahalia grizzle while his hand throbbed. He got up and tried to settle her a couple of times. With his eyes closed the throb and the grizzle seemed to be assaulting him from all sides.
Matt lay with his eyes closed and listened to Mahalia’s feeble cries. He could see that she was tired, too, but she couldn’t settle. A tear ran down the side of his face. It was a tear of exhaustion and self-pity and remorse. He longed for Emmy to be there. I’m sorry, he said to her in his head. I’m sorry.
Mahalia’s cries continued, more urgently now. She was trying to make him take notice of her.
The grizzle continued. He put on the light and looked down into her cot as if she were an object unknown to him: not his; not a person. He bent down and picked her up wearily but the wailing continued. He changed her nappy, offered her a bottle, but she turned her head away. He put her into the bed beside him and looked into her face.
What he said was experimental, to see how the words sounded out loud: ‘I hate you, Mahalia.’
Said to her face like that, they were a transgression, a blasphemy. He was saying the unthinkable.
But he’d said them too softly.
Say them louder. And with meaning.
‘I hate you, Mahalia. Everything’s hard because of you.’
Just before Matt left school they’d had a casual teacher for history one day. He was Danish or Swedish or something. And he was crazy! the class thought. Crazy! He raved on about the optimistic carp. He said the Japanese liked carp because they were so optimistic, swimming up rivers and up waterfalls, struggling against the odds. He talked about it for almost the entire lesson!
They laughed at him, nearly laughed themselves sick. ‘He’s a lunatic!’ they told each other as they rushed out for lunch. ‘Crazy! Off the planet!’
Matt told his mother.
‘Do carp do that?’ she said, and frowned. ‘Are you sure he didn’t mean trout, or salmon?’
‘No. Carp,’ Matt told her.
And she said, ‘That’s nice. I like the idea of an optimistic carp.’
Matt did too, when he thought about it. He’d thought the teacher was crazy, but that lesson was the only thing Matt remembered about school.
Matt woke late with his hand still throbbing and Mahalia apparently a bit off-colour. He decided not to keep at the job, and hated himself for being weak, for giving up too easily, for not being able to hack it.
He needn’t have agonised. When he turned up at the cafe with Mahalia in the stroller to say he couldn’t make it, he discovered someone else working in the kitchen anyway: the person he’d taken over from, who’d come back from wherever it was he’d gone. It turned out the job had been only temporary, only he hadn’t been told.
Mahalia Page 9
