After hardly eating the day before, he was starving now; he piled cheese onto bread and ate it standing at the kitchen sink. Then he let himself out. All day he walked the streets, just walking, trying to keep his head empty. He rested for a while, lying on a bench in a park, covering his eyes with his arm to shield them from the sun.
In the afternoon he went back, for that was when Emmy was to drop Mahalia off. ‘Think about what I said,’ she said to him. ‘I’d like to talk about it soon.’ Then she was gone again.
They were the only ones home. Matt sat Mahalia on his bed and looked around the room. Her things were still scattered over the floor. Slowly, methodically, he packed them up.
‘How about we go away for a holiday?’ he said to her, squatting down and looking into her eyes. She gazed right back at him, right into his eyes, the way she had ever since she’d been born.
‘Da!’ she said happily, waving one fat arm in the air.
‘Away!’ he said, and stuffed things into a duffel bag. He went to the kitchen and took a few dried staples, potatoes and pasta. After a moment’s hesitation he wrote a note for Eliza. Gone away for a few days.
And he hefted Mahalia onto his hip and went out to the road, and before too long had managed to hitch out of town.
Matt took Mahalia to the place where he and Emmy had lived in the months before her birth, and for a week afterwards. It was a caravan perched high in the hills, and was owned by an easy-going man named Kevin. It was a spare space, a space for visitors, a space for people needing somewhere to live or simply in need of a bolt-hole for a while.
When Matt arrived, Kevin was taking a shower. The bathroom had no walls and backed onto the rear wall of his house. Kevin’s head was covered in suds and he barely looked around as Matt arrived. Matt saw only a stocky, pale, hairy body, buttocks splattered with froth. ‘Sure, mate, sure,’ Kevin said. There was no one using the van at the moment. He told Matt to go for your life. He could stay as long as he liked.
It was an old van, spare of comforts. There was a gas stove, a double bed. A water tank stood outside, filled by a pipe from Kevin’s roof.
There was a view of hills, and acres of forest; it was the kind of country Matt felt familiar with. They’d come here, bringing the baby Emmy carried in her belly, to wait for its arrival. Matt had felt, without expressing it to himself, that this country, and this landscape, would winkle itself into the baby’s soul.
He remembered floating in the dark waters of the creek late in the afternoon, sitting out at dawn in front of the van with a cup of tea, watching the sky, dragging the mattress out to sleep under the stars on hot nights.
The van was stuffy. Matt opened the windows and spread out a sheet on the double bunk. He lay there and sweated. Mahalia explored the van and the area outside it. He called to her through the window to make sure she didn’t wander too far, but she knew where he was, all right. She came in to clamber all over him, putting her fingers into his mouth. Her needs made themselves felt, as they always did. She wanted food: he fed her on some bread and fruit he’d brought with him. Her nappy was sopping: he took it off and let her run round with a bare bottom. She was soon filthy from playing in the dirt, so he removed the rest of her clothes and sluiced her down with water from the tank, gulping down mouthfuls of the water as he did so, grateful for its coolness. After that she slept, and he was left with his own thoughts.
It was thinking that he didn’t want to do. Confused, all he could think of was Emmy’s statement that she wanted Mahalia to live with her. This is your chance of freedom, boy, he told himself, but it wasn’t his own voice he was hearing. It was someone else’s, Elijah’s maybe, the voice of someone who was more cynical and didn’t understand.
Kevin came down and asked Matt up to the house ‘for a feed’, but Matt declined the offer. He couldn’t bear the thought of kindness. He needed to be alone. When Mahalia woke, he cooked up some rice with milk and fed her on that. He ate nothing himself; he found he wasn’t hungry.
That night it stormed. The wind buffeted the van and Matt felt it might take off, blow right over the edge of the slope where it perched. He put his face next to Mahalia’s, listening to her breath. She whimpered occasionally in her sleep.
In the distance he heard dogs barking. There were other thoughts he was resisting. Of Eliza, the night before. Her arm across his chest. The way she’d whispered, ‘Just go to sleep.’
Matt didn’t go to sleep. He lay and listened to the storm and waited for it to pass.
At the birth, when Emmy had finally given the last enormous push that launched Mahalia into the world, she’d gestured to the nurse to give the baby to Matt. So he was the first to hold her, snuggled into his armpit. She’d opened her eyes and looked at him: really looked at him, before closing her eyes and sleeping again. Then Matt took her, swaddled and new, to where Emmy still lay on the delivery table so that she could see her baby for the first time.
She was a ‘good baby’. For the first weeks Mahalia had simply fed and slept, surfacing every so often to feed again. After Emmy fed her, she would lay her beside Matt, and Matt would watch the expressions on her face. Mahalia frowned, and little wrinkles creased themselves across her forehead; she pursed her lips; her eyelids flickered, she smiled a drunken smile. It was as if she was practising all the expressions she would need throughout her lifetime. She woke herself up momentarily and then sent herself off to sleep again, floating in a state between sleep and consciousness.
Everything smelt milky. Emmy complained of the milk that seeped constantly from her breasts. She tried to wake Mahalia sometimes to get rid of the excess milk, and sometimes she cried with frustration, as Mahalia found it hard to take hold of her nipple. After one week in the hospital and one week in the van, Matt’s mother arrived to visit and took a look at the struggle they were having. She insisted gently that they come and live with her for a while. Matt wanted to refuse, but he saw the look of gratitude on Emmy’s face and agreed to go.
It rained all next morning. Mahalia was cranky and bored, and Matt sang songs to soothe her. He cooked rice in powdered milk again and they ate it direct from the saucepan, turn and turn about. One spoon for you and one for me. Matt knew he’d need to do something about the food situation. A trip into town seemed necessary, but he didn’t want to make it. He still didn’t know what he thought, or what he would do, but it felt safe here. He washed out some nappies by hand in Kevin’s laundry and hung them on a line strung across one end of the van.
The sun came out early in the afternoon. Matt slung his duffel bag across one shoulder and hoisted Mahalia up into his arms and set off across the hills. He found a stack of pumpkins in a paddock and put one into his bag and kept walking. The light was clear after the rain, and every colour was brilliant and distinct. He tramped on, passing houses, and saw washing flapping from lines. He waved to children who had come out to make the most of the break in the weather. Into the duffel bag he popped several chokoes he found growing over a fence. He felt strong and invincible and absurdly optimistic, stepping over sagging barbed wire fences, his jeans wet to the knees from the long grass. He had no idea where he was going but simply needed to move. He had Mahalia on his shoulders, exclaiming and waving her arms at the world.
They came at last to a shed of ancient timber and rusty galvanised iron, with one side open to the weather and a sloping, broken wooden floor. A vine with purple trumpet flowers draped itself across the windows.
He was about to go inside and explore, but heard a movement at the back, then footsteps, and a moment later came face to face with a young man so tall and wild and thin that he thought for a moment he might be looking in a mirror.
It gave him a shock, the something in the young man that reminded him of himself. His eyes were at exactly Matt’s height, so Matt looked into them easily, without needing to look down, as he usually did with people.
The man held out his hand and smiled, a shy, diffident smile. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘I’m Anton.’
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He was the thinnest person Matt had ever seen. His skin was grey. He looked as if he could do with a good feed. His hair was stiff and dull. Matt put his hand up to his own hair, self-consciously. ‘Hi,’ he said, nervously. ‘I’m Matt. And this is Mahalia.’
Anton smiled. ‘I don’t often get visitors.’ He gestured towards the wide entrance of the shed. ‘Do you want to come in?’
Anton showed Matt around. He was proud of what he’d done with the shed. He’d made a rough kind of home of it. It used to be full of junk, he said. All along one wall there was a row of old refrigerators, none of them going, but there was no electricity anyway. Someone brought the fridges here once, he said; he couldn’t think why, but here they were, and they served as cupboards for his things.
Since the place didn’t have four walls, he’d scrounged enough timber to fill in a little room at one end, and it was here that he slept, away from the wind and the weather. He offered Matt some chokoes from the vine that grew up over the house, perhaps seeing the hunger in his face. Matt took them, not wanting to refuse, though he’d already scrounged chokoes for himself.
Anton showed Matt the way fig trees had germinated in his gutters, in the leaves that had composted there. Matt wondered if they were strangler fig, and imagined them in time enveloping the shed, the way figs did with host trees. Anton looked the sort of person who wouldn’t mind that – he’d live somehow between the aerial roots. He had the face of someone who’d been shipwrecked and adrift on a lifeboat for weeks: his skin rough, his hair harsh, eyes staring from a face that looked out at the horizon hopefully, but somehow hopelessly too, for sight of land.
‘George is expecting me,’ he said suddenly, as if just remembering, ‘for afternoon tea.’
‘That sounds very ladylike,’ Matt blurted out, and Anton laughed, slapping him on the back.
‘Will you join us?’ said Anton, in a posh accent. And then laughed again.
So, with Mahalia waving her arms and talking to the sky, they headed up the hill to George’s place, which was an old farmhouse with all the mod cons compared with where Anton was living. But still, it was modest enough, with cracked grey paint on the outside, and dull yellow paint on the inside.
George was an old man with mottled old skin and no bum to speak of, so that the seat of his trousers was baggy. They were too big for him, so it seemed that he’d recently lost a lot of weight. Matt thought how he was once a little baby, like Mahalia, with perfect pearly skin and a mother who nibbled on his little toes and marvelled at how tiny and perfect his toenails were.
George had made a magnificent afternoon tea, of scones he’d freshly baked, with jam and cream and butter, and thick slices of white bread with corned meat and pickles. The minute Matt saw this spread, all laid out at a table with a white cotton cloth embroidered with pansies, the saliva spurted into his mouth, and he swallowed it, and felt ashamed of his greed.
But he needn’t have. George was as greedy as Matt, spreading dollops of jam and mountains of cream onto his scones. Mahalia sat on Matt’s lap and crammed food into her mouth. Matt realised how hungry he’d been, and almost laughed at the sudden unexpected abundance of it. The four of them ate as if there were no tomorrow, though all the time Matt was mindful of his manners, and he had to drink his tea carefully to avoid spilling the hot liquid onto Mahalia.
Seeing his handicap, George put out his arms to take her, and Mahalia crawled across onto George’s lap as if she’d always known him. He jiggled her up and down. ‘Ah, a baby,’ he said. ‘We haven’t had one of these here for a while. You looking after her on your own?’
‘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 th
e 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.
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