Little Wing (11 page)

‘So this is the little one.' He turned back the edge of the baby blanket, and said coyly, ‘May I?' before picking her up and cradling her in her arms. ‘Oh, look, Margaret,' he said. ‘Our first grandchild.'

Emily's mother allowed the baby to be thrust into her arms; Emily saw her soften slightly, before returning the child to her husband.

‘What is the babe's name?' he asked shyly.

‘Mahalia,' she said.

He didn't quite understand, and she had to repeat it.

‘Mahalia,' he said. ‘That's . . . unusual, isn't it? But I like it, I think,' he said warmly, turning to his wife, who nodded, curtly.

Emily remembered the way her parents had always made her feel hemmed in. Her childhood dream of horses had been a way of escape from them. A horse had strength, and swiftness, and unpredictability. You could be free on a horse. She'd written a story when she was in primary school about running away on her imaginary horse. In the story she'd gone as far as Western Australia, and when she saw headlines in the paper that her parents were looking for her she hadn't felt one bit of remorse.

When she was too young to know what she was doing they'd stuck her in a white dress and taken her to the church and had her confirmed in a faith that she could never take seriously. Years later, she had coaxed the priest into allowing her to climb up the church tower. And she'd taken Matt with her, pulling him up the dim stone staircase, and kissed him for the first time right on top of the tower. She hoped that everyone would see them, but feared that no one had.

And she'd jumped into the river one day, just to see what it felt like. It had been cold and muddy and exhilarating. She'd wanted to shock herself awake, to experience everything. She'd wanted more than the pretty pink bedroom in her parents' house.

Lying in the hospital bed with her baby beside her, she could see that not only had she hemmed herself in again, she'd also thoughtlessly implicated a child who hadn't asked for life at all.

10

As Emily walked away from Charlotte's house, there were very few people about, and the streets had the weary flatness that she remembered from other Christmas afternoons. She walked past Martin's house through habit. One of Pete's sneakers still lay sole up on the front verandah in exactly the same position it had been in last time.

In the town centre she went into a milk bar and stood waiting to be served. The girl behind the counter was wiping down the stainless steel with a thick grey rag; it swirled around, leaving beads of water on the gleaming surface. Three people about Emily's age sat at a booth in the dim recesses of the café. She heard a boy's voice say, ‘Hey! She's hot!' and a girl's derisive laugh. Finally the shop assistant came up to her with an expression that implied she was being interrupted, and Emily asked politely for a chocolate milkshake.

She glanced towards the back of the shop to the faces in the booth; she noticed only a girl with a plump, freckled face who looked away from her and down into her milkshake with a smirk.

As the shopgirl dipped a ladle into the refrigerator to scoop up the milk, Emily realised that she had come out without her bag. ‘I'm sorry,' she interrupted her, ‘I'll have to cancel that – I've forgotten my purse,' and fled without looking back.

She found a park and squirted water into her mouth from a bubbler. The place had an air of desertion, and because of the welcome lack of people Emily sat down on a seat. She didn't want to go back to Charlotte's place yet. It would feel at once too constricting and too empty. The light on the answering machine would blink insistently at her. Her parents could even ring again, and she mightn't be able to resist answering.

An Indian family – people of all ages, including a couple of toddlers – came into the park and spread out picnic rugs. They carried several pots wrapped in teatowels, and picnic baskets. The oldest woman unwrapped the pots and ladled rice and curry onto plates. Another poured steaming tea from a thermos and handed the cups round. The children were given soft drink. The men sat to one side of the picnic rugs and talked and smoked.

Then they ate, laughing and talking all the while, and the toddlers staggered about and collapsed onto their bottoms on the ground when their legs gave way. Whenever one came within their orbit, one or other of the women would press rice into its willing mouth with her fingers.

Emily saw a single figure enter the path at the far side of the park. She knew from the rangy look of him, the bare feet and the matted hair, that it was the lonely boy whose eyes Martin had noticed were so blue. He walked along the path until he came level with the Indian family, stopped and stared at them for a moment, and then walked on with his steady, purposeless trudge. The family did not notice him (as indeed they had not noticed Emily), and Emily wondered if the lonely boy had been there at all, or if she'd imagined it. And she wondered if she was there either, she seemed so nebulous, the world swirling around her as if nothing existed at all, least of all Emily herself.

11

The caravan where they'd lived was high in the hills, and had views of the surrounding countryside; it was like living in an eagle's nest.

There they had lived in a sort of idyllic dream – had cooked outside on a campfire, and lain under the stars at night when the van became too hot. When Emily and the baby came out of hospital they returned there – both insisted on it, though Matt's mother had wanted them to come and stay with her for a while.

The place, which to Emily had previously felt like paradise, was now too bleak and uncomfortable. They shared a bath with Kevin, the man who owned the property – it was an old enamel tub in the open, attached to the back of his house. Nappies had to be washed by hand in Kevin's laundry tub, also in the open air. Everything was a struggle. Emily felt that they were too exposed to the elements. The sun was too hot and relentless, the wind too windy, the nights black.

Matt had been eager to do as much as he could to help. He did all the washing and cooking. He woke the moment the baby cried at night, and gave her to Emily to feed. But she found breastfeeding difficult. The baby hunted for the nipple so frantically, moving her head rapidly from side to side, it was as though she was really fighting to get away from it. And then she'd cry, and Emily would cry. By the time the baby managed to latch on to feed they were both exhausted.

They spent a week living in the van. In that time, Emily felt that they were isolated and alone. Perched up there above the world didn't feel like paradise. It felt like exile. She was alone with the baby in a hostile, unforgiving world.

It had been a relief to stay with Matt's mother. Julie had come to visit, saw at once how impossible it was with a baby, and insisted they come to live with her.

Her place was on the side of a mountain covered with rainforest; the only sounds were the cries of whipbirds, or the soft booming coo of native pigeons.

They had a whole huge bedroom and the use of the rest of the house. There was a washing machine and a proper kitchen; things that Emily had once taken for granted. When she'd first met Matt, she'd thought the place where he lived was strange after the suburban brick house she'd been raised in, because it had been built out of second-hand materials, but it had all the comforts you needed.

The house had a wonderful bathroom with bright, handmade tiles. Emily would lie in the bath and look out a door and see bush, and sky. Most of the time they spent there was bliss. Matt was a most attentive father; he picked up the baby when she stirred at night and brought her to Emily, and the look on his face when he gazed at both of them made Emily feel cherished.

But her parents never visited. Her mother knew that Matt lived far out in the hills in what some people in town called a
hippy house
, and it was the sort of place her mother would never set foot in. Even though Julie offered to take her and the baby into town to visit
them
, Emily was too proud. And she was happy up there in that house; she didn't feel the need to go anywhere.

It was Matt who'd wanted to move into a place on their own. ‘We can't live with my mum forever,' he said.

And so they moved into town, to the flat at the back of an old house, into what Emily later thought of as the white room.

The room was very white. It was an enclosed verandah, and had a length of frosted glass windows along the front. In the morning it was so bright it was like being in the glare of a spotlight. And in the afternoon, when the sun shifted away, the room shaded into near-darkness, speaking to her of loss and loneliness.

She spent almost five months in that room. At one end was a small kitchen; at the other a shabby bathroom. The laundry they shared with the old woman whose house it was in – it was under the house, and had an unsavoury odour of damp soil.

Emily rarely went out; she let Matt do all the shopping. Her few friends had drifted away. If she did go out, there was the sense of everything being different. There seemed to be no skin, no protection between her and the rest of the world. She felt no connection with anything.

There was only a profound sense of loss. She would lie for hours and listen to Matt play softly on his guitar. The baby would at least grow up with music.
Blues is the music that heals
, he'd lettered on the side of his guitar case. She wondered if the music might heal her. It was a bass guitar, its notes low and thrumming, its rhythm like a heartbeat.

‘Are you okay?' Matt would ask, nestling down next to her on the bed where she spent nearly the whole of each day.

‘Me? I'm fine,' she'd tell him. He seemed to believe it, and she longed for him to say something to indicate that he knew she wasn't all right at all.

She'd hear the locks of the guitar case click shut.
Snap. Snap.
Matt would pick up his guitar and escape, off to jam with his friend Otis.

Her father came to visit, by himself. He seemed to enjoy sitting on the sofa with the baby on his lap, a cup of tea going cold on the floor beside him. After that, he often popped in to see them on his way to golf, or meetings of his car club. Emily felt sure her mother knew nothing of these visits.

Then one day she was there at the door beside him.

She came into the kitchen and stood while Emily made them cups of tea. Emily was able to remember that they both took milk. She removed the teabags, searched for a saucer to deposit them on and settled for the edge of the sink, where they sat leaking mud-coloured liquid. Emily's mother looked around. ‘I wanted more for you than this,' was all she said.

The baby was asleep that day in a basket in the living room, and they sat around her and talked softly and awkwardly. The baby was often asleep; she was a good baby. Emily had been astonished by the strength of her purity and calmness. It scared her, the responsibility of looking after such a precious creature.

Emily's father peeped into the basket and turned back the edge of the blanket. ‘They say you should never wake a sleeping baby,' he said softly, with an impish twinkle, ‘but it's hard to resist, isn't it?'

That day Emily, too, wished the baby wasn't asleep – it might give them something to look at and talk about. But she didn't wake, and Emily's parents left after a while. She felt for a long time the cool kiss her mother gave her on departing.

Emily found that she was good at pretending. She could get dressed up when she had to, and go out, and pretend cheerfulness and competency. ‘Yeah, in the end I decided that I couldn't be bothered with breastfeeding,' she said to Matt's mother, on a visit to her place one day. ‘With a bottle, Matt can feed her, and I don't have to worry about having enough milk.'

She energetically chopped fruit for a fruit salad, tossing pineapple skin into a pile. She laughed (she could still laugh!). ‘I'm thinking of taking up belly-dancing!' she lied. ‘Can't do that with boobs full of milk.'

Matt's mother looked at her with concern, and later asked her, ‘Are you sure you're coping okay? I mean, it's all right not to, you know.'

‘God, yes,' said Emily. ‘I mean, she's so good – haven't you noticed? And Matt does heaps.'

Emily called it her
big front
, the way she was able to fool people. She felt that nothing was real any more. And above all, she was not real.

She worried that something would happen to the baby. There was so much that could go wrong. Car crashes, house fires, drowning. She feared her child would get caught up in some disaster, if not now, then at some later time in her life. Or she could simply die in her sleep – some babies did – or become ill. Emily felt helpless in the face of all these imagined catastrophes. She was inadequate, a
bad mother
.

She cared for Mahalia mechanically. She changed nappies, wiped pink goo onto her bottom, made up bottles, in ceaseless repetition. Nothing gave her any joy. Always, there was the knowledge that she'd wanted more for her baby than she was capable of giving her.

Then she became afraid that it was she who would do harm to the baby. She put all the knives in a drawer and tried to pretend they weren't there. She threw Matt's Stanley knife, which had such a tempting deep, sharp blade, into the bin and then retrieved it and hid it under the sink cupboard.

She first cut herself on the arm one day when Matt was out taking the baby for a walk. Alone in the house, she felt drawn to the cupboard where she'd hidden the Stanley knife. In the dim afternoon light in the kitchen it looked so harmless at first, with its red plastic handle and short, sloping blade. Staring wonderingly at the knife, she felt that nothing she did would matter. She wondered whether any action she performed would have a real, tangible result.

The first cut had been the most difficult, and the most thrilling. It had taken ages for her to steel herself into drawing the blade across the pale skin of her inner arm, just heavy enough to make a fine cut a few centimetres long. The sting of it had exhilarated her, and she'd stared at the thread of blood that had appeared. When it began to spill into drops she took a wad of tissue and mopped it up, her heart beating rapidly, afraid that she might have cut too deep.