Little Wing (15 page)

4

The first time Emily takes her out on her own, Mahalia screams and screams. Emily has been visiting her every day for a week, and Mahalia has been happy enough to play on the swings and let Emily feed her lunch, opening her mouth obediently and then taking hold of the spoon to feed herself. Now she screams and wriggles on the bed while Emily tries to change her nappy.
She hates me
, Emily thinks in panic,
and no wonder
. . . But then a voice that might be Martin's comes to her, and it says, reasonably,
All babies get like that sometimes. Anyway, she'll get used to you, just give it time.

So she picks her up and talks softly through the complaints, walking round the bedroom and giving her a bright pink toy horse to hold. ‘Hor,' says Mahalia, the tears stopping as quickly as they started, staring at the toy with a look of stunned amazement.

‘Do you want a swim in the pool?' says Emily, and the baby looks at her questioningly. She lies her down on the bed to undress her. The baby kicks her foot against her in a slow, testing movement, and Emily grasps it and holds it gently. Mahalia looks at Emily with interest. Emily smiles. Mahalia pushes her foot against Emily's hand and, enjoying the resistance, does it again.

Emily puts her nose against the baby's belly and breathes in the smell of her.

She undresses Mahalia and then takes off her own clothes, and carries her through the house and out to her parents' pool, where she lifts the latch on the child-proof gate and goes in.

Going into the water, she can feel Mahalia clinging to her hips with her knees, and one small hand holding on to her hair, the other to her breast. A strong, sweet feeling of love and possessiveness overtakes her, and she kisses her baby so hard that they both gasp.

She hadn't counted on this – on her own greed. She loves Mahalia so much that she wants her all to herself.

One day, as she picks her up from Matt's place she says, ‘Look, Matt, I should tell you something. I'd like Mahalia to come and live with me.'

In the face of his dismay, she hesitates and says, ‘Think about it, yeah?'

The next time she comes to pick up Mahalia, they have gone.

5

One of the girls who shares the house with Matt opens the door. ‘I'm sorry,' she says (and she does look sorry), ‘but they're not here.'

‘Do you know when they'll be back?'

‘No. I meant, they've gone away for a while. I don't know where. Matt left a note.'

‘Can I go up to their room?'

‘Sure.'

Emily takes herself up the dark stairway to their room at the front of the building. The yellow room, which is a grimy, dull yellow, not a happy colour at all, feels abandoned. Mahalia's cot is folded up against the wall, and a few of her clothes are scattered over the floor. Emily kneels down and unconsciously puts her nose to a tiny shirt, and her throat closes up. It looks to her as though they've gone for good.

A fly buzzes against the glass of the verandah door. Emily opens it, releasing the insect, and steps out. There is a yellowing newspaper on the floor out there. A clothesline strung across the space holds several faded plastic pegs. She goes to the railing and looks down into the street. A girl on a bicycle rides past, glancing up and waving as though she knows the occupants. A black dog noses in the gutter. Emily finds some old wind chimes lying in a corner of the verandah; she picks them up and they clack with a soft, harsh sound. She throws them down again and they lie there like bones.

She looks around and takes a breath. This is where Mahalia has lived for most of the time she's been away. All the time Emily was in the mountains, wandering the windy streets, sleeping in Pete's bed in the afternoons and having cups of tea with Martin in the garden, this has been her life. Emily has been unable to imagine it. She was afraid to imagine it, but now she is here and they are gone she feels pain and sweet nostalgia.

Downstairs, the front room is a mess of boxes and old furniture; it looks as though it's used as a storeroom. There's a sound from the kitchen, and Emily walks down the short hallway in that direction. The girl who'd opened the door (Eliza, is it? Emily can barely remember her name) stands at the opened refrigerator eating fruit yoghurt from a large tub. She's dressed in a fancy, old white lace petticoat, and scuffed work boots.

‘I'm going now,' says Emily. ‘Can you let them know I was looking for them?'

The girl licks yoghurt from her lips and puts the tub away. She has a head of long curls that she has to keep flinging back from her face. ‘I'll see you out,' she says, and follows Emily back down the hall. Emily can hear the sound of her boots tramping behind her; she's very heavy on her feet.

Emily returns to her parents' place.

‘Where's Mahalia?' says her mother.

‘They weren't there.'

Emily speaks without evident emotion, but inside she has a spring coiled up, threatening to unwind. If she allows it to snap she will let out a long, agonising wail.

She goes and lies on her bed. She won't allow herself to cry. In a little while she gets up and rings Matt's mother, who says that they aren't at her place without a hint in her voice that something might be wrong.

So perhaps it's nothing. They've just gone away for a day or two.

She paces about the house, can't eat, and finally lies sleepless in the dark. Her father comes and sits on the edge of the bed, smoothing the hair from her forehead. ‘We'll figure something out,' he says. ‘She'll be okay. Try to get some sleep.'

Very much later, as she still lies there with dry eyes, her mother appears at the doorway, a silhouette against the nightlight in the hall. ‘Emily?' she says, in a hesitant voice. ‘May I come in?'

Emily doesn't reply, but she feels the mattress dip as her mother sits down next to her. It creaks as Emily turns round to face her; her mother is a padded shape in the dark, round and plump in a summer brunch coat. She never wears perfume, but ever since Emily can remember she has smelt of the same floral bath soap. She doesn't say anything, but reaches out and takes Emily's hand. Emily can hear her clock ticking, her pink ballerina clock that she's had since she was a child. The numerals on its face are lit up in the darkness. It must have been steadily ticking away like that all the time she's been away.

Emily knows that she doesn't need to do or say anything, simply sit there with her mother's hand in hers. She falls asleep with her mother sitting there beside her. When she wakes in the morning it has come to her where Matt and Mahalia might be.

6

It isn't possible to drive all the way to the van. There is a parking place near the top of the hill; from there on you have to go on foot. It is mid-morning, shrill with cicadas, by the time Emily walks into the clearing where Matt watches her approach. Mahalia is nowhere to be seen.

She is in the van, exclaiming over a butterfly flapping against the glass. Matt opens the window and lets it go, and Mahalia cries. Matt picks her up and sings to her to quiet her. ‘You've learned to sing,' says Emily, her words seeming to rasp, sounding strange to herself. Emily looks at her baby with surprise. She still isn't used to the
realness
of her.

‘You funny little thing,' she says with wonder.

She bends down to look into Mahalia's face and says firmly, in a louder voice, ‘You're a funny little thing. Do you know that?'

Emily takes Mahalia down to the bed, which is unmade and tangled with limp bedclothes. She lies down and closes her eyes. Her body remembers being here. She imagines she can still smell herself on the sheets. Her fingers reach back onto a shelf above the bed and find a pair of star-shaped earrings; she tucks them into the pocket of her jeans.

She remembers how it had been then. But this is now.

She can feel the sweet weight of Mahalia clambering on top of her and makes no effort to push her away. Everything seems like a dream; she is sick and light-headed from grief and lack of sleep. And she finds herself somehow at the door of the van, and then outside, staring out at the hills, at that view, which once enthralled and then oppressed her.

‘I was too young. We were both too young. We should never have had her.'

And it feels like the truth and not the truth at the same time, but someone has said it. It must have been her, because Matt is crying. Real, unfettered tears are coming from his eyes, falling like rain. ‘Don't
say
that. Don't
say
that!'

‘I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.'

She knows that it isn't all right to wish that your own child had never been born. She thinks fiercely that even though she now loves Mahalia enough to kill for her, enough to hurt Matt beyond belief it seems, it is still the way she feels.

‘There's no chance of us getting together again, is there.' It isn't a question that he's asking.

‘No,' she says. ‘It's gone beyond that.'

She can hear herself swallow.

Matt says, ‘You should have seen her the first time she walked. I might easily have missed it, but I was there.

‘She was holding herself up with this bloody washing basket and pushing it along. And then she saw me and let go . . .'

He has tears in his eyes. She can see he's almost crying. But he blinks them away.

She and Matt spend a long time talking. Emily has an impression of hours passing, though it's probably only minutes. By the time they've finally packed up and left the van for good, it is still not much after midday.

Matt says, the words coming from him with difficulty, ‘I just want you to explain why you went away.'

Emily looks out at the endless view – all that blue sky. Despite the difficulties she and Matt are having now, a feeling of hope and possibility has returned to her. She isn't the same person who had gone away. She isn't even the same person that Matt had once known, when they had planned for their baby with such foolish confidence.

No ordinary words can explain how she had felt. The heaviness, and blackness. The feeling of having a weight inside her, but at the same time having a huge hole there, too.

So Emily tries, and stumbles; she can hear how feeble it sounds, because no words can convey that feeling. So she rushes in with more words, and that's all they are: words to fill in the spaces, because no one could understand. She doesn't even understand it herself, and now that it's over it seems as though it has all happened long ago, or in a dream, or to someone else.

She sees Mahalia, sitting on the ground putting stones into an old plastic pot, with such intent and beautiful concentration. Emily feels with exultation,
I love her. I love her!
She runs over and squats in front of her and tickles her on her fat foot. Mahalia squirms and laughs. ‘Incy-wincy spider,' says Emily, walking her fingers up Mahalia's leg.

But then Matt comes over and seizes the baby, scooping her up from the ground and holding her so tightly Emily thinks that he might crush her. She goes to him and puts her hand to his cheek. Her fingers are pale against his brown skin. ‘Don't
look
like that,' she says.

‘Like what?'

Like you want to die, or something.
Emily doesn't say anything. Mahalia wriggles to get free and he puts her on the ground.

‘I'm
good
at looking after her,' he says. ‘It's what I do
really well
. I won't let you take her away from me!'

Then Emily says the thing she almost instantly regrets, and the words seem to make the world stop. Even the cicadas cease their shrilling. Only Mahalia continues doing what she is doing, contentedly and steadily putting stones into the pot. And when she's filled it up at last she tips them all out onto the ground again.

Afterwards, Emily drops Matt and Mahalia back at
their place
, and it feels like that, their place, as she watches them go up to the old shop door, where Matt puts their belongings down on the ground and searches in his pockets for the key. Emily doesn't wait for them to go in. In the rear-view mirror she sees Mahalia still waving to her as she drives away.

Emily doesn't go back to her parents straight away. She stops the car down near the river to think, and sits with the afternoon sun blazing in. She doesn't like to think of what she said to Matt up at the van, but she has to remember it and own up to it.

She said, ‘I could take it court!'

And at that moment she meant it, because she wanted Mahalia all to herself.

‘And you'd probably win,' said Matt, sounding defeated. ‘Because you're her mother . . . But you don't want that, do you?'

‘No,' she admitted defensively.

It won't come to that. Some people would say that Matt had won. But there isn't any winning where children are concerned, and maybe Mahalia has won, because they've agreed, after all that, to share looking after her.

‘Let her keep living with me,' Matt said. ‘For now, anyway. I don't want to take her away from you – I'd never do that. But she's her own person. Getting more like that every day. Maybe one day she'll want to go and live with you.'

Emily thinks about the old shop that has been Mahalia's home since she's been away; the room painted dirty yellow, the verandah with the weathered timber floor, and people who cycle past and wave. The back yard has a sandpit. It isn't a bad place for a baby. And Matt looks after her well, she can see that.

Emily starts the car and points the nose homewards.

7

(A postcard: the north head of the Brunswick River and New Brighton beach from the air)

Dear Pete,

This is the beach where I am today. There are some rocks in the water in front of me that look like a whole lot of shark fins, and I've just met a dog that wants me to keep throwing a stick for it to fetch. It's a cute dog, so ugly it's almost beautiful. It was great to get your phone call. I forgot that you were starting school this year – is it still good fun? I am also at school now, and Martin's probably told you I have a baby, called Mahalia – maybe you'll meet her one day.