Mahalia (7 page)

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, B
LUES 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 surgery. 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.

‘You're starting to look sharp,' said Matt. ‘You after someone or something?'

‘Let's go for a walk,' said Otis, giving Matt a smile that told him he wasn't going to let on. ‘Won't be long, Auntie!' he called, and they let themselves out the front door.

‘My life is shit at the moment,' said Matt. ‘Ever since Emmy left . . .' He shoved his hands into his pockets, wishing his jeans weren't stiff with grime.
I have to go to the laundromat,
have to get things together, have to stop wasting my time, get a job, write
to Emmy; got to make it all
WORK
!

The night dog, Voucher, came along the street and ran up to Matt, tail wagging. ‘Hey,' laughed Otis. ‘This dog knows you! Where you live, eh, where you live?' he asked the dog. Otis had a way with dogs; he swore they talked to him.

Eliza's ad for the room had said
friendly household
. And Eliza was friendly. She picked Mahalia up and crooned to her, and told Matt to help himself from the
veggie garden
that she'd also mentioned in the ad.

The veggie garden was a raised bed in the middle of a concrete space at the back of the building, and contained mostly herbs, plus a few frilly lettuces and a single tomato plant.

After a long day at the Con, Eliza dumped her bag on the kitchen table and waltzed on her bare feet out to her plot, where she squatted and weeded and watered until dark. She had a compost heap in the corner that she cared for as tenderly as the garden itself.

But, friendly as she was, Eliza wasn't often at home. Matt felt at times that he and Mahalia inhabited the entire dark building on their own. The shadows sometimes spooked him. It was tedious looking after a baby, and he thought of Emmy, often. He thought of her mouth as it was when he first met her: generous and smiling. He refused images of her as she had become after Mahalia was born, when her forehead creased into a frown and she didn't smile much at all. But memories were relentless, and sometimes he just had to get out of the house, so he walked, not really caring where. The movement made him feel better.

One day, late in the afternoon, he found himself at the place where Eliza was a student. It was a former high school in the centre of town, two tall ramshackle brick buildings in an asphalt car park. Fig trees and camphor laurels provided shelter, so Matt sat on a seat underneath them. Graffiti on a wall of the building asked the passer-by to SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM. It also said EJACAYSHUN FOR ALL, NOT JUST THE RICHÉ, and WHY SO MANY POOR? Mahalia chewed on her fist and grizzled; she was getting her top front teeth.

Young people dressed in glitzy ragbag clothes, clothes like Eliza's, greeted each other and bounded up and down the stairs. With their coloured hair and jewellery they made Matt feel dun-coloured. They were as casual as birds, but they had purpose.

Crows gathered in the fig trees and squabbled, dropping fruits to the ground. Their voices were harsh and lonely. Matt looked up to the top of the building and saw fig seedlings growing in the gutters. It felt as if the end of the world had come and Nature was reasserting herself. The students were the bright, feral remnants of a society that had destroyed itself.

From inside the building he heard the beat of a drum, and then someone starting to sing. It sounded like Eliza's voice. Tired of sitting and listening to Mahalia grizzle, Matt carried her stroller up the steps at the back of the building.

Inside, the walls were painted in bright colours, hung with artwork. A grey metal tray for smokers overflowed with plastic drink bottles and lolly wrappers. Matt couldn't hear the singing now that he was inside, but he wandered up stairs and down corridors, wheeling the stroller over a coarse old blue carpet that flowed like a river through the building, up and down staircases that linked various mezzanine floors. It was a labyrinth, with coloured glass windows throwing eerie light over the floor. The bones of the old school building it had once been were there, but it looked like a place that had been settled by gypsies.

Matt saw a young man with a shaved head striding along a corridor. ‘Hello!' the man called. ‘Hello!'