Mahalia

by Joanne Horniman

  JOANNE HORNIMAN has worked as a teacher of adult literacy, and has written a number of books for children and teenagers. She and her partner Tony have two grown-up sons, and live in a place they built themselves near Lismore.

  Praise for Joanne Horniman’s A Charm of Powerful Trouble

  ‘A tight, intriguing, beautiful story.’ www.theblurb.com

  ‘Not to be missed.’ Magpies

  Praise for Joanne Horniman’s Secret Scribbled Notebooks

  (winner of the Queensland Premier’s Award 2005)

  ‘A deeply satisfying novel on every level …

  a writer of rare skill and power.’ Viewpoint

  ‘The writing is beautiful …brightened by shafts of humour …

  romantic and introspective.’ Magpies

  ‘Kate’s emotions, her thoughts and her honesty are transfixing.

  Horniman captures the anxiety and possibility of the cusp of adulthood,

  using elegant, evocative prose.’ Weekend Australian

  Joanne Horniman

  First published in 2001

  This edition published in 2006

  Copyright © Joanne Horniman 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: frontdesk@allen-unwin.com.au

  Web: http://www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Horniman, Joanne.

  Mahalia.

  For secondary school students.

  ISBN 978 1 74114 910 4.

  ISBN 1 74114 910 X.

  1. Single fathers – Australia – Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  Designed by Ellie Exarchos (Scooter Design) and …oid design

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed by Australian Print Group, Maryborough, Victoria

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Now the man has a child

  He knows all the names

  of the local dogs.

  – Japanese poem

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  1

  Matt loved Mahalia. He loved the smell of her, of fresh soft skin and milky sleepiness. He loved her bald vulnerable head, and the tender folds of skin on her neck. He loved her tiny fingers that clutched at his clothing and folded themselves up into fists when she slept. He loved the way she sucked intensely at her bottle and gazed at him with her cross-eyed stare. Most of all he loved the fact of her. He loved her because she existed.

  On a windy August day that threatened rain, when Mahalia was exactly five months, three weeks and three days old, and Matt was seventeen and a half, he stood by the side of the road holding her against his chest in a cloth pouch, swaying his body gently to and fro to soothe her as she slept. He gazed down at her. Her skin was almost transparent, and expressions played across her sleeping face the way cloud shadows chase each other across a landscape. Matt felt the calm movement of his chest as he breathed, and the answering movement of Mahalia’s body.

  He stood beside the road heading north out of Lismore till almost midday, waiting to hitch out of town. Most of his possessions – three plastic garbage bags and a guitar – sat beside him, and he waited patiently, knowing it was simply a matter of time until someone stopped to give him a lift.

  Lismore was an old town built on a slow brown river whose banks were choked by weeds and vines. On the hills above the town and stretching out towards the coast crept a brick-and-tile suburbia, but here, where Matt waited, were mostly high-set old timber houses. Their stumps and ageing weatherboards were askew; they had suffered a hundred years of relentless sunlight and regular floods, and somehow still stood.

  An old Toyota Corona pulled up beside Matt and a young man motioned for him to get in. He never spoke as he took them on a winding road through weed-infested farmland and rainforest remnants to a village called The Channon, where Matt only had to wait fifteen minutes before a woman in an old Holden station wagon picked him up.

  ‘You’ve got a beautiful baby,’ said the woman as the car moved off, spraying gravel and spinning the wheels. Mahalia flinched at the sound, but stayed asleep.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Matt. He looked down at Mahalia, and smiled.

  ‘How far do you want to go?’

  ‘Mount Nardi. Almost to the top?’

  ‘That’s where I’m going. You’re in luck. Whose place?’

  ‘Julie Mitchell’s. You know her?’

  ‘Sure do. I’m just a few places before hers. You must be her son Matt. And this must be Mahalia. My name’s Therese. I’ve lived down the road from your mum for a couple of months.’

  Matt smiled at her; he didn’t mind that she already knew about him. That was what it was like when you lived in the bush: everyone knew everyone.

  The Holden crunched gears and proceeded uphill. Car bodies lay abandoned by the roadside; the road up Mount Nardi killed gearboxes. They wound up through the rainforest, and the air became cooler, and moister, until they were driving into light cloud. Finally, when it seemed that the old car could bear no further punishment, they were at the driveway of Matt’s mother’s place.

  Mahalia woke as he got out of the car, opening her eyes suddenly and staring at his face. Matt waited for the sound of the engine to recede before he made a move. He wanted to savour the silence, which wasn’t real silence, but the sounds of the bush. If you listened, there was life going on all around you.

  ‘Hey, Mahalia, hey,’ he said, jiggling her softly in the cloth pouch. She looked into his eyes; she had the most direct gaze of anyone he knew.

  It started to rain lightly, so Matt left the garbage bags in the drive for the moment, caught the handle of the guitar case in one hand, steadied Mahalia with the other and made his way up to the house.

  His mother was on the veranda. ‘I thought I heard a car.’ She smiled, and held out her arms for the baby. Matt undid the strap of the carry pouch and released Mahalia into the waiting arms. He turned around without a word and went back for his things.

  ‘Where’s Emmy?’ called his mother.

  ‘Emmy’s gone away for a while,’ he said when he’d returned with the garbage bags and dumped them on the floor of the living room. He looked into his mother’s face. ‘I don’t know if she’ll come back.’ It was the first time he’d expressed his fear aloud. He sat down at the table.

  Mahalia started to cry. It was her hungry cry. Matt got to his feet and rummaged in his bag for her bottle. ‘Have you got any boiled water?’

  ‘There’s probably some in the kettle. Look, I’ll do it.’

  ‘No! I can.’ He dumped the bottle and a tin of formula on the bench.

  After Mahalia had been fed and
was sleeping again in a bunny rug on the floor, his mother said, ‘What happened with Emmy?’

  ‘Happened? Nothing. She wanted to get away. She said it was getting too much for her – the baby, and me, and . . . everything I suppose. She said she was going to stay with a friend of her mother’s in Sydney, a sort of godmother or something. She gets on better with the godmother than she does with her mum. So she got on the bus and – went.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A week ago.’

  ‘I see.’ His mother nodded, weighing up what he’d said. She didn’t look surprised, and Matt felt in some obscure way that he’d disappointed her.

  ‘Why do you think she mightn’t be back?’ she asked, in her quiet, reasonable voice. She was a social worker. She observed people’s lives falling apart all the time.

  ‘She took all her stuff. And . . . I don’t know, just a feeling I have sometimes. But she wouldn’t leave Mahalia for ever – would she?’

  He looked at his mother, who held his gaze for a moment and then got up and moved over to the sink. She wiped it carefully with the sponge, her head bowed, then turned to face him.

  ‘You know you can stay here as long as you like,’ she said. ‘You’re not on your own – you know that.’

  When Mahalia woke, Matt took her out into the garden, upending her and carrying her firmly upside-down, her body secure against his chest. He’d carried her like this for short periods almost since she was born. He’d heard somewhere it would help her spatial development, whatever that was. The way she experienced spaces, or something. Matt wanted Mahalia to experience all the spaces of the world, fully. She looked out at the world upside-down with a solemn expression, her little mouth shaped into an o, her eyes round too. She was so calm and alert that he knew she liked being carried this way.

  He took her to the looking-out spot, a cleared place which overlooked the forested valley. Matt was sure there wasn’t a better place in the world. Wind had blown the cloud away now.

  ‘Look at that view, Mahalia,’ he said. ‘Just look.’ He knew she couldn’t see into the distance, but he hoped the beauty would seep into her bones.

  Next, he walked her round inside the house, right way up this time. Up close, she could see very well. She noticed everything. The whole world was new and full of wonder for her.

  He took her into the room his mother used as a studio and showed her the masks made of leather and papiermâché.

  ‘What do you think of this one?’ he asked, showing her a mask with a smiling face, red cheeks and yellow woollen plaits. Mahalia waved her arm at it, and tried to reach out and take hold of it. She babbled, and smiled.

  He moved on to a stern-faced leather mask, with hard high cheekbones and black eyebrows. Mahalia creased her face into a scowl and began to bellow.

  ‘Oh, no, no, it won’t hurt you!’ said Matt, taking her quickly away to show her a mobile of bright satin fish that hung in front of the window. ‘Look, Mahalia, little fishies, like the ones Grannie made you. A red one and a green one and a blue one and a purple one.’ Matt touched each fish as he spoke, and they bounced about. Mahalia stopped crying, and reached out to touch them.

  When he was little, Matt and his mother had collected shells and brought them home, where they still smelled deliciously of the sea. They looked up books to find out the names. There were cart-rut shells, fine white angel’s wings, and shells that they called hats, which were a kind of limpet. There were scallop shells, and zebra volutes, and turban shells, and cat’s eyes. There was the occasional rare cowrie.

  His mother collected everything. She collected beautiful fabric and lace and trimmings in different colours and textures, which she used to make quilts or wall-hangings or mobiles; and building materials, which she had gradually made into a house for them. She collected a lot of stuff that seemed like rubbish too: electrical wire, and old wooden soft-drink boxes, and enamel utensils scabbed and abscessed with wear, and old watches and cogs from machinery, and knives and forks – all of it was beautiful, she said, and put it away in case she found a way of combining the things together into a work of art.

  She ran warm water into a plastic tub and put out her arms for Mahalia.

  ‘I’ll bath her, if you like,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Matt, ‘I’ll do it. She’s my baby, all right?’ His vehemence startled Mahalia, and she started to cry, angry with the sudden tension she sensed in his body.

  His greatest fear was that his mother would take over, that he’d let her take over.

  But bathing Mahalia relaxed him again; he soaped her body all over till she was as slippery as an eel and rinsed her off. He swaddled her firmly in a towel and kissed her lightly on the forehead. She peered up at him, her face serious and wise.

  The thing Mahalia would want to know one day would be Why. And then How.

  The how would be easier. That was the birds and the bees stuff. His own mother had always been frank about that since he was very young. He thought he could cope with that. The why would be harder to explain. Why he and Emmy had her.

  Mahalia was starting to play with sounds. Today she went mum mum mum mum mum, and he’d echoed her back. Before too long he’d be able to talk to her properly, and tell her things.

  If he were to explain why she had come into existence he supposed he could put it down to all those days when he and Emmy should have been at school spent lying on the river bank watching the clouds. He could put her down to clouds. Or to beetles lumbering through the grass, the way Emmy’s eyes lit up when she put one down his back so that he just had to tickle her.

  For that was where it had started, their delight in each other and one thing leading to another.

  Emmy was the most reckless person he’d ever met. When Matt was with her, nothing was ordinary. He was in an other world: an Emmy world. The other-worldliness surrounded her, and enveloped him as well. It was a world that existed behind the dimension of ordinary life.

  She had a way of making everything special. There was a sort of magic attached to her. And, magically, she had a way of getting what she wanted.

  She said that for ages she’d had this thing about climbing the bell tower of the Catholic cathedral in Lismore. It was a square squat tower with a round turret attached to the side. ‘I bet there are nuns live there,’ she said. ‘With their noses in a prayer book. Shut up in there all the time to pray.’

  Matt was shocked. Emmy was a good Catholic girl. They hadn’t yet begun missing school to lie about on the river bank together.

  ‘I’m going to climb that tower,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been wanting to since I was a kid.’

  She dragged him to the church office, and put on her most demure Catholic-girl demeanour. She told the priest how she’d been wanting to climb the tower all her life, and now she felt she was old enough and responsible enough. She said nothing of her wild and insulting fantasies about nuns.

  The priest was reluctant to allow them up the tower. He talked about the danger. Proper channels and so on. ‘But I thought you were the proper channel,’ she said, eyes downcast.

  Matt squirmed and wished for invisibility. He watched a fly on the wall take off and exit through the open door. Emmy’s conversation with the priest became a buzz in his head and he prepared to be shown the door. He prepared to follow the fly, ignominiously.

  And then the priest took some keys from a drawer, and they followed the tramp of his no-nonsense black polished shoes through a back entrance to the cathedral, into the polished-wood stained-glass hush, where light entered as though from behind clouds. And there was the door that led to the tower.

  The priest unlocked the door and threw a light switch. The bells were controlled by computer; he warned against staying in the bell room at the times when they would ring, and told them not to climb the ladders onto the roof.

  Emmy promised they wouldn’t.

  Then, as soon as the priest departed, she grabbed Matt’s hand and dragged him up the spiral staircase. It was all rough
brickwork and narrow, impossible windows. They reached the first floor of the tower – a dim room, empty except for dust and a wooden lectern, lit only by a small stained-glass window. Emmy was disappointed. No nuns shut up with their prayer books.

  She grabbed Matt and kissed him, for the first time. In that room where she’d hoped for nuns. Her mouth tasted of pink lollies. Her tongue was muscular and inquisitive.

  They kissed again in the room on the next floor too, where the bell handles were arrayed in rows and numbered. Cardboard sheets were scattered on the floor, with words and numbers to show which bells were to be rung. Silent night, holy night: 11 6 11 5 3 12.

  The second kiss was quicker. Just when he was beginning to enjoy it, just when he was becoming familiar with her tongue, and felt that the taste of pink lollies was the centre of his world, Emmy pulled away. She led him up the next short section of stairs to the bells. They were tilted on their sides, twelve of them, different sizes; their clappers were still, waiting to be released – a dozen silenced metal tongues.

  The light was bright up there, for this was the top of the tower, open on all sides to allow the sound to ring out. Matt could see the town outside: the houses up on the hill and sporting fields and clumps of camphor-laurel trees. He and Emmy put their faces into the wind and held them there for a long time. The air was like lemon soda water, and Matt wanted to drink and drink.

  A green ladder led to a walkway above the bells. From that walkway was another ladder to a trapdoor out onto the roof, which Emmy had promised the priest she wouldn’t climb.

  Emmy’s face was full of mischief and possibility. ‘I did promise,’ she said, demurely and unconvincingly.

  ‘But I want to,’ she added.

  For Emmy, wanting to do something and doing it followed each other naturally and inevitably. Matt went with her out of fear. Fear of being without her; fear of what she would say. Because, already, he would do anything for her.

  He helped push open the trapdoor to the roof. And stood leaning over the parapet with her. ‘Someone will see,’ he heard himself say, feeling ashamed of his craving for conventionality.