Mahalia

by Joanne Horniman

  FRIENDLY HOUSEHOLD, VEGGIE GARDEN, CHILD WELCOME

  OPTIONAL FREE SINGING LESSONS INCLUDED

  Matt tore the address (sorry, no phone, it said) from the strip at the bottom and put it in his pocket, and made his way out to the main coast road to hitch.

  The wheels of Mahalia’s stroller sang along the concrete paths of Lismore; they rasped and whirred across the blue metal roads, whisking right past the used-car yards, where Matt had spent too many boring hours in his youth with Elijah, who drooled over what he called the beasts. And the crappy wooden houses of Lismore leered and beckoned, for Matt had known many a person who lived in them; the flat he and Emmy had shared before she went away was up that street there. And high above the old part of Lismore, the part that flooded, with its three bridges crossing its two rivers, and its pubs and clubs and the most deadly boring main street in the entire universe, nestled the houses of the newer suburbs, the houses with trim gardens and views. Emmy’s parents lived up there, watching television and vacuuming the wall-to-wall carpet and washing up three times a day. And there was the cathedral, with the squat date palm and the tower that he and Emmy had climbed, and there were the camphor-laurel trees they had seen from the tower, and here was the road that led out of town and here was a kombi van stopping for him.

  He arrived at the beach that day with a joyful heart, despite (or perhaps because of) the smile of the girl in the op shop that reminded him of how much he was missing Emmy. Emmy had a way of looking at him, of lifting the corners of her mouth and lighting up her eyes somehow at the same time, so that her whole face was surprised and joyful. She made him feel that he was the only person in the world she ever looked at like that. ‘Hey!’ she’d say to him, grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl, her face alight with mischief, ‘Catch!’

  Down on the sand he took Mahalia’s nappy off and carried her down to the water. The hat the girl had found for her shaded her stern little face. She was solemnly aware that a new experience was happening to her and she was ready for it. He dipped her toes in the water and she curled up her feet and wrinkled her face and exclaimed. Then, when she was used to the feel of the cool water, he held her under the arms and bounced her up and down at the edge of the sea, and she flexed her legs and took her weight on her feet, digging her toes into sand for the first time in her life.

  Matt was careful of her pale defenceless skin, and had left her shirt on, and after a short time he bundled her up in a towel and carried her back up into the shade. Then they walked down the beach to search for shells.

  Reality, he told Mahalia, is that nothing happens. But he looked out at the sea, squinting at the curve of the coast from the lighthouse to where it disappeared into infinity in the north, and was quite content, at the moment, for nothing to happen.

  He and Emmy had been on this beach once, with sand stretching forever, no one much around apart from strolling couples and a lone person doing yoga on the sand near the sea.

  And there came a horse from behind them, a horse with a rider crouched low, and as it got closer, they saw it was a man with a bare chest, riding bareback, and wearing a long feathered Indian headdress.

  He swerved to avoid the walking couples, and the yoga person, who didn’t budge, and as he thundered past Matt saw his face, bright with war paint, mouth pulled into a grimace, teeth sharp as a fox’s: it was like staring into a mask. As he went past he looked down at them; it seemed to Matt that he looked particularly at Emmy. But he shot past them in a moment, and all they could see was the rear of the horse, its speckled rump, its hoofs kicking up sand.

  He stopped a little way up the beach and led the horse into the water, and soon they caught up with him. He appeared ordinary off the horse, just a man with a painted face and funny headgear and a bare brown chest.

  Emmy paused to stroke the horse, talking to it all the while, and the man asked her if she’d like to get on it.

  Once she was up on the horse’s back holding the reins, Emmy looked out over the sea with an expression on her face Matt had never seen before. Without a word she dug her heels into the horse’s flanks and took off. Matt heard the sound of hoofs and saw the sand kicked up in their wake, and stood helplessly, watching her go. The Red Indian grinned to himself. He didn’t look at Matt at all. He was the sort of dude who thought it was cool that some girl had just taken off on his horse.

  And just when Matt thought Emmy would never come back, just keep going along that infinite beach until she became a speck and disappeared, she wheeled the horse around and returned, and he watched her coming closer and closer, crouched low over the horse’s back.

  When she reined it in she was so close that Matt could see the sweat glistening under her nose. The Red Indian grabbed the reins, and she slid off.

  Matt put his face into her hair. All he could smell was horse sweat, and Emmy sweat; she pushed him away after a moment, and looked up at the horse with love, her face bright with exertion.

  5

  ‘The Bluebird Cafe,’ said his mother, as they pulled up. She was dropping him off at the address he’d torn from the advertisement.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This place used to be the Bluebird Cafe. Years ago. Oh, when you were only a bit older than Mahalia. It didn’t last long. It was one of those early hippie cafes. Fresh orange juice and veggie burgers. I don’t think I ever went there. But I always remembered the name.’

  The place was a double-storeyed shopfront, with a veranda. The shop windows had been painted over to stop people peering in, in ochre and aqua paint, with a design of an arch and latticework.

  A man answered the door, a pale man with a long ponytail. He had the look of someone who spent a lot of time in record shops flicking through old records, a look of shy fanaticism. ‘Yes?’ he said. He had a flat, expressionless voice.

  ‘I’ve come about the room?’ said Matt, shifting Mahalia to his other hip. She was too big for the pouch now, and her fold-up stroller sat beside him on the footpath.

  ‘The room? Oh. Yeah.’ It took him a long time to register what Matt had said.

  ‘Er – come in. My name’s Dave.’

  Matt picked up the stroller and took it inside with him. ‘Mind if I just leave it inside here?’

  ‘What? Oh, sure.’ There were people who simply didn’t notice babies, or strollers, ever, and Dave was one of them. He hadn’t even glanced at Mahalia, let alone said hello to her, as many people would have done. Was this the place that advertised child welcome?

  Once Matt’s eyes had become accustomed to the darkness he saw that they were in a large empty room with a few cardboard boxes stacked up around the edges and two sagging sofas. A timber staircase at the side led to the second storey.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dave, ‘Well, we never seem to use this room. There’s only Eliza and me here now and we congregate in the kitchen or stay in our own rooms. But come up and see the room that’s for rent.’

  Even in a ponytail, Dave’s hair reached to his waist. Perhaps that’s where all his energy was, for he barely used a muscle in his face, and he led Matt up the stairs with a walk so languid that he appeared to begrudge the effort required to move.

  ‘This room’s been vacant for a while. We didn’t bother getting anyone in. The thing is, I’m moving in with my girlfriend as soon as I can get someone to replace me. So when I leave there’ll be another room vacant as well. Eliza and whoever rents this can decide whether they want a third person.’

  Matt stared at Dave’s heels as he climbed the stairs. Mahalia was in his arms, and he put his nose near the top of her head. The sweet smell of her soft bald scalp masked the musty dark odour of the house.

  Dave led him into a large front room that was filled with light. It was painted yellow. The walls had become grubby and it was bare except for a small cardboard box with scraps of cloth in it. Matt liked the room immediately.

  ‘Gets a bit of noise from the street,’ said Dave, opening the door that led to the veranda.

  Matt went o
ut. It was a deep veranda, partly closed in by peeling latticework. ‘What do you think, Mahalia?’ he said. ‘A veranda!’

  In his imagination he had already moved in.

  He looked up approvingly towards the roof, where a red nylon rope was suspended from the rafters. ‘With a washing line.’

  The front door downstairs slammed.

  Dave had followed Matt out to the veranda. ‘That sounds like Eliza,’ he said.

  There were energetic footsteps on the stairs. Then someone walked briskly around the top floor.

  ‘Eliza! Come out to the veranda!’ called Dave.

  Footsteps came through the yellow room. Bold, striding footsteps on the bare boards. A face appeared, the face of the lion girl.

  She grinned at Matt, but it was Mahalia she spoke to. ‘How was that hat, eh? Keep the sun off you all right?’ She was one of the people who noticed babies.

  ‘Do you know each other?’ said Dave, but his voice was devoid of surprise or curiosity.

  ‘Not really. But we’ve met. Kind of.’ Eliza’s almost-crossed-eyes met Matt’s.

  ‘I’m Matt,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  ‘Eliza,’ she said. ‘And this is?’ She looked at Mahalia with a quizzical look.

  ‘Oh. This is Mahalia.’ Matt positioned her so she could see Eliza better.

  ‘Wow! Mahalia! After Mahalia Jackson?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  An awkward silence followed. She’d expected him to say more.

  Matt finally found his voice.

  ‘Who gives the optional free singing lessons?’

  ‘I do,’ said Eliza.

  Eliza had given him a key, and there was no one home when he moved in. Matt noticed that his mother tactfully made no comment about the darkness and the sparse nature of the furnishings in the front room, the former shop, which was so obviously used as a kind of dumping-ground for junk rather than a living room.

  ‘Our room’s up here.’

  He opened the door onto the veranda to let in some air, and his mother looked around.

  ‘Needs a sweep,’ he said, anticipating her feelings about it.

  ‘Oh, it’s nice,’ she said warmly. ‘A good room. Big. Lots of light.’

  They set up Mahalia’s cot first and put her in it while they moved Matt’s things. (His mother had bought the cot second-hand and painted it mauve. ‘You think I can’t buy my own granddaughter a cot?’ she’d said, when Matt protested.) Mahalia sat on the bare mattress, rattling the bars, looking as if she might cry at any moment.

  Matt squatted down to look at the box of things that had been left behind in the corner. There were some pieces of bright fabric and a few tubes of glitter.

  ‘You want?’ he asked his mother, showing the box and its contents to her. She nodded happily. It was exactly the kind of stuff she collected.

  ‘Visit me!’ she said sternly, as she left him to settle in. He stood on the balcony and watched her car pull away. He thought of the emptiness of the house on the mountain that she was going back to. She loved the quiet, she had chosen it, but he’d heard her tell people it could be too quiet. They had lived there together all his life, and Matt knew she’d loved having him and Mahalia stay with her the past few weeks. He found it lonely too, bringing up a baby by himself. The flat had been unbearable after Emmy went, and that was one of the reasons he’d gone back to stay with his mother.

  But he needed to strike out on his own again.

  On the veranda floor he found a set of bamboo windchimes lying abandoned like a collection of old bones. He picked it up and fixed some of the strings and hung it, and that night it sang them to sleep with its diffident music.

  Matt liked his new place. He liked looking out through the gaps in the latticework that screened the veranda on one side, seeing the world chopped up into tiny squares. He liked the way the paint peeled off the door, showing layer upon layer going right back in time to a grim ochre. He liked looking out in the mornings to see the grey-bearded man from the 20,000 Cows Vegetarian Restaurant across the road eating breakfast, visible through the glass window of his shop. He liked the buzz of commercial activity: the service station across the road, the saddlery next door (We travel to fit your saddle said the sign), the paper shop on the next corner and the pub down the street. He even liked the rambling voices of drunks making their way home on foot after closing time, their bursts of song and equally brief bursts of argument. Most of all he liked the way you could see the country in the distance if you looked down the end of the street.

  Daily life with a baby took up all his energy. Eliza spent a lot of her time at the Conservatorium, which was in an old high-school building in the main street. She was a singing student, and worked at a cafe as a waitress, so he didn’t see much of her at first. Dave moved out and Matt agreed with Eliza that they should try and let his room. So far there had been no takers.

  He took Mahalia for walks. They went shopping and he bought things for them to eat. People walking past them often smiled at Mahalia. Sometimes they stopped to talk to him. Having a baby was the way to meet everyone in the world, eventually.

  In this part of town, people were poor. You could see it in their dull lank hair and cheap clothing: chain-store flannelette shirts and track pants and joggers. There were also hip young poor people in army surplus greatcoats and boots and dreadlocks. But it all amounted to the same thing. Everyone, like Matt, was just getting by.

  Mahalia enjoyed her walks in the windy spring sunshine. She kicked her legs and sucked on her fists. She laughed and talked to the universe. Matt answered her, saying, ‘Yes, that’s a cat, a cat, Mahalia. Meow meow. And here are the dogs! Do you remember the dogs? Teg and Tessa. That’s what they’re called.’

  He stopped outside the laundromat so Mahalia could reach out and touch the orange fur of the two Chows that sat there hanging out their blue tongues and panting with happiness. He’d learned their names when he met their owner, who lived down the laneway beside the shops.

  Mahalia squealed and lunged at the dogs. She sat back triumphantly with fur between her fingers, and tried to put it in her mouth, but Matt patiently removed it and showed her how to pat the Chows nicely. ‘Dad dad dad,’ she said, chomping her new teeth and her top gums together, lifting her chin and stretching out her hand.

  They walked down to the paddock under the railway overpass, to visit the horses, and Matt lifted Mahalia out of the stroller and held her so she could pat them. Mahalia panted quickly with pleasure, a few loud huffs that made Matt sure she must be able to smell their strong, exciting, horsy smell.

  Emmy had shown him a story she’d written when she was ten. She’d been ambitious then, and hadn’t even thought of spending her schooldays sprawled on the river bank, watching clouds.

  She’d kept it all that time. Six years. It was a long story, with chapters.

  It was about how she’d run away with her horse, called Flame. (The horse was made up. She didn’t have a horse, had never had a horse, though she’d learned to ride at a friend’s place.)

  In the story she loaded Flame with a saddlebag full of food and a sleeping bag, and ran away to have an adventure, sleeping at night under the stars in front of her campfire. One day she saw headlines in the paper about a missing girl and horse who were wanted by the police, and rather than give herself up, she packed up at once and set off quickly so they couldn’t find her, heading for Western Australia.

  That was as much as she’d written. She’d illustrated it, with meticulously drawn pictures of horses, including saddles and bridles. Matt admired the determination of the girl in the story: not to be caught, to have adventures. He even admired her callousness in not worrying about her anxious parents.

  ‘One day, Mahalia,’ he said, ‘you can have a horse. When Emmy comes back, we can live in the country with horses.’

  6

  Oh motherless child-ren

  motherless chil -il-dren

  mother-less child-re-en

  have such
a hard hard hard hard hard ti-i-i-ime

  And it’s sometimes I feel

  I feel someti-i-mes

  Like a motherless

  motherless chi-ild

  Oh and sometimes I feel I feel I feel

  like a mother-less

  motherless

  child

  A lo-ong way

  Such a long long way

  A lo-ong way

  Fro-om my ho-o-ome.

  Matt stood in the dark centre of the house and stared up the stairs to where Eliza was singing in the hallway of the second floor. The light coming down from the top of the house, the shadows everywhere, the stillness, and the purity of the sound made the broken-down old building feel like a cathedral.

  It was a simple, dignified song, sung with strength and purpose. Eliza improvised, and sang on, oblivious of Matt standing in the shadows, listening. She played with the notes, bent them and warbled them, whispered them, and cried them out, her whole body, her mouth and lungs and chest an instrument for the sound.

  When she’d finished she continued on her way down the stairs which was where she’d been going until a fit of singing overtook her. Eliza was heavy on her feet; she was one of those people whose footfalls sound heavily and resoundingly through a house. She arrived at the foot of the stairs with a jump, and saw Matt, still standing where he’d been arrested by the sound.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. Her hair was wet from a shower, and still dripping water. She smiled at him and went on into the kitchen.

  Mahalia had been asleep in their room upstairs, and now she woke and started to grizzle, wanting Matt to come to her. He went up the stairs two at a time and caught her in his arms. When he arrived in the kitchen with Mahalia to make her a bottle Eliza was sitting with her head flung forward, towelling her hair dry. Her knees were apart, her hair swept over her face from the back, and her neck was bare. She didn’t see him come in, but she heard him and said, muffled by the towel, ‘I hope I didn’t wake Mahalia up.’

  ‘She was due to wake anyway – doesn’t sleep long during the day.’ Matt had only been in the house less than a week, and they were still at the stage of getting to know each other, polite, asking tentative questions, sounding each other out.