Mahalia

by Joanne Horniman

  He found himself, in the slow, hot, childless afternoon, bumping into Elijah, who was just about to knock on his front door. He’d got the address from Matt’s mother. Elijah was back from fruit-picking, and he had a dog, a fierce-looking dingo ridgeback cross. ‘This is Jess,’ said Elijah, ‘And it depends who you are, how she likes ya.’

  Jess wagged her tail at Matt.

  Matt was pleased to see Elijah, who looked at him speculatively. ‘You’ve had ya hair cut, mate!’ he said, nodding his head cynically. Elijah’s hair was also shorter. He looked older and more muscular, and his eyes had a defensive, challenging look.

  They wandered down Matt’s street to where paddocks led to their old school, and they sat on the edge of the oval, sharing a durry that Elijah took from a back pocket.

  ‘Remember nicking off from there?’ said Elijah, nodding towards the timber, high-set buildings of the school. ‘Best thing we ever did.’

  ‘Did you go fruit-picking?’ said Matt. ‘Make any money?’

  ‘Went all the way to Shep,’ said Elijah, ‘Shepparton. In Victoria. Got a job as a farm labourer for a while. They work ya, those blokes, I tell ya, ten, thirteen hours a day, eight days without a break. Got to the eighth day I collapsed in the heat.’ He laughed bitterly. His mouth turned down. ‘There was this guy, a pen-pusher from Bondi, started working there. Did three days and collapsed. This bastard of an owner says to him, “I downed you after three days. Took me eight to down Elijah.” ’

  He took a sour kind of pride in this. ‘And then, when they don’t want ya, when the weather’s bad, it’s back to Centrelink. Those bastards know not to muck me and Jess around now. After the few go-ins I had with ’em. They see me comin’ with Jess and they’re all politeness. I say to Jess, “We’re goin’ down to Centrelink . . .” ’ When she heard the word ‘Centrelink’, Jess turned her orange head and growled.

  ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Jess? Centrelink!’

  Jess growled again.

  ‘Jess is the scourge of Centrelink. This woman says to me, “I’d appreciate it if you left your dog outside. We don’t permit animals in here.’’ ’ ‘

  “Listen,” I said. “This dog goes where I go.” You’ve got to call the buggers’ bluff. They’re happy if you don’t want a job. But when you want a job, when you demand a job, when you want to know why the bastards who’ll employ you on a day-to-day basis like, won’t give you any permanent employment, when they hire and fire you just like that . . . Anyway, me and Jess are real well known at Shepparton Centrelink.’

  Elijah laughed again. He was older, harder.

  ‘Did you make any money?’ said Matt.

  ‘Made it, and spent it.’ He sighed. ‘Made just about enough to keep me and Jess alive. Still got your baby?’

  Matt nodded. ‘She’s visiting Emmy’s parents today.’

  Elijah nodded and pulled a face. He had an almost constant downwards turn to his mouth now. ‘You could get them to look after her all the time, probably,’ he said.

  ‘But I don’t want them to,’ said Matt, amazed that Elijah could suggest such a thing. ‘She’s mine.’

  The truth was that when Matt was without Mahalia he felt that something was missing. It was an uneasy feeling, a sense that he’d left something behind, that there was something he should have remembered that he’d forgotten. It was too easy to walk down the street without a baby in tow. No getting together all the stuff you had to take, no unfolding the stroller or folding it up again, manoeuvring it through doors and over kerbs, no talking constantly, soothing and reassuring. You just stood up and you . . . went. It was unnatural.

  With Mahalia still not due back till later in the afternoon, Matt, in his aimlessness, ended up at the Conservatorium, waiting for Eliza. He sat under a fig tree, watching people come and go.

  SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM said the graffiti on the wall.

  This annoyed Matt because he didn’t even know how to pronounce PARADIGM, let alone what it meant. Maybe he should go back to school (go to TAFE, like Virginia!), learn some big words, make something of himself.

  At last Eliza emerged, wheeling her bicycle down the steps because she had no bike lock and always took it inside for safe-keeping. Kent was with her. They saw Matt and came over to him.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ Matt said, indicating the graffiti with a movement of his head.

  ‘Why so many poor?’ said Eliza. ‘Good question, when the country’s meant to be so prosperous.’

  ‘You mean “paradigm”?’ said Kent, knowing at once what Matt was getting at. He said it so it rhymed with ‘dime’. ‘It means a way of looking at things. The concept that dominates this society.’ His dark bright eyes looked keenly at Matt.

  ‘Which is?’ Matt wondered why people had to use such difficult words.

  Kent grinned. ‘How about: Work. Consume. Die? No, but really, you tell me what it is.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Matt grunted.

  ‘It comes from a Greek word meaning a pattern.’

  ‘You just know that?’

  ‘Nah, had to look it up in a dictionary when I saw that graffiti.’ Kent grinned at him.

  Matt laughed. ‘It could be paradiddle. Subvert the dominant paradiddle. You know, that hand pattern for drumming . . . right, left, right right, left left . . .’

  ‘Or right, right, right, right . . . maybe that’s the dominant paradiddle?’ interrupted Kent, laughing.

  ‘Oh, what are you on?’ said Eliza, impatient with the conversation. She got onto her bike. ‘I’ll leave you blokes to it!’ she yelled, her head turned to one side so they’d hear her as she rode off.

  ‘Hey,’ said Kent. ‘A little bird told me that you had your bass back. How about coming for a jam with us? See how you go. We’re meeting on Saturday afternoon, shed in the back of my place. Eliza’ll give you the address.’

  The shed backed onto a laneway and they left the roller door open to let in light and air. Matt brought his guitar, and Mahalia, and toys to keep her amused, and food, and a bag of nappies and spare clothes. He was used to packing up all that stuff now.

  He was worried that she’d go out onto the street, so they improvised a barricade from an old ladder. It was something of a deterrent to Mahalia, but she would still be able to climb over it, and Matt had to constantly turn around to check out where she was.

  Matt wanted to play well today. He wanted to get into the band. He knew a lot of guitarists played bass from necessity because their band needed a bass player, but they really preferred to be on guitar. But Matt actually liked being part of the rhythm rather than the melody. He found great delight in providing the background notes.

  Besides Matt on bass and Kent on guitar, there was another guitarist, Brian, who was very short and muscular and beautiful, with long black curly hair and a beatific smile almost always on his face. The drummer was Pete, a tall thin man with an unshaven face and multiple piercings in his ears and nose. There was also a trumpet player, whose name Matt didn’t catch, for he arrived when Mahalia had started up a slow persistent whine, holding her arms up for Matt to lift her, and then shaking her head and wanting to get down again, so that Matt missed most of Kent’s introduction.

  Matt settled Mahalia with a toy car to look at and a bottle full of water with a teat to suck on. Though she mostly drank from a cup, he still used a bottle to comfort her, and now he laid her down on a beanbag in the corner. She held the bottle with one hand and the car in the other, and her eyes followed his every move. She was wary of this new place, dark and dank and full of new people.

  ‘You know that Dan Penn song, “Cry Like a Man”?’ Kent asked him.

  Matt shook his head. ‘Play it and I’ll pick it up.’

  They started to play, straggling into the song and tentative at first, but Matt soon picked up the rhythm. ‘. . . and cry, cry, cry like a man,’ it went.

  Mahalia couldn’t make it to the end of the song without starting to cry herself. She sat up and held the teat o
f the bottle in her mouth and wailed, her face damp and flushed. Matt dashed over to her, his guitar dangling round his neck, steadying it with one hand while he picked Mahalia up with the other. ‘Look, sorry,’ he said to the others over his shoulder. ‘I won’t be a sec . . .’

  An old man appeared at the door of the shed, dressed in work pants held up by a rope. He was long-haired and grey-bearded. ‘Brian!’ he yelled, his face bright with happiness.

  Brian’s face lit up. ‘Andreas! Come in!’

  The old man stepped heavily over the makeshift barricade. ‘I heard you play!’ he bellowed. ‘Can I stay and watch?’

  Brian nodded and introduced him to Matt. ‘Matt, this is Andreas.’

  Matt smiled vaguely, distracted by Mahalia.

  ‘Guess where I am from!’ Andreas demanded of Matt, not noticing how flustered he was. Matt shrugged. Andreas spoke each word distinctly, in an accent he couldn’t identify.

  ‘Alaska!’ Andreas yelled, in an exaggerated American accent. ‘But I was born in Austria.’

  Mahalia had finished her water and still wanted more to drink. Matt seized a large bottle of chocolate-flavoured milk that Kent had put on top of the amp and poured some into her bottle.

  ‘I came to Australia forty years ago. Saw it in National Geographic. Came out on a boat. Guess which port I arrived at!’

  ‘Brisbane?’ hazarded Matt.

  ‘No! Fremantle!’ Nothing Andreas said was in anything less than a shout. The others in the band tuned their instruments, ignoring him. Mahalia was startled by all the yelling, and started to cry.

  ‘I’m divorced from my wife, but we still talk! Guess why!’

  Matt shrugged. He rubbed Mahalia’s back, trying to soothe her.

  ‘We have thirteen grandchildren!’

  ‘Hey, Andreas,’ said Brian gently. ‘We need to start and you’re disturbing the baby. Shhh!’ he put his fingers to his lips with a smile, and Andreas was obediently silent. He went over to a chair and sat quietly, preparing to watch them.

  Matt laid Mahalia back on the beanbag, where she sucked on the bottle of chocolate milk.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Kent. ‘‘’Cry Like a Man.” ’

  They got almost to the end of the song before Mahalia started up again. She sat up and held the teat of the bottle between her teeth again and she cried, red-faced and angry. Leaning forward, she bit suddenly and fiercely at the teat, and bit it right off. The bottle fell to the floor and the milk spilled out. Just as Matt arrived to mop it all up she got to her feet, tottered forward, and vomited into Brian’s open guitar case.

  By that night Mahalia had a full-blown fever. She cried and tossed and fretted. It was a hot night anyway, a night to sleep with a sheet only, and Matt dampened some washers with cold water and put them to her forehead. It helped for a while, but then she vomited again, and contined to vomit throughout the night. Matt was exhausted with getting up and down to her. All his sheets and towels were soon soaking in the bathtub.

  Eliza and Virginia got up and looked on at his struggles with her, helpless. Finally, long after she had anything left to vomit up, Mahalia was on her knees in her cot, retching. She was pale and weak, and Matt looked up at Eliza, who sat at the end of his bed, and said, ‘I’m going to take her to the hospital. What do you think?’

  Eliza nodded.

  He’d needed someone to consult. It was hard making a decision on your own. Eliza went out to a phone box to call a taxi and went to the hospital with him.

  The doctor was the same one who’d attended to his cut hand. Matt felt a vague sense of shame, as if he was a person who couldn’t manage his life, who turned up uselessly at hospitals at odd hours. The lights shone, white and intrusive, and Mahalia squinted into the glare. Her hair was damp. She was crumpled with exhaustion. Usually robust and plump, she looked a tiny scrap in just singlet and nappy.

  ‘Is she still breast-fed?’ said the doctor, to Eliza.

  ‘Um – no,’ said Eliza. ‘She’s weaned,’ loyally not dispelling the assumption that she was Mahalia’s mother.

  ‘Well, it’s not serious,’ said the doctor, ‘if you don’t let her get dehydrated. She has gastroenteritis – most babies seem to get it at about this stage. But you need to keep the fluids up to her.’ He wrote down the name of some stuff they could use. ‘I’ll give her something now and something you can take home and give her until you can get to a chemist.’

  They went back in a taxi, Mahalia asleep at last in Matt’s arms. ‘The thing is,’ said Matt, ‘you just don’t know, and in the middle of the night, when she looks like that . . .’ He hated to be seen as an incompetent parent, but he was relieved that she’d be all right.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ said Eliza, and patted his arm as she peered out at the night from the back of the taxi. ‘You weren’t to know what it was.’

  When they got home Matt put Mahalia to bed and kissed her lightly on her damp, sick-smelling little head. Afterwards, he and Eliza sat for a while together at the kitchen table, drinking tea in an exhausted companionship.

  When Matt finally got to bed the sky had started to become pale. He listened to Mahalia’s light even breathing, the blessed silence of her sleep, and he hugged his arms around himself. He thought, as he often did before sleep, of Emmy, but this time he had trouble remembering her face.

  She’d worn a red dress the day she left, and carried the rest of her clothes in a small black bag. She’d looked at him with a face full of distress. ‘Look, I have to get away for a while. You’ll be right with the baby . . .?’ She’d fled on a bus, not looking back at them.

  At first, when she’d gone, he’d remembered only her mouth; her mouth and her smile and her fine white teeth. But then what he missed was the sheer fact that she wasn’t there with them; he had no one to consult, no one to sleep beside at night.

  Now he remembered the red dress, a short red dress with a ruffle round the neck. And now it hit him that he’d been a fool for months. It was over between them, and she wasn’t coming back, wasn’t coming back.

  And he knew that if she did, it wouldn’t be for him.

  15

  A week later, on an ordinary day, when she stood at the front door, her face, which Matt thought he’d forgotten, was alive to him again. Her eyes, almond-shaped, brown, deep-set in her face, were just as he remembered. So were the freckles scattered across her nose. Her mass of thick soft brown hair, pushed back behind her ears, was exactly the same. It had seemed an eternity since he’d seen her, but now, with her there so suddenly, no time appeared to have passed at all.

  Emmy licked her lips in a way that was utterly characteristic of her, her tongue pausing on the lower lip. Then she smiled, uncertainly at first, then with her whole face. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’re at home.’ She looked embarrassed, perhaps at saying such a dumb, obvious thing.

  ‘I’m sorry to surprise you,’ she went on quickly. ‘But I didn’t know what else to do. I got home yesterday, and I couldn’t wait. You don’t have the phone . . .’

  She stepped forward and put her arms around him. He caught the familiar scent of her hair; it was warm from the sun, and smelt of moist brown leaves. She gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘I don’t know what to say. Can I see Mahalia?’

  He took her through to the back yard, gesturing for her to go ahead of him. He’d forgotten how small she was, yet how rounded and curved. She wore a tight-fitting top, and a short skirt that showed the shape of her hips. Halfway down the hall to the kitchen she turned and glanced up at him frankly without pausing in her brisk stride.

  Mahalia was busy with a bucket and spade in a sandpit he’d made in the corner. ‘Da?’ she said, as he arrived. She turned to greet him, waved the spade in the air, lost her balance and landed on her bottom. Saving face, she scrambled to her feet immediately and smiled at them both.

  Emmy crouched down, to look at her better. So did Matt. Mahalia came over to him, unsteady still on her legs, and handed him one of her toy cars. His arms went ro
und her, and she snuggled shyly against his shoulder and peeped out at Emmy from her safe vantage point. Something about their demeanour alerted her that this was no ordinary stranger.

  ‘You got back yesterday?’ he asked. ‘You’re staying with your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He was thankful that Eliza and Virginia were out. He made a cup of tea, and Emmy came into the kitchen to drink it, looking out through the back door at Mahalia, who played in her sandpit and talked to herself, exclaiming and making sounds of wonder.

  Emmy sat and stared out into the yard. He couldn’t see her face. Then he saw that she was crying, silently, to herself, and he went over to her and put his arms around her.

  But she pushed him gently away. Embarrassed, he went to the sink and started to clatter dirty plates. Tears came to his eyes and he blinked them away. He would not, would not, he thought, allow memories of their life together to intrude now.

  Eliza arrived home, clattering her bike through the front door and calling out a cheerful greeting to whoever might be in the house. She appeared for a moment at the kitchen door, and went away just as quickly without saying a word.

  ‘Do you want to take her up to the park?’ said Matt, and Emmy nodded. Once there, they sat, cross-legged, facing each other on the grass.

  Matt thought that they might be able to talk, but Mahalia called out urgently from the swing, where she stood holding onto the seat, unable to get on. It wasn’t a word, just a sound, but the meaning was clear. She wanted to be pushed.

  So Matt pushed her, and Emmy stood by and watched shyly. ‘She’s grown a lot,’ said Emmy, in a subdued, sad, husky voice. ‘In just seven months.’

  Emmy visited them again the next day.

  She was happy to sit and watch Mahalia. She didn’t rush her, or scare her by trying to pick her up too soon. She merely sat, with a sad smile on her face, and allowed Mahalia to play around her. Soon Mahalia came up to her and handed her a toy car: Mahalia was very keen on cars – she called them broooms.

  Emmy reached out at last and touched her hair. Mahalia immediately put her hand to her head and glared at Emmy, pushing the hand away and rubbing her head as if someone had violated her. Then she smiled, and lunged forward to grab Emmy by the leg. Emmy scooped her up at once and placed her on her lap. Mahalia squealed and tried to wriggle free, but by this time her shyness was a game, and she ended up lying back in Emmy’s arms and gazing into her face, as if she recognised her.