Little Wing (6 page)

‘She never told me that story.'

‘Well, she wouldn't, would she? She always was a bit stuffy. Took me a lot of persuading to get her to take off her clothes.'

Emily hadn't bothered to have her hair cut for a long time. Nor had she trimmed her fingernails; she bit them down if they annoyed her. When her toenails got too long she snipped them off with paper scissors.

Emily, who had once loved her body, never thought about it now. She no longer looked at herself in the mirror (and it had once pleased her to see herself reflected back). She often didn't bother to clean her teeth. She dressed in anything that came to hand – usually an old tracksuit.

That night, in the dark, she ran her hands over her body. Once, she'd often touched herself with delight. Now, she felt detached, and it gave her no pleasure. She could feel that she was thinner now than she'd ever been. The bones of her hips stuck out, and her belly dipped, concave like a hammock, surprisingly still firm after being stretched by pregnancy.

Every one of her ribs stood out. Her breasts were small.

You might never have known that she'd had a baby.

Emily took one of her nipples between her fingers and squeezed. Eventually, a very small bead of milk came to the surface. She licked it from her finger. It tasted sweet, and thin, and warm.

W
hen i look at my baby i feel nothing, and i'm scared.

Two

1

When Martin left Emily at her front gate, he strode away with his arms swinging freely, his chest open and expansive. He felt the air passing in and out of his lungs, easy and slow. He was pleased that he'd found her again.

When he got to his place the front door was shut, and he took a key from his pocket and unlocked it. Cat kept the front door closed, but Martin always left it open, and the back door, too, in all but the worst weather, or at night. It wasn't so much the flow of air that he wanted, but the sense that the house was open to the world, and that everything could flow through it. He hated houses to be isolated, self-contained boxes. He wanted to feel that anyone in the world might come to his door. He remembered the day that Emily had first stood there, looking ready to flee. If the door had been closed, she might never have knocked.

As he made his way down the hallway, Cat called from the bedroom, and he went in. She was sitting at the dressing table, doing things to her face. He dropped down onto the bed and lay with his hands behind his head. ‘You going out?' he asked. It was obvious from the care she was taking with her appearance that she was, though he often wondered why she bothered. To him, she looked nicer in plain old everyday clothes – jeans and a sweater and brightly coloured sneakers.

‘Don't you remember? We're meant to be going to Michelle and Damien's for dinner.'

‘That's cool. I'm ready when you are.'

Cat kept looking at herself in the mirror. ‘Pete's had a bath but he's probably dirty again by now. Where were you all afternoon?'

Martin sat up and leaned on one elbow. ‘I met Emily.' He stopped. Then he said, ‘I found her, Cat. She was sitting in the park . . . Cat, she told me that she's had a baby, but that she left it – I haven't asked all the details yet, but imagine how she's feeling . . .'

Cat turned to look at him. He saw that she was annoyed with him, but all she said was, ‘She's a very strange girl.' She said it cautiously, as though she was keeping another comment in check. ‘When I found her sleeping on our bed that afternoon . . .' She frowned. ‘It's all a bit much, really.'

When he didn't reply, Cat said, ‘Why do you encourage her? I mean, she's such a kid. A troubled one, by the sound of it.'

Martin thought for a moment. ‘She needs people to talk to,' he said. ‘Some place to go. And Pete likes her. Most of the time.'

‘
I
like her,' he added decisively.

What he didn't tell Cat was that, despite the difference in their ages, he felt a kind of affinity with Emily that couldn't be explained by a similarity of interests or anything rational at all. It was simply that deep down he felt they were made of the same stuff. He felt at ease with her, despite her silences and moodiness.

‘Besides,' he said with mock sorrow, ‘Pete and I have trouble getting play dates. She's someone for us to be with. We're almost outcasts, otherwise.'

‘Trouble getting play dates!' said Cat, plonking herself down on top of him and wrestling his arms above his head.

‘It's true! I'm just not one of the girls. I've tried, God knows. But they're in a sort of club, with their tidy cargo pants and . . . and their girl talk. And they talk about their kids in a different way than I do.'

‘They came to your party!' said Cat, releasing him.

‘Yes, but that was because it was a party. And because you were there.'

‘Anyway, what about that hippy woman who used to come over – what was her name? Amber?' Cat fished some shoes out of the wardrobe.

Martin groaned. ‘Amber! Don't you remember? She didn't believe in saying “no” at all. And little Magenta was a biter. Pete hated her. He prefers Emily, he really does.'

‘And despite her also being a girl, she's okay to be with?' said Cat, looping the shoe straps over her heels.

‘Yes,' said Martin softly. He went to get a fresh shirt. They were arrayed in neat piles in the cupboard. It was Cat who kept their cupboards tidy. She was so
organised
. It was one of the things that had attracted him to her – her capability and certainty. They'd met when he'd seen a car pulled up beside the road with the bonnet up. He'd been passing on his motorbike and stopped to give a hand. And there was Cat, dressed in old jeans, triumphant at having successfully wrangled with a dirty sparkplug. Her hands had been covered in grease; she hadn't needed his help at all. He often thought of what she'd be like at work; in the operating theatre she'd assist without flinching, peering into the bloodied interior of the patient on the table as if it was an interesting problem that needed solving.

‘Anyway,' he said, pausing at the doorway to watch her check her face in the mirror again, ‘I don't see why we should always have to like the same people.

‘Come on, Pete!' he called, going out into the hall. ‘We've got to be somewhere soon!' He found Pete in the sandpit in the dusky garden, and took him through to the bathroom to wash his hands.

‘Come on, let's get you into your pyjamas. You'll probably want to go to sleep before we get home.'

‘I hate going to sleep at other people's places,' said Pete.

Martin went to Pete's room and threw some toys into a bag, then almost collided with Cat in the hallway, as she came out carrying a bottle of wine she'd just grabbed from the fridge. Without speaking, they crammed themselves into the car and drove off.

They arrived home several hours later with Pete asleep in the back seat. Martin carried him, warm and floppy, into the house, and tucked him into bed. Martin thought that after Pete had grown up and left home, he would remember times like this as some of the happiest of his life.

But later, when Cat had fallen asleep and he stood at their bedroom window staring out at the dark, it wasn't his family he was thinking of, it was Emily. In the park that afternoon she'd asked him, ‘What sort of mother does that?' He hadn't been able to give her an answer – but then, it had been one of those questions, full of despair and self-hatred, that didn't require an answer.

2

She arrived two mornings later while he was in the middle of doing the washing. Standing in the damp laundry with piles of clothes all over the floor, he heard a sound at the front of the house through the grinding noise of the machine. He went out into the hall and she was standing at the open front door the way she had that first time, looking uncertain and ready to run away again.

‘Hey!' he said. ‘Emily! Come in . . .'

‘You don't mind?'

‘No. It's good to see you.' He had to go down the length of the hall and meet her where she stood on the threshold before she would step inside. But she wouldn't look at him, and he took her through to the laundry where he pulled a load of clothes from the machine. Without speaking, she helped him peg the washing onto the line, and then they sat in the thin sunlight on the back step. Emily stared broodingly at the path.

Martin got up. ‘Do you know what?' he said. ‘Pete's at preschool and now I've done the washing I'm through with my chores for the day. I feel like taking a holiday – d'you want to do something?'

‘Yeah,' she said, and her smile was as strained as the sun attempting to shine through the clouds. So he packed a small backpack with water bottles and fruit and as they went down the hall he handed her the rainbow hat from the peg. She crammed it onto her head as though she didn't care how it looked, and he had to stop himself straightening it and turning up the brim for her. He wanted to give her a hug and somehow make it all better, the way he did with Pete sometimes, but he couldn't take that liberty. She was too old for that, and she was a girl, and she wasn't his child.

So what he did was walk with her. He took her to the far side of town and down a bush track into the valley, climbing down steps cut into the rocky cliff face. As they descended, the forest became damper and darker. The air was clean and cool. At the bottom of the valley he came to a causeway where the path crossed a small creek. From here on, it was his secret place, off the track. He took her up beside the creek, where water trickled over rocks and moss silenced their footsteps.

He brought her to a pool with a small waterfall at the top of it. They sat on adjoining stones and sipped water from the bottles that Martin took from his pack. He handed her an apple, and she bit into it.

Martin removed his shoes and went to sit at the side of the pool with his feet in the water. ‘Try it,' he said, ‘it's not as cold as you might think.'

When she didn't respond, Martin went over and started to unlace her shoes, as if she was a child. Removing them from her feet gently, he tucked the socks inside and placed them neatly on a rock. Then he took her hand and led her to the pool, and they sat on the edge together

She said, ‘My mother rang up this morning. I couldn't talk to her. I never can.' She looked at him. ‘I have nothing to say to her.'

Martin made no comment. Then he said, ‘Can you tell me about your baby? What's her name – and who's looking after her now?'

Emily thought for a moment. She said tenderly, ‘Her name's Mahalia. Her father's looking after her. His name's Matt.'

She looked away and examined a leaf that she picked up from the ground.

‘And this Matt – he's all right doing this? He can look after her okay?'

Emily nodded. ‘Better than I could,' she said.

There followed one of those silences where Martin couldn't think what else to say – he didn't want to seem to be prying and Emily didn't volunteer anything else. ‘How agile are you?' he said eventually.

Emily looked up at him with such a look of surprised anticipation that he got up and led her over the rocks that straddled the creek. She turned out to be very light on her feet, and followed him readily as he leapt from boulder to boulder. They came to a twisted fig tree on a rocky outcrop, and as they clambered past it, Martin took hold of her hand. He felt how soft it was, the bones in it.

‘Look,' he said. ‘The tree's hollow.'

She stood on tiptoe and looked into it and smiled. He told her that it was a good nest for a possum; it was scattered with leaves and twigs and bark. After peering down into the tree they both looked up at the sky where it showed through the canopy. The rapid change in perspective gave him a feeling of vertigo; he closed his eyes and when he looked at her she was standing there patiently waiting for him.

They moved on, and came to a part of the creek where the rushing water made many layers of sound, with high splashing notes underlaid occasionally with deep gurgles, as the water ran on a hidden, complicated path under the stones. He sat her down on a rock as though he was conducting her to a seat in a concert hall, then went away and left her alone with the music of the water. He went back to the first rockpool where the water also rushed, though in a much more roaring and straightforward way. He waited for her there, and his head was full of the sound of the water, and it was that sound that was important, rather than the look of the water, or the trees, or the sky, or anything.

After a while he saw her picking her way down the creek. When she got within a metre of him she lay down on the ground and closed her eyes. She said in a slow, even voice, ‘I have this grey sludgy feeling that is there most of the time. And it makes me strange, and say strange things, and not know how to behave with people. It's because the world I'm living in isn't the same as the world they're in. It makes it hard to connect.

‘You're okay because I know you, and you make allowances for me. You know to just keep talking anyway, and sometimes when I'm with you and Pete there's this thin, silvery-blue opening where I can see the place where everyone else is. And sometimes I think that if I'm patient then one day the crack will get wider and wider, until the blue is the whole world. And I'll be me again.'

There was nothing but the sound of the rushing water, and after a while she stretched and got to her feet. Martin stood up too, and without speaking they made their way back up into the world.

Afterwards, he remembered the look of her as she lay there on the ground.

She'd had her hair cut since the last time he'd seen her. It was shorter and blunter, and she held it away from her forehead with a broad stretchy hairband. He saw how unhealthy and pallid the skin on her face was – almost grey. Her forehead was dotted with tiny pimples. She looked pathetically young to have had a baby.