Mahalia (6 page)

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.

Eliza sat up and tossed her hair back from her face in a swift, practised movement.

‘Do you want the singing lesson?'

Matt measured milk powder into Mahalia's bottle. ‘You mean the optional free singing lesson that comes with the room?'

Eliza laughed. ‘Yeah, well, I thought it might be an added inducement. It's not the most attractive place to live, but I like it.'

‘I don't sing.' He settled Mahalia onto his lap, where she lay back sucking on her bottle.

‘Oh, go on. You play the guitar, right? So you must sing along with it sometimes.'

‘I sound like someone being strangled.'

But instead of protesting that he must be exaggerating, as many people would have, she said, ‘You're probably not using the right techniques.'

Matt shook his head. ‘I'd never keep it up. But I could play my guitar while you sang. It's a bass, though.'

‘Yeah, I know, I've heard you playing in your room. Interesting to sing along with. I'll improvise.'

Matt handed Mahalia to Eliza while he fetched his instrument. Mahalia wasn't yet shy of strangers, and Eliza smiled at her so winningly that Mahalia smiled and smiled back, with her milky, gummy mouth, and wouldn't drink any more of her bottle. So Eliza sat her up on her knee and got her a crust of bread to chew. When Matt came back with the guitar they were both sitting there eating bread and butter.

‘She needs to chew,' said Eliza. ‘Now that she's got some teeth. Give her gums something to work on too. Do you have an amp?'

Matt shook his head. ‘My friend Otis does, and I plug it in when I go to his place.'

‘That's okay. You won't drown me out then.'

Matt didn't think it would be possible to drown Eliza out. He'd heard how she could belt out a song. ‘How come you know so much about babies?' he said.

‘My sister. I've been an aunt since I was twelve.' She glanced at Matt's guitar case, on which Otis had lettered BLUES IS THE MUSIC THAT HEALS. ‘Who said that?'

‘John Lee Hooker, I think.'

‘Mahalia Jackson wouldn't have agreed. She said that blues are the songs of despair. Gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing gospel you have a feeling there's a cure for what's wrong.'

Matt wasn't used to people talking this way: putting forward ideas unafraid of what people would think. ‘How old are you, anyway?' he said.

‘Twenty-two.'

She handed Mahalia to Matt, who sat her on the floor and gave her some plastic containers to play with. Then he tuned his guitar for a bit, and when he was ready he picked out a soft, low rhythm that Eliza improvised to, making her voice deep and growly. They went on until Eliza started laughing so hard she had to stop.

‘So you're at the Con,' said Matt, after he'd relished the silence that filled the kitchen when they'd finished the song. ‘What's it like?' He put away his guitar and picked up Mahalia, sitting her on his knee.

‘Oh, it's fantastic!' said Eliza. ‘Wonderful! It's what I've always wanted to do. But I never thought I'd have the chance to be a full-time singing student. When I left school, I did what I was only mildly interested in.'

‘What was that?'

‘I became a hairdresser.' Eliza grimaced, and laughed. ‘Yes, look at me now – I just let my hair grow out long and frizzy the way Nature intended it. Cut it myself when it gets too unruly.

‘But to spend most of my day singing . . . it's a dream come true. Have to pinch myself sometimes. All those years I spent making tea for customers and sweeping hair from the floor and snipping away . . .' She did an exaggerated shudder. ‘I never want to do it again. I waitress now, to get money, rather than do that again.' Her voice was puzzled. ‘I always kind of liked fiddling with people's hair, when I was a kid. But not as much as singing. Funny, isn't it?'

Eliza reached out for an orange from a bowl, peeled it with her hands, and ate it, a segment at a time, not worrying about the juice that covered her fingers. ‘D'you mind me asking,' she said, ‘how come you're looking after Mahalia on your own? I mean, it's a bit unusual.'

Matt took a breath. This was the question people would always ask. ‘Oh, Emmy found it really hard with a baby and she needed a break.' He grasped Mahalia's foot and counted her toes off, one at a time, wiggling them as he went. She laughed and kicked her legs, because it tickled.

He hadn't even explained to himself
how come
yet.

Eliza noticed his awkwardness and left it alone. She said, ‘That song I was singing on my way down the stairs . . . I didn't think . . . I didn't mean to be tactless . . .
motherless child
could be interpreted as someone without a mother country. It could be about the Negroes longing for Africa. Or for heaven.'

She held out her arms to take Mahalia, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for Matt to hand her over for a while. She said, ‘Sometimes I think we're all a long way from home.'

Matt wrote to Emmy at last.
Mahalia is well
, he said,
and we are
both missing you. We are living in town, but when you come back we
could get a place in the bush and have horses
.

Then he screwed the letter up, switched off the light, and lay watching the shadows on the ceiling. Mahalia was sleeping in her cot; he heard her snuffle and sigh. He strained to listen to her breath. Sometimes he suffered from such anxiety for her that he feared that she would simply stop breathing one night; he'd heard that some babies do. If she coughed in her sleep, he woke and listened, afraid that she might be getting sick.

There were flickering shadows from the streetlight, and a car roared past. Gusts of wind rattled the chimes on the veranda. Mahalia woke and started to cry, a sad, sorry-for-herself cry; Matt picked her up at once and buried his face in the sweet-smelling down on top of her head. He changed her nappy, and took her downstairs to warm a bottle, and she settled down at last in the darkness to serious, intent drinking.

Afterwards, still unable to sleep, Matt rugged them both up and settled Mahalia into her stroller and set off for a long walk. These walks were becoming a habit for him.

They passed other night walkers, and exchanged curt greetings.

‘G'devening.'

‘G'devening.'

Matt's voice was always gruffer than he felt. He passed through the main street, where kids in hotted-up cars loitered after the pubs had shut, and girls with short skirts leaned against cars, just hanging out, not wanting to go home.

A black dog followed them, joining them from a shadowy gateway not far from where they lived. It was like a spirit-dog at first, keeping a distance from them so that Matt could imagine that it was a hallucination, an imaginary dog. And then it came closer, huffing a warm doggy breath near the backs of his knees and glancing up at him with that craven devotion that dogs assume.
Voucher
, Matt called it, and the dog pricked up its ears as if this were a name it could recognise.

Matt walked for hours along suburban streets and along the river bank that he and Emmy had once made their own. Life went on, all through the night. He saw aimless kids in track pants and beanies wandering with nothing to do, drawn together by some kind of fellow feeling, diverging in a wandering orbit for a while and then accidentally-on-purpose bumping into each other, rattling against each other, looking for something, or for trouble, whichever came first. He saw police cars cruise by, and, once, a woman cowering in the bushes outside her house with her children while a drunken husband ranted and raved inside. He saw lovers, lingering hand-in-hand or parked in cars, not wanting to part, or with nowhere else to go. He was part of that aimless, night-time other-life, because he didn't want to lie sleepless listening to Mahalia's breath and thinking of Emmy. He walked rhythmically, listening to the whisper of the stroller's wheels on the pavement, the sighs from Mahalia as she slept, the click of the dog's claws following on the concrete. The silence was broken by the slam of a car door, a raised voice, or a car roaring past. Sometimes Mahalia woke, and Matt became aware of her eyes staring darkly out into the night before the lids drooped again and closed. Plump-jowled, her head lolled to the side. Matt walked, and every footstep, every creak and movement of his shoes said
Emmy, Emmy, Emmy
.