Mahalia (2 page)

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.

Someone will see
, he thought, as she kissed him for the third time, the wind whipping their hair, in full view, he imagined, of the whole of Lismore.

‘Don't be silly. No one ever looks up here. No one cares about this tower. Only me, and I'm up here, aren't I?'

2

His mother's house was a patchwork, made up of bits and pieces: odd items of timber, doors, windows – more doors and windows than any house needed, collected from second-hand building yards. Despite the surfeit of doors elsewhere – doors that led nowhere, just plugged a gap in the wall – the living room opened straight out onto the veranda with no door at all, just a wide gap. When it was rainy or cold Matt had to shut the door of his room to stop the draught blowing in. From the outside, the house looked like a collection of old windows and doors that someone had left in a pile to see if it could rearrange itself into the semblance of a house of its own accord, and somehow it had. Somehow it all worked.

Matt felt that his life was like that. In optimistic moments he felt that he and Mahalia had all the bits there and somehow they'd make something of it one way or another, even if it did get a bit draughty sometimes.

And at other times he wasn't so sure.

Matt had left school a year ago. There was never a time that he remembered liking it, not even in kindergarten.

Not that he wasn't smart. Growing up in the bush in the house that his mother had cobbled together from odds and ends, he knew the names of all the birds that came to the garden by the age of four, those of a dozen rainforest plants at five; he could read then too, and write
tyrannosaurus
and sort the shells they'd collected at the beach into their different types. At six he went to school and learned how profoundly boring it could be.

He met Emmy at the age of fifteen, and they became a team, nicking off from school together to spend the day lying on the river bank, or hitching over to the beach at Byron Bay. They loved the way the long stretch of beach was different every single time, the way the colour of the water changed with changes in the sky, and they always found shells and strange bits and pieces the sea had thrown up. Matt put them in his pockets and they started their own collection of beach treasures, each of them a memento of a particular day. Emmy said you should never let a day pass unnoticed, that it should be memorable and particular and special. She said it was a
sin
to let time pass unheeded and unregarded, to
waste
it like that.

After Matt left school, Social Security sent him to countless courses designed to give him life skills and
build his
self-esteem
, but what he wanted was a job of the kind that didn't exist any more: a job where you didn't need any book learning and where you could get by on good honest toil.

He planted trees in reforestation projects and helped stabilise riverbanks, but all that was left at the end of these short-term jobs was the dole – again.

When Emmy left, he had to declare on his form that he had separated from his partner. And he found himself on the single supporting parent's pension.

There was the inevitable interview with the social worker; hours spent with Mahalia strapped in her possum pouch on his chest while he waited to be dealt with. He paced and rocked her, murmuring soft words. He watched numbers flash onto a screen and checked them against his docket. His head screamed at the mindless daytime TV; the monitor was placed on a bracket up near the ceiling so that no one could get away from it. He sat in one of the detestable grey plastic chairs and stared at the grey walls, and somehow his feelings transferred themselves to Mahalia, for she stiffened her body and screamed and screamed under the fluorescent lights.

Finally it was all over. He had said all the right things, and he had smiled (he couldn't help himself; it was part of his nature to smile). He said his mother could help him with the baby. But all the time he felt sure he didn't need help, just the money necessary for them to stay alive. In the end that was all that was forthcoming anyway.

Matt's mother had the bluest of eyes, and still wore her hair long, adding henna to soften the appearance of white strands in the black. One of her friends trimmed it for her. ‘Now that you're forty, maybe you should think of cutting it short.'

His mother looked stricken. ‘I will one day. But not yet. Not yet.'

Her hair was her only vanity. She wore no make-up, and dressed always in shorts or jeans and men's shirts she bought at op shops. Even at work she got away with a tidy variation of her
uniform
, as she called it.

She said that lipstick
rotted your brain
.

If she wasn't wearing her gumboots they were on the back veranda, caked in mud. Her fingernails were often filthy with earth from gardening, or oil from the engine of her ute. She slashed lantana and planted trees and vegetables.

She and Matt had been alone all their lives. His father hadn't wanted children, so she'd brought Matt up by herself, with no contact really, no support. ‘Though I wouldn't have minded if he'd wanted to take part in you,' she'd said. She made it sound like a bushwalk she'd invited someone to.

Matt had felt the loss. It was such a lonely house, with just the two of them, even though his mother had filled it with music and flowers and the beautiful things she made. Matt had missed the ordinariness of daily contact with a father. He determined when he was very young that he would see his own children grow up.

His mother had done everything she could to see that he didn't miss out. She took him to ovals and taught him to kick a soccer ball around. He remembered her running and running, her black hair flying out behind her, leaping and kicking at the ball, her legs in long red and green football socks. She brought home books on paper aeroplanes, and they sat at the kitchen table together folding and experimenting. Matt had the best paper aeroplanes of any kid he knew.

There were friends, lots of friends, and people who stayed with them for extended periods. There were men who stayed the night in his mother's bedroom sometimes, but none had been allowed to share their life. There were men who were
just friends
. One of them, Peter, had taught him to play the guitar. But as far as Matt could see, these men weren't much different from his mother: they struggled with cantankerous vehicles and slashed and planted and watered in their spare time. They always had half-completed houses with many pairs of muddy gumboots on the veranda.

When Emmy and Matt knew they were going to have a baby, they went to her parents and told them they intended to keep it.

Keep Mahalia, as it turned out.

Emmy's parents as good as told them they were mad. Evil, even, to consider it. Which Matt supposed was why Emmy wouldn't have anything to do with them, afterwards.