Mahalia by Joanne Horniman Page A

There were snags under the water, old tree branches with limbs supplicating like drowned men; dead dogs sometimes; old wharves covered in vines, their timbers rotten and spongy.
    As she climbed out of the water, the freckles on her back showed through the wet thin cotton of her shirt. She laughed when Matt rubbed her arms, which were covered in goose bumps even though she swore she wasn’t cold.
    She said she did it out of curiosity. To see what it felt like.
    She laughed.
    Matt hadn’t ever imagined that Emmy would jump into the river out of sheer curiosity. Once, he’d felt that he and Emmy were the one person. But he was wrong.
    Matt wanted to look after Mahalia without help from anyone, even though he knew his mother would love to take her for a day or two, and Charmian would be happy to have her there as part of the shifting throng of children she cared for from time to time. He didn’t want to ask for any help at all. And he hadn’t. He felt it would be a sign of failure to ask for help.
    He loved Mahalia. Of course he loved her. But he got tired, and bored sometimes. Eliza might sing to her in a spare moment and Virginia sit and play or spoon food into her mouth, but in the end caring for Mahalia was always his responsibility.
    One day, when everyone else was out and the house seemed full of ghosts again, Matt wandered about restlessly. He had put Emmy’s letter away under his clothes; it haunted him, but he couldn’t bear either to read it again or destroy it. He hadn’t felt able to reply.
    Late-afternoon sunlight made particles of dust dance down the stairs, and it was so still that even the windchimes had taken a break. Mahalia was asleep. Her hands were flung in an attitude of abandon beside her face, which was as fat and shapeless in sleep as an old man’s. Her eyelids flickered; perhaps she was dreaming.
    Matt wandered out to the back yard and squatted down to look at Eliza’s herbs. He reached out and pinched a leaf of a musky plant, putting it to his nostrils.
    It was Friday night, the time when people went out to see their friends, ate food they hadn’t had to cook, had a few drinks. Sometimes Matt experienced a great hunger, a need for a good feed , and he felt that need most urgently now. There was no decent food in the house. He craved bacon, and eggs, something greasy and salty and filling. There was nothing in the house that would satisfy that kind of hunger.
    He got up quickly and went up to check on Mahalia. She hadn’t had her after-lunch nap today, and had fallen asleep at last in the late afternoon. She was breathing quietly, her face abandoned to sleep. It wouldn’t take him long to nip out to the corner shop and get some food to cook.
    He hesitated. He’d never left her alone before, and he knew he shouldn’t. Anything could happen while he was away. It wouldn’t, but it could. But the shop was only a minute away. He pulled on a jacket and left the house quietly, pulling the door shut as stealthily and guiltily as a thief.
    But once out, alone and unburdened for the first time since he could remember, his thoughts turned to the cheap burgers at the pub up the road. He could get a takeaway and be away just a few minutes more than if he’d gone to the shop. It would be a fast mission – a mission for a hamburger. A bacon and egg burger. Saliva spurted shamefully into his mouth at the thought.
    â€˜Hey . . . mate!’ It was Janno, one of the friends who’d melted away after Mahalia had been born. ‘Hey, come and sit down. We’re all here . . .’
    Matt let himself be drawn away from the food counter to the beer garden at the back, thinking Just a moment. I’ll say hello to everyone and just get back. And he found his back slapped, and then he was sitting down, and everyone was laughing and someone put a beer in front of him and he took a sip.
    And he drank the whole beer, thinking all the time Just one more