Little Wing Page 5

  ‘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.

  She wore the same old trackpants and fleecy top she always wore. The pants had slipped down over her hips and the top rode up as she lay with her arms above her head, leaving her middle exposed. He thought how transparent her skin, how mottled with cold, and threaded with fine blue veins. He saw the slenderness of her waist, and the steady rhythm of her breathing.

  3

  Martin didn’t tell Cat that he’d spent the day with Emily in the forest. He wasn’t sure why he kept it from her. Nothing had happened between them. But if nothing had happened, why did he have such a feeling of expectancy each day? He always half expected to find Emily standing at the open door. But she didn’t come.

  In the meantime there was his ordinary, everyday life: pegging the washing out to dry, enjoying the smell of fresh sheets; seeing Pete hurtling into the child-care centre in the mornings and hurtling out just as fast when he was picked up in the afternoons; making a snack with him when they got home; eating it together in the back yard. There was curling up behind Cat in the early morning, every morning, a special, blessed part of each day; reaching over to take her hand while she slept.

  The air was balmy, and it made even more sense to keep all the doors and windows open. But a bird got caught in the house; a little brown honeyeater that couldn’t find the way out. He finally released it by throwing a teatowel over it and cupping its small beating body inside his hands. Then there was the mouse that had crept into the kitchen and lived there somewhere, which he fed by putting a few crumbs on a saucer in the corner. But when he found it running around on the bench one day, about to get into the bread (it slunk away, low and lean, its belly flat to the ground), he caught it in a tunnel trap and released it into the forest. There was the spider that lived above the laundry tubs and stood guard over an egg sac. There was the yellow robin in the lemon tree, looking just like a lemon; it looked at him with its bright eye and flew away. He recorded all of this in the silk-covered book that Emily had given him.

  And then one day she was there. It was an ordinary morning, a non-pre-school day. He and Pete were making a chocolate cake. Pete had licked out the bowl, and had somehow got chocolate mixture all over his fringe (‘I wanted to see what it would be like to actually lick it out, Dad, and not use the spoon’), and the cake was in the oven. And there was Emily at the front door, then in the kitchen, staring almost without comprehension at a wooden spoon full of raw cake-mix that Pete had thrust into her hands, and fending off Pete’s questions as to where she’d been. ‘Nowhere, Pete,’ she said. ‘I never go anywhere. I’ve just been . . . about.’

  She seemed very cool and calm, and almost happy. They went out into the back yard, and Martin got his guitar, a steel-stringed acoustic that he seldom played any more; it felt as if he hadn’t played it for years. And he sat on the grass and played her a tune he hadn’t thought of in a long time, a tune he associated with the time years ago when he played in the band. Emily listened with a smiling, wistful, distracted expression on her face, and Martin said when he’d finished, ‘It’s a pretty little tune, isn’t it?’

  She said, ‘Matt plays the guitar. Matt . . . Mahalia’s father? But he plays bass.’

  That was all she said. They sat there in the sun with Pete buzzing round them while Martin played another tune.

  After that, Emily came round almost every day. She took to coming into the house again without knocking, and he could gauge how she was by the manner of her arrival. If she was having a good day she pinged the bell on the bicycle in the hallway to warn him she was on her way; on bad days she slunk into the kitchen without speaking and seemed crushed, scarcely able to move.

  On a good day she might take Pete for a walk to the corner shop and come back with packets of mixed lollies; she ate lunch with fastidious pleasure, picking up her food in her fingers and afterwards licking them ostentatiously. Other times she would weep at apparently nothing, walk into a branch of the lemon tree and scratch her face, or accidentally drop a plate on the floor, leave the house, and not come back for days.

  She could sit for ages not saying anything, staring straight ahead, and there was something fierce and desperate in her expression. She was like someone in a silent, continuous battle with herself.

  They sometimes sat in the garden and talked about nothing in particular. Afterwards, he couldn’t even remember what they’d said. A tree in the garden dropped pink blossoms over the path. Sometimes one tumbled while he watched, and it was like the soft, sad sound of her occasional laughter.

  4

  He accepted three days’ casual teaching with a Year Three class. He liked to do things with his temporary classes that were easy and fun, so that day they looked for frogs in the drain behind the school (and found none), and then he gave them a photocopied diagram of a frog, and got them to label all the parts of a frog’s anatomy from a similar picture he drew on the board. He got them to colour in the frog, and they got so keen on art that he found a whole lot of stuff in the storeroom and they made collages of the animals they’d like to be. He’d brought in his acoustic guitar and they sang songs. He read them a story called Amos and Boris about a whale and a mouse who were great friends, and they discussed the importance of loyalty and friendship and how you didn’t need to be exactly like someone to have a great affinity with them. He got the children to lie down on mats on the floor and taught them how to close their eyes and relax. He watched how some settled down immediately and even fell asleep, and some wriggled and squirmed and opened one eye and giggled, or scratched their noses.

  He loved all of them – the ones who came up to him in the playground and put their hands in his, tangling their hot, sweaty little fingers with his own, and those who came up to him earnestly to tell him something, their breath smelling of bananas and peanut butter, and the ones who concentrated so intently on what they were doing that they appeared lost to the rest of the world.

  Martin preferred the classroom to the staffroom, where most of the teachers seemed jaded and weary with life. He found few kin
dred spirits in school staffrooms, though there was often at least one teacher (usually a woman) who chatted to him in a friendly way, or gave him a conspiratorial glance.

  It was at the end of one day while the children were lying on the floor relaxing that Martin found the time to think about Emily. The other day, she’d said that even though her parents wanted her to give the baby away, she and Matt had always planned to keep it. ‘We thought that if we just loved her enough, everything would be all right. How dumb was that?

  ‘I hated myself. Because I was weak when she needed me to be strong.’

  He remembered when Pete was born, the first time he’d held him. He wanted nothing bad to ever happen to him, he wanted to look after him forever. He remembered cupping that tiny head in his hands, where it fitted perfectly. But you couldn’t protect your children from everything. Or perhaps from anything much at all.

  That afternoon, after collecting Pete from pre-school, he arrived home to find Emily sitting on the front steps. Inside the house, she curled up on the chair in the living room, and when he brought her in a cup of hot chocolate she’d fallen asleep. He covered her with a blanket, noticing how meekly her feet rested one on top of the other. She had a secret mole at the back of her ankle. She didn’t stir even when Pete turned the television on softly for Play School, and he and Pete sat there beside her while she slept.

  She was still sleeping when Cat arrived home. Martin was in the kitchen preparing the dinner when he heard the front door bang shut. Then Cat was there with her workday eager face. She threw down her bag next to the table and kissed him. ‘We’ve got a visitor?’ she said.

  ‘She’s not staying . . .’

  And then Emily stood at the doorway, drowsy and rumpled. She rubbed her forehead, and then took her hand away and stared at it, as though seeing it for the first time.