Read Online Mahalia by Joanne Horniman - Free Book Online

up with that stuff? Sorry, but I just want to be careful.’
    Matt shook his head.
    Virginia shifted her weight from foot to foot and looked away from Matt’s face. ‘Anyway, maybe I should come back when this Eliza’s home.’
    â€˜Don’t you want to see the room?’
    â€˜Yeah. Oh, yeah, okay.’ Matt led her up the stairs. ‘I really like it round here, you know? That pub on the corner has really cheap meals. I eat there when I can – couldn’t cook it myself for what they sell it for there . . .’
    Dave’s old room was small, and looked over the square of back yard and Eliza’s vegetable garden. A pumpkin vine grew over the back fence, and it had a butternut pumpkin on it. Virginia peered out through the back window as she talked. ‘See, I really wanted to do this media course at the Uni, but they didn’t let me in. Said I hadn’t done enough school, but all I want to do is make films, you know?’ She shook her head at the impossibility of it all. ‘So now I’m doing this TAFE course, trying to get my Year 12 certificate. Maybe I’d be better off just getting myself a camera, making films on my own.’
    â€˜Thanks,’ she said, when they were back in the kitchen again. She looked bashful. ‘Look, I talk too much, you gotta stop me. Maybe you can tell that girl that I came by. Eliza, was it? Yeah. Maybe I’ll come back later? Anyway, look, I’ve gotta go, gotta go, I’ll see you round the place, eh?’
    She took off, clumping out through the front room. Matt heard the door close behind her.
    Mahalia started to grizzle for her bottle, so Matt sat her on the worn lino so that he could prepare it. ‘Gotta get you a highchair, mate,’ he said. ‘You can’t spend your life grovelling round everyone’s feet.’
    Matt hocked his guitar. The money he got from the pension was never enough. Sometimes it simply disappeared on him and he didn’t know where it had gone. He tried making lists of what he spent it on. Food, powdered baby formula, rent, power, disposable nappies when he was feeling lazy, chocolate bars to keep his energy up. He saw how easy it was for money to go. It all added up.
    He thought he could do without the guitar for a while. He would save to get it out of hock. Or he’d come up with a job, soon. A part-time job at least. Anyway, if he lost it, he’d get another guitar. One day.
    But it seemed like a bit of himself disappearing when he handed the black case over the counter, B LUES IS THE MUSIC THAT HEALS lettered in Otis’s writing on the side, the white paint so thick it was textured like an oil painting.
    Matt discovered that waiting room was an accurate description of the outer public area of a doctor’s surgery. He waited and waited there one day with Mahalia, after her bogus, attention-getting cough turned into a real one. Her nose continually ran with thick yellow snot, and she didn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time. Matt hadn’t slept for three nights by the time he waited in the waiting room, patting Mahalia on the back and talking to her in an attempt to stop her pathetic cry.
    It was a grey miserable room on a grey miserable day, a rainy spring day that felt like winter. The chairs had hairy grey seats and every one of them was occupied. Matt preferred to stand and move about with Mahalia curled against his shoulder. He listened to the coughs and noticed the hairy patterns on people’s jumpers, the hairiness of their winter coats. His world had turned into a grey, hairy, coughing, sniffling, waiting one.
    All the doctor could do was reassure him that Mahalia didn’t have an infection, and all that could be done was to make her more comfortable. He wrote down the names of things Matt could get at the chemist to ease her congestion. He was a kind man, with a waiting room full of coughing patients he couldn’t do much for.
    Matt