Text: Matilda's Story

from A Gibson, 06.02.10

I was seventeen the day I found out that the woman whom I believed to be my mother, was actually my grandmother. The stories have been heard before, a daughter too young to raise her own child, a willing and still youthful mother offers to bring the child up in a warm, loving and familial home. An offer too good to resist for a girl (for she was all but a child herself) with her whole life ahead of her.

Matilda was sixteen and wild, according to my (grand)ma. Wild, of course, means that she got on well with the blokes in town, and made no secret of it. (Grand)ma told me, as she explained the last two decades of our life to me, that my mother would spend night after night with a purple iris behind her ear as she danced with anyone who was willing. (Grand)ma said this as though it were a shameful secret, but I felt my feet twitch in sympathy when she told me. Sometimes there just isn't enough dancing in this world.

My mother would disappear for weeks at a time. (Grand)ma complained that she must have had some blackfella in her blood somewhere. But she always came back. The blokes in town coined an expression for her disappearances; she'd gone waltzing. I think they missed her wildness when she was gone.

The day she disappeared for good no one realised. Jokes were made about the lucky man who was waltzing with Matilda, but no one knew who it was. After two months, though, it was apparant to even the most dim-wittedly hopeful man that she wasn't coming back. Some of them came to ask my (grand)ma what had happened, standing awkwardly at the door to the house, their hat in the hands out of respect and their rough voices as polite as they could make them. But (grand)ma would neither confirm nor deny that Matilda was gone for good. The tensions which had frayed, causing the wild child to take to the country, were still too raw for explanations. I think that's when the light of the town started to dim. The squatters got meaner, the workers got drunker and more reckless, and a slow but steady stream of men started to abandon the town, each looking to waltz their Matilda until fortune found them. Some were lucky, some weren't, and I was raised by a woman mourning the loss of her child to the sounds of a faintly heard song which reached to us out of the desert.