Fall on Your Knees Read Free Page A

were real oil paintings — one, in pride of place over the mantelpiece, of a single cedar tree on a mountain.
    James would be let in the kitchen door by a dark round little woman who he initially assumed was the maid, but who was in fact Mrs Mahmoud. She always fed him before he left. She spoke little English but smiled a lot and said, “Eat.” At first he was afraid she’d feed him something exotic and horrible — raw sheep, an eyeball perhaps, but no — savoury roast meat folded in flat bread, a salad of soft grain, parsley and tomatoes with something else he’d never before tasted: lemon. Strange and delicious pastes, pickled things, things wrapped in things, cinnamon….
    One day he arrived to find Mrs Mahmoud chatting in Gaelic with a door-to-door tradesman. James was amazed but glad to find someone with whom to speak his first language, since he knew few people in Sydney and, in any case, Gaelic speakers were mostly out the country. They sat at the kitchen table and Mrs Mahmoud told him of her early days in this land, when she and her husband had walked the island selling dry goods from a donkey and two suitcases. This was how she had learned Gaelic and not English. Mr and Mrs Mahmoud had made many friends, for most country people love a visit, the mercantile side really being an excuse to put on the kettle. Often the Mahmouds carried messages across counties from one family to another, but good news only, Mrs Mahmoud insisted. Just as she did when she read a person’s cup — “I see only good.” So when she peered into the tea-leaves at the bottom of James’s cup he was neither frightened nor skeptical, but felt himself drawn in with an involuntary faith — which is what faith is — when she said, “I see a big house. A family. There is a lot of love here. I hear music…. A beautiful girl. I hear laughter…. Water.”
    When the Mahmouds had saved enough, they had opened their Sydney shop, which thrived. Mr Mahmoud had bought his wife this splendid house and told her to stop working and enjoy her family. And yet James never saw a sign of the family. Her children were all at school, and the big boys were at the shop with her husband. Mrs Mahmoud missed her Gaelic friends in the country and looked forward to grandchildren. She never spoke of her homeland.
    On this New Year’s Eve day, Mrs Mahmoud greeted James with Bliadhna Mhath Ūr but didn’t show him into the front room, remaining in the kitchen to work alongside the hired Irish girl, who had a lot to learn. He proceeded there by himself, quite comfortable now in this house, took off his jacket and got to work.
    He had already removed a few ivory keys and was bent under the lid behind the piano’s gap-toothed smile, so he didn’t see Materia when she stepped into the archway.
    But she had seen him. She had spied him from her upstairs bedroom window when he came knocking at the kitchen door below, toting his earnest bag of tools — a blond boy so carefully combed. She had peeked at him through the mahogany railings carved with grapes as he entered the front hall and hung his coat in the closet beneath the stairs — his eyes so blue, his skin so fair. Taut and trim, collar, tie and cufflink. Like a china figurine. Imagine touching his hair. Imagine if he blushed. She watched him cross the hall and disappear through the high arch of the big front room. She followed him.
    She paused in the archway, her weight on one foot, and considered him a moment. Thought of plucking his suspenders. Grinned to herself, crept over to the piano and hit C sharp. He sprang back with a cry — immediately Materia feared she’d gone too far, he must be really hurt, he’s going to be really mad, she bit her lip — he clapped a hand over one eye, and beheld the culprit with the other.
    The darkest eyes he’d ever seen, wet with light. Coal-black curls escaping from two long braids. Summer skin the colour of sand stroked by the tide. Slim in her green and navy Holy