The Good Parents

by Joan London

  ‘Well, you do keep everyone waiting, Jake. Everyone knows you’re always late.’

  ‘So I’m an instrument of fate. Or God? God used me.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ Kitty went on, ‘maybe she was at the intersection then because she stopped to buy a newspaper or Tampax or something after she dropped you off.’

  Guilt rushed forward to snuff out this little spark of hope. ‘She would have stopped at the shop twenty minutes earlier too if I’d left with her straight away.’

  ‘Or she might not. She might have gone home and had to go out to the shop twenty minutes later. You can’t know, Jake.’

  ‘You shouldn’t think about it anymore,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s killing you and it won’t bring her back.’ She reached for another slice of bread to put in the toaster. ‘If you told the Maguires they’d have to go through it all over again.’

  ‘Don’t eat so much,’ Jacob said, not unkindly. Something was easing around his chest, he could breathe again. Surprise had jolted him out of himself, surprise at his sister’s unexpected good sense.

  Kitty rolled her eyes at him in her old way, but she pushed the slice of bread back in the packet.

  Jacob went out the kitchen door and stood on the fire-escape landing. A night breeze had sprung up and blew cool in his face. He saw the gleaming lights of the district dancing amongst the trees.

  He reached inside and took one of Arlene’s cigarettes. As he breathed out, he saw Nathalie’s face again. How she looked when she arrived somewhere and stood by the door, her frizzy hair streaming around her. Shy but taking everything in. Her eyes shining. Sometimes he’d note to himself that she was getting prettier. He’d begun to perceive something delicate about her freckled face, something fine-tuned about her presence. He liked her attentiveness, her open laugh at his ironies. He felt at home when he was with her, free to be large and reckless. But he’d never thought about this at the time. He was afraid of falling in love with her, he saw that now. One day he might have, after he’d finished chasing lots of exotic girls. Nathalie wasn’t the sort of girl you could lightly let down. She read Jane Austen. She liked Bergman. She was the only girl he knew who’d read Catch 22. She liked him, Jacob. But he’d been years away from being worthy of her.

  Did being in love mean seeing someone as she really was for the first time?

  She was the best person he’d ever known, he saw that now. Tears spurted from his eyes.

  He tried to be nicer to Kitty, to take an interest in her. When Beech came round on the weekends he sat him down in the kitchen for a while so Kitty could join in. But shyness seemed to have taken a grip on Kitty’s throat. Her voice dried up. If Beech looked at her she blushed. He and Beech always ended up wandering off into his room. Once he took Kitty with them to a party. That was a disaster. He became involved in a conversation and when he looked around, Beech and Kitty had disappeared. He had to go home without her. Beech treated Kitty just the same afterwards, like a kid sister, which probably made her feel worse about herself. Where did his loyalties lie? If it fucks you up, it’s good for you, Beech liked to say. Still, Jacob felt uneasy. I’m not Kitty’s father, he told himself. It was none of his business.

  After a while the lurch in his guts whenever he thought of Nathalie became less violent, became a tug, then an ache, then a bruise less and less sensitive to the touch. Every night after work, he went out to parties and friends’ houses and as many of the festival films at the university as he could afford. But unlike Beech, he didn’t fall in love every night. He still felt he was coming in from somewhere very cold and pure. It had a terrible pull, this purity, he had to work hard to distract himself. He knew he couldn’t face a year in a country town, couldn’t risk too many nights alone in a rented room. He applied for leave from the Education Department, asked Vito for more work and prepared to leave the country with Beech. He wanted to forget, not about Nathalie, but about the dark sleepout, the ceaseless sewing machine, the endless passage of women through the lounge room. He wanted never to come back.

  All this happened a long time ago. Long before Jacob and Toni met. Long before they became parents.

  4

  White Garden

  It never happened when Magnus was looking. A beam of light from the setting sun came over the paddocks, through the pine trees and the window of his room, straight onto the strained shining face of Miles Davis on his trumpet in the poster on the opposite wall. Suddenly Miles was alight, every evening, and Magnus knew it was time to go. He let the last beat die away and turned off the tape. Three minutes to six on his bedside clock. He had a reputation for lateness in the family, but he could time a tape perfectly. The Garcias ate dinner on the dot of six, as his parents had reminded him several times before they left. He whistled Winnie, but she’d beat him to it and stood grinning at the door.

  The de Jongs and the Garcias lived back to back on two parallel roads in the north-west corner of the town. The Garcias on Burma Street faced west, to open paddocks stretching to the horizon. The de Jongs on India Street looked east, over a fenced reserve of scrubby bush and old bitumen which had once been the Warton drive-in. India Street ran on past the oval and the showgrounds to join the main road on its way out of town, but Burma Street ended soon after it started, curving around to join India Street. Within that curve the two backyards blended into one another, like the communal courtyard of an old farmhouse.

  Right in the middle were two ancient pines, each huge trunk a massive delta of lesser trunks, their brushy arms intertwined to make a vast roof like a covered walkway between the two houses. Scattered around the block, axle-deep in the long grass, were all the spare vehicles that the Garcias had managed to accumulate, a horsefloat, a tractor, a Moke, a campervan, and the old corrugated-iron shed which Carlos still used sometimes as a workshop. Just beyond the shade of the pines was the spindly bush-pole fence of Chris Garcia’s horse paddock, and her two remaining horses. She’d given up agisting a year ago, after Warton went online.

  Magnus made his way along the well-worn track under the pine trees. It had its own climate under there, cool when it was hot, dry when it rained and a sound that enclosed you, wind through branches, like the sea. When they went there as kids, he and Maya and the Garcia boys, they were cut off from everything else. They made up games there that went on and on for days and took them over, like a dream. Games that they didn’t talk about with other kids, wars with complex rules, pine cone munitions, lookouts, forbidden zones. Quests like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, with clues, blindfolds, trials – leaping from one tree to another – unto death.

  ‘What do you get up to out there?’ the parents asked them.

  ‘Nothing,’ they said.

  Nobody ever told them there were spirits there, yet they were always trying to call them up, daring each other to walk the path alone at night, even sleeping in a tent under the trees once, huddled together. Nothing ever happened. Perhaps the horses, with all their little moods and trots and whinnies, were the spirits. Always eating, casually looking round while chewing, aware of everything that was going on. Perhaps the magic was just in being kids, walking through the flickers of light and the giant shadows of the pine trees which they thought of as beings. To Magnus they were two friends, males, guardians, like Carlos and Jacob, who in those days used to talk and smoke for hours in the doorway of the old shed.

  Nobody hung out there anymore. First Josh, then Maya started high school and the games stopped. None of the four ever talked of them again. Going to the Garcias’ now was a bit like walking through ruins, crunching over the brown pine needles, past old landmarks that had lost their life, were just abandoned tyres and rolls of wire again. Only if you stopped to listen to the sound of the surf in the trees did you remember. If he shut his eyes it could still make him shiver.

  He swung through the fence to the horse-paddock and the horses came trotting towards him. Granite, the old fat gray pony, the nanny ride for all of them, snorted her warm breath all over h
im, nudging at his pockets, while Choko stood back, cocking his soft wild eyes at him. He’d forgotten to bring them an apple or carrot. There was something edgy about them. They looked unbrushed, their thin legs restless, like kids on the loose. He couldn’t see any hay lying about. Maya would have stayed with them awhile, talking and stroking and finding them some grass. Horses always made him think of Maya.

  The Garcias’ house looked shut down. There was no smoke coming from the chimney and no light in the kitchen. But all the family vehicles were there, lined up down the driveway, and as he walked under Chris’s hanging baskets on the patio he saw the blue glow of the television in the family room. As was the old custom between the children of the two houses, Magnus opened the back door and walked in. Winnie set up watch on the back step, she knew that was the deal.

  Carlos was sitting at the kitchen table. Josh and Jordan were slumped on the couch, watching The Simpsons on TV. The room smelt of old wood smoke and cigarettes.

  Carlos looked up. ‘Magnus. Is it dinner time?’ The boys didn’t stir.

  ‘Chris still on line?’ Magnus sat down opposite Carlos. It was a family joke. Chris was on the computer 98.2 per cent of the time.

  ‘Well the fact is, Magnus, Chris has left us. Gone to Florida, US of A.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Gone to live with someone else.’ Carlos was drinking whisky with a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the table. Chris never let him smoke inside. Carlos, whose features were familiar to Magnus from the earliest days of his life, had shadows like stains under bloodshot eyes and black stubble all over his face. ‘She met a guy on the chat lines.’ He stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. ‘Funny thing is, I read about this in the paper a couple of weeks ago. A lot of people are flying off to America these days.’

  One of the things Magnus loved about Carlos was the way he talked the same to everyone, young or old, friend or stranger. He never pulled rank or lied or tried to hide anything. ‘She sprang it on me last night. I had no idea, if you can believe that. All I knew was that she was on that thing day and night.’

  ‘Is she gonna come back?’

  ‘You know Chris when she makes up her mind.’

  Nobody had lit the potbelly. It was cold and there was no sign of food. The boys each held a can of beer. It hurts them too much to move, Magnus thought. They looked licked, ashamed. They needed to be private. He stood up.

  ‘I better be going.’

  Carlos roused himself. ‘If you hang on a bit, matey, Josh’ll go to the Lucky and get us some take-away.’

  ‘It’s OK, Carlos,’ Magnus said firmly, sensing his freedom. ‘I know how to cook.’ He hovered at the door for a moment. He wanted to say ‘Will you be all right?’ but coming from him it might sound patronising. ‘Don’t worry about me anymore, Carlos,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay at home from now on.’

  Carlos nodded with his eyes closed, and raised one finger in farewell.

  Night had fallen, with a small white moon rising over the roof in India Street, but everything was different. Old Chris! Who’d have thought she’d do something so contemporary? He sometimes went over there early so he could chase up stuff on the net while Chris got dinner. He saw her last night. Why hadn’t he noticed anything?

  A thought crossed his mind: had she taken the laptop with her? No, he wasn’t going to ask Carlos. Let that one go through to the keeper, as his father often said. He could still, just, live without it. When his parents came home they were bringing him a laptop.

  On impulse he turned left at the end of the Garcias’ patio and made his way past their shed and laundry and fruit trees, to see if the White Garden was still there. Until now he’d forgotten all about it. Everyone had. All one winter Chris had hauled white quartz in a wheelbarrow from a pile on the driveway, back and forward, day after day. He remembered her shorts and workboots, her square shoulders and bobbing blonde mullet, how serious she looked, her sweaty face and tight mouth.

  She said she was making a White Garden, and Magnus had a vision of crystalline plants and snow drifts and ice ponds. When the garden was finished the two families were invited to drink champagne there at twilight. There was a sunken courtyard, with tiered banks, where you could sit, though not for very long. Everything was covered with sharp white stones. The white glow blinded you even after the sun had gone down. Jacob and Toni said it was amazing, they were genuinely surprised. Chris said she got the idea out of a magazine. Jacob and Carlos didn’t make their usual jokes, because everybody knew that Chris had no sense of humour. She was so straight that Magnus often felt kind of protective of her. Chris hardly ever smiled. She was intense.

  The party clinked glasses, and became quite merry, in their sunglasses, crunching around on the stones. Carlos made a barbecue and they all returned to the patio and as far as Magnus knew, never set foot in the White Garden again.

  Now he followed the overgrown, quartz-edged path through the bare fruit trees and stood looking down at it. The pit was dull and streaked with murky little puddles everywhere. The quartz had grown mossy, weeds sprang out of the cracks. Some of the banks had caved in, it was half-filled with leaves. It looked like a ruined bathroom.

  He dumped a bale of hay from the shed into the paddock for the horses and they came running towards it. He could hear them slathering and snorting in the darkness as he walked home under the pine trees. Alone at last, and yet he felt sad. He was walking away from his childhood. The only person who would understand this was Maya and he realised that this tug of loneliness was what was meant by ‘missing’ somebody.

  Just as he let himself into the house the phone rang. A crackling and then a tiny voice broke though. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Maya! No kidding, I’ve just been thinking about you.’

  ‘I can’t talk long. Are the folks in Melbourne yet?’

  ‘Yeah. They’re staying at your place. Where are you?’ He could hear her breathing as if she were walking, and traffic noise. She was on a mobile.

  ‘On the front steps of a hotel.’

  ‘A swanky one?

  ‘No way. Are they pissed off?’

  ‘The folks? With you? No.’

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  A pause.

  ‘Myz, why don’t you call them?’

  ‘Listen, I’ve got to go. Give Winnie a kiss for me.’

  ‘A weird thing’s happened to the Garcias …’ he began, but the line was dead.

  5

  Country of the Young

  One morning Jacob, at the top of the stairs, spotted Cecile at the front door just as she was about to leave. It was like catching sight of a rare wild animal.

  ‘Hey! Cecile!’ He sounded louder and more urgent than he’d intended. He would have tried to reach her if the foot that he’d twisted a few days ago wasn’t naked, swollen and purple. His feet were exposed in rubber thongs. Boots were out of the question. It was painful even to pull his jeans on and going downstairs was hell.

  ‘Hi,’ Cecile called, her voice soft and clear. She was wearing a puffy black bomber jacket and her hair was pulled into a topknot, speared, as far as he could see, with a knitting needle. ‘Any news?’

  ‘No.’ He stayed up there, not wanting the sight of his foot to repel her forever.

  ‘I have to run…Jacob … I’m working to a deadline. I finish on Friday. See you then.’

  She had nearly forgotten his name.

  Another day in Melbourne. Another day in this house. He made his tortuous way downstairs, and took up his position on the couch, his swollen foot propped up on the coffee table. Rain was splashing down the window into the fishpond. Just as he reached for the remote control, Toni loomed and dumped the cordless phone into his lap.

  ‘Telephone duty. I’ll be going out soon.’ It was like this every day, she couldn’t wait to leave the house.

  ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘It’ll stop.’

  ‘I’ll check the weather report,’ he said, seizing the chance
to turn on the television.

  Each morning they woke up a little more separate from each other.

  He tried an old wheedling tone. ‘Aren’t you just a little bit sorry for me?’

  ‘We could have done without this, Jacob.’ She’d got the hang of the kitchen and was putting away last night’s dishes with brisk expertise. Since his injury, perhaps because he was always having to look up at her, he saw her differently, as a sort of sister figure, eternally displeased with him.

  ‘Why are you in a bad mood?’ he said, across the room.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are. As if everything’s my fault.’

  The phone rang. He grabbed it and fumbled with the button. It was for Cecile, a male with a German accent. ‘She is at verk? Thank you.’ The caller hung up at once without saying goodbye.

  Jacob’s eyes met Toni’s. ‘Just some rude guy for Cecile.’ Her lover, he supposed. He reached back for the remote control. How much longer would they have to camp out like this in someone else’s life?

  They ate their breakfast on the couch, watching the news. The Olympics, the latest fiasco, a spat between officials. Some tribal war calls and chest-beating and cries of kicking ass and getting gold. He could almost feel nostalgia for the old dour ways of the Australia he grew up in, where the worst crime was to skite, to have tickets on yourself.

  He was becoming old and dour himself.

  The weather report was for rain continuing to fall all over Victoria, in places he’d never even heard of. He was suddenly homesick for the familiar incantation of names, the Pilbara, the Kimberly, the Eastern Goldfields, the Great Southern, the coastal waters from Bremer Bay to Israelite Bay. He was homesick for the great empty plains!

  They lounged, moody and listless, flicking through The Age, waiting, always, for the phone to ring. For years they’d said how they couldn’t wait to stop being slaves to their children’s freedom and start experiencing their own, but now that they were here, with no one to look after, not even a dog, they were unable to enjoy themselves. Nurture had become a habit, not only as parents, but in their work and their life in Warton. Nurture had come to define them, it was how they related to the world. Without it they were at a loss, like soldiers out of uniform. They had nothing to talk about together.