The Good Parents

by Joan London

  The rain stopped and Toni went out. She’d bought a mobile phone, so he could call her if there was word from Maya. Magnus would be pleased with this purchase.

  Jacob dozed and woke up thinking about Kershaw, the retired headmaster of Warton District High. Strange how often these days he found himself thinking of Kershaw. Was he missing the old guy? Or was it because of being stranded and laid up? This was what it meant to be an old man, without wife or kids or car, without strength or any power at all.

  In his early days in Warton, when he was the new cool guy on staff, he couldn’t stand Kershaw, who was old school, a stickler for the rules. He never had lunch in the staffroom but walked home at midday to eat with his wife. Even on the hottest day he wore a tie to work. Formal, remote, he doggedly stayed on for five more years until he retired.

  Gossip filtered down from Perth. In his past there was a thesis, a scholarship to an English university, the promise of a brilliant career. These things became known by a sort of osmosis in a country town. In England he’d met his wife, Miriam, who was a recluse, sometimes seen floating around the streets of Warton in her straw hat, her long faded plait, her distinctive, high round belly. It was generally understood that the reason he’d ended up in Warton was to provide a safe haven for mad Miriam, that she was his burden, his downfall. On the whole, the town was sympathetic to Kershaw. Unlike Jacob, they had no objection to old school.

  When Maya was born, out of the blue, Miriam came to see the baby. For some reason she insisted that she and Maya had a special affinity. For a few years after that she would regularly visit Toni, but only in school hours when Jacob wasn’t home. He didn’t know why, but he was always infuriated to hear that she had been in the house. One day Toni spotted her coming up India Street, and without thinking, in a panic, grabbed both kids and ran through the back paddocks down to the creek. She didn’t know whether Miriam had seen them, but she never visited again.

  After Miriam’s death this year, Jacob went to visit Kershaw early one evening with a bottle of wine and sat with him on the verandah of the cottage that he and Miriam had bought for his retirement. It was on the far, flat side of town in the shadow of the great silver silos, looking out over low-lying scrappy land where horses sometimes grazed amongst Shire bulldozers and piles of blue metal. When Jacob asked him if he was going to leave Warton now, Kershaw replied that he couldn’t conceive of living anywhere that Miriam hadn’t lived. ‘I like to visit her,’ he said with a smile and nod in the direction of the cemetery. Jacob understood then what nobody had ever taken into account, that Kershaw loved his difficult wife.

  It was restful sitting on the verandah. Miriam had painted the house’s name on the sign swinging over the gate. Isolation. There was a book of Hardy’s poems besides Kershaw’s chair. They were not so different after all, he and Kershaw. They lived as exiles here. But Kershaw had refused to disguise himself. They listened to the bells ringing at the level crossing as the wheat train clanked past. Jacob could feel the lure of a quiescence that was all too familiar.

  At midday he perched on a stool at the breakfast bar and ate some cheese and crackers that Toni had bought. He flicked through the pile of mail that Cecile must have left by the telephone and found an envelope addressed to himself, in Carlos’s scrawl. On the back, Carlos had left his greeting, a round disconsolate face, with down-sloping eyebrows and a jawline dotted by villainous bristles. Inside was a postcard sent to Warton from Kitty in London. In the thick black script that always looked self-conscious to Jacob, she announced that she was coming back to live in Perth. She’d stay with Arlene and Joe for as short a time as possible – this was underlined. Looking forward to meeting my niece and nephew. Poor old Kitty. It mustn’t have worked out with her fella. He noted a restless movement in his shoulder blades, the old feeling of being pursued, of Kitty dogging his steps. He didn’t want to have to worry about her. Judging by the postcard’s date, she’d have touched down by now.

  He turned the postcard over. Self-Portrait, Aged 51, by Rembrandt, from the National Gallery of Scotland. Kitty was an energetic cultural tourist and liked to refer to their Dutch heritage. There was always something pointed in the images she sent. Jacob could not see that he bore any resemblance to Rembrandt, although he was nearly the same age. Rembrandt looked as if something terrible had been revealed to him which he would have to live with for the rest of his life. Jacob propped the card up behind the telephone.

  The bamboo in the courtyard fluttered bright green in afternoon sun. What now?

  It occurred to Jacob that he had strayed into that other country, the country of the young, the country where you still had time. Time, if nobody stopped you, to watch late-night movies and channel-surf the breakfast shows. To lie on the couch, hour after hour, thinking about yourself. To play music non-stop, everywhere, like a soundtrack to your life. Hedonism was taken for granted. It was like entering another zone. Even this vague, persistent unease was part of it, he supposed. What you forgot about being young was how unhappy you often were.

  That was why young people were always on the phone. You felt better when you were with friends. You didn’t feel so perilous.

  If he were in Warton now, he’d have a beer with Carlos and tell jokes about his helpless state. He’d get in the car and go and see Jerry Delano at the police station and talk over Maya’s situation with him. He’d call Forbes Carpenter who always knew somebody who knew somebody. He’d have another drink with Carlos and a cigarette. All of them would try to help him.

  Maya, in her last months in Warton, was always alone. She’d only ever had one friend at a time and then there was no one. Perhaps he’d missed something more serious going on? He was so used to accommodating moody adolescents and their dramas at school.

  An old anxiety came back to him, that he didn’t really know how to be a father, not having grown up with one.

  What would Maya have done here on an afternoon like this? There was a row of unmarked videos on Cecile’s desk, not, he supposed, for general use. No books to be seen. He hadn’t brought anything to read from home, in anticipation of the famous bookshops of Melbourne. Maya’s unread volume of Chekhov was beside the bed but he couldn’t face the stairs. If he could walk, he would have gone out to the movies and lost himself in a thriller, or something warm and easy that made him believe that everything always worked out. It was one of life’s exquisite pleasures, seeing a movie in a foreign town. Emerging into strangeness. Once, long ago, while he was watching Tora! Tora! Tora! in Calcutta, it rained so heavily that afterwards he had to wade through streets flooded up to his knees.

  Sometimes on Friday nights he drove to Perth, stayed the night with Arlene and Joe, saw a movie in the morning and another in the afternoon and sped back, music blaring, through the long, menacing shadows of the drab bush along Albany Highway.

  Music. He limped his way across the room to the discs on Cecile’s desk. This was where he and any happy dream of contemporary living parted company. There were no familiar signposts, nothing to tell him what he felt like listening to.

  ‘Sit down and listen,’ Magnus said to him one day, when Jacob came into his room. And he had listened, really listened as Magnus played him tapes and records of Deep House, and hip hop instrumentals, and ambient jazz and the expansive dream landscapes of Detroit techno. Already Magnus was DJing at parties around the district. He’d created tapes with his own mixes, labelled Party tunes, Mellow, Downbeat, Blue. He talked of loops and samples, how producers picked out bits from other records, the funky stuff that makes you want to dance, putting it with other bits, building energies, layers, moods. There was no social message. ‘It started with people playing around,’ he said. ‘Being experimental. Making music with machines.’

  He referred to musicians called Mos Def and Recloose and Moodymann, just as Jacob had once explained Bach to him, or Pink Floyd or Dylan. Did the happiness he felt come from the slowly dawning revelation of the beauty of what he heard, or from the fact of sitting there on
Magnus’s bed, invited, not left out?

  Sometimes Magnus came with him on his jaunts to Perth and while Jacob went to the movies, Magnus disappeared into little music shops in the back streets. His favourite was above a shop that advertised fetish and erotic underwear. ‘Everything upstairs is kind of underground,’ Magnus said. The owner knew Magnus and put aside records for him. He had a programme on RTR which Magnus taped.

  Something new was happening. He felt as if he’d woken up from a pastoral dream and the world had changed. It was in the grip of ceaseless, relentless electronic innovation and it was just beginning. It seemed to Jacob that they were on the verge of a social revolution as great as that of his own generation in the sixties. It was no longer possible to ignore it even in Warton. When they returned and gave Magnus his computer, their life would change. Non-stop communication and information. It was like Arlene finally giving in and buying a television. After that she never turned it off.

  He flicked through the mesh rack of Cecile’s CDs again. The covers were elegant, delicately hip. The names were enchanting. Sigur Ros, The Sundays, Cocteau Twins. Some lettering was too pale and tiny for him to read without his glasses. He pressed the play button and the room filled with a rendition of ‘Night and Day’, just recognisable in the sad plucked chords of a solo cello. Two intermittent piano notes that broke his heart.

  He’d persuaded Maya once to come to Perth with him, after the debacle with that poor young Brethren kid. He remembered listening to Lucky Oceans on The Planet, while Maya looked out the window into the darkness and listened to her Walkman. He wanted to tell her how often he’d fucked up when he was her age, but she wouldn’t give him a chance. She never said a word to him the whole weekend.

  Where was Toni? Where the hell did she go?

  6

  Boans

  For some time she sat in the grounds of the tower blocks across the road, on a boulder amongst the trees, overlooking the little goalposts and the muddy playing field. The glowing pearl-gray air made her feel lighter and more alert. Right now the last thing she felt like was the burden of a big wounded man.

  The jewellery box had upset her this morning. She was trying to shove their bags to the back of Maya’s cupboard when she found it, wedged into a corner. A large, brown, clumsily carved wooden box, mass-produced for tourists. She sat on the bed and studied it, squatting on the floor like a toad. Her heart was thudding. She felt an irrational, violent antipathy to it, as if it cast a spell. Maya would never buy a thing like that. For a start, she had no jewellery. And it was ugly, dated – the sort of thing Arlene and Joe used to buy on one of their trips to Singapore. Someone who hadn’t given any thought to what Maya would like had given it to her, and she had accepted it.

  In the tower blocks, now that the rain had stopped, carpets were hanging out to air over the balconies and curtains were billowing in open windows. Toni caught a whiff of curry steam. No little black-haired kids and their mothers had come out yet to the playground. Yesterday she stood and watched them. When she saw parents and young children together she saw a love affair.

  She walked over to the empty swings and frames in their wet bark beds. The rubber seats swung idly in a secret current of air. She dumped the jewellery box, wrapped up in a plastic bag, into the playground bin, which she hoped was emptied daily.

  She wouldn’t tell Jacob about this. He would say she had no right to dispose of something of Maya’s. Besides, any hint of what he called ‘the dark arts’ always made him furious.

  It was a challenge finding ordinary household goods in the Vietnamese supermarket. Where was the Vegemite amongst the chutneys, pickles, lurid syrups? The butter, in those little glass-fronted fridges with the plastic boxes of aquarium-coloured jellies? The phosphate-free laundry powder amongst the stacks of giant boxes of Omo, with instructions in Chinese? Her hand hovered over the bright green spring onions and bok choy, the mangoes and rambutans, all at no-nonsense prices. Forget about petro-chemicals, additives, sprays. No one had time for greenie scruples in this hubbub of transaction, amongst these purposeful, fast-moving people.

  She was picking out mandarins from a mound on the table when from the corner of her eye she glimpsed a girl in a denim jacket with pale skin and wide cheekbones and a dark bowl-like haircut, paying at the checkout. Of course it wasn’t Maya, she was nothing like her really, in her twenties, part-Asian, but after that Toni wasn’t equal to the noise and clutter of these aisles anymore. Coffee, she needed coffee to rev her up to the pace here. Where could she go?

  She reeled down the footpath past the windows with the varnished brown corpses of ducks and chickens, the street-front GPs’ clinics, the herbalists and acupuncturists, tax consultants, fishmongers and video stores. There were several Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants but she fled into the known insipidity of a franchised French Bakery. Even here fried rice and spring rolls were offered along with the croissants and baguettes, and the waitresses in their bright pink T-shirts and caps were Asian.

  At a table in the back corner, facing the room, next to the exit – a habit learnt from Cy Fisher – she spooned up her cappuccino foam and listened to the old-fashioned trundle of a tram going past.

  I keep thinking I see you: that’s what her mother used to say when they had one of their lunches in Boans.

  Beryl found her by working her way though every travel agency in the Yellow Pages until she rang Park Lane Travel and spoke to Felice. After that they met for lunch two or three times a year in Boans’ cafeteria. Beryl also always sat in the furthest corner, but for a different reason, so that none of her friends would see them if, by a stroke of calamitous bad luck, one of them happened to walk past. Not that Beryl’s crowd were likely to lunch there. The cafeteria was on the top floor of Boans department store, under huge meshed windows, a vast hall filled with a dusky cathedral light and the rising hum of dozens of lunching women’s voices. Middle-aged waitresses in peppermint-green uniforms and nurse’s caps doled out peas and mashed potato with ice cream scoops as you stood at the servery and pointed at what you wanted. Homely meat and gravy smells and the clatter of dishes issued from the kitchen. Even in the seventies it was old-fashioned.

  The first time they met, Beryl talked non-stop about the same old things as if Toni had just come back from a trip and was still part of her world. Her headaches, Karen and Bevan’s new house, Nig’s winning team at bowls. Then she stopped, her eyes wandered and her lips trembled.

  ‘You know, I was … sick … for a while,’ she said. Toni did not respond. Of course she knew, she’d known as she crossed the Horseshoe Bridge in her bridesmaid’s outfit how it would be for her mother. As if bells rang out all over the suburb, the sky darkened, war was declared. She would become hysterical and take to her bed. The doctor would be called. When she’d recovered sufficient strength to talk to her friends on the phone, she’d put it about that Toni, always independent, was off flatting – that was the word she’d use – with a girlfriend. But one sceptical glance, one pointed lack of enquiry, would let Beryl know the word was out. The Parker lass had run off with a common criminal, and no decent people would have anything more to do with her. A girl whose looks had gone to her head.

  Toni’s leather coat hung on the back of her chair, her long straight hair gleamed, her breasts had grown. She knew she was dazzling. The ease and pleasures of her life surrounded her like an aura that protected her. For the occasion, it was true, she had taken off her little diamond ring, but that was to avoid personal questions.

  As they were about to leave, Beryl, hunting in her handbag for her powder compact, said in a low, deliberate voice: ‘I think you should know that Daddy missed out on his promotion.’ Her eyes caught Toni’s. It took Toni a moment to realise. Because of you, her mother was saying, because of the scandal. ‘So he still has to hawk his wares all over the country.’

  Toni stood up and walked out. She’d learnt from watching Cy that you had to act quickly. You had to take the power. If people wanted to do busin
ess with you, they had to show respect.

  She knew her mother would hold her tears back until she reached home. On the phone beside her bed she would tell Nig and Karen that Toni had changed, had been influenced by him, had become glamorous and hard. Her own daughter was a stranger.

  All her life she’d known what Beryl was thinking until she couldn’t stand it anymore. The thoughts didn’t touch her now. You never compromise, Cy said, you never look back. That way there was never any fuss.

  And he was right. Beryl rang Park Lane Travel a few months later to invite Toni to lunch and never tried to blackmail her again.

  She belonged to another family now. In the beginning she didn’t know how to cook or even make a shopping list but it didn’t matter, they ate at restaurants or in the big kitchen of Cy’s mother, Régine. They sat around Régine’s table with his sisters and his brother-in-law and ate vegetables from her garden, sausages she’d cured herself, chicken she’d raised on corn and killed and plucked. His mother’s food made Cy supremely happy. ‘Maman, you surpass yourself,’ he said, each time. Régine was the only person Toni ever heard Cy praise. She welcomed Toni as if she were a waif, poorly fed, motherless, shockingly untrained in the house. After the meal, in a rush of clatter and high voices, she and her daughters would dispense with the dishes while Toni was still looking for a tea-towel. But anyone Cy brought home would always be an honoured guest for Régine.

  Régine stomped up the stairs to the flat to instruct Toni on how to clean it, how to make the bed in the way Cy liked. She took their washing home because Cy didn’t like laundry hanging around the place. She excused this act of possessiveness, this blatant invasion of privacy, by saying she knew Toni was busy, all the young women were busy these days. Besides, wasn’t she Toni’s own mother now? Régine had Cy’s black deep eyes, but hers were distracted, always looking for the next thing to do. She was short and dumpy with bad feet, in a wraparound coverall and fraying canvas shoes, her gray hair pulled roughly back from her white, damp face with the long, flattish nose that she had, in various versions, bequeathed to all her children. Beryl would have said that Régine had let herself go, but for her children she was an angel, who devoted every moment of her day in service to them. Even when she went to Mass, it was to pray for their bonheur, she said, for their luck in love and with the monnai.