The Good Parents

by Joan London

  Downstairs in Park Lane Travel, which was never very busy, her daughters made her sit down and drink coffee, and in her honour Cy would come out from his office behind the shop with whoever was with him, Johnny, Serge, Pino, and they would all drink coffee standing around Régine, laughing and teasing each other, because it made Régine so very happy.

  Far from being the sordid, dangerous life Beryl envisioned, this new world was warm, familial, orderly and clean. Toni had never felt so light-hearted. In the mornings she worked in the travel agency – there was sometimes a booking to be made for friends or relatives, or a backpacker shopping for the cheapest deal or the odd passer-by struck by a sudden whim for the south of France. Mostly she and Felice read magazines and did each other’s nails and listened to 6PR. Sabine was pregnant and kept irregular hours. In the back office, men came and went from the carpark behind the shop. It hadn’t taken Toni long to realise that this was where the real business was transacted.

  When Park Lane Travel was very quiet, the girls put a back at twelve sign on the door, took an advance on their pay from the till, and went shopping. Money, saving it, spending it, worrying about it, so large a part of Toni’s upbringing, was never talked about. When Toni passed her driving test – Cy organised lessons with a driving school in which he had an interest – he gave her a car, a little red brand-new Renault that was taking up space in a yard. He said he didn’t like her catching public transport.

  Three times a week she drove to lectures and tutorials, and sat apart, sleek, chic, claimed. Her diamond flashed as she took notes and the tips of her hair brushed the page. She felt far older than the other students. It was as if she came from another country. After the lectures she drove straight home. Her books were set up on a table in the corner of the living room, but she found it harder and harder to summon the energy to open them. There was enough for her to learn in her new life. Besides, what use was a degree to her now? She dropped down to one subject a term, just to reassure herself that she still had a life of her own. Then there didn’t seem any point and she didn’t re-enrol, though she knew she ought to keep up French to talk to Régine, who kissed her on both cheeks when she tried. Something had gone soft and lazy in her.

  Cy didn’t like anything to seem like an effort. He was never in a hurry. In the afternoons he generally went upstairs for a siesta and he liked Toni to be there. Nobody would ever disturb them.

  Since he didn’t come home to sleep until the early hours of the morning, he was at his most sensuous in the afternoons. It was his Mediterranean blood, he said. Later she lay in a deep bath and dressed for the evening. When she looked in the mirror she could hardly believe her own splendour. On the nocturnal round of bars and clubs and restaurants, Cy introduced her as ‘my fiancée’. It seemed to her that wherever she went she was surrounded by a circle of shining faces. She only had to pull out a cigarette packet for a lighter to appear. When she was tired and Cy wanted to gamble through the night, one of the boys drove her home, walking into the flat ahead of her, checking the rooms, snapping lights on and off.

  Sometimes she paced through the flat and wondered if she was in danger of becoming spoilt, a major term of disapproval where she came from. She had acquired so easily what so many girls yearned for, a man, a house, beautiful things. But questions like this were immaterial in Cy’s world. Anything that was not to do with business or pleasure was not worth another thought. She made a vague resolution to read more books and not to look too often in the mirror.

  One morning she woke late, alone, in the sun-warmed bedroom and understood that she felt different. A heaviness had lifted, she could breathe more easily. The darkness and strain that had surrounded her from her earliest childhood, like the murmuring of a forest, the striving to keep up appearances, the worry about other people, the criticism, had simply dissolved. And where it had been there was lightness, freedom, silence, an open plain.

  When she sat across the table from her mother in Boans, she felt superior to her. I know how to live, she thought.

  Why didn’t she take into account her parents’ accusation that Cy was a criminal? She tossed it away as just another example of Beryl and Nig’s snobbery. Criminal? What did that mean? Cy was a businessman, a successful one. It was a different way of life. What would her father know about it?

  Everything was business, she was beginning to see that.

  In a way which she found hard to put into words, she knew that Cy was more honest in his life than her parents were in theirs. His moral universe was more consistent. He was so honest that he made everybody nervous. In his presence you became aware of how weak you could be in your decisions, how often you lied a little, acted in bad faith. He saw no reason for lies because he always did what he wanted to. A liar was afraid of other people. If one of the team lied to him, he was out. A weak person was a dangerous person. A liar lacked respect.

  More and more she suspected Cy of omniscience. There wasn’t anything he didn’t know about her, what she did, where she went. She discovered that he knew where she was at any hour of the day.

  ‘So you met your mother today.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Deduction.’

  One of the boys or one of his many contacts all over town must have seen her going into Boans. He kept an eye on everyone who belonged to him. She began to sense that beneath his smooth surface there lurked a vast possessiveness, a dark, fathomless cavern.

  He was preternaturally alert. He saw, smelt and heard more than anyone else. He often prowled around the flat thinking he smelt gas, something burning or someone else’s aftershave. Even when he was talking he saw things from the corners of his eyes. He was always on guard.

  ‘I’ve never trusted anyone since I was four years old,’ he told her. That’s when he started to take his trolley round the streets of the better-off suburbs, selling fish that his grandfather had caught at the Fremantle wharf to patronising, penny-pinching, middle-class housewives.

  When he was fourteen he was big enough to kick his father out. His father, Arnie Fisher, an animal, soon died, drunk, of a heart attack in a rooming house. Cy had supported the family ever since.

  ‘How did you support them?’

  ‘Business. Making myself useful. Running messages. Taking bets.’

  He was a successful gambler not only because of his powers of observation but because of his intuition. All his decisions came from inside, he said. Especially when he was alone, he was sometimes aware of presences flickering just out of sight. Someone looked after him. Maybe his grandfather.

  He was surrounded by loyal henchmen and an adoring family, but he was always apart.

  After she came to live with him he didn’t mention marriage again until one afternoon three years later when he came upstairs and told her to hurry, he’d made an appointment at the registry office. ‘Come just as you are,’ he said. Everything went very fast. They were shown straight into the office. Her documents – how did he get them? – were waiting next to his on the desk. Two clerks were called in as witnesses. There was a table waiting for them in Luis’, by the window, with an ice bucket and champagne. It was raining, an early winter twilight. The champagne went to her head. ‘Cyprien,’ she said, ‘Cyprien Arnold’, and she couldn’t stop laughing.

  ‘Why do you like me?’ she dared to ask. She had just promised officially to love and obey him until death, but in private they rarely said the word ‘love’ to each other.

  ‘Because you know how to mind your own business.’ His white face had the faintest touch of colour. His mouth was twisted as if to hold back a smile, which was his way of smiling. Just this once he would indulge her: he hated questions like this. Wasn’t marrying her enough of a statement? She knew that possessing her was an act of revenge against those middle-class households. For him she was as exotic as he was for her.

  She looked at him across the candle on the table. He isn’t really good-looking, she thought, but he’s an interesting man. My husband. Even his bl
ack suits and white shirts hanging in the wardrobe looked powerful and mysterious.

  He had chosen exactly the right moment to secure her, when she was at the peak of her contentment and fascination. Yet someone, a long-forgotten maiden aunt perhaps, a voice in her blood, was always whispering in her ear that it was a dangerous luxury to relinquish yourself like this.

  When Beryl saw the gold band on Toni’s finger, she couldn’t hide the sudden bitter grimace that contorted her face. ‘Now you’ll never be rid of him,’ she said, looking out across the tables of women.

  By the time Toni met her mother for their last lunch in Boans, the rules of engagement had been long established. That is, Beryl talked on and on and Toni gave nothing away. Beryl had given up asking Toni questions about her life and acted as if it was better not to know. That silence was a curtain between them. This was how they’d managed to survive this hour together, year after year.

  Beryl’s injured air had been replaced by one of generalised anxiety. Her news this last time was that Karen was worried about her little boy, Lincoln. He wasn’t talking or walking, he was far behind other children of his age. Karen had her hands full.

  ‘I wish you’d give her a call,’ Beryl ventured.

  Toni shrugged. ‘Karen never calls me.’

  Toni had visited Karen in hospital after she had her baby. She went early in the morning, when she judged that she wouldn’t be likely to meet up with any other visitors. Karen was in the shower. Toni stood at the nursery window and looked at the little fat red face, its mouth open, soundlessly screaming. I’m never going to have one of those, she thought.

  ‘He looks like Bevan,’ she told Karen and for once they laughed together. Karen was lit up by such happiness that for a moment she could even forgive her selfish, wayward sister.

  ‘I thought I saw you half a dozen times on my way here,’ Beryl was saying.

  Toni frowned and looked away. Some things were beginning to trouble her. The way she looked, like a free spirit, a flower child, when nothing could be further from the truth. There’d been a revolution in her generation and she had missed it. She wore the clothes because it was the fashion. Her life was as conservative in its way, as closed off as Karen’s or Beryl’s. She was restless with her easy routines. If she wasn’t with Cy she was bored.

  Perth had changed. There was a minerals boom, a building boom, millionaires were born and died overnight. Wealth and travel were bringing the rest of the world closer. She and Cy went to parties in craggy brick lounge rooms in the hills, or on balconies overlooking the river, or in hotel suites hired by mining companies. Sometimes she even met girls from school there, married to stockbrokers or lawyers. All the women wore upmarket ethnic clothes, while the men’s hair curled like medieval princes’ onto their collars. They danced to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but made jokes about Whitlam and hippies and women’s libbers that shocked her with their viciousness. She didn’t have the words to define her position, but more and more she felt there was a war on and she was on the wrong side. She knew she was the spy in the camp.

  There were drugs at these parties, and a lot of naked frolics in swimming pools. Cy didn’t dance or joke or make small talk. He restricted himself to two tumblers of whisky and smoked his own cigarettes. He was there to do business. He still wore a black suit, which he certainly didn’t take off. His hair was the same length it had always been.

  But the village-like atmosphere of his business interests, his patch, his people, had changed. Buddha sticks and heroin were flooding in from south-east Asia. Drugs were big business, though Cy Fisher never touched them. It was the beginning of the big nightclubs. A prominent Perth madam was shot in her car, and the police investigation drew a blank. Cy told her he knew who did it. She felt the walls around her growing higher and higher.

  How did people change themselves? It was as if she were waking up from a long sleep. In terms of education she was still a schoolgirl. She bought a copy of The Female Eunuch and read it all one night in bed alone. When Cy came home at dawn she was too angry to speak. Cy, sitting on the end of the bed, taking off his shoes, looked amused.

  ‘What’s your problem? You’ve got everything you want.’

  ‘Nothing I have has been earned by me.’

  ‘You’ve got a job.’

  She stared him down to let him know she understood full well that Park Lane Travel was just a front for the back office, as well as a way of keeping the women of the family under his eye, in pocket money, and out of trouble. She, Felice and Sabine were no more than decorative receptionists. Suddenly she was overwhelmed with weariness. The task of converting him would be like rolling a small stone up a mountain.

  ‘I have no power,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘Don’t you believe it.’ Cy was in a genial mood. He must have won at cards.

  ‘My little feminist,’ he said, sliding into the sheets beside her, his warm dense flesh smelling of night-life. ‘Who would have thought?’

  She was beginning to see how many doors were closed to her. Travel, for a start. Cy didn’t see the point in travelling, everything vital in his world existed around him, in the few streets which he’d known all his life. He hated being in a place where he didn’t know the ropes, hated sleeping in any bed but his own. Without a real job, Toni could see she would never go to any of the places advertised in the posters around the walls in Park Lane Travel.

  It would be hard to hold down a real job that fitted in with the hours required to be Cy Fisher’s companion. No business in Perth would employ her unless it was answerable to Cy. And she was pretty sure that a job in the government wasn’t an option for Mrs Cy Fisher.

  She would never know what it was to make her own way in the world.

  Boans’ cafeteria hadn’t changed, but its days were numbered.

  ‘Why aren’t you happy?’ Beryl said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Toni was startled. This was breaking the rules.

  ‘You’re a bundle of nerves. And you’ve lost weight.’

  ‘I weigh exactly the same.’

  For once Beryl did not back off. ‘Something’s bothering you. I’m still your mother, you know, I can tell.’ Tears filled her eyes.

  ‘Mum, if you cry I’ll leave.’

  But she no longer felt so invincible with her mother. She had lost her implacable faith in the rightness of her decision.

  Her belief in her life with Cy Fisher had crumbled definitively one night at The Riviera when she happened to look out a back window on her way to the ladies’. There amongst the rubbish bins, in the dim light cast by the kitchen door, she saw Pino being kicked by two men. One of them she recognised as Johnny. He had taken his jacket off, rolled up his sleeves, as if to do a job. She could hear the thuds of their kicks, their panting and grunts. Pino lay curled, his arms over his face. She ran back to Cy at the bar and told him. Cy said nothing, looked her steadily in the eyes. She reached for the phone. ‘I’m going to call the police.’

  He put his large hand over hers.

  ‘Then I’m calling an ambulance.’

  He didn’t remove his hand.

  ‘Why?’ A tear ran down her face.

  ‘Because it’s necessary.’

  She began to detect an edge of cruelty in everything he did or said. His decisiveness came from ruthlessness, a belief in his own ends. When she heard him say ‘Keep me updated’ or ‘Yeah, go ahead’ on the phone to Johnny she was chilled.

  Seeing Johnny with his sleeves rolled up, his foot swung back, shocked her, like seeing a father misbehaving. He was older than Cy, in his forties, with a short, wide body, and a bustling, determined walk. His loyalty was unquestioned. He was working as a security guard when Cy met him. Rumour had it that he was an ex-cop. His ruddy, closely shaven face was as impassive as a bodyguard’s, though every now and then he’d give a short bark of laughter showing close-packed, shining, cream-coloured teeth. He wore pale suits and his hair was fine and puffy, hair-net brown. There was always a w
oman waiting for him at home, a series of women over the years, whom nobody ever met. Toni used to try to get a smile out of him once, but now she couldn’t bear to look at him.

  A new member of the team, Sam, drove her home one night from The Riviera. He was about her age, loose-limbed with long splayed fingers, a nervy jokester, anxious to please. He wore a drooping moustache, like a joke on his face, and a double-breasted, burgundy suede jacket. He’d had a stint managing some local bands and when he opened up the flat for her, he stayed talking about the music scene for twenty minutes.

  ‘Did he touch you?’ Cy asked when he came home.

  ‘Of course not!’ She didn’t mention what Sam had told her, in his exuberance, that she and Cy were known around the traps as Beauty and the Beast.

  She never saw him again.

  ‘What’s happened to Sam?’ she asked Cy.

  ‘He’s moved on.’

  A few weeks later she read in The West that a young man had suffered serious injuries after being beaten up and thrown off the Horseshoe Bridge. His name was Warwick Hubble and he was twenty-seven. There was a photo of him. She showed it to Cy. ‘That’s Sam, isn’t it?’