The Good Parents

by Joan London

  ‘Looks like it.’

  After a while she said: ‘Was it because of me?’

  He shook his head in disbelief at her presumption.

  She had become afraid of him. At night she lay beside him but she wasn’t in her body. She didn’t challenge him anymore because it wasn’t worth it. She wanted to leave. Wanting to leave filled every moment of her days. When she was with him she tried to concentrate on what was around her, systematically noting cars, faces, advertisements, because she knew he could read people’s minds. In bed she tried to remember the names of all the girls in her class, or the details of her old room so he wouldn’t hear her thoughts.

  Why couldn’t she just say to him ‘I want to leave’ and walk out the door? Or tell him that she couldn’t love a man with blood on his hands? Because then he would find a way to make her stay. He’d convince her that staying was what she really wanted, but after that he’d watch her, or have her watched, all the time. He’d break her, in some way. Nobody left Cy, they were kicked out.

  Whenever she summoned all her strength to confront him, he didn’t come home, or couldn’t be found, as if he knew her plan. For a large man, he had a startling ability to disappear. She could turn towards him in a bar and find that he was gone. Then just as magically he’d be back at her elbow. Once some detectives from the Vice Squad came to Park Lane and asked to speak to him. His sisters said he wasn’t in. The detectives turned to Toni and asked to search the flat. She led them up, weak-kneed, knowing she’d left Cy asleep in bed. But when they entered, he wasn’t there. His shoes were gone, even the bed was smooth. The only back exit was from the platform into the pepper tree. She couldn’t envisage Cy, who hated all physical activity, launching himself into its brittle, swaying boughs. But there was no sign of accident, no broken branches. The flat was ordered, filled with tranquil leaf shadow, reminding her how quick, silent and clean he was in all his habits. She felt a moment’s pride in his escape.

  It turned out that at just the right moment he’d woken for a pee and seen the car turning into Park Lane. His sixth sense told him it was the wallopers. He was down the stairs and out the back door just before they walked in.

  How could she ever escape him? He always knew where she was. If she holed up in a room in a distant suburb, got a job in a supermarket, changed her name, dyed her hair, he would find her. She had no money for a plane ticket to the eastern states. Besides Cy had contacts at the airport and in all the capital cities. He would chase her down.

  She couldn’t bear to go home to her parents. Anyway, he would have their house watched, their phone tapped.

  Why wouldn’t he let her go if she wanted to so much? If he loved her? But the young and beautiful can never quite trust what they’re loved for. His benevolence surrounded her as one of his family. Once you left the family, you were the enemy. His sweet sisters would spy on her and betray her. Even now she suspected that Cy had asked Felice to keep an eye on her. Régine, who kissed her all over her face and called her my little daughter, would throw her belongings down the stairs. There was a ruthlessness to Régine too, she had watched those old red hands wring a chicken’s neck. The family would say she was ungrateful. They would say she had no respect. People who didn’t understand respect, Cy said, had to be taught.

  She became more and more remote. His touch was cold to her, as if it came from someone else. Cy must have noticed her withdrawal from him but he said nothing. He knew how to watch and wait.

  She took to walking in the park opposite, day or night, up and down, around the dark old Moreton Bay fig trees, past the bleak little stadium, the stagnant lake. She couldn’t seem to get enough fresh air. She missed nature, the suburban garden of her childhood, riding her bike along the river. Once in her childhood there had been a holiday in a beach house, way down on the south coast. In bed at night she tried to reconstruct it. Sea, sky, bush, the sound of the waves. She went for long drives alone in her car along the ocean or up to the hills.

  She longed for the days when she had lain beside Cy, untroubled, content in his orbit, a child. She was emerging from a dream. Something had awoken her, her own voice again, the only voice she could trust.

  She lived a half-life. A thought came to her from nowhere: she couldn’t bring a child up in this world. She hadn’t been aware that she wanted children.

  It was well past lunchtime. The French Bakery had filled up and emptied again while she had sat in her corner as rigid and stony-faced as she used to be sitting opposite her mother in that great barn on top of Boans. Why had she been so hard on Beryl? I keep thinking I see you. Of course she did. A generation always resembles each other in dress and voice and expression.

  The only other customer left was sitting at the adjoining table, a middle-aged woman with crew-cut gray hair wearing a maroon-coloured robe. In spite of her preoccupations, Toni was intrigued. A Buddhist nun, in the French Bakery, calmly drinking tea.

  The nun looked up and smiled at her. She had a pink, scrubbed face traced with lines, and pixie ears. Her smile was warm and matey, almost a grin. Her clear blue-gray eyes were crinkled at the ends.

  Toni indicated her long-empty cup. ‘I guess I lost track of the time.’ She felt washed out, as if she had been crying.

  ‘Shopping does my head in,’ the nun said agreeably. Nothing unworldly about her. She had an American accent. There was a pot of green tea in front of her. Unhurried, she turned around on her chair to face Toni.

  Afterwards, Toni couldn’t remember much about their conversation. She’d done most of the talking. She told her that her daughter had run away. Her companion sat very still, a look of pure interest on her face. Her eyes seemed alight. Perhaps it was her job to listen to sad people. Did the Buddhists have confession? She was afraid that her daughter had got herself into a situation that she couldn’t handle, Toni found herself saying. That she had lost herself.

  The nun said her name was Kesang, and as they parted she handed Toni a card. She’d said no word to reassure her yet Toni walked home lighter from the talk.

  They phoned Magnus in the early evening, more for their sake than his. For the sheer pleasure of his calm, young voice.

  Winnie had started fretting. She wouldn’t eat.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Magnus told Toni. ‘She comes to school with me.’

  ‘What on earth does she do there?’

  ‘Lies outside the classroom. Everyone talks to her. She really likes the attention.’

  ‘What do the staff say?’

  ‘Nothing. Just make the usual pathetic jokes.’

  Did all the teachers feel sorry for Magnus, abandoned by his parents?

  ‘What about you? Is Chris feeding you up?’

  ‘Chris isn’t here anymore. She’s gone to America.’

  ‘What! She never told us she was going away.’

  ‘She didn’t tell anyone. She’s gone to meet some guy off the internet.’

  ‘Jacob!’ Toni called out. ‘Chris has left Carlos!’

  ‘Magnus,’ she said back into the phone, ‘are you still going there to eat at night?’

  ‘Carlos is kinda out of it. I don’t want to hassle him. I know how to cook.’

  ‘What did you eat last night?’

  ‘Can’t remember. Instant noodles.’

  ‘I’m going to phone Carlos.’

  ‘Don’t! Don’t do that. Carlos doesn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Magnus, can you go and stay at Ben’s place? Please. I’ll call Beth Lester.’

  ‘No! I can’t!’ For Magnus he sounded almost panicked.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’ve got cats. I can’t take Winnie there.’

  He could hear his mother talking to Jacob.

  ‘Magnus?’ Her voice had a rising edge to it, the only time he didn’t like to hear it. ‘We’ll talk it over and call you back.’

  After she hung up he remembered that he hadn’t told her Maya had called. He hadn’t made up his mind whether or not Maya wanted him to. />
  7

  The Lucky

  An Asian multimillionaire had a vision of a shift in the earth’s axis which would cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. He bought a piece of land north of Warton, near Tumbring, because he believed that this region would be spared from a massive tidal wave which was going to hit the west coast. He saw the piece of land in a vision during meditation. In Tumbring they said that he’d spent ten million dollars on supplies to feed and house and give medical treatment for up to ten thousand refugees. He said the Buddhists believe that selfless acts would bring about a golden age of peace. He’d come to live here to get back to God.

  This event might not happen, he said, but if it did it would be before the end of 2001.

  Warton didn’t have a mystic saviour, only the Brethren, who hadn’t told anyone why they’d chosen to come here ten years ago and start a furniture business and build a church in a wheat-belt town. The Brethren never told their plans to non-Brethrens, ‘the worldlies’ they called them. Magnus knew this from Maya’s secret ex-boyfriend, Jason Kay. But one thing was certain. If a great flood did come, God would make sure the Brethren were the first and only people to be saved.

  Sometimes when Magnus set off like this, at dusk, through the empty streets, he thought about the sea water spreading across the flatness, filling up the streets and the saltpans along the creeks, turning the silted-up lake into an inland sea. He saw a great searchlight piercing through the clouds and tiny Brethren figures swirling up like dust mites, the sad, dowdy women holding down their skirts, the little nursery-rhyme girls in their headscarves, the pale, aggressive males with their bad haircuts …

  People would wait for rescue on roofs and the tops of trees, or make rafts and try to paddle to Tumbring to be saved. Inevitably his thoughts turned to the one he wished to save, or spend his last moments with, and here he is: leaping onto a door that is floating past and managing to reach Brooke Lester just before the chimney she is clinging to is swept away …

  He was walking to the Lucky because he was hungry and the kitchen smelt of empty Pal tins. He’d eaten all the supermarket food he’d bought, eggs, Weetbix and packet ham on white sliced bread. How did Toni do it, put together meals that made you feel good afterwards? He hadn’t been to the butcher – if he bought two chops, say, everyone would know he was cooking for himself and then the Garcia situation would come out, and the mothers would get together and insist he stay with one of them.

  Most nights he ended up going to the Lucky when all the families were inside.

  He stood for a moment under the pine trees and studied the Garcias’ house for signs of life. Carlos’s truck was in the carport all the time now, he mustn’t be going to work. When he saw Carlos putting hay out for the horses yesterday he went over and asked him how he was. Carlos said he had an almighty hangover. Magnus didn’t want to look into his eyes. ‘How’re you doing Mag?’ he called out after Magnus. Magnus called back that he was fine.

  There were no lights on in their house again tonight, just the television, but smoke was coming out of the chimney. Josh’s jeep was gone, he’d be out with his mates, it was Friday night. He must have taken Jordan with him. They’d be at the pub to watch Geelong versus Hawthorn. Carlos was probably pissed.

  It was very quiet. The evening mist was swirling up from the creek. Surprising how much a house could tell you about a family’s feelings if you stood and looked long enough. The horses had gone remote, back to their own horse lives again.

  He was working on an eighty-minute tape for Carlos. He didn’t know what else he could do.

  The moon was rising as Magnus stood waiting for Winnie to finish sniffing around the gate of the old drive-in. To cheer her up he let her fool herself for a few minutes that she was still a young dog who could catch a lizard or a rabbit.

  The drive-in was surrounded by a high cyclone fence, but from time to time a hole would appear and it would become a hang-out again, until the Shire came to fix it. When he and his friends were little kids they used to race their bikes around the cracked bitumen circuit. Last summer they sat amongst the broken glass on the steps of the projection booth drinking cans of beer stolen from home. Those who smoked had a few cigarettes or joints. He liked the feeling after a drink or a toke that you knew everything, but it didn’t last. Long yellow grass grew up around the booth and the ticket box with its still decipherable sign, Lights Out Please. The screen and the speaker-poles had gone long ago. There was always talk that the drive-in was going to be bulldozed but it never happened. The one thing this town didn’t need was space.

  The drive-in had closed even before his parents came to live here. For years his father used to photograph it at different times of the day or the year, but then he lost interest. He said it had become a great Australian cliché.

  For Magnus the drive-in wasn’t a cliché, it was part of his life, already turning into memory. It was part of a composition. He had an idea for a video clip called Six Thousand and One Nights in Warton. That was about how long he would have spent here – his whole life – when he left. Everything would go into it one day. Samples of old film themes, cars horns, road trains, barking dogs, show day. Crows, crickets, the school bell, the radio in the Lucky, all the background static that you didn’t notice anymore. Bits of music that his father used to play and his photos of the drive-in. The sound of bike tyres over gravel. Everything flowing together, flowing forward.

  It was because he’d be leaving in two years and five months that he was able to see the drive-in as poetic. All his time here now was a sort of goodbye. One day, he knew, he’d be glad of his small-town background, it would be part of whatever he did, whatever it was that would make him famous. A hell of a lot of musicians in America came from small towns.

  He whistled and Winnie rushed out to him, grinning, her snout sandy, her ears lopsided. It was like looking after a little kid.

  Whenever he set off to town he felt a faint excitement stir deep inside him. It was sexual. There was a chance that he might see a girl he liked. That is, Brooke Lester. Even now when it was nearly dark, he had hope of seeing her. Sometimes she came home late from basketball practice. Once he walked with her some of the way. Afterwards he realised that he’d talked non-stop about himself, what he liked and didn’t like. But all the time his every sense was alert to her. She had long straight blonde hair that blew in strings and she tucked it behind her ears. He liked the way she was so self-contained. Sometimes she rode her bike home, her long legs gleaming in the half-lit streets. She didn’t look like a Lester, but like a visitor from Scandinavia. It seemed amazing that Warton had produced her.

  The Lesters called her Brookie at home, like a toy or a baby girl. When he went there to visit Ben, she was sometimes friendly and sometimes acted as if he wasn’t there. Then he knew that when she looked at him she saw one of her kid brother’s friends and he couldn’t talk at all.

  Still, there was hope. Next year Brooke was going to Perth to become a physiotherapist. Magnus was convinced they’d meet up somewhere, Perth, London, Berlin, New York. He was beginning to think international.

  He could hear his own footsteps on the gravel. This solitude, this freedom felt so natural to him that he wondered if, when he was a man, he would always live this way. If he wasn’t so hungry he would have liked to keep walking, out of the town into darkness. Sometimes in the holidays he took off with Winnie into the flatness, walking towards the point where the telegraph poles joined. He felt a pull to the horizon. Old tracks and creeks led him into the bush. He carried water and a plastic box for Winnie to drink from and some muesli bars and apples. No money. He wanted to know what it felt like to be homeless, a wanderer. Living on the long paddock: he loved the sound of that. To sleep under a tree. To have faith that everything you needed would come your way.

  He never went so far out of range that he couldn’t catch the putter of a tractor somewhere or a truck passing by. If he wasn’t home by dark his parents would freak out. He always ended u
p hitching a ride to town in a ute or truck with Winnie barking out the back the whole way.

  Magnus came out of the Lucky carrying a double hamburger and there was Jason Kay on the footpath, bending down to Winnie who was stamping her feet and slobbering on his hands. She hadn’t forgotten him. Jason stood up, rubbing his hands on his jeans, shuffling, his soft, smiling face looking down. At once Magnus remembered everything about him, his shyness and quietness, his naturally white teeth, long fingers and the way his yellow-brown hair flopped over his face. The feeling of liking he gave.

  ‘So how’s it going?’ Jason murmured. Magnus remembered this too, how Jason hated talking face to face, yet he knew by the little dark gleaming pool in the centre of his eyes that Jason was pleased to see him.

  ‘OK. Winnie hassles me. She’s really missing Maya.’ Why did he have to mention Maya straight off like that? Jason’s ears went red. Magnus said quickly: ‘What are you doing these days?’ He hadn’t seen Jason all year.

  ‘I’m full-time at the workshop.’ That meant long hours in the Brethren furniture factory behind the shop they called Warton Homeware. People came from miles around for their stuff. After Jason dropped out of school, he’d disappeared back into the Brethren world, their chocolate-brick houses out on the flats and their church with a wire fence. How did a guy like Jason, who was clever and artistic, feel about making tables and bedheads all day?

  ‘You look pretty clean for a factory worker.’

  Jason had his own style. He was wearing an ink-blue shirt buttoned up and a black waistcoat. He didn’t dress like anyone else in Warton, especially not the Brethren guys. His face was smooth and pale, he was eighteen but he didn’t have to shave. When you saw him up close you remembered how good-looking he was in an androgynous sort of way.

  Jason laughed. ‘I work in the office.’ He gave a quick look over his shoulder. Brethren weren’t meant to be too friendly with the worldlies. Especially not Maya’s brother. Because Jason was very quick with numbers the Brothers had decided to let him stay on at school to study accountancy in Year 12, the only Brethren kid to go on to senior high school. He wasn’t allowed to watch videos, play sport or eat from the canteen. Someone told the Brothers that he sat next to Maya on the school bus, and he left without sitting for his exams. Fortunately that was all the Brothers were told about.