The Good Parents

by Joan London

  Now there was nowhere else to go but ‘Karma’. They drove tensely, on kangaroo watch. All they could see was the stretch of gravel ahead in the VW’s weak lights. Something about the quality of silence made him aware that Toni was crying. He didn’t dare look at her but put one hand for a moment on her knee. That made her burst out.

  ‘It was terrible not to have gone to help them. Those poor old good people. Did you see Doug’s shaking hands?’

  ‘They must have been confident they could cope or they wouldn’t have come.’

  ‘I feel like a thief. I feel like I stole from them.’

  ‘We hardly used anything except a bit of kerosene. We replaced the firewood. They won’t even know.’ He suddenly remembered the sherry.

  ‘Of course they will! What about the towel? Bit by bit they’ll discover little things. Our ashes are still warm. They’ll smell my shampoo. We stole their privacy. They’ll never feel secure there again.’

  ‘Old people don’t have much of a sense of smell,’ he said, trying to joke. He couldn’t help feeling a secret exultation that she trusted him enough to show herself to him at last. She sobbed bitterly, her cheeks wet with tears.

  ‘That makes it worse! We took advantage of their age.’

  ‘Toni, they gave us shelter and I’m grateful to them. Does a few days’ squatting in a house that’s hardly used really matter?’ He was surprised to see what a stern moralist she was. Years of travelling, camping in other people’s houses, had made him casual about possession, he supposed.

  ‘I’m always running away from things,’ she said drearily, blowing her nose. ‘I want to be honourable. I want to be good.’

  He drove into a track leading off the road into the bush and pulled up in the dark. They listened to the ticking silence for a moment as the moonlight found its way into the car and then at last, like a pair of teenagers they lowered their seat backs and wound their legs and arms together. Orphans, fugitives, outsiders in a landscape: already the pattern of their future life was set.

  After the rain a low sharp wind had started up that blew across the balcony straight onto his body in its sodden clothes. He sat against the wall with his arms around his knees, trying to control spasms of shivers. What time was it? The light flickered so busily through the tossing trees that he couldn’t read the face of his watch. It must be ten o’clock at least. He ought to get up, stamp his feet, wave his arms around, but he was too stiff to take any action at all.

  He hadn’t thought about this journey for many years. He used to tell it as a comic story from the crazy seventies. Funny, what remained most vivid in his memory now was the glimpse in the twilight of the old couple at their car, Rosemary helping Doug with his fly.

  Soon, like old Doug, he wouldn’t be able to wait anymore, he was going to have to pollute the fishpond. It was that or desecrate Mrs Chen’s porch. Was it possible to die of exposure on a Melbourne balcony?

  He dozed and woke to hear voices passing in the street, talking in a foreign language. ‘Um-ber-to!’ someone called, plaintive and musical. Perhaps he’d caught pneumonia and was delirious. If he died, one of the things he’d miss would be the soft voices calling out in Fellini movies.

  The light came on in the bedroom behind him.

  He started to gather up his legs but when he tried to stand he fell forward. He slowly turned himself around and looked through the glass door on his hands and knees.

  Cecile was putting one arm into the sleeve of a cardigan and then the other arm. It was the tiny purple cardigan he liked, the one that subtly mocked home-knitted cardigans. She was doing up the buttons like a little girl, slowly, her head bowed.

  It was clear to him now that such simple, ordered movements came from strength of mind. She was fending off sadness. Why hadn’t he seen before how sad she was? The heart within me burns. Who said that? His thoughts were looping, as if he had gone crazy. All his being was waiting to be recognised by this marvellous girl. With his last strength he reared up like Frankenstein and knocked on the glass door. Her face coming towards him was at once familiar and yet changed, as if he’d been away for many years. Oh no, not this, he thought.

  He felt her fingers, fine as chicken bones, grasping the purple slabs of his hands.

  After he’d stood for a while under hot stinging water and put on clean clothes, he went to find her. It was nearly midnight but she was sitting at her laptop. She swivelled around to smile at him.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Extremely humble.’

  ‘That handle! I should have warned you. Someone tried to break in once and I never had it fixed.’

  ‘I wasn’t snooping in your room, by the way.’ When she stood up, he’d quietly reclaim his jacket from the back of her chair.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I went out there to have a smoke and see the view.’ He felt wild and simple, a man come in from the desert. Past fear, past hope.

  She sat studying him with full, thoughtful attentiveness. ‘Are you hungry, Jacob?’

  ‘I need a drink, first of all.’

  ‘There’s a little late-night place around the corner where you can get a good soup and a glass of red wine. How does that sound to you?’

  He wanted to tell her that nothing much mattered except to be with her, but he couldn’t find the words.

  14

  Karma

  If happiness was so simple, so natural, how come it was so hard to achieve? She thought this as she sat cross-legged in the meditation hall, trying to concentrate on her breathing. For thousands of years people had been striving to follow this path. A whole religion had been built on this belief in inner peace, millions of lives devoted to its disciplines. All this, the house, the monks and nuns, the humble students, the chants and talks, was a product of a vast ancient project to teach humans how to be happy.

  For some years now Toni had thought that she’d be ‘good at’ Buddhism, a natural. She had a little book of the Dalai Lama’s sayings which she often referred to, and after reading a page or two she always felt more serene. She’d allowed herself the fantasy that the Buddha was waiting for her. Each time she passed the chubby little statue in Cecile’s courtyard she smiled at him as if they had a private understanding. Sooner or later, she thought, she would be called.

  In her current state of uncertainty and worry, the sight of Kesang’s plain clean face gleaming at her with loving kindness was enough to make her want to throw herself into the Buddha’s arms.

  But now that she was here, dressed in a dark red coarse-woven cotton robe of the novice, under a rule of silence, she was discovering that far from being comforting and maternal, the Buddha’s embrace was hard-edged and austere. She saw that years of gruelling discipline and practice lay ahead of her if she were ever to still her racing mind. Gongs rang, instructions were given, candles lit, and there she was, left stranded in her own unquiet heart. The more she tried to leave the world behind, the more it seemed to crowd in on her.

  Without words, did you see more? Or was it the clarity of the air? In the first meditation session in the hall, as she closed her eyes and mindfully breathed in and out, she was startled by a technicolour, large-screen vision of Maya, Maya as a little, wild, big-toothed, tangle-haired girl, galloping towards her through the trees, in the days when her greatest wish was to be a horse. Her face loomed into close up, until she saw the pale skin still faintly pitted here and there from her teenage years, like scars, like sensitivity.

  While the other novices breathed softly around her, lost in their devotions, Toni was consumed with longing for her, so acute that she could have groaned out loud. Nobody knew you like your girl-child, your stony watch-dog. Your fellow female. The one who always brought you to account. Right from Maya’s birth this had been a secret tension in the household.

  The ashram sat on the crest of an escarpment, an old stone mansion built in the twenties as a country retreat for a wealthy family. One of the heirs had endowed it to the Centre. Now temple bel
ls and gongs echoed through the wide hallways, robed figures glided up and down the grand wooden staircase, chanting lifted the cold air. The rooms had been cleared of carpets, paintings and furniture, the floorboards stripped and polished, the walls painted white. The old stables across the courtyard had been converted into sleeping cells.

  Nobody knew each other’s names. There were two male novices and six women, whose soft worn faces reminded her of those women in Warton who filled the congregations in the churches, made the cakes for the stalls, ran the charity drives. Each night as she lay on her canvas futon, she heard their solitary rustlings and sighs, women on their own, released at last from looking after everyone.

  The robes made all their figures look bulky. They walked slowly, like brides or girls in evening gowns. Toni wore a sweater underneath. Some mornings they rose to mist winding itself around the courtyard and the valley was obscured. At night a modest fire barely warmed the hall while they sat cross-legged, listening to the evening talk. She was always a little cold.

  There wasn’t a mirror in the bathroom, or anywhere in the house. The fall of her hair on her shoulders was probably inappropriate: she half-expected to be told to pin it back.

  Meals were served at a refectory table in the grand old kitchen. Two tall young nuns, their bare heads revealing swan-like necks and dainty ears, their beetroot robes unable to conceal a loose-limbed slenderness, were the cooks for the ashram. Pearly-faced, serene, they dished out porridge in the mornings, thin yellow dhal and vegetables and rice at other meals. The servings were not large and needed more salt. Toni was always a little hungry. The novices didn’t look at one another as they ate, but attempted to concentrate, as instructed, on who had grown and made the food and the interdependence of all things.

  At six in the morning when the meditation gong sounded, she had an impulse to pull her thin white quilt over her head, like a naughty girl at boarding school.

  Wherever it was that Maya phoned Magnus from, she wasn’t happy.

  Breathe in the pain of a specific person, they were instructed at morning meditation. Toni saw Maya’s bowed head. Breathe out the white cool light of compassion. Toni breathed in and out, in and out, but still Maya’s head did not lift.

  Extend your practice to all who are suffering in the world. Maya pushed Lincoln around in his chair. He knows everything, Maya said. He’s full of feelings. She sent him drawings of horses. He used to cry for her if it had been too long since he had seen her.

  One night in her cell, when everyone else was asleep, she phoned Magnus and in a low rapid voice instructed him to tell Maya what she had omitted to say in every other call. That they loved her and nothing else mattered. That if she needed money she must let Magnus know.

  The youngest woman amongst the novices was in her early thirties, short and buxom with a distorted walk. There was something wrong with her hips, she had to sit in a chair in the Hall. She had soft dark troubled eyes and black curling hair. Italian perhaps, or Greek or Maltese. She was very conscientious in her devotions. Her affliction burdened her, Toni thought, she was trying to get relief. One day during walking meditation, as the girl made her torturous, lurching way on the bush track that ran along the top of the escarpment, Toni, coming from the opposite direction, broke the rules and looked her in the eyes, smiling at her. The girl, surprised, smiled back. The sweet, obliging smile of a strictly-brought-up girl in a patriarchial household. Suddenly she understood that she was drawn to this young woman because she reminded her of Felice. Sweet Felice, her long-lost sister-in-law.

  She’d thought it was quiet in Warton, but not compared to this. There were no other buildings nearby, no cows or chooks or dogs, no road. The meditation pathway looped through the bush and turned back on itself. Far below a small road snaked through the valley, with a scattering of houses beside it. One afternoon she saw an orange school bus pull up and five tiny kids swarmed out and ran off into separate houses. She felt a longing to go down there, to be amongst the life of children and houses.

  Karma. A word once so familiar that it had its own meaning for her and Jacob now, as a sort of joke, a joke against themselves. Here it was again, the subject of an evening talk from a big-shouldered, bespectacled Australian monk in his mid-thirties, delivered in the matter-of-fact, boyish way of a sports teacher. If you’re unhappy or in a poor situation, it’s due to actions you yourself have committed in the past, including past lifetimes.

  The only escape from this endless cycle was mindfulness. She breathed in, she breathed out.

  One night she could not sleep. As she lay listening to the snores of the other novices she saw light falling soft and sparkling through a roof of leaf shadow into a forest clearing, as if she were standing there. She saw the two old railway carriages parked on blocks parallel to each other, and between them the cooking fire. There was the big iron pot hanging from its tripod, the battered kettle on the embers inside the ring of blackened stones. She saw the stumps for seats arranged around the fire in their companionable circle, and then the wider circle around the clearing, the great soaring trunks of the tinglewood trees. A line of tatty T-shirts and jeans was strung between the two nearest trees and a canvas bag, hoisted by a rope and pulley, was hanging from the lowest branch. They called this the shower tree. Prem had invented the pulley. Now she could see the white naked bodies of the communards, Prem and Wanda and Jacob, gasping and bobbing under the precious gush of water, one after the other. After a shower, if the evening was mild, Prem and Wanda liked to stroll around for a while with the air on their skin, chatting, bending to stir the pot, hanging out their towels. She could still see in detail, as if the sight had shocked itself onto her retina, Wanda’s deep-clefted, indented womanly flesh, Prem’s neat muscly buttocks as he crouched to stoke the fire.

  Jacob’s turn at the shower tree was theatrical, baritone warblings, soap in a lather. She found a way of dousing herself with a bucket of hot water behind the carriage. She said she’d have a shower when summer came.

  The trees were so high that the sun only started to light up the clearing at the end of the morning. If it was overcast, or raining, they walked around all day in twilight. At certain hours, between certain trees, the light penetrated in cathedral beams. The ground was strewn with leaves and nuts and fallen logs and tufts of bright green grass. Around the camp the ground was trodden into gray-black earth that quickly turned to mud.

  From the moment they arrived, she realised that she was unprepared for the grubbiness and scrappiness, the dingy half-light. Prem and Wanda’s greeting was so cool as to be offhand. Each morning she woke to darkness and shut her eyes again. She prayed that today she’d begin to like it. There was nothing else to do but to try to make it better, because there was nowhere else to go.

  Prem and Wanda had been there for some months now and could give them the lowdown on the weather, the wildlife, the open suspicion and contempt of the locals. The lack of sunlight in the clearing was proving to be a problem for growing vegetables but soon they hoped to clear another acre at the northern end of the block. They counted on attracting followers to help with the felling and milling of the trees and the building of houses. Perhaps because the block was so far south, and the giant forests so daunting, up until now only Jacob and she had turned up. Prem and Wanda weren’t from the west and had no contacts here. They’d come because they heard the land was cheap. Prem was from Melbourne. He worked in the family foundry before he dropped out. He had mechanical skills and was used to the bush. His whole family used to go camping together all around the peninsula.

  Prem was small and wiry, snub-nosed with a wispy beard. He’d travelled for several years and ended up with a guru in northern India. That was where he and Wanda met. Wanda was American, and an old hand at communes. A long time ago she had been married to a businessman, but she ran away to San Francisco to join the flower kids. The block and ute and railway carriages had all been paid for by her marriage settlement. She reminisced about communal living in California af
ter dinner as they passed around one of Prem’s huge, home-grown joints. ‘Sure, everybody balled each other all the time. There was no possessiveness. It was wild.’

  Toni and Jacob slept on a mattress in the second carriage, which also served as the communal storehouse. They shared it with a happy company of country mice, who partied furiously all through the night. Jacob talked of traps but Wanda was horrified that he could even think of taking any living creature’s life. At least the snakes were in hibernation now. As summer came on moths hatched in the sacks of rice and flour and lentils and beat against the windows to go out. If they tried to read in bed, the moths hit and sizzled against the kerosene lamp. There was no flywire if they opened the windows to the night air where the mosquitoes hovered, waiting to come in. In the end they daubed themselves with citronella oil and pulled the sheet right over their heads.

  In spite of brotherly love, they had fallen into a natural alliance against the other two.

  ‘Where did you meet them?’ she whispered.

  ‘On a houseboat in Kashmir. I have to admit we were all pretty stoned at the time.’

  Prem and Wanda weren’t bad people. It was just, she thought, they weren’t her people. It was almost biochemical, the way kids in a playground chose or rejected each other. Meeting them, she knew at once deep down it was never going to work. Did they also whisper about her and Jacob in the other carriage? Somehow she thought they were too pure.

  Above all was the worry about money. When they arrived at the commune they were down to their last twenty dollars. In the one-store town, all they could afford was a little petrol, soap and tampons, not even toothpaste or a newspaper or a bag of mixed lollies to console themselves. There was no question of credit. The woman behind the counter, Mrs Skinner, rang up their scanty purchases without speaking or looking at them. To her, Prem told them, they were the vanguard of a plague that was advancing south, across the honest rural world. There were shops in some little towns in the south-west with signs that said: No hippies served here.