The Good Parents

by Joan London

  He worried that she kept meeting with him because she felt sorry for him, deserted and adrift in Melbourne. After all, she had seen him at his lowest point. But the ordeal on the balcony was like a wound he couldn’t even bear to think about, he had to leave it alone to heal. He felt he’d died out there and been reborn, delivered into her arms.

  Each evening he was taken over by a sense of urgency. Another day gone without news of Maya. He’d worked through all the Flynns now, even had genealogical conversations with a few of the old ones, and at this hour, after a drink or two, braced himself to retry the last few unanswered numbers.

  He had a sense of time running out. Time for what? To save Maya, save her soul from peril? To save his own? Alone and restless all day, he knew he had to guard against spilling over to Cecile in the wine bar, telling her too much about himself, more than she would want to know.

  Like the way, in a burst of confidence, he found himself telling her about Glad Rags, by Chickie Fitzgerald, and the whole glorious frenzied summer he’d spent writing a screenplay about a dressmaker’s son who goes berserk in a small country town. Being Chickie Fitzgerald seemed to help.

  He’d had the idea for years, ever since the day, soon after he came to Warton, that he heard the whirring of a sewing machine at the back of the newsagency, and poked his head around the door. And there was old Nora Carpenter, a spinster aunt of Forbes’s, feeding a hem through the foot of an antique treadle Singer with spotted arthritic hands. She used to be the dressmaker for the whole district in its heyday and she still worked a little in this room lent to her by Forbes. Everything was so familiar to him, the cutting table and ironing board, the ghostly tissue-paper patterns, the mirror, the magazines, the bent, devout head of the dressmaker. Her heavy, lethal scissors. In a flash he had his story. Her son, an ageing biker, spies on her clients, gets fixated on the town beauty, kidnaps her and goes around stabbing his rivals. It was supposed to be black comedy, he explained to Cecile, in which small town morality, hypocrisy etc is exposed. He hoped he sounded suitably ironic.

  Cecile remained serious. ‘Did you sell the script? I’ve a feeling I’ve heard of a film like that.’

  ‘Because it’s like everyone’s idea for an Australian film! The tragic outsider. The country town. Sending it all up. Of course he ends up letting the girl go. She’s enraged and sets fire to his house. He dies in the blaze.’ Even now, as he spoke, his heart sank at his lack of originality. Why turn everything into a farce? Like a smirking adolescent, wanting the laughter of the crowd. Why didn’t he take himself seriously? Sometimes Warton blazed into poetry before his eyes. He saw stories all around him, real stories, beautiful stories. Nora Carpenter lay amongst the long grass of the cemetery now.

  After it was rejected – with not even the suggestion of re-submission – he saw Chickie’s work for what it was, false, derivative, Hollywood generic. He couldn’t believe how he’d deceived himself. Up until then he still had faith he could do it, produce the great work, from a back shed in a country town. He blamed his failure on the time he gave to teaching, fatherhood, being a good citizen of Warton. But the truth was he’d turned away from the harder labour, the labour of thought.

  ‘Why Chickie Fitzgerald?’

  ‘It’s the name of my first pet and the first street I lived in. An old friend once told me that’s how you get your porn name. I’m not into porn, but I liked the name, it sounded like a jazz musician. For Chickie the words came more easily.’

  ‘I think your work should always carry your own name.’

  In one stroke, Chickie Fitzgerald, hired Hollywood hack, morphed back into a canary and a stretch of tarmac. Glad Rags, with its trail of failure, was finally laid to rest.

  Cecile spoke of her conviction that everything would change in the film industry, with handheld cameras, high-grade video, internet distribution. ‘I think film will become more eclectic, more personally expressive. I see a new sort of cinema, closer to the grain of life.’

  She talked about her favourite directors. He swallowed his despair that he’d never heard of any of them and asked if she’d select some videos for him to watch out of her collection.

  ‘If it is her boss, he must be away,’ he told Toni when she called him. ‘I’ve spoken to every other Flynn in Melbourne.’ An M Flynn with an Indian accent. A snobby old lady Flynn who told him to mind his own business. Kiddy Flynns who hung up when he asked if they knew a man called Maynard. The only one left on his list was the number of M&D Flynn. He tried it whenever he thought of it, at every hour of the day. The number leered at him from the notepad by the phone.

  Toni was silent. They were distant but gentle with one another.

  ‘Why can I hear birds singing?’

  ‘I’m on my walking meditation,’ she said, her voice lowered. ‘Jacob, I’ve been thinking. Didn’t Tod Carpenter get her the job? Maybe he knows where the boss is.’

  At the last minute Cecile said she would come with him. It was Sunday afternoon, and she didn’t have to start work till five. She felt like walking. They could walk through the Fitzroy Gardens to Kafka’s, the cafe where Tod Carpenter said he would meet Jacob. It was near Tod’s gym.

  Tod, on the phone, though he had no news of Maya, had been full of bonhomie and eager to help. ‘Yes, Jacob, what can I do for you?’ he said. ‘Look forward to meeting you, Jacob.’ That was the way with Tod’s generation, Jacob supposed. Everything was public relations. They called you by your first name at every opportunity, the salesman, the manager in the bank. The personal touch. It was a relief to take action, though he doubted that this Tod could tell him much.

  But as he set off with Cecile he felt his spirits soaring to a dangerous, an inappropriate degree, the sheer happiness that he remembered feeling sometimes as a young traveller, for no better reason than having the freedom to please himself, and a girl he liked beside him, and the world spread out before him.

  He stood on Wellington Parade and surveyed the three modes of public transport, tram, bus, train, running smoothly side by side. What organisation! There was a civic long-sightedness about it here that intrigued and pleased him. The Melburnians made their way easily amongst each other. These people had a belief in their city, a pride, a history. Melbourne was confident of itself.

  Toni had said that the Melbourne air was filthy, the trams threw up a fine black dust that got into her hair and eyes and skin. This had annoyed him. It seemed to him that it was this fussy search for purity that had kept them out in the cow paddocks under the gum trees. Too easy to blame Toni, he thought now, generous in his freedom. Just for now he wanted to pretend that he belonged here.

  ‘I’m beginning to get the hang of this place,’ he told Cecile, a little breathless as they strode across the park. Though her legs were so much shorter than his, they always walked in step with one another. She set a city pace.

  They passed through velvet theatre curtains into Kafka’s interior, dim and intimate, a stage-set lit by ornate wall lamps, with plush armchairs set around little tables, and polished wooden racks of newspapers and magazines. Old-world Prague. Mid-afternoon, most of the tables were empty.

  They sat down and ordered double espressos. A short, broad man in a zippy black tracksuit and baseball cap stepped through the curtain and peered into the shadows, screwing up his eyes. This could only be Tod. He had the fresh pink look of one who has recently showered, and a shaven head beneath his cap. Mid-thirties, Jacob thought. Baby-faced, but getting jowly.

  ‘Isn’t this place insane?’ Tod said as he shook Jacob’s hand, in a cloud of aftershave. He smelt like the boys in Warton on Saturday night. ‘I love the ambience.’ He pulled up a chair and parked his sports bag underneath it. ‘Had a girlfriend once who used to work here. Have you eaten? The cakes are sensational.’

  Jacob introduced Cecile as Maya’s housemate.

  Tod took Cecile’s hand with a quick keen look at her. His eyes flicked between the two of them for a moment with a half-smile.

  Jaco
b stared at him coldly. He’s a creep, he thought, but all the same he felt a warmth rising up his neck. He’d never considered how much he and Cecile must look like that classic pair, older man and young Asian woman. He glanced at Cecile, mortified for her. As if to celebrate the afternoon’s outing, she was wearing a boxy black hat, like a miniature priest. Her hair was parted severely in the middle and drawn back. Her black high-collared coat was plain as a uniform. Couldn’t Tod see how unique she was? He didn’t think of her as being of any race, but as a sort of angel, far more grown-up than him.

  ‘Ludo!’ Tod hailed the waiter. ‘They know me,’ he explained to Jacob, ‘I come here after the gym. Mind if I eat? They have real food – European. I’m always starving after a workout. I recommend the strudel. No? Not hungry? You won’t join me in a glass of red?’ He turned to the waiter and called out, ‘The usual, Ludo.’

  He turned to Cecile. ‘I’m off on a business trip to Asia next week. Where are you from?’

  ‘Sydney.’

  ‘No, where are you really from?’

  ‘I was born in Kuala Lumpur.’

  The waiter, as pale and gaunt as a tubercular poet, brought Tod a dish of golden cutlets, the slender bones paper-ringed and fan-shaped around the plate. ‘Schnitzel,’ Tod said with satisfaction. ‘Best in town.’ He chomped into the cutlets one after the other, holding the bone in his hand. The meat was pink, like his rosy tongue and mouth.

  ‘No vegetables?’ said Jacob.

  ‘I only eat protein. These are cut by a Viennese butcher.’ Tod went on picking at a bone. ‘What line of work are you in, Jacob?’

  ‘Teaching. English and Communications.’

  ‘Ah ha, a highbrow.’

  ‘Hardly. I’m a teacher at a country district high.’

  ‘English teachers are terribly important,’ Cecile said. ‘I had a teacher once who fed me books. Reading saved my life when I was a kid.’

  ‘I love reading myself,’ Tod said, wiping his hands and picking up a toothpick. ‘Have you read The Alchemist?’ he asked Jacob.

  Being with another person gave Jacob a chance to watch Cecile. Tod threw her into relief. Everything about her was simple, natural, and did not call attention to itself. And yet the more he saw her, the more he understood that she was, in every way, supremely elegant. Her face, when she looked at Tod, was without expression. But her eyes were alive. They saw things in the same way, he believed. As scenes, as an unfolding narrative. Perhaps it came from reading as a child. Was that why they’d always been at ease with one another? Or was that her gift? Maya had sounded happy when she moved into that house. All at once he was flooded with relaxation and warmth. He would have liked to squeeze her hand. He felt close to her, united against Tod.

  On the other hand, after years of watching classroom politics, he would say that Tod probably had this effect on a lot of people.

  He had an instinct to get her away from Tod.

  ‘I wonder what you know about Maynard Flynn?’ The table was cleared, more coffee ordered.

  ‘Ah. Maynard.’ Behind one hand Tod was busy with his teeth. ‘Haven’t seen him for yonks.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘He started off as a client – I’m in insurance – then it turned out he went to the same gym. So we used to talk, yeah, you know, on the treadmill, in the shower.’

  ‘What sort of guy is he?’

  ‘Maynard? Your average small businessman.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Works hard. Always trying to get ahead. Having a bit of a struggle financially.’

  ‘Did he chase after women?’

  ‘Huh!’ Tod took the toothpick out of his mouth and half-laughed, glancing at Cecile. ‘To be honest, we didn’t go that deep, mate. We talked business. Anyway he stopped coming to the club when his wife got really sick. The last time I saw him he told me he needed someone to hold the fort in the office. That’s when I sent him Maya and they took it from there.’

  ‘The office is closed up.’

  ‘I heard that, yeah. His wife passed away.’

  ‘He doesn’t answer his home phone. This number.’ Jacob jotted it down on a serviette. ‘Is this right?’

  ‘No idea, mate.’

  ‘Do you know where he might be?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s been a while. He used to talk about moving back to Asia, Jakarta, maybe, or was it Bangkok.’

  ‘Could Maya be with him? Is he that sort of guy?’

  Tod shrugged. ‘To be honest with you, Maya’s a pretty strong-minded little lady. She does what she wants to.’

  Why did he have to keep on declaring his honesty? You couldn’t doubt that he was fit, but there was something about him that wasn’t healthy. He never stopped acting the man. His voice was too loud, his eyes flickered, watchful. He was angry, he could easily explode. No wonder Maya left his place as soon as possible. Did he resent her for this? Was he capable of spite? What did he really know?

  Jacob decided to order a glass of wine, and another one for Tod. Cecile left for work. As soon as the velvet curtain swung behind her childlike hatted figure, Tod dropped his voice and leaned across the table.

  ‘They’ve got something, haven’t they?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Asian girls.’

  Jacob stared at him.

  ‘To be honest, I did hear that Maynard had a bit of a taste in that direction.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Tod shrugged and shook his head. He drained his glass and hailed the waiter for the bill.

  He couldn’t help himself, Jacob thought, he had to show he’s in the know. Now he regrets it.

  ‘So Tod,’ Jacob said, leaning forward, man to man, ‘if you had to make an educated guess, would you say there’s a pretty good chance Maya is with him?’

  Forbes’s nephew, the man to whom he’d entrusted his daughter. Because of him, he and Toni had let Maya come to Melbourne. Did the bastard set her up? How could he ever make him talk? Jacob repressed an impulse to toss his wine into Tod’s sly, disingenuous face.

  But Tod was already standing up, reaching for his sports bag, rummaging inside it. He slapped an envelope onto the table. ‘Nearly forgot! Here’s a couple of tickets for the Grand Final next week. Turns out I’ll be in Bangkok. On me, for old Forbes’s sake. Just don’t ask me how I got ’em.’ He was backing out through the curtains. ‘No teams from the West this year, but they’re good seats. You can take your missus. Or your girlfriend!’

  ‘Let me know if you hear anything,’ Jacob yelled after him, but the curtains had swung closed.

  It was a relief to be outside again, breathe in the innocent air. Tod was someone you felt you wanted to wipe off you after being with him. There was something disturbing about what he’d said. What was it? It seemed to have a grip on Jacob’s body, clutched his heart, made his legs turn heavy. He suddenly remembered watching Forbes once in the newsagency serve a Chinese family that was passing through the town. After the family left, Forbes pushed the corners of his eyes up and grinned at Jacob. Jacob had shaken his head at him and turned away. He was only friendly with Forbes, he’d told himself, because of the smallness of the town.

  To calm himself now he tried to concentrate on what he was seeing, shutting out everything else. He was walking through a Melbourne twilight, down laneways between the back walls of shops and foundries. Every view was picturesque. He saw a poplar, a church spire, a full moon rising over roofs. An old tree in a yard with its arms lifted, laden with blossom. A solitary nineteenth-century street lamp came suddenly alight. It was bewitching. He felt a pang of pleasurable sadness that he used to feel as a boy, roaming the back lanes around Arlene’s at this hour. Or looking out the flat’s front window at the lights coming on along Fitzgerald Street, dreaming of making his way to great cities. He used to feel he came alive in urban twilights, as if that was his natural territory.

  What had happened to that boy? He belonged here, or in some other city’s streets. What h
ad stopped him following his rightful course?

  Ideology. All his primal energy, his youthful virility had gone into an idealistic movement that had simply petered out, been subsumed by new imperatives, by the world grinding on. The great wave of his times had swept him up and dumped him in a country town, left him stranded, washed-up, a dinosaur. No wonder his kids wanted to get away as soon as possible. This must be how an old commie feels, he thought.

  The counter-culture was the father he never had. Fatherless boys need something to belong to. Hadn’t he offered this advice at countless parent nights? Something to believe in.

  Once in his travelling days when he found himself in Holland, he’d tried to trace his father’s family. He knew from his own birth certificate that Anton de Jong was born in Utrecht in 1927. He set himself up with a pile of coins by the telephone in a sleazy Amsterdam hostel and in the end he found a second cousin, Grete.

  He took a train through the flat, wet landscape to what she called her summer house, a little makeshift hut on an allotment by a canal. Grete was a large-boned, pleasant-faced, intelligent woman in her late sixties, undaunted by this long-lost, long-haired foreign relative. She spoke good English, like so many of the Dutch. Anton was a nice boy, she said, quiet, much younger than her, whom she sometimes saw at family weddings. There was a little sister who died as a child. Anton’s own father, Jacob, her cousin, was a tailor. It was said that Anton did well at school. He would have been a schoolboy in the war years. She lost all contact with his family during the Occupation. His father died. After the war she heard that Anton had joined the merchant navy. She would have said he wasn’t the type but conditions in Holland were terrible then, no jobs, no money. Perhaps, she said with a gracious smile, he was looking for adventure, like you. Later she heard that he had drowned. She never knew that he had an Australian family.

  ‘Do you think he really did drown?’ Jacob asked her. He told her of his speculations when he was a kid, that perhaps his father had jumped ship and swum ashore to South Africa. His mother had, after all, never received a penny of his pension.