The Good Parents

by Joan London

  Then Cy Fisher came along and interrupted her and her life as a woman began. How long had she been waiting for that to be over?

  She lived with silence now.

  Was all this breathing in and breathing out just another way to be good? A sort of insurance policy? Above all else be good. What you’ve been taught in childhood always comes back. After Cy Fisher she’d craved purity. She’d scrubbed and ordered, saved water, recycled, visited the sick. Not just to be good, to be seen to be good.

  What if Maya decided not to see them again? What was it she thought they could never understand?

  Out of the worry and self-doubt since Maya’s defection, something new was emerging. She saw more, Toni thought, now she was outside her life. Now that she was not so pleased with herself. Gradually this was becoming her compensation.

  Did she really need bells and gongs and robes? What she wanted was an even more extreme modesty, an anonymity, a lightness on the face of the earth. She wanted to apply herself to this, give it her whole life.

  A small, a very small place. Trees, bush, but not too far from the plains. She’d grown used to the wide vista over the years. A verandah where she could sleep. To be closer to the drama of weather, the stars, the pure cold air.

  You could eat the air. You could live on air. The sounds – a single bird call across the valley, then another by the track. So clear in the silence it made you attend. You became more present. Getting closer to what? To that which she sought.

  You become addicted to noise, radio, TV, telephone. It was threatening to be alone. She was just at the beginning.

  She thought of the lone ones who sometimes came into town. Old shearers, or jobbers who lived out on a back block. Miriam Kershaw, walking the streets, was called the town witch. Solitude was not much approved of in Warton. It was related to madness.

  To live apart. Even as a child, at the Richardsons’ beach house, she had thought this was a better way to live. For her that possibility – when Magnus left – was far more thrilling than a trip to Paris, say, or Istanbul, or the world which she had never seen.

  She wondered if Jacob, always faithful to her wishes, would grant her this.

  No news from either of the children.

  ‘I’ve seen Tod Carpenter.’ Jacob sounded cheerful, even breezy. ‘No leads. But he’s given us a couple of tickets to the Grand Final next Saturday.’

  ‘I leave the retreat that morning. Ask someone else. Ask Cecile.’

  ‘I want you to come,’ Jacob lied. To take Cecile to a Grand Final, to see this great Australian ritual through her eyes, was his idea of heaven, but Cecile worked every day of the week.

  ‘It might be a bit much … it’s not really my …’ But her voice failed. She knew this was a dream of his.

  ‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance. These tickets are gold.’ He produced his trump card. ‘Magnus would never forgive you.’ Though he wasn’t sure – who could ever be sure about anything with that boy? – that Magnus would care at all.

  They agreed that he would mail her ticket to her, and they would meet at the seats.

  ‘Do you good. Bring you back to reality.’ He made the smack of a kiss before he hung up, sounding false and debonair. He was possibly a little stoned. She supposed he’d fallen in love with Cecile.

  She was crossing the courtyard when she came across the young nuns in a sunny corner, shaving each other’s heads. They were chattering and laughing as one sat in a chair with a towel around her shoulders and the other sheared her downy skull with battery-powered clippers. Toni enjoyed standing there in the sun with them. Suddenly she asked if they would cut her hair.

  ‘How much off?’ they asked when Toni had sat down and put the towel over her shoulders. They pulled back Toni’s heavy mane into their hands. Others gathered around.

  ‘Like you,’ said Toni.

  17

  The Mimosa

  ‘What’s the time where you are? It’s really late here.’ It didn’t sound as if she was speaking out in the street this time. He could hear her yawning. Moonlight splashed across the cold kitchen floor. He took the phone back to bed with him. For some reason he felt it was warm where she was.

  ‘Why are you up so late?’ She never gave any information.

  ‘Talking with Kitty. Playing music for her. That’s all we do these days.’

  ‘Are Kitty and Carlos still going strong?’

  ‘Yeah. They think it’s a secret though …I’ve just remembered something. I saw Jason the other day.’

  ‘Jason Kay? Is he still around?’

  ‘I saw him outside the Lucky. We talked.’

  They were silent for a while.

  ‘Myz? Are you still there?’

  ‘That fuckin’ weak wimp Jason.’ She broke into Warton High lingo when she was upset. ‘When’s he gonna get his shit together and leave that fuckin’ town?’

  ‘Also Ma sends her love. She said to let me know if you need money or anything.’

  ‘You told them I called you?’

  ‘They were gonna get the cops.’

  Silence. This time he didn’t try to break it.

  ‘Are they still in Melbourne?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Weren’t they going to Tasmania?’

  ‘I guess they’re waiting for you.’

  He couldn’t hear her in the silence but he sensed she had started to cry.

  She’d been dreaming. She was walking up a hill towards some sort of celebration, loud music and bonfires. It was night-time, the path was lit by burning torches stuck into the earth, the flames streaming in the wind. He was ahead of her, holding his little son Andrew’s hand. Then she saw he was also carrying a tiny girl, with flying strands of thin dark hair, who suddenly jumped down and ran to cling to her, Maya, walking behind them. She picked the child up and started carrying her. The dream was dark and urgent, black and red.

  She woke into thick darkness and for a little while she didn’t know where she was. Then she became aware of the familiar rattle of the air-con, and saw the faint glimmer from a street light around the edges of the sealed frosted-glass window. He had gone out earlier in the evening, and she must have fallen asleep.

  It wasn’t till she turned on the light that she saw he’d forgotten to take his phone with him. It was lying on the table on his side of the bed.

  The only person she wanted to speak to was Magnus. The only one she could bear. Because he wouldn’t be shocked or worried, and he wouldn’t ask questions. He knew she did what she did because she had to. Kids growing up together got to know each other in a deep, realistic way. He was the one she told the truth to, because with him there was no need to lie.

  Sometimes the desire to speak to him was so strong that she’d take the phone from Maynard’s jacket when he was asleep or in the shower and go out onto the street to phone him.

  It was the straightness of his voice, the pureness of his tone, without probing or put-downs, that made her want to cry. As if a clean breeze had blown into the sealed air of this room. She looked at the clock. 3.34 am. That meant 1.34 over there. It was pretty cheeky of her to call so late, yet he’d shown no shock. She lay back on her pillow and thought of him at this moment, across the continent, falling asleep in his room off the kitchen, the moonlight flickering over the long hump of his body, and the wallful of looping wires and dials that was beginning to define him.

  His room was the centre of the house. All the purest channels of the family ran towards him.

  What would happen to him if there was something that he really wanted? Would he change? Would he compromise? Would his heart get broken if he was betrayed?

  In the way that she and Magnus were different, she and Jason Kay were the same. She’d sensed this from the moment she first saw him but hadn’t liked to admit it. Every morning when she saw his face on the school bus she had the feeling she was looking at herself.

  She sat next to him the first time because it was the only empty seat left. He radiated differen
ce, like a halo around him. Sitting next to a Brethren was like sitting next to someone who didn’t exist. You never talked. They weren’t supposed to talk to worldlies. She hated school and didn’t want to talk to anyone. It was restful, with him, a little island amongst all the action around them. They both looked out the window – flat paddocks, scrub, the big water pipe – and left each other alone. She sat next to him on the way back.

  They started to talk. He was doing maths and economics, tech drawing and accountancy. He wasn’t allowed to do sport or English Lit, history, biology or religious studies. He couldn’t socialise or buy food. He went to the library every lunchtime, the first Brethren kid here who had gone to senior high school. She began to notice how beautiful he was, in his own way. Brown eyes, shining brown-blond hair, white teeth, eyebrows as delicate as fishbones. Long fingers, long torso, with a way of wearing his school clothes that made him look as if he were going to an office.

  How was it they discovered they had both seen the UFO, back when they were ten? Jason had never told anybody. His stepfather Grant would beat him for telling lies, he said. When his mother Valda married Grant, they moved into the community in Warton. She picked out Valda amongst the Brethren women, meek-looking like all of them, but prettier, fine and pale like Jason, with long blonde hair under her headscarf.

  Even her parents told her she must have been dreaming. They told her it was better not to talk about it. No one else reported seeing it. Something made her mention it to Jason on the bus. It turned out that on the same night, at the same time, they were both woken by a bright light coming through their windows. They each described it – long, glowing, cigar-shaped, hanging in the northern sky – nodding excitedly at one another. It was silent, yet alive, like an animal. After this, how could they not be bound together? They were a club of two. They felt they’d been in some way chosen.

  They started to meet during the holidays, on the afternoons when Jason’s mother helped out at Warton Homeware. Sometimes he came to her place. They met in the cemetery along the Perth road if they wanted to be alone. Jason walked from his side of town and she walked from hers. They had to take care nobody saw them. This made them a little tense. It was exciting. They walked around the graves reading out the epitaphs. They lay down in the shade and talked about school and everyone they knew and how sick of Warton they were and what they would do when they left. He’d like to work in a music shop in a big city, he said. She had it all worked out for him. Every week he had to put away a little money until he had a bus fare to Perth. Once there he could stay with Arlene and Joe, get a job and save his fare to Melbourne and join her. Surely the Brothers would never find him in a gated retirement village in an outer suburb? Jason raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  By mid-year they were kissing. She thought she was in love. She had to fall in love with someone and he was the only one who came near being possible. When the chance finally came, with both sets of parents out of town, even Jason said it felt God-sent.

  She didn’t think of Jason as male but as a fellow being. When they lay side by side under her doona, naked, his smoothness against hers, it hadn’t felt sexy, but natural. She thought of animals in dark burrows, insects beneath leaves, earthworms rubbing together.

  ‘Try! Try!’ she said sternly as she held him. He’d sneaked out of the Brethren enclave under cover of darkness. First she made him smoke a joint that she’d got from Josh Garcia and drink a glass of Carlos’s beer. Then came the ultimate test. Something about him made her want to rip her clothes off and confront him.

  ‘I can’t.’ A clamminess had broken out over his skin.

  ‘Why not?’ They were whispering so Magnus wouldn’t hear them.

  ‘It’s a sin.’

  ‘What sin?’

  ‘Lust and fornication. If you sin you have to stand out the front of the meeting hall and be judged by the Brothers. I’d be withdrawn from.’

  ‘But you don’t think it’s a sin.’

  ‘It’s in the Bible. The bottomless pit. The lake of fire.’

  ‘The Bible was written by old men like the Brothers. Anyway, they can’t see you.’

  ‘God can.’ He was shivering all over his body.

  ‘Your God’s like a surveillance camera.’

  ‘This is the Devil’s country.’ He was groaning.

  ‘You have to give that stuff up.’

  ‘I can’t! I can’t!’ He was rocking back and forwards, on the edge of her bed, his fists in his eyes. ‘It’s like a virus. It’s like AIDS, once you get it, it’s always with you.’

  It was a pretend world they’d made, she’d turned him into her pretend lover. Now she saw he didn’t really want her. He was crying. He sickened her a little, filled her with sadness.

  Then her parents walked in. She went under the doona and stayed there while her mother sat down on the bed and put her arm around him. ‘It’s OK, Jason, it really is, just put some clothes on and go home. Nobody need ever know.’ They lectured her through the doona after he was gone. She didn’t know what she was up against, etc, how she could harm him, cause irreparable psychological damage.

  When she came to Melbourne, she’d wanted a lover. A real man. To prove herself.

  Jason was pulled out of school and started working in the furniture factory. It was as if he’d moved to another town.

  One evening just before she left, when she’d been working late in the newsagency, she went to the dunny out the back and stepped into the lane to look at the moon. And there was Jason, standing further up the lane behind Homeware. Quietly they approached each other and stood talking in the shadows for five minutes. She told him her plans for Melbourne and he listened, looking down and shuffling, a little smile on his face. She carefully didn’t ask him any questions, except one, just as they parted.

  ‘Why did you come out into the lane just then?’

  ‘I wanted to look at the moon.’

  At ten, he’d come back to the room with a pizza which they’d eaten sitting on the bed watching TV. He drank a couple of cans of Fourex beer and was almost asleep when there was a call on his mobile and he’d gone into the bathroom to talk, sliding the door closed. Then he said he had to go out. Maybe this time I’ll come too, she said from the bed. To test him. And because of the long night ahead.

  He frowned. ‘I have to meet some people. You’re not dressed.’

  She was wearing the short denim skirt she’d left Melbourne in, her legs bare for the heat. He must know there wasn’t anything else.

  ‘Get some sleep,’ he said, deftly slipping a handful of coins into the fruit bowl. She knew this was for her breakfast in the morning. He wouldn’t be back tonight. Any hint of complaint on her part turned him to ice, to acid. All her problems, he’d tell her, were in her own head. What’s happened to the old, spunky Maya? he’d say, if he was in a good mood. Nothing was too hard for that girl! He liked her sparky, ‘cute’ like she used to be in the office. What he called ‘this droopiness of yours’ annoyed him. As if she was still a paid employee and falling down on the job.

  They stayed in a different hotel at first when they came here, a modern, LA type of place where the rooms all opened onto a central pool. Mr T was on a higher floor. After Mr T went to Bangkok, they moved to the Mimosa, to this room. It was so small that they had to turn sideways to walk past the bed. The bathroom was a closet. The shower wet the toilet. The frosted-glass windows were sealed shut.

  ‘Why did you bring me here?’ she asked, sitting on the bed.

  ‘Just until a deal comes through,’ he said. He looked around the room and pulled a face. ‘Then we’ll upgrade.’

  ‘But why did you bring me to Brisbane?’

  ‘I thought it might be fun.’ He turned away coldly to hang a shirt up in the narrow cupboard. It was empty apart from her sheepskin jacket.

  ‘This isn’t fun.’ Her heart was thumping. She had to fight her fear of him these days, fear of his temper.

  ‘Well, all right, because you were so
upset! And I’m fond of you, I can’t help being fond of you for some reason.’

  He moved quickly, snatching up his keys and slinging his jacket over his shoulder, unable to bear even the threat of a scene. ‘You know you can leave whenever you want to,’ he said, as he stood by the door.

  ‘I can’t afford to buy a ticket.’ She’d spent the last fifty dollars on her Visa card on underclothes and a T-shirt and a pair of Indian sandals so she didn’t have to wear her boots. She couldn’t bring herself to mention pay because what would he be paying her for? Two words she was unable to say to him were money and love, just as she was no longer able to smile at him or call him by name.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Oh for God’s sake, I’m sure we can scrounge you up a fare!’ But he didn’t bring the matter up again and neither did she.

  After that he started the habit of emptying the coins out of his pockets into the plastic fruit bowl on top of the bar-fridge if he was going out somewhere. Sometimes he was gone for a whole night and the next day. She had no choice but to use the money to buy coffee or food. It was another of the things they didn’t speak about.

  Fond of you for some reason. She let that warm her for a while. How little she made do with these days! She sensed it wasn’t a lie. He rarely spoke of his real feelings except in irritation. Trying to shave in the bathroom, he swore under his breath. He knocked her nose-stud – that damned thing – down the drain. She heard the finicky clipping of his nails. He had to bend down to spike up the tufts on top of his head in the mirror. She knew he hated losing his hair. Sometimes the traces he left, beard flecks, nail clippings, swirling hairs, made her feel strange. His snores woke her when he came back here to sleep. Would she feel like this with a boy of her own age?

  She lay on the bed and turned the TV up loud to block out his sounds and give him privacy.

  What had happened to the high room, the lonely tower? To that girl walking towards her lover through the city streets at dawn? She was a different person then, going to a different lover.