The Good Teacher

by Richard Anderson

  ‘If Ian’s that boyfriend he’d better get running.’ Andy slammed a hand on the suffering steering wheel.

  ‘You’re not going to confront him?’

  ‘Bloody oath, I am.’

  ‘We should talk to Madison first.’

  ‘You talk to Madison. I’m going to talk to Ian.’

  BROCK

  Every day of the holidays was interminable. In between dreading the result of the investigation he played golf with some of the fathers but couldn’t put his heart into it; he went to the pub a couple of times but came home sober in more ways than one; he watched a lot of TV that he didn’t like and perversely took up smoking. And why not? What was the worst thing that could happen? He’d get kicked out of the school? He’d get lung cancer? He’d already admitted to the chubby policeman that he was a man who had an occasional smoke (even though he’d only just become that man). He thought it best to come clean early if he was going to come clean about something he didn’t do.

  Some of the parents remarked on his new habit, but he just shrugged and didn’t bother to proffer an explanation. His number one pastime became drinking beer and smoking cigarettes while watching 1980s cop shows. Jennifer hadn’t come near him and hadn’t sent a message or phoned him and certainly hadn’t lived up to her ‘another day’ promise. He gave up hoping.

  Sometimes, when he heard a car pull up outside and saw through the curtain one of the mothers arriving, he would hide under the bed. They would knock and ‘Yoo-hoo’ for a while and then depart, leaving a baking dish full of casserole or pie on the front step. He was on a downward spiral and he knew it, but he really didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. He just wanted to be left alone until the department gave him notice.

  One morning, in a hiccup of inspiration, he took to the washing up, cleared the stubbies and emptied the ashtrays, half-made his bed, fully flushed the toilet, put a load of clothes in the washing machine and went into Fresh Well and bought a new car. There had been so many ads on the TV and in the newspaper he almost felt obliged. The salesman was delighted to see a new face in town and, after spending some time persuading him to buy something he was already convinced by, gave him a terrific deal. Or so he said. Brock traded in his father’s beige Corolla for nothing much, without a moment’s sentimentality, for a shiny new four-wheel-drive. The salesman said it was a ‘soft roader’ or something like that but Brock struggled to maintain interest, his spasm of motivation all flexed out. He just liked the idea of owning the sort of car that meant you didn’t have to plan your trips around a possible breakdown. It was plush and fast and the music sounded great turned up full bore. But after a couple of laps of Stony Creek he had nowhere to go so he left it in the driveway for the birds to crap on and returned to the embrace of his couch.

  Magically, one afternoon, a note from Jennifer appeared under his door. He must have dozed off because there had been no sound of a car or footsteps or a rattle at the entrance. The note suggested a rendezvous in Fresh Well in two days time, and asked that the note be destroyed after reading. Brock was too deep in his funk to believe it. He figured it was a trick to get him to drive all the way into town and when she wasn’t there she’d blame him for getting the time or place wrong and still be able to say she tried. And even if it was for real, were they honestly going to get together in the back of his car? Were they going to take a room in that empty motel where everyone knew who came and went? He screwed up the note and threw it in the bin.

  Then, on the Sunday afternoon at the end of the second week of holidays, in the middle of a Rockford Files marathon, when Brock was sunk in his couch in a chip-and-dinner-daubed tracksuit, Jennifer arrived, pushing through the door and slamming it behind her. He hadn’t heard her car so he guessed she must have parked at the school and walked across.

  ‘Come on, up and in the shower. I’m not doing it when you look and smell like that.’

  As he slowly got to his feet, she opened a window (careful not to be seen), picked up bachelor detritus and wrinkled her nose. She put her head in the bedroom. ‘Got any clean sheets?’

  ‘In the hallway cupboard.’

  ‘Right. You clean up and I’ll make the bed.’

  It wasn’t quite how he imagined their reunion. In fact, he wondered if she was going to have sex with him or get him ready for surgery. Though that was taking the nurse fantasy a step too far.

  By the time he got out of the shower she was sitting up in bed, covered only in a sheet, waiting for him. It occurred to him that now would be a cracking time to call Angela Crown and invite her in or bolt off down the road with Jennifer’s clothes. He took off his towel and slipped in alongside her.

  They had fresh, clean sex in the bed. She seemed to enjoy herself a great deal, struggling to stifle noise, but Brock felt like he couldn’t quite make everything work. He was distracted by the desire to make every moment count because this was his big pay-off and the last time it would happen and probably the last good thing that would come his way. When it was over they lay on their backs, smoking, as if they were expecting to be shot in black-and-white.

  ‘Thank you, Brock,’ she said between lazy puffs, ‘for everything.’ She rubbed his shoulder with her free hand. ‘You’ve no idea what I stand to lose if—’ she paused as if unsure how specific to be, ‘—it ever got out.

  Brock opened his mouth to say something like ‘I stand to lose a fair bit too, you know’, but she gazumped him.

  ‘And the sex has been fantastic. Honestly.’ She’d sealed the deal.

  He smiled at her and she smiled back and then she was getting out of bed, covering her bottom with a sheet and heading for the bathroom.

  He lay, still smoking, listening to her dress, feeling the dull flatness of having been slightly cheated. If that was the payment for him taking the rap for something that might end his career, it wasn’t a very big payment. And somewhere in the back of his head an idea that he hadn’t dared hold up to the light had begun to glow: These kids needed him and this was his calling. It was true. This was his calling.

  ‘I want to do it again.’

  He heard her stop what she was doing for just a breath and then continue. ‘Do what again?’

  ‘This.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘No. Until I go.’

  ‘Sorry, Brock. That’s impossible. I could only get here today without anyone noticing because the women are all at the Open Gardens and the men are planting.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  She put her head round the corner and, smiling sweetly at him, said: ‘You understand, don’t you? I mean, I would if I could. I’d love to. It’s just impossible.’ She made the last bit sound playful.

  Brock stubbed his cigarette out and realised he was in another one of those buttock moments: either reach out and grab something you wanted or shrink back apologising.

  ‘I understand but I want to do it again …’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry but we can’t.’ Her voice was firm from the bathroom.

  ‘… and considering what I’m sacrificing.’

  ‘I’m going to have to insist.’

  She strode past the bedroom door shouldering her handbag. ‘Goodbye Brock.’ He heard the door pull shut.

  As he stretched out in the clean sheets, Brock found himself smiling. He’d never done anything quite like this before, never intended to take advantage of the situation. It was conniving and not particularly moral, but what did he have to lose? He either got to have more sex with Jennifer or maybe he got to keep his job. Emily would have called that ‘win-win’.

  ANDY

  What kind of bloke—a mate of sorts—did this sort of thing? Ian was a bit of a prick, self-serving, with the type of arrogance that was best suited to running your own business, but was he this much of a prick? To take advantage of a mate’s daughter? Even if Madison had been the keen one, which was possible, surely he’d have the backbone to say no? And if it wasn’t true where did a rumour like this come from? Had
Ian made some joke about getting it on with the babysitter while his wife was out of the house?

  Andy drove in the Howards’ front gate and down past the house and garden. The garden didn’t look like the garden of a wife who was away. It was clipped and mowed and mulched. The rest of the farm was neat but the garden looked like it was expecting visitors. Perhaps Jenny had got it wrong and Sarah wasn’t even away. What would he say then?

  In the background he could see the long straight furrows of a paddock clean of weeds and ready to be sown with canola or wheat.

  There was a ute at the sheds and he headed towards it. Ian was lying underneath the front of a header, adjusting some part of it. As Andy parked, Ian crawled out from underneath and stood up.

  ‘G’day Ian.’ Andy saw something in his face, the briefest look. Shame?

  ‘Andy. How ya going?’

  ‘I’m all right. You?’

  ‘Pretty good. Just fixing the knives on this thing—again.’

  They both nodded at the header. Then Andy looked at Ian, hard.

  ‘I’ve heard some things I don’t like, rumours.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Ian gave nothing away.

  ‘So I thought I’d better come and see you about them.’

  ‘Oh yeah. What sort of rumours?’ Ian breathed out heavily as if he was bored when he plainly wasn’t.

  ‘I’ve been told that Sarah’s gone on a holiday.’

  ‘Yep. Went to her sister’s for the school holidays.’ Unease had arrived in his manner.

  ‘I’m told the reason she left was that you’ve been playing up.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business, Andy.’

  Up until that point, Andy had been calm, checking his facts, but an aggressive note in Ian’s voice stirred his blood.

  ‘It’s my business because I’ve been told the “playing up” was with my daughter.’

  He could feel himself shaking.

  Ian was stony. He began to say: ‘Well, you heard wrong …’ and then stopped. His face lost its structure and he was silent. He kicked at the ground. ‘I stuffed up. I didn’t mean to. It just got out of control.’

  He was still offering explanations when Andy stepped up to him and hit him hard in the jaw. Ian went down without defending himself, as if relieved to be hit.

  Andy looked at him on the ground and said: ‘Never again. You hear me?’

  Ian held his face and nodded.

  Andy got in his ute.

  His blood was hot and his hands thumping. He couldn’t tell what made him more angry: the way people would talk about Madison, the way Ian had behaved, the way Madison had behaved, or the way it would make him and Jennifer look. It was all too much, and not enough of it was released by one punch. Still, there was a rush that went with that punch and the sore fist, there was no denying that. He felt powerful and alive.

  He drove too fast up the gravel road, drifting dangerously as he hit the turn to go out the gates. It didn’t matter. He was a man with righteous rage, afraid of nothing.

  MADISON

  How on earth did they find these things out? Hadn’t there only been three of them in the room? The nearest neighbours were two kilometres away. The phones were turned off. Ian wouldn’t have told anyone and Sarah had disappeared to the city. But two and a half weeks after Sarah had walked in on her, Madison’s parents knew everything. Facebook was a clunky old tin-cans-and-string communication system compared to the links in this small community.

  She could only guess that Sarah must have told a friend who’d let it slip to one of the local loudmouths. They’d be muttering about ‘the Booth girl’ all over again.

  But it didn’t really seem like something Sarah would do. She wasn’t a drama queen or a gossip or one of those women who enjoyed bringing another down. Madison guessed Sarah had to give her friends some explanation for the sudden departure and maybe in all the emotion the name slipped out.

  But someone had spilled, because her father, with her mother behind him, was now across the kitchen table from her. He was red-faced and furious, banging his fist on the table and ranting about behaviour and small communities and the way you treated people and, of course, morality. It wasn’t good, but she just had to take the rap. Her parents seemed to know all the facts and she wasn’t going to cry rape or anything, even though for a split second she could see in their eyes that they were prepared to give her that opportunity. She didn’t have any explanations or excuses; all she could do was keep a solemn face, nod occasionally and concentrate on the lines in her father’s face or the small cracks in the surface of the table.

  They loved this high moral ground routine, loved to stand on their pedestal of perfection babbling on about the right path. They obviously had never done anything wrong. Congratulations, Andrew and Jennifer. Top of the class.

  Inevitably, although she was eighteen, she was grounded forever, internet use restricted to schoolwork, phone confiscated except for half an hour each evening, in front of them.

  Afterwards her mother followed her to her room and proceeded to tell her how disappointed she was, how they had brought her up with a good moral code, how embarrassing it was for her father, and what would happen if everyone just slept with whoever they wanted and yadda yadda yadda. Was that a tear welling in her eye? It then led into a discussion about whether Madison was regularly having sex and why hadn’t she talked to Jennifer about it and was she using protection, and so on. Who on earth did her mother think she was having regular sex with? It was amazing how her mother could find a word like ‘regular’ to make it sound like such a mundane bodily function, in the category of keeping ‘regular’.

  It wasn’t that she was hiding the sex stuff from her mother; it was just that she knew her mother would want to be involved, probably in the room with her, near the bed, checking whether everything was in order, clean and tidy, and whether the male was doing a sufficiently efficient job. And there was all that emotional preparedness and physical readiness stuff to be waded through when all she’d really wanted to do was get it out of the way.

  ‘Froggy’ McKinnon had been chosen for the job because he was nice-looking and apparently experienced without being a deadshit about it all. His parents owned the particularly dreary motel on the main road and so they’d used a room one afternoon when no one was about. It was okay. Everything went to plan and her virginity was dispatched on a towel on a brown flowery bedspread with a print of ‘Stony Creek Town Hall 1960’ looking on. They’d had instant coffee from foil sachets in cups afterwards. Of course he couldn’t believe his luck and was keen for more. She wasn’t, so they did it once more on a Saturday and that was that. When she surveyed the local talent, Ian seemed like the next best candidate.

  Eventually her mother left the room, and Madison was proud that she’d outlasted the barrage without giving in to the temptation to call them stupid and old and ignorant. Self-control was a brand new habit, too.

  She lay on her bed and thought about Ian on top of her and wondered if her mother had been ‘sexually active’ at an early age? It seemed unlikely. Had her mother ever been ‘sexually active’. Again it seemed unlikely. Not that she wanted to think about it, but it would be nice to imagine that her mother had once been something other than the efficient, effective household and community organiser she was now.

  She could get a phone at the post office. There were cheap ones there although no one would call her because they wouldn’t have her number. There were still a few days of holidays to go and only having her parents to talk to was a horror story in light of the day.

  She could always talk to her grandfather. She could ride Zumba over to visit him and gradually get the horse back into some sort of fitness. They wouldn’t stop her doing that because she could say it was for the portrait and in a way it was. Maybe one more examination of that face would help her solve the puzzle of the eyes.

  She probably couldn’t tell Mack she’d slept with Ian, that was too much of a stretch, which was a pity because s
he’d been able to discuss everything else with him. She’d told him how she’d hated school and how she thought her mother was a bitch and how genuinely boring everything was and he listened. That was the amazing thing: he actually listened. He didn’t tell her she should like school or she shouldn’t say nasty things about her mother. He just listened.

  When she had been expelled from boarding school last year, and told him why, he actually laughed. The idea that she would climb into the dining room and steal the housemistress’s wine seemed to him to be a remarkable piece of good humour. That good-natured laugh was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her. Which was silly because she’d fully intended to get expelled, had expected punishment and the wrath of her parents and had no intention of apologising or feeling sorry for herself. Still, it was nice to be loved. It was only a school after all, even if a very expensive one. Of course it was a mistake and she told him that too. She had thought that at home she would have more freedom and more fun and fewer beady-eyed teachers watching her every move. But the high school was just the same as the boarding school, her parents were stricter than anyone, and there was nothing to do, not even boys.

  Why Mack didn’t live in the house with them she couldn’t fathom. He was hardly trouble, didn’t smell or anything, was very thankful and just plain nice to be around. But when her parents talked about him they rolled their eyes as if he was a terrible burden and an awful individual. When questioned, her mother said he lived alone by choice because he wanted his space and independence, and Mack gave the same reasons. But he never looked like he was enjoying his space overly much. He looked lonely. And not just that; in his little house near the road, he looked discarded by everyone except Leo.

  SARAH

  The car packed and the kids strapped in, Sarah hugged Nikki tightly and thanked her again. The fantasies about living in the city were all dried up now. The children needed to be near their genital-controlled father, Damien needed to be at school and Sarah needed to face up to real life. No doubt people would have heard, somehow, about what had happened. She would have to face them all, their muttered criticism and their sympathy. And she’d have to face Jennifer and Madison too. And then there was the matter of Jennifer and Brock. How she handled that would depend on how they were handling themselves and ‘handling themselves’ was a very uncomfortable way of thinking about it. She asked Nikki to send her best to Joel, who was out training for a triathlon somewhere, and she did partly mean it. Joel had stayed well clear for most of her stay and when he was around he was non-complaining and quiet enough to be non-judgmental. It was probably as close as he got to kindness.