The Good Teacher

by Richard Anderson

  When she stepped out of the car and surveyed all the things she had worked so hard to create and nurture, her house, her garden, and the land, she experienced the strange liberating sensation of: nothing. The things that had mattered so much to her now meant nothing.

  In the car, in the flush of lust, love and imminent cataclysm, Jennifer had an idea. Abi Dunlop. She knew that Andy had been messaging with Abi for months. Andy wasn’t skilled on the computer and she had come across their conversations more than once. They were reasonably infantile and she was pleased to know her husband had feelings he wanted to express and happy there was someone else to deal with them. It was the sort of secret she put away to use as a weapon at a later date, even if, compared to what she had done with Brock, their cute online conversations would be as much a weapon as a soft foam baton. But now the foam baton hardened in her brain as a bludgeon of opportunity.

  When she was home and certain that Andy was not on his way in, she called up his messaging. He never deleted the conversations, which she took to mean that he treasured them.

  But the last entry said: I’m so sorry but I just can’t do this anymore.

  She sat back open-mouthed, her whole strategy gone. Andy had got in first. She checked back through his recent history and saw Andy’s hypothetical about partners A and B. It brought out a strange sense of betrayal: he had been consulting Abi in his approach to his wife. It was bad enough that he was having these secret, half-sexy conversations with another woman, but to ask her how he should conduct his marriage was a breach of faith.

  The conversation had been going perfectly well, getting more intimate, when the ‘I just can’t do this anymore’ line appeared. There was no lead-up to it. And it didn’t really sound like Andy. Had someone else tagged into their conversation? If so, it could only be Madison. It was unnerving to think her daughter had been there before her and alarming to realise she had some bridges to mend for her plan to work.

  She opened her tablet, created a new account using Andy’s full name and then messaged Abi.

  Hi. Sorry about those last comments. They weren’t from me, they were from Madison. She was cranky at me. You know how it is. All good now. Sorry to hear about your break-up. Very depressing. I hope you’re coping OK. At the risk of being insensitive I think it’s important to remember that when one door closes, almost always, another opens.

  I’ve opened a new account so we can talk. You can get me here.

  Next she deleted all their messages from the office computer, and Abi’s address. It was important that she controlled the conversation for a little while.

  And then, resolute from the re-establishment of control, she went to the bathroom, took a pregnancy test from a zipped section of her toiletry bag and sat down on the toilet. Her hands were shaking but some of her old certainty was back. If she was pregnant she would deal with it. She put the tester in position, urinated on it, then put it on top of the bathroom cabinet. She washed her hands, wiped the sink, gave the soap dish a quick clean, then straightened towels, took them down, shook them out and put them back up; took them down, shook them out and put them back up. She picked the tester up again, and held her eyes closed for several seconds, knowing this moment was a life-changer. When she went through that white door again she would walk through as a different woman.

  She opened her eyes and struggled to believe the result. The tester was blue. She wasn’t pregnant. She was not carrying a child—anyone’s child. She leaned to the vanity, pulled a drawer open and extracted a second tester. This time she performed the task as thoroughly as her body would permit. She held it up and shook it, then shook it again. Clear. She was in the clear. Perhaps that meant she didn’t have to go with Brock. The status quo could remain. But, sitting on the toilet, her pants still down, Jennifer dismissed the thought. Whatever she did now had to include Brock. She still wanted him.

  The first new message to come through from Abi was: ‘I’ve missed you.’

  Jennifer slammed a hand down on the table and began to yell out ‘How dare you?’ until she realised this was exactly what she had wanted. She sat back and calmed herself. It was a bit forward though, wasn’t it? The relationship had only just been resurrected and Abi was already cutting to the chase. She struggled to get out: ‘Me too.’

  After that, she courted Abi for ten days online, asking about her life and her break-up, talking about the farm so she would sound like Andy and slipping in references to how he had missed their conversations and how important they were to him. Then:

  I’m feeling very close to you. I was wondering if you wanted to come and stay for a couple of days? We could spend a bit of real time together. Talk soon.

  She knew she should have waited. It would be safer to ask after a couple of months of to and fro. But Jennifer couldn’t wait that long. It was a matter of taking a punt. If it didn’t work out she would think of something else.

  ABI

  Abi was taking a train in the way a schoolgirl might: buying a ticket and boarding on a whim, not a care in the world. A six-hour trip ahead of her. She had received Andy’s invitation and as foolish as it was, and as risky, she had bloody well accepted it. It was all above board: simply an offer from an old friend to come and stay. She had even called to ask Jennifer if it was all right. Jennifer was cool, which was a blessing as it would allow Abi the space to see what she felt about Andy and, just as importantly, what he felt about her. Perhaps it was as innocent and insignificant as face value suggested. Maybe Andy had told Jennifer about their online friendship and Jennifer wanted to show (as Abi would) that she was not threatened by it, that she understood what had happened and she and Andy were as strong as ever. And perhaps not. What was she walking into? Where were partner A and partner B at exactly? Had Andy orchestrated the invitation for the same reasons she had accepted it? To see if the attraction was more than the notes-passed-in-class game they’d been playing?

  Abi had not been on this train line since she was a schoolgirl going to parties in the country. The train was nothing like she remembered. It was now light and bright with even some colour in the upholstery—nothing like the ‘Mail’ train she had gone on to parties with her friends, cigarettes in her bag alongside bottles of truly awful but easily procurable alcohol. Dubonnet, she remembered, and could not think why it was chosen except that it could be chosen. Summer Wine made its way in there too. Youth was a pleasure best enjoyed in retrospect.

  She’d been to Andy’s a couple of times back then, too. He was already married, and so not a prospect, but she saw him looking at her sometimes in ways that weren’t brotherly.

  Would he look at her in that way now? She liked to think he would. It concerned her that when he tapped a message to her on the computer, he was visualising a young, slim, shapely version of herself. She was different now, fuller, less girl but more woman. If he wanted a twenty-something ‘slip of a thing’, there was no contest, but she was confident he wasn’t that man. Whether the physical chemistry worked or failed was crucial to what she might risk next. And there was every chance that she would risk nothing, allowing their relationship to wither or return to the platonic support it had always been.

  Abi had been far more intimate with her thoughts and feelings with Andy than she had ever been with Tim. He wouldn’t have listened anyway. Especially not in the last few years. He had drifted away from her into his world of golf and golf people and the relentlessness of his work and finally to the woman in HR. It was a very slow process, years in the making, but she had let him go. Not consciously or deliberately, but more out of a kind of laziness. Going to the trouble of engaging Tim, of hearing about his golf and the quirky stories of his fellow workers, increasingly felt like too much trouble. He obviously felt the same way about her enjoyment of poetry and politics and, embarrassingly, cat videos. Couples were supposed to go on holidays, minus the kids, to beautiful tropical isles and get to know each other again. Somehow, she and Tim had mutually, wordlessly agreed that they knew each other en
ough. You had to work at marriage, everyone always said it, but it was plain they didn’t feel up to that sort of toil.

  Which made it sound like it was a laid-back, amicable parting of two old friends and that wasn’t true. It had been as nasty as anyone else’s break-up. Her hatred for him had been more passionate than anything she had expressed for decades.

  How frightening to think that sometimes love just walked out on you. Simply left your house. You could do what you liked about it: pretend it was still there; accept its absence; tell yourself you never expected it to last forever; fill the space with nice things or holidays or sex; but nothing replaced it. You either loved or you didn’t. The most ruthless emotion.

  An hour out of the city, she realised she felt it incumbent upon herself to track down a new source with whatever leads she had been given. Abi wasn’t going to be that lone woman who only had her children to love. Outside, green paddocks and uninterested cows flicked past and she was surprised again at how quickly the city was left behind.

  Right now leaving it behind suited her down to the ground.

  A bearded man, reeking of a young man’s deodorant, took the seat next to her. He smiled at her in an offhand way and said: ‘Hey.’ She estimated him to be in the middle years, with all the greying, spreading and sagging that suggested. He took a second look. Perhaps she should have been flattered, but how many options for a second look did a man like that get? Very few, you’d have to guess.

  She still had the weapon of cleavage, in hiding for some years, but it wouldn’t be any help to her. Décolletage would not go down terribly well in the Booth household. Not this trip anyway.

  Her memory had Jennifer as a stiff-backed woman, pretty and athletic. Formidable too, even as a young woman. Abi had put that down to the fact that Jennifer already had a child and was well immersed in that next stage of life which involved so much responsibility and sleeplessness, a stage that was very foreign to Abi at the time. She had seen Jennifer only a couple of times in the intervening years and she didn’t appear to have softened but was always nice (niceish). She had been very pleasant on the phone. Almost too pleasant for Abi’s liking. So it was a little nerve-racking now to think of entering Jennifer’s house as a kind of double agent, possibly undermining her marriage. But Abi shook the fear off. A marriage couldn’t be challenged if there weren’t significant cracks in the foundation already.

  She flipped through a gossip magazine and noted how little had changed in the years since she’d last bought a copy. What people wanted never changed. They might like to see the form alter a little, the way things were dressed up, but the content was always the same. As far as Abi could tell, The Bachelor was simply Days of Our Lives or The Young and the Restless rewritten with supposedly real people.

  She wondered who would meet her at the train station.

  ANDY

  Out of nowhere at morning tea, casual as you like, Jennifer had said: ‘Abi Dunlop is coming to stay. Did I tell you?’

  Andy almost swallowed his tongue pretending the mention of Abi meant nothing to him and knowing full well that Jennifer had made no previous mention of her. ‘Abi Dunlop? Wow. How come? Is she passing through?’

  ‘Apparently. She rang out of the blue and I couldn’t really say no, could I?’

  ‘Haven’t seen her for decades. Nice girl, she was.’

  ‘Yes, well, she’s no girl anymore, I imagine. I’m not sure I’ll recognise her when I pick her up off the train today.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Uh-huh. I’m sure I told you.’ She took a sip of tea, looked across at him and said: ‘I did tell you. Yesterday afternoon, at lunch.’

  ‘You didn’t. I’d remember.’

  ‘Why would you remember? I always have to tell you that sort of stuff twice.’

  ‘Someone coming to stay, uninvited, who we haven’t seen for years? That’s not normal daily info. How long’s she staying?’ Andy was suddenly wondering what Abi had told Jennifer. Had she disclosed that they had been communicating for months? What if she had and he was here pretending he didn’t know the first thing about her? Guilt descended immediately. He would keep his mouth shut.

  ‘I guess a couple of days. She said she was just passing through, stopping off here and there to visit old friends.’ Jennifer was giving the impression that the visit was a minor inconvenience, even an annoyance, but the sort of thing you had to accept from old friends. ‘Not sure why you’re so concerned. I don’t even know what we’re going to do with her. I don’t imagine she wants to be cleaning and gardening with me. Maybe she can help you?’

  Andy tried not to let his face show the joy he was feeling at the idea. ‘I’m not “so concerned”, but I could take her round the place, entertain her, work something out if it helped.’

  ‘I’m sure you could. You always held a little flame for her, didn’t you?’ There was a certain controlled glee in the way she asked it that Andy couldn’t decipher.

  ‘Abi? Nah. I’d already made my choice by the time she was around.’

  He gave her a fond smile, sick at his own deviousness. Why didn’t he just tell her that they’d been talking? If there was nothing wrong about it, then keeping their conversations secret was making them dirty and illicit. He was proving his own lie. But he couldn’t make the words come out. He was stuck with his creeping, growing deception.

  He grabbed his hat, thanked Jennifer for the tea and went outside. He was glad of the spring air, even if it was desert-dry. Now he had to deal with the contending emotions of pleasure at Abi’s arrival and the self-loathing at his duplicity.

  He would have to let Abi know their conversations had been a secret. He hoped she would understand. If she didn’t because she felt there should be no secrets in a marriage or because she couldn’t stand to be underhanded, then he was in trouble.

  But then maybe it wouldn’t be trouble. It was not as if Jennifer could take up calling the kettle black. And the elation he was feeling at the near presence of Abi was something he hadn’t experienced for as long as he could remember. It was the sort of sensation that a married man avoided or quelled at first blush. The vision of Jennifer in flagrante with Brock had shifted that, even though he hadn’t realised it. That shift was allowing him to draft rationalisations in his head for his own divergence that he would have previously considered treacherous and perverse. Why shouldn’t he follow this feeling that might exist for Abi? Jennifer had well and truly chased down her desires and was no worse off because of it. Perhaps it would become clear that Abi was just a friend. Maybe Jennifer would like her too and they could all spend time together. He could only muse on that by deliberately ignoring the fantasies he’d had about rogering Abi in the office on those many nights when she had been a binary presence in the room. Dishonesty, even with himself, was becoming a habit.

  JENNIFER

  On the way into Fresh Well, to the train, while Jennifer was gloating over Andy’s response to her covert needling, her phone rang. She didn’t recognise the number.

  ‘Mrs Booth? Detective Johnson here. How are you?’

  Jennifer’s heart moved sideways in her chest at the recognition of his name. ‘Well thank you. And you?’

  ‘I’m good. Would you have a minute to talk? Thank you. I’m under a lot of pressure from my superiors to reopen the investigation into the burning of the school. One of them has a wife or a sister in the Department of Ed who’s got all upset about it.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Jennifer didn’t want to do anything for Detective Johnson, ever, and the thought of the case being reopened made the blood flush hot under her skin.

  ‘I was hoping we could get together for a chat, unofficial, I guess, with the ex-principal, Mr Kelly.’

  ‘I think you’ll find he’s the principal once again.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t know that.’ There was silence on the line. ‘I guess that makes it easier for us to get together then.’

  ‘Unofficially, you said?’

  ‘Yes. There
’s just a few things I’d like to clear up.’ He paused and she could hear his habitual laboured breathing. ‘With you and the ex-, the, ah, current principal.’

  Jennifer wasn’t sure what was going on but knew she couldn’t avoid or outflank the detective for any length of time. ‘I’d be happy to get together for a chat, Detective. Tell me when would suit and where.’ Efficient and agreeable seemed the best approach—bureaucrats always liked that.

  ‘Maybe we could meet at the school since Mr Kelly has returned.’ She could hear him pushing at buttons. ‘Sunday? Would that be possible?’

  Jennifer looked out the window as the farms got smaller and the houses closer together. It was Friday afternoon. Who knew what would have changed by Sunday. Jennifer needed Abi to be gone for the decisions and announcements she had to make, but she guessed it would take a full weekend for Abi and Andy to hoist themselves on their own petard. ‘I can’t make the weekend at such short notice, I’m sorry. It’s a very busy time for us. Of course, if you’re telling me as a police officer that I have to be there, that’s a different story.’

  ‘No, no I’m not. I’m asking for a friendly get-together, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, then, Monday would work.’

  ‘Monday? 10 am at the school?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I’ll confirm after I’ve checked with the principal.’

  Jennifer put her phone down. If he wanted to pin the fire on her she would confess to everything if she had to, but only as Brock’s partner. The detective would be confronted by two people united, not divided as before. There would be no more point in his investigations.

  She pulled into the empty parking area for the train station. On the platform there was one other couple waiting and Jennifer was relieved to see they had suitcases, which meant they were catching the train, not picking someone up, and that made her less afraid she might not recognise Abi. That many years could do drastic things to a woman’s appearance. Immediately she thought of Brock and sucked her stomach in. The train blew its horn coming into town, and she stood straight and practised smiling. The train of five carriages stopped and let four people off: two older women, bent over and sideways-looking, an enormous tattooed young man in even bigger t-shirt and jeans, and a pretty, cushiony, smiling blonde-haired woman who wouldn’t have yet passed for forty. As she stepped down, the woman waved a small, relieved wave at Jennifer and Jennifer waved one back at her. The woman had a little case that might have been heavy. She put it down, readied herself, then picked it back up and walked towards Jennifer.