The Good Parents (10 page)

The sigh of the pneumatic brakes of the buses at the lights on Fitzgerald Street punctured his long solitary hours, and more
sporadically, the two notes of the bell above the door of Arlene’s as the customers came and went. Ding-dong! Snatches of
high voices and his mother’s clipped professional footsteps. The distant ping! of the till. He’d never been such a witness
to his mother’s life before. Every morning, in lipstick, high heels, and an outfit that she might have just run up for herself
the night before, Arlene went downstairs and didn’t come up again until she closed the shop at six.

She took no interest in anything outside the business. Nature, the weather, the passage of time, were only seen in terms of
suitable clothes. She was never happier than crawling round the hem of a client with a mouthful of pins. Best of all were
those clients who ‘gave her her head’, an expression which caused Beech to smirk when he heard it. She looked
forward to the day when she didn’t have to do alterations anymore, just work on her own creations. Her greatest triumph was
to be out somewhere with Joe and have a woman say to her in the ladies’,
I hope you don’t mind me asking, but where’d you get that dress?

The only reading she had time for was
The Sunday Times
over breakfast at Joe’s. Whoever he and Kitty had inherited their bookishness from, it wasn’t Arlene.

Once, after reading the death scene of Prince Andrey,
the simple and solemn mystery of death
, where the two women who loved him wept from
the emotion and awe that filled their souls
, he looked up from the book and surveyed the bare walls around him. Wouldn’t a widow want to keep something to remind her
of her kids’ father, a letter, a watch, a wedding portrait on the mantelpiece? Just as he couldn’t remember anything about
his father, he couldn’t remember sensing any grief about his death.

There
was
a photograph somewhere. He’d seen it once, years ago, unless it was a dream. He went into her bedroom and rummaged through
the old letters and certificates and his and Kitty’s class photos and reports in Arlene’s bedside drawer. He found it, a black
and white Kodak snap of his parents and himself as a tiny boy on a verandah. He took it back to the living room, propped it
up on the mantelpiece and studied it.

You could call it
The Sailor on Leave
. Arlene’s brother Bob took it, he was also a sailor, he’d introduced Arlene to Anton de Jong. It was taken at the little
wooden house in the coastal town in NSW where Bob and Arlene had grown up. Arlene stayed living there after their parents
died.

Anton was in uniform, perhaps he was about to set off again. A classic sailor suit, with wide pants and a kerchief cross-tied
on his chest. He was seated in a wicker chair, one foot in its huge blunt-nosed shiny shoe resting on the other knee. His
head was lowered, in shadow, he was reading the newspaper that lay across his bent leg. A streak of light caught his temples,
his receding hairline, his narrow-bridged nose.

Arlene, seated at the other end of the verandah with her back turned to her husband, was preoccupied, adjusting the straps
of sturdy little Jacob’s romper suit, which no doubt she had made herself. Her bare arms were tanned and slim and her short
blonde hair was curled. He couldn’t remember having a young, fresh mother. Her legs were crossed, one white high-heeled shoe
peeping out from beneath the folds of her floral print dress. She would have got herself all dressed up for his visits. She
might have been pregnant with Kitty. Was this Anton’s last leave?

Anton was reported missing, presumed drowned, soon after his ship left Durban. There was no pension, because there was no
witness to his accident and no body was ever found. Arlene, with new-born baby Kitty, had to take in sewing.

‘What if he signed on and then swam back to shore?’ Jacob once asked her. ‘Do you believe he really drowned?’

‘Of course he did! They just wanted to get out of paying me any money.’ Arlene was not one for regrets or second thoughts
or talk about the past.

She was vague about what happened next. There were problems with the man next door. He got a fix on me, she said, it gave
me the creeps. He certainly got no encouragement. Late one night Bob drove Arlene and her kids and her Singer sewing machine
to Sydney and put them on the train to Western Australia. He paid for the tickets. They left everything behind them, clothes,
furniture, a dinner setting. Bob sold the house with all its contents. She had to disappear without a trace, Arlene said.
There was nothing else you could do with a man like that.

If Jacob walked in the streets of South Africa and passed his father, he wouldn’t recognise him. From that photo, all you
could say that Anton had passed on to his kids were large feet, a love of reading and their names. At their school a Dutch
name was just one of all the other non-Anglo names, Greek, Jewish, Italian, Yugoslav, Chinese. Most were not mainstream Australian.
He was Jake de Jong until the Rolf Harris song, when he became Jake the Peg. After that he called himself Jacob.

But the others all had fathers. The nature of his father’s disappearance was something he kept to himself.

You could almost see a line of tension between the sole of Anton’s propped–up shoe and Arlene’s floral back in the photograph.
Had they had a fight? Did they realise they had nothing to talk about? Anton was reading the way you read when you want to
forget about what is around you. If time was so short, why wasn’t he playing with his little boy?

He was in the shade and Arlene was in the light. If you had to guess, you’d say she’d be the survivor. Did Anton choose death,
or did he escape to another life? Was his character
weak
?

How exhausting procrastination was! He was pale and sluggish with dark rings under his eyes. He had no spirit for his old
trick when he had the place to himself, of putting on the Four Tops and miming ‘I’ll Be There’ with a fist microphone in front
of the long mirror. He had no desire to arrange the curtains ready for his evening pleasures. All that was behind him now,
a pervert’s habit that had probably set him off on the road to mental ruin.

If he wasn’t reading Tolstoy he fell asleep. On his rare excursions into the outside world, sneaking down the fire escape
to the newsagent’s for a packet of Columbines or a
Mad
Magazine
, he was shocked by the harshness of the light, the dust blowing down Fitzgerald Street, the banality of this desert town.
He kept his head down to avoid people’s eyes. He was nearly knocked over by Rosser, the science dux from school, pounding
along in running shorts. ‘I’m pacing myself,’ Rosser panted. ‘Four hours at the desk and then I run a mile.’ Jacob rushed
home, longing for snow, dronskies, lanterns, long rustling dresses.

It was too late for him now. All he could do was open Tolstoy, the last act of a dying man. Its effect was instantaneous,
like plunging into a golden broth. Don’t end, don’t ever stop … He rang Beech to curse him for lending him the book. Beech
sounded slow and distant, as if engrossed in work. Bastard! (Later it turned out that Beech had been back to the Capelli brothers,
and was experimenting on his own in the rectory shed.)

‘
Father! Father!
’ says Prince Andrey’s young son Nikolinka in the last line of the story. ‘
Yes, I will do something that even
he
would be content with
…’

But by that time, as Jacob closed the book, it was as if he were at the end of his youth, with all its happy expectations
of success.

He had two days left before the Leaving started. He was washed out, devastated, purified. Almost curious now about his impending
disaster, he reached for his history notes and began to memorise some dates.

His life wasn’t ruined, he scraped through, though like a slap on the wrist, with only a provisional pass in English, his
best subject. Without a Commonwealth Scholarship he would have to be bonded to teachers’ college and study at university part-time.
Beech, another star pupil, did even worse, but a
parishioner of his father’s helped him get a job on
The West
as a cadet journalist. Beech was called up – or as he said, ‘my marble was pulled’ – but failed the medical. Flat feet was
the official reason, but Beech said it was because he’d told them he was looking forward to writing real-life accounts of
a soldier’s life in Vietnam.

Jacob was never called up. Together they plunged into the heady days of the oncoming decade. But the Tolstoy factor would
remain with Jacob as a distrust of himself, a suspicion that whenever there was something he should do, something vital, he
would occupy himself with something else.

Of course he found her. As she came to know him she realised that he would have sent one of the boys to find out who she was
and where she lived and what her movements were. But as with most things that happened around Cy Fisher, she only saw the
results, not how he achieved them. Her little trick with her address was never mentioned. Incidents in which someone got the
better of Cy were rare and only meant that, sooner or later, without a word, he’d prove how futile such attempts were.

After the Leaving, she took a Christmas job at Boans, selling gloves and handbags. One day she looked up from the counter
and there he was. It was a shock to see him again in daylight, his black eyes and fish-belly white face, his solidity and
assurance. She felt her heart beating. Her first thought was that she hadn’t really got away after all.

‘How are you?’ he said, with a businesslike nod, and straight away asked to look at a leather shoulder bag, the classiest,
the most stylish, the one she yearned for. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said,
handing it back. She was surprised to see her hands shaking a little as she wrapped it. ‘
Merci
,’ he said, as he gave her a cheque, and at last he smiled. He put the bag under his arm, nodded at her and walked away.

The name
Cy Fisher
was almost childishly clear in the big black writing on the cheque. Who was the bag for? she wondered.

He came back two days later, his usual span for the softening-up process. By then she’d had time to think about him. In fact,
in the same way that he’d loomed over the counter, he now loomed in her mind. She felt haunted by him from the moment she
woke in the morning, as if those black eyes had watched her while she slept.
Cy Fisher
,
Cy Fisher
, she muttered at the mirror, like a question to herself.

This time her heart lurched violently as soon as she caught sight of him, as just before closing time he threaded his way
through the Christmas crowd towards her. He stood out from everybody else, in his loose black suit, with his long, groomed
hair and the villainous five o’clock shadow darkening his cheeks. Hardly the answer to a mother’s prayer, or a schoolgirl’s
dream for that matter. But then she wasn’t a schoolgirl anymore. He asked her to have a drink with him after work and she
accepted.

Everything that happened around Cy Fisher was swift and simple. The Citroën was parked in a loading zone at the back of Boans.
He always parked wherever was closest to his mission. If a ticket found its way onto his windscreen, he crumpled it up and
threw it on the ground.

He took her to The Riviera, a nightclub in the old part of the city on the other side of the railway line, where girls from
her suburb never went. This is where migrants came when they first arrived in Perth, wave upon wave of them, setting up in
the little dark terrace houses and shops until they could afford to move out to a quarter-acre block in the suburbs and become
proper Australians. It was too early for The Riviera to be open for business but Cy knocked and was let in. He ushered her
inside and as they entered he put one hand on her shoulder. To protect her or claim possession?

It was a large bare room, naked-looking as a church hall at this time of the day. From small windows near the ceiling the
summer twilight fell in beams across the swept wooden floor. There was a bar near the door and a table of men playing cards.
As soon as the barman saw Cy Fisher he put down two glasses and a bottle. Cy pulled out a bar-stool for Toni before strolling
to the table and shaking hands with each of the men. The barman filled the glasses with colourless liquid from the bottle,
grappa, he told Toni, the very best. He was a small, quick man with sympathetic brown eyes and a professional manner. Cy sat
down, clinked his glass against Toni’s and downed it in one gulp. Toni took a sip. She felt she was being watched but when
she glanced over her shoulder, the men at the table were studying their cards. They were darkly well-groomed, of all ages,
in suits or laundered shirt sleeves. I could be in Europe, she thought. She took another sip. Cy and the barman, Pino, discussed
soccer scores. As soon as she had drained her glass, Cy stood up. He ushered her to the door and the card-players raised their
hands. She felt their eyes on her back.

In all their time together she never once saw him pick up a bill.

His timing was impeccable. He drove her to the bus stop on the avenue close to where she lived – he seemed to know that it
wouldn’t be a good idea for her to be seen alighting from a stranger’s car in her own street – and she arrived home
only a few minutes later than usual. Everything went as if to a plan.

He started to pick her up every day after work. He took her all over the city, to little restaurants where no English was
spoken, or dark bars up stairways or jazz clubs in basements. She had no idea that such places existed in Perth. Mostly these
establishments had not yet opened for the night, which gave a cosy family atmosphere to their visits. He knew all the owners
and everybody seemed glad to see him. Doors opened before them, a table was always waiting, a bottle appeared, vodka or grappa
or some other sort of ethnic brandy. The smoothness of their path, the warmth of their reception, made her feel languorous
and secure. This is what grown-up life is like, she thought. There was an aura of authority around him, and within it she
felt safe. Nothing was going to happen to you once you stepped into his orbit. It was clear he was some kind of leader, though
she had no idea what he was a leader of, exactly. Arriving somewhere with him was like entering a ball with the captain of
the rowing squad.