The Good Parents (23 page)

Arlene was with a customer.
Guipure lace to soften the neck
, she was saying,
off-the-shoulder Thai silk. Sand-coloured or bone.
She had a broader accent than her son, a low-pitched, relentless voice.

She had glimpsed Arlene before, in brief sorties to the shop with Felice and Sabine, but now she looked at her with new eyes.
Strange to recognise his features in this large, professional
woman, like landmarks overlaid with time and change. Already there was a sense of familiarity about her. Her gray eyes were
his, though very slightly bulbous. Her hair was silvery-gold, back-teased in the style of the sixties, but with Jacob’s widow’s
peak. All the time she was talking she was taking garments off the racks to display to the customer and hanging them up again,
straightening and smoothing with expert twitches of her plump wrists, as if each were a piece of art. She herself was costumed
in traditional saleswoman black, though the ruffled skirt was not flattering.

‘Can I help you with anything?’ Arlene called, once the customer had left.

Toni asked for Jacob’s phone number. She had her excuse ready, but the bell rang again and Arlene scribbled the number down
and handed it to Toni without speaking, hardly looking at her. Toni stayed a few minutes more, browsing politely, listening
to Arlene’s spiel. It wasn’t that Arlene was unfriendly, she thought. She couldn’t tune in to anything that wasn’t to do with
clothes.

She rang Jacob from a public phone box in the early evening before Cy came home. He sounded dozy and friendly, he said he’d
been asleep in front of the telly after a long day’s painting. So the Capellis hadn’t been instructed to sack him. Cy must
have wanted him to stay where he could keep an eye on him.

‘Have you told the Capellis about your commune plans?’ He laughed. ‘The Capellis think all drop-outs are just uni kids.’

‘Have you told anyone else?’

‘Only my ole pal Beech.’

‘Can you trust him to keep his mouth shut?’

‘Well that depends,’ Jacob started to be humorous, but he sensed her urgency. ‘Sure, if I ask him to …’

‘I think you should head off down south right now.’

‘Hey,’ Jacob said gently, ‘that just isn’t possible. Not until I get some cash together.’

‘Then
please
lie low for a few weeks. Watch your back. Go away as soon as possible. And don’t talk about where you’re going.’

He was silent. Did he understand why she was telling him this? No doubt the Capellis had given him the lowdown on Cy. But
how to explain the speed, the thoroughness of his revenge? Jacob might think this was strangely intense after what was, after
all, one casual conversation, but it didn’t matter. Yet she couldn’t quite bring herself to say: keep away from me.

‘I liked talking to you,’ he said.

‘Do you want to talk some more?’ she heard herself asking. Suddenly, as if she’d been planning this all along, she told him
of a lonely little burger joint on the ocean road to the north. She’d noticed it on one of her drives a few months ago and
must have stored it away in her mind, as a place that no one she knew would ever go to.

‘Tuesday, two-thirty,’ she said, amazed at herself. ‘Or the following Tuesday, if I’m not there.’

That’ll test him, she thought as she hung up. She ripped up Arlene’s piece of paper and threw it down a drain. Better to forget
that number. Now to buy those cakes. She was suddenly shaking with fear.

Strange how the traditional shape of a church, the upward reach of its spire, like a lightning rod to God, seemed to
promise comfort. Toni, wandering back into the street, felt herself drawn to the old, black-bricked church opposite Maya’s
office, as if to a place where she might ask for help.

But as soon as she sat down in a back pew she remembered the school chapel. The same smell of wood and mustiness and incense.
The same punitive hush.
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee O Lord, and save us from the perils of the night.
She could almost hear the nun-like chant of adolescent girls. The clap of their skirts as they fell to their knees, like
birds landing.

She went to sit outside in the courtyard on a plastic chair beneath the trees. Maya would have sat here, she was sure of it,
at home each one of the family liked to sit outside alone in the sun with the birds and the wind in the trees. She felt closer
to Maya here than in Cecile’s house.

The sun disappeared and for a moment all went quiet. A chill came over her spirit. All her life, wherever she lived, it seemed
to her that each street, block by block, had a different presence and character that affected her, so that she chose certain
routes according to her mood. Here, in the middle of this city street, in spite of the soaring glass buildings around it,
it was the old black church and its courtyard that presided. There was something uncanny about this little precinct.

What was it that had trapped her daughter?

Fear, she was forgetting fear, the way it made you do things.

Where to now? Not back to another day of waiting to hear from Maya. Not back to Jacob on his couch. What more could she do?
She stood up, tightened her scarf, dug her hands into the pockets of her jacket. Her fingers grasped a card. Suddenly, clear
as a photograph, she remembered Kesang and the kindness of her face. She hadn’t really stopped thinking of her.

The card was deep blue, with a stylised white lotus. Beneath it,
The Mahayana Institute
was written in fine white lettering.
We work to relieve all beings from suffering in all its forms.
On the back was scribbled a mobile phone number.

‘I
s she pretty?’

‘Stylish. Her hair’s sort of red and her skin’s really white and she wears red lipstick every day. She looks like someone
from London. She talks like a Pom.’

‘What are her clothes like?’

‘Black.’

‘Is she nice?’

‘Pretty much. She’s taken Winnie off my hands. And she cooks really amazing meals …’

Maya interrupted him. ‘I gotta go now.’ The line went dead.

Kitty won Winnie’s heart in her usual way, through food. She
bought big meaty bones for her from Warton Meats and slipped her snacks when she was cooking. Within a day Winnie had given
up school, too busy following Kitty everywhere. They went on long walks together, sniffing out the town. Kitty was still trying
to understand how Jacob could have buried himself here for so many years.

Even mid-morning the main street looked uninhabited. The shops were vast barns half-lit by fluoro strips, the sparsely stocked
shelves reminded her of Prague in ninety-one. Plastic streamers flapped in the doors. In the newsagency she ordered
Th
e
Guardian Weekly
and the woman behind the counter put on the glasses which hung from a chain across her bulging tracksuit top and introduced
herself. Rhonda Carpenter.

‘We didn’t know Jacob had a sister! If there’s anything you need, just sing out …’ Her eyes, enlarged behind the glasses,
bored into Kitty.

‘Thank you.’ Kitty heard her voice sounding plummy and English. ‘We seem to be doing quite well.’

Jacob mustn’t have told her about me, Rhonda thought.

She sensed that everyone knew who she was. Trailed by Winnie, all in black, she pursued her research, picking up leaflets
on the town’s history from the Shire office, stalking in and out of Warton Real Estate, Billabong Crafts and Warton Homeware,
run by some funny-looking sect. She hated the ugliness of everything. If she lived here she’d be like one of Chekhov’s angry,
yearning provincial spinsters.

Four-storey truckloads of sheep thundered past. Bells rang, a bar came down across the wide street. All traffic stopped while
an endless wheat train trundled its way towards the distant silver towers of the silos that melded into the whiteness of the
horizon.

It was a tame world Jacob had chosen. There was so much
you didn’t have to deal with here, noise, queues, strangers, crime. Urban life seemed very far away. Yet when he was a boy,
it was cities her brother had wanted, like her, great cities that promised to save them. They were both, after all, half European.

Eighteen years in this town: perhaps you got attached to it, as prisoners do. Perhaps it got so you were afraid to leave.

She explored the oval, the showground, the cemetery, the bleak Shire picnic grounds beside a creek as brown and sluggish as
a drain. The township was a frail grid placed over the landscape. So quickly, after the stage set of the main street, it dissolved
into paddocks and bush. One day, she thought, when all the farms are owned by corporations, Warton will be a ghost town, absorbed
back into the land.

In the Moke with Magnus, testing out her driving skills, she drove to the lake, ten kilometres to the east. They parked at
the top of a hill and looked across a silver-white expanse, edged with dead black stick-like trees. It stretched as far as
the eye could see, like a Russian snowfield. When he was just a little kid, Magnus told her, everyone used to come here to
picnic and swim. Gradually the lake salted up till swimming in it stung your skin. Now beneath the white crust was a thick
mud with a terrible stench. Everything was silent out there, even the birds. She could see rings of salt surf, like petrified
time.

Each morning, she woke Magnus to an
international breakfast
, pancakes or hash browns like the Americans, or English bacon and eggs, French toast or Israeli fruit salad and yoghurt,
even chops and grilled tomatoes like Australians used to have. Lots of coffee, her fresh lipstick smearing the mug as she
read her
Guardian
and left him to eat in silence. Then she whisked him
off to school in the Moke, Winnie grinning in the back. He croaked ‘Bye’, and loped inside just before the bell.

The school was of the model of the school of her childhood, red brick with an iron roof and white-rimmed, twelve-paned windows,
one of hundreds that the government erected in the fifties to cope with the baby boom.

Wonderful trees grew all around, immense gums with pink trunks and thick leaves that caught the morning sun. The kids she’d
taught, shivering in dark ancient courtyards, would think this was paradise. She watched some teenagers in a line throwing
a basketball, healthy-looking boys and girls in high spirits, showing off to one another. No mobile phones. Mist was rising
above a distant playing field where tiny boys playing soccer were dwarfed by giant trees. An Aboriginal mother dropped off
a carload of small kids. A group of girls from another era, wearing long skirts and headscarves over waist-length hair went
through the school gate, the older ones ushering the small ones ahead. It wouldn’t be a hard life, teaching here.

Like an echo of the past, she heard a handbell clang, the scrape of chairs, sing-song greetings breaking out in classrooms.
Then the old-fashioned chortling of magpies in an emptied playground.

The back shed was Jacob’s study, Magnus said. Of course he’d have to have a place for himself, like her, they’d grown up living
secret lives in separate rooms. There was a battered wooden school table beneath the window and a cheap office chair. Except
for an old tape deck, the table was bare. Spidery stacks of boxes took up one wall: he’d never got around to making shelves.
She sat down in his chair. The view was straight across the terrace into the kitchen window. The fridge light came on
and there was Magnus pouring himself a glass of milk. A yellowed teaching timetable was blu-tacked to the wall and a fly-spotted
photo of a little thatched pavilion under a coconut palm. No sign of teaching notes or research, but then how much preparation
would you need, year after year in a country junior high?

Jacob’s room: it was as if the young man she knew had died.

In the drawer of the table were two bound folders, each with a title.
How Much Land Does a Man Need? – A Screenplay adapted from Tolstoy
by Chickie Fitzgerald. And
Glad Rags – A Screenplay
by Chickie Fitzgerald. This one had a received date stamped on it, 29 June 1994. From what she could read, flicking hastily
through the yellowed script, it was a kind of slasher movie set in a country town. By Jacob? No, not Jacob,
Chickie Fitzgerald
.

‘What does he do out there?’ she asked Magnus.

‘Stares out the window. Plays music. Falls asleep. Has a smoke when he thinks we’re not looking.’

‘Sounds like when he was a boy.’

‘No kidding! He’s always telling me to get my act together.’

‘Nobody ever told Jacob to do anything. Maybe you’re lucky.’

Chickie Fitzgerald
. So this was the person she’d been trying to prove herself to all these years. The big brother who was always her superior.
When she was teaching she made herself go to bed early, no matter what the hours of her current lover, to have enough energy
for all she tried to do in the classroom the next day. She counted each lesson a failure if she did not see some light of
interest or ease on every student’s face. She had to take care she slept enough or she became exhausted.

Slowly she’d climbed the ladder from teacher to policy-maker. By this time, nobody even knew she was Australian. She couldn’t
have carried on teaching the way she did, but she came to look back on her teaching years sadly, like an artist appreciating
the vitality of early work. By the end of her time in London, she was just another bureaucrat slowly burning out.

Meanwhile Jacob had disappointments of his own.
Chickie Fitzgerald
.

But he did have beautiful children.

Best of all she liked Maya’s room. She fell into the habit of taking an afternoon nap on Maya’s bed. At that hour the sun
lay in a streak of warmth across the quilt, and the walls were patterned with palm tree shadows. No posters, no trinket boxes,
no childhood teddy bears. A packed-away emptiness that declared life in this room was over. All that she’d left were the photos
on a pinup board above the desk. Every day Kitty studied them. An enlarged, arty shot of the Garcias’ horses in mist, probably
for a school assignment. Maya and Magnus as little snaggle-haired kids, arms wrapped around an ecstatic bulldog pup. A frail
teenage boy in a wheelchair with a drooping head. A snap of Jacob and Toni slumped asleep in sarongs on their bed, slightly
turned away from each other, yet somehow fitting together. Even asleep Toni was photogenic. Arlene and Joe getting married
in those terrible matching white Thai silk suits. And the famous photo, The Sailor on Leave, Anton de Jong reading the paper
on the verandah, ignoring his family. How had Maya got hold of that? There was even a faded Polaroid of Aunt Kitty in the
snow, sent one Christmas years ago.