The Good Parents (28 page)

So much for Daddy’s broken heart, she said as she sat on a bar-stool next to Jacob, but brighter nevertheless. They each ordered
a pie and a beer.

The Federal was empty, apart from the barman, a surprisingly exotic man, slim and tanned with a head as bald and shining as
Yul Brynner’s and a manner so cool and ironic that he didn’t even take a second look at Toni. It was a great brown dusty room,
once grand, now cluttered with pool tables and coin-machines, reeking of cigarettes. They saw their faces in the tarnished
mirror over the bar, small and smudged like newsprint. Did it stick out all over them, they wondered, that they were on the
run? The beer went to their heads and for a moment they felt daring and glamorous like heroes in a movie,
safe because heroes always won through in the end. Even the enigmatic barman, now reading the paper, seemed part of this,
their great adventure.

They had to stop for a train that was crawling across the main road towards the silos with an interminable clanging of bells.
A good scene for an outback thriller, he thought. The barrier lifted and they drove off without a backward glance. There was
no hint or omen that it would be here, in this sleepy town, that their real future lay. (By that time the bald barman had
gone, leaving no trace in the town’s memory.)

As soon as they left Warton the land grew flatter, the sky larger. On one side was a low silver lake, its shoreline lapping
around the ankles of dead trees. A road sign announced:
You are now entering the Great Southern
.

‘The Great Southern what?’ Jacob asked. Toni didn’t answer and he saw she was asleep.

For a while he was alone with nothing for company but the sad pop-pop of insects hitting the windscreen and the disturbing
little rattles and missed breaths of the car. The horizon rose up out of the flatness. They passed through a grove of trees
he’d never seen before, the slender white trunks splashed with orange as if stained by gravel dust, their branches tapering
into broccoli clusters of waving, gleaming leaves.

He became aware of a shadow lurking in the corner of his eye, a tracery in smoke-coloured pencil along the right-hand horizon,
that as the miles passed, like a theme in music, grew ever more present, until there it was in full symphonic impact, a range
of mountains towering above the plains. He slowed down to study the humps and turrets of its outline, sharp as a paper cut-out
against the sky.

‘The Stirlings,’ Toni said, awake.

‘I didn’t know.’ He meant he had no idea about the landscape of his own country. He’d trekked mountains in Nepal, crossed
deserts in Afghanistan, jungles in Sri Lanka, but he’d never been past the hills around his home town. There’d been no bush
holidays in his childhood, no picnics, no relatives on farms. Rural Australia never entered his consciousness. He wondered
what the Aboriginals called this range.

And now it was as if they’d entered another zone, an airy land of space and sky, with silver lakes and long-grassed roadsides
and plains in great clean sweeps shadowed by clouds as big as airships. Sheep were grazing right up to the foot of the mountains
and a trembling line of birds hovered over the vast horizon, stretching and shrinking like the tail of a kite.

Something lifted in his spirits. It felt so far away. There was no other car on the road. The few houses they saw were small
and lonely, fibro bungalows with a shed and water tank. One sat with its back turned, its tiny verandah facing the mountains.
What would it be like growing up here, he thought, in this magical, Tolkienesque land?

There was a flock of parrots on the road ahead. Toni reached over to sound the horn and just in time they rose in a green
cloud. But a wedgetail eagle, busy with something brown and fluffy on the tarmac, stared them down with eyes so vengeful that
Jacob wound his window up and took a wide berth around it. The sun was sinking. Light speared under the clouds, and the roadside
scrub glowed emerald.

‘We’ve got to be on the lookout now.’

‘Why?’

‘Kangaroos.’ She was an old hand compared to him.

They took a turnoff onto a gravel road. The VW began a valiant course of bumping and bucking. If it can just make it to the
house, he prayed, in dread of having to expose his total lack
of mechanical competence to this unknown woman. There were no houses anymore, no help if they broke down. Just acres of shining
bush as far as the eye could see, the land as once it would have been. The mountains loomed huge, in the shape of a resting
lion. They raced through bush-covered cuttings, ripe for ambush.

And then the road rose up, there was a lightness on the horizon, a flash of white desert hills far in the distance, the dunes
of the coast. It was dusk now, the sky was a deep religious blue. They stopped to pee, leaving the doors open, the engine
running for fear it wouldn’t start again. He stood at the front of the car, Toni crouched at the back. He remembered hippie
girls on his travels squatting in the dust beside him, hitching up their long skirts.

In the last light they bumped up a white track to the beach house. It stood remote, a dark shape on a headland overlooking
unseen water. They stepped out into the great hollow murmur of the sea. A fumbling of matches in the wind, Toni crouched under
the water tank, emerging triumphant. The spare key was still there on a stump, as it had been all those years ago.

Nature had found protection in this empty house from the storms of winter. Like a warning to keep out, a spider web fell onto
Toni’s face as soon as she opened the door, so that she stood gasping and swiping at sticky threads in her hair. Inside was
pitch black, with the stale reek of mice. They shuffled in, feeling their way. They hadn’t thought to bring a torch, and now
as they stood in the kitchen, they realised they’d neglected the matter of food. The deep chill in the place seemed to be
lying in wait for them. They struck matches and found candles on the kitchen bench. The light flickered over armchairs covered
in sheets, drawn curtains, a Tilley lamp on a table, a
kerosene fridge with its door ajar. They felt a primitive need for fire, to keep the devils out. There was a basket of kindling
and newspapers beside the potbelly stove. They achieved a small blaze for half an hour. There was a woodpile at the back of
the house, Toni said, but – her voice trailed – snakes could be hibernating there.

The house creaked in the wind, windows rattled, creatures scrabbled in the roof-beams. A bleak loneliness took them over so
that they couldn’t speak. What else did fate have up its sleeve for them? They knew too little of each other to offer comfort.
They took a swig each from an old bottle of sherry and ate some stale digestive biscuits sealed in a tin in the mouse-riddled
cupboards.

Beneath the green chenille cover of the Richardsons’ bed, mice had made a nest in the hollow of the mattress. Toni screamed,
Jacob quickly pulled the cover up again over the frenzy of scattered kapok. There remained the bunk-beds in the loft, left
over from the young Richardsons’ childhood. Zipped up to the chin in Jacob’s sleeping bags, on separate narrow berths, they
blew out the candle and hastened to fall asleep.

The town was ten kilometres away, along a gravel track that wound around the escarpment, past the bluffs and bays, the heave
and sparkle of the Southern Ocean, the miles of white beaches where nobody went. It was no more than a handful of buildings
scattered around an inlet, some modest houses, a fishermen’s co-op, a general store with petrol pump. A caravan park overlooked
the ocean, empty until summer. Surely Cy Fisher’s long arm didn’t extend this far. They bought what provisions were available,
eggs and bacon, Weetbix, milk, chocolate, tins of baked beans. The newspapers were five days old. They fell on the chocolate
as soon as they sat in the car.

The ocean was the dominating presence, the reason for everything here. From the first morning when he pulled back the living
room curtains to the shock of it, the great turquoise bay spreading out below him, he was conscious of it, its moods and colours
changing hour by hour. Across the water was a long headland that led out to the open sea. Beyond was the Antarctic. They used
Doug Richardson’s binoculars to see the headland’s yellow cliffs lashed by cruel waves.

The Richardsons had built the house themselves out of concrete blocks. Outside it looked rough, rustic, amateur: inside it
had all the trimmings of genteel housekeeping, old floral armchairs, crocheted runners, vases of everlastings, little machine-woven
rugs strewn over the floors. Everything spoke of the old couple’s rigour and industriousness. Polite instructions were written
on a kitchen pad in an upright spidery script.
Note to Visitors! Firewood at back of house. Please replenish!
Biscuit tins with pictures of Highland dancers were labelled
First Aid
and
Sewing Kit
.

The bookshelves were a time warp, bestsellers from past generations,
A Town Like Alice
,
East of Eden
,
The Grapes of Wrath
, a whole series of cowboy tales in paper covers.

Nothing at all had changed, Toni said. She went from object to object with cries of recognition, as if she were still twelve
years old.

On the bookshelves was a snap of the Richardsons, Doug and Rosemary in overalls, huge and craggy-faced as the Whitlams, standing
over the foundations of this house brandishing their trowels. Good Christian people, Toni said, pillars of their church, with
a grown-up family who’d all done well in life. When she was a kid she was rather frightened of them. But a few years ago Rosemary
came walking towards her on St George’s Terrace and, unlike others from her mother’s circle,
didn’t purse her lips, or toss her head and look away, but greeted Toni warmly and asked her how she was and seemed genuinely
pleased when Toni said that she was well. The Richardsons had always stood apart. They weren’t interested in social life,
but were loners who did everything together. They loved driving off to this bay at the bottom of the world.

One summer Beryl must have confided in Rosemary that they couldn’t afford a holiday. Beryl would have been in one of her states.
She must have trusted Rosemary a great deal to speak like this, without fear of losing face. Rosemary offered them the house.

Here, Toni explained, for a short time, the first and only time she could remember, her family was happy. Nig sat smoking
and drinking beer, reading cowboy stories one after the other. He teased his women all the time about sharks and mice and
snakes. Beryl didn’t wear lipstick or set her hair, but slapped around in rubber thongs, bare-legged, showing her veins. At
night they played Cheat in the light of the lamp, yelling and laughing and throwing down cards. They ate grapes on the verandah
and spat their pips out into the bush. Something had melted between them all. Even Karen told her a disgusting joke from the
upper bunk, and they lay chortling on their lumpy mattresses. They fell asleep listening to the sound of the waves. She had
never felt so safe.

On the drive back, Beryl snapped at Nig and then, miles further on, apologised. Nig went silent. They all froze up again.

She often dreamt about this place, Toni said. She lost her reserve when she spoke of it, became warm and intense. He wanted
to touch her.

They passed a third night separate in their sleeping bags, even
though he’d poured them each a large glass of the Richardsons’ sherry and suggested a game of Cheat, when he hated card games.
He lay awake for ten minutes in a drunken rage. The wind whistled around the house and the sea pounded discouragingly.

The issue was palpable between them. It was a stalemate, a standoff. Their voices creaked in their throats, they could no
longer talk naturally to one another. They were no closer than they had been eating pies in one of her roadhouses. If anything,
they were growing further apart. What did he really know about her? She was so silent. What was he to her, some sort of sexless
knight errant? Had he outgrown his use now?

Don’t think I will automatically sleep with you
, her silence seemed to say.

What makes you think I want to
? he silently answered. Like all beautiful women, however disingenuous, at heart, he detected, she was vain.

They went for walks alone and came back hours later, their faces freshened and hopeful from the air. All day they went in
and out, separately. Outside, stepping off the verandah, all was wild, ramshackle, vivid in the light. The dizzying play of
sun and wind was like childhood.

Everything seemed to be in a perpetual state of motion. All along the limestone track to the bay pods snapped, crows called,
the wind rustled in the peppermint trees. The sun glinted on the shot-silk surface of the sea as it shifted in invisible currents.
The sky came right down into the bush, filled in all the gaps, and rose up, a wall of royal blue above the line of the olive
green escarpment.

Clouds passed overhead as he stood on the beach, their shadows racing towards him, dimming everything for a
moment and then releasing him into light. The sand squeaked under his feet, so white he was snowblind. Only he seemed to be
in stasis.

Sometimes he struck off along weedy tracks where nobody went. Myriad birds chattered amongst the trees, like the occupants
of a thousand miniature tenements. If he could turn the sound up he would be deafened. He sat on a fallen log. Dense bush
crowded in on him. He felt watched by creatures he would never see.

He was a stranger here, a stranger to nature, and yet it seemed to accept him. He tried to listen to the voice of the wind
as it ran across the trees, each gust a variation of a theme. What did it say? Something he could never decipher.

That evening the little niggle of rage started up again as he stalked home along the track. He was going to speak. He was
going to have it out with her. One more night and they would drift past each other forever. All they had between them was
a dream.