The Good Parents (33 page)

Slowly they came back into the world. They forgot that they had ever thought they were different. After all, their children
were natives here. Over time they were accepted. They were helped in this by Toni’s appearance. Babies, dogs, shop owners
were always drawn to her gleam and fragrance, the symmetry of her features. Men kept an eye on her. Women were suspicious
of her, but everybody enjoyed looking at her. There was the story of the truck that veered into the kerb, smashing a verandah
post, one hot afternoon when Toni pushed her pram down Cannon Street in a pair of small denim shorts. But she was modest and
helpful, a devoted mother, and never flirtatious. In the end the town was proud of her. A world-class beauty, they said.

Jacob was well-liked by many of the students, and being with Toni, he suspected, gave him extra clout.

Soon after they came to Warton Toni discovered she was pregnant and after that there was no question that they would stay
together. She must have been pregnant when her mother died, when she went to the city. Sometimes she wondered if unconsciously
she’d known, and that was why she phoned Cy Fisher from Boans. To make a home for a child.

And so they had another shared project, one that called on their innermost resources, which they could not desert, or afford
to fail. Everything served that purpose, and in its relentlessness they were grateful to discover each other’s constancy and
diligence and were satisfied with the simple joys of their
life. For many years they were busy, their arms full, their hands occupied. Jacob at last learnt how to work. Apart from his
sporadic little trips to Perth, he stuck around. His kids were going to know what it was to have a father.

Toni never asked him to do anything he didn’t want to, as if deep down she felt she owed him. She gave him space, the greatest
gift, which she herself required. They never married because to divorce Cy Fisher would not be keeping out of sight. Anyway,
as they told their kids, they didn’t believe relationships needed official sanction. After a while they forgot about lying
low. Toni never spoke of her former life. The years with Cy Fisher were like a silent movie. She couldn’t remember the words.

They ended up with a house, a dog, a TV and video, a four-wheel drive. They grumbled about bills and teachers’ pay. Like the
farmers around them, they had good and bad seasons. They went to funerals and weddings and quiz nights, just like everybody
else. The values they’d aspired to, sharing, hospitality, community, turned out to be country values, not radical at all.

Jacob sent three instalments of money to Prem, and then he let it slide. With a baby there were new expenses. A dilapidated
cottage opposite the drive-in had come up for sale. He was sure that by now he’d reimbursed Prem for their share in the meagre
meals and the occasional jerry can of petrol. He wasn’t going to run his family short to pay back rent for a mouldy mattress
on a carriage floor.

Some years later they met a visiting teacher who’d taught for a term in the one-room school in the forest. He told them that
Prem and Wanda had stuck it out, built up a seed business, gained respect with the locals. That is, Prem did. Wanda was always
regarded as not being the full quid. Did they have kids?
Toni asked. The teacher thought not. But there were always people and kids hanging out there. Then a few summers ago they
got burnt out. Houses, trees, plant, everything went. Uninsured of course. Prem and Wanda went to join the Orange movement
in Poona and never came back.

M
ost nights now, when Cecile came home late, they went to the little wine bar around the corner. She was always hungry after
work, and though exhausted, not yet ready to sleep. It was the time she liked to talk. In the house they had a whole conversation
pit to themselves, and yet they seemed to need this neutral territory – with a couple of glasses of red wine for Jacob, a
steaming bowl of noodles for Cecile – in order to sit face to face across a table and speak about whatever came into their
minds. He liked to think of it as
their
place, but he kept that to himself.

He made sure that he was always downstairs and dressed ready to go out when she came in the door. All day he saved up things
to tell her in the bar. He even went to places so he could report on them to her, caught trams all over Melbourne.
Once he went to see a Russian film she recommended in an old art-house cinema in the city and waited for her afterwards in
Chinatown amongst ferociously fashionable young Asians. It was a warm night, every shop and bar was open, the trams swung
along under their canopies, and he began to feel alive to this city.

He worried that she kept meeting with him because she felt sorry for him, deserted and adrift in Melbourne. After all, she
had seen him at his lowest point. But the ordeal on the balcony was like a wound he couldn’t even bear to think about, he
had to leave it alone to heal. He felt he’d died out there and been reborn, delivered into her arms.

Each evening he was taken over by a sense of urgency. Another day gone without news of Maya. He’d worked through all the Flynns
now, even had genealogical conversations with a few of the old ones, and at this hour, after a drink or two, braced himself
to retry the last few unanswered numbers.

He had a sense of time running out. Time for what? To save Maya, save her soul from peril? To save his own? Alone and restless
all day, he knew he had to guard against spilling over to Cecile in the wine bar, telling her too much about himself, more
than she would want to know.

Like the way, in a burst of confidence, he found himself telling her about
Glad Rags
, by Chickie Fitzgerald, and the whole glorious frenzied summer he’d spent writing a screenplay about a dressmaker’s son who
goes berserk in a small country town. Being Chickie Fitzgerald seemed to help.

He’d had the idea for years, ever since the day, soon after he came to Warton, that he heard the whirring of a sewing machine
at the back of the newsagency, and poked his head around the door. And there was old Nora Carpenter, a spinster
aunt of Forbes’s, feeding a hem through the foot of an antique treadle Singer with spotted arthritic hands. She used to be
the dressmaker for the whole district in its heyday and she still worked a little in this room lent to her by Forbes. Everything
was so familiar to him, the cutting table and ironing board, the ghostly tissue-paper patterns, the mirror, the magazines,
the bent, devout head of the dressmaker. Her heavy, lethal scissors. In a flash he had his story. Her son, an ageing biker,
spies on her clients, gets fixated on the town beauty, kidnaps her and goes around stabbing his rivals. It was supposed to
be black comedy, he explained to Cecile, in which small town morality, hypocrisy etc is exposed. He hoped he sounded suitably
ironic.

Cecile remained serious. ‘Did you sell the script? I’ve a feeling I’ve heard of a film like that.’

‘Because it’s like everyone’s idea for an Australian film! The tragic outsider. The country town. Sending it all up. Of course
he ends up letting the girl go. She’s enraged and sets fire to his house. He dies in the blaze.’ Even now, as he spoke, his
heart sank at his lack of originality. Why turn everything into a farce? Like a smirking adolescent, wanting the laughter
of the crowd. Why didn’t he take himself seriously? Sometimes Warton blazed into poetry before his eyes. He saw stories all
around him, real stories, beautiful stories. Nora Carpenter lay amongst the long grass of the cemetery now.

After it was rejected – with not even the suggestion of re-submission – he saw Chickie’s work for what it was, false, derivative,
Hollywood generic. He couldn’t believe how he’d deceived himself. Up until then he still had faith he could do it, produce
the great work, from a back shed in a country town. He blamed his failure on the time he gave to teaching, fatherhood, being
a good citizen of Warton. But the truth was he’d turned away from the harder labour, the labour of thought.

‘Why Chickie Fitzgerald?’

‘It’s the name of my first pet and the first street I lived in. An old friend once told me that’s how you get your porn name.
I’m not into porn, but I liked the name, it sounded like a jazz musician. For Chickie the words came more easily.’

‘I think your work should always carry your own name.’

In one stroke, Chickie Fitzgerald, hired Hollywood hack, morphed back into a canary and a stretch of tarmac.
Glad Rags
, with its trail of failure, was finally laid to rest.

Cecile spoke of her conviction that everything would change in the film industry, with handheld cameras, high-grade video,
internet distribution. ‘I think film will become more eclectic, more personally expressive. I see a new sort of cinema, closer
to the grain of life.’

She talked about her favourite directors. He swallowed his despair that he’d never heard of any of them and asked if she’d
select some videos for him to watch out of her collection.

‘If it is her boss, he must be away,’ he told Toni when she called him. ‘I’ve spoken to every other Flynn in Melbourne.’ An
M Flynn with an Indian accent. A snobby old lady Flynn who told him to mind his own business. Kiddy Flynns who hung up when
he asked if they knew a man called Maynard. The only one left on his list was the number of M&D Flynn. He tried it whenever
he thought of it, at every hour of the day. The number leered at him from the notepad by the phone.

Toni was silent. They were distant but gentle with one another.

‘Why can I hear birds singing?’

‘I’m on my walking meditation,’ she said, her voice lowered.
‘Jacob, I’ve been thinking. Didn’t Tod Carpenter get her the job? Maybe he knows where the boss is.’

At the last minute Cecile said she would come with him. It was Sunday afternoon, and she didn’t have to start work till five.
She felt like walking. They could walk through the Fitzroy Gardens to Kafka’s, the cafe where Tod Carpenter said he would
meet Jacob. It was near Tod’s gym.

Tod, on the phone, though he had no news of Maya, had been full of bonhomie and eager to help. ‘Yes, Jacob, what can I do
for you?’ he said. ‘Look forward to meeting you, Jacob.’ That was the way with Tod’s generation, Jacob supposed. Everything
was public relations. They called you by your first name at every opportunity, the salesman, the manager in the bank. The
personal touch. It was a relief to take action, though he doubted that this Tod could tell him much.

But as he set off with Cecile he felt his spirits soaring to a dangerous, an inappropriate degree, the sheer happiness that
he remembered feeling sometimes as a young traveller, for no better reason than having the freedom to please himself, and
a girl he liked beside him, and the world spread out before him.

He stood on Wellington Parade and surveyed the three modes of public transport, tram, bus, train, running smoothly side by
side. What organisation! There was a civic long-sightedness about it here that intrigued and pleased him. The Melburnians
made their way easily amongst each other. These people had a belief in their city, a pride, a history. Melbourne was confident
of itself.

Toni had said that the Melbourne air was filthy, the trams threw up a fine black dust that got into her hair and eyes and
skin. This had annoyed him. It seemed to him that it was this fussy search for purity that had kept them out in the cow
paddocks under the gum trees. Too easy to blame Toni, he thought now, generous in his freedom. Just for now he wanted to pretend
that he belonged here.

‘I’m beginning to get the hang of this place,’ he told Cecile, a little breathless as they strode across the park. Though
her legs were so much shorter than his, they always walked in step with one another. She set a city pace.

They passed through velvet theatre curtains into Kafka’s interior, dim and intimate, a stage-set lit by ornate wall lamps,
with plush armchairs set around little tables, and polished wooden racks of newspapers and magazines. Old-world Prague. Mid-afternoon,
most of the tables were empty.

They sat down and ordered double espressos. A short, broad man in a zippy black tracksuit and baseball cap stepped through
the curtain and peered into the shadows, screwing up his eyes. This could only be Tod. He had the fresh pink look of one who
has recently showered, and a shaven head beneath his cap. Mid-thirties, Jacob thought. Baby-faced, but getting jowly.

‘Isn’t this place insane?’ Tod said as he shook Jacob’s hand, in a cloud of aftershave. He smelt like the boys in Warton on
Saturday night. ‘I love the ambience.’ He pulled up a chair and parked his sports bag underneath it. ‘Had a girlfriend once
who used to work here. Have you eaten? The cakes are sensational.’

Jacob introduced Cecile as Maya’s housemate.

Tod took Cecile’s hand with a quick keen look at her. His eyes flicked between the two of them for a moment with a half-smile.

Jacob stared at him coldly. He’s a creep, he thought, but all the same he felt a warmth rising up his neck. He’d never considered
how much he and Cecile must look like that classic pair, older man and young Asian woman. He glanced at Cecile,
mortified for her. As if to celebrate the afternoon’s outing, she was wearing a boxy black hat, like a miniature priest. Her
hair was parted severely in the middle and drawn back. Her black high-collared coat was plain as a uniform. Couldn’t Tod see
how unique she was? He didn’t think of her as being of any race, but as a sort of angel, far more grown-up than him.

‘Ludo!’ Tod hailed the waiter. ‘They know me,’ he explained to Jacob, ‘I come here after the gym. Mind if I eat? They have
real food – European. I’m always starving after a workout. I recommend the strudel. No? Not hungry? You won’t join me in a
glass of red?’ He turned to the waiter and called out, ‘The usual, Ludo.’

He turned to Cecile. ‘I’m off on a business trip to Asia next week. Where are you from?’

‘Sydney.’

‘No, where are you really from?’