The Good Parents (34 page)

‘I was born in Kuala Lumpur.’

The waiter, as pale and gaunt as a tubercular poet, brought Tod a dish of golden cutlets, the slender bones paper-ringed and
fan-shaped around the plate. ‘Schnitzel,’ Tod said with satisfaction. ‘Best in town.’ He chomped into the cutlets one after
the other, holding the bone in his hand. The meat was pink, like his rosy tongue and mouth.

‘No vegetables?’ said Jacob.

‘I only eat protein. These are cut by a Viennese butcher.’ Tod went on picking at a bone. ‘What line of work are you in, Jacob?’

‘Teaching. English and Communications.’

‘Ah ha, a highbrow.’

‘Hardly. I’m a teacher at a country district high.’

‘English teachers are terribly important,’ Cecile said. ‘I had a teacher once who fed me books. Reading saved my life when
I was a kid.’

‘I love reading myself,’ Tod said, wiping his hands and picking up a toothpick. ‘Have you read
The Alchemist
?’ he asked Jacob.

Being with another person gave Jacob a chance to watch Cecile. Tod threw her into relief. Everything about her was simple,
natural, and did not call attention to itself. And yet the more he saw her, the more he understood that she was, in every
way, supremely elegant. Her face, when she looked at Tod, was without expression. But her eyes were alive. They saw things
in the same way, he believed. As scenes, as an unfolding narrative. Perhaps it came from reading as a child. Was that why
they’d always been at ease with one another? Or was that her gift? Maya had sounded happy when she moved into that house.
All at once he was flooded with relaxation and warmth. He would have liked to squeeze her hand. He felt close to her, united
against Tod.

On the other hand, after years of watching classroom politics, he would say that Tod probably had this effect on a lot of
people.

He had an instinct to get her away from Tod.

‘I wonder what you know about Maynard Flynn?’ The table was cleared, more coffee ordered.

‘Ah. Maynard.’ Behind one hand Tod was busy with his teeth. ‘Haven’t seen him for yonks.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘He started off as a client – I’m in insurance – then it turned out he went to the same gym. So we used to talk, yeah, you
know, on the treadmill, in the shower.’

‘What sort of guy is he?’

‘Maynard? Your average small businessman.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Works hard. Always trying to get ahead. Having a bit of a struggle financially.’

‘Did he chase after women?’

‘Huh!’ Tod took the toothpick out of his mouth and half-laughed, glancing at Cecile. ‘To be honest, we didn’t go that deep,
mate. We talked business. Anyway he stopped coming to the club when his wife got really sick. The last time I saw him he told
me he needed someone to hold the fort in the office. That’s when I sent him Maya and they took it from there.’

‘The office is closed up.’

‘I heard that, yeah. His wife passed away.’

‘He doesn’t answer his home phone. This number.’ Jacob jotted it down on a serviette. ‘Is this right?’

‘No idea, mate.’

‘Do you know where he might be?’

‘Like I said, it’s been a while. He used to talk about moving back to Asia, Jakarta, maybe, or was it Bangkok.’

‘Could Maya be with him? Is he that sort of guy?’

Tod shrugged. ‘To be honest with you, Maya’s a pretty strong-minded little lady. She does what she wants to.’

Why did he have to keep on declaring his honesty? You couldn’t doubt that he was fit, but there was something about him that
wasn’t healthy. He never stopped acting the man. His voice was too loud, his eyes flickered, watchful. He was angry, he could
easily explode. No wonder Maya left his place as soon as possible. Did he resent her for this? Was he capable of spite? What
did he really know?

Jacob decided to order a glass of wine, and another one for Tod. Cecile left for work. As soon as the velvet curtain swung
behind her childlike hatted figure, Tod dropped his voice and leaned across the table.

‘They’ve got something, haven’t they?’

‘Who?’

‘The Asian girls.’

Jacob stared at him.

‘To be honest, I did hear that Maynard had a bit of a taste in that direction.’

‘What do you mean?’

Tod shrugged and shook his head. He drained his glass and hailed the waiter for the bill.

He couldn’t help himself, Jacob thought, he had to show he’s in the know. Now he regrets it.

‘So Tod,’ Jacob said, leaning forward, man to man, ‘if you had to make an educated guess, would you say there’s a pretty good
chance Maya is with him?’

Forbes’s nephew, the man to whom he’d entrusted his daughter. Because of him, he and Toni had let Maya come to Melbourne.
Did the bastard set her up? How could he ever make him talk? Jacob repressed an impulse to toss his wine into Tod’s sly, disingenuous
face.

But Tod was already standing up, reaching for his sports bag, rummaging inside it. He slapped an envelope onto the table.
‘Nearly forgot! Here’s a couple of tickets for the Grand Final next week. Turns out I’ll be in Bangkok. On me, for old Forbes’s
sake. Just don’t ask me how I got ’em.’ He was backing out through the curtains. ‘No teams from the West this year, but they’re
good seats. You can take your missus. Or your girlfriend!’

‘Let me know if you hear anything,’ Jacob yelled after him, but the curtains had swung closed.

It was a relief to be outside again, breathe in the innocent air. Tod was someone you felt you wanted to wipe off you after
being with him. There was something disturbing about what
he’d said. What was it? It seemed to have a grip on Jacob’s body, clutched his heart, made his legs turn heavy. He suddenly
remembered watching Forbes once in the newsagency serve a Chinese family that was passing through the town. After the family
left, Forbes pushed the corners of his eyes up and grinned at Jacob. Jacob had shaken his head at him and turned away. He
was only friendly with Forbes, he’d told himself, because of the smallness of the town.

To calm himself now he tried to concentrate on what he was seeing, shutting out everything else. He was walking through a
Melbourne twilight, down laneways between the back walls of shops and foundries. Every view was picturesque. He saw a poplar,
a church spire, a full moon rising over roofs. An old tree in a yard with its arms lifted, laden with blossom. A solitary
nineteenth-century street lamp came suddenly alight. It was bewitching. He felt a pang of pleasurable sadness that he used
to feel as a boy, roaming the back lanes around Arlene’s at this hour. Or looking out the flat’s front window at the lights
coming on along Fitzgerald Street, dreaming of making his way to great cities. He used to feel he came alive in urban twilights,
as if that was his natural territory.

What had happened to that boy? He belonged here, or in some other city’s streets. What had stopped him following his rightful
course?

Ideology. All his primal energy, his youthful virility had gone into an idealistic movement that had simply petered out, been
subsumed by new imperatives, by the world grinding on. The great wave of his times had swept him up and dumped him in a country
town, left him stranded, washed-up, a dinosaur. No wonder his kids wanted to get away as soon as possible. This must be how
an old commie feels, he thought.

The counter-culture was the father he never had. Fatherless boys need something to belong to. Hadn’t he offered this advice
at countless parent nights? Something to believe in.

Once in his travelling days when he found himself in Holland, he’d tried to trace his father’s family. He knew from his own
birth certificate that Anton de Jong was born in Utrecht in 1927. He set himself up with a pile of coins by the telephone
in a sleazy Amsterdam hostel and in the end he found a second cousin, Grete.

He took a train through the flat, wet landscape to what she called her summer house, a little makeshift hut on an allotment
by a canal. Grete was a large-boned, pleasant-faced, intelligent woman in her late sixties, undaunted by this long-lost, long-haired
foreign relative. She spoke good English, like so many of the Dutch. Anton was a nice boy, she said, quiet, much younger than
her, whom she sometimes saw at family weddings. There was a little sister who died as a child. Anton’s own father, Jacob,
her cousin, was a tailor. It was said that Anton did well at school. He would have been a schoolboy in the war years. She
lost all contact with his family during the Occupation. His father died. After the war she heard that Anton had joined the
merchant navy. She would have said he wasn’t the type but conditions in Holland were terrible then, no jobs, no money. Perhaps,
she said with a gracious smile, he was looking for adventure, like you. Later she heard that he had drowned. She never knew
that he had an Australian family.

‘Do you think he really did drown?’ Jacob asked her. He told her of his speculations when he was a kid, that perhaps his father
had jumped ship and swum ashore to South Africa. His mother had, after all, never received a penny of his pension.

Grete stared at him. ‘Why would he do that?’

He shrugged. ‘To start a new life.’ Too hard to explain something so shadowy, based on the length of a verandah between his
parents in an old photograph. On the shadowiness of his own memory.

Two men came, noisy, enormous, the house was filled with deep voices, heavy treads, he was picked up and thrown in the air,
but by whom? His father or Uncle Bob? In his memory it happened only once and was as exciting as Christmas. He didn’t want
to go to bed but Arlene shut the door. She never showed any grief or nostalgia for Anton. Far too hard to explain Arlene.

‘I can’t believe that.’ Grete shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t have walked out on you. He was – how can I explain? – he was like
his father, a sensitive boy.’

‘Do I look like him?’ More than once in the streets of Amsterdam he’d passed an older man and saw, in his build and colouring
and features, his own future.

‘Perhaps in your expression …’

‘What?’ He had to persist. This was his last, his only chance.

‘The look in your eyes.’

For years he and Grete exchanged Christmas cards. Then one year hers stopped coming.

To start a new life. To jump ship. The moment of decision. The plunge into cold waters. Because you had no choice, you couldn’t
stay any longer, you were dying. Then the new shore, starting again, knowing there was no going back. Did you sometimes wake
up thinking you were in your old bed? Did you carry a shadow-life with you, the smell of a hot country twilight, your wife’s
face when she was sad, your little children wanting to play with you and not go to bed?

As soon as he opened the door by the fishpond his thoughts turned to Cecile. He stepped down into the conversation pit and
everything about the room spoke so strongly of her that it was like a face with an expression. Even though he knew she was
going straight to work from the cafe, he moved swiftly, compulsively through the house, checking out the food in the fridge,
the cups on the sink, the CDs that had been played. He saw what he was doing, but he couldn’t stop himself. He was always
waiting for her. He never knew when she’d be home. Sometimes in the early morning he woke to hear the toilet flushing, the
discreet rush of the shower. Her footsteps were too light to hear. If he didn’t leap out of bed at once, all he’d find would
be a warm teapot, an open newspaper, a load of clothes swirling in the washing machine.

He didn’t check her bedroom. Since the night she’d rescued him from the balcony, he’d never entered her bedroom or opened
her laptop again.

He went to the bathroom (her towel was dry) and looked in the mirror as he washed his hands. Why had this happened to him
now, at the end of his life, just as his jaw was sagging, his gut loosening, his hands turning red and knobbly? Just as he
really knew how to love. Toni and the children had taught him.

Meanwhile Beech, arch-seducer, had, according to occasional brief despatches, retired from the field. After years of living
the expat life in different cities in Asia, drink, drugs and women, he had caught malaria and nearly died. Now he lived at
a different pace. He was married to a wealthy Thai business-woman and had three children. He drove them to school and helped
out in the business. ‘It’s a family tradition,’ he wrote. ‘Asia suits us. It’s anti-romantic, anti-guilt.’ A photo fluttered
out from his last letter, of three bright-eyed little Eurasian kids. On the back of the photo Beech had written ‘The Golden
Birdcage’.

He hated this prowling obsession that had taken him over, like an old man in a boarding house. He wondered if their daily,
unspoken intimacy was driving him mad. It recalled the climate of his mother’s house, the haunting presences, the scents and
voices, the women in the lounge room taking off and putting on their clothes. He fell in love from afar, over and over again.
That was the real story of
Glad Rags
. The making of a voyeur. The dressmaker’s son going mad.

He marched downstairs again and stood in the empty kitchen. Enough of this, he was hungry, soon he would go out and buy some
noodles, double-serve. Meanwhile he poured himself a glass of wine. He stood drinking, staring into the dark living room lit
only by the spotlight over the fishpond. His mood grew sombre. He felt the shadow of Maya’s boss creeping back. Meeting Tod
seemed to make Maynard Flynn all too credible. He could almost feel Maya’s fingers tapping a reminder on his arm. As if in
some way this stubborn absence of hers was telling them something. What?