The Good Parents (9 page)

‘You’re acting funny, Jake.’

Smiling mysteriously, avoiding her eyes, he navigated his way past her to the sleep-out.

There was only one bedroom in the flat, which Kitty shared with Arlene. His sleepout was another part of the enclosed verandah,
next to the kitchen. It had a similar low-silled window into the workroom. He stood watching in the dark, as he always did
if the curtains were open.

The client was standing at the workroom door with her back to him, putting on her coat. She reached her hands up
under her brown hair and flicked it out over her collar, a female gesture which Jacob always found alluring. He heard the
chorus of thanks and promises as Arlene escorted her down the inside stairs. She was nicer to her clients than to her children.
How encouraging women were to one another! His mother’s voice became louder when she was tired. How many hours had he spent
watching the women in that room, with his light turned off, through any chance gap in the curtains?

Once when he was younger – not all that much younger, if he were honest – he’d let Beech watch a wedding party fitting. Before
the appointment, he sneaked into the workroom and carefully pre-arranged the curtains. For hours Beech stayed glued, floridly
describing body shapes and mouthing marks out of ten. Jacob felt glutted, soiled, somehow disloyal, which he never felt when
he watched alone. He couldn’t wait for Beech to go home and leave him to his private pleasures. What after all was there to
see? Just a succession of female bodies in not very radical states of undress, the young and old, the misshapen, the well-formed.
The soft bulks, almost comical, turning and turning on his platform, like dolls in a music box. Rarely perfect, rarely even
an eight, never as yet a ten, though his and Beech’s standards were exacting. An occasional bending down to reveal an entire
cleavage, a bare back with the bra undone, a length of thigh, though Beech swore he’d spotted pubic hair.

Beech missed the point. His own appreciation was subtler, more specialised. It was their hands, the gentle curl, the smallness
yet strength, adjusting a stocking or a fallen strap. The intimacy of their bare feet. The smoothness and tautness of their
skin, over the shoulders and back, the sheen of collarbones. The hints and glimpses, a nipple outlined, a puckered little
belly button. All the versions of their underclothes, full and half-slips, bras, suspender belts, from the worn and homely
to slithery shell-coloured lace and silk. Seeing who skimped and who was prepared to love herself, even with what was concealed.
Their vulnerable necks, turning this way and that to examine themselves, and the private face each had when she looked at
herself in Arlene’s mirror. The remoteness and grace of the special ones. There was always one who was his favourite, even
amongst the older women. They all had their role in his fantasies, roles that would surprise them if they knew. He felt the
pain of not being able to reach them, of letting them go, again and again.

He lay down on his bed. The rain had stopped and he could hear his name – Kitty was reporting on him to their mother in the
kitchen. Arlene was silent. When she came up the stairs at the end of the day she had no energy left to talk. Right now she’d
be standing in her towelling scuffs at the open kitchen door smoking her end-of-work cigarette, looking out into the darkness.
She’d never had any authority over Jacob, and let him off everything for the past few months because of the Leaving. All she
wanted, pleaded for daily, was for him to have a haircut.

He ought to put his light on now, and start studying. He reached out, and put in the earpiece of his transistor instead.
Eleanor Rigby
. The lonely people. Everything that needed to be said came from music these days. Fat little Kitty with her books open on
the table, the smear of chocolate on her mouth. Hungry. He and Kitty were always hungry. Once, years ago, he’d seen Kitty
through the workroom window, dancing to the LP of
Peter and the Wolf
in the tutu Arlene had made her, throwing her solid little body around the big table, leaping on and off his platform, curtseying
in front of the mirror, and he knew she was a fantasist, like him.

Insights flooded him. He, Kitty and Arlene lived together
but the real life of each of them took place elsewhere. They hid their true passions from one another. Every night he fell
asleep to the whirr of the sewing machine, stopping and starting, relentless riffs going nowhere. On Saturday afternoons Arlene
closed the shop and took a bath, did her nails and set her hair, ready for her night out with Joe Lanza. Joe, her friend as
she called him, two feet wide and coming up to her shoulder, had put the money down for the shop. On Saturday nights she slept
at Joe’s house, doing what old friends do, he supposed, a grotesque thought. She came home to slap some tea together on Sunday
night and put in a few hours at the sewing machine. It pays the bills, she said, but he and Kitty grew up knowing it was clothes
that had her full attention, that all she really cared about was
the cut, the fit, the hang
.

Sundays in the flat were long, silent, spacious. Bells rang out from St Alban’s, Beech’s father’s church, where Beech would
be kneeling, his hair tucked inside his collar, the image of devotion. Jacob didn’t know how lucky he was, Beech said. All
the pretty girls in the area were Greek or Italian, and they went to the Orthodox or Catholic churches.

Everyone else in the district spent Sundays with family, with fathers, cousins, grandparents, but Arlene had no relatives
here. In street after street they were eating big Sunday lunches, roasts, spaghetti, pots of cabbage. Jacob and Kitty roamed
around without talking, studied themselves in mirrors, listened to their transistors, sprawled on their beds, reading. Their
life was all in their heads, in dreams of the future. They made French toast and pikelets and slice after slice of grilled
Kraft cheese, eating while they read.

Arlene,
couturière
before all else, took no interest in their education and yet had produced two bookish kids, always at the top of their class.
From the first they had covered their own
schoolbooks with brown paper and signed their own homework cards. They learnt to find the books they wanted in libraries,
op shops, parish jumble sales. They were used to looking after themselves and helping out Arlene. They did things out of a
kind of sorrow for her.

They never talked about Arlene’s Saturday nights with Joe. Jacob had come to appreciate the freedom of his upbringing, but
Kitty, he sensed, was ashamed of Arlene’s unmotherly ways.

He took the earpiece out in order to enjoy his thoughts and the luminous evening light after the storm. The scene was lit
up in his mind, as if he was looking down on it from very high, the flat above the shop, the miles and miles of twinkling
streetlights, the dark coastline and far out, like a ship on an eternal horizon, the Flying Dutchman, the Drowned Sailor,
the Lost Father. Long ago, before Kitty was born, before he could remember, their father had become an absence, soundless
as the black water that had engulfed him, and like the water, always there.

His own life was a film or a book, and this was a chapter soon to be finished. He was the hero and also the writer. This was
what it must be like to be a poet, one epiphany after the other!

This Capelli stuff was magic. No wonder it was catching on. A great wave was breaking, he could feel it, an extraordinary
club was forming, a bright new ragged army was lining up against everything that had oppressed him about his future as a man,
the nine-to-five, the mortgage, the retirement plan. Giving the finger to the old men who ran things, the government, the
law, the army, and their war in Vietnam. He longed to have a draft card to burn on St George’s Terrace.

The accused was lying drugged on his bed
. I am lying drugged on my bed, he told himself. And he was not the only one. All
across the world people were letting their hair grow, lighting up and lying down and becoming poets.

Jacob called it the Tolstoy factor, from the time when he spent the entire two weeks’ swot-vac before the Leaving reading
War and Peace
. Beech had left the book on his bed, saying casually: ‘This is supposed to be the greatest novel in the world.’ He and Beech
often exchanged books and always knew what the other was reading. There was a slightly competitive edge to it. That year they’d
read, neck and neck,
Crime and Punishment
,
Another Country
,
Catch 22
,
Justine
,
The Outsider.
Beech himself hadn’t read
War and Peace
, he’d bought it in a second-hand shop on his way to visit Jacob. It was the evening of their last ever day at school and
they were drinking Arlene’s sherry in the sleepout. From tomorrow both of them would have to study day and night if they were
to get the results they needed. They agreed not to meet again until after the exams. They slapped each other around the shoulders
for good luck and, mildly drunk, Beech sloped off to the rectory,
his work done
, Jacob came to think. He would never know whether Beech left the book on his bed on purpose, or whether, as he said, he just
forgot it. The minister’s son, instrument of the devil.

Day after day he told himself that his whole future depended on this dash to the finish line, and yet even as he ate his breakfast,
stolid with panic, he found himself reaching for the book. Only Tolstoy’s world was real to him. Every morning, it was as
if he picked himself up out of the snow and set off again, blindly marching to his doom. This was how he wanted life to be,
heightened and distilled! What were a few exams in the face
of the great movements of love and history?
Why do I struggle
? he thought, with Pierre.
Why am I troubled in this narrow, cramped routine, when life, all life, with all its joys, lies open before me?
He
was
Pierre, the eye of the novel, the observer. The noble slob. He was astounded by Tolstoy’s insight. Was this the story of
every man’s inner life, with its private hungers, its unrequited loves? With the secret desire for fame:
I want glory! I want to be beloved by people I don’t know!

And war, with the same male dilemma, whether or not to fight.

No matter how much he resolved, as he fell asleep at night, to pull himself together, take control of himself, in the morning
his hands opened the book as if by themselves. He was paralysed in a bad dream. He was teetering on the edge of an abyss.
He’d swum too far out of his depth. And all the time he watched himself, like a scientist observing a rat on a treadmill.

He told himself that he was caught up in the tidal wave of great literature. That all the real moments of his life had come
from books or films. That he’d always preferred art to life. He even toyed with the idea – wasting ever more time – that this
was his tribute to art, his sacrifice. But he knew that he was avoiding a simple truth, which was that he couldn’t help himself,
and all the voices of authority, teachers, ministers, headmasters, woke him in terror in the middle of the night. Why was
he so weak? Because he’d never had a father to give him a good belting, like the Capelli boys? The only way he could go back
to sleep was to reach for
War and Peace
and read a little more.

It was getting hot under the tin roof of the sleepout, so by day he set himself up in the workroom, at the large table where
Arlene cut out her patterns. Use of this table was one of
Arlene’s few prohibitions, but now she said nothing as each day he shoved aside her bolts of cloth and laid out his notes
and books. She and Kitty left him alone, peeking at him through the window in the kitchen, keeping their voices low. Arlene,
in a rare maternal gesture, cooked steak to keep up his strength, fish fingers to feed his brain. After school Kitty brought
him cups of milky, well-sugared Nescafé. If anyone were to catch him out it would be Kitty. She was always looking over his
shoulder to see what he was reading, a habit that annoyed him. Even worse, she had been known to sneak his current book out
of his room and read it herself. He read Tolstoy on his knee under the table when she was home, and only grunted if she tiptoed
in, to show he wasn’t going to answer any questions.

Why were they being so respectful? Did the fortunes of the family rest on his shoulders, the son of the house, like Count
Nikolai Rostov? He was in a nineteenth-century haze. He lifted his eyes from his book and saw the women framed by the window
in the kitchen as if through Tolstoy’s eyes. Kitty’s desire to be good, her shy, private life of hope, related her to one
of the plainer Tolstoyan heroines. There was something about Arlene, however, that resisted romanticising.

There she was, seated at the table with a towel over her shoulders while Kitty, in rubber gloves, stood behind her, dabbing
at her scalp with peroxide. This was a regular household ritual, which Arlene, directing operations from a hand mirror, called
‘doing my roots’. Now Kitty was checking out a pimple in the mirror. Now Arlene was telling Kitty to get a move on, Joe was
picking her up at six. Everything they did was so familiar to him. They were large-boned, strong-minded modern women, managing
their lives perfectly well without him. Kitty studied much harder than he did and already had plans for becoming a teacher.
Arlene was a successful businesswoman who, as she said,
always paid her bills. She’d never let her children prevent her from doing anything she wanted, and didn’t bother to conceal
the fact that she couldn’t wait for them to leave.

The flat’s lounge room had always been given over to Arlene’s work. Only after dinner at night or on the weekends were he
and Kitty allowed to reclaim the sofa from the clients, flick through the fashion magazines, listen to the radiogram which
Arlene turned on when she was sewing. Apart from old Chickie sleeping in his cage by the window, the room was bare of any
sign of family life. No pictures or books. No mess. No television. Arlene had read in the papers that television was bad for
teenagers and had taken one of her sudden, stubborn stands on the issue. Besides she had no time to watch it herself and if
she had the money she’d spend it on one of those new Japanese sewing machines.