The Good Parents Page 3

  The hall was cold and bare as a hospital. Far down the end it opened into a room where people were talking. She caught the foreign inflection of women’s voices and the clink of dishes. Francine, Bernadette and Tina no doubt, doing what women friends do. An oxygen cylinder stood in a bar of light outside an open bedroom doorway, and in the shadowy front room next to her she glimpsed a table piled high with bouquets. She could smell freesias, a cold sweetness from her own past. She had no right to be here.

  ‘These were her favourite colours, did you know that?’ Andrew said, touching Maya’s flowers. She nodded, unable to speak. He had his father’s hands, but more finely cast. She could see Maynard’s features in the set of his face, but his skin was olive and his eyes were dark, wide-spaced, intense. Dory’s son. You could tell that she’d been beautiful.

  That’s him, Maya thought, without quite knowing what she meant. It was as if she’d dreamt of him.

  ‘Andy? I think you’re needed.’ A long-legged girl in jeans strode up the hall towards them. She was wearing a large football jumper, probably borrowed from Andrew, the way girlfriends liked to do. She put her hand on Andrew’s shoulder. ‘Granny’s asking for you.’ Perfect, cool, in charge, good skin, dark hair in a curly ponytail. She would have been a champion runner, a maths whizz, a prefect, one of the shining girls at school.

  ‘This is Kirstin,’ Andrew said. His girlfriend. The girlfriend he deserved.

  There was a pause. Since Maya didn’t speak, Kirstin reached for her bouquet.

  ‘I’ll take this if you like.’ She whisked it into the front room with all the other flowers.

  ‘Maynard? Andy?’ The old girl was down the corridor of course, making sure that no one forgot her. Where was Maynard? She knew he wasn’t here.

  Andrew kept on looking at her. ‘Were you one of Mum’s students?’

  Maya shook her head and backed towards the door.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he asked. ‘Anything at all?’

  His dark eyes each held a drop of radiance inside them, like the gleam of water at the bottom of a well. She couldn’t look too long into them. He knew something she couldn’t bear to know.

  ‘No, no. My taxi’s waiting.’ She opened the front door and started across the porch. Then she turned and said quickly: ‘I’m Maya, from the office. I’m really sorry …’

  ‘I know you are.’ He stepped forward and took her hand for a moment. ‘Dad’s at the funeral director’s. With Mum.’ He looked up over Maya’s head. ‘What a beautiful day!’ he said. ‘I had no idea.’ He was almost high, she saw, almost a little crazy.

  ‘The funeral’s on Thursday, nine-thirty at St Xavier’s,’ he called out after her as she fled down the path. She nodded over her shoulder and he raised his hand to her. Fuck fuck fuck, she muttered, rushing down the street, bare, of course, of taxis. He knew. She could swear he knew. On this day Dory’s son knew everything.

  The bushy rise at the end of the street looked down over a football oval, a playground, a bike trail. At this hour it was spotted with retirees throwing balls for their dogs and young mothers with little kids. The embankment was floored with shredded bark and planted artistically with native grasses and shrubs. Imitation bush, city bush, not a place where you could lose yourself. Where to now? Her bladder was bursting, and without thinking, as if she were still a country kid, living out of doors, she crouched down between two bushes and pissed splashily into the bark, risking yet more exposure.

  She lay awake in the dark, trying to remember when Cecile said she’d be back from Kuala Lumpur. Sometimes she got up when Cecile came home late from her editing work and they talked. Could she be back tonight? Maybe Cecile would be too tired to talk, but it would be a relief just to see her, or even just to know she was in the house. She longed for Cecile’s calmness. Cecile was nearly thirty, far ahead of her in everything. Her advice was always very down-to-earth.

  But in the morning Cecile was still not there. What if she’d come home to get changed and then gone straight off to work? Sometimes she did that. Maya wandered in and out of rooms looking for clues to see if Cecile had been and gone. The house was dark from pouring rain. Everything was cold. She didn’t know what to do next. She couldn’t even think of going to the office. In the end she went back to bed.

  She wished she hadn’t told Andrew her name. Maynard would be angry when he heard of her visit. You know the rules. Would he say that to her, like a teacher? What were the rules? They’d never spoken of them, but she knew that they were there. He liked to keep all the different parts of his life separate. She knew, without anything being said, that he was afraid of demands, of being trapped, held back. If she looked away, got on with her own work, suddenly he’d come to her. Sometimes this made her laugh. It reminded her of handling Choko, the most highly strung of the horses in the Garcias’ paddock. Turn your back and he’d be nuzzling in your pocket.

  He was capable of sulking. He believed in his right to do what he wanted when he wanted to, and was savage if he couldn’t. It had been a shock to find that out. But underneath, always, was the tug of need.

  At first he joked about the matching first three letters of their names. I knew this was a good omen, he said, as soon as we met! A few weeks later she’d referred to this and his face went blank. She’d set off his alarm system: did she think that this bound them together? Was she hanging on to his every word? Nothing he tossed off to be charming could be taken as a promise.

  Yet she had no dream of any future with him beyond the usual one, to spend a whole night together. She couldn’t conceive of any other place in the world where they would fit, they existed as a couple only in their eyrie with the bird’s-eye view of the spire. If he was offhand, became businesslike and impersonal, she could cringe to think of herself on that mattress, like a creature without its shell.

  He was a bit overwhelmed by her devotion, she suspected, by what he had unleashed. Sometimes he was touched by it and was tender: a small, spontaneous measuring out. Only her love kept them afloat. The creaks and sighs of the old building around them sounded like a warning. Throat-clearings of disapproval. She wondered if after this she’d ever be able to have a ‘normal’ relationship. If secrets and rules were part of its kick, a kick she’d got used to now.

  More and more he was out of the office. This was the nature of the business, he told her, a lot of running around. It was better to pick up freight yourself than deal with a customs broker. Then there was the banking and the checking of stock in the warehouse and trips to see potential customers. Sometimes a customer whom he said he was meeting rang up to speak to him. From time to time she caught him out with little lies, to her, to his mother. Why didn’t she take this into account?

  What did she know of him? She only had a keyhole view of him, a fixed, secret eye.

  Sometimes he’d lie back and suddenly open up to her. How his widowed mother sent him to a private school where he had less money than the other boys and never learnt anything but how to gamble and play the saxophone. How when he left – he was asked to leave – he ran away to join a jazz band that was touring though Asia.

  ‘Why were you kicked out?’ she asked. These days you had to do something pretty heinous, or that was how it was at a country high. She needed to know everything about him so she could understand him.

  ‘Got a girl pregnant,’ he said briskly. ‘The headmaster told my mother that she was wasting her money on me, I was a blight on the school’s reputation. My God, if they only knew what was really going on there.’ He was still angry about it, she could see.

  ‘What happened to the girl?’

  ‘She lost the baby before it was born. I was told I’d ruined her life. Girls weren’t supposed to want sex in those days, you understand.’

  He fell in love with Asia and married Dory and stayed there for many years. He and Dory decided to bring up Andrew in Australia, but he still went to Asia on business at least three times a year. With the contacts he’d made in Indo
nesia he started up Global Imports. She’d have to come with him one day to the warehouse in South Melbourne, he said, and pick out something for herself. One morning she arrived to find a large carved wooden jewellery box sitting on her desk. Not really her sort of thing, but he seemed pleased with it and she couldn’t tell him that.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he played the sax.

  He was fifty, a couple of years older than her parents though he didn’t seem part of the same generation, the sixties or whatever it was. She couldn’t imagine him long-haired in a protest rally. He told her he voted Liberal, and was amused at her gasp of shock. I make love with a right-winger, she thought. She began to explain to him what it was like being Labor in a country town, but as usual he wasn’t listening. He was always dreaming, she’d come to realise, and if she asked, his dreams were always schemes for making money. If he and her parents met, they would have nothing at all to say to one another. But that must never happen. They must on no account ever meet.

  ‘Global is never going to make my fortune,’ he said, looking up at the ceiling high above them. ‘I’m using some contacts to diversify.’

  If he’d looked anything like her father, large, sweaty, hairy, nothing could possibly have happened between them. If he’d had the body of men in Warton of his age. But he was narrow-boned, smooth-skinned, trim. Sometimes he’d pat his belly or flex his arms and frown. ‘Haven’t been able to get to the gym for months now.’ The stress of his current life kept his shape almost boy-like. When their two pairs of shoes lay side by side beneath the radiator, hers were the same size as his.

  Her first thought when she met him was that he had the looks of an actor, an older, workaday version of, say, Kevin Spacey. His cheeks were hollow, close-shaven, with a fold on either side of his mouth like pleats in soft leather. A half-circle of creases ran up his neck and jaw if he tucked his head down. He had a habit of running his fingers back through his hair, which was cleverly cut to be pushed-up at the top where it was thinning. It was babyishly fine, a fading reddish-brown sprinkled with silver. Was he vain? At his desk he wore small, fine-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses. His eyes were quick and hard to read. In his black coat he looked like a Melbourne man.

  Age didn’t come into it. She registered an instant reaction to him when she saw him, a softening all through her body at the sight of his hands and wristwatch, his ivory skin, his pale shirts, his narrow, gold-buckled belt.

  There was some sweetness too, a quick understanding, and sometimes a playful streak. Rarely now. He’d become more and more preoccupied.

  Late morning she went downstairs and ate a bowl of Weetbix with the last of the milk. There was nothing else to eat. Neither she nor Cecile had been shopping for a couple of weeks. She ate at the kitchen bar, the big open room silent around her. The long leaves of the bamboo in the courtyard hung flat in the endless rain. She remembered the fierce rush and instant turning off of Warton rain, like a little kid’s tantrum. She kept listening out for the scratch of the key turning in the lock.

  When Cecile was home there was always music. As soon as she came in, even if it was very late, she went straight to her workbench next to the stairs, turned on the lamp and played music on her computer. Music was the background to everything Cecile did. It was the same in Warton when her father or brother were home. She would never forget the feeling of relief when she first entered this house and stepped into music.

  Cecile gave her the sheepskin coat a few nights after she moved in. It had been hanging forever at the back of her cupboard, much too big for her, she said. She’d bought it from a friend who was desperate for money. The moment she put it on, Maya felt safe, embraced, protected, able to face the Melbourne streets at last. It was a perfect fit, the cream fleece tucked inside against her skin. Cecile put her head to one side and studied her as they put on their shoes at the front door. It was ten o’clock at night and they were about to go to a Vietnamese restaurant to eat a soup called pho which Cecile had a craving for.

  ‘I knew the right person would turn up for it one day.’

  Maya opened the door and set out, muttering something about being big-boned like the Dutch side of the family. At that time, before Maynard, she still hated to be looked at, and avoided looking at herself in mirrors.

  After she started wearing the coat everything changed. It transformed those cold dawns, transformed her into a city girl. She began to feel at home. The house, small yet strangely spacious, had a distinct personality that in her mind she associated with Cecile. Just as, from the start, she didn’t feel shy with Cecile, so she felt at ease in this house.

  Melbourne started to look different to her. She got the hang of the trams. Shops and restaurants on Victoria Street became familiar. She and Cecile always ate there, or bought take-away. Restaurateurs hailed them. They never cooked at home. Cecile introduced her to Shanghai dumplings and baked pork buns and sticky rice in a twist of bamboo leaf out of the warmers in the little supermarkets. Wherever she went Cecile always looked out for quality.

  She began to sense the romance of this city. One night when she and Cecile were trudging home with Thai take-away, sharing an umbrella, the lights shining on the wet road, she felt so light-hearted that she wanted to say his name.

  ‘Maynard says Thai is the haute cuisine of Asia.’

  ‘Maynard?’

  ‘My boss.’ She turned her head and found herself looking right into Cecile’s eyes. Their gaze locked for a moment beneath the umbrella and then they looked away.

  They were passing the tower blocks of Housing Commission flats that loomed above the trees in the park on the corner. Lights shone in window after window, people were home, eating together as night fell. For the first time she understood the comfort in being part of the myriad lives of a great city. Warmth spread through her from the misted-up plastic boxes she clutched. It was a relief to let her secret out even a tiny bit, ease the pressure she carried around with her every moment of the night and day.

  The next day, Thursday, the day of the funeral, it was still raining. She pictured the black cars waiting outside the house, Maynard escorting his mother down the path under an umbrella, Andrew hand in hand with Kirstin, and the faithful three bringing up the rear, Francine, Bernadette and Tina. All in black clothes and dark glasses. The cars gliding off into the rain.

  At midday a postcard came from her parents, in her mother’s writing, but signed T & J, reminding her they’d be arriving next week. Her mother, always suspicious of technology, still didn’t trust leaving phone messages. Typical of her, to send a postcard of the lake turned to salt, proceeds to CALM, from the stack on the counter in the Warton newsagency. Can’t wait to see you xx. Maya couldn’t bear to think of their familiar, expectant faces here in this house. She was a different person now.

  She still hadn’t cleared out the little back room under the stairs for them. Cecile said it was OK if they stayed. They planned to spend two weeks here before going to Tasmania. She’d told them she and Cecile would be at work when they arrived and where to find the key.

  Her father would be blown away by Cecile’s music. She felt a pang of possessiveness about her life with Cecile. It was hard-won. It was a gift.

  We don’t want to get in your way! If they were so anxious about that, why didn’t her father take his long-service leave somewhere else?

  They’d tried to persuade her to go to Perth, not the other side of the country, and study literature, acting, film, something to do with ‘self-discovery’.

  They had no idea of real exploration.

  Nobody knew how sick she felt, those first few weeks here. She came to understand, in a way she never had before, that the city and the country were two separate worlds. She understood now the kids who grew up with her in Warton and never wanted to leave. There wasn’t a person, a horse, a tree, a stretch of road or horizon in Warton that she didn’t know, while here she was a stranger to everything, the beauty of the shops and cafes, the people in smart coats like Europ
eans, even the different brand names for homely milk and bread. The city was like a heavy mass she was trying to fight her way through. She got lost in the grid of the streets and was too self-conscious to ask for help.

  She made herself sit on a high stool in a tattoo shop and have her nose pierced, which she and Jason Kay had always sworn would be the first thing they’d do when they left Warton. The first of their piercings. She wrote a postcard to Jason telling him how cool it was here, but didn’t send it, it made her ashamed. She was a stranger to cool, anyone could tell that at a glance. ‘Country’ was written all over her, nose-stud and all.

  It took her a while to realise that the sinking sensation in her stomach, the scooped-out feeling in her brain, was homesickness. It really was an illness that she woke up with every day. She’d been unable to remember why she wanted to come here. On the other hand, she knew she couldn’t possibly go back.

  The only reason her parents had let her come was because it was arranged that she could stay for a while with Tod Carpenter, nephew of Forbes and Rhonda Carpenter, who owned the Warton newsagency where Maya worked after school.

  ‘Tod is such a lovely young man, he always does his best for people, he’ll look after you,’ Rhonda told her. ‘Why Toddy’s never married …’ She shook her head.

  ‘Married to his own right hand most likely,’ growled Forbes, waiting for Rhonda.

  ‘Forbes!’ Rhonda never let him down. Besides, a couple of years ago Rhonda had undergone a near-death experience. She had a heart attack and saw the portals before she was revived. It gave her a sort of moral authority.

  Her father talked to Tod on the phone and arranged it all. He knew how to make a good fellow of himself, old Tod. It took her in for a while. And then mysteriously, every cell of her body seemed to shrink away from the sight of him.

  It was true that Tod did his best. He played guitar, cooked stir-fry, took a camera everywhere. When he drove his MG he wore an Italian cap to protect his head. His hair fell out ten years ago in the week before his twenty-first birthday because his girlfriend ran off with his best mate. There were photos of him at his party, hamming it up in a woman’s wig. He was round-faced, snub-nosed, stocky but fit, he worked out. He’d lived in Hong Kong and London for a few years and was paying off his house, a stark home unit twenty stops out on the train. He didn’t have a girlfriend just now, but lots of friends, at work – he sold insurance – and at the clubs he’d joined. He heard of the job at Global Imports from a guy at the gym.