The Good Parents Read online

  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 ho
w 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.

  The sigh of the pneumatic brakes of the buses at the lights on Fitzgerald Street punctured his long solitary hours, and more sporadically, the two notes of the bell above the door of Arlene’s as the customers came and went. Ding-dong! Snatches of high voices and his mother’s clipped professional footsteps. The distant ping! of the till. He’d never been such a witness to his mother’s life before. Every morning, in lipstick, high heels, and an outfit that she might have just run up for herself the night before, Arlene went downstairs and didn’t come up again until she closed the shop at six.

  She took no interest in anything outside the business. Nature, the weather, the passage of time, were only seen in terms of suitable clothes. She was never happier than crawling round the hem of a client with a mouthful of pins. Best of all were those clients who ‘gave her her head’, an expression which caused Beech to smirk when he heard it. She looked forward to the day when she didn’t have to do alterations anymore, just work on her own creations. Her greatest triumph was to be out somewhere with Joe and have a woman say to her in the ladies’, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but where’d you get that dress?

  The only reading she had time for was The Sunday Times over breakfast at Joe’s. Whoever he and Kitty had inherited their bookishness from, it wasn’t Arlene.

  Once, after reading the death scene of Prince Andrey, the simple and solemn mystery of death, where the two women who loved him wept from the emotion and awe that filled their souls, he looked up from the book and surveyed the bare walls around him. Wouldn’t a widow want to keep something to remind her of her kids’ father, a letter, a watch, a wedding portrait on the mantelpiece? Just as he couldn’t remember anything about his father, he couldn’t remember sensing any grief about his death.

  There was a photograph somewhere. He’d seen it once, years ago, unless it was a dream. He went into her bedroom and rummaged through the old letters and certificates and his and Kitty’s class photos and reports in Arlene’s bedside drawer. He found it, a black and white Kodak snap of his parents and himself as a tiny boy on a verandah. He took it back to the living room, propped it up on the mantelpiece and studied it.

  You could call it The Sailor on Leave. Arlene’s brother Bob took it, he was also a sailor, he’d introduced Arlene to Anton de Jong. It was taken at the little wooden house in the coastal town in NSW where Bob and Arlene had grown up. Arlene stayed living there after their parents died.

  Anton was in uniform, perhaps he was about to set off again. A classic sailor suit, with wide pants and a kerchief cross-tied on his chest. He was seated in a wicker chair, one foot in its huge blunt-nosed shiny shoe resting on the other knee. His head was lowered, in shadow, he was reading the newspaper that lay across his bent leg. A streak of light caught his temples, his receding hairline, his narrow-bridged nose.

  Arlene, seated at the other end of the verandah with her back turned to her husband, was preoccupied, adjusting the straps of sturdy little Jacob’s romper suit, which no doubt she had made herself. Her bare arms were tanned and slim and her short blonde hair was curled. He couldn’t remember having a young, fresh mother. Her legs were crossed, one white high-heeled shoe peeping out from beneath the folds of her floral print dress. She would have got herself all dressed up for his visits. She might have been pregnant with Kitty. Was this Anton’s last leave?

  Anton was reported missing, presumed drowned, soon after his ship left Durban. There was no pension, because there was no witness to his accident and no body was ever found. Arlene, with new-born baby Kitty, had to take in sewing.

  ‘What if he signed on and then swam back to shore?’ Jacob once asked her. ‘D
o you believe he really drowned?’

  ‘Of course he did! They just wanted to get out of paying me any money.’ Arlene was not one for regrets or second thoughts or talk about the past.

  She was vague about what happened next. There were problems with the man next door. He got a fix on me, she said, it gave me the creeps. He certainly got no encouragement. Late one night Bob drove Arlene and her kids and her Singer sewing machine to Sydney and put them on the train to Western Australia. He paid for the tickets. They left everything behind them, clothes, furniture, a dinner setting. Bob sold the house with all its contents. She had to disappear without a trace, Arlene said. There was nothing else you could do with a man like that.

  If Jacob walked in the streets of South Africa and passed his father, he wouldn’t recognise him. From that photo, all you could say that Anton had passed on to his kids were large feet, a love of reading and their names. At their school a Dutch name was just one of all the other non-Anglo names, Greek, Jewish, Italian, Yugoslav, Chinese. Most were not mainstream Australian. He was Jake de Jong until the Rolf Harris song, when he became Jake the Peg. After that he called himself Jacob.

  But the others all had fathers. The nature of his father’s disappearance was something he kept to himself.

  You could almost see a line of tension between the sole of Anton’s propped–up shoe and Arlene’s floral back in the photograph. Had they had a fight? Did they realise they had nothing to talk about? Anton was reading the way you read when you want to forget about what is around you. If time was so short, why wasn’t he playing with his little boy?