The Good Parents (14 page)

Just as he let himself into the house the phone rang. A crackling and then a tiny voice broke though. ‘Hello?’

‘Maya! No kidding, I’ve just been thinking about you.’

‘I can’t talk long. Are the folks in Melbourne yet?’

‘Yeah. They’re staying at your place. Where are you?’ He could hear her breathing as if she were walking, and traffic noise.
She was on a mobile.

‘On the front steps of a hotel.’

‘A swanky one?

‘No way. Are they pissed off?’

‘The folks? With you? No.’

‘Worried?’

‘Yeah.’

A pause.

‘Myz, why don’t you call them?’

‘Listen, I’ve got to go. Give Winnie a kiss for me.’

‘A weird thing’s happened to the Garcias …’ he began, but the line was dead.

O
ne morning Jacob, at the top of the stairs, spotted Cecile at the front door just as she was about to leave. It was like catching
sight of a rare wild animal.

‘Hey! Cecile!’ He sounded louder and more urgent than he’d intended. He would have tried to reach her if the foot that he’d
twisted a few days ago wasn’t naked, swollen and purple. His feet were exposed in rubber thongs. Boots were out of the question.
It was painful even to pull his jeans on and going downstairs was hell.

‘Hi,’ Cecile called, her voice soft and clear. She was wearing a puffy black bomber jacket and her hair was pulled into a
topknot, speared, as far as he could see, with a knitting needle. ‘Any news?’

‘No.’ He stayed up there, not wanting the sight of his foot to repel her forever.

‘I have to run…Jacob … I’m working to a deadline. I finish on Friday. See you then.’

She had nearly forgotten his name.

Another day in Melbourne. Another day in this house. He made his tortuous way downstairs, and took up his position on the
couch, his swollen foot propped up on the coffee table. Rain was splashing down the window into the fishpond. Just as he reached
for the remote control, Toni loomed and dumped the cordless phone into his lap.

‘Telephone duty. I’ll be going out soon.’ It was like this every day, she couldn’t wait to leave the house.

‘It’s raining.’

‘It’ll stop.’

‘I’ll check the weather report,’ he said, seizing the chance to turn on the television.

Each morning they woke up a little more separate from each other.

He tried an old wheedling tone. ‘Aren’t you just a little bit sorry for me?’

‘We could have done without this, Jacob.’ She’d got the hang of the kitchen and was putting away last night’s dishes with
brisk expertise. Since his injury, perhaps because he was always having to look up at her, he saw her differently, as a sort
of sister figure, eternally displeased with him.

‘Why are you in a bad mood?’ he said, across the room.

‘I’m not.’

‘Yes you are. As if everything’s my fault.’

The phone rang. He grabbed it and fumbled with the button. It was for Cecile, a male with a German accent. ‘She is
at verk? Thank you.’ The caller hung up at once without saying goodbye.

Jacob’s eyes met Toni’s. ‘Just some rude guy for Cecile.’ Her lover, he supposed. He reached back for the remote control.
How much longer would they have to camp out like this in someone else’s life?

They ate their breakfast on the couch, watching the news. The Olympics, the latest fiasco, a spat between officials. Some
tribal war calls and chest-beating and cries of kicking ass and getting gold. He could almost feel nostalgia for the old dour
ways of the Australia he grew up in, where the worst crime was to skite, to have tickets on yourself.

He was becoming old and dour himself.

The weather report was for rain continuing to fall all over Victoria, in places he’d never even heard of. He was suddenly
homesick for the familiar incantation of names, the Pilbara, the Kimberly, the Eastern Goldfields, the Great Southern, the
coastal waters from Bremer Bay to Israelite Bay. He was homesick for the great empty plains!

They lounged, moody and listless, flicking through
The Age
, waiting, always, for the phone to ring. For years they’d said how they couldn’t wait to stop being slaves to their children’s
freedom and start experiencing their own, but now that they were here, with no one to look after, not even a dog, they were
unable to enjoy themselves. Nurture had become a habit, not only as parents, but in their work and their life in Warton. Nurture
had come to define them, it was how they related to the world. Without it they were at a loss, like soldiers out of uniform.
They had nothing to talk about together.

The rain stopped and Toni went out. She’d bought a mobile
phone, so he could call her if there was word from Maya. Magnus would be pleased with this purchase.

Jacob dozed and woke up thinking about Kershaw, the retired headmaster of Warton District High. Strange how often these days
he found himself thinking of Kershaw. Was he missing the old guy? Or was it because of being stranded and laid up? This was
what it meant to be an old man, without wife or kids or car, without strength or any power at all.

In his early days in Warton, when he was the new cool guy on staff, he couldn’t stand Kershaw, who was old school, a stickler
for the rules. He never had lunch in the staffroom but walked home at midday to eat with his wife. Even on the hottest day
he wore a tie to work. Formal, remote, he doggedly stayed on for five more years until he retired.

Gossip filtered down from Perth. In his past there was a thesis, a scholarship to an English university, the promise of a
brilliant career. These things became known by a sort of osmosis in a country town. In England he’d met his wife, Miriam,
who was a recluse, sometimes seen floating around the streets of Warton in her straw hat, her long faded plait, her distinctive,
high round belly. It was generally understood that the reason he’d ended up in Warton was to provide a safe haven for mad
Miriam, that she was his burden, his downfall. On the whole, the town was sympathetic to Kershaw. Unlike Jacob, they had no
objection to old school.

When Maya was born, out of the blue, Miriam came to see the baby. For some reason she insisted that she and Maya had a special
affinity. For a few years after that she would regularly visit Toni, but only in school hours when Jacob wasn’t home. He didn’t
know why, but he was always infuriated to hear that she had been in the house. One day Toni spotted her coming
up India Street, and without thinking, in a panic, grabbed both kids and ran through the back paddocks down to the creek.
She didn’t know whether Miriam had seen them, but she never visited again.

After Miriam’s death this year, Jacob went to visit Kershaw early one evening with a bottle of wine and sat with him on the
verandah of the cottage that he and Miriam had bought for his retirement. It was on the far, flat side of town in the shadow
of the great silver silos, looking out over low-lying scrappy land where horses sometimes grazed amongst Shire bulldozers
and piles of blue metal. When Jacob asked him if he was going to leave Warton now, Kershaw replied that he couldn’t conceive
of living anywhere that Miriam hadn’t lived. ‘I like to visit her,’ he said with a smile and nod in the direction of the cemetery.
Jacob understood then what nobody had ever taken into account, that Kershaw loved his difficult wife.

It was restful sitting on the verandah. Miriam had painted the house’s name on the sign swinging over the gate.
Isolation
. There was a book of Hardy’s poems besides Kershaw’s chair. They were not so different after all, he and Kershaw. They lived
as exiles here. But Kershaw had refused to disguise himself. They listened to the bells ringing at the level crossing as the
wheat train clanked past. Jacob could feel the lure of a quiescence that was all too familiar.

At midday he perched on a stool at the breakfast bar and ate some cheese and crackers that Toni had bought. He flicked through
the pile of mail that Cecile must have left by the telephone and found an envelope addressed to himself, in Carlos’s scrawl.
On the back, Carlos had left his greeting, a round disconsolate face, with down-sloping eyebrows and a jawline dotted by villainous
bristles. Inside was a postcard sent
to Warton from Kitty in London. In the thick black script that always looked self-conscious to Jacob, she announced that she
was coming back to live in Perth. She’d stay with Arlene and Joe for as short a time as possible – this was underlined.
Looking forward to meeting my niece and nephew.
Poor old Kitty. It mustn’t have worked out with her fella. He noted a restless movement in his shoulder blades, the old feeling
of being pursued, of Kitty dogging his steps. He didn’t want to have to worry about her. Judging by the postcard’s date, she’d
have touched down by now.

He turned the postcard over.
Self-Portrait
,
Aged 51
, by Rembrandt, from the National Gallery of Scotland. Kitty was an energetic cultural tourist and liked to refer to their
Dutch heritage. There was always something pointed in the images she sent. Jacob could not see that he bore any resemblance
to Rembrandt, although he was nearly the same age. Rembrandt looked as if something terrible had been revealed to him which
he would have to live with for the rest of his life. Jacob propped the card up behind the telephone.

The bamboo in the courtyard fluttered bright green in afternoon sun. What now?

It occurred to Jacob that he had strayed into that other country, the country of the young, the country where you still had
time. Time, if nobody stopped you, to watch late-night movies and channel-surf the breakfast shows. To lie on the couch, hour
after hour, thinking about yourself. To play music non-stop, everywhere, like a soundtrack to your life. Hedonism was taken
for granted. It was like entering another zone. Even this vague, persistent unease was part of it, he supposed. What you forgot
about being young was how unhappy you often were.

That was why young people were always on the phone. You
felt better when you were with friends. You didn’t feel so perilous.

If he were in Warton now, he’d have a beer with Carlos and tell jokes about his helpless state. He’d get in the car and go
and see Jerry Delano at the police station and talk over Maya’s situation with him. He’d call Forbes Carpenter who always
knew somebody who knew somebody. He’d have another drink with Carlos and a cigarette. All of them would try to help him.

Maya, in her last months in Warton, was always alone. She’d only ever had one friend at a time and then there was no one.
Perhaps he’d missed something more serious going on? He was so used to accommodating moody adolescents and their dramas at
school.

An old anxiety came back to him, that he didn’t really know how to be a father, not having grown up with one.

What would Maya have done here on an afternoon like this? There was a row of unmarked videos on Cecile’s desk, not, he supposed,
for general use. No books to be seen. He hadn’t brought anything to read from home, in anticipation of the famous bookshops
of Melbourne. Maya’s unread volume of Chekhov was beside the bed but he couldn’t face the stairs. If he could walk, he would
have gone out to the movies and lost himself in a thriller, or something warm and easy that made him believe that everything
always worked out. It was one of life’s exquisite pleasures, seeing a movie in a foreign town. Emerging into strangeness.
Once, long ago, while he was watching
Tora! Tora! Tora!
in Calcutta, it rained so heavily that afterwards he had to wade through streets flooded up to his knees.

Sometimes on Friday nights he drove to Perth, stayed the night with Arlene and Joe, saw a movie in the morning and
another in the afternoon and sped back, music blaring, through the long, menacing shadows of the drab bush along Albany Highway.

Music. He limped his way across the room to the discs on Cecile’s desk. This was where he and any happy dream of contemporary
living parted company. There were no familiar signposts, nothing to tell him what he felt like listening to.

‘Sit down and listen,’ Magnus said to him one day, when Jacob came into his room. And he had listened, really listened as
Magnus played him tapes and records of Deep House, and hip hop instrumentals, and ambient jazz and the expansive dream landscapes
of Detroit techno. Already Magnus was DJing at parties around the district. He’d created tapes with his own mixes, labelled
Party tunes
,
Mellow
,
Downbeat
,
Blue
. He talked of
loops
and
samples
, how producers picked out bits from other records, the funky stuff that makes you want to dance, putting it with other bits,
building energies, layers, moods. There was no social message. ‘It started with people playing around,’ he said. ‘Being experimental.
Making music with machines.’

He referred to musicians called Mos Def and Recloose and Moodymann, just as Jacob had once explained Bach to him, or Pink
Floyd or Dylan. Did the happiness he felt come from the slowly dawning revelation of the beauty of what he heard, or from
the fact of sitting there on Magnus’s bed, invited, not left out?

Sometimes Magnus came with him on his jaunts to Perth and while Jacob went to the movies, Magnus disappeared into little music
shops in the back streets. His favourite was above a shop that advertised fetish and erotic underwear. ‘Everything upstairs
is kind of underground,’ Magnus said. The owner knew Magnus and put aside records for him. He had a programme on RTR which
Magnus taped.

Something new was happening. He felt as if he’d woken up from a pastoral dream and the world had changed. It was in the grip
of ceaseless, relentless electronic innovation and it was just beginning. It seemed to Jacob that they were on the verge of
a social revolution as great as that of his own generation in the sixties. It was no longer possible to ignore it even in
Warton. When they returned and gave Magnus his computer, their life would change. Non-stop communication and information.
It was like Arlene finally giving in and buying a television. After that she never turned it off.