The Good Parents (2 page)

She had a key to let herself into the building. Past the brass letterboxes, past Mimi’s glass door with its stencilled sign,
Waxing
,
Peeling
,
Paraffin Treatments
: she still hadn’t found out what Paraffin Treatments were. The stairway was in darkness. She was aware of the ticking life
of the building when it was left to itself, and its particular smell, ancient wood and radiators and dust, like an old person’s
house. Her heart started thumping as she climbed the stairs. Her stomach felt queasy with excitement. Sometimes Dory had to
have an injection and he’d arrive later than her. She could always sense if he was or wasn’t there. Nearly always. With about
98.2 per cent accuracy, as her brother would say.

‘I thought you were a farm girl!’ he said, amused, when she arrived that first morning windswept and out of breath. ‘I thought
you’d be used to getting up at dawn.’ She began to explain that she didn’t grow up on a farm, but in a town in the wheat-belt,
that her family weren’t real country people, but whenever she spoke about her past she knew he wasn’t really listening. He
went on making jokes about her strong shoulders and legs, from all that hay baling and cow milking: if he was in a good mood
he liked to tease her about her cowgirl strength. The only questions he ever asked her were about her social life in Melbourne.
When she told him after the weekend that she’d walked in the Botanical Gardens, or gone for dim sum with her housemate Cecile,
he
seemed disbelieving, even disappointed, and quizzed her about clubs and bars and boys. She shook her head. Something froze
in her when he asked her these sorts of questions.

You could tell he wasn’t being looked after by a woman. The first time he held her his shirt smelt musty, as if it had been
left too long in the washing machine. A bachelor smell, like some of the young male teachers at school.

It was a fatherly sort of hug that first time, an arm around her shoulder as he left for the day. The culmination of all the
little taps on her arm he’d been giving her over the past couple of weeks when he was pleased with her. Just a little more
lingering.

Good old country commonsense, he said that first time, his face close to hers, his arm along her shoulders. A can-do attitude,
he said. This was his way of showing his approval, she told herself. It was what good employers were supposed to do. Look
how it made her work even harder! All the same, all afternoon she could feel the heat of his arm at the back of her neck.
It seemed like a long time since anyone had touched her.

That night she dreamt she was walking down the main street in Warton with a friend of her brother’s, Ben Lester, a nice enough
boy, tall, freckled, three years younger than she was, to whom she’d never given a single moment’s thought. Except it wasn’t
Warton, it was voluptuously beautiful, it was India, it was Paradise. A grove of feathery palm trees all swayed in the same
direction, like underwater plants, beside a heaving grape-green river. The light was bronze, as before a storm. Everywhere
she looked was this swelling beauty, exotic and familiar at the same time. She and Ben Lester stood beneath a blossoming tree
by the river and moved closer, their feelings generous and loving.

She woke with the words
of course he wants you
in her head.

The next morning as she climbed the stairs, she was suddenly aware that they were the only two people in the building. When
she let herself into the office and saw him she was too shy to speak.

‘There you are,’ he said softly, as if he too had been dreaming of blossoms and rivers. He stretched out his hand to her.
‘Maya,’ he said, to her vast surprise, and yet deep down some part of her wasn’t surprised at all. ‘You’re
tormenting
me.’ His voice was husky. ‘I can’t stand it.’ Her first thought was that she must have done something unfair to him, and
she searched her mind for how she might have hurt him. He looked tired as if he hadn’t slept. He must be cracking up under
the strain of Dory. She took a step towards him. That was the crossing-over time.

From that moment she ceased having her own life.

When she first came here she saw an office that was too bare, that had been cheaply, hurriedly put together. It looked like
he’d just moved in and could disappear overnight, though Global Imports had existed for some years. None of the furniture
suited the dark wood of the old room: the flimsy pine desks, the metal filing cabinet, the plastic table for the fax and photocopier.
The matting was greenish and springy as if it had only recently been grass. In the corner there was a little fold-up divan,
on which, before Delores got sick, he used to take a siesta, a habit he’d picked up during his time in Asia, he said. Only
the long uncurtained windows with their view of the spire were beautiful.

Now in her mind it was a room at the top of a tower, floating amongst the clouds, detached from the world. She was grateful
for its unclutteredness, the space it gave them, its work functions pushed to the margins. Its bareness seemed to say that
this was enough, this was all they could ever ask for. They lay on the divan’s thin mattress which he placed on the seagrass.
There he was fully attentive. A beam of early sun streaked across the floor, stroked their white winter ankles. It was a shock
to see white flesh in the pure morning light.

Whenever she was alone, in the office, on the tram, in bed, at any time of the night or day, she would see his hands, or the
flank of his cheek, relive his touch, feel the weight of his legs, hear his voice in her ear as she fell asleep. She would
sense the gray light swirling around them in their wordless concentration, hear the bird cries of their endless practice,
closer and closer to the brink, and a shiver would run through her all over again.

The reason she couldn’t write letters was because he was everywhere and everything and he was secret.

Sometimes the phone rang, the answering machine clicked into life or a fax spewed out. He chuckled. She knew it excited him,
to be lying with her at the top of this silent house of business. He liked to stalk naked across the room, and stand at the
window, lightly scratching himself, with only the birds to see him.

For a short time afterwards, dressed and back at his desk, he was blinky, dopey, like a little boy woken from sleep, winking
at her as he spoke on the phone, calmer, no longer
tormented
. He was very attractive to her then. ‘My legs don’t work,’ she said as she tried to stand up from the mattress, and he’d
smile but keep listening to his messages. She dressed quickly, took the little bag from her desk and set off downstairs, briefly
carefree and light-headed.

He winked and joked when he was happy and had sudden bouts of fondness for her. As he passed he’d whisper in her ear that
she was the best little worker he’d ever had.

Although she was proud to have made him happy, she couldn’t laugh at this with him. What had happened between them seemed
too large, too radical for jokes. She smiled at him but she couldn’t laugh.

A
country girl
. He’d been surprised he was her first. Wasn’t that unusual these days? he asked. The isolation in the bush perhaps? She shrugged,
not knowing why he was so keen for news of her generation, or why he seemed so taken up with the idea of all young women as
freely promiscuous. She didn’t want to think about this.

She didn’t say that the way he made her feel aroused a longing in her to tell him about horses and her brother and her dog
and the seasons and landscapes of the wheat-belt, all the things that fed into the river of loving that flowed through her.

She knew all the tones of his voice. He had a voice for doing business with Asians and another voice for Australians. Like
her father, he became more macho, jokey, his accent broader, when dealing with Australian men. He was more at ease exchanging
smooth small talk with the Asians.

Then there was the way he had of talking to his mother, tucking the phone under his chin, keeping on working, rolling his
eyes now and then, ironic, yet always patient. His mother lived in a retirement village and forgot things and left flustered
messages late at night:
Maynard? Maynard? Are you there?
– her voice quavery with self-pity.

Who are you?
she demanded, impatient if Maya answered the phone.
Oh, you’re the little lass from the West, yes, yes, he’s told me about you
. There were old girls like this in Warton, left over from the big landowner families, shuffling into the newsagency with
their hats and walking sticks, pretending to be helpless but always getting their own way. Going on and on about
something that annoyed them, while everybody else had to wait.

His nicest voice, the only time he sounded open and natural, was when he spoke to his son Andrew. He was always happy after
he hung up the phone to Andrew, smiling to himself for a few minutes, in a little dream. Andrew was an agricultural science
student, writing his PhD – Maynard always mentioned the PhD – who’d come back home to help look after his mother. It was when
she thought of Dory Flynn as a mother that Maya was able to grasp the momentousness of the situation, the affliction that
had struck this family. A mother with cancer.

The light in the house going out.

Just before she left Warton she went to say goodbye to Miriam Kershaw, the headmaster’s wife. Miriam had asked for her, and
at the last moment she knew she had to go. She steeled herself to step into that house, dark and stale with illness, walk
down the shadowed corridor, sit beside her, and not show shock at Miriam’s body, so terrifyingly shrunken in her bed. Afterwards
she went to the creek and lay back on the boulders and took deep swigs of air. I’m young! I’m young! she breathed.

Her father was angry that she’d been summoned and angry that she went. Something about Miriam always made him harsh and impatient.

Maynard never spoke of Dory’s illness in the office and she knew she mustn’t ask him. He remained matter-of-fact, calm and
cheery. He gave no sign that he was worried. She couldn’t tell how much he cared. Perhaps he pretended not to care because
he cared too much?

She worried that he didn’t care enough.

But this morning when she came in after the weekend, the
face he turned to her shocked her. His eyes were sunken, his face blotchy, unshaven. For the first time she thought of him
as old. He’d been up all night, he said. Things were going downhill. His voice was gruff and his hands shook a little as he
shuffled papers. I shouldn’t really have come in, he mumbled, looking around the room. She knew it was for her, the ‘fix’
he sometimes joked about. In that moment she had no suspicions of him. She went straight to him at the desk. As she held his
head against her, her eyes searched out the spire in the window behind him, her point of reference. Why should she be troubled
by something so simple, so generous? She bent and whispered how she’d missed him, how she’d hardly lasted the weekend. She
loved him for his need of her, and for his pain at last, his redemption.

At midday there was still no word from him. She was so hungry that she closed the office and ate a hamburger and chips – taboo
foods of her childhood – very quickly, sitting on a stool at the window of the espresso bar on the corner. Then a jam doughnut.
She knew she ate too much to make up for being parted from him. The cafe was busy but not fashionable. She didn’t feel intimidated
here. It had a TV and a magazine rack and a table of pale-skinned salesmen meeting for coffee. There was a pinup board in
the back corner covered with fluttery desperate-looking homemade notices, to sell, to buy, to rent. It was here that she’d
noticed Cecile’s
Room to Let
sign, her eye drawn to its professional graphics and its lack of chest-beating. She was still proud of this moment of good
judgement, and the luck it brought her, to find Cecile. There was a new sign pinned up, a flyer for something called
The Marijuanalogues
, which made her think of her father.
An evening of hilarity you will not soon forget (unless you smoke pot of course). Spread the herb!
She
remembered that her parents were coming to Melbourne to stay with her. When? It must be soon. For the past couple of months
she’d deliberately wiped all thought of this visit from her mind.

She finished off with a large Diet Coke and left. The day stretched endlessly ahead.

The office was one in a row of old buildings, all joined together, two or three storeys high – a fashion agency for uniforms,
a paper warehouse, a plumber’s workshop – down a side street, facing the church. It was like an old-fashioned village street
tucked in amongst the tall buildings. Seen from a distance, it would make a good location for a film.

The city centre was only a few streets away, but she never went there, among the fashionable people. She preferred to sit
in the courtyard of the church. Every day she felt the need to collect herself, by being outside, near trees. The church was
nested down between the glass flanks of the high-rise on either side of it, a valley surrounded by mountains. It was built
of blackened stone, as old as England. Clusters of white plastic chairs were set out hospitably beneath tall English trees.
A few twittery sparrows hopped along the bare black branches. She was used to native trees full of singing birds. Sometimes
it was in this courtyard that she could feel most fully a stranger. When she first came to Melbourne she was almost surprised
to find the same currency. It was like another country over here.

Clouds scudded past the tops of the skyscrapers so you could think it was the buildings that were moving. A hush seemed to
descend over the precinct and for a moment everything stilled. Nothing appeared, no car, no passer-by. No phone rang, no door
slammed, no voice called out a greeting. On the Diet Coke billboard next to the cafe someone had scrawled
Nutra Sweet Causes Cancer
.

She understood suddenly that death meant
ending
. Her heart started to thud, for Dory.