The Good Parents (26 page)

‘Slowly.’ She sighed. ‘It’s about being Chinese in Australia. Dieter wants to turn it into a road movie documenting every
Chinese restaurant around the continent. He thinks he could probably get funding.’

‘And you?’ He realised he smiled when he looked at her. What was the expression? She was
light on the eye
.

‘Whenever I think of it, for some reason an immense weariness comes over me.’

‘I know the feeling.’

But already she’d taken her glasses off and was folding the newspaper. ‘I must go, Jacob. We’ll talk some more another time.’

‘Toni’s off at some Buddhist outfit for a couple of weeks,’ he called after her as she rushed to the door. ‘So I’m holding
the fort.’ She kept on tugging at her boots.

‘If that’s OK with you,’ he added, suddenly apprehensive.

‘Of course it is.’ She grabbed her backpack, smiled at him and left.

Her smile always surprised him, so warm and sudden, in someone so self-possessed.

He poured himself another cup of tea.
We’ll talk some more.
Was this out of kindness? Or was it an acknowledgement that they had things to say? Some conversations that didn’t bore him
to death, he found himself thinking.

Part of him had died in Warton, or gone into a sleep so deep that he’d forgotten what it was to be energised. Moods of restlessness
or despondency could always be traced back to ego, lust, the greed that was the source of Western discontent. According to
Hindu philosophy, he was living out his Householder stage and must submit to its responsibilities.

Beneath the surface of his life lay a substructure of belief, long neglected but never quite forgotten, like the music from
adolescence, an ideology made up of bits of Eastern religions and the theories of his youth. A spiritual quest that he still
turned to for consolation, but which he no longer believed had the power to change the world. It contained the secret hope
that through the simple life you become enlightened. That something numinous was waiting at the end of the road.

Gradually he’d stopped thinking of himself as a revolutionary in exile. The revolution hadn’t happened, instead there was
economic rationalism
. The movement he belonged to, so careless and playful and ragged, had barely lasted ten years. Its gurus were discredited.
A gear-change in history had swallowed it up.

One night as he sat at his desk in the shed marking Year 10 essays, he wrote:
He was just one of the world’s millions of poets who stay silent
.

A few months ago, Magnus had asked him: ‘How old are you?’

‘Forty-eight.’

‘You don’t have much time left, do you?’

‘Time for what, my boy!’

‘You know what I mean.’

For all his dreaminess, Magnus could display a surprisingly practical streak.

How beautiful this house was. Its elegance grew on you. The bareness was soothing, it matched the austerity of his mood. At
this hour, the light pouring through the glass wall of the courtyard filled every corner of the room. A house of glass, he
thought, an airy leafspace that enclosed him. A house with its sleeves rolled up, its decks cleared, ready for work. As alluring
to him as a loft in New York, a studio in Paris.

Upstairs he shaved and slicked back his hair, searched out a clean black T-shirt to wear under his leather jacket. It seemed
like a long time since he had really looked at himself in a mirror. His face was paler than it had been in Warton, and there
was a new, sad puffiness under his eyes. He wasn’t fat but he was amazed to see in old photos how much more slender he used
to be. Sometime in the past few weeks he’d crossed a line, he thought. He could never again be taken for a man younger than
his age.

He liked being alone. His thoughts were sharper.

As he opened the front door he felt a pang of sadness, as if, by getting on with their lives, he and Toni were moving further
away from Maya.

Who knows? he thought, tucking the key under the little Buddha, perhaps she needed us to change.

He saw the spot of light pulsing like an eye in the shadows as soon as he came in. Cecile’s laptop, left sleeping all day
by itself on her desk: he hadn’t noticed it in the light. It was late afternoon, he was about to pour himself a glass of red
and read his newspaper, and then, before he thought about it, he was opening the laptop lid.

An image filled the screen that he recognised, of the sulky young Chinese girl sitting by a grilled window. Cecile’s sister,
Clarice, in Kuala Lumpur. He scrolled down. All the images were of Clarice. Some were old photos out of an album, Clarice
as toddler with bowl haircut, Clarice as schoolgirl in white socks and sailor collar. Clarice as teenager, her hair crinkly
from plaits, talking to a parakeet on her finger. Clarice nearly grownup, in posed shots, legs too thin in high heels, torso
too slight in a bikini. He scrolled down to the end. Clarice posing at the top of a set of steps. Wasn’t that the Melbourne
Town Hall? Clarice crouched by the fishpond, eye to eye with the Buddha. Model thin, her face blank, watching television in
the conversation pit. Clarice had lived here for a while and she hadn’t been happy. She must have gone back to KL.

Was Cecile compiling this for Clarice, or for herself? Was she in love with her half-sister? She was clearly obsessed by her.
He scrolled back, looking for clues. The calculated intensity with which Clarice stared back at the camera began to chill
him.

Suddenly he saw himself bent over, squinting, pressing the keys with large intrusive fingers. An old man peering at a young
woman. A modern form of voyeurism, though that wasn’t why he kept on looking. Clarice the girl left him cold. It was because
of Cecile, because he wanted to understand her. Did he hope to catch a spark from her creative fire? All at once he was struck
with a deep yearning for her. He shut the laptop with a click and turned away.

A shadow which had followed him all day crept up on him.
How old was Maya’s boss?

He poured himself a glass of wine. This evening he’d start phoning all the Flynns in the book. When people came home for dinner.

He caught sight of Dieter’s silver film canister tucked behind the speakers and couldn’t help smiling: exactly where you used
to find it in one of those freewheeling shared households in the seventies. He opened it and sniffed the secret nostalgic
aroma. Once it had been regarded as a holy weed, a short cut to revelation … Like a whisper in his ear he heard the words
Why not?
The merest pinch … he’d tell Dieter when he next saw him. With a smoothness that shocked him, he found himself sitting on
the couch rolling a quite passable little number. He hadn’t lost his touch, he told himself grimly.

On the balcony upstairs you looked down over the traffic passing in the street, and into the upper branches of the trees in
the park opposite. Leaves on the evergreens swayed in lush, rustling armfuls. He’d come up here with his wine and his joint
to enjoy a change of vista. The only access was through the French doors in Cecile’s room, but he presumed the balcony wasn’t
private. He walked swiftly through her room without looking. No more prying! No more trying to work the poor girl out.

It was a bit like being on the top deck of a ship. He lit up, inhaled and was flooded with well-being. Inhaling again, he
saw a sharp wind run in a wave towards him through the tops
of the trees. It blew the smoke into his eyes and slammed the door behind him and when he turned he saw there was no handle
on the door. He threw the butt down into the fishpond and tried to fit his little finger into the hole where the handle used
to be. He ran his nails down the edges of the doors. He looked around for a stick, a piece of wire that he could insert in
the lock, but the balcony was without furniture, a bare slab of concrete. He peered down over the iron balustrade and his
eyes met those of little old Mrs Chen next door, sweeping her spotless white-tiled porch. She was frowning up at him, one
hand on her hip, the other on her broom.

‘I know wha’ you do!’ she shouted. ‘Drug addick!’

Jacob leapt back, an accused man. Guilt made him panic. He looked around for escape.

The walls on either side were wedged up against the neighbours’ walls. If he held onto the top of the balustrade and let himself
drop, he would land, heavily, onto the rocks and slime of the fishpond. He was only wearing socks: in the custom of the house
he’d left his boots by the front door. His sprained foot was still tender. He’d certainly damage some part of himself, worst
of all his spine. In boots and with two sound feet – or if he were younger and lighter – he might have had a crack at a Tarzan
leap from the balustrade onto Mrs Chen’s verandah roof. The roof might collapse. Mrs Chen, now gone inside, would call the
police. She would tell them about ‘the drugs’. She would sue him for damages, for giving her a heart attack.

If she came out again, would she listen to him while he begged her to find the key under the Buddha, let herself in and come
upstairs to release him?

He could hail a passer-by. Though he’d have to make a quick judgement about the person. Otherwise it could be an
invitation to ransack the place while he was stuck up here. But as far as he could see there was no one on the street or in
the park opposite. The six o’clock traffic sped past.

He could break one of the glass doors, using his shoulder or fist. Then he would have to find an afterhours glazier to come
straight out and secure Cecile’s room before nightfall. He couldn’t bear the thought of her coming home and finding the room
strewn with splintered glass.

He decided to wait for Cecile to return. Take a chance that she wouldn’t be too late. Wait it out until he couldn’t bear it
anymore. Hadn’t she implied that the job she was working on was nearly finished? He sat down on the concrete, his back against
the wall and stretched out his long legs. It was in postures like this that the skeletons of explorers were often found, after
they’d died of thirst and exposure …

He tried to remember if he’d scrolled right back to the beginning of the Clarice file. Had he put the canister back? He’d
left his leather jacket slung over the back of her chair, incriminating evidence. What would Cecile think if, after discovering
these intrusions, she came upstairs and saw his large shape crouched outside her bedroom door?

Windows lit up one after the other across the apartment blocks. Sunday night. Cars braked over and over at the lights on the
corner. He heard the distant rumble of a tram, metal on metal. There was no sign of Mrs Chen, and no one out on the street
to shout to. It reminded him of twilights when he was a little kid, looking down from the flat at the rush-hour traffic, the
sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he called ‘homesickness’, even though he was at home.

How had he got himself into this situation? There was a hunger inside him that he couldn’t even name. How undignified
it was! A man of his age, who regarded himself as being, in his own way, honourable. (He couldn’t think of any man he knew
who didn’t think that of himself.) What would his family say if they saw him now?

He pictured them standing on the footpath opposite, pointing up at him, the kids bent double with laughter, Toni shaking her
head. She always had been the more grown-up of the two of them.

This was how he’d watched them, night after night, year after year, from his desk in the shed. A family in dumb show, passing
to and fro across the kitchen windows, lit up as they argued or snacked or talked on the phone. Leaves from the vines over
the terrace framed the scene: they looked as natural and self-centred as animals prowling in their lair.

Once, after one of his annual declarations that he was giving up cigarettes, he was standing at the shed door smoking, when
suddenly a loud knocking started up on the glass of the kitchen window and he saw his children frowning and shaking their
fists at him. Even Magnus, who generally minded his own business. For a moment he couldn’t move, gripped by shame and panic.
Then they burst out laughing and disappeared.

He cut himself off from family life with his desire to create. He used to toil in his shed all during the long summer breaks,
trying to write screenplays. One hot evening when he was at his desk, his plastic fan whirring, Maya burst in, panting, her
face alight. She was in the middle of one of the wild, terrifying games the kids used to play with the Garcia boys in the
dark. She’d come to him for refuge. For a few minutes she stood beside him, her elbow on his shoulder, watching him type.
Her breath on his cheek was warm and sweet like the scent of the long dry summer grasses and he didn’t turn or speak, so as
not to break the effortless bond between them. She took a sip of
water from his glass, tapped a farewell on his arm and ran off again into the night.

He could still feel the confiding touch of her fingers and he groaned aloud. He hadn’t been able to protect her. In this,
the most primary of responsibilities, he had failed.

Always looking through windows. Arlene’s boy, peering through the chink in the curtains. At the Garcias’ millennium party,
a few long months ago, he slipped outside to smoke a cigarette. His last for the old century, he’d told Toni, though it was
well past midnight by then, the older guests had gone home. The hot lounge room was empty except for Magnus, absorbed in playing
Carlos’s old LPs.