The Good Parents (27 page)

He stood on the porch and surveyed the street. The Garcias’ verge was lined with cars, old bombs, utes, four-wheel drives.
He could name the owner of each of them, even the history of purchase and maintenance of most of them. As he knew the history
of the dent in the Garcias’ brown striped roller door, and of the
Forbes Carpenter Real Estate
sign on the block opposite, which had been there for fifteen years. He stubbed out his cigarette and took a walk around the
house, skirting Chris’s strange white mildewed pit. For some reason it had always embarrassed him. The horses were awake,
shying and snorting, taking off in little nervy spurts around the yard. There’d been fireworks at the showgrounds, and from
time to time a spray of stars still broke out in a bang over the roofs of Warton. All the livestock in town would be awake.
Through the arch of the pine trees he saw the shape of his own roof. He caught the echo of one of Winnie’s mournful howls.

In the Garcias’ backyard a group of very drunk young men and a few girls, Josh’s friends, were standing around the barbecue,
staggering and laughing, slapping each other with
frozen steaks. They’d come back from the bash at the show-grounds, his own kids with them, Maya looking distant and bored.
None of the social events on offer in Warton held interest for her anymore. He couldn’t see her now. Had she gone home?

He lurked in the shadows, looking into the kitchen. He could see Toni standing by the window, wearing a sarong, the fall of
her hair on her bare brown shoulders, her strong arms crossed, a drink in one hand. Tom Gabbelich, the Phys Ed teacher, new
last year to the school, was reaching out to top up her glass. Were they flirting?

The first time Tom met Toni, as a dinner guest at their place, he blurted out to her: ‘You look like Elizabeth Hurley.’

(I don’t think young Gabbo’s got much between the ears, he said to Toni later when they were washing up.)

Suddenly he made out Maya’s pale young face against the far wall, deep in observation of her mother. He was swept with relief
that she was still at the party, that his family was starting the new era together. He couldn’t quite read her expression.
Toni, without trying to, without
wanting
to, somehow took the light in a room. Usually, he thought, it was the other way round, the mother kept her eye on the daughter.

They both watched as Toni, smiling at Gabbo, put her hand over her glass and shook her head.

It was nearly dark. If the sky wasn’t so opaque he’d see the first stars. The tower blocks loomed, lit up festive as ships
moored in a harbour. The tossing trees seemed like the only things alive on the street, he almost felt neighbourly with them.
It was getting dangerously cold but he couldn’t afford to think about that, or regret his jacket and his boots. The cold of
the concrete slab seemed to spear through his buttocks and he sat
on his hands for a while. He was locked up in a fresh-air prison.

He hadn’t felt this bad about himself for many years. The grief over Nathalie Maguire had long gone, but the black hole, once
known, always lurked ready to open up again before him and now, with Maya’s defection, he knew he must take himself in hand.
Focus on something, follow a train of thought or memory. To prevent madness a prisoner had to discipline the mind.

At least it isn’t raining, he thought, and then the first sprinkles blew onto his face.

It was raining on the morning that he went to pick up Toni and drive down south to the commune. There would be no coming back,
at least not to Perth, Toni warned him, Cy Fisher had a long memory. Who’d want to come back here anyway, he thought, as he
crawled in thick traffic past the tatty warehouses and budget shops along Albany Highway. True to form, he was running late.
That was because, when he was due to leave, he couldn’t stop rubbing at the blu-tack left on the walls of his bedroom.

Beech peered around the door. ‘Got cold feet?’

He kept on rubbing. He suspected it was a case of the Tolstoy factor and yet he couldn’t stop.

‘I don’t blame you. You wouldn’t catch me running off with a gangster’s moll.’ Beech advanced into the room, comfortably scratching
his stomach.

‘His wife, actually.’

Beech whistled. ‘And you haven’t even porked her.’ Naturally that had been his first question.

‘That’s not what it’s about.’ Or was it? If it was the Tolstoy factor, then it meant that there was something he was avoiding.
Deep down, all those years ago, he’d been afraid of becoming involved with Nathalie. After her death he made a pact with himself,
that he’d never let another woman down.

‘I wouldn’t worry about the walls,’ Beech was saying. ‘This place’ll be knocked down soon by some big crook developer. Probably
her husband.’

Jacob picked up his kitbag, made a thumbs-up sign to Beech, and left. ‘Rather you than me, old boy,’ Beech called out after
him. There would be the occasional letter, but they never saw each again.

Beech was the only person to know where he was going. He’d had to tell him when he bought his scrapyard VW for two hundred
dollars. Beech himself, only in Perth to spend some time with his old, ailing parents, was going to stay at the rectory before
he went back to London in a few days. He could probably manage to keep his mouth shut till then.

He’d warned Beech not to spend another night in this house. Fear was a virus. Now he was always looking over his shoulder.

Everything had been planned down to the last detail. Toni was to leave her house at ten, after Cy had left, without taking
anything more than a shopping bag. At eleven he would pick her up at the train station in Armadale. By now she’d have left
her car keys and jewellery and chequebook in the top drawer in the bedroom, with a signed note saying she relinquished all
rights to her account. In the shopping bag was a change of underwear and a toothbrush and her housekeeping money for the week.

Timing was essential. The longer Toni stood around Armadale station, the more chance there was that she’d be seen.
She couldn’t wait more than half an hour. On the two or three occasions that Toni had ever been significantly late Cy traced
her within the hour. Their best chance of staying undetected was in the wilds down south, she said, because of Cy’s nature
phobia and general aversion to the country. But they couldn’t afford to make any contact with banks, hospitals, families.
They had to drop out of the known world.

He didn’t know how it had got to this point. They had never even kissed, not so much as held hands. Each time they met she
suggested another rendezvous the next week. Surely this only increased the danger, which was the reason she’d contacted him
in the first place? But he always agreed to meet. He drove miles out to the backlands, to sandwich bars in industrial areas,
a tacky Devonshire teahouse in the foothills, fish and chip shops overlooking bleak suburban coasts. Toni seemed to take pleasure
in the unlikeliness of these places. She found them on the long drives she took when she wanted to be alone.

Their meetings quickly became a ritual, a secret part of each week, and then they became its focus, its romance.

Summer ended, autumn rain fell down greasy windows, they wore coats and blew their noses and left umbrellas hanging over plastic
chairs. Each time they met she seemed more beautiful. He breathed in her perfume and tried to read the mood in her soft eyes.
Once she came to meet him at a drop-in centre in an outer-suburban church hall, dressed in a long black coat like a Cossack’s
and knee-high tooled leather boots. She was on her way to another appointment. He could hardly look at her as they queued
up at the urn for their tea, her pale winter face emerging from her fur collar, the little diamond flash on her hand. Like
Anna Karenina, like Natasha … Sometimes she turned up in a duffle coat and beanie, but
nothing could disguise her fineness, her radiance. Everybody looked at her. In spite of the danger, he was proud to be seen
with her.

Afterwards the meetings seemed dreamlike, a sort of fairytale.

They talked of one thing only, the commune movement, the quiet revolution, the alternative society. What else did he have
to offer but his ideals? He was nervily aware that he was nearly thirty with nothing to his name, back in the town he’d vowed
to leave forever. Utopian fervour, pastoral dreams gave him power. They were all that saved him from despair. He believed
that the whole of his moral and political education of the past decade had led him to this. All that was left to him now was
to take the step. It was the great adventure, the last frontier. Forty years ago this energy would have been consumed in fighting
Hitler’s war: fifty years earlier he would have been a communist.

Toni learnt quickly. She was his first and only convert. One by one he lent her the books he’d bought in London, on Findhorn,
subsistence living, folk medicine. She read them whenever Cy Fisher wasn’t around and returned them the next time they met.
Talk of monastic-style rituals, harmony with nature, mystical things, made her lower her eyes and slowly nod her head. She
spoke very little about herself, but said she’d wanted a different way of life for a long time. They talked only of the future
and gradually it became their future.

Communes were springing up all over the south, he told her. Groups of people raised the money for the land, or leased it from
a struggling farmer, and then lived on the dole until they were self-sufficient. That was the goal. He thought of them as
pioneers in a new way, an elite network that would eventually have its own schools, and bands and poetry, its own
trading arrangements. He’d made contact with a couple he’d met in India, who were starting out on a piece of land in the forest
on the south coast. It was all planned. There was work in the local timber industry so that after a few months they could
buy materials to build their houses and put in a cash crop, nut trees or avocados. They’d called the commune ‘Karma’. Even
he had to grin when he told Toni this.

He caught himself talking to her in his mind all the time, which always happened when he was going to get involved with a
girl. He wanted to tell her everything about himself. Who was she? It seemed amazing that she’d grown up at the same time
as him in Perth and yet their paths had never crossed. He tried not to think of her in a carnal way. She was a married woman
with movie-star looks – ten out of ten – way out of his class. He borrowed Arlene’s car or Beech’s VW for these appointments
and, like her, always parked at least a street away.

They were sprung when the brother-in-law of Cy Fisher’s sister Sabine walked into the roadhouse on the Great Eastern Highway
where they were eating eggs and chips. ‘Don’t look around,’ Toni hissed at Jacob, her head bent over her plate. ‘It’s René.’
The young man made no sign that he’d seen her, paid for his petrol and left. But that was enough, Toni said. It was only a
matter of time now.

‘You’ve got to leave town as soon as possible. Tomorrow.
Please
Jacob.’ He felt a stab of pleasure at her concern for him, her voice catching in her throat, her lovely brows knotted in
a frown. She fixed her eyes on his.

‘I want to come with you,’ she said.

As he drove through the rain to Armadale, he could no longer avoid the thought which had lurked at the back of his mind for
some time. That all along she’d been planning this, she’d been laying a trail in which to trap an unsuspecting man. Beautiful
women always found a man to save them. They got men to do what they wanted. And she was desperate to be saved.

If he told her at the station that he’d changed his mind, would there still be time for her to catch the train back home,
go to the top drawer, screw up the note, put her jewellery on again?

By now he was nearly half an hour late. Another minute and Toni would have left. He had pushed fate to teeter for a moment,
to see which side it would fall. A minute could decide his future, could even mean life or death. By the time he reached Armadale
his blood was thumping in his throat and his eyes had blurred. When he caught sight of her standing just inside the station
entrance he was flooded with relief as if she had become his only friend in the world. He realised suddenly how tired he was
of himself, how he could no longer face going on alone.

For the first half of the trip they did not speak. The VW’s heater didn’t work, the windscreen misted up and Toni sat shivering.
She still smelt of perfume, of the city. The car had no radio or tape deck and shuddered violently if pushed past ninety ks.
They sat stiff and cold and silent, checking behind them every few minutes. Without ceremony they had become a couple, making
their bid for survival.

They turned inland, towards the wheat-belt, and the rain stopped. According to their plan, to put Cy off their scent, they
didn’t drive directly to ‘Karma’, but headed for a bay on a remote part of the south coast, to a beach house where Toni had
once stayed as a child. It was owned by an old couple from her parents’ church, the Richardsons, who couldn’t often make
the long trip there. At this time of the year the house would be empty and they could stay for a night or two. Toni said she
knew the way. She had never forgotten that holiday.

It was understood between them, though neither said this, that before they started their great communal venture they needed
some time alone. Were they committing themselves to it separately or as a couple? When he glanced at Toni she looked serious
and self-contained. They knew nothing of each other in the everyday. Yet this commitment was, for the time being, final.

They stopped in Warton for petrol and for Toni to phone her mother. She was directed to a coin phone in the bar of the Federal
Hotel. Nig answered, to her relief. She told him she was driving north to Broome for a long holiday and would be in touch
when she came back. ‘Right you are, lovey,’ said Nig cheerfully. No questions. No hurt feelings. Year after year, in this
way, they rang each other on birthdays. He was probably running late for bowls.