The Good Parents (30 page)

One night in her cell, when everyone else was asleep, she phoned Magnus and in a low rapid voice instructed him to tell Maya
what she had omitted to say in every other call. That they loved her and nothing else mattered. That if she needed money she
must let Magnus know.

The youngest woman amongst the novices was in her early thirties, short and buxom with a distorted walk. There was something
wrong with her hips, she had to sit in a chair in the Hall. She had soft dark troubled eyes and black curling hair. Italian
perhaps, or Greek or Maltese. She was very conscientious in her devotions. Her affliction burdened her,
Toni thought, she was trying to get relief. One day during walking meditation, as the girl made her torturous, lurching way
on the bush track that ran along the top of the escarpment, Toni, coming from the opposite direction, broke the rules and
looked her in the eyes, smiling at her. The girl, surprised, smiled back. The sweet, obliging smile of a strictly-brought-up
girl in a patriarchial household. Suddenly she understood that she was drawn to this young woman because she reminded her
of Felice. Sweet Felice, her long-lost sister-in-law.

She’d thought it was quiet in Warton, but not compared to this. There were no other buildings nearby, no cows or chooks or
dogs, no road. The meditation pathway looped through the bush and turned back on itself. Far below a small road snaked through
the valley, with a scattering of houses beside it. One afternoon she saw an orange school bus pull up and five tiny kids swarmed
out and ran off into separate houses. She felt a longing to go down there, to be amongst the life of children and houses.

Karma
. A word once so familiar that it had its own meaning for her and Jacob now, as a sort of joke, a joke against themselves.
Here it was again, the subject of an evening talk from a big-shouldered, bespectacled Australian monk in his mid-thirties,
delivered in the matter-of-fact, boyish way of a sports teacher.
If you’re unhappy or in a poor situation, it’s due to actions you yourself have committed in the past, including past lifetimes.

The only escape from this endless cycle was mindfulness. She breathed in, she breathed out.

One night she could not sleep. As she lay listening to the snores of the other novices she saw light falling soft and sparkling
through a roof of leaf shadow into a forest clearing, as if she were standing there. She saw the two old railway carriages
parked on blocks parallel to each other, and between them the cooking fire. There was the big iron pot hanging from its tripod,
the battered kettle on the embers inside the ring of blackened stones. She saw the stumps for seats arranged around the fire
in their companionable circle, and then the wider circle around the clearing, the great soaring trunks of the tinglewood trees.
A line of tatty T-shirts and jeans was strung between the two nearest trees and a canvas bag, hoisted by a rope and pulley,
was hanging from the lowest branch. They called this the shower tree. Prem had invented the pulley. Now she could see the
white naked bodies of the communards, Prem and Wanda and Jacob, gasping and bobbing under the precious gush of water, one
after the other. After a shower, if the evening was mild, Prem and Wanda liked to stroll around for a while with the air on
their skin, chatting, bending to stir the pot, hanging out their towels. She could still see in detail, as if the sight had
shocked itself onto her retina, Wanda’s deep-clefted, indented womanly flesh, Prem’s neat muscly buttocks as he crouched to
stoke the fire.

Jacob’s turn at the shower tree was theatrical, baritone warblings, soap in a lather. She found a way of dousing herself with
a bucket of hot water behind the carriage. She said she’d have a shower when summer came.

The trees were so high that the sun only started to light up the clearing at the end of the morning. If it was overcast, or
raining, they walked around all day in twilight. At certain hours, between certain trees, the light penetrated in cathedral
beams. The ground was strewn with leaves and nuts and fallen logs and
tufts of bright green grass. Around the camp the ground was trodden into gray-black earth that quickly turned to mud.

From the moment they arrived, she realised that she was unprepared for the grubbiness and scrappiness, the dingy half-light.
Prem and Wanda’s greeting was so cool as to be offhand. Each morning she woke to darkness and shut her eyes again. She prayed
that today she’d begin to like it. There was nothing else to do but to try to make it better, because there was nowhere else
to go.

Prem and Wanda had been there for some months now and could give them the lowdown on the weather, the wildlife, the open suspicion
and contempt of the locals. The lack of sunlight in the clearing was proving to be a problem for growing vegetables but soon
they hoped to clear another acre at the northern end of the block. They counted on attracting followers to help with the felling
and milling of the trees and the building of houses. Perhaps because the block was so far south, and the giant forests so
daunting, up until now only Jacob and she had turned up. Prem and Wanda weren’t from the west and had no contacts here. They’d
come because they heard the land was cheap. Prem was from Melbourne. He worked in the family foundry before he dropped out.
He had mechanical skills and was used to the bush. His whole family used to go camping together all around the peninsula.

Prem was small and wiry, snub-nosed with a wispy beard. He’d travelled for several years and ended up with a guru in northern
India. That was where he and Wanda met. Wanda was American, and an old hand at communes. A long time ago she had been married
to a businessman, but she ran away to San Francisco to join the flower kids. The block and ute and railway carriages had all
been paid for by her marriage settlement. She
reminisced about communal living in California after dinner as they passed around one of Prem’s huge, home-grown joints. ‘Sure,
everybody balled each other all the time. There was no possessiveness. It was
wild
.’

Toni and Jacob slept on a mattress in the second carriage, which also served as the communal storehouse. They shared it with
a happy company of country mice, who partied furiously all through the night. Jacob talked of traps but Wanda was horrified
that he could even think of taking any living creature’s life. At least the snakes were in hibernation now. As summer came
on moths hatched in the sacks of rice and flour and lentils and beat against the windows to go out. If they tried to read
in bed, the moths hit and sizzled against the kerosene lamp. There was no flywire if they opened the windows to the night
air where the mosquitoes hovered, waiting to come in. In the end they daubed themselves with citronella oil and pulled the
sheet right over their heads.

In spite of brotherly love, they had fallen into a natural alliance against the other two.

‘Where did you meet them?’ she whispered.

‘On a houseboat in Kashmir. I have to admit we were all pretty stoned at the time.’

Prem and Wanda weren’t bad people. It was just, she thought, they weren’t her people. It was almost biochemical, the way kids
in a playground chose or rejected each other. Meeting them, she knew at once deep down it was never going to work. Did they
also whisper about her and Jacob in the other carriage? Somehow she thought they were too pure.

Above all was the worry about money. When they arrived at the commune they were down to their last twenty dollars. In
the one-store town, all they could afford was a little petrol, soap and tampons, not even toothpaste or a newspaper or a bag
of mixed lollies to console themselves. There was no question of credit. The woman behind the counter, Mrs Skinner, rang up
their scanty purchases without speaking or looking at them. To her, Prem told them, they were the vanguard of a plague that
was advancing south, across the honest rural world. There were shops in some little towns in the south-west with signs that
said:
No hippies served here
.

For the time being they had to share Prem and Wanda’s provisions, but that was cool, Prem said, his eyes narrowed, he was
keeping a tally, which included rent for the carriage and instalments for their share of the land. The money trip wasn’t what
it was about, he said. All the same it put Jacob and Toni at a disadvantage. They saw Prem looking at them if they took second
helpings, and they felt like bludging guests. Wanda gave them each a special twig from India to clean their teeth.

Thrift and its grim little satisfactions came naturally to her, as it did to all of them, children of parents who had grown
up in the Depression and set up house after the war. She remembered Beryl’s bargain hunting and penny-pinching. Even in the
midst of a fight with Nig, she would stalk around the house snapping off lights. But now they felt the exertion of poverty,
the time and energy it took to make do, mend, barter, plan, go without. Time and energy were all they had. She remembered
with wonder the shopping sprees she used to go on in her old life with Felice and Sabine.

They heard there was work at a sawmill, a small temporary outfit called a spot mill, set up amongst the lighter trees at the
edge of the forest. Jacob tied his hair back and went off with Prem. He returned exhausted and very quiet. The great
whirling saws scared him to death, he told her in the carriage, as she massaged his back and rubbed some of Wanda’s herbs
on his cuts and bruises. Machinery had always been his natural enemy. Prem, on the other hand, had even fixed a broken roller
for the boss.

Jacob was given the job of loading the non-stop spew of milled blocks onto trolleys, and soon he was the butt of all their
jokes. It reminded him of playing football when he was kid, he was never in the right place at the right time. The other workers
were a very rough lot. Some of them were on the run from the law. They told stories during smoko about the tricks they played
on fellow workers. There were a lot of missed digits and stumps amongst them. It was only a matter of time before it was his
turn. Already they called him Jake the Peg. You have no idea, he groaned. The infernal noise, the smoke from burning piles
of sawdust … it was purgatory, it was Gomorrah, probably Sodom too if he didn’t watch out, the stories of nights drinking
in the shed were bloodcurdling … his voice croaked on and on, like a little boy’s. But the next morning, without speaking,
wincing from his injuries, he set off again with Prem. The work was casual, he didn’t need papers. They paid in cash.

They treated themselves to a tin of tuna, eaten on their own in the car. Jacob bought tobacco and a bottle of port. She bought
a pair of workman’s bib-and-brace overalls, and canvas sandshoes, all that the store stocked in the way of clothes. Her single
pair of city jeans was threadbare, her boots in holes.

She and Wanda dug compost into the vegetable patch, hauled water from the creek, picked bugs off stunted silver-green cabbages.
When Prem had time, he was going to make a special pit to process their shit as fertiliser. The natural interdependence of
people with the land, Wanda said. They used to have
chooks to eat the bugs, but the foxes soon got them. She was hanging out for a couple of angora goats to raise, but they’d
have to build a strong pen.

Inside her carriage, which she’d made cosy with Afghan rugs and woven Indian hangings, was a spinning wheel and loom bought
by mail order from America. She had a thriving herb farm in a collection of old paint tins and saucepans she’d found in a
dump. For relaxation she sat on a stump talking and sewing herb pillows made from cut-up flour bags to sell at the Nannup
fair. Her hands were never still.

Wanda had a rosy face, flat-cheeked like a Tibetan, with waist-length, graying chestnut hair. She wore long Indian skirts,
faded beyond pattern, hitched up above her rubber boots. All day her slow flat vowels washed over Toni.

It turned out that she had left a child behind with his father in San Diego. A boy, Otto, now nine years old. Now all she
wanted was to have a baby. She was obsessed with moon cycles, fertility herbs, propitious times according to the I Ching.
She told Toni endless stories of home births, children born on the floor of a tepee while everyone sat around chanting and
holding hands.

The clearing was claustrophobic. Toni walked for miles along the road looking for a horizon, but apart from an occasional
set of ringbarked karri, there was nothing but the black-green walls of trees. The only solace was to sit by the creek that
ran across one corner of the block, and listen to the quiet brown water, eternally leaving, going somewhere. To join the inlet,
she supposed, to lose itself in the great Southern Ocean.

Clouds moved in overhead, ready to pour down rain. It was a sodden, remote place and the farmers were hard-pressed. There
was a darkness everywhere.