The Good Parents (6 page)

OK? he said. He fetched her coat and helped her put it on. He seemed like a friend, but he was not a friend. Everything had
slowed and darkened. There was a drumming in her ears.
Strange to see the brightness outside the windows, like a world she’d just left.

He put on his jacket and picked up his briefcase. Did she want to leave a message for her housemate? Celia, was it? He wasn’t
very good with names. Often called her Myra in the beginning. She couldn’t focus, her mind looped and slid away from something
she had to remember. Something important. He ushered her out ahead of him. Her legs went one after the other as if they didn’t
belong to her anymore.

For some reason all she could think of as she went down the stairs was the little back room that she hadn’t cleared out for
her parents.

T
he key was under the little Buddha by the fishpond, where Maya told them it would be.

The house was a surprise, a narrow brick townhouse, wedged in between two nineteenth-century cottages. Its weathered, slatted
wooden fence stood right on the footpath. Looking up, through fronds of bamboo, you could glimpse French doors opening onto
a small balcony. Inside the gate was a dwarf courtyard jungled over with bamboo, and it was somehow comforting to make out,
amongst the matted trunks, the little fat familiar figure meditating beside a swampy pool.

Inside, putting their suitcases down, they both said
oh
at the same time. They were looking out from a landing into one large, high-ceilinged room, set lower than the entrance,
three steps down. Behind its economical façade, this house expanded
into family-sized proportions, as if it had been hollowed out.

Light from the courtyard filtered in through a plate-glass window and cast a pattern of dipping bamboo over the rough brick
walls.

A staircase to the floor above half-bisected the room. To the left was the kitchen, marked off by a bench and bar-stools.
To the right, down a couple of shallow steps, was a sunken floor surrounded by three black built-in couches, like ringside
seats at a swimming pool or theatre in the round. In the middle was a bare coffee table and on the fourth side was a TV. No
mess anywhere.

What had they expected? Cramped student digs? Grungy suburbia? Not plainness as style. Not
open plan
. Although it had the stripped, shabby look of a rented house – the worn black leather of the couches was splitting in places,
the varnish of the coffee table was stained with cup rings, the floorboards were dull and scratched – in the play of light
and sweep of its proportions, it had a grace that still drew attention to itself. Like good bones in an old face.

‘I went to parties once in rooms like this,’ said Toni.

They stepped down into the living room. ‘Isn’t this what we used to call a
conversation pit
?’ said Jacob. It reminded him of youth, sex, aspirations to sophistication. All a little dingy now. Nothing here was bright
or new.

Then he spotted the gleam of contemporary hardware in the gloom beyond the kitchen. On a bench against the wall was an impressive
line-up, brushed aluminium laptop, scanner, printer, a see-through perspex speaker coiled like a model of an alimentary canal.
Technology he didn’t know how to use. He shuffled through a wire mesh rack of CDs. Contemporary, jazz, Latin, electronic.
Whose ear and eye? Most of the musicians he’d never even heard of.

‘She’s done well for herself,’ he called out. He sank down on the black couch opposite the television. Almost by itself his
hand reached for the remote control on the coffee table and began to channel-surf the afternoon programmes.

Toni went to the kitchen and filled the electric kettle. They’d left Warton at three that morning to drive to the airport
and they needed a cup of tea. She found teabags and cups on the bench, but apart from a few packets of spices and noodles,
the cupboards were empty. None of Maya’s comfort foods. Were she and her housemate on some sort of diet? Some wrinkled apples
in the fridge, a jar of jam and a packet of coffee grounds. No milk. A trail of ants was trekking across the vast white steppe
of the bench.

All at once she left the teacups and ran upstairs. She opened the first door onto a still life of Maya’s tracksuit and ugg
boots lying tumbled on the floor. The bed was crumpled, the doona thrown back. She must have been running late. There was
the usual pile of magazines and books beside the bed, and a few skeletal apple cores scattered about. Maya couldn’t sleep
without reading and couldn’t read without eating an apple. The Chekhov paperback was on top. Jacob had given it to her, he
was always trying to get the kids to read Chekhov.
The Lady with the Lapdog and Other Stories
, with a photo of Magnus and Winnie as a bookmark, just a few pages in. She wasn’t doing much reading here.

The room was a lonely little tower, bare brick walls with a long thin window overlooking the roof next door. The air was cold
and stale. Did Maya wake up here this morning? Toni resisted the impulse to pick up the tracksuit, pull up the doona, open
the window. Maya resented anyone setting foot in her domain.

In the bathroom opposite was her towel from home, bone-dry on a rail, and another towel, more recently used. There was an
expensive little pot of lemon-scented cream on the shelf
beneath the mirror. Whose? Toni sniffed it, dipped her finger in and smeared it under her eyes. Her face felt dried out from
the plane. What made her think she could take liberties like this in her daughter’s house? Right now she’d like to curl up
in Maya’s bed and close her eyes.

As she came downstairs a beam of late afternoon sun shone straight from the courtyard onto the couch where Jacob slumped.
Toni removed the remote control from his hand, turned the television off and sat down next to him. Within a minute she too
was asleep.

This was how Cecile saw them when she came into the house. First the suitcases, then the two figures sitting side by side
in the last light. She knew at once who they must be. She padded down and stood in front of the couch, studying them. The
man was snoring gently, one hand across his stomach. The woman’s head lolled back, her mouth slightly open and her chin squashed
down in a position she probably wouldn’t regard as flattering. They were just at the turning point in that process of thickening
and blurring that slowly ate up people’s youthful looks. In sleep, this was endearing.

They looked like they were used to sitting like this on a couch, their hands fallen down together as if at any moment they
might find each other and clasp them. Cecile almost felt that
she
was the intruder. She stepped back a couple of paces.

People resented being looked at, she’d learnt that very young. Her mother – her adoptive mother – used to go red in the face
and start to cry if Cecile stared at her when she was a child. She was sent to her room, but she crouched listening at the
end of the hall to the inevitable phone calls that her mother would make to her friends.

To be perfectly honest she frightens me.

I sometimes think she isn’t human.

Her mother never understood that she’d learnt to read people with her eyes from the moment she opened them because she was
alone and too young to know the words their mouths were forming.

Why was Maya so offhand about her folks? When Cecile asked if they’d be OK with a mattress on the floor, Maya rolled her eyes.
‘They’d love it! They’re
terrified
of luxury. They’re just old hippies.’

This couple didn’t think of themselves as old. They both wore jeans and worn leather jackets and much-polished R.M. Williams
boots, more like ageing rockers than hippies. His belt was snuggled under the gentle rise of his belly. Her long roughened
fingers were scattered with silver rings. He had a pouchy jaw, a weathered face, and a mass of gray-blond hair. Her hair was
dyed dark red, tucked thick and curling behind her ears. She had black arched eyebrows, clear sallow skin, a long, muscular
neck. She took care of herself. Her jacket pushed out over her breasts.

You could say a sort of small-town version of Nick Nolte and Anjelica Huston. They looked right somehow in this setting. They
matched the house.

She liked the way they didn’t sprawl, but sat upright, self-effacing in their daughter’s territory. They could be sitting
in an airport lounge. There was a holiday sheen about them, they seemed to breathe a wholesome air. Good country people come
to the city. Their eyelids were fluttering. People always knew when they were being watched. Cecile felt a moment’s pang for
what she had to tell them.

‘Hi,’ she said softly.

They opened their eyes at the same time and sat up blinking, wiping their mouths.

‘I’m Cecile. I live here with Maya.’

Dazed, they started to struggle to their feet. Cecile held up her hand.

‘First I have to tell you that Maya is not here.’

‘She’s at work,’ said the mother, sitting back.

‘She’s gone away. She left a message on the phone five days ago. I wasn’t here when she went.’

‘Where has she gone?’

‘She didn’t say. She said it was for work and that she’d be in touch.’

‘Did she say when she’d be back?’

Cecile shook her head.

They sat very still and solemn, their hands fallen on their laps, as if the air had gone out of them. They’d forgotten to
introduce themselves. They were
sweet
.

In spite of her mother’s apprehension, Cecile knew that she observed her fellow beings in a spirit of enquiry and benevolence,
not to say, in some cases, with a quite disproportionate tenderness. In fact she was careful to keep a space around herself
in order to retain detachment and balance. She knew, even as a child, that her distance from her adoptive mother was a kindness.
Above all else she despised the exercise of power over others.

She turned on the lights and the heating and stood at the kitchen bench. ‘Shall we discuss it over an aperitif?’ she asked
them.

‘Maya and I pride ourselves on our dry martinis,’ Cecile was saying, brandishing a tarnished cocktail shaker, chattering like
a cooking demonstrator, aware that the parents weren’t really listening, when suddenly, without a word, they rushed past her,
out the front door into the courtyard. She peered up to see
them illuminated by the spotlight over the fishpond, each puffing furiously on a cigarette. Smoking the way people drink when
they want to get drunk, with a savage, private intensity. Like most smokers they were probably trying to give up.

How had they managed to stay together? This was the question Cecile always asked herself about couples. He was a big, pale,
dreamy man. She was quite a foxy lady. What was the glue between them? Her detachment? His distraction? He was putting a packet
of Drum back in his pocket. They were roll-your-own type of people.

Ever since they opened their eyes to see a tiny Chinese girl standing before them, the world had darkened and a heaviness
crept over them that no martini could lift. The girl – the young woman – Cecile was very kind. Of course you must stay, she
said. She was very self-possessed. She had a precise, definitive way of talking, perhaps from speaking English as a second
language, or perhaps from going to an exclusive school. It was hard to tell her age, she could be nineteen or twenty-nine.
Not the stereotype of the glamorous Asian girl, in her loose black clothes with her hair pulled back behind her slightly protuberant
ears, and her bare broad face. Almost a Maoist look. Her sleeves were neatly turned back from her slender wrists, ready for
work. She was a gracious host, more than she needed to be. For a few minutes she slipped out, reappearing with some sort of
spicy Asian soup which normally they would have relished. She brushed aside any offer of payment. They ate, forgetting to
taste it or praise it. Had Maya been unhappy? they asked. Did she have a boyfriend? Was there any sign that she was into drugs
or a religious cult?

They felt shocked, like jilted lovers. Sick with disappointment. They hadn’t realised how much they’d been counting on
seeing Maya. Now they must wait a little longer. Surely there was a good practical reason for her absence.

Or were
they
the reason?

They felt shamed, rejected, in front of this sophisticated young woman.

They must stay as long as they needed to, Cecile said. Shyly they excused themselves and made their way up to Maya’s room
where, like sick children, they put themselves to bed.

‘It isn’t like her,’ Jacob said.

‘Isn’t it? You know how we get on her nerves.’

‘That’s because we still matter to her. She’s very loyal, really. She’s never let us down before.’

‘Remember how I treated my parents?’

‘We’re not parents like your parents.’ Right from the start, this had been an article of faith between them.

‘Maybe we are, to Maya.’ Toni turned her head to look out the window. They liked to think of themselves as young at heart,
open-minded, but it was true, Maya hadn’t seemed very pleased with them for some time.

‘We
let
her go,’ Jacob said.

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have.’

‘We had no choice, remember?’ My little thundercloud, he used to call her.

‘Maybe this is her way of telling us that she wants to be left alone in her new life.’

‘Maybe it isn’t anything to do with us. Most likely she got the date wrong and she’ll be back tomorrow.’

They were silent for a while. Jacob thought of the hallfuls of parents he had faced, term after term, queuing up for his good
advice. His self-righteous hints that perhaps there was something that they didn’t quite get about their kid. Usually he
advised easing up, letting alone, believing in the good in your child. Sometimes his palms tingled and he knew he wanted to
say that the little bastard needed a strong hand.

Physician, heal thyself
. Where was that from? The Bible? A line of a song or poem would often go round in his head and he wouldn’t know where it
came from. It generally related to where he was in his life. His unconscious sending him a message.