The Good Parents (7 page)

‘Something is
keeping
her away,’ he said at last.

‘A love affair,’ said Toni.

There were no curtains in this house. The room was lit by the glow of the sky of a great unknown city. Maya’s room at home
looked out onto the palm tree next to the verandah. Every day Toni stood in front of her pinup board for a few minutes to
look at the photos, not for themselves, but to understand why Maya had chosen them. In Warton it would only be about eight
o’clock. Magnus was probably still at the Garcias.

They’d come to bed way too early, they would never fall asleep.

They lay still, not talking. Visions crossed their eyes but they didn’t share them. Both thought they were stronger than the
other.

After some time Jacob decided to get up. Toni was asleep. There was no true dark here, no relief. The bed sagged and his tracksuit
pants were twisted in the crotch. Usually he slept naked, but he didn’t like to, somehow, in his daughter’s sheets. He thought
he’d sneak down to the living room and see if he could catch a late-night movie.

He heard a faint twang of music as he came down the stairs. There was no light on in the living room except for the glow of
the computer screen. Cecile was sitting at it, intent. From
behind she looked like a twelve-year-old schoolgirl with a ponytail. The music came from her computer, a flute, a tinkling
ukelele, wailing voices, a sort of Oriental opera.

‘Working late?’ he called out, so as not to surprise her.

‘Editing.’ She kept looking at the screen. She was wearing narrow rimless glasses.

He approached. On the screen was an image of a walled courtyard with a door open to a dark interior.

‘You’re a
film
editor?’

‘Editor, writer, director. I have my own company, Prodigal Films.’

‘Why “Prodigal”?’

She turned. ‘That’s the name of a film I want to make. When I can work out how to do it.’

‘I won’t disturb you. I just need a drink of water.’

She turned back to the screen and pressed a key. ‘This is just personal footage. Holiday snaps.’

He stood looking at the image over her shoulder. Light fell through a grilled window onto the solemn profile and translucent
folded hands of a young Chinese girl.

‘My half-sister, Clarice. In Kuala Lumpur.’

Her hand paused on the mouse and he felt he was intruding. He went and filled a glass from the tap in the kitchen and stood
drinking, looking at the courtyard window. The spotlight by the fishpond was still on. Security, he supposed. The swaying
bamboo reminded him of water plants streaming upwards in an aquarium. He felt he’d stumbled into an underwater workshop, a
secret, nocturnal industry. Excitement churned deep in his bowels. He turned back, unable to keep away.

‘You work with music?’

‘For rhythm. Mood. This is a
pingtan
opera, in Cantonese.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘The fleeting nature of love. Something like that. I don’t speak Cantonese.’

She turned to face him. Strange to have such a large, solid presence in the house. Maya had the same roaming curiosity as
he did, and also wore tracksuit pants to bed. It must be a family trait.

‘Did Maya know about your films?’

‘Of course.’

He was silent. She’d never mentioned it to him. Why did this hurt him? He’d always felt that Maya understood his passion for
films.

‘Have a cigarette if you like,’ she said, ‘I really don’t mind.’

‘Oh, no thanks. I’m giving up while I’m here. That was just an aberration earlier. Toni hasn’t smoked for years.’

What a dag he was, in these saggy-bottomed pants, nattering, middle-aged. He lived in a dream and sometimes it cleared a little
and words came to him about his life.

‘Right now I feel as if I’m in a film myself,’ he said.

‘What kind of film?’

He considered. ‘A mystery. A crime thriller? Most plots turn around a crime these days, have you noticed? It’s become the
norm.’ All his thoughts seemed to take shape, spill out of him. ‘Beautiful young women are always in danger. You’re afraid
for them the moment they appear …’ He took a breath. Cecile was studying him. ‘Sorry. You were working.’

‘I’d better finish this tonight. I promised Clarice.’

Did she ever lose her composure?

‘Goodnight Cecile.’

‘Goodnight.’ She gave an unexpectedly wide smile. His face loomed out of the dark like a portrait by an Old Master, an infinitely
layered texture of tiny brushstrokes and lines. The sad eyes burn, self-judging.

To keep faith with Maya, they decided to set off the next morning to see the sights of Melbourne. Maya wished no one to worry,
she wished to be left alone. They must respect that. ‘We should try not to talk about her,’ Toni said over the cup of green
tea that was all she could find for breakfast. ‘We should try to not even think about her. Our
vibes
mustn’t disturb her.’

Before they left, Jacob phoned Global Imports and listened to the recorded message.
The office is currently unattended, but leave your number and we’ll get back to you.
What could you learn about a man from his voice? The tone was smooth as a radio announcer going through his paces. A mature,
confident, middle-class voice. What did
we
mean? Jacob took a breath and left a message, as if to answer him, man-to-man.
This is Jacob de Jong, I’m looking for my daughter Maya.
He spoke low in his throat, using what his kids called his headmaster voice. He hoped he sounded like someone to be reckoned
with. As he spoke he felt increasingly aggressive. If Maya heard the message she would know he was upset.

There was no sign of Cecile. Her child-size boots were still standing by the door, but perhaps she was wearing another pair.
Or was she asleep upstairs in the room next to theirs? Did she finish the holiday snaps for Clarice? Their conversation last
night was a tiny lit-up room in Jacob’s mind. He didn’t mention it to Toni.

Out into the world they went, armed with map and camera. In the park opposite there were European trees with bare sculpted
branches. Chestnut trees? Oaks? Also poplars and plane trees and unfamiliar eucalypts with tough dark leaves. The sky was
gray, the gum leaves didn’t shine as they did back home.
Apartment blocks towered over the park. Many of the families in the towers were refugees, Cecile had told them. It was good
to think of them waking to the birds and trees, that this country had offered them a haven.

There was a playground for the kids and a set of goalposts with a large puddle in front of it. The usual man with a dog sat
smoking on an ornamental rock. They passed an old Chinese couple in straw hats tied under the chin and a Vietnamese man delivering
newspapers on a bicycle.

Everything was thrown into the mix here. A broken-down worker’s cottage next to an up-to-the-minute converted warehouse, all
weatherboard and corrugated iron. Glimpses of old-time suburbia, front fences, roses, birdsong, then an apartment block with
an Asian look, tiled white balconies, wrought-iron screens. Two shops side by side, one selling newspapers, ice creams and
shampoo, like a shop at a beach, the other transformed into a hip little wine bar. A Buddhist nun with a vivid homely face
walked past, her burgundy robe not out of place here. In the distance were old brick factory chimneys, a spire, a civic clock,
a fluttering Australian flag.

So this was what had happened to the rest of the country! Apart from camping holidays and a package trip to Bali, they hadn’t
lived anywhere but Warton for nearly twenty years.

What a difference a few hours’ sleep made, Jacob thought. Was Maya’s absence really such a catastrophe? If she had mixed up
dates, arrived back a day or two late, was that the end of the world? They took their place at the crowded tram stop outside
the Vietnamese supermarket, amongst tiny grandmothers in black pyjamas and smooth-faced housewives in straw hats. Some were
accompanied by their daughters, patient and slender with long black hair and fashionable jeans. Maya hadn’t
told them this was an Asian neighbourhood, just like she hadn’t mentioned that Cecile was Chinese. He could see it wouldn’t
seem relevant, living here. On the corner a group of Middle Eastern men were talking Arabic, doing a deal. Young people of
all races milled around the shopfronts in a sort of costume of poverty, army jackets, broken-down sneakers, gelled hair. A
swarm of skaters kicked their boards into their hands and swung onto a tram.

They walked across a grand old English park into legendary Carlton where Jacob had always wanted to go. Look at the trams
rattling past, the rows of Victorian houses, people reading in cafes! A greengrocer played opera and sold buckets of cut flowers.
They allowed themselves to be enticed by a spruiking waiter to eat spaghetti at a table on the pavement where they could study
the passers-by. In this tender light all the passing faces looked intent and defined. Was it the glare at home that flattened
and slowed everybody? Lovely pale-skinned girls with sensitive expressions went past, like Parisiennes on their way to a cello
lesson. Young urban males walked and laughed unself-consciously together. Older women wore jagged hems and tousled hair like
playful little girls. Old people were everywhere, in the bookshops and cafes, making sign language to friends through windows,
as hedonistic as the young. Everybody moved fast, had somewhere to go. The elegant Melburnians. Where were the fat people?
Personal beauty was rare in Warton, but here it was hard to see anyone who didn’t have style. There were little specialty
businesses everywhere, enterprise wherever they looked. They were used to a dying town, shops closing down one by one.

They felt slow and lumbering and, as clouds massed over the winter sun, more and more chilled. They smoked a cigarette
each and then another one. What hicks they were, eating spaghetti in a tourist joint! Without their kids they didn’t know
how to be part of life. Unwanted, outdated, unmoored.

‘The bigger the world the smaller I become,’ Jacob said. There was a smudge of cappuccino foam on his lip. Toni brushed it
off. She felt a moment’s anger with Maya for having reduced them to this. They’d come bearing gifts and love and she’d thrown
it all in their faces! She was old enough to know better.

She
did
know better.

‘Something is wrong, Jacob.’

He knew at once what she meant. Pointless not to talk of Maya. They’d never stopped looking for her in the streets.

‘What if she calls?’ Toni said.

Suddenly they were frantic to go back. They ducked their way across a vast parade of streaming traffic, too panic-stricken
to find a crossing. The heel of Jacob’s boot caught in a grate by the kerb and his foot twisted as he wrenched it away. A
tram came rolling down on them. He limped aboard like an old man while Toni fumbled with the ticket machine. The tram was
packed and they swung close together for protection.

Toni rushed to the phone on the kitchen bench, Jacob hobbling after her. There was no message from Maya. Cecile wasn’t in.
She doesn’t stick around much, Jacob thought. Maybe there’s a lover somewhere.

From now on one of them must always be home, they said, within earshot of the phone.

They called Magnus in Warton, when they judged him to be back from school. The arrangement was that he’d eat his evening meal
and sleep the night with the Garcias next door. In the daylight hours when he was not at school he could stay
home with the dog. This was a compromise. It was not that Magnus wasn’t comfortable with Carlos and Chris and their boys,
in fact the whole family worshipped him. But he wanted the chance to have the house to himself, to live with his music. Even
now, on the phone, Toni could hear the electronic thud coming from his bedroom. He’d be standing in the kitchen, looking out
the long windows. All of them turned to look out the window when they spoke on the phone. The almond tree, a white radiance
in spring, would be sprouting its first buds. Already there was a detached, self-sufficient note in the husky tones of Magnus’s
voice. The music was getting fainter, he must be walking down the hall. She saw him mooching round the house in his big sneakers,
head bowed, Winnie trailing him.

‘Is Winnie missing us?’ She heard the smile in her voice. The whole world smiled for Magnus.

‘Maybe. She won’t let me out of her sight. How’s Maya?’

‘I don’t know. She isn’t here at the moment. Actually, she’s been gone a few days. Something to do with work.’

‘Weird.’

‘Listen Magnus, where do you think she’d hang out in a city like Melbourne?’

She hadn’t been going to tell him about Maya in case he worried but now she felt she couldn’t risk losing the chance of a
sibling insight. He and Maya were close. In fact he’d be offended if she didn’t tell him.

‘Music shops. Parks. Movies. Hungry Jacks. Why, don’t you know where she is?’

‘No.’ She’d never been able to lie successfully to her children.

‘Weird,’ Magnus said again.