The Good Parents (15 page)

He flicked through the mesh rack of Cecile’s CDs again. The covers were elegant, delicately hip. The names were enchanting.
Sigur Ros
,
The Sundays
,
Cocteau Twins.
Some lettering was too pale and tiny for him to read without his glasses. He pressed the play button and the room filled
with a rendition of ‘Night and Day’, just recognisable in the sad plucked chords of a solo cello. Two intermittent piano notes
that broke his heart.

He’d persuaded Maya once to come to Perth with him, after the debacle with that poor young Brethren kid. He remembered listening
to Lucky Oceans on
The Planet
, while Maya looked out the window into the darkness and listened to her Walkman. He wanted to tell her how often he’d fucked
up when he was her age, but she wouldn’t give him a chance. She never said a word to him the whole weekend.

Where was Toni? Where the hell did she go?

F
or some time she sat in the grounds of the tower blocks across the road, on a boulder amongst the trees, overlooking the little
goalposts and the muddy playing field. The glowing pearl-gray air made her feel lighter and more alert. Right now the last
thing she felt like was the burden of a big wounded man.

The jewellery box had upset her this morning. She was trying to shove their bags to the back of Maya’s cupboard when she found
it, wedged into a corner. A large, brown, clumsily carved wooden box, mass-produced for tourists. She sat on the bed and studied
it, squatting on the floor like a toad. Her heart was thudding. She felt an irrational, violent antipathy to it, as if it
cast a spell. Maya would never buy a thing like that. For a start, she had no jewellery. And it was ugly, dated – the sort
of
thing Arlene and Joe used to buy on one of their trips to Singapore. Someone who hadn’t given any thought to what Maya would
like had given it to her, and she had accepted it.

In the tower blocks, now that the rain had stopped, carpets were hanging out to air over the balconies and curtains were billowing
in open windows. Toni caught a whiff of curry steam. No little black-haired kids and their mothers had come out yet to the
playground. Yesterday she stood and watched them. When she saw parents and young children together she saw a love affair.

She walked over to the empty swings and frames in their wet bark beds. The rubber seats swung idly in a secret current of
air. She dumped the jewellery box, wrapped up in a plastic bag, into the playground bin, which she hoped was emptied daily.

She wouldn’t tell Jacob about this. He would say she had no right to dispose of something of Maya’s. Besides, any hint of
what he called ‘the dark arts’ always made him furious.

It was a challenge finding ordinary household goods in the Vietnamese supermarket. Where was the Vegemite amongst the chutneys,
pickles, lurid syrups? The butter, in those little glass-fronted fridges with the plastic boxes of aquarium-coloured jellies?
The phosphate-free laundry powder amongst the stacks of giant boxes of Omo, with instructions in Chinese? Her hand hovered
over the bright green spring onions and bok choy, the mangoes and rambutans, all at no-nonsense prices. Forget about petro-chemicals,
additives, sprays. No one had time for greenie scruples in this hubbub of transaction, amongst these purposeful, fast-moving
people.

She was picking out mandarins from a mound on the table when from the corner of her eye she glimpsed a girl in a denim
jacket with pale skin and wide cheekbones and a dark bowl-like haircut, paying at the checkout. Of course it wasn’t Maya,
she was nothing like her really, in her twenties, part-Asian, but after that Toni wasn’t equal to the noise and clutter of
these aisles anymore. Coffee, she needed coffee to rev her up to the pace here. Where could she go?

She reeled down the footpath past the windows with the varnished brown corpses of ducks and chickens, the street-front GPs’
clinics, the herbalists and acupuncturists, tax consultants, fishmongers and video stores. There were several Chinese and
Vietnamese restaurants but she fled into the known insipidity of a franchised French Bakery. Even here fried rice and spring
rolls were offered along with the croissants and baguettes, and the waitresses in their bright pink T-shirts and caps were
Asian.

At a table in the back corner, facing the room, next to the exit – a habit learnt from Cy Fisher – she spooned up her cappuccino
foam and listened to the old-fashioned trundle of a tram going past.

I keep thinking I see you
: that’s what her mother used to say when they had one of their lunches in Boans.

Beryl found her by working her way though every travel agency in the Yellow Pages until she rang Park Lane Travel and spoke
to Felice. After that they met for lunch two or three times a year in Boans’ cafeteria. Beryl also always sat in the furthest
corner, but for a different reason, so that none of her friends would see them if, by a stroke of calamitous bad luck, one
of them happened to walk past. Not that Beryl’s crowd were likely to lunch there. The cafeteria was on the top floor of Boans
department store, under huge meshed windows, a vast
hall filled with a dusky cathedral light and the rising hum of dozens of lunching women’s voices. Middle-aged waitresses in
peppermint-green uniforms and nurse’s caps doled out peas and mashed potato with ice cream scoops as you stood at the servery
and pointed at what you wanted. Homely meat and gravy smells and the clatter of dishes issued from the kitchen. Even in the
seventies it was old-fashioned.

The first time they met, Beryl talked non-stop about the same old things as if Toni had just come back from a trip and was
still part of her world. Her headaches, Karen and Bevan’s new house, Nig’s winning team at bowls. Then she stopped, her eyes
wandered and her lips trembled.

‘You know, I was … sick … for a while,’ she said. Toni did not respond. Of course she knew, she’d known as she crossed the
Horseshoe Bridge in her bridesmaid’s outfit how it would be for her mother. As if bells rang out all over the suburb, the
sky darkened, war was declared. She would become hysterical and take to her bed. The doctor would be called. When she’d recovered
sufficient strength to talk to her friends on the phone, she’d put it about that Toni, always independent, was off
flatting
– that was the word she’d use – with a girlfriend. But one sceptical glance, one pointed lack of enquiry, would let Beryl
know the word was out. The Parker lass had run off with a common criminal, and no decent people would have anything more to
do with her. A girl whose looks had gone to her head.

Toni’s leather coat hung on the back of her chair, her long straight hair gleamed, her breasts had grown. She knew she was
dazzling. The ease and pleasures of her life surrounded her like an aura that protected her. For the occasion, it was true,
she had taken off her little diamond ring, but that was to avoid personal questions.

As they were about to leave, Beryl, hunting in her handbag for her powder compact, said in a low, deliberate voice: ‘I think
you should know that Daddy missed out on his promotion.’ Her eyes caught Toni’s. It took Toni a moment to realise. Because
of you, her mother was saying, because of the scandal. ‘So he still has to hawk his wares all over the country.’

Toni stood up and walked out. She’d learnt from watching Cy that you had to act quickly. You had to take the power. If people
wanted to do business with you, they had to show respect.

She knew her mother would hold her tears back until she reached home. On the phone beside her bed she would tell Nig and Karen
that Toni had changed, had been influenced by
him
, had become glamorous and hard. Her own daughter was a stranger.

All her life she’d known what Beryl was thinking until she couldn’t stand it anymore. The thoughts didn’t touch her now. You
never compromise, Cy said, you never look back. That way there was never any fuss.

And he was right. Beryl rang Park Lane Travel a few months later to invite Toni to lunch and never tried to blackmail her
again.

She belonged to another family now. In the beginning she didn’t know how to cook or even make a shopping list but it didn’t
matter, they ate at restaurants or in the big kitchen of Cy’s mother, Régine. They sat around Régine’s table with his sisters
and his brother-in-law and ate vegetables from her garden, sausages she’d cured herself, chicken she’d raised on corn and
killed and plucked. His mother’s food made Cy
supremely happy. ‘Maman, you surpass yourself,’ he said, each time. Régine was the only person Toni ever heard Cy praise.
She welcomed Toni as if she were a waif, poorly fed, motherless, shockingly untrained in the house. After the meal, in a rush
of clatter and high voices, she and her daughters would dispense with the dishes while Toni was still looking for a tea-towel.
But anyone Cy brought home would always be an honoured guest for Régine.

Régine stomped up the stairs to the flat to instruct Toni on how to clean it, how to make the bed in the way Cy liked. She
took their washing home because Cy didn’t like laundry hanging around the place. She excused this act of possessiveness, this
blatant invasion of privacy, by saying she knew Toni was busy, all the young women were busy these days. Besides, wasn’t she
Toni’s own mother now? Régine had Cy’s black deep eyes, but hers were distracted, always looking for the next thing to do.
She was short and dumpy with bad feet, in a wraparound coverall and fraying canvas shoes, her gray hair pulled roughly back
from her white, damp face with the long, flattish nose that she had, in various versions, bequeathed to all her children.
Beryl would have said that Régine had let herself go, but for her children she was an angel, who devoted every moment of her
day in service to them. Even when she went to Mass, it was to pray for their
bonheur
, she said, for their luck in love and with the
monnai
.

Downstairs in Park Lane Travel, which was never very busy, her daughters made her sit down and drink coffee, and in her honour
Cy would come out from his office behind the shop with whoever was with him, Johnny, Serge, Pino, and they would all drink
coffee standing around Régine, laughing and teasing each other, because it made Régine so very happy.

Far from being the sordid, dangerous life Beryl envisioned, this new world was warm, familial, orderly and clean. Toni had
never felt so light-hearted. In the mornings she worked in the travel agency – there was sometimes a booking to be made for
friends or relatives, or a backpacker shopping for the cheapest deal or the odd passer-by struck by a sudden whim for the
south of France. Mostly she and Felice read magazines and did each other’s nails and listened to 6PR. Sabine was pregnant
and kept irregular hours. In the back office, men came and went from the carpark behind the shop. It hadn’t taken Toni long
to realise that this was where the real business was transacted.

When Park Lane Travel was very quiet, the girls put a
back at twelve
sign on the door, took an advance on their pay from the till, and went shopping. Money, saving it, spending it, worrying
about it, so large a part of Toni’s upbringing, was never talked about. When Toni passed her driving test – Cy organised lessons
with a driving school in which he had an interest – he gave her a car, a little red brand-new Renault that was taking up space
in a yard. He said he didn’t like her catching public transport.

Three times a week she drove to lectures and tutorials, and sat apart, sleek, chic, claimed. Her diamond flashed as she took
notes and the tips of her hair brushed the page. She felt far older than the other students. It was as if she came from another
country. After the lectures she drove straight home. Her books were set up on a table in the corner of the living room, but
she found it harder and harder to summon the energy to open them. There was enough for her to learn in her new life. Besides,
what use was a degree to her now? She dropped down to one subject a term, just to reassure herself that she still had a life
of her own. Then there didn’t seem any point and she didn’t re-enrol, though she knew she ought to
keep up French to talk to Régine, who kissed her on both cheeks when she tried. Something had gone soft and lazy in her.

Cy didn’t like anything to seem like an effort. He was never in a hurry. In the afternoons he generally went upstairs for
a siesta and he liked Toni to be there. Nobody would ever disturb them.

Since he didn’t come home to sleep until the early hours of the morning, he was at his most sensuous in the afternoons. It
was his Mediterranean blood, he said. Later she lay in a deep bath and dressed for the evening. When she looked in the mirror
she could hardly believe her own splendour. On the nocturnal round of bars and clubs and restaurants, Cy introduced her as
‘my fiancée’. It seemed to her that wherever she went she was surrounded by a circle of shining faces. She only had to pull
out a cigarette packet for a lighter to appear. When she was tired and Cy wanted to gamble through the night, one of the boys
drove her home, walking into the flat ahead of her, checking the rooms, snapping lights on and off.