The Good Parents (19 page)

Placidly, year after year, season by season, they did and said the same things. There was comfort in the rituals. It kept
the loneliness at bay. Who else was there to show the photos to after you’d been on a trip? They grew sleepy early from food
and wine and lack of stimulation. The women left and went off to their beds. The men stopped feeling sleepy then and stayed
up talking and watching videos.

The real friendship was between the men. They liked each other. (If they didn’t, it wouldn’t have been possible for the couples
to socialise.)
The boys
, Chris and Toni called them, and it was true, when they were alone together they shed the burden of being family men.

Carlos was easy in his skin, practical, open to a good time, like the woggy boys Jacob had grown up with. Right away Jacob
felt at home with him. In the early days Carlos helped him put up shelves and build a laundry. Jacob was always trotting out
to the pine trees to ask advice from Carlos in his shed. They made excursions into the bush together to cut firewood with
a chainsaw. Chris had built a high stone chimney in the Garcias’ new games room. She loved to keep a fire burning. ‘My little
white ant’, Carlos called her, which made the de Jongs laugh, thinking of Chris’s busy walk, her small grim mouth.

‘Why is Chris doing this?’ Toni said. ‘These chat-line romances never work.’

Chris as a romantic? Pouring her heart out in emails? The Garcias weren’t people of words. Jordan, who never spoke, was like
their spirit, silent and benign.

Sitting around talking made Chris restless. It was hard to remember the sound of her voice. There was always a project she
was working on. She developed fierce obsessions, horses, DIY, that strange stone garden. Each new project replaced the others.
When Wesfarmers closed down and she lost her job she started to spend ten hours a day on her computer. She didn’t train horses
anymore and she never went near her garden.

‘How do you know they don’t work?’ Jacob said. Toni’s certainties could annoy him. He thought she sounded smug. ‘Why not?’
Why not, if you start a conversation that seems to feed a private hunger? That seems to wake up a part of yourself which you
thought had forever shut down?

Chris was
in love
. What did that mean? I’ve forgotten, Toni thought. The notion was as foreign to her as being struck with genius. She remembered
the White Garden.

‘Poor old Carlos.’ Jacob saw his friend sitting at his kitchen table, leaning over his paunch, which he bore as gracefully
and cheerfully as a pregnant woman. He saw his dark-stubbled double chin, his small hairy fingers rolling a cigarette. His
eyes downcast, his thick black lashes. His quietness. Carlos was devoted to Chris. She had saved him. He was a junkie when
they met, lying beaten up in a park in Northbridge. Chris had been jogging. She’d stopped and asked if he needed help.

Chris made him go cold turkey. When you saw her with horses you understood how. A born trainer, Carlos said, proudly. She
brought him to live in the country. Carlos was grateful for every moment of his life. There was something loose about him
that Jacob loved. He’d been blown open and
there were no defences left, no illusions about himself. He was the humblest person Jacob had ever met.

He never lied, because nothing needed to be covered up, or different from how it was. The ordinary – a wife and kids, a porch,
a barbecue, his job in the workshop at the local hospital – was a miracle to him. With Carlos, Jacob felt the old longing,
to give up striving to be whoever he was and give himself to the simple pleasures of the world.

One winter when the kids were small, he and Carlos cultivated a dope bush behind the Garcias’ shed. After a smoke, everything
in their domestic lives turned into comedy. Late at night, like bulky boys, they roamed beneath the starry sky in parkas and
beanies, while the women slept, exhausted by the children. They loved escaping the intensity of living with a woman. We have
to give this up, they said, guilty as lovers. They began to smoke more and more. Once, during the holidays Jacob went stoned
to school, cruised down the empty corridors in his dark glasses, only just dodging Kershaw, sat at his desk, jotting down
words like ‘beauty’ and ‘cruelty’.

Chris put her foot down. Carlos was an addictive personality, he was playing with fire. Jacob could lose his job. Carlos uprooted
the bush and burnt it.

They started watching videos after everyone went to bed. Seasons of Cassavetes, Fellini, Bergman, old favourites and new directors
from Japan, Iran, Hungary, that he’d painstakingly taped from SBS over the years. Some of the classics he ordered through
the Education Department. Carlos developed a passion for Kubrick. Jacob liked to say that it was his greatest achievement
as a teacher, to turn Carlos into a film buff like himself.

He remembered a line in
War and Peace
and hunted it down.
They say men are better friends when they are utterly different.

‘Magnus has the best of intentions,’ Toni said from the kitchen, ‘but he doesn’t have a clue how to cook. He’ll never get
himself to school. He won’t wash his clothes.’

‘He’ll survive.’ Jacob felt a sneaking sympathy with Magnus’s desire to be alone. ‘Do him good,’ he added. Wasn’t it a father’s
duty to throw his son in at the deep end?

‘No, Jacob.’ Toni shook her head. ‘Three months is too long. If we can’t sort out Magnus we’ll have to go home.’ It would
be a relief in a way. It seemed as if their departure had upset a balance, let new, hostile forces into their world.

At that moment the front door opened and Cecile came in, followed by a skinny fellow in a dark-green pork-pie hat.

Was the whole room brighter because a young woman stood in the conversation pit in her black socks, black pants and jacket?
Jacob was surprised to feel an authentic thump in his chest. Cecile seemed larger than he remembered. He forgot his invalid
status and rose to his feet.

Her companion hung his hat up by the door and removed his shoes. A regular. How regular? Jacob studied him as he came down
into the room. His thin ashy hair seemed to have bites taken out of it, as if he’d attacked it himself in front of a mirror.
His deepset, unfriendly eyes glittered above wide Slavonic cheekbones. Jacob shook his small white hand. Dieter.

‘How are you guys going?’ Cecile said softly. She reached up behind her head to pull the clasp out and shook her thick hair
down around her neck. She looked tired but elated in some way.

‘Want to eat?’ Toni said.

‘Hear that, Dieter? He was ready to pass out from hunger as we came in the door. We’ve just worked twenty hours straight,’
she told Toni. Dieter said nothing. He went over to the breakfast bar and sorted through the mail. Jacob reflected that
in all his life he’d never met a man in a little hat who wasn’t pretentious.

Everything seemed suddenly cheerful. It was a relief to be with other people again, young people with their buoyant self-involvement,
their hearty appetites. Their powers of recovery.

Jacob hobbled into the kitchen and opened a bottle of red. Toni piled pasta into dragon bowls. They were a team again, in
service. This is what they were used to and it made them feel better. Cecile and Dieter sat on one side of the bar, they sat
on the other. Dieter put his head down and tucked into his spaghetti.

It turned out that Dieter was Cecile’s business partner. They had just finished a project for Prodigal Films, hiring the editing
suite at the company where they both had day jobs.

It was a corporate video for Cecile’s parents, who owned a business in Sydney.

‘My adoptive parents,’ Cecile said. ‘They’re Australian. They came to Kuala Lumpur and adopted me when I was three.’

‘You grew up in Sydney?’ said Jacob.

‘Yes. But I learnt everything I know in the first three years of my life.’

‘Are you happy with the video?’

Cecile shrugged. ‘It’s a professional job. We did it to fund other projects.’

We
. Dieter ate steadily, without attempting to join the conversation. Jacob remembered Joe Lanza, Arlene’s ‘business partner’.

‘My parents commissioned the film out of guilt. As a way of making me accept some of their money. I left everything behind
when I came here, car, clothes, books, watch, everything they’d ever given me. I was twenty-one. I sat my parents down and
told them that I never wanted them to give me another
cent. I thanked them for my education, put my key on the table and left.’

There was a faint, apricot-coloured flush on Cecile’s cheeks. She’s a bit high from her work, Jacob thought. But she wants
to tell us this. He felt a flare of happiness. He leaned across the bench and topped up her wine.

‘Can I ask you why?’

‘For so long it was kept in the dark. I wasn’t allowed to say I wasn’t happy. There is a wall of glass between me and my parents
and there always has been. I have never belonged to you, I told them, and you know it. I could see in their eyes that they
did. They sent me to the best schools and took me to Disneyland and put me in the will with their other kids, but I knew when
I saw them at the airport, at three years old, that I couldn’t be part of this family. They quickly came to regret their little
fit of philanthropy.’

Dieter calmly helped himself to more pasta with the air of one who has heard it all before.

‘When did you come to Melbourne?’ Jacob asked.

‘Nine years ago. I worked in a Chinese restaurant on Victoria Street while I finished the film course. I made a short film.
I changed my name back to Wong, my mother’s name.’

Cecile was suddenly weary. She put down her fork. ‘Maya hasn’t called?’ She climbed down from her stool and stretched, her
hands on her spine, her head tipped backwards. ‘Editor’s neck,’ she explained.

‘Toni can give you a massage,’ Jacob said.

Toni kept on stacking dishes.

‘She’s the official masseur of Warton. People come from miles around to see her.’ Jacob turned to Toni and recklessly went
on: ‘Did you bring your oils with you?’

Toni nodded, unsmiling.

Cecile undressed without speaking. Her room opened through French doors onto the balcony above the courtyard and was full
of restless shadows from the lights of the tower blocks flickering through the trees. Everything personal was stored behind
a wall of white slatted cupboards. They set out a folded sheet on the carpet next to the futon, and bent the neck of the reading
lamp for the light to be discreet. It was a good space for a massage.

Toni took off her rings and boots. Loud music, jazz, was being played downstairs. Concentrate, she told herself as she rubbed
her hands with almond oil. After all, she was grateful to Cecile and would like to do something for her. The small, warm body
lay spread out before her, face down, torso covered with a towel. Only the legs seemed adult, with surprisingly muscular calves.
She sensed an absence and knew that Cecile was falling asleep. Toni sat back on her heels, bowed her head and slowly twisted
up her hair.

Why had Jacob put her up to this? He knew she didn’t want to massage anymore. Before they left for Melbourne she’d sent out
cards informing her clients that the business was closing until further notice. Body & Soul Therapeutic Massage was no more.
In fact the name made her shudder. The whole hubristic venture was over.

Tonight, without knowing it, Jacob had switched allegiances. The beam of his approval was now focused on Cecile. He’d become
Cecile’s knight-at-arms, Cecile’s champion. It was as if an engine next to Toni’s ear had been turned off, a hum of involvement
was silenced.

Why don’t I care? she thought. Recently a strange, primitive conviction had come over her, that to get Maya back there would
have to be a sacrifice.

She had to clear her mind now, let her hands do the work.
The touch of a compassionate stranger
. She took a deep breath and started with a kneading movement to the feet, then, her hands rolling and pouncing like a concert
pianist’s, she made her way up the perimeter of the body to dig her thumbs deep into the pockets of the shoulders. Cecile
sighed. Her whole upper body was ropy with tension.

This was the reason why she had gone along with Jacob’s offer of her services. Because she could see Cecile was in pain. This
too was why she had offered to massage Miriam Kershaw when she was dying. By the time she’d brought her up the stairs to her
room on top of the community centre, she knew that Miriam was beyond any skills she had to offer. It was a shock to see how
frail she was. How the poor woman had winced and cried out as Toni touched her pitifully withered body. Tears of pain gushed
from Miriam’s eyes.

After Toni had helped her dress and sat her on the couch to rest a little before they tackled the stairs back down, Miriam
said: ‘There are healers and non-healers.’

‘What makes a healer?’ Toni asked.

‘Lack of ego.’

Toni drove her home to
Isolation
in silence. At the door, Miriam turned to her and looked her in the eye. ‘Our Lady of Warton.’ She gave a broad, deliberate
grin. That was the last time Toni saw her.