The Good Parents (22 page)

‘I don’t think she wants to tell me. She’s on a mobile, in a city. She only talks for a little while.’

‘How do you think she is?’

A pause. ‘Not happy.’

‘Could you let us know when she calls again,
straight away
? Doesn’t matter how late. We were about to go to the police.’

‘OK.’

‘Does she know we’re in Melbourne? Does she know we’re
very worried
?’

‘She knows.’ She wanted me to tell them, he thought.

Everyone is replaceable, Toni thought on the tram. If she died or disappeared, all the family would find substitutes. Less
than a year after her mother died, Nig married a divorcee called Mavis Kearns, fifteen years younger than him, and retired
to the
Gold Coast. All creatures acted from self-interest. The last and greatest vanity was to think you were essential.

The sky was dour outside the window. Last night she’d hardly slept.

The tram was not the early one that Maya would have caught but it followed the same route. At this hour it was filled with
schoolkids swinging on poles and gossiping. Maybe Maya would have been happier growing up here. When she left Warton she had
no real friends.

Odd lonely people were taking their first ride for the day. An ageing man with black teeth and an airline bag sat opposite
and tried to catch her eye. Did he sense she was now one of them, homeless, adrift on the streets?

But she was on a mission, resolved in the bleak dawn light, to retrace Maya’s route to the office, look for clues to her state
of mind. She had to focus now, try to see this city through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old country girl. A young woman descended
from the tram ahead of her and strode down Russell Street. She had wide shoulders and a free swinging walk, and she wore a
red hooded jacket which reminded Toni of a red windcheater that Maya used to wear. She could almost think it was Maya, a city
version, grown sophisticated and purposeful, head bowed listening to her Walkman. This girl had magenta streaks in her hair
and that indefinable big-city chic.

As if she were leading her, the girl turned into the street that Toni was looking for, a little road of nineteenth-century
offices and factories tucked in amongst the high-rises. Toni’s boots clipped along after her, a brisk, leggy countrywoman,
out of place here. The girl turned up a laneway and disappeared.

A
For Sale
sign swung high from a window on the top floor of the narrow building which housed Global Imports. This panicked Toni for
a moment, as if all evidence of Maya’s life in
this little fairytale canyon might also disappear. The front door next to Mimi’s salon was open. She went in. Through the
glass salon door she could see a pretty, black-haired beautician smiling as she spoke on the phone. From the dingy hallway
Mimi’s world glowed, soft, female, maternal. That was why women came to these places, to be comforted.

The treads of the dusty stairs creaked as she made her way past Jonathan Fung Barristers, up to the top floor. Global Imports,
handwritten in biro on a card, was slipped into an antique cardholder on the door. She knocked. The door was locked.

She walked out onto the fire escape and stood looking at the tunnels of pale sky between the blind glittering walls of the
modern buildings, the rusting roofs and fire escapes of the old. There, one floor lower, in a warehouse across the laneway,
was the girl with magenta hair, helping to move a screen. Large colourful canvases were leaning against the walls. The girl
had removed her red coat and was wearing a lime-green shirt. For a moment Toni was filled with longing for Maya to be like
that girl, laughing with workmates in a big bright space. Why did Maya always have to pursue the dark and solitary, the creaking
stairs and narrow passageways, like this Dickensian building?

She went to the Ladies’ Restroom on Jonathan Fung’s floor. It reminded her of the toilets in Boans in the seventies where
she used to rush for respite from Beryl. In the mirror she saw the shadows fall across her face. The heaviness like a stone
inside her had dragged down the corners of her mouth.

The pretty receptionist in Mimi’s shook her head. ‘The office closed a couple of weeks ago after the guy’s wife died. He’s
never even been back to pick up his mail.’ She indicated one of the letterboxes out in the hall, overflowing with flyers.

‘I’m looking for my daughter. She used to work here.’

‘The young girl with short hair?’ She frowned in sympathy. ‘I saw her on the day they closed. She left with him and another
man. We didn’t know it was the last time.’

Toni thanked her and turned to leave. She turned back.

‘How old was he? The boss?’

‘Late forties. Fiftyish.’

‘What did his wife die of? Do you know?’

‘Cancer, I believe.’ She gave a sober nod as she spoke, woman to woman. With a small farewelling smile she answered the phone.

She isn’t just pretty, Toni thought, as she pulled the sheaf of flyers from the mailbox, she’s the Beauty around here. So
where was the Beast? An envelope slipped out, addressed to Mr Maynard Flynn, Global Imports. She stuffed the flyers back and
put the letter in her bag.

She opened it in the corner lunch-bar as she waited for her coffee. A bill for goods sent from a company in Thailand. No huge
sums involved. At least she knew his name now.

A man whose wife had died. Some men couldn’t stand it. Like Nig. They rushed for consolation.

Yesterday she’d rung Karen. Maya loved her cousin Lincoln and sometimes stayed with Karen to give her a hand. She was much
closer to Karen than Toni was.

‘Nuh, not a word,’ Karen said in the blunt way she had these days. As if she didn’t have much patience for fuss over trivial
matters. As if nothing more was ever going to upset her. ‘She promised to send us a postcard, but Linc and I are still waiting
…’

‘That’s not like Maya.’

‘Ah, you know how it is at her age.’ Karen wouldn’t hear a word against Maya. ‘You fall in lurve and can’t think of anything
else.’

If anyone was going to say
history repeats itself
to Toni, it would have been Karen. But she didn’t. Conventional life, its small disruptions, was far behind her now. When
the kids were small, Toni was ashamed of their health and boisterousness if they visited Karen and Lincoln.

Bevan had left when Lincoln was two. He said that he was sorry, but he couldn’t take it. At that time the house was full of
a team of round-the-clock volunteers which Karen had organised for one of Lincoln’s therapies. As soon as the divorce came
through Bevan married his secretary. He proved to be tight with maintenance payments. Karen cared for Lincoln full time. She
kept her hair cut very short and wore tracksuits. They lived in an old home unit and had few luxuries, but Karen said they
were better off by themselves. ‘I’m not sorry,’ she said once. ‘Everything I know about life I’ve learnt from having Lincoln.’

‘Maybe she’s taking care of someone,’ Karen said before she hung up. ‘Got sucked in. She’s all heart, that girl.’

The coffee was good, the sunlight was pleasant in the window, there were newspapers to read, but Toni was unable to feel the
ordinary contentment of things anymore.

This morning Jacob had stood at the kitchen sink drinking a glass of water. ‘Lovely!’ he said.

‘What’s lovely?’

‘Water, when you’re thirsty. Melbourne water’s really quite good.’

All his observations of this city were positive, while she thought of it as dark and hostile. But Jacob, she could see, was
still alive to life’s joys. He was able to be distracted.

It wasn’t a death, after all. It wasn’t an abduction. Not even a missing person case, since Maya couldn’t quite give up
Magnus. But now, as clearly as if she were watching through Mimi’s glass door, Toni saw Maya pass down the dingy hallway,
her head bowed, following two men.

According to family myth, Jacob had rescued her from a dangerous criminal. Did she fall in love with him in Cy Fisher’s kitchen?
She couldn’t remember. Or did she – unconsciously – seize on him as a means of escape?

She wondered if she’d ever really been in love with anyone apart from her kids.

On the first day she and Felice watched the painters troop up the back stairs with their ladders and trestles, the handsome,
hung-over Capelli brothers – their father owed Cy a favour – and a friend they introduced as Dutchie. All of them had cigarettes
in their mouths. She registered Dutchie as different from the brothers, quieter, more introverted, as thin as a teenager in
his outsized borrowed overalls. Unlike the Capellis’ lustrous black curls – to the base of the neck, the longest their father
would allow – his rough tawny hair was cropped short. All day she could hear their footsteps and radio and the scrape of ladders
on the ceiling overhead. They were still working when she closed Park Lane. She and Cy were staying with Régine while the
flat was painted.

One slow, hot afternoon when everyone else was out, she slipped upstairs to check the painters’ progress. Only Dutchie was
there, high on a ladder, slapping a roller back and forwards over the kitchen ceiling like a robot, like a kid playing games
to relieve the boredom. A paint-spattered transistor tuned to 6PR was blaring on the scaffold beside him.

‘Hi,’ she called.

He swung around, knocking transistor and paint tray onto the tarpaulin covering the floor. They watched while a wave of white
paint spread across the canvas. He scrambled down and tried to block its progress with rags. His face was red. ‘I’ve got no
aptitude for this sort of thing,’ he said. It was so hot up there, with the sun through bare windows bouncing off the white
walls, that he had to shade his eyes when he looked at her. She invited him downstairs for a cold drink.

‘Coke? Beer?’ she said as she opened the little fridge.

‘Water will do,’ he said, then gave a short, self-conscious laugh. He was about her age but of the other camp. A hippie. At
last she had a chance to talk to one of them.

What man could ever resist the opportunity to explain himself to a receptive woman? He seated his paint-spattered rump on
her desk, and talked for two hours. Political activism was all but over since Vietnam, he said. It had been replaced with
a non-violent, non-materialist movement that was spreading across the world.

As soon as he had enough to buy a Kombi he was heading down south to find himself a commune.

Upstairs the puddle of spilt paint hardened on the tarpaulin.

‘Am I boring you?’ he asked. By now the sun was shining low through the trees in the park and light seemed to outline his
body. He’d renounced all asceticism for the evening and was accompanying her in a second gin and tonic. They sat facing each
other on opposite desks.

‘I think about this stuff night and day,’ he said, half to himself. There was something melancholy about his long cheeks,
their fullness around the jaw, but his mouth was firm, obdurate. His eyes were wide-spaced, idealist’s eyes. He had a wispy
beard and moustache that you didn’t notice.

He ran his hand through his rough hair. ‘I got a fever in
Ceylon before I came back. They made me cut this off.’ He laughed again. ‘They said my head had to cool. I was thinking too
much.’ Everything about the men she knew, it seemed to her, he had eliminated. The gestures of aggression and defence, the
hard presence, the air of humorous patience if a woman spoke … He was gentle, open. Could this be a new sort of man? It was
deliberate, she thought, something larger than himself was at stake. She felt the pull and strangeness of his conviction.
A spattered paperback stuck out of the pocket of his overalls. The late sun caught on the silver Sikh’s bangle on his thin
brown arm. She thought of the word
light
when she saw him.

He was a good storyteller. Already a vision had been transmitted and was taking form in her head, a strange mixture of the
tropics and the bush. Torchlit processions, bare feet on dirt tracks, the sound of drums and singing. Cooking fires all over
the valley, lamplit tables, rain through trees. Children’s laughter.

Any moment they could be disturbed but they kept sitting there on the desks, swinging their legs as the light softened and
their faces glowed in the shadows. Already, if they only knew it, he had crossed the peak of zealotry and was on the other
side, going down. Later he was to say – with some irony – that this was his true moment. Never had he been so articulate,
his mind more agile and creative. This was what he’d been waiting for. His ideas had finally served their true evolutionary
purpose, that is, to attract to himself the faith of a good-looking woman.

His eyes suddenly shifted beyond her. Cy Fisher was standing in the doorway. How had he managed to materialise without so
much as a creak on the floor? A smooth exchange followed about the speed of drying paint in the heat. But that was it, Toni
understood. The next day Romano Capelli came to finish off the painting. She knew better than to make any comment.

That night she lay beside Cy on Régine’s feather pillow and went to a place in her mind, a small house, a clearing, sheets
snapping in the wind. A tank for water with a pipe running into it. The sound of children playing. Was it somewhere in her
own childhood she wanted to return to?

She knew he was lost to her forever. She tried not to think of him in case Cy picked it up. She was consumed with fear that
the hippie painter would suffer some mysterious injury. One thing was certain, his career wouldn’t prosper in this town.

She wanted to warn him, tell him to leave for that commune of his or at least lie low. He’d mentioned that he was living with
an old friend who’d come back from London. She couldn’t risk sending a note via the Capellis. You never knew who was an insider.
Any further sign of interest on her part could be fatal. This sounded like a joke in the morning light.
But I’m not joking
, she said to herself.

She remembered Jacob telling her that he grew up a few blocks away from the Capellis, above that funny dress shop on Fitzgerald
Street. While Cy was in a meeting out the back, she told Felice she’d buy Greek cakes for morning tea and fled down Fitzgerald
Street. She entered Arlene’s to a peal of jangling bells and, trying to calm herself, rifled through her awful frocks.