The Good Parents (29 page)

Toni was hanging out her towel on the line between two verandah poles. The bay lay before her at its loveliest, all pastel
shimmer, the coastguard lights twinkling like diamonds. The air was luminescent gray. A giant yellow rim was rising up behind
the escarpment.

Her long hair was wet and she was barefoot, in his sarong. She looked like a hippie or a gypsy, but in fact, he reflected
bitterly, she was anything but.

He walked straight up to her.

‘It’s OK, Jacob,’ she said. ‘It really is.’

They sat down on the plastic chairs overlooking the ocean. He folded his hands on the rickety table.

‘You have lovely hands,’ she said, as if this was a matter of record.

One thing he’d learnt about women, they always knew who they did or didn’t want to touch them.

Darkness was flowing in and at that moment they heard the hum of a motor. A pair of headlights came swerving up the track.
They rushed into the house, locked the door, closed the curtains and spied through the gaps. The car wavered to a halt at
the water tank, but left its headlights shining on the house. Luckily the VW was parked amongst the peppermint trees out the
back.

‘Dear?’ they heard a woman’s voice calling in the stillness. ‘Did we leave our towels out all this time?’ In the car light
they saw a big woman in a headscarf like the Queen’s, standing at the driver’s side, looking towards the house. Stiffly, a
little stooped, she made her way around the car to the passenger’s door. Inch by inch, a little old man emerged, and stood
shaking, bent and helpless, gripping onto his wife. Toni gasped. ‘Something terrible’s happened to Doug.’

She turned to Jacob. ‘I can’t face them,’ she whispered.

‘It’ll take them a while to get to the door,’ he said, watching. Now Rosemary was propping Doug’s back against the car as
he fumbled with his fly. The poor old guy must have been at bursting point. Rosemary bent down to help him.

They rushed around collecting their possessions. They had so little that there was even time to sweep the crumbs off the bench
and shove their cups and plates back into the cupboard. He tipped apples out of a bowl into a sleeping bag, Toni threw the
dust sheets back over the chairs. Just as they were letting themselves out onto the verandah, they heard the feeble scrabble
of the key in the front door. Stooped over their bundles, they ran around the other side of the house.

Now there was nowhere else to go but ‘Karma’. They drove tensely, on kangaroo watch. All they could see was the stretch
of gravel ahead in the VW’s weak lights. Something about the quality of silence made him aware that Toni was crying. He didn’t
dare look at her but put one hand for a moment on her knee. That made her burst out.

‘It was terrible not to have gone to help them. Those poor old good people. Did you see Doug’s shaking hands?’

‘They must have been confident they could cope or they wouldn’t have come.’

‘I feel like a thief. I feel like I stole from them.’

‘We hardly used anything except a bit of kerosene. We replaced the firewood. They won’t even know.’ He suddenly remembered
the sherry.

‘Of course they will! What about the towel? Bit by bit they’ll discover little things. Our ashes are still warm. They’ll smell
my shampoo. We stole their privacy. They’ll never feel secure there again.’

‘Old people don’t have much of a sense of smell,’ he said, trying to joke. He couldn’t help feeling a secret exultation that
she trusted him enough to show herself to him at last. She sobbed bitterly, her cheeks wet with tears.

‘That makes it worse! We took advantage of their age.’

‘Toni, they gave us shelter and I’m grateful to them. Does a few days’ squatting in a house that’s hardly used really matter?’
He was surprised to see what a stern moralist she was. Years of travelling, camping in other people’s houses, had made him
casual about possession, he supposed.

‘I’m always running away from things,’ she said drearily, blowing her nose. ‘I want to be honourable. I want to be
good
.’

He drove into a track leading off the road into the bush and pulled up in the dark. They listened to the ticking silence for
a moment as the moonlight found its way into the car and then at last, like a pair of teenagers they lowered their seat backs
and
wound their legs and arms together. Orphans, fugitives, outsiders in a landscape: already the pattern of their future life
was set.

After the rain a low sharp wind had started up that blew across the balcony straight onto his body in its sodden clothes.
He sat against the wall with his arms around his knees, trying to control spasms of shivers. What time was it? The light flickered
so busily through the tossing trees that he couldn’t read the face of his watch. It must be ten o’clock at least. He ought
to get up, stamp his feet, wave his arms around, but he was too stiff to take any action at all.

He hadn’t thought about this journey for many years. He used to tell it as a comic story from the crazy seventies. Funny,
what remained most vivid in his memory now was the glimpse in the twilight of the old couple at their car, Rosemary helping
Doug with his fly.

Soon, like old Doug, he wouldn’t be able to wait anymore, he was going to have to pollute the fishpond. It was that or desecrate
Mrs Chen’s porch. Was it possible to die of exposure on a Melbourne balcony?

He dozed and woke to hear voices passing in the street, talking in a foreign language. ‘
Um-ber-to!
’ someone called, plaintive and musical. Perhaps he’d caught pneumonia and was delirious. If he died, one of the things he’d
miss would be the soft voices calling out in Fellini movies.

The light came on in the bedroom behind him.

He started to gather up his legs but when he tried to stand he fell forward. He slowly turned himself around and looked through
the glass door on his hands and knees.

Cecile was putting one arm into the sleeve of a cardigan and then the other arm. It was the tiny purple cardigan he liked,
the one that subtly mocked home-knitted cardigans. She was doing up the buttons like a little girl, slowly, her head bowed.

It was clear to him now that such simple, ordered movements came from strength of mind. She was fending off sadness. Why hadn’t
he seen before how sad she was?
The heart within me burns.
Who said that? His thoughts were looping, as if he had gone crazy. All his being was waiting to be recognised by this marvellous
girl. With his last strength he reared up like Frankenstein and knocked on the glass door. Her face coming towards him was
at once familiar and yet changed, as if he’d been away for many years. Oh no, not this, he thought.

He felt her fingers, fine as chicken bones, grasping the purple slabs of his hands.

After he’d stood for a while under hot stinging water and put on clean clothes, he went to find her. It was nearly midnight
but she was sitting at her laptop. She swivelled around to smile at him.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Extremely humble.’

‘That handle! I should have warned you. Someone tried to break in once and I never had it fixed.’

‘I wasn’t snooping in your room, by the way.’ When she stood up, he’d quietly reclaim his jacket from the back of her chair.

‘Of course not.’

‘I went out there to have a smoke and see the view.’ He felt wild and simple, a man come in from the desert. Past fear, past
hope.

She sat studying him with full, thoughtful attentiveness. ‘Are you hungry, Jacob?’

‘I need a drink, first of all.’

‘There’s a little late-night place around the corner where you can get a good soup and a glass of red wine. How does that
sound to you?’

He wanted to tell her that nothing much mattered except to be with her, but he couldn’t find the words.

I
f happiness was so simple, so natural, how come it was so hard to achieve? She thought this as she sat cross-legged in the
meditation hall, trying to concentrate on her breathing. For thousands of years people had been striving to follow this path.
A whole religion had been built on this belief in inner peace, millions of lives devoted to its disciplines. All this, the
house, the monks and nuns, the humble students, the chants and talks, was a product of a vast ancient project to teach humans
how to be happy.

For some years now Toni had thought that she’d be ‘good at’ Buddhism, a natural. She had a little book of the Dalai Lama’s
sayings which she often referred to, and after reading a page or two she always felt more serene. She’d allowed herself the
fantasy that the Buddha was waiting for her. Each time she
passed the chubby little statue in Cecile’s courtyard she smiled at him as if they had a private understanding. Sooner or
later, she thought, she would be called.

In her current state of uncertainty and worry, the sight of Kesang’s plain clean face gleaming at her with loving kindness
was enough to make her want to throw herself into the Buddha’s arms.

But now that she was here, dressed in a dark red coarse-woven cotton robe of the novice, under a rule of silence, she was
discovering that far from being comforting and maternal, the Buddha’s embrace was hard-edged and austere. She saw that years
of gruelling discipline and practice lay ahead of her if she were ever to still her racing mind. Gongs rang, instructions
were given, candles lit, and there she was, left stranded in her own unquiet heart. The more she tried to leave the world
behind, the more it seemed to crowd in on her.

Without words, did you see more? Or was it the clarity of the air? In the first meditation session in the hall, as she closed
her eyes and mindfully breathed in and out, she was startled by a technicolour, large-screen vision of Maya, Maya as a little,
wild, big-toothed, tangle-haired girl, galloping towards her through the trees, in the days when her greatest wish was to
be a horse. Her face loomed into close up, until she saw the pale skin still faintly pitted here and there from her teenage
years, like scars, like sensitivity.

While the other novices breathed softly around her, lost in their devotions, Toni was consumed with longing for her, so acute
that she could have groaned out loud. Nobody knew you like your girl-child, your stony watch-dog. Your fellow female. The
one who always brought you to account. Right from Maya’s birth this had been a secret tension in the household.

The ashram sat on the crest of an escarpment, an old stone mansion built in the twenties as a country retreat for a wealthy
family. One of the heirs had endowed it to the Centre. Now temple bells and gongs echoed through the wide hallways, robed
figures glided up and down the grand wooden staircase, chanting lifted the cold air. The rooms had been cleared of carpets,
paintings and furniture, the floorboards stripped and polished, the walls painted white. The old stables across the courtyard
had been converted into sleeping cells.

Nobody knew each other’s names. There were two male novices and six women, whose soft worn faces reminded her of those women
in Warton who filled the congregations in the churches, made the cakes for the stalls, ran the charity drives. Each night
as she lay on her canvas futon, she heard their solitary rustlings and sighs, women on their own, released at last from looking
after everyone.

The robes made all their figures look bulky. They walked slowly, like brides or girls in evening gowns. Toni wore a sweater
underneath. Some mornings they rose to mist winding itself around the courtyard and the valley was obscured. At night a modest
fire barely warmed the hall while they sat cross-legged, listening to the evening talk. She was always a little cold.

There wasn’t a mirror in the bathroom, or anywhere in the house. The fall of her hair on her shoulders was probably inappropriate:
she half-expected to be told to pin it back.

Meals were served at a refectory table in the grand old kitchen. Two tall young nuns, their bare heads revealing swan-like
necks and dainty ears, their beetroot robes unable to conceal a loose-limbed slenderness, were the cooks for the ashram. Pearly-faced,
serene, they dished out porridge in the mornings, thin yellow dhal and vegetables and rice at other
meals. The servings were not large and needed more salt. Toni was always a little hungry. The novices didn’t look at one another
as they ate, but attempted to concentrate, as instructed, on who had grown and made the food and the interdependence of all
things.

At six in the morning when the meditation gong sounded, she had an impulse to pull her thin white quilt over her head, like
a naughty girl at boarding school.

Wherever it was that Maya phoned Magnus from, she wasn’t happy.

Breathe in the pain of a specific person
, they were instructed at morning meditation. Toni saw Maya’s bowed head.
Breathe out the white cool light of compassion.
Toni breathed in and out, in and out, but still Maya’s head did not lift.

Extend your practice to all who are suffering in the world
. Maya pushed Lincoln around in his chair. He knows everything, Maya said. He’s full of feelings. She sent him drawings of
horses. He used to cry for her if it had been too long since he had seen her.