The Good Parents (3 page)

By three o’clock she felt very bad indeed. She shut down the computer, put on her jacket, zipped it up to the chin and locked
the office door. Although she had no experience of religion she went straight across the road into the old church and sat
down in a pew. She had an impulse to pray for Dory, though she didn’t know what for. Too late now to pray that she’d be cured.

For her forgiveness? Why hadn’t she thought of this before? She’d let herself believe that to be held and caressed like this
was a good thing, kind and loving, when they were both so lonely. He was more lonely than her in a way. But who knew what
Dory felt or understood, lying there day after day?

She’d taken her cue from Maynard in this.

When he spoke of Delores his voice was even and controlled like a professional carer, or the parent of a special child. Once,
after he’d thanked one of Dory’s church friends for the curry she’d sent, he put down the phone shaking his head. ‘Excellent
women,’ he said. ‘Saints.’ He sighed. ‘Just like my wife.’

He spoke as if she were apart from him. He only called her ‘Dory’ if he was talking of the past. He said
I
when he talked of future plans. How to finance his return to Asia, probably Indonesia or Thailand. To live, for good. He
spoke like a traveller who would soon be on his way.

But this morning he’d held onto her like a child does, his head against her stomach. He was breaking up inside and didn’t
know it. She knew she was harnessed to him now, wherever he was going.

No one had taught her how to pray. Who is God? she’d
asked her parents when she was a kid, and they had thrown their arms about and talked of trees and kindness and the way families
love each other. Jason Kay’s God was the Great Headmaster, watching you wherever you went. Jason lived in fear of Hell, yet
when she rode past his Brethren meeting hall, it seemed to her that
it
was Hell, chocolate-brick, windowless like a big toilet block, a yard of gray sand, a high cyclone fence all around.

Churches always made her curious. What was supposed to happen there? Comfort? Inspiration? But the cold dusty light and vinegary
smell inside this old church had no power to calm her.

The tram was packed with very loud schoolkids. She was only a year or so older than some of them but she shut her eyes in
their midst like a middle-aged woman with worries. If she could have prayed it would have been for Cecile to be home but Cecile
was in Kuala Lumpur visiting her sister. There was nobody else in Melbourne she could talk to. Her secret life with Maynard
cut her off, from her own past, her own family. She belonged nowhere.

Above all do not panic, she told herself. She would buy some takeaway noodles, have a long shower and watch a rerun of
Friends
, which was like going to bed with your teddy.

The next morning he wasn’t there. She strode straight through the dark office to the flickering answering machine and listened
to the voice of a woman with a foreign accent telling her that Mr Flynn would not be coming in today, because unfortunately,
yesterday afternoon, Mrs Flynn passed away.
Mr Flynn will be in touch
, said the woman in her precise, gentle
foreign voice. Francine, Bernadette or Tina? Whoever she was, she didn’t feel comfortable speaking into an answering machine.
Er – thank you
.
All the best …
Like signing off a letter.

Maya sat down in his chair. Through the window she could see the very tip of the spire, a mysterious, ornate black knob. What
was it supposed to be? An acorn? A bud? She’d asked some workers at the church, but they didn’t know. All that care, she thought,
put into something that nobody knew about or saw. Just the birds, year after year. For some reason, this made her want to
cry.

She didn’t know how long she sat there. It was cold, she’d forgotten to switch on the heating. She sat sunk into her jacket,
the collar turned up, the wool around her jaw. A phone rang on and on somewhere in the empty building. It felt like days since
she’d spoken to another human being. What to do next? She took her little bag from the drawer of her desk and made her way
down the stairs to the Ladies’ Restroom.

A toilet was flushing and the black-haired beautician from Mimi’s was washing her hands. She had switched on the lights and
was peering critically at her skin, though her geisha-pale face looked perfect to Maya. She smiled at Maya from the mirror.
All the women from Mimi’s were friendly. She was wearing tight black pants and a pale-blue smock and high black platform heels.
The air carried drafts of her airy, floral perfume.

‘Busy day?’ she said to Maya, as she reached for a paper towel. Her name, Jody, was embroidered on the pocket of her smock.
Jody had a kid, Maya had watched her once on the footpath, blowing kisses to a little tear-blotched face in a car driving
off up the street.

‘Not really. My boss’s wife died last night.’

‘Oh no!’ A concerned, maternal frown appeared beneath
Jody’s dead-straight, blue-black fringe. ‘Was it expected?’

‘She’d been sick for a while. Cancer.’ They stared at one another as Jody slowly dried her hands.

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ Maya heard her own voice echo, high and plaintive in the tiled room. ‘I’ve never known
anyone who died before.’

Why was she talking like this? She’d never once met Dory. And even as she spoke she remembered Miriam Kershaw.

To sound innocent.

Jody raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows. ‘You could always send some flowers.’

‘How do you do that?’

‘There’s a florist round the corner. They’ll deliver them for you or you can take them yourself.’ She started to edge gently
around Maya. ‘I’ll speak to the girls. We’ll send a card or something. That poor guy. Any kids?’ She hesitated at the door.

‘A son. Grown up.’

‘You OK, sweetie? Going to close up for the day?’

‘Yes, I will. I’ll take the family some flowers.’ She hadn’t known this was what she was going to do until she heard herself
say it.

Everything was speeding up. She was in a taxi holding a bouquet as big as a baby, wrapped in mauve cellophane, the stems like
limbs across her knees. They were racing down a freeway, in a direction she’d never been before. Billboards, overpasses, factories
stood to attention beneath a sombre sky. She was like an official mourner, sweeping past in a motorcade. The taxi was filled
with the freshness of her flowers.

Why this terrible rush? She’d run into the florist’s, pointing
to irises and hyacinths and orchids and flowers she didn’t know the name of, as long as they were purple or mauve. She’d never
been in a florist shop before, and the exotic blooms, the leafy hush and tang went to her head. In Warton if people gave you
flowers, they would have grown them.

She hadn’t asked how much they’d cost – nearly as much, it turned out, as a really good haircut – just signed her credit card
and rushed out again to hail a taxi. As if she were late. For what? To show him her support? So as not to be left out?

Her mouth was dry and she was sweating inside her coat. She caught a glimpse of her half-profile in the taxi’s tinted window,
and for a moment she thought she saw Dory. But Dory looked nothing like her.

She’d spotted a photo once in his wallet and made him take it out and show her. Dory with baby Andrew beside a potted palm
in a studio in Jakarta, a creased little colour print, faded now, washed out. The tiny boy was fat and gingery, his face a
smudge, screwed up ready to cry. In contrast, Dory was very striking, like a sixties pop-star, with a beehive of black hair,
pale pink lipstick and dark, kohl-lined eyes. She was Dutch-Indonesian, Maynard said. (My father is half Dutch! Maya told
him, but as usual, he didn’t seem to hear.) He’d met Delores in Java in his days as a saxophonist with a touring band. She
taught Indonesian in a language school. Later he went into business for a while with her father. Dory wore white gloves and
a collarless mauve coat with large mauve cloth-covered buttons. Her smile was serene, her eyes shy, shining. ‘She looks happy,’
she said to Maynard as he slid the photo back into his wallet. He said nothing.

In her mind, as time went by, the name
Dory
came to have a sort of orchid-coloured glow.

They were off the freeway now, charging into a suburb. The
main street of every suburb here was a city in itself, stacked with shops and cafes, under rows of swinging wires. This was
what Dory would have seen when she first came to Melbourne, looking out a taxi window over little Andrew’s head.

The flowers were for Dory, of course.

The Flynns lived in a dead-end street that finished in a shallow rise of bushland. The houses were packed in, side by side,
close to the road. In Melbourne everyone lived closer together. Some of the houses were modernised, with glass and timber
additions and frondy landscaped gardens, but the Flynns’ house was bare and treeless, like it would have been when it was
built.

So this was where he came from and returned to. Winter sun shone briefly through the clouds, but the house looked dark, stricken,
closed in on itself.

It was after she had paid the driver and turned towards the house with her armful of rustling cellophane and flowing purple
ribbons, that she realised her offering was not only showy and over the top, it was fatally, morally
wrong
. Sweat spurted into her armpits, she swung around but the taxi had already disappeared. No shelter anywhere. Oh God, how
could she get rid of it? Was anybody watching her?

The curtains in the house were drawn. There was no one on the street. Quick, she told herself, leave it on the doormat and
run. Head lowered, she moved swiftly up the front path to the porch. There was no garden, just a concrete slab and some woody
shrubs by the steps. Somehow she’d expected Dory to have made a beautiful garden.

Andrew opened the door as she tiptoed across the porch. He could be nobody else but Andrew, though he’d grown tall and dark
and clear. The fat smudge-faced days were long gone. How had he known she was here?

A wave of heat moved up her neck so violently that her eyes watered. ‘I just wanted to …’

He smiled and put his arm out and firmly ushered her inside. The door closed behind her.

The hall was cold and bare as a hospital. Far down the end it opened into a room where people were talking. She caught the
foreign inflection of women’s voices and the clink of dishes. Francine, Bernadette and Tina no doubt, doing what women friends
do. An oxygen cylinder stood in a bar of light outside an open bedroom doorway, and in the shadowy front room next to her
she glimpsed a table piled high with bouquets. She could smell freesias, a cold sweetness from her own past. She had no right
to be here.

‘These were her favourite colours, did you know that?’ Andrew said, touching Maya’s flowers. She nodded, unable to speak.
He had his father’s hands, but more finely cast. She could see Maynard’s features in the set of his face, but his skin was
olive and his eyes were dark, wide-spaced, intense. Dory’s son. You could tell that she’d been beautiful.

That’s him
, Maya thought, without quite knowing what she meant. It was as if she’d dreamt of him.

‘Andy? I think you’re needed.’ A long-legged girl in jeans strode up the hall towards them. She was wearing a large football
jumper, probably borrowed from Andrew, the way girlfriends liked to do. She put her hand on Andrew’s shoulder. ‘Granny’s asking
for you.’ Perfect, cool, in charge, good skin, dark hair in a curly ponytail. She would have been a champion runner, a maths
whizz, a prefect, one of the shining girls at school.

‘This is Kirstin,’ Andrew said. His girlfriend. The girlfriend he deserved.

There was a pause. Since Maya didn’t speak, Kirstin reached for her bouquet.

‘I’ll take this if you like.’ She whisked it into the front room with all the other flowers.

‘
Maynard? Andy?
’ The old girl was down the corridor of course, making sure that no one forgot her. Where was Maynard? She knew he wasn’t
here.

Andrew kept on looking at her. ‘Were you one of Mum’s students?’

Maya shook her head and backed towards the door.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he asked. ‘Anything at all?’

His dark eyes each held a drop of radiance inside them, like the gleam of water at the bottom of a well. She couldn’t look
too long into them. He knew something she couldn’t bear to know.

‘No, no. My taxi’s waiting.’ She opened the front door and started across the porch. Then she turned and said quickly: ‘I’m
Maya, from the office. I’m really sorry …’

‘I know you are.’ He stepped forward and took her hand for a moment. ‘Dad’s at the funeral director’s. With Mum.’ He looked
up over Maya’s head. ‘What a beautiful day!’ he said. ‘I had no idea.’ He was almost high, she saw, almost a little crazy.

‘The funeral’s on Thursday, nine-thirty at St Xavier’s,’ he called out after her as she fled down the path. She nodded over
her shoulder and he raised his hand to her. Fuck fuck fuck, she muttered, rushing down the street, bare, of course, of taxis.
He knew. She could swear he knew. On this day Dory’s son knew everything.

The bushy rise at the end of the street looked down over a football oval, a playground, a bike trail. At this hour it was
spotted with retirees throwing balls for their dogs and young mothers with little kids. The embankment was floored with
shredded bark and planted artistically with native grasses and shrubs. Imitation bush, city bush, not a place where you could
lose yourself. Where to now? Her bladder was bursting, and without thinking, as if she were still a country kid, living out
of doors, she crouched down between two bushes and pissed splashily into the bark, risking yet more exposure.

She lay awake in the dark, trying to remember when Cecile said she’d be back from Kuala Lumpur. Sometimes she got up when
Cecile came home late from her editing work and they talked. Could she be back tonight? Maybe Cecile would be too tired to
talk, but it would be a relief just to see her, or even just to know she was in the house. She longed for Cecile’s calmness.
Cecile was nearly thirty, far ahead of her in everything. Her advice was always very down-to-earth.