The Good Parents (32 page)

‘Haven’t you heard? We finally got a diagnosis. He’s never going to walk or speak or sit up by himself.’ She turned her head
away for a moment. ‘I think it was the last straw for Mum.’

Bevan filled the doorway. ‘The car’s come for us.’ As if to balance Karen, he’d grown fuller everywhere. Toni followed him
down the hall and saw a little roll of fat spilling over the back of his white collar.

There was no wake afterwards. Nig couldn’t wait to go home. After Karen and Bevan had driven off, he disappeared into the
bedroom to reappear in casual clothes, a polo shirt and crumpled gaberdine trousers and worn soft shoes that Beryl would have
tried to throw out. He swung his car keys, ready to leave.

‘You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, of course, but I have to tell you that I’m putting the house on the market as
soon as possible. I’d like a little flat overlooking the city. I might even move into a hotel.’ He spoke rapidly but firmly,
knowing this could be taken as cold-hearted.

She knew he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t wait to be alone, to come and go, unaccountable. He’d waited too long for his
freedom. Then the poor girl died, by herself, just as she’d always feared. Far from being cold, he was exploding with emotion.

‘I’m ready to go,’ she said. ‘There’s a bus I can catch.’ Beryl’s daughter, she ought to have murmured something like
if I’m not needed here
, but alone at last, there was an instant understanding between them. He didn’t demand hypocrisy. She wasn’t sure there would
be a bus, but like him she had to get out of there.

A retired bishop had listed Beryl’s virtues, service in the WAAF, work for charities, above all commitment to husband and
family. Dates and names were confused, but he was too bland and professional to care. Another funeral was waiting to come
in one door as they left out the other. Outside, all her mother’s well-dressed, sharp-eyed friends clustered around Nig, murmuring
that he mustn’t cut himself off, he would have to come to dinner very soon. He was so distant and handsome in his dark suit
that they didn’t quite dare to kiss him. Soon they would be match-making for him. Beryl’s worst fears would be realised.

The field of battle had come to honour Beryl, or at least look over what remained. They stared openly at Toni as if she were
Patty Hearst returned from robbing banks with the Symbionese Liberation Army. If the Richardsons were there, they would have
spoken to her, held her hand, and she would
have had the chance to look them in the eye. To say without words that she was sorry. Perhaps Doug was too frail to come,
or perhaps they were at the beach house now, far away where nobody could reach them.

Where was Beryl in all this? Toni looked up at the sun shining through the well-groomed trees, and tried to recall her conviction
in Brad Skinner’s truck, that Beryl was in the light around the edges everywhere, that she knew something different now and
was free.

She slipped away from the line-up to wait for Nig and Karen in the memorial garden. She realised she missed the silence. The
silence that wasn’t silence, wind through leaves, bird calls, nuts falling. The space it gave her. She’d thought she was running
away to the country, but in fact she was running towards something she had wanted all her life. She couldn’t wait to go back.

But not to the commune. She paced up and down the lawn.

She didn’t offer her father any explanation about where or how she lived and he didn’t ask any questions. Except one, just
as they were about to depart. He stopped and looked at her in the hall as she waited for him, in her mother’s dress, her overalls
and sandshoes in a plastic bag.

‘Anything you need?’ he asked.

‘Yes. My bus fare. About twenty dollars.’ She hated having to admit this.

He went straight to the bedroom. She heard a drawer scrape. The sock drawer, where he and Beryl always hid their cash. He
put a roll of notes in her hand.

‘Here you are.’

‘That’s far too much.’

He pushed her hand away. ‘If you need a bus fare, you need
more than a bus fare,’ he said, moving to the front door. ‘Let’s go.’ He was dropping her off in the city. He had never changed
towards her. She would never know if he was very wise or just indifferent. ‘
Daddy can’t bear to see you.
’ Perhaps Beryl hadn’t wanted her to see Daddy.

‘Where are you going now?’ she asked as Nig dropped her off at the Perth station.

‘To a pub where nobody knows me.’ He caught her eye. ‘To play pool and drink myself silly.’

They laughed.

He kissed her affectionately and drove off in a great hurry.

Within a year he’d be snapped up by Mavis and living on the Gold Coast. It was his curse to have sex appeal. It turned out
that Mavis and her ex-husband used to run a pub in the country. Mavis had been on the scene for years.

There wasn’t a bus until seven the next morning. She sat at the table in Boans’ cafeteria where she and Beryl used to sit.
With the roll of notes she could afford to buy a meal but she wasn’t hungry. She bought a cup of tea. There was something
consoling about being amongst the clatter of strangers. Ordinary people, eating decadent Western food, meat pies, ham sandwiches,
jelly trifle. This was what people wanted and who could blame them? Who wants to eat beans in a forest? The clearing was a
little lit scene at the back of her mind, tragic, biblical, the thin smoke, the tiny long-haired figures toiling like peasants.
How amateurish and make-do everything seemed. That was the whole
point
, Jacob said.

Why all the fuss about the way you lived? It was over in a flash.

She was in a strange state. Being close to a death was a bit like being high. She hadn’t counted the money but it would be
enough for her and Jacob to drive away from the commune for good. There was still the matter of Cy Fisher’s long arm. Just
a street away, across the railway line, was his territory. Someone would see her here, she found herself thinking. And then
what would happen?

Nothing at all.

She realised her fear had started to lift a few weeks ago after a dream about him. She was at some sort of family reunion,
a party or wedding in a little suburban house, and Cy Fisher appeared. He brushed against her in the crowded kitchen, and
to her amazement she felt a beautiful warmth from the contact with his large body. She tried to find him again to say goodbye,
but he never reappeared.

Was this a sign that Cy had moved on? Cut your losses, he used to say. It was almost his motto. Business as usual. He was
above all a business man.

Everything comes to an end, she knew that now. She stood up from the table and went straight to the public phone in the ladies’
restroom and dialled the familiar number.

He was there waiting for her at six o’clock in the bar of the old hotel beside the railway line, a five-minute walk across
the Horseshoe Bridge. How smooth he looked to her now, a well-groomed city man. The blue shadow was just beginning to creep
up his jawline, and his glass of whisky was on the bar in front of him. He hadn’t given any sign of shock to hear her voice
on the phone but now, after years of reading him, she knew he was affected by the sight of her. He sat very still and his
eyes went dense with calculation. As she climbed onto the stool next to his, he lifted a finger and her standard drink,
brandy and dry, was put down in front of her. They didn’t look at one another for a while. Her eyes roamed the room as if
it was of almost scientific interest to her. In fact it was a blur of jumpy light and smoke, and end-of-the-day cracked male
voices. She noticed that her hand shook a little as she lifted her glass. Yet she hadn’t thought she was nervous.

She’d never been to this pub with him. It opened straight off an asphalt carpark, where cars pulled up and drivers rushed
in out of the day’s last heat to down a glass, and then another one before they went home. There was a line-up of skinny,
livid-faced old regulars at the far end of the bar. Not Cy’s usual sort of place. Not the sort of place you’d take a woman
to. The barman didn’t look at her. He was generous with the brandy though and because she was unused to alcohol now and hadn’t
eaten for two days, its effect swept over her.

They looked at one another via the mirror behind the bar. She asked after Régine, the essential courtesy. He replied that
his mother was well. She couldn’t bring herself to ask about Felice and Sabine.

She’d forgotten his stillness. He didn’t speak or move, apart from taking an occasional sip of whisky. The barman was suddenly
there, filling his empty glass.

‘My mother died last week.’

He bowed his head in acknowledgement. She could tell he knew already. He would have read the notice in the paper: he kept
a hawk-like watch on
The West
. His expression was grave. Anyone in his employ could rely on his respect for a death in the family, especially of a mother.

Then she understood that she was there because
she wanted to tell him
.

‘The funeral was today. It was awful.’ She suddenly wondered if he’d had the proceedings watched.

The elegant little collar of Beryl’s
good silk
caught her eye in the mirror and she started to cry. She made no sound, but watched her mouth drop open and her eyes scrunch
up, until like a storm outside a window, everything was obscured. Cy Fisher put one of his large, Régine-laundered handkerchiefs
into her hand.

Still she cried. She had the funny feeling that this at last was real and that everything else, Jacob, the commune, the forest,
was a dream. ‘I am so tired,’ she said at last, blowing her nose.

Cy Fisher made a sign to the barman who handed him a key. He put his arm lightly around Toni’s back and ushered her through
a door behind the bar, up a flight of dusty stairs, along a green corridor smelling of old bathrooms.

The room’s window was open and a yellowing lace curtain billowed in the hot evening breeze from the carpark. Cy sat her on
the bed and took off her sandals. She lay back on the threadbare cotton bedspread, her plastic bag beside her. You could hear
the trains rumbling in and out of the station.

A no man’s land. ‘It’s nice here,’ she said. He always got it right. She felt as light and scorched and inconsequential as
the blowing curtain.

He lay down on the other side of the bed and put his hands behind his head. ‘You like it? I’ve bought the place. We’ll modernise
next year.’ He sniffed the clothes inside her plastic bag and cocked an eye at her. ‘Now why can I smell wood smoke?’

‘You smell the same as you always did,’ she said. She yawned. Her eyes closed.

He was gone when she woke. It was early morning. The curtain hung still in the gray light. He must have folded the bedspread
over her and her plastic bag.
Just keep out of my sight.
Did he whisper that before he left or did she dream it? Could she take it as a promise?

She made her way down through the dark empty pub, unlocked the door into the carpark and went to buy a cup of tea at the station
before she caught the bus.

She saw Jacob’s sad, soft face from the bus window, waiting for her in the dusk outside the store. She could smell the leaf-mould
damp of the air.

If she hadn’t been on this bus, he said, he would have come for the next one in two days’ time, or the one after that. ‘It’s
terrible here without you.’ He couldn’t even smile. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.’ Because in the silence between
bird calls, in the emptiness of the carriage, it had become clear to him that the whole meaning of life was centred, not on
the clearing, but on her, being with her, having her with him.

As they drove through the forest she told him they could leave the commune now. She showed him the roll of notes. But for
the time being, she said, they should lie low, stay in the country. Keep out of sight.

‘You seem different.’

‘Do I?’ she said lightly. ‘I suppose you only go to your mother’s funeral once in your life.’

During the interminable bus trip down Albany Highway, the long wait in the terminus, the local bus’s crawl along the edge
of the forest, she had packed up the hotel room, the blowing curtain, the sound of the trains, and stowed it firmly at the
back of her mind.

Jacob went to the store and rang the Education Department next morning and accepted a post as temporary teacher at Warton
Junior High, starting as soon as possible.
Accommodation provided. They went back to the commune and packed.

Prem and Wanda waved them off. No one had much to say. Jacob promised to start sending the money owed as soon as he was paid.
Who knows, we might turn up again, he said cheerfully, once we’ve saved up a bit. But they all knew there was no going back.
To leave meant they had lost faith. They were deserters, their will was too weak, they were abashed and shamefaced.

They drove in silence until they hit the open road.

‘I don’t want to hear the words
self-sufficient
again for a very long time,’ Jacob said.

‘Or
compost toilet
,’ she said.

‘
Wind power.
’

‘
Findhorn.
’

They laughed like naughty children, the wind on their faces.

But it had marked them.

They would continue to live by their ideals, they told each other – simply, not wasting the world’s resources – but they would
stay quiet about it. For some time they kept themselves apart in Warton. The values of the town were conservative, while they
felt they occupied a natural position of dissent. They thought of themselves as more enlightened, more radical, more contemporary
than the local inhabitants. They took care however to be seen as respectable, paid their bills, helped out if called upon,
wary of the hippie label. In all sorts of small ways they tried to be good.

They retained a long-term distrust of luxury, viewing dishwashers, microwaves, air-con, the latest toys, with an almost moral
distaste. They were suspicious of synthetics, additives, technology, material extravagance of any kind. They debated
whether or not to have TV or a telephone. They had a hatred of formality, ‘good china’, clothes ‘for best’, any sign of bourgeois
display. Their relationship with nature was more romantic than their neighbours’. Discreetly, alone or together, they would
head off into a sunset, a moonlit night, the aftermath of a storm.