The Good Parents (37 page)

She was wearing the short denim skirt she’d left Melbourne in, her legs bare for the heat. He must know there wasn’t anything
else.

‘Get some sleep,’ he said, deftly slipping a handful of coins into the fruit bowl. She knew this was for her breakfast in
the morning. He wouldn’t be back tonight. Any hint of complaint on her part turned him to ice, to acid. All her problems,
he’d tell her, were in her own head. What’s happened to the old, spunky Maya? he’d say, if he was in a good mood. Nothing
was too hard for that girl! He liked her sparky, ‘cute’ like she used to be in the office. What he called ‘this droopiness
of yours’ annoyed him. As if she was still a paid employee and falling down on the job.

They stayed in a different hotel at first when they came here, a modern, LA type of place where the rooms all opened onto
a central pool. Mr T was on a higher floor. After Mr T went to Bangkok, they moved to the Mimosa, to this room. It was so
small that they had to turn sideways to walk past the bed. The bathroom was a closet. The shower wet the toilet. The frosted-glass
windows were sealed shut.

‘Why did you bring me here?’ she asked, sitting on the bed.

‘Just until a deal comes through,’ he said. He looked around the room and pulled a face. ‘Then we’ll upgrade.’

‘But
why
did you bring me to Brisbane?’

‘I thought it might be fun.’ He turned away coldly to hang a shirt up in the narrow cupboard. It was empty apart from her
sheepskin jacket.

‘This isn’t fun.’ Her heart was thumping. She had to fight her fear of him these days, fear of his temper.

‘Well, all right, because you were so upset! And I’m fond of you, I can’t help being fond of you for some reason.’

He moved quickly, snatching up his keys and slinging his jacket over his shoulder, unable to bear even the threat of a scene.
‘You know you can leave whenever you want to,’ he said, as he stood by the door.

‘I can’t afford to buy a ticket.’ She’d spent the last fifty dollars on her Visa card on underclothes and a T-shirt and a
pair of Indian sandals so she didn’t have to wear her boots. She couldn’t bring herself to mention pay because what would
he be paying her for? Two words she was unable to say to him were
money
and
love
, just as she was no longer able to smile at him or call him by name.

He rolled his eyes. ‘Oh for God’s sake, I’m sure we can scrounge you up a fare!’ But he didn’t bring the matter up again and
neither did she.

After that he started the habit of emptying the coins out of his pockets into the plastic fruit bowl on top of the bar-fridge
if he was going out somewhere. Sometimes he was gone for a whole night and the next day. She had no choice but to use the
money to buy coffee or food. It was another of the things they didn’t speak about.

Fond of you for some reason
. She let that warm her for a while. How little she made do with these days! She sensed it wasn’t a lie. He rarely spoke of
his real feelings except in irritation. Trying to shave in the bathroom, he swore under his breath. He knocked her nose-stud
–
that damned thing
– down the drain. She heard the finicky clipping of his nails. He had to bend down to spike up the tufts on top of his head
in the mirror. She knew he hated losing his hair. Sometimes the traces he left, beard flecks, nail clippings, swirling hairs,
made her feel strange. His snores woke her when he came back here to
sleep. Would she feel like this with a boy of her own age?

She lay on the bed and turned the TV up loud to block out his sounds and give him privacy.

What had happened to the high room, the lonely tower? To that girl walking towards her lover through the city streets at dawn?
She was a different person then, going to a different lover.

Why couldn’t she leave? This was where the thinking stopped. He rushed in and out, distracted, sweating, anxious.
You’re not yourself
, her mother used to say when she was grumpy. Sometimes in bed he’d turn to her and clutch her and breathe her warm body into
his.

Devotion. Devotion had brought her here.

‘He’s all right, just got some funny little habits,’ Maynard said to her on the plane here, after he’d had a gin and tonic.
Mr T was in business class.

‘Like voyeurism.’

He tapped her hand half in praise of her vocabulary. ‘Maya, I didn’t think you’d be like this … He’s my business partner now.’

In her on-going, non-stop thinking, she was sometimes occupied by thoughts of strange people. Miriam Kershaw, Dory. How brave
they were facing death. Rhonda Carpenter, famous for taking a look and
coming back
.

She woke to the toy-like ring of his mobile somewhere in the bed. Morning light filled the frosted glass of the window. In
a panic she searched amongst the sheets and found it.

‘Andy here!’ A young man’s voice. Andrew. He sounded phony-cheerful. After a moment he said, ‘Dad?’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Maya.’

‘You’re with Dad?’ The line crackled with his surprise.

Accused, she looked around and saw all the evidence around her, the jumble of bedclothes and newspapers and tissues, last
night’s pizza carton and empty cans, their pathetic, make-do life together. No point in pretending this was an office. She
had no energy for lies.

‘He went out last night.’

‘Are you expecting him back?’

‘I guess so.’

The phone beeped dead in her ear.

She had to get out of this room. She rushed into the tiny bathroom, showered and dressed. Just as she was scraping up the
coins in the fruit bowl, the phone rang again.

‘Maya? I’m sorry.’

She was silent.

‘Dad still not back?’

‘No.’

‘Maya, it’s OK, it really is. I know what he’s like. My mother knew.’

She was unable to speak.

‘Talk to me,’ he said gently.

‘What about?’

‘Do you like it there?’

‘No.’

‘Why don’t you leave?’

Silence.

‘My father used to talk about you. He said you were a country girl and nothing was too much for you.’

Silence.

‘I remember your face, Maya. Your flowers.’

She remembered his face too and the long, grieving tower of his body in the doorway. She cleared her throat. ‘Do you miss
your mother?’

Silence, this time from his end of the phone.

‘I thought I was prepared. She tried to prepare me.’

‘Were you very close?’

‘My mother was special. Close isn’t the word for how she was with people. Sort of a saint, really. Maybe too much for poor
old Dad.’

‘Do you love your father?’

He half-laughed. ‘You certainly get straight to the point.’

‘There isn’t much time.’ She was shaking. Any moment Maynard could walk in the door. He would be furious to find her talking
to his son. He would be tempted to slap her. But from the moment she’d heard his voice, she knew that Andrew, like Magnus,
was someone she could talk to. For some reason she knew he’d tell the truth.

‘Of course I do,’ he said.

‘Do you think he’s a good man?’

He hesitated. ‘We knew about his trips to Thailand and everything, my mother and I. But that’s only one side of him. I mean,
he thought the world of her. He couldn’t stand it when she got sick. She was his heart and soul.’

She said nothing. He’s worse than you know, she thought.

‘How is he? I’m worried about him.’

So that’s why he’d rung back. ‘Dunno.’ Her voice went harsh again. ‘How’s Kirstin?’

‘Kirstin?’

‘Your girlfriend.’

‘Kirstin’s the daughter of Mum’s oldest friend, Francine. She’s the closest I’ve got to a sister. She’s just got engaged.’

Out into the narrow white-tiled corridors that criss-crossed the Mimosa, an identical map upstairs and down. Past the rows
of numbered doors, the growly coughs of the morning, the talk-back and TVs of the permanent residents. Through every door
now she could hear the muffled voices of the morning shows.

The woman who cleaned the hotel was so thin that she almost seemed suspended from the wings of her shoulder-blades as she
bent over a mop at the end of the corridor. She nodded as Maya walked past. Her name was Helga. Close up you saw she wasn’t
very old but had the lined face of a smoker and a weary flickering kindness.

There was a sign above the manager’s desk:
Rooms not serviced daily
. She’d forgotten to bring the pizza box and beer cans out of the room: it would smell when she returned. The Mimosa smell,
mould, cigarettes, cheap room freshener, clung to her wherever she went.
Neat dress and shoes required for the dining room at all times.
The dining room, glimpsed through a glass door, with its chairs turned up on the tables, looked as if it had been closed
for several years. Beside the office was a set of shallow steps with a sign above it,
Kitchen Facilities Provided
. Beyond was a dark cubbyhole with an electric stove and sink and a door opening onto the carpark out the back. Men sat around
the doorway, smoking and talking at all hours of the day. Even in the morning someone would be drinking beer.
Special weekly tariffs & long term tenancy rate available
.

There was something grimly homelike about the place, with its regulars and its rules. But it was not a place you stayed in
unless you had to.

Across the desk she could see the manager reading the paper at a table in his private quarters. Strange to see a normal living
room, a couch, a cat, a television. The manager’s name was
Terry, a Pom with a shaven head and a T-shirt which showed his biceps. Polite, brisk, uncurious: he wanted to get back as
quickly as possible to his life in the living room. Sometimes he shouted for Helga who lived with him. He didn’t seem to have
made her happy.

From the outside the Mimosa was a three-storey, redbrick façade with rows of frosted-glass windows, each with an air-conditioner
protruding out of it. It was a masterpiece of ugliness. The first sign you saw was beside the front door.
No Charities
.

The Corner Cafe was next door to the Mimosa, up another set of steps from the footpath. It had a little terrace with an iron-grill
fence around it and two white plastic tables set out beneath dusty umbrellas advertising coffee. In the middle of the terrace
was a tall palm tree but if you looked up you saw its leaves were just a bunch of brutally pruned brown stalks.

Inside were more plastic tables in a dark bare space and a glass-fronted counter filled with rows of bains-marie. There were
all sorts of Asian food, noodles, rice-paper rolls, couscous, curries, tagines. Or you could have chips and sausage rolls
and toasted sandwiches. Today’s special, written on the blackboard, was chicken korma. The owners, a young couple called Ali
and Rita, seemed to live out the back, and their relatives and children came and went through a bead curtain behind the counter.
Business was steady, Maya noted, with a professional eye from her days in the newsagency, but it was seldom busy.

She was unable to eat. Sometimes she ordered fried rice or a toasted cheese sandwich, but more and more she wasn’t hungry.
Her denim skirt had sunk dangerously low on her hips, soon she’d have to improvise a belt. ‘Are you trying to look like a
model?’ he said one night. ‘You’re becoming gaunt.’ She even had to tighten the watchband on her wrist. Funny how you got
what you thought you wanted – travel, living with your lover, being thin – when you no longer cared. Perhaps this was the
secret to life? Maynard should stop
wanting
to be rich.

She ordered a cappuccino and took up her daily position at one of the tables outside. They were just beyond the city centre,
on a wide, windy, indifferent street about to be reclaimed from seediness. Businesses were moving in amongst the cheap hotels,
old flats and boarding houses, a Persian Rug Centre, a Hair Concept Salon, a Flight Centre. A single flight to Perth cost
$450. The lunch bars and newsagents and chemists were for the office workers. Men passed in white shirts and ties, and women
in high heels.

There were trees along the street she’d never seen before, with long green leaves hanging from their stems like the teeth
of a comb. Birds dived in and out of them. Around the corner was a jacaranda tree, catching the blue of the sky. Every day
she went and looked at it. Her mother would do this, she caught herself thinking.

Rita brought the cappuccino to her table. They smiled, both too shy to speak. Rita was neat and quick with beautiful rosy
brown hands. Today she wore her hair back, twisted up into a spout with a tortoiseshell clip, the way Cecile sometimes did.
Rita made her long for Cecile.

Maynard didn’t like her talking to people. ‘Speak to anyone today?’ he’d ask casually, his only question to her. He even frowned
when she said hello to Helga. He didn’t want anyone knowing their business, he said, there were some sensitive deals in the
pipeline. They’d be moving on soon. When a day’s negotiations went well he was happier, gentler, like he used to be after
sex.