The Good Parents by Joan London Read Free Book Online Page B

proportions, as if it had been hollowed out.
    Light from the courtyard filtered in through a plate-glass window and cast a pattern of dipping bamboo over the rough brick
     walls.
    A staircase to the floor above half-bisected the room. To the left was the kitchen, marked off by a bench and bar-stools.
     To the right, down a couple of shallow steps, was a sunken floor surrounded by three black built-in couches, like ringside
     seats at a swimming pool or theatre in the round. In the middle was a bare coffee table and on the fourth side was a TV. No
     mess anywhere.
    What had they expected? Cramped student digs? Grungy suburbia? Not plainness as style. Not
open plan
. Although it had the stripped, shabby look of a rented house – the worn black leather of the couches was splitting in places,
     the varnish of the coffee table was stained with cup rings, the floorboards were dull and scratched – in the play of light
     and sweep of its proportions, it had a grace that still drew attention to itself. Like good bones in an old face.
    ‘I went to parties once in rooms like this,’ said Toni.
    They stepped down into the living room. ‘Isn’t this what we used to call a
conversation pit
?’ said Jacob. It reminded him of youth, sex, aspirations to sophistication. All a little dingy now. Nothing here was bright
     or new.
    Then he spotted the gleam of contemporary hardware in the gloom beyond the kitchen. On a bench against the wall was an impressive
     line-up, brushed aluminium laptop, scanner, printer, a see-through perspex speaker coiled like a model of an alimentary canal.
     Technology he didn’t know how to use. He shuffled through a wire mesh rack of CDs. Contemporary, jazz, Latin, electronic.
     Whose ear and eye? Most of the musicians he’d never even heard of.
    ‘She’s done well for herself,’ he called out. He sank down on the black couch opposite the television. Almost by itself his
     hand reached for the remote control on the coffee table and began to channel-surf the afternoon programmes.
    Toni went to the kitchen and filled the electric kettle. They’d left Warton at three that morning to drive to the airport
     and they needed a cup of tea. She found teabags and cups on the bench, but apart from a few packets of spices and noodles,
     the cupboards were empty. None of Maya’s comfort foods. Were she and her housemate on some sort of diet? Some wrinkled apples
     in the fridge, a jar of jam and a packet of coffee grounds. No milk. A trail of ants was trekking across the vast white steppe
     of the bench.
    All at once she left the teacups and ran upstairs. She opened the first door onto a still life of Maya’s tracksuit and ugg
     boots lying tumbled on the floor. The bed was crumpled, the doona thrown back. She must have been running late. There was
     the usual pile of magazines and books beside the bed, and a few skeletal apple cores scattered about. Maya couldn’t sleep
     without reading and couldn’t read without eating an apple. The Chekhov paperback was on top. Jacob had given it to her, he
     was always trying to get the kids to read Chekhov.
The Lady with the Lapdog and Other Stories
, with a photo of Magnus and Winnie as a bookmark, just a few pages in. She wasn’t doing much reading here.
    The room was a lonely little tower, bare brick walls with a long thin window overlooking the roof next door. The air was cold
     and stale. Did Maya wake up here this morning? Toni resisted the impulse to pick up the tracksuit, pull up the doona, open
     the window. Maya resented anyone setting foot in her domain.
    In the bathroom opposite was her towel from home, bone-dry on a rail, and another towel, more recently used. There was an
     expensive little pot of lemon-scented cream on the shelfbeneath the mirror. Whose? Toni sniffed it, dipped her finger in and smeared it under her eyes. Her face felt dried out from
     the plane. What made her think she could take liberties like this in her daughter’s house? Right now