The Good Parents by Joan London Page A

reporting on him to their mother in the
     kitchen. Arlene was silent. When she came up the stairs at the end of the day she had no energy left to talk. Right now she’d
     be standing in her towelling scuffs at the open kitchen door smoking her end-of-work cigarette, looking out into the darkness.
     She’d never had any authority over Jacob, and let him off everything for the past few months because of the Leaving. All she
     wanted, pleaded for daily, was for him to have a haircut.
    He ought to put his light on now, and start studying. He reached out, and put in the earpiece of his transistor instead.
Eleanor Rigby
. The lonely people. Everything that needed to be said came from music these days. Fat little Kitty with her books open on
     the table, the smear of chocolate on her mouth. Hungry. He and Kitty were always hungry. Once, years ago, he’d seen Kitty
     through the workroom window, dancing to the LP of
Peter and the Wolf
in the tutu Arlene had made her, throwing her solid little body around the big table, leaping on and off his platform, curtseying
     in front of the mirror, and he knew she was a fantasist, like him.
    Insights flooded him. He, Kitty and Arlene lived togetherbut the real life of each of them took place elsewhere. They hid their true passions from one another. Every night he fell
     asleep to the whirr of the sewing machine, stopping and starting, relentless riffs going nowhere. On Saturday afternoons Arlene
     closed the shop and took a bath, did her nails and set her hair, ready for her night out with Joe Lanza. Joe, her friend as
     she called him, two feet wide and coming up to her shoulder, had put the money down for the shop. On Saturday nights she slept
     at Joe’s house, doing what old friends do, he supposed, a grotesque thought. She came home to slap some tea together on Sunday
     night and put in a few hours at the sewing machine. It pays the bills, she said, but he and Kitty grew up knowing it was clothes
     that had her full attention, that all she really cared about was
the cut, the fit, the hang
.
    Sundays in the flat were long, silent, spacious. Bells rang out from St Alban’s, Beech’s father’s church, where Beech would
     be kneeling, his hair tucked inside his collar, the image of devotion. Jacob didn’t know how lucky he was, Beech said. All
     the pretty girls in the area were Greek or Italian, and they went to the Orthodox or Catholic churches.
    Everyone else in the district spent Sundays with family, with fathers, cousins, grandparents, but Arlene had no relatives
     here. In street after street they were eating big Sunday lunches, roasts, spaghetti, pots of cabbage. Jacob and Kitty roamed
     around without talking, studied themselves in mirrors, listened to their transistors, sprawled on their beds, reading. Their
     life was all in their heads, in dreams of the future. They made French toast and pikelets and slice after slice of grilled
     Kraft cheese, eating while they read.
    Arlene,
couturière
before all else, took no interest in their education and yet had produced two bookish kids, always at the top of their class.
     From the first they had covered their ownschoolbooks with brown paper and signed their own homework cards. They learnt to find the books they wanted in libraries,
     op shops, parish jumble sales. They were used to looking after themselves and helping out Arlene. They did things out of a
     kind of sorrow for her.
    They never talked about Arlene’s Saturday nights with Joe. Jacob had come to appreciate the freedom of his upbringing, but
     Kitty, he sensed, was ashamed of Arlene’s unmotherly ways.
    He took the earpiece out in order to enjoy his thoughts and the luminous evening light after the storm. The scene was lit
     up in his mind, as if he was looking down on it from very high, the flat above the shop, the miles and miles of twinkling
     streetlights, the dark coastline and far out, like a ship on an eternal horizon, the Flying Dutchman, the Drowned Sailor,