The Good Teacher

by Richard Anderson

  He must have been mouthing the name ‘Leo’, because the kelpie who owned it jumped up onto the verandah and nosed his hand. Feeling Leo’s need for him, it occurred to Mack that perhaps dogs were one of the great human achievements: to breed an animal from a wolf that was so useful, so sensitive to human emotion and such good company was something he’d always marvelled at. It made robots look like the silly tinkering of mad scientists. A good topic for discussion, if there was someone to discuss it with. But there wasn’t because the people he would like to chew it over with weren’t much good at discussion anymore. They were good at remembering and repeating.

  Even though it was his choice (the least worst option, in fact), it was lonely to live on his own sometimes and occasionally nerve-racking. Only last week he had found himself lying on the kitchen floor, a room away from any phone, unsure if he could get up, worried that it might be days before he would be found. Right then, with his head on the cool tiles looking up at the rickety table, he wished the Limousin bull that had knocked him down in the yards and broken his ribs and ankle two years ago had done a more thorough job. It would have been preferable to this. After a while he got to his knees and the blood returned to his legs and it turned out to be just a rolled ankle. But it did make a bloke think. He got Andy to buy him another mobile phone and he left it plugged in on the floor, figuring that if worse came to worse he’d at least be able to drag himself a few metres to it.

  He thought about Jennifer’s car going back and forth and remembered when she first turned up as Andy’s girlfriend, a good-looker but someone, you could immediately tell, who was certain of what she wanted and how to get it. It unnerved him. The first time she walked through their house she inspected it like she was a potential buyer. He couldn’t help feeling as if he and Celie and the farm were on probation (and not the other way round). Jennifer was never the sort of person to fall head over heels in love and ignore the circumstances. That much was obvious. Something about: ‘Don’t marry for money but love where money is.’

  Celie thought he was being old and unfair. She thought Jennifer was just what Andy needed: someone positive and energetic, someone who could organise his life for him and get things done. In that, she was right. Jennifer was a very good partner for Andy and the business and the household ran well. Andy had been so ambitious he probably would have married her for her book-keeping skills. Who knew? Maybe that’s what Andy wanted in a wife. They’d certainly stayed together (twenty years, was it?) and appeared happy enough.

  To all intents and purposes Andy was contented, even if he never really laughed anymore, but that was a whole other thing that a father couldn’t get involved in. Maybe if they’d had more kids or no kids it might have helped. Madison was a delight in his eyes but she was probably as lonely as Andy and Jennifer possibly were.

  But these were things that Celie had troubled herself about. He’d never bothered about them, considering Andy and Jennifer big enough to look after themselves. It would only be his business if divorce and splitting of assets ever loomed, which they didn’t.

  But now, he bothered about everything: family, feelings, history, world politics, the environment, racism, and on and on. He’d always thought of reading books as somehow girlish, indoorsy and not for men—not for men of any worth. But now he loved them and spent his days with them. Even through the thickest glasses his eyes wouldn’t let him read for long, but he listened to recorded novels and internet podcast things that Madison set up for him.

  Sometimes he thought what an odd pastime it was to take on at his stage of life. He reckoned he couldn’t have too many years or even months left and yet he was happy to spend them lost in someone else’s story. Was this some sort of vicarious dementia? At least it didn’t upset anyone and didn’t lead to him wandering the streets half-naked, invoking the name of a decades-dead relative or something. God knows there was enough of that about.

  SARAH

  Sarah drove back out into the night with Damien and Julia snuggled in their seats, cocooned by doonas and pillows and soft toys. The only plan she had come up with was to head for Nikki’s place.

  Nikki, her older, more sensible sister (everyone said it), lived in the city, in a large house with a monstrous garden, with a conceited banker called Joel. Joel provided everything anyone could want in the world except humanity. They had houses and cars and boats and holidays and expensive schools and ‘exquisite dining experiences’, all of which sounded nice as long as you didn’t have to share them with someone like Joel. Sarah saw him at Christmas and family functions, which was more than enough, even though he didn’t really bother to talk to her. She never let her feelings show. Joel was the reason she didn’t see as much of Nikki as she would have liked and that was a significant disappointment. She was jealous of women who spent time with their sisters and brothers, shared holidays and important family moments, and knew their nieces and nephews well. Nikki’s kids were grown up and Sarah had never managed to get past their polite smiles and the ‘effort’ they made with their aunt. She couldn’t think what Nikki saw in Joel, except money, and there simply wasn’t enough of that in the world to compensate for his Joelishness. Whenever Sarah saw him she felt a tug of love and admiration for Ian because Ian was so real. He was a man without pretence, who could do useful things with his hands, who was unconcerned by appearance and unmoved by the idea of getting his body waxed. But now Ian was a prick. Joel at least had shown himself to be steadfast.

  So it had been with no little pain that she had rung Nikki to ask to stay and had to say she would be arriving in the middle of the night, tonight, with the kids and may need to stay for a while. Nikki sounded unsurprised, which unsettled Sarah even more. Had everyone else assumed—or worse, been aware—that Ian was rooting the babysitter?

  ‘Of course you can stay here. As long as you like. I’ll make up the beds.’ And then after the mobile signal predictably disappeared and returned she said: ‘Are you okay?’ It was the sort of question that brought you undone so Sarah just said: ‘I don’t know. Speak to you later.’ And hung up.

  She turned the radio onto a music station and focused on driving and breathing. Thankfully the children were fast asleep. Julia would miss kindy and Damien would miss school tomorrow but then there were three weeks’ holiday. She could tell them it was a holiday in the city with Aunty Nikki and then make up her mind about what she was going to do. It might not make Joel happy but it wasn’t a huge imposition: their house was big enough for four families. Why did the world reward the most unpleasant people?

  When she reached the highway it was a pleasure to be surrounded by bright lights and cars full of people buzzing around her. Were there other people like her in those cars? Good people fleeing betrayal, with their children snuggled and smuggled in the back? Most likely. If the past few hours were anything to go by betrayal was more common than love.

  She put fuel in the car at a large, bright petrol station, bought herself a coffee and then walked up and down the asphalt to get the blood flowing. Did she look like a content mother, part of a stable relationship, in control of her life? This morning she had been, or thought she had been. In the back of the car, the children stirred but didn’t wake. She tried not to look at them too long. If she began to cry she wouldn’t stop. She got back into the comfort of the car, a comfort that was beginning to make her feel that the car was her friend, maybe her only friend.

  Every time her mind calmed, a vision of Ian’s bare bottom flexing (hilarious in another context) unveiled itself and made her gasp. Why was her own brain fighting a guerrilla war against her? She set off again, resolute that for the moment there was no other option than the one she had hastily chosen.

  By the time she arrived it was very late, but Nikki was waiting for her in a no-nonsense robe, looking like she was about to take in a family of waifs. Sarah almost expected there to be soup on the hob.

  ‘Can’t be good news,’ Nikki said, examining her closely, and Sarah burst into tears. Nikki hug
ged her and helped her to get the kids into bed.

  Later, in the over-large, shiny kitchen, Sarah told her version of the evening’s events while Nikki listened horrified and open-mouthed over her cup of tea. She told of interrupting Ian and Madison, of that backside, of Madison’s bloody eighteen-year-old perfection, of the kids almost in the next room and of the flight into the night. It hurt to tell it as much as it had to experience it. Nikki swore Ian’s name at every interval.

  Sarah wiped her eyes again and took a long breath.

  ‘Madison Booth?’ Nikki asked. ‘Andy and Jennifer’s daughter?’ She had stayed with Sarah enough times over the years to know a few locals.

  ‘I can’t blame her, I guess. She’s only a child really.’

  ‘Has he done this sort of thing before?’

  ‘Not that I know of. God.’ Sarah had the sudden thought that he might have done it many times before and she was too naive to realise it. But who else could he have possibly done it with? Mrs Patterson?

  Then she explained about the P&C meeting, Nikki said something disparaging about the Booth women, and Sarah told her that no one else in the meeting responded to the evidence of Jennifer and Brock’s liaison.

  Nikki began to giggle and Sarah felt panic rising in her stomach, desperately hoping that the laughter was with, not at her. The feeling that she was out of step with the world came rushing back at her. Here was more powerful evidence, from her own sister, that it was true. It wasn’t the world that was crazy. It was her.

  ‘Nobody was hiding anything from you, Sare, you idiot. They just didn’t notice.’

  ‘You couldn’t miss it. They might as well have had a sign up.’

  ‘You couldn’t miss it. No one else probably even had a good look at them. Too busy catching up. You see and feel things other people don’t. You know that.’

  Sarah thought about this and wondered if it was true. There were certainly plenty of things other people saw and felt that she didn’t.

  ‘I think you’ll find that your community has no idea what the principal and the president are up to.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure. Tomorrow, ring Angela or Pam and tell them you’ve gone for a holiday with me and wanted to know if anything happened in the meeting.’

  It was a very good plan. Sarah went to bed feeling maybe things weren’t as bad as she had thought. Her husband had betrayed her, but perhaps her friends hadn’t.

  So she slept, and quite well, which wasn’t what she’d expected. But Ian’s betrayal, it still hurt like a stab wound. She had woken with the faint stupid hope that it really had been a dream.

  He rang at breakfast but she declined to talk to him, partly because she couldn’t stand to and also because her mouth was stuffed with a range of fruits, yogurt and cereals. Nikki told him in flat tones that the kids were fine and safe and that was all she could tell him. When she put the phone down, Sarah told her she needed to hide for a while, turn her mobile phone off, protect her children and give herself a chance to do some healing. Nikki was quick to tell her she understood.

  But there was one other part that still bothered Sarah. After toast she put it to Nikki.

  ‘Why weren’t you surprised when I rang last night?’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  Sarah watched, biting her lip and wondering what was about to come.

  ‘I was surprised, but I’d had two girlfriends ring this week about that time of night with husband problems. You just sort of fitted into the time slot.’

  Sarah believed that Nikki was telling the truth, just not all of it. Both of them knew that Sarah saw Ian through rose-coloured glasses. Had always done so. It took evidence she couldn’t refute for her to accept that Ian was never as loyal as she had made herself pretend. But she’d never guessed he could be this disloyal.

  ‘You expected that Ian would cheat on me at some point?’

  ‘No. Not at all. He loves you. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I can’t say I was shocked.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ But Sarah knew what she meant.

  ‘I don’t mean anything, Sare. Just that it’s not uncommon.’

  Joel came in through the kitchen door, returning from a long bike ride ridiculous in bright lycra, and that put an end to the conversation.

  MADISON

  Madison spent the rest of the evening in her room, plugged into her music, texting her old boarding school friends and her friends in town. She would have liked to talk to them but the risk of her mother’s supersonic hearing and her father interrupting were too great. Her mother had gone back to the fire but it didn’t matter—she could hear from anywhere at any time.

  Sex itself wasn’t headline material for her group. They’d all had sex and things that passed for sex but once they’d disposed of their virginity, in a not particularly enjoyable fashion, few of them could find anyone worth sleeping with. No one at the high school interested them enough and no one was as daring as Madison, prepared to go outside the confines of their age group. And now (of course) she had taken it almost as far as you could take it: a much older man, a married man, caught in the act, in his house, causing the wife to leave.

  Her room was simple, mostly yellows and whites with pictures of things that interested her: a design, a sculpture, a rock formation, alongside random drawings and photo collages of her friends. In the corner on an easel (with a drop sheet on the floor) was her major artwork: a painting of Mack in watercolour. Next to it was a little table of paints and brushes and rags. It was the one project, the one subject that never went away, never left her. When she went to sleep at night it was the last thing she saw and the last thing she thought about. It wasn’t finished and it wasn’t right but it was beginning to feel creepy, like Mack was actually in the room with her. What would he think of what she’d just done?

  As she had driven home in Ian’s ute, her heart still thumping, the thrill and the drama had been challenged—ambushed really—by a creeping feeling that she had done something wrong. The excitement of the illicit and then the buzz of Sarah’s intrusion was being made limp by the persistent sense that she had been careless with people’s feelings, that she’d possibly caused a family with young children to break up.

  But now, as she told the story again, 140 characters at a time, and knew her friends would be flipping out, she easily shed that sense of responsibility. It was his fault. He sought her out. He was the one who kissed her and held her around the waist after the kids had been fed. He was the one who paid particular attention to her, playfully flirting with her at family parties. He had seduced her. Simple as that. It would never have been the other way around. And if it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else. She was only a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself. People with good relationships didn’t have affairs, hadn’t she heard someone say that on TV?

  She went to make herself a milk drink in the kitchen. From the office her father said: ‘Are you working, Madison, or just yarning to friends on your computer?’

  ‘Bit of both.’

  ‘You should try to keep them separate, you know. Work and then take a break. If you do them at the same time you won’t be able to tell how much was work and how much was play. You’ll kid yourself you’ve done two hours of work when in actual fact …’

  He was still going when she left the room. He had a million theories on study and how to do well in exams, when family history had it that he hadn’t bothered with his own schoolwork one bit, except for sport.

  Hypocrisy was some sort of God-given right of parents. At this thought she returned to her own actions and had to concede that the problem with the ‘someone else’ theory was that ‘someone else’ single and available was a rare commodity in Stony Creek. There were no other eighteen-year-olds. They were all scattered around the state at boarding schools, just as Madison had been until she made the mistake of thinking she could have more fun at home and created the incident.

&
nbsp; The other babysitters the Howards used were fifteen or fifty. If not for Madison, he would have had to make a play for Mrs Patterson, whose huge bosom competed with her stomach for prominence, or little Sally Elsom with arms and legs like a pale pink praying mantis (and that would have been a whole other sort of crime).

  The other flaw in the argument was that she had liked him. He had a kind of movie-star sense about him: a great smile and an aura that said he could probably slay a dragon for you if you needed it.

  Of course she didn’t feel that anymore, did she? He was diminished. The picture of him as the broken man was clear in her mind. And if she admitted to herself that she liked him then she was dangerously close to admitting guilt. Better to stay with the idea of him exploiting her youth and powerlessness and simultaneously concentrate on celebrating the moment with her friends.

  Her mother returned, calling out that everything was under control. She was tempted to yell something back about it being a relief for a control freak but she didn’t bother. Baiting her parents had long since lost its pleasure, and living at home in the middle of nowhere where they controlled her money, her phone, her transport, her food and drink and her social life meant they could be very unpleasant.

  She didn’t hate them though. They did care about her and occasionally, when one of them had the time, they did have fun together. It was just that they saw the world from such a narrow, fearful vantage point. They never saw fun or adventure. They saw wasted opportunity, laziness and ruin. Granted she’d done a bit of that, but was she really expected to live the life of a goal-oriented, morally pure forty-year-old? But all she had to do was get through the next seven months and finish her HSC. Then she’d be out in the world and hopefully into art school. A tattoo would be her first act. She liked the idea of a Van Gogh ear inked to her shoulder and maybe something henna-like on her toes.