The Tower Mill (13 page)

Why couldn’t Mike do that, instead of offering up more wounded understanding? I was beginning to hate him for it.

TOM

H
ow did Dad
survive those months when my mother abandoned him to finish out his Bindamilla posting alone? Whether he wanted to admit it or not at the time, those months were the harbinger of his marriage’s end, but at least they left a legacy of a different sort that he’s rightly proud of. He let slip occasional snippets over the years, enough for me to assemble a vague picture of those lonely months – and then there are the poems, some of the most heart-searing verse I have ever read.

On weekends, he would take sheets of scrap paper into the sand hills beyond the southern edge of Bindamilla and scramble his way to the single tree that clung stubbornly to the crest. Here, he was far enough from town to hear none of its slow breathing, as he described it to me once, and when the wind dropped, there was a silence like he had never known. That was why he came. The house, for all its size, was claustrophobic.

‘At school, did they teach you about Wordsworth’s emotion reflected in tranquillity?’ he asked me once, and we’d shared a good laugh then because those were the very words my English teacher had used. ‘Nothing much changes, then. I was told the same thing. Except it’s bullshit and I needed Bindamilla to teach as much.’

I heard then of how he’d despaired at the trite lines he came up with. There was no poetry in those tranquil sand hills and no poetry in him, either, it seemed. He stared out at a landscape utterly devoid of human presence and only became more aware of himself as an alien amid such emptiness. Mike Riley belonged where human beings crossed his view, he belonged among houses and streets and the hum of traffic and the shadows cast by office towers.

‘The silence, Tom. You have to experience it to know how all consuming it can be. Even the scratching of pencil on paper was carried off into its vastness,’ he told me. ‘
I wandered lonely as a cloud
,’ he’d called once, at the top of his voice. There was no echo. The silence devoured Wordsworth, too. He tried Larkin, then Shakespeare.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

‘I could feel the horizon laughing at me,’ he confided. ‘Especially after I made a rushed visit to Brisbane to spend time with your mother. I was lonelier than ever after that weekend and walked out to the hills, to no avail, it seemed. But one day when I stood up and turned around, there was Bindy. At my back all that time, I’d forgotten it and taking it in suddenly, like a slap, I felt my own revulsion and at the same time my need. It was my wife that small town had rejected, not me.’

So he sat down again, at the base of the same tree, facing the town this time. He said he could feel the weight of the landscape against his back, but it was Bindamilla that jerked his pencil into motion. ‘Forget Wordsworth,’ he told me. ‘Tranquillity was no mood for the poetry in me, Tom.’ And with the town stretched out before him, he’d listened at last to a landscape that was anything but silent, and began to write.

SEVEN

TOM

I
n my twenties
a certain rhythm worked its way into how I built a picture of Susan’s marriage. I would talk to her, winning precious nuggets, assay them in my own good time then go digging for more from Dad. That was why, soon after my solo tour of Circular Quay, I found myself saying to him, ‘It must have been hard living in Bindy by yourself.’

By then he was used to such questions popping out of the blue. ‘You can put up with anything when you know how long it will last,’ he said, ‘and there were some compensations. I wrote all the Larkin and Eliot out of myself and started hunting around for an original way to say things.’

‘You found your voice.’

He shot a dismissive breath down his nose. ‘Don’t get wanky on me, Tom. Anyway, much as I missed your mother, having some space between the two of us brought its own relief. Looking back on it now, I can see how unhappy she was married into a compromise and stuck out there among people she didn’t understand. At the time, it seemed like an emotional flu that never went away, and I was the one she wiped her nose on. What I missed wasn’t Susan so much, it was marriage, the partner thing. And I missed you, too, more than I’d bargained for.’

‘Who’s getting wanky now?’

‘No, it’s true. I guess that had a lot to do with what happened afterwards.’

‘In Sydney?’

‘Yes, in Sydney. Susan’s told you about the rows we had, I suppose.’

‘She thinks she was half-crazy, should have been on something to calm her down.’

‘Your Riley grandparents would agree,’ he said, then making a face he tilted his head to one side as though considering this idea as a work of art. ‘The result would have been the same, though. Had to be. We were growing apart too quickly and you can only follow someone a certain distance before you realise she’s not leading, she’s running away. And then, of course, there was the Dismissal. That seemed to stir her up even more than the state election where it all started.’

No, Dad, I wanted to say. It started at the Tower Mill when the police charged into the crowd with thirty-six-inch batons in their eager hands. You were there, Dad. You saw it begin.

Instead, I said, ‘She still gets hot talking about what Kerr did to Whitlam.’

‘Yeah, well, I was just as angry at the time. I was still in Bindy when it happened, a Tuesday – I remember because we were setting up for a staff meeting when someone came in with the news.’

‘Susan was visiting Diane at Mater Mothers’,’ I added. ‘Said she came out onto the footpath afterwards and saw the headline at a newsstand. She started to shake.’

Dad’s face went heavy with an odd solemnity as he listened. According to them both, the death of John Lennon wasn’t the where-were-you-when-you-heard moment for their generation, it was Whitlam’s sacking by the governor-general.

Poor Dad. He was wrong about the Dismissal, too. Yes, Susan was outraged, but it was the phone call she’d received the weekend before that did greater damage.

I was in a privileged position again, where I knew more than he did, and once more had to convince myself that silence wasn’t treachery. He had never heard of a journalist named Obermayer and he didn’t know that Susan had received an unexpected call three days before Kerr moved against Whitlam.

The caller was Barry Dolan.

‘You’ve been asking around about me,’ said the voice in her ear.

There was no name, but Susan’s mind was so full of Barry Dolan by then that she immediately made the connection.

‘How did you get this number?’

‘I’m a detective. It’s what I do,’ he told her calmly. ‘Wasn’t hard, the way you’ve left such a trail trying to track me down. Now what’s this about?’ he demanded. ‘Why so interested in me?’

She wasn’t prepared and desperately tried to bluff her way through: ‘I’m a reporter. I want to interview you about—’

‘No, you’re not. You’re a student.’

Her mouth went dry. He’d done his own checks, probably knew where she lived.

‘It’s about the Tower Mill,’ she said, hoping to put him off balance and for a few moments it worked. A long pause followed, and when he spoke he was wary rather than belligerent.

‘What about it?’

‘You were there, you chased the demonstrators down into the park.’

‘There were hundreds of coppers that night. Our orders were to clear the public footpath.’

‘You know what I’m talking about.’

Silence from Dolan, then the predictable: ‘Haven’t got a clue. You must have me mixed up with someone else.’

‘There was a witness,’ said Susan.

‘Bullshit. It was pitch black in that park. No one saw a thing.’

Those were his words, Susan insisted whenever she told me about this telephone conversation.
No one saw a thing.
To her it was an admission of guilt.

But she was on dangerous ground. The witness was the letter writer, and she didn’t know his name. But Dolan certainly did. She kept quiet about the letter and the vacuum this left was quickly filled by Dolan’s reborn confidence.

‘You’ve got nothing, lady. And seriously, do you think you could get anywhere with this, even if you did? How old are you, anyway? A fucking girl by the sound of you. Do you think my mates are going to investigate, no matter what you turn up, do you think the government’s going to let one of us go down for that, just when things are getting cosy? Try all you like, but before you waste your time, take a look around. Does the man in the street give a shit? Or the papers? Of course not, and without them you’ll get nowhere.’

I don’t know if that’s really how he said it, but Dolan had challenged her, openly, contemptuously and for all the steel in her soul, she knew he was right.

That call settled something that had been growing in her, a new pregnancy for the womb she wouldn’t fill with a brother or a sister for me.

‘I’m getting out,’ she told Obermayer on the phone afterwards. ‘I can’t stand living in this state another minute.’

Getting out. She swore to me that was the first time the idea had taken form in words and I believed her, but she’d already got herself out of Bindamilla. Did she ever join the dots, as neatly as I did so many years later?

Another time I asked Dad, ‘What was the summer course that caused so much trouble between you and Susan? The one she went to Sydney for.’

Mum, Lyn that is, had taken the girls somewhere and he was marking papers at the dining room table, as he often did on a Sunday afternoon. At this new assault on his history, he stared at me as though I’d enquired after the secret of life. Then a memory of my earlier questions about Bindamilla seemed to build context around my question and his face lost its confusion. ‘Ah, you’re thinking about 1975 still.’

‘Well, technically it was ’76. The summer school was in the new year, wasn’t it?’

He stared at me a moment. ‘You know a lot about it. Since you’re asking, it was called ‘Media and the Feminine,’ he went on, as though the memory lay on his tongue as easily as the names of his daughters.

‘She wanted to move down there, didn’t she?’

‘She talked about going overseas, actually. She started on at me about it as soon as I finished my time in Bindy. Christ, I felt like I’d been spun around in a clothes dryer. I wanted to teach overseas at some stage, in a good school if I could swing it, but she kept on about it, all because Whitlam had been chucked out, as far as I could see, and before I knew what was happening, we were shouting at one another.’

Dad paused there and it wasn’t hard to guess why.

‘You hated it, didn’t you?’

‘Fighting’s not me, is it, Tom? Yet I could feel the missiles primed at the base of my throat. Shit, I
’d been transferred to Kenmore High School and I didn’t want to swap that for some London slum. That was all I’d get if we turned up out of the blue. I shouted those very words in your mother’s face. She backed off, about England, at least, but then she started on about a summer school she wanted to do in Sydney. I said yes just so she’d stop ranting about how she had to get away.’

‘She used those words, did she? She talked about getting away?’

He stared silently at me again, considering his answer, making me aware of how earnest I sounded. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, before he could respond.

‘It does, or you wouldn’t have asked.’

‘I’m sorry. Really, forget what I said.’

He went back to his assignments and I wandered into the kitchen to check whether the fridge held anything more interesting than it had ten minutes earlier. As I closed the door in disappointment, he called through from the dining room.

‘For the record, yes, she talked about getting away, or getting out, actually.’

I was quickly through the doorway to hear what else he might add.

He looked up at me again and in a tone that still held the faintest twinge of hurt, said, ‘Fool that I was, I didn’t realise she was talking about our marriage as much as anything geographical. I doubt she realised it herself.’

What I really wanted to ask couldn’t be asked. Did she want to get out
with
me on her hip? The question would have sounded too pathetic.

SUSAN

January, 1976

F
ate loves irony
.
Ask the Greeks, who laced their dramas with both to torment their protagonists more cruelly. Should it be any surprise, then, that the days Mike and I spent together in Sydney started so well? With Tom in a space-age safety harness strapped to the back seat, Mike drove the Holden down the Pacific Highway to collect me from the summer school, and, after some days in Sydney, we would make a leisurely return north, stopping for a swim at every beach that took our fancy. That was the plan, anyway. It didn’t even matter that the hotel he’d chosen out of the phone book turned out to be a down-at-heal pub with rooms above the bar.

‘Mike, Sydney’s so alive,’ I told him when I joined them there on the Thursday night. ‘
I
feel more alive.’

I kissed him, nuzzled Tom then pushed them both onto the ill-sprung bed for a tickling game, or was the game called ‘mother and wife’?

I’d already decided on a place to eat and all the way there gushed about Sydney and what I’d been learning. ‘There’s a lecturer called Rhonda Nicolson. Oh Mike, you should hear her. She sees things so clearly. And, God, the university makes
uq
look like a blockhouse. I could be walking around the cloisters of Oxford. Sydney’s such a fantastic place, so much fun. Thanks for letting me do this, Mike.’ And like the schoolgirl I no doubt resembled, I kissed him again, impetuously.

The next morning, while I went off to the last day of the summer school, he took Tom for a baptism at Bondi Beach and then a picnic by the harbour.

‘There’s a party to celebrate the end of the course,’ I told him when we were together again in our room above the bar. ‘Linda’s place. Surry Hills somewhere.’

‘What about Tom?’

‘We can take him. Linda says he can sleep in her bed.’

He had a good laugh at that. ‘I’d hoped my boy would be a bit older before he got offers like that.’ He hadn’t stopped smiling since he’d arrived. What a relief that was. I let myself believe things were on the mend.

When we parked the Holden at Linda’s, the sky was on fire, and as a reminder of the sun’s largesse my face was covered in a sheen of sweat before we could reach the door.

Linda’s place was as ramshackle as our hotel, which only made it more appealing to me, a reminder of student days with Terry. I no longer dodged such reminders; I was eager for them, in fact, and it didn’t seem to matter that I’d once had to carefully segregate my husband from the man who lived in those memories. The letter had changed that, and Sydney seemed part of the same renewal.

I held Tom tightly to reassure him among so many strangers, but unlike the teachers in Bindy, these girls didn’t put on faux displays of mothering and they spoke to him in sentences, without the self-conscious cutesiness that annoyed the crap out of me. It made all the difference, as though I was home at last.

Mike tagged behind us, meeting Linda and her housemate, and with them the only male member of the summer school, Derek someone.

‘God, I haven’t been to a party like this for years,’ he said to Derek, who shrugged.

‘It’s what students do.’

‘Yep, and I partied with the best of them,’ he tossed back lightly.

Good on you, Mike, I thought. Let’s party. Tom will be right once he goes to sleep in the back room.

Polite questions followed as my new friends welcomed Mike among them yet all too obviously he answered like a teacher who’d been out in the real world for three years now, his student days already in past tense and tinged with nostalgia. He spoke about buying a house and how hard it was to get a loan from the bank, as if students gave a shit about things like that. Couldn’t he step across the distance that his plans hollowed out between them, even for one night? I felt like calling to him, Mike, I’m over here, on this side of the ditch, come and join me.

The bundle in my arms was part of what separated him, as it separated me, now that my husband and my son had come to Sydney. Only in the smoky lounge room did I finally see what a holiday the past fortnight had been. The others in the room were entirely free in a way the Rileys were not, something Mike would have agreed with, devoid of the least resentment. To him, the freedom of youth was a currency you used to purchase your future, and, with me filling his eyes and now Tom, who’d somehow transferred into his arms, Mike obviously considered his wisely spent.

Derek produced a roll-your-own from his pocket. ‘You want a toke?’ he asked us both.

I’d taken him up on the offer more than once in recent days, but this time folded his fingers back over the joint and, with another shrug, Derek went off to find someone else to share it with.

I caught Mike’s eye and grinned. ‘Hey, they’re students. We passed plenty of joints around in our day.’

‘True enough. Doesn’t feel right, though, kids and dope.’

No, it didn’t, when he put it that way.

Tom grew limp in his arms and I took him in search of the untainted air of Linda’s bedroom. There were more bodies when I returned, all contributing to the thickening smoke around the single globe. Mike was caught in the crush near the makeshift bar, where he listened to a half-circle of girls, the most vocal a leggy thing who was braless in a way that skinny girls could get away with. She hunched her shoulders, accentuating the bones, and blew smoke in a confident stream into the cotton wool cloud above her head. The music and the distance meant I couldn’t catch what she was declaiming, but she was certainly having a go at another girl. Poor thing, the victim didn’t look happy, especially when laughter broke up the circle.

Mike was still smiling when he extracted himself at last and came to my side.

‘You happy?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, fine.’

‘Great people, aren’t they?’

‘If you agree with what they’re saying, yeah,’ he said, looking over his shoulder at the girl who’d been the butt of the joke. Beetroot red with indignation, it seemed her opinion had been sliced through and left to bleed.

We fell into a group including the helpful Linda.

‘Happy to oblige,’ she said, when Mike thanked her for the use of her bedroom. Linda wore a loose-fitting dress, as well, although hers flowed gracefully to the floor, accentuating a long face that was framed by honey-blond hair in the hippie style that never quite slipped out of fashion. ‘What did you do with your little fellow today?’ she asked.

‘We played the foreign tourists, never out of sight of an iconic landmark, two at once if I could manage it,’ said Mike.

He listed where he’d taken Tom: Mrs Macquaries Chair, across the bridge just for the fun of it, a ferry ride to Milsons Point.

‘Seems strange to go out of your way for them,’ said Linda. ‘They’re just part of the landscape to us. Tom’s lucky that one of his dads can show him around. Never knew my father, and Mum didn’t find anyone else.’

Before Linda could say anything more, a new face become part of the huddle, through no deliberate choice, I thought, more in the way a pip is squeezed from an orange and has to land somewhere.

‘Hello, Rhonda,’ I said. She’d been coy about coming and I was suddenly delighted to see that she had.

‘You’re the lecturer,’ said Mike quickly. ‘Susan was raving about you last night.’ He offered his hand.

Rhonda ignored it. ‘Ah, the husband from Queensland,’ she said, looking at me.

Undaunted, Mike pushed the usual pleasantries her way: ‘Sue’s really enjoyed your course.’

‘Escape is always a joy,’ she shot back at him.

Again she was looking straight at me, and this time so was Mike, clearly bewildered. He expected people to like him and couldn’t work out why Rhonda was being so curt. I could have bloody killed her!

Mike turned full on to Rhonda, who offered no ironic smile to accompany her little barbs. Her silence seemed to offer him a free swing, as though she were saying, Come on, mate, your turn to slip in a witty riposte. What was she up to? Was she stoned already?

Rhonda didn’t explain herself, and didn’t hang around, either, leaving me to field my husband’s questions.

‘What did she mean by that? Escape from what? What have you been saying to these people?’

‘Nothing, Mike. She wasn’t having a go at you.’

But that’s exactly what Rhonda had been doing. With help from the satyr-eyed Derek, Rhonda and I had got off our faces on the third night of the summer school and I couldn’t stop leaking my unhappiness onto her sympathetic shoulder. I’d said more than I should have, heard myself say things that until then I’d stomped on whenever they tried to sprout in my mind.

‘That other girl seemed to know that I’m not Tom’s father, too,’ Mike added. ‘You’ve been pretty quick to tell them our history.’

‘It came up in something we were discussing, that’s all.’

I didn’t want to stir up the rawness of the weeks before New Year. Not tonight; we were in Sydney to start over.

Mike went off, only half-convinced, to check on Tom, leaving me to fold myself into my classmates. The next time I saw him he was laughing with Derek, his humour apparently restored. I didn’t see Rhonda until she was beside me.

‘Look, I probably told you too much last week. Things aren’t as bad I made out. Mike’s been good to me, really.’

Rhonda shrugged, without offering any apology. ‘They’re all good to their wives as long they get things their own way. Believe me, Sue. I had a husband of my own once.’

I could have asked her to back off, could have
told
her to piss off for that matter, but Rhonda, this whole fortnight, had been so important to me, I didn’t want it to end sourly.

Later still, Mike joined me. ‘That Derek fancies you,’ he said, laughing. ‘What a hoot!’

He’d been enjoying Derek’s generosity by the look of things, too. I took the joint from his fingers and held the smoke in my lungs while it passed to a waiting hand. Too late, I saw that it was Rhonda’s.

Mike was watching her with open belligerence. Oh, would you give me a break.

‘How did you spend your day?’ asked a girl who hadn’t been there earlier.

He started at the top with the swim at Bondi.

‘Oh, I was there tonight. It’s so easy now with daylight saving.’

‘S’pose it is,’ said Mike. ‘We don’t have it in Queensland.’

‘Don’t have what?’ said the girl, confused.

‘Daylight saving.’

‘Bloody ridiculous,’ snapped Rhonda, who’d closed in a step to claim a place in the circle. ‘Typical dog-in-a-manger attitude of the ruling junta up there. Worried it’s against God’s law or something.’

If it had been anyone else in the room, Mike would have joined in her contempt. Ruling junta, hypocritical God-botherers; he liked to bang on about Joh and his cronies in the same words.

‘Actually, daylight saving doesn’t suit Queensland,’ he said instead, rolling out an attitude he’d never mentioned before. ‘Summer days up our way are hotter for longer. We look forward to the sun going down so the temperature will drop and give us a bit of relief.’

‘And all that extra daylight fades the curtains, too, doesn’t it?’ said Rhonda.

Ah, that old chestnut. Someone was sure to bring it up. I laughed with the rest, even Mike.

‘But it’s true, what I said about the heat,’ he lunged on, his serious tone out of kilter. ‘The best part of the day in Queensland is the morning, when it’s cool. Personally, I like it being light nice and early, lets me take Tom out in the stroller and get things done before it’s too hot.’

They stared at him, perplexed; they were all young, single, they stayed in bed as long as they could in the mornings, just as Mike and I had done once, ourselves. They didn’t give a damn when the sun came up.

‘Sounds like you’re worried about the curtains,’ said Rhonda.

There was no laughter this time. We’d done that joke. She seemed to realise and, holding Mike’s eye deliberately, came up with a fresh dig. ‘They should change Brisbane’s name to Johannesburg after he bunged on a State of Emergency for those footballers. You know they’re putting a new sign up at the border, don’t you?’ She raised her arms with fingers splayed wide to mimic a lavish billboard:
‘Now entering Queensland. Turn your clocks back an hour and your mind back a hundred years.’

It was so bloody true, I thought, and I couldn’t help smiling with the rest, all except Mike. What was he upset about? Having a go at Queensland? Oh, come on, Mike. It’s just a bit of ribbing, I wanted to say, and to be honest, the place deserves it. They could be such yokels. Even in Brisbane they went on like bushies, and the place was all the more backward because of it.

Mike would work his way out of his funk now, I thought. The jibe about the Springboks was an easy opening. Shit, none of this lot had been chased into a park by riot police in the fight against apartheid. All he had to do was say as much and he’d take the smirk off their faces.

I waited for him to bring Rhonda down a peg or two with the story, but he didn’t. It was the petty stuff about Queensland that was getting his goat and, at that moment, I felt the gulf between us like the slash of a knife.

‘Look, you don’t understand what you’re making fun of here,’ he said, using his teacher’s voice, the one he used on dolts who needed things laid out in simple lines. ‘I spent two years in the bush. Daylight saving makes things harder for farmers.’

‘Upsets the cows,’ said Rhonda. ‘They get to vote in Queensland, don’t they? It’s the only way Bjelke-Petersen can get elected.’

‘Donkey vote,’ said another voice.

‘They’re all donkeys up there.’

Everyone laughed.

‘At least try to understand,’ said Mike, louder now as he became more annoyed. ‘When I was teaching out west, some of my kids rode a bus for an hour each day just to attend school. With daylight saving, they’d be waiting at the roadside in the dark. Why should they do that just so uni students in the city can go for a swim after lectures?’

He’d made it personal now, drawn a clear line of demarcation, him and them.

Rhonda didn’t bother with him, but spoke directly to me. ‘I didn’t realise you were married to one of Bjelke-Petersen’s mob.’