The Tower Mill (17 page)

‘No one to stop them. It’ll get worse when Whitrod goes.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘The police commissioner. The ordinary coppers go over his head now,
straight to Joh.’ I stabbed in disgust at the article about the bashed student. ‘They’ll be kissing his hand after this.’

‘His arse, more like. What are you going to do?’ Janet asked.

‘I don’t know. I’m tired, I’m not getting anywhere. If all this didn’t boil my blood –’ I swept my arms wide over the table – ‘I’d dump it in the bin.’

‘If you did, maybe you wouldn’t feel so angry.’

Oh God, I thought. Was that really an option?

NINE

TOM

E
very child knows
the story of how his parents met, it’s just not usual to be alive when it happened. Or, at least, it was unusual until the modern world forced the word
parent
to evolve like one of Darwin’s species. A pedant would argue you can’t exist before your real parents meet long enough to exchange bodily fluids. In fact, that was the trick Peter Carey played in
Oscar and Lucinda
, where the narrator’s forebears meet long enough for that function alone, with the father killed off only hours later. Nice one, Pete. And nice one, Dad, since he gave me a copy for Christmas when he decided I should be reading literature instead of James Bond. To be fair, he didn’t realise the significance I would find in Oscar’s fate and, in any case, it remains one of my favourite novels.

I could play tricks with parentage, too, because my own mum and dad contributed not a single strand of
dna
to my genes. When people said that I was growing more and more like my father, the smile we offered in return was a joke we happily kept to ourselves.

I was a few months short of my fifth birthday when Mike Riley met Lyn Cosgrove at Kenmore State High. That meeting was on the first day of school in 1977. Then, like the start of
World War II, nothing much happened for a couple of months except that the Decree Absolute came through, dissolving the marriage of Michael and Susan Riley.

On Holy Thursday, the Kenmore staff went for a drink after school, which turned into many drinks and the pair who stayed longest suddenly found more joy in the company of another human being than they’d known for a long time.

After Easter, Lyn invited Dad to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, which some of her friends were putting on at La Boite. It was a romp and he had never enjoyed Shakespeare so much. For their first real date, he took her to La Grange, a restaurant boasting not just haute cuisine but genuine French waiters, where he ordered his meal in the vernacular. Apparently, Mum fell out of her chair laughing at the pained face of
le gar
ç
on
(her story), or else she simply chortled with enough mirth to embarrass the poor klutz (Dad’s version).

In the meantime, I was in charge of the shopping.

This was quite a responsibility for a five-year-old and I took to it like a ship’s captain, standing braced at the front of the trolley like Lieutenant Cook on the poop deck. All I needed was a telescope.

The job was assigned to me because I’d taught myself to read, after first working out the link between black marks on a page and then with help from
Sesame Street
and
Play School
. Once I started school, it was time to put this fabulous skill to work, so Dad allowed me out of the supermarket trolley to find a bag of flour or two cans of crushed tomatoes, or (big challenge) a packet of Arnott’s Arrowroot.

What I remember about those days, when it was just Dad and me, was the whistling. My adventures as grocery hunter sometimes took me three or four aisles away, and Dad might have moved on by the time I had the prize in hand. The solution was whistling – not from a five-year-old’s lips, but from Dad’s. He tootled along like a canary, an unconscious thing that I hadn’t noticed until then, or maybe he simply hadn’t felt like whistling in the years when I first began to watch him, copy him, bind myself to him. But, certainly, in the days leading up to the wedding and afterwards, when Lyn joined us in the house they’d bought in Ashgrove, he was a six-foot songbird.

SUSAN

Anzac weekend, 1978

‘Y
ou should have
let me take a cab,’ I said to Janet.

The rain hadn’t let up all afternoon and since it was the Friday before a long weekend, the traffic was a soggy tangle from Redfern to Mascot.

‘You’d have been lucky to get one. Might have missed your flight,’ she replied, without taking her eyes from the road.

I glanced at my watch, then out through the sweep of the windscreen wipers and finally at Janet in the driver’s seat.

‘It’s not raining in Brisbane, according to Mike. I rang him with my flight number this afternoon.’

‘Joh probably arranged a dry day for the diggers. He’s got a direct line to God, hasn’t he?’

‘Up there, they think he
is
God. So does
he
. Would make a great interview – a lot more interesting than ‘attitudes to Anzac Day’.

That had been the topic of my final piece for the
Advocate
. I got the feeling it was punishment for leaving just when I was getting good at the job.

‘Did you interview anyone, or just recycle copy from the year before?’ said Janet, and we grinned cynically, like a pair of seasoned journalists.

‘You’re taking Tom another present, I see.’

I looked down at the package in my lap. ‘He’ll think it’s his birthday all over again, but it didn’t seem right to go up there without something to give him. Lego this time. My brothers loved it.’

‘Mine too.’

Shoptalk and birthdays were easy territory, except that mention of Tom seemed to teleport him into the back seat of Janet’s car, where he was proudly telling anyone who’d listen that his dad was getting married.

The news hadn’t surprised me; I’d been expecting as much since Christmas when Mike told me, nervously, ‘I’ve met someone.’

Forewarning didn’t stop my stomach from twisting as the airport emerged from the gloom because in the northern sunshine waited a woman I had yet to meet, much my own age and soon to be a wife. How soon she became a mother was up to me.

On the flight, I tried to imagine her, this rival in motherhood who had suddenly appeared, starting with an image from the
Vogue
on my knee, until the poise and flawless couture made me laugh out loud. At the second attempt, I went for an earth mother with the easy knack of nurturing and the body of a fertility goddess.

I stopped making such pictures as soon as the engines changed pitch on the approach into Brisbane. I was north of the border again, where I’d sworn I’d never go. Through the window, I watched the street lamps of the southern suburbs scoot by until the lights climbed vertically to form the office towers with the black snake of the river coiled round them.

I turned away. Terry was down there, but so was Dolan these days. He’d been transferred to the big smoke as a detective sergeant, according to John Obermayer’s sources. If I craned my neck, I could take in Parliament House and remind myself of the latest outrage: street marches needed a permit from the police now, except that Bjelke-Petersen appeared on the news taunting protestors, ‘Don’t bother applying. You won’t get one.’

And the people cheered. Anyone who badmouthed Joh these days was badmouthing Queensland. The whole state was a joke.

At the arrival gate, Tom came running into my arms before I was ready, knocking me back a pace. Mike joined us, smiling, and after a few moments I became aware of a third figure hovering close. God, she’d come to the airport with them. Not a model, not an earth mother, pretty without the burden of beauty, Lyn was well dressed in labels I could name, she wore great shoes, but the pants looked like a comfortable pair from last season. It was the kind of choice I would have made. She stared at me, a tentative smile glued in place to cover her nerves.

Me too, I wanted to say. I’m a jelly. It was hard enough for the new wife to meet the old wife at the best of times, but we had a complication, one attached to my chest as though he would never let go.

A kiss seemed too intimate. ‘Hello, I’m Sue,’ I said, freeing one hand and feeling Lyn’s in mine. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

They drove me to Diane’s, who’d found the backbone to defy Joyce’s ban. Tom stayed with me overnight, played, fought and slept with his cousins until, on Sunday, Mike and Lyn returned, and the four of us went to Lone Pine so Tom could see the koalas.

‘Am I the ogre you expected?’ I asked Lyn, while Mike took Tom to the toilet.

‘I’m relieved there’s only one head. Actually, Mike hasn’t told me much about you at all. That only made it harder when I knew you were coming.’

The affection between Mike and Lyn was obvious in the way they were aware of each other constantly, in little touches, deliberate and welcome. Mike had done the same with me until I told him it felt claustrophobic and, of course, he eventually stopped entirely. In unscripted moments, I glimpsed my son with Lyn and couldn’t miss how comfortable he was with her. The wedding was not until August but the mothering had already begun.

On Anzac Day, Mike came for me on his own and in silence we drove through mostly empty streets, past granite soldiers staring down at tributes of flowers, now abandoned, while the old diggers got drunk. In Coopers Plains, Mrs Stoddard had the front door open before we were out of the car.

I’d been here many times, yet I held back. Terry had come on a lot since I’d been so repulsed by the sight of him in hospital. Those days were gone. It was the uncertainty of emotion that kept me beside the car. What did I feel? Sympathy, because he was the one who’d been robbed of so much, anger at the way it had happened, or was it fury at myself that I’d given up on Dolan?

When Mike realised I wasn’t close behind him, he turned, his face a gentle question. Oddly, I wanted him to hold me a moment. I had lovers these days, whoever took my fancy, in fact, but none of them embraced me with the affection that Mike had once shown me – I made sure of that – but at that moment I needed the warmth of someone I could trust.

I was out of luck, though. ‘We don’t have to stay long,’ he said, low enough so that his words wouldn’t reach Mrs Stoddard. Then he took purposeful strides towards the front door, and what could I do but follow?

Terry sat in the same overstuffed chair, his hands clutched possessively on the armrests. ‘This is the lady I told you was coming, Terry,’ said Mrs. Stoddard. ‘This is Susan.’

It had been so long. Of course he’d forgotten me, of course his mother needed to prepare him. In the same tone she said to me, ‘We’ve been practising your name,’ and sure enough Terry pronounced it clearly and smiled at his own success.

‘Good boy,’ said Mrs Stoddard.

I took a step closer. There were no scars, like Frankenstein’s monster any more, perhaps because his hair had been combed carefully over his forehead to hide them. The hair, once fabulously untamed and falling to his shoulders, was cut like an old man’s, with a dead-straight part on the left-hand side and every strand neatly suppressed and shining across the dome of his skull.

I bent forward to kiss him, but he stiffened and pushed back in the chair.

‘He doesn’t like people coming too close,’ warned Mrs Stoddard.

‘Susan,’ Terry said again.

‘It was awful,’ I confessed to Diane on the drive to the airport. ‘When I think of what he might have been. No one will know his name, no one will remember what he once was. An oversized child now, nothing more. Depends on his mother for everything. I felt terrible afterwards, leaving her to her loneliness. Then I had to front up to Tom. I’m starting to see parts of Terry in him now. He was all Kinnane when he was younger, but I guess the male side is starting to show through.’

‘What does Tom make of it all?’ she asked.

‘Nothing yet. Mike doesn’t think it’s right to take him along just yet. Might upset him.’

Diane weighed up what she thought of this, but made no comment. Her tone remained serious, though, when she asked, ‘What’s the verdict on Mike’s fiancée?’

‘I like her, more than I expected to. They’re made for each other and I suppose I’m happy about that, happy for Mike.’

‘I was thinking more about . . .’ But Diane lost her nerve and began to redden.

‘It’s all right. I know what you mean. I’ve made up my mind. The visit to Terry settled it somehow. Tom’s staying here, with Mike and Lyn. I told them this afternoon.’

‘But Sue, he’s yours! You’re his mother. It’s the wrong choice.’

‘Don’t, Diane, please. It’s done now. It was done a long time ago.’

‘I don’t understand you, Susan.’

‘You don’t need to. But I do need you to leave it alone.’

‘Mum will go through the roof,’ she said. ‘She thought Mike getting married again would shake you up, make you see what you were missing out on.’

‘Does Mum think of what Tom will be missing out on if I take him back to Sydney with me? I can’t be a mother like you, Diane. It’s not
in
me. Tom’s happy here and I can’t make him any happier. I’m starting a new job next week, the
National Times
, for God’s sake. Do you know how many people I beat to get it? And they’ll want their pound of flesh, too. I’ll have to chase stories all hours of the night. I know you can’t understand it, but this is the life I wanted, back at uni, before the Tower Mill.’

At the airport, we ignored the parking signs and sat in the car.

‘I’m sorry I ranted at you, Di. Say you forgive me?’

‘For the rant, yes. As for the other, I’m not so sure. Can I have Tom over to play with my kids? He’s still part of the family.’

‘That’s up to Mike, and his new mother, too, I suppose.’

It was nothing more than a statement of fact but Diane’s face showed her astonishment all over again. ‘I don’t get you, Sue, really I don’t.’

I reached for the doorhandle but Diane put her hand on my elbow. ‘Can I tell you something?’

I lowered my hand, sat back in the seat.

‘I’ve gone on the pill. Four kids is enough and Jim still likes his Saturday nights.’

At last. Thirty years of Joyce telling you what to do is enough for anyone, I wanted to say. ‘I’m proud of you,’ I said instead, leaning across to kiss my sister, but her announcement called for more than a peck on the cheek. I hugged her as I’d seldom done before, and when she did the same I discovered the affection I’d craved all weekend.

‘I’ve got a son and a sister who love me,’ I said, tearing up. ‘Too bad you both belong here and I don’t.’

In Sydney, I took a cab from the airport, only to find the flat empty and cold. I sat in the dark for a while, telling myself it was the right decision and it was, too, but I still ached now that it was done.

Something else had floated up through this weekend, and only in the cold and the darkness did I admit it. Jealousy wasn’t part of my nature, but that night I envied the man I was once married to, envied the easy intimacy he’d found; I could have done with a little of the joy that rayed out of Mike Riley like the Queensland sun.