The Tower Mill (20 page)

SUSAN

March, 1988

After the Inquiry
was done with Barry Dolan, I lingered an extra day to make sure Tom was all right. He seemed so, and even though he was a little stand-offish when I went round to say goodbye, he hugged me with real affection when it was time to go. I returned that affection in spades, surprised by the need in me.

On the way to the airport, I dropped in on Terry. It was getting easier, now. He was watching
tv
in his room, which seemed the sum total of his days, despite assurances that patients were taken on regular outings.

Did he recognise me after my recent visits? Again, I had only the nurses’ word that he did know faces if he saw them often enough. He smiled in the way the uncertain do, as a form of defence, but the noise and colour of the screen soon drew his eyes away. I sat beside him, wishing suddenly that I could take his hand, for my comfort, not his. But no, touching made him anxious; the nurses were adamant about that.

‘What did you think of
Tom?’ I asked him.

Did it matter if he made any sense of the question?

‘I had it out with Mike afterwards, over never bringing Tom to see you. I’m still furious about that . . .’

A male nurse stuck his shaggy head through the open doorway. ‘I heard talking,’ he said, clearly surprised. ‘Sorry, seemed unusual, that’s all.’ And immediately he was gone.

‘You don’t talk, do you, Terry? There’s nothing going on in there that would let you know your own son. Would you get on together if you suddenly snapped out of the netherworld? Or would you be like me? I didn’t like what I saw in him, at first. An awkward boy in his oversized body and watching bloody football over my shoulder while I scratched around for things to say. He was so complacent, so stitched up, a copy of Mike Riley instead of . . . what? You and me? I don’t want him to be a copy of anyone.

‘I’m glad I brought him here to see you, though. I didn’t realise how vulnerable he was, how easily he could break. He seemed so grown up when I came back from London. And then he sided with me against Mike. Maybe there’s more of you in him than he shows. That’d be good, wouldn’t it, Terry?

‘He’s going to be a good-looking man, too, like you were, and he’s no fool. Top of the heap at school, according to Mike. Wish he wasn’t at Terrace, all that testosterone and born-to-rule bullshit.’

I was mouthing off as though I didn’t have a say in any of it, and I didn’t, really. No point in pushing for a change when he’d be finished next year.

‘Too late. Too late for a lot of things,’ I said. ‘We’d have raised him differently . . .’

Had I spoken too loudly, or was there something in my tone of voice that made Terry turn my way? It was enough to make the fantasy fall in on itself and with his vacant face waiting for enlightenment I told him the truth: ‘We talked about an abortion, didn’t we? Pretty much decided. No getting away from that. Then the Tower Mill.’

Terry continued to stare, waiting for more, as though he was happy to listen.

‘Was I wrong to leave him with Mike? If there’s one question I wish you’d answer for me, that’s it. He was your son, too, Terry. I’m sorry, more sorry now that I see what kind of man he’s going to be, but I had to do it the way I did, if I was going to stay the person you knew.’

If I went on like this I would make myself cry. Ridiculous. It was seventeen years ago.

Could you love a son the way you loved his father? And then I was crying and couldn’t stop, even in the cab on the way to the airport.

ELEVEN

TOM

When do you
stop talking to your parents? Boys are supposed to become grunters in their early teens, according to the cliché, so what made me the exception, because I kept gabbing to Mum, Dad and the teachers at Terrace, right through to my mid-teens. For me, the silence came later, and focused mainly on Dad. Even then, it was only about certain things, as though I’d built a private room at the end of the hall and went there alone to be with Terry and Susan. I doubt anyone else noticed, except Mum, who could be a winged Cerberus at times, guarding the nest she’d built for her two blond-haired daughters and the gangly youth I had become by my final year at school. I’d started calling myself the cuckoo’s child by then, recognising the out-sized comparison I made with Gabby and Em as a telltale sign that the stealthy bird had paid a visit.

Then, suddenly, I wasn’t a schoolboy any more, and without quite knowing why, I settled on journalism at
uq
.

No, that’s not true. The reason was all too obvious and Dad knew it. He would have accepted my choice better if Susan hadn’t started flying me down to Sydney to spend time with her and then, of course, there was the holiday in Europe at the end of first year. He and Mum couldn’t possibly indulge me like that, with two girls to put through All Hallows’ and mortgage interest rates touching seventeen per cent.

How many eighteen-year-olds know about interest rates, though? When Susan dangled an airline ticket in front of my nose and promised Christmas in Paris, I snatched at the chance. Of course I did.

SUSAN

1990

Travelling with a
teenager was an education, or perhaps a revisitation, if there is such a word. Since the day I’d started at the
Advocate
, through three years at the
National Times
and my career with the dailies, I’d been up with the sun. It was easy to forget that, before then, I could sleep until noon and think nothing of it.

On Christmas Eve, when Tom finally emerged in search of a late breakfast, I told him what lay ahead for the day.

‘Robert’s taking his kids out to Chantilly, to visit their grandparents. Rapid fire French all day, I’m afraid. Best if we don’t go.’

‘Just you and me, then,’ he said, and the pleasure with which he spoke grew midwinter blooms in my belly. I’d already played the tour guide for his wide-eyed early days in Paris, when there were so many icons to tick off, and found myself dredging up obscure details about the city.

Robert was impressed. ‘How in the blue blazes did you know that?’

He loved inserting what he thought were Australianisms into our banter, especially when Tom was around.

My greatest triumph had been the extraordinary public toilet beneath La Madeleine, which offered the delectable pretence that we’d descended not a flight of stairs but an entire century. From its pissoires, Tom could wave to me if he hadn’t been a touch embarrassed.

‘What will we do instead?’ he asked over his coffee.

‘There’s a market street Robert says we should visit out near the red light district. And don’t get any ideas, you’ll be on a tight leash.’

A bitter December breeze channelled along Boulevard de Clichy as we climbed up from the Metro at Pigalle. ‘Holy fuck,’ he complained.

‘Wimp!’

‘Where’s my mother’s care and sympathy?’

‘You’re twice my size. About time you took care of me,’ I teased.

The gawkiness of his teens was washing out of him, revealing a lean young man, broad-shouldered and handsome – I saw the girls eyeing him off, and thirty-something matrons, too – and was I the only one who saw it, or was there a tangibility about his potential?

As Robert had warned, the footpaths along the boulevard were seedy with sex shops and peepshows. After a couple of blocks, I guided him with a hand under his elbow into the shelter of Rue Lepic; and shelter it was, too, from both the wind and the bawdy neon. Stalls spilled amber light and their riotous jumble of wares into our path, first a chaotic butcher’s shop crammed with sausage and hung with gutted pigs and unplucked turkeys that needed only a twinkle in their eyes to fly again. A barrow of flowers straddled the gutter.

‘Where do they grow flowers at this time of year?’ Tom asked.

‘Fly them in from North Africa,’ I said, the faux expert once more.

He wanted to buy me a bouquet of tulips but I forestalled him because they’d have been awkward to carry round for the rest of the day, then regretted my practicality when he looked so crestfallen.

He was fascinated by the snails, but baulked in horror at tasting one and, at a basket of oysters, had to be tutored in the pronunciation of
hu
î
tres
.

‘Not
wheat
, darling.’

I was touching his arm again, hugging him to myself. ‘Make an
aitch
sound and turn it into a double u.’

‘Still, your French is better than your father’s.’ I laughed, aware too late that I was forgetting who his real father was.

But Tom knew who I meant and threw back his head in acknowledgment. ‘I know, he used to test my vocab. Didn’t sound anything like Mademoiselle Lernier.’

‘Mademoiselle?’

‘A dish, much too pretty to be a teacher at Terrace, but not as pretty as you,’ he said.

‘Worm.’

He put his long arm around me and kept it there until the next corner when we had to jump our separate ways or be parted more violently by a motorbike. I hoped his arm would return, but it didn’t. Robert often looped an arm around me as we walked, my husband in all but name and, while I welcomed it, this intimacy with Tom was something different.

Paris was a lovers’ cliché, and, as I climbed Montmartre with my son, I smiled at the absurdity of falling in love.

It was a steep climb to the top, and we were in no hurry: Tom, because each street was a wonderland; and me, for delays of my own that I was too happy to examine. When the ground flattened out, so did Tom’s interest, as the city of Parisians ceded the streets to charcoal artists and racks of
I Love Paris
t-shirts.

We broke through to the steps of Sacré-Coeur with the city spread out before us, crowned by a pale, unblemished blue, and here I was suddenly beset by memory.

‘What is it?’ Tom asked, when I began to cry softly, soundlessly.

I hadn’t seen them coming, hadn’t imagined that words said for a laugh amid sex-tangled sheets could reach across two decades and round the planet to snatch the breath from my lungs.

‘Your father brought me here,’ I said.

‘Dad! But you two never . . .’

‘Terry,’ I corrected him, more sharply than I’d intended. ‘He took me on a tour, fed me at Maxim’s, kissed me in a garret with the Eiffel Tower right outside our window.’

He still didn’t understand, and how could he, when it wasn’t true.

If I’d tried to explain, there, in the middle of Paris, only my anger and guilt would have escaped into the chill. I knew what had been done to Terry and yet I’d given up chasing the bastards who were responsible. My punishment seemed clear enough, here, in the middle of Paris. This wonderful day with my son, who was Terry’s son, too, was to be taken from me.

In the silence, Tom moved closer to put his arm around me, as I’d invited him to do all morning.

‘No, it’s all right,’ I said, putting my hand against his chest to stop him pressing closer. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’ And to recover myself I walked away until the worst of it passed.

By then, of course, the fun had gone skipping away from us, and although I tried to fetch it back he seemed oddly reluctant.

In the weeks after Paris, I thought of Tom almost every day, not in passing, but in the long silence before sleep and over coffee in the bustle of the newsroom. I was mother to an almost-man. He needed to know things that a child could not.

That was why, early in the new year, I found myself among strangers who, like me, followed a line painted on the stark concrete until we were inside a room surprisingly alive with children. They had come to see their fathers, of course, attended by weary mothers who didn’t share the joy of reunion with quite the same enthusiasm, if I was any judge.

Soon after, a different door opened and men filed in, watched languidly by the uniforms stationed around the room. One man stopped in front of my small table.

‘You Kinnane?’ he asked, and when I nodded he slipped into the seat opposite.

‘You know I’m a journalist, right? I made that plain when I asked to see—’

‘I know who you are. I’ve read your stuff in the papers.’

He was aggressive, an attitude that had surely served him well on the force. No doubt it was a handy shell in gaol, as well. He was slimmer than I remembered from the courtroom and his face no longer the florid crimson of his trial. A year on this prison farm had browned it along with the lean and powerful arms he set in place on the table like twin sphinxes. I tried to forget for a moment what those arms had done.

‘Then you know that nothing sympathetic is likely to come out of this interview,’ I said.

He dismissed this with a grim chuckle and said again, ‘I know who you are. We spoke on the phone once, a long time ago. Your name was Riley, then. Kinnane’s your maiden name.’

‘If you know that, why did you agree to see me?’

He shrugged and asked, less forcefully this time, ‘Are you here as Riley or Kinnane?’

‘My name wasn’t Riley for very long and, as you say, it was a while ago. The time I want to talk to you about is before I got married. So the answer, I suppose, is Kinnane.’

‘Seventy-one, the Tower Mill,’ he guessed. ‘That is going back a long way.’

‘It sticks in your mind when the man you love suddenly becomes a vegetable,’ I said, matching his belligerence.

Dolan leaned back, taking his arms from the table while he observed me dispassionately for long seconds, no doubt making connections. He seemed to have a good memory, another valuable skill in a detective. More than likely he’d been good at his job, the one he was paid for by the Queensland Treasury.

‘How are you getting on here?’ I asked, backing off to let him think. ‘It’s almost a year since they transferred you from Wacol.’

‘It’s better. I was segregated from other prisoners for a long time when they first put me away. Saved me from being bashed, but it didn’t save me from finding a turd in my shepherd’s pie, petty stuff like that.’

‘At least you didn’t get your head kicked in.’

He made that connection quickly enough.

‘Is that why you’ve come, to gloat, to be sure I’m festering to your satisfaction?’

I had often thought of Dolan behind bars in the aftermath of his trial, not in a pool of his own blood, but among other felons, the fox made to sit among the chickens because he’d made himself one of them. But that wasn’t why I’d come and I told him so.

‘Then why?’

‘Because I have a son. Terry Stoddard’s son. I was already pregnant on that night at the Tower Mill. He’s at university now, growing into a fine young man. At the moment, he doesn’t know that Terry’s injury wasn’t an accident. He’s old enough to know the truth and when I tell him, he might reasonably ask why I haven’t done more to see justice done for his father.’

Still tilted away from me, his arms now folded, Dolan asked, ‘Have you come to ask my permission or for a confession? You’re wired up, is that it, hoping to trap me into saying something?’

‘You watch too much television. Besides, you seem to have put yourself away for a long stretch without any help from me.’

It was catty of me and I knew it. Worse, I’d surrendered the moral high ground in exchange for a cheap shot. He had every right to say fuck off, lady, and go back through the steel door. But Dolan surprised me again by smiling faintly and resting his arms back on the table.

‘Touché,’ he said. ‘But what you’re saying about ’71, there’s no evidence. There was never anything you could do.’

I reached into my handbag. Across the room a guard stirred and watched me with interest until he saw I’d simply taken out a sheet of paper. Carefully, for the letter was fragile from numberless re-readings, I opened out the folds and slipped it across the table.

Dolan read it all the way through.

‘Still won’t get you anywhere. It’s unsigned and the man who wrote it is dead.’

Was this a bluff?

‘Road accident,’ said Dolan, when he saw me weighing up the claim. ‘Hit a tree out past Emerald somewhere. He was drunk, not an unusual state for him, apparently. Not that you’ll read that in the official report.’

It was the truth, I could be sure of it, and it didn’t matter anyway. I hadn’t come to trap Dolan or threaten him and he seemed to accept that now. It changed the tone of his voice.

‘I was shit scared, you know, by what I’d done. A rage of the moment thing. We were so fired up.’ He stopped and looked me in the face. ‘That probably sounds like an excuse. It’s not. I don’t know what difference it makes to you, but it’s the one thing I’d change if I had my time over, even more than . . .’ He let his hand wander in a vague reference to his surroundings. You get a lot a time to yourself in a place like this. Not physically, but maybe you can guess what I mean.’

‘You didn’t show a lot of regret when you telephoned me out of the blue.’

‘No, mustn’t have sounded that way. When I called you, I didn’t know why you’d been asking about me. Once I did, well, it was pointless to pursue me. Different time, back then, different climate. You were never going to get anywhere. When was that, ’75?’

I nodded, once again stunned by the accuracy of his recall. ‘The same time Whitlam was sacked.’

‘Was it?’ he said. ‘That makes sense. Joh’d helped to get rid of him by putting that clown into the Senate. He was on top of the heap. We knew the score by then. Nothing could touch us.’

He leaned forward and spoke with a sincerity that couldn’t be feigned: ‘You know, the stuff that happened, the bribes, the raid on those pathetic hippies up north, we did it because we could. That was the main reason. Government wasn’t going to stand in the way as long as we kept up our side of the bargain. In fact, the bribes we took seemed like payment for services rendered. There was nothing to stop us. That was the real corruption, not the money, it was knowing there was no check on what you could get up to, except the next guy up the line who was pocketing more than you were.’

He stopped suddenly and held my eyes. His own were as hard as ever, I saw, which was why his remorse seemed authentic.

‘When you’ve told your son, will you want to bring him here? I won’t see him, you know. This is not a zoo. I’m not here to be gawped at.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll show him this letter and tell him your name. The rest is up to him.’