Across the table from me, she seemed to think for a long time about what she had said, avoiding my eye until, with a final drag on the cigarette, she stubbed it out savagely. The action seemed to turn her savage, like the dog that snaps suddenly at a leash it has happily ignored for hours.
‘Seems a bit ridiculous to have just one child,’ she said. ‘You either have a family or you don’t. One’s not a family, is it, Tom, but when a woman has that first baby, well, she’s lost her chance for the purity of a childless life. No proud feminist choice to skip the oppression of motherhood.’ This was said loudly, a parody for the benefit of the few faces that turned our way once more. Then softly, so that only I could hear, she said, ‘I wanted to have an abortion back in ’71, you know. I sat in this very place thinking about it. I even asked Mike to help with the money.’
Not then but later, after she had dropped me at home, I tried to work out why she had hurt me that way, my own mother, just when I’d felt something for her. No one had ever cut me so deeply, nor so deliberately, although I had been living a charmed life until then, under the roof of Dad and his wife, the woman I did call Mum.
TWO
TOM
‘It was you who introduced Susan to Terry, wasn’t it?’
My question wasn’t entirely out of the blue, when Terry Stoddard was the reason Dad and I were both on this plane. Perhaps he had been thinking about Terry, too, because he answered immediately.
‘At a rally in Roma Street Forum. The cops had beaten up some Aboriginals in Spring Hill, and the newspapers didn’t give a damn. That upset Terry more than the bashing.’
It didn’t surprise me that Dad remembered the cause even though that hour of placard-waving must have been one among many.
‘But you’ve always said you hardly knew him,’ I said.
‘It’s true. We ran with the same bunch, but Terry was in a different league. You could tell he would always be out in front, that he had big things ahead of him. We were in a tute together and I’d pretty much done an assignment for him when he was too caught up in one of his causes. When he spoke so passionately at the rally, Susan wanted to know who he was. I saw an opportunity to be useful to her, to impress her with the people I knew.’
‘Not such a wise move then, introducing her to Terry. Were you already in love with her?’
‘Intoxicated,’ he said, then laughed at his choice of word.
‘This was after you two hooked up on Gold Coast, wasn’t it?’
‘She’s told you about that, has she?’
He looked a bit surprised and I wondered if it was fair to go on. I knew more than he’d be comfortable with about the holiday when Susan had been stuck with her family at Tugun, playing endless games of Five Hundred and bored out of her skull. Then, on the beach one morning, there was a familiar face from the refec, and better still he had a car. Mike Riley had been just the distraction my mother needed, someone to have a bit of fun with in return for a kiss or two while they fed the seagulls.
‘Susan says you fell in love way too fast.’
Dad shot a breath sharply from his nose, a mannerism I’d long linked to the way he weighed up what to say and what to keep from me.
‘We drove up to Tambourine. Stopped for a swim at Cedar Creek with the water so clear we could see to the bottom. Your mother in a bikini, Tom. Yes, I was helpless after that, wanted her for myself, dreamed of us together and wrote lovesick poems with Susan as my muse.’
I was tempted to say, ‘You got her to yourself in the end’, but that would have been clumsy, even callous. He did get her, but it hadn’t been the end.
I said nothing and the conversation lapsed. I was on my own again, with too many hours to Singapore and Susan wedged between Dad and me, as she had been so often since the Fitzgerald days in Brisbane.
And that was where my memories wandered next: Grandma Joyce died just as the after-wash of the Fitzgerald Inquiry was making itself felt across Queensland, and it was something of a renewal in my life, too. With Joyce gone, the Kinnanes no longer treated me like a living billboard of my mother’s crimes.
I hadn’t been the only one set free. At Grandma’s wake, Aunty Diane downed two beers faster than the men and took me by the elbow.
‘Come out into the yard, Tom,’ she said. ‘I want to tell you about your mother when she was a girl.’
I worried she would cut into Susan like a leg of lamb. But Diane wasn’t like that. She was judgmental, just as Grandma Joyce had been, but there was no stiletto hidden up her sleeve.
‘They fought like nobody’s business, you know, specially after Sue left school,’ said Aunty Diane, once we were far enough from the rest. ‘Your mother was just so excited to be out there at St Lucia, free of all the petty rules and with a new bunch of girlfriends, because she hardly had anything to do with the old lot once she left Avila. The things she got up to . . .’
My aunt rolled her eyes as though she couldn’t imagine half the things Susan did as a student.
‘Drugs, you mean?’
‘Oh God no. Tom, don’t ever think that.’
I might have said leprosy!
‘No, not drugs. Sue got drunk a lot in her first year and that was enough for Mum to start calling her wild. No, what I mean is, she just went a bit crazy with the freedom, stayed out all night and wouldn’t say where she’d been, or who she’d been with. Drove Mum mad. It was a different world then, Tom, especially in our house. You didn’t get a key until you were twenty-one. Mum was worried Sue was being, well . . . Do they still use the word promiscuous? That was what she called it, like it was the scandal of the century. Sue didn’t tell me much. Worried I would tell tales, I suppose, but I don’t think she got up to anything with those boys, not like Joyce imagined anyway.’
‘What about my father?’
She stared at me and I quickly understood her confusion.
‘I don’t mean Dad, I mean Terry.’
She was still reluctant. Perhaps it had just occurred to her that she was talking about sex and even with a couple of beers on board, Diane was still her straight-laced self.
‘Yes, well, I suppose she must have been sleeping with Terry.’
SUSAN
May, 1971
I held Terry’s hand tightly as we walked, sometimes lagging to make him tug me along, not so much reluctant as coy. It was a game I loved to play and that helped to kill the faint vestiges of guilt. I should have been at a tute, after all. My tutor had seen me in the lecture, leaving me no valid reason to skip.
Terry was reason enough. He’d been at a meeting in the union building and just happened to pass the lecture hall as I came out. Had my tutor seen me kiss him? There was my excuse.
Tired of acting coy, I was soon taking the lead, pulling him across the lawn below the Forgan Smith Building and towards the hitching post on Schonnel Drive. Terry stuck out his thumb and within minutes a Holden stopped to pick us up.
‘Thanks,’ I mumbled, as we fell into the back seat, but the driver had recognised Terry. It was hardly surprising when his face had been in the Courier-Mail only days before, after a demonstration outside Parliament House. Terry’s speech was the thing. A couple of Aboriginals spoke with an anger and conviction that only personal experience could fire, but among the whites who followed, none was a match for Terry as an orator:
The international community must stand shoulder to shoulder against apartheid with Australia at the very centre, the keystone and catalyst for action. It is up to us to confront this travelling bandwagon of propaganda. The reception the Springboks get here must show every South African what the rest of the world thinks of their apartheid.
No wonder the papers wanted him afterwards, and it was the certainty he put into every word that claimed me then, and every time, whether he was talking to a thousand or to me alone. Whatever he
called into being would live and thrive. Terry Stoddard would change the world and I was going to be at the centre of everything he did.
But for now we were in the back of a stranger’s Holden, the driver resting one hand on an untidy pile of essays beside him as he switched between watching the road and glancing over his shoulder.
‘Saw the interview you did. I doubt you’ll stop the Springboks from touring, more’s the pity.’
The stiff-collared shirt marked him as old-school, but he was a fellow traveller where it counted. Terry sat forward to speak more easily over the front seat.
‘We’re mounting a campaign. The unions are against the tour, too. McMahon’ll be sorry he let those Boers into the country.’
Listening, I felt the thrill of the change we’d bring, which somehow folded itself into the joy of the wind in my hair and with every mile along the road, the anticipation that was building. Auchenflower wasn’t far. We’d soon be there.
The man dropped us on Coronation Drive, half a mile past the Regatta Hotel. We rounded a corner to head away from the river and when Terry took my hand again, I tensed my fingers, trapping his.
‘Ouch, you’ve got me,’ he said, and laughed, kissing me above the ear. ‘Never let me go,’ he whispered.
‘Well . . . not for the next hour, maybe,’ I said.
He pulled me to him in front of a panel beater’s shop and kissed me full on the mouth.
‘Lucky bastard!’ a grinning mechanic shouted from the darkness.
‘Come in here and let me give you a kiss, too, love,’ called another.
We ran off, laughing, towards the house, aware that this time it wouldn’t be just for an hour or two. He didn’t have anything planned for the entire weekend. He was all mine.
There had been others before Terry, boys with names I could barely remember, who’d fumbled in the dark as much as I let them. Sex was like drinking, a heady rush, more enjoyable because it was forbidden at home, than for the pleasure it brought.
Then suddenly there was Terry; heart-thumping, loud-hailing Terry. He took me for a starry-eyed groupie at first and, besides, I wanted to be sure there was more to him than fine words on a podium. I went to meetings, made him notice me and, when I got him alone, measured him against the promise of the more public Terry until I knew there was only one face to the man.
‘Don’t you have a boyfriend?’ he asked me finally.
‘Would it matter if I did?’
‘No, but I’ve got enough enemies as it is,’ he said, then promptly took me to bed in the house in Auchenflower, a place where his friends let him crash whenever he liked, since his mother lived miles out on the southside somewhere. I wanted him all the time now, not for the sex so much, but for the way I felt when I was with him, every part of me alive.
We crossed Milton Road with the four Xs of the beer factory winking at us on the crest of the hill, urging us on towards the sunburnt Queenslander with its peeling paint and badly built-in verandas. Terry felt underneath the top step until he came up with a key.
‘Anybody home?’ he shouted into the fog of midday heat and last night’s mosquito coils.
No reply and immediately I began a familiar game. We both knew where we’d end up soon enough, but I headed for the kitchen and with Terry watching from the doorway, set about making a sandwich. The air moved languidly through the house. Above our heads the corrugated iron strained against its rusty fixings. Neither of us spoke. I was wearing an Indian cotton top and a wrap-around skirt, deliberately hitched low on my hips. I knew Terry’s eyes were tracing the lines of my body and enjoyed the expectation it sent through me. I could feel my desire like a silken sheet gliding in waves around me, slowly, deliciously wrapping every inch of me inside it.
Terry moved to the bench and began to kiss me, on the back of the neck, on the shoulder, until I turned. Then we were in one of the bedrooms where anything on the mattress was swept aside with a scoop of his hand. I loosened the skirt and let it join the jumble of dirty clothes and half-read novels already on the floor.
There was a party at the house that Friday night, which became Saturday morning while I slept beside Terry, and finally Saturday afternoon. When I woke still beside him, I watched him sleeping with the fascination of a first-time mother. The contentment lowered me into sleep again, and when I woke a second time found him staring fixedly at the ceiling.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘All sorts of things,’ he said, without breaking his far-away gaze. Terry wasn’t one for limits. He was staring straight through the roof, to the universe beyond. ‘Getting support for this Springboks thing,’ he confided. ‘I’ve been to a couple of Labor Party meetings.’
I lifted myself onto one elbow to look at his face. ‘How’d it go?’
Terry took his time over the answer, until I wondered whether he’d heard me. He sighed and said, ‘They’re not an inspiring lot. A mixture of socialist warriors and old-style head-kickers better at getting the numbers in a backroom vote than coming up with ideas. About the only one with any life about him is Tom Burns.’
‘No women, I suppose.’
‘As far as these guys are concerned, sheilas make the tea.’
‘And root for the team,’ I said, nudging him.
Terry laughed. ‘Some better than others,’ he teased, gathering me into the crook of his arm. ‘The point is, though, what makes them any better than the other side? A wad of tired ideologies, rights for the worker, that’s about all.’
‘If you went into parliament, you’d shake things up.’
I meant it. I’d seen inside him more deeply than anyone, not just as a lover, but a believer. He carried the passion of his words in every breath and every twitch of his muscles. It was why I loved him.
‘You’re thinking about it, aren’t you, going into politics?’
Terry shifted to kiss me softly on the forehead, then settled my head on his chest. ‘What I’m thinking about is taking you to Paris.’
‘Spending whose money? You’re poorer than I am!’
‘Who needs money? We can do it without leaving this bed. I’ll be your guide.’
‘You’ve never been to Paris.’
‘Neither have you,’ said Terry, undaunted. ‘Just as well, too, because I haven’t got a clue which end of the Champs Elysees they put the Eiffel Tower.’
‘That’s the Arc de Triomphe.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Get on with the tour.’
Terry put on a faux French accent and, without missing a beat, directed us through the Louvre, then a boat along the Seine to Notre Dame, a bird market he remembered from a picture book his mother read to him over and over, on to Montmartre, complete with eccentric artists in berets and finally the site of the guillotine, where he described Marie Antoinette proudly mounting the steps to her doom.
‘Then it’s back to our studio high above the Rue de whatever, where we make love all afternoon. We’ll be hungry by then. Maxim’s, I think . . .’
‘Where have you been?’ said Joyce, when I mounted the front steps on Sunday afternoon. It was almost dark by then, although I hadn’t planned to be quite so late.
‘Uni, mostly,’ I answered, swinging my shoulder bag onto the sofa, where a heavy book spilled out on cue. Evidence.
‘For three days!’
‘I was studying. Stayed at Donna Redlich’s both nights. Didn’t you get the messages I left? You were down at the church doing the flowers when I rang yesterday.’
‘As you knew I would be,’ she said.
Of course I’d rung when I knew she wouldn’t be there, just as I’d picked the busiest time on Friday, so one of the boys would beat Mum to the phone.
I looked away at the porcelain cats on the sideboard, each sitting demurely on its doily, at the photo of Di
ane on her wedding day and Dad in his army uniform. It was going to be like this, then. Had I really expected anything different? I’d had the best weekend of my life and now my mother was going to make me pay.
‘Mum, why the third degree? I’m here now, aren’t I, sober, all in one piece, no needle marks on my arms?’ I presented them both for inspection.
She ignored the provocation. ‘My daughter, not even twenty years old yet, leaves home Friday morning and the next I see her it’s Sunday night. Of course I’m going to ask where you’ve been.’
‘Why do you have to know where I am every minute of the day? You should have guessed, anyway. I was at uni, studying.’
But I’d made a tactical mistake. I wasn’t a studier. I passed my subjects with last-minute cramming and assignments done the night before they were due. I wasn’t the type to spend an entire weekend at St Lucia when exams were still a month away, and Mum knew that better than I did.
‘You weren’t at Donna’s, were you?’
Had the bitch rung up and asked for me? I felt the blood heating up beneath my skin. But she was bluffing. Donna’s place didn’t have a phone, in any case.
‘You were out with that one who’s been in the papers.’
I could have denied it, could have stuck it out and gone off to my room with her suspicion sticking out of my back like an assassin’s blade.
But I hated the lying. It made me feel dirty, petty, like my mother. It made the world narrow and mean when, for three whole days, it had been as broad as the sky with Terry and me floating about in the blue and wishing every day could promise such freedom.
‘Terry, his name is Terry Stoddard and yes, I was with him. So what? He’s my boyfriend. Why shouldn’t I be with him. We’re in love.’
The Tower Mill Page 3
