The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  ‘Why the motorcycle helmets?’ I asked Mike.

  ‘Oh, we’re a vicious mob.’

  He was closer to me now, although not intentionally. Despite the defections, the numbers were swelling again and the footpath was narrow. Even with bodies pressed unnaturally close, some spilled into the park behind us, where the ground dropped away, making it tricky underfoot in the darkness.

  The restlessness had spread to the nearest row of coppers now. It brought a new edge to the night that I didn’t like. I looked for Terry, but couldn’t find him this time and the crush was too tight to go searching.

  ‘He’s over there –’ Mike’s voice was right in my ear – ‘talking to the Aboriginal guy.’

  Mike was watching me, aware of me and what I was thinking. I should have resented it, and if we hadn’t been talking about Terry, I might have told him off.

  ‘Terry never stays still for long, does he?’ I said proudly. ‘One minute he’s revving up the crowd and the next he’s conspiring one on one.’ Was he really mine? There had to be a better word than boyfriend. Lover, maybe. There was an old-world daring about the term that appealed to me.

  ‘Terry took me to a party last week,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t believe who was there.’

  ‘Yeah, you told me.’

  Did I? ‘Oh, sorry.’ I’d mentioned it to a few people out of sheer wonder, really, that such company would open up to me. I hadn’t sat in the corner like some decoration, either, while Terry worked the room. When he was drawn away from me, I plunged straight in and found myself talking seriously with people who’d only been exalted names around the campus until then.

  Going home afterwards was like slipping through the gloomy gates of a prison, from freedom to the cage, from grown-up to child. That was when I saw what bound me to Terry: more than the sex and the laughter, he was my ladder over the wall.

  That delicious thought was still in mind when the crowd’s mood shifted, and things began to fly over my head onto the road, whatever lay at hand, even a half-eaten hamburger spilling out of its paper bag. The mess was a sign of the frustration we shared, a petty demonstration of something far deeper.

  ‘Littering as public disobedience,’ I joked. That was going to change the world, wasn’t it? Yet the silly missiles somehow added to the anticipation and I was no longer shivering simply from the cold.

  ‘They look more pent up than we do,’ Mike said, and I knew what he meant: The police were arrayed with such precision along the white centre line.

  Then the line began to move.

  Everyone on the footpath that night must have seen it begin. What Mike picked out before the rest, though, was what it meant.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ he said, and before I quite knew what was happening, he’d grabbed me by the sleeve of his own jumper and backed across the footpath towards the park.

  By then the police were on the charge and already at the gutter.

  I didn’t resist Mike’s tugging, not at first. I had no choice, really, because bodies were shifting around us, all in one direction, away from the helmets and batons. Screams shot into the night air, some so close they pierced my ear drums; people pushed and jostled to get away.

  Only when Mike had us both ten yards down the slope could we think about turning one way or the other, although even that was limited. Downhill was the only escape.

  But I didn’t want to escape. Not yet. It was easier to stop now and I slapped at Mike’s hand, trying to pull away. ‘Terry, what about Terry?’

  ‘Too late for that! Can’t even see him. He’ll be on the run like the rest of us.’ Mike tugged my arm harder this time, and, confused, frightened, crying, I let myself be pulled along as we careered down the slope, blind to where our feet were landing. I would have fallen if Mike hadn’t kept hold.

  Bodies, feet, snatches of human form were all I sensed around me as everyone fled in the weakening light. We’d come so far now the blackness of the park seemed to swallow us whole. Others cried out, in shock, in outrage. I glanced over my shoulder and saw gleaming white spheres reflecting the light from street lamps: the police were still coming, herding us more deeply into the park. I could feel the fear around us now, the fear of falling, of being caught. Christ, we’d be beaten to a pulp.

  I simply couldn’t believe it. None of us had thought anything like this could happen. A confrontation, yes, the front rank – people like Terry – taken away, with arms wrenched behind their backs. But not a baton charge, not riot police, like Brisbane had suddenly become Paris or Chicago. I couldn’t accept what was happening, but I kept on running because it was happening, and because Mike Riley held on with a grip that made my arm ache.

  Then a sudden halt. ‘We’ll be trapped above the retaining wall,’ he said, fighting for breath. ‘This way.’

  He veered off to the left, under a metal guardrail and we slid down the landscaped embankment behind the dental hospital, and finally we were in Albert Street. Behind us, we could hear the others screaming. I was terrified.

  ‘Come on! We don’t know how far they’ll chase us,’ he said, and pulled me sobbing and stumbling for another city block and into King George Square.

  Finally I caught my breath. ‘How could they do that?’ I shouted at Mike. I was shaking, not with cold, but shock. ‘We have to find Terry.’

  ‘Not yet. It’s too dangerous.’

  Fuck him, he’d finally let go of me so I took off into Albert Street again and uphill into Turbot, forcing Mike to follow. Outside Trades Hall, which backed onto the park, police were manhandling a figure into their car.

  When it pulled away, we ventured closer, asking after Terry whenever we found a familiar face.

  No one had seen him.

  ‘You can’t go into the park,’ someone warned. ‘The pigs are still prowling.’

  Wickham Terrace was cordoned off entirely. An hour passed while we skirted fruitlessly around the streets, jumping at every sound.

  ‘They’ll fucking pay,’ I cried. ‘They had no right. We were just standing there!

  ‘Where’s Terry?’ I heard myself wail over and over. I felt wild and empty, like a drunk. ‘There’s a house in Auchenflower. Maybe he’s gone there.’

  Terry’s friends in Auchenflower made us coffee and dragged out a blanket from one of the bedrooms so we were warm, at least. I sat with Mike, his arm around my shoulder and his voice in my ear saying that Terry would turn up. No need to worry. Someone went off to ring the watch house from a phone box on the corner.

  ‘He’s not there,’ was the update. ‘The smart arse copper said all the long-haired mob have been bailed already.’

  Where else could he be? ‘The bastards. They won’t get away with it, you know.’ I could feel hatred rising into a fog above my head. I was afraid to look up in case it was really there.

  Then Mike went off without saying where he was going. It was almost three a.m. before he came back and, despite the worry, I was half-asleep and too dopey, at first, to guess why he was explaining to the others that his father was a doctor. I came awake quickly, though, when he got to the point.

  ‘I asked Dad to ring around the hospitals, use his contacts. Terry’s at the Royal. They brought him in unconscious. Some kind of head knock.’

  THREE

  TOM

  During my year as an articled clerk, one of the partners sent me to track down some medical records for a complicated insurance case. It dawned on me afterwards that I could request my father’s from the Royal Brisbane Hospital.

  Terrance John Stoddard, aged twenty-three, was written at the top of each document. You only learn a person’s full name if he appears in the newspapers, accused of a crime, or else among the death notices.

  But my father wasn’t dead. Mention of a cranial fracture first appeared in the notes of the emergency ward registrar,
who described the trauma as being consistent with a high-speed car accident, probably because he saw cases like it every week.

  I read down the dispassionate list of observations – extensive bleeding in the frontal lobes, raised intracranial pressure, tissue dangerously swollen. Someone had scribbled in the margin, 4hrs? A different pen had underlined the same jottings. Later documents confirmed that four hours had elapsed between the injury and first examination in Emergency.

  Other details came from the police report. Terry had been found beside a path that had a steel railing along one side. It seemed all too clear what had happened. In fleeing the police, he’d tripped and smashed his skull against one of the unforgiving uprights. I winced every time I thought about it.

  Did the surgeon wince when he opened my father’s skull to stop the bleeding? He could hardly have stood among the nurses shouting, ‘Holy shit, look at this mess.’

  No, most likely he winced, privately, invisibly, beneath his mask, whispering, ‘You poor bastard. What have you done to yourself? Better see how much there is to save.’

  My mother was told all these details at the time, I suppose, but while Terry lay in a coma through that first week, all she would have cared about was that he held on to life. If he died, she would die with him, she told Dad, who sat with her through the worst of it.

  SUSAN

  26 July, 1971

  ‘I’m his girlfriend!’ I shrieked at the nurse. ‘You have to let me in.’

  Raising my voice got me nowhere. I would go for her throat soon. The hospital had been stonewalling for days and I was fed up, desperate, exhausted beyond tears.

  ‘Please, Sister,’ said a voice from beside me, ‘if you let us see him, just for a few minutes, it will give Sue something to hang on to, might help her sleep.’

  This lame plea came from Mike Riley, who’d driven me to the Royal and come in with me, even though I’d told him not to. I didn’t want to sleep, I didn’t want anything to hang on to except Terry’s hand, but if this silly twaddle got me to his bedside, I’d go along with it.

  The nurse went off to ask, again, leaving me to walk the corridor, again, until the heavy doors swung aside and the nurse was back. ‘One of you, only. You’ll have to suit up.’

  Mrs Stoddard was beside the bed when I was finally allowed in. We’d only met twice before and a hug seemed too intimate for where we stood with each other. With masks over our mouths we couldn’t do much more than mumble a greeting and it didn’t help that a rosary swung from the woman’s hand.

  Bloody witchcraft. I wanted to snatch it out of the old girl’s fingers.

  ‘Oh Terry, look at you,’ I whispered. He lay on his back, his head a ball of white gauze and with a mask over his nose and mouth. The parts of his face I could see were stained yellow by whatever they used to ward away infection – a bit more scientific than rosary beads. His exposed arm belonged in a Hollywood morgue. Around him machines puffed and clicked, screens blinked, drops fell into a bag suspended from a pole until I had to turn away out of fear that this was where his life existed, not inside his sallow skin.

  ‘It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left you there. We should have run down into the park together, all the way to Auchenflower.’

  I knew he couldn’t respond, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hear me. If Mrs Stoddard hadn’t been watching, I’d have kissed his cheek and stood back to watch him rise out of the coma, like Lazarus, or Christ himself.

  Later, in Mike’s car, I couldn’t stop myself. I smashed my fist against the door, making Mike jump in the driver’s seat.

  ‘I shouldn’t have let you drag me away like that. If I’d gone back for him, this would never have happened. It’s my fault. I didn’t think fast enough and you were pulling me down that hill before I had a chance to do anything else.’

  ‘They were on to us too quickly, Suze. You’re forgetting what it was like, all the people—’

  ‘I should have gone back for him!’ I shouted. ‘If you’d left me alone I would have found him and he wouldn’t be in that hospital bed.’

  When the Cortina pulled up at home, I fought my way out as fast as I could and headed for Mum, who was waiting with the front door open.

  ‘Did they let you see him this time, darling?’

  ‘For five bloody minutes.’

  I took refuge on my bed and raged that all I had were prayers I didn’t believe in and calls from friends like Donna who were sure he’d be all right, even though they knew even less than I did. I lay face down and wept in fear and frustration even when the door opened and a weight pressed down on the bed beside me. I didn’t have to look to know it was Mum’s soft hand on my back.

  When the grief became unbearable, I wrapped myself around her, hugging as fiercely as I’d ever held Terry. ‘Oh Mum, what am I going to do if he dies?’ I kept saying, and she held on to me just as strongly, saying, ‘He’s not going to die, darling. He’ll come through.’

  A weekend passed and on Tuesday morning I went to uni, to a room I’d sat in a hundred times, listening to a lecturer who always managed to draw a laugh or two, no matter how dry the topic. I needed distraction, a moment’s respite, but I didn’t hear a word, and when it was over I fled from the claustrophobic walls.

  Mike was crossing the Great Court. ‘Have you got your mother’s car?’ I demanded, and when he nodded, asked, with only marginally less aggression, ‘Will you take me up to the hospital?’

  He came in with me again, and annoyed the crap out of me by insisting I sit with him in the cafeteria, first.

  ‘Mike, I just want to see Terry.’

  ‘You’re shaking. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten properly for days, have you?’

  ‘Mike . . .’

  He pushed a tray into my hands and loaded it with two sausage rolls, a bucket of chips and a chocolate bar. Only when the first of the chips slid down my throat did I realise how famished I was. My mood improved enough to offer thanks, which he waved aside as he filched another chip from the bucket.

  By the time we reached icu, I’d stopped shaking and the urge to cry that had lingered like a persistent cold had left me at last.

  ‘Okay, I can handle it from here,’ I told Mike, once my jeans and jumper had disappeared beneath the green surgical garb. As I pushed through the heavy doors, he called something about a lift home, but the mask was over my mouth and I didn’t bother with a reply.

  Terry was better; not so many tubes and the nurses didn’t visit his bed as often. Mrs Stoddard stayed in her seat in the corner while I had my turn. It had been like this each time I’d visited and even the greetings we exchanged were repetitions. The surgeon came by on his rounds and accompanied us both into the corridor, where Mike was scribbling on some scraps of paper; poetry, I was pretty sure, after he’d reluctantly shown me a few lines during our weeks together on the Gold Coast. He stuffed paper and pencil hastily into his pocket and came to join us.

  ‘Mrs Stoddard tells me you two are her son’s closest friends,’ said the surgeon, a pale man with fingers like a pianist’s.

  Me, yes, of course, but Mike? It didn’t seem important enough to correct him.

  The surgeon continued: ‘The last twenty-four hours have seen significant improvement. He’s out of danger, no doubt about that.’

  ‘How long before he wakes up?’ I asked immediately.

  ‘Days rather than weeks, I’d say, but you must remember—’

  ‘How long will he need to stay in hospital, once he’s awake?’

  The surgeon’s face said he wasn’t used to being interrupted.

  ‘Going home is getting a little ahead of ourselves at this stage,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve already explained this to Mrs Stoddard. Terry will stay in icu for up to a fortnight, yet. We’ll know more about the long term when he regains consciousness. I don’t want to s
peculate until then. It wouldn’t be fair to his loved ones.’ He managed a gracious nod towards both Mrs Stoddard and me that warmed my soul in a way I hadn’t known since the accident.

  ‘There’ll be a lot of rehabilitation needed, but some of that might be possible in the home. Depends on how much executive function he’s lost.’

  ‘Function!’ said Mike, from behind my shoulder. ‘You mean he . . .’

  Whatever he was going to say died when I turned a for-Christ’s-sake-shut-up look on him.

  But the surgeon had guessed his question and used terms I barely understood. ‘Neural signs . . . post-traumatic amnesia . . . apraxia.’

  What the hell was apraxia? I didn’t care. The doctor expected Terry to wake up soon and things would be different then, even if Mike didn’t seem to think so during the drive home in his mother’s car.

  ‘His poor mum,’ he said. ‘I drove her home a couple of nights ago and she talked about him the whole way. I don’t think there’s anyone else, no one she can talk to. Terry’s all she has.’

  Hadn’t he listened to the doctor? Terry was on the mend.

  ‘He’s awake,’ I called through the house, before the telephone had settled back into place. ‘Mum, Mum – Terry’s woken up! Can you drive me to the Royal?’

  As we crossed the Story Bridge I warmed myself with a vision of Terry sitting up in bed, smiling weakly, pleased to see me, and with so much to tell me that one thing would get jammed up with another as he fought to get it all out of his mouth. Would I be allowed to hug him? Gently maybe. The touch was what mattered, the press of his skin on mine.

  Mrs Stoddard was there when I arrived, withdrawn into her corner as always, only this time she didn’t seem to notice me.