‘That was today? What did he say?’
‘That it’s nothing to worry about. All a waste of time,’ I couldn’t help adding. ‘The doctor treated me like a moron because we didn’t believe the gp.’
‘Doesn’t hurt to get these things checked out.’
‘It does when it’s such a hassle getting there and back again.’
I could feel the heat under my skin. Stop now. It’s over, no harm done. Just shut up.
‘It would have been easier if I’d had the car.’
I knew what reaction I’d get and I hated myself when the despondency appeared in his face. ‘It’s hard enough getting a lift one day as it is, Suze. Frank never says no, but the signals are always there about how far out of his way he has to come.’
I began to cry. The car wasn’t important. My tears came from disappointment that I’d even brought it up.
‘I can try taking the bus again,’ he said.
‘No, no, no!’ I wailed. ‘That’s not it. I could have the car every day but I’d always have to take Tom with me and I’d always have to come back here afterwards.’
Mike shifted uncomfortably. ‘We can’t afford a better place yet. I’m sorry about it, but—’
‘I’m not talking about this place. I mean I have to come back to you and Tom all the time.’
‘Don’t say that. You’re tired from going into town. I’m sorry it was all for nothing, and I wish there was something I could do about the car . . .’
He kept talking, but I was thinking about what he’d muttered a few moments before. Don’t say that. Why not? Why couldn’t things be said? Why couldn’t I say them?
‘I know, I know,’ I shouted, ‘but none of that’s the problem. If this was a proper marriage it wouldn’t matter, but I only got married to get away from my bloody mother and now I’m trapped all over again with a husband and a bloody baby.’
I’d said it. I had felt it there, lurking beneath everything else, a boil too sensitive to lance. I’d known these words would end up running out of me like pus. I collapsed into a chair at the table and sobbed into my hands.
When I looked up, Mike was gone.
I called his name. No response. I went looking for him but he was nowhere in the house. Christ, what had I done?
‘Mike!’
I found him at the bottom of the stairs, sitting hunched over on the lowest step. His shoulders jerked a couple of times then fought to stay still. Did he know I was watching?
I despised myself, felt sick to my bones. ‘Mike, I’m so sorry,’ I called down the steps.
He didn’t turn around, didn’t acknowledge that he’d heard me at all even when I started down the stairs and stopped two steps above him. I sat and put a hand tentatively on his shoulder. He flinched.
‘I should never have said those things. It wasn’t fair. If I could scrub them out of your head, I would.’
I tried my hand on his shoulder again, the same place. This time, he left it there.
‘I can’t do any more,’ he said, still looking away, still struggling with tears.
‘You don’t have to. I’m just jealous of Donna, that’s all. Schoolgirl stuff.’
I lowered myself to the next step and pressed my face between his shoulder blades. Put my arms around him.
‘I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean that bit about our marriage. I do love you, I do, I love you, I love you, I love you.’
I wasn’t the first to hope a mantra would bolster belief.
TOM
I could never bring myself to ask Dad, ‘When did things go wrong between you and Susan?’ even though the question itched like a scab right through my teens. There was no doubt what he would have said. Bindy – their marriage fell apart in Bindy – and he’d have been right, but not for the reasons he thought.
For a long time, Dad didn’t know about Barry Dolan. I could have changed that once I’d learned of the part Dolan played in our lives, but convinced myself the story was Susan’s to tell, not mine.
What difference would it have made for the three of us, if Dad had known – what if Susan had taken the last of the anonymous letters to him on the day she first read it – her hands shaking in outrage as they must have been? I know Mike Riley. He would have given even more of himself to Susan, instead of making the stand that he did. He might have saved his marriage! But then what? If he had, there would be no Lyn Cosgrove in his life, as there is today, no daughters named Gabrielle and Emma and I doubt there would have been an invitation from East Anglia University to be its poet-in-residence in 2003.
Would Susan’s life have been any better if they’d stayed together? Less pain perhaps, or would there have been a great deal more? It’s impossible to say. And what of little Tom who grew into big, tall Tom? The same words apply, I suppose, although they never stopped me wondering.
What did happen was Dad’s transfer to Bindamilla for the start of ’74.
Although it was my home for eighteen months, my only memories of the town have been fabricated from the stories of others. My mother hated the place, and if, in contrast, Dad managed to salvage one of his proudest achievements out of his time there, it was misery that let him drill down to words he hasn’t matched in his poetry since then.
‘Why didn’t you try to get out of it?’ I asked Susan, when I was twenty and finally understood the importance of what had happened in Bindamilla.
‘I did,’ she said, reasonably.
‘Not until the second year,’ I pointed out. But I meant why didn’t they get out of the posting altogether. When I said as much she had to give me an answer, and obviously didn’t want to.
‘It was the Aboriginal thing. Bindy had a sizable black population and Mike wanted to teach disadvantaged kids. It was the Whitlam years. I could hardly renege on my principles, could I?’
By that time, I’d long since found the tiny dot on the map of Queensland, a full day’s drive from Brisbane. On the edge of the Outback, the town spread out across the black soil, making it seem bigger than it really was, according to Dad. ‘A bacterial maw’, he called it in a poem from his first volume, The Unquiet Landscape of Silence.
Later, I rummaged through the folders where Dad kept early drafts of his poems and found the photo of a grand Queenslander, which had seen better days, certainly, but, since my mother stood on the veranda with a baby in her arms, I realised it must have been where we lived. It was the only proof that I had ever lived in Bindamilla because the rest was all stories.
Just beyond the edge of that photo must have been the vacant block where I ventured one morning to begin the downward spiral of my mother’s standing among the locals. I climbed out of my cot, the story goes, doing fatal damage to the kilter of my nappy and finding both Mummy and Daddy asleep still, and a door onto the veranda unlatched, I went exploring. My nappy finally slipped free at the bottom of the steps and with my little willy pointing the way, I walked along the footpath to where a scrum of Aboriginal kids was playing brum-brum games in the dirt.
I still have clear images in my head of every moment, right down to the strange lady who picked me up some time later and took me home. Except I was barely two years old on that day and I’ve surely embroidered such memories from the stories Dad told me later. Dad, not Susan.
SUSAN
May, 1974
‘Oh my goodness, look at you,’ I said to the little monkey who’d lurched from the stranger’s arms and attached himself to me. I hugged him tight, then jumped at how cold his bare bottom felt to my hand.
‘What happened?’ I asked the Good Samaritan who stared at us from the top of the staircase.
‘I found him playing with some Aboriginal children on the corner,’ she said.
I should have asked her name straightaway, but the whole thing was such a hoot. Instead, I raised
Tom in my arms to see his face. ‘How did you get out? Quite the little Houdini, aren’t you?’
To the stranger, I said, ‘He scoots around so quickly these days, I can hardly keep up,’ and laughed at how true that was, all the while jigging my son up and down. ‘Yes, you’re a proper Burke and Wills.’
Embarrassment didn’t kick in until I looked again at Tom’s rescuer. No mirth in that face. What was she, sixty-five? A grandmother out on her morning constitutional in a faded dress and leather shoes with closed-in toes to keep out the gravel. A Bindy local from better times.
‘You should think about locking your doors at night if your little one likes to roam,’ she said. ‘Then you can sleep in all you like.’
Oh dear. I glanced at Mike, who was thinking the same thing. But it was a sunny autumn morning, the air was invigorating in a way it hadn’t been through the hot and wretched months after we first arrived, and I wasn’t going to let the old biddy dump any guilt on my doorstep.
‘I don’t think I’ve met you before,’ I said.
‘Mrs Shepherd. I live a few doors down the street.’ She pointed. ‘I’ve seen you walking with the little boy. That’s how I knew where to bring him.’
No first name, I noted. We were from different generations, and some of the older types were sticklers for convention, even in Bindamilla. Come to think of it, especially in Bindamilla.
‘Well, we really can’t thank you enough, Mrs Shepherd. You’ve certainly lived up to your name this morning.’
I was hoping for a smile, but no, my lame joke had gone the way of a lead balloon.
Mrs Shepherd wouldn’t stay for a cup of tea, thank you all the same. She was just pleased to see the baby safe with his parents, a sentiment she delivered with the formality of a speech.
Mike escorted her to the gate, and, even though I didn’t hear what was said, I could tell, from the way he bent over her deferentially, that he was grovelling over our negligence as Mrs Shepherd seemed to expect.
‘That lady thought the wolves were going to eat you,’ I told Tom, while he splashed in the blackened bathwater. ‘You didn’t see any wolves, did you, Tommy, or I suppose it would be dingoes out here? Dogs, any doggies?’
Tom stopped playing and looked at me. It was a word he could put a meaning to and so he repeated it: ‘Dog.’ He checked behind me to see if there were any in evidence and seemed disappointed when there were no doggies to be seen.
I still felt a thrill when he responded to words, and loved to name things for him, like Eve in the garden. No bow-wows for my boy.
When he was dry and dressed I took him to the bedroom where Mike was settling back under the blankets with the Sunday paper he’d been down to the main street to fetch.
‘It didn’t go as well as expected,’ he commented, showing me the headline. ‘Gough’s back in, but with a reduced majority.’
‘Let me see.’ I swapped Tom for the newspaper and, while the bed shook and the room filled with a two-year-old’s squeals, I read the results from the federal election. ‘Geez, we lost more seats than I thought we would.’
Mike had given away the tickling and the two of them now lay panting beside me, with the smaller body enveloped in his daddy’s arms. ‘Do you want a baby sister to play with, Tommy?’ said Mike.
I stopped reading and looked down at them both, certain now that the hokey pose was chosen for the occasion. ‘Are you asking him or me?’ I said. ‘He’d get more fun out of a dog.’
Mike said no more about it, and when Tom became restless I took him into the kitchen, slotted his expeditionary legs into the highchair and tied a bib around his neck.
A second child. ‘Only it will really be your daddy’s first, won’t it?’ I said to Tom, posting the first spoonful of cereal into his eager mouth. ‘Do you want a little sister? Will you two be like Ritchie and me, making mischief together and driving your mother mad? It would serve me right.’
It’s time. I smiled ruefully at how Labor’s slogan from the ’72 election was being turned on me. If I fell pregnant soon, there’d be three years between my firstborn and my second. Just right, like Goldilocks’ porridge.
Tom thought only of porridge, and of stairs to climb down and new places to explore. A baby’s privilege. Despite his presence, I felt alone in the kitchen – alone in the house, too.
Mike was slow on the up-take, as ever. Mum and Diane had been building their case since before Christmas, with unsubtle references to the best gap between children. In their opinion, I owed it to Mike because he’d ridden so valiantly to my rescue. Even if neither one of them dared to say so, the insinuation lived in every glance, every half-smile sent my way, while Diane fussed over her pigeon pair.
I didn’t want another child. There, the truth was easily said. It was much harder, though, to fend off fears that to feel that way loosed my claim on the title ‘Loving Mother’.
‘I do love you, Tom,’ I said to the self-absorbed figure in the highchair, ‘I do, I do.’ But I only managed to dredge up memories of an afternoon at the bottom of the stairs in Taringa.
I was resisting a bigger truth that morning: a second child would change the dynamic between Mike and me. Two years ago, I’d been vulnerable, losing the shape of my life. I’d needed an ally, so in front of that priest, Mike and I had struck a deal: I escaped my mother’s deadening hand, and he got his dream girl.
I’d fought against such thinking since that afternoon on the back stairs, but truth was a persistent bugger and it was whispering again as I wiped Tom’s mouth and set him down on the floor. Things were different now. I wasn’t pregnant and powerless. If I had a baby with Mike – and why just one? – I was choosing to be his wife in a way I didn’t when Tom was the size of a plum inside me. I would become Mrs Riley at last, wife to a loving husband and mother to our brood of children. A second baby was my choice, a free choice.
‘Free,’ I said, as Tom rushed away like a possum springing from a trap.
Yes, I was free, all right – except for ten thousand years of social norms and the burden of biology.
Mike came home with the first stories on Monday afternoon.
‘They knew all about Tom at school,’ he said. ‘Before I was even through the gate, Marg Hackworth said she’d heard how he’d gone walkabout. Then Mr Verity called me into his office to ask if Tom had suffered any ill effects. You’d think he’d been kidnapped by cannibals. Even the kids got in on the act. That little shit Rodney Acres pipes up in class, “Hey Sir, your little boy got a bit black in the dirt yesterday, eh? Hope it all came off,” he says. Even the black kids were sniggering.’
I thought he was overreacting until I copped the same at Millers’ the following day: ‘Good to see your son got his nappy back from the blackfellas,’ said the woman behind me at the checkout.
‘And his nose wasn’t running all over his lip either,’ I shot back at her. She had to wipe the snot off her own little darling, then. Wiped the smirk off her face, too.
It was the way of small towns, I told myself on the walk home, although I didn’t have to like it. And there was a deeper issue to grapple with. It was all very well to score points in a checkout queue, but I needed people, a few new friends. The women on Mike’s staff were mostly our age, but they were single and partied hard. To them, I was a matron they deferred to because of my status as wife and mother. As if!
‘Come on,’ I felt like saying, ‘let’s get drunk,’ but if we had, or even if I’d suggested it, my impropriety would have wrinkled the corners of their eyes.
Still, I saw more of them than the Bindy women. I’d heard so much about the hospitality of country folk and somehow imagined it would simply fold me into its bosom. There’d been plenty of smiles from the locals – just nothing behind it.
‘We’re transients,’ Mike explained. ‘When our two-year stint is up, we’ll scuttle back to wh
ere we came from. Out here, friendships are for life.’
We had one like-minded soul, at least, in Louise Moriarty, a nurse with the Aboriginal Health Service. Overweight and not one to give a damn, she came round on weekends to talk politics and drink beer and invariably left me happier than before she’d arrived. Unfortunately, she also pointed out the unofficial apartheid down at the movie theatre. Only ‘friends of the manager’ were welcome upstairs, where the seats were more comfortable; curiously, the manager didn’t have any Aboriginal friends. Mike was outraged, and when the local paper ignored his letter to the editor he insisted that we join Louise’s silent boycott.
One less thing to do in Bindamilla, one more way to stand apart. If it had been up to me, I’d have ignored the discrimination and gone to the movies with everyone else.
FIVE
TOM
By the time I left school, I was five centimetres taller than Dad and had a voice like Rocky Balboa, which I like to think I put to better use than the mumbling boxer. I was never sure whether it was the voice or my size that convinced Dad of my maturity, but he began to discuss the issues of the day with me more. We were on the cusp of a new decade and the tension between Hawke and Keating in Canberra had the media enthralled, my mother as much as anyone.
‘I’m surprised Susan never had a go at politics,’ I said to Dad one night after the television news.
‘She writes headline articles for a national broadsheet, Tom. Would you not call that having a go at politics?’
‘You know what I mean. As a candidate. She’s got all the skills.’
To my surprise, he laughed openly, leaving me to feel insulted on her behalf.
He saw my confusion and said, ‘Skills, yes. In parliament she would have been an asset to any party.’
‘Only one, surely. She’s Labor through and through.’
The Tower Mill Page 9
