The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  ‘About as much chance as this bit of steak here galloping round the paddock again.’ Already charred, he tortured it with another pass over the flames.

  ‘Will it really be that bad?’ asked Mike, who was on to his third stubby.

  We all knew Alan Dowd would go down in a screaming heap and I was quietly resigning myself to this sad fact when I found Murchison staring at me through the wavy heat of the hotplate. What was that about?

  When the steaks were ready, we shuffled to the tables to load up our plates while slowly the sun disappeared and darkness dried our perspiration.

  ‘Can I have a word, Sue?’

  I looked up to find Don Murchison hovering.

  ‘What about?’

  He walked off a few paces, inviting me to follow. ‘The election,’ he answered when we were out of earshot. ‘I ran into Alan during the week and he asked me to pass on a message. The truth is, he’d prefer you didn’t hand out How-to-Vote cards on Saturday.’

  ‘But the cards are all ready. Of course we’ll hand them out.’

  ‘Yes, yes, there’ll be someone on the booth to do that. Alan just doesn’t want it to be you.’

  If I’d only looked into the man’s face I’d have sensed his embarrassment, but instead I was forcing him to spell it out.

  ‘The feeling is you’ll drive away Alan’s votes in Bindy. God knows, he’s not going to get many in any case. Best if you stay out of the campaign from here on in.’

  TOM

  I had to keep at Dad, listening for crumbs and at my mother, too; I had to keep nudging, cajoling and all the time conscious that I was stirring painful sediments that they would have preferred to keep as impermeable rock. But I wanted to know; I wanted to know everything, whether I had the right or not. It was my life, too. I had grown out of them – Susan especially.

  What Dad had told me filled in a gap that I somehow knew was there. My mother is far too political an animal to have stayed out of party politics entirely. She’d picked a bad time, though. I knew my alp history and 1974 was as dire as it got for the party in Queensland. They make ’em different north of the border, goes the saying. You heard that a lot back then, apparently. It is still said today, although always with a wry grin because the sting has gone out of it. The points of difference between Queensland and the southern states aren’t a call to identity in quite the same way, and certainly not with the same intensity. But in the mid-1970s, the dictum became a proud declaration on the lips of Queenslanders themselves, and a knowing smirk when muttered by the rest of Australia.

  As well, Dad’s story about Susan’s political exploits shed light on something that had niggled at me for years. Yes, the result of the ’74 poll was abysmal – Labor became a parliamentary rump bounced around on the shitting end of a rampant bull named Bjelke-Petersen. Why it was so significant to me, though, had nothing to do with numbers in parliament. Rather, it helped explain my mother’s state of mind when the last of the anonymous letters turned up in Bindamilla during their long absence for the Christmas holidays. It must have sat there for weeks, in the way a landmine lies patiently for its singular moment.

  I have often pictured Susan pushing my stroller to the post office on the first day of school in 1975.

  ‘Mail for Riley,’ she would have asked at the counter, or perhaps after a year there was no need to give her name. If the postal clerk had been a true believer like Susan, they might have exchanged a few words of commiseration over the election result while the clerk shuffled the envelopes. After their long holiday, there must have been quite a bundle, and among the bills and tardy Christmas cards there was one bearing unknown handwriting with no address on the back.

  She wouldn’t have read it there in the post office, with others milling around and the gossip vultures not afraid to pipe up, ‘Not bad news is it, dear?’

  She would have gone outside, bumping me down the steps because there were no ramps for the child-encumbered in those days. My personal picture of Bindamilla’s post office has a park bench under an awning on the footpath outside, and so the scene, invented in my mind entirely and revisited more times than I can count, has Susan sitting on this bench to tear open the envelope.

  Yes, I was close by in the stroller but Susan was alone when she read that letter. I’ve come to believe that my mother remained alone from that moment until she showed it to me in Sydney, and I was at uni by then. That’s a long time to be alone, a long time to be so angry and with no one else to share the weight of it. And anger is the heaviest emotion. I know that as well as anyone on this earth.

  It didn’t have to be that way. She could have pointed the stroller towards the school straightaway and simply turned up at Dad’s classroom door. He would have dropped everything to help her get over the shock.

  She didn’t, though.

  What was in her mind? Why did she keep it to herself? It would be years before she told me, leaving a silence between us that shaped my life in ways I couldn’t see. At first I assumed this was because she genuinely didn’t know, but as I grew older I became less tolerant of my mother’s evasions. I loved her, but I didn’t trust her. Susan did know, and simply wouldn’t tell me, because to do so would be to tell herself. It would have been a confession like none she had ever made to a priest, a cleaving open with the same knife that severed her marriage to Dad.

  Oh Mum, I could only imagine. Terry was my father, but I never knew him as you did.

  The letter was anonymous, but it did contain a name, even if the letter writer hadn’t intended it to. It was a first name only, for a man she would take some time to identify, but that name became both her torment and her lifeline. It drove her from Queensland and it brought her back, which meant it brought her back to me, too, to take me out to the university and make me smoke a cigarette with my feet up on a chair, to meet me outside the Tower Mill with tears in her eyes that I mistook for grief and pity, when in fact they were tears of vindication and the very human satisfaction one feels in revenge, even when that revenge has not come by your own hand.

  SIX

  TOM

  It’s difficult to place precisely in time when a particular conversation with my mother occurred. Many took place in Sydney and she has lived in the same Rose Bay apartment since her stint in London. There was one conversation of more significance than most that began on her balcony in Rose Bay. It must have been after Susan took me to France in 1990, because she’d shown me the Bindy letter by then, but before the Bjelke-Petersen trial, so it can’t have been much later.

  The important thing is I was older and felt this should be recognised with something deeper from her, even if I couldn’t name quite what I wanted. I was prepared to be more daring, too.

  ‘Grandma Riley has never forgiven you for the way you treated Dad,’ I told her bluntly.

  ‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ she retorted. ‘If a woman treats you like that, Tom, I’ll cut her off at the knees.’

  ‘So what are you saying? You’re putting your hands up? “I’m guilty. Drag me off to bad girls’ gaol?” I’m not sensing a lot of remorse.’

  ‘That’s unfair, Tom,’ she snapped, and immediately the nonchalance was dispensed with. ‘You’ve seen the letter. You can work out what was happening to me. As for Mike’s mother, yes – Helen has every right to judge me, but it’s not as though she asked me what was going on.’

  ‘Would you have told her?’

  There was a long pause, then, ‘No.’

  ‘It might have helped Dad if you’d explained. You could have shown him the letter, at least.’

  ‘Fuck you, Tom.’

  She went inside, leaving me feeling remorseful, and angry, too.

  This was a problem I ran into occasionally in those days, when my allegiance as loving, loyal son was prone to unpredictable swings from one parent to another. When you love someone, i
t’s difficult to understand how they can hurt others, especially when the victim owns your love in equal measure. I just wanted Susan to explain herself, to let me know what was in her mind. I don’t know why it meant so much to me, but my new-found confidence wasn’t done with yet.

  I left my remorse with the million-dollar view of Sydney Harbour and went in pursuit of my mother, who was making busy in the kitchen to no real purpose.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier for Dad if you’d told him? I mean, he stuck it out in that hole for an entire semester without you, but he must have known it wasn’t so you could be back at uni six months early. The letter would have explained what was driving you, but instead you made him jump through hoops not many men would have stood for and you didn’t give anything back, not that I can see. Wasn’t there another way?’

  ‘You think you deserve an answer, do you? I didn’t explain myself to Mike, but you’re different, is that it?’

  ‘You can’t divorce me,’ I said curtly.

  ‘No, but I can show you the bloody door!’

  She was pointing with an enormous kitchen knife and rather than back down, I left.

  We laughed about the knife later that night, when she announced there was even more of her in me than she’d realised, and we got drunk over a second bottle of wine, but at the time I felt stupid marching away in high dudgeon, not least because I was staying with her, and had nowhere else to go.

  I took a bus into the city and wandered around Circular Quay to the thump and whine of amplified didgeridoos and the foreign patter of tourists. That was the day I discovered the bronze disks set into the paving stones, an odd kind of manhole cover I thought at first, until I realised they carried quotations from Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and a demilune of home-grown writers.

  Would Michael Riley ever get a guernsey among such company? He was starting to be noticed by then: A late bloomer with an original eye and a sensibility to match, declared one critic. Another thought he possessed more intrinsic honesty than any living poet in the country. But Dad didn’t belong among these luminaries, especially when each quotation was a paean to Sydney. He’d never felt comfortable here, and for good reason, it had to be said.

  My hour spent moving from disk to disk was a calming pleasure that finally drew me to the water’s edge to admire its colour. Poor Brisbane. Its river was the colour of army fatigues and no match for the harbour’s rich emerald, churned to turquoise by departing ferries as I watched. Yet, poor Sydney, too: no amount of colour and life would change the place it held in the history of Mike and Susan Riley.

  But then, Sydney was simply the end point for what had started in the park below the Tower Mill and was later made unbearable by a letter read in solitude outside Bindamilla’s post office while I squirmed in my stroller.

  That was as much as I knew on the afternoon I stood dazzled by the harbour, with a homage to the world’s best writers underfoot. I pointed myself back towards the apartment in Rose Bay, apology at the ready and resigned to making do with what I had.

  Susan opened the door quickly when I knocked, as though she’d been listening for me. ‘I’m opening a bottle,’ she said, more as a question.

  I nodded and followed her out onto the balcony, where her first words were, ‘I’m sorry about the knife.’ That was when we laughed, although there was real contrition in the way she’d spoken.

  ‘I know exactly what my journo friends would do with that kind of scene,’ she said, and in a masculine tone she drawled, ‘The female offender threatened her son with a knife. Police consider Ms Kinnane dangerous and warn the public to approach her with extreme caution.’

  ‘I always do,’ I said, leaving her with no option but to laugh again, to counter any fear I might have meant it.

  ‘Tom, I do want you to understand the things I did back then. It wasn’t like I treated Mike so badly on purpose.’

  Was she going to open up at last? I sat forward with the glass of wine left untouched between my knees.

  ‘The letter changed everything, of course, but I didn’t think of going back to Brisbane straightaway. Didn’t think I’d need to. I started with letters to government departments, but they were too easy to ignore so I tried calling from the phone box outside the post office, with you threatening to run onto the road at any moment. Even when I got through, the bastards stonewalled me while the meter ticked at trunk-call rates. Being so far from the people who could give me answers was just too frustrating.

  ‘By Easter I knew I just had to be in Brisbane if I was going to nail the bastard. I nagged Mike to get a transfer, but he was worried about what it would do to his career and he wouldn’t apply for private schools because he’d have to refund his bond – thousands of dollars – just because I had the shits with Bindy. That’s what it looked like to him. He was calm, sensible, typical Mike and all that did was wind me up even more.

  ‘On top of that, I had Bindy pressing around me like a vice,’ she said in a softer voice. By then she was leaning forward in her chair, as well, as though this news needed to remain between the two of us. ‘The more time I spent among them, the more I saw their narrowness, the chip on the shoulder about city know-it-alls like me. They were the very people who sneered about demonstrators deserving everything they got. You’ve seen the letter, Tom. You can imagine how that made me feel. In my mind, Bindamilla had become Queensland.’

  Yes, I’d seen the letter. So why not Mike? I wanted to say. But Susan was talking freely so I held back, hoped the answer would come without anything more from me.

  ‘Mike guessed how I felt about the Bindy mob,’ she said, leaning back now, our conspiracy loosening. ‘He kept making excuses for them. “It’s a country town,” he’d remind me. “They’re always suspicious of outsiders, but they’re good people at heart.” He said that over and over. They were good people. It was just that new ideas, new ways of doing things made them uneasy. It was all about Whitlam and the change he was putting us all through.’

  ‘But he was wrong, Tom. It was about Queensland back then, about the soul of the place. They were afraid of anyone and anything different from themselves and when they shoved their ballot paper into the box, they were voting for people who feed on those fears. Without telling Mike, I filled in application forms for uq and when confirmation turned up at the post office, I simply told him. “I’ve enrolled at uni for second semester, full-time, back in Brisbane.” I was going and that was it. He was angry, but more than that, he was frightened of losing me. Christ, I was a bitch. I played on that fear, you know. Made him talk his parents into letting me live in the granny flat beneath their house. But I had to. I had to be in Brisbane if I was going to get the rest of the name in that letter.’

  ‘Me, too, though. You took me with you.’

  Susan looked at me. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said, as though there was no need to confirm it. ‘Helen agreed to mind you when Diane was too busy. Through gritted teeth, I might add.’

  ‘And Dad? He had to finish out the year in Bindamilla without us.’

  She nodded, but said nothing more about him. ‘You have no idea what the politics was like back then, Tom. It got in the way of everything.’

  Maybe it did, but that wasn’t what I’d hoped she’d talk about. What were her reasons for keeping the letter from Dad? I was still no closer to understanding that, no closer to understanding her.

  SUSAN

  1975

  ‘Sue, I don’t know how you can say that,’ said Diane.

  I saw instantly that I’d made a mistake in letting my thoughts become words. It was because I was stuck in the granny flat with only Tom for company and, in fact, that’s what we were talking about, really. I’d made new friends at uni, but they all had part-time jobs, leaving Diane as the only option on weekdays and, much as we were growing closer, there were times I wanted to stick my head out the window and sc
ream.

  I was annoyed with her about other things that morning, as well. She’d been too obviously fishing for news of a second baby, ‘a brother or a little sister for Tommy to play with’.

  She was plump with her third and seemed to think the melon-humping should be shared around more evenly among sisters.

  And then I’d let my honesty get too cosy with my tongue and said, ‘I’m not a natural mother like you, Di. I love Tom, of course I do, but it’s not like I can’t imagine a life without him.’

  That was too much for Diane: ‘I’d die without my kids.’

  Not far away on the new carpet, Rosanna was exercising her right, as the big girl, to engage both brother and cousin in a game of house, which involved entirely too much sitting still. I could see the boys about to rebel. They could easily be brothers, which was what had set Diane waxing on in the first place.

  And separate from what was going on in my sister’s lounge room, I was wondering how I could call the number I’d already tried twice before leaving home. When the boys broke up Rosie’s domestic idyll, I said, ‘Why don’t we go outside and play in the sandpit?’

  That way, I could duck back inside to make the call.

  I’d found John Obermayer’s name in the Courier-Mail while researching the Springbok protests, and immediately detected a sympathy in his reporting. He was the only one; all his mates seemed to have relished what had happened to the demonstrators. When I called the paper, they told me Obermayer had moved to Melbourne and the girl on the switch didn’t know how to contact him. But I’d been lucky – he was on staff at the second Melbourne paper I called.