The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  ‘What?’ he asked, when I went so suddenly dry.

  ‘Nothing.’ I said. ‘Nothing that can make any difference now.’

  My son was six hundred miles away and with Mike so busy at his new school, while I was pretty much twiddling my thumbs, it was up to me. I booked a ticket on the train, planning to head north on Friday night, sitting up to save money, then come south again on Sunday, in a sleeper. Tom would think it was a great adventure.

  On Friday, though, I delayed packing, and knew I was doing it. The room in Surry Hills seemed so small, and what if there were drugs in the house, not just for parties, either? The girls were fine, but what about their friends? At four o’clock I still hadn’t packed for a six-thirty departure. At five, I rang to cancel.

  ‘I can appreciate you’re not really in a position to fetch him yet,’ said Mike, when I tried to explain. ‘I’ve found a babysitter so Mum doesn’t have to look after him and things are working out well. Why don’t I keep Tom until you’re settled somewhere more appropriate?’

  I agreed, too readily and, in a panic, rang Janet’s doorbell a second time.

  ‘Brave girl,’ she said, over a Friday night glass of wine. It was from a cardboard cask the size of a shoe box, which meant there was plenty to get us both drunk.

  Janet began to expand on the whole matter. ‘If my mother had her time over, she’d do the same. Never said so, raised four kids and never complained, but it was there in her face all the time. Wife and mother in the suburbs was all there was, back in her day.’

  ‘I’m already a mother. No choice in that now.’

  After a refill, I let my thoughts go free-range. ‘It’ll be hard on my own. I’ve got no help down here, no sister nearby, can’t ask friends to mind a toddler.’ And finally, after another glass: ‘I’m not a very good mother.’

  ‘I’ve heard that before. Is your little boy underfed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Covered in sores? Is he left to cry when he needs a hug, do you never play games with him, do you smack him, tell him he’s a whining little shit? That’s a bad mother.’

  ‘It’s deeper than that.’

  ‘Is it, or are you expecting too much of yourself?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t have the mother gene. I love my son, but I don’t want to play the mother game.’

  On Sunday, the absent girl returned unannounced and I had to scramble around in embarrassment, cleaning and gathering up my things, which, thankfully, fitted back into my bag. But there was no need.

  ‘I’m moving out,’ the girl told Linda. ‘Sorry about the short notice, but it looks like you’ve found someone else already.’

  Too good to be true, for me. I could have the room permanently now, or so it seemed until Annemarie spoke up.

  ‘Listen, Sue, about your little boy. When I said it was fine, it was only going to be a week or two, wasn’t it? I didn’t think it would be, like, forever.’

  I phoned the house in Brisbane where my son was safe from drug fiends and had someone to mind him during the day.

  ‘Mike, can you keep Tom a bit longer? Things are a bit fluid here at the moment.’

  He was sympathetic. ‘Do you need money? I can put part of my wages into the joint account for you. I’ll have to do it anyway, child support or whatever it’s called.’

  I feared the thin edge of dependency. ‘No, I’ll get work soon, and that’ll pay my way here. I’ll get by.’

  After the call I slipped away to my room, to my bed, to the blank wall in my face. In my face, too, was the truth: I wouldn’t be going up to Brisbane to get Tom, not in a week or two, not a month. I cried the first real tears and found there were more inside me than I’d bargained for. I cried for two days, until I heard Linda and Annemarie, bereft and panicky, discussing doctors.

  They called Derek, instead, who brought some weed with him and between them they coaxed me out of my room and onto the sofa, where the reefers were lit and my sobs became laughter, or at least the sound of each became indistinguishable, and their sensation, too.

  TOM

  I visited Sydney many times throughout my university years. During one of those visits, I took myself on a private tour of the city’s sights, not the Rocks and Hyde Park Barracks but in pursuit of my own history, and so I know that the old pub Dad and I stayed in is still serving beer to retired wharfies in singlets and tattered shorts. Maybe they’re waiting for Godot with the same mixture of hope and impotence that Dad must have felt as he waited for Susan just one floor above their heads. When I asked, however, the girl behind the bar seemed surprised that the rooms upstairs had ever been available to the public.

  I also stood outside the address where the marriage of Michael and Susan Riley finally collapsed into its hollowed-out centre, but instead of a dilapidated share house for students, a six-pack of apartments stared back at me, ugly in pale 1970s brick.

  What was I looking for on my pilgrimage, anyway? A glimpse of Susan hurrying from the house so I could know whether her eyes were wet or dry? Those details were harder to ask for, although it was telling that she could recall the address so readily when I asked her, probably on the same visit to Sydney.

  ‘That was the place you stormed away from, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Dad thinks you went to see some lecturer who had it in for him,’ I said to her once. ‘Some feminist who’d convinced you that all marriage was oppression and a husband from Queensland was sure to be an oaf.’

  That surprised her. ‘No, I didn’t go to see anyone, not that day. I just walked the streets.’

  Dad never did discover what drove Susan to turn on him so irrevocably in that house. By the time I made my private pilgrimage I could have told him myself about the letter and John Obermayer and Barry Dolan. If I didn’t, it was because I felt it was Susan’s story to tell, not mine, but if that was true, why did I walk the streets of Sydney as she had done? What was I looking for?

  How does a son ask his mother why she gave him up? What answer can she give that doesn’t tie itself into knots of self-justification? If I’d left the questions unspoken, would she have told me anyway?

  I was in my late teens by the time I started wanting to know – gone from school, gone from childhood, where mothers stand guard against life’s harm. She’d missed her chance there. Let’s not beat about the bush; Susan missed her chance to raise me the way other mothers raise their children, working up from the ground floor with a child who is entirely dependent at first, then a little less so, and a little less so. She’d got off at the third floor and let me go on rising in the company of others, until I was pretty much at the top.

  Love came later. I built a love for my mother in the way Grandma Cosgrove worked on her jigsaw puzzles at the beach each Christmas: a little patch of colour spreading out, over many visits, then jumping ahead in brief spurts that started when she took me to see my father in the nursing home, then slowing for long periods while I continued to live as Mike Riley’s son, content and untroubled by the anomaly. Susan would say the vital moment came when she showed me the letter she first read with me in my stroller, outside the Bindamilla post office, but I’m not so sure. That letter explained a lot of things, but not what mattered most to me.

  SUSAN

  April, 1976

  It was months before I saw them again.

  ‘I want to have Tom over the Easter weekend,’ I told Mike, during one of our weekly calls. He could hardly refuse, but a bit of compromise seemed only fair when it was such a long way and neither of us had the money to fly. We agreed on Coffs Harbour, where my bus arrived less than an hour before the Holden pulled into the car park of the Pacific Sands Motel.

  With Tom latched onto me like a little possum, Mike and I pecked each other on the cheek. Had I really been married to this man for three years? I still was, and it was still his surname I wrote at the top of my
assignments and that came printed on the legal documents we’d started to fill in.

  He paid for the room and refused the notes I offered as my share, to my considerable relief. Once inside, I wouldn’t let Tom out of my grasp. He was over the moon to have so much of my attention, until his boyishness kicked in and my arms infringed his right to charge around like a mad thing. I let him go, chased him, caught him and pretended to eat him up while he squealed and begged for more. I had to take him back with me. This was too much to miss out on.

  In the morning I took him to the beach, just the two of us, and the certainty of my decision warmed me more than the sun on my skin.

  Afterwards, while Tom took his nap, Mike and I talked, and, although we’d slept in the double bed without embarrassment – and without touching – now that we were seated on the edge of the same bed, the words didn’t come easily, as though six hundred miles of phone line allowed for better communication.

  We kept to procedural matters. Divorce papers had been lodged, and, since we hadn’t been much good at collecting the usual accoutrements of a marriage, there wasn’t really anything to divvy up.

  ‘I took Tom round to see Joyce,’ he said. ‘They were pleasant enough.’

  ‘Half your luck. She’s just about melted the phone lines with what she thinks of me. All my fault and she can’t believe I haven’t got Tom with me in Sydney. I’m a disgrace to motherhood, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her. It’s just the circumstances.’

  ‘It hurts all the same when she says I don’t love him. I do, Mike, you know that, don’t you?’

  Who was I trying to convince?

  ‘You’re a good mother, Sue. Look at the two of you together this weekend.’

  I’d seen the extra bags in the boot of the Holden and knew he’d come prepared.

  ‘Was I, Mike? Getting married saved Tom from being illegitimate, but it didn’t save me from being an illegitimate mother. I always felt a fraud, like I was just doing what had to be done. That’s why it hurts when Mum gets on her high horse. She’s disowned me, won’t let Diane talk to me, or the boys. It’s another kind of divorce.’

  ‘Excommunication,’ he said. ‘Catholics don’t do things by halves, do they?’

  After dinner, with Tom again out for the count, I said, ‘Do you want to . . . you know.’ I glanced towards the bed. ‘I’m still good for a hand job, or whatever.’

  ‘I use my own,’ said Mike, with a mocking wink.

  ‘You don’t think of me while you’re doing it, do you?’

  ‘No, I have a picture of Richard Nixon that works better.’

  I laughed, surprising myself.

  If he’d simply denied such intimate consolation, I wouldn’t have believed him, but to find him so casual – and so callous – offered hope.

  I could do without the passionless half-hour in the bed, too. I’d lost all interest in recent months and decided it was because sex meant giving away a part of myself. In the rebuilding of Susan Kinnane, there was nothing left to share with others, not in that most intimate of acts, anyway. The house in Surry Hills was my life now, the place where I’d slowly grown a new skin after the excoriation of January, after conversations with a fading husband and tears over a little boy as slippery as a buttered pig in my dreams.

  He wasn’t the only presence in my night-times. Terry was there, in a way I’d been able to block out in the years when the wedding band on my finger told of where I’d escaped to. I was glad I’d gone to see him as often as I did while Tom and I were living in the Rileys’ granny flat. I would never visit Brisbane again, never set foot across the border, which meant those visits would have to sustain me. But, with what I knew, it was impossible to go back there, and wasn’t I persona non grata according to Joyce, anyway?

  So the house in Surry Hills was my refuge now, and Linda my friend, if not my confidante, and others came through the door, mostly women, which I preferred. The house was rarely quiet, the many voices vibrant as they argued and declaimed and painted pictures of life as it might be without a thought for that other world of children and husbands. I got rat-faced on cheap wine and wept with laughter in a way I hadn’t known since a similar house in Auchenflower.

  I’d found a part-time job typing and filing in a doctor’s surgery, which paid the rent and for my share of the food. I was no better at studying methodically than I’d been as a teenager, but that didn’t seem to matter when I could dash off an assignment in last-minute frenzy and have my tutor write across it, Sue, you must have been a journalist in a former life?

  Then came Coffs Harbour – reunion, reclamation of what should rightly reside with me. By the Sunday, Tom was over the novelty of my undivided attention and just wanted to get on with having two parents for a change. He played no favourites and engineered an excruciating walk along the water’s edge, with himself in the middle, swinging his plump little body into the air while Mummy and Daddy held one hand each.

  ‘Happy families,’ said Mike grimly.

  It was the closest we came to laughing freely with one another that day.

  By then, I was aware of a change in myself. My exuberance had dimmed, I let Mike dress and undress the little figure, which he’d clearly become used to, and I found myself watching Tom only when he called on my attention.

  On the last morning, I still hadn’t said anything, and knew by then that I wouldn’t.

  ‘Mummy loves you, Tom,’ I said, hugging him for too long and having to suppress my hurt when he pulled away.

  At the bus station, I kissed them both and waved as the Greyhound took me southward again leaving Mike to strap Tom into the Holden and drive him to their home across the border.

  The tutor was watching the men, or boys, really, except for the mature-age student who didn’t look quite right in jeans.

  I was bored because every male in the room was playing possum with this week’s topic in case it flushed them out.

  ‘Equal pay for equal work, it’s basic justice,’ said one of the guys, as though anything else was unimaginable. He couldn’t imagine recent history, then, I thought, couldn’t imagine the mothers of the many young women around him, or was he simply avoiding an argument, as I suspected.

  ‘How do we arrive at figures like these, then?’ prompted the tutor, a woman no older than me, who quoted brick-hard statistics to build the abysmal picture of female earnings compared to male.

  As a group, we dutifully ferreted out the culprits in the way Mrs Fenster liked her history class to list the causes of World War I. It was access to jobs, it was gender bias in promotion, jobs for the boys. These boys all showed their disdain for such discrimination, although the older man among them bravely admitted that he would have struggled to work under a ‘sheila’. He said the word through his best Paul Hogan grin and got away with it because he’d made fun of himself.

  ‘You can’t forget discrimination against mothers with young children, either,’ said the serious soul beside me. ‘The law still doesn’t protect women from being sacked when they start a family.’

  This was where the discussion went now, carried by the other girls while I looked on. I was the only mother in the room, although none of them knew this about me. The white line on my ring finger had long since tanned.

  ‘But there’s a reason for that,’ said the dark-eyed boy who haunted the same corner every week, drawing long stares from girls who would have loved to fold him into their shoulder bags and take him home. ‘When a woman starts a family, she’s taking on another job, motherhood’s a job, a big one. She doesn’t have time for work as well.’

  ‘Many women seem to manage it, Ian,’ said the tutor.

  ‘Yes, but how well? Both jobs end up suffering. At work, she’s tired and has her mind on what’s happening with her kids, or maybe she gets called away because her kids are sick a
nd other workers have to cover for her. That’s not very fair. Worse than that, she’s not there when her kids need her.’

  Young Ian had thrown a switch. I saw feminine hair bristle in the static and I sat up at last in anticipation. The tutor sensed it, too, but turned deliberately to the other boys.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Some squirmed and avoided the tutor’s eye, as though they were back in a Grade Nine science class and afraid to be asked the valency of sodium.

  ‘I think Ian’s got a point,’ said one. ‘Kids need their mothers. You can’t really turn that on its head for the sake of academic theory.’

  Emboldened, another voice followed: ‘The children should always come first.’

  I turned to pick out the speaker, Tony D’Astasio. If I knew his name, it was because he was usually more thoughtful and articulate than the rest.

  ‘I’m thinking of the little ones,’ Tony went on, ‘because those early years are really important, aren’t they? It’s not the same for fathers, the relationship is different. Kids need their mothers at home with them while they’re little, up to school age, anyway. Why have them otherwise?’

  Masculine heads rose tentatively, but it seemed clear Tony had summed up their collective opinion.

  Why have them? My chair creaked as I shifted, alerting me to my own agitation.

  ‘Do you think women only have babies when they want to?’ I asked. ‘A lot of them get knocked up by the likes of you and your mates here, for a start, and it’s not men who end up with a bulge in their bellies. And when that bulge becomes a baby, what are a woman’s choices then? Settle down in the suburbs and raise the little thing while Daddy pays the bills? Is that how it’s supposed to be? Because it isn’t, you know, for a hell of a lot of women. They get abandoned, they get divorced.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about those women. Married women was what I meant.’