The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  I lowered my hand, sat back in the seat.

  ‘I’ve gone on the pill. Four kids is enough and Jim still likes his Saturday nights.’

  At last. Thirty years of Joyce telling you what to do is enough for anyone, I wanted to say. ‘I’m proud of you,’ I said instead, leaning across to kiss my sister, but her announcement called for more than a peck on the cheek. I hugged her as I’d seldom done before, and when she did the same I discovered the affection I’d craved all weekend.

  ‘I’ve got a son and a sister who love me,’ I said, tearing up. ‘Too bad you both belong here and I don’t.’

  In Sydney, I took a cab from the airport, only to find the flat empty and cold. I sat in the dark for a while, telling myself it was the right decision and it was, too, but I still ached now that it was done.

  Something else had floated up through this weekend, and only in the cold and the darkness did I admit it. Jealousy wasn’t part of my nature, but that night I envied the man I was once married to, envied the easy intimacy he’d found; I could have done with a little of the joy that rayed out of Mike Riley like the Queensland sun.

  TOM

  I remember the first time I did it, and why. I was closer to seven than six by then, and memories from that age are unequivocally one’s own; they remain deeply rooted to become the bricks of who you build yourself to be.

  The day was special. I was taking my costume to school so Mrs Milavic could be sure it was right for the end-of-year concert, but that’s not why the day was a marker in my life. I’d been thinking about the matter for some time, and especially in the car that morning, with Dad at the wheel and beside him this laughing, lively woman who’d come into my life. I’d been told to call her Lyn from our first meeting and I was a good boy so I did what I was told; but, all the same, my dad’s name was Mike and I didn’t call him Mike. I wanted to be like my friends.

  When Lyn walked me into school, holding the hanger high, I took her other hand and, once my costume had been safely delivered to Mrs Milavic, said out loud for my classmates to hear: ‘Goodbye, Mum.’

  SUSAN

  1979

  The shop assistant was fitting a Bankcard form into the little machine when the pager began to buzz inside my handbag. I didn’t need to check the tiny display to know it would be Brian.

  ‘I’ll wrap them myself,’ I told the girl, and hurried through the ritual of signature, carbon copy and receipt. I’d chosen a racing car and a poster showing the relative sizes of dinosaurs. ‘He’s obsessed with them,’ I’d explained to the assistant earlier.

  ‘Mine, too. They all are at that age.’ She’d replied with a knowing smile that was meant to link us as mothers. I wondered what she’d have thought had she known the car and the poster were going in the post.

  With Tom’s presents loose in a bag, I was quickly onto the concourse and checking the signs overhead. Public phone this way.

  I was put through to my editor immediately: ‘Susan! Thanks for calling so quickly. I’ve just seen the copy you showed to Morty. Sensational. This could blow the lid off the volcano. You’re sure of your sources?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How much crosschecking have you done?’

  ‘I’m not a doe-eyed novice, Brian. The minister’s been feeding details to Ridgeport for over a year, and I’ve got a sniff on another two donors.’

  ‘Do you need help? This could turn into—’

  ‘No, I’m on top of it and the last thing I want is some cowboy charging in to scare the horses.’

  He paused, putting me on alert. ‘I was thinking of bringing in Eddie Topfer on this one.’

  ‘No you fucking won’t!’ I shouted into the phone, drawing the eyes of passers-by. ‘It’s my story, Brian. I’ve done all the legwork to get it this far, and I’m going to see it through on my own. Eddie’ll want his by-line above mine, anyway.’

  Brian laughed because it was true and left me to it. It was late, and I had notes to type up, which I did best at home. The days were shortening and my new flat was dark by the time I reached home. Janet now had a job with the Age, in Melbourne, which was just as well, since I’d have been a lousy flatmate. I grabbed meals on the run, and, once the review of each day’s chicken scratch was done, I slept.

  Tom’s presents sat in their bag on the end of the table while I typed. I’d need wrapping paper; something with rocket ships or zoo animals. Did they make dinosaur wrapping paper? It had been a Christmas photo Mike had sent that prompted my comment to the shop assistant. I carried the photo in my handbag because it was such a lovely shot of Tom, sitting near the tree with a plastic triceratops in one hand and a tyrannosaurus in the other. He was smiling with his whole face, the way Mike used to do, and probably still did. Interesting nature–nurture experiment going on there. The slim feminine legs in the background were surely Lyn’s.

  Last year, I gave Tom his birthday present in person, but there was no way I could get up there this time. Must have it in the post tomorrow, I told myself, to be sure it was there for him to open on the thirty-first.

  TOM

  My mum, who happily signed her name Lyndall Cosgrove for the last time at Wanganui Gardens in 1978, is actually older than Dad by more than a year. I suspect that her age had something to do with Gabrielle’s arrival only eighteen months after the wedding, or perhaps having one child in the house already reduced the incentive for delay. I was the perfect age to be fascinated by her bulging belly, which I insisted on listening to with my ear pressed up against the taut skin and claimed, once, to hear the baby speak to me. Gabby turned up one night, late in ’79, while I was fast asleep at Aunty Jane’s. Emma joined us two and a half years later, in time for my tenth birthday.

  Somewhere in there, Dad had his first poems accepted by a ‘small magazine’ and, encouraged by this, submitted the best of a decade’s work to University of Queensland Press. I was too young to have the least idea what it meant when shown the first precious copy of The Unquiet Landscape of Silence.

  In those days, though, it was Susan who was hitting sixes in print. Years later, I ferreted about among the microfiche in the university library to find her articles, and excoriating stuff it was, too, written with just the right balance of worthy opprobrium and ‘gotcha’ journalism. A minister fell on his sword and there were other triumphs.

  I was still a kid, though, when Mum was the scourge of dodgy politicians and even the unions she’d first worked for at the Advocate. Despite her idolisation of Whitlam, she was fearless in pursuing left as often as right and, to underscore her bipartisanship, is rumoured to have bedded men on both sides of the aisle, as the Americans would put it. That’s not something a son particularly wants to verify.

  To me, she was simply my Sydney mother, who sent fabulous presents for Christmas and birthdays and came for visits occasionally, during which I owned her completely. Heady stuff for any kid. She never stayed long, which didn’t matter, because I had my Brisbane mum to listen to my woes, tuck me into bed and lend me the warmth of a soft feminine body whenever I needed its comfort. I loved them both as only a child can love, because there was no reason to do otherwise. What a life!

  I knew I had two fathers, as well, one remote and one close at hand, just like my mothers, but unlike the mostly absent mum, the father named Terry never came to visit, never phoned and, more importantly, in the view of a seven-, eight-, nine-year-old, sent no presents, and it was this very practical issue that prompted my first serious questions.

  ‘Terry is very sick,’ was Mike’s answer. ‘Too sick to send you anything.’

  That sufficed for a few days, until I returned with the reasonable observation that sick people eventually got better, so why couldn’t he get with the program?

  ‘What’s made him sick is something you never get better from.’

  Since Dad wasn’t very fort
hcoming on the matter of my first father, and Mum didn’t seem to know much at all, I cunningly took a different route and asked Susan the next time she came to Brisbane.

  ‘Terry lives in a land where no one can reach him,’ she told me. ‘But you don’t need to worry, Tom. He’s happy where he is.’

  Oh? And how could she know that, if no one could reach him?

  Parents hate having their cleverness skewered by irrefutable logic, especially when the whistleblower only recently gave up believing in Santa Claus. I don’t recall her response, except that it was vague and unsatisfying.

  Although she didn’t know it at the time, that visit was to be the last before a lengthy absence of Susan from my life, because, of course, other lives were on the move while I climbed the ladder of single-digit birthdays, hers as much as anyone’s. One of the big broadsheets got tired of seeing the best stories in the National Times and went headhunting. At little past thirty years of age, Susan Kinnane was writing front-page articles for a national daily and, after two years of this, when the paper’s Washington correspondent resigned unexpectedly, Susan got the nod as his replacement.

  My Brisbane mother spent these years crafting two exquisite sisters for me out of her own body, while, on the other side of the mattress, Dad opened the Courier-Mail one Saturday morning and saw that a private girls’ school was looking for an English teacher. Family folklore records that at interview the head of department asked if he was Michael Riley, the poet, since he hadn’t had the chutzpah to put this in his cv. He was offered the job there and then, even though a sadly expectant candidate still waited outside for her chance to impress.

  God knows, there’s no money in poetry, but that wasn’t the only time Dad would be rewarded for all his lonely toil. His reputation grew modestly through the 1990s until, in 2003, East Anglia University invited him to Norwich as poet-in-residence for its creative writing summer school. That was why, when the news came about Terry, he was in England and in need of a last-minute flight to Brisbane, like me.

  An airline seat might not be the best place for intimate discussion, but there were times on that journey when the hubbub of people moving about and the clatter of trolleys along the aisle offered a chance. Amid the many contemplations that overtook me on that flight, a question rose that I hadn’t asked Dad before.

  ‘Did Mum ever meet Terry?’

  ‘Lyn? Only once. It was enough for her to know how sad it all was.’

  ‘She wanted you to take me along as well, didn’t she? You had a row about it.’

  His answer was to stare at me, clearly caught out. ‘I didn’t realise you’d . . .’

  ‘I heard you in your bedroom. They were the first cross words I ever heard between you.’

  I could count the others on the fingers of one hand and still hold a coffee cup to my lips.

  He nodded. ‘They were our first cross words. It wasn’t just the Terry business, more subtle than that. Couples don’t normally argue over just one issue. Lyn was every bit your mother as I was your father and she expected the same amount of say. I was the one. I expected exclusive sway over the big things. Wasn’t fair. And she was right about Terry, too, only I couldn’t see it.’

  ‘How did you work it out?’

  ‘We compromised. I sat you down and I told you, instead of showing you. It was a mistake.’

  ‘Yeah, I still remember it: “Your father had an accident a long time ago. His brain doesn’t work properly and he has to be cared for like a child.” Was he in the nursing home by then?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Stoddard died not long after Lyn and I got married. I’m sorry, Tom. I should have taken you to see him. It would have saved you a lot of upset.’

  More than he knew. The exchange with Dad on that flight home had been prompted by a memory from my teens, shoved back into focus by Terry’s death. I can’t say that it was more painful than others I battled over the years, but it stands out because I faced it alone.

  On the western slope of Red Hill in Brisbane, where Windsor and Musgrave roads meet at a sharp angle, there’s a block of land of no use to home builders. Instead, a Moreton Bay fig had spread its largesse over the busy roads and a small post office that in the 1980s became a cafe.

  I passed the spot every day on the way home from school. How old was I on the day I broke my journey for a closer look? Fourteen, maybe. I had no money for a drink, so I tried to hide behind the edge of the building at first. All a bit comical, if it hadn’t seemed so serious to me at the time.

  On the tip of the corner, beyond the boundary of the cafe’s leasehold, I suppose, there was an old council bench. On that day, it was occupied by a single figure, as it was every afternoon, because no one else was likely to sit beside him. Busy with my friends and the delicious presence of girls on the bus, I hadn’t given the man a second thought, but that quickly changed once Dad told me about my other father. After that, I became increasingly obsessed with what I saw, until one day I worked up the courage to leave the safety of the bus.

  Once I could spy on him from close range, the detail appalled me even more. He was grubby and unkempt, his bare feet traced with black and jagged lines where dirt had become embedded in the cracks of his heels.

  What I’d seen from the bus – more than the three days’ growth on a bony chin and long greasy locks – was the performance. The man was never still. With the bench as his stage, he carried on a routine for anyone who cared to watch, folding his legs, right over left then left over right. He would twine his arms like snakes in his lap, and when they were locked together he’d rest his chin on the topmost hand. Then suddenly he would unfold, like a flower with its face to the sun, shedding petals of pain and loneliness and confusion.

  In my hiding place, I was shaking. A fear had hold of me, no matter how much I told myself it couldn’t be him. This man was too old. But the poor bugger might be twenty years younger than he looked.

  Could I walk up to the man, ask his age? Why not his name?

  But I knew he wouldn’t be able to answer. His mind was gone and, with it, probably all memory, all recognition.

  ‘Do you want a table?’

  The waiter had sussed me out. My answer was to back away, stumbling over a chair, my bag colliding with a vacant table as I lurched onto the footpath. The man looked up at me, I could smell him, or was it my own fear? The traffic lights changed, leaving me free to cross, to go back to the bus stop where I could resume my journey home. But I stood there, staring, and on the edge of desperate tears. This wasn’t my father, but was Terry any different?

  TEN

  SUSAN

  1987

  The carriage swayed and rocked to the irregular rhythm of the Tube. I could have taken a cab to Heathrow and charged it to the paper, but I liked the Underground and the chance it gave me to see the English in all their boiled-beef and poorly dressed glory. Two hours from now I would be in Paris, where the locals wore their clothes with panache, even something as ubiquitous as a scarf. I wore the new heels I’d bought in Kensington High Street especially for the occasion.

  By Acton Park, though, the train was no longer underground; grey rain spat against the window and I had to admit I was tired of London, just as I’d grown tired of Washington.

  I looked down at the research notes on my knee and re-read the telex sent from Sydney overnight. Société d’Europa was rumoured to be using proxies to take a position in the anz, and the editor wanted me to draw Berringer out on this point to gauge his reaction.

  At the bottom of the telex, I read again the teasing addendum: You’re an ex-Queenslander, aren’t you, Sue? You’ll be interested to know they’ve opened a royal commission into police corruption. Joh must have been asleep at the cabinet table. Cheers, Joel.

  I shot a disdainful breath down my nose, just as I had the first time I read it, and smiled privately at the reply I’d fire
d off: I’ll buy shares in a whitewash factory. Never get rich on what you pay me.

  The autumn sun was out in Paris. Was it the dazzling light that turned every Peugeot, Citroën and Renault into a Formula One racer? My cab driver seemed especially afflicted.

  ‘Votre nom est Alain Prost, c’est bien cela?’

  ‘Oui, Alain Prost.’ He laughed and, as though this boast needed proving, changed lanes for no reason that I could see.

  ‘Doucement, s’il vous plaît. J’ai tout mon temps.’

  I spoke in my best French, but it wasn’t a language he understood, it seemed, and as a result I presented myself at Société d’Europa’s offices ahead of time and was shown into a sumptuous antechamber to wait.

  The decor of Australia’s corporate offices exuded all the warmth of a witch’s smile, in my opinion. Not this room. The high ceiling lent grandeur, the doors were double-height and inlaid with understated patterns of rosewood and mahogany, and wasn’t that a Louis Quinze sideboard looking me over with Parisian insouciance from across the room? If Société d’Europa brought this sort of style with them, then Labor’s decision to open up the financial sector would have secondary benefits.

  At precisely eleven, the elegant doors opened and Robert Berringer came out to greet me.

  ‘Ms Kinnane, I hope I have not kept you waiting,’ he said, in a tone that instantly outshone the room. The accent was heavy but he’d pronounced ‘Ms’ perfectly, as though he’d been prepped by the pa who hovered behind his shoulder; a man, not some mademoiselle in a pencil skirt as so many were.

  Berringer was barely three inches taller than me, but he carried himself like a larger man. Fine suit, Alain Delon haircut. Why did flecks of grey and crow’s-feet bracketing the eyes make a man more attractive, while women became slaves to lotions and dyes? I knew from my notes that Berringer was forty-six years old and divorced for nearly a decade, having produced a pigeon pair of children who now lived with their mother.