As Robert had warned, the footpaths along the boulevard were seedy with sex shops and peepshows. After a couple of blocks, I guided him with a hand under his elbow into the shelter of Rue Lepic; and shelter it was, too, from both the wind and the bawdy neon. Stalls spilled amber light and their riotous jumble of wares into our path, first a chaotic butcher’s shop crammed with sausage and hung with gutted pigs and unplucked turkeys that needed only a twinkle in their eyes to fly again. A barrow of flowers straddled the gutter.
‘Where do they grow flowers at this time of year?’ Tom asked.
‘Fly them in from North Africa,’ I said, the faux expert once more.
He wanted to buy me a bouquet of tulips but I forestalled him because they’d have been awkward to carry round for the rest of the day, then regretted my practicality when he looked so crestfallen.
He was fascinated by the snails, but baulked in horror at tasting one and, at a basket of oysters, had to be tutored in the pronunciation of huîtres.
‘Not wheat, darling.’
I was touching his arm again, hugging him to myself. ‘Make an aitch sound and turn it into a double u.’
‘Still, your French is better than your father’s.’ I laughed, aware too late that I was forgetting who his real father was.
But Tom knew who I meant and threw back his head in acknowledgment. ‘I know, he used to test my vocab. Didn’t sound anything like Mademoiselle Lernier.’
‘Mademoiselle?’
‘A dish, much too pretty to be a teacher at Terrace, but not as pretty as you,’ he said.
‘Worm.’
He put his long arm around me and kept it there until the next corner when we had to jump our separate ways or be parted more violently by a motorbike. I hoped his arm would return, but it didn’t. Robert often looped an arm around me as we walked, my husband in all but name and, while I welcomed it, this intimacy with Tom was something different.
Paris was a lovers’ cliché, and, as I climbed Montmartre with my son, I smiled at the absurdity of falling in love.
It was a steep climb to the top, and we were in no hurry: Tom, because each street was a wonderland; and me, for delays of my own that I was too happy to examine. When the ground flattened out, so did Tom’s interest, as the city of Parisians ceded the streets to charcoal artists and racks of I Love Paris t-shirts.
We broke through to the steps of Sacré-Coeur with the city spread out before us, crowned by a pale, unblemished blue, and here I was suddenly beset by memory.
‘What is it?’ Tom asked, when I began to cry softly, soundlessly.
I hadn’t seen them coming, hadn’t imagined that words said for a laugh amid sex-tangled sheets could reach across two decades and round the planet to snatch the breath from my lungs.
‘Your father brought me here,’ I said.
‘Dad! But you two never . . .’
‘Terry,’ I corrected him, more sharply than I’d intended. ‘He took me on a tour, fed me at Maxim’s, kissed me in a garret with the Eiffel Tower right outside our window.’
He still didn’t understand, and how could he, when it wasn’t true.
If I’d tried to explain, there, in the middle of Paris, only my anger and guilt would have escaped into the chill. I knew what had been done to Terry and yet I’d given up chasing the bastards who were responsible. My punishment seemed clear enough, here, in the middle of Paris. This wonderful day with my son, who was Terry’s son, too, was to be taken from me.
In the silence, Tom moved closer to put his arm around me, as I’d invited him to do all morning.
‘No, it’s all right,’ I said, putting my hand against his chest to stop him pressing closer. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’ And to recover myself I walked away until the worst of it passed.
By then, of course, the fun had gone skipping away from us, and although I tried to fetch it back he seemed oddly reluctant.
In the weeks after Paris, I thought of Tom almost every day, not in passing, but in the long silence before sleep and over coffee in the bustle of the newsroom. I was mother to an almost-man. He needed to know things that a child could not.
That was why, early in the new year, I found myself among strangers who, like me, followed a line painted on the stark concrete until we were inside a room surprisingly alive with children. They had come to see their fathers, of course, attended by weary mothers who didn’t share the joy of reunion with quite the same enthusiasm, if I was any judge.
Soon after, a different door opened and men filed in, watched languidly by the uniforms stationed around the room. One man stopped in front of my small table.
‘You Kinnane?’ he asked, and when I nodded he slipped into the seat opposite.
‘You know I’m a journalist, right? I made that plain when I asked to see—’
‘I know who you are. I’ve read your stuff in the papers.’
He was aggressive, an attitude that had surely served him well on the force. No doubt it was a handy shell in gaol, as well. He was slimmer than I remembered from the courtroom and his face no longer the florid crimson of his trial. A year on this prison farm had browned it along with the lean and powerful arms he set in place on the table like twin sphinxes. I tried to forget for a moment what those arms had done.
‘Then you know that nothing sympathetic is likely to come out of this interview,’ I said.
He dismissed this with a grim chuckle and said again, ‘I know who you are. We spoke on the phone once, a long time ago. Your name was Riley, then. Kinnane’s your maiden name.’
‘If you know that, why did you agree to see me?’
He shrugged and asked, less forcefully this time, ‘Are you here as Riley or Kinnane?’
‘My name wasn’t Riley for very long and, as you say, it was a while ago. The time I want to talk to you about is before I got married. So the answer, I suppose, is Kinnane.’
‘Seventy-one, the Tower Mill,’ he guessed. ‘That is going back a long way.’
‘It sticks in your mind when the man you love suddenly becomes a vegetable,’ I said, matching his belligerence.
Dolan leaned back, taking his arms from the table while he observed me dispassionately for long seconds, no doubt making connections. He seemed to have a good memory, another valuable skill in a detective. More than likely he’d been good at his job, the one he was paid for by the Queensland Treasury.
‘How are you getting on here?’ I asked, backing off to let him think. ‘It’s almost a year since they transferred you from Wacol.’
‘It’s better. I was segregated from other prisoners for a long time when they first put me away. Saved me from being bashed, but it didn’t save me from finding a turd in my shepherd’s pie, petty stuff like that.’
‘At least you didn’t get your head kicked in.’
He made that connection quickly enough.
‘Is that why you’ve come, to gloat, to be sure I’m festering to your satisfaction?’
I had often thought of Dolan behind bars in the aftermath of his trial, not in a pool of his own blood, but among other felons, the fox made to sit among the chickens because he’d made himself one of them. But that wasn’t why I’d come and I told him so.
‘Then why?’
‘Because I have a son. Terry Stoddard’s son. I was already pregnant on that night at the Tower Mill. He’s at university now, growing into a fine young man. At the moment, he doesn’t know that Terry’s injury wasn’t an accident. He’s old enough to know the truth and when I tell him, he might reasonably ask why I haven’t done more to see justice done for his father.’
Still tilted away from me, his arms now folded, Dolan asked, ‘Have you come to ask my permission or for a confession? You’re wired up, is that it, hoping to trap me into saying something?’
‘You watch to
o much television. Besides, you seem to have put yourself away for a long stretch without any help from me.’
It was catty of me and I knew it. Worse, I’d surrendered the moral high ground in exchange for a cheap shot. He had every right to say fuck off, lady, and go back through the steel door. But Dolan surprised me again by smiling faintly and resting his arms back on the table.
‘Touché,’ he said. ‘But what you’re saying about ’71, there’s no evidence. There was never anything you could do.’
I reached into my handbag. Across the room a guard stirred and watched me with interest until he saw I’d simply taken out a sheet of paper. Carefully, for the letter was fragile from numberless re-readings, I opened out the folds and slipped it across the table.
Dolan read it all the way through.
‘Still won’t get you anywhere. It’s unsigned and the man who wrote it is dead.’
Was this a bluff?
‘Road accident,’ said Dolan, when he saw me weighing up the claim. ‘Hit a tree out past Emerald somewhere. He was drunk, not an unusual state for him, apparently. Not that you’ll read that in the official report.’
It was the truth, I could be sure of it, and it didn’t matter anyway. I hadn’t come to trap Dolan or threaten him and he seemed to accept that now. It changed the tone of his voice.
‘I was shit scared, you know, by what I’d done. A rage of the moment thing. We were so fired up.’ He stopped and looked me in the face. ‘That probably sounds like an excuse. It’s not. I don’t know what difference it makes to you, but it’s the one thing I’d change if I had my time over, even more than . . .’ He let his hand wander in a vague reference to his surroundings. You get a lot a time to yourself in a place like this. Not physically, but maybe you can guess what I mean.’
‘You didn’t show a lot of regret when you telephoned me out of the blue.’
‘No, mustn’t have sounded that way. When I called you, I didn’t know why you’d been asking about me. Once I did, well, it was pointless to pursue me. Different time, back then, different climate. You were never going to get anywhere. When was that, ’75?’
I nodded, once again stunned by the accuracy of his recall. ‘The same time Whitlam was sacked.’
‘Was it?’ he said. ‘That makes sense. Joh’d helped to get rid of him by putting that clown into the Senate. He was on top of the heap. We knew the score by then. Nothing could touch us.’
He leaned forward and spoke with a sincerity that couldn’t be feigned: ‘You know, the stuff that happened, the bribes, the raid on those pathetic hippies up north, we did it because we could. That was the main reason. Government wasn’t going to stand in the way as long as we kept up our side of the bargain. In fact, the bribes we took seemed like payment for services rendered. There was nothing to stop us. That was the real corruption, not the money, it was knowing there was no check on what you could get up to, except the next guy up the line who was pocketing more than you were.’
He stopped suddenly and held my eyes. His own were as hard as ever, I saw, which was why his remorse seemed authentic.
‘When you’ve told your son, will you want to bring him here? I won’t see him, you know. This is not a zoo. I’m not here to be gawped at.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll show him this letter and tell him your name. The rest is up to him.’
TOM
Dad wasn’t the only one who held things back from me until I was ‘ready’, although in the case of the dog-eared letter Susan finally showed me after Paris, it would be more correct to say, until she was ready. The trip to France had changed things for her, I think. My birthday was the excuse for the gift of an airline ticket to Sydney.
Did she fly me down for the sole purpose of showing me the letter? She didn’t produce it like ‘Exhibit A’ while I was still fresh from the airport. Thinking about it later, I recognised how she steered conversation and invited questions more openly than during my earlier visits.
I had things on my mind, too, questions I wanted to ask, but until then had lacked, not so much the courage but a pathway into my mother’s complexity. I knew all I needed to know about Terry Stoddard by then, but far too little about Susan Kinnane and the decisions she had made fifteen years earlier. Yet I still couldn’t bring myself to ask, straight out, why she had let Mike Riley raise me as his own. Instead it seemed better to broach the matter in the way she always seemed to do: I asked why she hated Queensland so much.
‘I don’t,’ she responded, in honest surprise.
‘You did once. Dad told me. You were adamant about it. You weren’t going back there, you were never going to set foot in Queensland ever again. He says it like he’s quoting you.’
‘From a long time ago, Tom. I go there now to see you, to see Terry. You can love a place, but dislike the people who live there, and it’s only some of them, anyway. There was a time, in the ’70s and ’80s, when there seemed to be too many who got my goat. I couldn’t stand the politics. Had to get out.’
Had she skilfully nudged me towards that question and I simply hadn’t noticed? Whether that was true or not, I had created the perfect opening for her, and she took it up seamlessly.
‘You’re nineteen tomorrow, aren’t you, Tom?’ Without waiting for me to respond, she said, ‘I was nineteen when I met Terry. There’s something you need to see. It will answer the question you just asked better than any explanation I can give.’
She rose and went along the hall to the bedroom she shared with Robert, who was off with clients that night. She didn’t immediately emerge, and I’ve since sketched a scene in my mind where she stands considering what she holds in her hand. Until that moment, only a friend she had once lived with and a journalist named Obermayer had ever seen the letter, and neither could have experienced the personal connection that it held for Susan. Only I could share that.
When I looked up to watch her approach along the hall, she was carrying the kind of plastic sheaf that clips into a ring binder. Seating herself beside me, she placed the sheaf on the table, more in front of me than her, where I quickly saw it contained a handwritten letter, a rather grubby, much-folded letter.
Without a word, she waited while I read it.
Dear Mrs Riley,
I seen your face in Queensland Country I reconnise you from a picture in the Brisbane paper a few years ago and your name is the same except your last name is different. I kept the page from that paper so thats how I know you are the same one. I am sending this to you because of the man who got hurt during the trouble over that football team. The paper said you were his girlfriend even if you must have married some teacher in Bindamilla since then. I was the one who went back afterwards and called the ambulance because it wasn’t right the way we just left him there like that. I didn’t want to but the one who hit him was senior to me and I had to do what he said. He made me help him to carry him to the path. He knew he had hit him to hard and might get put up on a charge for it when the Inspector found out. If we left him next to the path, it would look like he hit his head on the railing and that would be an accident. I did not want to leave him there like that. He looked bad to me, even though there was no light to see him by. He did not move the whole time. When I came out into the street afterwards, there was blood on my uniform. I told him we should get an ambulance but he said no. Let other people find him so it doesn’t come back to us. After that we were ordered back into ranks. I could not do anything then and he was watching me. When we got back to the barracks, it was after midnight. He went to have a drink with some others and I went out through the gate and found a taxi.
Your boyfriend was still there. No one found him after we left. That is why it was me who called the ambulance. I feel very bad about this because the paper said he got brain damage. I did not hit him but I seen it happen. He hit him to hard and he should face up to it.
You
should know what happened because the paper said you were his girlfriend. Then I saw you in Queensland Country. I feel sorry about what happened. I cannot tell you his name because we don’t rat on anyone no matter what they did. But you should know what happened.
The letter lay inside its plastic sleeve for good reason. The original folds were almost worn through and the edges fraying.
‘You carried this with you?’ I said.
‘In my handbag. Yes, for a long time. After a while I knew it by heart, pretty much, but I still opened it, held it in my hands.’
There were other creases, a drunken spider’s web that meant the letter didn’t quite sit flat, even in its cocoon of plastic.
‘You crumpled it up.’
‘More than once. That mark, there –’ she pointed to a smudge that had darkened like a liver spot – ‘is from when I threw it into the kitchen rubbish.’
I pictured her doing it, and just as clearly saw the frantic retrieval.
‘Who sent it?’
‘I spent years trying to find out. That was the reason I left Bindamilla, only it was impossible to get even a list of the policemen who were brought in from the country for the State of Emergency. They blocked me at every turn and I was a novice, anyway. I tried again once I had a few journo tricks up my sleeve, but Joh was at the height of his reign by then and the police were his private army, contemptuous of the media. It was hopeless.’
She leaned forward, bringing her face down close as gawpers do over a museum exhibit. ‘Sometimes I don’t know who I hate more – the bastard who swung the baton or the coward who sent me this.’
‘Coward?’ I said. ‘It would have taken—’
‘Oh, bullshit, Tom. He was drunk, wanted to ease his conscience. See these smears? They were already on the letter when it arrived. I’d say he wrote it one night, when he was pissed and feeling guilty because he’d seen my picture in Queensland Country. Once he was sober, he couldn’t bring himself to post it, I’ll bet. God knows how many times he flip-flopped until he was off his face again and finally shoved it in a letter box.’
The Tower Mill Page 21
