‘He called the ambulance.’
‘Four hours too late! If he’d called for help straightaway, he might have made a difference, but instead he covered his mate’s arse. Terry was bleeding inside his skull all that time. It was the build-up of pressure inside his brain that did the damage.’
The full meaning of the letter came then, by stealth. ‘He was bashed,’ I said.
‘With a thirty-six-inch baton.’ Susan held her hands apart to show me the length. ‘Swung by an average man, the tip can reach a speed of more than a hundred miles an hour. Do you want to know how many pounds per square inch that equals? I worked it out once. Your father’s been as good as dead since that night, Tom, clubbed to death by a Queensland copper who’s never had to answer for it.’
‘What did Dad say about this?’ I said, touching the plastic lightly with my fingertips, then lifting them instantly as though it had given me a jolt.
She sat back, making me turn and look at her while she kept me waiting. Her face had hardened. She was disappointed – no, more than that, she was annoyed with my question.
‘Nothing. He’s never seen it.’
‘Why not?’ I looked down at the juvenile scrawl with its spelling mistakes and clumsy grammar. ‘He calls you Mrs Riley, mentions Bindamilla. It must have come while Dad was still out there.’
‘Before then. It was sent to me care of Bindy post office.’
‘And you didn’t show Dad?’
‘It wasn’t addressed to him.’
I took her answer at face value, that night. Only later did I want something less evasive. I looked back at the letter.
‘There are no names, just what happened,’ I said. I was beginning to see what a torment it must have been, to offer evidence of a crime and at the same time deny any chance of catching the culprit. ‘There are no names . . . It would have been better—’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Susan calmly.
I checked the bottom of the letter. Definitely nothing. ‘The envelope?’
She shook her head, eyes for the letter only. Slowly, reverently, she took it from the plastic sleeve and with the blunt end of a pen touched the letter where a word had been blocked out.
I read the context and saw that him had replaced a name.’
‘He started writing the man’s name, then saw what he’d done and scribbled it out. Looks like he did, too, doesn’t it?’ said Susan, raising the letter up to the overhead light.
I stared at the letter closely. ‘Barry,’ I whispered. ‘Jesus, you got a name. Could be a surname, though.’
‘I thought of that, too,’ she said, ‘but it’s not. I couldn’t identify the letter writer, but with help from a reporter at the Courier-Mail, I got the surname for our friend Barry.’
She stopped speaking to concentrate on her hands, returning the letter to its plastic sleeve with the care of a conservator. This only heightened my anticipation, although she hadn’t intended it that way.
‘Well?’ I urged.
‘Dolan. Barry Dolan. He was one of the brown shirts brought in from regional stations to make up the numbers at the Tower Hill that night.’
‘But you had his name. You must have gone after him.’
‘I wanted to. I tried, but without the evidence of the letter writer, it was pointless. Dolan had got wind of what I was up to by then, as well. Warned me off. Best I could do was keep tabs on him. I was still doing that when I went to Washington.’
‘Where is he now? Are you still keeping tabs on him?’
Susan couldn’t resist a teasing smirk. ‘Don’t you recognise the name, Tom? Detective Senior Sergeant Barry Dolan. He did quite well for himself, you see, rose in the ranks.’
I could only shake my head, making her laugh out loud with a freedom that seemed almost manic in the circumstances. Didn’t she hate this guy for what he’d done to my father, for what he’d done to us?
The letter was suddenly a snake ready to strike and I stood up, knocking over my chair and making Susan reel sideways in surprise. It was a moment or two longer before she realised what was happening.
‘You’re shaking,’ she said, hugging me.
My chest was heaving. A panic attack, I recognised later, but at the time I’d never had my body play tricks on me this way. I held on to her for dear life, a full head taller and strong enough to crush the air out through her ribcage if I wasn’t careful.
‘Darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would hit you this way. I thought you were ready. I’m so sorry.’
‘No, no, you did the right thing.’
And as quickly as it had gone into spasm, my body relented, leaving me weak and in need of her support just to remain on my feet.
Afterwards, while I longed for sleep in the spare room, my thoughts overshadowed the letter. I must have hugged my mother as a child, when I was afraid or, like tonight, simply cattle-prodded by emotions that defied analysis, hugged her with my three-year-old strength and felt her arms around me, comforted and with never a thought that it would ever be different. She must have said soothing things to me and called me darling with a mother’s tenderness.
I wished so much I could remember it.
I didn’t know who Barry Dolan was until Mum laid it all out for me after Paris. He was in gaol by then, and, because receiving corrupt payments gets you five years at most, he was released not long after and went off to live under a rock somewhere.
Perhaps he’d found salvation, but, for all the Christian charity endlessly impressed upon me at Terrace, I didn’t give a fuck if he saved his soul or not. The man smashed my father’s head open with a thirty-six-inch baton and left him in the darkness, dead in all but the details.
Later, my lawyer’s training told me Dolan would never be tried for murder. Where was the body, the defence would demand. Terrance John Stoddard was still breathing, still ate three meals a day and still squeezed out a healthy shit every morning with the satisfaction of one whose bowel movements were an important marker in his daily routine.
Fucking Queensland.
At least Dolan was made to face a guilt of some sort; he was made to experience that moment in the dock when the people cried, ‘Look at what you did, you bastard. The evidence is out there for us all to see. You did take the money, you did betray the public trust.’
Joh Bjelke-Petersen never suffered such a moment. Susan hoped that he would. So did I, once I knew the story. Without Joh, there would have been no Barry Dolan.
That was why, at the end of 1991, Susan and I sat side by side in a courtroom as the verdict was announced in his perjury trial. We weren’t the only observers hoping for vindication that day – not because the former premier might have lied in his evidence to the Fitzgerald Inquiry, but for crimes that would never come to court.
In the most personal sense, we were seeking revenge for a baton charge on a cold night in 1971, when I was no more than a few cells inside my mother, a night when my father came face to face with an angry copper. It could have been any one of them, of course. They’d all had their hatred of rabble-rousing long-hairs primed for an act of brutality, and the man responsible now stood in the dock, not for inciting violence but to answer for something, at least. What my mother and I were seeking was that essential moment when he was forced to admit he’d done wrong.
But when the moment came – it was snatched away. Oh, Christ, what a night that was, outside the court in George Street after the verdict, with my mother howling in rage and my own limbs so robbed of life I could barely keep her upright.
A hung jury. The accused had walked free, spluttering self-righteous claims of innocence through a smugness that couldn’t hide how stunned he was to get away with it.
How utterly denied we felt, how unfinished. Within days of the non-verdict the papers carried news of a dodgy juror from the Friends of J
oh campaign, who’d held out against the rest. What a knife in the heart that was. The entire state had been given a chance to redeem itself in one cathartic act, and they’d squibbed it.
Susan was inconsolable for days. She’d thought she’d witness another fall, like Barry Dolan’s.
‘You asked me why I get so angry with everything up here,’ she said, once she’d calmed down enough to speak. ‘Do you see, now? There are still faithful souls who’d follow him all the way to hell. Anything but admit they were wrong.’
I thought she meant the knee-jerk conservatism that bubbled through into how people voted, but when I said so, she snapped at me.
‘God no. I don’t give a damn what party they vote for. National, Labor, that’s all tribal. It’s not even the childish pretence that up here they’re better than the poofters and posers down south. There’s as much envy in that as there is suspicion.’
‘What is it, then?’ I demanded. I wasn’t a teenager any more and I wanted to peel away my mother’s evasions.
In response, she skewered me with a long silence that might have ended with her storming away in typical Susan fashion and more days of silence between us until I came crawling back, a son needing his mother on her terms alone.
Well, bugger that. I was ready to be done with her if she fobbed me off again.
‘Tell me, then. There had to be more than that letter to drive you away.’
When she began to answer, with barely a moment’s hesitation, I knew the earlier silence hadn’t been maternal discipline. She’d been marshalling her response.
‘Because when it mattered,’ she said, speaking slowly, as though I wasn’t to miss a word. ‘When it mattered, too many could only sneer at their own right to dissent – that’s what I’m talking about, Tom. They decided they didn’t need it. They trusted one man, instead, a man as ignorant of history as they were.’
‘You’re talking about Joh.’
‘Or anyone cagey enough to sweep up all the local prejudices and serve them back as some kind of victory for the common man. It takes a stubborn kind of naivety to choose that, Tom. There were two mobs in Queensland back then, one you could see at demos and the other mob that bayed for their blood and cheered old Joh on when he gave it to them. They had no idea what battles had been fought to free them from men like him.
‘Can you imagine how I felt watching it happen around me?’ she demanded. ‘By the time I left, Joh was Queensland. Criticise him and you were a traitor to the entire state, and even if there was no law that said it was a crime, there was the court of public opinion. Thank God for the lawyers who brought it all crashing down.’
I saw, then, that in the tension of that courtroom, more than a single defendant had stood accused. In my mother’s eyes, millions of others had stood in the dock with Joh, and if a guilty verdict had been returned, all those faces would have been made to look at what they’d flirted with – not Joh, who’d become a parody of himself by then, but the slow dismantling of their own political heritage.
When the verdict or, more precisely, the non-verdict was delivered in the Bjelke-Petersen trial, I was in the middle of uni exams. Later, when the results were posted, I’d managed only modest scores in comparison to earlier semesters and it would be easy to join the dots of cause and effect.
But such straight lines would have been an illusion. Through much of that year I’d fought a growing disgruntlement, and for the first time in my life became slapdash with assignments. The truth slipped out one night, unbidden. ‘I’m bored,’ I told the girl I was seeing at the time.
‘Then change what you’re doing,’ she replied, as though it was the easiest thing in the world.
Rather to my surprise, it was. I filled in the forms, salvaged what credit I could from my journalism courses and started 1992 as a law student.
Why Law? A straight line would lead to Dad, who’d always said I had the right kind of mind for a lawyer – and it wasn’t necessarily a compliment. He certainly pushed the suggestion once I’d confessed my disillusion, but, again, his advice wasn’t the deciding factor. Susan was the one. Something she’d said played over and over in my mind: thank God for the lawyers who brought it all crashing down.
Did she realise what she was admitting? Ask Dad, or anyone who lived through the Fitzgerald days, and he’ll tell you it was a band of crusading journos who brought down Joh and Lewis and the rest of his cronies. The truth isn’t quite so romantic. My mother’s profession might have wrestled the beast to the ground, but it was the law that drove a sword through its heart.
I’d been absenting myself from the Riley household more and more through those early years at uq. My many trips to Sydney began to feel like a journey between two countries, despite Queensland being welcomed back into the fold through the early ’90s after the Joh decades of wilful separateness. For me, the differentiation lingered, and always in favour of the south. It was personal, and far from reasonable in any objective sense, but each time I crossed the border I felt a change in the current.
I willingly confess how silly this was, when the shake-up that flowed from the Fitzgerald Inquiry meant Queensland’s political processes were downright pristine compared to New South Wales’. That wasn’t the point, though. Political personalities came and went, they were honest or otherwise; what filled me with quiet disdain were the stories my mother told, over and over, of the tacit consent given by an entire state to a regime that was steadily, deliberately chipping away at the rights of its own people.
‘It’s still there, Tom,’ she’d insist. ‘It might be lying dormant for the time being, but the seed is still in the soil.’
Oh, how my mother loved the dramatic. She’d interviewed John Sinclair, the man who saved Fraser Island from sand mining. A public servant in his day job, Sinclair had been hounded out of the state, and Susan saw herself in the same light, following the grand tradition of writers and artists who found Queensland too stultifying to remain.
Not that I was content to sit at her feet drinking in every word. How many times did Robert leave us bickering on the balcony, resigned to his own exclusion, and with a wink at me that said I’d found the way to my mother’s heart – argue politics.
Lurking in the shadows behind us both was Terry Stoddard. The three of us were a family in a way I could never feel within the loving quartet that welcomed me back to Brisbane whenever I returned. The verdict in Joh’s trial had robbed my father’s ghost of closure, so Susan and I were perpetual wanderers as well, and if she continued to rail against her bête noire, out of all proportion to his crimes, this was why. I knew it was over the top, but let myself be swept up in it all the same, for no other reason than it bound us together as mother and son. At least I thought it did.
During the inquiries I’d made about changing courses, I’d looked at universities interstate. In the end, uq took me in without demur, but the idea lingered. Why wait until holidays, if there was a way to see Susan every day?
When I told her about it, she was chuffed and before I knew it she was sussing out flats near the University of New South Wales. ‘I’ll pay the rent until you find some flatmates,’ she assured me.
Her response was both natural and generous, yet as soon as she started on about a flat in Paddington my interest waned. I lied and said Dad wouldn’t let me move, only to be found out when Susan rang him, demanding he change his mind. How could I come right out and say it, that I wanted to live with her in Rose Bay, for a month or two, anyway, until I found my feet? There was a spare bedroom, after all.
But she hadn’t even considered the idea.
TWELVE
TOM
‘Come and look at this, Tom,’ said one of the paralegals one morning, when I’d been working at Coghills for more than a year.
By the time I looked up, she was already gone from my doorway and I had to follow her to a conference ro
om where the television screen was filled by a talking head.
‘That woman from Ipswich, it’s her maiden speech,’ came the explanation.
‘The fish shop lady?’ I said, only to be shushed by one of the partners standing with arms folded and a scowl I hadn’t seen since I’d stuffed up some research in my first year.
From the speaker came a nasal, faintly indignant voice: ‘Present governments are encouraging separatism in Australia by providing opportunities, land, moneys and facilities available only to Aboriginals. Along with millions of Australians, I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government . . .’
Was this woman actually peddling such twaddle in Federal Parliament? I listened, caught between dismay and laughter.
‘Today, I am talking about the privileges that Aboriginals enjoy over other Australians . . .’
‘Like low life expectancy, no government services, harassment from the police,’ I began to enumerate, until the partner glared at me a second time.
I watched the face on screen, trying to decide whether it was the ignorance or the audacity that appalled me more. I should have gone back to my desk, but her distortion and bigotry held a macabre attraction. I simply couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and if the partner beside me could stay to hear it all, so would I.
At my desk afterwards, I felt sorry for the poor woman for the inevitable jibes about her red hair and her irritating voice, but mostly for the vilification she would suffer for stirring up prejudices that we’d outgrown. Reaction to the speech was sure to be savage.
SUSAN
1996
‘Downward envy, they’re calling it in the office,’ I said from in front of the tv, where the news prattled away with the sound turned low. I’d kicked off my shoes to recline with my feet on the coffee table, and the first glass of red in my hand.
The Tower Mill Page 22
