The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  Only Robert’s top half was visible above the island bench where he was cooking dinner. My culinary skills were on a par with my French – adequate, but lacking nuance. The kitchen was his own little Paris, he’d told me, and I let him ‘go home’ whenever the mood took him.

  The news moved on, extinguishing the face of Pauline Hanson, who had prompted my remark.

  ‘We have the same with Le Pen,’ said Robert. ‘He has a surprising amount of support.’

  ‘This galoot of a woman will do the same, you watch. I had Tom on the phone the other day saying no one will take any notice of her. He lives in a bubble, that boy. Got to get him out of that lawyers’ sweatshop, shake him up. If he’s not careful, he’ll work twelve hours a day for thirty years and wonder where his life went.’

  ‘Only twelve? I slept on the floor behind my desk some nights,’ said Robert.

  I threw a cushion at him, but without enough conviction for it to reach the bench.

  ‘He’d have been a lousy journalist. He can’t see what a story Hanson is. I’ve heard Sixty Minutes is sniffing around.’

  ‘Perhaps she’ll expose herself.’

  Sudden nakedness filled my mind. Sometimes Robert’s way of phrasing things begged a belly laugh, but he corrected my French howlers only gently, and I’d learned to return the favour.

  ‘Make a fool of herself, you mean. The producer could make sure of that with a bit of judicious editing, but why kill the story? She’s a hundred per cent news fodder, this one. Talk-back loves her.’

  Hanson would become a lightning rod for every nutter from Cape York to Perth, she’d legitimise anyone who felt threatened by ‘the other’. Despite my cynicism a familiar anger stirred in me. Look where the woman came from. Should anyone be surprised?

  TOM

  For a man with eight grandparents, the death of one shouldn’t have affected me the way it did, but, in ’97, when Len Kinnane drew cancer’s short straw, I found myself unaccountably overwhelmed. I went up to the hospital to see him after the surgery and listened to him talk of how he would fight this like he’d fought the Japanese.

  ‘Good on ya, Grandad,’ I muttered, with the rest.

  Weeks later, when the chemo did little but make him frail and miserable, I was warned of the inevitable. Finally, the hospital sent him home with a drip in his arm so he could die in his own house, another vow he’d made and one he’d soon kept. He and Grandma Joyce had raised their kids there and, after her too-early death, he’d stayed on, even though every stick of furniture, the prints on the walls, even the doilies must have reminded him of her.

  Aunty Diane moved into the bedroom she’d once shared with my mother and called in the rest of the family to make their farewells. I picked Susan up from the airport and together we drove straight to Holland Park to find Grandad propped up on pillows and still lucid, despite the morphine.

  Why was I so affected? I barely knew the old guy, I told myself, and in that simple truth lay the answer to my question. Len was the last of my real grandparents, the ones whose blood ran in my veins. Soon, there would be only Susan and Terry left in that direct line and this left me lonely in a way I couldn’t explain.

  Such sentiments didn’t stop me becoming annoyed with Len, though, when he took my hand and said, ‘I wish I’d known you better when you were a young nipper. There you were, just across the river all those years.’

  He didn’t need to cross the river to see me – didn’t have to go anywhere – not when, every winter Saturday, he’d come to watch my cousin play football for the school. Gary’s B team were always the curtain-raiser for my As, so it would have been simple to stay behind, and he surely saw Mike Riley among the faces waiting for my game to start. Yes, he knew, but he never said a word to Dad, never stayed to tell me I’d played well. That would have been something, at least.

  I said as much to Susan when we retired to the lounge room to await the tea Diane had promised.

  ‘That was my mother’s doing,’ said Susan, and suddenly Grandma Joyce was so fully in the room there was barely air to breathe.

  I was grateful for the convenient ‘out’ she’d offered, because I didn’t want to be so hard on Grandad, not with the end so close and a need in me that still had no name.

  Susan seemed to take my football story as a cue for her own. ‘Ritchie and I gave Mum hell in this house, you know,’ she began, with a smile. ‘No wonder I remember her screeching at us so often. The things we got up to.’ Then, as I suspected it would, her smile took on some subtle adjustments. ‘He was worse than me, the little devil, but he had a cheeky way of sucking up to Mum when she lost patience. I never learned how to do it.’

  Her smile became a wince and then a frown, just as her childhood mischief had become an urge to be gone that itched like sunburn and bled whenever she scratched it. We were sitting on the same sofa where Joyce, with Len beside her, had tried to lay out their daughter’s future, as though Susan had no say in it at all, except Susan hadn’t talked about her future on the many occasions she told me the story. How had she phrased it? ‘They planned my motherhood, down to the last nappy and who might deign to marry me.’

  Her bitterness was justified, no doubt, but I’d listened to her stories many times and wanted something else from my mother at this moment – family, forgiveness, softer sentiments more suited to a house where a man lay dying. Susan said something, but I didn’t pick up what it was. I think she was trying to get the conversation going again because my edginess had rendered me silent.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  I responded with a shrug.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do for Grandad,’ she said quietly. ‘He’s resigned to it and the pain’s under control. We don’t need to stay if—’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No you’re not. I can tell from the way you’re sitting there, jumpy as a cat. Nothing to be ashamed of—’

  ‘It’s not about Grandad,’ I said, too sharply.

  She tried another tack, which left me equally dumb, then, as she did so often, Susan filled the void with the issues of the day. ‘It’s this Hanson thing, isn’t it?’

  We’d talked about it on the phone in recent weeks. The maiden speech had turned Hanson into a convenient piñata for the chattering classes, but the stuffing she spewed out was making her a hero, for Christ’s sake. My mother had seen it coming, but not me.

  Since she’d put the matter out there, I took hold of it. ‘Some girls at Dad’s school have been having a go at the Aboriginal boarders, saying they get everything for free, stuff white people have to work for.’

  Susan shook her head. ‘Half-truths are harder to argue against than outright lies, especially in politics. Those girls are only quoting Hanson from the television, of course.’

  With spectacularly bad timing, Aunty Diane came in with the tea tray and her own opinion. ‘Some of the things she says aren’t so far from the truth, you know.’

  Susan and I glanced at each other, but we loved Diane too much to embarrass her. What we hadn’t said came out later, while we drove to the nursing home through the lassitude of a Sunday afternoon in Brisbane.

  ‘Don’t be too hard on your aunt. She’s good at heart,’ Susan concluded, after we’d each let off a bit of steam. It seemed enough for her, yet left me more hollowed out than ever and my mood didn’t improve when we found Terry in bed with a drip in his arm.

  ‘Chest infection,’ said the nurse in charge of Terry’s wing. ‘The doctor doesn’t want it to turn into anything worse. His head injury makes him more prone,’ and she went on to explain why in terms that neither of us understood.

  My poor father. He lay in bed as ghostly white as Len Kinnane, but with no idea of what was happening to him. That seemed to make his condition worse, despite the nurse’s assurances that he wasn’t in any danger. They had se
cured his right arm to the bed frame to stop him pulling out the drip from his left, and, defeated by this, he remained unnaturally still through our entire visit.

  Grandad would be dead by week’s end, and, with Terry making an almost identical scene, it struck me again that my personal history was slipping away. It was too late to know Grandad, but with Terry there had never been a chance, not since the day I was born.

  ‘I wish I’d known him,’ I muttered.

  On the other side of the bed, Susan stirred. My words might not have formed a question, but that’s what they were, yet another variation of ‘What was he like?’ It was as though I couldn’t get enough of the stories she told, willingly and sometimes through tears. I’d first heard them back in the Fitzgerald days, but I kept asking, because none of her answers quite satisfied.

  On that day, the Hanson thing gave her an easy hook.

  ‘He’d have taken her on, head to head if he could. He’d have dismantled the scaremongering and jealousy with hard evidence instead of prejudice. He was learning so quickly, you know, Tom, back in ’71. He could see the street protests would take a cause only so far. Only real power could bring change. He might have been premier, one day.’

  It wasn’t the first time she’d made that prediction. It was something to be proud of and I certainly felt proud when she spoke of what he might have been. It formed part of the familiar theme I picked up in all her stories – we had all been deprived of Terry’s political potential. Since she offered nothing more personal that day, as on every other, it was all I could latch on to. And, as always, I felt angry, without quite knowing what I was angry about or who I was angry with.

  When Susan suggested we leave, I was on the move almost before the words were out of her mouth. At the car, when I couldn’t fit the key into the door the first time, I wanted to punch through the glass. It was a rage I recognised, half against the world, half against myself.

  ‘Tom?’ said my mother tentatively. She’d come round the car and was suddenly at my side.

  ‘I felt so ashamed sitting there beside him,’ I told her. ‘Terry’s in there because he stood up against the same rubbish Hanson is peddling all over again, twenty years later. I thought we’d all moved on. Now this. Nothing’s changed at all, especially not here.’

  ‘There are too many like your aunty Diane, I’m afraid. The mindset is rooted way down deep. There’s talk that she’ll form her own party. It’s all about the leader, you see, and we know where that leads,’ she said, nodding towards the nursing home.

  ‘I’ve had a enough of this place,’ I heard myself say. ‘Even the stuff I’m doing at work . . . I don’t know, it’s so trivial when you look around at . . .’ I couldn’t finish, because the thought simply wouldn’t form.

  ‘Then leave – go overseas. I still have contacts in London. Maybe one of them can swing something for you. Do you want me to make a few calls?’

  ‘Yes, today, right now,’ I begged.

  Suddenly, she was laughing. ‘Tom, it’s four in the morning over there. Can you wait a few hours?’

  It did seem funny, once she put it that way. ‘Yes, a few hours,’ I said, pulling her hard against me for comfort.

  Did I really leave Queensland because of Pauline Hanson? My mother put it in those terms a couple of times, halfway between a private joke and something more serious. At the time I felt it was simply time to go. Many of my friends had already taken a working holiday in England. There was nothing special in what I was doing.

  Susan’s contacts didn’t prove much use, as it turned out, but I had money enough to be patient and London held things for me that I hadn’t anticipated. While job hunting, I’d sometimes sit by the Thames and stare across at Westminster, feeling that I’d come home, at last. This was odd, because, when asked where home was by some nameless drinking companions in a nearby pub, I answered ‘Brisbane’ without hesitation. I even turned spruiker when they stared blankly at my reply.

  ‘A thousand kays north of Sydney, in sunny Queensland. Great place.’

  Yet I didn’t carry around with me any strong images of the home state I’d been so quick to own. Let poets like Dad memorialise its landscape; my training was the law and that was how I experienced places. To me, Queensland was a political entity and since its laws and parliament had grown out of the buildings I could see across the river, yes, I found a homely contentment in London. It became stronger when I began at the Crown Prosecutor and found, in the work I was doing, a second homecoming.

  How much did Hilary have to do with that happiness? I’d been working at the Crown Prosecutor for two years when, on a bus to London University for a postgrad course I was doing, I noticed the same girl three weeks in a row. On the third night I said hello and after we’d laughed at our matching accents, discovered a Brisbane connection, as well. If she’d been part of the Catholic mafia we might have met at school dances, and the fact that she wasn’t only made her more attractive to me.

  And Hilary was very attractive. Hair like Susan’s, about the same height, and pale-skinned, which she put down to the English weather. By the Christmas of ’99 we were living together in a cosy flat in Kennington, ten minutes’ walk from The Oval, where the Australians occasionally came to play cricket.

  They weren’t the only Australians to make a beeline for Kennington, either. My sisters, Gabby and Emma, camped on our floor for a week in 2001 as part of their grand tour, and a year later Susan turned up.

  ‘Thought I’d pop over to check out my old stamping ground, and to visit my son, of course,’ she said, but it was obvious she’d come to run the ruler over this young woman I talked so much about in my emails.

  SUSAN

  2002

  Was there ever a more fraught role to play than the partner of the father of the bride – and in a foreign country, too, amid a language that could deliver the stiletto’s thrust with such charm? No doubt, the Parisians had a title for what I was, a variation of La Bitch, most likely. Torment would be lingering, as well, because we’d arrived well ahead of the wedding so Robert could be part of the excitement, and he adored Sabine, in any case.

  Fortunately, the solution proved both acceptable and very welcome.

  ‘Je vais rendre visite à mon fils, à Londres pendant quelques jours,’ I announced after one night’s penance among the aunts. ‘C’est possible qu’il y ait un mariage bientôt,’ I couldn’t help adding.

  Tom was waiting for me at Kennington tube station. My God, look at him, I wanted to shout at everyone within earshot. He was no taller, but the self-assurance made him seem so, a man to pick out among others – or was that a mother’s bias? I embraced the feeling and welcomed his long arms around me, hugged him, clung to him as much as our coats would allow. It was early April, but the sun was gone for the day and there was a bite in the air.

  The business of the moment was Hilary, however, and I pulled away quickly to smile at the young woman who watched us with an anxious smile. Despite the darkness, she stood out in a red coat and beret, so much more lively than my mania for black.

  She offered kisses and the right words: ‘So good to meet you, nothing like I expected.’ She was almost trembling as she delivered her lines.

  I had my own stock phrases ready, as well, and delivered them on cue at the dinner table after Hilary had pulled out all stops with a culinary welcome.

  ‘Fabulous,’ I declared. ‘How did you do the peppers?’ They’d been stuffed with mushrooms and some herb I couldn’t identify.

  ‘Aren’t they great?’ gushed Hilary. ‘And so easy. The secret is to cook them slowly.’

  I nodded politely at this advice and wondered whether a comment about the fish would be overdoing things. Hilary, however, wasn’t finished with the entree.

  ‘You won’t find the recipe in any cookbook, either. It’s a traditional peasant dish from Slovakia. A w
oman at work wrote it all down for me,’ she said, and before I could stop her, she’d run to the kitchen to fetch it. ‘I’ll write you out a copy, if you like.’

  The name of the mystery herb would have been enough.

  I glanced towards Tom, who had seen my embarrassment, but he treated the whole thing as an excuse to chuckle at both of us. If Hilary had seen this exchange, she might have pulled back a bit, but no, she continued to monopolise the chatter, and the wine bottle, until ten o’clock, then dumbfounded me further by saying, ‘Oh, you two must have so much to catch up on,’ and promptly waved her way off to bed.

  In the morning, she looked pale. Hung-over, I decided, until an alternative shook me. Oh Christ, she’s not pregnant, is she?

  ‘Did you pick up the drycleaning?’ Tom called while he was getting dressed.

  ‘Damn, I forgot again,’ came the sheepish reply.

  Tom made a further comment, which I couldn’t make out, but the tone hinted at exasperation.

  I was being unfair, I decided. Shouldn’t have been listening in to their domestic back and forth like this. I withdrew to my room, closing the door after me until a knock called me to breakfast. Hilary was half dressed for work and half for a return to bed, a decision Tom was having no luck helping her to resolve. Eventually, she opted for work and went off towards the tube station, utterly cured by a bowl of cereal, it seemed.

  Was she enough for Tom? I didn’t want him to sell himself short.

  Oh, shut up, Susan, and enjoy the reunion. Tom had taken the day off.

  ‘Hilary is worried she made a fool of herself last night,’ he confided over a mid-morning coffee. ‘It’s only nerves. Your reputation alone is enough to intimidate, Mother Susan,’ he teased. ‘Heavyweight journalist, confidante of kingmakers. She tried too hard to impress you. Things will be better tonight.’

  And, at first, they were. ‘We thought we’d take you out for dinner,’ Tom announced. ‘An Indian place. Used to be John Major’s favourite restaurant when he was prime minister.’