The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  Where was she getting this from? I’d never sensed any crossed wires.

  ‘You don’t get what I’m talking about, do you?’ she said, more a sigh of regret than an accusation. ‘We could talk all night and you still won’t get it. It’s you, Susan. Tom can’t come home because of you.’

  Well, nothing if not blunt. Where had the girl from London disappeared to? I surprised myself by feeling little anger, but angry or not, it was time to return fire. ‘You mean I’ve set him against this place with my stories about the Tower Mill? Tom thinks he’ll betray his parents if he lives here. Is that it? Well, Hilary, to borrow your own words, I don’t buy it. So much has changed and Tom knows it. The way Hanson imploded so quickly was proof of that. He’s said as much over the years. No, the politics here is—’

  I’d been going to say ‘more mature’, but my final words never made it into the night air.

  ‘There it is, you see. Politics,’ she interjected. ‘In a way, I agree with you. Tom’s past all that. He’s heard so much about the politics of it all it’s a wonder there’s room in his head for anything else. But that was never what he wanted from you, Susan. He wanted to know what was in here,’ and she struck her chest so hard I heard the echo in her lungs. ‘He’s been trying to get that from you for so long.’

  ‘Tom hasn’t said this to you, has he? Not in so many words?’ I demanded.

  ‘No, not the way I’m saying it, but I know him. There’s a part of him he won’t let me into, won’t even let me touch.’

  Hilary was fighting the first tears, and to hide them she avoided my eyes. Not a great one for arguing: she expected others to appreciate her sincerity, even if she couldn’t make them agree. She wasn’t about to cede the field, though, I discovered.

  ‘Forget the politics, Susan. Tom can’t come home because you won’t let him.’

  This left me utterly bewildered. I could only shake my head, close to laughter at how absurd she was becoming. ‘What makes you think I won’t let him?’

  Perhaps she was aware of her own silliness, too, because she went quiet while her eyes searched my face in the fading light. What did she expect to find? Whatever she’d hoped for didn’t appear, it seemed, and with her own eyes closed in what looked like defeat, she said, ‘It’s true, Susan. It took me a long time to see it, but I’m certain of it now. That’s why I asked to see you, alone. Tom’s stranded over there, like some stateless refugee and not even I can make him come home.’

  I was right about her defeat, then. ‘I take it he hasn’t succumbed to your brinkmanship.’

  It was a savage thing to say, as I’d meant it to be, and I expected real fury in return.

  ‘Blackmail,’ she said. ‘You may as well call it by the proper name. Makes me look desperate, doesn’t it? I hate doing it this way, and you’re right, it hasn’t worked. It shows what an influence you are in his life, though. You must see that.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Tom’s thirty-one years old. I can’t tell him where to live.’

  ‘You don’t have to, when everything you’ve done has pushed him further and further away from you.’

  The claim was so patently wrong I could only ask in wonder, ‘When have I ever pushed Tom away? Even when Mike and I split, it wasn’t like that. There was no pushing away.’

  ‘In Paris, there was,’ she said instantly. ‘You were crying in front of some cathedral. He wanted to comfort you, and instead you pushed him off like some groper in the street and walked away.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have taken it that way,’ I murmured, letting my thoughts become words. Before I could steady myself, they had prompted more from Hilary.

  ‘He wanted to live with you in Sydney, too, but you wouldn’t let him. He thought he’d have a chance to get back some of the years he’d missed, but you weren’t going to let him get that close.’

  Live with me! Did she mean back in . . . when was it? But Tom had changed his mind about coming. Before I could say so, she came out with something even more outrageous.

  ‘Then you sent him off to England.’

  This was too much! ‘I didn’t send him. He wanted to go. He asked for my help, for Christ’s sake! He’s got things mixed up – both of you have. Everything round the wrong way.’

  ‘Looks the right way round to me,’ Hilary said calmly. ‘It’s what it looks like to Tom that matters, anyway. Then you came up with that passport idea. Why didn’t you just say you didn’t want him to come back at all?’ There was a willingness to hurt in her voice now, an anger in search of retribution, not for herself, but for Tom. ‘So many times you’ve drawn him in close, then shut him out,’ she blundered on. ‘Why do you do it? Do you hate him because of what he reminds you of?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I snapped, angry enough to walk away. But behind the girl’s desperation lay a need for my son that I recognised. I had been in love with his father once, just as strongly. ‘Tom’s my son and I’ve always loved him, no matter what you might think.’

  Looking up at me once more in the last of the day’s light she said, ‘What I think is there’s a hollowness in Tom that he won’t let me fill. He’s always on about how lucky he is, that he’s got two mothers, but that’s a bullshit story to hide his fear. Inside the hollowness he’s afraid he has no mother at all.’

  ‘Where do you get off saying such a thing. Lyn’s not even here to defend herself. She’s been a fucking marvel and Tom loves her to bits.’

  ‘She’s not his real mother. Whatever he says, there’s only one that counts.’

  ‘So we’re back to me, then. I’m a blank in his life. Yet a moment ago you were saying what an influence I was. Pardon me if I see a contradiction there, Hilary. Tom knows how much I love him.’

  ‘Then why does he grieve, every day, like it was his mother who died at the Tower Mill. It’s you he longs for, Susan. He’s waited thirty years for you to be his mother. Tom and I could be happy, if only you’d learn how.’

  After Hilary walked off towards Edward Street, I must have found my way to the main gates and crossed to the hotel, although I have no memory of doing so. A restless night followed in the company of her words and, when I closed my eyes, her face. Since there had been so little light in the park, my half-conscious mind borrowed memories from London to give her flesh and colour. That the images didn’t match up was alarming, somehow.

  I’d hoped for a Saturday lie-in but gave up by seven-thirty and went in search of breakfast, only to start like a nervous pony when a girl at the cereal bar looked like Hilary. I was back in my room when the text arrived from Lyn Riley.

  Boys on their way via Singapore and Sydney. Arrive Brisbane noon Sunday.

  Monday for the funeral, then. I called to confirm as much, then, in a reprise of yesterday, found myself with nothing more to arrange – and the clock beside my bed insisting it was only 9.17 a.m. What was I going to do for twenty-hour hours? I could feel Hilary inside my head, waiting for a quiet moment.

  Qantas offered escape and by twelve I was on the ground in Sydney, half-convinced that an evening with Robert justified the airfare.

  He knew, though, once I’d told him about Hilary in the Botanical Gardens; and, with none of his teasing humour, he flushed me out. ‘You’re going to meet Tom off the plane, aren’t you, before that young woman can get to him?’

  Later, he came to me as I stared out at the harbour with my arms doubled across my body – protecting myself from a punch in the belly, he said.

  My uterus was down there, too, I might have replied.

  ‘I can’t get it out of my head that she might be right,’ I told him.

  The day wasn’t done with me yet. During dinner came a call I should have anticipated, perhaps.

  ‘Ms Kinnane, this is Barry Dolan,’ said a voice that somehow fused both confidence and hesitation.

  ‘You’ve
heard the news then?’

  ‘Yes and I was sorry to hear it. You know that I mean that, don’t you?’

  I did. Since his release we had spoken a number of times, and not just on the phone. ‘I’d like to be at the funeral,’ he said. ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t, but I’m not the only one who has to be okay with it.’

  ‘The boy.’

  ‘Tom’s hardly a boy any more. But yes, I’ll have to speak to him before I can give you an answer. He’s on his way back from London right now.’

  Robert had guessed who the caller was. ‘You’ll have a lot to discuss with Tom tomorrow, then.’

  It was no less than what I was thinking. I checked my watch and tried to make numbers work in my head. ‘What time is it in Singapore?’

  ‘He’ll be exhausted,’ said Robert, but despite the protest he found the dialling code for me.

  ‘Susan! Good timing. I’ve just switched on,’ said Tom when he answered.

  ‘How long are you stuck in Singapore?’

  ‘Hours yet. Wouldn’t be so bad if we were flying straight to Brisbane.’

  ‘Lyn said you were coming through Sydney. I’m back there now, myself. What’s your flight number? I’ll try and get on the same plane.’

  With the numbers safely scribbled on a scrap of paper, I said, ‘Listen, Tom, about the funeral . . .’

  ‘What do you need me to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing. That’s all taken care of. No, it’s something else. I’ve had word from Barry Dolan.’

  From the distant tropics came a long silence.

  ‘He wants to be there,’ I said finally.

  ‘Tell him to bugger off.’

  ‘No, Tom. Don’t dismiss the idea so quickly. I told you how I went to see him in gaol.’

  ‘He thought you were still after him. Laughed at the letter, said the man who wrote it was dead. Dolan’s not coming to the funeral.’

  I recognised my own anger in his voice and wondered why it wasn’t mine any more. Had I passed it over to him, let it become his burden at a time when I’d lost the strength to carry it any further? Oh Tom, I didn’t do it on purpose.

  ‘Tom, you need to think about this. Death puts an end to things. This is an opportunity to—’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he snapped, before I could get up any momentum. ‘I’ve said too much already.’

  ‘Tom, will you at least think about it some more?’

  ‘Ring him now. I don’t care what time it is in Australia. The answer is no.’

  It’s a mistake, Tom, I wanted to say into the phone when he’d rung off. We needed to finish this thing, all of us. Dolan knew it, I knew it, and before we reached Brisbane my son had to see it, too.

  FOURTEEN

  TOM

  I sat for long seconds, staring at the phone in my hand, because I didn’t want to see what lay in Dad’s face. He was right there with me, amid the little nest we’d made for ourselves in the airport’s Burger King. But who was I kidding? He’d heard every word and he was clearly intrigued, I saw, once I dared look across the table.

  ‘That sounded like fun. Hope you don’t always speak to your mother like that,’ he said in a tone he hadn’t used since I was fifteen.

  The sardonic air was to give me a moment to collect myself, I suspected, but it was a signal, too, that he expected an explanation.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to hear that. I should have gone out of earshot.’

  ‘I’d have heard you from the far end of the terminal, Tom.’

  No smile from me, if that’s what he was after. When I still had nothing to say, he dropped the pretence. ‘Who’s Dolan and who’s this dead man who wrote a letter? I don’t remember any letter.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  Already I could sense what I was going to do. If I’d been touchy with Susan on the phone it was because I’d carried something under my skin for years, and these days the slightest bump was enough to rouse it. It didn’t help that Hilary had left me alone in Kennington, where the extra space made me bounce off the walls like a pinball until I was ready to trash the furniture.

  It was more than that, though, and a different anger rose in me, not at Susan but at the face I saw reflected in the massive pane of glass beside us. For ten years I’d told myself the story was hers to tell, ten years in which I’d left uni, left home, put a dozen men in gaol.

  ‘Not here. There are too many others,’ I said, nodding at the tables close by.

  Dad reached for the little daypack he used for carry-on luggage and as soon as he was ready I led him off into the wastes of Changi airport. The irony of this march was that the best place I could find was the most public – in the long, long halls leading to departure lounges thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six and on into the distance, all of them utterly deserted.

  ‘Dolan was a policeman,’ I said, taking Dad’s questions in the order he’d asked them. ‘He was at the Tower Mill, the same night you were there with Susan. And Terry, of course. The letter was about him, this Dolan character, about what he did once you’d all been chased down into the park.’

  At first I tried to recall details of the letter, until I realised the wording didn’t matter and the entire page could be summed up in a single sentence. ‘Terry didn’t fall, he was bashed by Barry Dolan.’

  It was done and so quickly I could barely believe this was all it had taken. After ten years – no, twelve, but what did that matter when, for Dad, it was close to thirty?

  I’d told the story for him, without a thought for what the telling would do for me, and this made its impact all the greater. I sensed a lightness that I’d known only once before, in the heady days when Hilary first moved into my flat and every breath had been a joy. I began to weep and glanced apologetically towards Dad.

  He was too tightly wound within himself to notice.

  ‘I’ll kill her. I’ll bloody kill her,’ he said softly.

  My throat was tight and sluggish and even if there had been more to say I would have struggled. Sensing this, Dad lifted his head, revealing no tears, but some of my restless anger had jumped across the narrow gap between us.

  ‘I couldn’t feel worse if you told me she’d slept with every man in Bindamilla,’ he began. ‘What’s the word? Cuckold. Shakespeare liked his cuckolds to be unaware. More pathetic that way, because they couldn’t make right what they didn’t know about.’

  ‘I’m to blame, too. I should have told you back . . .’ But I squibbed the rest, flapping my hand in substitution, because no arbitrary number of years could soften it.

  ‘It would have explained a lot of things back in Bindy,’ said Dad. ‘I can’t even begin . . .’ And defeated by his own words, he walked off.

  ‘Dad,’ I called.

  He turned briefly. ‘Just need a minute,’ he said, and with that he wandered slowly past the empty departure lounges and at the end of the concourse slipped out of sight.

  I settled down to wait for him, but after twenty minutes I picked up his little pack and my own satchel, and returned to the Burger King.

  An odd memory from my schoolboy reading found life in the scene around me. In the days when sailors navigated by dead reckoning, the best of them could tell when land was near from the currents, the birds overhead and even the detritus on the water’s surface. Returning to Australia was a bit like that, I decided. The place counted for little in London, but in Singapore its tidal pull was there to see on the departure boards and especially the newsstands. I bought the Sydney Morning Herald and set about reading it from cover to cover.

  An hour later, Dad found me there, hunched over pages I’d already taken in with more interest than they deserved. I waited to see whether he had anything more to say about Dolan, or the letter, or Susan. He read as muc
h in my face and said, ‘I still don’t know what to make of it all, Tom. Until I do, it might be best if you didn’t tell your mother that I know.’

  ‘Our little secret,’ I said.

  ‘Secret,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, let’s keep it from Susan,’ he said, with a grim smile that drew me into his conspiracy.

  He dropped into the seat opposite and nodded at my newspaper. ‘Seems we had the same idea,’ he said, slipping a copy of the Australian onto the table. ‘Did you see the Rugby score?’

  Yes, I’d seen it. Australia had beaten the Springboks in a Tri-Nations match. ‘The game was played in Brisbane,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, in Brisbane,’ he responded wistfully. ‘The protests are all forgotten now. They were never about the football, anyway. I don’t even know how much they were about apartheid, either, and that’s all gone, too.’

  ‘And now Terry Stoddard, as well,’ I added bitterly. ‘Must have been for something, Dad.’

  He thought about this for a moment and seemed on the verge of an answer – then kept it to himself. There was no need. I knew what the Tower Mill had been about.

  SUSAN

  August, 2003

  A bottle of Robert’s burgundy helped me sleep, until I woke, dehydrated and headachy, an hour before dawn. My mind was immediately full of what I had to do that day, so, while the kettle boiled in the too-bright kitchen, I used the laptop to check flights into Sydney. There it was – ex-Singapore, due at eight-thirty. Tom was already over Australian soil, then. What was I going to say to him? The winter morning was no colder than any other but I tugged my robe tightly around my body.

  Hilary had thrown me in a way I hadn’t been unseated for years. It hadn’t seemed so hard last night, defending myself over dinner with Robert in the judge’s seat and blatantly on my side. This was different.