The Tower Mill (19 page)

TOM

Mike Riley was a teacher who wrote poetry and he didn’t kid himself that those roles could be transposed. He was never going to win literary prizes or have his name spoken by prime ministers and this was why the residency in 2003 was such a thing for him – a tick of recognition, and from East Anglia, a university renowned for its creative writing program, too. What did it matter that it was for a summer school in Norwich, not a semester? When he rang to tell me, his excitement couldn’t quite smother the pride; this time it was the dad who was desperate to show off the ribbons he’d won on sports day.

He was never going to fly off to England without Mum, either. They used their long service leave to make a decent go of it and didn’t they have a ball. Gabby, Emma and I had all beaten Mum and Dad to Europe, which made them determined to see everything, taste it, swim in it, to make their own what had always seemed so far away. Once Dad started in Norwich, Mum was to head back to Brisbane, and with that day looming they spent the last week with me in London.

Hilary was gone by then. They were too polite to say anything and too open-faced to hide their disappointment. We thought she was the one, their silent glances told me, even though they had never met her. With explanations left unspoken, I did my best as tour guide and snatched a day off work to show them around, as I’d done when Susan came the year before. That was the day we went to the National Portrait Gallery. It sticks in my mind because of a single moment that occurred there, before a portrait of Germaine Greer, of all people.

You’d think a bit of company in a flat that I now had to myself would enliven me, but, in truth, they made me more aware of Hilary’s absence. After the first gush of catching up, I felt myself going dry and started in with questions about home, and people I hadn’t seen in years – or cared about for longer.

On the second night, Dad shot a breath down his nose and smiled like a happy devil. ‘A famous old name popped up in the papers just before we left, in fact. Do you remember the police commissioner exposed by Fitzgerald?’

‘Lewis?’ I said instantly.

‘That’s him,’ said Dad. ‘Wants his superannuation back, apparently. Says it shouldn’t have been forfeited just because he went to gaol.’

‘You’re joking. Has he run out of the money he took in paper bags?’

‘You’re getting your villains mixed up, Tom. Joh was the one who liked paper bags for his cash. And Joh’s on the make, too, now that I mention him. Thinks he should be compensated for lost business opportunities because nobody’d touch him after Fitzgerald. He’s made an application to the government.’

If Mum hadn’t been there I would have let fly with more than ‘Bloody hell! Shows how much he cares about the damage he caused. I tell you, I’m going to piss on that man’s grave!’

‘That’s a bit over the top, Tom,’ said Mum. ‘What are you so hot about Joh for? He’d gone before you even left school.’

Dad saw it the same way. He leaned forward on the sofa and said more seriously, ‘It was our generation that copped all of Joh’s crap.’

No, Dad, I wanted to say, that crap was mine, even more than it was yours. But I didn’t say it, just as I’d kept quiet a dozen times before when the urge had taken me. It was Susan’s story. She’d kept the Bindy letter from him and I wondered what good it would do to tell him now.

SUSAN

March, 1988

They were the
hottest seats in town. Even a year into the Inquiry, there was often a queue outside the court, the Brisbane boys told me, and it doubled in length whenever another big fish was about to go belly up. The police pond was already ripe with putrid carcasses.

I wasn’t actually covering the Fitzgerald Inquiry for my paper. I had wangled my way to Brisbane a few times on blatantly false pretences, but when the name I’d been waiting for came up, I simply took leave. I couldn’t miss his moment on the hook.

I was at the court in George Street in plenty of time and with a borrowed press pass to be sure of a seat, for today the gavel would fall on his head at last. There would be no damage for the surgeons to mend, not like there was for Terry Stoddard, but the bastard’s life would never be the same.

I could barely sit still while the hearing room filled. Council assisting appeared, consulted with associates and rifled notes at a lectern facing the commissioner’s bench. I didn’t see the commissioner take his seat, nor take in the murmur of those around me.

‘The commission calls Detective Senior Sergeant Barry Dolan.’

And suddenly he was there. I had stared at his photograph many times, more than one shot, in fact, because the higher you climbed in the police force the more often the media wanted your face. I knew what his voice would sound like, after the phone call years earlier, but this was the first time I’d sighted his flesh, finding it pink, not newsprint grey after all, and with the bulk of it buttoned into an ill-fitting suit. Even so, he couldn’t hide his humiliation. I breathed it in as he passed in the aisle.

The years hadn’t been kind. What had once been a formidable frame now sagged beneath too many shouts with his mates, or was it too much time at the trough? His jowls were wider than the sweating forehead and even accounting for a sleepless night, he seemed withered. He was forty-five years old, I knew, young to have risen to the rank he would soon lose, thanks to the services rendered and favours proffered in return, which now hung about him like a shroud.

‘They’re going to bury you,’ I said, under my breath.

‘Detective Senior Sergeant, is it correct that you have made certain admissions to investigators representing this Inquiry?’

A long pause followed, yet even the most stubborn must yield eventually.

The answer extracted itself like a stubborn tooth. ‘Yes.’

‘And what was the nature of those admissions?’

I remembered Tom in his highchair, many years ago, with his little mouth clamped shut against the spoonful I was determined to get down his gullet. I wanted to shout at Dolan, Open wide, you fucker. There are no thirty-six-inch batons in this courtroom, no darkness to hide you, no frightened mates to keep their traps shut. Open wide, swallow the purgative, and let
me
be cleansed.

‘Senior Sergeant?’ prompted Council.

‘That I have received payments.’

Come on, Barry, you could do better than that – which Council Assisting reminded him, until it came out at last.

‘Illegal payments, yes.’

‘Corrupt payments?’

‘Yes.’ It didn’t seem so hard now.

‘How much did you receive in corrupt payments?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘How much was each payment, in rough terms?’

‘Five hundred dollars.’

‘And approximately how often did you receive such payments?’

I once interviewed a torturer in Egypt, who trained Alsatian dogs to attack naked men in their cells. The injuries, shown to me in photographs, had turned my stomach, but the moment of purest horror came when I realised he enjoyed inflicting such pain. On that day, before Commissioner Fitzgerald, I understood my Egyptian torturer. The savage bite of Council’s questions couldn’t elicit enough agony, as far as I was concerned. I wanted the shame to linger in his florid face, so that I could savour it like no one else. Hadn’t I come halfway round the world to see it?

Dolan’s admissions continued, while the crowded courtroom listened in silence. It was a familiar litany, which I’d read many times in the transcripts stretching back to before I left London. Corruption was so banal, so unimaginative; grubby notes palmed to look the other way when passing the door to a brothel or a backroom casino that half of Brisbane knew was there. No wonder Lewis and his mates dubbed it ‘The Joke’.

But this was all Dolan had to answer for. There were no questions about a young man running through Wickham Park on a cold winter’s night, no questions about undue force or a conspiracy with an unnamed constable to make what happened look like an accident. Dolan didn’t know that a woman in the court wanted to put those questions to him, a woman he’d dismissed as a joke as well, more than ten years ago. He’d got away with that one, and for all I knew he’d forgotten it ever happened.

Today he was being held to account for something, at least.

I began to cry, too loudly to go unnoticed. The commissioner himself glared at me from the bench because I was interrupting vital testimony. Did I seem like a relative, a sister? Oh God, he thought I was the bastard’s wife!

I blundered free of the courtroom, and, in the seclusion of the ladies’ room, sobbed as loudly as I damned well needed to, for the seventeen years I’d waited and wasted and hated myself because of what I couldn’t do, and which today was being carried out by others who didn’t even know what Dolan had destroyed.

Later that day, I met Tom. Our meeting had been arranged before I was quite sure when Dolan would appear at the Inquiry, and I knew I couldn’t simply fail to turn up when I’d been so cruel to him on my last visit.

For some reason, he stopped at the old windmill and was looking away from the Tower Mill Hotel, where we’d agreed to meet. Then, as I tried to join him, he started towards me, throwing his school bag over his shoulder as he walked.

Oh God, Terry once carried an old-fashioned briefcase like that. I saw Terry in his face, too. The nose, the line of his jaw. I’d picked these out years ago, before I left for overseas, but today, after the hearing, the similarities became a fist closing tightly around my heart.

I asked him what he knew about 1971.

He stared blankly at me. I prompted him with the Springboks and the State of Emergency.

He shook his head.

‘Come with me,’ I demanded, leading him to the place beside the path where Terr
y
had lain for hours while the pressure inside his skull crushed all trace of the man he’d been. ‘This is where your father was found. Your
real
father,’ I told him, even though the emphasis sounded cruel in my throat.

‘This is where it happened?’ he asked, that same face darkening in fear.

No, I wanted to say. The worst of it happened somewhere else in the park. Impossible to know where. I couldn’t explain, though. Instead I said, ‘You’ve seen what it did to him.’

Another long stare, then, ‘No. I’ve never seen him.’

‘Mike hasn’t taken you? Not even when your grandmother died?’

‘Terry’s mother?’ he said, stunned. ‘I didn’t know I had another grandmother.’

‘I don’t believe this. Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s time you met your father.’

There was a taxi rank downhill from the Tower Mill, for patients visiting the specialists along Wickham Terrace. Tom followed me – I was moving too quickly and we didn’t speak until I had him in the cab.

‘You mean we can visit him? But I thought . . . I had this idea he was a long way off, that I couldn’t see him.’

‘No, Tom, he lived with his mother out in Coopers Plains until she died. That’s the grandmother you never knew you had. Bloody Mike. I’m going to have a piece of him over this.’

‘I asked, but Dad said it wasn’t possible. That’s why I thought . . .’

He stopped there and said no more during the twenty-minute journey.

His silence only made me more angry, and once the cabbie was paid the same fury made me march him to the reception desk as though I was delivering a miscreant to the principal’s office.

‘Mr Stoddard’s in his room watching television,’ the nurse told us, and since I knew the way I was off again without a glance over my shoulder. Only when I arrived at Terry’s door did I find that Tom wasn’t behind me. He was half a corridor away and motionless.

Despite the half-dark, I could see every line of uncertainty in his face, every fear, every tremor.

‘Tom?’

He turned and started away, making me run to catch him before he’d turned the corner. ‘Tom.’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

Susan, you’re a bigger fool than Mike Riley I told myself. The boy is petrified and he has every right to be; he’s about to meet his father for the first time.

‘Oh Tom, I didn’t understand what a moment this would be for you.’

He fell against the wall, his head limp on his chest and weeping despite manly efforts to silence himself.

I pressed my forehead against his. ‘It’s all right.’

‘What if I can’t stand it?’

‘You’ll be all right. I know you will.’ I shifted closer and slipped my arms around him, the first time I’d truly held him like that since he was a toddler.

‘But what’s he like?’ At this lament, I saw deeper into my son than I’d ever been privileged to see before. This was what it was like, being mother to a child you could no longer lift into your arms.

A nurse approached along the corridor, unseen by Tom, who kept his head down. She stopped a few metres off and enquired with her face alone whether she could help.

I shook my head just enough to answer and she continued on her way. Then, as tenderly as I could manage, I spoke into his ear.

‘He’s like an oversized little boy, Tom, if that makes any sense. He’ll be watching cartoons because the colour and the movement make him laugh. He’s not a monster and he’s certainly not dribbling and pathetic. Come and see for yourself and then you don’t need to be afraid.’

I felt his body relax in my embrace and loosened it a little so he could stand up straight, wiping quickly at a tear in the hope I wouldn’t notice. I pretended not to, then took his hand and led him to the door.

TOM

Imagination can be
as deadly as it is playful and the more apprehensive you are about something, the more sharply it sways towards the deadly.

I had imagined my father in many guises, most often as a homeless man who roamed the streets of Red Hill. To find him in clean clothes and smiling, vacantly perhaps, but well cared for and content within the limited world left to him, brought a relief I owed entirely to Susan. Something changed that day, even if it didn’t end.

Terry Stoddard was nothing like any of the pictures I had drawn inside my head, frightening or otherwise. He was pudgy around the middle and losing his hair, with similarities between his face and mine that could be noticed if we stood side by side, but not enough for strangers to pick us out as father and son.

The only heartache I felt in that room came when Susan told him my name and, smiling up at me, he repeated it, immediately and accurately. Because of this, I thought for an instant there might be a real intelligence behind his eyes and a recognition of who I was.

‘No, Tom, there’s nothing there,’ Susan assured me, when I said as much. ‘Don’t torture yourself and don’t waste any time hoping, like I did.’

Mostly what I remember, along with the relief, was the sense that we made a family, just the three of us in that room, my real father in a chair in the corner, the mother who had carried me inside her body standing by the door and between them, their son. Three different surnames, maybe, but one family all the same.

I said so, adding, ‘This is the first time we’ve been together,’ and when Susan heard that she surprised me with heavy, painful tears.

I went to her. She had played mother for me in the corridor outside Terry’s room and now it was my turn to play the son. I wasn’t playing, though, because I’d moved spontaneously, and what was to say she hadn’t spontaneously
found the right words to coax me inside?

‘I’ve got some things to settle with Mike,’ she said, and it took me a few moments to catch up. In fact, we were in the cab before I was fully aware of the change in her. No more tears. She was angry now, and eager to dump that anger over the target area.

Dad’s Camry was parked in the driveway when the cab pulled up in Ashgrove.

‘Is that Mike’s?’ she asked.

I could only nod.

‘Keep the meter running,’ she told the cabbie. ‘I’ll be five minutes.’

Dad had seen us pull up and was waiting with the front door open and a condescending smile on his face that disappeared when Susan came straight to the point.

‘We’ve just come from the nursing home.’

He stood aside to let her into the lounge room and waited for me to pass as well, his eyes searching my face to see how the visit had affected me, but he was looking for something else, too, I was sure of it. He knew he’d been caught out and he was already trying to guess what this would do to things between us.

In the lounge room, Susan set to work. ‘I can’t believe you’ve kept Tom from seeing Terry all these years. He had the right, you know. I had no idea it was like this.’

Another man might have launched into her that she’d been absent from my life for five years and barely present for five before that. Dad wasn’t like that.

He looked over his shoulder towards Mum, who was watching from the doorway into the kitchen. Her face was hard to read – full of sympathy for a loved one about to cop a hiding, but holding back a little in an I-told-you-so kind of way. Emma came to watch, too, attaching her six-year-old self to Mum’s legs, and at this interruption Lyn picked up my sister and went off calling for Gabby as well. I saw the three of them soon after through the window, the girls bouncing happily on the trampoline at the bottom of the garden. Dad was on his own.

‘I didn’t think Tom was ready to see Terry. I thought it would upset him.’

‘Bullshit! How long were you going to wait? Until he’s thirty?’

‘When he left school. I was . . .’ But Dad couldn’t seem to convince even himself.

Susan ripped into him again and this time Dad reacted. Back and forth they went about what was appropriate for me and how I would feel about Terry and when was the right time and what a boy of ten, or twelve or fourteen could handle.

‘Stop it, the pair of you!’ I called. ‘This is me you’re talking about. I’m right here. Why don’t you ask me what would have been best?’

I’d silenced them as I’d intended to, but I’d turned the focus on me when I hadn’t quite worked out what
would
have been best. It meant, too, that whatever I said, I’d end up taking the side of one against the other. It had never been an issue before, there had always been Dad on the sideline during the game, Dad in the audience applauding when I was handed the prize, Dad at the dinner table charting a path through my conundrums. Susan was the sender of presents, the voice on the phone, and so far away no clash was possible. I was well and truly pincered now. No way back, only forward.

‘Dad, it wasn’t right,’ I said. ‘I’ve wanted to meet my real father for years, I asked you about him and you lied to me. It wasn’t fair.’

Would I have said that if Susan hadn’t been there and on my side? I doubt it. I’d been angry at Dad about a lot of things, mostly what I was allowed to do, to say, or to have as my own, but there had been other times, as well, when something more deeply rooted was at stake. Not that I could remember what those things were at the time; it was the anger unable to find expression that became indelible, and this was the first occasion, at just short of sixteen, I allowed myself to simply go with it.

And I did. I didn’t quite work myself into a rage because I hadn’t inherited that particular gene from my mother, but I didn’t lay it all out for him as passionlessly as a debating argument, either.

‘You don’t know how much I used to think about what he was like, what a wreck he would be, and then when I finally meet him, he’s perfectly all right, just simple, like a big kid, nothing to be scared of. You shouldn’t have done this to me. You should have let me see him all along.’

There was more, all of it heartfelt and most of it forgotten now, since it was more the emotion that I was discovering within myself that has stayed, that and the regret in Dad’s face as I let out the hurt that I was only then discovering ran deeper inside me than I’d ever imagined.

Afterwards, I went with Susan out to car, very much aware that I had sided with her against everything that had loved me and kept me safe for as long as had memories. Susan was pleased with herself, pleased that she’d righted a wrong. Was she pleased with herself, too, because we’d come closer together that afternoon?

I guess she was, yet her departure left me thinking back to Terry’s room, where I’d wanted to step close, I’d wanted us to meld together in a bucket of tears, and once we grew tired of that we would have laughed at ourselves for being such cry babies and she would have told me stories about the man who bound us together.

As she waved to me from the taxi, I felt vaguely cheated, but what could I do except head back inside to Mum and Dad, who were not my parents, and the sisters who were not my sisters.