The Tower Mill (24 page)

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 much 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.

Hilary had accused me of crimes I’d never thought of, a form of neglect through substitution, if there could be such a thing. Instead of what might have been between a woman and her son, I had inserted politics and grand ideas.

Guilty, a voice shrilled in my head. How many times had we talked about justice, policy, the myopia of governments?

But what was supposed to fill the space between mother and son? I had three hours to find out before Tom emerged at the arrivals hall at Mascot, sleepy and expectant and looking for me in the crowd. Panic gripped me. I didn’t know. I simply didn’t know.

It was easier to focus on the physical things, packing for the return to Brisbane and the nuts and bolts of getting to the airport. Only I knew that something so profoundly elusive awaited me there. In the cab, I found it better to focus on the other thing I had to do: I was going to convince Tom to accept Dolan at the funeral tomorrow. Was that mothering? It would be something, a least.

‘Are you late for your flight?’ the cabbie asked.

‘No, plenty of time.’

He saw my surprise. ‘You keep looking at your watch, that’s all.’

‘Oh! Actually, I’m meeting a plane first. My son’s flying in from Europe.’

‘Been away a long time, has he?’

‘Too long.’

Further and further away. Those had been Hilary’s words in the Botanical Gardens, and, among all she said, this frightened me most. I had pushed Tom away, sent him off to England, as far away from my life as it was possible to be.

There was a punchline to Hilary’s story about Tom and me. It was the last thing she’d said before we parted, and it was the last snatch of memory I took from the cab into the arrivals hall: my son’s happiness depended on me.

I saw Mike first, tugging his suitcase behind him on its tiny wheels and looking over his shoulder for the figure who was yet to appear. Moments later, there was Tom with a much smaller bag in tow, hinting at a brief visit, an interruption to his life that would be dealt with, then put behind him.

I hurried to greet them, aiming squarely for Tom. ‘It’s so good to see you,’ I cried, and now came the tears I’d avoided in the taxi. ‘It was the right thing to come for Terry, and for me, too. It’s so sad that he’s gone.’

When I showed no signs of letting go, Tom began to laugh. ‘Hey, there’s someone else here you should say hello to.’

With barely a glance at Mike’s face, I embraced him with the cordiality of an ex-wife.

We took a cab to the domestic terminal where I tried, once again, to get a seat on their flight. But it was the same story from last night: the plane was full and I was stuck with a flight thirty minutes earlier.

I had to act quickly then, and, turning to Mike, I said what had to be said. ‘I need Tom alone for a little while. I’m sorry, it’s something between the two of us.’

He glanced at Tom and even managed a smile, which Tom returned with similar ease. I was too distracted to care. ‘I’ll wait in the departure lounge,’ he said.

I took Tom by the elbow and I led him along the concourse to a lift beside gate thirteen.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘There are meeting rooms on level two,’ I explained. ‘I’ll tell my paper I was getting background from a visiting legal expert.’

That earned another of Tom’s smiles, for me this time.

The receptionist greeted us cheerily and asked, ‘Will you need any
av
? Tea, coffee?’

When, finally, she closed the door behind her, I sat back in the plush leather. ‘I’m sorry about all this, Tom.’

The apology was for the farce I’d subjected him to, but I might have been speaking of Terry’s death – or my thirty-one years as his mother. ‘I couldn’t talk about Barry Dolan in front of Mike.’

He shrugged at this. ‘That’s what happens when you keep secrets.’

‘Yes, Tom, I kept it from Mike,’ I said, without rancour, ‘but don’t you see how that letter gave me my life back?’

‘And took away your son.’

‘Don’t say that. It was never cut and dried, not with you. You said it once yourself, I could stop being Mike’s wife, but I couldn’t stop being your mother.’

‘That bloody letter, what happened at the Tower Mill . . .’
Tom said bitterly. ‘It’s still there, getting in the way, for all of us.’

‘Those things have harmed us for thirty years, Terry most of all,’ I agreed. ‘Now he’s dead, is the rest of it going to end tomorrow, as well? Are we going to stop letting these things harm us? Because if the answer’s yes, then Barry Dolan must be at the funeral.’

‘No,’ he said, not harshly, as he had on the phone from Singapore, but with equal determination. ‘He killed my father. It’s taken thirty years to hold the funeral, but Terry died that night.’

‘All of that is true,’ I conceded. ‘But I told you what he was like, didn’t I, when I went to see him in gaol? He’d had time to think about what he got caught up in. I’ve met him a couple of times since then, too. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to search him out, but he called me once he was released, and the next time I was in Brisbane, I took him to see Terry.’

‘Jesus, Susan, how many secrets do you need? Why always alone? Was I still in Brisbane?’

I answered with a nod. ‘It was before you left for England.’

‘Then why wasn’t I there, too?’

I couldn’t say that I didn’t know, even if the answer that bubbled out of me was too emotional to have come from any reasonable part of my being. ‘Because I’d already brought you far enough into that night beneath the Tower Mill, Tom, and I couldn’t bear to lead you any further. I was protecting my son, as mothers are supposed to do. You’d come to mean far more to me than Terry, who’d become a cause I couldn’t put right, but you were different, you were part of me. I didn’t invite you along that day because Dolan had taken Terry away from me, and I was terrified that meeting him would take you from me, as well.’

He seemed stunned by this. I certainly was. Where had it come from, and how much more could I say without reaching so deep there would be nothing left to salvage?

‘He sat with Terry for half an hour, seeing more than my eyes were taking in. I wish you
had
been there to see it, you should have been there,’ I said, confessing. ‘He regrets what he did, Tom. You’ll see as much in his eyes, if you let him come tomorrow. Dolan wants to be at the funeral because he needs an end, too, like you and me, and Mike.’

‘I don’t know what to think,’ said Tom, sounding more vulnerable than angry. ‘I mean, does he want absolution, is that it?’

‘I don’t think it matters. Forget what Dolan’s after, Tom, and think of what he means for you and me. There were never going to be any public admissions about what happened, never going to be any punishment for men like Dolan or those who egged them on. That’s all you and I have been able to see for years, but now, maybe there’s something real for us at last. If he’s there, you and I can bury more than a man’s body tomorrow.’

Tom stared into my face as I spoke. Now that I seemed spent, he focused on the floor near his feet, to weigh up what I’d said, perhaps, or to avoid a reply. I wasn’t sure.

I watched him now, not in anticipation of his answer, more in wonder that this man was my son. How could I have pushed him away?

‘Tom, I’ve done a lot of thinking in the last day or two. All the time you’ve been in the air, to be honest.’

His head bobbed up at this. ‘Me too,’ he murmured.

‘What I said before, that death can bring other things to an end. It’s time I said something else that’s been stuck between us for too long.’ I leaned forward in my chair, sure, at last, of what I would say.

‘Tom, back when you were three years old, I chose myself, instead of you. There were all sorts of reasons and I can justify what I did until I’m blue in the face, but what matters is how that looks to you. Hear me say it: I didn’t put you first, and it’s stood between us ever since.’

Perhaps he was still taking in what I’d said, but he didn’t respond.

‘I’m not asking you to forgive me, Tom. The best I can do is admit the truth of it. All these years I’ve told myself, told anyone who’d listen that I was a poor mother, that I don’t have the gene. None of that matters, though, does it? I should have seen how it looked to you, Tom. I’m your mother, and I let you down.’

‘Don’t say that, Mum,’ he said through tears.

I put up my hand to stop him saying more. ‘There’s one thing I want you to understand. Please, Tom, you have to understand this. When I came back from Europe and you were still a teenager – from the time I took you to see Terry in the nursing home, really – I’ve tried to be your mother, and if it seems like I’ve failed all over again, it’s because I didn’t know how. Please believe that. It wasn’t for want of love, or because I was afraid of what you’d take from me. What I didn’t know, what I’m still learning, is how to take from you, to take what you want to give. I need it, Tom. I need my son, for the funeral tomorrow and every day until they put me in a box, too. Maybe by then I’ll have learned the rest of it.’

A knock came at the door and moments later it opened enough for the receptionist’s face to appear. ‘They’ve just called your flight, Ms Kinnane.’

‘I can get a later one,’ I said to Tom. ‘Do you want to stay, talk it out?’

He closed his eyes and in no more than a whisper, said, ‘No, I can’t. Not now, not yet.’

He walked with me to my departure gate, too full of his own unspoken words to hear any more from me.

‘I’ll wait for you in Brisbane,’ I called, as my boarding pass was scanned, and didn’t miss the irony in what I’d said.

Would Tom let Dolan attend the funeral? It was out of my hands now, yet whatever he chose, it wouldn’t end there, for he was my son and I would always worry that he might be unhappy, or ill advised, dumped on by others or by his own folly, that he’d be unloved, betrayed, or the culprit in betrayal, that he’d be lonely, overworked, or overly pleased with himself. Such fears would stay with me, not so much that I lay sleepless as I had for the last two nights, but as the background hum to my life.

On board, I found my seat and settled beside a window with a view of the terminal.

What had I done, back in that unlikely room? Something
had
shifted in me. I could use up every minute of this flight to Brisbane trying to name it, or I could simply embrace the peace it brought me.