The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  Then, a fortnight after my parents had laid out the future for me, Diane arrived with Rosanna perched comfortably on her hip and a lighthouse glow in her face. With the one-year-old playing happily on the carpet and a cup of tea in her hand, she said, ‘I’ve just come from the doctor’s. I’m having my second. In May. Our babies will be only months apart,’ she said, beaming at me. ‘We’ll pretty much be pregnant together, Suze.’

  I hugged her and said all the right things.

  ‘Three grandchildren in two years,’ said Mum, as though it was all her own work. It damn well was!

  I made an excuse and went up to the phone box to call Donna Redlich.

  Donna had come to the hospital with me more than anyone else from uni, except Mike, of course. None of them had been close to Terry in the way I had, but they came to support me. Now I was discovering how even the steadiest of friendships fade when you don’t see people every day. Donna was frantic with exams and as gently as she could, put me off. I would have done the same, and with considerably less grace.

  I called two more lapsed girlfriends and met with similar regrets; then I dialled Mike’s number.

  He sounded weary as he asked how things were going with the baby. His sister, Jane, had suffered terribly from morning sickness, apparently.

  ‘Listen, Mike, what are you up to at the moment?’

  ‘I’m under three feet of notes. Haven’t seen daylight for a week. My last exam’s the day after tomorrow and that’s it for my arts degree. Just have the Dip. Ed. next year, then look out world.’

  My weariness was lifting. I allowed myself to hope. ‘You wouldn’t be able to come round, would you? I’ve got to get out of this house before I go mad.’

  Oh God, he was hesitating. ‘It’s that last exam, isn’t it?’ I sounded pathetic and hated myself for it.

  ‘Look, give me a few hours to get on top of this. Is after lunch okay?’

  Mum hovered by the front door when the Cortina pulled up. I was about to assure her we’d only be an hour or two but stopped myself. That was what she wanted. I kept quiet, but there was no way to stop Joyce Kinnane from running an eye over Mike to see if she approved. The door swung back to reveal a young man in tailored shorts and brand new Dunlop Volleys, his hair washed that morning and shorter than last time I’d seen him, even if it did fall halfway to his shoulders. He was tall, like my brothers, whom Mum always stared up at with pride.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Kinnane,’ he said, with a tentative smile.

  And Christ, Mum was smiling back at him and suddenly I wished he’d turned up hung-over and scratching at a three-day growth.

  But if he had, Mum would have jacked up and then where would I have been? Shit, shit, shit! I was losing control of my life and the baby wasn’t even showing yet.

  Mike held the gate aside for me then hurried across the footpath to open the car door. The chivalry was overdone, a signal, maybe, that he wasn’t thrilled to be hauled away from his books.

  ‘I’m sorry about this. You’ll still pass, won’t you?’

  ‘Pass! It’s Twentieth-century Poets, Sue. Eliot, Hughes, Larkin. I’m hoping for a high distinction.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mike. I was desperate.’ Surprising myself, I reached up and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘You can play me like a fish, Kinnane,’ he said, laughing. ‘All right, Larkin and the rest can wait. Do you want to visit Terry?’

  ‘No, I went last week and it was awful. I just sat there crying like his mother with all the other human wrecks around us. I don’t care where you take me, as long as I’m out of the house.’

  Then I was crying again, as bitterly as I had on the night of the Tower Mill, and I didn’t care. ‘They’re manipulating me, the pair of them. Mum can’t get over herself. She waltzes around the place like the most forgiving, caring mother on the planet. If they loved me, they’d help me get on with my life, but she’s keeping me helpless. I’m scared, Mike, really scared that I’ll end up like Terry, with what I used to be lost somewhere inside me and gone forever.’

  Mike listened, said nothing, a witness to my misery as he guided the car wherever he’d decided to take me.

  ‘McLean’s Bridge,’ he said, when I asked, and it instantly became just the right place. I knew it from childhood picnics, carefree games with Ritchie, and my dad in a playful mood. On Beaudesert Road I began to escape my self-pity while the warm breeze toyed with my hair.

  Mike had brought a rug and a sticky bun and shared similar stories about his own family, who’d come here so he and his sister, Jane, could swim in the shallows.

  ‘I guess I’ll bring my baby for a paddle in a couple of years,’ I said, patting my stomach. It was the first time I’d spoken about it with any affection. I saw myself in the water up to my knees, holding a one-year-old’s arms as the river tickled her feet.

  We played on the sandbanks and splashed around like a pair of kids while my shrieks bounced off the gum-lined banks above us.

  ‘Thanks for bringing me here,’ I said meekly, then folded myself into him while we stood with our ankles still submerged in the chill water. ‘You’ve been very good to me, Mike, taking me up to the hospital all those times. I haven’t shown it, maybe, but I appreciate it, really I do.’

  He held me until I’d had enough then took me home along the same route, where my melancholy returned as we grew closer to Holland Park. I felt myself diminishing and fell silent.

  ‘I wish there was something I could do,’ Mike said, before escorting me formally to the front door and accepting a second kiss on the cheek for his pains.

  ‘Good luck with the exam,’ I said, but he didn’t seem to hear, as though Larkin and his mates were already displacing me in his mind. Later, I would realise what was really swirling in Mike Riley’s head as he drove away that day.

  TOM

  My Riley ‘grandparents’ tried to talk Dad out of marrying Susan. I certainly would have, if I’d been in their position. Dad couldn’t support a wife and child and still finish his Dip. Ed. unless they helped with the money, but, when they pulled this lever, Dad said he’d ditch his Dip. Ed. and find a job in the public service. Mike Riley as a graduate clerk? He was born to be a teacher and his parents knew it. They caved.

  For a few years, Rob and Helen Riley were the only grandparents I knew, even though they were nothing of the kind if you’re a stickler for dna. Helen was both wonderful to me, and the slightest bit reserved. Her reserve was hardly surprising, when you consider what happened a couple of years later. Even then, she was never less than welcoming, attentive to a fault, yet I didn’t feel she loved me the way Grandma Cosgrove did, and Grandma Cosgrove had no more blood connection to me than Helen Riley. Helen was Mike’s mother, though. She loved me because she loved her son, which gave the pair of us solid ground beneath our feet when we needed it most, but I was never going to earn the same love in my own right.

  SUSAN

  Middle week of November, 1971

  I felt Mike’s unblinking eyes stare into my own. ‘You can’t be serious,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not quite the answer I was hoping for.’

  ‘But Mike. Marriage!’

  ‘Sue, I love you. I’ve loved you almost from the day I met you.’

  Oh Jesus, he was in love with me.

  ‘But I don’t love you,’ I said, and watched Mike’s face slowly fade to a blank. He wasn’t defeated, he didn’t seem hurt, despite what I’d just said. I searched for something that might end the embarrassment without sounding cruel, and snatched too quickly at the first thing that sounded heartfelt.

  ‘Mike, there’s no love in me for anything right now, not even for Terry. I don’t think he exists any more, and every part of me has gone numb because of it. Please don’t take this badly.’

  I could feel myself about to launch into a
consolatory list of all his good points that would end with words like, You’re the gentlest, most caring person I know. I killed it off before more damage was done.

  After a tender kiss on his lips, because he deserved that much, I walked away across the grass of the Botanical Gardens where he had brought me for his proposal.

  I took the bus straight home, where Mum didn’t quite jot a time down in a log dangling from the fridge, but the effect was the same. Diane came round. They spared me a repeat of last week’s fashion parade of Diane’s loose-fitting skirts and dresses. As long as I kept to my room, the scream stopped clawing its way to the base of my throat.

  Mum and I had taken to sniping at each other again. Her sympathy over Terry seemed to have run its course, especially now that I could ward off thoughts of what he had become. The pain was there, though, whenever I remembered what he had been, yet even that was fading and I was afraid my life would fade to black along with it.

  I had to get free of this house, I’d told Mike when he took me to McLean’s Bridge, but how far could I get with twenty dollars in my bank account? I’d read of girls who did it anyway, thumbed a ride far from home, but the stories didn’t make comfortable reading: before the halfway happy endings, there was sex with truck drivers, nights with dope fiends, bruises, loneliness and childbirth in a Salvation Army shelter. I was trapped, but I wasn’t crazy.

  Mike rang two days after we’d met in the Botanical Gardens and for almost five minutes we each danced skilfully around the issue. Then, from him: ‘Have you thought any more, about what I said?’

  ‘Nothing’s changed, Mike. I’m sorry.’

  I was close to five months’ gone and resigned to the tightening at the waist of my skirt when, in the last week of November, a letter arrived from uni.

  Dear Miss Kinnane.

  The officialese detailed my crimes. This moment had hovered in the back of my mind for months yet I’d done nothing. It was time to change that. I found a photo of myself with Terry on the front steps of the house in Auchenflower, and collected newspaper clippings from the Courier-Mail. Student Radical in Coma was one headline.

  The dean was sympathetic. He could not reinstate my scholarship, but he would let me finish my degree without penalty.

  I took the happy news home to Mum, who was cooking tea.

  ‘Darling, you won’t have time for that.’

  ‘Not in first semester, no,’ I conceded, ‘but I thought I’d try a subject in second semester.’

  With the potatoes on the boil, Mum dried her hands and sat down with me at the kitchen table.

  ‘Susan, I’m surprised you’re even thinking about this. Raising a baby is harder than you think. You’re going to feel like you don’t have enough time anyway, let alone study as well. And you can hardly take a baby to lectures.’

  ‘I thought you could mind it while I’m out at uni. Only be one day a week, and only for a couple of hours.’

  Mum shook her head. ‘It’s not how long you’re away from the baby, it’s leaving the little thing at all. You’ll be a mother soon. When I said you won’t have time for study, I meant, ever.’

  ‘But I want to finish. I want to graduate, get a proper job.’

  ‘Your job is being a good mother to your baby.’

  If I’d kept up the argument, we would have been at each other’s jugular in no time. I couldn’t face it. I regrouped, strategically, as I was learning to do, and spoke to Diane instead.

  Yes, she would mind the baby while I went to lectures, as long as I took care of Rosanna and her own newborn in return. She quite fancied the idea – until her enthusiasm mysteriously evaporated. I suspected heat from Joyce Kinnane.

  Even if I could get to lectures, there were still the fees to pay and Dad simply refused outright: ‘You had your go at university, and I can’t say it did you much good.’

  At last I’d glimpsed the future they were planning for me. It wasn’t just my body they wanted to imprison, and not just until the baby arrived. They wanted all of me, forever. Mum was set on total victory.

  FOUR

  TOM

  I was present when each of my mothers married. As a six-year-old, I stood in Wanganui Gardens with Grandma and Grandad Riley while Dad was out the front with his bride, Lyn Cosgrove. At Susan’s wedding, I was even closer to the action, inside the white gown.

  For years I harboured an entirely egocentric interest in whether a bump was in evidence at the church. The only picture I’ve seen, snapped by Aunty Diane’s husband and preserved in their family album, was taken straight-on and leaves the matter inconclusive. The photo is interesting for another reason, though – the biggest smile undoubtedly belongs to the bride’s mother, which seems a little ironic in the circumstances.

  ‘Joyce, oh she was delighted,’ Dad had told me brightly, when I asked him about it years ago. ‘I was a good Catholic boy, soon to be a teacher. Her daughter was saved. She practically said that much to me outside the church, although she had the good sense to make sure Susan didn’t hear, or they’d have had a barney in front of the guests. Our first argument was over Joyce, actually.’

  ‘I thought married couples fought over money,’ I said, trying to sound more knowledgeable than the schoolboy I was at the time.

  ‘Not us. Never a cross word on that account. We were always a bit different. No, she took me to task for being too pally with Joyce –’ and, putting on a high-pitched voice, he’d mimicked Susan in full flight – ‘You don’t know what she’s like, you just see the smiles meant to draw you in. She’ll use you to control me!’

  The exchange left me with visions of a paranoid mother, which I knew to be unfair, because the performance Dad had just bunged on for my benefit was only one side of her.

  Susan’s view, Dad’s view – the subtle differences posed an interesting conundrum. Most of what I knew came from two people unashamed of their own bias; their stories, their excuses had to be weighed and sifted, and by what, if not my own bias, because I had ways of seeing things, as well. That became worse, years later, when I knew more, knew more than even Dad about certain things; by then objectivity had become impossible, as it always is when you’re angry with someone, or for someone, when an injustice sticks in your craw, when you can’t forgive.

  Marriage. My mother used it to escape, something she’s been entirely open about since I was old enough to discuss such things with her. In 2003, when I made that long flight from London with Dad at my elbow, marriage was on my own radar. At thirty-one, I was in the zone, you might say. Hilary and I had certainly discussed it; we’d discussed it in half of the restaurants around London and in the flat we shared in Kennington before she went home to Australia.

  Did I ever ask her straight out, ‘Will you marry me?’

  I can’t have, because she would have said yes and that would have demanded that one of us make the compromise we were each hoping the other would make. The shift wasn’t coming from me and since she wasn’t yet ready to force the issue, for a long time she took the soft route.

  ‘You’ve got to get over it, Tommy,’ she’d say, knowing damned well how much I hated the diminutive. ‘You don’t belong over here any more than I do. Let’s go home, and Brisbane’s not so bad, really. It’s certainly got a better climate than London. You can hardly argue about that.’

  I wasn’t the commitment phobic of popular cliché – quite the opposite – and if I needed reminding of the joy marriage can infuse through a man’s life, like the rosy glow of a Renoir, I only had to look at Dad. Mike and Lyn Riley were quite a canvas and I wanted that painting on my own wall one day.

  They stayed with me in Kennington for a week before Dad started a stint as poet-in-residence at East Anglia University. Hilary had gone by then, though. They knew about her, of course, and were clearly disappointed to have missed her.

  ‘Her visa ran o
ut,’ I said, and left it at that, although I could see they expected more. Thankfully, they were good enough to leave the questions unasked.

  It struck me, afterwards, that I had envied them since I first became aware that love was not automatic or forever, and that a long-haul marriage wasn’t the only kind. How old was I then? Mid-teens? Later than some of my friends, who learned this truth at a younger age, and with a hell of a lot more pain.

  Considering the pain Dad’s first marriage brought him, it was hardly surprising he gave few details away. It was only through an unguarded moment on his part that I found out where he and Susan had lived straight after the wedding – a house in Taringa close to the route I took each day on my way to uni.

  I didn’t take much notice, at first. It was only later, when I wanted to know all I could about my mother, that I went back for a closer look. It also held a significance for me, I realised, since it was my first home, the place they must have brought me to straight from the hospital.

  SUSAN

  1972

  Barefoot, and sweating beneath an old shirt I used as a painting smock, I crossed a floor carpeted with newspaper. The shirt, one of Mike’s father’s, had turned up in Taringa among the drop sheets and brushes borrowed from home. Mike was stripped down to even less, just a pair of football shorts.