Dad’s face went heavy with an odd solemnity as he listened. According to them both, the death of John Lennon wasn’t the where-were-you-when-you-heard moment for their generation, it was Whitlam’s sacking by the governor-general.
Poor Dad. He was wrong about the Dismissal, too. Yes, Susan was outraged, but it was the phone call she’d received the weekend before that did greater damage.
I was in a privileged position again, where I knew more than he did, and once more had to convince myself that silence wasn’t treachery. He had never heard of a journalist named Obermayer and he didn’t know that Susan had received an unexpected call three days before Kerr moved against Whitlam.
The caller was Barry Dolan.
‘You’ve been asking around about me,’ said the voice in her ear.
There was no name, but Susan’s mind was so full of Barry Dolan by then that she immediately made the connection.
‘How did you get this number?’
‘I’m a detective. It’s what I do,’ he told her calmly. ‘Wasn’t hard, the way you’ve left such a trail trying to track me down. Now what’s this about?’ he demanded. ‘Why so interested in me?’
She wasn’t prepared and desperately tried to bluff her way through: ‘I’m a reporter. I want to interview you about—’
‘No, you’re not. You’re a student.’
Her mouth went dry. He’d done his own checks, probably knew where she lived.
‘It’s about the Tower Mill,’ she said, hoping to put him off balance and for a few moments it worked. A long pause followed, and when he spoke he was wary rather than belligerent.
‘What about it?’
‘You were there, you chased the demonstrators down into the park.’
‘There were hundreds of coppers that night. Our orders were to clear the public footpath.’
‘You know what I’m talking about.’
Silence from Dolan, then the predictable: ‘Haven’t got a clue. You must have me mixed up with someone else.’
‘There was a witness,’ said Susan.
‘Bullshit. It was pitch black in that park. No one saw a thing.’
Those were his words, Susan insisted whenever she told me about this telephone conversation. No one saw a thing. To her it was an admission of guilt.
But she was on dangerous ground. The witness was the letter writer, and she didn’t know his name. But Dolan certainly did. She kept quiet about the letter and the vacuum this left was quickly filled by Dolan’s reborn confidence.
‘You’ve got nothing, lady. And seriously, do you think you could get anywhere with this, even if you did? How old are you, anyway? A fucking girl by the sound of you. Do you think my mates are going to investigate, no matter what you turn up, do you think the government’s going to let one of us go down for that, just when things are getting cosy? Try all you like, but before you waste your time, take a look around. Does the man in the street give a shit? Or the papers? Of course not, and without them you’ll get nowhere.’
I don’t know if that’s really how he said it, but Dolan had challenged her, openly, contemptuously and for all the steel in her soul, she knew he was right.
That call settled something that had been growing in her, a new pregnancy for the womb she wouldn’t fill with a brother or a sister for me.
‘I’m getting out,’ she told Obermayer on the phone afterwards. ‘I can’t stand living in this state another minute.’
Getting out. She swore to me that was the first time the idea had taken form in words and I believed her, but she’d already got herself out of Bindamilla. Did she ever join the dots, as neatly as I did so many years later?
Another time I asked Dad, ‘What was the summer course that caused so much trouble between you and Susan? The one she went to Sydney for.’
Mum, Lyn that is, had taken the girls somewhere and he was marking papers at the dining room table, as he often did on a Sunday afternoon. At this new assault on his history, he stared at me as though I’d enquired after the secret of life. Then a memory of my earlier questions about Bindamilla seemed to build context around my question and his face lost its confusion. ‘Ah, you’re thinking about 1975 still.’
‘Well, technically it was ’76. The summer school was in the new year, wasn’t it?’
He stared at me a moment. ‘You know a lot about it. Since you’re asking, it was called ‘Media and the Feminine,’ he went on, as though the memory lay on his tongue as easily as the names of his daughters.
‘She wanted to move down there, didn’t she?’
‘She talked about going overseas, actually. She started on at me about it as soon as I finished my time in Bindy. Christ, I felt like I’d been spun around in a clothes dryer. I wanted to teach overseas at some stage, in a good school if I could swing it, but she kept on about it, all because Whitlam had been chucked out, as far as I could see, and before I knew what was happening, we were shouting at one another.’
Dad paused there and it wasn’t hard to guess why.
‘You hated it, didn’t you?’
‘Fighting’s not me, is it, Tom? Yet I could feel the missiles primed at the base of my throat. Shit, I’d been transferred to Kenmore High School and I didn’t want to swap that for some London slum. That was all I’d get if we turned up out of the blue. I shouted those very words in your mother’s face. She backed off, about England, at least, but then she started on about a summer school she wanted to do in Sydney. I said yes just so she’d stop ranting about how she had to get away.’
‘She used those words, did she? She talked about getting away?’
He stared silently at me again, considering his answer, making me aware of how earnest I sounded. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, before he could respond.
‘It does, or you wouldn’t have asked.’
‘I’m sorry. Really, forget what I said.’
He went back to his assignments and I wandered into the kitchen to check whether the fridge held anything more interesting than it had ten minutes earlier. As I closed the door in disappointment, he called through from the dining room.
‘For the record, yes, she talked about getting away, or getting out, actually.’
I was quickly through the doorway to hear what else he might add.
He looked up at me again and in a tone that still held the faintest twinge of hurt, said, ‘Fool that I was, I didn’t realise she was talking about our marriage as much as anything geographical. I doubt she realised it herself.’
What I really wanted to ask couldn’t be asked. Did she want to get out with me on her hip? The question would have sounded too pathetic.
SUSAN
January, 1976
Fate loves irony. Ask the Greeks, who laced their dramas with both to torment their protagonists more cruelly. Should it be any surprise, then, that the days Mike and I spent together in Sydney started so well? With Tom in a space-age safety harness strapped to the back seat, Mike drove the Holden down the Pacific Highway to collect me from the summer school, and, after some days in Sydney, we would make a leisurely return north, stopping for a swim at every beach that took our fancy. That was the plan, anyway. It didn’t even matter that the hotel he’d chosen out of the phone book turned out to be a down-at-heal pub with rooms above the bar.
‘Mike, Sydney’s so alive,’ I told him when I joined them there on the Thursday night. ‘I feel more alive.’
I kissed him, nuzzled Tom then pushed them both onto the ill-sprung bed for a tickling game, or was the game called ‘mother and wife’?
I’d already decided on a place to eat and all the way there gushed about Sydney and what I’d been learning. ‘There’s a lecturer called Rhonda Nicolson. Oh Mike, you should hear her. She sees things so clearly. And, God, the university makes uq look like a blockhouse. I could be wal
king around the cloisters of Oxford. Sydney’s such a fantastic place, so much fun. Thanks for letting me do this, Mike.’ And like the schoolgirl I no doubt resembled, I kissed him again, impetuously.
The next morning, while I went off to the last day of the summer school, he took Tom for a baptism at Bondi Beach and then a picnic by the harbour.
‘There’s a party to celebrate the end of the course,’ I told him when we were together again in our room above the bar. ‘Linda’s place. Surry Hills somewhere.’
‘What about Tom?’
‘We can take him. Linda says he can sleep in her bed.’
He had a good laugh at that. ‘I’d hoped my boy would be a bit older before he got offers like that.’ He hadn’t stopped smiling since he’d arrived. What a relief that was. I let myself believe things were on the mend.
When we parked the Holden at Linda’s, the sky was on fire, and as a reminder of the sun’s largesse my face was covered in a sheen of sweat before we could reach the door.
Linda’s place was as ramshackle as our hotel, which only made it more appealing to me, a reminder of student days with Terry. I no longer dodged such reminders; I was eager for them, in fact, and it didn’t seem to matter that I’d once had to carefully segregate my husband from the man who lived in those memories. The letter had changed that, and Sydney seemed part of the same renewal.
I held Tom tightly to reassure him among so many strangers, but unlike the teachers in Bindy, these girls didn’t put on faux displays of mothering and they spoke to him in sentences, without the self-conscious cutesiness that annoyed the crap out of me. It made all the difference, as though I was home at last.
Mike tagged behind us, meeting Linda and her housemate, and with them the only male member of the summer school, Derek someone.
‘God, I haven’t been to a party like this for years,’ he said to Derek, who shrugged.
‘It’s what students do.’
‘Yep, and I partied with the best of them,’ he tossed back lightly.
Good on you, Mike, I thought. Let’s party. Tom will be right once he goes to sleep in the back room.
Polite questions followed as my new friends welcomed Mike among them yet all too obviously he answered like a teacher who’d been out in the real world for three years now, his student days already in past tense and tinged with nostalgia. He spoke about buying a house and how hard it was to get a loan from the bank, as if students gave a shit about things like that. Couldn’t he step across the distance that his plans hollowed out between them, even for one night? I felt like calling to him, Mike, I’m over here, on this side of the ditch, come and join me.
The bundle in my arms was part of what separated him, as it separated me, now that my husband and my son had come to Sydney. Only in the smoky lounge room did I finally see what a holiday the past fortnight had been. The others in the room were entirely free in a way the Rileys were not, something Mike would have agreed with, devoid of the least resentment. To him, the freedom of youth was a currency you used to purchase your future, and, with me filling his eyes and now Tom, who’d somehow transferred into his arms, Mike obviously considered his wisely spent.
Derek produced a roll-your-own from his pocket. ‘You want a toke?’ he asked us both.
I’d taken him up on the offer more than once in recent days, but this time folded his fingers back over the joint and, with another shrug, Derek went off to find someone else to share it with.
I caught Mike’s eye and grinned. ‘Hey, they’re students. We passed plenty of joints around in our day.’
‘True enough. Doesn’t feel right, though, kids and dope.’
No, it didn’t, when he put it that way.
Tom grew limp in his arms and I took him in search of the untainted air of Linda’s bedroom. There were more bodies when I returned, all contributing to the thickening smoke around the single globe. Mike was caught in the crush near the makeshift bar, where he listened to a half-circle of girls, the most vocal a leggy thing who was braless in a way that skinny girls could get away with. She hunched her shoulders, accentuating the bones, and blew smoke in a confident stream into the cotton wool cloud above her head. The music and the distance meant I couldn’t catch what she was declaiming, but she was certainly having a go at another girl. Poor thing, the victim didn’t look happy, especially when laughter broke up the circle.
Mike was still smiling when he extracted himself at last and came to my side.
‘You happy?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, fine.’
‘Great people, aren’t they?’
‘If you agree with what they’re saying, yeah,’ he said, looking over his shoulder at the girl who’d been the butt of the joke. Beetroot red with indignation, it seemed her opinion had been sliced through and left to bleed.
We fell into a group including the helpful Linda.
‘Happy to oblige,’ she said, when Mike thanked her for the use of her bedroom. Linda wore a loose-fitting dress, as well, although hers flowed gracefully to the floor, accentuating a long face that was framed by honey-blond hair in the hippie style that never quite slipped out of fashion. ‘What did you do with your little fellow today?’ she asked.
‘We played the foreign tourists, never out of sight of an iconic landmark, two at once if I could manage it,’ said Mike.
He listed where he’d taken Tom: Mrs Macquaries Chair, across the bridge just for the fun of it, a ferry ride to Milsons Point.
‘Seems strange to go out of your way for them,’ said Linda. ‘They’re just part of the landscape to us. Tom’s lucky that one of his dads can show him around. Never knew my father, and Mum didn’t find anyone else.’
Before Linda could say anything more, a new face become part of the huddle, through no deliberate choice, I thought, more in the way a pip is squeezed from an orange and has to land somewhere.
‘Hello, Rhonda,’ I said. She’d been coy about coming and I was suddenly delighted to see that she had.
‘You’re the lecturer,’ said Mike quickly. ‘Susan was raving about you last night.’ He offered his hand.
Rhonda ignored it. ‘Ah, the husband from Queensland,’ she said, looking at me.
Undaunted, Mike pushed the usual pleasantries her way: ‘Sue’s really enjoyed your course.’
‘Escape is always a joy,’ she shot back at him.
Again she was looking straight at me, and this time so was Mike, clearly bewildered. He expected people to like him and couldn’t work out why Rhonda was being so curt. I could have bloody killed her!
Mike turned full on to Rhonda, who offered no ironic smile to accompany her little barbs. Her silence seemed to offer him a free swing, as though she were saying, Come on, mate, your turn to slip in a witty riposte. What was she up to? Was she stoned already?
Rhonda didn’t explain herself, and didn’t hang around, either, leaving me to field my husband’s questions.
‘What did she mean by that? Escape from what? What have you been saying to these people?’
‘Nothing, Mike. She wasn’t having a go at you.’
But that’s exactly what Rhonda had been doing. With help from the satyr-eyed Derek, Rhonda and I had got off our faces on the third night of the summer school and I couldn’t stop leaking my unhappiness onto her sympathetic shoulder. I’d said more than I should have, heard myself say things that until then I’d stomped on whenever they tried to sprout in my mind.
‘That other girl seemed to know that I’m not Tom’s father, too,’ Mike added. ‘You’ve been pretty quick to tell them our history.’
‘It came up in something we were discussing, that’s all.’
I didn’t want to stir up the rawness of the weeks before New Year. Not tonight; we were in Sydney to start over.
Mike went off, only half-convinced, to check on Tom, leavi
ng me to fold myself into my classmates. The next time I saw him he was laughing with Derek, his humour apparently restored. I didn’t see Rhonda until she was beside me.
‘Look, I probably told you too much last week. Things aren’t as bad I made out. Mike’s been good to me, really.’
Rhonda shrugged, without offering any apology. ‘They’re all good to their wives as long they get things their own way. Believe me, Sue. I had a husband of my own once.’
I could have asked her to back off, could have told her to piss off for that matter, but Rhonda, this whole fortnight, had been so important to me, I didn’t want it to end sourly.
Later still, Mike joined me. ‘That Derek fancies you,’ he said, laughing. ‘What a hoot!’
He’d been enjoying Derek’s generosity by the look of things, too. I took the joint from his fingers and held the smoke in my lungs while it passed to a waiting hand. Too late, I saw that it was Rhonda’s.
Mike was watching her with open belligerence. Oh, would you give me a break.
‘How did you spend your day?’ asked a girl who hadn’t been there earlier.
He started at the top with the swim at Bondi.
‘Oh, I was there tonight. It’s so easy now with daylight saving.’
‘S’pose it is,’ said Mike. ‘We don’t have it in Queensland.’
‘Don’t have what?’ said the girl, confused.
‘Daylight saving.’
‘Bloody ridiculous,’ snapped Rhonda, who’d closed in a step to claim a place in the circle. ‘Typical dog-in-a-manger attitude of the ruling junta up there. Worried it’s against God’s law or something.’
If it had been anyone else in the room, Mike would have joined in her contempt. Ruling junta, hypocritical God-botherers; he liked to bang on about Joh and his cronies in the same words.
‘Actually, daylight saving doesn’t suit Queensland,’ he said instead, rolling out an attitude he’d never mentioned before. ‘Summer days up our way are hotter for longer. We look forward to the sun going down so the temperature will drop and give us a bit of relief.’
The Tower Mill Page 13