The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  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 had
n’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.

  SUSAN

  March, 1988

  After the Inquiry was done with Barry Dolan, I lingered an extra day to make sure Tom was all right. He seemed so, and even though he was a little stand-offish when I went round to say goodbye, he hugged me with real affection when it was time to go. I returned that affection in spades, surprised by the need in me.

  On the way to the airport, I dropped in on Terry. It was getting easier, now. He was watching tv in his room, which seemed the sum total of his days, despite assurances that patients were taken on regular outings.

  Did he recognise me after my recent visits? Again, I had only the nurses’ word that he did know faces if he saw them often enough. He smiled in the way the uncertain do, as a form of defence, but the noise and colour of the screen soon drew his eyes away. I sat beside him, wishing suddenly that I could take his hand, for my comfort, not his. But no, touching made him anxious; the nurses were adamant about that.

  ‘What did you think of Tom?’ I asked him.

  Did it matter if he made any sense of the question?

  ‘I had it out with Mike afterwards, over never bringing Tom to see you. I’m still furious about that . . .’

  A male nurse stuck his shaggy head through the open doorway. ‘I heard talking,’ he said, clearly surprised. ‘Sorry, seemed unusual, that’s all.’ And immediately he was gone.

  ‘You don’t talk, do you, Terry? There’s nothing going on in there that would let you know your own son. Would you get on together if you suddenly snapped out of the netherworld? Or would you be like me? I didn’t like what I saw in him, at first. An awkward boy in his oversized body and watching bloody football over my shoulder while I scratched around for things to say. He was so complacent, so stitched up, a copy of Mike Riley instead of . . . what? You and me? I don’t want him to be a copy of anyone.

  ‘I’m glad I brought him here to see you, though. I didn’t realise how vulnerable he was, how easily he could break. He seemed so grown up when I came back from London. And then he sided with me against Mike. Maybe there’s more of you in him than he shows. That’d be good, wouldn’t it, Terry?

  ‘He’s going to be a good-looking man, too, like you were, and he’s no fool. Top of the heap at school, according to Mike. Wish he wasn’t at Terrace, all that testosterone and born-to-rule bullshit.’

  I was mouthing off as though I didn’t have a say in any of it, and I didn’t, really. No point in pushing for a change when he’d be finished next year.

  ‘Too late. Too late for a lot of things,’ I said. ‘We’d have raised him differently . . .’

  Had I spoken too loudly, or was there something in my tone of voice that made Terry turn my way? It was enough to make the fantasy fall in on itself and with his vacant face waiting for enlightenment I told him the truth: ‘We talked about an abortion, didn’t we? Pretty much decided. No getting away from that. Then the Tower Mill.’

  Terry continued to stare, waiting for more, as though he was happy to listen.

  ‘Was I wrong to leave him with Mike? If there’s one question I wish you’d answer for me, that’s it. He was your son, too, Terry. I’m sorry, more sorry now that I see what kind of man he’s going to be, but I had to do it the way I did, if I was going to stay the person you knew.’

  If I went on like this I would make myself cry. Ridiculous. It was seventeen years ago.

  Could you love a son the way you loved his father? And then I was crying and couldn’t stop, even in the cab on the way to the airport.

  ELEVEN

  TOM

  When do you stop talking to your parents? Boys are supposed to become grunters in their early teens, according to the cliché, so what made me the exception, because I kept gabbing to Mum, Dad and the teachers at Terrace, right through to my mid-teens. For me, the silence came later, and focused mainly on Dad. Even then, it was only about certain things, as though I’d built a private room at the end of the hall and went there alone to be with Terry and Susan. I doubt anyone else noticed, except Mum, who could be a winged Cerberus at times, guarding the nest she’d built for her two blond-haired daughters and the gangly youth I had become by my final year at school. I’d started calling myself the cuckoo’s child by then, recognising the out-sized comparison I made with Gabby and Em as a telltale sign that the stealthy bird had paid a visit.

  Then, suddenly, I wasn’t a schoolboy any more, and without quite knowing why, I settled on journalism at uq.

  No, that’s not true. The reason was all too obvious and Dad knew it. He would have accepted my choice better if Susan hadn’t started flying me down to Sydney to spend time with her and then, of course, there was the holiday in Europe at the end of first year. He and Mum couldn’t possibly indulge me like that, with two girls to put through All Hallows’ and mortgage interest rates touching seventeen per cent.

  How many eighteen-year-olds know about interest rates, though? When Susan dangled an airline ticket in front of my nose and promised Christmas in Paris, I snatched at the chance. Of course I did.

  SUSAN

  1990

  Travelling with a teenager was an education, or perhaps a revisitation, if there is such a word. Since the day I’d started at the Advocate, through three years at the Nation
al Times and my career with the dailies, I’d been up with the sun. It was easy to forget that, before then, I could sleep until noon and think nothing of it.

  On Christmas Eve, when Tom finally emerged in search of a late breakfast, I told him what lay ahead for the day.

  ‘Robert’s taking his kids out to Chantilly, to visit their grandparents. Rapid fire French all day, I’m afraid. Best if we don’t go.’

  ‘Just you and me, then,’ he said, and the pleasure with which he spoke grew midwinter blooms in my belly. I’d already played the tour guide for his wide-eyed early days in Paris, when there were so many icons to tick off, and found myself dredging up obscure details about the city.

  Robert was impressed. ‘How in the blue blazes did you know that?’

  He loved inserting what he thought were Australianisms into our banter, especially when Tom was around.

  My greatest triumph had been the extraordinary public toilet beneath La Madeleine, which offered the delectable pretence that we’d descended not a flight of stairs but an entire century. From its pissoires, Tom could wave to me if he hadn’t been a touch embarrassed.

  ‘What will we do instead?’ he asked over his coffee.

  ‘There’s a market street Robert says we should visit out near the red light district. And don’t get any ideas, you’ll be on a tight leash.’

  A bitter December breeze channelled along Boulevard de Clichy as we climbed up from the Metro at Pigalle. ‘Holy fuck,’ he complained.

  ‘Wimp!’

  ‘Where’s my mother’s care and sympathy?’

  ‘You’re twice my size. About time you took care of me,’ I teased.

  The gawkiness of his teens was washing out of him, revealing a lean young man, broad-shouldered and handsome – I saw the girls eyeing him off, and thirty-something matrons, too – and was I the only one who saw it, or was there a tangibility about his potential?