The Tower Mill (2 page)

SUSAN

1968

I
swapped the
straps of my school bag from one red palm to the other, wishing, as I often did by the time we reached this corner, that I’d caught the bus instead. Karen strolled shoulder to shoulder with me on one side and Cathy Betts on the other. It was always this way, with me in the middle. I had further to go so maybe they let me have the narrow footpath to make the walking easier. We’d never talked about it.

Cathy always had fags in among her school books and we had just shared one among the overgrown trees on a vacant block set back from Logan Road. Whether we were smoking or walking or simply standing together on a street corner, we talked, not about anything much, but friends didn’t talk about important things; that
was
their importance. It made a nice change from school, because in the classroom, where the topics were more serious, I talked myself hoarse.

Susan always has something to say in class and expresses herself resolutely
, Sister Bernadette wrote on last year’s report card. The bitch was having a dig, of course.

Mum chuckled to herself when she read the words but there was real pride in her face, I think, and later, too, when she’d shown the comment to Dad.

‘Good to see you give your teachers the run-around and not just me,’ she said, slipping her arm behind me while she stirred the gravy. Joyce was always quick with a loving hug when it was something she approved of.

As we crossed a side street, Karen tugged at her waist to adjust the folds of her uniform already bunched over her belt. We all used the same trick to look more like the models in
Seventeen
. Whenever the nuns sprang a uniform check, we just let the material fall naturally and sure enough, our hems finished perfectly in line with our knees.

‘Any higher and some dirty old man will drive his car into a telephone pole,’ I said to Karen, and all three of us sniggered at the mayhem we were capable of.

Actually, my legs were better than Karen’s, which were too long and shapeless, like a giraffe’s. Men liked my legs; I’d seen them looking on the way back from communion each Sunday, when I wore my skirts as short as Mum would let me.

We continued our weary way home, peering into brown backyards much like our own. First Cathy turned into her street, then Karen, who lived higher on the slope overlooking Holland Park, leaving me to lug my heavy bag another half-mile. Our place was a weatherboard Queenslander, like every other house in the street, although Dad had built a fibro extension at the side for my little brothers. It stuck out like an angry pimple, if you asked me. Even with the extension, I was the only one with a room to myself, and that was a recent privilege thanks to my sister getting married.

When I arrived home that day, the Torana parked out front told me Diane had come to visit. Great, there’ll be cake, I thought, and my mouth began to water.

But there wasn’t any cake. Mounting the front stairs I found Di in tears on the settee and Mum red-faced in the kitchen. I went back to the lounge room and slipped onto the cool vinyl beside my sister.

‘What’s happened?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ she answered, with a bitterness that just wasn’t her.

‘What does that mean? Has something happened to Jim?’

But I knew that if anything had happened to Diane’s brand new husband, Joyce would be all sympathy and consoling arms around the shoulders.

Di stood suddenly and left the house without saying goodbye, and still none the wiser, I took my questions back to the kitchen.

‘You’re too young . . .’ Mum started to say, then stopped herself, afraid of tears. My mother wasn’t one for crying.

At school the next day, I told Karen.

‘I haven’t seen them like this before. They never fight. I can’t work it out.’ Karen was the youngest of four sisters, but with so little to go on, not even she could come up with a cause.

Diane rang the next evening and spoke to Mum for a long time, and this seemed to clear the air; enough, at least, for me to stop talking about it with my friends. It wasn’t over, though. I saw the suspicion in Mum’s eyes every time Diane came round, until I couldn’t stand it any longer and demanded answers.

‘She thinks I’m still on the Pill.’

I knew she was on it. Before the wedding, while we’d waited at the dressmakers for the final fitting, she’d opened her handbag and taken out a long silver card with a colour-coded arrow printed over the back. The tiny pills rattled like a baby’s toy when I took them from her hand. They seemed so grown up, so forbidden to someone like me. My finger flicked at the broken foil.

‘I’ve started taking them already. You have to, so it will be safe on the honeymoon.’

Oh God, hadn’t we blushed then. She was still a virgin that afternoon, I’d have bet my life on it, but the open packet announced what she’d soon be up to in a way that white gowns and wedding cakes did not.

Now, in the bedroom we’d shared until a few months ago, I asked innocently, ‘And are you still on it?’

‘No, I can’t be, can I, not after the stupid Pope had his say. Bloody Mum, though. There’s only one way I can convince her, isn’t there? Only one way to show I’ve stopped.’

The stand-off festered, unnoticed by the rest of the family, all conveniently male, of course, but not by me. How could poor Diane prove she
wasn’t
doing something so invisible. It was like a test for witchcraft; throw a girl into the pond and if she drowned, then her innocence was proven, but if she stayed afloat, haul her off to the stake.

I was the one who burned. The flames might have died down a little between Mum and Diane, but I still felt them like a blow torch. It was so unfair!

Then the archbishop came to St Teresa’s for confirmation and among the twelve-year-olds rounded up for a ceremonial slap on the cheek by his Grace was my youngest brother. It occurred to me, as we were filing in to a pew, that Diane couldn’t take communion if she was guilty of a mortal sin and, if she was still taking one of the tiny pills each morning, then in the eyes of God and Joyce Kinnane, she certainly was.

With eight of us, plus Jim Wells, we took up a whole row, and, when it was our turn to head down to the communion rail, first my newly confirmed brother stepped into the aisle, followed by our parents until, with Mum turned round to watch, Diane stood also, resigned but strangely triumphant. She had knuckled under for the sake of peace in her soul, or was it simply for peace with Mum.

I watched as the rest of my brothers trailed listlessly behind Diane. It wasn’t right. There should be a Kinnane left sitting here in defiance and if it wasn’t one sister, then it would be the other.

Mum had thunder in her face when she saw me still sitting there, but held her tongue until she had me alone in the house.

‘What do you mean by that, back there in the church?’

‘I couldn’t go. I wasn’t in a state of grace,’ I said boldly.

Sin wasn’t something you talked about. If you’d scored a big one – my Johnny Farnham poster caused occasional lapses of purity – you went to confession without a fuss. No, Mum knew me too well. I was up to something and she wouldn’t have it.

‘Did you think of your brother before you embarrassed us all in front of the archbishop?’

I wasn’t having any of this, either. ‘I know about Diane and the Pill,’ I shouted. ‘I know you made her go off it.’

Mum seemed flummoxed for once and, at first, simply blustered clichés. ‘That’s none of your business. How dare you talk about that. You shouldn’t even know about Diane. I’m disgusted. It’s over now, anyway; she knew what she had to do and I’m proud of her.’

‘I’m going to take it,’ I said, although the idea hadn’t occurred to me until the words were out of my mouth.

‘That’s enough—’

‘I don’t care what the church says about it.’

‘You can’t just pick and choose to suit yourself.’

‘I’ll take it before I get married if I want to.’

Mum slapped my face, then stood looking at her hand as though it belonged to someone else. The shock made me burst into tears more than the pain.

Later, Diane sat on the edge of my bed and asked in her gentle, always reasonable tone, ‘What are you trying to do, Suze? This is between Mum and me. You’re only seventeen, for God’s sake. It’s not up to you.’

‘You’ll get pregnant.’

‘No I won’t. We’re being careful and it’s not like I don’t want to be. It’s the money really. We’re trying to get a deposit together.’ After a pause she spoke again, more firmly. ‘You’re not helping, you know. It’s been hard the last few weeks, between Mum and me, but it’s over now and I’m happy about it. Leave it alone. Please.’

I sat up on the bed and let Diane put her arm around my shoulder, coddling me, tracing a finger along the side of my face to sweep loose strands of hair behind my ear.

‘That’s better. Come on. You have to sort things out with Mum. You can’t live in this family without that.’

She helped me up and together we went into the hall. There, where the hall opened into the kitchen, Mum waited like the archbishop watching candidates approach for confirmation, except on this occasion the slap had already been administered.

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I muttered.

But I wasn’t. I’d come out of my room to save the peace Diane had bought by giving in. I played the penitent daughter and let myself be hugged, hating myself for it and hating Joyce even more for her motherly good grace that showed she’d beaten us both.

Bugger it! I didn’t like losing and if opportunities for retaliation were limited at home, I had an alternative.

I began to bait Sister Bernadette in religion class until I could see the dread in the old bat’s eyes before every lesson. I was good, too. The other girls watched me go at it, all of them fed up with school, but at the same time spooked by what lay beyond. I was a distraction for them, a spectacle.

In the final week, Karen, Cathy and I slipped away from the grounds at lunchtime, to a park at the base of the hill. There, we climbed onto the low branches of a fig tree and stretched out like leopards.

‘It’s so radical,’ said Karen, breathing smoke slowly into the air above her face.

It was the third time she’d used the word in as many minutes. Cathy was almost as bad.
Radical
was their new word for everything, borrowed from the spaced-out Americans on television.

I was suddenly tired of it all. ‘What’s radical?’

The prickliness in my tone made their heads turn. They liked me getting feisty with Bernadette; not with them.

‘Smoking, you mean? Pulling your skirt up so high we can see your undies? It’s all bullshit,’ I snapped.

Self-conscious now, Karen covered her thighs. ‘I meant you, Suze. In religion, the way you face off with Sister about the Pill and everything. Half the girls think you’re already on it, you know.’

I didn’t miss the deliberate pause here to show that speculation extended to those present. I tried a non-committal smirk which didn’t quite come off. Anyway, how did they think a schoolgirl could get hold of the Pill, especially with a mother like mine?

‘You’ve got poor old Bernie guessing anyway,’ said Karen. ‘You can see her getting madder and madder when you argue with her. It’s just so . . .’ She caught herself in time. ‘I don’t know. At least it’s not boring.’

And there it was, at last. That was all I was to these two, an antidote to their lethargy. No one else would take up the fight, either. Many had been my friends since primary school, but the truth was I was tired of them, their obsession with boys and clothes and being a rebel in just the right way to impress other girls, but never so much they crossed the line. I was tired of being watched and mimicked. I wanted something to give my whole life a damned good shake.

‘The old duck’ll be glad when we’re gone and she doesn’t have you in her face all the time,’ Karen went on, still talking about Bernadette, school, the same old things.

Cathy was more thoughtful. ‘Do you think you’ll still go to church after you leave school?’ she said. It was a question to Karen as well, but really it was my answer she wanted.

I thought about it: Mum standing in the doorway of my bedroom on a Sunday morning, calling me to hurry, the others all ready to leave.

‘I’m not going to church. I’m going to uni.’

TOM

S
usan took me
out to the University of Queensland one afternoon. She’d arranged to collect me after school, on a day when the Inquiry was in recess, I suppose, but since the name Fitzgerald was just part of the background hum on telly, I had no idea of what was going on. It must have been before she took me to see Terry at the nursing home. While Dad didn’t put any obstacles in the way of us meeting after that, he didn’t exactly encourage us, either, until I started ringing her myself from the phone in the lounge room and told him outright that I wanted more contact with her. He had to back off, then.

We went to a park at first. Where was it? Certainly not Wickham Park, not that day. There were some boys training for Rugby on a field nearby and she caught me watching them. That set me going and I told her I’d played pretty well in the trial games at school and might win a spot in the First XV, even though I was still in Year Eleven. I thought that was why she had asked to spend time with me, to find out what I did with myself.

‘Rugby,’ she sneered. ‘Greater Public School. Terrace is the last place I’d have chosen.’

That was when she thought of going out to
uq
. ‘Come on,’ she called, already on her way to the car.

Students were leaving after the day’s lectures by the time we arrived and she had little trouble finding a parking space close to the undergraduate library.

‘This road used to go right through,’ she said, as we followed the ring road to where the barriers had been built. I thought this trip was to be more reminiscence, like our visit to her old school the Christmas before, but I was wrong.

She took me to the canteen, the ‘refec’, she called it, and there we sat with a coffee for her and a Coke for me. She was more relaxed here, as though finally she had found a place from her youth that she remembered fondly. A raucous bunch of students roamed through the scattered chairs, three voices talking at once and everyone laughing. She watched them with obvious approval, recognising her former self among them, perhaps. It didn’t last. She saw others hurrying by, alone and serious and these figures earned even more contempt than she had shown for my football.

‘Look at them, scuttling off to their commerce lectures. Full steam ahead to an
mba
, then into to the market place. All they can think about is that first
bmw
. It makes me sick in my bones.’

What could I say to that? I knew what a
bmw
was, but what was an
mba
? I’d already tried to tell her what was important in my life and found it ignored, so I clammed up, miserable and hoping she would drop me home soon. It was then she leaned across the table, confiding in me in a way that suddenly made me realise this was my mother and she felt there was something vital I should know.

‘I learned more in this refec than I ever did at lectures,’ she said, happy at last. ‘It’s still the same. When you get out here yourself, remember that. And don’t do a bloody business degree, either. You
do
want to come here, don’t you, Tom?’

Hearing my name on her lips was a shock, especially as it was said with tenderness this time. She wanted something for me and I felt ludicrously grateful. ‘I haven’t thought about it,’ I answered truthfully, wanting to be convinced.

‘Well think about it now. This is the place. Even with yuppies fouling up the footpaths, I can still feel it. Can you feel it, Tom?’

Again she’d left me floundering. ‘Feel what?’

‘The atmosphere,’ she insisted, lifting her open hands level with her shoulders for a second. ‘This place was hopping when I came here for my degree. No teachers, certainly no nuns, just lecturers more radical than the students. We were all aping the Americans, of course, but Christ, it was the end of the ’60s and we were changing the world!’

This meant nothing to me, praise for a time before I was born, though it somehow brought her closer to Dad in my mind because he raved about the ’60s, too, dragging out old photos of him in shirts that looked vaguely Indian and with some friend of his flashing the peace sign in the background. It was a joke, and an embarrassment, but it was Dad all over and now my mother was waving at me from the same frame.

I think she felt the distance between us then, because she backed off, watching me. I wondered suddenly what she was thinking and decided she was trying to love me, this son of hers in a school uniform she seemed to despise. It was as though she knew she had to love me, but didn’t have the first clue how to go about it.

She was on her feet quickly and I moved to join her but she waved me down again. ‘No, stay there. I’ll be back in a minute. You want anything?’ she said, as an afterthought.

‘Yeah, another Coke, please.’

She was back quickly, my Coke and another coffee on a tray, and there was something else besides – a packet of cigarettes. I hadn’t managed the first mouthful from the Coke before she had the packet open and offered me one.

‘I’m only fifteen, Mu—’ Just caught myself. We had agreed I would call her Susan. It worried me that I could slip up so easily.

‘Come on, Tom, all schoolboys smoke. It’s like wanking.’

I didn’t want to go there, so I took a cigarette from the packet and sat with it between my fingers, waiting for a light. But this frank embarrassment struck me as deliberate and I began to suspect the Benson & Hedges served the same purpose. She wedged a cigarette between her own lips then struck a match, leaning across with hands cupped to light first mine, then hers. I took a shallow puff and let the smoke out quickly, looking timidly around the refec.

‘What are you looking for?’ she said, challenging. She knew, but I told her anyway.

‘I’m in my school uniform. I could get expelled.’

She laughed; it was hardly the considerate act of a loving mother. I still didn’t realise what she was trying to do. With my free hand, I started to work at the knot of my tie.

‘No, leave it,’ she said, and laughed again, with an elbow propped on the arm of her chair and hand cocked to let the smoke trail away over her shoulder in a mockery of pretentious elegance. ‘Take a risk, Tom,’ she said. ‘You spend all your time living by the rules, don’t you? I’ll bet you try every day to make your teachers happy and your football coach and most of all Mike Riley. You don’t have to, you know. Has that ever occurred to you?’

What was she on about? I wanted to go home, but the way she looked at me, waiting silently across the table stirred me as much as it unsettled. Leaning back, she used her feet to position one of the empty chairs, then lifted her legs into it, folding one over the other. Took a long drag and let it stream blue-grey into the air. Smiled.

Suddenly, she broke her pose and positioned a chair for me to do the same and at last I understood the act she was putting on, an act for me, her son, a boy she hadn’t seen for years. She didn’t know how to act, so she was putting on a show.

I lifted my legs and let the heavy black shoes fall into the chair.

‘That’s better,’ she said, and drawing back she worked her mouth obscenely until out floated a smoke ring. ‘Can you do that?’

I had been practising since a mate had shown me how, weeks before. I tried, but managed only a wobbly square that broke disappointingly a few centimetres from my lips.

My mother, meanwhile, pushed ring after perfect ring into the air at a forty-five-degree angle.

To hell with smoke rings. I took a deep lungful and produced a satisfying smack with my lips as they parted company with the butt. She nodded her approval and watched as I dispensed the smoke through mouth and nose at the same time.

‘Do your parents know of this expertise?’

‘I’ve been caught once, so far.’

‘Do you use mints for your breath?’

‘Yeah, but they’re a dead giveaway. Clothes are the real problem. The smell gets into the material.’

‘Easy, you just say there were others smoking all around you. They can suspect, but they can’t prove anything. Did it with my parents all the time.’

This exchange was the freest we had managed since she’d landed back in my life at Christmas, but I couldn’t ignore the way she had talked about my parents, as though she wasn’t one of them.

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.

‘I don’t.’

‘What about those smoke rings, then?’

‘A misspent youth,’ she said, laughing as she tapped ash onto the floorboards. ‘I gave it up when I was pregnant with you. There were no warnings about smoking and pregnancy back then, but something made me stop.’

‘Instinctive,’ I said.

‘Shit no. Motherhood’s not instinctive, Tom, no matter what they tell you.’ Then, out of the blue she nearly floored me. ‘What would you think if I had another baby?’

‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ I asked. She squawked at the panic in my response, while the heads that turned our way made me self-conscious again.

‘No, of course not, but I’m thirty-six and time is running out if I do want another one.’

‘I thought you needed a husband.’

‘Shows what lies those Brothers teach you. No, all you need is a man, Tom, and only for a few minutes.’

I was to discover years later that her little joke meant more to her than I was allowed to see. She had moved in with a new partner and a baby wasn’t out of the question that day in 1988. Strangely, the idea appealed to me. I had two sisters, but much as I loved Gabby and Em, they weren’t really my sisters. If Susan went ahead, then I’d have a half-brother or sister, at least. Was she asking my permission?

Across the table from me, she seemed to think for a long time about what she had said, avoiding my eye until, with a final drag on the cigarette, she stubbed it out savagely. The action seemed to turn
her
savage, like the dog that snaps suddenly at a leash it has happily ignored for hours.

‘Seems a bit ridiculous to have just one child,’ she said. ‘You either have a family or you don’t. One’s not a family, is it, Tom, but when a woman has that first baby, well, she’s lost her chance for the purity of a childless life. No proud feminist choice to skip the oppression of motherhood.’ This was said loudly, a parody for the benefit of the few faces that turned our way once more. Then softly, so that only I could hear, she said, ‘I wanted to have an abortion back in ’71, you know. I sat in this very place thinking about it. I even asked Mike to help with the money.’

Not then but later, after she had dropped me at home, I tried to work out why she had hurt me that way, my own mother, just when I’d felt something for her. No one had ever cut me so deeply, nor so deliberately, although I had been living a charmed life until then, under the roof of Dad and his wife, the woman I did call Mum.