The Tower Mill (25 page)

TOM

After I’d seen
Susan off down the air bridge, I joined Dad and we went in search of a coffee.

‘Your mother had a look in her eye,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen her like that since . . . it’s not right to say it, maybe. Since Terry was struggling for life in the hospital.’

‘First time I’ve seen her like that, too,’ I said. ‘She put herself on the line, Dad,’ and I might have added ‘for me’, but was there any need? ‘Before, she’d always held back a part of herself. This time was different . . .’ I needed to think. The coffee helped, and so did Dad’s weary silence.

Later, after our plane had levelled out on the final leg to Brisbane, I reached into the seat pocket for Dad’s copy of the
Australian
, or the part of it I’d kept, at least.

Time played dizzying games around me, as it does when you stare too hard at the one thing. I could sense him watching me. He’d seen that I was studying the legal appointments.

‘Force of habit,’ I said. ‘I bet you check out the teaching jobs when you get the chance.’

‘Only to find out who’s moving on. I’m not planning a change in my life, unlike some,’ he added.

‘What makes you think
I
am?’

‘Oh, the mysterious Hilary to begin with. You haven’t come home just for Terry’s funeral, have you, Tom?’

His wry smile showed that denial would be thrown out of court. He shifted his weight in the seat, as he so often did in the creaking cane chair on our back deck in Ashgrove, and said, ‘I’ve been reading over kids’ shoulders for thirty years, Tom. You’re looking at that
cmc
job, aren’t you?’

What could I do but admit it? ‘It’s the second time they’ve advertised. That’s the usual procedure, two weeks apart, to be sure word gets around.’

‘I didn’t think you bothered with the
Australian
in London.’

‘I don’t. Hilary cut out the page and sent it to me.’

He considered this for a few moments. ‘The Crime and Misconduct Commission. Sounds like a good fit for you, Tom. You’ve cut your teeth at the Crown Prosecutor in London, and then there’s the Tower Mill. After what you told me in Singapore, it must rankle that the police were never held to account. That’s why the
cmc
was set up, to make sure men like Joh don’t get ahead of themselves.’

‘I know what the
cmc
’s for,’ I said sharply, ‘but don’t you see what would happen, Dad? I’d be setting myself up as the avenging angel who rides in to smite ordinary mortals who’d given way to their baser instincts. I’d be seduced by my own righteousness, my own self-importance. That’s precisely what Joh suffered from.’

He waited until my little tirade had played itself out, then, with his face as hard and serious as I’d ever seen it, he leaned into my ear and said, ‘Tom, if you can say that to me, and to the mirror every morning, then maybe you’re exactly the type who should apply.’

I didn’t feel up to an answer, not after twenty-four hours spent more inside my head than the cabin of a 747. And not after the brief stop in Sydney, either. ‘A few things are up in the air,’ was all I could manage.

Dad seemed to think on this in the way I’d seen him come up with an elusive line for one of his poems, and it didn’t surprise me when he said, ‘You know what Auden said about poetry? That it doesn’t make things happen. That’s why I’ll never be more than a scratch on the eyeball of history. But you’re different, Tom, and I think you know it. You’ve spent ten years getting yourself ready for that job, whether you’ll admit it to yourself or not. Why all that postgrad work in London, if you weren’t? You don’t study admin law to put more burglars in gaol.’

I have a fair idea of how my face must have looked when he said this. I’d seen it often enough in court, that delicious moment when the defendant’s shoulders slouch in the dock because he knows it’s all over, that hard evidence has overwhelmed his barrister’s diversions and it’s only a matter of time before the guilty verdict is handed down. That was me.

It was what he said next that mattered more, though.

‘Tom, if do your best work on the other side of the globe, you won’t make things happen where it means the most to you.’

‘So you think I should move home to Brisbane?’

‘I’m not the only one who thinks so,’ he said, with a studied glance towards the legal appointments. ‘Finding the right woman’s the big one, Tom. Trust me on that. But it seems to me a few other things have been getting in the way.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that all the way from Heathrow.’

‘I can’t tell you whose son you are, mine or Terry’s, or even Susan’s. I can’t tell you to use your Australian passport or your British one, or maybe make up a special one to say Queenslander. I can’t tell you where you belong, Tom, or what you owe to your countrymen once you make up your mind.’

He went back to his novel, leaving me to stare out of the window, aware that it was still New South Wales below the wings. There was no border marked on the ground, but at some instant in the next half-hour we would cross over, a transition that had once meant so much to me. It did again, though in an entirely different way.

On a weekend stay with me during his residency, Dad had visited the National Portrait Gallery to worship his gods, Tennyson, Thomas and Zeus himself, Shakespeare. I’d gone with him.

‘All Brits, of course,’ I said, for the want of something to say since he’d drifted into such a euphoric state words seemed beyond him.

But my timing was poor because we’d just arrived at the large portrait of a woman with hair like windswept mulga, face on the tilt, her body sitting low on a sofa with knees up and her skirt draped informally between her legs. It was a rare woman who would let herself be depicted in such a pose, and Germaine Greer was certainly that. It’s a fabulous portrait, but it was something Dad said while we stood in front of that painting that came to me during those waning moments of our journey.

‘Do you remember what you said about old Germaine while we were standing in front of her portrait?’ I asked him.

He looked up from his book, a little flummoxed. I prompted him with his own words: ‘You said she wasn’t one of us any more. That she’d lived over there so long, she was English, and that was why her portrait was in their national gallery, not ours.’

‘Did I say that?’

He’d forgotten, but I hadn’t.

Not one of us
, and with those words he’d made something shift deep in my guts as though a vital core had been ripped out of me. I never wanted to feel that wrench again, and, as our plane crossed the invisible border below, I knew that I wouldn’t. Without fanfare, without a word of declaration to Dad beside me, the matter seemed settled and the relief that came over me urged the question – Why had it taken so long to work out? Wasn’t I the same man I’d been twenty-four hours ago, when I’d boarded at Heathrow? More than something nameless in my guts had shifted, even if I couldn’t explain what, or why.

‘It’s time you and Mum met Hilary,’ I said. ‘She’ll be at the funeral tomorrow. Not exactly an occasion you’d choose for a first meeting,’ I said, with a shrug. ‘You’ll like her, though.’

I expected a smile at this, but Dad’s face was serious again. ‘There’s someone else who should be there tomorrow, Tom. I imagine your mother had something to say about that, back in Sydney.’

I nodded. Things had been decided in that matter, too, it seemed.

Neither of us spoke again until the engines lowered their pitch and I felt the aircraft slowing, losing height on the approach into Brisbane. When the first officer took to the microphone he seemed pleased with his news.

‘. . . landing on time. We’ll be coming in over the city, where it’s a sunny nineteen degrees.’

Soon the suburbs were below us and then the
cbd
, so well defined in the winter sunlight I imagined my hand reaching through the window to touch the buildings.

‘Looks different,’ I said, with my nose to the glass.

‘Does it?’ Dad shifted in his seat enough to push his face close to mine, and together we watched the high-rise and the twin peaks of the bridge slide under the wing.

‘I suppose, to someone who’s been away a while,’ he said, then sank back into place to hitch his belt a little tighter. ‘Certainly a lot different from the city your father knew.’

Which father did he mean? I grew up knowing of two. But Dad was talking about Terry, who had stopped knowing anything before I was born and tomorrow would go into the Queensland soil, leaving me with only one father, the usual quota, and as the plane sank through a solitary wisp of cloud I felt myself join the ranks of the ordinary, at last.

The parks of Bulimba stood out among the houses and the river flashed briefly beneath us, the reflected blue of the sky hiding its khaki water. We glided lower and still lower until the blur of green beside the runway became grass growing out of solid earth and then, finally, came the jolt of journey’s end.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the women who helped me with
The Tower Mill
: Teresa Carroll, Janet Allison, Mary Nosworthy, Kate Moloney, Moya Hickey, Jane Connolly, Brigid Hickey, Siobhan Zielinski and the publishing team at UQP, Madonna Duffy and Rebecca Roberts.

First published 2012 by University of Queensland Press

PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

www.uqp.com.au

© 2012 James Moloney

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Cover design by Christabella Designs

Cover photographs © Millennium Images; Queensland riot police beside the Tower Mill, Brisbane, 1971 © Newspix

Author photograph by Jen Willis

Typeset in Bembo 12/15.5 pt by Post Pre-press group, Brisbane

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data

is available at
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
/

The Tower Mill / James Moloney

ISBN:
978 0 7022 4932 7 (pbk)

ISBN:
978 0 7022 4862 7 (pdf)

ISBN:
978 0 7022 4863 4 (epub)

ISBN:
978 0 7022 4864 1 (kindle)

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