The Tower Mill (5 page)

By then the police were on the charge and already at the gutter.

I didn’t resist Mike’s tugging, not at first. I had no choice, really, because bodies were shifting around us, all in one direction, away from the helmets and batons. Screams shot into the night air, some so close they pierced my ear drums; people pushed and jostled to get away.

Only when Mike had us both ten yards down the slope could we think about turning one way or the other, although even that was limited. Downhill was the only escape.

But I didn’t want to escape. Not yet. It was easier to stop now and I slapped at Mike’s hand, trying to pull away. ‘Terry, what about Terry?’

‘Too late for that! Can’t even see him. He’ll be on the run like the rest of us.’ Mike tugged my arm harder this time, and, confused, frightened, crying, I let myself be pulled along as we careered down the slope, blind to where our feet were landing. I would have fallen if Mike hadn’t kept hold.

Bodies, feet, snatches of human form were all I sensed around me as everyone fled in the weakening light. We’d come so far now the blackness of the park seemed to swallow us whole. Others cried out, in shock, in outrage. I glanced over my shoulder and saw gleaming white spheres reflecting the light from street lamps: the police were still coming, herding us more deeply into the park. I could feel the fear around us now, the fear of falling, of being caught. Christ, we’d be beaten to a pulp.

I simply couldn’t believe it. None of us had thought anything like this could happen. A confrontation, yes, the front rank – people like Terry – taken away, with arms wrenched behind their backs. But not a baton charge, not riot police, like Brisbane had suddenly become Paris or Chicago. I couldn’t accept what was happening, but I kept on running because it
was
happening, and because Mike Riley held on with a grip that made my arm ache.

Then a sudden halt. ‘We’ll be trapped above the retaining wall,’ he said, fighting for breath. ‘This way.’

He veered off to the left, under a metal guardrail and we slid down the landscaped embankment behind the dental hospital, and finally we were in Albert Street. Behind us, we could hear the others screaming. I was terrified.

‘Come on! We don’t know how far they’ll chase us,’ he said, and pulled me sobbing and stumbling for another city block and into King George Square.

Finally I caught my breath. ‘How could they do that?’ I shouted at Mike. I was shaking, not with cold, but shock. ‘We have to find Terry.’

‘Not yet. It’s too dangerous.’

Fuck him, he’d finally let go of me so I took off into Albert Street again and uphill into Turbot, forcing Mike to follow. Outside Trades Hall, which backed onto the park, police were manhandling a figure into their car.

When it pulled away, we ventured closer, asking after Terry whenever we found a familiar face.

No one had seen him.

‘You can’t go into the park,’ someone warned. ‘The pigs are still prowling.’

Wickham Terrace was cordoned off entirely. An hour passed while we skirted fruitlessly around the streets, jumping at every sound.

‘They’ll fucking pay,’ I cried. ‘They had no right. We were just standing there!

‘Where’s Terry?’ I heard myself wail over and over. I felt wild and empty, like a drunk. ‘There’s a house in Auchenflower. Maybe he’s gone there.’

Terry’s friends in Auchenflower made us coffee and dragged out a blanket from one of the bedrooms so we were warm, at least. I sat with Mike, his arm around my shoulder and his voice in my ear saying that Terry would turn up. No need to worry. Someone went off to ring the watch house from a phone box on the corner.

‘He’s not there,’ was the update. ‘The smart arse copper said all the long-haired mob have been bailed already.’

Where else could he be? ‘The bastards. They won’t get away with it, you know.’ I could feel hatred rising into a fog above my head. I was afraid to look up in case it was really there.

Then Mike went off without saying where he was going. It was almost three a.m. before he came back and, despite the worry, I was half-asleep and too dopey, at first, to guess why he was explaining to the others that his father was a doctor. I came awake quickly, though, when he got to the point.

‘I asked Dad to ring around the hospitals, use his contacts. Terry’s at the Royal. They brought him in unconscious. Some kind of head knock.’

THREE

TOM

D
uring my year
as an articled clerk, one of the partners sent me to track down some medical records for a complicated insurance case. It dawned on me afterwards that I could request my father’s from the Royal Brisbane Hospital.

Terrance John Stoddard, aged twenty-three
, was written at the top of each document. You only learn a person’s full name if he appears in the newspapers, accused of a crime, or else among the death notices.

But my father wasn’t dead. Mention of a cranial fracture first appeared in the notes of the emergency ward registrar, who described the trauma as being consistent with a high-speed car accident, probably because he saw cases like it every week.

I read down the dispassionate list of observations –
extensive bleeding in the frontal lobes
,
raised intracranial pressure
,
tissue dangerously swollen
. Someone had scribbled in the margin,
4hrs?
A different pen had underlined the same jottings. Later documents confirmed that four hours had elapsed between the injury and first examination in Emergency.

Other details came from the police report. Terry had been found beside a path that had a steel railing along one side. It seemed all too clear what had happened. In fleeing the police, he’d tripped and smashed his skull against one of the unforgiving uprights. I winced every time I thought about it.

Did the surgeon wince when he opened my father’s skull to stop the bleeding? He could hardly have stood among the nurses shouting, ‘Holy shit, look at this mess.’

No, most likely he winced, privately, invisibly, beneath his mask, whispering, ‘You poor bastard. What have you done to yourself? Better see how much there is to save.’

My mother was told all these details at the time, I suppose, but while Terry lay in a coma through that first week, all she would have cared about was that he held on to life. If he died, she would die with him, she told Dad, who sat with her through the worst of it.

SUSAN

26 July, 1971

‘I’
m his girlfriend
!’
I shrieked at the nurse. ‘You have to let me in.’

Raising my voice got me nowhere. I would go for her throat soon. The hospital had been stonewalling for days and I was fed up, desperate, exhausted beyond tears.

‘Please, Sister,’ said a voice from beside me, ‘if you let us see him, just for a few minutes, it will give Sue something to hang on to, might help her sleep.’

This lame plea came from Mike Riley, who’d driven me to the Royal and come in with me, even though I’d told him not to. I didn’t want to sleep, I didn’t want anything to hang on to except Terry’s hand, but if this silly twaddle got me to his bedside, I’d go along with it.

The nurse went off to ask, again, leaving me to walk the corridor, again, until the heavy doors swung aside and the nurse was back. ‘One of you, only.
You’ll have to suit up.’

Mrs Stoddard was beside the bed when I was finally allowed in. We’d only met twice before and a hug seemed too intimate for where we stood with each other. With masks over our mouths we couldn’t do much more than mumble a greeting and it didn’t help that a rosary swung from the woman’s hand.

Bloody witchcraft. I wanted to snatch it out of the old girl’s fingers.

‘Oh Terry, look at you,’ I whispered. He lay on his back, his head a ball of white gauze and with a mask over his nose and mouth. The parts of his face I could see were stained yellow by whatever they used to ward away infection – a bit more scientific than rosary beads. His exposed arm belonged in a Hollywood morgue. Around him machines puffed and clicked, screens blinked, drops fell into a bag suspended from a pole until I had to turn away out of fear that this was where his life existed, not inside his sallow skin.

‘It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left you there. We should have run down into the park together, all the way to Auchenflower.’

I knew he couldn’t respond, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hear me. If Mrs Stoddard hadn’t been watching, I’d have kissed his cheek and stood back to watch him rise out of the coma, like Lazarus, or Christ himself.

Later, in Mike’s car, I couldn’t stop myself. I smashed my fist against the door, making Mike jump in the driver’s seat.

‘I shouldn’t have let you drag me away like that. If I’d gone back for him, this would never have happened. It’s my fault. I didn’t think fast enough and you were pulling me down that hill before I had a chance to do anything else.’

‘They were on to us too quickly, Suze. You’re forgetting what it was like, all the people—’

‘I should have gone back for him!’ I shouted. ‘If you’d left me alone I would have found him and he wouldn’t be in that hospital bed.’

When the Cortina pulled up at home, I fought my way out as fast as I could and headed for Mum, who was waiting with the front door open.

‘Did they let you see him this time, darling?’

‘For five bloody minutes.’

I took refuge on my bed and raged that all I had were prayers I didn’t believe in and calls from friends like Donna who were sure he’d be all right, even though they knew even less than I did. I lay face down and wept in fear and frustration even when the door opened and a weight pressed down on the bed beside me. I didn’t have to look to know it was Mum’s soft hand on my back.

When the grief became unbearable, I wrapped myself around her, hugging as fiercely as I’d ever held Terry. ‘Oh Mum, what am I going to do if he dies?’ I kept saying, and she held on to me just as strongly, saying, ‘He’s not going to die, darling. He’ll come through.’

A weekend passed and on Tuesday morning I went to uni, to a room I’d sat in a hundred times, listening to a lecturer who always managed to draw a laugh or two, no matter how dry the topic. I needed distraction, a moment’s respite, but I didn’t hear a word, and when it was over I fled from the claustrophobic walls.

Mike was crossing the Great Court. ‘Have you got your mother’s car?’ I demanded, and when he nodded, asked, with only marginally less aggression, ‘Will you take me up to the hospital?’

He came in with me again, and annoyed the crap out of me by insisting I sit with him in the cafeteria, first.

‘Mike, I just want to see Terry.’

‘You’re shaking. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten properly for days, have you?’

‘Mike . . .’

He pushed a tray into my hands and loaded it with two sausage rolls, a bucket of chips and a chocolate bar. Only when the first of the chips slid down my throat did I realise how famished I was. My mood improved enough to offer thanks, which he waved aside as he filched another chip from the bucket.

By the time we reached
icu
, I’d stopped shaking and the urge to cry that had lingered like a persistent cold had left me at last.

‘Okay, I can handle it from here,’ I told Mike, once my jeans and jumper had disappeared beneath the green surgical garb. As I pushed through the heavy doors, he called something about a lift home, but the mask was over my mouth and I didn’t bother with a reply.

Terry was better; not so many tubes and the nurses didn’t visit his bed as often. Mrs Stoddard stayed in her seat in the corner while I had my turn. It had been like this each time I’d visited and even the greetings we exchanged were repetitions. The surgeon came by on his rounds and accompanied us both into the corridor, where Mike was scribbling on some scraps of paper; poetry, I was pretty sure, after he’d reluctantly shown me a few lines during our weeks together on the Gold Coast. He stuffed paper and pencil hastily into his pocket and came to join us.

‘Mrs Stoddard tells me you two are her son’s closest friends,’ said the surgeon, a pale man with fingers like a pianist’s.

Me, yes, of course, but Mike? It didn’t seem important enough to correct him.

The surgeon continued: ‘The last twenty-four hours have seen significant improvement. He’s out of danger, no doubt about that.’

‘How long before he wakes up?’ I asked immediately.

‘Days rather than weeks, I’d say, but you must remember—’

‘How long will he need to stay in hospital, once he’s awake?’

The surgeon’s face said he wasn’t used to being interrupted.

‘Going home is getting a little ahead of ourselves at this stage,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve already explained this to Mrs Stoddard. Terry will stay in
icu
for up to a fortnight, yet. We’ll know more about the long term when he regains consciousness. I don’t want to speculate until then. It wouldn’t be fair to his loved ones.’ He managed a gracious nod towards both Mrs Stoddard and me that warmed my soul in a way I hadn’t known since the accident.

‘There’ll be a lot of rehabilitation needed, but some of that might be possible in the home. Depends on how much executive function he’s lost.’

‘Function!’ said Mike, from behind my shoulder. ‘You mean he . . .’

Whatever he was going to say died when I turned a for-Christ’s-sake-shut-up look on him.

But the surgeon had guessed his question and used terms I barely understood. ‘Neural signs . . . post-traumatic amnesia . . . apraxia.’

What the hell was apraxia? I didn’t care. The doctor expected Terry to wake up soon and things would be different then, even if Mike didn’t seem to think so during the drive home in his mother’s car.

‘His poor mum,’ he said. ‘I drove her home a couple of nights ago and she talked about him the whole way. I don’t think there’s anyone else, no one she can talk to. Terry’s all she has.’

Hadn’t he listened to the doctor? Terry was on the mend.

‘He’s awake,’ I called through the house, before the telephone had settled back into place. ‘Mum, Mum – Terry’s woken up! Can you drive me to the Royal?’

As we crossed the Story Bridge I warmed myself with a vision of Terry sitting up in bed, smiling weakly, pleased to see me, and with so much to tell me that one thing would get jammed up with another as he fought to get it all out of his mouth. Would I be allowed to hug him? Gently maybe. The touch was what mattered, the press of his skin on mine.

Mrs Stoddard was there when I arrived, withdrawn into her corner as always, only this time she didn’t seem to notice me.

Terry was on his back as ever, head and shoulders slightly elevated this time and with the mask gone from his face. His eyes were open, focused on the ceiling as I crossed from the door to his bedside.

‘Terry.’

He didn’t turn his head, didn’t smile, didn’t respond at all.

I squashed the disappointment and leaned over him, pushing my face into his line of vision. ‘Terry, it’s me. Susan.’

I was looking down into empty eyes.

The shock snapped me to attention. His face seemed made of plasticine and not a muscle moved beneath the skin. But the movement had attracted his attention and, slowly, his head turned so that his eyes could follow me. They stared at me, seeing nothing. Then his jaw moved up and down once, twice, in a parody of speech, but no words came out. The only sound was the dull flap of meeting lips, amplified grotesquely by the hollow mouth behind.

‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be!

I turned towards Mrs Stoddard, seeing her properly for the first time and found her weeping quietly, her rosary beads nowhere in sight.

In
icu
, I hadn’t been aware of other patients. Even when they’d moved Terry to this ward in the Rehabilitation Centre, I’d had eyes only for him. That morning, for the first time, I began to examine this new world he’d been brought to, made up of bodies beneath white sheets, mostly, no different from his own. Many were old, grandad old. Some stared into the same space above their beds, mouths open and slack on one side. Stroke victims.

A man was being helped from his bed, his scrawny legs barely able to support his body. He leaned on the wardsman, utterly dependent and with every ounce of concentration devoted to this simple task.

‘That’s it, Mr Pendlebury. Much better than last week.’

The patient’s reply was half-moan, half-whimper like the cry of an animal left to die slowly in a forgotten snare.

The cold winds of August gave way to the cloudless skies I’d always loved. There was no joy in them that year, and no change in Terry’s condition, despite what the doctors said. On an afternoon in mid-September Mike Riley drove me home once again, following a familiar route through the Valley, across the Story Bridge and along Main Street. At an intersection near the cricket ground the light was red, but I kept right on going.

‘That bloody hospital, the nurses, the whole fucking lot of them. They’re not doing anything. Last week the doctor tried to sell me some bullshit story that Terry would have to walk with those metal rod things on his legs. Can you imagine? They’ve given up on him completely, just shove food in his mouth like a baby in a highchair and his useless mother stands around crying, bamboozled by the whole doctor-knows-best routine. I won’t let it happen. He’ll get better, I know he will. He’ll be like he was before.’

The light went green, signalling Mike’s turn.

‘You have to face facts, Suze. There’s only so much they can fix. I mean, it’s the brain.’

‘So you’ve given up, too. The hospital can go on treating him like a vegetable and you don’t care, either.’

He sighed as though he’d expected me to go at him like this, no matter what he said. So why did he say it? It seemed he’d appointed himself the voice of reason in all this but that wasn’t what I wanted.

‘I didn’t say we should give up,’ he continued, in a level tone that irritated me even more. ‘I’m saying we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. If you expect too much, you’re going to end up disappointed.’

He’d flogged the same caution on me a dozen times already and looked pissed off that he wasn’t getting anywhere. That was when he said, ‘You know, Sue, I saw this movie a while back, about a skier who broke her neck. She wanted to ski again, and of course she couldn’t, but the movie was about how she came to appreciate the things she
could
do. It was a triumph, really. If you’re in a wheelchair, then walking with callipers must feel like flying.’

‘I don’t believe this! Now you’re quoting some feel-good movie at me. I’m not listening to this crap. Stop the car. I’d rather walk home.’

Mike ignored me, which was a red rag to me. ‘Stop the fucking car!’

He began to pull over and I wrenched opened the door before he’d even stopped the car. But I didn’t get out. I didn’t want to get out and I felt stupid because I’d known as much even as I was shouting at him. I just wanted to shout.

‘Don’t get out,’ he said.

That made it easier for me. I closed the door, relieved. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about Terry in a wheelchair,’ I warned. ‘I don’t want to hear about how they’ll teach him to talk again, to say ‘water’ when he’s thirsty, or say my name when he sees my face. He’s going to talk to me like he always did.’

‘Do you really believe that, Sue?’

‘I have to,’ I said, too quickly.

‘You’re fooling yourself and you know it, don’t you? I’ve stood beside Terry’s bed, too. I can see how bad it is. It’s not a bunch of broken bones that mend themselves good as new, it’s brain damage. He’ll never be the same, never, and you have to accept that.’

‘No!’ I slammed my clenched fist down on the Cortina’s glove box and when the violence of what I’d done made no difference, I found myself rocking forward and back, forward and back, suddenly helpless.

‘It’s horrible, Mike,’ I heard my voice say. ‘I can’t bear to see him like this. I can’t look at the others in the ward, dribbling, pathetic, their minds gone. He’s just like them.’

I looked across at Mike, my eyes surprisingly dry because this wasn’t a play for sympathy. I was just so desperate.

‘The way his mouth opens and closes . . . it’s disgusting. I wish they’d tape it shut. And his eyes, they just stare at me, with no idea who I am. I want to put dark glasses over them so I don’t have to see. He doesn’t even know what a human being is,’ and this last was a terrible lament I wrenched from so deep within myself it might have brought blood.