The Tower Mill (7 page)

Mike had brought a rug and a sticky bun and shared similar stories about his own family, who’d come here so he and his sister, Jane, could swim in the shallows.

‘I guess I’ll bring my baby for a paddle in a couple of years,’ I said, patting my stomach. It was the first time I’d spoken about it with any affection. I saw myself in the water up to my knees, holding a one-year-old’s arms as the river tickled her feet.

We played on the sandbanks and splashed around like a pair of kids while my shrieks bounced off the gum-lined banks above us.

‘Thanks for bringing me here,’ I said meekly, then folded myself into him while we stood with our ankles still submerged in the chill water. ‘You’ve been very good to me, Mike, taking me up to the hospital all those times. I haven’t shown it, maybe, but I appreciate it, really I do.’

He held me until I’d had enough then took me home along the same route, where my melancholy returned as we grew closer to Holland Park. I felt myself diminishing and fell silent.

‘I wish there was something I could do,’ Mike said, before escorting me formally to the front door and accepting a second kiss on the cheek for his pains.

‘Good luck with the exam,’ I said, but he didn’t seem to hear, as though Larkin and his mates were already displacing me in his mind. Later, I would realise what was really swirling in Mike Riley’s head as he drove away that day.

TOM

M
y Riley ‘grandparents
’
tried to talk Dad out of marrying Susan. I certainly would have, if I’d been in their position. Dad couldn’t support a wife and child and still finish his Dip. Ed. unless they helped with the money, but, when they pulled this lever, Dad said he’d ditch his Dip. Ed. and find a job in the public service. Mike Riley as a graduate clerk? He was born to be a teacher and his parents knew it. They caved.

For a few years, Rob and Helen Riley were the only grandparents I knew, even though they were nothing of the kind if you’re a stickler for
dna
. Helen was both wonderful to me, and the slightest bit reserved. Her reserve was hardly surprising, when you consider what happened a couple of years later. Even then, she was never less than welcoming, attentive to a fault, yet I didn’t feel she loved me the way Grandma Cosgrove did, and Grandma Cosgrove had no more blood connection to me than Helen Riley. Helen was Mike’s mother, though. She loved me because she loved her son, which gave the pair of us solid ground beneath our feet when we needed it most, but I was never going to earn the same love in my own right.

SUSAN

Middle week of November, 1971

I
felt Mike’s
unblinking eyes stare into my own. ‘You can’t be serious,’ I said.

‘That’s not quite the answer I was hoping for.’

‘But Mike. Marriage!’

‘Sue, I love you. I’ve loved you almost from the day I met you.’

Oh Jesus, he
was
in love with me.

‘But I don’t love you,’ I said, and watched Mike’s face slowly fade to a blank. He wasn’t defeated, he didn’t seem hurt, despite what I’d just said. I searched for something that might end the embarrassment without sounding cruel, and snatched too quickly at the first thing that sounded heartfelt.

‘Mike, there’s no love in me for anything right now, not even for Terry. I don’t think he exists any more, and every part of me has gone numb because of it. Please don’t take this badly.’

I could feel myself about to launch into a consolatory list of all his good points that would end with words like, You’re the gentlest, most caring person I know. I killed it off before more damage was done.

After a tender kiss on his lips, because he deserved that much, I walked away across the grass of the Botanical Gardens where he had brought me for his proposal.

I took the bus straight home, where Mum didn’t quite jot a time down in a log dangling from the fridge, but the effect was the same. Diane came round. They spared me a repeat of last week’s fashion parade of Diane’s loose-fitting skirts and dresses. As long as I kept to my room, the scream stopped clawing its way to the base of my throat.

Mum and I had taken to sniping at each other again. Her sympathy over Terry seemed to have run its course, especially now that I could ward off thoughts of what he had become. The pain was there, though, whenever I remembered what he had been, yet even that was fading and I was afraid my life would fade to black along with it.

I had to get free of this house, I’d told Mike when he took me to McLean’s Bridge, but how far could I get with twenty dollars in my bank account? I’d read of girls who did it anyway, thumbed a ride far from home, but the stories didn’t make comfortable reading: before the halfway happy endings, there was sex with truck drivers, nights with dope fiends, bruises, loneliness and childbirth in a Salvation Army shelter. I was trapped, but I wasn’t crazy.

Mike rang two days after we’d met in the Botanical Gardens and for almost five minutes we each danced skilfully around the issue. Then, from him: ‘Have you thought any more, about what I said?’

‘Nothing’s changed, Mike. I’m sorry.’

I was close to five months’ gone and resigned to the tightening at the waist of my skirt when, in the last week of November, a letter arrived from uni.

Dear Miss Kinnane.

The officialese detailed my crimes. This moment had hovered in the back of my mind for months yet I’d done nothing. It was time to change that. I found a photo of myself with Terry on the front steps of the house in Auchenflower, and collected newspaper clippings from the
Courier-Mail.
Student Radical in Coma
was one headline.

The dean was sympathetic. He could not reinstate my scholarship, but he would let me finish my degree without penalty.

I took the happy news home to Mum, who was cooking tea.

‘Darling, you won’t have time for that.’

‘Not in first semester, no,’ I conceded, ‘but I thought I’d try a subject in second semester.’

With the potatoes on the boil, Mum dried her hands and sat down with me at the kitchen table.

‘Susan, I’m surprised you’re even thinking about this. Raising a baby is harder than you think. You’re going to feel like you don’t have enough time anyway, let alone study as well. And you can hardly take a baby to lectures.’

‘I thought you could mind it while I’m out at uni. Only be one day a week, and only for a couple of hours.’

Mum shook her head. ‘It’s not how long you’re away from the baby, it’s leaving the little thing at all. You’ll be a mother soon. When I said you won’t have time for study, I meant, ever.’

‘But I want to finish. I want to graduate, get a proper job.’

‘Your job is being a good mother to your baby.’

If I’d kept up the argument, we would have been at each other’s jugular in no time. I couldn’t face it. I regrouped, strategically, as I was learning to do, and spoke to Diane instead.

Yes, she would mind the baby while I went to lectures, as long as I took care of Rosanna and her own newborn in return. She quite fancied the idea – until her enthusiasm mysteriously evaporated. I suspected heat from Joyce Kinnane.

Even if I could get to lectures, there were still the fees to pay and Dad simply refused outright: ‘You had your go at university, and I can’t say it did you much good.’

At last I’d glimpsed the future they were planning for me. It wasn’t just my body they wanted to imprison, and not just until the baby arrived. They wanted all of me, forever. Mum was set on total victory.

FOUR

TOM

I
was present
when each of my mothers married. As a six-year-old, I stood in Wanganui Gardens with Grandma and Grandad Riley while Dad was out the front with his bride, Lyn Cosgrove. At Susan’s wedding, I was even closer to the action, inside the white gown.

For years I harboured an entirely egocentric interest in whether a bump was in evidence at the church. The only picture I’ve seen, snapped by Aunty Diane’s husband and preserved in their family album, was taken straight-on and leaves the matter inconclusive. The photo is interesting for another reason, though – the biggest smile undoubtedly belongs to the bride’s mother, which seems a little ironic in the circumstances.

‘Joyce, oh she was delighted,’ Dad had told me brightly, when I asked him about it years ago. ‘I was a good Catholic boy, soon to be a teacher. Her daughter was saved. She practically said that much to me outside the church, although she had the good sense to make sure Susan didn’t hear, or they’d have had a barney in front of the guests. Our first argument was over Joyce, actually.’

‘I thought married couples fought over money,’ I said, trying to sound more knowledgeable than the schoolboy I was at the time.

‘Not us. Never a cross word on that account. We were always a bit different. No, she took me to task for being too pally with Joyce –’ and, putting on a high-pitched voice, he’d mimicked Susan in full flight – ‘You don’t know what she’s like, you just see the smiles meant to draw you in. She’ll use you to control me!’

The exchange left me with visions of a paranoid mother, which I knew to be unfair, because the performance Dad had just bunged on for my benefit was only one side of her.

Susan’s view, Dad’s view – the subtle differences posed an interesting conundrum. Most of what I knew came from two people unashamed of their own bias; their stories, their excuses had to be weighed and sifted, and by what, if not my own bias, because I had ways of seeing things, as well. That became worse, years later, when I knew more, knew more than even Dad about certain things; by then objectivity had become impossible, as it always is when you’re angry with someone, or for someone, when an injustice sticks in your craw, when you can’t forgive.

Marriage. My mother used it to escape, something she’s been entirely open about since I was old enough to discuss such things with her. In 2003, when I made that long flight from London with Dad at my elbow, marriage was on my own radar. At thirty-one, I was in the zone, you might say. Hilary and I had certainly discussed it; we’d discussed it in half of the restaurants around London and in the flat we shared in Kennington before she went home to Australia.

Did I ever ask her straight out, ‘Will you marry me?’

I can’t have, because she would have said yes and that would have demanded that one of us make the compromise we were each hoping the other would make. The shift wasn’t coming from me and since she wasn’t yet ready to force the issue, for a long time she took the soft route.

‘You’ve got to get over it, Tommy,’ she’d say, knowing damned well how much I hated the diminutive. ‘You don’t belong over here any more than I do. Let’s go home, and Brisbane’s not so bad, really. It’s certainly got a better climate than London. You can hardly argue about that.’

I wasn’t the commitment phobic of popular cliché – quite the opposite – and if I needed reminding of the joy marriage can infuse through a man’s life, like the rosy glow of a Renoir, I only had to look at Dad. Mike and Lyn Riley were quite a canvas and I wanted that painting on my own wall one day.

They stayed with me in Kennington for a week before Dad started a stint as poet-in-residence at East Anglia University. Hilary had gone by then, though. They knew about her, of course, and were clearly disappointed to have missed her.

‘Her visa ran out,’ I said, and left it at that, although I could see they expected more. Thankfully, they were good enough to leave the questions unasked.

It struck me, afterwards, that I had envied them since I first became aware that love was not automatic or forever, and that a long-haul marriage wasn’t the only kind. How old was I then? Mid-teens? Later than some of my friends, who learned this truth at a younger age, and with a hell of a lot more pain.

Considering the pain Dad’s first marriage brought him, it was hardly surprising he gave few details away. It was only through an unguarded moment on his part that I found out where he and Susan had lived straight after the wedding – a house in Taringa close to the route I took each day on my way to uni.

I didn’t take much notice, at first. It was only later, when I wanted to know all I could about my mother, that I went back for a closer look. It also held a significance for me, I realised, since it was my first home, the place they must have brought me to straight from the hospital.

SUSAN

1972

Barefoot, and sweating
beneath an old shirt I used as a painting smock, I crossed a floor carpeted with newspaper. The shirt, one of Mike’s father’s, had turned up in Taringa among the drop sheets and brushes borrowed from home. Mike was stripped down to even less, just a pair of football shorts.

‘Here,’ I said, handing him a glass of cold water. ‘Could it be any hotter, do you think?’

‘How’s your back?’

I made a rather deliberate face and with a hand over my kidney, stretched a little to test it, making the bulge in the shirt more pronounced. ‘Better than yesterday. Will the undercoat hold out?’

We looked together into the near-empty can.

‘Should be enough for the windows,’ he said. ‘I’ll start on the yellow this afternoon.’

I backed away to the single bed Mike had covered with drop sheets and lay on my side, the only position left to me by then. From there, I watched the muscles of his back working and the way the sweat formed beads that trickled in little rivers all the way to his waistband.

He’d been so good about everything – so good to me. Better than I deserved, because, try as I might, I couldn’t always keep my mouth shut when he niggled me.

‘There, finished,’ he announced, standing back with the brush still in hand and thoroughly pleased with himself. He looked so hot.

A bucket of water stood close to the bed, in case of spills and rogue strokes from the brush. I sat up and drew the bucket across the newspaper, until I could reach the rag floating on top.

‘Come here. You’ve got paint all over you.’

He sat on the edge of the bed and watched as I wrung out the rag and then made him turn away from me while I wiped away the broad smear where he’d backed into the wet wall. It was a powerful back, muscular.

When the paint marks were gone, I went on washing the sweat from his skin.

‘Lie down while I get the paint off your stomach,’ I said, and once the dabs of undercoat were gone, I went on smoothing the cloth gently, up over his chest and shoulders, too.

He’d closed his eyes to enjoy the sensation, but when I kept it up, longer than needed to wash away the perspiration, he opened them and watched me expectantly. He’d always been slow on the up-take.

He drew the shirt over my head and helped me slip off the sensible bra. He liked my hair to fall over his face, although he’d never said anything.

My briefs followed, then I stripped off his shorts and for a few sweaty minutes, we bucked up and down until he spent himself with a final grunt. The facial contortions had disconcerted me on the honeymoon, but after three months I’d decided they were the sign of a job well done.

‘That was fantastic,’ he said, still out of breath.

I lay down beside him, panting myself and put my head on his chest.

‘You can see why they call it making love,’ said Mike. ‘We made more of something, out of nothing. We’re Gods.’

‘You’re full of shit, Mr Riley,’ I said, laughing.

He seemed to drift into sleep then surprised me by speaking almost into my ear. ‘Have you thought any more about names?’

‘Well, Riley as a surname cuts out Kylie and Wendy, anything ending like that.’

‘You don’t really like those names, do you?’

‘No, I hate them, but I’m just saying . . .’

‘Any boys’ names yet?’

‘It’s a girl, Mike,’ I said, with a certainty that made him snort.

‘I don’t imagine the name Joyce is likely to get a guernsey.’

I slapped his chest, making him jump at the sudden pain.

‘If it is a boy, will you call him Terry?’

‘No,’ I said instantly, and the reason came out too quickly: ‘I’d think of his fath – of the other Terry every time I said the little thing’s name.’

My mind still went to fuzz whenever Terry came up between us. Not Mike, though. Things were already settled on that score, as far as he was concerned.

‘When will we tell her, or him, whatever. Do you want her to call me Daddy or Mike?’

It was a surprise then that I answered immediately and with the same certainty that I was carrying a girl. ‘Kids should have mummies and daddies. We’ll stick with that, except this one –’ I dropped a hand onto my belly – ‘will hear about two daddies. It’ll be like Santa Claus. Kids don’t question contradictions until they’re ready to know the truth.’

‘S’pose you’re right,’ he said, as though he couldn’t be bothered to put his own view. That annoyed me.

‘You don’t have to agree with me on everything,’ I said, raising my head so he’d see I was serious. ‘
You’re
going to be this thing’s father, Mike. What are you painting this bedroom for if you’re not?’

Settling back into the crook of his neck, I couldn’t see his face, but the silence showed he was thinking about what I’d said.

‘When I was little, they used to call me Thomas because I wanted to see things with my own eyes. I quite liked it. When I needed a confirmation name, that’s what I picked.’

‘Thomas Riley.’ I tried it on my tongue. ‘A bit formal.’

‘Everyone will call him Tom.’

When he didn’t say any more, I moved to get up.

‘No,’ he said, drawing me back to the bed. He squeezed out the rag and began to sweep it slowly over my belly. He’d told me that my body was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, not a bad thing to hear when you’re feeling every ounce of the extra weight.

Mike refreshed the rag and went on soothing my back, slowly, from under my hair all the way to my ankles. When it was done, he put the rag aside and ran his open palm over the slippery skin, into the cave of my back and over the outward curve of my bottom.

‘Up at Cedar Creek, and even when I saw you walking across the Great Court, I dreamed of doing this. The gods have whispered magic among the planets, just for me.’

‘Is that your precious Larkin?’ I asked. ‘Sounds more greeting card to me.’

He laughed and put his shorts back on.