The Tower Mill Read Online Free Page A

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