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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.

TWO

TOM
    ‘I t was youwho introduced Susan to Terry, wasn’t it?’
    My question wasn’t entirely out of the blue, when Terry Stoddard was the reason Dad and I were both on this plane. Perhaps he had been thinking about Terry, too, because he answered immediately.
    ‘At a rally in Roma Street Forum. The cops had beaten up some Aboriginals in Spring Hill, and the newspapers didn’t give a damn. That upset Terry more than the bashing.’
    It didn’t surprise me that Dad remembered the cause even though that hour of placard-waving must have been one among many.
    ‘But you’ve always said you hardly knew him,’ I said.
    ‘It’s true. We ran with the same bunch, but Terry was in a different league. You could tell he would always be out in front, that he had big things ahead of him. We were in a tute together and I’d pretty much done an assignment for him when he was too caught up in one of his causes. When he spoke so passionately at the rally, Susan wanted to know who he was. I saw an opportunity to be useful to her, to impress her with the people I knew.’
    ‘Not such a wise move then, introducing her to Terry. Were you already in love with her?’
    ‘Intoxicated,’ he said, then laughed at his choice of word.
    ‘This was after you two hooked up on Gold Coast, wasn’t it?’
    ‘She’s told you about that, has she?’
    He looked a bit surprised and I wondered if it was fair to go on. I knew more than he’d be comfortable with about the holiday when Susan had been stuck with her family at Tugun, playing endless games of Five Hundred and bored out of her skull. Then, on the beach one morning, there was a familiar face from the refec, and better still he had a car. Mike Riley had been just the distraction my mother needed, someone to have a bit of fun with in return for a kiss or two while they fed the seagulls.
    ‘Susan says you fell in love way too fast.’
    Dad shot a breath sharply from his nose, a mannerism I’d long linked to the way he weighed up what to say and what to keep from me.
    ‘We drove up to Tambourine. Stopped for a swim at Cedar Creek with the water so clear we could see to the bottom. Your mother in a bikini, Tom. Yes, I was helpless after that, wanted her for myself, dreamed of us together and wrote lovesick poems with Susan as my muse.’
    I was tempted to say, ‘You got her to yourself in the end’, but that would have been clumsy, even callous. He did get her, but it hadn’t been the end.
    I said nothing and the conversation lapsed. I was on my own again, with too many hours to Singapore and Susan wedged between Dad and me, as she had been so often since the Fitzgerald days in Brisbane.
    And that was where my memories wandered next: Grandma Joyce died just as the after-wash of the Fitzgerald Inquiry was making itself felt across Queensland, and it was something of a renewal in my life, too. With Joyce gone, the Kinnanes no longer treated me like a living billboard of my mother’s crimes.
    I hadn’t been the only one set free. At Grandma’s wake, Aunty Diane downed two beers faster than the men and took me by the elbow.
    ‘Come out into the yard, Tom,’ she said. ‘I want to tell you about your mother when she was a girl.’
    I worried she would cut into Susan like a leg of lamb. But Diane wasn’t like that. She was judgmental, just as Grandma Joyce had been, but there was no stiletto hidden up her sleeve.
    ‘They fought like nobody’s business, you know, specially after Sue left school,’ said Aunty Diane, once we were far enough from the rest. ‘Your mother was just so excited to be out there at St Lucia, free of all the petty rules and with a new