The White Tower Read Online Free Page B

saw him, a woman who wore too many clothes, yet was diminished and truncated, sitting on a straight-backed chair, knees and hands together, bearing witness.
    â€˜Lie down,’ I told Ivan. ‘What is it about you that you’ve never learnt how to talk and be comfortable at the same time?’
    â€˜You’re not going to complain about the cold.’
    â€˜Just lie down and give me back my half of the doona.’
    Ivan did what I asked then rolled over with his back to me. I gave it an experimental pat.
    â€˜I thought you were tired.’
    â€˜I am.’
    I put my arms around him, blew on the back of his neck and made the black feather curls, our daughter’s curls, lift and tighten. I felt the tension underneath his skin. Our conversation had focused his frustrations with his own life and work. But I didn’t think he’d made up his mind not to help me.
    . . .
    Katya woke in the thick dark before a spring dawn, and I got up to feed her.
    The initial sensation of alarm, almost of repulsion, the sweetness as my tight breasts, overfull and strained, began to empty. The discomfort of being made to wait, though Katya waited and then took what was offered most days, most nights, without complaint, taking and receiving with an even hand pressed on a working breast. These pre-dawn feeds were when I felt it purest, cleanest, the sucking and the draining down and out. The act, basic and mechanical, a place to start from. She and I had started in the middle of the night, with a single cry as the doctor handed her to me, black hair crowned in blood.
    When we came home from hospital, Ivan kept the fire going so I could sit by it at three in the morning and feed her. Now we’d reached a workaday routine. On Katya’s creche days, I expressed milk early in the morning. Over the last few weeks I’d been finding I didn’t really have enough to make it worthwhile. Katya took milk from bottles with the same wide-eyed calm she accepted it from me.

Four
    The Telstra Tower pointed a long white finger at the plate blue sky. So blue, blue not of a distance, suggesting other times and places, other cities. Canberra laid out like a dream, smell of the bush, its finger­prints all over Black Mountain. The mountain squatting underneath the tower, and the tower so tall and white, so elongated, needle-thin, it looked like a child’s rendition of what was architecturally impossible, a stick building where stick figures went to play.
    I climbed towards it, my car protesting more at every bend. I’d grown up in Melbourne, and though I’d lived in Canberra for a long time, I still felt more at home in the damp and rolling fogs of the national capital’s winter mornings than these bright, cloudless days. I wondered what the weather had been like the morning Niall’s body had been found. I would soon be talking to the woman who’d found him. I had no doubt she remembered.
    As I reached the top of the mountain and the base of the tower, a gust of wind swung my car hard to the left. My hands tensed on the wheel as I pulled back from an eight hundred metre drop. I gritted my teeth and made it to the car park, which was lined with acacias, the smell of their blossoms thick and heady. I locked my car and walked over to a fence that separated the car park and a walkway from the tower.
    My view of the base was obscured by a corridor of trees and bushes. Looking around, I noticed that this corridor was narrow to the left, but widened considerably downhill to my right. I was early for my appointment, and intended using the time to get as close to the spot where Niall had landed as I could.
    I studied the fence. It was surprisingly dilapidated, and low enough for even an athletic dunce like me to climb over without any trouble. Between a row of steps leading to the first floor entrance and the fence was a gap large enough for a smallish person to squeeze through.
    I stepped over the