The White Tower Read online

  ‘Favourite way of spending my day off.’

  ‘How’s Sophie?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Are you seeing her today?’

  ‘We’re having dinner at the Taj Mahal.’

  ‘Oh very posh,’ I said, and laughed when Brook went red.

  ‘Jealousy does not become you Sandra,’ he said with mock ­pomposity, leaning forward to kiss me goodbye.

  For so long Brook had been branded by his illness. Now he stretched and pulled, smiled and limbered, out from underneath the brand. His body was smooth, his greying hair neatly cut into his neck and around his ears. Yet I knew he dressed carefully and admired this trait in others because there was that in him which couldn’t be smoothed out, which might ambush him still. This was what gave his eyes a shadow no matter what the time of day. Fear had put down roots as strong as cancer, and came to the surface more or less according to its own inclination. Brook dressed smoothly because crumpled was the best he could hope for underneath.

  . . .

  That night Ivan and I sat up in bed talking about Niall.

  ‘I wonder why he did it.’

  ‘Maybe he was inventing a past for himself,’ Ivan said, fiddling with the doona, folding a corner, letting it loose, then re-folding it. ‘And ­suddenly he was struck by the futility of it. Poor little fucker just could not see the point. The guy has to get a few points for originality. A bit of theatre, no? But his mother will suffer. You can’t do anything about that.’

  Ivan abandoned his fidgeting and fixed me with his black eyes, but just then I saw Moira Howley more clearly than I 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.

  ‘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?’

  ‘You’re not going to complain about the cold.’

  ‘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.

  ‘I thought you were tired.’

  ‘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 fence and made for the spot where I estimated Niall would have fallen, using the photographs I’d copied to orient myself as best I could. The area I was in seemed to be the only one free of trees and bushes. Much of the ground was hard and bare, but spring was making itself felt in new grass and flowering wattle. Now that I was practically underneath it, looking up, the tower appeared like some impossible ocean liner standing on its end.

  A number of viewing and broadcasting platforms were spaced out along it. The platform closest to the ground, hung with large white ­circular discs, each painted with the Telstra logo, jutted out at a height of what I guessed was about thirty metres. From where I was standing, this platform looked much wider than the three above it. How would anyone jumping from the higher platforms avoid hitting this wider one on his way down?

  I climbed back over the fence and walked uphill along it. The ­currawongs were making a racket. I wondered how many native birds nested on the mountain. I’d once seen a currawong swoop down and take a young thornbill, not long out of the nest, balancing on my back fence.

  Access to the tower was through two sets of doors, one at ground, another at first floor level. I’d have to check to see if there was a back entrance as well.

  At the front of the main entrance I read the notices to visitors. Opening times were from ten in the morning to ten in the evening seven days a week, every day of the year except Christmas and Good Friday. There was a revolving restaurant and a canteen. Access to the viewing galleries was by lift and stairs.

  A few minutes later, I was introducing myself to Olga Birtus, the kitchen hand who’d found Niall Howley. I held out my hand and Olga grasped it in her tiny one.

  I felt brittle yet enduring bird bones through her skin. Her face was pale, made paler by powder and red lipstick, her dark hair wrinkled at the ends. She wore a man’s heavy watch on her thin left wrist, and her eyes kept returning to it, as though the passage of minutes, if she marked them closely enough, would bring the interview sooner to an end.

  I asked her what she’d been doing on the morning of 23 June.

  ‘I see something through fence.’ Olga jumped into the middle of her story, staring at me, then down at her watch.

  ‘You were in the car park?’

  ‘Am walking from car park. Very cold.’

  I pictured Olga hurrying to get inside the tower.

  ‘I see that it is body.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I am fright, you understand. I go inside. My hands is shaking, so.’ She held up her chicken wings and shivered. ‘I wait. Beverley, she come ten minutes.’

  ‘Beverley’s your—?’
/>   ‘Supervise. My supervise.’

  ‘What’s her second name?’

  ‘Pearce.’

  Olga drew the double vowel sound out. Beverley had been late that morning, she explained, and waiting had been terrible. She knew she ought to go back downstairs and tell someone, but she hadn’t been able to.

  ‘What time did you arrive for work?’

  ‘Is eight-twenty,’ Olga replied immediately, obviously having answered this question often enough to roll it off her tongue. ‘Beverley she come eight, I come twenty past. Beverley is late, but when she come I tell, and straight, Beverley, she telephone security. He come, and Beverley say, you come Olga, you show us.’

  ‘What was the security guard’s name?’

  ‘Mikhail.’

  ‘You took Mikhail and Beverley back and showed them through the fence?’

  ‘I am thinking maybe drunk, you know, asleep. But too cold. That night freezing. Mikhail has phone. He ring to the police.’

  ‘So none of you attempted to get through the fence and go to Niall?’

  ‘Mikhail he go, after phoning to police.’

  Olga shot another meaningful look at her outsize watch. I wished I’d tried to set her at her ease by first asking about her children, or telling her about mine.

  ‘Was there anyone else in the car park when you arrived for work that morning?’

  ‘Is fog,’ said Olga, surprised that I seemed to have forgotten this. ‘From five, six metres nobody can see.’

  ‘But were you aware of anyone else? Any other cars?’

  Olga shook her head.

  ‘Where did you park your car?’

  ‘Am parking close.’

  ‘Close to the entrance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So if there had been other cars in the car park, further away from the entrance, you wouldn’t have seen them?’

  Olga frowned, as though I was trying to trick her. I bit the inside of my lower lip and decided to leave the question of cars.

  ‘How did you get into the building?’

  ‘Mikhail, he lets me in.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell Mikhail about the body?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I think Beverley is there. I tell Beverley. She know what to do.’

  ‘But Beverley wasn’t there, so you sat down and waited for her. Were you scared of Mikhail? Scared to tell him?’

  Olga shrugged, withdrawing further from me.

  ‘I won’t keep you much longer,’ I said. ‘I was wondering, though, how was Niall Howley lying? What position?’

  ‘He have head like this.’ Olga rested her head on her right arm, fluffing out her brown hair over it, or attempting to. ‘He lie so.’ She raised her head. Her eyes glittered with what might have been anger. ‘I am thinking,’ she said, ‘I am thinking, what a beautiful young man.’

  . . .

  Olga Birtus was one of the names on a photograph that showed her standing outside the fence in front of Niall’s body. The other name I’d got from the photos was Mikhail Litowski, the back of whose head appeared in a shot taken from further along the car park. Birtus and Litowski. Did Olga’s hesitancy to deal with Mikhail, her evident ­mistrust, stem from the fact that he was her countryman? I should have asked Olga where she came from. Among other things. I wasn’t sure whether there was any significance in the fact that she’d waited before telling anyone about the body. Had there been something odd about it, something she’d needed to think about before she said anything? She’d told Beverley readily enough when Beverley turned up for work half an hour late.

  I had fifteen minutes before my meeting with Litowski, a consequence of having rushed through my interview with Olga. I inquired after the canteen supervisor. As luck would have it, she’d left the Telstra Tower in August.

  I took the lift to the top platform, deciding I’d use the rest of the time to scout around. I wished it was foggy. I wanted to see for myself what visibility was like on a foggy morning. It wasn’t unheard of for Canberra to have fogs as late in the year as this, but it was unlikely.

  The view was dizzying. I clutched the handrail for support, even though, since I was still inside the tower, I was separated from the 850 metre drop by thick walls and reinforced glass. The trees below me looked like matchsticks with spiky tops. The roads were grey ribbons, the cars bits of shiny Christmas tinsel, and the blue and purple mountains a border for an architect’s or town planner’s model.

  The wind spun me around as I stepped through heavy doors to the outside viewing area. A steel fence with inward pointing spikes, a metre and a half high, ran along the edge. Before he jumped, Niall Howley must have negotiated those spikes. Surely there’d been signs of that—threads of cloth, even bits of skin or blood where he’d cut his hands?

  It looked incredibly difficult. I wasn’t even sure if it was possible. I’d have to ask the security guard about access to the lower platforms, but I guessed, in advance, what his answer would be. At ten o’clock at night, it would have been pitch dark outside the radius of the tower’s lights. How big an area did the lights cover? And the next morning—slow winter wakening of birds, hunkering down of possums and other nocturnal creatures after a night spent foraging in sub-zero temperatures. There were kangaroos on Black Mountain. Every so often one ventured off it, crossing the highway that separated the hillside from the lake. Once I’d seen one hopping frantically along the grassy verge on the edge of busy Clunies Ross Street, a joey in her pouch.

  I made myself complete a circuit of the viewing gallery, stopping short of actually hugging the wall, glad that no one else was mad enough to be out there with me in the roaring wind. Just before I got back to where I’d started, I came to a gate, with an arrow pointing to a further gallery. I’d thought I was as high as the public were allowed to go. A notice under the arrow said the upper gallery was closed. I tried the gate to make sure.

  For a second, I considered hopping over it, but quickly dismissed the idea. There was a chance that one of the security people would catch me and I’d be in their bad books from the start.

  I contented myself with standing on tiptoe and craning my neck. The upper gallery appeared to be a duplicate of the one I was on, but instead of a tall steel fence, sightseers were protected by one that looked to be only about half a metre high. I moved away from the gate and looked up again. There was the fence, running around the rim of the top gallery. Any adult could easily step over it. But if they did, and jumped, all they would do is land on the gallery I was standing on. The top gallery hugged the side of the tower much more closely than any of the others. Nobody could jump out wide enough to clear the platforms underneath it.

  . . .

  Mikhail Litowski looked to be in his late forties. He wore his grey-brown hair so short it was an affectation. His eyes were black and round, two small black shafts drilled into his head. I’d pictured a man with Slavic features, high cheekbones, creamy skin. Litowski looked Indian, rather than eastern European. Standing next to him, I felt the contrast. I’d inherited the light brown hair and pale skin of my Scots and Irish ancestors.

  Litowski looked at me as though I was a meal that had been carefully prepared, but still wasn’t to his liking. His eyes tasted my insignificant height and overall appearance, the care I’d taken to dress for the ­interview. Clearly my preparation did not measure up to the perfect knife creases in his trouser legs. He showed me a three dimensional model of the tower. I’d noticed the model on my way to the viewing ­galleries. You could scarcely miss it, since it stood in an open foyer, between the lifts and an information kiosk. Like many models of its kind, it had a wedding cake perfection, untouched by weather or by city dirt.

  ‘Howley climbed over here.’ Litowski pointed to a replica of the fence with the inward facing barbs.

  ‘What about here?’ I pointed to the lower platform, the one with the white discs. ‘Couldn’t he have jumped from there? It would’ve been much easier.’


  ‘That is a secure area.’ Litowski kept his eyes firmly fixed on the model, but I sensed the contempt in his black eyes for a person who didn’t even know the basic facts. ‘There’s no way any member of the public can get in.’

  ‘Who works there?’

  ‘Technicians.’

  ‘How many technicians?’

  ‘Varies. Always minimum of two.’

  ‘Twenty-four hours a day?’

  ‘Well, no, not on that platform. There are always two technicians on duty, but they might be working somewhere else.’

  ‘What about security?’

  ‘The same. Always a minimum of two. Of course there are more during the hours when the tower is open to the public.’

  ‘Who are you employed by?’

  ‘The company’s name is Swift.’

  ‘The technicians are government employees?’

  Litowski nodded. If you paid attention to his voice, you could pick up a faint accent. If you were just listening, not looking at him, if you didn’t know his name, you might have said he was a second-generation Australian who spoke another language with his parents.

  ‘How do the technicians get in?’ I asked. ‘I mean, say I was a technician coming to work, what would I do?’

  ‘Well, you’d come in the security entrance. The guard on duty there would check your pass and sign you in.’

  ‘Which pass is that?’

  ‘Picture pass. It’s got your photo, name and ID number. The guard enters it on his computer, then issues you with an access card.’

  ‘An access card?’

  ‘That’s what gets you in. Say you’re working on the broadcasting platform here.’ Litowski indicated the one with the white discs. ‘You have to go through this security door. That’s what your access card’s for. When you’ve finished your shift, you’re signing off, you hand back the card. Access cards never leave the building. That’s why I say that boy must have jumped from the public platform up here, because it’s impossible for an unauthorised person to enter a restricted area.’

  I nodded. I wanted Litowski to think I was taking careful note of everything he said. But I was used to security people—in particular I was used to computer security people—claiming their systems were foolproof. They were obliged to. If this man had any doubts he ­certainly wasn’t going to admit them to me.