Read The Piper's Son Page 15


  Bill was looking dazed.

  “Joe was always talking about him and Dominic going to Hanoi together,” Tom says.

  “Dominic, is it?” Bill asks, unimpressed. “We’re on first-name terms with your father now, are we?”

  “Yeah, we are, Bill. Do you have a problem with that?”

  And there’s the look. The first one Tom has received from his father in years that reminds him of normalcy. The one that tells him that if he uses that tone with Bill ever again, he’ll be seeing stars.

  “Don’t upset Georgie,” Bill mutters to Dominic before walking out. “I’ll talk to Grace when we get home.”

  There’s something inside of Tom that makes him want to stay in this room. Look at everything his father’s collected. Talk to him about how he feels about Tom Finch. About what it’s like having to say the words disposed of when talking about the body of the father you never knew. And to talk about Bill, to point out, “Can’t you tell that the poor bastard loves you all like crazy?” But he can see that Dominic is cut.

  “Go make sure he’s okay,” his father says gruffly.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Date: 17 August 2007

  Dear Finke,

  I’ve been thinking of your comment about what you and Lenina Crowne have in common, and have to argue that exclusivity in a relationship is slightly overrated and tends to cause complacency in one partner and lack of ambition in the other. Take Francesca for example, who’s sitting on a useless degree and sewing with her granny while Trombal enjoys a single guy’s life away from her, probably getting pissed and having sex with whoever he wants over there. I’m not saying I don’t understand exclusivity. But at our age, some may say it’s a trap. It’ll stop you from doing what you want to do in life, because one person is always going to miss out or feel held back. Just a warning in case you’re getting in too deep, exclusively dating one person.

  Tom

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Date: 17 August 2007

  Dear Tom,

  This may be difficult for you to understand. Your longest relationship lasted four weeks and only because for three weeks of it, her low IQ prevented her from understanding that “I don’t want to go out with you anymore” actually means “It’s over.” I’m presuming that the length of that relationship was superseded by the one with your flatmate Sarah What’s-Her-Face for no other reason than that you didn’t actually have to pick up a phone or make an effort to walk to her place. Was it a holler from your room or hers?

  Only in your tiny mind, Tom, does Frankie + Will = complacency. I wouldn’t exactly call that relationship an easy one to manage, or remotely one-sided, and don’t you dare presume you’d know what Will gets up to over there. He might be an arrogant and introverted cold fish at times, but ask him the question in front of his macho engineering buddies, “Where do you see yourself in ten years time?” and he doesn’t miss a beat. “Wherever Frankie is.” The same useless Frankie who’s still working on her music, and running Stani’s pub at night, and whose “sewing with her granny” job actually pays a shitload of money these days, and who’ll finish a history degree with honors when she’s up to going back next year. If that’s complacency, then I can’t imagine what category I fit in.

  Don’t let me have to analyze you, Tom. It will be too predictable and you’ll come across as a textbook case. I know you can’t handle being described as mediocre.

  T

  Her parents don’t go home, and it’s the uncertainty of what they bring to the equation by being in her home that worries Georgie. It means Sam’s around more often during the day, as if the more people in the house, the less he thinks she’ll notice him there. Plus he has his son during the week these days, not just weekends. It’s not that she minds, which surprises Georgie, but that he never stays at night and she’s irritated because she misses his body beside her and Georgie doesn’t want to miss Sam.

  Today Georgie and Grace are baking while Sam’s kid plays with the strings of the guitar Tom has left lying around. Sam’s outside making a phone call, work-related by the looks of things from the window. Georgie hands Sam’s kid a spoon from the bowl to lick, and he hovers between them like the two spaniels waiting for the next bout of generosity. She stares down at him. Her blue-eyed boy, she’d call Sam when they were a couple. At least she doesn’t have to look at some other woman’s face every time she looks down at this kid. But it makes her wonder if she’s looking at what her own child will look like six years down the track. Will he have Georgie’s dark hair and gray eyes, or will he be all Sam? Will he have a shy smile like this little boy?

  Tom comes in and puts his arms around Grace from behind.

  “Can you tell Bill to get rid of the shorts?” Georgie hears him beg against her ear. “It’s been a week of jogging with him. It’s abuse by humiliation.”

  “Can anyone tell Bill to do anything?” Grace asks, kissing her grandson quickly on the cheek. “You smell of cigarettes.”

  “How come he gets to do that?” Tom says, looking down at the kid who’s licking the spoon with abandon. Tom wrestles Callum for it, and the boy giggles, because his crush on Georgie has moved to Tom.

  “Show Tom how you can play the guitar,” Georgie says.

  Tom puts the kid on his lap and grabs the guitar, his arms around him, holding Callum’s fingers in place. It reminds her of how Joe taught Tom to play in the kitchen at Northumberland Street. Callum strums a tune and they all clap. The kid’s beaming and then Tom puts him down and picks up the guitar, asking for requests. Grace says Elvis.

  He plays “Viva Las Vegas” with exaggeration and Sam’s kid is laughing. Next minute, Georgie’s holding Callum’s hands and they’re swinging around the kitchen.

  “You’ll hurt yourself,” Grace laughs, because all of a sudden Georgie is fragile in her mother’s eyes. If she had known it would have taken a pregnancy to get her mother to notice her she would have got knocked up years ago.

  Later, Sam comes inside while Callum is hovering by Georgie’s side.

  “Sit,” Sam orders.

  Callum sits. So do the dogs.

  Sam begins to set the table, which is only built for six and not seven, and then Dominic comes in and the men begin talking collective bargaining and union stuff. Georgie puts the finishing touches on the cake and Sam’s kid is there again, knowing there’s one more spoon to lick.

  “Callum, sit,” Sam says. “You’re getting in Georgie’s way.”

  No, not getting in Georgie’s way at all, Sam. You are, she wants to say.

  They sit crowded around the table and Dom ends up standing by the window to eat.

  “We’ll have to get a bigger one,” Georgie says.

  Tom mumbles something about a table.

  “What?”

  He looks up, his face stiffening under everyone’s questioning looks.

  “There’s the one Dominic made on Temple Street.”

  No one speaks. Dominic had built that table for Grace, so her children and daughter-in-law and grandchildren and Joe’s Ana Vanquez could fit around it perfectly when they all came down to Albury for holidays two years before.

  “Well, where the fuck is it?” Bill asks, and Georgie avoids the look Sam’s sending her. She knows he doesn’t want anyone swearing in front of his kid.

  “In storage,” Tom says, because it was Tom and his mother and Georgie who had packed up the house that time when Dominic left.

  “Then we’ll have to get it out someday,” Grace says quietly. “So we can all fit.”

  Georgie takes the next day off to drive Grace and Bill to their check-ups because, according to Grace, “Dominic has things to do.” So Georgie takes them from the skin clinic to the heart specialist to the breast clinic to the podiatrist. In the car she listens to discussions about Dominic looking fuller in the face and the disgraceful Sydney traffic. Grace warns her she’s goin
g so fast that she’s almost kissing the car in front of her, and Bill tells her about the house for sale on their street in Albury. Bill has always believed that they’ll all miraculously decide to move down south and live in the same street happily ever after. Grace reminds Bill that Sam has a son and he would never be interested in moving down south, and Georgie reminds Grace that Sam is not in her life. Bill brings up Roger, the forty-five-year-old divorced optometrist, about five times. Bill hates Sam because when Bill dared to criticize the Labor Party, Sam called the Nationals a bunch of fuckwit whingers and then asked Bill politely not to swear in front of Callum. Bill had called the Greenies a swarm of arseholes, then Tom had asked what arseholes and bees had in common. It’s the type of communal stream-of-intellectual-Finch-Mackee-consciousness that used to cause her and Joe to laugh hysterically.

  She’d been here before with Joe a couple of years ago. He had reminded Bill that Roger, the optometrist, was a cross-dresser and that Georgie hated sharing anything, let alone her lipstick and shoes, so it was bound to end in a divorce where they’d be fighting over the boob-tube dress she wore to her Year Ten formal and the Jimmy Choo shoes she bought on eBay. That time both siblings had killed themselves laughing so much that Georgie was snorting. Grace had told them both to grow up. She said it to Joe affectionately, and to Georgie disapprovingly, before saying, “How old are you, Georgie?”

  By the time Georgie’s driving up Crystal Street, her heart is pumping blood at a rate that frightens her and she wants to be home, in her bed in her room, door locked. But one street away from sanctuary, a police booze bus stands in the way — random breath testing.

  “Could you count to ten, ma’am?” the cop, who looks approximately fifteen years old, asks. She wants to give him a lecture on how insulting it is to call someone ma’am. It makes her feel one hundred years old.

  “Have you had a drink today, ma’am?” he continues to ask.

  “No, but I’m planning on going home and getting shit-faced. Is that all right with you, Officer?”

  “Oh, Georgie,” her mother mutters.

  When they walk into the kitchen, Dominic looks up from what he’s reading. Georgie wants to rant and she does. He sits and listens, and then says quietly, “I could have taken them. You don’t have to be a martyr, you know, and do it all yourself.”

  “It’s good to see that the bastard streak still lives within you, Dom,” she snaps, shoving past him and her mother along the way. “You said you asked him first,” she accuses Grace, who follows her up the stairs, warning her about blood pressure and babies.

  “Dominic’s not an invalid, Mum.”

  Grace makes the sound that Georgie knows all too well. She used to call it “the Grace-full sigh of disappointment” but Dominic and Joe had no idea what Georgie was talking about because somehow Grace dared not express her disappointment in front of her sons. The sigh of disappointment was only dished out to Georgie and Bill.

  But worse still is the look she’s getting now. The Grace-full look of martyrdom.

  “Tomorrow we’ll take a taxi,” her mother says. “We don’t want to be disturbing anyone.”

  “But it’s okay to disturb me?”

  Next look, the Grace-full stare of hurt. The killer of all looks.

  Georgie takes a deep breath. “All I’m saying, Mum, is that you’re better off without me racing out of work and being a martyr,” she yells, so that Dominic can hear her. “Dominic’s home —”

  “Dominic has enough to worry about,” Grace says.

  “Don’t do that!” Georgie says. “You always do. ‘Poor Dominic has Tommy to care for,’ and then, ‘Oh, that poor Dominic, looking after Tommy and Anabel and Jacinta Louise and trying to juggle everything,’ or ‘Joe can’t be disturbed because Joe is studying,’ or ‘Leave him; Joe’s trying to have a social life.’”

  “You’re very emotional because of the baby, Georgie.”

  “No, I’m not!” she shouts with frustration. “All of a sudden, every other thing pales in comparison. I would have preferred you come to visit me when there was no baby. When I was dealing with what Sam did seven years ago, or having to cope with the decision to go to London to bring back Joe’s body, or worse still, coming home without it.”

  Mention of Joe was okay in her family. Mention of what happened to him was a no-no, but Georgie can’t stop herself.

  “And do you know what else I remember? When Joe died, Mum, all you could say was, ‘We have to go home to Albury. Bill’s suffering without his boy and he needs to go home.’ Two days you stayed with me and then you all went home. All of you. And left me here, on my own, to fix up everything, because everyone’s lives were bigger and their suffering was greater, because they had their own families to take care of and their own lives to put back together. But it was like I was worth nothing then, and now, all of a sudden because of this baby, everyone thinks Georgie needs help.”

  “I suffered for you when Sam —”

  “No, you didn’t. ‘You shouldn’t have let him go, Georgie. He wouldn’t have strayed if you didn’t let him go.’ That’s what you said to me and those words killed me more than anything.”

  “Oh, you’re a cruel girl, Georgie, to remember that over everything else.”

  In the kitchen, they can hear everything. Tom is trying to eat, but it’s cardboard in his mouth and his father is fixed on the newspaper in front of him while Bill is just staring. At nothing.

  “I’ve got to go to my meeting,” Dominic mumbles, standing up.

  “I’ll go with you.” This from Bill.

  Somehow it’s as if Tom is left with only two options in the world. Stay in the house with Georgie and Nanni Grace tearing each other’s hearts out or go to an AA meeting with his father and Bill. The alcoholics win. There’s something about a bunch of people clapping just for saying your name and admitting sobriety that works for him.

  Tom’s heard it too often in the movies to be touched by it. Now it just seems like a cliché. No one can say it with authenticity without it seeming like a joke.

  “Hi, my name’s Des and I’m an alcoholic.”

  Big clap. Clap. Clap.

  How great would it be if it applied to other things in his life?

  “Hi, my name is Tom and I dropped out of uni and spent the last year smoking weed and getting high.”

  Clap, clap, clap.

  “Hi, my name is Tom and I had a one-and-a-half-night stand with one of my best friends and I don’t have the guts to ask her how she felt about it.”

  Clap, clap, clap.

  “Hi, my name is Tom and I treated my friends who hung around to pick up the pieces like they were shit.”

  Clap, clap, clap.

  “Hi, my name’s Dominic . . .”

  Tom’s eyes swing up to the front of the hall, where his father is standing. For the first time in a year, he gets to look at him properly. So far he’s been passing him by in the corridor back in Georgie’s house or sitting around the kitchen table, but he hasn’t dared to look his way, in case there is prolonged eye contact.

  Tom finds out things he hasn’t had the guts to ask. His father hasn’t touched a drink for 150 days. Tom makes calculations, and it means Dominic’s been sober since March. Nothing momentous about March. No birthdays. No anniversaries. Nothing. He finds out that Dominic took his last drink in Wodonga on the New South Wales–Victoria border, which means that his father was staying with Nanni Grace and Bill at the time. He wonders if it was Bill who bullied his father out of bed every morning to join him on his daily jog.

  “I had been on a blinder for a couple of days and I woke up in a park,” his father continues. Tom’s heard his father make speeches hundreds of times. At home. In a meeting hall of irate builders. At a union rally. But his voice is different this time. Broken. “I remember the humidity and that I stunk and that I still had my wallet on me. This woman was there. A jogger . . . with a look on her face that makes me . . . I don’t know . . . Just thinking of it . . . People’s c
ompassion has always floored me. Despite all the shit in the world, people’s compassion never fails to surprise me. Anyway, she helped me up and she asked for permission to look into my wallet so she could help work out who I was and what to do, and while she was flicking through it, she came across a photo. She asked me who they were. And I looked at the photograph and I pointed to my wife and said, ‘That’s Jacinta Louise. She’s the love of my life,’” he says, and there are tears in his eyes. “Then I pointed to my baby girl and I said, ‘That’s Anabel. She’s in Year Eight and plays a mean trumpet.’”

  He stops, and finds Tom in the audience, and their eyes lock. “And then I pointed to my son.” There’s so much emotion in that one look. It tells Tom that his father stopped drinking because he loved him and that he was sorry and maybe for now he has to allow that to be enough. Tom could move on with that knowledge. That Dominic Finch Mackee gave up drinking for his son, Tom.

  “And I couldn’t remember his name,” his father said, his voice hoarse. “I couldn’t remember my boy’s name. And that was the first day . . .”

  Tom doesn’t hear the rest. He feels as if someone’s just punched him in the gut. He thinks he hears a sound from his grandfather. Thinks he even feels Bill’s hand on his shoulder. He wants to be back in the house where Georgie and Nanni Grace are fighting about the fact that once upon a time Dominic couldn’t look after his parents and his sister because he was too busy looking after his son.

  He doesn’t remember much after that except there’s a bit of a collection to cover basic costs and then they serve tea, coffee, and biscuits. His father speaks to almost everyone in the hall. They gravitate to him the way people always have. And they all want to meet Tom. To tell him that even though they’ve only known Dominic a couple of weeks, they all love him. Does his father do it on purpose? Cause people to have a dependency on him so that when he’s gone, it’s hard to cope?

  The three of them walk home in silence. It’s not Tom’s night to work, but he splits from them at the corner without a word and goes into the pub. He knows, with a satisfaction born of bitterness, that his father won’t follow him into the Union.