The Piper's Son

The string slices into the skin of his fingers and no matter how tough the calluses, it tears.

But this beat is fast and even though his joints are aching, his arm’s out of control like it has a mind of its own and the sweat that drenches his hair and face seems to smother him, but nothing’s going to stop Tom. He’s aiming for oblivion.

And he hears them holler his name because the song’s ended and he’s still going, strumming strings to their foundations. And suddenly the room is spinning and when he hits the ground, headfirst off that table, his life doesn’t flash before his eyes because Tom can’t remember his life. Can’t remember the last year, anyway.

But then memory taunts him and he’s back at that cemetery where they’re burying his uncle in an empty grave. And Nanni Grace is there alongside his step-grandpop, Bill, and Auntie Georgie and Tom’s dad, and they’re all just dead inside. Georgie says it’s what happens to you when you bury your little brother. Nanni Grace says it’s what happens when you bury your youngest son. Tom’s dad says nothing.

Beyond where they stand, there’s another empty grave that belongs to them. Of someone even younger than his uncle Joe.

“It’s what I’ve been doing for most of my life, Tommy,” Nanni Grace tells him. “Burying the men in my family in empty coffins.”

She’s always said it’s why they have the right to own the world. Because their family’s blood is splattered all over it. Long Khanh, Vietnam. That Tube station in London. Different types of wars, someone else’s fight, but it’s the Finches and the Mackees who have paid.

When he opens his eyes, he’s four years old again and his dad clicks the seat belt into place. “We’re on our way, mate,” Dominic Mackee says, like he does every single time they go through the ritual. For a moment their hands touch and it turns into “This Little Piggy
.”

And Tom feels like he’s flying.

Because he and the piper are on their way.

He’s just Tom.

“Thomas Finch Mackee?”

The everyman with the most overused name.

“Come on, mate. Try to keep awake,”
the voice says.

Even the Bible was hard on them. The doubter who didn’t trust his band of brothers and had to see the proof for himself to believe. He never liked that story. It made the Toms in history look piss-weak.

“Thomas? Is it Thomas or Tom? Come on, mate. Keep your eyes open.”

In Year Eleven, the girls knew him as Thomas because it was the name they heard at roll call. Took years to get them to call him Tom. At home, it became a game within the family. Another day, another Tom.

“Tom Thumb, what’s the story, little man?” his uncle Joe would ask him.

And when he was seven and they lived down the road from Georgie’s place on Northumberland Street, she’d come over for dinner and make him do Tom Jones impersonations in front of the family, twisting with him as she held both his hands while he sang “What’s New Pussycat?” in a Welsh accent that always had his mum, Jacinta, and Georgie killing themselves laughing until they almost wet their pants.

Then came Peeping Tom and
Tom Sawyer
and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
and Little Tommy Tucker and “Tommy Trot, a Man of Law.” The Toms in literary history had let him down and he hated them all. They were all a bunch of Prufrocks. He wanted his name to be Huck. Or Ishmael. Yossarian would do just fine.

“Tom?”

Different voice. A nurse. He can tell because she sounds like Sister Terri from
All Saints.

“Tom, can you hear me? You’re at the hospital,
Tom.
Your friend is here to collect you.”

Let it be her.

Has he said those words out loud? Tom thinks he’s said her name, anyway. Hasn’t seen her for two years, but he prays that she’s come to collect him because Tom needs collecting. Because he can’t get her out of his mind. Sees her every time he closes his eyes. Sees the thousand things about her that turned him on. There was that lopsided way she walked because the satchel of her uni books weighed her down, and there was the fringe that covered her eyes, and no matter how many times he looked into them, he couldn’t tell if they were green or brown, just somewhere in between. She told him once that the girls convinced her to do stuff with her hair. Foils, she called them, and he didn’t understand foils, so she showed him using tin foil and he thought,
How bloody stupid,
until he saw what the foils did to her hair, all gold mixed with brown, and the way it was cut jagged around her chin, making her look scruffy one minute and cool the next.

It amazed him how they went from being best mates and just hanging out to having a bit of eye contact that lasted just a tad too long, turning their relationship into all things confusing. It had happened that time they were watching a band at the Sando with some of his mates from uni. He had stood with his arms around her and his chin resting on the top of her head. Nothing new about that. They were a tactile bunch, all of them. But she leaned back to say something and that was it. Again. And he couldn’t let go. Not when they were sitting at the Buzz Bar in Newtown having a hot chocolate and his hands were playing with hers and she was letting them play, and not when they were crossing King Street to go back to one of the guys’ houses in Erskineville and he was holding her hand and she was letting him, and he knew that if he tried to kiss her, she’d let him. But he didn’t.

He was never afraid when it came to girls.

Unless it was Tara Finke.

When the nurse calls out his name again and he opens his eyes, Francesca Spinelli is sitting there, wearing fifty emotions on her face like she always did when they were at school together. He doesn’t tell the nurse that she’s lying. They’re not friends. He has no idea how the hospital even tracked her down. These days his contact with her is limited to the unavoidable once or twice a week they cross each other’s path at the Union, one of those incestuous inner-west pubs where everyone ends up drinking or working. And you know how it happens. One day you pass strangers by and think,
I used to hang out with them.
But that was a world before dropping out of uni and parents splitting and two nights of everything with a girl whose face you can’t get out of your head and relationships falling apart and favorite uncles who used to call you Tom Thumb being blown to smithereens on their way to work on the other side of the world.

Talk of Francesca these days is frequent among his flatmates. Two of them work with her, and most nights Tom is subjected to rants and tirades about the “wack job” in charge of the rosters at the pub. Tom walks away each time because the moment the insults enter his ears, he’ll be an accessory, and he’s never in the mood to come to her defense just because he spent three years almost surgically attached to her and the others. And Tara Finke.

Tom’s always enjoyed being a coward like that.

But here Francesca sits calmly by his bed, clutching his backpack, and he hates her for that look in her eye. Compassion. Empathy. It’s a killer. It disarms you when you least want to be disarmed. After his uncle Joe’s death, two years ago, he hated looking at any of their faces. Tears constantly welling up in their eyes. “How are you, Tom?” they’d ask, and he’d want to tell them to shut the hell up and stop asking questions. It’s what he’s enjoyed most about living with his flatmates this past year. They drink, they smoke their weed, they play their music, they have no ties with whomever they have sex with, and the days pass in a pleasant haze where nobody analyzes how he feels, how he’s supposed to feel, how he’ll feel the next day, how he feels about the present, which is shaped by the past, which will impact on the future. With his flatmates, Tom just exists.

“I’ll drive you back to my place, Tom,” Francesca says. “My parents are overseas, so you don’t have to talk to anyone and you can just rest.”

He doesn’t respond.

“The nurse says you should try to stay awake because they’re worried about the concussion. You’ve got ten stitches because you fell into a glass.”

“I’m going home,” he mutters, holding a hand to the bandage on his head. He stares down at his fingers, which are taped. “But if you can drop me off at the Union, I need to get the key to the flat from Zac and Sarah,” he says, referring to his flatmates.

“They’re not there,” she says quietly.

“Then they’ll be home. Drop me there.”

He still hasn’t looked at her properly. Sometimes back in high school they’d compete over who could stare each other out. Francesca was hopeless. She would fail in the first five seconds, every single time. Tara Finke held out the longest, for three minutes most times, and something always happened between him and Tara in the thirty-third second that felt like a punch to his gut. He didn’t get what it meant back then.

“Stani had to let them go, Tom,” Francesca says. “Both of them.” Her voice is firm as though she’s prepared for his reaction. “They never turn up on time and I always have to cover for them and do double shifts. They didn’t even tell us you had an accident, Tom.”

“Why would they?” he snaps, sitting up. “Are you my next of kin?”

He grabs his backpack from her, fumbles through it for his phone, and rings Sarah’s number. It goes straight to voice mail, so then he tries Zac, but no one picks up.

“And anyway . . .” Francesca continues, but he blocks her out. For someone who was a basket case the first six months they knew her, she turned out to be the most resilient and coordinates the rest of the girls with an efficiency born of a hidden Fascist gene. “She’s Mussolini’s bastard child,” he once confided to Jimmy Hailler, the only other male in their group at the time.

“. . . the being stoned thing got a bit boring,” she finishes.

He wants to hit someone. “So you sacked them because they smoke dope?”

He’s out of bed and standing over her. Although there’s alarm on her face and a little bit of fear, she doesn’t move away.

“I don’t give a shit what they do, Tom, except when they don’t turn up to a shift and Justine has to come in when she needs to be at a gig,” she says fiercely. “Each to their own. They can stick whatever they want up their nose, down their throat, and up their arse.”