The Piper's Son (12 page)

He travels home by bus most days, because the trip is ten minutes longer and most of his time is spent trying to avoid being on his own or trying to not look like he’s on his own. MP3 players are perfect because the sight of someone walking the streets listening to music means something totally different from someone staring into blank space. It’s the joy of smoking for him. Isolation doesn’t have to be explained when you’re leaning against a brick wall with a cigarette in your hand. Rolling your own is better. It takes more time, and Tom has all the time to spare.

And what keeps him going is the number one next to his in-box when he clicks on the address
anabelsbrother,
or when he takes over the ranking of the footy-tipping competition at work from a guy who left and susses out that Mohsin the Ignorer is at the top, with Tom catching up, or when he listens to Francesca Spinelli trying to get a chord right, or to Justine whispering to Ned the Cook about the next installment of her love for a guy called Ben who plays a violin and doesn’t know she exists. Or it’s Georgie’s voice calling out to him from her bedroom as he climbs the stairs to the attic every night. Sometimes when he comes home and he aches for the sound of something more than a “Hey, Tommy,” he lies on her bed and they keep each other company. They talk about Anabel and how much they both miss her and Great-Aunt Margie, Tom Finch’s sister, who’s a nun way out west. And it always comes down to Tom Finch and the veterans and how every time the phone rings, they think it’s the government giving them the news that even after forty years none of them is prepared for. And they talk about Joe. Of the time when Tom was in Year Eleven and he half moved in with them. Because it’s hard not to talk about Joe, with the ugly armchairs and banana chairs and LP collections and photographs constantly reminding them.

“He was crazy mad for your father, you know,” Georgie tells him one time. “And Dom would have done anything for him. When you were born, Joe was in Year Nine boarding at Saint Sebastian’s, and your dad used to ring up and impersonate Bill to get him out of school most weekends. Anytime Joe wanted to be picked up or taken somewhere, Dom would do it.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Tom wonders if they’re thinking the same thing. Dom would pick up Joe anytime, but not that final time. Not Joe’s body from London.

“Once when Joe was at uni, he ended up in the lockup at Stanmore police station because he and his dickhead friends got drunk and stole a street sign. So he rings your father and he starts making up the lyrics to Paul Kelly’s ‘How to Make Gravy.’ But instead of singing,
‘Hello Dan, it’s Joe here,’
he sang,
‘Hello Dom, it’s Joe here.’
”

“Then he sang about every member of the family. Your auntie Margie Finch coming down from Queensland and your mum’s family coming from the coast, and he was bellowing out, ‘Who’s going to make the jelly?’ instead of the ‘gravy.’”

Tom can’t help chuckling, no matter how many times he’s heard that story.

“He reckons even the cops were killing themselves laughing,” she says.

“He taught me the chords to that song, you know,” Tom says. “‘It’s a love story, Tommy,’ he told me. ‘It’s a love story between Dan and Joe and every member of their family.’”

He turns on his side to face her, leaning on his elbow.

“Remember when we used to come downstairs and get you to choose who did the best Joe Satriani?”

“Oh, bloody Joe Satriani,” she said.

“And that time you couldn’t stand it anymore and you bunked in with Anabel down at our place and Joe got me out of bed in the middle of the night and we played Satriani’s ‘If I Could Fly’ under her window so you’d think you were having a nightmare.”

The bed shakes for a long time from their silent laughter.

“Be honest. Who did the best Joe Satriani?” he asks.

Before she can answer, she grabs his hand and presses it against her stomach and he’s about to tell her he doesn’t want to feel the baby, but her hand is trembling. Next minute he’s laughing and saying, “Oh, shit.
Shit,
” and she’s pressing his fingers in deeper and he’s saying, “You’ll hurt it, Georgie.”

Other times they just listen to each other’s music.

“What’s this one?” she asks one night while they’re sharing earphones.

“‘Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors,’” he tells her, turning it up louder.

Georgie makes him listen to stuff that she doesn’t play when she’s out in the real world. There’s a whole lot of Regina Spektor, who sings about a guy called Samson being her sweetest downfall. Tom becomes a closet fan and listens to it secretly in his attic. He wonders if it’s the type of stuff Tara would have written if she had to write music about their relationship.

Other times the door’s shut and he wonders if Sam’s in there.

Every other moment of his day is a reminder of Tara Finke. When he watches his fingers tap at the keyboard, he remembers her thing about hands. Her own, others, everyone’s. It was one of the paradoxes about the very practical Tara Finke. Decides to extend her studies where she’ll have her hands in dirt, but has an obsession with manicures. Her school backpack was always sure to contain a manicure set and papaya hand cream. She rubbed it onto his hands one day in Year Eleven, feeling the texture of his fingertips, callused by the strings of his guitar, and his palms, rough from woodwork.

“Productive, despite your lazy streak,” she had said, inspecting them.

Some days he e-mails her stuff he knows she’ll find funny, like a “Vote Pedro” link because they both had a
Napoleon Dynamite
obsession. No one else in the group got it. Tom’s favorite impersonation was of Napoleon Dynamite running away, all arms and legs flailing. “It’s not even funny,” they’d say, but Tara Finke would be crying with laughter every single time. Back then, they’d send each other links all the time, trying to come up with the smartest. His favorite was “Survivors of childhood subjugation to watching
The Bill.
” Both Tom and Tara Finke belonged to a one-television household, a strange type of abuse at the hands of parents obsessed with noncommercial television. In most other ways they were different. She didn’t do toilet humor; he loved it. She hated epic fantasy; he hated anything with big Victorian frocks, no matter how much cleavage. Once she made him watch
Pride and Prejudice
and for ages he would reword Mr. Bingley’s apology to Jane Bennet, saying, “I’ve been an inexplicable fool,” for anything from losing his keys to burping out loud. Her reply to anything she wanted to do was Jane Bennet’s response to Bingley’s marriage proposal: “A thousand times yes.”

One afternoon in his in-box he sees her name:
taramarie.
The Nazi who collects footy tips every Friday afternoon tells him he has thirty seconds to hand them in, but he hasn’t even started on them yet. His eyes are fixed on the screen, his heart is hammering, and finally, with shaking fingers, he presses the in-box and sees words typed in the most ridiculous font.

What. A. Bitch.

“It’s only four thirty,” Stani says to him one day when he walks into the kitchen and puts on his apron and begins pulling the glasses out of the washer.

He shrugs. Francesca’s in the back room practicing and Justine’s doing an essay at one of the tables in the main bar, so it’s not as if he’s the only one who has nowhere else to go.

Ned walks in as well, his face reddening instantly when he sees Stani. Ned is intimidated by anyone who speaks or looks at him, except for Francesca and Justine. And Tom. There’s nothing about Tom that intimidates Ned.

“You’re early,” Stani barks.

Ned nods in agreement and then goes to the freezer to get the meat out.

Whether Ned wants him to or not, Tom begins chopping up the salad items just to keep himself occupied. Francesca’s voice travels to where they’re working silently.

Ned stops seasoning the meat and closes his eyes for a moment, before walking to the door.

“’Cause nothing counts unless you’re here.
/
Shake these shackles, I might tear,”
he calls out to her before returning to the sink bench.

“I have an aversion to rhyme,” he explains, as if Tom’s asked.

Francesca’s practicing on the banjo today. Tom likes how it sounds.

“She watched
Shut Up and Sing
and thinks she’s one of the Dixie Chicks.”

Ned’s on a roll. He does that sometimes. Explains stuff out of the blue. It’s usually about the girls, and, inspired by Mohsin the Ignorer, Tom pretends he’s not interested.

She begins singing again:

Ned grunts with satisfaction. Tom stops chopping and thinks for a moment before walking to the door.

“’Cause nothing counts unless you’re here.
/
Shackles bind me, I walk free,”
he calls out.

He walks back to the sink. Ned stares at him questioningly, shaking his head. “Doesn’t make sense.”

“When he’s home, she’s unbound from the shackles constructed by her loneliness and so she walks free,” Tom explains before going back to the chopping.

“Whereas I think that if she doesn’t shake the shackles, she is so fragmented and fragile that she’s like a piece of . . .”

“Tissue paper?” Tom suggests.

Ned nods. “That can tear.”

She tries it again with Tom’s chorus.

“I think they’ve had a mini argument long distance,” Ned explains. “She’s okay with tattoos in ode to her, but apparently he got pissed with the engineers while they had a day’s leave and piercing took place. One to the eyebrow and the other . . . she won’t say.”

Tom looks at him with disbelief. “Will Trombal? Piercing? In places she won’t say?”

Justine walks in and has an anxious little chatter with Ned the Cook in the corner. When Tom walks toward them to empty the scraps from the cutting board, they stop speaking for a moment.

“It’s not as if I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mutters.

“We’re not talking about you, if that’s what you think, Thomas,” Justine says patiently.

He goes back to his chopping but doesn’t let it go. “I’ll make you a two-trillion-dollar bet I know what it’s about.”

She stands with her arms folded, waiting. Tom and Justine always used to make bets in the trillions and billions, mostly about music trivia and chords, and Justine could never resist taking up the challenge. There’s a hint of a smile on her face.

“Go on,” she says.

“You’re probably in love with some musician at the Con. And we all know how that’s panned out in the past. One whole year of having a secret crush you’ve told no one about and now you’ve entered the second year, where you talk about him and do nothing about it. Next year you’ll be analyzing the way he says, ‘Hi, Justine.’ Hopefully by the Beijing Olympics — no, the Olympics they’ll one day have in Afghanistan — you’ll have exchanged mobile numbers.”

She stares at him drolly and then gives Ned the same look.

Francesca walks in at two minutes to five, ready for her shift. And the news. “Why’s everyone standing around?” she asks, fiddling with the radio.

“Because Thomas is a smart-arse,” Justine says. “He reckons I’m not going to get Ben the Violinist’s phone number until Afghanistan has the Olympics.”

He’s ready for the onslaught. Daring to hurt the feelings of one of the sisterhood was punishable by a death stare. Tara Finke’s was the deadliest, but Francesca’s was the closest by seconds.

“What timeline did I give it?” Francesca asks.

“2025,” Ned informs her. “You said she would probably be taking Ben the Violinist on their first date to your fortieth birthday.”

“Mock me all you like, but this guy’s not shy. He’s just not into me,” Justine says. “He doesn’t even know I exist.”

“His name’s Ben,” Francesca says to Tom, as if he’s asked. “And he’s twenty-one and he’s a violinist and he’s from the Riverina and he has a very, very dry sense of humor and he lives in Waterloo with a bunch of mates, and when he plays the violin, he keeps his eyes closed and this one time he opened them and the first thing he did was catch Justine’s eye. And then he winked. So now she says it’s their song.”

Tom makes a sound as if he’s sobbing and he covers his heart with his hand.

“And she just has to build up her courage and let him know how she feels,” Francesca says.

It’s always been the same with Justine. She was the most comfortable in her own skin of all of them, and since they left school, she was the one with the biggest social life outside their group, totally at ease with guys. Unless she’s madly in love with them.

Stani pokes his head in. “Are we on strike?”

Justine follows him out, and Tom walks over to the radio and turns it off in the middle of the second news story, which is about some freight train crashing into a passenger train in California. Francesca switches it back on, staring at him with irritation until he switches it back off again.

“It’s nowhere close to where your people are,” he tells her quietly. “Seeing you’ve got the original out of the way, what will the cover song for the Blessed Pierced One be?” he adds.