The Piper's Son (17 page)

Georgie watches as he focuses on the merry-go-round in front of them. She shivers. It always looks creepy at night without kids playing on it.

“And I didn’t get what she meant,” he says. “At first I thought it was about me walking out on Tom six weeks after she took Anabel away. I thought it was about the drinking, but then something told me that it was more than that. And I’ve spent this whole time trying to work it out. How far back do I go?”

His head is in his hands and sometimes he’s muffled and she has to lean closer to hear him.

“And I went all the way back to when we were twenty,” he says, his voice still bitter. “Four generations of housing commission and welfare, and Jacinta Louise, the wonder girl, wins a scholarship to Sydney Uni from the western suburbs of Brisbane, and two and a half years in, I get her pregnant.”

“Oh, Dom, don’t do this,” Georgie mutters.

“I remember the look on her parents’ faces when they drove down.
Shit,
Georgie. She was one of five girls to make it to Year Eleven at her school, because everyone else got knocked up or were off their faces on drugs by the time they were fourteen. Even the nuns wouldn’t let her out of their sight. And I swore to them all, on my family’s honor, that I wouldn’t let her drop out of uni and that I’d take care of everything. For years people would go on about how I threw it in so my wife could finish her degree. I was Mr. Wonderful.”

He shakes his head with disbelief.

“You know what I think, Georgie? That I wanted to throw it in. And worse still, she didn’t want all that. Not with a baby on the way. We made the plans, but no one asked Jacinta Louise what she wanted. What if all she wanted was to be at home with her boy?”

He looks at her for the first time, his expression so pained as he rubs his hands over his mouth. “While I was telling her to get the baby on the bottle because it wouldn’t work if she was still breastfeeding him. So it makes sense that six months ago, she’s crying on the phone, Georgie, and I heard the anger when she said,
‘If you take this decision away from me, like you did before, I’ll never forgive you for Tom.’”

Georgie closes her eyes. She wants to be one of those ventriloquist dolls and have someone put the right words in her mouth.

“Okay,” she acknowledges. “Maybe. But she’s my best friend, Dom, and we’ve covered every conversation there is to cover over the last twenty-two years. Believe me, I know things about your sex life that I should not know.”

He glances at her and she almost laughs at the look of horror.

“But Jacinta’s said it to me before. That she was never happier than the time when we all lived in that dump in Camperdown after Tommy was born. And how your uni mates couldn’t grasp the fact that you weren’t studying law anymore and they spent most of their time with us in that mad house listening to Joy Division and the Pretenders and drinking and having arguments about politics and religion, and how we’d watch
Rage
every Sunday morning and then we’d wrap up Tommy and go to Mass. And if it wasn’t for the fact that she hadn’t met Anabel Georgia yet, she’d want to go back to those years and not move an inch. Because she had her gorgeous boy and you.”

She presses a kiss to his arm. “Jacinta loved that she got to use her brains, Dom, and she loved that Tom and you were inseparable for those years. ‘Better than men who don’t get to know their kids,’ she’d say. Don’t take that away from yourself just because of what’s happened in the last two years.”

He’s still stooped over and she puts her arms around his back and leans her head against him. They stay like that for a while.

“So what’s the deal with you and Sam?” he asks later.

“So what is the deal with me and Sam?” she asks tiredly. “Are you shocked?”

“Who wouldn’t be? It’s amazing.”

“The baby?”

“No. I just can’t get over your boobs.”

She laughs and sits up, looking down at them.

“Aren’t they fantastic? B cup and growing.”

“You don’t get to keep them. You know that, don’t you, G?”

And then she’s laughing some more, because that’s the closest she’s got to hearing Dominic’s real personality. The dry drawl in his voice. The shit-stirrer extraordinaire.

“I’m going to breast-feed this kid until he’s in kindergarten.”

He pulls her gently to her feet and they cross the road, looking up at the front veranda. “Have you seen the way he looks at me?” Dominic asks quietly. She knows he’s talking about his son.

They walk up the steps of the terrace, where Tom sits smoking a cigarette in the dark, putting it out quickly before she gets to him.

“Don’t leave butts in my potted plants,” she says firmly.

“You’ve killed them all anyway,” he mutters, but she catches the relief in his eyes and holds out a hand to him, which he grips for a moment before she goes inside, their fingers lingering like she’d let them when he was a kid.

When Tom can hear her safely in the kitchen, he looks up at his father.

“Is she okay?”

Dominic shrugs. “For the time being.”

“Sam rang. He’s really pissed that you took her to . . . a meeting.”

“What did he say?”

“I recall the letter
c
and the letter
u
and the letter
n
and the letter
t
and lots of
f
s and
k
s. It will filthy up my mouth to repeat the words.”

Tom doesn’t know why he says that. It’s what his mum would say when she had to repeat someone’s swearing, and his father would laugh every time. The princess, they would call her. But the princess packed her bags and took Anabel with her and told his father not to come near them until he had been sober long enough not to remember his last drink. “And if you break that rule, I’ll file for divorce and you’ll have to see your daughter through a court order,” she had said. But she still added “my love” to it. So his father stayed away all this time, and now Tom thinks he’s doing it all wrong. In the movies, the guy gets sober and goes straight back to reclaim his family, like something out of a Paul Kelly song. He doesn’t hide in his sister’s house, still avoiding the world.

Sometimes Tom wants to break into his father’s room and search it. Does he hide his booze there? Did he get up there tonight at his meeting and say, “Hi, my name’s Dominic and I’m an alcoholic and I’ll never drink again because I love my family too much to screw up again”?

They walk into the house and his father shuts the door behind them.

“She hasn’t eaten all week,” Tom says quietly. “She’s going to go straight up to her room. Do something.”

He doesn’t know why he says that either. Why he thinks his father will be able to do anything. But he follows Dominic into the kitchen, just because it’s instinctive.

“Can you make us something to eat, Georgie?” he hears his father say.

It’s about eleven thirty and he hears the beep of a horn. At first he thinks it’s random, but Tom knows that horn well and peers outside the tiny window and sees the Valiant first and then Justine and Francesca jogging on the spot to keep warm. They’re dressed up, he can see that. It’s what they used to do years ago with Tara and Siobhan. Beep the horn and he’d have to determine in a split second, by the way they were dressed, where they were all off to. One minute’s notice. Tonight he has no reason to respond, because their lives aren’t like two years ago, but Francesca and Justine aren’t budging, so he grabs a pair of jeans and collared shirt.

Five minutes later, he’s out of the house, and without a word, Justine and Francesca get back into the car and he hops in after them. They end up in some warehouse nightclub in Rosebery for a schoolmate’s twenty-first. He hasn’t seen the school crowd since the last of the eighteenth birthdays. The moment they step inside, Justine and Francesca are kidnapped by Anna Nguyen and Eva Rodriguez, off to the dance floor where he knows they’ll spend the rest of the night. He ends up out back with some of the guys, smoking. Someone hands him the bottle of Johnnie Walker doing the rounds and he shakes his head. If there’s one thing that makes him sick to the stomach, courtesy of Dominic Mackee, it’s the smell of whiskey.

“When your uncle died, I felt it here, bro,” Shaheen says, thumping his chest.

“Same,” Travis says.

It gets too intense and someone brings up football. Tom’s relieved to be talking about something that has rules and purpose, and next minute they’re arguing and everyone’s calling each other pussy and dickhead and boofhead and turd with such affection that it almost brings tears to his eyes. Later, he goes inside and ends up on the dance floor with the girls and it’s hazy and sweaty and he doesn’t have to think; he just has to feel the bass inside him. It’s what he always had with Francesca and Justine. They were uninhibited when it came to music and sometimes the three of them had a tune inside their head that no one else could hear, and tonight it’s there between them and they’re fucking the space with their bodies.

In the early hours of the morning, a bunch of them drive to Maroubra Beach like they used to when they were at school. The last time they were all here together was after graduation night, with their dates. Tom thought Tara was making a statement because she hadn’t asked anyone to be hers. He had been going out with one of the Year Elevens who seemed keen, but that night he couldn’t keep his eyes off Tara Finke and he knew she felt it. They drove around the city with Tom as their designated driver, planning to stay the night on the beach, where there was too much drinking and too much emotion among all of them. Will Trombal and Francesca had been apart because he’d graduated the year before and had been overseas for most of that year. Despite Francesca’s rule that they were going to take it slowly, the two couldn’t keep their hands off each other. And he remembered the water that night and how warm it felt and Jimmy doing a nudie run along the beach, and then they all stripped down to underwear and even now, looking at how rough the surf is, he can’t believe they went in, the others were so tanked. But in the darkness that night he knew exactly where to find Tara. He hadn’t realized he was looking until his hand snaked out and grabbed her, their mouths connecting and tongues taking over while his brain was saying,
Danger, danger, Will Robinson.
His mouth had been everywhere, hands with minds of their own . . . fingers . . . his . . . hers . . . scratching, searching, kneading.

“Tom!”

Until his date’s voice rang out through the night and Tara pushed him away. And she was crying. His one claim to fame, he thinks. Being able to make Tara Finke cry. All he could say the next day was, “Sorry about last night.
Shit.
What was that?” Like he didn’t know, the weak bastard that he was.

He feels someone against his shoulder and it’s Francesca calling his name again.

“You’re getting your jeans wet,” she says, and he walks up the sand with her to where Justine’s sitting on the hood of the car under one of the streetlights. This place isn’t exactly the best spot to be hanging out on a Saturday night if you’re not a local, but it’s like they couldn’t even be bothered being scared.

He lights a cigarette and sits between them.

“Stani’s going to have to find a new dish-pig if you don’t come back,” Justine says.

“He was actually thinking of promoting you to glassy,” Francesca adds.

“Oh, my God. Then what am I going to do about the job offers from Bill Gates and Donald Trump?”

“Tell them the Union’s a better gig,” Francesca says. “It’s where you need to be.”

He can’t speak because it’s like there’s something in his throat, but these two have learned the art of silence and they stay there until some shifty-looking guys come along and it’s time to go.

And as quietly as they arrived to pick him up, they drive back over the Anzac Bridge and drop him off in front of Georgie’s, just as the sun begins to appear.

“You don’t have to play,” Francesca says, “but we’re running out of time for our compilation and we need lyrics. Think about it.”

He gets out of the car and waits for them to pull away. His stomach’s churning and he realizes that it’s a subconscious thing, seeing Francesca and Justine. That he was always used to seeing Tara with them, and he wonders if he thinks of her more often because they’re around. He wants to hear her voice again, but he can’t bear the idea that she could be lying beside some guy, some pasty-faced soldier.

He turns when he hears a sound behind him and sees that it’s his father, preparing for his morning jog. Obsessive-compulsive to a T, Dom Mackee is.

His father looks at him closely as he passes him, and Tom realizes bitterly that the prick has the hide to be assessing whether he’s drunk or off his face on drugs. He wishes he was, so he could say, “Because of you.”

But neither says a word to each other, and it’s his father who puts the earphones in and looks away first.