The Piper's Son (2 page)

“I live with them,” he spits.

“I don’t care. They’re —”

But he holds up a hand to cut her off and grabs his clothes, which are hanging off the bed. “You’re everything they’ve ever called you behind your back, you stupid bitch,” he mutters.

“If you swear at me again, Thomas . . .”

“What?” he sneers. “You’ll tell Trombal? Where is he now? Last I heard, he was pissing off overseas to get away from you.”

Francesca takes a visible breath in front of him and picks up her bag and pushes past him. But she hesitates for a moment and turns back.

“For your information, your friends call me those names to my face. And they’re thieves as well. So while you guys were hanging out spending the money they were bringing in, take note that most of it came from Stani’s till at the Union.”

She shakes her head and there are tears in her eyes.

“I know you’re sad, Tom. But sometimes you’re so mean that I wonder why any of us bother.”

It’s dark outside, but Tom can’t see the time on the clock of his phone because the glass face cracked, presumably at the same time as his head. He rings the landline at the flat but is warned by a recorded message that he’s almost out of credit, so he hangs up before the answering machine sucks up what’s left. He has a hazy recollection of having topped up his phone card and can’t for the life of him remember where it’s all gone, but nothing seems to be making sense to him at the moment. He stops twice from the dizziness and sits on the brick fence that lines the hospital on Missenden Road, watching an ambulance drive in and offload some drunk that they’ve probably picked up off the streets. He clutches the phone, willing it to ring. For Zac and the guys to be pissed or high and start belting out, “Ground Control to Major Tom,” which got old a long time ago, but tonight he needs to hear it to make sure everything’s okay.

The moment he’s off the main road, a part of him panics. Although he’s close to home, where he stands there are no hospital lights to keep him alive to the world. He doesn’t want to collapse in the back streets of Newtown in front of one of these ugly flats, which according to his aunt should have been demolished the moment they were finished. His aunt Georgie has a strange idea of justice. Rapists, pedophiles, and architects of redbrick flats built in the 1970s all belong in the same jail cell. Out here tonight, under the dullest of moons, Tom feels as if he’s the last man on earth. Six blocks east from the home he grew up in. Three blocks south from the university he dropped out of a year ago. Four blocks north of the bed he shared with Tara Finke that last night together when life made sense for one proverbial minute, before everything blew up.

Outside his flat, the moon sheds light on the garbage strewn all over the front lawn, and it’s not until he’s up close that he realizes it’s not garbage at all. It’s his stuff. There’s not much of it, but he can’t believe they’ve left his guitar out here for anyone to pinch. Zac and the gang haven’t gone to the trouble of packing or asking questions about allegiance. They’ve just chucked everything over the balcony. It’s what happens when their only two sources of a steady income, notwithstanding a dole check or two, have just been sacked courtesy of someone who belongs to Tom’s past. He hammers on the security door, but no one answers and then he steps back to look up to the balcony.

“Sarah!”

Some nights she crawls into bed with him when she’s between boyfriends. She isn’t one to deal too well with her own company and who’s he to refuse if it’s on offer with no strings attached. He likes the fact that she can keep sentimentality and emotion out of it. Until now. He makes the mistake of believing that sex between them will make a difference.

“Sarah?”
he yells, and it almost breaks open his stitches to put that much effort into speaking. When no one answers except the guy on the top floor to tell him to shut the hell up, he goes back to his stuff on the lawn and crams some of his clothes in his backpack and begins to feel around in the dark. All he wants is his guitar and his
Norton Anthology.
But the photos usually tucked inside the poetry anthology are missing, probably scattered all over the grass, so he crawls around until he finds all three. He doesn’t know which one’s which, but knows he’s not leaving until he has them all. He grabs his guitar and tucks the photographs back into the book and then he heads back toward the hospital, weighing up his options. Georgie is the obvious one, but he knows he can’t turn up to his aunt’s place in the middle of the night with ten stitches in his head. She’ll ring Brisbane in an instant, and then he’ll have to deal with his mother’s anxiety. And so he realizes, with a lack of shame or guilt born of desperation, that he’ll call Francesca Spinelli because after tonight he’ll never have to see her again. There’ll be no hanging out at the Union now that his flatmates have been sacked. It’s a bed she can offer with no questions from her mother and father. He’s got enough credit for one more phone call and he rings her because he’s a prick. He knows Francesca will come and get him no matter what he said to her tonight. He knows she’ll expect nothing in return.

He’s outside the front of the Mobil petrol station ten minutes later, and once his body has been stationary for a while, the painkillers begin to wear off and the cold snaps at his bones. At this time of night, Parramatta Road looks like some sci-fi movie. Massive lights from the servos and traffic lights, and not one car to be seen except a ute coming toward him from Annandale. Which means Will Trombal is driving. Mostly Tom’s pissed off, except for a sliver of enjoyment in knowing that he’s probably disrupted Trombal’s night. There’s never been love lost between Tom and Francesca’s boyfriend. The filthy look that Trombal sends him and the five-minute drive of silence to Francesca’s house, while the three are squashed in the front seat, prove it.

When they get to her place, Francesca touches Will’s hand, and Tom watches as Will clenches hers. “I’ll just go unlock the door for him,” she says quietly, waiting for Tom to get out first. Will gets out as well and leans against the ute. Tom can’t see his expression in the dark, but he feels the bastard’s eyes drilling a hole into him. Will Trombal was in the next year up from them at school, and Tom can’t believe Francesca’s still with him after five years.

“Thanks.” Tom mutters the word. He doesn’t mean it but says it all the same.

“Don’t,” Trombal says quietly. “You’d still be out there, and I wouldn’t give a shit if you were bleeding all over Parramatta Road, if it was my choice. You know that.”

They have a quick verbal exchange but only get to cover the alphabet from A to F, outdoing each other with the most choice of words. Trombal kind of wins this round, courtesy of having hung out with engineers in Asia for most of the year. Then they’re shoving each other and Tom sees more emotion on the other guy’s face than he has in the years he’s known him. Francesca’s back between them, trying to push them apart, but it’s Trombal she’s facing and they start kissing in the middle of his fight —
they start kissing
— and it’s no longer about Tom, and he makes his way to the open front door, looking back once.

Trombal has her pressed against the door of the ute and they’re going at it like they’ve got no time left in this world together and Tom can hear that she’s crying and any time she comes up for air, Francesca’s saying, “Be careful, Will,
please,
” and Tom’s not an idiot to realize what he’s interrupted. Will Trombal’s some wunderkind in engineering, sponsored throughout his uni years by one of the top companies. Now Trombal’s taking a break from studying and it’s payback time, so he’s had to spend most of the year working offshore in Sumatra.

Francesca’s still crying when she comes inside and makes herself busy doing up the sofa bed for him in the lounge room.

“When’s he leaving?” Tom asks quietly, more out of the need for something to say than real interest.

“In the morning.”

“Go be with him, then. I’ll be fine.”

She fluffs up the pillow and throws it on the bed before looking up at him coldly.

“As if I’d leave you here with my little brother.”

Georgie makes a list. Her hand is steady as she writes and she nods and records. It’s part of the job description to stay neutral.

A Bosnian woman sits facing her. Georgie can see by the information on the form that they’re almost the same age, the woman maybe a year or two younger. The woman looks older, but so would Georgie if she had waved good-bye to her husband with the nylon tracksuit pants and her son with the Adidas shoes and her father with the wool sweater and her uncle with the gray parka and her cousin who loved a girl named
Sofya
and never saw them again. Sometimes the woman takes her hand and begins to weep, and Georgie lets her hold it while she continues to write. And when the woman lets go, Georgie wants to beg her to keep holding on. She wants to weep with her.

She’s not doing too well these days, although she’s only thrown up twice today. Earlier, while she was puking up morning sickness that doesn’t seem to discriminate between morning or afternoon, she made another list. She wants to stop making the lists, but she can’t. It’s become her little addiction, list making.

So she tries to call them rules. Ignore the first rule of not getting pregnant at forty-two because of the risks, because it’s not as though she planned this and it’s too late anyway. First real rule: no smoking. And no alcohol. Not even a glass of wine. Deformities, they say. No stone fruit. Not good for the baby’s intestines. And of course she’ll breast-feed. According to midwives, nothing beats the nutrients in breast milk because they keep the baby strong. Except if you live in Ireland, where ninety percent of them don’t breast-feed, so they must have strong immune systems to start with for some reason. She’ll sleep it on its tummy so it won’t die during the night from crib death. Or is the rule sleeping it on its back these days? And no pool. According to the stats, backyard drowning is the leading cause of injury for children under five, ahead of violence, poisonings, falls, burns, and motor-vehicle crashes. Of course her baby’s not sitting in the front seat because air bags can decapitate young children. She’ll vaccinate. She won’t give it peanuts. She’ll never leave it overnight at a friend’s because according to statistics ninety-five percent of all molestations happen at the hands of a family friend. There’ll be no Internet. Pedophiles are lurking everywhere. And she’ll holiday at home, thank you very much. No tsunamis here, or earthquakes.

And won’t he grow up to be the healthiest of young men, all because she kept him safe? Ready for the world. Ready to one day conquer it. To travel. Get on a train. Go to work. Get blown out of her life.

Maybe she should be having that glass of wine and cigarette after all.

The stone top step of his aunt’s front porch is cold under him, but Tom’s not budging. He’s got all the time in the world and nowhere else left to go. Across the road at the park, he can see people letting their dogs off the leash for that final run before they go home for dinner and lock out the world behind them.

He sees Georgie before she sees him. Coming up Percival Street from the station, and he can see it’s her ex, Sam, by her side. Georgie and Sam haven’t been together for seven years and they don’t look together now. Their bodies are stiff, their heads down. When they stop at the park across from him, Tom watches as Sam’s hand reaches out to Georgie for a moment, but he seems to stop himself and then she’s walking across the road toward the house and there’s that look Tom’s become used to in his life with his aunt. It’s the unconditional love that flashes across someone’s face before they remember the shit. Before they remember that their only nephew hasn’t made contact for months and that he’s a big prick. She can’t hide her joy for a moment, not Georgie, and Tom knows the instant she sees his stitches because she has a hand against her chest and the eyes give it all away. But that’s Georgie. Her pain was awful to watch the day they buried his uncle Joe, or whatever the hell you call it when you have a service with no body. Georgie’s grief was worse even than Nanni Grace’s, who refused to allow anyone to comfort her. “Take care of Bill,” Nanni Grace said over and over again because Tom’s step-pop was crying like nobody’s business. No one had ever seen Pop Bill cry. “Take care of Bill,” Nanni Grace said, “because he’s falling apart without his boy.”