The Piper's Son (22 page)

When they finish, Francesca groans about the ache in her arm and her brother gives her a massage.

“It’s like hanging out with the bloody Partridge Family,” Ned mutters, eating from a packet of chips. But he doesn’t leave and they rehearse the songs they’ve written, this time with Luca on drums, and before they know it, it’s past two.

Tom notices there’re a few missed calls from Bill. And a text from Georgie asking where he is.

He doesn’t want to tell her. Not to punish her, but because he wants his father to think he’s dead on the street somewhere.

He goes back to the Spinellis’ with Ned, and even when Francesca shows them the wedding dress she’s working on and her brother goes to bed vowing he’s not going to school in the morning Tom stays. Ned makes it as far as the explanation of calico.

“I’m yawning,” Ned says, leaving.

When Francesca talks beading, Tom puts up a hand.

“Frankie, not the beading. I don’t mind the bridezilla stories, or even the ones where your grandmother’s a bitch to clients with bad taste, but not the rest.”

“Will loves the beading stories.”

Will is such a big fat liar.

She’s grinning and he knows it’s because she’s thinking of Saint Trombal, patron saint of the anal-retentive, coming home soon.

“Is it true about the piercing and the
I love Frankie
tat?” he asks.

She rolls her eyes. “I blame the engineers for the piercing. They are such a bad influence. And I wouldn’t exactly call it an
I love Frankie
tat,” she adds with a laugh.

He makes himself comfortable, trying to shove the dog away, who’s hogging most of the couch.

“So aren’t you worried that he’s being unfaithful over there? Isn’t it an issue for you?”

She looks up at him. “That’s a pretty personal question.”

“What? I’ve never asked you a personal question before?”

She doesn’t reply.

“What would you do if he did the dirty on you?”

He thinks of Georgie and Sam and the way they haven’t really recovered from Sam being with someone else, regardless of the circumstances.

“I’d never take him back,” she says without hesitation. “If he was unfaithful, I wouldn’t. And I love him as much as I love my parents and brother, and you know how I feel about them. Will knows that. I’ve told him. That if he’s about to do something that will betray us, then to picture my face because it will be the very last time he ever sees it.”

There’s a look in her eye that tells Tom she’s not joking.

“Then how do you know he’s not lying to you when he says he hasn’t gotten up to anything?” he asks.

She gives a snort. “Have you seen his face?” she asks incredulously. “Everything’s stamped all over it. Every emotion he can’t articulate, because he’s so introverted is all there. Every time he’s lied to me, I’ve worked it out in a nanosecond.”

“So he lies to you? And you’re okay with that?” he asks with disbelief. It’s like he wants Francesca to conjure up every shit thing about Trombal. He doesn’t know what he’d do with Trombal-less Francesca, but he always liked it better when the other guy wasn’t around.

“What? You’ve never told a girl you have a family function on when it’s really the football?” she asks. “Will doesn’t do romance well. He doesn’t believe in Valentine’s Day, and if my birthday falls on a night when the Dragons are playing, we celebrate the next day.”

“Then what
does
he do well?”

She thinks for a moment, and it’s as if she’s never had to articulate it. “I told him at the beginning of the year that Tara was homesick. Just in passing. And you know, Will and Tara don’t really connect, but there they are, living a two-hour flight away from each other. So when he had a weekend free, he flew to Dili with some of the other guys and she met them there from Same. I swear to God, Tom, she went on and on for weeks about how great it was. And whenever Will’s home, he’ll go with my brother and my dad to a Sydney FC game and Will
hates
soccer, but the idea of my brother and father and Will hanging out together makes me so happy . . . and he’s found me the most unbelievable silk material in those tiny villages in Sumatra, and believe me, he hates shopping in market stalls anywhere in the world and the guys he works with give him a lot of shit when he does stuff like that.”

She looks at Tom. “And if I get a little chemically imbalanced in the head, like we all know I tend to get sometimes, and I don’t want my parents or brother knowing, Will’s like, ‘We’ll deal with it.’ He’s never said, ‘Snap out of it,’ and he’s never said, ‘I don’t get it,’ and he’s never said, ‘I’ll fix it up.’ He just says, ‘You’re not up to going back to uni to finish your Honors this year? Big deal. There’s next year. We’ll deal with it.’” She nods. “That’s what he does well.”

Tom doesn’t respond. He’s never asked about her depression in the past, just knew it was there like a big black blob over her head. In Year Eleven they thought it was a one-off because her mother had been sick, but he had seen it once or twice again. Francesca knew the signs and he could tell she fought it with everything she had inside of her. He didn’t want to think of Trombal fighting it with her. He didn’t want to like the other guy in that way.

“I’m going to marry him,” Francesca says with such certainty that it makes his head spin.

“Bet your mother’s jumping for joy,” he says dryly.

“She reckons she didn’t go to uni and get herself a master’s so her daughter could marry her first boyfriend and sit making wedding dresses with her grandmother in Leichhardt like Italian women did fifty years ago,” Francesca says. “But my mother keeps on forgetting that she did everything she wanted to do. Married my father. Went to university. Had a family. No one got in her way. All at our age now. And that’s what she taught me. To do what I want to do and stop having people telling me that I can’t marry Will because I’m too young and I haven’t seen the world or taken advantage of the choices out there. Who says we’re not going to see the world? Or that I won’t want to sew for the rest of my life, or that I won’t want to finish my Honors? Who says choice is better in ten years’ time when it comes to guys? Just say there are bigger dickheads out there?”

“But you’ve only had sex with one guy, I’m presuming. Don’t you want to try . . . something different?”

Francesca gives him that look again. “Tom, without going into great detail, Will and I are very,
very
compatible in that department.
Very.
”

He looks at her, trying to get his head around Will Trombal having sex.

“Very,”
she repeats.

“Enough,” he mutters. “I’m sick just thinking of it.”

She’s grinning.

“He feels the same way about you. When he left that next morning, he sent me a text saying,
If that ‘insert-C-word-here’ moves in while I’m away, I’ll kill myself.
”

“He wrote
insert-C-word-here
?”

“No. He used it. Capitals all the way.”

She’s looking at him as if he’s some insect under a microscope, as if she can truly see inside of him.

“Do you remember the first time we really . . . I don’t know . . . connected?” she asks. “You made me dance with you in drama class during one of Ortley’s ridiculous ‘freeing ourselves’ sessions.”

He nods.

“I asked you later why you got me to dance, and you said it was because . . .”

He nods again. “You always looked sad.”

“So did you, Tom. That’s why I took you up on it. Because back then, even before your uncle died, you looked as sad as I did. Except you were better at hiding it.”

He stands up, needing to get away. Sometimes he feels a pull toward Francesca. She was the reason he came into their group. It was her misery that united them, and somehow it ended up being her personality that kept them together when everyone split. She’s the one who writes the letters to keep the world informed. She listens to the news every hour to make sure everyone’s safe. So tonight he walks away even though she’s moved forward to give him a hug. Because he wants to kiss her, and knows she’ll hate him for it and that he’ll hate himself. He knows it’s for all the wrong reasons and that he’ll end up thinking of Tara Finke and her Brazilian peacekeeper and Will Trombal and the way he doesn’t do romance but eats the space between him and Francesca anytime he’s in the room with her.

Georgie is sitting in the kitchen when Tom comes home. It’s late, but she can’t sleep because her blood is dancing with anxiety over everything.

“Go to bed,” Tom says, doing that thing where he opens the fridge and stares at it for ages as if his favorite food is going to somehow appear miraculously.

“You know he’s not going to ask for your forgiveness, don’t you? But you know it’s what he desperately needs, Tommy.”

“Don’t,” he says coolly. “I don’t want to talk about him, Georgie.”

Bill’s at the kitchen door too and she wonders if anyone’s asleep tonight.

“If you say a word,” Tom says over the fridge door, addressing Bill, “I’m walking out the door and I’m not coming back.”

Despite Tom’s tone, he walks by, brushing a kiss on Bill’s head. Bill makes himself comfortable in front of her and she realizes, all too late, that it’s her he’s been listening out for and not Tom.

“She doesn’t ask Dominic to drive her to appointments, not because she thinks he’s busy or whatever she says . . . She doesn’t ask Dominic because she wants you to do it. It makes her feel safe to have
you
there,” he says quietly.

She doesn’t speak and when she can’t handle the silence anymore, she stands up.

“You don’t seem happy about the baby, Georgie.”

It shocks her to hear those words, coming from Bill. Like no one dared to announce her pregnancy, no one has dared to say those words.

“How can I be happy?” she asks with anguish. “To get this baby, my brother had to die. Do you understand?”

“And to get this family, my best friend had to die,” he says gruffly. “So aren’t we both a sorry pair?”

The next afternoon, she sits out back with Grace and Tom on the banana chairs. Callum’s there as well. It takes her a while to work out that the satchel buckle he has around his shoulder and the hat on his head and the cord from Bill’s dressing gown that he is using as a whip actually mean he’s Indiana Jones. She has no idea where Sam’s disappeared to, probably somewhere with Dom. It’s a good day for sun, and between her mother wearing Tom’s ridiculous sunglasses and Callum whipping the trees with the cord, Georgie is feeling happy for a change. Grace asks Tom about the women in his life and he just grunts.

“I’ll organize a novena for you when I get back to Albury,” Grace says.

“What are you going to pray for?” he asks. “That I get lucky with the girl I want? And just say I do? We’ll end up having sex. Will the novena people at your church like that?”

“Now you’re being silly and making fun of me,” Grace says. “I always offer novenas for you kids to be happy.”

Georgie wants to point out the low success rate of Grace’s prayers to the Virgin Mary but doesn’t dare. She’s trying to work through the fight with her mother the night before and doesn’t want anything to break the peace.

“They work for me,” Grace says. “Look at Anabel. She could be like some other miserable teenager, but you can’t stop her excitement over the phone. And Dom’s been sober for six months when some people can’t even make one day. And he’s living with you, Tommy, and I know that means everything to him. And Georgie’s having this baby.”

Georgie catches Tom’s eye over her mother’s head. She can’t hold back. “How can you see things in that way, Mum?” she asks gently, frustrated. “When they’ve been so awful?”

Grace turns to look at her. Georgie can only see her own face in the reflector sunglasses.

“Because if I don’t, I wouldn’t be getting out of bed every morning, Georgie,” her mother says. “And don’t any of you forget that no one was happier than Joey when he died. That’s better than some people get.”

The baby decides to have a bit of a stretch and Georgie grabs Grace’s hand and Grace is oohing and aahing, and next minute Indiana Jones junior is standing in front of them, his eyes wide in awe.

“Can I listen?” he asks.

“It doesn’t actually speak,” Georgie explains, but she holds out a hand and he takes off his hat and leans forward to press his ear to her belly. Tom takes a photo with his phone.

Callum calls out “Hello, hello” to the baby until he gets a bit bored and goes back to his game.

She hears Tom’s sigh of exaggeration. “Okay, you can say a novena to help my love life, Nanni G. Her name’s
Tara Finke.
F-i-n-k-e. Don’t forget the
e.
Everyone does and she gets cranky.”

“Spelling’s not important,” Georgie says.

“Middle name,
Marie,
” Tom adds. “I could get brownie points because she was probably named for the Virgin Mary.”

“
Marie
is a cheat name for the Virgin Mary,” Georgie explains to him. “That’s what Sister Patrick told Marie Fitzgerald when we were in primary school. It has to be either
Mary
or
Maria.
”

But Grace is shaking her head. “Tara Finke? Didn’t you break her heart, Tommy?”