The Piper's Son (11 page)

“It’s Sam’s?” Jonesy asks, surprised, just as he gets a message.

“Where have you been, Jonesy?” Bernadette says. “In La-La Land?”

“Contrary to popular belief, I think it has no penis,” Georgie whispers to them while Lucia covers Sam’s ears.

Jonesy looks up from his text messaging, shocked. “Poor little guy.”

After everyone’s eaten and the men are outside playing cards in the tiny courtyard, Abe’s mother dangles a necklace over Georgie’s belly to see if it’s a boy or a girl. As she sits surrounded by the women and her goddaughters, who watch with the widest of eyes, she is suddenly overcome with emotion. Leila sees it on her face and takes it gently between her hands. “She misses her mama, don’t you, Georgietta?” the older woman says.

“What’s it going to be, Tata?” Bella asks. “The baby?”

There is a certainty on the older woman’s face. “A boy. It’s all at the front and there’s no change in the face.”

Later, Lucia piles Georgie up with leftovers while Sam lights up a cigarette, waiting in the dark on the front lawn.

“I hope you’re not smoking in front of her,” Lucia says to him.

“Yeah, I lie in bed and puff in her face, Lucia,” he says, irritated.

“I hope he’s joking.”

“He’s joking,” Georgie says with a yawn, kissing her and then Abe.

When they’ve pulled away from the curb and waved to everyone, Sam puts on the heater to warm up the car for the short drive home.

“Can you feel that?” he asks.

They place their hands in front of the heat at the same time and both pull back.

“Bella came out and said it was a boy,” Sam says.

Georgie laughs for a moment. “The odds are fifty to one. I reckon it’s a girl.”

Silence again.

“My mother wants to visit,” he says.

“Tell her to visit,” she says quietly, leaning her head against the window frame and closing her eyes. Sometimes in the past when they’d come home from Dominic and Jacinta’s or Lucia and Abe’s, they’d make love with a lack of inhibition born of too much alcohol and too few issues in their lives. These days their lovemaking is instigated in silence. No words. No teasing. He had once been verbal during sex. Had to articulate. Swore. Cursed. Prayed. All words entwined in every thrust. “Shhh,” she’d laugh, in case they’d wake up Joe, who lived in the attic during those days. But he couldn’t keep it contained, so she’d cover his mouth with her hand and she’d see it all there in his eyes. All of it.

She wants to cover his mouth now. Cover the silence and watch his eyes for a sign. But they’ve become strangers, guarded with each other.

The next day, Lucia and her sister come over and Georgie has to stop them from wanting to talk babies. Her announcement the day before has reopened the floodgates of communication, which is both a relief and a curse, really. Then they get to talking about Bernadette’s decision to try Internet dating, and all three of them end up hunched over Georgie’s laptop when Tom walks in.

“Is that my wifebeater?” he asks.

“I don’t like the derogatory term, thank you. It’s a undershirt.”

“Yeah. My undershirt, Georgie,” he says. “With a spencer underneath it. Looks ridiculous.”

“Shucks, Tom, because I’m really going for the fashionable look these days.”

“Buy yourself maternity stuff, Georgie,” he mutters.

She feels him peer over their shoulder to see what has glued them to the screen of the laptop.

“Internet dating?”

“People are meeting the loves of their lives this way,” Bernadette explains.

“
BabyI’myourman69
?” he asks, reading the name on the screen. “I hope you girls don’t think that sixty-nine represents the year he was born.”

Lucia laughs. “If the munchkin, whose face I used to wash, tries to explain to us what a sixty-niner is, I’m going to report myself to child protection.”

Georgie’s not listening. She’s too busy following what’s on the screen in front of her with her finger. “But look at what this one wrote: ‘If you’re in your late thirties, I suppose your biological clock is ticking and midnight is just around the corner. So hey, baby, baby.’ He’s ready. He wants kids.”

“His own, Georgie,” Bernadette points out. “And we’re looking for me, not you.”

“And you’re not in your late thirties,” Tom points out while he fiddles through the cabinets, looking for food.

“Okay, what about this one?
Itsnowornever.
”

She finds it difficult pronouncing the name.

“It’s now or never,” Tom explains, back over their shoulders.

Georgie reads it carefully. “This guy chose the ‘Don’t want any of my own, but yours are okay’ option for kids.” She feels optimistic.

“What a surprise that there isn’t the option, ‘Don’t want any of my own, but it’s okay for you to be fat with someone else’s child,’” Tom says.

Georgie can’t get over how cynical her nephew’s become.

Tom leans forward and taps the screen with determination. “Look at his taste in music, girls. You can’t go out with someone who listens to ‘anything from the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s.’ That’s what he’s written. He has to be more discerning than that. And he’s a swinging voter. Sam would never let a swinging voter bring up his child.”

Georgie stares at him, unimpressed. “So now we’re a Sam fan, are we?”

“At least he’s always been specific about his musical tastes.”

She turns to Bernadette and Lucia, not believing what she’s hearing.

“So who would you choose, Bernie? The faithful guy who listens to
’
70s,
’
80s, and
’
90s music and swings in his voting, or the unfaithful guy who’s into the Clash and the Waterboys and still believes the Labor Party are the true believers?”

“They’re my choices?” Bernadette asks, dismayed. “Can’t I have another one?”

“What does Sam say about this?” Tom asks, eating the cereal from the box with his hands.

“Sam and I aren’t together.”

He points to her belly.

“So you’re giving birth to the Messiah, are you?”

“Why is Sam an issue all of a sudden?” she says angrily.

“Georgie, you’re sleeping with the guy!” Lucia says, laughing with exasperation, looking at Tom. “She’s sleeping with him, isn’t she?”

He stares at them, mid-mouthful. “Please,” he says after he’s swallowed. “It’s bad enough that the middle-aged are having sex, without thinking of my aunt doing it. And I don’t know why someone just doesn’t tell Sam to use a condom instead of impregnating the women of the inner-west.”

Georgie stares at him, stunned, and then she bursts out laughing.

“Middle-aged? What a little dickhead,” Lucia says.

There is nothing in his in-box the next day. Part of him is relieved. He can imagine her seeing his name and pressing the delete button, and that thought gives him the freedom to hit the keys again. It becomes part of his way of filling up those seven twenty-fours. Between working alongside Mohsin the Ignorer, lying on ugly banana chairs in Georgie’s backyard at night, chatting to Sam, who seems to come by more frequently, or working from five to ten at the Union, his life becomes consumed by the number displayed alongside his in-box. Most times there will be an e-mail from Anabel and one from a mate he met at uni, who sends him the most ridiculous stuff on YouTube or attachments with a plethora of tits or other types of nudity. But Tom decides it’s going to be his mission to keep on writing to Tara Finke. He’s going to aim for the record. He’ll stop at ninety-nine unanswered e-mails. He’s going to wear her down.

He takes to getting to work at the Union earlier each day. Most of it is about boredom, but usually whoever arrives first has dibs on the MP3 player the moment the day shift clocks off at five. Lately Francesca’s been going through the I-miss-Will compilation he burned for her and it’s a whole lot of Bloc Party and Augie March and not quite Tom’s thing, and then there’s what he calls Ned the Cook’s emo music and Justine’s Monsieur Camembert, and worse still, Stani’s talkback.

Today Francesca is in even earlier than Tom, taking advantage of the quiet time until the five o’clock crowd comes in. She’s practicing guitar in the back room and he hears a few of the words but doesn’t recognize them and figures that it’s one of her own.

“Change it to a minor,” he tells her from the doorway.

She pauses for a moment but does what he says. Although she’s got a good ear for music, her bends are dodgy and he stays to listen.

“You bend like a girl.”

He walks over and changes the placement of her three fingers on the neck of the guitar.

“And cut your nails.”

“I love my nails,” he hears her mutter as he walks out.