The Piper's Son (21 page)

“I suffered for you when Sam —”

“No, you didn’t.
‘You shouldn’t have let him go, Georgie. He wouldn’t have strayed if you didn’t let him go.’
That’s what you said to me and those words killed me more than anything.”

“Oh, you’re a cruel girl, Georgie, to remember that over everything else.”

In the kitchen, they can hear everything. Tom is trying to eat, but it’s cardboard in his mouth and his father is fixed on the newspaper in front of him while Bill is just staring. At nothing.

“I’ve got to go to my meeting,” Dominic mumbles, standing up.

“I’ll go with you.” This from Bill.

Somehow it’s as if Tom is left with only two options in the world. Stay in the house with Georgie and Nanni Grace tearing each other’s hearts out or go to an AA meeting with his father and Bill. The alcoholics win. There’s something about a bunch of people clapping just for saying your name and admitting sobriety that works for him.

Tom’s heard it too often in the movies to be touched by it. Now it just seems like a cliché. No one can say it with authenticity without it seeming like a joke.

“Hi, my name’s Des and I’m an alcoholic.”

Big clap. Clap. Clap.

How great would it be if it applied to other things in his life?

“Hi, my name is Tom and I dropped out of uni and spent the last year smoking weed and getting high.”

Clap, clap, clap.

“Hi, my name is Tom and I had a one-and-a-half-night stand with one of my best friends and I don’t have the guts to ask her how she felt about it.”

Clap, clap, clap.

“Hi, my name is Tom and I treated my friends who hung around to pick up the pieces like they were shit.”

Clap, clap, clap.

“Hi, my name’s Dominic . . .”

Tom’s eyes swing up to the front of the hall, where his father is standing. For the first time in a year, he gets to look at him properly. So far he’s been passing him by in the corridor back in Georgie’s house or sitting around the kitchen table, but he hasn’t dared to look his way, in case there is prolonged eye contact.

Tom finds out things he hasn’t had the guts to ask. His father hasn’t touched a drink for 150 days. Tom makes calculations, and it means Dominic’s been sober since March. Nothing momentous about March. No birthdays. No anniversaries. Nothing. He finds out that Dominic took his last drink in Wodonga on the New South Wales–Victoria border, which means that his father was staying with Nanni Grace and Bill at the time. He wonders if it was Bill who bullied his father out of bed every morning to join him on his daily jog.

“I had been on a blinder for a couple of days and I woke up in a park,” his father continues. Tom’s heard his father make speeches hundreds of times. At home. In a meeting hall of irate builders. At a union rally. But his voice is different this time. Broken. “I remember the humidity and that I stunk and that I still had my wallet on me. This woman was there. A jogger . . . with a look on her face that makes me . . . I don’t know . . . Just thinking of it . . . People’s compassion has always floored me. Despite all the shit in the world, people’s compassion never fails to surprise me. Anyway, she helped me up and she asked for permission to look into my wallet so she could help work out who I was and what to do, and while she was flicking through it, she came across a photo. She asked me who they were. And I looked at the photograph and I pointed to my wife and said, ‘That’s Jacinta Louise. She’s the love of my life,’” he says, and there are tears in his eyes. “Then I pointed to my baby girl and I said, ‘That’s Anabel. She’s in Year Eight and plays a mean trumpet.’”

He stops, and finds Tom in the audience, and their eyes lock. “And then I pointed to my son.” There’s so much emotion in that one look. It tells Tom that his father stopped drinking because he loved
him
and that he was sorry and maybe for now he has to allow that to be enough. Tom could move on with that knowledge. That Dominic Finch Mackee gave up drinking for his son, Tom.

“And I couldn’t remember his name,” his father said, his voice hoarse. “I couldn’t remember my boy’s name. And that was the first day . . .”

Tom doesn’t hear the rest. He feels as if someone’s just punched him in the gut. He thinks he hears a sound from his grandfather. Thinks he even feels Bill’s hand on his shoulder. He wants to be back in the house where Georgie and Nanni Grace are fighting about the fact that once upon a time Dominic couldn’t look after his parents and his sister because he was too busy looking after his son.

He doesn’t remember much after that except there’s a bit of a collection to cover basic costs and then they serve tea, coffee, and biscuits. His father speaks to almost everyone in the hall. They gravitate to him the way people always have. And they all want to meet Tom. To tell him that even though they’ve only known Dominic a couple of weeks, they all love him. Does his father do it on purpose? Cause people to have a dependency on him so that when he’s gone, it’s hard to cope?

The three of them walk home in silence. It’s not Tom’s night to work, but he splits from them at the corner without a word and goes into the pub. He knows, with a satisfaction born of bitterness, that his father won’t follow him into the Union.

“Tom!” Bill calls out. “Mate, let’s go home.”

Tom holds up a hand and waves him off.

Inside, it’s a quiet Monday night crowd.

He walks into the kitchen and smells something different and peers into the saucepan.

“Is this pasta sauce?”

“Frankie’s cooking for her brother,” Ned informs him. “Her grandmother’s out for the night and she’s babysitting.”

“Only Frankie would take over the pub for her family,” he mutters.

“You’re not on tonight, you know,” Ned says. He doesn’t seem so happy either, and he’s taking it out on the T-bone and sausages.

“I’ve just come in to pick up my pay. Do you have a problem with that?” Tom snaps.

Ned stops and stares at him. He knows there’s no pay to pick up. They all must know that Tom doesn’t get paid.

“You have the look that says you want to hit someone,” Ned says. “Should I be cowering?”

“You have the same look.”

“People can smell the pasta sauce,” Ned complains. “So every time I go out there to hand over the food, I get asked if we’re serving vegetarian. Is your gripe bigger than that?”

“Yeah. My father’s a cunt.”

“I can’t help liking mine, nutcase that he is,” Ned says. “Do you want an espresso? She brought the percolator as well.”

“It’s a
caffettiera,
” Tom corrects him, looking over to where it sits on the stove.

“Yeah, whatever.”

Ned has absolutely no idea what to do with it and pours water and coffee into the top.

“Your father . . . doesn’t have issues about your . . . lifestyle?” Tom asks.

Tom gets eye contact beyond Ned’s fringe. “I don’t have a lifestyle.”

“Your sex life?”

“I don’t really have a sex life. I’m not into casual sex or one-and-a-half-night stands like you.”

“I’m not into one-and-a-half-night stands either,” Tom says bluntly, not appreciating the label.

“What about the spitfire from Dili?” There’s a smugness in the way Ned says those words.

“What
about
Tara?”

“When she was here at Easter, we spent a lot of time talking. I’d always look forward to her coming to that door. It was the way she’d stand there with her hands on her hips and that face that you’d actually like to iron out.”

Tom’s taking deep breaths.

“Can I give you some advice, Ned?” he says, grabbing the
caffettiera
out of his hands and tipping out the coffee and water. “There are a lot of guys out there waiting to find Mr. Self-Righteous-Know-It-All-Who-Swings-Both-Ways. I’d go hunt them down if I were you.”

Ned is watching him carefully.

“You don’t fit the mold, you know, Tom. You have a bigger problem with the fact that I could be into girls as well as guys. Why is that?”

“I really don’t care.”

“Yes, you do.” Ned points a knowing finger. “I made them a bet that you still think you’ve got a chance with her. May I remind you she has a boyfriend?”

Tom chooses not to contribute to the conversation anymore. He makes a show of how to put together the
caffettiera
and slams it on the stove.

“You’re a dish-pig who left her feeling like shit,” Ned continues. “He keeps peace. Wow, what a dilemma. Wonder who I’d pick?”

“For your information, peacekeepers did bugger-all in the Balkans,” Tom argues. It’s a bit lame, but it’s the best he can do. “And like a pasty-faced army grunt is going to put me off if I want to go for her,” he adds with bravado.

“They have Brazilian peacekeepers in Timor.”

The air whooshes out of Tom. His whole image of Tara’s life in Timor does a ninety-degree swing. He feels sick to his stomach.

“Who’s Brazilian?” Frankie asks, walking in with a packet of parmesan cheese. “Are you guys talking about Tara’s boyfriend?” She takes the saucepan off the stove and throws the pasta into the colander.

“From Brazil,” Ned confirms again with a nod, looking at Tom.

“As in from South America?” Tom can’t help asking. “Olive skinned and waxed chest?”

“Very beautiful people. The women always come first in the Miss Universe pageants,” Francesca says.

“No, I think it’s Venezuela,” Ned explains.

“So what do they do?” Tom asks. “Salsa and speak Spanish all day in Dili?”

“She’s actually in Same and it’s not Spanish; it’s Portuguese,” Frankie corrects.

“She didn’t correct me,” Tom says half to himself.

“She probably didn’t want you to feel stupid for not knowing the Brazilians and the East Timorese speak Portuguese,” Ned says, handing Francesca the right spoon for the pasta.

“I reckon a lot of people wouldn’t know that.” Tom’s on the defensive now.

“Ask him.” Francesca points to her brother as he walks in holding his drumsticks, and somehow Tom can tell that Ned and Francesca are having fun. At his expense.

“Ask me what?” Luca Spinelli asks. The kid is pathetically good-looking and talks with Anabel on MSN, so Tom wants to hate yet another person in the world. Luca Spinelli punches him in the arm as a means of saying hello.

“Go on. What language do the Brazilians speak?” Francesca asks her brother as she pours the sauce onto the pasta in the plate Ned hands her.

Luca grins up at Tom. Tom knew the kid when he was ten and in primary at their school and had always felt slightly protective of him, because of how hard it had been when Francesca’s mum was sick.

“You thought it was Spanish, didn’t you, Tom?” The kid is laughing at him.

“I’m writing a song, you know. It’s called, ‘Oh, if I could be as smart as the Spinelli siblings.’” Tom gets out his own fork and twirls some of the pasta from the plate Francesca’s holding. She puts it in front of her brother and then Ned is also there, hovering over them with his own fork.

“How spoiled are you?” Tom mutters.

Francesca is kissing her brother. “He’s my
tesoro,
” she says. “And I’m going to miss him to death.”

“Where’s he going?” Ned asks, making a grunting sound of satisfaction when he finally gets to taste the food.

“My mother can’t live without her baby, so he’s going to join them in Italy for the rest of their trip. In eighteen days, Will is flying home for a five-day break and then they’ll fly to Singapore, where Will puts Luca on an airplane bound for Italy.”

“Wow, seven hours on a flight with Will beside you,” Tom says, feigning wistfulness. “Wish it were me.”

“Are you off that day?” Ned asks Francesca. “If not, I can do a swap.”

“We don’t do airports when he’s leaving. Will’s banned me.”

Tom can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You can’t cry at the airport because he says. What? Is he the boss of your emotions or something? He sounds like a tyrant.”

“And in eighteen days I’m going to see my boy,” she says, grinning like Luca, “and I will forget his tyranny.”

When Stani closes up, the lot of them sit around the back room and it’s only because Francesca’s brother is there, and Tom used to accompany him on guitar when the kid was learning drums, that he agrees to jam.

It’s Luca who’s teaching Francesca to play guitar, so he chooses a Dylan song because it’s easy but long and it’ll give her the practice on guitar she needs. Luca sings because she says she doesn’t have the energy to do both just yet. Halfway through the song, Tom pulls Francesca up from the chair she’s sitting on, by the scruff of her neck, and she gives him a look of sufferance but keeps on going and it feels like the most natural thing in the world to be playing with them.

Justine is playing, too. How Justine could be so uninhibited on stage and then be unable to speak to a musician she likes baffles Tom. She says the violinist is a genius, but Tom thinks
she
is and for a moment their eyes meet and she grins at him because it’s what would happen onstage when they used to perform. It was the high Tom couldn’t get any other way, no matter how much he tried. He likes the feel of the harmonica burning against his mouth, the way it seems to have its own emotion, wavering. Stani watches them from the door, smoking a cigarette now that the clientele is gone, and somehow Tom gets a feeling that no one has a place to go to tonight.