The Piper's Son (6 page)

His father’s face in the wedding photo freaks Tom out. It’s like looking at himself in the mirror. Worse still, it’s like looking at a photograph of his grandfather, Tom Finch, and he can’t help thinking that when Tom Finch and Dominic were his age, they were fathers. By the time Tom Finch was a year older, he was dead.

He looks back at the keyboard and begins typing.

He takes the bus home, already bored, which is a worry when it’s only three thirty and the highlight of your day is an e-mail from your little sister. The thought that this will be his timetable for the next couple of months makes him feel as if he’s gagging from lack of air. At least if he was with his flatmates, he could waste the day away and not realize it was even over until it was two in the morning and one of them would point out that the home-shopping show was on.

The worst part of the day is always walking past the Union hotel. Today Stani, the owner, is out front smoking. Tom could keep walking and forgo the long history his family has with the place, but he can’t. Because Dominic and Joe Mackee drank here. Georgie still does with his parents’ friends. And then there’s the story of his grandparents and this pub. Two best friends traveled from the Burdekin in North Queensland sometime in the 1960s and walked into the Union and fell in love with Grace. Tom Finch was the smarter talker of the two and won first round, marrying her before his name came up in the lottery sending him to Vietnam on a tour of duty. He never returned. The heartbroken, patient one, Bill Mackee, grieved a best friend and married the love of his life, adopting the twins when they were four years old.

“Tom,” Stani acknowledges.

He still speaks with a heavy Eastern European accent, although he’s been in the country long enough to have lost it. Tom had met him briefly in the days when he hung out with Justine Kalinsky, Stani’s niece, but the old guy’s never used his name before. Tom knows he can’t spend the next couple of months walking past and being on the receiving end of Stani’s accusing stare each time. He can handle people thinking that the Mackees were a bunch of ratbags. He imagined that his uncle would have been kicked out once or twice, too. Joe could be a bit of a yob when he was drunk. And God knows how bad his father was in the end. But what Tom’s ex-flatmates had made him, by association, pissed him off. Mackees weren’t thieves, nor were Finches. He thinks he’ll make it easy and just give Stani the money from his final dole check.

When he turns back, Stani’s already disappeared inside, so Tom follows him in.

It’s a small pub. No slot machines. No big-screen TV. No jukebox. The room at the back has good acoustics for rehearsals and is hired out for small parties. On Sunday afternoons there’s a regular bunch of locals who sit around the table near the door and play. Sometimes Tom turned up, not because his flatmates worked there but because of the sounds. A fiddle, two guitars, and vocals, with a fierce passion to the music. He liked what he played over at the Barro hotel, from time to time, but it was beginning to bore him. It was like the stuff he used to play when he was fifteen. Before the girls came into his life.

“It’s shit punk,” Tara Finke once pointed out bluntly on the way home from one of those combined schools extravaganzas during their last year at school. The music teacher had asked him to accompany the orchestra for a number that needed guitar, and Tara had been sent along as a prefect representative. “That doesn’t mean I think punk is shit,” she continued. “It means that when someone plays punk in a shit-like manner, it’s excruciating. So either find yourself a good punk band or move on, Tom. Because it kills me to say this, but you’re actually a tiny bit gifted.”

“How would you like it if I said to you, ‘It kills me to say this, but you’re actually a tiny bit beautiful’?” he had asked, pissed off.

She hadn’t said anything then, which was rare for her.

“Would you have been lying?” she said after a long silence.

“Lying about what?”

More quiet.

“About me being a tiny bit beautiful.”

“Shit, yeah.”

But later that night, he had sent her a message on MSN.

Of course I was lying. The “tiny bit” part, anyway.

Stani looks up at Tom from behind the bar, surprised to still see him there.

“Francesca reckons Zac and Sarah took some money,” Tom says.

He doesn’t want to make it sound like a whine or an accusation, but it comes out abruptly. Stani doesn’t speak.

“So around how much are we talking about?” Tom asks briskly.

Stani waves him off. “They’re gone. You go too. Let’s call it even.”

Tom shakes his head. He focuses on the bottles lined up behind Stani’s head.

“Just tell me how much it is and I’ll pay you, and
then
we’ll call it even.”

Tom’s getting frustrated. He wants to get on with his life. He wants to get off the bus every afternoon and walk past the pub without feeling guilty.

He hears the music from the back room: someone stumbling over guitar chords and then the sound of the accordion. He knows Justine uses the back for rehearsal, and he wants to get out of here before he has to face her. Seeing Francesca the other night was bad enough. “Just tell me how much it is,” Tom says again, forcefully.

Stani already dismisses him with a look, but Tom won’t budge.

Just tell me how much it is, you old bastard,
he wants to shout.

“It’s over two thousand dollars, Tom. Got that kind of money?”

Tom can’t hide his reaction. Tries to, but can tell from Stani’s expression that he fails. The money in his pocket seems pathetic, and he wants to punch something or someone. The guitarist in the back room who doesn’t know the chords makes him want to barge in there and smash the instrument into pieces.

“Why didn’t you sack them?” he blurts out. “You would have known what they were doing.”

Stani leans forward over the counter. He’s led a hard life, and it’s stamped all over his face.

“Because I promised Dominic Mackee that I wouldn’t let any of my employees sign a workplace agreement. It would have been easier if I did.”

“My father didn’t represent your union.”

Stani shrugs. “A union man’s a union man.”

Tom gives up. He doesn’t have two thousand dollars.

The guitar playing continues, and he notices Stani taking a deep breath of total sufferance.

“Wrong chord,” Tom mutters to him, and then walks away but stops before he makes it outside.

“I’ll work for you,” he says from the door. “Until I pay it off.”

Stani shakes his head. “Like I said, don’t return here with your friends, and you and me, we’re square.”

Tom shakes his head. “
No.
I work here until the debt is paid off.”

“No.”

“You think I’m going to steal from you, don’t you?”

His voice is aggressive, but he can’t help it. He’s back at the counter, fists clenched at his side. He tries to remember what his counselor in high school would tell him during their “how to combat the bully in you” sessions that Tom was forced to attend in Year Eight.

“I do,” Stani says flatly.

Wrong chord again.

“Bloody bastard,” Stani mutters.
“Wrong chord, Frankie!”

Great. Francesca. That’s all Tom needs. Both girls.

“Change the chord!”
Stani calls out again.

“To a G,” Tom tells him.

“To a G!”

The guitar playing stops.

“What if I promise?” Tom persists.

Stani’s just staring at him. All pale-blue bloodshot eyes squinting with distrust. But then Tom gets sick of the groveling and walks toward the door.

“On your father’s honor?” Stani asks as Tom reaches the door.

“No.” Tom’s not wanting to bring his father into this . . . into anything in his life. “On my uncle’s. On Joe’s. You knew him?”

Stani nods with a sigh. “Yeah, I knew Joe.”

The guitar playing begins again. It’s slow and she’s thinking too hard. He can imagine the look on Francesca’s face while she concentrates on the chords. She picks a Waifs song — a good one for learning because it’s just one or two chords and it’s slow.

Francesca Spinelli’s voice can do anything, and singing alongside her always made Tom sound better than he was. Justine was the same. One of those musical geniuses. Except she chose the accordion, or as she’d say, it chose her, and it’s not exactly the conservatorium’s choice musical instrument. When they were in Year Twelve, the three of them formed a band and called themselves The Fey. Tom was purely into writing their own material. Originals or nothing. Francesca didn’t mind dabbling with a cover once or twice. Justine was neutral. They ended up with a mixed bag that they always believed made them unique, and for the first year of uni, they played gigs around each other’s campuses, constantly hiring and firing drummers until they decided they’d stick to just the three of them. They were different from the others in their group. Tom and Francesca, especially, had a bit of a lazy streak, courtesy of natural ability. They just liked playing music with absolutely no ambition of going anywhere with it and it was Justine who took care of business and was in charge. By the end of their first year of uni, Siobhan Sullivan was working three jobs, saving to go to London, and Jimmy Hailler was nursing his sick grandfather. Tara Finke was stuck with three music fanatics who dragged her to every gig they had.

Just listening to Francesca’s voice makes Tom think of those nights he’d camp out at her place and they’d be practicing in her bedroom and Tara would fall asleep on the bed still holding her study notes.

“We’re going to be famous one day and you’ll tell people we used to put you to sleep,” he teased at the time when the looks between them changed into something intense. They had enjoyed some kind of clumsy antagonistic attraction since they had first met in Year Eleven. Tara Finke dealt with it by ignoring him. Tom slept with other girls. But it had always been there, scrutinized by Francesca and Justine. The same two staring at him now from the back-room door.

“Seems like Tom here will be washing plates,” Stani tells the girls. “In the kitchen with Ned.”

Still nothing from the two except a bit of irritated surprise on their faces.

Justine is the first to break the silence.

“If his friends come in, I’m calling the police,” she tells her uncle.

“And he gets the lockup shift,” Francesca says.

They speak like they’re in charge, and judging from Stani’s shrug, maybe they are.

He remembers the times they’d walk toward him in the playground with that same look on their faces, but double in number with Siobhan and Tara. “It’s the four horsewomen of the apocalypse,” Jimmy Hailler would say. “They’re going to make us do something we don’t want to do.”

“We’re not going to give in,” Tom would say.

But they did. Always. “Think of the alternatives,” Jimmy said. “They love us. Imagine if they hated us.”

There’s no need for imagining here.

Francesca walks away, taking out her phone and texting. He knows who it’s to and what she’s saying.
The dickhead of our lives is back.

He gives himself four weeks to pay off the debt and never walk into this place again.