The Piper's Son (26 page)

“Don’t be bloody ridiculous. He doesn’t do letters. And she doesn’t . . .” He impersonates her silent coy giggle.

Anabel sighs. It’s an Agnes of God sigh down to a T.

“I’m telling you, Tom. Those kids are writing smut to each other.”

He’s killing himself laughing, but she looks sad for a moment and he knows this is where she starts falling to pieces. The one thing all three of them, four counting Georgie, have in common is making sure that Anabel’s okay, and he wants to make everything right.

“He told me about Grandpa Tom Finch and how he might be coming home,” she says, her voice wavering.

He nods.

“I told Pop Bill that if Grandpa Tom Finch comes home, I’m going to play his trumpet. To welcome him, you know. Do you think he’d like that, Tom?”

Tom doesn’t know whether she’s talking about Pop Bill or Grandpa Tom Finch.

“I think he’d love it.” He doesn’t even know how those words have come out.

She looks up at him. “I think Bill cried when I told him I would. I wish everyone would stop crying, Tom. Uncle Joe would be so angry about it.” But she’s crying herself now. “He’d be so angry at us, Tom, for crying so much when all he did was laugh.”

It’s silent in the car and he doesn’t realize until they reach Byron that he hasn’t said a word the whole time. They change drivers at Lennox Head and sit on the beach for a while, just watching the surfers. It’s cold, but he doesn’t want to move. It reminds him too much of that time with Tara Finke at Maroubra on the night of graduation.

Because back then there was the promise of the next day when he drove back to Georgie’s and they all got together. All the Mackees and their friends to say “Hooray,” as Bill and Auntie Margie Finch, and the rest of those who came from the Burdekin, would say. “Hooray” to Joe, who was off to London to a teaching job. And Dominic stood on Georgie’s table while everyone told him to get down. “No, no, no. I’m making a speech here.” And he did. One of those speeches that only Dominic Finch Mackee could make. Full of guts and emotion and humor. Tom remembers grabbing his uncle and saying, “I kissed the psycho Tara Finke last night. Can you believe it?”

Joe had looked stunned in that comic way of his. “Because you were pissed or because you wanted to?”

“You know I don’t drink.”

Then Joe grabbed his face, grinning. “You wanted to. I can see it in your eyes, you cheeky bastard.”

And that look of joy, that look of total euphoria, is the last image he has of Joe.

He starts crying and he can’t stop. He doesn’t know where it comes from, this grief. How it blindsides you. But Justine’s hand comes across to clutch his, like she’ll never let go, and Francesca’s holding him, murmuring his name over and over again and he just wants to go back to the moment when he was in that water. At that near-perfect moment in his life when Tara Finke was in his arms. Because if he could go there, he could start from scratch and make everything in his life right.

“Are you going to be okay about your exams?” he asks Ned in the car, because the silence between Lennox and Coffs gets too much after a while.

Ned waves him off. “First one’s
Moby
-
Dick
head. I’ll just go on about the sperm scene and apply a feminist reading. They love that. Do you want a chewie?”

“Yeah, why not.”

When they drop him off home late that night, he finds both his father and Georgie in the kitchen. Waiting, it seems.

“If it’s Dominic you want to punish, then at least have the decency to phone me,” Georgie says coldly.

“As if my mother hasn’t rung you both.”

“His mother,”
Georgie says, looking at his father. “She doesn’t belong to us anymore. Did you know that, Dom?” Georgie stands up and walks to the sink to rinse her cup.

“I’m going to bed before I say something I might regret.”

But his father doesn’t move. He just sits there and looks at Tom, and there’s an expression on his face that Tom can’t quite place. In front of him is the
Herald.
Tom knows his father would have read it line by line; it was always his way. Lots of grunting, lots of “You’ve got to be bloody joking.” He’d even read the page that told when the sun set and rose, and if the family was ever away, it was his father’s obsession that they all see a sunrise or sunset together.

Once, just before Tom’s final exams in Year Twelve, the four of them went to Mudgee for the long weekend. Work and study seemed to have taken over their lives and his dad said it was all going too fast and they needed to regroup. The first thing they noticed as they drove into the property was a red vinyl sofa sitting on a grassy incline, overlooking the country highway in the distance.

Tom remembers how his dad’s eyes were fixed on it the whole time they were there.

“I’m going to watch the sun rise tomorrow from the hill,” Dominic announced on their last night, looking up from the local paper. “Says here it’ll rise at 5:47 in the morning.”

“Enjoy,” Tom’s mum murmured, not looking up from the novel she was reading. It’s what she claimed you had to do when Dominic got an idea. Not look him in the eye.

“But you’ve got to wonder why someone would put a sofa up there,” his dad continued.

“I’m not wondering at all.” Tom kept his eyes on the page. He had been rereading
Brave New World,
hoping miraculously that he’d discover something new that would help him blitz his HSC exam.

“Gang, when are we going to get a chance to see a sunrise together again?” his dad had argued.

“We’re not the waking-up-at-five-in-the-morning type of family, Dom,” his mum said patiently. “We’re the sleeping-in-until-nine-o’clock type.”

“Love that kind of family,” Tom said.

“I’ll come with you, Daddy,” Anabel reassured him.

“’Course you will, Beautiful, and then we can spend the trip home trying to describe the perfect sunrise to these philistines.”

“And you can spend the rest of the week blowing her nose when she gets a cold,” his mum said.

“Nah, I’ll leave that to Tom for not keeping his sister warm on that sofa.”

There was silence after that and Tom thought he and his mum had won the round. But it only lasted a minute.

“Don’t you wonder —?”

“No,”
Tom and his mother answered.

“Just say up on the hill is the meaning of life and someone knew it and they wanted everyone else to enjoy it. So they put a red vinyl sofa up there.”

His mother had made a snorting sound.

“Aren’t you even curious, Tom?” he asked.

Tom finally put his book down. He wanted to give his response all the effort in the world. “I’m
not
getting up at 5:46 in the morning. I’m not.
Not.
Do you understand the word
not
? It’s called the negative in many cultures. I’ll say it again.
Not.
”

He looked his father in the eye.

At 5:45 the next morning, he stood on the incline beside the two snuggled up on the sofa. His father was grinning.

“Come on. Cuddle up, Tom,” Anabel said.

“Big boy,” Tom muttered, shivering. “No cuddles.” There was enough blanket next to his dad to keep warm and he yanked as much around him as he could. The meaning of life had better come soon, he thought, or he was getting back into bed. They heard a sound behind them and his dad chuckled.

“Knew you’d join us, darlin’,” Dominic said, patting his lap so Anabel could sit on his knee and he could make room for Tom’s mum.

“Because you stole my blanket, you bastard,” she said, curling up beside him.

His dad made sure the girls were covered, leaving Tom exposed.

“Cuddles?” Tom begged. Anabel giggled.

The sunrise wasn’t much after all. It was too cloudy. But they stayed there for ages, just the four of them, and Tom remembers how silent they were most of the time. How someone spoke once in a while about work, or Sydney, or just stuff. How Anabel fell asleep in his father’s lap and he pressed a kiss to her head because Dominic always said he’d never see anything more beautiful than his girls. How his mother had touched his dad’s cheek. “What did you do to yourself?”

“Nicked myself shaving,” he murmured.

Tom thought they must have looked strange from the highway, sitting on that incline on the red vinyl sofa, but nobody cared. Then his dad yawned, stretching his arms out wide and hitting Tom on the face. On purpose. Sometimes it pissed Tom off when his father did that. “He’s just playing with you, Tom,” his mum would say when Tom looked like he was going to have a go. But that day he didn’t mind. He was too content and he wondered how it could be that no matter how much he loved his mum and Joe and Pop Bill and Nanni Grace and Georgie, that nobody would have got him on that sofa at 5:46 in the morning. Except his dad. And that was the problem with Dominic Mackee. That he could promise the meaning of life with just a look in his eye and a tone to his voice. Tom would have followed the bastard anywhere.

Except here they are in Georgie’s kitchen. In a different kind of silence from the one on that hill in Mudgee. And in this silence he knows he’s finished with being the Tom of books and rhymes. Tom Sawyer was a weak shit compared to Huck Finn. Thomas the apostle didn’t have enough faith in his friends to believe the unbelievable; Uncle Tom was a white man’s tool, a disappointment to his people. Worse still, he doesn’t know how to follow the piper anymore because it’s a path Tom has lost faith in. And the piper knows it. Tom can see it in his father’s eyes now. And the more he stares, the clearer it becomes. He wonders if that guy who put explosives in his backpack and blew up Joe’s train imagined that two years later, on the other side of the world, his anger would come to this. That the piper didn’t know who to be anymore, because he wasn’t Joe’s brother, or Tom and Anabel’s dad, or Jacinta Louise’s husband.

It made Tom want to weep all over again.

His mobile rings after midnight. No
hello
or
how are you
or
this is what I’m responding to.
Just straight into the conversation as if she’s sure he’ll know what she’s talking about.

“It all comes back to your family,” Tara explains. “On one hand, you’re frightened to commit to anyone because you’re probably thinking you’ll get her pregnant, like your father got your mother pregnant, and then one of you is going to have to give up something. On the other hand, you don’t want to move away from your security base because each time a family member has, something awful and tragic happened, like with Tom Finch and then Joe. So your way of dealing with the first is through casual relationships where you don’t let anyone hang around long enough, and your way of dealing with the second is not moving out of your comfort zone. Think about it. You moved four blocks away when you went to live with those dickheads and now you’re back at Georgie’s. Two blocks from home. You could draw a line around the parameters of your world, Tom, and I’m presuming that every girl you’ve slept with lives within that grid.”

He sits up for a moment.

“Is this one of those cheering-me-up phone calls that you specialize in, where you tell me to get on with my life?” he asks, torn between excitement and anger and trying to work out how far back he had asked for the character analysis.

“Sorry.” He hears the apology in her voice. She must have picked up on the anger in his tone. “Look, I’ll speak to you another —”

“
No.
No, don’t hang up. What time is it there?” he asks.

“Two hours behind you.”

There’s silence for a moment.

“So you think I’m a coward who sticks to my comfort zones?”

He hears her sigh. “No. I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

“No, I didn’t, Tom. I said you stick to your comfort zones. Not that you’re a coward.”

“Doesn’t it mean the same thing to you?” he asks.

“No. I think the worst thing that ever happened to me was leaving home,” she says honestly.

“Why?”

“Because I miss it like you’d never believe, and then I go away from this place and I miss here too. I’m scared I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a state of yearning, regardless of where I am.”

He gets comfortable. He wants to hear her voice in his ear. In the dark. In this attic. In his bed. He wants to hear it for as long as he can.

“What do you miss most?” he asks.

“Winter,” she says.

He chuckles. She does too.

“Only you’d say that, Finke.”

“You would too if you didn’t get to experience one.”

If he had the guts, he’d ask her about that night in her parents’ house. It was in winter. He remembers how cold she felt. If he had the guts, he’d ask what she remembers.

“I love it getting dark early in Sydney and I love snuggling under my blanket and wearing tights and boots and sitting with you guys somewhere in Newtown or at Bar Italia and having a latte or lying in front of the heater watching DVDs.”

“Then when you come home, I’m organizing a winter’s day for you.”

More silence.
Rein it in, Tom,
he tells himself.
Don’t scare her away. You’ve wooed her this way before and then you walked away.

“I miss you,” he says, failing to take his own advice.

She doesn’t respond.

“Why does it take forever between e-mails?” he asks.

“I don’t have regular access to the Internet, but I’ve made a deal with the Portuguese teachers and they let me use it up at their house.”

“Then give me a landline and I’ll ring you.”

“They decided to skip that technology and went straight to mobiles,” she explains. “But it only costs me forty cents a minute to ring.”

“How much does it cost me?”

“I don’t know. Work it out. Go to sleep.”

Logical Tom begs emotional stupid dickhead Tom not to ask the question.

“Are you alone?” he asks quietly.

He hears her breathing so close to his ear.

“Yes.”

“Good,” he says, his voice croaky. “I’ll sleep like a baby.”