The Piper's Son

by Melina Marchetta

  And can you please clear your crap out of Georgie’s attic? She reckons you use her place like it’s a hotel. Don’t expect me to bring my girl to a hovel.

  With much love and affection,

  Joe

  P.S. Tell your father to get stuffed about the Roosters getting beaten by the Tigers. One text message a day is enough gloating.

  In Tom’s family, there’s “before London” and “after London.” The 28th of June 2005 was “before.” It was easier to remember the “befores.” That morning, he had googled Yeats and worked out that STD was all about seizing the day and not some sexually transmitted disease. He knew that all along, he’d tell his uncle, Mr. Expert on dishing out advice about footy and women. He was always curious to know if Joe worked out the subject line before he began the e-mails or after. Joe was an English and history teacher, so everything had a theme. Most times it was the Shakespeare he was teaching. Tom could tell it was King Lear those days because the subject line the week before was “Poor Tom’s a-Cold,” just because he wrote to complain about the windchill factor at Brookvale Oval.

  In the kitchen that morning, his mum had been putting some fruit and a muesli bar into her lunch bag and peering out the back window.

  “Check your father out,” she said.

  Tom stood beside her that day “before London,” dwarfing her, because she was so tiny. All ginger hair and freckles, Jacinta Louise Mackee was. Half the time she looked like a kid and not someone who advised the government on how to treat their immigrants. The morning light had blinded him for a moment as he’d watched his dad hunch over the timber.

  “He pencils a line,” she explained, still intrigued after all these years, “and then he stands back for hours, thinking about whether it’s right or not. Next, he’s going to run his fingers along the timber and if there’s one little splinter out of place, he’ll file it back. With my nail file, mind you. Prick.”

  But it had been an insult laced with affection. She picked up her satchel and kissed Tom’s cheek.

  “Tell him it’s time to go to work and that we’ve got Anabel’s confirmation talks tonight, and don’t forget to move your crap out of Georgie’s attic, Tom. You know she wants to get things ready for Joe.” She knocked at the window and held up a hand in a wave and then she was off.

  He poured his cereal into a bowl with milk and walked out back to watch the master at work. It had been bloody freezing and he’d regretted not putting on any clothes except for the boxers.

  “You’re going to be late,” he said with a yawn. On the bench was a good slab of timber, a river red gum. His father was making Nanni Grace a table for when Joe and his girl came to visit from London.

  “Straddle it, will you?” his dad said, grabbing hold of the electric saw. “Hold it still.”

  Tom hadn’t been happy with the suggestion. “You better not get that too close to you-know-where,” he muttered, swallowing a mouthful of cornflakes and putting down the bowl.

  His father stared at a spot he missed and began filing again before he put on his goggles and switched on the saw. When it was over, Tom was shaking his head with disbelief, pointing to his private parts. His father was grinning.

  His dad was looking good, he had thought. Not like the year when Tom turned seventeen and Dominic was heading toward some meltdown, courtesy of too many liquid lunches and union negotiations between a hostile government and disgruntled workers. But forty was looking good on him. His father took off the goggles. “Listen,” he said. “Georgie wants you to —”

  “I know,” Tom interrupted. “She wants me to get my shit out of her attic. You’d think a king was returning, the way she’s going on.”

  His dad had shrugged. “He’s her little brother. You know how she is about Joe.”

  “Like you’re not,” Tom scoffed. “His woman’s going to be with him, you know, and he’s not going to be able to do all the stuff you’ve got planned. Can’t imagine Penelope Cruz going to a footy match or at the pub every night.” They called her that because she was Spanish. Georgie called her Pen for short.

  His dad lifted his arm to stretch out a muscle and Tom had reached over and poked him in the gut.

  “What’s this? Looks like flab, Dominic.”

  Tom loved calling him that too, just to piss him off.

  “Little shit,” his father said, holding his gut in and slapping his abs. “Watch this body. It’s what yours’ll look like one day.”

  “Mum noticed it from the kitchen,” Tom had lied, grinning. “She was like, ‘Check out that carcass, will ya!’”

  Before he could duck, his father had hooked him around the neck with his elbow and they struggled for a while. They were both killing themselves laughing and neither gave in. It was allowed toget as vicious as they wanted, without any repercussions, and thosedays it was the only physical contact they had with each other. Tom got the upper hand, but he knew he could lose it any moment.

  “She didn’t seem to have a problem with it last night,” his father managed between grunts when they hit the ground.

  Tom shoved him back and had tried not to choke at the idea of whatever his parents had got up to the night before. He’d just been given a reason to be in counseling for the rest of his life.

  Later, they carried the slab of timber onto the grass. He could tell the table was going to be beautiful and he could understand his father’s obsession with getting it right. They both stared at it for a moment. The smell of it, mingled with the silky oak and lavender in the backyard, made him smile.

  “Nice,” Tom said.

  “Getting there.”

  “Can I borrow fifty bucks?”

  He got the look.

  Tom laughed. “I can’t fit a job in between band and uni, and they pay peanuts for gigs these days.”

  “What about the contacts your mum had?” his dad asked.

  “I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don’t think it recognized ‘Are you shitting me?’ as an option.”

  “You know why that is?”

  “Why is that, Dominic?” Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why.

  “Because we don’t live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We’re not citizens. We’re customers. That’s what this government’s done to us.”

  “Can’t I just ask you for fifty bucks and you be Marcel Marceau?”

  His father, the smart-arse, mimed out the handing of the money and they were both grinning again.

  “As long as I don’t have to chase you to pay it back.” He looked at Tom suspiciously. “What’s it for?”

  “Membership for the Young Libs.”

  “Yeah, very fucking funny.”

  Tom had laughed at the expression on his father’s face. “I’m wooing a girl.”

  He remembers seeing Tara that night and how he kissed her and how they ended up in Georgie’s attic. And how one week later they ended up going all the way in her parents’ house. Then his life became all about “after London” and now Tom’s taking those deep breaths, like the ones a counselor told him to take, because he thinks he can’t breathe. Until he sees it there in the in-box and his heart lifts: tomsister@hotmail.com. At thirteen and three quarters, as she persists in reminding everyone, Anabel’s news is limited to what their mum won’t let her do and the ongoing bitter battle with Trixie Pantalano, her nemesis, in a bid for top of the class for Year Eight, and someone called Ginger who fights her on everything to do with the social justice committee. But the soap opera she’s filming to document her life makes him laugh every time she sends him the next segment. The kid can do deadpan better than anyone he knows, better even than their father. In today’s episode, she’s sitting at Grandma Agnes’s table lamenting her life in a sonnet. She’s got the iambic pentameter down to perfection. He can hear the click of a computer in
the background and imagines that his mother is holding the camera while she’s working on some legislation. He gets a quick image of his mum when Anabel’s back in possession of the camera and he can’t help but notice those laugh lines around her eyes that seem to be all about age these days and little to do with laughter. In the old days, his mum and Georgie spent most of their time killing themselves laughing at absolutely everything. “You girls are going to wet your pants,” his father would say in his typically dry tone, but most of the time it was Dominic who made them laugh. Tom could do it too. And Joe. They were perfect mimics.

  The film ends with Anabel dancing around the kitchen, playing the trumpet. Tom’s impressed with the speed of her playing and her ability to keep the notes in check. His parents wanted her to play the violin, but the moment Pop Bill showed her Tom Finch’s trumpet, Anabel wasn’t interested in any other instrument. The screen freezes on a kiss that she throws out to the world, but it’s the wedding photo of his parents on Granny’s mantel behind Anabel that he stares at. He magnifies the screen until he sees both their faces. Shit, they were young. So young that his mother’s parents flew down from Brisbane to talk Dominic and Jacinta Louise out of “ruining their lives.” But Tom’s mum and dad had already gone and done it at Saint Michael’s with only Georgie and a couple of their best friends in attendance. Six months after the wedding, Tom was born. Nanni Grace and Bill insisted that they move to Albury, but Tom had heard his father say more than once that he would never have been able to look his in-laws in the eyes if Jacinta didn’t finish her degree in politics. So his father dropped out of law to look after Tom, and instead of taking his wife home to his parents, he took her home to his twin sister and they all moved into a cramped two-bedroom fibro in Camperdown and lived off Georgie’s wage as a paralegal while Dominic started fixing people’s furniture.

  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.

  To: tomsister@hotmail.com

  From: anabelsbrother@hotmail.com

  Date: 16 July 2007

  Dear H-anibal,

  How goes it, fugly girl?

  Make sure Agnes of God doesn’t get Mum down, and tell her I’m staying with Georgie and, yes, she has put on weight and will be losing it in about four months.

  Love, the better-looking sibling,

  Tom

  P.S. The Mackee pride goes down the toilet if you let chicks with names like Trixie and Ginger get the better of you.

  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 w
ants 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.