The Piper's Son

by Melina Marchetta

  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.

  “I can hazard a guess, but I’ll never know

  Why you put these walls up, I can’t get through

  It’s as though you want to be lonely and blue.”

  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.

  To: mackee_joe@yahoo.co.uk

  From: georgiefinch@hotmail.com

  Date: 16 July 2007

  I practice my response, Joe. Because it’s what everyone wants to ask. I can see it in their eyes. How did I let this thing with Sam happen? And this is how I try to respond: That he was hiding in wait, one street away, hovering on the perimeters of my world, still hanging out with Dom and the others. I’d know. Because I’d smell him the moment I’d walk into anyone’s house. I was like a wolf — able to follow his scent through this whole city. It’s what happens when you’ve lived with someone for seven years. But I didn’t want anyone to take sides, remember? You did. You never spoke to him again, Joe, but it wasn’t the way I wanted things. I just wanted everyone to keep their end of the bargain and never ever expect Sam and me to be in the same room or to discuss him or his child in front of me. The Jews tear their clothing when someone in their life dies. I was Jewish the year Sam’s child was born. Tearing everything inside of me that wasn’t already torn.

  But then you got on that train, Joe. And it was Sam who spoke to Foreign Affairs, contacting every person he knew in London to try to work out what they knew in those first couple of days. It was Sam who booked my flight because we all felt hopeless waiting for you to come home to us, and it was Sam who traveled with me. In London it was Sam who went to every hospital, hanging up photographs of you in waiting rooms and outside Tube stations. Sam who told me and your beautiful Ana Vanquez that there was no body to take home. No evidence of you except your cash card being used that morning to buy a weekly ticket at the Tube station. It was Sam who had to listen to the words over and over again, “I can’t go home without my brother’s body. Don’t ask me to do that to my mother.”

  And then he was back in my bed, Joe. I don’t know how. I didn’t ask him. He didn’t ask to come back. It’s as though I woke up one morning and Sam was lying there beside me. And he stayed and I couldn’t understand why, because I hated everyone around me. Every time anyone opened their mouth I wanted to tell them to shut up because their words were useless. But Sam stayed, and here we are, Joe. Sam and I.

  Almost living together, and I’m able to forget.

  Except for the Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, when he has his son.

  Tom works at the Union from five o’clock onward because it’s the only time Stani serves food. The menu is limited to sausages and mash, T-bone, and salad. Stani doesn’t cater to vegetarians. “Bloody bastards,” he mutters when people complain. “Cook in your own homes.”

  The cook’s name is Ned and he’s a lanky guy Tom’s age, with eyes that swing all over the place nervously, and a height that makes him stoop with awkwardness. He’s slightly too cool-looking to be considered goofy, but it’s a very fine line that he walks.

  Tom’s ex-flatmates used to do impersonations of the way Ned would say, “Hi, Sarah,” in a puppy-dog fashion, tongue hanging out, and then they’d do an exaggerated circular motion to the other side of the room and say, “Hi, Zac.” They didn’t know which way he swung sexually, but then again, Zac didn’t know himself, so it could have been him projecting.

  Once or twice Tom attempts to make conversation, but Ned the Cook seems to have the same problem as Mohsin the Ignorer. With Francesca, Ned the Cook is different. Ned the Introvert becomes Ned the Wit. On Tom’s third night working, Ned spends the whole time speaking Latin to Francesca. It was one of the useless subjects she took as part of her history degree, and the two banter and giggle using words ending with cus, tis, and ergo that make Tom want to commit a felony with a scourer sponge. He makes it clear what he thinks through small snorts of disbelief.

  Ned the Cook is doing a double degree in art and education and has a novel in his hand at all times, and the worst thing is that no matter how much Tom wishes it, the bastard doesn’t even come across as pretentious.

  When Francesca and Justine aren’t serving outside or rehearsing in the back room, they’re hanging out in the kitchen with Ned and invisible Tom. The only time they don’t chat incessantly
is when the news comes on and Francesca is listening to it, and then they start up again until Stani calls Francesca up the front and Justine goes back to rehearsal.

  Tom takes it for just a week. He has no problem with the girls not talking to him. When it comes to wars of attrition, these girls are the commanders in chief, but Ned the Cook is a different story.

  “Do you have a problem with me?” Tom finally asks forcefully.

  Ned throws a T-bone on the grill. Doesn’t miss a beat.

  “I didn’t like your friends.”

  “Really?” Tom feels like playing the cruelty game. “Funny that. Because I heard you had the hots for both my flatmates.”

  The cook lays the lettuce out on two plates and starts chopping up the onions.

  “Yes, I did,” he says casually. “In the first minute I met them. Then in the second minute, I decided I wasn’t going to be into dudes who treat others like crap only because they can. And then in the third, I actually stopped noticing they were around. I’m easily bored around stupid people.”

  Tom hadn’t worked out that his flatmates bored him until the fifth minute, so he feels slightly inferior to Ned the Cook, who is also able to articulate what the great white whale represents in Moby-Dick while cooking a T-bone to a perfect medium-rare.

  And that’s how Tom spends his nights. Washing up alongside Ned the Cook, who makes a bigger mess than is necessary just to piss him off. On the nights she’s rehearsing at the Union, Justine spends half the time whispering to Ned about the latest guy she’s in love with, and Francesca journeys into the kitchen every hour to listen to the news. She’ll say, “There’s been a cyclone in Sri Lanka, Ned,” or “Oh, my God, an earthquake in southern Turkey . . . a car bomb in Karachi.” Ned just listens patiently and Tom wants to warn him not to nurture her obsessive compulsiveness because it always turns into something devastating. But he can’t be bothered.

  Most days, when he arrives before the nighttime shifts begin, he can hear the sounds of guitar and accordion from the back room. From what he’s picked up in conversation, Justine and Francesca are putting together a compilation for everyone they know overseas so they can post it on their MySpace page. He only knows that because he has to listen to every single one of their conversations without taking part. Six covers. Six originals. For Siobhan Sullivan they choose “London Still” because — surprise, surprise — she’s in London still, and one afternoon he hears them practice “The Blower’s Daughter” and wonders if that’s for Tara. They’re still trying to work out one for Jimmy Hailler, who seems to have disappeared, and Wonder-Boy Will, and Francesca’s parents, who are in Italy until September. The last one is for Justine’s cousin in Poland. He also hears the reason Francesca’s learning guitar. It’s because the guitarist who replaced Tom in their band told her that all she could do was “sing and look good in a sundress,” which is probably more than that tosser could do.

  “What about your originals?” Ned the Cook asks her after six minutes of silence listening to the news and a short discussion about the kidnapping of hostages in Mogadishu. Francesca knows all the hostages by name. She switches the radio off the moment the sport report comes on as if there’s no one else in the room who may want to hear the outcome of a league player’s salary cap appeal.

  Tom recognizes the signs. Some afternoons she’s flat because most of her world is away. If she’s not listening to the news, she spends her days sewing wedding dresses with her grandmother. Sometimes she speaks about the intricacies of the beading and he watches the way her fingers dance and her eyes come to life as she demonstrates. A useless arts degree in the classics, sewing with her grandmother in a room above a Leichhardt haberdashery shop, and pining for her boyfriend. Knowing Francesca’s mother, she’s probably despairing about the lack of ambition in her daughter’s life.

  His days are worse. He’s either bored to death at work or lying in the attic listening to music. Georgie’s pretty moody at the moment and sometimes Sam is around and Tom doesn’t really know how to react. He was fourteen when Sam and Georgie fell apart and it was hard on everyone because Sam and Tom’s father had become best mates. Tom had never really thought much of him when he was younger. Sam was a bit of a know-it-all back then, working in a wanky law firm. He was a smart-arse, really. These days he’s a lawyer with the Industrial Relations Commission. That was the thing with Sam, Tom’s mum would argue. Refused to let the Mackees believe they were better than him, Georgie included, but Sam’s passions for unions came through knowing the Finches and the Mackees. Perhaps his whole sense of social justice came from knowing them. Despite the way Tom felt about his father these days, he knew Dominic Mackee would bust a gut to make sure some worker wasn’t getting taken advantage of. It was the kind of passion that enticed Sam away from a six-digit salary.

  Despite the obvious evidence of a fetus in her womb, Tom hasn’t worked out if Georgie and Sam are sleeping together. There’s too little said between them, not necessarily awkward, but it’s like they don’t know how to speak to each other. Except Tom can see the obvious in Sam’s face. If Sam’s not with his kid, he doesn’t want to be anywhere except with Georgie. The two strangers are a long way from the Georgie and Sam of Tom’s childhood. Back then, they’d bicker and smooch and fight and tease, and Sam would call her his “Georgie girl,” and he was “babe” or “Sambo” to her.

  Tom watches them some nights while Sam’s tapping away at his laptop and Georgie’s watching TV. She’s a commercial-television slut, obsessed with Dancing with the Stars and home-improvement shows. She cries every time someone gets their backyard renovated, and tries to tell Tom the story. Once upon a time he could have imagined Sam being a bastard about it. Nowadays, Sam seems just grateful for being allowed to sit beside her in the lounge room.

  “You okay?” he asks her one evening when they’re both sitting out back, on the banana chairs Joe bought her one Christmas. Another couple of eyesores, really. Sometimes Tom thinks Joe did it to stir Georgie. The light’s on behind them and she’s reading and he’s nursing a coffee and playing his guitar.

  “My friends aren’t talking to me,” she murmurs.

  He shrugs. “Neither are mine.’”

  She looks his way and then laughs.

  “The girls will come around.”

  “I’m talking about my ex-flatmates.”

  He sips his coffee and then gets up and scrapes his banana chair away from her so he can light up.

  “Can I ask you something?” he asks, his voice quiet.

  He can see she thinks he’s going to ask about the baby, but she nods all the same.

  “Why do you think he went off the deep end?”

  It takes her a moment to understand he’s talking about his father.

  “You don’t think it was losing Joe?” she asks.

  He shakes his head. “That was the last straw. But it began earlier. When I was in Year Eleven and I started hanging out here with you and Joe.”

  She’s not speaking. He’s scared she won’t.

  “Was it their marriage?” he asks.

  She shakes her head and then she smiles to herself, as if Tom’s not there for a moment. “I started the trend of Dominic being the piper. He came out first and I was right behind him, and it’s never changed. It’s like everyone’s used him to suss out the dangers before they take the next step. If Dominic Mackee was doing it, then it was okay. The thing with Dominic is that no matter what the risk, I wanted to follow. And sometimes it meant that I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t his twin sister, but I didn’t care. Because he never left me hanging. That’s what I loved about him. He always looked after me. Meanwhile Bill just went on and on about Dom’s duty to me and to the world, and then when Joe was born seven years later, that responsibility was cemented in place. And your father took it seriously, Tom. I remember once, when we were twelve, we wanted to go to the Easter Show on our own and Bill insisted that we take Joe. He drilled it into Dominic that he wasn’t to let Joe out of his
sight. The lecture went on forever and all we wanted to do was nick off with our friends.”

  Tom could see that the memory was vivid and painful, but then again, any thought of Joe was.

  “And we lost him. Dominic was holding his hand and somehow he lost Joe in the crowd, and it took us and the police three hours to find him. Your father was inconsolable. And I hated Bill for this part of it, because the moment we got home, the belt came off and Dominic got it so bad. Joe and I cried and cried, begging him to stop.”

  “What did Nanni Grace do?”

  “Nothing. The discipline was always Bill’s thing and if there was one thing Nanni Grace agreed with, it was that Joe and I were to be looked after. ‘You’re responsible, Dom. Responsibility, Dominic.’ It’s all he ever heard, so it’s no wonder he ended up captain of his primary and high school and everywhere he’s been since. That’s not to say he didn’t have a bit of a bastard bullying streak, but thank God he used it for good, because he could have been a real prick, you know.”

  “But never one to Mum and Anabel.”

  She sighs, wrapping her arms around her body to block out the cold. “He was tough on you,” she says, looking over to him.

  Tom’s shaking his head.

  “No, he was,” she insists. “He was just like Bill. They both treated their wives like princesses, but their sons were different.”

  “How come Bill didn’t treat you like a princess?”

  She gives him a droll look and he laughs.

  “Come on, Georgie, it’s because you don’t give people a chance to treat you that way.”

  “Not true. There are some women who get away with being princesses and I’m not one of them.” She looks at him closely. “Did he ever hit you?” she asks quietly.

  Tom doesn’t speak for a moment.

  “Not like you said Bill did to him that time when he lost Joe. Except maybe a bit of shoving around in those last years of high school.”

  Tom could tell Georgie about the days after his mum and Anabel left, but he preferred not to. He couldn’t deal with anyone’s judgment of his father, no matter what.