The Piper's Son

by Melina Marchetta

  One morning he had asked, “Do you think that’s a good idea?” after watching his father pour a glass of scotch.

  “Do you have a better one, Tom?”

  “Yeah, actually I do, Dominic.”

  He got a backhand for that. It split his lip and made his head spin.

  “Shit,” his father muttered, grabbing Tom to see what he had done, but Tom stepped away, tasting blood in his mouth. He watched his father stumble. “Come on, Tommy. Just let me look at it.”

  It began a pattern between him and his father. And on the very day Tom woke up hoping that he didn’t have to go through that ritual of watching his father down a scotch just to get him through the morning, or that he didn’t have to stick his father’s head under a shower spray and sober him up for a meeting between the Labor Council and industry bosses, that he didn’t have to kid himself that a mug of black coffee would work a miracle — on that very day that Tom woke up wishing it would all go away, it did.

  Georgie’s stare pierces into him, jolting him back to the present.

  “You know you’d make your mum happy if you rang her,” Georgie says.

  “I was pretty cut when she walked out on him,” he says, relieved to be thinking of something else.

  “She didn’t walk out on him, Tom. She took Anabel to Brisbane so Anabel wouldn’t have to see him at his worst. She did that for Dom, not for herself. It was a horrific year and Dom just crashed. It was the hardest decision she’s ever had to make. But she didn’t leave him and she didn’t leave you, Tom. She wanted you to come up with her. She begged you to.”

  “So what about before? When I was in Year Eleven and things were just beginning to get bad?” he asks again, not wanting to remember the look in his mother’s eyes when he wouldn’t say good-bye a year ago.

  She shrugs. “Who knows? I think when Jacinta had to go back to work, it killed them both for a while.”

  “I thought she wanted to work.”

  “Anabel was only eight, and your mother had worked all through your primary years, so I really think she wanted to be home for Anabel. Pick her up from school, turn up to sports carnivals, be a real at-home mum. I think Dominic felt he failed her by not being able to support you all on a single wage, but your parents were mortgaged to the hilt and interest rates were ridiculous. Plus his job was always so full-on and he had little to show for it, especially when the government came down hard on the unions.”

  “So he regretted dropping out of uni?” he asks.

  “Why ask that?” she snaps. “So you can blame yourself and say you being born stuffed up their lives? Well, it didn’t, and once he got into the union, he never looked back. It was like he was born for that job. There were no regrets, Tom. A bit of guilt from Jacinta because she thinks your father missed out on something, and a bit of guilt from him because he thinks she missed out on something.” She smiles. “But there was nothing wrong with their marriage. I could be a fool for believing this one hundred percent, but there was never anyone for Dominic but Jacinta and vice versa. They knew they’d get through the shitty part.”

  “But they didn’t,” he argues.

  “They’re not divorced, Tom. That marriage is not over.”

  “Georgie, they’ve been living apart for more than a year and we don’t have a clue where he is.”

  And there it is. A look that tells him everything and nothing. All of a sudden he’s pissed off. Not quite sure who with, but somehow Georgie gets in the way.

  “Where is he?”

  She sighs, getting up from her chair. “Let’s not do this now.”

  “You have no right to keep it from my mother. You’ve always thought you were more important than her when it comes to him, but you aren’t,” he says angrily.

  She stops walking. Can’t hide the hurt.

  “Where did that come from?” she asks angrily. “I would never keep anything about Dominic from your mother, and he would never be in contact with me before being in contact with her. Sisters and daughters come second in this family, Tom. They always have. So if you want to find out anything about your father, pick up the phone and speak to your mother.”

  “I didn’t mean to —”

  “Yes, you did,” she says, cutting him off. She’s crying and it makes him feel like a piece of shit.

  “Georgie, I’m sorry!” he shouts as she disappears inside, but all he hears is the sound of her footsteps and the slamming of her door.

  He goes for a walk and finds himself two blocks away in Temple Street, outside the house he grew up in. It’s a semi, much smaller than Georgie’s, with a tiny garden path and a bit of lawn and a border for planting roses. His father was a stickler for keeping it perfect. At the moment, they rent it out and everything’s dead.

  It’s a bad place for memories. Some of the best moments of his life happened here and some of the worst. It’s where his father broke the news that Joe was probably dead. Tom remembers Dominic standing on this very veranda, waiting for him, saying, “Tom . . . Oh, God, Tom.”

  He crouches down to where a dead stem is buried in cracked dirt and crumbles the soil inside his fist.

  “I called police!” He hears a voice from next door.

  He peers around the hedge and smiles. The light’s on and he can see their tiny neighbor, clutching her quilted dressing gown around her.

  “Hey, Mrs. Liu. It’s me, Thomas. Thomas Mackee.”

  Her face registers shock and then joy. “Oh. Oh. Thomas. Very sorry.”

  She steps onto the lawn, and he climbs over the hedge and into hergarden, bobbing down to kiss her cheek. When he was at school, she used to walk up the main drag of Stanmore with a white mask over her mouth as if the SARS virus was in the neighborhood. Sometimes his father would have to go up to the shops with her to translate. It’s not as if Dominic knew how to speak Mandarin, but somehow both Mrs. Liu and the person behind the counter seemed happier when his dad was patiently repeating what the other had to say.

  Tom answers the questions about his mum and Anabel, and when she asks after his father, he tells her the truth and says he has no idea where he is. Then she invites him in and he wants to say yes, so that he can see his family’s kitchen from her living room. But he can’t stand the idea of seeing another Tom sitting at the table. Another Anabel resting her face in her hands, elbows on the table, grinning. Another Jacinta and Dominic doing the sums about whether they could afford a new fridge. People spoke within the walls of their home. His parents genuinely liked each other. They liked their kids. Love’s easy. It kind of comes with the territory. But liking is another story.

  “When Jacinta and Dominic come home, Tom?” Mrs. Liu asks, tears in her eyes. “People in your house,” she continues, leaning forward to whisper. “Dirty. Very dirty.”

  That was another thing his father didn’t take into account when he allowed everything to fall apart. That neighbors like Mrs. Liu were left lonely, living next door to dirty people.

  They talk for a while. Small talk, really. It reminds him of his father coming out here every night to water the plants, back before the water restrictions. “He’s always had a thing for old women,” his mother would joke. She’d call him the patron saint of the lonely. He could sit outside and spend hours chatting with anyone who just wanted to talk. “Even five minutes of your time can make someone’s day,” he’d tell Tom and Anabel.

  Tom was beginning to understand the five minutes a lot more these days.

  Later, when he’s back at Georgie’s, he finds her in the kitchen making a cup of tea. He thinks of those nights after Joe died, when Nanni Grace and Pop Bill returned to Albury, which was hours and hours away. In his own home, he remembers how his mum would sit on his bed at night, encouraging him to talk about how he was feeling, and the way Anabel would huddle onto his father’s lap and whisper for him not to be sad. He remembers the murmuring from his parents’ bedroom, always the murmuring. But had they forgotten about Georgie alone in this house? Were her friends there for her? Did
they sleep alongside her? Is that how Sam came back into her life? Tom needs to know. Who kept one of their own from the mind-numbing solitude during those nights of hell? And because he can’t stand it any longer, because sometimes he thinks everything inside him will crack, he walks to where Georgie has her back to him at the sink and wraps his arm around her and they stand there for a long while, their bodies shuddering from the exhaustion of this dry retching of emotion.

  When Georgie approaches the Union, her nephew’s standing outside, having a smoke during his break. He looks lonely out here on his own. When he sees her, he stubs out his cigarette and gives her a hug, but already there’s an irritated look on his face.

  “Don’t complain about the food.”

  “What a ridiculous thing to say,” she says. “Why would I complain about the food? I love the fact that Stani’s finally introduced it.”

  “I’m warning you.”

  When she follows him inside, her eyes go straight up to the blackboard menu and then back at him, with irritation.

  “Why introduce food if he’s only going to offer two plates?”

  “Georgie, don’t.”

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  “Go for the T-bone. You’ll love it.”

  He’s pushing her — no, actually he’s shoving her — toward the table near the door, and then Francesca Spinelli is there saying, “Georgie!”

  Georgie tries to move around Tom and fails. It’s like he’s blocking her, but Francesca manages to push him aside.

  “Oh. My. God. You’re pregnant!”

  For a moment, Georgie is stunned. Tom’s muttering while Francesca is grinning from ear to ear. “You look gooooorgeous.”

  There’s hugging all around, and before Georgie can stop herself, before she even wants to, she’s talking trimesters and morning sickness and the joy of her growing bust size and how she’s carrying it all at the front, which could mean a boy, and she’s saying aloud every single thing she was frightened to even feel. To this girl who used to hang out in her attic with her friends and Tom, playing music and arguing and calling him a dickbrain and every other suffix or prefix you could stick dick to. And there it was. A memory of a time when Tom was at his happiest and the girls were the key.

  Francesca kisses her with the promise of returning on her break and then she’s gone and Georgie sits at the table, the greatest of relief overcoming her. As if she’s been holding her breath for so long.

  She’s having a baby. Months or days don’t count anymore. It’s all about weeks now. Twenty weeks. Too late to change her mind. Too early to feel safe, but close enough.

  “How bloody rude was that?” Tom says with disgust, staring at the bar where Francesca’s serving. “I mean, what if you had a fat gut and a bigger arse because you’d put on weight?”

  “Oh, what a silver-tongued devil my nephew’s turned out to be.”

  Lucia and her sister, Bernadette, are twenty-five minutes late. “Don’t be critical,” Lucia protests.

  Georgie shrugs. “I would never get away with being twenty-five minutes late,” she says.

  “Kids . . .”

  “Give you an excuse to be late.”

  “You have no idea. . . .”

  “And it also gives you permission to say the words, ‘you have no idea,’” Bernadette says. “She was supposed to pick me up half an hour earlier.”

  Lucia looks disgruntled, but then she spots the blackboard. “Since when have they had food here?”

  “Six months. But only two choices.”

  Tom comes out of the kitchen, and Georgie beckons him over again. He leans over to kiss Lucia and Bernadette.

  “Why is there no vegetarian dish?” Georgie asks.

  He shrugs. “I think the boss wants to do things slowly.”

  Georgie sees Stani, and her hand goes up in a beckoning wave before Tom grabs it.

  “Don’t call him over and tell him off about the menu,” he warns.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, Tom. It’s ridiculous that there’s no vegetarian dish.”

  “More ridiculous that you’re not a vegetarian. Sam’s been cooking protein all week.”

  This seems to interest Lucia and her sister, who exchange a quick look that doesn’t go unnoticed by Georgie.

  When he walks away, Lucia stares after him. “I don’t remember him looking that much like Dom. It’s freaky. How’s he doing?”

  “Him or Dom?”

  “Both.”

  Georgie shrugs. “They all need to be together. They’ve never been good without one another.”

  Lucia’s doing that probing stare thing. It’s part of her arsenal. Wearing Georgie down emotionally with an empathetic stare and then trying to sort out her life.

  “So Sam’s cooking for you?”

  Georgie doesn’t respond.

  “No one’s being critical, Georgie.”

  “Well, that pisses me off,” Georgie says angrily. “Seven years ago it was all fire and brimstone and everyone telling me to forget about him, and now . . . now I should give it a go. Would you, Lucia? Would you take Abe back?”

  Lucia doesn’t respond for a long while and then sighs. “I don’t know what I’d do, Georgie. Probably what you did. Lose my mind a bit. Be angry forever. But things aren’t exactly the way you put it.”

  No one ever dares say the words to Georgie, but she knows they want to. That it wasn’t behind her back. They were having a break, called by her. Because back then Sam was a bear with a sore head for so long, the time came when she said, “I want you to go, Sam. I want you to just work out what you want, because sometimes I don’t think it’s me.”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” he had said with a sigh, getting into bed.

  But she insisted on it. There was no talk of it being long-term or forever. In her heart she felt she was giving him the room he needed to work out whatever it was that was weighing him down. There was never any talk of them going out with others. Of having drinks on Friday night after work and sleeping with a colleague. Of starting a relationship, a five-minute relationship, that meant absolutely nothing to him. There was never any talk of Georgie finding out through the inner-west gossip network about the affair, or three months later finding out about the pregnancy. People said Sam’s hair went straight to gray after that bit of information, but nothing beat what it did to Georgie.

  “I would not forgive him for the suit,” Bernadette says.

  The suit. The title for the mother of Sam’s child. Lucia had known the suit when they both worked with Sam years ago, and somehow Sam’s son and Lucia’s son, Daniel, have ended up at the same primary school, in the same class.

  “How can you stand seeing her at Saint Michael’s, Lucia?” Bernadette says.

  Lucia doesn’t like Bernadette’s tone. It’s written all over her face. “So I have to take Daniel out of school? Bernie, I have Sam’s kid at my house most weekends. Through Sam, not the suit. I can’t just turn around and ignore her when we’re doing tuckshop.”

  “You do tuckshop with her?” Georgie asks, horrified.

  “Well, if it makes you feel better,” Lucia says, “she’s having problems.”

  Georgie bites her tongue. “So everyone imagines that I want her to be miserable.”

  “Why not? I want her suffering like you’d never believe,” Bernadette snaps.

  “I think she’s having issues with the guy she’s been dating for a while.” Lucia leans forward. “I think they’re very serious and he prefers it when Callum’s not around.”

  “I can’t believe she would tell you that,” her sister says angrily. “You’re one of Georgie and Sam’s best friends. She has no right using you as a confidant.”

  “She didn’t confide in me,” Lucia argues. “She told Kate Blaxland while they were heating up the chicken tenderloins the other day.”

  “Because she knew you were listening,” Bernadette argues back.

  Georgie doesn’t know whether she can handle a full-on argument between
the sisters. Despite how distasteful she finds the topic, she decides to join the conversation to avoid the conflict.

  “I can’t believe any of you are shocked that the boyfriend prefers it when the kid’s not around,” she says quietly.

  “Well, if he loved her . . .”

  “That’s bullshit. You can’t measure someone’s love based on how they feel about your child.”

  “And I love the way she gets to do the tuckshop because Sam’s paying her enough child maintenance so she only has to work two days,” Bernadette says bitterly.

  Lucia’s nodding. “She gets her hair straightened every week and the suit has been replaced by expensive Pilates gear.”

  Georgie doesn’t want to hear any more. Regardless of how she feels, Sam’s kid seems happy and well adjusted, so they must be doing something right.

  Francesca Spinelli and Tom bring them their food and stay for a moment. Lucia and Bernadette know Francesca’s family, and they chat for a while, the young girl’s arm around both their shoulders. Georgie feels like a pushy parent, desperate for Tom to hang out with her again. Francesca speaks about her parents traveling through Italy and how her nonna’s moved into their house so someone can be at home for Francesca’s younger brother at night.

  “Her nonna’s the best seamstress in Leichhardt,” Lucia tells them.

  Francesca nods in agreement. “I’m kind of her apprentice this year. I do most of the beading, and I’m beginning to do patterns as well. I made this,” she says pointing to her dress, perfect for her figure and coloring, all full breasts and rich olive skin. “And most of Justine’s clothes.”

  “How beautiful is that?” Georgie says, feeling emotional. “Making wedding dresses with your grandmother.”

  “I’ve got grime to scrub from the wall,” Tom mutters, standing up and walking away.

  Boredom becomes a killer. It makes him do things he would never contemplate. Like read every online newspaper from back to front. He hates the blogs the most, but he becomes hooked. The sports ones are the worst, and although he’d rather die than admit to Georgie that ex–league stars can’t string a sentence together because of all the battering they’ve taken around the head, he finds himself clicking his tongue with frustration at the way they can ruin the language.