The Piper's Son

by Melina Marchetta

  When I saw Ulysses on Georgie’s bedside table and Tom Finch’s name written on it in a scrawl so like my old man’s, I felt that I wanted to read it as a preparation for what’s about to happen to us all. I understand where the brawny part of my father and I come from — Bill. I’m not saying Bill’s not smart, but my old man is a pretty intelligent guy and that kind of intellect came from Tom Finch. I want to turn the pages he turned. But honestly I’m actually finding it hard. I think that the whole world has lied and nobody has read the book completely. It’s a conspiracy up there with Roswell.

  Wish you’d write.

  Love, Tom

  Shit! He went to the sent box, praying that somehow the e-mail got rejected. No such luck. Twenty seconds earlier anabelsbrother sent taramarie a message, not with the word cheers or see ya or whenever. But signing off with the word love.

  The grief hits her hard one day. The way it can’t be controlled. The way that yesterday can be good and so can the day before, and so can the week and fortnight before that, but then today comes and she’s back to zero. How she can’t type words into her computer or even press the in-box for her mail. The effort it takes to walk. How words can’t form in her mouth and how her blood feels paralyzed. For the first time since she can remember, she finds herself dialing Sam’s number but hangs up the moment she hears his voice because too much emotion goes into keeping Sam at an arm’s distance.

  In front of them is a couple. They’re Serbian, and for a moment she panics and thinks they’ve got a Bosnian translator by mistake. She sees their mouths move but hears nothing.

  Her co-worker reaches over and touches her hand. “Why don’t you go home, Georgie?” he asks gently after they’ve left.

  She’s too listless to even shake her head.

  “Georgie,” one of the girls from the next desk says, holding the phone in her hand and covering the mouthpiece. “It’s your brother.”

  She picks up the phone in an instant.

  “Joe?”

  She hears a sigh of such depth that she doesn’t know if it’s hers or his.

  “Georgie?”

  “Dominic,” she whispers.

  It’s just been e-mails until now. She hasn’t heard his voice for almost twelve months. Before that, she’d hear it every day of her life. She’d swear to others that she heard it in the womb for those nine months.

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  “Central. Can I come and stay with you?”

  She wants to weep, but she’s too emotionally tired.

  “That you even have to ask,” she says.

  She goes home via Coles at Norton Street Plaza to grab some groceries. It gives her purpose. Purpose is good at the moment. Milk, bread, toilet paper, and the newspaper give her something to do that doesn’t require emotion or contemplation. Although she has fewer than eight items, she lines up anywhere, and with a shaky hand she texts Jacinta and then Lucia to tell them that Dominic’s home.

  “Hi, Georgie!”

  On the line in front of her is Sam’s kid, Callum. Dressed in his school uniform and smiling shyly up at her. Sam says he goes into infantile mode when Georgie’s around. Some kind of six-year-old’s crush, where he talks like a baby. He has a cardboard box around his arm and then Georgie sees a hand touch the cardboard box. It’s the suit’s hand. Georgie and the suit never cross paths, surprisingly enough. The last time they spoke was at a function where Sam worked about eight years ago. She was all smart, tailored, slimline fitted suits and straightened hair. She said “mate” a lot and “matey,” mostly to the guys. The suit came from the school of thought that whatever you wanted, you went out and got, regardless of whether it belonged to someone else. Grace and Bill’s lesson was that you had the right to go and get what you wanted, unless it hurt others. Unless people got stepped on. Unless lives were ruined.

  Apart from that, there wasn’t much of a difference between Georgie and the suit, so no big room for analysis of why Sam had gone out with her, or whatever it’s called when people sleep together for a month without actually dating. The suit was younger, but not young enough for it to be one of those younger woman things. The suit was attractive, but Georgie had never been coy about her own looks. She had inherited them from Grace and felt comfortable with the uniqueness of them. Georgie had never quite felt at ease in the suit’s presence. Not a premonition that this woman would cause the end of her relationship, but an irritation that whether in the presence of women or men, the suit had to prove she knew more about pop culture, more about the latest trends and what was happening on the sports field. That no one was more down-to-earth than her. That no one was more up-to-date. She was the type who hogged the pen and paper at a trivia night. No one was more capable.

  “Hi, Georgie.”

  Georgie doesn’t speak until she remembers that Callum is there.

  “Leonie,” she says quietly. It’s hard thinking of her as the suit when she’s standing there in gym gear.

  “Congratulations.”

  On what? Georgie wants to ask. Are they really going to do this? Toast this pregnancy? Stand around and discuss what good-looking children Sam produces?

  Callum pushes the products across the conveyor belt, looking up at Georgie for her approval. Like he wants her to say that he’s the perfect helper. He gets nothing, because Georgie’s mind is a blank for a moment. She looks at the cardboard around his arm.

  “A robot, are you?” she asks.

  He nods as if relieved that she gets it.

  She wants the guy behind the cash register to hurry up and stop procrastinating, to make up the price of the unmarked butter. Come on, Amal. Don’t grab the microphone, she wants to beg him, reading his name tag. But he does and it’s a couple more minutes of hell in her life.

  “Can we talk, Georgie?”

  Please no, Georgie wants to say. Read on my face that I can hardly breathe at the moment and every time you open your mouth, I can breathe even less.

  “I know this is a long time coming, but I need to say it.”

  While waiting for the price of the butter at the checkout? The suit’s workshopped this with her friends. Pick a place where Georgie Finch can’t make a scene.

  “I thought he was looking for someone different, back then. Not something different. It was never to best you.”

  When Georgie called a break, she never truly believed Sam wanted to walk away from her, despite some of the issues in their relationship. She knew it was about his job and life in general. That was why she gave him space, so he could sort himself out without taking their relationship hostage. Except she never imagined what it had done to his pride for her to call the shots. Sam had a capacity for coldness. He was passive-aggressive and too many things about Georgie were an issue for him. Her lack of ambition. Her reluctance to give in to him. Someone always has the power in a relationship, he told her once. She had told him in return to stop seeing life as one-upmanship.

  The butter gets its price and the suit hands over the money, and the moment Callum walks away, to push the trolley back to where it belongs, Georgie speaks.

  “Apart from my brother being blown up, talking about this is up there in the top three things that make me feel sick to my stomach, so I’d prefer that you never bring it up again because I’m not here to make you feel good with absolution, Leonie. I never actually got the turn-the-other-cheek lecture in religion. Don’t try this again, especially when Callum’s around.”

  The suit doesn’t respond. She picks up her groceries and waits for Callum to return, and, clutching her shopping bag, she takes his robot hand and disappears around the corner.

  Georgie would like to have been cooler about it. Flicked her hair back in disdain a bit more. Delivered it like maybe Julia Roberts or Reese Witherspoon in a movie, southern accent and all. But she knows her voice was wavering and her hands were trembling and her face was twitching with emotion.

  “I can’t believe it,” Lucia says when Georgie rings her from the car park.
r />   “Believe it. And she doesn’t even have a proper environmental shopping bag. Still using plastics.”

  “What. A. Cow.”

  She goes to the Union to speak with Tom. It’s five and she knows he would have started by now and she wants him to know about his father before he comes home that night. Doesn’t want to spring Dominic on him. Out of all the relationships, the one between her brother Dom and his son is the most fragile, the most heartbreaking. On a good day, she thinks that Jacinta and Dom will make it somehow, and that they shielded Anabel from it. But not Tom. Tom’s hero fell off a pedestal way too high and he smashed all over the place. If Georgie hasn’t been able to forgive aspects of life with Bill by her age now, she can’t imagine how long it will take Tom to forgive his father. Dominic and Tom were inseparable most of Tom’s childhood. The betrayal was felt deeply.

  When she sees Stani, she points to the back and he nods. She comes around the bar and pokes her head in to where Tom works silently with a guy his age. How did he get to be so quiet? This boy who was born talking and who came from a family that never shut up.

  “Tom?”

  He hears her voice and swings around quickly, alarm on his face. Fear. Terror. Such despair. She knows that feeling too. Of believing that each time someone says her name, it’s to tell her that something bad has happened.

  “It’s okay,” she says with a smile there. A tired one, but she watches his shoulders relax and he swallows hard.

  He follows her outside, his trembling arm around her shoulder.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  She nods, reaching up and kissing his cheek.

  “Tom, your father’s back.”

  There’s a look of disbelief on his face, and she can see he’s fighting hard to keep some control.

  “Where?”

  “He’s back at the house, I think.”

  Tom’s shaking his head. “Why? Why isn’t he up north seeing Mum? What’s he doing here when he should be fixing things up with her?”

  She puts a gentle hand to his mouth. “It’ll be fine. He’s been sober for more than half the year, Tom, and he’ll be determined —”

  He cuts her off. “You didn’t live with him,” he hisses. “When she left and I was living with him, he was determined every day.”

  She doesn’t want to fight Tom. He’s too fragile and she doesn’t know how it will manifest itself.

  “For most of your life, he was a pretty fantastic father and husband, and I think it will be very sad if you remember him for what happened when Jacinta left. I’d hate to think any of us will be judged on a handful of years, Tom.”

  He’s shaking his head. He doesn’t want to hear.

  “I have to go,” she says, taking a deep breath because she doesn’t know how she’s going to prepare for Dominic. “I’ll see you at home tonight. You knock on my door when you come up to bed because I’ll be awake until you come home. Do you hear me?”

  He pulls away and goes back inside without responding.

  Her brother is waiting for her on the front step.

  Dominic Finch Mackee.

  School captain of Saint Sebastian’s, with his stocky swagger that beckoned the world to follow. “He’s the bloody pied piper,” Bill would complain when Georgie and Joe copied everything he did. Dom, who got his girlfriend pregnant, married her, and dropped out of an honors law degree so Jacinta could finish hers, and never once in twenty years dared express a regret over what could have been. Dom, who made a speech on the Sydney waterfront back in 1998 when the Patrick company sacked their entire workforce in the dead of night as a threat against unionism. Delivered it with his four-year-old daughter in a pram next to him and his thirteen-year-old son by his side. But he could also be Dominic the bastard. He was a drinker, Dom was. Always had been. Enough to make him the life of the party when things were good, and when it got bad, enough to make him a bad-tempered bastard for at least three quarters of the day. So if his son grunted an answer back to his mother in a typical adolescent way, it was a shove up against the wall with enough force to bruise him. Until Tom learned to shove back and ended up spending most of Year Eleven with Georgie and Joe.

  He looks thin, not the thickset build he’s always had. And there’s such a hollowness in his eyes. And he’s looking older. They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke. Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.

  He stands up and holds her for a while and she feels his body tremble.

  “Come on,” she says quietly.

  “Tommy?”

  “He’s working at the Union. Won’t be home until ten. Let’s go in.”

  Dominic shakes his head, seems like he needs fresh air.

  She leaves the groceries on the porch and takes his hand. “Then let’s walk.”

  They cross over to the park and she fights the shivers from this early August night. “I think he’s at breaking point,” she tells him, as though he’s asked. “He came to me four weeks ago with ten stitches in his head.”

  Silence.

  “Drugs. Bit of speed. Heaps of weed. Hanging out with a bunch of dickheads.”

  She can’t see him in the dark, but she knows he’s gutted.

  “He’s working, though,” she continues. “With Bob Spinelli’s kid and Stani’s niece. And that can’t be a bad thing.”

  They sit on the swings for a while, not talking. In the park where they used to hang out on Sundays with Jacinta and Anabel and Lucia and Abe and their kids. Georgie was the picnic instigator. She’d have all the food and picnic gear under control so there’d be no backing out and no excuses about it being too much of a hassle. In summer they’d stay there until the sun came down. Tom and Dominic could kick a ball around for hours and not get bored. Even without Sam, it didn’t take much to make her happy. It had been the unspoken deal between her and Jacinta, years back when Dominic’s girl came into their lives. It’s where his other girlfriends had failed. Share her brothers and Georgie would be loyal for life. Jacinta got that, smart girl. Georgie missed her sister-in-law these days as much as Dominic. She longed for her niece, Anabel, with an anxiety that a phone call every second night couldn’t soothe.

  They return to the house and Dominic grabs the groceries and follows her to dump the bags in the kitchen and then they settle his things in the front room that doubles as a study. When he sits on the futon, his eyes find hers and for once in their lives they have nothing to say to each other.

  “I’ll make you something to eat,” she says quietly, walking out.

  Later that night Georgie hears the front door open, and she comes out of her room and walks down the stairs to where they stand in the corridor staring at each other. Tom and Dominic. Same height. Same bog Irish looks courtesy of Tom Finch. Say something, Dom, she wants to shout. You’ve always had something to say. Tell him you’re sorry you let him down but you’re human. Tell him you’ll work hard to make this right. You’re a union man, Dom. The person who can get dialogue going between two opposing sides.

  But Dominic says nothing and Tom pushes past him and takes the stairs two at a time, as if to get as far away as possible.

  When Tom gets to work on Monday morning, he notices that despite not getting his footy tips in on time, he’s kept his place in the top three. The only person he imagines getting them as accurate as him is Mohsin the Ignorer.

  “Mate, did you fill out my footy-tipping sheet?” he asks when he sits down.

  Mohsin ignores him and Tom wants to spit chips. When Mohsin the Ignorer finally looks at him, Tom can’t hold back.

  “What’s your fucking problem?”

  Mohsin has the audacity to look taken aback and Tom just bars him with his own look and goes back to work.

  Like he does most afternoons at the Union before his shift, he stands at the door of the back room, watching Francesca and Justine negotiate their compilation. Each time, they acknowledge him with a nod before goi
ng back to the music. Once or twice he suggests a shift in key or a need for more force in a bend, but mostly he just watches as Justine plays her accordion and Francesca works with the lyrics and scribbles down the corrections.

  Today Francesca looks up at him again, and he senses it’s an invitation to let him come in and listen.

  “It’s going to be hillbilly,” Justine explains, as if he had asked. “Harmonica, accordion, and guitar. Bit like ‘Crazy Train,’” she adds, referring to a Waifs piece they used to do.

  “We’ve called it ‘I Met You at the Cornerstone on the Highway to Bedlam,’” Francesca says.

  He thinks about the title for a moment and nods, kind of liking it, really.

  “Go on,” he says. “Read me the rest.”

  “Only if you commit to playing on the compilation.”

  Francesca has that arrogant air of being in charge. It still amazes him how they could have been misled by her personality in Year Eleven. It’s what depression does to a person; it changes them completely.

  “You invited me in to listen,” he argues.

  “It’s very confronting to have you listen to my lyrics,” she explains. “You’ll be critical and you’ll snicker. If you’re going to be a critical snickerer, I’d prefer that you pay with a bit of guitar playing.”

  “And harmonica,” Justine says, trying the first line in another key. He always loved watching her fingers fly over the little black bass dots. Their best times on stage were when they dueled.

  “I’m not good enough to do harmonica and guitar at the same time,” he says, still irritated that he’s at their mercy.

  “Then work on it.”

  Francesca flicks through her notepad and reads out some of the lyrics.

  “I met you at the cornerstone on the highway to bedlam.

  Walked with you to the pinnacle, along that ledge to hell,