The Piper's Son

by Melina Marchetta

Traveled along the passageway of all things aching,

  But would crawl with you if you wanted me to

  On the steeple point to hope.

  So we can tip the stars and hold the moon,

  Graze the sun, but make it . . .”

  She glances toward the doorway and whispers “soon” to end the chorus in rhyme. It’s clear she doesn’t want Anti-rhyme Ned to hear.

  “I think the chorus could be longer,” Tom suggests, “especially if it’s going to be hillbilly.”

  “So we can tip the stars and hold the moon, / Graze the sun, but make it soon. / Come home, Jim, we’re waiting here,” Justine suggests.

  Tom and Francesca are nodding and thinking.

  “With three cigarettes and a glass of beer!” Ned taunts mockingly from the kitchen.

  The three of them exchange looks. “He’s very annoying,” Tom says, taking the lyrics from Francesca. He didn’t realize the song was for Jimmy, but it makes sense really. Jimmy was all bedlam and hell at times. A curse to be around when you just wanted things to be calm. He never played by the rules, which made things too unpredictable most times. Both Jimmy and Tom had been forced to hang out with each other when they attached themselves to the female force. When he met Tara and these girls, he didn’t explain the shit of what was happening at home with his father’s drinking and why he spent so much time with Georgie and Joe. He just sat behind them on the bus home in the afternoon and took advantage of the therapy they dished out to Frankie, whose own home life was falling to pieces. Until being with them made more sense than being with his other mates. It kept him sane, really. It wasn’t until Jimmy Hailler called him on it, not until the crazy bastard had started sitting with him in woodwork classes, that he actually started talking. Jimmy Hailler was a killer of a listener. The guy understood fragmented people.

  “Suggestions?”

  Francesca and Justine are standing in front of him. Their lyrics are in his hands, and he doesn’t realize until Francesca reaches out to steady the paper, her dark eyes piercing into him, that his hands are shaking.

  He thinks for a moment. “Yeah,” he says, but his throat feels croaky, so he clears it.

  “So we can tip the stars and hold the moon,

  Graze the sun, and fate our chances.

  But make it soon; our sorrow lingers

  And time just seems to slip away.”

  He shrugs. He doesn’t know where to go from there without sounding sentimental.

  Justine puts the accordion down. “It’s five,” she says, looking up at the time.

  She walks out and Tom waits as Francesca packs up.

  “Where is he?”

  “Who?” she asks, looking up.

  “Jimmy?”

  “Jim,” she corrects. She shrugs. “Who knows with Jim?”

  “What happened?”

  “He just nicked off after his granddad died last year.”

  “His granddad’s dead?” Tom is stunned. Jimmy had lived with the old man for years. As far as they were concerned, there was no one else around.

  “When?”

  She’s confused by the question. “November last year.”

  “So where did he go?”

  She shrugs. “Away. Out bush. You know Jim. He was never going to stick around.”

  “Why did you let him go?” Tom can feel himself getting angrier and angrier, but he can’t control it, especially when he sees her expression contains fury beyond anything.

  “Jim couldn’t cope,” Francesca snaps. “Jim went out bush. We don’t know where he is. Once in a very blue moon we get an entry on Siobhan’s MySpace page. He once sent her a message asking if he could borrow a hundred dollars. She deposited it into his account. Another time he sent my mother flowers for her birthday. What do you want me to say, Thomas? Jim doesn’t want to be found just yet. We had the funeral and then he was gone.”

  “Did anyone turn up?” he asks. “His mother or father?”

  She shakes her head. “Just us and our families, and some of the old guys his grandfather knew, Ms. Quinn and Brother Louis and even Mr. Brolin from school.”

  Everyone but him. He kicks the chair across the room and the music goes flying.

  “Whose decision was it not to tell me?”

  She shakes her head, grabs her stuff, and walks out of the room, pushing past Justine, who stares at Tom from the door, stunned.

  “People can hear, Thomas.”

  There’s something in her eyes that makes him feel like he’s sickened them, like that time when they saw him lose it years ago after a night in a pub on Broadway, when some guy had tried to pick a fight. Tom always did anger well. Hid it well, but showed it even better — courtesy of his father and Joe, who could go off at any given moment. Joe said it was a Bill thing. Nothing about nature there. With the Mackees, it was all nurture.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about Jimmy’s grandfather. I would have been there.”

  “Frankie . . .”

  “I don’t care what Francesca decided! I would have been there.”

  Justine walks toward him, and he can tell that she’s angry. She picks up some of the sheet music from the floor.

  “Why do you do that, Thomas? Make Frankie the villain? Just say it was me?” she says, pointing to herself. “Just say it was me who said, ‘Thomas doesn’t give a shit about us’? What would you say?”

  Stani is at the door. “Hey!” he says, looking directly at Tom. “Keep it down.”

  What would he say? He’d say, Thomas doesn’t give a shit about himself.

  “Why don’t you go ask your dumb flatmates why you didn’t know? Frankie told them to pass on the details. We just thought you didn’t care.”

  He feels knifed. Doesn’t know why he stays, but he’s in the kitchen putting on his apron.

  Ned the Cook is pissed off and makes a mess for him to clean up. The next minute, Tom has him down, grinding Ned’s face into the floor, and Francesca is pulling him off, crying, and Stani’s there grabbing him, holding him back, his steel bar of an arm across Tom’s chest.

  “Tom, take a breath. Take a few deep breaths.” He hears the accent in Stani’s voice that only comes out with emotion. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Tom.”

  Ned is bleeding from somewhere on his face and Francesca helps him to his feet.

  He’s trembling, Tom is. His whole body is shaking, but he can’t help it. His eyes are fixed on Ned’s bloody face, and when he stops shaking and Stani lets go, he takes off his apron and walks out calmly.

  He can sense their surprise when he walks into the house. Both Georgie and his father are in the kitchen, eating soup in silence. Tom takes out a bowl and helps himself, and then sits at the table opposite them.

  “Have you rung your mother?” his father asks.

  Tom looks up from his soup, the expression on his face filthy.

  “Don’t,” he warns.

  “She wants . . .”

  “Don’t lecture me on how to treat my mother. Not you. Not after the way you’ve treated her.”

  They’re the first words Tom’s spoken to him. A couple of don’ts and nots.

  “Tom . . .” Georgie begins, putting a hand gently on his shoulder.

  “And don’t lecture me on how to talk to him,” he snaps, shrugging her hand away. “You’re always sticking up for him like he’s never done anything wrong.”

  There’s not much to say after that, so everyone goes back to slurping in silence. Tom’s determined not to be the one who walks away first. He’s not going to give the bastard the satisfaction. Of course, the great Dominic Mackee gets up because he’s good at leaving. He takes his plate to the sink and begins to rinse.

  “She got her doctorate,” his father says with his back to him, washing the plate. “She left a message. Wanted you to know.”

  And then his father walks out without looking back.

  Later in the night, he dials the number with trembling fingers.

  “Hello.”<
br />
  “Mum?”

  He hears her catch her breath. “Dr. Jacinta Louise Mackee to you, thank you very much,” and it’s said with a sob and a laugh at the same time. It’s the first time he’s spoken to her in nine months and it makes him want to cry.

  “Are you at Georgie’s?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you spoken to your dad?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “I just wanted to hear your voice.” His voice is cracking. Keep it together, Tom. Don’t be a loser.

  “Then I’ll talk to you.”

  He swallows hard. “Just not about him, okay.”

  He hears her sigh and it sounds so sad. And then she starts talking. It’s what she’d do every morning he could remember when he was a kid. She’d wake him up at six in the morning with a cup of tea and they’d lie in his bed and talk for an hour before she had to get ready for work. It was to make up for the fact that at times she wouldn’t see him until six at night. Some mornings they’d read together; other times she’d explain what she did during the day. Tonight she speaks about the doctorate and about Anabel’s soccer and trumpet lessons and how Anabel’s not really enjoying school, and how sometimes she thinks she’s made the wrong decision, but most times knows it’s the right one. She talks about Grandma Agnes and his great-grandfather, who’s going to turn eighty-five and who told her he feels as if he’s closed his eyes for a moment and sixty years passed by. And then she stops for a moment.

  “What?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know how to do what you asked me, Tom,” she says sadly. “I don’t know how to talk about our lives without talking about your father. He’s in every one of the memories and every one of my decisions.”

  He closes his eyes and wants to sleep through the next sixty years.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “I love you, Tom. He loves you.”

  Her voice whispering love soothes him. They’d never done that before. Weren’t that type of family. Except now he doesn’t know what kind of family they are. What word is it that can define them? What would they call his family in the textbooks? Broken? He comes from a broken home. The Mackees can’t be put back together again. There are too many pieces of them missing.

  To: mackee_joe@yahoo.co.uk

  From: georgiefinch@hotmail.com

  Date: 7 August 2007

  I think of Dom and me lying in our bunks in Fort Street, Joe. He’d tell me that our father, Tom Finch, was coming back to us one day. If they hadn’t returned a body, it meant he was still alive regardless of what everyone else said. We’d work ourselves up wondering what would happen to your father if Tom Finch returned. What would happen to Bill? What would happen to Mum if she had to choose between both her husbands? It made us hate Bill, you know. We stopped ourselves loving him, Joe, because we couldn’t bear the idea of loving Bill like a father and then Tom Finch coming back. And then years later you were born. And I’d want to kill anyone who called you my half brother because there was nothing half about how Dom and I loved you. From the moment I saw you, when I was seven years old, in that incubator, Joe, I started thanking God that my father hadn’t come back. Because if he had, you would never have been born.

  And now I look at Sam, who would never have gotten on that plane to London with me, who wouldn’t even be back in my life again today if it wasn’t for you dying. And it’s like God’s being cruel and saying, “Well, if you want Joe, you can’t have Sam back. That’s the deal, Georgie.” And perhaps I could choose, Joe, but then God makes it worse. “If you want Joe, you can’t have this baby.”

  When Georgie walks out of the station that afternoon, Sam’s there. Leaning against the railing on the Main Street side, next to where someone’s chained a bike. It takes twenty seconds to walk through the tunnel under the platforms toward where he stands, and she keeps her eyes on him the whole way while he tries to get as much out of his cigarette as he can and then tosses it into the bin as she approaches. Today his son isn’t with him. He only gets Callum from Friday to Sunday and although she never gets a sense of his anticipation to be with the boy on Thursdays, she always senses his flatness on Sundays.

  Sometimes he forgets the unspoken rules written by their past and he places a hand around her shoulder. It’s instinct, intimacy is. Sometimes he lets it linger, while other times he drops his hand by the time they get to the lights on Salisbury Road. But apart from that, words have been removed. Words are intimacy she won’t allow and he would not dare ask for. The Georgie and Sam of the present have no past together. No talk of memories. No reminiscing of holidays, or friends and parties.

  “Do you want a hot chocolate?” he asks as they walk past Le Chocoreve.

  She shakes her head. She thinks of the e-mail she received today from Ana Vanquez, the girl Joe loved in London. They were teachers together in their East London school. Ana teaching her native tongue of Spanish, and Joe teaching English and history.

  These days she avoids Ana Vanquez’s e-mails and tells herself she’ll read them when she feels stronger. She knows what they’ll say.

  “I’m going to Melbourne for a couple of days for work,” he says, watching her closely because he knows the signs. “Why don’t you get Bernadette to move in?”

  “I’ve got Tom and Dominic,” she says.

  “They’re not exactly the best of company at the moment, Georgie.”

  Which is an understatement. Her brother spends most of his time locked away in the study. Sometimes he disappears early in the evening and she thinks it’s to go to an AA meeting, but he’s not ready to talk about it yet, so she doesn’t ask. Apart from his jog every morning and the brief appearance he makes at dinnertime, she’s hardly seen him. As a result of Dominic’s presence, Tom stays away or confines himself to the attic. She misses their talks. She misses Dominic more now than when he was away.

  “I’ll get Dom out of the house tonight,” Sam says.

  “Where?”

  He shrugs.

  “I don’t know. Down to the pub.”

  She looks at him, horrified. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sam. You don’t take an alcoholic to the pub.”

  “He’ll have to get used to being normal again, and being normal is all of us down at the pub. I’ll get Abe to come down and Jonesy.”

  “No,” she says. He used to make fun of the way she said it. “No-wa,” he’d exaggerate.

  “And anyway, Tom’s down there and it will be uncomfortable for both of them.”

  “It’s not the only pub in Sydney.”

  “No.”

  He sighs and she picks up a bit of irritation in the sound.

  “What? Are you going to follow him around for the rest of his life now?” he asks. “Make sure he doesn’t walk into pubs or linger around bottle shops? Are you that powerful, Georgie? That you can protect your brother from whatever’s out there?”

  She stares at him, taken aback, and he mutters something under his breath and she can tell he regrets his words.

  “Mick Thomas is playing at the Vanguard tonight,” he adds quietly. “I’ll take him there.”

  These days he’s almost all gray, not the fair-haired guy she once loved and although he tries to keep fit, he has to work at it harder than ever and she knows that irritates him. He never had Dom’s charisma or his gift of the gab. There was a distance to him that forced people to work harder at trying to get his attention, but she knew it wasn’t game playing for him. Sam had been brought up in a cold household where people had no idea how to communicate with each other. His parents were working-class people who believed in very little, and Sam observed a loveless marriage where the only bonding that took place was in front of the television set at night. Georgie was with Sam when his father had died suddenly at the beginning of their relationship, and there had been no emotion. She had never seen him cry. That Sam and his mother loved each other was obvious. That they loved Sam’s boy was even more so,
but there were very few words between them. It had been through Georgie, back when they were together, that his mother was able to express her affection toward Sam.

  With their friends, though, Sam was different. If they were warm to him, he returned that warmth. It was what Bernadette had once said that she loved about both Sam and Dom and even Abe. “A lot of times you’re around men who are so in love with their wives or partners that they don’t have anything to offer any other woman in conversation. Especially single women. But Sam and Dom and Abe can be in love with you three and still make a girl feel as if she has some kind of sex appeal. That’s nice.”

  “Dom knows he can look and not touch,” Jacinta said.

  “Does Sam look?” Lucia had asked.

  Georgie thought about it and nodded. “He loves breasts, so sometimes I see the eyes follow a bounce here or there.”

  But for all the love that Bernadette had seen, here Georgie was walking home with Sam as though they were strangers, and Dominic and Jacinta were living a state apart from each other.

  They reach the house and he shuffles through her bag for the keys.

  “Do you want me to stay tonight?” he asks.

  “Do you want to?”

  “Just answer the question, Georgie.”

  “Why can’t you answer mine?”

  He unlocks the door and there’s the sigh again.

  “Tell Dom I’ll pick him up at seven.”

  To: taramarie@yahoo.com

  From: anabelsbrother@hotmail.com

  Date: 10 August 2007

  Dear Tara,

  My father’s back. He’s living in Georgie’s study and I want to hurt him. God, I do. I want to go in there and pound the shit out of him. Because I stayed that time after my mum left. For him. No matter what, I couldn’t bear for him to be on his own after she took Anabel away. She called it tough love. “I’m not nurturing this, Dominic. Fix it and I’ll come back.” But I couldn’t leave him because you have no idea how he felt about Joe and how fucking sad he was that year. Joe wasn’t just his brother; they were best friends. I was scared for him those first couple of weeks after she left, honest I was. And then six weeks later he walked out on me and I mightn’t have been a kid anymore, but I wasn’t ready for all my family to be gone. They can’t suffocate you for years and be on your tail and have rules about when to be home and who to be and how important uni is and then take it away from you and leave you in that house with all those memories. On my own. And I don’t give a shit if my mum was begging me to come up and be with her and Anabel, or that Georgie was always trying to get me to come and stay with her. I wanted to stay there and wait for him to come home. And he didn’t, and now he won’t even look at me, the coward. The great Dominic Finch Mackee and the only thing I can understand him doing is drinking himself to oblivion. I can do oblivion, you know. I can do it better than him. I’d like to see how he likes it if I just disappear from his life without a word. It was okay for him to keep in contact with Georgie and my mum, but not once did he pick up the phone or write to me. Like I was fucking nothing to him. Like I’m nothing to no one.