The Piper's Son

by Melina Marchetta

“You forgot Ned Flanders,” Tom says.

  He spends some of the night serving out front, where a cute girl with an uncomplicated walk flirts with him. She’s not a regular, so she’s the first person for a long time who doesn’t have that hint of sorrow in her eye when he speaks to her. He feels normal for a change, flirting all the way back and enjoying it.

  At closing time, when the girls are rehearsing in the back room, he takes the lyrics he’s scribbled on a piece of paper from his pocket and hands them to Francesca.

  “You play it,” she says, holding out her guitar.

  He shakes his head. “No, you said you wanted words. You didn’t say anything about playing.”

  “Oh, come on, Tom. At least give us an idea of the melody in your head,” Justine says, peering over Francesca’s shoulder as she holds out the instrument. He loses the stare-off and grabs it from her. He hasn’t played a tune for real in front of anyone but Georgie since he dived off the table.

  “Play me something that makes me feel;

  This soul inside me is made of steel.

  Brain is breathing, but heart’s not beating

  And, babe, I need you to make things real.

  Walk inside me without silence,

  Kill the past and change the tense.

  Empty gnawing and the ache is soaring;

  Take me places that make more sense.”

  He looks up. Justine and Francesca are nodding. Ned, however, looks stunned.

  “I never took you for a rhyming guy.”

  “It’s a song lyric, Ned. Rhyme is important,” Francesca explains.

  “It’s a shame that someone who reads ‘Prufrock’ writes such shit.”

  “Fine,” Tom says, pissed off, tearing up the song.

  “No!” both Francesca and Justine yell, grabbing it from him.

  “I like rhyme,” Francesca argues. “But I think the line should be Brain is beating but heart’s not breathing.”

  Ned makes a rude sound.

  “And what about the music?” Justine says. “It has a great melody.”

  Ned sighs. “You’re right. Very uplifting. Might just go hang myself now.”

  “Yeah, you just do that, little emo boy,” Tom snaps.

  “Oh, that was pathetic,” Justine says. “As if he looks tortured enough to be emo.”

  Francesca looks at Tom and tries to keep the torn paper intact. “I loved it. And I know, for you, that counts for nothing, Thomas. But there it is. I loved it.”

  “Loved?” he says, imitating her. It was too easy to slip back into high-school idiotic mode.

  “And your voice . . . it was a real turn-on. Really sexy,” Justine says.

  “Hush. I’m blushing.”

  Ned is still looking pissed off, and Tom figures that it’s truly too late for an apology.

  “Regardless of how he comes across, Ned, he’s very sensitive,” Francesca explains. “Stands up for old people on the bus and cries in movies.”

  “Bullshit,” Tom mutters, picking up his backpack, wanting to get as far away from everyone as possible.

  “Oh, you do too, you liar,” Justine argues.

  “You cried in The Lord of the Rings when Sam Gamgee sobbed for Mr. Frodo,” Francesca says, doing an impersonation. “Mr. Frodo!” Tom goes to the greatest of pains not to laugh. “Mr. Frodo,” she continues to cry out.

  Even Ned’s laughing. No one’s a bigger show-off than Francesca when she has an audience.

  “Ask the girls,” Justine says and Francesca is already taking out her phone to text Tara and Siobhan. “When did Tom cry in a movie?” she says as she texts.

  “Okay, back to business,” Justine says. “Put your bag down, Thomas. We’ve got a song for Will, Frankie’s mum, and Jimmy, as well as this one you wrote for Tara. So we just need another two.”

  Alarm bells ring in his head. “What are you talking about?” He tries to get the torn paper back from Francesca.

  “Tara’s cover will probably be a Josh Pyke, and the original will be your untitled rhyme song.”

  “No!” And then for further emphasis. “No.” This time he is more forceful in trying to grab the words back. “That’s not for Tara.”

  “Well, who’s this one going to be for? Frankie’s mum and dad? Siobhan?”

  “Why not Siobhan? Or your cousin in Poland?”

  “I think my cousin’s will be a bit of a rock number,” Justine says. “They really like tacky eighties stuff there. Very Eurovision.” Francesca starts singing “The Final Countdown,” and Justine dances along to it. Ned’s just shaking his head.

  “And you know Siobhan. If she can’t dance to it, it doesn’t rate for her,” Francesca reminds him.

  “It’s a perfect song for your mother, Frankie,” he tries, but he knows he’s defeated. “She’ll like the sensitivity in the melody.”

  Francesca makes a snorting sound. “Is it true my father offered you an apprenticeship if you don’t go back to uni?” she asks him.

  He nods, not knowing where she’s going with this, but she’ll go some long-winded way, by the look of things.

  “Some advice, then. He’ll listen to whatever I send my mum and you’ll be on the credits. You don’t want touchy-feely songs on the résumé in case you decide to take him up on it. I’m not saying you will, but it could happen. So let me tell you something about my father, Thomas. Do you know where he was on the twenty-seventh of February, 1972? At the Led Zeppelin concert. He’s told us a million times. We let him think he’s got an edge.”

  Her phone buzzes with a message and she reads it, grinning with satisfaction.

  “From Siobhan. LOTR.” Francesca looks around. “Do I need to tell anyone what film she’s referring to?” She clears her throat and reads from the screen. “He cried when Aragorn kneels at all their feet.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot the sobs during that part,” Justine said.

  The phone beeps again and Tom tries to grab it from Francesca, but she holds it above her head and Justine comes to her rescue.

  “From Tara.”

  Justine peers at the screen, as if trying to make sense of it. “He cried when those two muppets climbed that mountain in New Zealand.”

  Ned looks confused and Tom bursts out laughing. That’s what it was like with the girls. They have the most inane conversations, to the point of being absurd, but they always make him laugh despite the fact that he doesn’t want to.

  “Muppets?” Ned asks.

  “Hobbits,” Tom explains.

  “New Zealand?”

  “Mount Doom.”

  “Tom made her watch all three movies one afternoon,” Justine says. “I wonder if Tara’s ever forgiven you.”

  The phone beeps again and she reads, “I want those ten hours of my life back.”

  And this time they’re all laughing and Stani walks past them, clicking his tongue with disbelief.

  “I’m off,” Ned says, with a wave, “to hang out with my little emo friends.”

  After a moment, Tom puts down the guitar and follows him. Outside, the regulars are still hovering as if they miraculously believe Stani’s going to reopen for them. “Read the sign,” he says, pointing to the one that tells them to respect the neighbors’ need for silence. The girl who flirted with him all night hovers by the doorway and they exchange a look. “Wait for me,” he finds himself saying.

  Ned’s already at the corner and he calls out to him. “Ned! Oi, Ned.”

  “Yeah?”

  Tom catches up to him. “Look, I’m sorry.”

  Ned doesn’t say anything.

  “About . . . you know . . . punching you.”

  “And not for the shit lyrics?”

  Tom knows he’s trying to rile him, but doesn’t allow himself to be riled.

  “They were very . . . I don’t know . . . James Blunt-ish. Was that the sound you were going for?” Ned asks, before waving him off and walking away.

  Behind Tom, the girl is waiting. Her name’s Rachel and she’s from up the
coast. She takes him back to where she’s staying. The sex is good, but even if it wasn’t, he enjoys the feel of skin against skin, of hands to clench, of the uninhibited dance of it all. And despite it being so casual and nothing serious, “because I’ve got a boyfriend anyway,” she lets him stay the night. He tries not to compare the awkwardness of Tara Finke with her. He had tried not to with his flatmate Sarah, or any of the girls he’s slept with since that night with Tara. But lying here next to this girl, he can’t get it out of his head. The lack of awkwardness that Tara and her peacekeeper will enjoy after months of exclusivity.

  He doesn’t realize until now that it’s not just regret he feels about how he walked away from Tara after Joe’s death. It’s more than regret. If he had the guts, he’d begin with how he made her feel that night in her parents’ house. Except he knows that the moment he mentions it, he won’t hear from her again, and for the time being, he’s like a starving man waiting for the e-mail crumbs she throws his way.

  “Out of bed.”

  He stares up at Bill with horror. First, because it’s five thirty in the morning. Second, because Bill is wearing the most hideous jogging shorts. So brief. The type where you can almost see his balls.

  Next minute they’re out in the street behind his father, who’s doing tae kwon do movements in the next-door neighbor’s driveway. At least when his father was a man on the verge of a breakdown, he was way cooler.

  “You can’t jog wearing thongs, you drip,” Bill says.

  “Let’s call them flip-flops, Bill,” he says, yawning. “A thong is a G-string. Do you know what a G-string is, Bill?”

  Dominic is running ahead of them, belting through the streets in front of Bill, with Tom flip-flopping after them until he gives up on the shoes and takes them off, trying to keep up. The only thing that inspires Tom to pick up speed and almost break the one-hundred-meter sprint record is when he sees his father heading toward Camperdown. There’s no way he wants to meet his ex-flatmates coming home from a gig with Bill in those shorts and his father doing Jackie Chan impersonations. Once Tom’s redirected them, his father sprints past him and Tom doesn’t even try to keep up.

  They reach their old place on Temple Street, where Dominic is talking to Mrs. Liu. Tom hears him promise that he’ll come around and mow the lawn before he grabs her wheelie bins and tucks them away at the side of her house. Mrs. Liu looks like all her Christmases have come at once. By the time his father is sprinting off again, Tom’s lungs are killing him. He hopes they come across a few more lonely people in the neighborhood who’ll stop Dominic Mackee for a bit of a chat in order to save his son from cardiac arrest. Worse still, Bill wants to talk.

  “You working?”

  “Yeah . . . kinda . . . yeah.”

  He’s going to give up smoking soon. Maybe get one of those patches.

  “What are you doing during the day?”

  He wonders if he’s getting the first signs of emphysema. “Just data crap.”

  “What type?”

  “Data. I don’t give it an identity.”

  Bill stops for a moment to check a stitch.

  “When are you going back to uni?”

  “I might not.”

  Tom presses a hand against his hip to make the pain go away wondering if this is the let’s-go-for-a-jog-so-I-can-lecture-you-about-your-future trick.

  Bill looks at him for a long while.

  “If you’ve got time up your sleeve at Christmas, your auntie Margie Finch needs some help out at Walgett.”

  The unspoken rule has always been that they do anything for his great-aunt. It was her money that kept Georgie and his father and Tom and Anabel in private schools. She always said it was what her brother, Tom Finch, would have wanted the Finch family money spent on. She rarely asked for anything in return. But the building of the recreation center, run by her order of nuns, has been an issue for years.

  “I thought maybe it would be built by now. It’s been two years,” he mumbles.

  “You should know better than that. No one does anything for nothing these days.”

  Bill sighs. “She’s got funding for the bricks and material. She just needs the workers.”

  He takes off again.

  They stop for a rest at one of the cafés and Tom is stuck doing all the talking.

  He’s never quite understood his father’s relationship with Bill. Never Dad or my father. Always Bill. Bill was old school. As kids, his father and Georgie had convinced each other that Tom Finch would have been the kindest father in the world compared to Bill the tyrant.

  He was just as tough on Joe. On one of the nights when Tom lay talking to Georgie, she tried to explain it. “I think Bill had a harsh upbringing. He doesn’t talk much about his father and spent a lot of time at Tom Finch’s house, according to Great-Auntie Margie Finch. Auntie Margie always said that Bill wanted to be a Finch. We thought he did the next best thing and coveted his family.”

  Their coffee arrives and they drink it in silence. Dominic has two short blacks before Tom finishes his. Tom understands addiction, but even when he was getting high all that time, it hadn’t seemed to attack his system like his father’s. And then he’s walking home behind both men and he can’t help notice how they walk alike for two people with no blood ties. Although there’s silence between them, they seem to want to stay side by side. Once in a while Bill makes a comment about a tree. He’s a tree freak, Bill is. “Wait till these jacarandas flower,” he says in wonder. “Any day now.”

  Inside, Tom can hear Nanni Grace and Georgie chatting in the kitchen.

  “Want to show you something,” his father says. Tom doesn’t know whether he’s talking to Bill or him, but he follows them into the study.

  There are maps all over the place. All over the floor, all over the study table. Vietnam. He’d know the shape of the country in his sleep. He could pin the tail on the donkey of the exact spot his father claimed Tom Finch was left. Behind enemy lines. How could such important words to his family sound so clichéd? But that’s what happened to Lance Corporal Tom Finch. His mates knew he was dead. One even crawled through the entangled mass of roots, over and over again, to try to free his body. By that time it was riddled with holes and to remove him would have been suicidal because the attack was coming from all sides. Those poor bastards never got over leaving Tom Finch behind. Tom had met them. They’d told him to his face when he was twelve years old that you never leave your mates behind.

  “They’ve got a portable X-ray machine out there, a navigator, field engineer, forensics. There’s seven of them and they swear they’ve got the location,” Dominic says.

  Tom is still stunned by the amount of detail around the room.

  “They know the body’s there,” his father is telling them. “All they need to find is contextual evidence. A dog tag. A map.”

  “Won’t it be damaged?” Tom asks.

  “Tiny Parker’s was found pristine and once they got Peter Gilson’s under the right equipment, they confirmed it was his,” his father says, referring to the two who had been returned to their families in July.

  Both Tom and his father are looking at Bill.

  “If they’ve got it all wrong and we think Tom’s coming home . . . for burial . . . and he doesn’t . . .” Bill’s shaking his head and Tom can see he can’t speak. “Don’t let me have to put Grace through this all over again, Dom. Not after the way they’ve fucked things up with Joe.”

  Tom’s father sighs. “Jim Bourke and his guys have done the work for them. This is the real deal. I know it. I’d bet my life on it.”

  Bill is shaking his head, eyes closed. Tom recognizes that look. He’s seen it on his own father’s face. Too many people to worry about.

  “I’m going to go over there when the time comes,” Dominic says quietly. “I’m going to bring my father’s body home.”

  Tom feels sick. Bringing a body home. How many families get to hear those words twice in their lifetime?

  “You don
’t even have a passport,” Tom mutters.

  “I do now,” his father says, but it’s Bill he looks at. “You’re going to have to start preparing Mum. Soon. They’ve returned Parker and Gilson to their families. I think it could be us any day.”

  No one says anything for a moment.

  “Georgie knows?” Bills asks quietly.

  Dominic nods. “But Sam’s not happy. Doesn’t want this happening now. Doesn’t think Georgie’s ready for what it all means.”

  “Are any of us?”

  “You are,” Dominic says emphatically. “You’ve been ready for this all our lives. Shit, Bill. Let’s bury him. He deserves it. We all fucking do.”

  It’s way too tense. Someone’s either going to get into a fight or cry. Neither option is preferable. Tom points questioningly to another sticker.

  “If the body was left there, why would they be digging here?” he asks, pointing to another spot.

  “Because he would have been . . . disposed of properly because of hygiene. They would have buried him because of their religious beliefs,” his father explains.

  Bill sighs, standing up, and he looks at Tom. “How much do you know about this?”

  Tom rubs his eyes tiredly. “Joe used to write to me about it.”

  It was Joe’s obsession, as much as theirs. Tom didn’t know what was worse. Growing up children of a soldier who doesn’t come back from war, or growing up the only sibling who didn’t belong to Tom Finch. His uncle had always been fascinated with the idea of Georgie and Dominic’s father. When he taught Tom guitar as a kid, he told him that Tom Finch had been obsessed with Bob Dylan. “He wrote poetry, you know, Tom Finch did,” Joe had told him. “And your pop Bill reckons that on the train they heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ on the trannie when they were traveling down to Sydney from the Burdekin. Before they met Mum. It always reminds Pop Bill of hope, regardless of the lyrics.”

  Tom loved those stories because Joe seemed to have all the information. Nothing could hold Joe back when he was intrigued, and the recovery of Tom Finch’s body became his fixation. He taught history. He worked with evidence, and as far as he was concerned, there was no reason why they couldn’t bring Tom Finch home.