The Piper's Son (25 page)

Later, she hovers with Sam on his front step. Tonight she wants more than just,
I might see you at the station on Monday.
But Tom’s there at the gate.

“Bill sent me to say, quote, ‘You better not be staying at Sam’s, because all he does is give you high blood pressure,’ unquote, and then Nanni Grace said, quote, ‘Oh, Bill,’ unquote.”

Sam makes a sound of disbelief. “They’re blaming me for your high blood pressure?”

“Let’s go.” Tom says it with force. He’s not leaving without her.

A moment later, Dominic jogs by. “At this time of the night?” she asks.

Tom takes Georgie’s hand and leads her away, but he turns back to Sam for a moment.

“I’m sorry about the packet of snakes I gave Callum,” he mumbles. “And the lime ice-block. And the Redskin.”

Georgie pinches him hard for lying to her, but as they walk back toward her house and she watches Dom do his fist thrusts in the distance, she can’t help laughing until she’s forced to stop because she can hardly walk.

“He’s OCD,” Tom says.

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s just a bit obsessive . . . in a compulsive sort of way.”

“Between my OCD father and you, I can’t understand why I’m not in the nuthouse.”

And she keeps on laughing until her stomach aches and her bladder feels weak. It’s the third time she’s laughed this week. But it feels better than crying.

Tom doesn’t realize until he wakes up on the morning of his mother’s birthday that he honestly believed his father would go to her. That he was counting on it. Praying for it subconsciously. Birthdays were big for his mum and every single year his father would come home feigning indifference and then spring something ridiculously extravagant on her.

“We can’t afford it,” she’d say.

“We can afford it. Tom and Anabel can just go without food for a week,” he’d say.

It was usually a fancy restaurant. His father was a foodie. Looked like a steak and chips guy. Yet another contradiction.

But this year, his father stays closed up in Georgie’s study and Tom feels it in his gut. That if Dominic doesn’t return to Jacinta Louise today, he never will.

He works alongside Ned, who’s complaining about five assignments and exams coming up and Francesca, who’s counting down the days before Trombal gets home. He finally rings his mother during his break while he’s having a smoke out back. Asks if she’s had a good day and he can hear her lie when she says yes. He tries to mumble
I love you
and
Happy Birthday
but Ned’s emptying the garbage beside him, listening to every word. Francesca doesn’t say much, but he feels her watching him with those big empathetic eyes and he even stays longer to scrub the stove until it sparkles so he doesn’t have to chat with them for their nightly postmortem on the pavement, which usually consists of Francesca believing that Stani’s going to let them play one Sunday afternoon if the old-timers call in sick. Or disappear. He’s worried that if the regular band members are mysteriously killed, he’ll have to point a finger at Justine and Francesca.

When he does leave, waving off Stani who always has that intense I’m-watching-you look on his face, Tom makes it as far as the end of the street before he realizes he’s being trailed.

“We’re going to Brisvegas,” Francesca says from the passenger window. “You coming?”

He can hardly see her in the dark. “You’re going to Brisbane?” he asks with disbelief, without stopping. He’s not in the mood for Francesca and her crap tonight. “What are you going on about?”

“We leave now and we’ll get there by eight in the morning, stay a couple of hours and then head back at lunchtime and get back here tomorrow night.”

He stops walking, well and truly pissed off.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You mean
ridicolos,
” Francesca says, imitating Stani. “We can drive through the Gold Coast. It’s a metropolis. I’ve been dying to get there for years.”

“The same Gold Coast you called a cesspit and boycotted for Schoolies? And we got stuck at Siobhan’s cousin’s flat at Engadine like the biggest losers around.”

“And I’ve regretted it ever since, so let’s drive through the Gold Coast.” The way Francesca can feign sincerity is amazing.

The car engine stops and he hears the door opening from the driver’s seat.

“Tom, get in the car,” Justine says firmly. “We’re going to Brisbane. I’m taking the first two hours, then Frankie, and then you and then Ned. Every two hours. Stop. Revive. Survive.”

“Ned? What the hell has he been telling you?”

“Get in the car. Now.”

They have a standoff. The two horsewomen of the apocalypse still win, despite their dwindling numbers.

He gets in and slams the door, glaring at Ned, who shrugs.

“Don’t you have five exams or something?” Tom accuses.

“Some people clean the fridge to avoid studying. I go to Brisbane.”

“I’ve got a plan so we don’t fight over the music,” Justine tells them. “Everyone gets their MP3s ready and they choose two songs each and we plug in when it’s our turn.”

“That’s fair,” Francesca says. She turns to face the back and nods. “Fair?”

“Frankie will choose the two shittiest songs each time, just to piss us off,” Tom mutters.

There’s a sound of disgust from the front seat. “What a thing to say, Tom. Since when have I been that petty, huh?” She turns to Justine. “Can you believe he said that? Can you?”

“Say you’re sorry, Tom,” Justine says.

He says he’s sorry and Francesca plays Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi.” She and Justine are killing themselves laughing because they know the rhyme will almost kill Ned and the tune will make Tom vomit. It’s a bit of death by music, really. Justine does the show tunes. It doesn’t get worse than “Jesus Christ Superstar” for Tom. Who would have thought to put music to a crucifixion? Worse still is the passion that Mary Magdalene and the good woman of Galilee in the front seat are putting into the singing. The girls know every single word and who gets to sing what. Ned is staring at Tom in horror. They haven’t even reached the north coast turn-off yet. “Pick something that will make them hurt,” Ned says. “Be vicious.” Tom thinks hard and can only come up with “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” and the caterwauling makes even him sick. Ned won’t be part of the bad-taste competition because he claims there’s only good-taste music in his MP3 player. He plays Sigur Rós, which Francesca explains is a form of government torture in some non-Icelandic nations. And that’s how they get to Brisbane.

When they reach the outskirts, early the next morning, Francesca stops by a roadside fruit vendor.

“Flowers, Tom.”

She looks at him through the rearview mirror.

“The tulips are great at this time of the year,” she says. “My mum loves them.”

And then he’s standing at her office door, looking at his mother for the first time in almost a year. His father would say she was all cornflower-blue eyes and attitude. Not feisty, because she didn’t lose her cool. Just attitude. Half the size of Dominic in his robust days, she always complained that she could get lost in the Amazonian world of the Finch and Mackees. Big people. Big personalities. “If your father ever wanted to prove I wasn’t the mother of his children, they’d just have to look at both of you and laugh me out of court,” she’d say. The last time Tom had seen her was when she came to pack up the house after his father disappeared. To beg Tom to come up north. He was stoned out of his brain that day, staring right through her the whole time. But he wasn’t stoned enough to forget the look on her face. He’ll take that look to his grave.

She glances up from her work as if to ask a colleague a question and he gives her the best smile he can, because she deserves it. And then she’s crying. Just crying and crying like everyone in his life does these days. He walks around her desk and hugs her. Vows there’ll never be a reason for him to treat her the way he has. Because he doesn’t want her crying like this ever again. It’s a different cry from the one when Joe died, and Tom knows it’s all about him.

Later, they go down to the cafeteria.

“Why doesn’t he come up to get you?” he asks.

“Because I’ve told him not to.”

“If he had the balls, he’d come anyway.”

She’s silent for a moment and shakes her head.

“You don’t understand, Tom.”

“Then explain it to me, Mum,” he says, frustrated. “Because I don’t get it. Did he screw around behind your back or something? Did he hit you?
Fuck,
did he hit you?”

“No,” she says.
“No.”

She waves to someone over his head, with a forced smile. “I’ve always let him —
no,
” she corrects herself vehemently, “
asked
him, to make the decisions. The ones I couldn’t make. From the moment you were born, I’ve said, ‘You make the decision, Dom. Because I can’t. It’s too painful and I might make the wrong one.’ And that wasn’t fair to him because he had to make some pretty shitty ones, Tom. I just need to know that I’ve made this next one for all the right reasons. I can’t go back without forgiving him.”

“He hasn’t had a drink in more than half a year. And Bill and he are really good together these days, especially talking about Grandpa Tom Finch coming home, and I’ve even heard him talk about Joe with Georgie sometimes.” He lies about that one. His father never talks about Joe.

She’s shaking her head. “This isn’t about his drinking, or Joe, or Bill, or Tom Finch, or this marriage, even.” She looks so intense, but it’s the fierceness of love. How could two people who are in love as much as his parents contemplate a life without the other?

“This is about his son. He left
you,
Tom, and we almost lost you. I don’t know whether I can forgive him for that, and I know he can’t forgive himself.”

He feels like he can’t breathe and he’s covering his head because he just wants to yell, but it’s the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and he’ll probably have security on him in a moment.

She takes his hand, kissing it. “But he can’t do that without your help. He can’t do that with your silence. You need to find a way, Tommy. He’s broken without you.”

“How do you know? You don’t even speak to him on the phone.”

It was strange to have his parents needing something from him. Something this big. In the past, they needed silence from him if he was making a racket. They needed him to apply himself.
“I need you to be sensible, Tom.”
But not this need. Not the need to make everything right.

“I want to see Anabel,” he says quietly. He can hardly recognize his voice. “Can you get her out of school? I need to see her.
Please.
”

She’s beautiful and,
God,
he loves the fact that she still wears a ponytail and looks like a kid her age. She’s running to him and there’s nothing graceful about Anabel because the Finch women aren’t really that graceful. They’re just beautiful and smart and fierce and ridiculously uncool. A bit like Tara.

They take the City Cat up the river and then they get off at Riverside and he buys her an ice cream and they talk about Georgie and the baby for most of the time. It makes him feel bad that he’s never expressed excitement about the pregnancy. He’s never seen it as anything but Georgie being depressed or not accepting Sam in her life again. But for a moment he sees it through Anabel’s eyes and nothing can be more joyous than that baby being born to them all.

“I’m working on J-Lo,” she says.

“How?”

“Every Thursday I log on to mycareer.com.au and download any Sydney job she’s qualified to do and then I forward it to her.”

He thinks for a moment. “Good work, 99.”

“And I’ve heard her ring a few people to ask if they’d be referees if she needs them.”

“Can I have a lick of your ice cream?”

“No, you have smoker’s tongue.”

“You’re a mean girl, Anabel Georgia.”

She pokes out her tongue and he puts his arm around her.

He knows he’s running out of time, and she knows it too because she tucks her arm into his, almost a death grip.

“Tom?”

“Yeah?”

“I miss Daddy.”

So do I,
he wants to say.

“Grandma Agnes says that he doesn’t deserve a second chance,” she says.

“Yeah, well Agnes of God should be a bit more forgiving.”

“Since he’s been . . . sober, he calls me every night.”

“What’s his take on Evil Trixie?”

She laughs and he’s glad to hear it.

“He said that sometimes people get frightened when someone new comes along and threatens the status quo and that I should make sure they feel as if there is nothing to fear.”

“Oh, please. What kind of crap advice is that?”

“Trixie and I are now good friends.”

“And the situation with Ginger and the social justice committee?”

“Collective bargaining, he reckons. The Ninja and I are negotiating.”

He’s looking at a miniature Georgie, who sounds like a miniature Dominic.

“I think he’s writing to J-Lo,” she says.

Tom looks at her.
“Dad?”

She nods knowingly. “She comes home and she’s all, ‘Any mail?’” Anabel puts on a sweet falsetto voice that sounds nothing like his mother. “And then she disappears into her room and once I walked in and she was all . . .” Anabel does this thing where she’s impersonating a silent coy giggle.