The Piper's Son (27 page)

They’re sitting in Lucia’s kitchen poring over brochures of holiday destinations for Christmas. Caravan parks down the South Coast are the only option for Lucia, who won’t unleash her children onto a resort. The subject moves to Georgie’s body, post-baby, in a cossie, and then maternity bras. Once in a while Lucia will stand up and hammer at the window, bellowing to her kids in the backyard to stop killing each other and Georgie reconsiders whether she wants to be part of that mayhem for the new year.

“I’ll take you shopping Saturday for maternity bras,” Lucia says.

Georgie can’t take her eyes away from the bushland surrounding the caravan park in the brochure. “I’ve already been,” she murmurs, having an Azaria Chamberlain moment where her baby gets kidnapped by either members of the savage animal kingdom or pedophiles who hang out in caravan parks. She tries to put it at the back of her mind as part of a twelve-point plan she’s devised after accompanying Dom to his AA meetings.

“With who?” Lucia asks.

“One of the ladies from my work.”

She doesn’t realize that Lucia’s angry until she hasn’t spoken for a while.

“What did I do?” Georgie asks.

“My counselor says some people don’t want to be happy.”

The caravan park and its promise of potential harm to her unborn child is pushed aside.

“You have a counselor?” Georgie asks. “Why would you need a counselor, Lucia?”

Lucia’s look has an edge. Like those martial arts movies where there are quick slicing sounds and the person stands there for a moment before crumbling into pieces.

“Why would I need a counselor?”

“Yes,” Georgie says patiently, “why would you need a counselor? You’re happy with your life. You’ve got a great family. . . .”

The look she receives is one of such anger that Georgie wonders what part of the last hour she missed. What part of the last two years has she missed?

“I’m going to a counselor because sometimes I’m pretty depressed. It’s what happens when your best friend is dealing with acute grief. My counselor tells me that I overstress. My best friend getting pregnant to her ex-partner, stresses me. Dominic, who is like a brother to me, going AWOL for over a year, stresses me. His marriage to Jacinta, the world’s most enviable marriage, I have to add, falls apart and it stresses me. Jacinta living in another state, miserable out of her brain, stresses me. Another friend — yes, Georgie, Joe was our friend too — well his death doesn’t just stress me, it devastates me. Not being able to offer my best friend any comfort, doesn’t just stress or devastate me; it kills me. That’s why I need a counselor.”

Lucia’s crying. There’s a hopelessness to it all and it leaves Georgie speechless. Worse still, the kids are at the glass door, staring at them as if they don’t recognize who anyone is anymore.

“I know this sounds cruel, Georgie,” Lucia says, “but grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel
useless
when all your life you’ve been functional to them. And you couldn’t even ask me to take you maternity bra shopping?”

Anything Georgie says now will seem contrived, so she says nothing, just sits there while Lucia goes to the glass door and has a quiet word with the kids before they disappear outside again.

“Do you want me to be honest?” Lucia asks.

“What?” Georgie asks, frightened. “The counselor spiel wasn’t honesty?”

Lucia gives her a don’t-push-it look.

“Georgie, you were a write-off when Joe died. You still are. You won’t let any of us in. It’s as if everything we say seems inappropriate or dumb. This one time, Sam and Abe and Jonesy and Abe’s sisters were at my place, and we were all trying to work out how to deal with what you and Dominic were going through. And all I can remember is Jonesy. We always laugh at what an idiot he is and how he’s always text messaging and how young he is in the head. But I remember him that day, sitting around my kitchen table. He just broke down and said, ‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say to make Georgie better, and I want to.’ And out of everyone’s reaction, his gets to me the most when I remember it.”

Georgie’s too tired to cry anymore. “There’s nothing you could have said,” she says quietly. “I promise you, Lucia. There’s
nothing
at all you can say to make us feel better.”

“I
know,
” Lucia says. “And Sam got that, Georgie. He understood your silence and he got how you wanted to talk sometimes and not be interrupted, and he got how some days you didn’t want to talk at all. For those little moments of calm he’s brought you, I will forgive him for anything.”

Georgie thinks for a moment.

“If you like, I’ll make a list . . . of all the things I should be doing . . . with your help,” she says with a bit of humility. “You can be in total charge,” she adds, knowing that she just sold her soul to the devil.

She can tell that Lucia is coming around to the idea and watches as she shuffles through a kitchen drawer, taking a pen and paper out. “I’m scribing,” Lucia says firmly.

Georgie curses herself for teaching Lucia the art of list-making. Now she makes lists of the schools she’d like to send her kids to if they had x amount of money and then a list of the ones they can afford. She makes lists of jobs she’d love if she wasn’t doing the following things, and then she makes a lists of those following things, and her lists become hybrid and feral. In the end, they make Lucia paranoid about all the things she’s supposed to be doing that she doesn’t have time for because she’s making lists.

“What’s the first subheading?” Georgie asks.

Lucia clicks the pen into action. “Sam.”

She volunteers to go to Callum’s soccer game because it’s part of Lucia’s idea of normality.

“Football,” the kid corrects as they cross the road toward the playing field. Sam reaches out to take her hand, and she lets him because it’s on her list to allow him to show affection without getting snippy.

“Football is rugby league as far as I’m concerned,” she says to Sam after he gives the most inane advice to his son about how to kick the ball.

Once they hit the park, Callum’s running awkwardly in his shin pads and soccer boots toward the crowd waiting around the field, and when he finds his teammates, they hug each other and walk around with their arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders.

The suit
is here with her boyfriend. He’s a pleasant-enough-looking guy in a north-shore-rugby kind of way, and Georgie can tell he knows the history of the situation because he’s trying his best to fill in the spaces with chatter rather than awkward silence.

“Hi, Georgie.”

“Leonie.”

A very chirpy soccer/football coach runs around the field with Callum and his team, and then the game begins. Callum isn’t much of a soccer/football player and runs to the sideline constantly to confer with Sam or his mother, negotiating time out, because the last place he seems to want to be is on the field.
The suit
deals with it by saying, “Sweetie, off you go. Two more minutes,” while Sam huffs and puffs as if his masculinity is being put to the test by his son’s ability to play the game. Because Georgie keeps the list in her pocket that states rule number five is to refrain from negativity toward Sam, she swallows her irritation. So what if the kid wants to spend all his time hugging his teammates as well as some of the opposition? At one stage, Callum sits with one of them at the goalpost, deep in conversation. Georgie would love to know what two six-year-olds are talking about with such intensity.

“Last game of the season, Callum. Try to kick the ball,” Sam says firmly once they get ready to go into the second half.

“It might even go in.” This from his mother. “Wouldn’t that be great, sweetie?”

“Ice cream for the one who gets the ball closest to the goalpost,” the boyfriend says.

Everyone seems to look at Georgie for her encouragement, even Callum.

“Tom says he wants a photo of you running,” she tries.

“But you don’t have a camera.”

She holds up her phone.

Chest puffed out, the kid sprints up and down the field, miles away from the action of the game and she can’t help smiling, can’t help seeing for the first time, not Sam’s kid with another woman, but the older brother of her unborn child. The closest he comes to the ball is when someone kicks it to his head accidently and then it’s over for Callum. Nothing’s getting him back on that field. He has a bit of a cry and his mother zips up his jacket. “He didn’t do it on purpose, sweetie. He didn’t do it on purpose.”

Later, Georgie exchanges good-byes with them politely and she feels Leonie watching her as Georgie shakes hands with Callum, who will get dropped off at Sam’s later tonight. It’s an intense look and Georgie realizes the truth.
The suit’s
not
threatened
by Georgie.
The suit
is
frightened
by her. Although there are things about her that Georgie hates, she understands the need to want your own looked after. She learned that from loving Joe and Tom and Anabel and Lucia’s kids and even the children of strangers who walk into her office every day. Georgie crouches at the kid’s level and shows him the photo she took of him on her phone. “I look like I’m fast,” he says with wonder.

“I’ll put it in the baby’s room for when he’s born,” she hears herself promising. “So I’ll know he’s safe.”

She feels like the whore of birthing class. She wonders what stories they tell about her in their homes. She’s already been to the class with Tom and Dominic.

“Why’s everyone looking?” Sam asks.

He can’t keep his hands off her stomach and she realizes that he’s been dying to touch her there, to allow his fingers to linger.

“What are we going to call him?”

“What makes you think it’s a him?” she asks.

“Tom said the woman at the pharmacy says it’s a him because you’re carrying it all at the front. And didn’t Abe’s mum say it was because of the chain?”

She cranes her neck to look back at him, amused.

“You? Believe that stuff?”

“I think it’s a boy. Shit, just say it’s a girl. Just say it’s a little Georgie?”

She laughs and his arms tighten around her and her heart’s beating fast. Not because of the breathing methods or her blood pressure; her heart’s beating fast because Sam’s teasing her. She hasn’t heard that tone for years. And then they don’t go straight home. They go to a Thai place on King Street and they’re talking about everything, in the middle of Sam saying, “No MSG. No MSG,” pointing to Georgie’s stomach. Their conversation seems strange at times, because years ago when she was with Sam and he spoke about work, it would be about people in his office cheating about their call sheets or how they were tossers, and it would be about insurance litigation and how much he hated his job and how much he hated the people. Now they’re talking about the James Hardie campaign the year before and there’s a fire in him as he speaks about how they’ll get rid of the new industrial relations laws and if they can get these fuckers out of Canberra in November, there’ll be dancing in the streets. He’s giddy beyond comprehension about the possibility of a new government, spewing out his fury at the culture of greed and social indifference under a leader who traded on the fact that people stopped thinking, a government that carefully nurtured an alarmist culture. She tells him about the DNA funding by the Danish government in the Balkans and the anti-mortem data project and how sometimes when she can’t get her clients talking about what happened over there she’ll get a map of the country, an appropriate map for their world, and pinpoint where they last lived, where their family went missing. Sometimes they would be reluctant to talk, but when they saw the map they would point to a place and say, “There. My village,” and that’s how their dialogue would begin. With a sense of place.

They’re outside her house and they stand there awkwardly and he’s touching her face, her hair, his eyes taking in every feature, every dark circle, every crow’s-foot, every frown line. “You’re beautiful,” he says.

And she does something she hasn’t done for seven years. Georgie kisses him. Funny how they can procreate, and wrap their bodies around each other, how she can feel his mouth against her neck and breast in those quick moments of lovemaking when he knows he can get away with it, but nothing seems as intimate, nothing makes her feel more vulnerable than pressing her lips against his. She hears it in the way he whispers her name,
Georgie,
like a prayer, and she thinks of what his mother once said, that it’s a miracle. These people who don’t believe in miracles. Her name is whispered like a miracle and the force of his mouth hurts her, but Georgie doesn’t care. They’re like two kids pashing on their parents’ front porch as though they’ve got nothing to lose when they’ve got absolutely everything to lose.

“Come home with me . . . please.
Please.”

There’s a new sound. The sound of Sam pleading. The sound of Sam broken.

She holds his face between her hands. She knows that Callum’s mother is dropping him off soon and although she’s willing to change all the rules, she’s not ready for that one yet. Not with the boy sleeping in the other room.