The Piper's Son (9 page)

“How can you stand seeing her at Saint Michael’s, Lucia?” Bernadette says.

Lucia doesn’t like Bernadette’s tone. It’s written all over her face. “So I have to take Daniel out of school? Bernie, I have Sam’s kid at my house most weekends. Through Sam, not
the suit.
I can’t just turn around and ignore her when we’re doing tuckshop.”

“You do tuckshop with her?” Georgie asks, horrified.

“Well, if it makes you feel better,” Lucia says, “she’s having problems.”

Georgie bites her tongue. “So everyone imagines that I want her to be miserable.”

“Why not? I want her suffering like you’d never believe,” Bernadette snaps.

“I think she’s having issues with the guy she’s been dating for a while.” Lucia leans forward. “I think they’re very serious and he prefers it when Callum’s not around.”

“I can’t believe she would tell you that,” her sister says angrily. “You’re one of Georgie and Sam’s best friends. She has no right using you as a confidant.”

“She didn’t confide in me,” Lucia argues. “She told Kate Blaxland while they were heating up the chicken tenderloins the other day.”

“Because she knew you were listening,” Bernadette argues back.

Georgie doesn’t know whether she can handle a full-on argument between the sisters. Despite how distasteful she finds the topic, she decides to join the conversation to avoid the conflict.

“I can’t believe any of you are shocked that the boyfriend prefers it when the kid’s not around,” she says quietly.

“Well, if he loved her . . .”

“That’s
bullshit.
You can’t measure someone’s love based on how they feel about your child.”

“And I love the way she gets to do the tuckshop because Sam’s paying her enough child maintenance so she only has to work two days,” Bernadette says bitterly.

Lucia’s nodding. “She gets her hair straightened every week and the suit has been replaced by expensive Pilates gear.”

Georgie doesn’t want to hear any more. Regardless of how she feels, Sam’s kid seems happy and well adjusted, so they must be doing something right.

Francesca Spinelli and Tom bring them their food and stay for a moment. Lucia and Bernadette know Francesca’s family, and they chat for a while, the young girl’s arm around both their shoulders. Georgie feels like a pushy parent, desperate for Tom to hang out with her again. Francesca speaks about her parents traveling through Italy and how her
nonna’
s moved into their house so someone can be at home for Francesca’s younger brother at night.

“Her
nonna
’s the best seamstress in Leichhardt,” Lucia tells them.

Francesca nods in agreement. “I’m kind of her apprentice this year. I do most of the beading, and I’m beginning to do patterns as well. I made this,” she says pointing to her dress, perfect for her figure and coloring, all full breasts and rich olive skin. “And most of Justine’s clothes.”

“How beautiful is that?” Georgie says, feeling emotional. “Making wedding dresses with your grandmother.”

“I’ve got grime to scrub from the wall,” Tom mutters, standing up and walking away.

Boredom becomes a killer. It makes him do things he would never contemplate. Like read every online newspaper from back to front. He hates the blogs the most, but he becomes hooked. The sports ones are the worst, and although he’d rather die than admit to Georgie that ex–league stars can’t string a sentence together because of all the battering they’ve taken around the head, he finds himself clicking his tongue with frustration at the way they can ruin the language.

Beside him, Mohsin the Ignorer chuckles at something on his own screen.

“What?” Tom asks, getting sick of the ignoring.

Nothing. In the movies, the Mohsin guy would turn to him and say, “Oh, just something I am reading that amuses me, my friend.” The Mohsin in the movies would use the words
my friend
a lot. But circumstance stops Mohsin from saying those words. Some history that has nothing to do with Tom. He can imagine the story. It’s probably one of those tragic ones where Mohsin’s father was placed under house arrest in his country and then imprisoned and killed for something he wrote. The family probably had to travel across the world in a leaky boat and his mother probably spent time in Villawood detention center with her kids, trying to keep them sane. Regardless, it didn’t give Mohsin the right to ignore anyone who wanted to be friendly, especially someone who would understand the humor of what some sports commentators get away with. But nothing from Mohsin the Ignorer.

When Tom’s done reading the
Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Guardian,
and the
New York Times
from top to toe, he starts reading his mobile-phone statement online. The curiosity of his low phone credit on the night he ended up in hospital doesn’t become an issue until tedium makes it one. What he notices are the international numbers. The country code of the first one is 44 and the second is 670. The phone calls were made at 10:47 p.m. and 10:49 p.m. — sometime after his dive off the table. One of his ex-flatmates and their hangers-on must have taken his phone while he was flat on his face bleeding and rung two overseas numbers. How low can people get? It was probably their dickhead drummer, who was into some Swedish chick he met on the Internet. So Tom goes to the Google search and looks up international phone codes. Not Sweden. The first belongs to the UK, the second to . . .

He chokes. His reaction must be loud, because everyone turns to look at him, except Mohsin the Ignorer. Tom’s eyes are fixed on the screen, and after a moment he fumbles through his backpack for his mobile, realizing that he left it back home being recharged. The countdown to three o’clock becomes an excruciating waiting game, and then he breaks speed records racing to the station, jumping turnstiles, taking the stairs up to the platform two at a time, and practically throwing himself into the train. He sprints out of Stanmore station so fast that one of the slacker skateboarders tries to race him.

Back in Georgie’s attic, he yanks the phone out of the socket and begins scrolling down the names under dialed calls, praying to anyone who will listen. God. Baby Jesus. Saint Thomas the doubter. Saint Whoever, patron saint of losers. Praying,
Please, please, don’t let it be true.

The first name shatters him.

The second makes his head spin.

He hears the clumps of footsteps on the stairs, and then Georgie pokes her head in.

“What?” she asks, alarmed.

He can’t speak because his tongue gets stuck in the roof of his mouth.

“Tom? You screamed.”

“No,” he says listlessly.

“You screamed. And swore. Like this.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
”

He tries to recover for a moment and stares at her. “Stubbed my toe. Painful.”

She squints with total disdain. “More painful than childbirth?”

“Oh, so now everything’s going to compete with that one,” he mutters. “I’ve got to go.”

He passes her and flies down the stairs and out of the house.

He can only get his head around one thing at a time.

That on the night he dived off that table, he rang Tara Finke in Timor.

And he can’t remember a single word of the conversation.

He walks straight to the back room of the pub, where Francesca and Justine are rehearsing.

“You’re not on tonight,” Justine says, almost as an accusation.

Ned the Cook walks in with some food he’s prepared for the girls and stops suddenly when he sees Tom.

“He’s not on tonight,” he says. Accusation in his voice.

It’s clear to Tom that he won’t be receiving employee-of-the-month badge at the Union.

He sits at the table they’ve taken possession of, and no one says a word for a moment. Francesca puts her guitar to the side discreetly. He doesn’t know how he’s going to broach this subject without drawing attention to the fact that he is in desperate need of information only she can give.

“I never thanked you for coming to the hospital that night.”

Francesca stares at him. She’s not buying it, he can tell. She looks over at Justine and even has the audacity to shrug in front of him as if to say,
I don’t know what his game is.

“No, I really appreciate it,” he says.

Still no words. Not even from Justine, with her rosy cheeks and perkiness. She’s a walking advertisement for clean living and an overabundance of endorphins. Except now, when she’s looking at Tom.

“Ah . . . how did you know I was there?” he asks casually, trying to avoid Francesca’s eyes because they’re armed with bullets. He knows that if she really wants to play games with him, it could take hours to get information.

“Tara rang us,” Francesca says.

Unless she loves the idea of pain being swift and vicious.

“You rang her and she rang Frankie,” Justine explains.

In the words of his grandma Agnes,
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!

“Wonder how that happened,” he said, trying to sound blasé. “Didn’t even know her number worked over there.”

“Well, you rang her that night.”

Ned hands Francesca the sandwich. “Bit extreme,” he says. “Isn’t she in Dili?”

“No, actually in
Same,
” Francesca explains to Ned. “Up in the mountains.
Same,
” she repeats, in case he didn’t get the pronunciation of the word in the first place.

“Same,”
Ned says, making himself comfortable.

“This is kind of personal,” Tom says, looking at him. “She’s a mutual friend of ours.” He waves a hand between him and the girls. “Probably won’t interest you.”

Ned the Cook is going nowhere.

Francesca sighs. “Look, Thomas, why don’t you write to her? She’s a long way from home and accepts letters from anyone. Plus she’s a great letter writer. She brings Same to life for us. She’ll respond, Tom. She’s never been petty and I actually think you both need closure.”

Justine leans forward. “I think she’s finally gotten over the
one-and-a-half-night stand.
”

When Justine says those words, she whispers them.

Tom can’t believe Tara spoke to anyone about those two nights.

“Send her a text message. She loves getting them.” Justine says this as if she’s reluctantly giving out information. Even Ned seems keen. So with nothing to lose, Tom takes out his phone and keys in the words.

He looks impressed with himself, and the girls look impressed back.

“The whole
one-and-a-half-night stand
really upset her,” Ned explains, pissing Tom off when he whispers the words.

“That’s pretty personal, and I don’t think she’d appreciate you knowing about . . . stuff.”

“When she was here in March, we bonded while exchanging stories about our first time,” Ned explains. “We came to the conclusion that they were pretty similar situations.”

“Why? Because they were both with guys?” Tom asks.

“No. They were both with fuckwits.”

Ned’s having fun.

“She’s got a boyfriend, Thomas. He’s a peacekeeper over there, and I think that all is forgiven and forgotten,” Francesca says. “She’s a lot calmer than she used to be. Very Zen-like.”

The phone alerts him to a message, and the girls clap with excitement. For a second, it’s like old times. He feels a bit of a rush, and his heart is hammering in the way it used to hammer back in the days when Tara Finke would walk toward him just before class began. Back then she’d piss him off in an instant, but the adrenaline would still keep running for the rest of the day.

“Read it to us,” Justine says.

The girls look a bit crestfallen, which surprises him, really.

“Let me read it again,” Justine the Positive says, taking his phone from him. “Because Tara says they do heaps of laughing over there.”

She concentrates hard as she studies the screen. “Look. She uses your name.
Thomas,
she calls you. Usually it’s . . .”

She looks at Francesca, who quickly shakes her head to silence her. He can imagine what Tara Finke usually calls him.

“Send her another,” Justine pleads.

“Not on your life,” he mutters, walking out of the room and out of the pub.

He’s had worse from Tara in their time. He probably deserves worse after what he did to her.

“Tom,” Francesca calls out from the front step of the pub when he’s halfway down the street. There’s worry in her voice, and he knows she’s seen something in his expression. She’s seen the sickness he’s feeling inside. But it’s not as if he can tell her the truth or that it will make sense to her when it doesn’t even make sense to him.

How can he explain that the international code 670 isn’t the issue? The 44 is. The U.K.

Because five minutes before he rang Tara Finke, he had made a call to London.

To his dead uncle.