The Piper's Son

  “Tom!” Bill calls out. “Mate, let’s go home.”

  Tom holds up a hand and waves him off.

  Inside, it’s a quiet Monday night crowd.

  He walks into the kitchen and smells something different and peers into the saucepan.

  “Is this pasta sauce?”

  “Frankie’s cooking for her brother,” Ned informs him. “Her grandmother’s out for the night and she’s babysitting.”

  “Only Frankie would take over the pub for her family,” he mutters.

  “You’re not on tonight, you know,” Ned says. He doesn’t seem so happy either, and he’s taking it out on the T-bone and sausages.

  “I’ve just come in to pick up my pay. Do you have a problem with that?” Tom snaps.

  Ned stops and stares at him. He knows there’s no pay to pick up. They all must know that Tom doesn’t get paid.

  “You have the look that says you want to hit someone,” Ned says. “Should I be cowering?”

  “You have the same look.”

  “People can smell the pasta sauce,” Ned complains. “So every time I go out there to hand over the food, I get asked if we’re serving vegetarian. Is your gripe bigger than that?”

  “Yeah. My father’s a cunt.”

  “I can’t help liking mine, nutcase that he is,” Ned says. “Do you want an espresso? She brought the percolator as well.”

  “It’s a caffettiera,” Tom corrects him, looking over to where it sits on the stove.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Ned has absolutely no idea what to do with it and pours water and coffee into the top.

  “Your father . . . doesn’t have issues about your . . . lifestyle?” Tom asks.

  Tom gets eye contact beyond Ned’s fringe. “I don’t have a lifestyle.”

  “Your sex life?”

  “I don’t really have a sex life. I’m not into casual sex or one-and-a-half-night stands like you.”

  “I’m not into one-and-a-half-night stands either,” Tom says bluntly, not appreciating the label.

  “What about the spitfire from Dili?” There’s a smugness in the way Ned says those words.

  “What about Tara?”

  “When she was here at Easter, we spent a lot of time talking. I’d always look forward to her coming to that door. It was the way she’d stand there with her hands on her hips and that face that you’d actually like to iron out.”

  Tom’s taking deep breaths.

  “Can I give you some advice, Ned?” he says, grabbing the caffettiera out of his hands and tipping out the coffee and water. “There are a lot of guys out there waiting to find Mr. Self-Righteous-Know-It-All-Who-Swings-Both-Ways. I’d go hunt them down if I were you.”

  Ned is watching him carefully.

  “You don’t fit the mold, you know, Tom. You have a bigger problem with the fact that I could be into girls as well as guys. Why is that?”

  “I really don’t care.”

  “Yes, you do.” Ned points a knowing finger. “I made them a bet that you still think you’ve got a chance with her. May I remind you she has a boyfriend?”

  Tom chooses not to contribute to the conversation anymore. He makes a show of how to put together the caffettiera and slams it on the stove.

  “You’re a dish-pig who left her feeling like shit,” Ned continues. “He keeps peace. Wow, what a dilemma. Wonder who I’d pick?”

  “For your information, peacekeepers did bugger-all in the Balkans,” Tom argues. It’s a bit lame, but it’s the best he can do. “And like a pasty-faced army grunt is going to put me off if I want to go for her,” he adds with bravado.

  “They have Brazilian peacekeepers in Timor.”

  The air whooshes out of Tom. His whole image of Tara’s life in Timor does a ninety-degree swing. He feels sick to his stomach.

  “Who’s Brazilian?” Frankie asks, walking in with a packet of parmesan cheese. “Are you guys talking about Tara’s boyfriend?” She takes the saucepan off the stove and throws the pasta into the colander.

  “From Brazil,” Ned confirms again with a nod, looking at Tom.

  “As in from South America?” Tom can’t help asking. “Olive skinned and waxed chest?”

  “Very beautiful people. The women always come first in the Miss Universe pageants,” Francesca says.

  “No, I think it’s Venezuela,” Ned explains.

  “So what do they do?” Tom asks. “Salsa and speak Spanish all day in Dili?”

  “She’s actually in Same and it’s not Spanish; it’s Portuguese,” Frankie corrects.

  “She didn’t correct me,” Tom says half to himself.

  “She probably didn’t want you to feel stupid for not knowing the Brazilians and the East Timorese speak Portuguese,” Ned says, handing Francesca the right spoon for the pasta.

  “I reckon a lot of people wouldn’t know that.” Tom’s on the defensive now.

  “Ask him.” Francesca points to her brother as he walks in holding his drumsticks, and somehow Tom can tell that Ned and Francesca are having fun. At his expense.

  “Ask me what?” Luca Spinelli asks. The kid is pathetically good-looking and talks with Anabel on MSN, so Tom wants to hate yet another person in the world. Luca Spinelli punches him in the arm as a means of saying hello.

  “Go on. What language do the Brazilians speak?” Francesca asks her brother as she pours the sauce onto the pasta in the plate Ned hands her.

  Luca grins up at Tom. Tom knew the kid when he was ten and in primary at their school and had always felt slightly protective of him, because of how hard it had been when Francesca’s mum was sick.

  “You thought it was Spanish, didn’t you, Tom?” The kid is laughing at him.

  “I’m writing a song, you know. It’s called, ‘Oh, if I could be as smart as the Spinelli siblings.’” Tom gets out his own fork and twirls some of the pasta from the plate Francesca’s holding. She puts it in front of her brother and then Ned is also there, hovering over them with his own fork.

  “How spoiled are you?” Tom mutters.

  Francesca is kissing her brother. “He’s my tesoro,” she says. “And I’m going to miss him to death.”

  “Where’s he going?” Ned asks, making a grunting sound of satisfaction when he finally gets to taste the food.

  “My mother can’t live without her baby, so he’s going to join them in Italy for the rest of their trip. In eighteen days, Will is flying home for a five-day break and then they’ll fly to Singapore, where Will puts Luca on an airplane bound for Italy.”

  “Wow, seven hours on a flight with Will beside you,” Tom says, feigning wistfulness. “Wish it were me.”

  “Are you off that day?” Ned asks Francesca. “If not, I can do a swap.”

  “We don’t do airports when he’s leaving. Will’s banned me.”

  Tom can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You can’t cry at the airport because he says. What? Is he the boss of your emotions or something? He sounds like a tyrant.”

  “And in eighteen days I’m going to see my boy,” she says, grinning like Luca, “and I will forget his tyranny.”

  When Stani closes up, the lot of them sit around the back room and it’s only because Francesca’s brother is there, and Tom used to accompany him on guitar when the kid was learning drums, that he agrees to jam.

  It’s Luca who’s teaching Francesca to play guitar, so he chooses a Dylan song because it’s easy but long and it’ll give her the practice on guitar she needs. Luca sings because she says she doesn’t have the energy to do both just yet. Halfway through the song, Tom pulls Francesca up from the chair she’s sitting on, by the scruff of her neck, and she gives him a look of sufferance but keeps on going and it feels like the most natural thing in the world to be playing with them.

  Justine is playing, too. How Justine could be so uninhibited on stage and then be unable to speak to a musician she likes baffles Tom. She says the violinist is a genius, but Tom thinks she is and for a moment their eyes meet and
she grins at him because it’s what would happen onstage when they used to perform. It was the high Tom couldn’t get any other way, no matter how much he tried. He likes the feel of the harmonica burning against his mouth, the way it seems to have its own emotion, wavering. Stani watches them from the door, smoking a cigarette now that the clientele is gone, and somehow Tom gets a feeling that no one has a place to go to tonight.

  When they finish, Francesca groans about the ache in her arm and her brother gives her a massage.

  “It’s like hanging out with the bloody Partridge Family,” Ned mutters, eating from a packet of chips. But he doesn’t leave and they rehearse the songs they’ve written, this time with Luca on drums, and before they know it, it’s past two.

  Tom notices there’re a few missed calls from Bill. And a text from Georgie asking where he is.

  He doesn’t want to tell her. Not to punish her, but because he wants his father to think he’s dead on the street somewhere.

  He goes back to the Spinellis’ with Ned, and even when Francesca shows them the wedding dress she’s working on and her brother goes to bed vowing he’s not going to school in the morning Tom stays. Ned makes it as far as the explanation of calico.

  “I’m yawning,” Ned says, leaving.

  When Francesca talks beading, Tom puts up a hand.

  “Frankie, not the beading. I don’t mind the bridezilla stories, or even the ones where your grandmother’s a bitch to clients with bad taste, but not the rest.”

  “Will loves the beading stories.”

  Will is such a big fat liar.

  She’s grinning and he knows it’s because she’s thinking of Saint Trombal, patron saint of the anal-retentive, coming home soon.

  “Is it true about the piercing and the I love Frankie tat?” he asks.

  She rolls her eyes. “I blame the engineers for the piercing. They are such a bad influence. And I wouldn’t exactly call it an I love Frankie tat,” she adds with a laugh.

  He makes himself comfortable, trying to shove the dog away, who’s hogging most of the couch.

  “So aren’t you worried that he’s being unfaithful over there? Isn’t it an issue for you?”

  She looks up at him. “That’s a pretty personal question.”

  “What? I’ve never asked you a personal question before?”

  She doesn’t reply.

  “What would you do if he did the dirty on you?”

  He thinks of Georgie and Sam and the way they haven’t really recovered from Sam being with someone else, regardless of the circumstances.

  “I’d never take him back,” she says without hesitation. “If he was unfaithful, I wouldn’t. And I love him as much as I love my parents and brother, and you know how I feel about them. Will knows that. I’ve told him. That if he’s about to do something that will betray us, then to picture my face because it will be the very last time he ever sees it.”

  There’s a look in her eye that tells Tom she’s not joking.

  “Then how do you know he’s not lying to you when he says he hasn’t gotten up to anything?” he asks.

  She gives a snort. “Have you seen his face?” she asks incredulously. “Everything’s stamped all over it. Every emotion he can’t articulate, because he’s so introverted is all there. Every time he’s lied to me, I’ve worked it out in a nanosecond.”

  “So he lies to you? And you’re okay with that?” he asks with disbelief. It’s like he wants Francesca to conjure up every shit thing about Trombal. He doesn’t know what he’d do with Trombal-less Francesca, but he always liked it better when the other guy wasn’t around.

  “What? You’ve never told a girl you have a family function on when it’s really the football?” she asks. “Will doesn’t do romance well. He doesn’t believe in Valentine’s Day, and if my birthday falls on a night when the Dragons are playing, we celebrate the next day.”

  “Then what does he do well?”

  She thinks for a moment, and it’s as if she’s never had to articulate it. “I told him at the beginning of the year that Tara was homesick. Just in passing. And you know, Will and Tara don’t really connect, but there they are, living a two-hour flight away from each other. So when he had a weekend free, he flew to Dili with some of the other guys and she met them there from Same. I swear to God, Tom, she went on and on for weeks about how great it was. And whenever Will’s home, he’ll go with my brother and my dad to a Sydney FC game and Will hates soccer, but the idea of my brother and father and Will hanging out together makes me so happy . . . and he’s found me the most unbelievable silk material in those tiny villages in Sumatra, and believe me, he hates shopping in market stalls anywhere in the world and the guys he works with give him a lot of shit when he does stuff like that.”

  She looks at Tom. “And if I get a little chemically imbalanced in the head, like we all know I tend to get sometimes, and I don’t want my parents or brother knowing, Will’s like, ‘We’ll deal with it.’ He’s never said, ‘Snap out of it,’ and he’s never said, ‘I don’t get it,’ and he’s never said, ‘I’ll fix it up.’ He just says, ‘You’re not up to going back to uni to finish your Honors this year? Big deal. There’s next year. We’ll deal with it.’” She nods. “That’s what he does well.”

  Tom doesn’t respond. He’s never asked about her depression in the past, just knew it was there like a big black blob over her head. In Year Eleven they thought it was a one-off because her mother had been sick, but he had seen it once or twice again. Francesca knew the signs and he could tell she fought it with everything she had inside of her. He didn’t want to think of Trombal fighting it with her. He didn’t want to like the other guy in that way.

  “I’m going to marry him,” Francesca says with such certainty that it makes his head spin.

  “Bet your mother’s jumping for joy,” he says dryly.

  “She reckons she didn’t go to uni and get herself a master’s so her daughter could marry her first boyfriend and sit making wedding dresses with her grandmother in Leichhardt like Italian women did fifty years ago,” Francesca says. “But my mother keeps on forgetting that she did everything she wanted to do. Married my father. Went to university. Had a family. No one got in her way. All at our age now. And that’s what she taught me. To do what I want to do and stop having people telling me that I can’t marry Will because I’m too young and I haven’t seen the world or taken advantage of the choices out there. Who says we’re not going to see the world? Or that I won’t want to sew for the rest of my life, or that I won’t want to finish my Honors? Who says choice is better in ten years’ time when it comes to guys? Just say there are bigger dickheads out there?”

  “But you’ve only had sex with one guy, I’m presuming. Don’t you want to try . . . something different?”

  Francesca gives him that look again. “Tom, without going into great detail, Will and I are very, very compatible in that department. Very.”

  He looks at her, trying to get his head around Will Trombal having sex.

  “Very,” she repeats.

  “Enough,” he mutters. “I’m sick just thinking of it.”

  She’s grinning.

  “He feels the same way about you. When he left that next morning, he sent me a text saying, If that ‘insert-C-word-here’ moves in while I’m away, I’ll kill myself.”

  “He wrote insert-C-word-here?”

  “No. He used it. Capitals all the way.”

  She’s looking at him as if he’s some insect under a microscope, as if she can truly see inside of him.

  “Do you remember the first time we really . . . I don’t know . . . connected?” she asks. “You made me dance with you in drama class during one of Ortley’s ridiculous ‘freeing ourselves’ sessions.”

  He nods.

  “I asked you later why you got me to dance, and you said it was because . . .”

  He nods again. “You always looked sad.”

  “So did you, Tom. That’s why I took you up on it. Because bac
k then, even before your uncle died, you looked as sad as I did. Except you were better at hiding it.”

  He stands up, needing to get away. Sometimes he feels a pull toward Francesca. She was the reason he came into their group. It was her misery that united them, and somehow it ended up being her personality that kept them together when everyone split. She’s the one who writes the letters to keep the world informed. She listens to the news every hour to make sure everyone’s safe. So tonight he walks away even though she’s moved forward to give him a hug. Because he wants to kiss her, and knows she’ll hate him for it and that he’ll hate himself. He knows it’s for all the wrong reasons and that he’ll end up thinking of Tara Finke and her Brazilian peacekeeper and Will Trombal and the way he doesn’t do romance but eats the space between him and Francesca anytime he’s in the room with her.

  Georgie is sitting in the kitchen when Tom comes home. It’s late, but she can’t sleep because her blood is dancing with anxiety over everything.

  “Go to bed,” Tom says, doing that thing where he opens the fridge and stares at it for ages as if his favorite food is going to somehow appear miraculously.

  “You know he’s not going to ask for your forgiveness, don’t you? But you know it’s what he desperately needs, Tommy.”

  “Don’t,” he says coolly. “I don’t want to talk about him, Georgie.”

  Bill’s at the kitchen door too and she wonders if anyone’s asleep tonight.

  “If you say a word,” Tom says over the fridge door, addressing Bill, “I’m walking out the door and I’m not coming back.”

  Despite Tom’s tone, he walks by, brushing a kiss on Bill’s head. Bill makes himself comfortable in front of her and she realizes, all too late, that it’s her he’s been listening out for and not Tom.

  “She doesn’t ask Dominic to drive her to appointments, not because she thinks he’s busy or whatever she says . . . She doesn’t ask Dominic because she wants you to do it. It makes her feel safe to have you there,” he says quietly.