The Piper's Son

  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 c
omes 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.

  “Don’t be bloody ridiculous. He doesn’t do letters. And she doesn’t . . .” He impersonates her silent coy giggle.

  Anabel sighs. It’s an Agnes of God sigh down to a T.

  “I’m telling you, Tom. Those kids are writing smut to each other.”

  He’s killing himself laughing, but she looks sad for a moment and he knows this is where she starts falling to pieces. The one thing all three of them, four counting Georgie, have in common is making sure that Anabel’s okay, and he wants to make everything right.

  “He told me about Grandpa Tom Finch and how he might be coming home,” she says, her voice wavering.

  He nods.

  “I told Pop Bill that if Grandpa Tom Finch comes home, I’m going to play his trumpet. To welcome him, you know. Do you think he’d like that, Tom?”

  Tom doesn’t know whether she’s talking about Pop Bill or Grandpa Tom Finch.

  “I think he’d love it.” He doesn’t even know how those words have come out.

  She looks up at him. “I think Bill cried when I told him I would. I wish everyone would stop crying, Tom. Uncle Joe would be so angry about it.” But she’s crying herself now. “He’d be so angry at us, Tom, for crying so much when all he did was laugh.”

  It’s silent in the car and he doesn’t realize until they reach Byron that he hasn’t said a word the whole time. They change drivers at Lennox Head and sit on the beach for a while, just watching the surfers. It’s cold, but he doesn’t want to move. It reminds him too much of that time with Tara Finke at Maroubra on the night of graduation.

  Because back then there was the promise of the next day when he drove back to Georgie’s and they all got together. All the Mackees and their friends to say “Hooray,” as Bill and Auntie Margie Finch, and the rest of those who came from the Burdekin, would say. “Hooray” to Joe, who was off to London to a teaching job. And Dominic stood on Georgie’s table while everyone told him to get down. “No, no, no. I’m making a speech here.” And he did. One of those speeches that only Dominic Finch Mackee could make. Full of guts and emotion and humor. Tom remembers grabbing his uncle and saying, “I kissed the psycho Tara Finke last night. Can you believe it?”

  Joe had looked stunned in that comic way of his. “Because you were pissed or because you wanted to?”

  “You know I don’t drink.”

  Then Joe grabbed his face, grinning. “You wanted to. I can see it in your eyes, you cheeky bastard.”

  And that look of joy, that look of total euphoria, is the last image he has of Joe.

  He starts crying and he can’t stop. He doesn’t know where it comes from, this grief. How it blindsides you. But Justine’s hand comes across to clutch his, like she’ll never let go, and Francesca’s holding him, murmuring his name over and over again and he just wants to go back to the moment when he was in that water. At that near-perfect moment in his life when Tara Finke was in his arms. Because if he could go there, he could start from scratch and make everything in his life right.

  “Are you going to be okay about your exams?” he asks Ned in the car, because the silence between Lennox and Coffs gets too much after a while.

  Ned waves him off. “First one’s Moby-Dickhead. I’ll just go on about the sperm scene and apply a feminist reading. They love that. Do you want a chewie?”

  “Yeah, why not.”

  When they drop him off home late that night, he finds both his father and Georgie in the kitchen. Waiting, it seems.

  “If it’s Dominic you want to punish, then at least have the decency to phone me,” Georgie says coldly.

  “As if my mother hasn’t rung you both.”

  “His mother,” Georgie says, looking at his father. “She doesn’t belong to us anymore. Did you know that, Dom?” Georgie stands up and walks to the sink to rinse her cup.

  “I’m going to bed before I say something I might regret.”

  But his father doesn’t move. He just sits there and looks at Tom, and there’s an expression on his face that Tom can’t quite place. In front of him is the Herald. Tom knows his father would have read it line by line; it was always his way. Lots of grunting, lots of “You’ve got to be bloody joking.” He’d even read the page that told when the sun set and rose, and if the family was ever away, it was his father’s obsession that they all see a sunrise or sunset together.

  Once, just before Tom’s final exams in Year Twelve, the four of them went to Mudgee for the long weekend. Work and study seemed to have taken over their lives and his dad said it was all going too fast and they needed to regroup. The first thing they noticed as they drove into the property was a red vinyl sofa sitting on a grassy incline, overlooking the country highway in the distance.

  Tom remembers how his dad’s eyes were fixed on it the whole time they were there.

  “I’m going to watch the sun rise tomorrow from the hill,” Dominic announced on their last night, looking up from the local paper. “Says here it’ll rise at 5:47 in the morning.”

  “Enjoy,” Tom’s mum murmured, not looking up from the novel she was reading. It’s what she claimed you had to do when Dominic got an idea. Not look him in the eye.

  “But you’ve got to wonder why someone would put a sofa up there,” his dad continued.

  “I’m not wondering at all.” Tom kept his eyes on the page. He had been rereading Brave New World, hoping miraculously that he’d discover something new that would help him blitz his HSC exam.

  “Gang, when are we going to get a chance to see a sunrise together again?” his dad had argued.

  “We’re not the waking-up-at-five-in-the-morning type of family, Dom,” his mum said patiently. “We’re the sleeping-in-until-nine-o’clock type.”

  “Love that kind of family,” Tom said.

  “I’ll come with you, Daddy,” Anabel reassured him.

  “’Course you will, Beautiful, and then we can spend the trip home trying to describe the perfect sunrise to these philistines.”

  “And you can spend the rest of the week blowing her nose when she gets a cold,” his mum said.

  “Nah, I’ll leave that to Tom for not keeping his sister warm on that sofa.”

  There was silence after that and Tom thought he and his mum had won the round. But it only lasted a minute.

  “Don’t you wonder —?”

  “No,” Tom and his mother answered.

  “Just say up on the hill is the meaning of life and someone knew it and they wanted everyone else to enjoy it. So they put a red vinyl sofa up there.”

  His mother had made a snorting sound.

  “Aren’t you even curious, Tom?” he asked.

  Tom finally put his book down. He wanted to give his response all the effort in the world. “I’m not getting up at 5:46 in the morning. I’m not. Not. Do you understand the word not? It’s called the negative in many cultures. I’ll say it again. Not.”

  He looked his father in the eye.

  At 5:45 the next morning, he stood on the incline beside the two snuggled up on the sofa. His father was grinning.

  “Come on. Cuddle up, Tom,” Anabel said.

  “Big boy,” Tom muttered, shivering. “No cuddles.” There was enough blanket next to his dad to keep warm and he yanked as much around him as he could. The meaning of life had better come soon, he thought, or he was getting back into bed. They heard a sound behind them and his dad chuckled.

  “Knew you’d join us, darlin’,” Dominic said, patting his lap so Anabel could sit on his knee and he could make room for Tom’s mum.

  “Because you stole my blanket, you bastard,” she said, curling up beside him.

  His dad made sure the girls were covered, leaving Tom exposed.

  “Cuddles?” Tom begged. Anabel giggled.


  The sunrise wasn’t much after all. It was too cloudy. But they stayed there for ages, just the four of them, and Tom remembers how silent they were most of the time. How someone spoke once in a while about work, or Sydney, or just stuff. How Anabel fell asleep in his father’s lap and he pressed a kiss to her head because Dominic always said he’d never see anything more beautiful than his girls. How his mother had touched his dad’s cheek. “What did you do to yourself?”

  “Nicked myself shaving,” he murmured.

  Tom thought they must have looked strange from the highway, sitting on that incline on the red vinyl sofa, but nobody cared. Then his dad yawned, stretching his arms out wide and hitting Tom on the face. On purpose. Sometimes it pissed Tom off when his father did that. “He’s just playing with you, Tom,” his mum would say when Tom looked like he was going to have a go. But that day he didn’t mind. He was too content and he wondered how it could be that no matter how much he loved his mum and Joe and Pop Bill and Nanni Grace and Georgie, that nobody would have got him on that sofa at 5:46 in the morning. Except his dad. And that was the problem with Dominic Mackee. That he could promise the meaning of life with just a look in his eye and a tone to his voice. Tom would have followed the bastard anywhere.

  Except here they are in Georgie’s kitchen. In a different kind of silence from the one on that hill in Mudgee. And in this silence he knows he’s finished with being the Tom of books and rhymes. Tom Sawyer was a weak shit compared to Huck Finn. Thomas the apostle didn’t have enough faith in his friends to believe the unbelievable; Uncle Tom was a white man’s tool, a disappointment to his people. Worse still, he doesn’t know how to follow the piper anymore because it’s a path Tom has lost faith in. And the piper knows it. Tom can see it in his father’s eyes now. And the more he stares, the clearer it becomes. He wonders if that guy who put explosives in his backpack and blew up Joe’s train imagined that two years later, on the other side of the world, his anger would come to this. That the piper didn’t know who to be anymore, because he wasn’t Joe’s brother, or Tom and Anabel’s dad, or Jacinta Louise’s husband.