The Piper's Son (18 page)

Tom’s at her bedroom door the next morning, a look of worry on his face. Georgie winces. She’s supposed to be the adult around here and instead, this poor kid’s looking after her.

“I’m okay, Tom. I promise,” she says, shuffling out of bed.

But he’s shaking his head. “Georgie, I’m sorry.”

She grabs her dressing gown, which doesn’t even reach her sides these days.

“I got so stressed yesterday and freaked out and . . .” he’s saying.

She stops and places her hands on his shoulders. “Calm down. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m going to have a shower now and then eat breakfast. And then I’ll do the grocery shopping and tonight I’ll cook properly. I promise.”

It takes a lot of energy to speak, but she doesn’t want him to see that.

“I rang Nanni Grace and Bill yesterday because I was worried about you,” he says.

She nods. She wants to get that look off Tom’s face. “I’ll ring them today and tell them I’m okay, Tommy — I promise.”

He’s pointing outside and then down. Tom was always a pointer. Pointed at his food as a substitute for words.

She hears barking.

“They’re downstairs, Georgie. And they brought the dogs. And big suitcases.”

Oh, my God.

She’s out the bedroom door in a moment. “Mummy!” she calls out from the top of the stairs. The dogs respond to the sound of her voice and she clutches the banister as they come bounding up the stairs.

And there she is. Amazing Grace. A grief-ravaged face, but the beauty and style is still there. No unruly hair for Grace Mackee. She’s all sleek bob cut and lipstick.

“Bill. Get the dogs off Georgie!”

“Bruno! Bazzi!”

Lots of bellowing.

Dominic stands behind their parents, at the bottom of the stairs. A bit shell-shocked really. When Georgie reaches them, Grace does that practical thing where she hugs her quickly and pats her on the back without lingering.
Just one second more, Grace,
Georgie wants to say.
Just one second.

“Bill will get some breakfast.”

“Is Bill going to get the dogs, or is Bill going to get breakfast?” Bill asks. Dom gets his drawl from Bill. It’s a Burdekin drawl, no matter how many decades he’s lived down south. Georgie hugs her stepfather awkwardly and he holds on. Maybe that’s why she has resented him all her life. Because he would hold on longer, when she wanted it to come from her mother. He looks worn out. Although still fit and working outdoors fixing tractors in Albury, Joe’s death had aged him. Around him the dogs are going insane and everyone’s falling over one another with suitcases.

“Do you want the spare room or the study?” Dom asks, and Grace agrees that the spare room is the way to go.

Georgie tries to wash up the plates from the last two days quickly, ashamed at how untidy the house looks. In the past, if she’d known her parents were coming, she would be spring cleaning for a week.

Her mother comes up behind her, holding a small diary. “What do you think, Georgie? Should I change Bill’s November checkups to now, seeing we’re here?”

“That sounds good, Mum.”

“But as long as your father doesn’t drive. As soon as we hit Sydney, he was useless. I told him the whole time not to take the Hume Highway. Do you think he listened to me?”

“Organize it with Dom and he can drive you both around.”

“He’s getting Alzheimer’s. I’m sure of it.”

“I’m not getting Alzheimer’s,” Bill says, walking into the kitchen with a box of produce they’ve brought up from Albury. Dom’s behind him with another and begins stacking some of it in the fridge.

“Great,” Georgie whispers to her brother as they huddle at the fridge door. “Bill gets Alzheimer’s and has an excuse to forget what a bastard he was all those years.”

The doorbell rings and she thinks it’s the neighbors coming to complain already, so she rushes to answer the door. To Sam.

“Where were you?” she blurts out. She doesn’t mean to make it sound like an accusation, but it’s out of her mouth before she can stop it.

“I told you I was in Melbourne. Shit, Georgie. Do you ever listen to me?” He’s not happy. “Next time I come back to you looking like this, you’re moving in with Lucia and Abe.”

It’s not until the dogs come running toward them that she notices that Callum is with him.

“Hi, Georgie.”

“Hi.”

And suddenly Grace is there, looking from Georgie to Sam and then the kid.

“Hello, Sam,” her mother says quietly.

“Grace.” He leans forward to hug her. It’s all a bit awkward. There was Sam who was like a son-in-law for seven years, Sam the adulterer who they didn’t see for years, Sam the savior who was around for Joe’s death, and now Sam the impregnator of their daughter, standing on her front porch with his son by his side.

Grace looks down at the kid.

“You better come inside,” she says. “Bill wants the door shut to keep the dogs in.”

Sam looks awkward. Georgie, defeated. Once Callum crosses the threshold, she doesn’t know what will happen. It changes the rules completely, although she isn’t quite sure what the rules are. The kid seems entranced. Usually there’s intrigue about Georgie’s front door. A whole lot of quiet and the mystery of what’s beyond there. But there are dogs barking and people bellowing, and Tom’s being a smart-arse and accompanying it all to music, strumming his guitar in a fast Spanish piece. He comes up behind her in the corridor, serenading over his grandmother’s shoulder, and then he looks down at Callum as well.

“Tom and Grace, this is Callum,” Sam says with a sigh.

The kid giggles at Tom’s antics, and the dogs come bounding. Georgie has no choice but to usher them in and shut the door.

That day, while planning a getaway in his head from the Mackee/Finch circus, he receives an e-mail from taramarie. Not exactly an e-mail, but a link to the Lenina Crowne Fan Club website.

Like he does most times when he thinks of Tara Finke lately, he smiles. And types. And decides he has nothing to lose.

Life just got one trillion times more bearable.

There’s nothing like the Mackee clan all under the same roof to help convince Tom to return to work the next night. He’d rather face Stani and Ned the Cook than deal with a harassed Georgie, or a rundown on how the drought is affecting rural areas and a whole lot of Sydney-bashing. Worse still was the conversation Nanni Grace was having in whispers after lunch about how some tablets Bill had taken for depression had affected him having sex. Even Tom’s father looked horrified and left the kitchen while Georgie was screwing up her face and looking at Tom, as if she had never heard anything so disgusting. After walking in on Sam and Georgie having sex, Tom was becoming a bit numb to the pain of it all.

The Union is pretty busy and he pushes past some of the regulars who are drinking and smoking on the pavement. “No glasses on the street,” he tells them, before walking in. In the kitchen, Ned looks a bit harassed and the plates are stacked up, leaving him with little room.

“Move,” Tom says, pushing him away from the sink.

Ned feigns a frightened sound, which Tom ignores. He doesn’t know how to deliver an apology. It’ll sound contrived now.

Francesca walks in with some dirty plates.

“Are you going to forgive him?” she asks Ned.

Ned stays silent.

“If I told you he can burp the whole of the national anthem, would you be impressed?” she says, dumping the plates next to Tom’s pile.

“Impressed only because a burp would replace the word ‘girt.’”

She walks out and Tom begins filling up the sink with clean water. Some of it flicks Ned, who feigns the frightened sound again, and Tom stares at him, unamused.

Francesca pokes her head back in. “What if he can recite to you the whole of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’?” she says.

Ned looks at him, half impressed.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Tom says. “You’re not my type.”

“The whole thing? Not just the first stanza? Not just the last lines about the mermaids singing? Not just the poxy rhyming line about Michelangelo?”

Tom ignores him.

“I’ll make you a bet,” Ned says, wiping his hands on his apron and going to his backpack to retrieve his
Norton Anthology.

“You carry your
Norton
around, you dickwit?” Tom asks.

“I’m an English lit student. I can’t believe you even know what one is.”

“It’s on page 1340,” Tom tells him.

Ned looks at him suspiciously and flicks to the page, looking even more suspicious when he proves him right.

Tom begins: “‘Let us go then, you and I . . .’”

Stani walks in later, glaring at them both.

“
Bloody bastards.
One minute punching each other, next minute reading poetry. What’s wrong with everyone this week?”

Tom can tell that Ned is pissed off that he’s lost the bet.

“What the hell made you learn that off by heart?” Ned asks. “Didn’t you drop out of construction or something?”

Tom sponges up the last of the grime around the sink. “His name’s Tom. T. S. Eliot. The only Tom I kind of like. I have a cursed name.”

“Try Ned. How many Neds are there in history? Two. Ned Kelly. Neddy Smith. Both crims.”

“You forgot Ned Flanders,” Tom says.

He spends some of the night serving out front, where a cute girl with an uncomplicated walk flirts with him. She’s not a regular, so she’s the first person for a long time who doesn’t have that hint of sorrow in her eye when he speaks to her. He feels normal for a change, flirting all the way back and enjoying it.

At closing time, when the girls are rehearsing in the back room, he takes the lyrics he’s scribbled on a piece of paper from his pocket and hands them to Francesca.

“You play it,” she says, holding out her guitar.

He shakes his head. “No, you said you wanted words. You didn’t say anything about playing.”

“Oh, come on, Tom. At least give us an idea of the melody in your head,” Justine says, peering over Francesca’s shoulder as she holds out the instrument. He loses the stare-off and grabs it from her. He hasn’t played a tune for real in front of anyone but Georgie since he dived off the table.

He looks up. Justine and Francesca are nodding. Ned, however, looks stunned.

“I never took you for a rhyming guy.”

“It’s a song lyric, Ned. Rhyme is important,” Francesca explains.

“It’s a shame that someone who reads ‘Prufrock’ writes such shit.”

“Fine,” Tom says, pissed off, tearing up the song.

“No!” both Francesca and Justine yell, grabbing it from him.

“I like rhyme,” Francesca argues. “But I think the line should be
Brain is beating but heart’s not breathing.
”

Ned makes a rude sound.

“And what about the music?” Justine says. “It has a great melody.”

Ned sighs. “You’re right. Very uplifting. Might just go hang myself now.”

“Yeah, you just do that, little emo boy,” Tom snaps.

“Oh, that was pathetic,” Justine says. “As if he looks tortured enough to be emo.”

Francesca looks at Tom and tries to keep the torn paper intact. “I loved it. And I know, for you, that counts for nothing, Thomas. But there it is. I
loved
it.”

“Loved?”
he says, imitating her. It was too easy to slip back into high-school idiotic mode.

“And your voice . . . it was a real turn-on. Really sexy,” Justine says.

“Hush. I’m blushing.”

Ned is still looking pissed off, and Tom figures that it’s truly too late for an apology.

“Regardless of how he comes across, Ned, he’s very sensitive,” Francesca explains. “Stands up for old people on the bus and cries in movies.”

“Bullshit,” Tom mutters, picking up his backpack, wanting to get as far away from everyone as possible.