The Piper's Son (31 page)

“Am I hard work?” she asks quietly.

“Yes.”

Silence for a moment.

“You could have hesitated in answering that.”

“Why? I’ve never lied to you before,” he says. “You do that all the time, you know. You ask me questions when you know the answer will piss you off. Ask me a question where the answer could be yes? Ask me if you’re worth the hard work? Ask me if in the last seven years of my life I’ve woken up in a cold sweat knowing I lost the most important person in my life apart from this kid I’m holding? Ask me if getting you pregnant has felt like the best thing that’s happened to me since my son was born?”

She’s stunned by the emotion.

“Fuck, Georgie, what do you want me to say? That I regret what happened back then? Look at me,” he says, the kid’s arms around his neck, his head on his father’s shoulder. “I can’t do that. That’s my punishment. Not being able to give you a complete ‘I regret every single thing that happened back then.’ This isn’t just about you and me.” He struggles to grab something out of his back pocket. His wallet. He manages to get it open.

“See this,” he says. It’s the photo Tom took that time in her backyard when Callum was listening out for the baby against her belly. “It’s all there, Georgie. Everything I want in the world is all there.”

They’re both shaky from the moment and begin walking again.

“Am I worth the hard w —?”

“Yes,” he says before she finishes.
“Yes.”

When they reach her house, she looks up at him. “Why don’t you stay the night?”

“With Callum?”

“No, we’ll leave him out on the lawn, Sam.”

He laughs for a moment. “I can’t. Not tonight. If he wakes up in a strange room, he’ll panic.”

He bends to kiss her, but it’s awkward with Callum in his arms.

“But promise you’ll ask me again if he’s ever awake enough to know where he is.”

Tom’s favorite errand for Francesca is driving Will and Luca to the airport, all three squeezed in the front of the Spinelli family ute. Nothing more satisfying than the idea of putting Trombal on a plane that’s leaving the country.

Luca Spinelli is pumped and trying to get into his duty-free bag without breaking the seal. Will’s subdued.

“Why didn’t you just let her come along and get emotional rather than trying to control it?” he asks, because all of a sudden he’s the Francesca-and-Will relationship analyst.

No response.

“She could have dropped you both off. What’s the worse she can do? Cry hysterically?”

The truck’s gears get stuck at the lights, and Will pushes Tom’s hand out of the way and shoves it into the correct gear.

“It wasn’t her,” he mutters after a moment.

“Sorry?” Tom says.

“She didn’t cry.”

“Then what?”

It’s too quiet except for the crap engine sounding like a lawn mower.

“I cried.”

Luca bursts out laughing beside Will.

“Yeah, well, I did,” Will says. “And it’s not the thing you want to do in front of a bunch of engineers. Now my nickname is Will the Crier. We’ll be playing footy over there and someone will say, ‘Throw it to Will the Crier.’ They’ve actually cut it down to just ‘the crier.’ Or they used to do this,” he says, squeezing two fists over his eyes, “every time they walked past me.”

Tom can’t help laughing, but only because Will’s laughing as well.

“I can’t believe you told us that, Will,” Luca Spinelli says. “We can blackmail you.”

“’Course you can, mate,” Will says innocently. “Just like I can tell anyone, maybe even Tom here, the name of the girl you have a crush on.”

Luca stops laughing. “I can’t believe Frankie told you.”

Tom shoves Will back so he can stare across at Luca, but the kid won’t meet his eye.

He stops at the drop-off outside the departure area and they get out of the car, dragging out Luca’s luggage and complaining about all the stuff his grandmother has packed to send over to relatives.

“Thanks,” Will mutters.

“We owe you,” Luca Spinelli says, still not looking at him directly.

“No worries. Although Frankie said I might be able to see the
Willy loves Frankie
tattoo if I ask nicely.”

“Just say it’s on my arse and I tell you to kiss it while you’re down there,” Will says.

“Show it to him,” Luca urges. “It’s awesome.”

Will hates attention. It’s there in his fidgeting face, but he pulls up his sleeve, revealing his arm. The tat is massive and a bit on the spectacular side with not a cliché in sight. Tom refuses to let his respect for it show.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “I thought it was a Frankie tattoo.”

And then he becomes audience to one of those moments when Will Trombal smiles as he looks down at it.

“They mate for life, you know,” he says.

“Are you alone?”

He always asks her that. Only once or twice has she told him she “can’t talk just now.” He never questions whether it’s about work or the peacekeeper because he dreads the answer, and today she makes it worse because he can only hear silence on the other side for what seems like forever.

“We’re not together anymore,” she says. “He reckons my heart wasn’t in it.”

Tom thinks he hears a choir of
Alleluia
in his head. He wants to skin the guy for even demanding that Tara give her heart to him when it belongs to Tom. He wants to run up and down the stairs to the
Rocky
theme except he’s naked and it’ll scare Georgie if she comes out of her room. He wants to take a plane to Albury and thank everyone in Nanni Grace’s novena club.

But he stays calm. “Hmm. What are you doing?”

“Painting my toenails. You?”

“Clipping mine.”

“Listening to?”

“‘Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.’
‘When there’s nothing left to burn, you have set yourself on fire.’”

“Very dramatic.”

“You?”

“Ani DiFranco. ‘32 Flavors.’”

“Don’t know it. Sing.”

“No, no, no, no. My voice is shit.”

“Nah. Go on.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure, sure.”

“‘I’m a poster girl with no poster . . .’”

“Stop!”

“‘I’m beyond your peripheral vision . . .’”

“I’m begging you.
Stop
or I’m hanging up, Finke.”

“I feel ugly in monsoon season and I need cheering up and you’re making me feel like crap,” she says, laughing.

“You’re just begging me for a compliment.”

“And I haven’t had a good haircut for a while or my eyebrows waxed, and a facial would be great.”

“Send me a photo. Take one with your phone and send it, and I’ll tell you the honest truth.”

“Okay, but I’ll have to hang up so you ring back when you get it.”

A minute later the photo comes through and he laughs before ringing.

“I’m calling you Finkenstein, daughter of Frankenstein.”

All he hears for a while is laughing.

“Prick.”

“I’m just calling it the way it is, baby.”

“Send me one of you.”

They both hang up and he quickly takes the photo and sends it. She rings back.

“You, on the other hand, take my breath away. I will sleep tonight with it clutched to my breast.”

Silence.

“Tom?”

“Sorry. The words
clutching
and
breasts
will render me useless for the next forty-eight hours.”

“Then I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone’s breasts out there to clutch.”

“Not interested in anyone else’s.”

Silence.

“What are you thinking?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Silence again.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then if you do, I think you already know.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Same.”

“Tom?”

He can’t breathe.

“Yeah.”

“Nothing.” She hangs up.

Other times he talks to her for ages, comforted by her
Hmm
s and
Go on
s and by the sound of her breathing.

“This one time,” he tells her, “I was thirteen years old and the stand-off at the wharf was happening and I remember my dad came home and told Mum he was going down there because it wasn’t just about the wharfies’ union anymore. It was about every worker in the country. Anyway, Mum said there was no way she wasn’t going if he was and she started ringing around to see if someone would babysit, but every person she spoke to said, ‘If Dom’s going, we’ll go too.’ So they took Anabel and me with them. My grandmother Agnes still goes on about how they put our lives at risk. There had been pretty wild scenes down there and some of the workers had been camped on the docks for weeks and weeks. Sometimes their kids were with them.

“So there we were down at the waterfront and it was packed with people that night and honest to God, Tara, some of them were the most feral I’ll ever see. Riled up beyond anything. Thousands. There’d been a massive call around to all the unions to come down and support the wharfies, so hundreds of cops were lined up facing this angry mob, and I heard my mum say, ‘Shit, those poor bastards,’ because some of those cops were so young and they looked scared.

“I was shaking like crazy and I remember my father took my hand and asked me if I was scared. But I lied and told him I wasn’t and he just looked at me and said, ‘Well, I am, so you’re going to have to hold my hand tight.’ I looked around and we were all there. Apart from my grandparents, everyone I loved in the world was there. My uncle Joe with his union’s banner, because he was the rep at the school he worked at, and Sam and Georgie, and my mum and dad and heaps of their friends. Everyone around us was shouting, ‘The workers united will never be defeated!’ and I honestly thought they were saying, ‘The Mackees united will never be defeated!’ I thought the chant was just for us. That nothing could break us. I felt in tune with every person around me for the first time in my life. And the only time I’ve ever felt that again is when I’m watching a great live band. Or when I started hanging out with you and the girls and Jimmy Hailler.”

He can hear that Tara’s crying.

“It’s not that sad a story, Finke,” he says gently.

“I was there,” she whispers.

She’d been there. On that waterfront. With parents like hers, how could she not?

Maybe she’d always been there. Maybe strangers enter your heart first and then you spent the rest of your life searching for them.

He doesn’t say anything at all after that and nor does she. But they stay on the line.

And there goes another week’s wage, but he doesn’t care.

When the phone rings, it’s five p.m. and Georgie knows. It’s about the timing. Grace and Jacinta always ring at night, and Lucia would never ring during family peak-hour. It continues to ring and she eliminates Sam, because they’ve never indulged in daily phone calls, and the office has no need to contact her now that she’s on leave. Plus Tom belongs to a generation that has no idea how to memorize landline numbers. He usually rings her mobile. So she knows. Dominic does too and she lets him answer, because he’s been waiting all his life for this one phone call and is better prepared. She thinks of the way they rehearsed this, from the moment they lay in their beds as children. But back then, they truly believed Tom Finch would come home alive. In their shared dream, he’d walk down the corridor of their home in Petersham and he’d catch them both in his arms and tell them that the memory of holding his twins kept him alive. But it was Bill they woke to each morning. Bill, who they’d convinced each other was the reason Tom Finch couldn’t return. Bill, whose expression they had interpreted as cold and bitter in those early years. When all that time it was just grief.

They both stand lost for a while, in the hallway of her house, neither having a single clue what to do. Until Dominic calls Jacinta Louise and she tells them to ring Bill and Grace and Auntie Margie Finch. But then Jacinta changes her mind and says that Bill probably should tell Auntie Margie and that she’ll ring the Queensland mob and that perhaps Georgie should tell Tom, while Dom rings someone from Tom Finch’s regiment. Georgie likes having that kind of purpose and when she speaks to her nephew, he’s calm and quite contained. “Come down to the pub,” he tells her. “Bring my father.”