The Piper's Son (20 page)

Tom loved those stories because Joe seemed to have all the information. Nothing could hold Joe back when he was intrigued, and the recovery of Tom Finch’s body became his fixation. He taught history. He worked with evidence, and as far as he was concerned, there was no reason why they couldn’t bring Tom Finch home.

Bill was looking dazed.

“Joe was always talking about him and Dominic going to Hanoi together,” Tom says.

“
Dominic,
is it?” Bill asks, unimpressed. “We’re on first-name terms with your father now, are we?”

“Yeah, we are, Bill. Do you have a problem with that?”

And there’s the look. The first one Tom has received from his father in years that reminds him of normalcy. The one that tells him that if he uses that tone with Bill ever again, he’ll be seeing stars.

“Don’t upset Georgie,” Bill mutters to Dominic before walking out. “I’ll talk to Grace when we get home.”

There’s something inside of Tom that makes him want to stay in this room. Look at everything his father’s collected. Talk to him about how he feels about Tom Finch. About what it’s like having to say the words
disposed of
when talking about the body of the father you never knew. And to talk about Bill, to point out, “Can’t you tell that the poor bastard loves you all like crazy?” But he can see that Dominic is cut.

“Go make sure he’s okay,” his father says gruffly.

Her parents don’t go home, and it’s the uncertainty of what they bring to the equation by being in her home that worries Georgie. It means Sam’s around more often during the day, as if the more people in the house, the less he thinks she’ll notice him there. Plus he has his son during the week these days, not just weekends. It’s not that she minds, which surprises Georgie, but that he never stays at night and she’s irritated because she misses his body beside her and Georgie doesn’t want to miss Sam.

Today Georgie and Grace are baking while Sam’s kid plays with the strings of the guitar Tom has left lying around. Sam’s outside making a phone call, work-related by the looks of things from the window. Georgie hands Sam’s kid a spoon from the bowl to lick, and he hovers between them like the two spaniels waiting for the next bout of generosity. She stares down at him. Her blue-eyed boy, she’d call Sam when they were a couple. At least she doesn’t have to look at some other woman’s face every time she looks down at this kid. But it makes her wonder if she’s looking at what her own child will look like six years down the track. Will he have Georgie’s dark hair and gray eyes, or will he be all Sam? Will he have a shy smile like this little boy?

Tom comes in and puts his arms around Grace from behind.

“Can you tell Bill to get rid of the shorts?” Georgie hears him beg against her ear. “It’s been a week of jogging with him. It’s abuse by humiliation.”

“Can anyone tell Bill to do anything?” Grace asks, kissing her grandson quickly on the cheek. “You smell of cigarettes.”

“How come he gets to do that?” Tom says, looking down at the kid who’s licking the spoon with abandon. Tom wrestles Callum for it, and the boy giggles, because his crush on Georgie has moved to Tom.

“Show Tom how you can play the guitar,” Georgie says.

Tom puts the kid on his lap and grabs the guitar, his arms around him, holding Callum’s fingers in place. It reminds her of how Joe taught Tom to play in the kitchen at Northumberland Street. Callum strums a tune and they all clap. The kid’s beaming and then Tom puts him down and picks up the guitar, asking for requests. Grace says Elvis.

He plays “Viva Las Vegas” with exaggeration and Sam’s kid is laughing. Next minute, Georgie’s holding Callum’s hands and they’re swinging around the kitchen.

“You’ll hurt yourself,” Grace laughs, because all of a sudden Georgie is fragile in her mother’s eyes. If she had known it would have taken a pregnancy to get her mother to notice her she would have got knocked up years ago.

Later, Sam comes inside while Callum is hovering by Georgie’s side.

“Sit,” Sam orders.

Callum sits. So do the dogs.

Sam begins to set the table, which is only built for six and not seven, and then Dominic comes in and the men begin talking collective bargaining and union stuff. Georgie puts the finishing touches on the cake and Sam’s kid is there again, knowing there’s one more spoon to lick.

“Callum, sit,” Sam says. “You’re getting in Georgie’s way.”

No, not getting in Georgie’s way at all, Sam. You are, she wants to say.

They sit crowded around the table and Dom ends up standing by the window to eat.

“We’ll have to get a bigger one,” Georgie says.

Tom mumbles something about a table.

“What?”

He looks up, his face stiffening under everyone’s questioning looks.

“There’s the one Dominic made on Temple Street.”

No one speaks. Dominic had built that table for Grace, so her children and daughter-in-law and grandchildren and Joe’s Ana Vanquez could fit around it perfectly when they all came down to Albury for holidays two years before.

“Well, where the fuck is it?” Bill asks, and Georgie avoids the look Sam’s sending her. She knows he doesn’t want anyone swearing in front of his kid.

“In storage,” Tom says, because it was Tom and his mother and Georgie who had packed up the house that time when Dominic left.

“Then we’ll have to get it out someday,” Grace says quietly. “So we can all fit.”

Georgie takes the next day off to drive Grace and Bill to their check-ups because, according to Grace, “Dominic has things to do.” So Georgie takes them from the skin clinic to the heart specialist to the breast clinic to the podiatrist. In the car she listens to discussions about Dominic looking fuller in the face and the disgraceful Sydney traffic. Grace warns her she’s going so fast that she’s almost kissing the car in front of her, and Bill tells her about the house for sale on their street in Albury. Bill has always believed that they’ll all miraculously decide to move down south and live in the same street happily ever after. Grace reminds Bill that Sam has a son and he would never be interested in moving down south, and Georgie reminds Grace that Sam is not in her life. Bill brings up Roger, the forty-five-year-old divorced optometrist, about five times. Bill hates Sam because when Bill dared to criticize the Labor Party, Sam called the Nationals a bunch of fuckwit whingers and then asked Bill politely not to swear in front of Callum. Bill had called the Greenies a swarm of arseholes, then Tom had asked what arseholes and bees had in common. It’s the type of communal stream-of-intellectual-Finch-Mackee-consciousness that used to cause her and Joe to laugh hysterically.

She’d been here before with Joe a couple of years ago. He had reminded Bill that Roger, the optometrist, was a cross-dresser and that Georgie hated sharing anything, let alone her lipstick and shoes, so it was bound to end in a divorce where they’d be fighting over the boob-tube dress she wore to her Year Ten formal and the Jimmy Choo shoes she bought on eBay. That time both siblings had killed themselves laughing so much that Georgie was snorting. Grace had told them both to grow up. She said it to Joe affectionately, and to Georgie disapprovingly, before saying, “How old are you, Georgie?”

By the time Georgie’s driving up Crystal Street, her heart is pumping blood at a rate that frightens her and she wants to be home, in her bed in her room, door locked. But one street away from sanctuary, a police booze bus stands in the way — random breath testing.

“Could you count to ten, ma’am?” the cop, who looks approximately fifteen years old, asks. She wants to give him a lecture on how insulting it is to call someone
ma’am.
It makes her feel one hundred years old.

“Have you had a drink today, ma’am?” he continues to ask.

“No, but I’m planning on going home and getting shit-faced. Is that all right with you, Officer?”

“Oh, Georgie,” her mother mutters.

When they walk into the kitchen, Dominic looks up from what he’s reading. Georgie wants to rant and she does. He sits and listens, and then says quietly, “I could have taken them. You don’t have to be a martyr, you know, and do it all yourself.”

“It’s good to see that the bastard streak still lives within you, Dom,” she snaps, shoving past him and her mother along the way. “You said you asked him first,” she accuses Grace, who follows her up the stairs, warning her about blood pressure and babies.

“Dominic’s not an invalid, Mum.”

Grace makes the sound that Georgie knows all too well. She used to call it “the Grace-f sigh of disappointment” but Dominic and Joe had no idea what Georgie was talking about because somehow Grace dared not express her disappointment in front of her sons. The sigh of disappointment was only dished out to Georgie and Bill.

But worse still is the look she’s getting now. The Grace-f look of martyrdom.

“Tomorrow we’ll take a taxi,” her mother says. “We don’t want to be disturbing anyone.”

“But it’s okay to disturb me?”

Next look, the Grace-f stare of hurt. The killer of all looks.

Georgie takes a deep breath. “All I’m saying, Mum, is that you’re better off without me racing out of work and
being a martyr,
” she yells, so that Dominic can hear her. “Dominic’s home —”

“Dominic has enough to worry about,” Grace says.

“Don’t do that!” Georgie says. “You always do. ‘Poor Dominic has Tommy to care for,’ and then, ‘Oh, that poor Dominic, looking after Tommy and Anabel and Jacinta Louise and trying to juggle everything,’ or ‘Joe can’t be disturbed because Joe is studying,’ or ‘Leave him; Joe’s trying to have a social life.’”

“You’re very emotional because of the baby, Georgie.”

“No, I’m not!” she shouts with frustration. “All of a sudden, every other thing pales in comparison. I would have preferred you come to visit me when there was no baby. When I was dealing with what Sam did seven years ago, or having to cope with the decision to go to London to bring back Joe’s body, or worse still, coming home without it.”

Mention of Joe was okay in her family. Mention of what happened to him was a no-no, but Georgie can’t stop herself.

“And do you know what else I remember? When Joe died, Mum, all you could say was, ‘We have to go home to Albury. Bill’s suffering without his boy and he needs to go home.’
Two days
you stayed with me and then you all went home.
All of you.
And left me here, on my own, to fix up everything, because everyone’s lives were bigger and their suffering was greater, because they had their own families to take care of and their own lives to put back together. But it was like I was worth nothing then, and now, all of a sudden because of this baby, everyone thinks Georgie needs help.”