The Piper's Son (13 page)

Francesca looks at him suspiciously and then back to Ned, who looks sheepish and gets back to work.

“How do you know I wrote it for him? It could be for any of them.”

“Need those hands. Make me whole.”

She makes a face as if she’s thinking. “That’s my mum.”

“My mistake.”

“
Hunger breaks me. I can’t breathe.
That’s Will’s line,” she says.

“Why? Because he’s choking the life out of you?”

She forgets about the news and walks away, but he can tell she’s laughing.

“Maybe Snow Patrol,” she answers from the door. “You know? ‘Set the Fire to the Third Bar’ or ‘Chasing Cars.’ Or something by the Silversun Pickups. He likes them.”

“Guitar work will be hard for both.”

She shrugs. “Lucky I know a good guitarist or two.”

Shit! He went to the sent box, praying that somehow the e-mail got rejected. No such luck. Twenty seconds earlier
anabelsbrother
sent
taramarie
a message, not with the word
cheers
or
see ya
or
whenever.
But signing off with the word
love.

The grief hits her hard one day. The way it can’t be controlled. The way that yesterday can be good and so can the day before, and so can the week and fortnight before that, but then today comes and she’s back to zero. How she can’t type words into her computer or even press the in-box for her mail. The effort it takes to walk. How words can’t form in her mouth and how her blood feels paralyzed. For the first time since she can remember, she finds herself dialing Sam’s number but hangs up the moment she hears his voice because too much emotion goes into keeping Sam at an arm’s distance.

In front of them is a couple. They’re Serbian, and for a moment she panics and thinks they’ve got a Bosnian translator by mistake. She sees their mouths move but hears nothing.

Her co-worker reaches over and touches her hand. “Why don’t you go home, Georgie?” he asks gently after they’ve left.

She’s too listless to even shake her head.

“Georgie,” one of the girls from the next desk says, holding the phone in her hand and covering the mouthpiece. “It’s your brother.”

She picks up the phone in an instant.

“Joe?”

She hears a sigh of such depth that she doesn’t know if it’s hers or his.

“Georgie?”

“Dominic,” she whispers.

It’s just been e-mails until now. She hasn’t heard his voice for almost twelve months. Before that, she’d hear it every day of her life. She’d swear to others that she heard it in the womb for those nine months.

“Where are you?” she asks.

“Central. Can I come and stay with you?”

She wants to weep, but she’s too emotionally tired.

“That you even have to ask,” she says.

She goes home via Coles at Norton Street Plaza to grab some groceries. It gives her purpose. Purpose is good at the moment. Milk, bread, toilet paper, and the newspaper give her something to do that doesn’t require emotion or contemplation. Although she has fewer than eight items, she lines up anywhere, and with a shaky hand she texts Jacinta and then Lucia to tell them that Dominic’s home.

“Hi, Georgie!”

On the line in front of her is Sam’s kid, Callum. Dressed in his school uniform and smiling shyly up at her. Sam says he goes into infantile mode when Georgie’s around. Some kind of six-year-old’s crush, where he talks like a baby. He has a cardboard box around his arm and then Georgie sees a hand touch the cardboard box. It’s
the suit’s
hand. Georgie and
the suit
never cross paths, surprisingly enough. The last time they spoke was at a function where Sam worked about eight years ago.
She
was all smart, tailored, slimline fitted suits and straightened hair. She said “mate” a lot and “matey,” mostly to the guys.
The suit
came from the school of thought that whatever you wanted, you went out and got, regardless of whether it belonged to someone else. Grace and Bill’s lesson was that you had the right to go and get what you wanted, unless it hurt others. Unless people got stepped on. Unless lives were ruined.

Apart from that, there wasn’t much of a difference between Georgie and
the suit,
so no big room for analysis of why Sam had gone out with her, or whatever it’s called when people sleep together for a month without actually dating.
The suit
was younger, but not young enough for it to be one of those younger woman things.
The suit
was attractive, but Georgie had never been coy about her own looks. She had inherited them from Grace and felt comfortable with the uniqueness of them. Georgie had never quite felt at ease in
the suit’s
presence. Not a premonition that this woman would cause the end of her relationship, but an irritation that whether in the presence of women or men,
the suit
had to prove she knew more about pop culture, more about the latest trends and what was happening on the sports field. That no one was more down-to-earth than her. That no one was more up-to-date. She was the type who hogged the pen and paper at a trivia night. No one was more capable.

“Hi, Georgie.”

Georgie doesn’t speak until she remembers that Callum is there.

“Leonie,” she says quietly. It’s hard thinking of her as
the suit
when she’s standing there in gym gear.

“Congratulations.”

On what?
Georgie wants to ask. Are they really going to do this? Toast this pregnancy? Stand around and discuss what good-looking children Sam produces?

Callum pushes the products across the conveyor belt, looking up at Georgie for her approval. Like he wants her to say that he’s the perfect helper. He gets nothing, because Georgie’s mind is a blank for a moment. She looks at the cardboard around his arm.

“A robot, are you?” she asks.

He nods as if relieved that she gets it.

She wants the guy behind the cash register to hurry up and stop procrastinating, to make up the price of the unmarked butter.
Come on, Amal. Don’t grab the microphone,
she wants to beg him, reading his name tag. But he does and it’s a couple more minutes of hell in her life.

“Can we talk, Georgie?”

Please no,
Georgie wants to say.
Read on my face that I can hardly breathe at the moment and every time you open your mouth, I can breathe even less.

“I know this is a long time coming, but I need to say it.”

While waiting for the price of the butter at the checkout?
The suit’s
workshopped this with her friends. Pick a place where Georgie Finch can’t make a scene.

“I thought he was looking for some
one
different, back then. Not some
thing
different. It was never to best you.”

When Georgie called a break, she never truly believed Sam wanted to walk away from her, despite some of the issues in their relationship. She knew it was about his job and life in general. That was why she gave him space, so he could sort himself out without taking their relationship hostage. Except she never imagined what it had done to his pride for her to call the shots. Sam had a capacity for coldness. He was passive-aggressive and too many things about Georgie were an issue for him. Her lack of ambition. Her reluctance to give in to him. Someone always has the power in a relationship, he told her once. She had told him in return to stop seeing life as one-upmanship.

The butter gets its price and
the suit
hands over the money, and the moment Callum walks away, to push the trolley back to where it belongs, Georgie speaks.

“Apart from my brother being blown up, talking about this is up there in the top three things that make me feel sick to my stomach, so I’d prefer that you never bring it up again because I’m not here to make you feel good with absolution, Leonie. I never actually got the turn-the-other-cheek lecture in religion. Don’t try this again, especially when Callum’s around.”

The suit
doesn’t respond. She picks up her groceries and waits for Callum to return, and, clutching her shopping bag, she takes his robot hand and disappears around the corner.

Georgie would like to have been cooler about it. Flicked her hair back in disdain a bit more. Delivered it like maybe Julia Roberts or Reese Witherspoon in a movie, southern accent and all. But she knows her voice was wavering and her hands were trembling and her face was twitching with emotion.

“I can’t
believe
it,” Lucia says when Georgie rings her from the car park.

“Believe it. And she doesn’t even have a proper environmental shopping bag. Still using plastics.”

“What. A. Cow.”

She goes to the Union to speak with Tom. It’s five and she knows he would have started by now and she wants him to know about his father before he comes home that night. Doesn’t want to spring Dominic on him. Out of all the relationships, the one between her brother Dom and his son is the most fragile, the most heartbreaking. On a good day, she thinks that Jacinta and Dom will make it somehow, and that they shielded Anabel from it. But not Tom. Tom’s hero fell off a pedestal way too high and he smashed all over the place. If Georgie hasn’t been able to forgive aspects of life with Bill by her age now, she can’t imagine how long it will take Tom to forgive his father. Dominic and Tom were inseparable most of Tom’s childhood. The betrayal was felt deeply.

When she sees Stani, she points to the back and he nods. She comes around the bar and pokes her head in to where Tom works silently with a guy his age. How did he get to be so quiet? This boy who was born talking and who came from a family that never shut up.

“Tom?”

He hears her voice and swings around quickly, alarm on his face. Fear. Terror. Such despair. She knows that feeling too. Of believing that each time someone says her name, it’s to tell her that something bad has happened.

“It’s okay,” she says with a smile there. A tired one, but she watches his shoulders relax and he swallows hard.