“I reckon Ned should go out there and accidentally hand the T-bone to the violinist, and if he has a vibe, then we’ll know Justine’s guy is gay,” Tom says.
Ned utters a sound of disbelief. “There’s no such thing as gaydar, dickhead.”
Francesca is looking at Tom and nodding for a change. “Go on, Ned. Even if there’s not gaydar, there’s this . . . I don’t know . . . thing.”
Ned is still looking horrified. “What am I to you people?”
“For Justine,” Francesca pleads. “She’s in the toilet, Ned. Let’s lay this violinist thing to rest tonight.”
Tom massages Ned’s shoulders and then chops at them like he’s about to meet an opponent in a boxing ring. Ned shrugs him off aggressively, grabbing the two plates of T-bones and walking out into the crowd while Stani’s barking out Francesca’s name to get back to the front and serve.
Minutes later Ned comes back all red-faced and a sinking feeling comes over Tom.
“You had a moment with him, didn’t you?” he asks flatly.
Ned is focused on the order as if it’s the most perfect piece of writing he’s ever seen.
“No,” he mumbles.
Ned begins chopping up the vegetables.
Tom’s confused. “No moment with the violinist?”
“No.”
“Yessss,” he says, punching Ned’s arm. “Then what’s wrong?”
Ned is agitated and he walks to the doorway and peers out. “There was a bit of a . . . moment . . . with one of the retard lookalikes.”
“Which one?” Tom asks, looking over Ned’s shoulder.
“God, I don’t know. The one who looks like the other one. Is he looking this way?”
Francesca races in with plates and plonks them in Tom’s hands.
“The violinist is all clear,” Tom explains to her, “but Ned had a moment with one of the guitarists.”
“Ned, don’t make this all about you,” she says before walking out again.
When half the bands have played, Justine introduces them to the violinist.
“Tom and Frankie,” she says politely, her face reddening instantly.
The violinist has a cocksure way about him and introduces his band.
“And who are you?” Tom asks.
He receives an evil unseen pinch from Francesca.
“Ben.”
“Are we on next?” one of the brothers asks rudely. Tom can’t tell the difference between him and the other brother. They have the same sour look on their faces. “We have a seven-hour drive in front of us and we have to get the car back first thing in the morning.”
“Why? Is it stolen?” Tom asks.
The brothers stare at him.
“Who told you that?”
Justine looks at Ben, slightly alarmed.
“It belongs to a friend,” he explains.
They’re called Deluge and their original piece is pretty impressive. Violin, sax, acoustic guitar, and bass guitar. It’s a bit of a wild number, mostly a show-off instrumental piece, but the crowd loves it and Justine’s violinist is one of the many musicians in Tom’s life who make him feel inadequate in the talent department.
But then it’s time for the cover and things go downhill.
Francesca and Justine gasp. Actually, Tom does as well, but he hopes his gasp gets lost with the girls’. Ned’s there too. “What?” Ned asks.
“Car thieves and song thieves. They stole our cover.”
But it sounds near perfect with just one vocal, two guitars, and the violin, and he hears Francesca and Justine sigh. Actually Tom does as well, but hopes that his gets lost just as much.
“It’s our song. Will’s and mine,” Francesca says.
“Yeah and everyone else’s in this room,” Tom says. “The violin player just looked at you, Justine, during the line about not being able to take his eyes off you.”
“And the guitarist looked at Ned.”
“He’s the one with the bass guitar. Remember that, Ned. The one you had a moment with is holding a bass guitar,” Tom says as if he’s speaking to a moron.
Ned mutters something and walks away.
“We need a cover,” Justine says. “You guys choose.”
“Tom?” Francesca says.
He chooses Paul Kelly’s “How to Make Gravy” and looks out to where his family is sitting, knowing the choice won’t be lost on them. The harmonica in his hand quavers from everything he’s putting into it, and Tom plays it for Joe. For introducing him to his first note, his first strum, his first understanding of the solace a song or instrument can bring. For placing a pick in his hand, because he knows he would never have met these two alongside him if it wasn’t for music. When they finish, it’s Stani who calls encore, and who are they not to take advantage of another five minutes onstage when the boss orders it? Francesca beckons her brother up to play drums and then she belts out “Union City Blues” as if her life depends on it. The crowd goes wild, her voice is so perfect in its ability to hold a note forever, making it hers and mixing it with every one of their emotions. He catches Justine’s eyes and she’s shaking her head in awe. Tom realizes that the universe must have changed in some way because he’s not just wishing Tara was there but that Will was too.
Later, he shares cigarette time against the front wall of the pub with the saxophonist and two guitar players from Deluge.
“Impressive,” the saxophonist says.
“Same.”
“You cheat when you go for Paul Kelly, though.” This from one of the guitarists. They’re not holding their instruments, so he can’t tell who’s who again. “Specially in front of a bunch of old-timers.”
“Had no choice. You stole our cover,” he explains.
The three of them lean forward from the wall and look at him.
“‘The Blower’s Daughter’? With an accordion? Don’t think so,” one of the lookalikes says.
“We’re pretty experimental. Our accordion player’s gifted.”
The others lean back again and mutter something about “the accordion player.” Tom doesn’t like their tone.
“Problem?” he snaps.
One of the guitarists peers into the window and shakes his head. “We have to sit in a car for the next seven hours with Mr. I’m-in-love-with-the-accordion-player.”
“And in one year he has made no progress from ‘She could like me’ to ‘I think she likes me,’” the saxophonist complains.
“We’re over it!” This from the second lookalike. “Back home, the girls are going to be like, ‘Did you ask her out, Ben? Did you? Did you?’ And we’re going to spend the whole time in therapy with him.”
There’s a banging sound on the window and it’s Stani.
“Got to go. Back to kitchen duty.”
Then Tom pauses. “With my friend, Ned,” he says for emphasis. He nods, looking at the guitarist. Actually both of the guitarists, because he doesn’t know which one had the moment with Ned. “Ned the Cook. Tall guy. Hair over his face. Kind of a bit shy? Ned. Hands out T-bones.”
They don’t say anything. Look at him suspiciously, actually. Until one of the guitarist grins, wolfishly.
“Tell Ned, Alex said hi,” he says.
“You?” Tom asks.
The guitarist points to his brother. “Him.”
Him’s a bit embarrassed. Him’s doing a Ned and looking everywhere but at them.
Inside, Justine and Ben the Violinist are awkwardly playing that game of her-fiddling-with-her-hair and him-talking-a-mile-a-minute-with-a-lot-of-hand-gestures.
Tom puts an arm around both of them. “He wants to sleep with you. She wants to sleep with you. Just do it.”
Justine stares at Tom in horror and he recognizes the look that says she’s about to cry and then she walks away leaving him with an incredibly hostile violin player.
“They made me do it,” he says, pointing to his friends.
Tom follows her into the toilet where Francesca’s standing by, a filthy look on
her face.
“Oh you are so dead, Tom.”
The Deluge wins the beer and drive away in the stolen car. It takes them forty-five minutes to get everyone out of the pub. Justine begins cleaning, while Francesca goes into damage control.
“He didn’t mean it, Justine. Tara’s always said that Tom’s the last bastion of arrested development.”
“I thought you’d like that he was into you,” Tom says, confused, as he mops the floor. He wished, with all his might, that there was a guidebook to life out there that he could follow.
Justine stops cleaning and looks at him. “I like him, Tom. A lot. I knew he probably liked me too. But that’s not the way it’s done.”
“Let me make it better.”
“No,” they all say at once, even Stani. “Bloody bastard,” he had muttered when he saw his niece in tears. Tom believes it was most probably directed to him and not the violin player.
“How long’s he gone for?”
“Until uni begins again. In March!”
“I reckon —”
“No more suggestions, Tom,” Francesca orders.
“I just want to —”
“No more,” she says, holding up a finger. “Or I’m telling Tara and Siobhan.”
“You’re going to tell them anyway,” he argues.
“Yes, but I was going to give you enough time to go to a place where they can’t track you down.”
“Stop!” Justine says.
“I didn’t say anything,” he argues. “Geez! Can everyone stop telling me to stop?”
“Stop,” Francesca says, holding up a hand to listen. “Shhh.”
Strands of music come from outside the door and they all rush to the window to peer out, even Stani tries to push them out of the way.
And while the violinist is playing his tune, the car thieves sit on the hood waiting.
“What is it?” Tom asks her.
“‘Calliope House,’” Justine answers.
“Are you going to go out there?” Ned asks. “He’s good.”
Justine shakes her head. “I’m so embarrassed. Everyone’s watching. I have to do this in my own time.”
“Justine, it’s been a year,” Francesca argues.
“I know,” she says honestly. “But not like this. Everyone’s watching and I just want to talk to him, alone. Or on the phone. Not with an audience.”
“Do you have his mobile number?” Tom asked. “I’ll go out and . . .”
“No!”
Justine backs away from the window.
“Great. Now the cops are here, and Stani, you’re going to get a fine for noise pollution.”
“Bloody bastards.”
When the violinist finishes, he walks to the window and slams his hand against it.
“He’s Post-it-noted the window,” Tom says, peering to see what it reads. “It says ‘Call me’ and his mobile number. I might just do that,” he muses. “He’s kind of cute.”
Justine and Francesca laugh. Ned does too. And there it is. The knowledge that it makes him happy to hear it. So simple. They laugh and it makes Tom happy.
He closes up and Stani hands him his pay. He started getting it a month ago. He can feel it’s too much and when he looks inside the envelope, he stares back at his boss.
“Back pay,” Stani explains.
“You don’t owe me back pay.”
“I do. What your friends did? Not your debt to pay.”
“Yeah, it was.”
“No.”
Tom flicks through the money.
“You earned it with the floorboards, anyway,” Stani says. “Don’t try to give it back or leave it behind, because you won’t have a job here if you do.”
Tom shakes his head but puts the envelope in his pocket.
He holds out a hand to Stani and they shake, then he turns and walks away.
“It’s been good to see your father again,” Stani says just as Tom reaches the door.
“He was a good in-between man, Dominic Mackee. A good union man. Kept the peace. Kept the dialogue going.”
He walks into the house later, into the kitchen, where his father’s sitting. Tom mutters a greeting and stands at the fridge door, staring at Georgie’s shit organic stuff as if it’s the most interesting thing in the world.
“I liked your choices tonight,” his father says.
Tom shrugs. “We didn’t know what else to play.”
But he’s lying and there is a part of him that hopes his father knows that too. The part that doesn’t have to explain away sentimentality. That doesn’t have to tell him the way he feels. He hopes, somehow, that ten minutes on a stage does that because he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to say it with the proper words. They’d all sound contrived and forced.
He feels the wad of money in his pocket. “Do you want me to come along?”
“Where?” his father asks.
He shrugs, facing him. “With you and Bill. To bring Tom Finch home.”
His father stares at him. “To Hanoi?”
Tom nods. An in-between man. Keeping the peace and dialogue going. That would be a good profession to go into. Union reps to keep families united. Maybe that was his calling.
“I don’t have the money for both of us, Tom.”
“Got my own. And Bill reckons the government will pay anyway.”
His father doesn’t speak. Just nods and then says, “I think Nanni Grace would love that.”
Tom goes to walk out again, but something stops him.
“Would you, though?” he asks his father.
“Would I what?”
“Love it? Not just Nanni Grace. Would you love it?”
His father seems confused by the question, but then Tom realizes it’s not confusion he reads on his face; it’s disbelief.
“How could you ask me that, Tom? I’d give anything for you to want to come along with my father and me.”
Tom doesn’t ask which father Dominic’s talking about. It can’t be that confusing loving more than one.
At work the next day, Mohsin shows him the course he’s applied for at Sydney University.
“Hmm,” Tom says. “Molecular science. Sure you don’t want to aim higher?”
He goes online and finds himself looking at the deferment rules for the course he dropped out of two years ago. And then he sees the number 1 next to his in-box. Anabel’s at school camp, so it can’t be from her. He knows exactly who it’s from.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: 8 November 2007
Dear Tom,
I’ll tell you what I remember, seeing as you asked. That after we made love that night in my parents’ house, you asked me to get out of bed, naked. Remember how I felt? I mean we had just had sex, so that’s as intimate as I thought it got, but it’s funny that I don’t remember that part as much as you making me stand in front of you with nothing on and we were freezing cold and I felt so exposed, like I felt you could see inside the guts of me. And remember, I cried? And you were like, Shh, shh, don’t. You’re beautiful, and I can’t believe I’m writing this now, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget your voice when you said that. I think I loved you at that moment.
But then Joe happened, and you didn’t ring or anything. You didn’t let me see you exposed from all your pain. You hid and you left me there, starkers, and for so long, for so, so long, I felt raw. Don’t ever ask anyone to do that again, Tom. Don’t ever ask them to bare their soul and then leave it. It’s fucking cruel and no matter how much pain you were in, you had no right. Because sometimes it makes me want to shudder, because sometimes I still think I’m there in my bedroom standing naked, except it’s like the whole world can see me, and they’re laughing like sometimes I remember people laughing at me behind my back in high school. And it makes me just want to cry with shame.
She doesn’t sign it off and he doesn’t even give himself a moment to think.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: 8 November 2007
Dear Tara,
If you think I’ve forgotten anything about that night, you, most gorgeous girl, are laboring under a great misapprehension. I remember everything. I remember your petticoat . . . slip . . . whatever the hell it’s called, and how you let me take it off. You made me close my eyes and that was even more of a turn-on.
You’ve always seen through me and that’s freaked me out. You saw the stuff I didn’t show other people. The part of me that sometimes can be a bully, because I come from a family of it. Learned behavior because I think my dad was taught by Bill and Bill was taught by his father and sometimes I feel it inside me as well, except we’re not actually comfortablewith it, but it’s there and it frightens all of us. And that night you saw the fear. You made it go away for just one minute and then Joe happened and I couldn’t speak anymore and the numbness — please, God don’t ever let me feel that numbness again. I think I was scared that you wouldn’t be able to make the numbness go away and if my mum and dad and Anabel couldn’t, and then you couldn’t, I didn’t know whether I could handle that.
I know I stuffed up and I know your peacekeeper probably treated you like gold and I’ve treated you like crap, but I want you to know that I remember the conversations we had in Year Twelve, when you told me you wanted to do a cultural studies degree because you believed in trade, not aid, and you believed that the only way was to ask the questions and listen to the needs of the people and I remember thinking that exact moment, I want to change the world with her. And I remember feeling that again in Georgie’s attic. That’s a pretty powerful gift you have there, Ms. Finke. To make the laziest guy around want to change the world with you. So next time you remember standing in your bedroom naked, know that it is the most amazing view from any angle, especially the one where we get to see inside.
Love always,
Always,
Tom
Georgie’s water breaks during breakfast one morning. It’s all pretty calm. She just says, “This is it, kids,” and then she picks up her phone and texts Sam.
“You can’t send him a text telling him his baby is about to be born,” Tom argues, looking around for Nanni Grace’s support. Nanni Grace has already gone up the stairs to collect the bag Georgie’s had packed ever since she read one of the books that told her to always be prepared.
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