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“So we can tip the stars and hold the moon,
Graze the sun, and fate our chances.
But make it soon; our sorrow lingers
And time just seems to slip away.”
He shrugs. He doesn’t know where to go from there without sounding sentimental.
Justine puts the accordion down. “It’s five,” she says, looking up at the time.
She walks out and Tom waits as Francesca packs up.
“Where is he?”
“Who?” she asks, looking up.
“Jimmy?”
“Jim,” she corrects. She shrugs. “Who knows with Jim?”
“What happened?”
“He just nicked off after his granddad died last year.”
“His granddad’s dead?” Tom is stu
“When?”
She’s confused by the question. “November last year.”
“So where did he go?”
She shrugs. “Away. Out bush. You know Jim. He was never going to stick around.”
“Why did you let him go?” Tom can feel himself getting angrier and angrier, but he can’t control it, especially when he sees her expression contains fury beyond anything.
“Jim couldn’t cope,” Francesca snaps. “Jim went out bush. We don’t know where he is. Once in a very blue moon we get an entry on Siobhan’s MySpace page. He once sent her a message asking if he could borrow a hundred dollars. She deposited it into his account. Another time he sent my mother flowers for her birthday. What do you want me to say, Thomas? Jim doesn’t want to be found just yet. We had the funeral and then he was gone.”
“Did anyone turn up?” he asks. “His mother or father?”
She shakes her head. “Just us and our families, and some of the old guys his grandfather knew, Ms. Qui
Everyone but him. He kicks the chair across the room and the music goes flying.
“Whose decision was it not to tell me?”
She shakes her head, grabs her stuff, and walks out of the room, pushing past Justine, who stares at Tom from the door, stu
“People can hear, Thomas.”
There’s something in her eyes that makes him feel like he’s sickened them, like that time when they saw him lose it years ago after a night in a pub on Broadway, when some guy had tried to pick a fight. Tom always did anger well. Hid it well, but showed it even better — courtesy of his father and Joe, who could go off at any given moment. Joe said it was a Bill thing. Nothing about nature there. With the Mackees, it was all nurture.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about Jimmy’s grandfather. I would have been there.”
“Frankie . . .”
“I don’t care what Francesca decided! I would have been there.”
Justine walks toward him, and he can tell that she’s angry. She picks up some of the sheet music from the floor.
“Why do you do that, Thomas? Make Frankie the villain? Just say it was me?” she says, pointing to herself. “Just say it was me who said, ‘Thomas doesn’t give a shit about us’? What would you say?”
Stani is at the door. “Hey!” he says, looking directly at Tom. “Keep it down.”
What would he say? He’d say, Thomas doesn’t give a shit about himself.
“Why don’t you go ask your dumb flatmates why you didn’t know? Frankie told them to pass on the details. We just thought you didn’t care.”
He feels knifed. Doesn’t know why he stays, but he’s in the kitchen putting on his apron.
Ned the Cook is pissed off and makes a mess for him to clean up. The next minute, Tom has him down, grinding Ned’s face into the floor, and Francesca is pulling him off, crying, and Stani’s there grabbing him, holding him back, his steel bar of an arm across Tom’s chest.
“Tom, take a breath. Take a few deep breaths.” He hears the accent in Stani’s voice that only comes out with emotion. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Tom.”
Ned is bleeding from somewhere on his face and Francesca helps him to his feet.
He’s trembling, Tom is. His whole body is shaking, but he can’t help it. His eyes are fixed on Ned’s bloody face, and when he stops shaking and Stani lets go, he takes off his apron and walks out calmly.
He can sense their surprise when he walks into the house. Both Georgie and his father are in the kitchen, eating soup in silence. Tom takes out a bowl and helps himself, and then sits at the table opposite them.
“Have you rung your mother?” his father asks.
Tom looks up from his soup, the expression on his face filthy.
“Don’t,” he warns.
“She wants . . .”
“Don’t lecture me on how to treat my mother. Not you. Not after the way you’ve treated her.”
They’re the first words Tom’s spoken to him. A couple of don’ts and nots.
“Tom . . .” Georgie begins, putting a hand gently on his shoulder.
“And don’t lecture me on how to talk to him,” he snaps, shrugging her hand away. “You’re always sticking up for him like he’s never done anything wrong.”
There’s not much to say after that, so everyone goes back to slurping in silence. Tom’s determined not to be the one who walks away first. He’s not going to give the bastard the satisfaction. Of course, the great Dominic Mackee gets up because he’s good at leaving. He takes his plate to the sink and begins to rinse.
“She got her doctorate,” his father says with his back to him, washing the plate. “She left a message. Wanted you to know.”
And then his father walks out without looking back.
Later in the night, he dials the number with trembling fingers.
“Hello.”
“Mum?”
He hears her catch her breath. “Dr. Jacinta Louise Mackee to you, thank you very much,” and it’s said with a sob and a laugh at the same time. It’s the first time he’s spoken to her in nine months and it makes him want to cry.
“Are you at Georgie’s?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Have you spoken to your dad?”
“No. Not really.”
“Talk to me.”
“I just wanted to hear your voice.” His voice is cracking. Keep it together, Tom. Don’t be a loser.
“Then I’ll talk to you.”
He swallows hard. “Just not about him, okay.”
He hears her sigh and it sounds so sad. And then she starts talking. It’s what she’d do every morning he could remember when he was a kid. She’d wake him up at six in the morning with a cup of tea and they’d lie in his bed and talk for an hour before she had to get ready for work. It was to make up for the fact that at times she wouldn’t see him until six at night. Some mornings they’d read together; other times she’d explain what she did during the day. Tonight she speaks about the doctorate and about Anabel’s soccer and trumpet lessons and how Anabel’s not really enjoying school, and how sometimes she thinks she’s made the wrong decision, but most times knows it’s the right one. She talks about Grandma Agnes and his great-grandfather, who’s going to turn eighty-five and who told her he feels as if he’s closed his eyes for a moment and sixty years passed by. And then she stops for a moment.
“What?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know how to do what you asked me, Tom,” she says sadly. “I don’t know how to talk about our lives without talking about your father. He’s in every one of the memories and every one of my decisions.”
He closes his eyes and wants to sleep through the next sixty years.
“I’ve got to go.”
“I love you, Tom. He loves you.”
Her voice whispering love soothes him. They’d never done that before. Weren’t that type of family. Except now he doesn’t know what kind of family they are. What word is it that can define them? What would they call his family in the textbooks? Broken? He comes from a broken home. The Mackees can’t be put back together again. There are too many pieces of them missing.