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“I think my cousin’s will be a bit of a rock number,” Justine says. “They really like tacky eighties stuff there. Very Eurovision.” Francesca starts singing “The Final Countdown,” and Justine dances along to it. Ned’s just shaking his head.
“And you know Siobhan. If she can’t dance to it, it doesn’t rate for her,” Francesca reminds him.
“It’s a perfect song for your mother, Frankie,” he tries, but he knows he’s defeated. “She’ll like the sensitivity in the melody.”
Francesca makes a snorting sound. “Is it true my father offered you an apprenticeship if you don’t go back to uni?” she asks him.
He nods, not knowing where she’s going with this, but she’ll go some long-winded way, by the look of things.
“Some advice, then. He’ll listen to whatever I send my mum and you’ll be on the credits. You don’t want touchy-feely songs on the résumé in case you decide to take him up on it. I’m not saying you will, but it could happen. So let me tell you something about my father, Thomas. Do you know where he was on the twenty-seventh of February, 1972? At the Led Zeppelin concert. He’s told us a million times. We let him think he’s got an edge.”
Her phone buzzes with a message and she reads it, gri
“From Siobhan. LOTR.” Francesca looks around. “Do I need to tell anyone what film she’s referring to?” She clears her throat and reads from the screen. “He cried when Aragorn kneels at all their feet.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot the sobs during that part,” Justine said.
The phone beeps again and Tom tries to grab it from Francesca, but she holds it above her head and Justine comes to her rescue.
“From Tara.”
Justine peers at the screen, as if trying to make sense of it. “He cried when those two muppets climbed that mountain in New Zealand.”
Ned looks confused and Tom bursts out laughing. That’s what it was like with the girls. They have the most inane conversations, to the point of being absurd, but they always make him laugh despite the fact that he doesn’t want to.
“Muppets?” Ned asks.
“Hobbits,” Tom explains.
“New Zealand?”
“Mount Doom.”
“Tom made her watch all three movies one afternoon,” Justine says. “I wonder if Tara’s ever forgiven you.”
The phone beeps again and she reads, “I want those ten hours of my life back.”
And this time they’re all laughing and Stani walks past them, clicking his tongue with disbelief.
“I’m off,” Ned says, with a wave, “to hang out with my little emo friends.”
After a moment, Tom puts down the guitar and follows him. Outside, the regulars are still hovering as if they miraculously believe Stani’s going to reopen for them. “Read the sign,” he says, pointing to the one that tells them to respect the neighbors’ need for silence. The girl who flirted with him all night hovers by the doorway and they exchange a look. “Wait for me,” he finds himself saying.
Ned’s already at the corner and he calls out to him. “Ned! Oi, Ned.”
“Yeah?”
Tom catches up to him. “Look, I’m sorry.”
Ned doesn’t say anything.
“About . . . you know . . . punching you.”
“And not for the shit lyrics?”
Tom knows he’s trying to rile him, but doesn’t allow himself to be riled.
“They were very . . . I don’t know . . . James Blunt-ish. Was that the sound you were going for?” Ned asks, before waving him off and walking away.
Behind Tom, the girl is waiting. Her name’s Rachel and she’s from up the coast. She takes him back to where she’s staying. The sex is good, but even if it wasn’t, he enjoys the feel of skin against skin, of hands to clench, of the uninhibited dance of it all. And despite it being so casual and nothing serious, “because I’ve got a boyfriend anyway,” she lets him stay the night. He tries not to compare the awkwardness of Tara Finke with her. He had tried not to with his flatmate Sarah, or any of the girls he’s slept with since that night with Tara. But lying here next to this girl, he can’t get it out of his head. The lack of awkwardness that Tara and her peacekeeper will enjoy after months of exclusivity.
He doesn’t realize until now that it’s not just regret he feels about how he walked away from Tara after Joe’s death. It’s more than regret. If he had the guts, he’d begin with how he made her feel that night in her parents’ house. Except he knows that the moment he mentions it, he won’t hear from her again, and for the time being, he’s like a starving man waiting for the e-mail crumbs she throws his way.
“Out of bed.”
He stares up at Bill with horror. First, because it’s five thirty in the morning. Second, because Bill is wearing the most hideous jogging shorts. So brief. The type where you can almost see his balls.
Next minute they’re out in the street behind his father, who’s doing tae kwon do movements in the next-door neighbor’s driveway. At least when his father was a man on the verge of a breakdown, he was way cooler.
“You can’t jog wearing thongs, you drip,” Bill says.
“Let’s call them flip-flops, Bill,” he says, yawning. “A thong is a G-string. Do you know what a G-string is, Bill?”
Dominic is ru
They reach their old place on Temple Street, where Dominic is talking to Mrs. Liu. Tom hears him promise that he’ll come around and mow the lawn before he grabs her wheelie bins and tucks them away at the side of her house. Mrs. Liu looks like all her Christmases have come at once. By the time his father is sprinting off again, Tom’s lungs are killing him. He hopes they come across a few more lonely people in the neighborhood who’ll stop Dominic Mackee for a bit of a chat in order to save his son from cardiac arrest. Worse still, Bill wants to talk.
“You working?”
“Yeah . . . kinda . . . yeah.”
He’s going to give up smoking soon. Maybe get one of those patches.
“What are you doing during the day?”
He wonders if he’s getting the first signs of emphysema. “Just data crap.”
“What type?”
“Data. I don’t give it an identity.”
Bill stops for a moment to check a stitch.
“When are you going back to uni?”
“I might not.”
Tom presses a hand against his hip to make the pain go away wondering if this is the let’s-go-for-a-jog-so-I-can-lecture-you-about-your-future trick.
Bill looks at him for a long while.
“If you’ve got time up your sleeve at Christmas, your auntie Margie Finch needs some help out at Walgett.”
The unspoken rule has always been that they do anything for his great-aunt. It was her money that kept Georgie and his father and Tom and Anabel in private schools. She always said it was what her brother, Tom Finch, would have wanted the Finch family money spent on. She rarely asked for anything in return. But the building of the recreation center, run by her order of nuns, has been an issue for years.
“I thought maybe it would be built by now. It’s been two years,” he mumbles.
“You should know better than that. No one does anything for nothing these days.”
Bill sighs. “She’s got funding for the bricks and material. She just needs the workers.”
He takes off again.
They stop for a rest at one of the cafés and Tom is stuck doing all the talking.
He’s never quite understood his father’s relationship with Bill. Never Dad or my father. Always Bill. Bill was old school. As kids, his father and Georgie had convinced each other that Tom Finch would have been the kindest father in the world compared to Bill the tyrant.