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“Tom!” Bill calls out. “Mate, let’s go home.”
Tom holds up a hand and waves him off.
Inside, it’s a quiet Monday night crowd.
He walks into the kitchen and smells something different and peers into the saucepan.
“Is this pasta sauce?”
“Frankie’s cooking for her brother,” Ned informs him. “Her grandmother’s out for the night and she’s babysitting.”
“Only Frankie would take over the pub for her family,” he mutters.
“You’re not on tonight, you know,” Ned says. He doesn’t seem so happy either, and he’s taking it out on the T-bone and sausages.
“I’ve just come in to pick up my pay. Do you have a problem with that?” Tom snaps.
Ned stops and stares at him. He knows there’s no pay to pick up. They all must know that Tom doesn’t get paid.
“You have the look that says you want to hit someone,” Ned says. “Should I be cowering?”
“You have the same look.”
“People can smell the pasta sauce,” Ned complains. “So every time I go out there to hand over the food, I get asked if we’re serving vegetarian. Is your gripe bigger than that?”
“Yeah. My father’s a cunt.”
“I can’t help liking mine, nutcase that he is,” Ned says. “Do you want an espresso? She brought the percolator as well.”
“It’s a caffettiera,” Tom corrects him, looking over to where it sits on the stove.
“Yeah, whatever.”
Ned has absolutely no idea what to do with it and pours water and coffee into the top.
“Your father . . . doesn’t have issues about your . . . lifestyle?” Tom asks.
Tom gets eye contact beyond Ned’s fringe. “I don’t have a lifestyle.”
“Your sex life?”
“I don’t really have a sex life. I’m not into casual sex or one-and-a-half-night stands like you.”
“I’m not into one-and-a-half-night stands either,” Tom says bluntly, not appreciating the label.
“What about the spitfire from Dili?” There’s a smugness in the way Ned says those words.
“What about Tara?”
“When she was here at Easter, we spent a lot of time talking. I’d always look forward to her coming to that door. It was the way she’d stand there with her hands on her hips and that face that you’d actually like to iron out.”
Tom’s taking deep breaths.
“Can I give you some advice, Ned?” he says, grabbing the caffettiera out of his hands and tipping out the coffee and water. “There are a lot of guys out there waiting to find Mr. Self-Righteous-Know-It-All-Who-Swings-Both-Ways. I’d go hunt them down if I were you.”
Ned is watching him carefully.
“You don’t fit the mold, you know, Tom. You have a bigger problem with the fact that I could be into girls as well as guys. Why is that?”
“I really don’t care.”
“Yes, you do.” Ned points a knowing finger. “I made them a bet that you still think you’ve got a chance with her. May I remind you she has a boyfriend?”
Tom chooses not to contribute to the conversation anymore. He makes a show of how to put together the caffettiera and slams it on the stove.
“You’re a dish-pig who left her feeling like shit,” Ned continues. “He keeps peace. Wow, what a dilemma. Wonder who I’d pick?”
“For your information, peacekeepers did bugger-all in the Balkans,” Tom argues. It’s a bit lame, but it’s the best he can do. “And like a pasty-faced army grunt is going to put me off if I want to go for her,” he adds with bravado.
“They have Brazilian peacekeepers in Timor.”
The air whooshes out of Tom. His whole image of Tara’s life in Timor does a ninety-degree swing. He feels sick to his stomach.
“Who’s Brazilian?” Frankie asks, walking in with a packet of parmesan cheese. “Are you guys talking about Tara’s boyfriend?” She takes the saucepan off the stove and throws the pasta into the colander.
“From Brazil,” Ned confirms again with a nod, looking at Tom.
“As in from South America?” Tom can’t help asking. “Olive ski
“Very beautiful people. The women always come first in the Miss Universe pageants,” Francesca says.
“No, I think it’s Venezuela,” Ned explains.
“So what do they do?” Tom asks. “Salsa and speak Spanish all day in Dili?”
“She’s actually in Same and it’s not Spanish; it’s Portuguese,” Frankie corrects.
“She didn’t correct me,” Tom says half to himself.
“She probably didn’t want you to feel stupid for not knowing the Brazilians and the East Timorese speak Portuguese,” Ned says, handing Francesca the right spoon for the pasta.
“I reckon a lot of people wouldn’t know that.” Tom’s on the defensive now.
“Ask him.” Francesca points to her brother as he walks in holding his drumsticks, and somehow Tom can tell that Ned and Francesca are having fun. At his expense.
“Ask me what?” Luca Spinelli asks. The kid is pathetically good-looking and talks with Anabel on MSN, so Tom wants to hate yet another person in the world. Luca Spinelli punches him in the arm as a means of saying hello.
“Go on. What language do the Brazilians speak?” Francesca asks her brother as she pours the sauce onto the pasta in the plate Ned hands her.
Luca grins up at Tom. Tom knew the kid when he was ten and in primary at their school and had always felt slightly protective of him, because of how hard it had been when Francesca’s mum was sick.
“You thought it was Spanish, didn’t you, Tom?” The kid is laughing at him.
“I’m writing a song, you know. It’s called, ‘Oh, if I could be as smart as the Spinelli siblings.’” Tom gets out his own fork and twirls some of the pasta from the plate Francesca’s holding. She puts it in front of her brother and then Ned is also there, hovering over them with his own fork.
“How spoiled are you?” Tom mutters.
Francesca is kissing her brother. “He’s my tesoro,” she says. “And I’m going to miss him to death.”
“Where’s he going?” Ned asks, making a grunting sound of satisfaction when he finally gets to taste the food.
“My mother can’t live without her baby, so he’s going to join them in Italy for the rest of their trip. In eighteen days, Will is flying home for a five-day break and then they’ll fly to Singapore, where Will puts Luca on an airplane bound for Italy.”
“Wow, seven hours on a flight with Will beside you,” Tom says, feigning wistfulness. “Wish it were me.”
“Are you off that day?” Ned asks Francesca. “If not, I can do a swap.”
“We don’t do airports when he’s leaving. Will’s ba
Tom can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You can’t cry at the airport because he says. What? Is he the boss of your emotions or something? He sounds like a tyrant.”
“And in eighteen days I’m going to see my boy,” she says, gri
When Stani closes up, the lot of them sit around the back room and it’s only because Francesca’s brother is there, and Tom used to accompany him on guitar when the kid was learning drums, that he agrees to jam.
It’s Luca who’s teaching Francesca to play guitar, so he chooses a Dylan song because it’s easy but long and it’ll give her the practice on guitar she needs. Luca sings because she says she doesn’t have the energy to do both just yet. Halfway through the song, Tom pulls Francesca up from the chair she’s sitting on, by the scruff of her neck, and she gives him a look of sufferance but keeps on going and it feels like the most natural thing in the world to be playing with them.
Justine is playing, too. How Justine could be so uninhibited on stage and then be unable to speak to a musician she likes baffles Tom. She says the violinist is a genius, but Tom thinks she is and for a moment their eyes meet and she grins at him because it’s what would happen onstage when they used to perform. It was the high Tom couldn’t get any other way, no matter how much he tried. He likes the feel of the harmonica burning against his mouth, the way it seems to have its own emotion, wavering. Stani watches them from the door, smoking a cigarette now that the clientele is gone, and somehow Tom gets a feeling that no one has a place to go to tonight.