The Piper's Son

Joe had looked stu

“You know I don’t drink.”

Then Joe grabbed his face, gri

And that look of joy, that look of total euphoria, is the last image he has of Joe.

He starts crying and he can’t stop. He doesn’t know where it comes from, this grief. How it blindsides you. But Justine’s hand comes across to clutch his, like she’ll never let go, and Francesca’s holding him, murmuring his name over and over again and he just wants to go back to the moment when he was in that water. At that near-perfect moment in his life when Tara Finke was in his arms. Because if he could go there, he could start from scratch and make everything in his life right.

“Are you going to be okay about your exams?” he asks Ned in the car, because the silence between Le

Ned waves him off. “First one’s Moby-Dickhead. I’ll just go on about the sperm scene and apply a feminist reading. They love that. Do you want a chewie?”

“Yeah, why not.”

When they drop him off home late that night, he finds both his father and Georgie in the kitchen. Waiting, it seems.

“If it’s Dominic you want to punish, then at least have the decency to phone me,” Georgie says coldly.

“As if my mother hasn’t rung you both.”

“His mother,” Georgie says, looking at his father. “She doesn’t belong to us anymore. Did you know that, Dom?” Georgie stands up and walks to the sink to rinse her cup.

“I’m going to bed before I say something I might regret.”

But his father doesn’t move. He just sits there and looks at Tom, and there’s an expression on his face that Tom can’t quite place. In front of him is the Herald. Tom knows his father would have read it line by line; it was always his way. Lots of grunting, lots of “You’ve got to be bloody joking.” He’d even read the page that told when the sun set and rose, and if the family was ever away, it was his father’s obsession that they all see a sunrise or sunset together.

Once, just before Tom’s final exams in Year Twelve, the four of them went to Mudgee for the long weekend. Work and study seemed to have taken over their lives and his dad said it was all going too fast and they needed to regroup. The first thing they noticed as they drove into the property was a red vinyl sofa sitting on a grassy incline, overlooking the country highway in the distance.

Tom remembers how his dad’s eyes were fixed on it the whole time they were there.

“I’m going to watch the sun rise tomorrow from the hill,” Dominic a

“Enjoy,” Tom’s mum murmured, not looking up from the novel she was reading. It’s what she claimed you had to do when Dominic got an idea. Not look him in the eye.

“But you’ve got to wonder why someone would put a sofa up there,” his dad continued.

“I’m not wondering at all.” Tom kept his eyes on the page. He had been rereading Brave New World, hoping miraculously that he’d discover something new that would help him blitz his HSC exam.

“Gang, when are we going to get a chance to see a sunrise together again?” his dad had argued.

“We’re not the waking-up-at-five-in-the-morning type of family, Dom,” his mum said patiently. “We’re the sleeping-in-until-nine-o’clock type.”

“Love that kind of family,” Tom said.

“I’ll come with you, Daddy,” Anabel reassured him.

“’Course you will, Beautiful, and then we can spend the trip home trying to describe the perfect sunrise to these philistines.”

“And you can spend the rest of the week blowing her nose when she gets a cold,” his mum said.

“Nah, I’ll leave that to Tom for not keeping his sister warm on that sofa.”

There was silence after that and Tom thought he and his mum had won the round. But it only lasted a minute.

“Don’t you wonder —?”

“No,” Tom and his mother answered.

“Just say up on the hill is the meaning of life and someone knew it and they wanted everyone else to enjoy it. So they put a red vinyl sofa up there.”

His mother had made a snorting sound.

“Aren’t you even curious, Tom?” he asked.

Tom finally put his book down. He wanted to give his response all the effort in the world. “I’m not getting up at 5:46 in the morning. I’m not. Not. Do you understand the word not? It’s called the negative in many cultures. I’ll say it again. Not.”

He looked his father in the eye.

At 5:45 the next morning, he stood on the incline beside the two snuggled up on the sofa. His father was gri

“Come on. Cuddle up, Tom,” Anabel said.

“Big boy,” Tom muttered, shivering. “No cuddles.” There was enough blanket next to his dad to keep warm and he yanked as much around him as he could. The meaning of life had better come soon, he thought, or he was getting back into bed. They heard a sound behind them and his dad chuckled.

“Knew you’d join us, darlin’,” Dominic said, patting his lap so Anabel could sit on his knee and he could make room for Tom’s mum.

“Because you stole my blanket, you bastard,” she said, curling up beside him.

His dad made sure the girls were covered, leaving Tom exposed.

“Cuddles?” Tom begged. Anabel giggled.

The sunrise wasn’t much after all. It was too cloudy. But they stayed there for ages, just the four of them, and Tom remembers how silent they were most of the time. How someone spoke once in a while about work, or Sydney, or just stuff. How Anabel fell asleep in his father’s lap and he pressed a kiss to her head because Dominic always said he’d never see anything more beautiful than his girls. How his mother had touched his dad’s cheek. “What did you do to yourself?”

“Nicked myself shaving,” he murmured.

Tom thought they must have looked strange from the highway, sitting on that incline on the red vinyl sofa, but nobody cared. Then his dad yawned, stretching his arms out wide and hitting Tom on the face. On purpose. Sometimes it pissed Tom off when his father did that. “He’s just playing with you, Tom,” his mum would say when Tom looked like he was going to have a go. But that day he didn’t mind. He was too content and he wondered how it could be that no matter how much he loved his mum and Joe and Pop Bill and Na

Except here they are in Georgie’s kitchen. In a different kind of silence from the one on that hill in Mudgee. And in this silence he knows he’s finished with being the Tom of books and rhymes. Tom Sawyer was a weak shit compared to Huck Fi

It made Tom want to weep all over again.