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“We’re not together anymore,” she says. “He reckons my heart wasn’t in it.”
Tom thinks he hears a choir of Alleluia in his head. He wants to skin the guy for even demanding that Tara give her heart to him when it belongs to Tom. He wants to run up and down the stairs to the Rocky theme except he’s naked and it’ll scare Georgie if she comes out of her room. He wants to take a plane to Albury and thank everyone in Na
But he stays calm. “Hmm. What are you doing?”
“Painting my toenails. You?”
“Clipping mine.”
“Listening to?”
“‘Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.’ ‘When there’s nothing left to burn, you have set yourself on fire.’”
“Very dramatic.”
“You?”
“Ani DiFranco. ‘32 Flavors.’”
“Don’t know it. Sing.”
“No, no, no, no. My voice is shit.”
“Nah. Go on.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure, sure.”
“‘I’m a poster girl with no poster . . .’”
“Stop!”
“‘I’m beyond your peripheral vision . . .’”
“I’m begging you. Stop or I’m hanging up, Finke.”
“I feel ugly in monsoon season and I need cheering up and you’re making me feel like crap,” she says, laughing.
“You’re just begging me for a compliment.”
“And I haven’t had a good haircut for a while or my eyebrows waxed, and a facial would be great.”
“Send me a photo. Take one with your phone and send it, and I’ll tell you the honest truth.”
“Okay, but I’ll have to hang up so you ring back when you get it.”
A minute later the photo comes through and he laughs before ringing.
“I’m calling you Finkenstein, daughter of Frankenstein.”
All he hears for a while is laughing.
“Prick.”
“I’m just calling it the way it is, baby.”
“Send me one of you.”
They both hang up and he quickly takes the photo and sends it. She rings back.
“You, on the other hand, take my breath away. I will sleep tonight with it clutched to my breast.”
Silence.
“Tom?”
“Sorry. The words clutching and breasts will render me useless for the next forty-eight hours.”
“Then I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone’s breasts out there to clutch.”
“Not interested in anyone else’s.”
Silence.
“What are you thinking?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Silence again.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then if you do, I think you already know.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Same.”
“Tom?”
He can’t breathe.
“Yeah.”
“Nothing.” She hangs up.
Other times he talks to her for ages, comforted by her Hmms and Go ons and by the sound of her breathing.
“This one time,” he tells her, “I was thirteen years old and the stand-off at the wharf was happening and I remember my dad came home and told Mum he was going down there because it wasn’t just about the wharfies’ union anymore. It was about every worker in the country. Anyway, Mum said there was no way she wasn’t going if he was and she started ringing around to see if someone would babysit, but every person she spoke to said, ‘If Dom’s going, we’ll go too.’ So they took Anabel and me with them. My grandmother Agnes still goes on about how they put our lives at risk. There had been pretty wild scenes down there and some of the workers had been camped on the docks for weeks and weeks. Sometimes their kids were with them.
“So there we were down at the waterfront and it was packed with people that night and honest to God, Tara, some of them were the most feral I’ll ever see. Riled up beyond anything. Thousands. There’d been a massive call around to all the unions to come down and support the wharfies, so hundreds of cops were lined up facing this angry mob, and I heard my mum say, ‘Shit, those poor bastards,’ because some of those cops were so young and they looked scared.
“I was shaking like crazy and I remember my father took my hand and asked me if I was scared. But I lied and told him I wasn’t and he just looked at me and said, ‘Well, I am, so you’re going to have to hold my hand tight.’ I looked around and we were all there. Apart from my grandparents, everyone I loved in the world was there. My uncle Joe with his union’s ba
He can hear that Tara’s crying.
“It’s not that sad a story, Finke,” he says gently.
“I was there,” she whispers.
She’d been there. On that waterfront. With parents like hers, how could she not?
Maybe she’d always been there. Maybe strangers enter your heart first and then you spent the rest of your life searching for them.
He doesn’t say anything at all after that and nor does she. But they stay on the line.
And there goes another week’s wage, but he doesn’t care.
When the phone rings, it’s five p.m. and Georgie knows. It’s about the timing. Grace and Jacinta always ring at night, and Lucia would never ring during family peak-hour. It continues to ring and she eliminates Sam, because they’ve never indulged in daily phone calls, and the office has no need to contact her now that she’s on leave. Plus Tom belongs to a generation that has no idea how to memorize landline numbers. He usually rings her mobile. So she knows. Dominic does too and she lets him answer, because he’s been waiting all his life for this one phone call and is better prepared. She thinks of the way they rehearsed this, from the moment they lay in their beds as children. But back then, they truly believed Tom Finch would come home alive. In their shared dream, he’d walk down the corridor of their home in Petersham and he’d catch them both in his arms and tell them that the memory of holding his twins kept him alive. But it was Bill they woke to each morning. Bill, who they’d convinced each other was the reason Tom Finch couldn’t return. Bill, whose expression they had interpreted as cold and bitter in those early years. When all that time it was just grief.
They both stand lost for a while, in the hallway of her house, neither having a single clue what to do. Until Dominic calls Jacinta Louise and she tells them to ring Bill and Grace and Auntie Margie Finch. But then Jacinta changes her mind and says that Bill probably should tell Auntie Margie and that she’ll ring the Queensland mob and that perhaps Georgie should tell Tom, while Dom rings someone from Tom Finch’s regiment. Georgie likes having that kind of purpose and when she speaks to her nephew, he’s calm and quite contained. “Come down to the pub,” he tells her. “Bring my father.”
It’s packed when they get down to the Union later that night. Uni’s winding down for the year and the younger crowd is around. She sees Tom over everyone’s head and he waves, and then he’s there, hugging her.
“Follow,” he says to them, and although he doesn’t hug his father, she notices that as he leads them someplace, Tom has a hand at the back of Dominic’s shoulder and it stays there the whole while. They reach a large table. “You,” she hears him say to a group of kids his age sitting there. “She’s pregnant and they’re old. Get up, you pricks.”