The Piper's Son by Melina Marchetta Read Free Book Online Page A

married the love of his life, adopting the twins when they were four years old.
    “Tom,” Stani acknowledges.
    He still speaks with a heavy Eastern European accent, although he’s been in the country long enough to have lost it. Tom had met him briefly in the days when he hung out with Justine Kalinsky, Stani’s niece, but the old guy’s never used his name before. Tom knows he can’t spend the next couple of months walking past and being on the receiving end of Stani’s accusing stare each time. He can handle people thinking that the Mackees were a bunch of ratbags. He imagined that his uncle would have been kicked out once or twice, too. Joe could be a bit of a yob when he was drunk. And God knows how bad his father was in the end. But what Tom’s ex-flatmates had made him, by association, pissed him off. Mackees weren’t thieves, nor were Finches. He thinks he’ll make it easy and just give Stani the money from his final dole check.
    When he turns back, Stani’s already disappeared inside, so Tom follows him in.
    It’s a small pub. No slot machines. No big-screen TV. No jukebox. The room at the back has good acoustics for rehearsals and is hired out for small parties. On Sunday afternoons there’s a regular bunch of locals who sit around the table near the door and play. Sometimes Tom turned up, not because his flatmates worked there but because of the sounds. A fiddle, two guitars, and vocals, with a fierce passion to the music. He liked what he played over at the Barro hotel, from time to time, but it was beginning to bore him. It was like the stuff he used to play when he was fifteen. Before the girls came into his life.
    “It’s shit punk,” Tara Finke once pointed out bluntly on the way home from one of those combined schools extravaganzas during their last year at school. The music teacher had asked him to accompany the orchestra for a number that needed guitar, and Tara had been sent along as a prefect representative. “That doesn’t mean I think punk is shit,” she continued. “It means that when someone plays punk in a shit-like manner, it’s excruciating. So either find yourself a good punk band or move on, Tom. Because it kills me to say this, but you’re actually a tiny bit gifted.”
    “How would you like it if I said to you, ‘It kills me to say this, but you’re actually a tiny bit beautiful’?” he had asked, pissed off.
    She hadn’t said anything then, which was rare for her.
    “Would you have been lying?” she said after a long silence.
    “Lying about what?”
    More quiet.
    “About me being a tiny bit beautiful.”
    “Shit, yeah.”
    But later that night, he had sent her a message on MSN.
    Of course I was lying. The “tiny bit” part, anyway.
    Stani looks up at Tom from behind the bar, surprised to still see him there.
    “Francesca reckons Zac and Sarah took some money,” Tom says.
    He doesn’t want to make it sound like a whine or an accusation, but it comes out abruptly. Stani doesn’t speak.
    “So around how much are we talking about?” Tom asks briskly.
    Stani waves him off. “They’re gone. You go too. Let’s call it even.”
    Tom shakes his head. He focuses on the bottles lined up behind Stani’s head.
    “Just tell me how much it is and I’ll pay you, and
then
we’ll call it even.”
    Tom’s getting frustrated. He wants to get on with his life. He wants to get off the bus every afternoon and walk past the pub without feeling guilty.
    He hears the music from the back room: someone stumbling over guitar chords and then the sound of the accordion. He knows Justine uses the back for rehearsal, and he wants to get out of here before he has to face her. Seeing Francesca the other night was bad enough. “Just tell me how much it is,” Tom says again, forcefully.
    Stani already dismisses him with a look, but Tom won’t budge.
    Just tell me how much it is, you old bastard,
he wants to shout.
    “It’s over two thousand dollars, Tom. Got that kind of