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

would call her his “Georgie girl,” and he was “babe” or “Sambo” to her.
    Tom watches them some nights while Sam’s tapping away at his laptop and Georgie’s watching TV. She’s a commercial-television slut, obsessed with
Dancing with the Stars
and home-improvement shows. She cries every time someone gets their backyard renovated, and tries to tell Tom the story. Once upon a time he could have imagined Sam being a bastard about it. Nowadays, Sam seems just grateful for being allowed to sit beside her in the lounge room.
    “You okay?” he asks her one evening when they’re both sitting out back, on the banana chairs Joe bought her one Christmas. Another couple of eyesores, really. Sometimes Tom thinks Joe did it to stir Georgie. The light’s on behind them and she’s reading and he’s nursing a coffee and playing his guitar.
    “My friends aren’t talking to me,” she murmurs.
    He shrugs. “Neither are mine.’”
    She looks his way and then laughs.
    “The girls will come around.”
    “I’m talking about my ex-flatmates.”
    He sips his coffee and then gets up and scrapes his banana chair away from her so he can light up.
    “Can I ask you something?” he asks, his voice quiet.
    He can see she thinks he’s going to ask about the baby, but she nods all the same.
    “Why do you think he went off the deep end?”
    It takes her a moment to understand he’s talking about his father.
    “You don’t think it was losing Joe?” she asks.
    He shakes his head. “That was the last straw. But it began earlier. When I was in Year Eleven and I started hanging out here with you and Joe.”
    She’s not speaking. He’s scared she won’t.
    “Was it their marriage?” he asks.
    She shakes her head and then she smiles to herself, as if Tom’s not there for a moment. “I started the trend of Dominic being the piper. He came out first and I was right behind him, and it’s never changed. It’s like everyone’s used him to suss out the dangers before they take the next step. If Dominic Mackee was doing it, then it was okay. The thing with Dominic is that no matter what the risk, I wanted to follow. And sometimes it meant that I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t his twin sister, but I didn’t care. Because he never left me hanging. That’s what I loved about him. He always looked after me. Meanwhile Bill just went on and on about Dom’s duty to me and to the world, and then when Joe was born seven years later, that responsibility was cemented in place. And your father took it seriously, Tom. I remember once, when we were twelve, we wanted to go to the Easter Show on our own and Bill insisted that we take Joe. He drilled it into Dominic that he wasn’t to let Joe out of his sight. The lecture went on forever and all we wanted to do was nick off with our friends.”
    Tom could see that the memory was vivid and painful, but then again, any thought of Joe was.
    “And we lost him. Dominic was holding his hand and somehow he lost Joe in the crowd, and it took us and the police three hours to find him. Your father was inconsolable. And I hated Bill for this part of it, because the moment we got home, the belt came off and Dominic got it so bad. Joe and I cried and cried, begging him to stop.”
    “What did Nanni Grace do?”
    “Nothing. The discipline was always Bill’s thing and if there was one thing Nanni Grace agreed with, it was that Joe and I were to be looked after
. ‘You’re responsible, Dom. Responsibility, Dominic.
’
It’s all he ever heard, so it’s no wonder he ended up captain of his primary and high school and everywhere he’s been since. That’s not to say he didn’t have a bit of a bastard bullying streak, but thank God he used it for good, because he could have been a real prick, you know.”
    “But never one to Mum and Anabel.”
    She sighs, wrapping her arms around her body to block out the cold. “He was tough on you,” she says, looking over to him.
    Tom’s shaking his