From: [email protected]
Date: 7 August 2007
I think of Dom and me lying in our bunks in Fort Street, Joe. He’d tell me that our father, Tom Finch, was coming back to us one day. If they hadn’t returned a body, it meant he was still alive regardless of what everyone else said. We’d work ourselves up wondering what would happen to your father if Tom Finch returned. What would happen to Bill? What would happen to Mum if she had to choose between both her husbands? It made us hate Bill, you know. We stopped ourselves loving him, Joe, because we couldn’t bear the idea of loving Bill like a father and then Tom Finch coming back. And then years later you were born. And I’d want to kill anyone who called you my half brother because there was nothing half about how Dom and I loved you. From the moment I saw you, when I was seven years old, in that incubator, Joe, I started thanking God that my father hadn’t come back. Because if he had, you would never have been born.
And now I look at Sam, who would never have gotten on that plane to London with me, who wouldn’t even be back in my life again today if it wasn’t for you dying. And it’s like God’s being cruel and saying, “Well, if you want Joe, you can’t have Sam back. That’s the deal, Georgie.” And perhaps I could choose, Joe, but then God makes it worse. “If you want Joe, you can’t have this baby.”
When Georgie walks out of the station that afternoon, Sam’s there. Leaning against the railing on the Main Street side, next to where someone’s chained a bike. It takes twenty seconds to walk through the tunnel under the platforms toward where he stands, and she keeps her eyes on him the whole way while he tries to get as much out of his cigarette as he can and then tosses it into the bin as she approaches. Today his son isn’t with him. He only gets Callum from Friday to Sunday and although she never gets a sense of his anticipation to be with the boy on Thursdays, she always senses his flatness on Sundays.
Sometimes he forgets the unspoken rules written by their past and he places a hand around her shoulder. It’s instinct, intimacy is. Sometimes he lets it linger, while other times he drops his hand by the time they get to the lights on Salisbury Road. But apart from that, words have been removed. Words are intimacy she won’t allow and he would not dare ask for. The Georgie and Sam of the present have no past together. No talk of memories. No reminiscing of holidays, or friends and parties.
“Do you want a hot chocolate?” he asks as they walk past Le Chocoreve.
She shakes her head. She thinks of the e-mail she received today from Ana Vanquez, the girl Joe loved in London. They were teachers together in their East London school. Ana teaching her native tongue of Spanish, and Joe teaching English and history.
These days she avoids Ana Vanquez’s e-mails and tells herself she’ll read them when she feels stronger. She knows what they’ll say.
“I’m going to Melbourne for a couple of days for work,” he says, watching her closely because he knows the signs. “Why don’t you get Bernadette to move in?”
“I’ve got Tom and Dominic,” she says.
“They’re not exactly the best of company at the moment, Georgie.”
Which is an understatement. Her brother spends most of his time locked away in the study. Sometimes he disappears early in the evening and she thinks it’s to go to an AA meeting, but he’s not ready to talk about it yet, so she doesn’t ask. Apart from his jog every morning and the brief appearance he makes at dinnertime, she’s hardly seen him. As a result of Dominic’s presence, Tom stays away or confines himself to the attic. She misses their talks. She misses Dominic more now than when he was away.
“I’ll get Dom out of the house tonight,” Sam says.
“Where?”
He shrugs.
“I don’t know. Down to the pub.”
She looks at him, horrified. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sam. You don’t take an alcoholic to the pub.”
“He’ll have to get used to being normal again, and being normal is all of us down at the pub. I’ll get Abe to come down and Jonesy.”
“No,” she says. He used to make fun of the way she said it. “No-wa,” he’d exaggerate.
“And anyway, Tom’s down there and it will be uncomfortable for both of them.”
“It’s not the only pub in Sydney.”
“No.”
He sighs and she picks up a bit of irritation in the sound.
“What? Are you going to follow him around for the rest of his life now?” he asks. “Make sure he doesn’t walk into pubs or linger around bottle shops? Are you that powerful, Georgie? That you can protect your brother from whatever’s out there?”
She stares at him, taken aback, and he mutters something under his breath and she can tell he regrets his words.
“Mick Thomas is playing at the Vanguard tonight,” he adds quietly. “I’ll take him there.”
These days he’s almost all gray, not the fair-haired guy she once loved and although he tries to keep fit, he has to work at it harder than ever and she knows that irritates him. He never had Dom’s charisma or his gift of the gab. There was a distance to him that forced people to work harder at trying to get his attention, but she knew it wasn’t game playing for him. Sam had been brought up in a cold household where people had no idea how to communicate with each other. His parents were working-class people who believed in very little, and Sam observed a loveless marriage where the only bonding that took place was in front of the television set at night. Georgie was with Sam when his father had died suddenly at the beginning of their relationship, and there had been no emotion. She had never seen him cry. That Sam and his mother loved each other was obvious. That they loved Sam’s boy was even more so, but there were very few words between them. It had been through Georgie, back when they were together, that his mother was able to express her affection toward Sam.
With their friends, though, Sam was different. If they were warm to him, he returned that warmth. It was what Bernadette had once said that she loved about both Sam and Dom and even Abe. “A lot of times you’re around men who are so in love with their wives or partners that they don’t have anything to offer any other woman in conversation. Especially single women. But Sam and Dom and Abe can be in love with you three and still make a girl feel as if she has some kind of sex appeal. That’s nice.”
“Dom knows he can look and not touch,” Jacinta said.
“Does Sam look?” Lucia had asked.
Georgie thought about it and nodded. “He loves breasts, so sometimes I see the eyes follow a bounce here or there.”
But for all the love that Bernadette had seen, here Georgie was walking home with Sam as though they were strangers, and Dominic and Jacinta were living a state apart from each other.
They reach the house and he shuffles through her bag for the keys.
“Do you want me to stay tonight?” he asks.
“Do you want to?”
“Just answer the question, Georgie.”
“Why can’t you answer mine?”
He unlocks the door and there’s the sigh again.
“Tell Dom I’ll pick him up at seven.”
From: [email protected]
Date: 10 August 2007
Dear Tara,
My father’s back. He’s living in Georgie’s study and I want to hurt him. God, I do. I want to go in there and pound the shit out of him. Because I stayed that time after my mum left. For him. No matter what, I couldn’t bear for him to be on his own after she took Anabel away. She called it tough love. “I’m not nurturing this, Dominic. Fix it and I’ll come back.” But I couldn’t leave him because you have no idea how he felt about Joe and how fucking sad he was that year. Joe wasn’t just his brother; they were best friends. I was scared for him those first couple of weeks after she left, honest I was. And then six weeks later he walked out on me and I mightn’t have been a kid anymore, but I wasn’t ready for all my family to be gone. They can’t suffocate you for years and be on your tail and have rules about when to be home and who to be and how important uni is and then take it away from you and leave you in that house with all those memories. On my own. And I don’t give a shit if my mum was begging me to come up and be with her and Anabel, or that Georgie was always trying to get me to come and stay with her. I wanted to stay there and wait for him to come home. And he didn’t, and now he won’t even look at me, the coward. The great Dominic Finch Mackee and the only thing I can understand him doing is drinking himself to oblivion. I can do oblivion, you know. I can do it better than him. I’d like to see how he likes it if I just disappear from his life without a word. It was okay for him to keep in contact with Georgie and my mum, but not once did he pick up the phone or write to me. Like I was fucking nothing to him. Like I’m nothing to no one.