“I’ll drive you back to my place, Tom,” Francesca says. “My parents are overseas, so you don’t have to talk to anyone and you can just rest.”
He doesn’t respond.
“The nurse says you should try to stay awake because they’re worried about the concussion. You’ve got ten stitches because you fell into a glass.”
“I’m going home,” he mutters, holding a hand to the bandage on his head. He stares down at his fingers, which are taped. “But if you can drop me off at the Union, I need to get the key to the flat from Zac and Sarah,” he says, referring to his flatmates.
“They’re not there,” she says quietly.
“Then they’ll be home. Drop me there.”
He still hasn’t looked at her properly. Sometimes back in high school they’d compete over who could stare each other out. Francesca was hopeless. She would fail in the first five seconds, every single time. Tara Finke held out the longest, for three minutes most times, and something always happened between him and Tara in the thirty-third second that felt like a punch to his gut. He didn’t get what it meant back then.
“Stani had to let them go, Tom,” Francesca says. “Both of them.” Her voice is firm as though she’s prepared for his reaction. “They never turn up on time and I always have to cover for them and do double shifts. They didn’t even tell us you had an accident, Tom.”
“Why would they?” he snaps, sitting up. “Are you my next of kin?”
He grabs his backpack from her, fumbles through it for his phone, and rings Sarah’s number. It goes straight to voice mail, so then he tries Zac, but no one picks up.
“And anyway . . .” Francesca continues, but he blocks her out. For someone who was a basket case the first six months they knew her, she turned out to be the most resilient and coordinates the rest of the girls with an efficiency born of a hidden Fascist gene. “She’s Mussolini’s bastard child,” he once confided to Jimmy Hailler, the only other male in their group at the time.
“. . . the being stoned thing got a bit boring,” she finishes.
He wants to hit someone. “So you sacked them because they smoke dope?”
He’s out of bed and standing over her. Although there’s alarm on her face and a little bit of fear, she doesn’t move away.
“I don’t give a shit what they do, Tom, except when they don’t turn up to a shift and Justine has to come in when she needs to be at a gig,” she says fiercely. “Each to their own. They can stick whatever they want up their nose, down their throat, and up their arse.”
“I live with them,” he spits.
“I don’t care. They’re —”
But he holds up a hand to cut her off and grabs his clothes, which are hanging off the bed. “You’re everything they’ve ever called you behind your back, you stupid bitch,” he mutters.
“If you swear at me again, Thomas . . .”
“What?” he sneers. “You’ll tell Trombal? Where is he now? Last I heard, he was pissing off overseas to get away from you.”
Francesca takes a visible breath in front of him and picks up her bag and pushes past him. But she hesitates for a moment and turns back.
“For your information, your friends call me those names to my face. And they’re thieves as well. So while you guys were hanging out spending the money they were bringing in, take note that most of it came from Stani’s till at the Union.”
She shakes her head and there are tears in her eyes.
“I know you’re sad, Tom. But sometimes you’re so mean that I wonder why any of us bother.”
It’s dark outside, but Tom can’t see the time on the clock of his phone because the glass face cracked, presumably at the same time as his head. He rings the landline at the flat but is warned by a recorded message that he’s almost out of credit, so he hangs up before the answering machine sucks up what’s left. He has a hazy recollection of having topped up his phone card and can’t for the life of him remember where it’s all gone, but nothing seems to be making sense to him at the moment. He stops twice from the dizziness and sits on the brick fence that lines the hospital on Missenden Road, watching an ambulance drive in and offload some drunk that they’ve probably picked up off the streets. He clutches the phone, willing it to ring. For Zac and the guys to be pissed or high and start belting out, “Ground Control to Major Tom,” which got old a long time ago, but tonight he needs to hear it to make sure everything’s okay.
The moment he’s off the main road, a part of him panics. Although he’s close to home, where he stands there are no hospital lights to keep him alive to the world. He doesn’t want to collapse in the back streets of Newtown in front of one of these ugly flats, which according to his aunt should have been demolished the moment they were finished. His aunt Georgie has a strange idea of justice. Rapists, pedophiles, and architects of redbrick flats built in the 1970s all belong in the same jail cell. Out here tonight, under the dullest of moons, Tom feels as if he’s the last man on earth. Six blocks east from the home he grew up in. Three blocks south from the university he dropped out of a year ago. Four blocks north of the bed he shared with Tara Finke that last night together when life made sense for one proverbial minute, before everything blew up.
Outside his flat, the moon sheds light on the garbage strewn all over the front lawn, and it’s not until he’s up close that he realizes it’s not garbage at all. It’s his stuff. There’s not much of it, but he can’t believe they’ve left his guitar out here for anyone to pinch. Zac and the gang haven’t gone to the trouble of packing or asking questions about allegiance. They’ve just chucked everything over the balcony. It’s what happens when their only two sources of a steady income, notwithstanding a dole check or two, have just been sacked courtesy of someone who belongs to Tom’s past. He hammers on the security door, but no one answers and then he steps back to look up to the balcony.
“Sarah!”
Some nights she crawls into bed with him when she’s between boyfriends. She isn’t one to deal too well with her own company and who’s he to refuse if it’s on offer with no strings attached. He likes the fact that she can keep sentimentality and emotion out of it. Until now. He makes the mistake of believing that sex between them will make a difference.
“Sarah?” he yells, and it almost breaks open his stitches to put that much effort into speaking. When no one answers except the guy on the top floor to tell him to shut the hell up, he goes back to his stuff on the lawn and crams some of his clothes in his backpack and begins to feel around in the dark. All he wants is his guitar and his Norton Anthology. But the photos usually tucked inside the poetry anthology are missing, probably scattered all over the grass, so he crawls around until he finds all three. He doesn’t know which one’s which, but knows he’s not leaving until he has them all. He grabs his guitar and tucks the photographs back into the book and then he heads back toward the hospital, weighing up his options. Georgie is the obvious one, but he knows he can’t turn up to his aunt’s place in the middle of the night with ten stitches in his head. She’ll ring Brisbane in an instant, and then he’ll have to deal with his mother’s anxiety. And so he realizes, with a lack of shame or guilt born of desperation, that he’ll call Francesca Spinelli because after tonight he’ll never have to see her again. There’ll be no hanging out at the Union now that his flatmates have been sacked. It’s a bed she can offer with no questions from her mother and father. He’s got enough credit for one more phone call and he rings her because he’s a prick. He knows Francesca will come and get him no matter what he said to her tonight. He knows she’ll expect nothing in return.
He’s outside the front of the Mobil petrol station ten minutes later, and once his body has been stationary for a while, the painkillers begin to wear off and the cold snaps at his bones. At this time of night, Parramatta Road looks like some sci-fi movie. Massive lights from the servos and traffic lights, and not one car to be seen except a ute coming toward him from Annandale. Which means Will Trombal is driving. Mostly Tom’s pissed off, except for a sliver of enjoyment in knowing that he’s probably disrupted Trombal’s night. There’s never been love lost between Tom and Francesca’s boyfriend. The filthy look that Trombal sends him and the five-minute drive of silence to Francesca’s house, while the three are squashed in the front seat, prove it.