“What happened?” Georgie asks, touching his face.
He doesn’t speak. Can’t.
“Tom, what happened?” she asks again.
“Can I stay here?”
“Are you in trouble with the police?”
He shakes his head. “It’s just stuff.”
The moment of unconditional love is over. All Tom’s life, Georgie has tried to be the cool aunt. The good cop to his father’s bad cop. The one who’d let him get away with anything. But she failed most times.
He stares at the front yard, the roses all pruned and the grass cut. He thinks of Sam walking her home and what that means. Back in the nineties, Georgie and Sam had bought this three-story Victorian because Sam was making a shitload of money and the property market hadn’t gone haywire yet. It was cheaper to buy on the Stanmore side rather than in Leichhardt because of the planes and flight path. When they broke up seven years ago, Georgie refused to move out and insisted on paying Sam rent. Sam moved onto the next street just to make things more complicated for all involved.
“Is he living here again?” Tom asks.
“Who?” she says firmly. “No. Who told you that?”
“Settle, petal,” he says, pissed off that he’s about to enter crazy family territory. “Give me the keys. You look like shit.” Suddenly he’s angry and he doesn’t know who he’s angry at.
“Bad day,” she says.
He nods. He knows bad days. Bad days take him completely by surprise. They make him not trust the good days because it’s likely something’s lurking twenty-four hours away.
Georgie sits on the step and he knows they’re not going through that door just yet.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asks.
Georgie works for some branch of the Red Cross where they track down people’s relatives who have disappeared in conflicts. Tom read somewhere that this year they were trying to identify bodies from mass graves that had been dug during the Bosnian War, more than ten years ago. That would mean Georgie spends most of her days interviewing survivors who immigrated here, recording what their dead or missing family members were wearing on the day they were last seen. Tom can’t think of a worse job for a Mackee.
“If you let me move in, I can pay my way,” he says. He can’t believe he’s twenty-one years old and begging his aunt to let him move in with her.
“Where are you working?” she asks, finally standing up, digging around for her house keys in a ridiculously oversize bag until she ends up chucking the contents of it onto the patio floor.
He hesitates for a moment. “I get money . . . from Centrelink.”
She stops searching and stares. She has what Tom’s mother calls classic looks, same as his little sister and Nanni Grace. Like those gorgeous actresses out of a 1940s war film with wavy dark hair, red lipstick, and what Tom’s mum called alabaster skin. If his little sister wants to know what she’ll look like at forty-two and sixty-three, she just has to look at Georgie and Nanni Grace. It’s all in their eyes. A dark-gray mass of bullshit detectors, with a bit of meanness thrown in. “Don’t you look at me with those eyes, Anabel Georgia Finch Mackee,” his mother would warn his sister.
“You’re on the dole?” Georgie has her arms folded and she’s angry.
“Yeah, like I said. Centrelink,” he says, instantly on the defensive.
“Just call it the dole, Tom.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Your father would have a fit and so would your pop Bill.”
“Well, seeing as the great Dominic Mackee is probably facedown in some gutter at the moment, I just might not take his opinion into consideration.”
He knows he’s gone too far. His father and Georgie are twins, and it’s against Georgie’s commandments for anyone to criticize her brother. Or brothers.
“What a thing to say,” she says, shaking her head with fury. “What a little shit you are, Tom. Don’t you dare talk about your father like that.”
He simmers for a moment, crouching down to throw her stuff back into her ridiculous handbag.
“You’re a hypocrite,” he accuses back. “You’ve said worse about your father. I’ve heard you go on about Bill.”
“And since when have you been allowed to call your pop Bill?”
Since everyone who used to make the rules nicked off on me, he wants to say.
“You don’t even go by Bill’s name anymore, Georgie Finch,” he exploded. “You haven’t for twenty years, and you and my father have never called him Dad. It was always Bill. The double-standard crap in this family shits me to tears.”
She finally gets the door open and he follows her down the corridor. He knows he’s going to be blasted with memories any minute now. Georgie’ll have a thousand photos all over the place. Mostly of Tom and Anabel and his uncle Joe. The first he’ll see in the lounge room is of Georgie and his dad at seventeen. Georgie’s wearing a boob tube, minus the boobs, and is standing between his father and Joe, both of them wearing those tight boardies from the eighties. Uncle Joe was ten in the photo, all skinny arms and legs like Pop Bill. But not Dominic. Pop Bill may have given them his name, but Dominic Mackee was all Tom Finch. He was Georgie and Dominic’s father, who had married Nanni Grace before he went to Vietnam to fight the war and never came back. In the corner, with the best view of the TV, is the ugly green vinyl armchair that his uncle Joe once found by the side of the street on his way home from the station. Joe had lived here with Georgie before he went to London to teach, and she put up with anything, although she hated the chair with a vengeance because it clashed with her period furniture.
“It’s an eyesore, G,” Tom’s father, Dominic, would say. “Get rid of it when Joe’s at work one day.” Before his job at the trade unions, Tom’s father had made furniture, so the armchair was a monstrosity to anyone with good taste. Tom hadn’t minded the chair. He’d fight his uncle Joe for it, and whoever got there first wouldn’t budge for the rest of the night. One time he even dislocated his shoulder, diving from one end of the room to beat Joe to the chair. That was the year Tom turned seventeen and things had been crap at home between him and his father. They had always been tight, but that year everything ended up in a fight. With Georgie living just around the corner, Tom ended up there most of the time.
Georgie disappears into the kitchen, and Tom joins her just as she finishes listening to her messages. He hears his mum saying, “Hey, G. Give us a ring.” He wants to ask Georgie to play it again, just to hear the voice.
“When did you last speak to her?” he asks quietly.
“A couple of days ago. Anabel played a piece on the trumpet over the phone.”
“What did my mum say?” he asks.
“Same thing as always,” Georgie says, turning on the coffee machine. “‘I’m worried about Tommy. I send him a text message every second day and he doesn’t respond.’”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“Yeah, I do. Sometimes.”
“Liar.”
“Night before last, I returned one. Know what she sent back?”
Georgie doesn’t answer.
“Same thing as always. I’m worried about your auntie G.”
He doesn’t add the part, Find out if it’s true that she’s pregnant. Although he can tell that she is. Either that or Georgie’s had a boob job.
Georgie holds up a mug and he nods. The beans begin to grind, and he smells memories with that sound. Of them snuggled in this kitchen. He couldn’t remember one Sunday morning without Georgie and his mum and dad and Anabel and Uncle Joe eating croissants from Le Chocoreve and drinking espresso and hot chocolate.
“I think she’s having a hard time,” Georgie says.
He doesn’t say anything, because no one gave his mother, Jacinta, a harder time than Tom. He had refused to go to Brisbane with her, even though he was flunking uni, because there was no way he was leaving his father behind. She said it would only be for a few weeks while his father sorted himself out, so Anabel wouldn’t be affected bywhat was going on with Dominic’s drinking. That was a year ago.