The Piper's Son by Melina Marchetta

Author:Melina Marchetta [Marchetta, Melina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5458-0
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2010-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

“Out of bed.”

He stares up at Bill with horror. First, because it’s five thirty in the morning. Second, because Bill is wearing the most hideous jogging shorts. So brief. The type where you can almost see his balls.

Next minute they’re out in the street behind his father, who’s doing tae kwon do movements in the next-door neighbor’s driveway. At least when his father was a man on the verge of a breakdown, he was way cooler.

“You can’t jog wearing thongs, you drip,” Bill says.

“Let’s call them flip-flops, Bill,” he says, yawning. “A thong is a G-string. Do you know what a G-string is, Bill?”

Dominic is running ahead of them, belting through the streets in front of Bill, with Tom flip-flopping after them until he gives up on the shoes and takes them off, trying to keep up. The only thing that inspires Tom to pick up speed and almost break the one-hundred-meter sprint record is when he sees his father heading toward Camperdown. There’s no way he wants to meet his ex-flatmates coming home from a gig with Bill in those shorts and his father doing Jackie Chan impersonations. Once Tom’s redirected them, his father sprints past him and Tom doesn’t even try to keep up.

They reach their old place on Temple Street, where Dominic is talking to Mrs. Liu. Tom hears him promise that he’ll come around and mow the lawn before he grabs her wheelie bins and tucks them away at the side of her house. Mrs. Liu looks like all her Christmases have come at once. By the time his father is sprinting off again, Tom’s lungs are killing him. He hopes they come across a few more lonely people in the neighborhood who’ll stop Dominic Mackee for a bit of a chat in order to save his son from cardiac arrest. Worse still, Bill wants to talk.

“You working?”

“Yeah . . . kinda . . . yeah.”

He’s going to give up smoking soon. Maybe get one of those patches.

“What are you doing during the day?”

He wonders if he’s getting the first signs of emphysema. “Just data crap.”

“What type?”

“Data. I don’t give it an identity.”

Bill stops for a moment to check a stitch.

“When are you going back to uni?”

“I might not.”

Tom presses a hand against his hip to make the pain go away wondering if this is the let’s-go-for-a-jog-so-I-can-lecture-you-about-your-future trick.

Bill looks at him for a long while.

“If you’ve got time up your sleeve at Christmas, your auntie Margie Finch needs some help out at Walgett.”

The unspoken rule has always been that they do anything for his great-aunt. It was her money that kept Georgie and his father and Tom and Anabel in private schools. She always said it was what her brother, Tom Finch, would have wanted the Finch family money spent on. She rarely asked for anything in return. But the building of the recreation center, run by her order of nuns, has been an issue for years.

“I thought maybe it would be built by now. It’s been two years,” he mumbles.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.