To: tomsister@hotmail.com

From: anabelsbrother@hotmail.com

Date: 30 July 2007

Dear H-anibal,

Yes, for the billionth time, Georgie is very excited about you coming for the Christmas holidays. Don’t say she didn’t tell you on the phone last night a thousand times, because I heard her. Tell J-Lo she finally told Nanni G and Bill about the baby and I get a sense Nanni G wants to come up earlier because she rings almost every second night.

And no, I don’t think it’s uncool for a girl to play the trumpet. Can you stop listening to Trixie the Antichrist and Ginger the Ninja? If you give up playing just because you’re measuring yourself up against someone else’s cool meter, then I’ll be pretty disappointed, Anabel Georgia.

Love, Tom

P.S. And may I remind you that I don’t care if Luca Spinelli is only one and a half years older than you. He’s in Year Ten. You’re in Year Eight. What kind of a pervert is he, thinking he can send you a playlist to remember Sydney by? Is he your counselor or something? Have you left Sydney for good and are never coming back? Nip this in the bud or I’m telling J-Lo and Dominic.

He travels home by bus most days, because the trip is ten minutes longer and most of his time is spent trying to avoid being on his own or trying to not look like he’s on his own. MP3 players are perfect because the sight of someone walking the streets listening to music means something totally different from someone staring into blank space. It’s the joy of smoking for him. Isolation doesn’t have to be explained when you’re leaning against a brick wall with a cigarette in your hand. Rolling your own is better. It takes more time, and Tom has all the time to spare.

And what keeps him going is the number one next to his in-box when he clicks on the address anabelsbrother, or when he takes over the ranking of the footy-tipping competition at work from a guy who left and susses out that Mohsin the Ignorer is at the top, with Tom catching up, or when he listens to Francesca Spinelli trying to get a chord right, or to Justine whispering to Ned the Cook about the next installment of her love for a guy called Ben who plays a violin and doesn’t know she exists. Or it’s Georgie’s voice calling out to him from her bedroom as he climbs the stairs to the attic every night. Sometimes when he comes home and he aches for the sound of something more than a “Hey, Tommy,” he lies on her bed and they keep each other company. They talk about Anabel and how much they both miss her and Great-Aunt Margie, Tom Finch’s sister, who’s a nun way out west. And it always comes down to Tom Finch and the veterans and how every time the phone rings, they think it’s the government giving them the news that even after forty years none of them is prepared for. And they talk about Joe. Of the time when Tom was in Year Eleven and he half moved in with them. Because it’s hard not to talk about Joe, with the ugly armchairs and banana chairs and LP collections and photographs constantly reminding them.

“He was crazy mad for your father, you know,” Georgie tells him one time. “And Dom would have done anything for him. When you were born, Joe was in Year Nine boarding at Saint Sebastian’s, and your dad used to ring up and impersonate Bill to get him out of school most weekends. Anytime Joe wanted to be picked up or taken somewhere, Dom would do it.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Tom wonders if they’re thinking the same thing. Dom would pick up Joe anytime, but not that final time. Not Joe’s body from London.

“Once when Joe was at uni, he ended up in the lockup at Stanmore police station because he and his dickhead friends got drunk and stole a street sign. So he rings your father and he starts making up the lyrics to Paul Kelly’s ‘How to Make Gravy.’ But instead of singing, ‘Hello Dan, it’s Joe here,’ he sang, ‘Hello Dom, it’s Joe here.’”

“Then he sang about every member of the family. Your auntie Margie Finch coming down from Queensland and your mum’s family coming from the coast, and he was bellowing out, ‘Who’s going to make the jelly?’ instead of the ‘gravy.’”

Tom can’t help chuckling, no matter how many times he’s heard that story.

“He reckons even the cops were killing themselves laughing,” she says.

“He taught me the chords to that song, you know,” Tom says. “‘It’s a love story, Tommy,’ he told me. ‘It’s a love story between Dan and Joe and every member of their family.’”

He turns on his side to face her, leaning on his elbow.

“Remember when we used to come downstairs and get you to choose who did the best Joe Satriani?”

“Oh, bloody Joe Satriani,” she said.

“And that time you couldn’t stand it anymore and you bunked in with Anabel down at our place and Joe got me out of bed in the middle of the night and we played Satriani’s ‘If I Could Fly’ under her window so you’d think you were having a nightmare.”

The bed shakes for a long time from their silent laughter.

“Be honest. Who did the best Joe Satriani?” he asks.

Before she can answer, she grabs his hand and presses it against her stomach and he’s about to tell her he doesn’t want to feel the baby, but her hand is trembling. Next minute he’s laughing and saying, “Oh, shit. Shit,” and she’s pressing his fingers in deeper and he’s saying, “You’ll hurt it, Georgie.”

Other times they just listen to each other’s music.

“What’s this one?” she asks one night while they’re sharing earphones.

“We’ve all been changed

From what we were

Our broken hearts

Smashed on the floor”

“‘Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors,’” he tells her, turning it up louder.

Georgie makes him listen to stuff that she doesn’t play when she’s out in the real world. There’s a whole lot of Regina Spektor, who sings about a guy called Samson being her sweetest downfall. Tom becomes a closet fan and listens to it secretly in his attic. He wonders if it’s the type of stuff Tara would have written if she had to write music about their relationship.

Other times the door’s shut and he wonders if Sam’s in there.

Every other moment of his day is a reminder of Tara Finke. When he watches his fingers tap at the keyboard, he remembers her thing about hands. Her own, others, everyone’s. It was one of the paradoxes about the very practical Tara Finke. Decides to extend her studies where she’ll have her hands in dirt, but has an obsession with manicures. Her school backpack was always sure to contain a manicure set and papaya hand cream. She rubbed it onto his hands one day in Year Eleven, feeling the texture of his fingertips, callused by the strings of his guitar, and his palms, rough from woodwork.

“Productive, despite your lazy streak,” she had said, inspecting them.

Some days he e-mails her stuff he knows she’ll find funny, like a “Vote Pedro” link because they both had a Napoleon Dynamite obsession. No one else in the group got it. Tom’s favorite impersonation was of Napoleon Dynamite running away, all arms and legs flailing. “It’s not even funny,” they’d say, but Tara Finke would be crying with laughter every single time. Back then, they’d send each other links all the time, trying to come up with the smartest. His favorite was “Survivors of childhood subjugation to watching The Bill.” Both Tom and Tara Finke belonged to a one-television household, a strange type of abuse at the hands of parents obsessed with noncommercial television. In most other ways they were different. She didn’t do toilet humor; he loved it. She hated epic fantasy; he hated anything with big Victorian frocks, no matter how much cleavage. Once she made him watch Pride and Prejudice and for ages he would reword Mr. Bingley’s apology to Jane Bennet, saying, “I’ve been an inexplicable fool,” for anything from losing his keys to burping out loud. Her reply to anything she wanted to do was Jane Bennet’s response to Bingley’s marriage proposal: “A thousand times yes.”