Prologue

The string slices into the skin of his fingers and no matter how tough the calluses, it tears.

But this beat is fast and even though his joints are aching, his arm's out of control like it has a mind of its own and the sweat that drenches his hair and face seems to smother him, but nothing's going to stop Tom. He's aiming for oblivion.

And he hears them holler his name because the song's ended and he's still going, strumming strings to their foundations. And sud denly the room is spinning and when he hits the ground, head-first off that table, his life doesn't flash before his eyes because Tom can't remember his life. Can't  remember the last year anyway.

But then memory taunts him and he's back at that cemetery where they're burying his uncle in an empty grave. And Nanni Grace is there alongside his step-pop Bill and Auntie Georgie and Tom's dad, and they're all just dead inside. Georgie says it's what happens to you when you bury your little brother. Nanni Grace says it's what happens when you bury your youngest son. Tom's dad says nothing.

Beyond where they stand there's another empty grave that belongs to them. Of someone even younger than his uncle Joe.

'It's what I've been doing for most of my life, Tommy,' Nanni Grace tells him. 'Burying the men in my family in empty coffins.'

She's always said it's why they have the right to own the world. Because their family's blood is splattered all over it. Long Khanh, Vietnam. That tube station in London. Different types of wars, someone else's fight, but it's the Finches and the Mackees who have paid.

When he opens his eyes he's four years old again and his dad clicks the seatbelt into place. 'We're on our way, mate,' Dominic Mackee says, like he does every single time they go through the ritual. For a moment their hands touch and it turns into 'This Little Piggy'.

And Tom feels like he's flying.

Because he and the piper are on their way.

From chapter one . . .

He's just Tom.

'Thomas Finch Mackee?'

The everyman with the most overused name.

'Come on, mate. Try to keep awake,' the voice says.

Even the Bible was hard on them. The doubter who didn't trust his band of brothers and had to see the proof for himself to believe. He never liked that story. It made the Toms in history look piss-weak.

'Thomas? Is it Thomas or Tom? Come on, mate. Keep your eyes open.'

In Year Eleven, the girls knew him as Thomas because it was the name they heard at rollcall. Took years to get them to call him Tom. At home, it would become a game within the family. Another day, another Tom.

'Tom Thumb, what's the story, little man?' his uncle Joe would ask him.

And when he was seven and they lived down the road from Georgie's place on Northumberland Street, she'd come over for dinner and make him do Tom Jones impersonations in front of the family, twisting with him as she held both his hands while he sang 'What's New Pussycat?' in a Welsh accent that always had his mum, Jacinta, and Georgie killing themselves laughing until they almost wet their pants.

Then came Peeping Tom and Tom Sawyer and Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tom Brown's Schooldays and 'Little Tommy Tucker' and 'Tommy Trot, a man of law'. The Toms in literary history had let him down and he hated them all. They were all a bunch of Prufrocks. He wanted his name to be Huck. Or Ishmael. Yossarian would do just fine.

'Tom?'

Different voice. A nurse. He can tell because she sounds like Sister Terri from All Saints.

'Tom, can you hear me? You're at the hospital, Tom. Your friend is here to collect you.'

Let it be her.

Has he said those words out loud? Tom thinks he's said her name, anyway. Hasn't seen her for two years, but he prays that she's come to collect him because Tom needs collecting. Because he can't get her out of his mind. Sees her every time he closes his eyes. Sees the thousand things about her that turned him on. There was that lopsided way she walked because of the satchel of her uni books that weighed her down and there was the fringe that covered her eyes, and no matter how many times he looked into them, he couldn't tell if they were green or brown, just somewhere in between. She told him once that the girls convinced her to do stuff with her hair. Foils, she called them, and he didn't understand foils, so she showed him using alfoil and he thought, How bloody stupid, until he saw what the foils did to her hair, all gold mixed with brown, and the way it was cut jagged around her chin, making her look scruffy one minute and cool the next.

It amazed him how they went from being best mates and just hanging out, to having a bit of eye contact that lasted just a tad too long, turning their relationship into all things confusing. It had happened that time they were watching a band at the Sando with some of his mates from uni. He had stood with his arms around her and his chin resting on the top of her head. Nothing new about that. They were a tactile bunch, all of them. But she leaned back to say something and that was it. Again. And he couldn't let go. Not when they were sitting at the Buzz Bar in Newtown having a hot chocolate, and his hands were playing with hers and she was letting them play, and not when they were crossing King Street to go back to one of the guys' houses in Erskineville and he was holding her hand and she was letting him, and he knew that if he tried to kiss her, she'd let him. But he didn't.

He was never afraid when it came to girls.

Unless it was Tara Finke.

When the nurse calls out his name again and he opens his eyes, Francesca Spinelli is sitting there, wearing fifty emotions on her face like she always did when they were at school together. He doesn't tell the nurse that she's lying. They're not friends. He has no idea how the hospital even tracked her down. These days his contact with her is limited to the unavoidable once or twice a week they cross each other's path at the Union, one of those incestuous inner-west pubs where everyone ends up drinking or working. And you know how it happens. One day you pass strangers by and think, I used to hang out with them. But that was a world before dropping out of uni and parents splitting and two nights of everything with a girl whose face you can't get out of your head and relationships falling apart and favourite uncles who used to call you Tom Thumb being blown to smithereens on their way to work on the other side of the world.

Talk of Francesca these days is frequent amongst his flatmates. Two of them work with her, and most nights Tom is subjected to rants and tirades about the 'wack job' in charge of the rosters at the pub. Tom walks away each time because the moment the insults enter his ears, he'll be an accessory, and he's never in the mood to come to her defence just because he spent three years almost surgically attached to her and the others. And Tara Finke.

Tom's always enjoyed being a coward like that.

But here Francesca sits calmly by his bed, clutching his backpack, and he hates her for that look in her eye. Compassion. Empathy. It's a killer. It disarms you when you least want to be disarmed. After his uncle Joe's death two years ago he hated looking at any of their faces. Tears constantly welling up in their eyes. 'How are you, Tom?' they'd ask, and he'd want to tell them to shut the hell up and stop asking questions. It's what he's enjoyed most about living with his flatmates this past year. They drink, they smoke their weed, they play their music, they have no ties with whoever they have sex with and the days pass in a pleasant haze where nobody analyses how he feels, how he's supposed to feel, how he'll feel the next day, how he feels about the present, which is shaped by the past, that will impact on the future. With his flatmates, Tom just exists.

'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 on 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 voicemail, 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 that 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 RPA 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 that according to his aunt should have been demolished the moment they were finished. His aunt Georgie has a strange idea of justice. Rapists, paedophiles and architects of red-brick 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.