Beatriz wept with relief when the McCormacks came home. She’d convinced herself they were going to burn to death in a bush fire, because all she saw on the evening news was drama and crisis. Seven men had died near Burra two days ago when a fire whipped over the containment line and trapped them in a vortex of heat and smoke, and a little girl and her daddy had only narrowly survived a wall of fire near Koonoona by drenching a woollen blanket in a stock trough, then lying under it, inside their ute, and letting the fire pass over them.
‘Hell’s fury unleashed,’ Michael said that evening, their first night back. ‘But we were lucky.’ He fetched a perfectly chilled Clare Valley Riesling from the fridge and began to pour it into five glasses.
‘Only a small one for me,’ Beatriz said. ‘And by the way, luck had nothing to do with it. I asked God, every morning and every night, to spare you, and he did.’ She sounded stern. Fifty years of service with this family, and still God didn’t get credit for his goodness.
‘God, Gil and the CFS,’ Michael said. ‘The holy trinity.’ He slid glasses of wine across the table to Ali, Stella and Thea, then handed a half-measure to Beatriz, and clinked glasses with her. ‘Cheers, dear Beatriz,’ he said. ‘Your prayers are a comfort to us all.’
‘It came so close, Beatriz,’ Stella said. ‘Scary how fast it moves. One minute the fire seems miles away; the next minute it’s heading for your hayloft.’
The old lady shook her head in horrified wonder; she felt blessed that they’d survived, when disaster had seemed, to her, a nailed-on certainty, and she’d cooked up a caldeirada to show how happy she was to have her family safely home. Portuguese fish stew, the celebration meal, the thanksgiving offering. She hauled the dish from the oven and lifted the lid to check the seasoning, and fragrant steam rose like a promise from the trusty, battle-scarred cooking pot.
‘Alma won’t cook fish,’ Thea said. ‘She says it makes her kitchen smell.’
Beatriz sniffed and said, ‘A cook who won’t cook fish is no cook at all.’ She rarely, and unfairly, had anything good to say about Alma, whom she’d met only twice, but whose reign at Lismore Creek represented an imagined threat to her own pre-eminence here in Adelaide.
‘It is kind of smelly though,’ Thea said. ‘In the morning, I mean, when you get the bones and heads going in your stock pot, Beatriz. A bit gross.’ She wrinkled her pretty nose.
‘Ingrate,’ Michael said. ‘This wine is perfect, Ali. Ali? Taste your wine.’ She was lost in thought, and jumped a little at the sound of her name.
‘Sorry?’ she said. She was thinking of Daniel Lawrence and Nick Drake and Rory Gallagher.
‘Try the wine, it’s delicious.’ He watched her take a sip, nod her approval. Michael liked feedback for his wine choices; really, he’d have preferred more than a nod, a little appreciative analysis perhaps. But Ali was no connoisseur, he’d failed to turn her into one, despite his best efforts; if the wine was cold, white and dry, that was good enough for her.
Beatriz said, ‘My street in Porto, when I was small, smelled of boiled fish heads every Friday. The whole street!’
‘I might go to Portugal on my travels,’ Stella said casually. ‘Italy, France, Spain, Portugal.’ She gazed into her glass and swirled her wine, watching it lap the sides.
Ali nodded, then remembered Michael didn’t know that Stella had changed her mind about drama school in Sydney. She opened her mouth to broach the subject, but Thea, sharp as a tack, said, ‘After NIDA, you mean?’ and Stella said, ‘No, instead of,’ and Ali thought, Oh jeez, here we go.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Michael said. He paused, with his glass en route to his mouth, and looked intently at his younger daughter. Stella looked at Ali. Michael put his glass down and looked at Ali too.
‘Stella’s decided she doesn’t want to take up the place at NIDA,’ Ali said. She couldn’t think why she hadn’t told him. It was a huge oversight, for sure.
‘Oh,’ Michael said. ‘Nice of you to mention it. When was this decided?’
‘At Lismore,’ Stella said. ‘But it wasn’t, like, a big moment or anything. You were out in the ute, checking fences or something. We didn’t mean not to tell you.’
‘Not a big moment?’
‘Oh, Stella, you’re such a pain in the ass,’ Thea said, and she sighed heavily. ‘I suppose we’re going to have to talk about you all night again now.’
‘Who’s going to Portugal?’ Beatriz asked, beaming widely, bearing her stew to the table, entirely oblivious to the tension that had suddenly filled the room to its corners. She placed the pot in the centre of the table. ‘Now we can eat,’ she said.
‘You flew through that audition in November,’ Michael said to Stella. ‘They loved you. You were barely out the door before they offered you a place.’
‘Well, anyway,’ she said. ‘I’m not going.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘Mum!’ Stella said, appealing to Ali.
Michael took the ladle and began to dole out fish stew into the topmost bowl of a stack of five in front of him. Always, when they ate together like this, Michael dished up the food Beatriz had cooked. Why was this? thought Ali. Because his father had, before him. Because Beatriz understood him to be head of the household. Because Michael simply took charge, naturally, easily, without debate.
‘Michael,’ Ali said. ‘Let’s have this conversation later.’
‘Bad enough that she chooses drama in the first place,’ Michael said, shovelling at the shellfish and rattling mussels and clams into the waiting bowls. ‘But at least she aimed high with NIDA. Now, apparently, she’s not even prepared to do that.’
‘Dad!’ Stella said. Her eyes filled with angry tears.
Michael looked at her, his face grim. ‘Your IB score was phenomenal,’ he said. ‘Phenomenal. You could do anything, anything. Christ Almighty, it was better than Thea’s, and she’s a med student.’
‘Michael! Do not take the Lord’s name in vain,’ Beatriz said, and Thea said, ‘Cheers, Dad, appreciate that.’ She took the bowl he’d filled and passed it to Beatriz, the next to Ali, then Stella, then took one for herself. Michael filled the last bowl, then pushed what remained of the stew back to the centre of the table. Yellow with saffron, red with tomatoes, green with herbs, it looked ambrosial, but even Beatriz realised now that her food was no longer the main event.
‘If you think you’re loafing around Europe alone, think again,’ Michael said. He was deeply aggrieved, with Ali more than with Stella; he was pale with suppressed anger.
‘You’re going alone?’ Beatriz said.
‘I won’t be on my own, not at first,’ Stella said.
The girl was trying to speak levelly, trying not to betray her emotion. She was their rebel, always the one with her own agenda, but even so, thought Ali, she was still affected by her father’s disapproval. He had the knack of making her feel very young, very uncertain. But Stella had fought for her right to apply to drama school when he – and all her teachers – thought she was destined for languages at ANU. Now she’d fight for the right not to do drama either. Stella would win; Ali knew this.
‘I’m going to volunteer for three months with an NGO, in Italy,’ the girl said now.
Ali and Thea, both impressed by this statement, said, ‘Are you?’ at precisely the same time.
‘No,’ Michael said. ‘No, Stella. You. Are. Not.’
‘I don’t think you can stop her, Dad,’ Thea said, still narked by his reference to her IB score, which had indeed been three points lower than her sister’s.
‘I’d really prefer to discuss this later,’ Ali said. ‘Beatriz made this lovely food, we should all just enjoy it and postpone this conversation until after dinner.’
Beatriz dipped her head at Ali, in recognition of a point well made. Stella immediately said, ‘Yes, sorry, Beatriz, it’s the best, obrigada.’ Beatriz smiled at Stella, then for a few long seconds no one said anything. The sound of cutlery on china was awkwardly loud. Ali drank her wine, too quickly. Thea picked up a half-opened mussel shell and peered suspiciously at its insides, poked at it with a fork, then held it up to Beatriz, who nodded yes, it’s fine, eat it.
‘Stella,’ Michael said, and everyone looked at him. He wasn’t a man for dropping the subject if he hadn’t yet got his way. ‘You’ve shown me in the past three months that you’re not capable of looking after yourself. You can travel afterwards, do the degree you applied for first, do some growing up.’
Stella carefully put down her fork and spoon. ‘When I told Mum I didn’t want to go to uni, she just said, “Then don’t.”’
‘Right, well, that’s only because Mum doesn’t know what you’ll be missing.’
‘Excuse me?’ This was Ali. She reached for the bottle and refilled her wine glass.
‘I only mean, you didn’t go to university yourself,’ Michael said. ‘You didn’t even finish school. So you’re not the best judge.’
Ali laughed, without amusement. ‘No, Michael,’ she said. ‘It’s not because I’m ill-informed, it’s because I want Stella to make her own choices. She can go to NIDA next year, or the year after. They’ll take her – they’ve never auditioned a girl with her talent, that’s what they said.’
‘My point is,’ Michael said, ‘she’s too young to travel.’
‘I was only eighteen when you met me in Spain.’
Michael looked at his wife with an expression of incredulity that she should raise her own example to support her case. ‘Found you, not met you,’ he said. ‘I found you in Spain. And God alone knows where you’d be now if I hadn’t.’
Alison Connor had been sitting cross-legged on the ground, alone, in the shade of a stone archway within the medieval walls of Santo Domingo de la Calzada. She was wearing denim shorts, a plain khaki T-shirt adorned only with the words ‘Wild Willy Barrett’, and a pair of flat leather sandals. She had a cotton cap, also khaki, which was beside her on the floor, and a canvas bag, a kind of small satchel, which she wore diagonally across her body. Her face and limbs were tanned but those parts of her feet not covered by the worn leather of her sandals were the same pale grey as the dust on the street. Her dark brown hair was chopped to just above her shoulders, but rather haphazardly, as if she might have done it herself, with blunt scissors and no mirror. Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be resting, but she wasn’t out of place here; there were lots of footsore pilgrims breaking their journey in this lovely Spanish town, so the world flowed around and about her, as easily and naturally as a brook.
Michael McCormack stared at her until she woke up and looked at him.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How you going?’
She showed no surprise or concern at being observed by this stranger, only gazed at him placidly. He’d thought, at first, she might be begging, but he could see there was no cup for loose change, no sign hand-scrawled on cardboard. She was just a sleeping girl, who’d now woken up. He squatted, so that he no longer looked down on her. She had greenish-brown eyes and dark lashes, golden skin, a perfectly symmetrical face. He held out a hand, and said, ‘Michael, Michael McCormack,’ and, after a brief hesitation, she took it.
‘Alison Connor,’ she said.
‘Are you walking the Camino?’ he asked.
‘Pardon?’ She yawned and ran her hands across her face, then through her hair. He watched.
‘The trail, y’know, to Santiago?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Sort of. Are you?’
He laughed. He had a loaded pack, strong boots, wet-weather gear, a tent, a sleeping mat.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked. He tried to sound casual, as if it wasn’t essential she say yes.
‘You’re Australian,’ she said.
‘And you’re a Pom.’
She smiled. ‘I sort of know a woman in Australia.’
He stood up. ‘You don’t say? What’s her name? I’m sure to know her too.’
Alison found this funny, so she took his proffered hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. He was a handsome boy, wholesome-looking, with sandy-blond hair, broad shoulders and slim hips, a swimmer’s physique. He looked supremely fit and healthy, and wonderfully well organised, Alison thought. She’d met all types since accidentally becoming a pilgrim, and Michael McCormack belonged to the category she’d identified as mountaineer. He’d be perfectly at home at Everest base camp; he had all he needed to make a summit attempt.
They found a tiny bar and he ordered two beers. While they waited, she told him she’d walked here from Logroño with three German nuns, who’d felt good about sharing their loaf with her, and their cheese. Before that, she’d walked to Logroño from Los Arcos, to Los Arcos from Estella, to Estella from Puente la Reina. Sometimes she was alone, she said, but more often she’d walk alongside other people, who fell into step along the way.
‘Well, you’ll know what I mean. Folk just join you, don’t they, or you join them, and chat?’
He thought for a moment, and pictured narrow dusty tracks disappearing into infinity. ‘I think I walk too fast for that,’ he said.
Oh, Alison thought: a racer, then, a competitive type, not a mountaineer. She’d encountered a spirited Scottish woman a few days ago, bearing down on the dawdlers and amblers, calling out, ‘Single file, on the left, single file,’ as she forged her own path through.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘If you dawdle like me, you meet all sorts of people.’
‘But they don’t all speak English.’
Oh dear, she thought.
A waiter slid up to them, balancing their beers on a tin tray. He placed them on the table, along with a plate of tortilla, cut into narrow slices. Alison said, ‘Ah, gracias,’ and he winked at her, and grinned. Michael noted this; noted, also, the way she offered the plate to him first, before she took a piece herself.
‘So,’ he said, ‘where’s all your gear?’
‘Gear?’
‘For the trail?’
‘This is it,’ she said. ‘What you see is what I’ve got.’
‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘What’re you thinking of?’
She shrugged. ‘The Camino will provide, they say, and I reckon it has. I wasn’t planning to walk, I just set off one day. Got talking to a man and his daughter in Pamplona who said they were walking to Santiago de Compostela. They said, “Come with us,” so I did.’
Michael considered this statement, the miraculous simplicity of it. He’d been planning this adventure for eighteen months from his home in Adelaide. He’d pored over guidebooks, compared the relative merits of the different routes – distance and terrain, variety and natural beauty, the prevalence of historic landmarks, the best trail for medieval authenticity. Before he left South Australia, he’d had rooms booked at hostels and refugios all the way from Le Puy to Santiago. He had a thick wad of traveller’s cheques in his money belt, and an emergency private telephone number for the Australian Embassy in Madrid, where an old friend of his father was chargé d’affaires. All these contingencies had seemed not only prudent but also necessary, and it was only now, sitting with this pared-down, beautiful, reckless creature, that he felt foolishly over-prepared.
‘Where are they now, your Pamplona buddies?’
Alison shrugged. ‘No idea. They stopped in Laredo for two nights, but I just carried on. Are you walking on your own?’
Michael didn’t want to talk about himself, or think about himself, or about the hundreds of kilometres he still had to walk before this long, lonely journey came to an end. It hadn’t been what he’d hoped or expected. He’d anticipated enlightenment, anticipated learning something about history, or life, or himself. This was what the guidebooks promised, but instead, he seemed to be pitted endlessly against whoever was on the road in front of him. It struck him, forcefully, that he’d been doing the Camino all wrong. So he ignored her question, and asked another of his own.
‘Do you even have a map?’
She shook her head and laughed. ‘It’d be hard to go wrong, but to be honest, I don’t really mind if I get there or not,’ she said. ‘I’m not after spiritual insight, I’m just enjoying the walk. And people are kind. Incredibly kind. When somebody says, ‘Hola, buen camino!’ I just feel, y’know, cheerful, and part of this crazy joint endeavour. Don’t you? I hope you do, after all the effort you’ve gone to, all the kit you packed.’
He stared at her.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Where’ve you been sleeping?’
‘Wherever I can.’
‘Outdoors?’
‘Once or twice, but it’s been warm, hasn’t it?’
‘And do you have money?’
‘Not right now, but I can always get work in a bar, or a café, if I need to. In Pamplona, I ran the ticket office in a little cinema for a few weeks.’
God, he thought, that was seriously cool. He felt such a fool. A pampered fool.
‘You speak the lingo, I suppose?’
She nodded. ‘French, yep, and I didn’t speak Spanish, but I do now, sort of.’
He stared at her for a while, watching her drink, watching her throat as she swallowed, and then his gaze slid lower. ‘Who’s Wild Willy Barrett?’ he said, reading the words on her T-shirt. ‘Is he a cowboy?’
She laughed, a proper full-throated laugh, and he smiled to see it, the way she threw her head back, and her hair swung, and her eyes changed shape.
‘Not a cowboy then, I’m guessing,’ he said.
‘Not a cowboy,’ Alison said. ‘A musician. John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett? No? Anyway, I found this T-shirt at a jumble sale in Paris, and I figured it’d be wasted on the French, so I rescued it.’
Paris, thought Michael: a jumble sale in Paris, a cinema in Pamplona.
‘So,’ he said. ‘I now know who Wild Willy Barrett is, but who are you?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Who are you?’
She looked at him steadily. ‘I told you that already. Alison Connor.’
‘No, I mean, who are you? Are you for real?’
Daft question, she thought. What did he think? That she was a figment of his imagination? She drained her beer, and put the empty glass down on the table. ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘I’m for real.’ She stood up, and he felt a rush of panic. ‘Please don’t go,’ he said. He wanted to say never leave my side, but what kind of weirdo would say that on first acquaintance? As it was she was regarding him with uncertainty, as if she felt a little sorry for him, and couldn’t quite decide what to do. He stood up too, and dug into his pocket for some pesetas, which he piled in a heap on the table.
‘That’ll be about three times too much,’ Alison said. ‘You’ll make his week.’
He couldn’t place her English accent; she sounded nothing like any of the Brits he knew in Adelaide, and as they walked away from the bar he asked her where she was from, but she only smiled and shook her head. ‘That’s a very un-Camino question,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know it’s all about where you’re going, not where you’ve come from?’
‘Right,’ he said. He was aware that he was following her now, uninvited, but she didn’t seem to mind. He adjusted the enormous pack, silently cursing its weight, and the way the camping stove dug into the small of his back.
She glanced at him. ‘What exactly have you got in there, pilgrim?’ she said. She was laughing at him again, and he couldn’t blame her. There was she, unfettered. There was he, with a world of material trappings on his back.
‘Where you off to now, Alison?’ he asked. ‘And wherever it is, can I tag along?’
She stopped walking and gave him a long, considering look. She liked his smile, his straight white teeth, and she liked his pale blue eyes, the way they watched her. She liked his eagerness, his gung-ho demeanour, his good-natured acceptance that she might find him slightly ridiculous. She didn’t mind that he didn’t know Wild Willy Barrett; she didn’t mind that at all.
She’d been on the move now for a year, living on her wits, working here and there, taking favours from strangers, hitching down through France and into Spain, never really settling, never really putting down even the most tender, slender root, and this had been exactly what she’d needed, this all-consuming nomadic life, and yet it was so tiring. So tiring. And here was this young Australian man, a man from across the globe, who knew nothing about her, nothing at all, but he wanted her, she could see that, he might as well have been carrying a banner declaring it, and his expression was so endearingly hopeful.
‘Have you seen the cockerel and the hen in the cathedral?’ she asked.
‘Chooks in church?’
She laughed. ‘Yeah. There was a miracle here, involving poultry.’
He smiled and said, ‘Lead on,’ and she felt a kind of mellow contentment, a kind of settling, as the past retreated further still.
The girls had gone to their rooms, Beatriz too, by the time Michael heard from Ali all of Stella’s very sound reasons for not wanting to stay in Adelaide this year, not wanting to hang out with the crowd that included Mystery Boy, with whom she’d had unprotected sex in a beach house at Victor Harbor, just once, and whom she ardently wished never to see again. Michael heard, but he didn’t bend. Stella must go to NIDA was his verdict; she’d be in Sydney, well away from the orbit of anyone she didn’t wish to see. Next, he did what he considered the right thing, and apologised to Ali for yet again peddling the old family legend, the McCormack Myth, that she, Ali, would be nothing without him. But it was only a half-apology, could only ever be such, because in his heart Michael did believe that he’d saved her: saved her from the unknown, unmet catastrophe that must surely have awaited her, travelling through Europe without the protection of family, or contacts, or money. Ali saw the past differently, remembered Michael as the hapless one, with his checklists and safety nets and back-up plans. She was proud of her own resourcefulness in those months abroad, away from home for the first time, although God knows her home life had taught her everything she needed to know, and more, about looking after herself.
But Michael had drawn her in, with his jaunty Aussie ways and stories of the bush. He made his boyhood adventures on the family sheep station sound like the kid’s in Skippy. Alison had loved that show, because somewhere in the same parched landscape lived Sheila, the lady who’d written the letters to Catherine, and now, in Spain, she had Michael telling her that if Sheila still lived in Elizabeth, he could drive her there from Adelaide in no time, half an hour, forty minutes max, and he’d gladly do it, gladly, then he’d bring her back to the city, to his beautiful North Adelaide home, and they’d drink daiquiris on the verandah, and watch the cockatoos pick plums from the trees. She found this a fantastical proposition, sparkling with allure, but Michael kept saying, ‘It’s not fantasy, it’s not fiction, it’s Adelaide life, there for the taking.’
They’d stayed together, of course, in Spain. They’d walked the remaining 540-odd kilometres of the Camino trail, and she’d slept with him in his pre-booked hostels, and – occasionally – talked him into sleeping outside, to be stirred at dawn by the clank of bells as goats on their way to be milked slid down stony paths on a dry and fragrant hillside. In Santiago, Michael had queued with a couple of hundred fellow pilgrims, waiting for the cathedral authorities to issue him with his certificate of completion, while Alison, who felt she didn’t qualify and anyway couldn’t see the point of paperwork to prove what they’d done, hung back and waited for him, sitting on the edge of a fountain in Platerías Square. The cold water on her hot feet was everything she needed in the world, but anyway an old Spanish lady had blessed her with a torrent of Galician prayer and a dry, papery kiss to the forehead.
Then Alison and Michael had journeyed together, up through southern France and into Italy. For three weeks, they harvested grapes in a vineyard in Umbria, then travelled on down through the length of the boot to Puglia. She acquired a rucksack of her own, and new clothes: a gauzy pink cotton dress, a green silk shirt, a white linen skirt, blue espadrilles. Michael bought these items for her, pleaded – when she resisted – to be allowed to indulge her, and she had to admit it was pleasant to submit, after so many months of scraping by on so little. Michael was besotted. Bewitched. He, who had everything, wanted only Alison Connor. At Gargano he proposed, but it was a whole week later, in the white baroque city of Lecce, that she said yes. In Ostuni, Michael’s money having eased their passage through municipal bureaucracy, they were married by the registrar before witnesses who didn’t know them, and on the same day they sailed from Brindisi to Kefalonia, from where they island-hopped for another month, before making the long, long way back to Adelaide, Mr and Mrs McCormack, Michael and Alison, Michael and Ali.
She’d had nothing to lose, back then; nothing but her absolute freedom, and she’d placed no great value upon that. Freedom had been born of necessity, in Alison’s case, and she’d known she could learn to love this man, because he loved her so much, and such devotion, she’d felt, ought to be rewarded. She had loved him. She did love him. Yes, she’d lost something of herself over the years, but perhaps he had too, perhaps it was a condition of a long marriage that part of one’s spirit must be sacrificed, in exchange for material comfort, children, companionship. Certainly, at some point soon after her arrival in Adelaide, she’d found herself conceding that the McCormack way was the only way; as a united front, they were irresistible, and irrefutable. Alison Connor was enveloped by them, she was claimed by the clan, and it was comforting, in so many ways, to succumb.
She glanced up at Michael, now, across the kitchen. He’d said sorry so easily, so glibly, for being high-handed and condescending, and was idly leafing through The Advertiser, perfectly satisfied with his behaviour. He didn’t know that his world was unsteady, that his word wasn’t always law, that Stella was upstairs looking at flights to Rome. He didn’t know that Ali, from this very room, had just sent a song to Dan Lawrence: the Arctic Monkeys, ‘Do I Wanna Know?’, a song Michael wouldn’t know, a Sheffield sound, from Sheffield lads.
He didn’t know how the lyrics made Ali feel, didn’t know, couldn’t know, how they spoke to her. He didn’t know – when Ali finished her wine, stood up, said goodnight – that by looking up from the newspaper and smiling at her, or by putting down the newspaper and kissing her, something small but significant might have been salvaged. But he did neither of these things, so she turned from him and went upstairs to bed.