Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Five minutes or so, and we’re on. That’s enough cheese, Dan, we’re not feeding the street.’

  She poured herself a glass of white wine from a bottle already started in the fridge, then sat down opposite him. ‘You’re in a strange mood,’ she said. ‘Bogotá, earrings.’

  He shrugged and got up to help himself to another beer. These were strange times, he could have said; strange days, indeed. He wondered what time it was in Adelaide.

  ‘God, I’m looking forward to taking off,’ Katelin said. She hooked up her left foot and massaged it through her tights. ‘I’ve earned this trip.’

  She was leaving in a week for the States. For a while, it had all seemed in jeopardy, when Duncan had briefly left home for his rock chick, and Rose-Ann had fallen apart, swinging between fury and grief. But Duncan had been back before Christmas and Rose-Ann was triumphant. Lindsay hadn’t needed him at all, she’d just wanted him from time to time, and while at first she’d made him feel wonderfully young, in the end – and very quickly – she only made him feel terribly old. So Rose-Ann had taken him back, and now he was having his balls cauterised – very, very slowly. It was depressing to see them together, Dan thought. His friend would never get off the back foot now.

  ‘Dan?’

  He looked at Katelin. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Don’t let everything go to pot while I’m gone, will you?’

  ‘Oh, give over,’ Dan said. He poked at the pasta. ‘This is ready, by the way.’

  ‘Drain it then, but put a splash of the water in the sauce. To be fair, I did just find you half-cut, in the dark, listening to God only knows what.’

  ‘Rory Gallagher,’ Dan said. ‘Irish lad. You ought to know that.’ He tipped the spaghetti into the colander, then tipped it out of the colander and into the sauce. Back on the heat, it spluttered and hissed.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Katelin said. ‘Just don’t.’

  ‘Look, while you’re away, I’ll do what I always do, which is write about music, listen to music, stare at the wall and sometimes drink beer in the dark. Oh,’ he said, remembering a phone call he’d had much earlier that day, ‘I had a call from Tess at Six Music today. They want me on a regular slot, some kind of panel, me and a couple of other hacks.’

  She said, ‘Good,’ in that tone she sometimes used that drove him nuts. He’d by no means decided to do it – it was a Thursday morning gig, and getting to Media City in Salford every Wednesday night wasn’t the most tempting offer he’d ever had. But there was Katelin with her encouraging, condescending ‘good’, as if he’d been slogging away fruitlessly for years and had finally had a lucky break.

  ‘Good, why?’ he said.

  She raised her eyebrows, as if it was obvious. ‘Regular work.’

  ‘Katelin, I do regular work, but I do it in an irregular fashion, and it’s never let us down yet.’

  ‘No, I know, but there’s always that feeling it could all dry up.’

  He stared at her over the top of his beer bottle. ‘No, there isn’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t have that feeling.’

  ‘You know what you should do? You should write another book.’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, should I?’

  ‘It’s a while since that last one, the Made in Sheffield thing.’

  The Made in Sheffield thing. A book he’d written that Katelin had never read, about music she’d never listened to. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘All in good time. Most music books don’t sell. They don’t dole out advances like they used to.’

  ‘But you have too much time on your hands.’

  ‘Katelin, that’s bollocks!’

  ‘Well, you do!’ she said, gesturing at him with her free hand as if he was exhibit A, the living embodiment of an under-employed journalist.

  ‘No, I don’t, I’m up to my neck in work.’

  ‘Good,’ she said again cheerfully, to properly convey her scepticism. ‘Great. So let’s eat.’

  Later, up in his eyrie, he worked late into the night. He wrote a piece about Bon Iver for Uncut, another for the Quietus about a new Bunnymen album slated for the end of the year. He made a start on the sleeve notes for a remastered album by The Clash, rehashed an interview with Ian McCulloch for the Guardian, read his piece on Pitchfork about the top 50 indie albums of 2012, replied to nine emails, then took a call from a journalist on Rolling Stone, who wanted his thoughts for a piece about Hunter S. Thompson. Katelin, watching television downstairs, then going to bed at half past ten, was unaware of his endeavours. This was how it was. This was the kernel of the problem. Katelin had no real idea what he did. It was his world, not hers, and ne’er the twain would meet. He’d realised many years ago that Katelin had always thought the music writing would give way to … oh, something more respectable, she didn’t know what exactly, but something less sketchy than his present existence. Nothing Dan had ever done or said had encouraged her in these beliefs, it was just the way of the world in her view, the natural progression of things, and she couldn’t understand why all those years of experience didn’t amount to a proper job in an office, rather than merely more of the same. He knew what he was doing though, he always had, and hadn’t everything worked out? He’d written the books he wanted to write, he’d made some money, and still did, one way or another. Granted, it had its frustrations; he spent at least a day a week chasing up unpaid invoices, and the rate for those online pieces was pitiful, but the money always rolled in from somewhere, and he’d never, in all his working life, had a bad day at the office. Just, now and again, a bad day at home.

  He picked up his phone, checked the time. It was half past two. As ever, the screen was a bunfight, a string of people vying for his attention, but only one caught his eye. Ali Connor sent you a direct message. He must, he really must, switch off these Twitter notifications, the very last thing he needed was Katelin catching sight of that name on his screen, at this delicate point in their lives together. But she was fast asleep, and for now, he just navigated his way swiftly to Ali’s message and saw that she hadn’t answered his bombardment of musical artillery with a link to a song, but instead had sent only a line, a lyric he supposed, and one he recognised, yet couldn’t quite place: And I feel your warmth and it feels like home.

  He stared at the row of simple words, processing them, waiting for enlightenment. It didn’t take long. Depeche Mode, ‘Here Is The House’. Oh, this woman was pure class. He stared at the message she’d typed for him, hoping for more, somehow; trying to wring some intention from the handful of words, but he found he could speak only for himself, and he knew he had no defences. None. She was utterly compelling, she was spinning through time, she was his once more; he could almost feel the softness of her skin again, the softness of her hair. He rested his forehead on the cool steel of his desk and waited for the violent longing to subside. Christ Almighty, he was inhabited by her and it was driving him out of his mind.

  Then he sat up. This is what he would do – he’d go to her. He would. He’d just turn up in Adelaide and see if this was real. The ethics of the scheme, the deception and daring – none of this clouded his mind right now. It was perfectly simple, entirely necessary. On his phone, he opened their thread and replied in kind with a lyric, a perfect snippet of Bunnymen genius, from ‘All That Jazz’. He watched it go, wondered when she’d see it, and if she knew it.

  See you at the barricades, babe.

  She probably wouldn’t guess, but it was full of intention; he meant what he said. He pushed back the chair and walked across his office to the wall with the world map, and traced a line with his eyes from Scotland all the long way across and down, down, down to South Australia. There’s my girl, he thought; there’s my girl, with another guy.

  The sooner he got himself to the front line, the better.

  18

  ADELAIDE,

  23 JANUARY 2013

  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.