‘Do you remember it?’
‘I remember random snatches of surreal happenings. But look, I didn’t ring you to reminisce. How’s your diary?’
‘Depends,’ Dan said.
‘Hmm, cagey.’
‘I’m just saying I’m pretty committed, but what you got?’
‘Well it’s a long shot, and it’s very last minute, and you’ll tell me it’s not your thing …’
‘If you think it’s not my thing, Terri, it won’t be.’
‘Dan! Hear me out at least!’
‘Go on then.’
‘So we’ve signed a few DJs, right, and they’re part of an all-night linked set at—’
‘No, I’m not covering a rave for you, all that bloody zoned-out trance stuff.’
‘No, Dan, this isn’t a nineties rave, it’s an electronic dance music festival, and these guys are album-selling career artists.’
Dan sighed, and idly opened his emails on the laptop. ‘No, Terri,’ he said. ‘C’mon, ask a twenty-one-year-old.’
But she was good, Terri Nichols. ‘See, that’s just what I don’t want,’ she said now. ‘I don’t want some kid with no memories of music before the Spice Girls. I want you, with everything you know about music, everything you’ve heard, to listen to them and explain their creative genius to everyone else.’
Dan groaned. ‘Oh, give over.’
‘Honestly, there’s a great piece in this, Dan. These artists work just as hard as an old-fashioned rock band. They tour, just the same, they put in the graft and the grind. Plus, the location’s knockout, in Kowloon’s cultural district.’
‘What? Where is it? I thought you meant here, in the UK?’
She laughed. ‘No, no, it’s in Hong Kong.’
‘Hong Kong?’
‘Yep, Hong Kong. Kowloon.’
He was quiet for a moment.
‘Dan, you still there?’
He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, go on, I’m listening,’ and while she talked, he let his mind race along another track entirely. Hong Kong to Adelaide, he thought: what would it be, eight hours, nine tops? A hop and a skip in global terms. So here was Terri Nichols offering a free long-haul flight in the right direction, for a nailed-on legitimate reason, thereby providing the salve for his conscience of an almost-perfect alibi. It was fate, he thought. An early birthday present from his own personal deity. In-fucking-credible.
‘Yes,’ he said, cutting right through her words. ‘Yes, I’m in.’
Terri’s voice skidded to a halt and she laughed. ‘Well, great,’ she said. ‘But you don’t know when it is yet.’
‘When is it?’
‘Next weekend. You’d fly Wednesday the thirtieth.’
His thoughts spun rapidly to the meeting with the publisher, to lunch with his agent, to the Thursday morning 6 Music gig with Lauren Laverne, to the writing commitments he had, yet none of these things held his full attention in the face of this barely believable turn of events. That this should happen, that Terri should call with this offer, on this very day, was insane. It was perfect. It was meant to be.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘No problem. Thanks, Terri, email me the details,’ and he hung up, and gave a great shout of laughter that woke the dog, who stared at Dan with reproachful eyes.
‘Sorry, buddy,’ he said to McCulloch. ‘You’re not going to like this.’
Of course, the dog was an issue. Dan would be gone for ten days, and old Bridie next door who opened the back door for McCulloch if he was stuck in the house all day couldn’t be asked to feed him, walk him and keep him company for this length of time. Or rather, she could be asked, but she would never agree, not with her four cats and a houseful of demanding orchids. His parents might once have taken him, but not now, not with Bill the way he was. He couldn’t ask Duncan, because McCulloch would certainly die from neglect. He almost asked Terri Nichols, because she was so grateful to him for accepting the gig, and she had no idea, none at all, that she’d articulated and facilitated his greatest desire before he’d even had the idea himself. It was so outrageous, so bold, and yet utterly legitimate. She didn’t bat an eyelid at extending the trip for him – shame to go all that way and not have a mooch around, she said – and this timescale gave Dan the freedom to fly from Hong Kong to Adelaide, before coming back to pick up his return flight. If Alison turned out not to be there, well … No, he thought; she had to be there. She would be there.
Anyway, he didn’t have to ask Terri to take the dog in the end, because he suddenly remembered dear old Jim on Veronica Ann: dear, lonely old Jim. He’d met McCulloch once before, must be ten years ago now, when Dan and Alex had had a weekend in London to watch Wednesday v. Crystal Palace, but Katelin had made them take the dog. They’d left him all day with Jim, and by the time they got back from Selhurst Park, McCulloch was sitting on the prow of the boat with a navy-blue bandana round his throat. ‘Ship’s mascot,’ Jim had said. ‘Splendid little chap. Bring him to me any time you like, Dan, any time you like.’
So, all this time later, Dan had taken him at his word, and had evidently made Jim’s week. ‘Smashing,’ he kept saying. ‘Smashing. A nice bit of company for me. We’ll get on splendidly.’ He stood with the dog on a lead the next day to wave Dan off, and McCulloch watched him go with a committed stare, which he kept up until the very last glimpse of his beloved owner was gone. Dan could feel the dog’s eyes on his back; he could sense them, all the way down the towpath to Warwick Avenue.
At Heathrow, he left a voicemail for Alex, to let him know he’d be away, although the chances of Alex caring were close to nil, given the pace of his life in Cambridge: the work, the girls, the gigs. Nice to hear his recorded voice though; it called him very much to mind, so that Dan could see his son’s intelligent brown eyes, his charming smile, his dark, unkempt hair. They were so alike: the boy’s colouring, height, sense of humour, hopeless passion for Wednesday – all his father’s. If there’d been another baby, it would’ve looked like Katelin, Dan was sure of this, a little Celt, pale skin and reddish hair. But she’d only wanted one child, and it had to be her call in the end, although as the years had passed Dan had sometimes found himself missing the other one, missing perhaps the other two, wondering who they might have been.
He had no bag to check in, he travelled light and always with the same canvas holdall; it’d been everywhere with him, seen it all. His business-class ticket gained him a seat in a chic, capacious lounge, free newspapers, food, wine, beer, but he found himself in a contemplative mood and so he just sat in a leather armchair looking out over the tarmac, where the ground crew loaded suitcases into the belly of the plane he’d soon be on. He reflected on this leap of faith he was about to take, and considered the limits of his own certainties. He had to see Alison Connor and his belief in the feelings she had stirred in him was rock solid, yet beyond this he could not say exactly what he wanted, or how this would end. He knew he was acting selfishly, chasing her down through the lost years to see her again and discover if such a person, so perfectly constructed in body and mind to suit his own, could possibly exist. But he had to see this through. Yes, it was an act of treachery, but of all the choices, large and small, that had helped construct his life so far, none felt more imperative than his decision to fly to Adelaide from Hong Kong, to find Alison.
He checked his phone. Details from Terri of the DJs he was seeing. A rescheduled meeting with the publisher. Confirmation from 6 Music that his gig with them would start after his return. And a song, from Ali Connor. He opened the link and stared at this gift, this frank and open-hearted gesture, and felt a pulse of pure love for her for sending the Pretenders, and of all their songs, this song. ‘I Go To Sleep’. Love and lust and plaintive regret.
He knew she’d be there when he got to Adelaide, knew it as he’d never known anything before, knew it in his gut. Knew she was there now, too: thinking about him, thinking about her.
21
ADELAIDE,
3 FEBRUARY 2013
Michael had invited a couple of his friends for dinner, people Ali barely knew: Moira Thiemann, a newly appointed consultant paediatrician at the hospital, and her husband Greg Golding, who was something high up in the state’s Environment Protection Authority. So that it wouldn’t just be the four of them, Ali asked Cass to come along, and, as Cass was currently without a boyfriend, she asked Tahnee Jackson too, so the numbers wouldn’t be odd.
‘Tahnee Jackson?’ Michael said. ‘That’s a bit passive-aggressive.’
Ali said, ‘Why, because your mother will be spinning in her grave?’
‘No, because you’re pissed off that I don’t like your philanthropy scheme, which you’re determined to plough ahead with anyway.’
‘Michael, I didn’t invite her to score a point,’ Ali said, trying to keep her voice level. ‘I asked her because she’s become a friend,’ but Michael only laughed and said, ‘Sure, right.’ Then Ali told him to change his tone because it sounded ugly, and he said well, he couldn’t say anything right, so what the hell.
This was how things often were these days with Michael, and this was why: Ali had gifted a trust fund to an Arts South Australia scheme to support indigenous musicians, and had also, as well as this, begun funding Tahnee’s career, while at the same time Stella had officially withdrawn from her place at NIDA and was now planning a year’s travel in Europe; and to each of these developments Michael was vehemently opposed. He had passionately, volubly opposed them – but then had to deal with the novelty of failure when his opinion hadn’t prevailed, which was tough for him, because he wasn’t used to dissent; he’d had very little practice, by and large. Sure, Stella had given him a run for his money these past couple of years, when, on turning fifteen, she’d been inhabited by a rebel version of her own sweet self, but from Ali he’d only ever had agreement, even if sometimes it’d been lukewarm. All their lives together she’d tended to bend softly to his will, give way to his point of view. Now, though, she was standing her ground, defending her own plans and Stella’s, and giving their youngest daughter all the support she needed – which wasn’t much, in fact, because Stella was resolute.
‘Ah, Dad, chill, I’ll just apply again,’ she said to Michael blithely. ‘They’ll take me another time if they like me that much. They’ll like me even more with some life experience behind me.’
She was leaving for Italy soon, now she’d made her mind up to bail on NIDA, and there was no one in Adelaide she wanted to hang out with any more anyway, no one she even wanted to bump into in a chance encounter in the mall or at the beach. There was a year group party coming up in late February, a lavish formal event at a house in the hills, and it was her ardent wish to be long gone before the photos hit Facebook. This made no sense to Michael, who repeated with futile persistence that drama school in Sydney – surely, surely – would take her far enough away from her demons in Adelaide? But no, Stella said. No. She wanted continents between herself and her mistake; she wanted a hemisphere between them. The boy – the one she still wouldn’t name – had bragged about his conquest at Victor Harbor, Stella had told Ali that much at least. Bragged about it and, by so doing, unleashed a scandalfest, a gossip free-for-all, and the peculiar, odious, judgemental piety of a whole bunch of seventeen-year-old girls towards their erstwhile friend. ‘I hate them all,’ Stella said. ‘They’re mean and petty, and I want to start all over again, as if none of it had ever happened. I want to erase them all.’
‘You can do that in Sydney, darling,’ Michael said.
‘Dad, no!’ she said. ‘How many times? I can’t do that in Sydney, I need to escape, I need somewhere completely different. Mum understands, don’t you, Mum?’
Ali nodded. ‘Totally,’ she said.
‘What a surprise,’ Michael said.
Ali and Stella stared at him and Ali opened her mouth to speak, but then the doorbell rang, and it was Moira and Greg, here in the McCormack home for the first time, bearing flowers and wine and wide smiles, so the subject was closed.
Oh, but it all felt wrong, from the start. In the first instance, there was the perennial difficulty of how to explain Beatriz, because it was always so hard to find the right tone when introducing her to new people. Michael tended to say, ‘And this is Beatriz, she’s the real boss around here,’ which somehow always seemed to imply the opposite: that if there was a boss, it was probably him, and it certainly wasn’t Beatriz. Ali’s favoured introduction was: ‘This is Beatriz, she lives with us here,’ but this still left unclear the matter of why Beatriz should share their home; was she a lodger? Had she been taken in off the streets? Tonight, the questions hung only briefly in the air between guests and hosts before Beatriz herself made it clear, in a long and convoluted greeting, that she was uniquely useful to this household. When Moira and Greg arrived she’d been heading out to a church social, swathed in purple chiffon, but she stayed on, half in and half outside the house, to offer an expansive explanation of how to make authentic piri-piri chicken and then to give Michael unnecessary instructions for the slow and steady grilling of said chicken, how to apply the sauce to the cooked meat – with a bunch of parsley, never with a brush – and finally to urge and insist that all washing up should be left for her return, this last being the only one of her instructions that would be roundly ignored. There was a brief hiatus after she’d gone, as there might be following a small earth tremor, then Ali said, ‘So, congratulations, you’ve been well and truly Beatriz’d,’ and Moira and Greg laughed a little uncertainly. Then Cass showed up, already slightly merry, waving a clanking bag from the bottle shop, and Tahnee appeared just afterwards, straight from the airport, and so Stella – who hadn’t realised Tahnee was coming – asked if she could join them for dinner, which of course was fine, except that Greg turned out to be in charge of the radiation protection division of the EPA, and Stella had done her Year 12 research project on the continued contamination at the Maralinga nuclear-testing sites, and Tahnee’s grandfather – it transpired, as the conversation blundered on – had been among the scores and scores of indigenous people hounded off their ancestral land in the fifties and sixties by white men in army vehicles, so that the area could be experimentally nuked by the British government.
Michael stood at the barbecue, listening to the steady unravelling of the evening he’d had in mind. He waited for Tahnee to finish what she was saying, then cleared his throat. ‘This chicken’s done,’ he said. ‘Just needs the sauce now. Hope everyone’s hungry.’
They were seated outside, under the hibiscus pergola, and there were tea lights in small tin lanterns, flames dancing like fireflies down the centre of the table. Tahnee, who was a thoughtful young woman possessed of a quiet, watchful confidence, said, ‘These are difficult subjects for such a lovely gathering,’ and Greg looked fractionally less uncomfortable. Michael began to anoint the chicken with piri-piri sauce, carefully, meticulously, with his surgeon’s concentration and the big bunch of parsley Beatriz had left for the purpose.
‘They were such different times,’ Moira said. She’d shown a tendency this evening to speak in platitudes, but Greg looked at her now and nodded sagely, as if her remark showed great insight.
‘They were,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Stella said. ‘Very different, if it was OK for Britain to turn a piece of South Australia into radioactive wasteland.’
‘Indeed,’ Greg said, ignoring her combative tone. ‘Cold War values.’
‘Australia sucking up to the Brits, more like,’ Stella said, ‘and nobody’s ever been held properly accountable for it.’
‘It’s all been cleaned up, y’know, Stella,’ Moira said.
‘It has,’ Greg said. ‘More than once, and, sure, there’s still a low-level risk, but we’re well within international guidelines these days.’
‘I spoke to a fella who told me plutonium’s considered dangerous for about a quarter of a million years,’ Stella said. ‘Hashtag, just saying.’
‘Stella, will you fetch the salad?’ Michael sai
d.
She shot him a look, but stood at once, and went into the kitchen, and Tahnee said, ‘My grandfather seemed to know that without any understanding of atomic science.’
‘How do you mean?’ Cass asked. She was having a far better time than she’d expected. She liked a tense dinner table, it made a nice change, and these McCormack occasions clearly benefited from a nuclear-powered rocket up the metaphorical arse. Cass didn’t really mind Michael McCormack, he was a bit of a stuffed shirt, a bit pompous and entitled, but the wine he served was always first rate, and he was a big improvement on that old scoundrel, McCormack Senior. But still, she much preferred having Ali to herself. Every time. Any day of the week. Cass waved the Pinot Noir at her friend, and she smiled regretfully and shook her head, because she’d promised Tahnee a lift back to Port Adelaide later, but Greg pushed his glass forwards for a refill, and Moira frowned and said, ‘Ah, I see, I’ll drive then.’
‘I mean, my grandfather totally understood the land was toxic,’ Tahnee said. ‘They all did, all his family, even years later, after it’d been declared fit for hunting. He used to tell me the kangaroos had yellow insides.’
Ali said, ‘Where did your grandfather go?’
Tahnee shrugged. ‘They were all moved to a mission. Whole new set of problems there.’
Stella said. ‘It’s all in my paper, Mum.’ She was back with the salad.
‘Jeez,’ Cass said. ‘Yellow roos.’
Greg said, ‘Look, I’m not an apologist for what happened out there,’ and Michael, coming to the table with the platter of burnished grilled chicken, said, ‘Of course you aren’t, Greg, and anyway it was nineteen fifty-six, way before your time, mate,’ and Tahnee cleared her throat and said, ‘Well, our way of life was destroyed long before nineteen fifty-six, Michael,’ and he said, ‘Sure, yeah, yeah, of course. Well, dig in, help yourselves.’
‘Michael, this looks just wonderful,’ Moira said. She was stick-thin though, her chest almost concave beneath her flimsy dress, and she only looked at the chicken, then didn’t take any. Instead, Greg helped himself to double, and sent the platter on its way round the table.
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