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.