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.