Two Steps Onward

by Graeme Simsion

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Three years after life got in the way of their long-distance relationship, Californian artist Zoe and English engineer Martin have an unexpected opportunity to reunite: a second chance to follow in the footsteps of pilgrims in Europe.

  This time, they won’t be walking the famous Camino de Santiago to north-west Spain but the less-travelled Chemin d’Assise and Via Francigena to Rome, along the mountainous paths from rural France.

  And rather than each setting off solo, they will accompany Zoe’s old friend Camille—who, despite her life-threatening illness, insists she will walk the whole sixteen hundred kilometres to seek an audience with the Pope—and her not-so-ex-husband, Gilbert, who sees the trip as a gourmet tour.

  Then Bernhard, Martin’s young nemesis from the previous trek, shows up, along with Martin’s daughter, Sarah, who is having a quarter-life crisis and doesn’t exactly hit it off with Zoe…

  Two Steps Onward is the wise, witty and wine-filled follow-up to Two Steps Forward, Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist’s bestselling novel about walking the Camino. it’s about helping the people you love, and knowing when to let go. Figuring out what you really want in life. And seizing your chances, before it’s too late.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  MAPS

  1 ZOE

  2 MARTIN

  3 ZOE

  4 MARTIN

  5 ZOE

  6 MARTIN

  7 ZOE

  8 MARTIN

  9 ZOE

  10 MARTIN

  11 ZOE

  12 MARTIN

  13 ZOE

  14 MARTIN

  15 ZOE

  16 MARTIN

  17 ZOE

  18 MARTIN

  19 ZOE

  20 MARTIN

  21 ZOE

  22 MARTIN

  23 ZOE

  24 MARTIN

  25 ZOE

  26 MARTIN

  27 ZOE

  28 MARTIN

  29 ZOE

  30 MARTIN

  31 ZOE

  32 MARTIN

  33 ZOE

  34 MARTIN

  35 ZOE

  36 MARTIN

  37 ZOE

  38 MARTIN

  39 ZOE

  40 MARTIN

  41 ZOE

  42 MARTIN

  43 ZOE

  44 MARTIN

  45 ZOE

  46 MARTIN

  47 ZOE

  48 MARTIN

  49 ZOE

  50 MARTIN

  51 ZOE

  52 MARTIN

  53 ZOE

  54 MARTIN

  55 ZOE

  56 MARTIN

  57 ZOE

  58 MARTIN

  59 ZOE

  60 MARTIN

  61 ZOE

  62 MARTIN

  63 ZOE

  64 MARTIN

  65 ZOE

  66 MARTIN

  67 ZOE

  68 MARTIN

  69 ZOE

  70 MARTIN

  71 ZOE

  72 MARTIN

  73 ZOE

  74 MARTIN

  75 ZOE

  76 MARTIN

  77 ZOE

  78 MARTIN

  79 ZOE

  80 MARTIN

  81 ZOE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1

  ZOE

  Fate announced itself as a buzzing in the pocket of my jeans.

  The guy running the team-building workshop for the refugee centre where I volunteered was checking off the clichés: altruism without empathy is like a ship without a rudder; a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. That one I’d lived. But since when did helping people get so complicated?

  My mind was on the homework he’d set. Be prepared to discuss three events that have defined your life. I could only think of two.

  The first was at college: I’d helped my roommate Camille get a termination. It had meant a road trip across the country, from St Louis to Los Angeles, estrangement from my religious mother, and the beginning of the kind of thinking that had brought me to where I was and who I was.

  The second was the death of my husband, Keith, in a car accident. My search for answers and healing led me first to Camille’s home in Cluny, in eastern France, and then to a single step that turned into a twelve-hundred-mile walk along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the ancient pilgrims’ path, from Camille’s door to the west coast of Spain. I had come back stronger—strong enough to say that my career was more important than moving to England to live with Martin, the engineer I’d fallen for on the walk.

  But three years later, here I was, in a hotel meeting room, surrounded by negative energy, while outside the sun caught the white caps across San Francisco’s harbour. I took out my phone: an email from some guy called Gilbert Morvan with a .fr address. Were scammers now posing as Frenchmen?

  Then I remembered: he was Camille’s ex-husband. I typed my PIN, and fate showed its face.

  Camille will make a pilgrimage on the Chemin d’Assise to Rome to see the Pope.

  What the hell? Gilbert was Camille’s ex. They’d split up just after I finished the Camino.

  And the Pope? Camille was Catholic, but when we were roommates in college, the most piousness I’d seen was a quick visit to the priest for a confession so she could sin some more. Always the same sin. She liked men. Today, I’d say she was conflicted. Back then I just thought she was a hypocrite. Not for screwing around: for going to church.

  Plus, the Chemin d’Assise is a walking track. There are only two long-distance trails that go through Cluny: the other is the Camino de Santiago. Camille had watched me pack for that walk, freaking out at the idea of living for three months without makeup. She liked discount designer labels, sexy lingerie and Chanel perfume. Not merino-wool shirts, sports bras and a chip of soap carried from hostel to hostel. No way was she walking to Rome.

  I was right, but in the worst way.

  Camille has multiple sclerosis. She is unable to travel without assistance. We are reunited. We will depart Friday.

  So don’t try to talk us out of it. Friday was three days away. And it seemed she was making her pilgrimage for the most traditional of reasons: the hope of a cure.

  My neighbour nudged me. The facilitator was looking right at me and my phone. ‘It’s not enough to talk the talk…’

  I stood up and headed to the door.

  ‘Everything okay, Zoe?’ the facilitator asked.

  ‘I’m walking the walk.’

  I read the rest of Gilbert’s email in the street. Most of it was practical stuff. How far can one travel in a day? Is there air conditioning in the hostels? What did women wear in the evenings?

  I’d heard of people doing the pilgrim trails in wheelchairs, following the cycling routes. I pictured Camille, stereotypically French in stiletto heels, being pushed by Gilbert along a dirty highway, trucks bearing down on her.

  A thought struck me: maybe I could get a hold of the cart that Martin had pulled from Cluny to Santiago: it had been redesigned as an all-terrain gurney for the army. Camille could travel on the walking tracks and avoid the traffic.

  I hadn’t reached out to Martin for three years. He’d taken my decision to stay in San Francisco and follow my dream of being an artist as a rejection—which I guess it was. I’d told myself it was just a vacation fling. It had been harder to let go of than I’d thought it would be, but the Camino isn’t life.

  Camille and I had only seen each other once in twenty-eight years. That single day at her home in Cluny had been enough to send me escaping in the direction of Spain.
We were different emotionally and spiritually, and at college she’d driven me nuts. Until she came to me for help.

  Since then—despite sometimes going a year without hearing from her, despite not being able to remember the names of her partners—there had been something unbreakable between us. Something I didn’t have with anyone else.

  I didn’t need meditation or divine guidance to tell me what I knew already. I had to be with Camille on this journey too.

  Even before I got home I’d called the travel editor at the Chronicle about doing a series of cartoons and stories from the Assisi trail and gotten a ‘maybe’. A friend at the refugee organisation knew someone looking for a short-term rental. The universe was playing ball.

  The time was right, too. My political cartoons were making it into print less often. I didn’t like the people I was drawing, and I guess it showed. Anything I tried to do for one of my daughters made trouble with the other. And I was over the volunteering.

  That left Martin. I forwarded him Gilbert’s email, told him that I would be walking to Rome with Camille and, I knew it was a stretch, but if he wanted to bring his cart…Then I hit the internet to find a cheap ticket to France.

  Martin got back to me while I was checking out deals. Couldn’t realistically consider a walk of that length on virtually no notice. Committed to time with Sarah—his daughter. I could hear his voice in my head. Distant in every way. And the subtext: Two days’ notice—you set me up to let you down. But the reason was the same as it was three years ago. Sarah must still be messed up. Regular college kids didn’t need their parents around.

  There was another option for the cart. I was friends on Facebook with Bernhard, the kid who’d helped in the design and was marketing it to the German marines. Or something like that. I messaged him and he was back to me right away.

  I will deliver a cart personally; please send the address.

  No looking forward to seeing you again but Bernhard wasn’t that kind of guy.

  The cheapest flight was with KLM. If I left tomorrow, I could have a stopover at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a collection of modern art I’d always wanted to see.

  That gave me twelve hours to get my stuff together. I spent two of them finding a gift for Camille, and one at the gear store. There, I knew exactly what I wanted: technical, lightweight, quick-dry. Two T-shirts, two thermal tops, a fleece, a waterproof jacket, walking pants with zip-off legs. The lightest hiking shoes, forget about ankle support. Three pairs of socks. Plus a new backpack, and more gifts for Camille and Gilbert.

  The next morning, pitching my pack into the airport shuttle, I was amazed at how liberated I felt. So easily, suddenly, why-the-hell-didn’t-I-do-this-before free.

  I was on my way to see my soulmate of nearly thirty years, in Europe for only the second time, about to walk another camino, reliving the best me-time of my adult life—and in Italy. Churches filled with art, stone walls that had seen battles and plagues and the best and worst of humankind, linguine with artichokes. All in front of me. I was so high, I couldn’t sleep, even on the plane, train and bus that got me from Amsterdam to Lyon, then on to Mâcon and Cluny. I hoped I could share my joy for the walk with Camille and that it might help her deal with her illness.

  Cluny looked totally different to what I remembered. Instead of the winter grey, there was a vibrant central square full of cars and tourists, people eating and drinking on terraces and on the street, and flowers cascading down walls and out of window boxes. The ancient abbey walls, sombre on my first visit, had come to life.

  I turned in the direction of Camille’s home, and found myself facing the hill where I’d first seen Martin three years ago, half-expecting he’d be there again, hauling his cart. But there were just the trees and the wall of the cemetery.

  As I looked down the empty street, my jet-lagged brain finally began to confront the reality of seeing Camille, my independent, impulsive friend now disabled and desperately turning to religion. I had to take off my pack to find the Kleenex and sat sobbing under a tree.

  It was better that Martin wasn’t coming. I had enough to deal with.

  2

  MARTIN

  My response to Zoe’s email hadn’t required any great weighing of options. I was already committed to Sarah, who was coming down from Edinburgh to spend the second half of her university holiday with me in Sheffield. It represented something of a breakthrough for us.

  Julia, my ex, had lost no time in charging me with career counselling, psychotherapy and remedial parenting, and making it clear that she expected me to make a hash of the lot. She suspected that Sarah had ‘borderline anorexia nervosa’ and was at risk of losing her hard-earned place in the medical course, which was contingent on satisfactory reports from her psychologist.

  While I was walking the Camino three years ago, there had been a sleeping-tablet overdose which Julia had characterised as a ‘cry for help’. I’d taken Sarah at face value when she insisted I not return home—a mistake I was still paying for.

  Zoe’s request—and invitation—had arrived as I was shutting down my computer for the night. Now, I couldn’t sleep. I re-read it and seized on the practical. The engineering school in Cluny where I had designed my cart had an example of the final model; I’d arranged for the British Army to ship it for display. I sent an email asking to borrow it, and another to Zoe’s friend Gilbert to get his address.

  Now I was free to tie myself in knots contemplating what I’d have done if I wasn’t responsible for a twenty-year-old, who, under normal circumstances, would be studying, partying or hiking her own camino instead of trying to fix her relationship with her father.

  Three years earlier, the answer had been clear, clear enough that I flew to San Francisco to invite Zoe to do exactly what she was now proposing to me. I’d come home confident that even if she didn’t agree to the walk, we’d find a way to get together. Then she’d pulled the plug. I was pretty unhappy—to be honest, as I eventually was with the therapist I ended up engaging—devastated. And, now she’d apparently decided she wanted to see me again, I was the one saying no. Some sort of karma.

  The next morning, there was a text from Sarah.

  Thinking about not coming down. Guessing that will be okay with you.

  Neither of us liked phone calls, but sometimes it was the only way.

  ‘What’s changed?’

  ‘Nothing. Just don’t want to be stuck in a flat in Sheffield.’

  ‘You could have stayed with your mother.’

  ‘I would have, but she’s gone away and won’t let me stop there. Which is a bit ridiculous considering I’ve been living away from home for two years.’

  ‘Regardless, we made an agreement. I’ve been looking forward to having time with you.’

  ‘What are we going to do? All day in Sheffield. It’s not exactly Paris.’

  I was supposed to be the rock in the stormy ocean. Reliable, consistent, there. Trouble was, Sarah’s emotional instability was paired with a keen intellect which she devoted largely to playing games. We’d been playing rock and ocean for twenty minutes when frustration got the better of me.

  ‘Look, I knocked back a chance to go walking in France—’

  ‘With Zoe?’

  Bloody hell. ‘Why would I be walking with Zoe?’

  ‘So, yes, then.’

  ‘So, no, then. I said no to her. Okay?’

  ‘Not okay. I’m not going to be the one who wrecks your holiday with your girlfriend so we can sit in a flat all day doing nothing.’

  ‘I thought you had study to do. Anyway, if you don’t come, I still won’t go to France.’

  ‘I’m not coming. So you’d be staying home for no reason.’

  I imagined myself explaining to my therapist that if Sarah had definitely pulled out, I might as well go to France. I suspected he wouldn’t find the logic as compelling as I did.

  Less than an hour later, Sarah texted again.

  Sorry for being rude. Things aren’t grea
t. How about I come to France with you? Everybody wins.

  Why would you want to come to France?

  Hello? France vs Sheffield?

  I sat on it all afternoon, and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. The Camino de Santiago had changed me, as it reputedly changes everyone; perhaps a walk would be the circuit-breaker Sarah needed. She and I would certainly have time together. And if—if—Zoe was going to be back in my life, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing that Sarah got to know her.

  Twenty-four hours later, I was at Mâcon-Loché TGV station, two hours from Paris and forty-five minutes from Camille’s house in Cluny. Sarah was flying direct from Edinburgh to Lyon.

  I’d arranged a lift with Jim, the expat-American estate agent I’d kept company with during the year I spent teaching at the engineering school. I spotted his car in the drop-off zone, threw my rucksack in the back and got in beside him.

  Jim looked unchanged. ‘Let me guess, because I’ve got to. You gave away all your money and you’ve come here to make a new start.’

  ‘That was last time.’

  ‘Past behaviour is the best guide to future behaviour. Couple sells a house because it’s too big and then…’

  I filled him in and discovered he’d met Camille—which was more than I’d done.

  ‘The evening I had dinner with your Zoe, it was at Camille’s place. She was in the throes of splitting up with her husband. Camille, not Zoe.’

  I thought I caught something in his voice. ‘And you were waiting in the wings? Past behaviour is the best guide…’

  Jim laughed. ‘Too flaky for me. Middle of a conversation she remembers she’s left her shopping in the store. Turns left, then realises she should have turned right. Cluny isn’t exactly the Fez medina.’

  ‘You know she’s in a wheelchair now? Multiple sclerosis.’

  ‘Shit. I thought I saw her a few weeks ago having coffee with her ex.’

  Jim accompanied me into the engineering school and my cart was waiting for me—still in its original packaging.

  ‘You sold it to the British Army, didn’t you?’ said Jim. ‘If they bought it, you should be able to sell it to the military around the world. Except America, of course.’

  ‘In theory. The German lad who came up with the idea of using it for patient transport thought so and we did a deal. I’ve had thirty-three and a third percent of nothing so far.’ And eighteen months of him blaming the design and offering his amateur ‘improvements’. Bernhard and I had always rubbed each other up the wrong way, and when he finally threw in the towel, my overwhelming feeling was relief at being shot of him.