‘Maybe we should get one, Shirl?’ Barry nodded at his wife, who didn’t appear to object to the suggestion.
It wasn’t long until a murmur rippled through the crowd; the race was about to commence.
Paula called Lachie over. She waved at Caitlin, who turned to the man beside her and pointed out Paula in the crowd.
The man’s gaze met Paula’s and he smiled.
For a moment, the sounds and sights of the club fell away.
Eyes like melted chocolate, toffee-smooth skin, an infectious grin.
The effect was breathtaking.
He began moving towards her, following Caitlin through the crowd, stepping between chairs and tables.
Paula fought the urge to run and hide in the ladies’ room. After seventeen years of marriage, she wasn’t confident she could still converse with this kind of stranger.
And then the starter bell rang and the room was suddenly swaying with jostlers, shriekers and clappers. People shouted out the names of horses as if they had personal relationships with them. One portly bar attendant yelled ‘Carn, Dunaden!’ so loudly, a woman dropped her glass of champagne. It smashed to smithereens and she stood over the pieces, cackling and hitching up her dress.
Caitlin and her new friend appeared at the table.
‘Mum, this is Marcelo,’ Caitlin yelled over the din. ‘He’s from Brazil.’
Her daughter smiled like she’d just found a fifty-dollar note on the pavement.
‘Hello,’ said Paula, reaching out to shake his hand. ‘I’m Caitlin’s mum.’
His handshake was warm and firm. ‘Caitlin’s mum? You don’t have another name?’
She laughed. ‘Of course. It’s Paula.’
‘Hello, Pow-la.’ His accent rocketed her somewhere warm and smoky.
The crowd surged forward as the horses turned into the final straight. Barry helped Shirl to her feet so that she could see the screen beyond the sea of heads and hats moving up and down.
As the winner crossed the line, the crowd cheered.
Second, third, fourth . . . twenty-third, twenty-fourth. It was all over in a matter seconds.
The din receded, but a lucky few were still dancing, yelling and hugging their friends. Meanwhile, the losers in the room tore up their sweep tickets or shook their heads philosophically.
‘Win anything for Shirl, Dad?’ asked Paula.
He nodded, his eyes still fixed on the big screen.
‘How much, Gramps?’ asked Lachie.
‘Well, I . . .’ Sid began scrolling on his iPhone with some urgency. ‘I, uh, backed the first four.’
‘The first four?’ Barry heard the words perfectly this time; he was obviously selectively deaf. ‘You mean . . . Green Moon, Fiorente, Jakkalberry and Kelinni? All of them?’
Sid nodded. ‘I put a ten-cent bet on them for you.’
‘Oh.’ Lachie looked disappointed. ‘That won’t be much.’
‘But it says here . . .’ Sid motioned to his telephone. ‘Shirl, Bazza, I . . .’
Barry couldn’t wait any longer. He grabbed the phone from Sid and squinted at the display.
‘Mother Mary!’ he yelled, seizing Shirl by the shoulders and shaking her. ‘We’ve just won seventy-seven grand!’
Paula gasped.
‘You’re pulling my leg . . .’ objected Shirl.
‘I’m not, darl,’ said Barry, his voice shaking. ‘We’re rich.’
Shirl looked around the room for a moment, as if she’d lost something. Then suddenly she swooned forward, like a bird shot in the forest.
Paula tried to grab her as she fainted, but she wasn’t fast enough.
A dark blur lunged in front of Paula, catching Shirl just inches from the floor.
Marcelo lay on the beer-stained carpet, his chest heaving, cradling the old woman in his arms.
Paula stared down at him, open-mouthed. He’d just saved Shirl from a nasty fall.
Supporting her neck, Marcelo deftly rolled Shirl onto her side in the recovery position.
‘Water,’ he said to Barry, who was dithering nearby. ‘Get her some water.’
Seconds later, Shirl opened her eyes, blinking in confusion.
‘It’s okay,’ said Marcelo.
Barry brought a glass of water and crouched down, holding it to Shirl’s lips.
A small crowd of onlookers had gathered around them.
Sid was the first to speak. ‘Where in Hades did you learn that little trick, mate?’ He looked at Marcelo. ‘I’ve never seen anyone move that fast.’
The Brazilian laughed. ‘In Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. You have to move fast in the favela.’
Paula had no idea what a favela was, but she hoped Marcelo might stick around long enough to explain.
‘You feelin’ alright, Shirl?’ Sid crouched down next to her.
‘Did you really win us all that money?’ The old woman was still pale.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Oh, Barry.’ Shirl began to smile. ‘Now we can fix the roof at the animal shelter.’
‘I know, love.’ Barry patted her hand. ‘I know.’
Suddenly Sid stood up, climbed onto a chair and cupped his hands around his mouth.
‘Cooee!’ he called. ‘Lady Luck’s on my side today, friends. Drinks are on me!’
A loud cheer rose up from the crowd.
‘Champion, Gramps!’ yelled Lachie, grabbing one of his grandfather’s hands. Marcelo stood too, then suddenly hoisted Sid up onto his right shoulder in a single, effortless sweep.
People thumped Sid on the back as Marcelo paraded him around the club, Lachie jumping around them like an excited puppy.
Balanced precariously on a stranger’s shoulder, laughing and high-fiving his grandson, Paula had never seen her father look so alive.
That evening, Marcelo joined them in Barry and Shirl’s backyard for a celebratory barbecue. Shirl reclined on a deckchair with a shandy in her hand, still stunned by the windfall, while Barry and Sid pushed several dozen sausages around a hotplate with metal spatulas.
‘This is an Australian barbecue?’ Marcelo asked, lifting a scorched sausage with a pair of tongs. ‘You have tortured the meat.’
Paula laughed aloud.
‘C’mon, mate, it’s just a bit of charcoal,’ said Sid. ‘How do you do it in Brazil?’
Marcelo beamed. ‘We are famous for our churrasco. Skewered meat over an open fire. That is a real barbecue.’
Paula watched Sid and Barry considering this. Australian men were proud of their barbecues, perhaps no more so than Brazilian men.
‘I was a butcher for forty-odd years,’ said Sid, puffing out his chest. ‘And Bazza here, he’s cooked more Rotary barbecues than you’ve had hot dinners. We do know what we’re doing.’
Marcelo clapped her father on the back. ‘A butcher? Then you are welcome in my family.’ He dropped the sausage back onto the barbecue. ‘We are cowboys from Rio Grande do Sul in the south of Brazil. Cattle workers, all of us, so we know how to butcher a steer. It’s been our way of life for eighty years.’
Paula sipped her champagne, watching him. And she’d thought gorgeous intriguing cowboys only existed in movies.
Sid’s face lit up. ‘Cattlemen, eh?’ He passed Marcelo another beer; Paula could tell he was impressed. ‘How big’s your landholding?’
‘Oh, we don’t own the land ourselves.’ Marcelo looked a little self-conscious. ‘We work for a big cattle family, one of the oldest in Brazil. My great-grandfather first worked for them eighty years ago.’
Sid nodded. ‘Well, if your family’s been barbecuing for eight decades, mate, we’re happy to learn from you. Ain’t that right, Bazza?’
Barry nodded amiably; he’d had a permanent smile on his face since the Melbourne Cup win.
Sid turned back to Marcelo. ‘We’ve got some interesting cuts of meat in Oz. Kangaroo, emu, crocodile. Great seafood, too—squid, prawns, crayfish. Can’t barbecue a dingo though.’
Lachie groaned. ‘Aw, Gramp
s, don’t start on the dingos again.’
‘What is a dongo?’
Lachie and Caitlin giggled.
‘A dingo,’ corrected Caitlin. ‘It’s a wild dog.’
Marcelo looked dismayed. ‘You eat dogs in Australia?’
‘Nah, mate,’ Sid began laying out plates, placing buttered slices of bread on them. ‘But I’ve always wanted to hunt one. And I’m going to, on the Nullarbor Plain.’ He tilted his head in a westerly direction.
‘So you’re going there too?’ Marcelo lifted a thick travel guide—Lonely Planet Australia—out of his small blue backpack and began flipping through the pages. ‘It says here you can see millions of stars crossing the Nullarbor Plain at night. I want to see that beauty.’
‘Bloody oath, mate,’ said Sid. ‘It’ll be a highlight of our trip, I reckon.’
‘Marcelo’s travelling along our route,’ Caitlin interjected, her face alight with excitement. ‘He’s backpacking to Darwin, right?’ She looked at the Brazilian for confirmation.
Marcelo nodded. ‘Yes, I have family connections there.’
‘Well, now.’ Sid glanced at Paula. ‘We’re going to be in those parts in a month or so, aren’t we?’
Paula sensed where this might be going, and wasn’t sure it was a good idea.
‘So, Marcelo,’ she said, ‘you’ve only been in Australia for three days. Do you know someone in Adelaide?’
‘All of you now.’ Marcelo grinned.
Paula couldn’t help but notice his perfectly white teeth. Somewhere in Brazil, a dentist was dreaming about that smile.
‘But really, I only came to Adelaide because it was the cheapest ticket,’ he said. ‘I left from Rio de Janeiro, then flew to London and Hong Kong. A very long flight, thirty-one hours and two stops. I was sick every takeoff, I’ve never travelled by air before. I much prefer horses.’
Paula could just picture him in a pair of tight jeans, riding boots and a broad-brimmed hat. The Brazilian Marlboro Man, driving cattle across the lonely, womanless plains of Rio Grande do Wherever-it-was.
‘When I boarded the plane, I looked at the map in here—’ he pointed to his guidebook—‘and only then I realised how far Adelaide is from Darwin.’
‘Bloody hell, mate,’ Barry said, laughing. ‘You stuffed that up, didn’t you? Could’ve flown straight to Darwin. Would’ve been much easier.’
Marcelo nodded. ‘Yes, it was my brother Lucas who booked the flight. He is um idiota.’ His expression darkened for a moment. ‘But Adelaide is a nice city. South Australian people are very friendly, like all of you!’
‘Cheers to that, mate,’ said Barry, raising his glass.
Paula resisted the urge to point out that all of their group came from Victoria.
‘I think I will see more of Australia this way, by going to Darwin by road,’ Marcelo added.
Barry chortled behind his beer. ‘Not much to see between here and Darwin, up through the red centre. Not unless you call desert and anthills countryside.’
Marcelo looked deflated.
‘Where are you staying in Adelaide?’ Paula asked, feeling rather like a private investigator.
‘In a youth hostel,’ said Marcelo. ‘I was planning to catch a bus to Perth, but then someone told me about the Melbourne Cup. It stops the nation, they said.’
Paula refrained from rolling her eyes.
‘I was curious and asked, where can I see it? They said, go to any pub tomorrow and you will find out. So after lunch today I left the hostel and caught a taxi. I said to the driver, take me somewhere I can see the Melbourne Cup.’ Marcelo grinned. ‘And he dropped me at the Walkerville RSL.’
‘You were just lucky then, eh?’ Sid smiled.
‘Welcome to Walkerville,’ said Barry, scraping fried onion rings onto a plate.
‘And to Australia,’ added Sid, leaning forward to clink his bottle against Marcelo’s. ‘Cheers.’
‘Saúde!’ said Marcelo, standing to reciprocate.
He proceeded to walk around the group, bending down and touching his stubbie against everyone’s drink, repeating the word ‘saúde!’. When he finally reached Paula, he pretended to be fatigued. Then, putting a hand on her shoulder, he leaned down and winked at her, touching his bottle to her glass.
That wink, his touch, made Paula blush. She bowed her head and pretended to hunt for something in her handbag, eventually retrieving a pocket-sized packet of tissues.
She went through the motions of blowing her nose.
Grow up, she scolded herself.
When she looked up again, Marcelo had returned to his seat, but was still watching her, from behind his beer. He smiled at her, as if they were sharing a private joke.
‘So . . .’ Paula attempted to regain her composure. ‘How long are you planning to stay in Darwin?’
‘It depends,’ said Marcelo. ‘If I like the Northern Territory, then I will try to find some work on one of the big cattle properties up there, maybe learn something new that I can take back to my family in Brazil.’ He looked reflective for a moment. ‘But really, I haven’t come to work. I want to see Australia, to understand it more. My mother was born in Darwin, you see. She met my father when she was a backpacker herself, travelling with a friend through Latin America.’
Paula smiled. ‘How did they meet?’
‘In Porto Alegre, on my father’s day off. He saw her on the street and tried to speak to her. He’d learned a few English phrases on the job, taking the cattle boss’s visitors out riding. Apparently he said to her, “Do you like horses? Come and see my horses.” And against her friend’s advice, she did.’
He laughed.
‘After a few days on the farm, she knew he was the man she wanted to marry. She worked in the kitchen with my grandmother at first, but then my father taught her to ride. After a while, she worked the cattle too. I used to ride around the property with her when I was little.’
Paula suddenly understood how a southern Brazilian cattle rancher could speak almost-perfect English. Albeit with an endearing Portuguese accent.
Marcelo drained the last of his beer, his eyes distant.
‘And since I was very small, my mother told me about her country. She had no close family left here, but she wanted to bring me and my brothers to Australia when we were old enough.’ Marcelo’s face softened. ‘But she died when I was a teenager.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Paula said. Thinking, my mum died last year too.
‘Que saudade!’ he replied, his tone earnest. ‘There is no English translation for that. In Brazil we say it when we yearn for something so much, our heart aches.’
The others looked uncomfortable.
Marcelo stared moodily at the flames licking the barbecue. ‘My family changed after my mother died. My older brother Lucas, he went a bit crazy. He was living in the favela with the wrong people, we lost contact with him for more than a year. Me and my younger brother stayed on the farm, but it wasn’t the same anymore. It never was, without her.’ His eyes met Paula’s.
‘You will understand this, I am sure, Pow-la. Mothers are the foundation of the home. When the mother is alright, the family is alright too. I have come to Australia to understand the culture of my mother, my core. I don’t mean the geography, the tourist places. But to discover it in here.’ He lay a hand over his heart. ‘It will be an important lesson for me, you know?’
‘I know, mate,’ Sid said. ‘We’re learning a few life lessons ourselves on this trip. Aren’t we, kids?’
‘Are we ever,’ said Caitlin.
Barry moved the sausages around on the hotplate with his tongs. ‘Righto, grub’s up,’ he announced. ‘Guests first.’
Barry passed Marcelo a plate piled high with bread, onion rings and several sausages.
‘Tomato sauce?’ Sid asked, waving a bottle in Marcelo’s direction.
‘Tell me about this,’ said Marcelo, peering at the plate. ‘There is some bread here. And . . .?’ He pointed at the charred onion rings.
&n
bsp; ‘That’s onion. You’ve got yourself a true-blue sausage sanger there, matey.’
Barry passed Sid a plate.
Marcelo looked around. ‘How do you eat it?’
‘You just pick it up.’ Sid lifted his own sandwich, wrapped the bread around the sausage and bit into it. Tomato sauce squirted out the other end, spattering Lachie’s forehead.
‘Gramps!’ Lachie wiped his face.
‘I know, I’m a bogan.’ Sid laughed and passed his grandson another serviette.
Marcelo looked puzzled. ‘What is a bo-gun?’ He held his hand up in the shape of a revolver.
Everyone laughed.
Sid slapped Marcelo on the back. ‘Stick with us, Marcelo, and you’ll learn a lot about Australian English. Otherwise known as Strine, right? Bogan means um idiota.’
Paula was impressed by her father’s recall of Portuguese.
‘Can Marcelo come with us, Mum?’ Caitlin pleaded, unable to contain herself any longer. ‘There’s room in the ute. He could teach us a bit about Brazil, too. It could be part of Gramps’s third life lesson.’
That was talk to strangers, Paula thought, not travel with them.
She watched Barry dole out more sausage sandwiches.
‘C’mon, Paula.’ Her father smiled at her. ‘It’ll be good to have another bloke around. He can help me hitch Clinton to Hillary of a morning.’
Paula bit the inside of her lip, thinking. Not long after her mother’s death, Sid had been diagnosed with arrhythmia during a routine cardiovascular examination. Now she watched him struggle to hitch the caravan to the ute’s tow bar and she worried about the strain it placed on him. There was only so much help she and the kids could offer.
‘It’ll be good to have some company up north, too,’ Sid added. ‘Lots of nutters in the Northern Territory, you know.’
But Marcelo could be one of them.
‘We’re going to Darwin the long way,’ she objected. ‘It might be easier if Marcelo just caught a bus straight there.’
No one said anything.
She looked around the group, feeling defensive.
‘Well, okay, what happens if he comes along and it doesn’t work?’ Paula turned to the Brazilian. ‘I’m sorry, Marcelo, but the mother in me has to ask. What if we’re not getting on? You mightn’t enjoy being stuck in the back of a ute. Or you might hate our food, our music . . . You mightn’t like us. I mean, you don’t know us. And we don’t know you.’
Wife on the Run Page 13
