Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls by Anne Casey-Hardy

Author:Anne Casey-Hardy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2022-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Our re-formed group decides to meet at Mamasita where you can’t book but can get Margaritas by the jug. We agree to wear high-waisted Levi’s with off-the-shoulder peasant blouses, off either one shoulder or both, or barely up and threatening to slide down.

Anyone who can’t get into their Levi’s is out.

At Mamasita, we settle into blond wooden benches and study the menu. Someone says the food is better at Fonda, but Christ almighty, we’re not here for the food! The only thing they sell by the jug is sangria, a red wine and fruit mix that comes from the Spanish word sangre, meaning blood.

Steeped in blood so far, says one person – she’s out.

We toast our Margaritas and order the banquet menu ($89 pp).

Do you believe that story about the Camino and the Door of Forgiveness? I mean, it sounds good.

We picture ourselves clomping along at a brisk pace with broken-in boots and those clickety walking poles, confidently shitting behind bushes, and wearing obvious knee braces to cut ourselves some slack. Maybe that part of it is okay, but the whole mea culpa thing is too Catholic, too witch-burny.

One of our members has paid in Bitcoin for dark web research and discovered there’s another way to get to the place we’re all dying to find. Now that we’re three or four Margaritas down, it’s okay to order the jug of sangria. We spill it around and huddle in close to listen. The urgency is growing in us. We all have period pains cramping in our guts and it’s not just hysteria.

Cheers!

There’s an entrance, she says. In the Blue Mountains. You can catch a train from Sydney Central and it’s only eighteen dollars. But it gets a bit hazy from there – be prepared to hike. Sometimes taxi drivers seem to know what you’re talking about but they’re usually wrong. They think you mean a literal place, an overgrown driveway with an old sign hung at an angle, a long and winding rutted track through a tunnel of trees joined overhead…

Past the bowerbird’s nest?

The yellow castle?

No. It’s a church. Família Sangre – family blood. In the walls.

We gasp.

You mean the Sagrada Família, the Gaudí church in Barcelona? That kind of makes sense.

Will you shut up! we snap. It’s clearly not that one. We hold hands across the table, trying to calm each other.

The Sangre woman continues in a reverential voice. A tall narrow church, reaching up with four spires curving inwards like arms… Her own arms curve towards each other overhead, like a ballet position. She is glassy-eyed, in the grip of a spiritual vision, not here in this place with the rest of us drinking and spilling sangria over our Mexican embroidered blouses.

Is there a door? How do you enter?

It’s guarded by a leopard.

The woman faints to the sound of shattering glass. We leave piles of cash on the table and carry her out between us. I’ll see her home, we all offer possessively, pulling her clammy body back and forth.

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