WALKING ON COBBLESTONES
ALM No.94, October 2026
SHORT STORIES
The child sings at the back of the bus, chortles from deep in her chest when she gets to whatever punchline she has conceived.
The bus sound system competes with ‘Down Under.’ Forty-five years since it was a hit and still it is the calling card of Australians abroad.
We are climbing down from the high mountains of Portugal. So far I have seen enough pieces of the True Cross to make, well, maybe a toothpick – but one of those good quality thick ones.
Bruce Springsteen then reminds us that we are all dancing in the dark. Effigies of saints in the churches here slouch like pop stars in repose as they await the Second Coming. And I also unexpectedly saw the mummy of a nun, but I was in a catacombs, so that one’s on me.
Death stalks me.
The sway of the bus has put the cheerful child to sleep so the Hits of the 80s reign supreme. I worry about what we have left the next generations, having taken so much for ourselves.
Travel is meant to broaden the mind.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asks as he looks up from his smartphone. I must have a look on my face. I smooth it out to an unreadable blank page. The only marks are now the crumples in the paper we call, in humans, wrinkles.
‘I am thinking about the graffiti,’ I say.
‘The urban art?’ he clarifies. ‘Yes, there are a lot of startling images, aren’t there?’
I can tell he’s now scrolling through his photos to remind himself. His images of images.
‘I’m glad we abandoned the rental car idea,’ he says as the traffic starts to clot around the bus on the outskirts of the city, though it was a friend’s description of the narrow mountain roads that’d been the decider. Bruce Springsteen pauses for a saxophone solo. ‘This is a lot more relaxing,’ he adds.
I censor the memory of him pacing a path like a wizard’s hex around the village bus stop worried we’d come to the wrong place, at the wrong time, anxious that the bus would not arrive. All the while, coachload after coachload of package tour tourists zipped past.
I’d meant a different graffiti. A stencil on a wall, the ‘o’s blocked in as solid black. TOURISTS FUCK OFF.
He stumbles as we get off the bus. There are three steep steps. It could have happened to anyone but it happens to him and though his jeans sop up most of the blood from his grazed shin, his ego is not so easily assuaged.
I knew when I married an older man there’d be a reckoning. I had not fully realised what the difference would blow out to as he aged and I grew up. His first wife would probably have been more comforting as he stumbled. He reached for my hand as he lost his balance. It was her name on his lips.
‘Maisy,’ he called.
I imagine Maisy like one of the many Madonnas in the churches of Portugal, a robust woman gazing down tenderly at the child in her arms who invariably looks like an aging accountant. Did artists not have access to real babies as life models in Medieval times?
I am the other Mary. Not the Mother. The Whore. His children call me that behind his back. His hearing aids protect him; they are never as good as advertised. I am more acute in my senses. Except that of right and wrong apparently. Their venom has not been neutralised by seventeen years of my acting the devoted step-mother. He did not want more children, who would with these vipers already in the nest, so I am unlikely to graduate from step- to full mother. No matter what I wanted. What I want.
The bus station has toilets where he can clean up the grazes. ‘WC’ blazes the sign on the wall. You can pay 0.50 euro into a machine that gives you a ticket with a barcode that activates a turnstile into the malodorous cavern behind the sign.
We do not have a coin. Who has coins when a piece of plastic can be waved like a magic wand in every other circumstance? In exchange for a chunky, sucker-covered tentacle of octopus on a bed of rice: I have a Visa for you. Entrance through a catacombs into the past: I have a Visa for you.
His ire at the machine is his anger at himself, for looking a fool, or worse, an unsteady old man.
We sit on the wide marble steps of the station and he inches up his trouser leg and I empty a bottle of water over the broken skin. Blood sluices through the dark leg hair and over his white Nikes. The water is still cold from the fridge at the small pastelaria next door. Paid for by card. He winces. Only says thank you after he has poked around and decided he will be okay.
‘No bones broken,’ he smiles.
Amongst the relics too, there have been bones. The bones of saints come in golden reliquaries, shards in mounted lockets, long bones contained in gilt prosthetics pointing to heaven. He will not say what he wants done with his. He will not face his own mortality.
I am not a saint. If I can’t be planted as compost for a tree, I’ll have my earthly remains cremated. He will have to find a third wife if he wants a more saintly nurse.
‘Porto is not a place. It is a feeling.’
I read this on a canvas bag bouncing on the wide hip of the American tourist in front of me. My feeling is that Porto would be lovely except for all the tourists who have not fucked off but flocked to the city. I don’t think this is what Agustina Bessa-Luis meant by her quote.
Romantic was the word much thrown around when we started discussing the trip. Not the words crowded, uncomfortable.
The promise of the romantic high mountains of Portugal had not registered properly before I booked the flights. The phrase should have indicated the steepness of the inclines in the cities built in high places. I was remiss not to look at a map with contour lines.
And God demanded they build higher still in these high hills. The American in front of me is ahead on the stairs in the cathedral. The contours of her body are generous. The quote bouncing on her hip is literally in my face.
I turn at the top of the staircase and he is not behind me. The crush pushes me out into the sunlight.
From the rooftop of the cathedral on the top of the hill, I can see the whole of the city laid out. I cannot see him in the street below and though I wait, he does not join me on high.
I stand amongst strangers taking selfies because they think they will not remember this otherwise. I know I will remember. The view is breathtaking. I pause and catch my breath back.
A message on my phone guides me back to him, sitting under an umbrella drinking beer. I pick him out in the crowd before he sees me. He is still a goodlooking man. Lean. It is his heart that is changed.
‘Was it worth it?’ he asks as I negotiate a path through the other tables and patrons in the square.
‘You didn’t want to come? It’s not like you to give up,’ I ask back.
‘You didn’t hear me say? What a crush. I turned back at the Jesus with the daisy halo. Climbing Notre Dame was enough back in the day.’
Seems you’ve been on top of one old church, you’ve been on top of them all.
I’ve never been to Paris.
I get myself a beer to join him. I peel the emergency 50 euro note from the back of my phone case to pay and insist on the correct change, small coins and all. Contingencies for the future.
‘Well was it?’ he asked when I sit down in the umbrella’s block of shade.
‘Was what?’
‘Worth it?’
The cobblestones are obviously making it difficult for him. They are knobbly and uneven, and at the same time they are also, each individually, worn slippery and smooth by countless feet over a very long time. He grimaces as pain shoots up his grazed leg. I watch my steps because the cobblestones make it difficult for me too and I have decades up my sleeve and intact shins.
I can’t wear heels here. I cannot look the whore.
Not that the cobblestones aren’t attractive, setting out the pavements in black and white, basalt and limestone, some of the patterns created, hundreds of years old.
He stops and drops behind again. I turn and watch him fetch his phone from where it has been temporarily stored in his jeans’ pocket. I suspect he is consulting the map app again because the roads refuse to go straight and it is easy to lose your way even if you think your internal compass is spot on.
This road is, as they all are, not only cobbled but has that steep incline. I am the one higher up. I stand above him, for once taller than him, looking down. I watch him age as he consults his phone.
I think, this is not a saying: the blood drained from his face. I see it happening.
It’s a message, I realise. He lifts his eyes from it to me.
‘From Ben, Nessa is in hospital.’
Nessa is six months pregnant. She is going to make him a grandfather. I am going to be having sex with a grandfather.
‘Nessa has lost the baby.’
The baby. The baby his daughter had jokingly said they’d call Van so between them they’d have a full name.
I take his arm and lead him into the church at the top of the road. There is a church at the top of every road. This one is clad all over in blue and white tiles depicting scenes from the Bible. Inside it is as golden as Smaug’s hoarded cave. There is space where we can sit a while.
Many other pews are already full. A woman, yes it is a woman I am sure, near the altar is leading a prayer. She chants, high, melodic. The congregation mumbles. She chants. The congregation mumbles. We are intruding on the faith of the locals. The stencil artists are right. We don’t belong here. The woman chants.
A doe-eyed Madonna to our right bounces a curly-haired cherub Jesus on her knee. Her son is a wounded and contorted near-corpse hung from a cross at the next station around the nave.
His heart is breaking for Nessa. For the child. For himself. I feel him suppress a sob. My anger is a loaded gun. My child, my losses, have no room. I cannot look at him. His grief will disarm me.
I have to do something. I pay a euro into a box and light a small candle to a god I don’t believe in. I place it with the forest of other small candles. The flames flicker. Alive, until they burn out.
Jane Downing has stories published at home in Australia and overseas. She was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2016, won the AAALS (American Association of Australasian Literary Studies) Fiction Award in 2023, the Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing in 2024, and the NSW Poetry Prize in 2025. She has a Doctor of Creative Arts degree from the University of Technology, Sydney, the creative component of which, 'The Sultan’s Daughter,' was released by Obiter Publishing in 2020. She can be found at janedowning.wordpress.com
Subscribe to FREE digital flip copy of the Adelaide Magazine printed edition.