Tim Winton - The Riders

Conor paled.

‘C’mon, Pete,’ said Scully, speaking in Conor’s presence for the first time that day. ‘Give the bloke a break.’

‘This fooker’s not Irish!’

‘Australian,’ said Scully.

‘Desert Irish, you might say.’

The table crashed forward and Conor was reaching for his brother’s throat when the noon Angelus suddenly sounded on the radio. Without hesitation, both Irishmen went slack, and adopted the prayerful hunch, snorting and trembling, as the church bell rang clear. Wind pressed against the panes. The fire sank on itself, and the bell tolled on and on into the false calm. Scully watched the fallen forelocks of the Keneallys and fought the fiendish giggle that rose in his neck. And then the last peal rang off into silence. The men crossed themselves and Conor Keneally noticed how upright Scully was, how his hands stayed in his pockets.

‘Good Christ, he’s not even Catholic, let alone Irish!’

‘And that’s not all,’ said Peter, chuckling and preparing to be pummelled. ‘He thought Mylie was in gaol for the VAT.’

Conor looked at Scully with a sudden mildness on his face — pity. ‘Jaysus, man, where did you go to school?’

‘Elsewhere, you might say.’

‘You bastards.’ Conor slapped his cloth cap against his knees. ‘You fookers had me banjanxed. He’s not with the Provos at all, is he.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Scully.

Pete tipped his head back and laughed, and he didn’t stop for a moment as Conor dragged him outside and rammed him into the door of the Toyota, and he kept it up as his roaring brother beat his head against the roof, holding his ginger forelock and slamming down once, twice until the big man let go and stood back and began to weep.

‘Oh, God, my life.’

From the door of his house which poured music and the smell of burning soil, Scully watched as Pete grabbed his brother and held him fiercely in the wind. The big man sobbed and dripped tears and snot. His roadmap face glowed with shame and despair and a kind of impotence Scully had never seen before. Peter’s hands were in his brother’s ginger curls and he wept too, his eyes averted, his head high in the wind.

Scully went inside and stood by the fire, hung the kettle on the crane, threw on some more turf. The radio played a ballad, and a woman’s mournful voice filled the cottage. He went back to the front door and offered the Keneallys a cup of tea. They straightened up, accepted with dignity and kicked the mud from their boots.

ON THE ELEVENTH OF DECEMBER, a Friday with sunlight and sharp, clean air, Scully stood at a sink full of hot water and sang in his broken, growly voice, an old song he had heard Van Morrison bawling yesterday on the radio.

But the sea is wide

And I can’t swim over

And neither have

I wings to fly…

The house smelled sweetly of turf and scrubbing. There was crockery on the pine dresser and a shelf beneath the stairs with old paperbacks on it already. There was a birch broom inside the door and a stack of larch kindling by the turfbox. An oilskin hung from a peg on the chimney wall above his Wellington boots. Beside him, the little refrigerator hummed on the flagstones. There were cheap curtains on the windows, blue against the whitewash, and the sun spilled in across the stainless steel sink. Admit it, he told himself, you like it, you like the place now that it’s full of things. Because you love things, always have.

Scully was like his father that way. No matter what the Salvos said, the old fella thought certain objects were godly. Briggs and Stratton motors, the McCulloch chainsaw, the ancient spirit level that lived in the workshed beside the dairy, the same bubbly level that caused Scully junior to have ideas of drawing and building. Ah, those things . The old girl thought it was idolatry, but she had a brass thimble she treasured more than her wedding ring.

It wasn’t getting things and having them that Scully learnt; it was simply admiring them, getting a charge out of their strange presence.

Scully wiped the windowpane with his sweatered elbow and saw the rhinestone blaze of the frozen fields. Too good a day for working. He couldn’t spend another day at it, not while the sun was out. Pete was right, he wasn’t seeing anything, buried alive in work. He didn’t even know where he was living.

On the kitchen table he began a letter home but he realized that it wouldn’t reach them in time. He looked at the little aside he had written to Billie in the margin. Even if I fall off the world, Billie Ann Scully, I will still love you from Space.

He smiled. Yes.

• • •

THAT MORNING HE DROVE INTO birr and organised his banking. He had a cheque made out to Peter Keneally as part payment. He bought a leg of New Zealand lamb and a sprig of rosemary at insane cost. He found oranges from Spain, olives, anchovies, tomatoes, things with the sun still in them. Men and women greeted him as he humped a sack of spuds to the Transit in a light drizzle. He bought an Irish Times and read about the mad bastard in Melbourne killing eight in the Australia Post building. Jumped through a plate glass window on the tenth floor. Someone else in Miami, an estranged husband killed his whole family with a ball peen hammer and gassed himself so they could all be together again. Shit, was it just men?

Two kids in fluorescent baseball caps walked by singing. He started the van. Yes, at least they sing here, whatever else happens.

• • •

ALONG THE WINDING LANES HE drove, contained between hedges and walls, swinging into turns hard up against the brambles, skidding mildly on puddles hard as steel, until he came to a tree in the middle of the road, with rags in its stark branches. It stood on a little island of grass where the road had been diverted around it. Scully pulled up alongside and saw the shards of cloth tied here and there, some pale and rotten, others freshly attached. A sad little tree with a road grown around it. It looked quite comical and forlorn. He drove on.

• • •

AT COOLDERRY HE PULLED UP outside the village school. He got out into the light and stood by the hurling pitch as the bell clanged for lunch. The bleat of children made his heart soar.

A car idled down the hill.

‘How are you, Scully?’

He turned and saw that it was Pete-the-Post with his arm out of the van.

‘Me? A bit toey, I’d say.’

‘Toey?’

‘Anxious, impatient, nervous…’

‘Antsy, then.’

‘No, toey.’

Pete smiled and turned off the motor. ‘Not long, son. Two days now, isn’t it?’

‘How’s Conor?’

The postman pursed his lips and looked out across the muddy pitch where gangly boys began to mill and surge, their sticks twitching. ‘Auld Conor’s losing, moment by moment. The drink, as if you didn’t know. It’s the saddest sight to see, Scully, a man lettin his own life slip through his hands.’

Scully scuffed his boots in the gravel. ‘Any reason for it?’

‘Aw, too long a story to bother you with. Somethin terrible happened in the family, five or six year ago. Somethin… well, somethin terrible. Conor’s the kind of man who’ll not let it be. He never mentions it, of course, never utters a word. But he broods, you know. There’s things that have no finish, Scully, no endin to speak of. There’s no justice to it, but that’s the God’s truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em. Now listen to me goin on in your ear like a radio.’

Scully waved his apology aside. ‘You’re a good brother to him.’

‘There’s a grand singin pub over to Shinrone I’m goin to tomorrow night. Why don’t ye come with me and we’ll celebrate your last night as an Irish bachelor.’