Tim Winton - The Riders

‘Arlo Guthrie was here last year, Scully. I came to see him myself. Remember that song:

Comin into Los Angeles

Bringin in a coupla keys

Don’t touch my bags

If you please, Mr Customs ma-aan!’

‘I remember. That’s a drug song, Pete.’

‘It never was!’

Scully took the bottle from him and laughed till it hurt.

‘One of them U2 lads was down from Dublin to see the auld Arlo. I nearly knocked him over in the pisser. Where would we be without music, eh? It’s not really a drugs song, is it?’

Scully only laughed, nodding.

‘Fookin hell!’

• • •

IN THE HOT WILD FUG of the pub that night, Scully lost the anxiety that had come upon him a couple of hours ago. The band tossed from jig to reel and the dust rose from the foul floors with the stomp of dancing and the flap of coats and scarves. The fiddle was manic and angular, the tin whistle demented, and the drum was like the forewarning of the headache to come. Someone came in with a set of pipes and an old man grabbed up the microphone and the fever of the place subsided as a ballad began. Scully couldn’t recall a sweeter sound that the sad soughing of those pipes. This was no braying Scots pipe; this was a keening, a cry loaded with desire and remorse. The old man sang with his tie askew and his dentures slightly adrift, a song of the Slieve Blooms, of being left behind, abandoned in the hills with winter coming on. Scully listened, transfixed, until in the final chorus he put down his glass and shoved his way to the door.

Outside it was raining and there was no one in the street but a sullen black dog chained to a bicycle. Across the road the chipper was heating up his fat for closing time, his hard fluorescents falling like a block of ice into the street. Scully’s face was numb in patches, and he stood with his cheeks in the rain, trying to account for his sudden moment of dread in there. That’s what it was, dread. It’s a song, Scully.

Pete stood in the doorway, peering out. ‘You’re not goin to puke, now are ye?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

‘You don’t like the music?’

‘The music’s great. Grand, in fact.’

‘By God, there’s some rascally girls from Tullamore in there.’

‘Go to it, son.’

‘You alright, then?’

‘I’ll be in in a moment.’

Pete slipped back into the hot maw of the pub and Scully shook the rain from his face. The black dog whimpered. He went over and let him off the chain. It nipped him and bolted into the night.

• • •

AMID THE GREASY STEAM OF a parcel of chips the pair of them drove home singing.

Keep your hands off red-haired Mary

Her and I are to be wed

We see a priest this very morn

And tonight we’ll lie in a marriage bed…

They came to the odd little tree in the middle of the road with its sad decoration of rags, and Scully asked about it.

‘A wishing tree,’ said Peter, stopping beside it and winding down the window to let in a blast of cold air. ‘People tie a rag on and make a wish.’

‘Does it work?’

Pete guffawed. ‘Does it fookin look like it, son? Does the country seem so much like the island of Hawaii? Not many of us get our wish in Ireland, Scully.’

‘Things aren’t that tragic here, surely,’ said Scully, feeling the mood slip from him.

‘Jaysus,’ yelled Pete. ‘Can you imagine how fooked it’d be if we did!’

The postie’s teeth were huge and hilarious in the gloom.

For a long way up the hill behind Binchy’s Bothy, a hare ran doggedly before them at the roadside, his tail bobbing in the headlights as they slowed. On and on it ran, weaving now and then to seek an opening in the stone wall, skittering across glassy patches of mud, until finally, it veered left into a boreen and claimed the darkness of the field. Scully and Peter Keneally cheered him all the way to the crest of the hill.

At the cottage, Scully climbed out and stood a moment by the van.

‘Cheer up, Scully. It’s tomorrow already.’

‘Tomorrow it is.’

‘God bless you now.’

‘Thanks for tonight. Thanks for everything.’

‘Ye want me to drive ye down to Shannon after mass?’

‘Thanks, but it’s probably best on my own.’

‘Well, see you Monday, then,’ said Pete, setting off down the hill. His lights burned down the hedges and disappeared.

Scully opened the door. There was still some life in the fire. He heaped on some more turf and a few chunks of coal and stirred it back to brightness. Room by room he went through the place, trying to imagine them all in it, but he was too tired and drunk perhaps, for the images skidded away from him as he straightened a rug here, stood a chair there, then finally went to bed upstairs in sheets that smelled of factories and shops and sunnier places.

SCULLY WOKE SOMETIME IN THE night, his throat raw and dry. He heaved himself out of his bed into the cold and stumped downstairs for a glass of water. Cattle bellowed from Brereton’s sheds down beyond the castle. At the sink he saw that the sky had cleared and there were stars out. A misshapen moon hung high and bright in the black. Down at the castle there were lights. He stood there naked and shivering by the window, watching them move through the trees. Kids, he guessed, local teenagers playing up on a Saturday night. He drank his water and placed the glass in the sink. He wondered if Jimmy Brereton knew. It couldn’t hurt to take a look.

By the door he slipped on his greatcoat, walked into his gum-boots and pulled a scarf about himself. The hard, icy air hit him flat in the face as he stepped outside into the night. The luminous dial on his watch said three in the morning.

Scully went cautiously down the field in the darkness. There was no wind, only a sharp mist rising from the ground. Down there through the trees — no, beyond the trees, right down in the valley — lights were moving. As he climbed the stile at the edge of his field, Scully saw how the lights snaked; they were a procession. He cocked his head for the sounds of revelry, but heard nothing except the sound of Jimmy Brereton’s cows.

Scully crossed the road and climbed through the wall where the ash wood met the road. He picked his way over fallen branches, crunching through the frosty detritus with his own breath like a beacon before him. The great shadow of the castle reached out beyond the trees, silent, blank, still. With frozen grass snapping at his bare shins, he crossed the courtyard beside the ruins of the pumphouse, now just dark, reeling blocks at the corner of his vision, and came to the brow of the decline to see the romping melée of burning torches turn in across the fields and come circling beneath the bare oak beneath the castle steps. Torches. Yes, they were flames he saw travelling high off the ground. Now Scully heard the thud of feet, and as the lights passed beneath the old tree, he saw the glistening, steaming bodies of horses, he saw the bearded faces of men. Staffs. A lank standard. The breaking mud rose before them like a bow wave.

Ripping through blackberry and nettle, Scully bolted for the cover of a crumbling wall. The cold had reached his balls now, they felt brittle as Christmas baubles between his thighs. He pulled the coat harder about himself and peered through a gap in the stones. Down there, in the gently sloping field beneath the castle steps, the horsemen had assembled. There were about twenty of them in fancy dress. They were wildhaired, cloaked and highbooted. Two of them wore spattered grey chestplates and rags across their brows. Scully heard the horses snorting and heaving for wind. They shot out columns of steam and rattled metallic shudders. With firelight in the dark balls of their eyes, the riders looked up at the keep, and Scully tried to think, to find his way ahead of all this. He shook with cold. Out in the valley there were no more lights, no floods burning in the yards of local farms, no handy sign of life. He watched and waited, mesmerized. He saw weapons now, scars and blood, the restless twitching of reins. He saw the sheen of sweat along the horses’ flanks and the united gaze of the horsemen. They looked a mercenary lot, fierce and stoic. In all his life he’d never seen men like these. From where he crouched he couldn’t quite see the front of the castle keep, whether or not a light showed, if a door was ajar, or if someone was up there.