Tim Winton - The Riders

‘You want help?’

The postie licked his chapped lips, anxious now.

‘I’m fine, mate.’

‘You look shot and killed.’

‘See you in a coupla days.’

Scully put the Transit in gear and lurched away.

• • •

IN THE COOLING BOTHY, Scully made lamb sandwiches and sat down with Billie to eat dutifully, mechanically, the way he ate those too-early fishermen’s breakfasts hours before dawn in another life, chewing for his own abstract good and without pleasure. From the china jug he poured glasses of milk. At the mantelpiece he took down the photo Dominique had taken and he cut it down to fit inside his wallet. The sound of the scissors was surgical. Three faces, a tilted Breton headstone.

He laid their documents on the table, checked their visas, the state of their crowded passports. Map. Swiss army knife. Some aspirin. Cash. Into Billie’s tartan case he packed a change of clothes for each of them. He placed their documents in her fluorescent backpack with the Walkman, her Midnight Oil tapes, her comic and her colouring gear. She pulled the Darth Vader out and put it on the mantel.

‘Are you alright, love?’

She sat down and drank. The milk left a moony glow on her upper lip. She shrugged.

Scully found a brush on the sill and gently straightened her hair. It was so like his own. In a few years it would be exactly his, completely beyond redemption, the kind of clot you run your fingers through and shrug at.

‘I like this house,’ he murmured, packing a few toilet things. ‘Everything’ll be alright in this house, Bill. I promise you. Here, I polished your boots. You need a horse with boots like that. An Irish hunter. Yeah.’

He stood, feeling the stillness of the place, the look in her eyes.

A car heaved up the hill in low gear. Scully waited for it to pass, but it pulled in and he recognized it.

‘Scully,’ said Peter at the door.

‘Hi, Pete.’

‘You’re off then.’

‘To the train station, yeah.’

‘Dublin?’

‘Yep.’

‘Let me drive you.’ Pete pressed his hands together and leant from boot to boot, averting his eyes.

‘You needn’t worry, mate. We’ve got a flight to Athens in the morning.’

‘Athens, Greece? If you leave that van there at the station the friggin tinkers’ll have it up on blocks before dark. Let me take you.’

Scully stood there with his hand in Billie’s hair watching the postie think.

‘Fair enough. Thanks.’

‘Athens. Can we have a drink?’

‘It’s just two days, Pete. Don’t look so worried.’

‘Oh, it’s not worry, son, it’s just fresh out today.’

Smiling, Scully took the bottle of Bushmills off the mantel. ‘Here. Slainte.’

‘Slainte.’

Then Scully took the bottle back and took a good hard slug, felt it bore down cruelly into his roiling gut. ‘You’re right,’ he said, laughing emptily. ‘It’s cold out.’

• • •

A LITTLE WAY DOWN THE road in the tiny green van, Pete slowed down and pulled up beside the frail tree in the middle of the road.

‘Can I have a loan of your handkerchief, Scully?’ he said, opening the door and stamping his feet on the glistening road.

Scully dragged out his disgraceful face rag, expecting to see the postman lean over and throw up into the muddy grass. But Pete strode across to the wizened little tree and tied the handkerchief to a branch. He crossed himself twice and came gravely back to the van.

‘Don’t say a word, Scully. Not a blessed word.’

• • •

THE TRAIN PULLED INTO ROSCREA station, easing up onto the deep granite cutting to stop right before the three of them. Pete opened a carriage door and helped Billie up the step, doffing his cap comically like a doorman.

‘Don’t do anythin clumsy, Scully, ye hear me?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Just be back for Christmas.’

‘Are you kiddin? This is two days, Pete.’

‘I tell you, I don’t understand women or God.’

Or men, thought Scully, who could think of nothing dignified or honest to answer him with, short of telling him everything, breaking down on the platform here and blurting out all his fears. He was a friend, wasn’t he, a frigging patron, even. He deserved to know, but some iron impulse told Scully to shut up and get on with it, to stop feeling and start acting. Doors slammed along the line. Scully hesitated, stepped up.

‘Look after that girl, Scully.’

‘You look after my house.’

The train moved away.

ARTHUR LIPP PUSHES OPEN HIS doors and steps out onto the wind-ripped balcony with his head near bursting with pain. The flannel gown flaps on him. His sparse hair is ruffled and instantly his eyes water in the wind. It surprises him after thirty years to quite suddenly hate the onset of winter. Certainly, the confounded tourists are gone with their tee-shirt slogans and sunburn, and prices have come back to normal in the tavernas. The dust has been sluiced off the alley walls and the donkeyshit from the dizzy steps by the first rains, and the mainland peninsula stands pink and clear across the gulf, the air sweetened by the change. He should be ecstatic as an Englishman seeing the first snow — the Englishman he once was.

But the outlook is loathsome, he has to admit it. For the first time, he dreads the long, cosy quiet of winter, and now, the very year he wants to escape it, fly up to Norwich to see his mother, to Chamonix to visit his old chums, the Bluster Boys from Cardiff, or to bloody outback Australia where everybody talks through their big, healthy teeth, he hasn’t a ghost of a chance. The Crash he thought he’d escaped has come for him after all. A few unsound portfolio moves. A series of bluffs that came undone. And then a humiliatingly gauche spending spree on that Danish undergraduate in the autumn. Suddenly he hasn’t enough for a civilized fortnight at the Grand Bretagne in Athens. The honest word is stranded. At least for a few months he’s in the same league as poor pathetic Alex, and at the very thought he whimpers with rage and dashes at the tears with the back of his hand.

Boats sway and tip in the harbour between the deserted moles and the great houses of the buccaneers of history. He turns his back on them and goes inside, forces the doors shut and confronts the ponderous and intolerable sound of the clock on the bureau. Beside the clock lies the little crayon drawing of the island with its spidery inscription, To Mister Arthur from Billie S.

Lipp places his hand on the rosewood desk and sees his body-heat fog the varnish. Well, he thinks, they escaped in good time. This island’s gone to the pack. There’s something rotten at its core, something we’re all making day by day.

With only the clock and his hangover to give him company he spends the hour before his first drink thinking of them, those strange Australians. The woman with the legs and the fierce hunger to be noticed. The sponge-haired child with the wild accent. And the big friendly shambles of a man who followed them like an ugly hound, loyal and indestructible in his optimism, in his antipodean determination to see the best in things. Such a family. The original innocents abroad. He wonders if he’s ever encountered a man as strange as young Scully. For the past thirty years men his age have all come as angry young lads, but Scully was so easygoing as to appear lazy. Arthur saw him work, though. Like a black, he worked, for Fotis the stonemason. He was just unnaturally sanguine, and goodnatured to the point of irritation. Seemed to like nothing better than to dive like a hairy seal all around the island and when your contempt for him rose to the back of your throat, he’d drop by with an octopus or a few fish for soup, as if to shame you. Salvation Army. It explained a few things.