Tim Winton - The Riders

They went up the long steps toward the little hotel he had in mind, somewhere discreet and back from the water a way. He wondered if they’d been seen already, if Jennifer had been standing by a high window or on a sunny terrace when the boat came in. What was she thinking? Would she send a message, just appear, panic? She could be packing her bags this moment. He paused halfway to the hotel on a little terrace from where he could see a strip of sea, and the mountain breeze caught about his ankles. In the house above, a woman sang in a deep, stern voice. He knew the song, but had never been able to follow the Greek well enough to understand it. Billie stood passive beside him, scuffing her feet on the smooth granite flags whose centres were hollow with wear. Scully hummed a few bars and caught himself shaking there in the sunlight.

• • •

HE KNOCKED AT THE HEAVY courtyard door and waited in the narrow lane. A small dark woman with an enormous bust under her black pinafore pulled the door back. With a broom in one hand, she regarded them.

‘Kyrios Scully?’

Scully stuttered, unnerved to be known by someone he didn’t recognize. Was she someone Jennifer knew? ‘Er, neh, Kyria, kalimera, um, hello.’

The woman ran her hand through Billie’s blonde curls and ushered them into the courtyard where sunlight piled in through the bare grapevines and lit her hanging gourds and her stone stairs.

‘Uh, Kyria, do you have a room… domatio?’

‘Neh, neh, poli’

She led them to the stairs where cats lay indolent in the light, not moving as they stepped over them. At the head of the stairs she opened a door onto a large room with several beds and wide doors opening to a balcony.

‘ Kala ,’ Scully stammered. ‘Kala, poli. We’ll take it. Efkaristo.’

‘Is very good place, you come back.’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘Cheap for you.’

‘How about two thousand drachs?’

The woman pursed her lips doubtfully but shrugged in the affirmative. ‘ Endakse.’

‘Okay, good.’

She brought them towels and soap, opened the doors and left the room, beaming. Scully took the pack off Billie’s shoulders and walked out onto the balcony. The fishhook of the harbour lay plainly below, and he looked out at the gulf and beyond it the mottled mass of the Peloponnese where the faraway smoke of charcoalers smudged the air above the peninsula.

He wondered where she would be. Unless she’d organized something from Australia, she wouldn’t have a house yet. Maybe a hotel by the water or a spare room in one of the expats’ houses. He tried to think. Where would be go after bolting in some kind of panic? God, the thought of her having a breakdown in some bare room twelve thousand miles from home. What else could make you act like that? Surely it couldn’t be a way of making a point. You couldn’t be right in the mind to do this to people you love.

Scully felt his fingernails in his palms and tried to shake it off. It was not time for macho bullshit. No breastbeating, no torrent of recriminations. Just be prepared to listen, he told himself; don’t go shitting in your own nest.

He felt Billie’s hand on the back of his leg. One of her shoelaces was undone, so he knelt and retied it and looked into her troubled face.

‘We’re gonna go down now and look, orright? It’s a small place — we’ll probably find her before lunch and she’ll explain why it happened. Everything’ll make sense somehow, and then I think we’ll understand. I just want you to be brave and let us sort it out. Let her say what she has to say, okay? Sometimes people having a baby can be very nervous — flighty, you know, like a horse. Now are you sure there isn’t anything you want to tell me first?’

Billie’s eyes began to fill as she shook her head.

‘It’s alright. I’m gonna fix it up.’

• • •

ON HIS WAY BACK down the jumbled steps to the harbour, feeling bilious and goosefleshed, Scully stumped through spokes of light that ran between the smooth white blocks of houses, and he only faintly sensed the brief heat of the sun’s concentration. He was lighter without all the northern clothing he’d been wearing, and despite all this weirdness, he felt more himself because of it. Jeans, sneakers, cotton windcheater, the old Scully uniform.

At the waterfront with its summer marquees peeled back to let in the sun, there were a few tables set outside tavernas here and there. Fishermen, old sailors, and a few gold-toothed muleteers sat in the kafenion playing tavla and shooting the breeze. The gold merchants, the postcard stalls and claptrap tourist joints were shuttered up, and no speakers played ‘Zorba’ across the water. The bank was open and sleepy and the hardware-cum- liquor store had its doors wide to the water. The Up ’n’ High was closed, the Pirate Bar looked forlorn without its summer Eurotrash. The place felt cleaner, happier for winter.

He ducked back off the waterfront and headed for the Three Brothers. In the lanes, islanders gave him troubled greetings, as though trying to place him, or even, he thought, trying not to place him, as if he was the last man they wanted to see this morning. He felt them turning, each of them, to watch him go. Living here the three of them had been distinctive, even among the xeni. No one forgot Billie and that rude awakening of blonde curls. She had been such a vivacious ambassador, easing their way every place they went, and here on Hydra she gave them respectability as well, the illusion of soundness, of family solidity.

Scully smelled pine and linseed oil as he passed a workshop whose saw fell silent. It was dark inside the double doors and he was blinded to its interior by the sunlight, but called a greeting and pulled Billie along when no answer came. It’s as if they smell disaster, he thought, bad luck. Am I imagining it, or are they uneasy? They’ve seen her arrive and then me, put two and two together, and they smell trouble.

In the market square, the butcher hacked at a goat carcase, cigarette in his mouth. Scully did not speak as he passed.

In the lane outside the Three Brothers, a few tables stood in the sun, their plastic covers pulsing lightly in the breeze. Inside were a couple of old islander men with great smoke cured moustaches and waistcoats who greeted him dully, and in the corner was Max Whelp whose eyelids hung low as the ash that drooped from his cigarette.

‘Max,’ said Scully without sitting down.

Billie stood by while the old men pulled comical faces at her.

‘Scully? You idiot, what are you doing back?’

‘Where are they all?’

‘The scum, you mean?’

‘If you like.’

‘Fuck em.’

‘There’s a kid here.’

‘Fuck em twice. I’m banned. That fucking Alex!’

‘You look terrible.’

‘Strange, you know, but I feel better every day. 1963 I came here, Scully, and I’m feeling better every day.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

Max pulled himself more or less erect and looked Scully up and down. ‘Didn’t you go back to the colonies?’

‘Where you banned from, Max?’

‘The Lyko. The smug bastards. Hm, that’s a pretty girl.’

‘It’s my seven-year-old daughter, Max.’

‘Lost-looking. Like her mother.’

‘You’ve seen her, then.’

Max Whelp stubbed his fag out, looked hard at Scully and laughed. Scully hauled Billie out of there and headed back down to the water.

‘When I was a boy on the farm,’ said Scully to the child, ‘my mum used to tell me to beware of worthless characters. I thought she was a bit hard on people, you know, being a farmer’s wife and everything, but I found out otherwise when I came here. Max is a worthless character. Don’t ever go near him.’