Tim Winton - The Riders

‘Sofia’s trying to shut up shop, Scully.’

‘Hmm?’

‘It’s afternoon. She wants a rest. You’re sitting out here like yesterday’s milk.’

‘I fed my child.’

Arthur sat down. ‘What the sodding hell has happened to you?’

Scully smiled and ran his fingers through a puddle of kokkineli on the pine tabletop. ‘That’s what I’m here to find out, Arthur.’

‘Get back on the hydrofoil, save yourself a horrible scene.’

‘Now why did Rory leave in such a hurry this morning, you think?’

‘Because he’s vain. He was terrified you’d mar his great asset.’

‘Mar, now there’s a word.’

‘There’s a hydrofoil at six.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought Rory, though.’

‘Rory is a dung beetle.’

‘You’re quite right, no change. I don’t suppose she’s up at Lotte’s?’

Arthur closed his eyes against him.

‘You’re not going to tell, then.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, there’s nothing I can tell you but get off this island for everybody’s sake.’

Scully’s head pounded. Some shadow flickered at the back of his mind, something trying to get his attention, but it just wouldn’t come. He kept seeing Alex’s yellow face, his long smoky forelock.

‘Tell me, where’s Alex these days? It’s not like him to mar a gathering by his absence.’

Arthur’s teeth met beneath his moustache in a click audible enough to startle Billie. A raw nerve there, to say the least.

‘He’s not keeping company, just at the moment.’

‘You’re kidding. Has the world gone mad?’

‘He’s up the mountain.’

‘Now you’re just winging it, Arthur.’

‘Shut up, Scully.’

‘It’s just that it’s a long way from a taverna, isn’t it.’

‘That’s the point.’

‘He’s quit drinking?’

‘Well, it remains to be seen. He’s looking after the place you and Fotis built for Bertie’s Athenian chum.’

‘Up at Episkopi.’

‘Don’t go up there.’

Arthur put a hand on Billie’s head with a look of real pity. His skin was smooth and deeply tanned, and with his down- turned moustache he was like a great seal shining there in the sun.

‘Arthur, what do you mean, don’t go up there?’

‘I mean, don’t go up there! Have the Irish turned you stupid already?’

‘Is he alone?’

‘Sofia wants you to go.’

Scully slapped some money down and stood up. Billie got up mechanically beside him.

‘Go home, boy.’

Scully mouthed that word. Home. He wasn’t sure where it was just at the present.

‘How long have you been here, Arthur?’

‘Thirty years. You know that.’

‘Did you stay too long, you think?’

‘That remains to be seen.’

‘You remain to be seen.’

‘I do at that. That’s my achievement.’

‘Not everybody remains to be seen, Arthur. Like my wife. She did not remain and neither is she seen. By me, anyway. Every other bastard seems to have a secret, though.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘No, but I’m unsteady. C’mon, Billie.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Oh, probably back to the hotel. Siesta, you know.’

‘Six o’clock, the boat goes.’

‘I won’t be on it.’

‘For Christ’s sake, don’t go up there!’

• • •

SCULLY LED BILLIE UP DONKEYSHIT Lane into the maze of houses, steps and alleys built vertically into the hill. They were like teeth in the jaw of the mountain, these houses whose whitewashed walls and bright-painted doors hid lush courtyards and shadowy cellars, whose glossy blue shutters lay ajar for the quiet rest of afternoon. On a small terrace before a taverna that bore no name, they came upon a chained dog that broke Billie from her trancelike gait.

She veered to where it stood beneath a bare fig tree. The dog watched her a moment, ears up, but sank back onto its haunches as she came close. It was the poor dog from the hydrofoil. Scully recognised the Shepherd and its owner who came out sweeping expressionlessly onto the terrace.

‘Kalimera!’ said Scully.

The woman stopped, inclined her head toward him and went on sweeping. The taverna was closed. Its geraniums stood naked in olive oil tins on the terrace.

Billie patted the dog on the snout and the two of them walked on up the hill, climbing toward the street of the Sweet Wells and the great houses from the buccaneering days of the last century. At Kala Pigadia they found level ground awhile and saw the harbour and its terracotta roofs far below. They walked on past the sound of hens laying behind rubble walls, past a tethered horse and three scrofulous cats eating from the same upturned bin. House shutters were closed and no people were about as they moved along the spine of the mountain and the ridge of ruined mansions that had begun to fall, piece by piece, into the long scree gully that twisted down to the village and marina of Kamini. The air was cooler up here, the Saronic Gulf a mere strip of sea below. Classroom chants floated across the wall of the Up School. Billie pressed her hand against the rubble parapet and listened. He could only wonder what she was thinking. He let her stay till she’d had enough. He said nothing. What could you say? Soon they came to the old people’s home with the soughing eucalyptus outside the gate, and then the walls became farm walls, cemetery walls as the land above and below the smooth stone road became orchard and field and the steps began to fall away before them.

Scully just followed his feet. The fields, steep and riven between the trackless bluffs of the mountains, had gone green and were tufted with wildflowers. There were stone sheep folds with thornbrush gates like pictures from a kid’s Bible. Shepherds’ huts lay tucked into hollows. A breeze cooled the sweat off their brows as Scully and Billie followed the path down through the rugged gorge country where the breeze became a wind in their faces, funnelled between haggard cliffs and balding bluffs, gulched and rock-strewn all the way down to the tiny village of Vlikos where a dozen whitewashed houses found the water’s edge. Scully felt it press into his cheeks, that wind, as he followed Billie beneath the familiar ruin of the stone bridge to the bottom of the scree gully where a donkey stood tethered to a lone pine and boats lay upturned like steeping turtles on the stony beach.

The emotions came like a fresh gust. He was thankful for the closed shutters of the siesta, to be able to pass through unseen and unjudged on the clay track between the houses of his old neighbours. But he paused a moment outside the place with the dark green shutters, knowing Billie would anyway.

The rocky yard fell away to the water in a maze of apricot, almond and plum trees. The figs were finished, the grapes and olives also. Four rivergums sprawled ironically in the ravine beside the house where they once hurled coffee grounds and olive seeds from the terrace of an evening. Sultry nights when bouzouki music trailed across the water from fishing boats and the mauve mass of the Peloponnese glowed on after sunset with the fires of the charcoalers. Just on dark he would climb from the water, his spear catching whatever lights were on, with a bag of octopus or a groper-like rofos with its gills still heaving. The air sharp with smoking grills and laughter from other houses.

Scully picked his way alone down the little ravine. Billie stayed up on the path, biting her lips, watching him creep across the dry, crackling ground beside the old house, up to the green shutters, up against the window itself. He crept in under the trellis of the bare grapevine, his heart mad in his neck. The granite terrace, the cubic substance of the whole house and its mirror shadow. A conspiratorial shush from the shorebreak below, the tumble of pebbles. Hadn’t they been happy here? After all the bedsits and borrowed apartments and shitty pensiones, hadn’t this been the dream place? So like home, and yet fresh, clear, new.