Tim Winton - The Riders

But the looks on the faces of those worthless mongrels in the Lyko this morning — the downcast eyes, the suppressed giggles, the shuffling embarrassment out in the street. Arthur’s horror at the mention of Alex Moore. It made you wonder. Had he lived in some Pollyanna blur all this time? Was he missing something? Was she miserable and bored? And worse?

He peered in through the half-open shutter of his old place and saw a man and a woman asleep there. Middle aged. Arms cast about like kelp from the stones of their bodies. Strangers. In his bed. Queer, but the sight of them brought back a memory. That one thing. That old embarrassing thing. He stared in at the twisted sheet and the overturned shoes and thought of the day he came down the mountain from work to the empty house. The strange feeling he had. Billie playing with Elektra’s kids next door, her mile wide accent echoing up the dirt lane. The easel and some daub on the stretched canvas. Alex’s bloody fag ends all over the terrace. And the bed all torn up like a dog had been in it. It took the longest, longest time for the dread to seep into him, that unfamiliar poison hitting him as he casually straightened the sheets and then ricked them back like a lunatic, scrabbling all over for some sign, some nasty wet mark that wasn’t there. Nothing. And somehow there was no comfort in finding nothing. The blind infant rage of jealousy. God, how pathetic. Was there anything more pitiful than a howling man rifling his own bed for someone else’s sperm? She came in on him like that, dripping from the sea and cheerful and he wanted to die from shame. Homesickness, he said, don’t worry. He cried in her arms. She pushed him down on the bed, salty and slick, fierce with lust, and he never gave the business another thought.

Until today. Just now. Looking in on these strangers. Once you open the door you can’t easily close it. You let your mind off on its leash and you have to go where it does. What did he expect, coming to the island? A rescue mission? A meeting? A quiet reckoning? Certainly not to be standing outside his old house entertaining the kind of thing he was thinking of now. Of that nicotine-stained old wreck slipping it to his wife. Of the afternoons they had, the bottles of wine and shady grottoes they might have found, of all the stupid brainless things he was letting himself think now, and thinking them with a kind of cold pleasure. Thinking about that baby now, of the marvellous heartwarming fact that it might not be his, and that Jennifer had set him up in some simple Irish decoy and gone home to cash in her chips and fuck off back to the great man. What a shitheaded moron he was! What a blind fuckwit! What an understanding little dickhead.

He bolted up the ravine and onto the path to where Billie stood mesmerized.

‘Someone else lives there now,’ he said, hearing the quaver in his voice.

She took his hand a moment and he sensed an opening in her, a pressure of tenderness. She tugged him in the direction of the harbour and for a few paces he let himself be led. But then he dug in.

‘Episkopi,’ he said. ‘This way.’

Billie flung his hand away. He reached for her but she fell down in the dirt with her head between her knees. So she knew. God help him, his kid knew. She was told at the airport.

‘C’mon,’ he croaked, ‘I’ll piggyback you.’

He stood there as the wind plied between them. Crickets hissed around. He heard her get up and dust herself off, and when he opened his eyes he saw her setting off along the road to Episkopi.

• • •

AT PALAMIDAS, the little oil-streaked bay beneath the island mountain, Scully took Billie on his back and slugged up the winding track through the gnarled olive groves, feeling the child’s breath against his neck, her body relaxing against his as she slipped into sleep. He felt the smoothness of her ankles beneath his callouses. He just didn’t know how something like this could be abandoned. What was there after a child, what could you want more?

He didn’t know what to expect up at Episkopi, how he would act. Why was it easier to hope that she’d gone crazy? After all, her mother had ‘episodes’. At sixty she’d been found running naked through the streets of Perth. Madness was its own excuse, it was everybody’s absolution. What a shit to think that way, what a coward.

Sweating and panting Scully came to the pine country and the final doglegs of the track as it found its way to the summit. What a joke it was to think of Alex and her living in the very house he’d been building while they were at it out on the terrace this year. Think of the irony. Such a civilized business, thinking of irony. What a master of self-control he was. Think of the irony, Scully. Don’t go in like a thug. Think of the kid, for Godsake.

At the brow of the incline in a small clearing stood a chapel white as a star there above the sea. There was fresh dung outside and he stopped a moment and sniffed. His stomach tightened strangely. Horse dung, a magical smell. He stood a few moments, looking at the dung and the chapel, blowing a little after the long climb. He stumped over to the door and touched it, pushed it gingerly back on its hinges. Behind him, a stand of quail flushed unseen and caused him to flinch.

A musty breeze circled out of the dimness of the place. Scully stepped inside. It was cool. The narrow windows let in rods of light ahead, and against the gable was a simple sanctuary and altar. An ikon, a sad Christ face all gold and burgundy, was animated by the three candles that burned there in the silence. Scully’s mouth went dry and his arms ached. He had a horrible weak urge to kneel here on the concrete floor, but with the child on his back he was spared the exercise. He pursed his lips to speak, but the silence of the chapel was overpowering, so he turned for the door and saw, framed in the light, a woman. He flinched and grunted. She had a black dress and shawl.

‘ Yassou, Kyria,’ he said in greeting.

Her eyes were black and on her feet were wide, men’s shoes. She held a twig broom in her hands and inclined her head towards him and stood aside to let him pass.

‘ Efkharisto,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you.’

She pointed her broom across the flat ridge where the road continued on across the spine of the island to Episkopi.

She knows, too, he thought. The wind lapped around her shawl and she did not move. She kept pointing along the road and her face was expressionless. As he came by her through the door, he saw the gob of spit hit the gravel before him and heard it again behind. He turned and saw her calmly making the sign of the cross against her flat chest.

He stumped off up the road, too angry to pause and drink at the cistern beside the track. The child was a sack on his back. All around him the pines sounded like an inhaling choir. He went on, determined now to get it over with and get on the hydrofoil at six as Arthur suggested. He might just make it. Say his piece, whatever it was he had left to say when it came down to it, and piss off back into the smoking ruins of his life.

• • •

UP FROM THE FINAL STONY gully, he came into the ragged conglomeration of huts, hunting lodges and houses that was Episkopi. A few mules were tethered outside a pillarbox lodge that echoed with snores. Scully felt drool running down his neck. He hiked the kid up on his back a little and walked on through to the big fresh whitewashed house at the cliff where the island fell away to the open sea on the other side.

The house was broad and plain and seemed to have settled into the topsoil of this bony edge of the mountain. The solitary fig stood before it, casting a black rag of shadow at its feet. The grey shutters were ajar and as Scully came up closer, he heard the sound of a tin whistle fidgeting from inside. He was footsore, perspiring, thirsty, and all his rage had left him. He looked up at the house he’d cut and carried the blocks for with nothing more than sadness.