Tim Winton - The Riders

‘Alex?’

The tin whistle faltered and stopped. A low voice. Or voices.

‘You there, Alex?’

A scuffling sound, a chair kicked across a stone floor. Scully slipped Billie from his back and let her stand groggy beside him. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and then his hands, and braced himself at the door. He was way past irony, further past violence.

In his rumpled cardigan and bifocals, as he tipped the heavy door back, Alex Moore didn’t look anything but guilty. His hand went to his mouth. He stepped back, looked across his shoulder a moment and then back at them.

‘Oh. My stars. Billie girl!’

‘Hello, Alex,’ said Scully.

‘Scully!’

‘Ask us in, Alex.’

ALEX STOOD IN HIS DOORWAY a moment, swaying, scratching his head, and Scully thought maybe he should thump him one after all, just to get things rolling, but the old man suddenly backed away indoors and Scully took Billie’s hand and followed.

The interior was a raving shambles. There were bottles underfoot and saucers brimming with fag ends, cheese rind, olive pips. Every surface was covered with old pages of the Observer. The place stank of retsina, of smoke and bad food. On the big pine table lay a block of creamy paper, a bucket of tubes, a jar of pencils and nibs, and a small raw canvas on a stretcher, all lying there ceremonially untouched.

‘You heard, then,’ said Alex, pushing open the doors onto the terrace.

Scully followed him out into the clean air.

‘No bastard told me anything.’

‘Well, you must have known something.’

‘Guess I had my suspicions.’

‘Well. Here it is. Here I am.’

Scully looked at the defeated curve of the little man’s back and then glanced again around the house. It’s a sign, he thought. She’s lost her mind. The little shit’s using her while she’s not in a fit state. No one would come and live like this without having fallen off the edge of the world somehow. This isn’t bohemian, it’s Third World.

‘Didn’t last long,’ murmured Alex. ‘I’m a living wreck. It always starts well, doesn’t it, a resolution, a new thing.’

‘So she’s gone?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Oh, come on, Alex, don’t shit me.’

‘Well, you are the first to come gloating. If the others were capable of the walk, that’s what they’d all do.’

‘What’d you think I came all this way for, the smell of your dirty socks and the view from your terrace? I want my wife.’

‘Your wife?’

Alex’s Adam’s apple twitched.

‘Billie, go inside.’

‘Scully, I —’

‘I just want to take her home, get her some help, Alex. It’s alright, I’m not gonna do anything.’

‘Jennifer.’ Alex leaned against the cool wall and looked down the blackened slope to the sea. Billie stood by the door expressionless and unmoving. A cat slid between her feet, leapt up to the parapet and stood before Alex expectantly.

‘Where is she, Alex?’

Alex smiled and looked at him with moist eyes. ‘You’re looking for her here, with me? My dear boy, are you well?’

‘I’ll go up myself. Billie, stay here.’

Room by squalid room, Scully went through the place, his disgust and fear mounting as he opened cupboards and poked under beds. The main room upstairs had its share of bottles and crusts and stubs, and the four-poster bed was tormented with grey linen and blankets which he prodded fearfully in the gloom. He sat on the bed a moment, staring at the assembly of pill bottles on the table beside it, and knew finally that she wasn’t here, that she’d probably never been there at all. There would have been some relief at least to have seen and known the worst. And that was it — he saw how much crueller it was to know nothing at all.

When he came back down onto the terrace, Billie sat with her back to the house wall and Alex had his head in his hands. A breeze lifted up from the sea, bringing with it the carbon smell of burnt country. He knew that smell from his own continent. The afternoon sun lay across the water and a yellow haze crept up on the horizon to seal out the distance.

‘Alex, I’m sorry.’

The old man wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his cardigan and smiled hopelessly.

‘You know, it’s very flattering, really. I haven’t had a scene like this for ten years.’

Scully opened his hands and closed them.

‘You see it has an ugly irony, this scene, even without a child present,’ he murmured with his neck bent meekly. ‘Because you see, Scully… well, it’s just plain bloody funny, really.’ Alex laid his almost transparent hand along the parapet. His nails were yellow, he smiled his saurian kiss-arse smile. ‘Because I’m, I’m not up to it, any more. I’m fucking impotent . Hah, now there’s a phrase!’

‘Alex —’

‘Why don’t you stay for dinner?’ the old man said, clapping his hands together feebly.

Scully laughed. ‘Oh, my God!’

Alex laughed a long time with him but his guffaws grew into sobs that bent him in half, and Scully stood there a while, watching the poor wretched bastard cry, before going across and putting a hand on his back.

‘It’s alright, mate.’

Alex straightened and clutched at him.

Scully felt the other man’s head against his chest, his breath hot on him. He glanced at Billie who had already looked away. The afternoon died around him, the six o’clock hydrofoil came and went and night came on quickly.

• • •

AFTER SCULLY GOT THE FIRE going with olive twigs and chunks of almond wood, he went through Alex’s sorry kitchen and found sheep’s yoghurt, garlic, a cucumber and a few things in cans that he went to work on while Alex played the tin whistle to Billie. On the table stood a bottle of rosé from Patras and a litre of Cretan red. Billie stroked the cat and smiled weakly now and then during Alex’s shaky rendition of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. With all the lamps lit, and some tired old pasta boiling on the stove, Scully cleaned the place up a bit.

‘You’re spoiling me,’ said Alex.

‘Well.’ Scully smiled, couldn’t help himself. ‘You’re used to it, aren’t you? Let’s face it, Alex, you’ve been pampered all your life.’

The old man assented grandly with a flutter of eyelids.

‘How long has she been gone?’

‘Two days,’ said Scully. ‘I went to the airport to collect them and only Billie got off the plane. Hasn’t said a word since.’

‘What about the police?’

‘Maybe after I’ve tried everything else.’

‘My God, we’re both in the wars,’ said Alex pouring himself a glass of rosé and emptying it in one gulp.

‘Things are bad for you too, then,’ Scully said, looking at his own empty glass.

‘I came up here to work. Dear Arthur suggested it. Trying to save my life and talent, he fancies.’

‘Not working.’

‘No, I’m lost, my boy. You know they used once to take their old people up to the cliffs in baskets, on this island. When they had become a burden. In harsher times. Used to throw them off, you know. Gives a new twist to the old fogey’s sport of basket- weaving, don’t you think? Or being a basket case.’

Scully watched him drain another glass, and finally just poured himself one.

‘I used to be a painter, Scully, and then something of a cocks- man and a scoundrel, excuse me, dear, and nowadays I’m lucky if I qualify as a scoundrel.’

‘Oh, you’d scrape in,’ said Scully, watching the old bugger hammering the wine again.

‘You think so?’ said Alex brightening.

Scully brought tzatziki to the table with some wrinkled olives, three boiled eggs and some fettucine in garlic and kalamata oil.