Tim Winton - The Riders

The sea came at them from every point. The boat pitched, rolled, plunged and fluttered. The prop screamed free of the water and hit again. The fibreglass hull shuddered — Scully felt the impact in his teeth. Already he was withdrawing into the deckhand’s stupor, the blankness that kept him sane all those years ago. When it got too awful out there in those days, you simply shut down inside and carried on in autopilot. The deck lurching and heaving, the chop breaking in cold sheets across the wheel- house and the stinking bait washing through the scuppers. Dreamy, that’s how he was, with that animal Ivan Dimic at the wheel and the ropes fidgeting from their coils to race over the side. The stinking pots clashing up onto the tipper full of lobsters and sharks and writhing octopus. Yes, Ivan Dimic, last of the fleet to leave and first to return. He fished all day at full throttle, hungover and vicious. From the flying bridge, shrieking down on your dripping head. His was the kind of bestial voice the mad heard, only the man was as real as the torment. Buy first, pay last, and always get your punch in before the other poor cunt sees you coming, that was Ivan’s philosophy. Scully stayed with him for the money of course, outrageous in those boom years, and because he believed that things could only get better, that he was capable of getting on top of it. But he didn’t come from the same stock as Ivan and the crews he knew in his fishing days. Scully simply wasn’t a fighter and the only way to win Ivan over was by force. The deckhand’s revenge. Oops. Over the side twenty miles out. It happened. But not for young Scully. All those February mornings hacking back into the easterly, Scully imagined himself elsewhere. But tonight there was only so far out of himself he could go.

Billie began to vomit. There was no way to direct it anywhere; he couldn’t hang on and help her as well, so he took the steaming little gouts against his jacket as he hugged her to him. It slicked the seat and filled the cabin with a bitter stink. The poor little bugger. He felt her hands at the back of his neck and hated himself for his stupidity and clumsiness, for letting this happen to her, for being in this insane situation. What else could possibly happen to her? She was so strong, so resilient, but how much could a kid take? He thought maybe he should have stayed, but what use was he to her in jail on a Greek island? There was no telling what could happen with the business of Alex, how things might turn out. He might have gone to a pharmacy, got the doctor out to Arthur’s, but the cops were too close and he simply couldn’t risk it. And the sight of her mad with fear amongst all those screaming people, the nurses wrestling her down like an animal. No, he couldn’t do it to her. He had to pray that she understood, that she knew him well enough to see that this was not normal, that this wasn’t what he would ever do unless he had to. But it wasn’t right, it shouldn’t be like this, she shouldn’t have to endure it and the enormity of it cut him to the blood. Some father, Scully, some father.

Meatballs turned, scowling.

‘Ermione no good! Hydra Beach we go! Hydra Beach!’

The boat rose out of a trough and hung bawling in the air so long Scully could feel it moving laterally in the wind. When it hit water again, Billie’s tartan suitcase burst open and flung underpants, razors, paper all over. He let it go and hung on.

‘There’s nothing at Hydra Beach this time of year! I gave you two hundred bucks!’

‘Hydra Beach. Only this.’

Water sluiced back across the canopy and the bow buried momentarily. It was claustrophobic underwater. Strings of pearly bubbles pressed against the screen. The boat shuddered and ground up into the air again. They were an hour out already and Scully knew it could take a lot longer to get down the coast to Ermione. It might take half the night at this rate.

Billie stiffened. The wound in her scalp had begun to bleed again and she was too weak to even cling to him anymore. The deck slopped, and at his feet, half curled and blotted, lay Alex’s sketch of the Rue de Seine, its buildings solid and angular, its pavements thick with people, dogs, cars, its high window perspective stupidly reassuring. He found himself staring at it, looking out through its window at the solid earth below.

‘Hydra Beach, Afstralia!’

Scully looked up at Nick Meatballs and saw him scared and greenfaced, all the macho bullshit gone. His lips were creamy with spit. Scully looked about for signs of lifejackets — none — and just then the bouzouki clamour fell silent, and the shouting voice of a man on the radio receiver was audible between clashes of static.

Imagine a breakdown in this shit, he thought. All those granite islets. The cliffs of Dokos.

They rolled heavily and crashed sideways into the water that pressed black against the glass.

Alex would be lying on a slab in Hydra harbour by now. The cops ringing around. The wake being planned. Arthur passing the hat. Buried as an infidel, no doubt. No matter how long you stayed you were always a foreigner in or out of church, alive or dead. Was it me, Alex, because of me?

‘Afstralia?’

‘Okay, Hydra Beach.’

‘You smart boy!’

‘Tell me about it.’

He looked down at the smudging Rue de Seine and saw women on the pavement, their hips high with walking. He wanted to go there, to be inside that picture with its smells of Chanel and coffee and cake, to be inside the life of it, in its steady, perfect composition and lightness of touch, but the real world, the twisted nightmare around him had hold too tight. The sea sucked and grabbed and hissed and snatched and Billie’s sweat glistened greenly. There was no going into the neatness of the imagination. He could only pray for her to forgive him, to take what was left of him, to strike him dead, to save him.

DEEP IN SOME BIG, MAD story, a Jonah story, a Sinbad story, a Jesus and the fishermen story, the kind that’s too true to be strange, too dreamy to be made up, Billie hung onto Scully’s jacket and heard the sea growl and saw the sky go underground with her. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry he was saying, like a ship’s engine driving her along, pushing her across the waves of sickness and pain and pictures that wrenched her. In her head, too, she heard the song from the Up School floating across the wall.

Something, something, parakalo,

Something, something, parakalo…

Her head was too crowded, she was forgetting Greek. What was it they were asking for? For everything to be still? For everything to go back to the way it was? For it all to stop?

Billie saw the poor wet dog. The way its eye moved slowly. The big, pink inside of its mouth and the meaty smell of its breath. And all the people. Yelling at her. The gold in their teeth, the blood stinging her eyes like Pears shampoo. All of them pushing and trying to take her away, twisting her arms, their hairy soft hands all over her. And Scully holding on, his face like a pumpkin, fat and bulgy with fright. She saw the newspaper in the lady’s teeth, his hand on her hair, brushing her like a dog, saying words too soft for language. His big heart there in his shirt, the love in his neck. He didn’t let go, he didn’t let them. The fat cigar, the stink of Mister Arthur’s cigar. Gentle fingers on her face. Every shot of pain the chime of an aeroplane toilet sign — ting, ting, ting. A white face in the cloud. Somewhere, too, a tin whistle pweeting. Another surge of people and glass doors peeling back like the sea for Moses and Scully’s busted face on the other shore beneath the chiming, tolling, swinging bells. Him not letting go, their fingers making bloodknots and bimini twists and not slipping, tied properly, not giving an inch. The dog had no one now and she had Scully. She was the lucky one.