Tim Winton - The Riders

‘You should stay off the piss for a while,’ he said as kindly as he could. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’

‘Say please,’ she said, tipping the bottle to her lips, eyes on him all the time.

‘Please.’

She smiled around the bottle and he looked down at his meaty hands.

‘You don’t care for me, do you Scully?’

‘Only known you twelve hours, and for most of that I was asleep.’

‘Puritan, that’s the word that comes to mind.’

‘You wouldn’t be the first whose mind it popped into. I was just asking about my wife. You claimed to have seen her.’

‘Claim? You don’t believe me, but you want more.’

Scully looked over at Billie who was using sign language with the big birthmarked barman. She had a Pepsi in front of her and he was showing his broken teeth in a smile.

‘I thought you might tell me what you could.’

‘I wonder.’

‘What?’

Irma sat back, her chin up, neck stretched, some cleavage showing.

‘How much you really want to know. What you’ll do to get it.’

Scully stared at her. She flushed again and emptied the glass of bourbon with a grimace which became a smile. He wanted to grab that neck in both hands and wring it like a towel.

‘You want money.’

‘I prefer adventure.’

He pressed his fingernails together. ‘This other woman she was with, what did she look like?’

‘We haven’t made a deal yet, Scully.’

‘What deal, what do you want, for Godsake?’

‘Come to the cabin.’

‘Tell me here.’

‘Come to the cabin.’

‘What for? You can say it here.’

‘I want to see if you have any guts.’

‘Something must have happened to you once.’

‘You look as though you just trod in shit.’

Got it in one, love, he thought.

‘Let’s go to the cabin.’

‘Oh, goody.’

‘Quick.’

He led her into the corridor and tried to think his way clear, but she came up so close behind him she literally trod on his heels.

‘Scully, you —’

‘Shut up. Where’s the key?’

When the cabin door opened, Scully shoved her inside and she fell giggling to the floor. He grabbed his case and the backpack and looked at Irma sprawled on the floor, legs apart, hair in her eyes.

‘What a fucking disappointment you are,’ she said.

He reached across to grab Billie’s knickers from the toilet door but she beat him to it.

‘Souvenir,’ she breathed.

Scully felt his boot go back. His leg. Felt himself adjusting his balance to kick her, the way you might kick down a toadstool in a winter paddock, turning it into a noxious cloud of shit in a second, and then he saw the look of fear and exultant expectation on the woman’s face and felt sick to his bladder. He staggered, bringing himself short, and almost fell on her.

‘Gutless, gutless!’ she hissed.

Scully reversed out of the cabin as though pressing back into a cold wind.

‘She was beautiful!’ Irma yelled. ‘They spoke French. They were checking out, Scully. She was soooo beautiful. I can see why she made the choice. I saw them! I saw them!’

He bounced off the walls of the corridor, her voice chasing him from every direction, and up against the firehose in a rusty recess he listened to the shocking sound of his heart in his ears, shaming him with every beat.

In the lounge, Billie and the barman looked up in alarm and curiosity. Irma was screaming back there, hollow and faint. Scully swung the luggage into a booth, stood panting beside it and sat down sweating, nursing his fists like stones on the sticky table.

THE SOLDIERS STAND MOTIONLESS… Quasimodo’s one eye gleams wildly. They are held at bay for a moment… until one of the more adventurous men can stand it no longer…

Out on the deck, in the fine cold, Billie read her comic and plugged her ears with her thumbs. Now that was a tantrum down there. The Hunchback bounded and raved, cried and shook and poured his bubbling lead down upon the mad masses of Paris. Sailors went bucketing downstairs to see what all the noise was, and Billie read on. It was even a bit funny. But Scully wasn’t laughing. He looked shocking.

In the end it went quiet and birds landed on deck. She squeezed Scully’s hand and tried not to feel the tight burning of her face. Boiling lead. The bells going mad. She knew this story like a song.

A while after Irma gave in and shut up, after passengers quit giving him the evil eye in his seat in the lee of the lifeboats, Scully felt Billie at his side nudging him out of his stupor. Out there, in the late afternoon gloom, the forts and rocks and lights — the houses of Brindisi winking their languid green and gold — raised a cheer from travellers at the rail.

Scully gathered up their gear and bullocked a path toward the exit companionway. It took a cruel time for the engine vibrations to change pitch, a hard foetid wait wondering where Irma was in the shoving crowd but the great hatch finally did crack open and Scully and Billie were amongst the first on the dock. The sun was down beyond the drab blocks of the town’s monuments and the quay was grey and close with the shunt and stink of travellers. Everywhere you looked there were people moving and waiting, watching, many of them without any obvious purpose or destination. They were faceless in the bad light, and sinister. Scully knew right off, clasping Billie’s hand and surging ahead blindly, that he wouldn’t stay in this town. He needed a shower and a sleep and they both wanted a quiet place to lie down but Scully knew they would have to keep travelling. Maybe his nerves were buggered and he was imagining a threat that didn’t exist here, but he wanted the first train out of here. Somewhere behind was Irma, and she was enough excuse to keep going.

Up in the streets there were backpackers and vagrants dossing down for the night in cardboard and torn blankets and bright nylon sleeping bags. Monoxide hung between buildings. Garbage crackled underfoot. Scully kept a straight tack up the main drag, feeling her bounce and lag beside him. Everyone seemed to move in the same direction, from the wharf upward, so he kept on.

‘What is this?’ Billie asked.

‘It’s Hell,’ said Scully.

‘No, that’s underground.’

‘Well this is Hell’s penthouse suite, Bill,’ he murmured. ‘Ah, see, STAZIONE, that’s the stuff. Quick, this way.’

‘Where’s Irma?’

‘Way back.’

‘What a tantrum. I feel sorry for her.’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘She’s like Alex.’

Scully felt a stab at the thought of Alex. Maybe they’d buried him already, the great bearded priests singing dubiously over him, the cats prowling between the headstones behind them. How long had it been? Two days? Three?

He shrugged off touts and buskers as they came to the station, Billie pressed to his side. Scully hissed at anyone who came near. He felt a wild fervour, a queer joy as people made way, sensing that this madman would head-butt and bite his way clear if need be. People’s skin was sallow, their teeth wayward. It was a lunatic asylum in here. Timetables rolled and clattered above their heads. Scully looked for any destination north, anything leaving soon, but there was only Rome at seven-thirty. A ninety-minute wait. It wasn’t ideal but he changed some money and bought two tickets for Rome. At the kiosk he bought a week-old Herald Tribune. People swirled aimlessly about them, pressing, surging, crying out and spitting.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Billie.

‘Okay, let’s get some spaghetti,’ said Scully hoisting her up out of the human current. ‘God, let’s just get out of here.’

• • •