Tim Winton - The Riders

BILLIE SAW SCULLY WINDING DOWN like that organ grinder’s music out there in the street. All the wildness was gone now. He just tooled with some bread in a little puddle of wine and said nothing. He was awake but nearly switched off. She sucked up some spaghetti. It wasn’t as good as he made. Anyway she could taste the antiseptic ointment on everything. It seemed a long time ago that she had spaghetti made by him. Out the window in the lights of the street the grinder’s monkey scratched himself and tipped his head at her. The holes in her head throbbed like music.

‘What country is this?’

‘Italy,’ said Scully.

‘So they speak — ?’

‘Italian.’

‘What town?’

‘Brindisi.’

‘Is it all like this?’

‘Italy, I’ve only ever passed through. No, we stayed in Florence a couple of days, remember?’

Billie shook her head. There were too many places. Stations, airports, the flat heads of taxi drivers. She remembered Hydra and Paris and Alan’s house, but other places were just like television, like they weren’t for real. And that house, that little house Scully made was all in a fog, blurry, swirling, like the cloud that came down on her head when she thought of the plane. The steamy hot towels the stewards brought. The toilet light going off. Her coming, so beautiful down the aisle. Hair all stuck back like perfect. The white neck, so white… and the cloud coming down.

‘All the statues have little dicks,’ she said.

‘I didn’t notice. Wipe your face, you’ve got sauce all over your chin.’

‘Why doesn’t that monkey run away?’

He looked at the monkey in the funny suit on the grinder’s box. ‘Maybe he’s too scared.’

‘Doesn’t look scared.’

‘Maybe he needs the dough,’ he said, trying to crack a smile.

Billie thought of all those people on the wharf and in the skinny streets. Like the ones you see in Paris, in the Metro and the hot air holes lying on boxes and sleeping bags.

‘Are we going to be beggars?’

‘No, love.’

‘We haven’t got much money anymore, have we.’

‘I’ve got a card.’ He got out his wallet, the one with the picture she didn’t want to see. He held up the little plastic card. ‘I can get money with it, see?’

‘They should give them to beggars. Jesus would give em cards, right?’

‘Spose. Yeah. I have to pay the money back later. It can be scary. People go crazy with them.’

‘It wouldn’t help Irma.’

He just looked out the window at that and didn’t want to talk. He had a good heart, her dad, but maybe it wasn’t big enough for Irma.

THE TRAIN PULLED OUT INTO the darkness. Billie tried to get comfortable. She bumped Scully’s newspaper and he sighed. People murmured. Some had pillows and eyepatches. Lights, houses, roads began to fall by. Trains weren’t so bad. You could see you were getting somewhere in a train, even at night like this, the darkness just a tunnel out there with you shooting through, roaring and clattering and bouncing through like a stone in a pipe, like the stone Billie felt in her heart now, trying to think of something good, something she could remember that wouldn’t make her afraid to remember. Past the cloud. The white neck, she saw. So suddenly white as if the tan had been scrubbed out in the aeroplane toilet. Beautiful skin. The veins as she sits down. Skin blue with veins. Like marble. And talking now, mouth moving tightly. Cheeks stretched. Hair perfect. But the words lost in the roar, the huge stadium sound in Billie’s ears as the cloud comes down, like smoke down the aisle, rolling across them, blotting the war memorial look of her mother in blinding quiet.

• • •

SCULLY HID BEHIND the Herald Tribune and tried to get a grip. But he was studying the reflections of the other passengers as though Irma might be among them. He was going mad, surely. He wasn’t heading anywhere, he had no purpose — he was just going. Come to think of it he envied Irma her performance on the ferry. Kicking and screaming, head-butting the walls. Some total frigging indecorum, he could do with it. No, too tired. He didn’t have a clue what he was up to. Funny, really, he was just going. Travelling. For the sake of it. It actually made him grin.

The paper fell in a crumple. Night warped by. It could have been anywhere out there. The mere movement of the train was soothing. Billie slept like a dog beside him. He saw himself in the glass smiling dumbly. A boy’s face in a steel milk bucket. The face of a boy who likes cows, reflected in the still oval of milk — white, dreamsome, sleepy milk.

• • •

BILLIE WOKE FOR A WHILE in the night and watched the land and lights slipping by. It meant nothing to her, it had no name, no place that she could see. It was like the walls of a long tunnel just going by and by. She wondered about Granma Scully, if maybe she would come to live with them now in that little dolls’ house. It was just country out there, more country. She thought of wide, eye-aching spaces of brown grass with wind running rashes through it and big puddles of sheep as big as the shadows of clouds creeping along toward lonely gum trees. That was a sight she could get hold of. Or the back step at Fremantle where the snails queued up to die by the tap. The sight of Rottnest Island hovering over the ocean like a UFO in the distance. She went to sleep again, thinking of the island hovering there, like a piece of Australia too light to stay on the water.

• • •

COFFEE AND ROLLS CAME BY at dawn and Scully bought breakfast for them, but Billie slept on twitchy as a terrier. Towns were becoming suburbs out there in the dirty light. Time to freshen up, beat the queues. He clambered into the aisle. It was hard work picking his way through the outflung legs of sleepers. The whole car stank of bad breath and cheap coffee. He had his hand on the latch of the toilet door when he saw her through the glass partition between carriages. Second row, aisle seat. Totally out to it. Mouth open slackly, head back, leg twisted out into the traffic. Two grimy runs of mascara down her cheeks. Irma.

He stood there a moment in awe. Yes, she was something else, something else entirely. You could almost admire her doggedness — until you thought of her souveniring your daughter’s underpants.

He went back down the aisle tripping on the ugly mounds of rancid backpacks and mattress rolls, stockinged feet, hiking boots, slip-ons. The train plunged and juddered. He snatched down their luggage and hoisted Billie to his shoulder. It took sea legs to move through the gut of that train, through doors and curtains of smoke, past suit bags and monogrammed luggage, around suitcases with wheels.

The toilet in first class was quiet and roomy. Scully sat on the closed lid of the seat with Billie still asleep on his lap and the genteel passengers of first class queuing patiently outside. In time the train slowed, but Scully’s mind racketed on. Hit the ground running, he thought. Hit it running.

• • •

ROMA TERMINI WAS A VAST chamber of shouts and echoes, metal shrieks and crashes of trolleys as Scully and Billie ran through the mob of beseechers and luggage grabbers toward the INFORMAZIONE office in the main hall. Scully felt smelly and gritty and wrinkled as he scanned the weird computer board that flashed messages in all languages.

‘Inglese?’ Called a thin dark woman from the counter behind them.

‘ Oui, ’ said Scully, panting. ‘ Si, yes, English.’

He saw the destinations reeling off before him.

8.10 Berne

8.55 Lyon (Part-Dieu)

7.05 Munich

8.10 Nice

7.20 Vienna

7.20 Florence