Tim Winton - The Riders

He looked up to see Billie press out through the glass doors. He snatched up the telegram and surged out into the street after her.

‘Billie!’

She was doll-like, her hands slack at her sides as she stumped along the cobbles, ankles tilting madly in her riding boots. The street was heady with coffee and cigar smoke.

He drew up beside her, laid a hand on her shoulder. She wrenched aside and kept walking.

‘Billie.’

What if she wants me? Billie thought. You only get one mother.

‘Billie, stop. What about the doctor?’

‘I’ll scream,’ she said hoarsely. ‘If you touch me, if you talk to me I’ll scream and police’ll get me. They’ll take me off you.’

He stood there, stunned. Cars and cobbles shone in a drizzle he hadn’t even noticed. She wiped her face on the dewy arm of her jacket and with a sobering visible force of will she straightened her back and pulled out the wad of lire he had left on the counter.

‘Just don’t talk,’ she whispered.

And they said not a word between them all through the streets to the hotel and the station and the night train to Paris.

SCULLY PROPPED HIMSELF UP in his bunk to watch the lights of the Italian Riviera peel by. Boats were stranded stars out in the low darkness. Tunnels tipped him into roaring space and gave him gooseflesh. He couldn’t see beaches but in the unlit gaps, in places no steel or concrete would fit, he sensed them out there. Palm-lined boulevards, stretches of sand. Breaking waves.

He recalled that weekend at St Malo in Brittany, the sight of a beach after so long landlocked in London and Paris. The wind off the channel was vile. The sand was ribbed by the outgone tide. It was so strand-like, so strange. In boots and coats the four of them belted up the shoreline, running in the wind, beneath the medieval ramparts of the old city. You could imagine Crusaders on this beach as easily as Nazi soldiers. Protected by a tidal spit, a fortress stood out in the sea as an advance guard. It wasn’t much of a sea but it sharpened his homesickness all the same. Inside the rampart walls overlooking the channel, built into their very cavities, was a labyrinth of marine aquariums, a discovery that delighted him. While the other three charged on through, gasping and nudging on ahead with their girlish voices reverberating in the subterranean dankness, Scully lingered at every tank, studying fish he did not recognize.

It was a good weekend, a relief from Paris. Of all their Parisian friends Dominique was the one Scully came closest to relaxing with. There was no sexual brittleness between her and him, no vast cultural gap. She carried her Leica everywhere, that weekend. Along the waterfront, in the strange old cemetery, in cafés and wintry streets. In the deserted hotel they played pool downstairs and drank hot chocolate and calvados. The sound of the shutter clunking away. Pool balls socking into cushions. The channel wind outside. And sea.

Scully opened the train window and felt the frigid blast on his cheeks.

Paris. This time he’d get the best of the bloody place. This time he was free, just passing through. And he wasn’t as green as he used to be. No pouting landlords to deal with, no scaly ringworm ceilings of the rich and tightarsed, no looks down the Gallic nose that he’d once had to take humbly, thinking of payday. The drudgery and anxiety of illegal work was gone — nights lying awake stinking of turps with fists like cracked bricks. This time he’d kiss no bums. No apologies for his hideous French or his hopeless clothes. No reason why he couldn’t enjoy himself. This time he was taking no prisoners.

He slid the window back down and felt the pleasant numbness of his face. There was no fear tonight, just a wild anticipation. Anything was better than not knowing.

• • •

BILLIE WRUNG THE BLANKET AT her chest as the black tunnel of night blasted by her head. Look at him tonight, like Quasimodo up in the bells. That smiley shine on his face reflected in the glass. His knees up. Like the hunchback kicking the bells, right inside himself, setting bells going that he can’t hear. She pulled the bedclothes up over her head and smelt the sourness of her breath. The train lurched and bucked. It felt like it wanted to leave the rails. Right there with the sheet between her teeth and the blanket like a fuggy tent above her head, Billie prayed for an angel, for a whirlwind, a fire, a giant crack in the world that might save them from tomorrow, from the other side of the cloud.

• • •

IN THE ZIRCON GLARE OF Indian Ocean water — reef water, bombora water, shark water — Scully saw a furrow. He paused at the gunwhale stinking of mackerel blood and running sweat. He peered. A wake, a flat subsurface trail that made him think of dolphins. But this swimmer had limbs. He saw it now — the outline of legs, arms, a kelp fan of hair — and she surfaced beneath him in the clear shade of the boat, naked and slick, breasts engorged, belly huge. Jennifer. Laughing, calling, buoyant. He didn’t even hesitate. He went over the side in his sea-boots and heavy apron, the gloves greedily sucking water at his elbows, and he sank like a ballasted pot, roaring down in a trail of bubbles to the hairy, livid base of the reef where Billie waited smiling, her face ragged from sharks, her body breaking up and the shadow of the swimmer on the surface passing over like the angel of death.

WITH THE HEATER BLOWING ITSELF into a useless fit and his hands stiff on the wheel, Peter Keneally pulls in off the icy road with the mail of the Republic sliding about behind him. He kills the motor in front of Binchy’s Bothy, and heaves himself out. It’s no damned colder out there. Jaysus, the sky is opaque as frozen ditchwater and the little house stands silent beneath it on the hill. Birds wheel and jockey down at that godawful pile of a castle and cloud spills down from the humpbacked mountains.

The postman unlocks the heavy green door and watches it heel back with a murmur. He’s been wanting to do this for a week now, be in Scully’s house alone. A smell of fresh mildew. Detergent. Paint and putty. The wee curtains all drawn, the womanly things here and there on sills and shelves. He sets a fire in the grate and lights it, goes prowling, hearing his big ugly boots on the boards and the stair.

The little bed, torn open and left. Some books. Madeline, The Cat in the Hat, Where the Wild Things Are, Tin-tin , a big Bible with pictures. The fresh paint on the walls. A whiff of smoke from a chimney crack somewhere. And the big bed all rumpled and strewn with toiletries and clothes dragged out in a hurry. There are books here too. The World According to Garp , for Godsake. Slaughterhouse Five, Monkey Grip . Newspapers, hardware catalogues.

Peter sits on the bed and uncaps his pint of John Jameson. The whiskey goes down like a pound of rusty nails. His heartbeat is up, being in this house. It has the strange fresh feeling of the new. It doesn’t look Irish anymore. The nicely made bookshelf beside the bed, the sanded chairs, the bright rug thrown across the floor. The house of a man who knows a few things, good with his hands and thoughtful. A careful man, and thorough, able to cook and do all these womanly things. A fella with books by his bed and stories of Paris and the red desert and huge blinking fish. A man with a child, no less. Yes, he envies old Scully, no way round it. All that coming and going. Even this little house now — he envies him for what he saw in it.

The postman gets up and opens a few drawers. He touches shirts and pencils, picks up a photograph of a girl with coal black hair and a ghost’s still face. The sky is blue behind her. His mind goes blank just looking at her, and he returns the photo to the drawer and sits back on the bed to look at his boots.