Tim Winton - The Riders

‘Messieurs.’

The proprietor, a fat man with earrings and peroxided curls raised his eyebrows.

‘Et pour monsieur?’

Scully took a moment to get it. No such thing as a free piss. He ordered an espress and sat looking at the bleary men with their English rock-star complexions. They all had moustaches, it seemed, and had taken the night’s revelry into the morning. They looked spent.

His coffee came and Billie emerged from the stairwell.

‘I looked for Femmes.’

‘Yeah?’

‘But they were all Homos.’

‘Hommes.’

‘No, it was Homos on both doors. There was a man in one.’

Scully paused, coffee halfway to his mouth. ‘Oh?’

‘He was asleep on the floor. Too tired to pull his pants up, I spose. He had a flower sticking out his bum.’

The coffee cup clacked back into its saucer.

‘Come on.’

Scully left some francs on the table and hoiked her out into the street.

‘Let’s stick to the automatic toilets from now on, huh?’ The further he got from the little café the sillier he felt.

‘The ones you put money in? The money dunny?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘They have music so no one hears you fart. And they wash themselves, you know. But the music’s the best.’ She looked at him, smiling suddenly. ‘I reckon someone stuck it in for a joke.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The flower.’

‘Oh gawd.’

‘Still,’ she smiled shrewdly, ‘it could have grown there. If he didn’t wash.’

All the way up the Rue de Rivoli, bumping against each other like drunks, they screamed and giggled.

• • •

IT WAS COLD AND STILL in the Tuileries. The long arid promenades of white gravel crackled underfoot. Bare chestnuts and planes stood without shadows. From the Louvre entrance they walked nervously, eyes narrowed with alertness. Now and then, in their path, lay a horse chestnut left over from the time of sunlight and leaves. Only a few people were about. Children in hoods and mittens chased by au pairs. Old men playing boules. Up at the Concorde end the fountain stood in the air straight as a flagpole.

Scully scanned the terraces toward the Orangeries museum. Twenty minutes to spare. His jaw ached with the tension. Billie scuffed in the gravel beside him, hat low on her brow. He dug out five francs for the swings and watched her tip and soar for a while. Bit by bit his sense of triumph was ebbing. What would he say? How could he control himself? He mustn’t frighten her off with the intensity of his feeling. He felt like a ticking bomb. No outburst of questions, no hint of recrimination. No bawling and breastbeating. Just try to be dignified for once in your life.

Scully gave Billie sixteen francs for the carousel. The coins rattled damply in his hands. Billie climbed up onto a white horse with a flaring tail. He sat beside two teenage girls who chattered and admired one another’s cowboy boots. The lights and bright paint of the carousel made a livid whirl in the dull midday. Scully shifted from buttock to buttock in the cold, swivelling now and then to scrutinize the trees behind him. He felt watched. Or paranoid. Or something. The girls beside him grew uneasy and moved off.

Five to twelve. He stood and prowled about the carousel, handed the operator more money, and waved sickly to Billie. Her horse’s teeth were bared, as if striving to bite the tail of the horse in front. They were all the same, each horse bearing down upon the next. The gay antique music set his nerves on edge.

Shit — would she show up? Okay, he’d brought Billie, despite the strict instruction of the telegram, but what alternative did he have? How could she hold it against him? He was without a clue. He had searched himself, as the Salvos said, he had examined his heart and come back to complete incomprehension. After all his guesses, all his agonies, he couldn’t know why she hadn’t shown at Shannon and now he didn’t know why she was turning up here. Faith. He was running on the scrag end of faith. In ten days Jennifer had become a ghost to him, an idea, a mystery. But her telegram crackled against his chest. A sign. It was all he had to go on.

She’d get off at the Concorde Metro and come in by the Jeu de Paume entrance, outlined by the blank expanse of the fountain pool. Their old route from St Paul when they’d come to buy Billie books at W.H. Smith across the road. Yes, that’s the way she’d come. No ghost. His wife. He knew her too well.

Tonight he’d take them out somewhere flash and traditional. Brass, leather, lace curtains. Waiters with their thumb up their arse. Snails, tails and quails — the full Gallic gallop. A good Bordeaux. A stroll on the quais. A return to civilization.

‘I don’t feel good,’ said Billie climbing down.

Noon. The ground felt spongy beneath him.

‘Sit down for a minute. You’re dizzy.’

Billie sat in the spinning shining world. Her skin was bursting and the blood inside her boiled. A chime went off inside her head. She saw sculptures up behind the fountain. They danced in the woozy glow. The seat shook like the floor of a jet. The marbled veins in that white, white face. Billie reaching out, scared to touch, scared not to. Her fingers outstretched to feel the white skin before it sets and goes hard. The smile tight as cement. The skin cold. Right before her, Billie sees it, as the cloud of silence comes down in the air of the plane. Bit by bit, her mother is turning into a statue. Something stopped. Something the rain hits and runs off, something whose eyes pale over. With an open mouth, saying nothing.

Scully saw the hooded figure appear on the terrace and felt a rash of gooseflesh. The figure froze, then turned in a whirl of dark coat as Scully straightened. He watched it stride toward the Orangeries, walking too fast for a stroll in the park. A white flash of face, a quick look and suddenly the figure tipped into a run.

Scully grabbed Billie’s arm and broke for the terrace steps. The fountain hissed. The gravel squinched and cracked like ice underfoot. He felt Billie wheeling and stumbling beside him, her legs too short to keep balance at such speed. She cried out, wrenched away and went skidding on all fours but he didn’t stop. The terrace steps were blows in the spine, the handrail burning cold, and at the moment he made the last step, he saw the shoulders and hood ducking down the street entrance to Place de la Concorde, so he wheeled right, knowing the Metro entrance was out on the corner and he had an even chance of coming down ahead of her. The gravel slurred, gave perilously beneath him. He hit the stairs and went down five at a time, barely in control, and heeled around the corner to the Metro entrance where there were more stairs and steel doors that swung to as he hit them. He burst through into the stink of piss and electricity and the sound of the train doors closing below. Empty stairs, drifts of butts and yellow billets. Four ways she could have gone and a train pulling out. The gritty air hung on him as he stood gasping and impotent against the tile wall.

‘You’re killing us!’ he screamed. ‘Fucking killing us!’

Two kids in a French parody of surfwear came up the steps nudging each other at the sight of him. The doors opened behind him to let in a shock of fresh air that stung his eyeballs and pressed him flat to the wall like the shadow he was.

• • •

UP IN THE COLD CHOKING fog Billie screamed and saw it all about her. Whirling all around were statues and birds and her own frightened voice, and pee ran down her legs hot as molten lead, burning her up, just burning her up.

SCULLY CARRIED THE CHILD tightly wrapped in his denim jacket down the Rue de Rivoli. In the steadily rising wind, the Christmas crowd avoided contact, made way, registering the desperate look of them in a second. Billie did not talk. Her face was swollen with weeping and something worse. The wind battered the canopies of oyster stalls and the upturned collars of holly sellers. Wreaths and wrapping paper skidded out into fogged gloss of a thousand gridlocked cars. Outside the glass doors of the BHV department store Scully submitted to the body search with a kind of hopeless rage. The guards smelled the piss on Billie’s jeans and recoiled. Scully hurled the wet jacket into the street and greeted the warm rush of air as the doors opened before him.