Tim Winton - The Riders

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BILLIE TRIED TO PULL THE new jeans up over her knees but the floor was sagging everywhere and her skin was cooking. She looked in the mirror and saw a crybaby, a sook, a beggar with scraped knees and no knickers, glowing like a bushfire.

With an armful of elastic-backed jeans, as Christmas muzak rained on him and women bustled by with chirping kids, Scully stood outside the changing booth and tried to complete a thought — any thought. Knickers, jacket, credit card. Words, things petered out in his mind.

‘Scully?’

Billie’s voice was quavery.

‘You alright?’

He slid the curtain aside a little and saw the kid pressed against the fogging mirror, pants around her shins.

‘Can’t you get them up?’

She turned slowly as a tightrope walker and he saw the glassy sheen of her eyes. ‘I’m… I’m hot.’

Scully fell to his knees and touched her bare skin. She had a fever. God, she was burning. Her wounds pouted nastily beneath their moist plaster strips.

‘Okay,’ he murmured. ‘Let me help you. We’ll get undies on the way out.’

He had the little jeans almost up when he felt the shadow of someone behind the curtain and heard the sharp intake of breath. He swivelled and saw a woman with a hand to her mouth. A livid flush came to her cheeks as he pulled the jeans up and snapped the press-stud without looking down. He tried to shrug casually and smile in a comradely parental way, but the woman turned on her heel. Scully set his teeth and finished up grimly. He gathered Billie in his arms and headed for the register.

INTO THE WINDTUNNEL OF THE Rue de Rivoli they come, bent as a single tree, clothes and shopping demented with flapping. She slips back into the bleak doorway to let them pass blindly by without feeling the heat of her love. She knows where they are going. She knows everything there is to know about them the way the dead see the living. The wind pricks her nipples and knees, the tip of her nose, and she watches her life limp by in the weird light of afternoon while she decides how far to follow, wondering when enough is enough, asking herself why it hurts to need so badly.

A TELEPHONE, THAT WAS THE first thing. Somewhere out of this wind, a phone. Dominique would be in town. She’d have a GP. She could translate for him. God, Scully how could you let this happen?

The streets were icing up now, the cobbles slick with it. Clochards hauled themselves out of doorways and headed for the shelter of the Metro. Billie’s mittened hand fluttered against his cheek. Car horns bleated in the narrow alleys of the Marais. He knew a place, a good place.

He swung into the fuzzy doorway of Le Petit Gavroche where the goldfish still swam in its glass orb atop the beer tap. The barman greeted him noncommitally, trying to place him. Faces came and went here. Scully slipped past the bashed zinc counter into the blue bank of cigarette smoke and found a table by the payphone. He sat Billie down, unwrapped her a little, and stowed the shopping bags beneath her.

The place was full of the usual crowd, mostly site workers on their lunchbreak. Scotsmen, Paddies, Luxembourgers. The cash work crew, hard men without papers, dodgy truck drivers, some local students, a few old hookers with big smiles and eyelashes like dead crows. It was Scully’s place. He’d heard a lot of stories here. The food wasn’t much but the beer was cheap and there was always someone lonely or drunk enough to talk to you.

Scully ordered hot chocolates and sat down to remember Dominique’s number. He cancelled Billie’s chocolate and made it lemonade. The kid sat there dreamily, trying to pull her mittens off. No, he was a blank. He dragged the butchered phone book out of its slot and looked it up. Yes. What was wrong with him? A simple thing to remember. God, his mind was going.

He stood up, stuck some francs into the phone and dialled. It rang and rang without an answer. The drinks came. Billie drank greedily. He got up and dialled again but no one picked up. Bugger it — that meant he had to ring Marianne. There just wasn’t anyone else. He dialled.

‘Allo, oui?’ The familiar deep voice. She had the timbre of a forties movie star. He paused a second, hesitating.

‘Marianne, it’s Scully.’

‘Scully?’ The mellifluous tone wavered. ‘My Gahd, Scully, where are you?’

‘Just around the corner, as it happens.’

‘Comment? Scully, what did you say?’

‘The Marais. I’m in the Marais.’

There was a considerable lag at the other end, as if Marianne were reaching over to turn something off — coffee pot, word processor, stereo. Scully saw Billie picking at the crust around the lid of the mustard pot.

‘What… what a surprise,’ breathed Marianne.

‘Listen, I’m sorry to call out of the blue but I was wondering if I could drop by for a second.’

‘N-no, it’s not possible,’ she murmured. ‘You understand, I have my work —’

‘Yes, of course, but listen —’

The line went dead. He rang back. Engaged. He flopped back into his seat. Shit — what was all that about? He was not exactly Marianne’s cup of tea, he knew, but they’d always been civil. She was flustered, really put out. And hostile.

He gulped at his coffee.

‘You don’t look good,’ said Billie.

‘Speak for yourself-Jesus.’

‘Don’t say that!’

A coat flapping down the stairs. A hooded coat. A blur, but not a ghost, someone real. I showed up and someone saw me. Jennifer, or someone else. Someone acting for her, maybe. To make sure I would come, to see that I was in town. Dominique? No, she was too decent. She would have talked to us. And she never struck me as that tall, that light on the loafers. But Marianne. Marianne doesn’t fancy me. She wouldn’t have qualms about giving me some stick. In fact, she’d probably enjoy it. Was everyone in on this? Why send a message and not show? Were they playing with him?

Billie licked sweat from her upper lip.

All those people you read about. The bloke who goes out for a packet of fags never to be seen again. Families whose kids go missing. People who live in limbo for years, always expecting the phone to ring, a door to open, a face to appear in a television crowd. Every mail bringing an absurd hope. And all the time really waiting, begging for the coup de grâce , the last swing of the axe to put them out of their misery. Horribly grateful to have the mangled, molested bodies of their loved ones finally uncovered in some vacant lot so that they can give up the poisonous hoping and be free.

Was that how it would be? A life of waiting by the phone? No. He didn’t care what it took. He’d find out for himself. He wouldn’t sit back and go quietly. Bollocks to that. In his soul he’d stepped beyond some mark he didn’t understand. Here, quietly, in a crappy café with a lukewarm chocolate in front of him. No, he was too tired, too scared and pissed off to go quietly.

SCULLY LEANT INTO THE IRON wind on the Rue Mahler and felt it ride up under his eyelids and whistle in his molars. He skated with Billie across the cobbles and shouldered his way past the sumptuous grey door into the frozen calm of Marianne’s courtyard.

Lights burned up on the third floor. Scully’s heart beat painfully. He felt the metal of the wind in him.

‘Take no prisoners,’ he muttered.

Billie quaked and said nothing.

In the entry hall which smelled of mail and polish he jabbed the intercom button hard enough to feel bone through the numbness. His twenty-five-franc mittens were stiff and damp.

‘Oui, allo?’