Tim Winton - The Riders

He thought of going back to Marianne and begging for help. No aggro, just butt-kissing humility. Or simply robbing the bitch, just busting in and knocking off stuff he could flog in the flea- markets. But he’d never get past the damn security. Besides, he’d never stolen anything in his life and was bound to stuff it up somehow.

He’d try the Amex office. Sort it out. He’d see Dominique. The way Marianne was acting, not letting him talk to her, it could be that Jennifer was over there at Dominique’s. Well, no one was answering, even now. Maybe Marianne was just pissing him off, prolonging the nasty moment with that pulled-out phone plug. They’d sort it out. Something. Bloody something.

He took a long swig of his eight-franc wine and gasped. He could be back in Ireland tomorrow night. The mournful wind, the turf fire, the valley unrolling out the window. Pete-the-Post dropping by for a pint and a bit of crack.

Dominique would help him. He gulped down more wine. She had plenty of money, some kind of trust fund that let her pursue photography. And she had a heart. ‘Softness’, Marianne called it with distaste. He remembered Dominique’s show on the Ile de la Cité. Scully turned up ancient with paint specks and people made room for him as though he was another kind of painter altogether. Dominique’s photographs were moody tableaux of women in bare rooms into which chutes of light fell. Her subjects’ gazes were outward and self-possessed and they reminded Scully of his mother. Marianne hissed out the side of her mouth that the images were soft, as though that were a sign of feeble-mindedness, but Scully liked them and Jennifer thought they were works of genius.

She said that a lot in the next year or so. Other people were geniuses. They were gifted, remarkable, ahead of their time, special. Scully began to wonder why people couldn’t just be good at things. It went beyond seeing the best in people. All this genius, it was like a blow to her, every stroke a bright light on her failure, her ordinariness. And his too. In Paris she had a way of blinking at him sometimes, as if trying to see something more than steady old Scully. It made him nervous, that blinking stare. It wasn’t the cool look she shot him across the tutorial room back in the beginning. It caused him to put his hands in his pockets and raise his eyebrows, appealing hopelessly, for a flicker of recognition. But she simply blinked and stared, as if he was a tree in her window, something she was looking through to a more brilliant world beyond.

He even mentioned it to Dominique, that look. ‘She is excited,’ she said. ‘Only excited.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. Maybe that’s all it was.

Dominique responded to Jennifer’s enthusiasm right from the start. He watched them become friends in the jerky ritualized way the French and English had. He felt welcome at the huge apartment on the Rue Jacob and he saw Dominique’s effort to cut some slack for Billie whose feral energy seemed to startle her. Billie was not the ornamental child these people were accustomed to. Billie was, she said, very direct.

Scully saw photos of her place on the Isle of Man, the houseboat in Amsterdam, horses, women he didn’t know. It was a calm place, that apartment. He’d go there tomorrow, first thing. He belted the rest of the cheap plonk down and heard a bedhead somewhere butting the wall. A woman was moaning. He finished the bottle and listened to her cry out greedily, and for a moment Billie’s eyes opened and fixed on him fiercely and then closed in sleep.

• • •

BILLIE COULD SEE HIM UP there now, swaying in the blistering cold, dangling there with firelight in his huge eyes, snagged by the hair in the huge bare tree. Scully. Crying, he was, calling out, begging for help and no one down there in the deep mud moving at all. Just the baying of dogs and him calling, the hair tight at the sides of his face and his arms flapping. There was no way back from that final bough, nowhere for someone that size to go anywhere but down and Billie just prayed for an angel, prayed and prayed until she burned like a log and horses shook and suddenly someone else was up there, someone small and quick and crying. Billie saw it now, it was her up there, Billie Ann Scully in her pyjamas with something in her mouth like a pirate. A silver flash. She saw it, the little glowing hand reaching out with the scissors open like the mouth of a dog, and Scully screaming yes and yes and yes, and the sound of his hair cutting like torn paper, Billie cutting his hair free so that he fell, calm and still, falling a long time from that skeleton tree with his eyes open until he hit the mud a long way down and was swallowed up and gone beneath the feet of strangers. Billie saw herself up there, the crying girl with wings, slumped in the tree like a bird.

IN SLEEP SCULLY FELT LIKE A flying fish, a pelagic leaper diving and rising through temperatures, gliding on air as in water. He heard the great oceanic static. He felt seamless. Weightless, free.

He woke suddenly with Billie’s face close to his, her eyes studying him, her breath yeasty with antibiotic. She ran the heel of her palm across the stubble of his cheek. Her skin was cool, her eyes clear. The surf of traffic surged below.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘I feel ordinary again.’

He lay there, muscles fluttering, like a fish on a deck, feeling the dry weight of gravity, the hard surprise of everything he already knew.

• • •

MIST LAY ACROSS the soupy swirl of the Seine. It hung in the skeleton trees and billowed against the weeping stonework of the quais. The river ran fat with whorls and boils, lumpy with the hocks of sawn trees and spats of cardboard. He felt it sucking at him, waiting, rolling opaque along the iced and slimy embankment. It made him shudder. He held Billie’s hand too firmly.

‘This isn’t the way to Dominique’s,’ she murmured.

‘Yes it is. More or less.’

In every piss-stinking cavity the mad and lost cowered in sodden cardboard and blotched sleeping bags. Out of the rain and out of sight of the cops they lay beneath bridges and monuments, their eyes bloodshot, their faces creased with dirt and fatigue. Was it some consolation to imagine that Jennifer might be here among them? Did the idea let him off, somehow, take the shame and rage away? These faces, they were generic. Could you recognize a person reduced to this state? Maybe he’d walk past her and see some poor dazed creature whose features had disappeared in hopeless fright. Would she recognize him, for that matter? Was his face like that already?

Beneath the Pont Neuf he stepped among these people and whispered her name. The stoned and sore and crazy rolled away from him. Billie tugged at his hand but he stared into their eyes, ignoring their growls of outrage until a big gap-toothed woman reared and spat in his face. Billie dragged him out into the faint light of day. She sat him down in the square at the tip of the island, and pressed the gob away from his face with his own soiled hanky. He let out a bitter little laugh. She hated to see the way he trembled. She hated all of this.

Scully looked back toward the bridge. Something in the water caught his eye. Something, someone out in the churning current. He shrugged off the child and went to the edge of the embankment to peer upstream. Dear God. He saw plump, pink limbs, tiny feet, a bobbing head. He wrenched his coat off. Please God, no.

‘Sit down, Billie, and don’t move! You hear me? Don’t move from this spot!’

He edged down the slick embankment, grabbing at weeds and holes in the cobbles. The current was solid. He looked about for a stick, a pole, but there was only dogshit and crushed Kronenberg cans. Close to the water he found a ringbolt and he hung out precariously from it, tilted over the water, reaching with one arm as the tiny pink feet came bounding his way. The steel was cold in his anchored hand. His face stung. His heart shrank in his chest. He saw ten perfect toes. Creases of baby fat. Dimpled knees. He poised himself, seeing his chance, and in one sweeping arc he reached out — and missed. Oh God! His fingers sculled hopelessly on the water. And then he saw it clearly as it floated gamely by — cherry mouth pert and cheeky, plastic lashes flapping as it pitched, cupped hands steering it through the soupy convergence at the end of the island.