Tim Winton - The Riders

‘Where’d she go?’

‘Don’t talk for a minute.’

‘I’m falling, look out!’

Scully tottered and found the perpendicular again but Billie scrambled down off him.

‘You’ll drop me!’

He’d drunk more than he thought. Now that he was in the open he was all but reeling.

‘I’m cold,’ he said, pulling himself up on the arrowheads of the fence. ‘I’m so cold.’

Billie took the backpack from his arm and shrugged into it. ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ she murmured.

‘I have to get inside for a minute. A café, anywhere.’

‘Here,’ she said, pointing to the great cathedral which fattened with music and the voices of the dead and the living and the tolling of bells in the sky above them.

Scully looked up at its dripping gargoyles and the mist of light that hung over it, spilling faintly down its buttresses like rain. His drunkenness settled heavily on him, his throat burned and his vision was speckled with stars and blips of all kinds. He felt like a man who’d walked through a sheepdip, his skin was so clammy. Oh God, not tonight, not when his hands smelled of Irma and his heart was a clump of oozing peat.

Billie tugged and worried at him. He batted her off. Their shoes chafed on the cobbles.

‘It’s Christmas,’ she said. ‘This is where we should be.’

No, he thought, feeling himself steered like a big stupid animal, no, it’s much worse than that, much worse than Christmas. He was too dizzy to resist her, though. The entrance with its kingdom of faces and upraised fingers and sceptres and staffs rose above him like the opening of a tunnel where he joined a river of figures. They smelled of wine and burnt butter and onions, these people, the slow-moving and dreamy, half-hearted and freezing. Their coats were buttoned and their scarves tight, their midnight mass faces shining in the gloom. Sounds of feet on the smooth stones until the roar of the organ pipes as they made the vast vaulted cave of the cathedral itself with its haze of incense and candle-smoke, the perfumes of a thousand women, the feel of sweat-oiled timber and cool sepulchral air of an underground city.

Scully felt himself a man on sea legs. He sensed people making space for him as though they smelt sex and failure and theft on him. They edged politely but firmly from the sight of his weeping rogue eye, and they saw into him. They knew and it made his teeth chatter. You’re no better, their compressed lips said. No use feeling outraged anymore — you bastard. You know how easy it is to bolt and leave them sleeping.

The bodies of saints flickered all around.

The great kite of the crucified Christ loomed and caused the crowd to vibrate. Like a pyre before him the bank of burning candles waited. The hot pure smell of burning. A woman’s fan of blonde hair in front of him scented like roses as he walked. Billie beside him, her face glowing with hurt and understanding. He lit a candle and held it up before him. God, how his head soared and pitched, how rod-like his blood went in his veins. A candle for the birth of Christ, for the squirming of Job in his own shit, of Jonah running like a mad bastard from the monster he knew he was. A candle for Jennifer, just for the sake of it, for his poor deserted mother, for Alex, and Pete and Irma, poor Irma who was making him cry and laugh right in the middle of things here in the cathedral of Our Lady of Paris. Our friggin lady who let him cry and stumble into that rose-smelling hair with the writhing flame of his candle suddenly spitting and cracking and bursting hilariously into true fire right before him and the others whose mouths were open as if in adoration at the weirdness of miracles. Tongues of living fire as he went falling, falling into the yielding squelch of people, God bless them.

WITH HIS HEAD BACK and his mouth open like a clown you put balls into, Scully snored and sprawled across the seats stinking of train stations and fire and cement and the long, horrible night. There’d been so many rotten nights for Billie, it was all rotten almost as far back as she could remember, but last night was the worst. Last night he really was the Hunchback, no pretending about it. Like a hurt animal, he was, frightened and scary, almost setting fire to that lady’s hair and falling over in church with the priest like an angry king up there in his robes. She got him out of there real fast, before people could do anything to him. It was terrible to see, him falling all over like a killed bull trying to lie down and die. He was so heavy and crying and awful that it hurt in her heart and she knew even then that only she could save him.

She swallowed her pill without water. It wormed down her neck as if it was alive. Her hands felt gritty and she needed a glass of milk or a little bottle of jus du pommes , the kind with hips that reminded her of Granma Scully. Her face didn’t hurt but her eyes were sore from staying awake and keeping watch.

There weren’t too many people in the carriage. Some men, some women, no families. Most of them looked like her Scully, as if they’d slept in a train station on Christmas Eve. She could tell they had no roast lunch to go home to, no presents waiting to be opened, no dollar coins hiding in the pudding, no afternoon at the beach, no party hats, no box of macadamia nuts to scoff on till they got crook. Billie didn’t care about all that, herself. She was a bit shocked not to care, but she had a job now. Looking around the train she bet half these people got on this morning just for something to do, somewhere to be that wasn’t Paris.

She looked at the knees of her new jeans and thought about Irma. She felt bad about her. Irma wasn’t a real grown up. She was little inside, but her heart was big. One day Scully would see that. Irma wasn’t a statue. And she would come looking again, she’d find them. She was just like Scully. Maybe that’s why Billie liked her. Yes, she’d find them and Billie wouldn’t mind at all. All anyone needed was a good heart.

Billie’s head ached. She rested it on the seat in front where some doodlehead had burned two holes with a cigarette. The sound of bells still went around in her head. That and him shouting and crying in the Metro tunnels. Paris exploding with bells. Even underground you could hear the bells in all the churches. Him lying across plastic chairs and on the floor in the Gare de l’Est while all those crazy people ran in the tunnels and crashed trolleys and busted bottles. And the old men sleeping in hot puddles and the sleeping bags rolled against the tile walls. Like under the bridges, it was. Paris was pretty on top and hollow underneath. Underground everyone was dirty and tired and lost. They weren’t going anywhere. They were just waiting for the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, the whole town, to fall in on them.

She picked up the last piece of her baguette and munched on it. No one in the carriage said anything. It rocked quietly, thumping on the rails. Rain streaked the windows. She needed to go to the toilet, so she put the tablet bottle back in her pack and took it up the aisle to the hissing glass doors.

In the toilet she listened to the roar of the tracks and felt the cold air spanking at her bum. A hopeless flap of light came in the little window and made her think of her bedroom in Fremantle. The big, big window that looked out on the boats. All the straight trees, the Norfolk pines, like arrows by the water. And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light. The wooden wall. The bare floor with little trucks parked on it and bears asleep in rows. No use thinking of it. It was all gone. There was a room in that little dolls’ house Scully had made in Ireland. And out the window a castle. And a paddock for a horse. It was all in a fog — that whole day was in a fog and she was glad, but fog always rises, she knew that. One day it would be clear, even the parts she didn’t want to see. Even the airport. Even that.