Tim Winton - The Riders

In the toilet mirror she looked dirty, like a gypsy but not so pretty.

She soaped up and cleaned her hands and face and clawed her hair back with her fingers. She was still glad she looked like Scully. He wasn’t pretty either, but pretty people weren’t the kind you need. Pretty people saw themselves in the mirror and were either too happy or too sad. People like Billie just shrugged and didn’t care. She didn’t want to turn into anyone pretty. Anyway, she had scars now, you only had to look.

Billie wet a paper towel and went back down the carriage with it. Scully had four seats now; his boots and legs were across the aisle on hers. His baggy jeans were stained and smelly, and stuff rode up in his pockets.

She stood there poised a moment, the puddles of land slipping by, before she reached into his pocket and eased out the fold of money. She left the coins right down against his leg. This was more money than they had before, much more. She slipped it into her jacket thoughtfully and took up the wet paper towel to scrub him down. He moaned and turned his head, but didn’t wake, not even when she got to his hands. When she finished there were little balls of paper on him here and there but he looked better. Billie stuffed the grey pulp into the ashtray and sat across the aisle from him with the pack on the seat beside her as she looked through their passports, at their old faces, their big watermelon smiles. She counted the money again — five one- hundred francs — and stowed it in her jacket and fell quickly to sleep as Belgium trolled by and by and by without her.

• • •

THROUGH THE STRANGE, neat ornamental suburbs of Amsterdam Scully rested his head against the shuddering glass and felt Billie patting at him like a mother at a schoolboy. The headache had gone ballistic this past half-hour, so frightful that the beating glass made it no worse. His throat, raw with puking, felt like a PVC pipe lately introduced into his body and he smelled like a public toilet. The other poor bastards in the carriage looked ready to climb onto the return train the moment they pulled in. The deadly power of Christmas.

He felt in his pockets for something to chew and came up with change in four currencies.

‘I took the money,’ said Billie across the aisle before it really registered.

‘You? Why?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m scared.’

‘Of me?’

Billie looked at her boots.

‘You’ll need to change it into guilders, then. Dutch money. This is Holland.’

‘Holland.’

‘You know, the boy with his finger in the dike.’

She nodded gravely.

‘Beats having your head down the dike, I guess,’ he murmured against himself.

‘Why are we here?’

‘I have to see Dominique. She’s got a houseboat here.’

She sighed and looked out the window. Scully gathered his limbs brittlely to him and nursed his nausea. Call me Rasputin, he thought. Poison me, chain me up, kick the hell out of me, but I’ll get up and keep coming. A crooked grin came to his lips. Come to think of it I can do it all to myself and still keep coming, so don’t underestimate me, Christmas Day. But deep down he knew he had nothing left. Last night was a dark cloud at the back of his head. His teeth ached, his chest was hollow. Anywhere he walked today, he knew, would just be walking to keep from sinking. The whole earth slurped and waited. It was no use pretending. He had nothing left. Jennifer would be here. He’d find her, he knew it now, but he’d be an empty vessel. She’d get her way in the end.

• • •

CENTRAAL STATION was empty of passengers, its kiosks and shops shuttered, but it was crowded with people who looked as though they lived there. Ghetto blasters and guitars reverberated in every corner. Junkies and drunks lay nodding in hallways. Dreadlocked touts hustled limply by the deserted escalators, disheartened by the holiday. A madman in fluorescent tights shrieked at his own reflection in the windows of the closed-up Bureau de Change. Hippies of seventeen and eighteen who looked German to Scully swilled Amstel and laughed theatrically amongst themselves. Scully snarled at them and pushed by. The air was warm and foul with body odour, smoke and urine so that the street air was a sweet blast to be savoured a second or two. It revived him long enough to sling the pack over one shoulder, raise his eyebrows doubtfully at Billie and stump out dazedly into the feeble light and the unravelling plait of tramlines in the square before them.

A canal, hundreds of uptilted bicycles, a stretch of pretty buildings encrusted and disfigured by neon. A fish sky low enough to make Scully hunch a few moments until he got into some kind of stride that never graduated beyond a victim’s shuffle, a lunatic’s scoot, the derro walk. He was a mess. He was ratshit.

The city was beautiful, you had to notice it. Beautiful but subdued to the point of spookiness. There was almost no one on the streets. Now and then bells rang uncertainly and a pretty cyclist, male or female, whirred past dressed to the gills and intent on being somewhere.

They went down the wide boulevard of closed-up cafés and cheap hotels, change joints, souvenir pits until they came to a big square. Beneath the monument in the square a few dark-skinned men smoked handrolled cigarettes and a sharp young Arab offered cocaine in a hoarse whisper.

‘Piss off,’ said Scully, feeling the spastic twinge of the newcomer, the fear of being in a city he didn’t know. He was surprised to feel anything at all, but there it was, the bowel-clenching sensation he remembered from London the first time, Paris the first time, Athens. An emotion, by God. It was worse without crowds, without currents he could simply slip into, hide in and follow while he got his bearings. Every door was closed to the street. Their footfalls rang clear on the sharp air. Scully had to stand there and look like a rube without a shred of cover. Why should he care? Screw them all. The hell with Amsterdam and Christmas Day.

In time they came to a Turkish joint where they flopped into plastic chairs and ate ancient hommus and tabouleh. They drank coffee and chocolate while young women swept and wiped around them. Scully stared out at bell gables and wrought-iron and immense paned windows. He tried to produce a lasting thought.

‘Where’s the houseboat?’ said Billie, cleaning her teeth with a paper napkin.

‘Dunno,’ he murmured, watching her eyes widen in disbelief.

‘You haven’t got the address?’

‘Nope.’

‘This is a city!’

‘Nice work, Einstein.’

‘Don’t make a joke of me!’ She looked at him with such fury that he shifted in his chair.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I could leave you,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve got the money.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t make me a joke.’

She got up and went to pay their bill. He watched as she carefully unpeeled a hundred-franc note and was amazed that the Turkish girls decided to accept it. They thought she was a scream, you could see. How doggedly she waited for her change. His kid. Billie turned over the bright guilder notes in her hands and thanked them politely before returning to the table.

‘Scully?’

‘Hm?’

‘Let’s go home?’

Scully shook his head.

‘I want to stop looking.’

He shook his head again and felt the pulse jerk in his temples.

‘You don’t even know where to look.’

He smiled. ‘How hard can it be to find a houseboat?’

Billie whumped a fist onto the table and walked out into the eerie street in disgust. For a while he watched her blowing steam out there and kicking the cobbles. Pigeons kept back from her, pumping their necks cautiously. He smiled at her through the glass. She scowled back.