Tim Winton - The Riders

‘You swear it?’

‘Alright, I swear!’

‘You’re a Catholic, then?’

‘No, I’m nothing.’

‘So the name’s false.’

‘No, my name’s Scully, I was christened C of E.’

‘You mean it might be honestly possible that you don’t know? Oh, Jaysus, Peter, you fookin eejit of a man, what a fright you’ve given yourself! Mr Scully, it wasn’t the VAT man who got Mylie Doolin at Liverpool, it was the Special Branch. You’re fookin luckier than you think. What a sweet, innocent child of God you must be! Mylie is with the Provos.’

Scully put down his glass. ‘You mean… you mean the IRA?’

‘The very same.’

‘Fuck a duck, you’re jokin!’

‘Do I look like a man enjoyin himself here?’

‘Shit. It can’t be.’

‘Ah, drink up now and don’t worry yourself,’ said Pete, wiping the sweat from his face and finding his grin again.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Life is mysterious, Mr Scully, but that I know for sure.’

‘I never even… you think he had anything to do with the Remembrance Day thing? All those bloody kids.’

Pete-the-Post emptied his glass and shrugged. A wind was moaning outside now. ‘He went in before. Weeks ago. Still, it was all such a fook-up, who could tell. You never know anybody properly, not the whole of em. A man barely knows himself, wouldn’t you say?’

Scully stared into the fire. Pete chuckled to himself a moment and hauled himself to his feet.

‘I’ll be by at one again. Don’t you worry about Mylie Doolin, that booger. By God, I nearly had mud in me trousers tonight! Goodnight, then.’

‘Yeah, righto. Watch out for snakes.’

• • •

ALONE, WITH THE FIRE WILD in the chimney, Scully drank and thought of that year of high-jinks with Mylie’s lads. He’d known they were hard men. Once, when some blazer-and-cravatted old bastard pleaded sudden poverty at the end of a job, knowing the Irishmen had no recourse to the law, Mylie opened up the fifth floor window and began calmly to hurl TV, microwave and stereo into the street until the cash appeared magically on the table. Another time, at the end of a horrible three-week lightning renovation at Hampstead, they discovered that the landlord had bolted to Mallorca and they would never be paid, so Mylie put instant concrete down all the toilets and sinks. A little Jetset here, a little Jetset there. You could almost hear it turn to stone. Three floors of plumbing utterly stuffed. It wasn’t the same as money in their pockets, but it gave them a bit of a glow in the pub afterwards. Mad Irish boys, he thought they were, but extortionists and bombers? Terrorists and thieves?

All evening he sat there, forgetting to eat, going through those London months again, wondering and not quite disbelieving, until near midnight he dragged his sleeping bag onto the old door and climbed in.

SCULLY WORKED ON, THAT NOVEMBER week, pausing only to eat and sleep, or to now and again find himself staring out across the valley to the Slieve Blooms and their changing light. He heard his own sounds in the cottage, his breathing, his footfalls and scrapings and hammerings, and knew that this was as alone as he’d been in all his life. So busy was he, so driven with getting the place habitable, that he had not even met his neighbours yet, though he knew them by name because of Pete-the-Post who came daily with mail, a newspaper, building materials and more often than not, a few pints of milk, a loaf of soda bread and a packet of bacon for the rough fryups they had on dark afternoons with the rain driving outside and the smell of burning peat in their faces. Pete gave him company most afternoons, made him laugh, and sped up the work enormously. Scully bragged shamelessly about his feisty daughter and all the barefaced things she said to people, how fearlessly she corrected teachers and shopkeepers and policemen. The way she’d sit and read for hours and draw elaborate comic strips of their life in Fremantle, Paris, Greece. How she was their safe-passage through Europe, the one who softened-up officials, won the hearts of waiters, attacked languages like new puzzles to be solved. The things she said, how she wondered what a marlin thought the moment it saw the boat it was attached to, the faces staring down from the transom as it lay exhausted on its side, its eye on the dry world. Scully could see how the idea of her tickled Pete. He did impressions of her little voice for him and the streams of talk she was capable of. Pete listened with his head cocked and his ears aglow. Maybe he didn’t believe him. Perhaps he thought it was just pride, just love. But Scully’s excitement was infectious, he could see it himself. The postie chortled and whanged the trowel approvingly against the stones. Scully liked him better than any man he could remember. He had worked with men all his life, since his fishing days and on farm after farm, where he knew what it was to be ridden, paid out on ruthlessly or ignored on site. Especially the fishing days, they were the worst; seven days a week working deck for a Serb with an iron bar in the wheelhouse. That bastard Dimic paid out on him all the way out and all the way back in to port, and what could you do twenty miles out to sea alone and unsighted? He worked with subdued Italian men in market gardens whose soil stank of rust and chemicals, whose women were boisterous and sexy and dangerous. But the biggest pricks of all were the whitebread heroes at the university, men who’d murder you with words for the sheer pleasure of it. They put an end to his working-class fantasies about the gentleness of the professional life. It was the suits you had to fear. They were the real bastards. He didn’t know what it was with Peter Keneally. It might just have been loneliness, but he was always glad as hell to see him.

The next Friday Pete brought another telegram with the pint of milk and parcel of chops.

Scully opened it carefully and stood by the window.

HOUSE SOLD. SETTLEMENT IN THREE WEEKS. ARRIVE SHANNON AE46, 13 DECEMBER. JENNIFER.

‘Shit,’ said Scully. ‘I better open an account at the Allied Irish.’

‘Good news?’

‘We sold our house. They’ll be here in three weeks.’

‘You better get busy, then. You can’t have em livin in a shite-hole, so.’

Scully folded the telegram soberly. So that was that. Their house was gone. But the idea, the fact of it stuck in his head. The limestone rubble walls he’d pared back himself, the stripped jarrah floorboards, the big-hipped iron roof, the airy verandahs and the frangipani blooms. The morning throb of diesels from the marina. It was the whole idea he had of their life together. The weirdest feeling. A fortnight to sell a house? God knows people had gone stupid in the West in boom, but hadn’t it all fallen over? Maybe they were buying real estate now — he didn’t understand economics. But they were coming. That’s all that counted. He had work to do. There was a house here. Wasn’t that the idea to work to, to the future!

‘Are you rich then?’ Peter asked from the top of the ladder that afternoon.

‘Rich?’

‘I don’t mean to pry,’ he laughed. ‘I just want to know if you’ve got a lot of fookin money.’

‘Is that why you won’t send me a bill, you crafty bastard.’

‘Now you’re gettin presumptuous,’ said Peter, swinging a bucket of mortar at him.

‘Look at these hands,’ said Scully. ‘Are they the hands of a rich man?’

Pete brushed a broken slate off into the air and they both watched it spear into the mud and disappear.

‘Well, that’s a disappointment to me,’ said the big redhead. ‘I thought you might be a drug baron or whatever they call em, cause you’re too ugly to be a rock-and-roll star.’