Tim Winton - The Riders

Billie skidded on a half-sucked lemon in the pink piggy light of the doorway and stumbled to her knees. There was a farmyard smell to the street and a look in people’s faces that made animals of them. Low aquarium windows loomed with ladies swimming in purple light, their eyes foxy and shining. Music bashed up out of doors in the ground and hot air gushed in her face pricking her scars with sudden heat. Into the tunnel of hips and legs and voices they veered, her grip slipping as Scully tipped away. Horse manure and food steamed on the uneven cobbles. Away into the tunnel he was falling, against a wall of pink bodies under glass like a graveyard, his hair streaked out against the tangle of fingers and legs and teeth, snarled and hanging. She saw the bottle in the girl’s vagina, the safety pin in the face beside it, the harness, the shocked cattle look of the eyes in the pictures hardened with glass as her father slid down watching someone pass. He was falling, falling, too heavy for her to hold. And then he yelled out that name , his voice hoarse and breaking.

‘Jennifer!’

Billie felt her nails break as he fought clear. She saw his back, his hair sinking in the moving squelch of bodies and he was gone. She could chase him, she knew. She was small enough to worm her way through and catch up to him, but the name froze her where she stood. Did she really see that glossy tail of black hair that moment in the corner of her eye?

Billie stood there, breathing but not moving with the light flickering on her and the canal shimmering like the entrance to the centre of the earth.

Piggy-looking people herded by her, snuffling and clacking and bristling up against the windows. The trough of the canal flattened off under the bridge.

A man in a baseball hat put his hand on her head, talking something she didn’t know and then stopped. ‘You talk Inglis?’

Billie twitched.

‘Ten guilder I be you daddy, uh?’

She stared at him. He had a face like a dog someone had beat up every day, sad and saggy, but with teeth still, and leery like he might snap if you turned your back.

‘I got my own,’ she said, backing up, but the bollard stopped her.

‘You nice little girl.’

She pressed against the bollard and felt it cold against the small of her back.

‘Very nice.’

Billie smelt antiseptic and sick in the street and this man’s sweat through his black coat. His yellow teeth parted his lips. She felt his hand cold on hers, pulling it toward him, right where his coat opened and his belt buckle hung like a falling moon. She punched him right there hard as her fist would go and burrowed into the crowd. She clawed and kicked her way through, going forward, getting clear enough to run and then she saw Scully near the bridge angling like a sailor across the pavement.

• • •

SCULLY ELBOWED THROUGH CONFERENCES of negotiating boys and drooping junkies, outside the Hard Rock Café and saw her make the bridge beneath the tolling church. In the light of the bridge lamps the tan flash of legs. He broke into a run, bouncing against all corners, all handrails, all sudden, surprising gusts of pain. Across the canal he found the corner but the alley was glutted, the heads and shoulders and slit thighs tidal. Steam rose as a cloud before him and the grinding monotony of rap music blasted in his face.

He caught a glimpse of raven hair enamelled by the light of a doorway. He scrambled ahead, his heart truly hurting him now, goading him to keep up. His bad eye closed out on him, bending, twitching the night before him. She hovered in the doorway, a shimmering curtain of hair, and went in. Scully slowed to smooth himself down a little. He tilted against a bollard and ground the fur off his teeth with the collar of his pullover. He ran fingers through his greasy hair and patted himself down hopelessly. This wasn’t what he expected. He wasn’t ready. He shook like a schoolboy, wondering if maybe he should just walk away, show a bit of pride. But he’d come too far for bloody pride. He made for the door.

Stepping down into the clinical fluorescents, Scully hesitated. It was a kind of sex supermarket, slick-shelved and lit, laid out for tourists and lonely hearts straight off the bus. Everything was wrapped in cellophane and ordered according to genre, like a music store, and it seemed suddenly hilarious. Shit a brick. He didn’t know her at all. Had she lit out for stuff like this? He felt a moron smile split his face and saw her moving between shelves.

‘Of all the sex joints in all the world,’ he blurted, louder than he could have imagined, ‘you’d have to walk into mine!’

The boy at the register, smooth-faced with a pearl earring and a sweater someone’s mum must have knitted, smiled tiredly and looked away. Pink faces, apple cheek faces turned his way as he sailed down into the aisle. Exchanging their Chrissie presents, he thought. Let’s hope they disinfected first.

The hair whirled up the back and his whole chest tightened. To feel the proximity of her. He smelt perfume and heard the snick of heels as he closed the gap.

‘Jennifer?’

The blur of a six o’clock shadow. Scully squinted as he lunged toward her, but already the wig was shifting beneath his hands and the startled bloke with the powdered face was falling off his heels and Scully was bellowing in fright. He staggered and shelves began to fall in sympathy. The fluorescent cavern echoed with screams and crashing. Scully wheeled with the outrage of the wig in his fist and caught the poor open-mouthed bastard in the yellow blazer right in the chops. People began to scramble across a drift of plastic penises. Scully held up his hands to placate them but the nice-looking kid from the register came armed with a circumcised cosh in a cellophane wrapper. Scully put his head down and went him. Just for the sweet feel of the blows on his face, for the quenching anaesthesia of a pain to fill the still darkness opening inside him.

• • •

BILLIE SAW HIM COME OUT handcuffed and bellowing like the Hunchback on the Feast of Fools, blurred by her crying. The crowd shivered with excitement and made way. They didn’t know him. They thought they did but they had no idea. The van flashed and someone touched her on the shoulder and she climbed in front to the smell of cigars and disinfectant. The doors slammed. The police talked their bird language. In the back, behind the glass, he was laughing. Someone, the driver, passed her a hanky.

‘You know him?’ someone asked.

Billie thought about it. She smelled the sweet soapy smell of the hanky and licked her lips. The narrow streets flashed by.

‘Yes,’ she said, without her voice breaking. ‘He’s my father.’

SCULLY WOKE WITH A HORRIBLE, head-shattering start and immediately felt the raw bitterness of his throat. His face was hot. The vinyl mattress squawked under him as he sat up in the bare cube of a room. A key gnawed like a rat in its hole and the big door swung open with its sliding window agape. Shee-it! He scrambled sluggishly to his knees, trying to catch up.

‘Billie?’

A woman in a rumpled corduroy suit and a bowl of ash- blonde hair stepped cautiously in. Behind her hovered a bloke in uniform. His moustache was downy on his firm pink face. So where was Billie? Oh God, oh God!

‘Hello?’ said the woman. She was thin and handsome. In her forties, maybe. It seemed she had just climbed out of bed. Her eyes were red. ‘You speak English, huh?’

Scully nodded gingerly, not liking this set-up at all. Billie!

‘My name is Van Loon. I am a doctor.’

Scully nodded. He was still on his knees before her. The door closed a little way.

‘Does your… head hurt?’

He put a hand to the side of his head and twitched.