Tim Winton - The Riders

FROM THE BIG HIPPED LINE of mountains a mist comes rolling and turning in the frozen light of morning, the sky grinding silent against the earth like the dead against the living. The stones of farm walls creak. Ice holds the grass stiff; the hoofprints of cattle are dead with it. At the head of the valley the lichened crosses lean into the sod and the lanes and boreens meander after their own shadow. In the sheds the slurry steams and the milk comes hot and ringing. Fields hummock and slant all the way to the bare and overreaching oak, it’s a lake of frozen, stippled mud. Above it, the sunless monolith of the castle is ruled by the weft of birds. Rooks launch from the sills of a hundred slots and windows, across ash wood and lane. They settle on the smokeless chimney of the bothy on the ridge, cranking their heads warily. A sculpture of frozen tyremarks is set in the mud before the house. A vapour rises from it, from every surface, every thing. The day hesitates a moment. Nothing moves. Then, from the north, from someplace else, a wind springs up and day comes.

A SILKY DRIZZLE WAFTED DOWN through the shadows of busted empty warehouses and ships’ masts in the morning light. Billie and Scully picked their way round ochre puddles and crippled bikes with the salty stink of the sea blowing in their numb faces. On the scabby embankment above the wharf were ragged deck chairs and rusted barbeque grills and weeds. Sticking up out of the dirt was a silver slipper. The whole dock looked like a war had been there. Piles of sodden clothes, mattresses, a clock, bent sunglasses, books lying open like fallen birds, a flat soccer ball with a pool of frozen rainwater melting in its cavity. From huge smashed windows hung twisted banners and stained bedclothes. A dog pressed against a wall, wary, and some scruffy boats lay on the water like more rubbish.

Neither of them spoke, they just walked. Billie listened to the snap and flick of her unravelling shoelace. They couldn’t talk, she knew that. It was just too hard. They weren’t really looking for anything, just walking. At first she had been following him, but now it was her leading. She steered him past the floating shed with the BAR sign hanging off the end of its slippery gangplank. The seagulls sounded like TV seagulls. She held his hand. Money lumped in her pockets.

In a windswept square where pigeons bent their necks for shelter and newspapers eddied and wrapped themselves shamelessly about the legs of passersby, a young man with a sheet of livid hair and a windripped kilt played bagpipes. His gingery legs stepped a beat and his red hair was beautiful in its train behind him. The wheezing drone of the pipes wound through the puzzled crowd and hung in the air above them, a sound lonely here amongst the sober bricks.

They walked on.

• • •

AT THE END OF THE alley was a sign and Billie heard a swell of old music, music from black-and-white movies and suits and ties, so she tugged him in out of the wind, beneath the street sign that he mumbled dully in passing.

‘Gebed Zonder End.’

A great gush of warm air blew in their faces as they entered the café with its smells of coffee and cakes and perfume and denim.

Billie felt the sand underfoot and saw the warm wooden walls, the stools, the human faces, round and shiny-cheeked. She met a little table with battered edges and ran her hands along it and sat down. For a moment Scully stood there above her as if he’d forgotten how sitting down went, but he touched the table and slid onto a chair, blinking. Billie put money on the table and they ordered breakfast. Coffee, rolls, cheese, jam, cold cuts of meat.

‘No more chasing,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

Billie put her fingers through holes in the cheese. ‘They wanted to know things,’ she said. ‘All kinds of things.’

He pressed brown bread into the plate. She could see his prints in it when he pulled his hand away.

‘Billie, I’m so ashamed.’

She nodded. ‘I know.’

It was quiet again for a while. She watched him look for words. His big hands lay on the table. She would know them anywhere. Someone said your heart was the size of your fist. She unzipped her pack.

‘Here,’ she said, holding the bunch of paper out to him.

‘What’s this?’

It looked like a flower there in her palm. Billie hoped he didn’t see how it shook.

BILLIE SAW IT STRAIGHTAWAY. Before they even crossed the narrow street, shuffling on the cobbles like old people in front of those cosy hotels and cafés, she saw it and stopped. She heard kids thumping a soccer ball in the square across the footbridge. A bird warbled in the bare tree above the parked cars on the canal embankment and somewhere a bike bell tinkled. Billie found a bollard and sat on it, feeling the dampness come through her jeans. Scully worked his way along the bank, his hair mad as a sun, his face uncertain, as though he didn’t know whether to look or not. She watched him find the houseboat, the red one with the fat rotting mattress of autumn leaves on its roof, the one with the silly tilt like Granma’s back verandah, and he straightened a moment, blinking.

‘This one,’ he said.

Billie looked away and saw ducks making vees in the black water. She thought of all the places she had seen that she had no names for, all the flats and hotels and houses in streets she couldn’t say, towns she didn’t know, where people spoke languages she didn’t understand. All those people she just didn’t know. All those stations and restaurants and airports and ferries that simply looked the same.

‘We went past it yesterday,’ he said quietly.

‘Yes.’

‘Looks deserted, huh.’

She shrugged. She was cold now and sad.

‘Funny,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve sort of got the creeps.’

Billie looked at the pretty footbridge with its green paint and curly rails. She heard his boots on the deck and looked over to see him knocking at the door at the bottom of the little wooden steps. Maybe this is how it felt to be an angel, to be sad at helping, sad to finish. He cupped his hands to portholes and real windows, climbing up the deck.

‘Come here, Bill.’

She thought about it a moment. That travel place was around here somewhere.

‘Bill?’

She trusted him. If someone was home she had to believe he would understand her. She was not giving him back. He had promised. She trusted him. But her heart sped up anyway.

‘Billie?’

She heard the glass break as she stepped carefully aboard and edged along the handrail to where Scully stood with an old chair- leg in his hand. Ducks rose from the water. Bicycles went past and out beyond the parked cars someone was laughing.

‘You slip in, mate. You’re smaller.’

‘Are we stealing?’ she asked, not really caring.

‘No, just looking. Mind the edge — it’s sharp.’

Billie heard her jacket tear as she wriggled in and fell suddenly headlong. She cried out, but the sofa was beneath her and musty with damp.

‘You alright?’

‘Yes.’

‘Open the door.’

Billie looked about. It was like a big caravan in there. Curtains, cupboards, a desk and proper dinner table with chairs. And photos, Dominique’s photos in frames on the walls.

‘Billie!’

She slipped off the sofa obediently and felt the shock of cold water round her ankles. Her boots drank it up and her toes stung.

‘It’s sinking!’

‘Open the door, love.’

She waded across to the outside door and fumbled with the handle.

‘You got it?’

Her feet began to hurt and her knees knocked. The door came open with a little wave that crept higher up her shins and slapped quietly up against the other end. She climbed onto a chair as he came in wide-eyed, and she saw all the tightness go out of his face. No one had been here for a long time. He looked shocked and relieved and restless. His face changed like the sky. She watched him open the door beside the table. A kind of kitchen. The next door was a toilet. That was it. It was like the end of a tunnel down here.