Tim Winton - The Riders

Then he stiffened. Out of the silence the footfalls of a walker. They were boots, hard-heeled boots, coming up the canalside cobbles, rapping up against the high walls of the Herengracht houses as his limbs went hard with recognition.

He unpicked Billie’s fingers, slid out of the cocoon she had built for them and tamped it back around her in the watery inward light. Steady up the canalside came those footfalls as he slid off the bed into the shock of the forgotten bilge water. God Almighty, it was all he could do not to cry out, but his burst of breath rang like a thud in the sepulchral space all the same. The bloody boat was sinking. Against his shins he felt the scabs of forming ice, or maybe it was rubbish, as he waded blindly for the companion- way past the line of chairs.

He cracked the hatch and tasted the colder air outside. His feet burnt away to an absence as he listened. Heels rang awkwardly now and then on the odd surfaces of the cobbles. His socks steamed beneath him. The footfalls stopped outside close by.

Up on deck the rotten leaves were treacherous. A mist buried the streetlamps and smothered the sky so that the only illumination was from muted yellow pillars of lamplight. They cast tidal pools here and there, between parked Opels and VWs, out on the stretch of cobbles where a steaming scone of horse dung revealed itself between the naked bodies of elms.

The air was soupy, maddening. Someone out there. Scully stood there peering until he made out bricks. A fan of streetlight, a sense of the street corner, yes, the narrow alley there, he remembered. The blood beat in his neck. He made out a traffic bollard, some wrought-iron, the flat biscuity bricks of housewall. The mist shifted on itself, sulphuric in his nostrils. He saw it butting the buoyant rooftops of the city. He needed to see. See properly. He wasn’t scared to feel watched like this, but he needed to know.

Scully hobbled numbly around the mulchy deck, keeping low as he could behind the cabin top. A single duck rose off the water, its wings whiffling like the school cane of memory. On the foredeck he crouched beside an ornamental coil of rope and rotten tackle and he saw the denim leg out there in the spill of corner light. The sharp-toed boot disembodied by mist and the angle. His breath quickened. He was calm but his body was loaded.

He measured the jump to the dock. It was close, furry with mist, but close. He figured four feet. It was twenty, twenty-five yards to the street corner. His calves locked up.

But he waited. Was he visible? It seemed unlikely. He saw a knee now. A fresh draught of recognition. He stayed put. Watched. He counted to twenty, forty, ninety. The creak of a heavy leather coat. What if she just crossed the cobbles to the gangplank, just pushed off that righteous Protestant wall and strode across and called out? What would happen, how would he act?

He heard the toes of his frozen socks slipping fractionally on the gritty slime of the foredeck. He gripped the searing metal rail, ready.

Then the boot turned and showed a Cuban heel, two. There was a worldly groan of leather and a shift on the cobbles. Out into the loop of strangled light blurred the hair and moonflash of skin as the figure turned unhurriedly up the sidestreet and was gone, leaving a wake of footfalls that set Scully off automatically. He sprang and lost ground, lifted and fell facedown in hemp and mire and leafy crap at the gunwhale’s edge. He scrabbled hopelessly for a few seconds and then gave up. It was simple. He just desisted and listened in bitter relief to the sound of those boots ringing upward in the mist, rapping against the high bricks of the Herengracht and the muted night.

It was in him to get up, he had the will, the sheer idiot stubbornness in him to do it, he knew, but he heard the clonk of furniture beneath him and the flicker of light and it was enough to lie there alive in the cold and feel the hawser against his face.

• • •

WHEN HE CAME STIFFLY DOWN the steps into the tilting cabin, Billie held out the wavering flame of the cigarette lighter whose plastic was foggy and green, and let him see his way to a chair. She had her pack on the table and the phone in her hand. He blinked in the strange light and peeled off his socks. His whiskery chin shook a little, but his eyes were clear.

‘Okay,’ he murmured. ‘Okay.’

Billie couldn’t tell if this was a question or a command, but she hugged the receiver to her ear and kept dialling anyway. Tiny waves rocked against the furniture. She watched him open cupboards to find some socks. She tilted up her own wrapped feet and shook them at him. At the other end of the phone after the sound of oceans and the land and sky, a man said.

‘This better be fooking good, then. Jaysus Mary and Joseph it better had!’

RAIN, GREAT UNRAVELLING SHEETMETAL SWATHES of rain fell as the old Transit slushed through the tunnels of hawthorn, through miry bends, past rows of poplars, of larch and oak. Curtains of mud rose at every turn and the wipers juddered across the glass. Through grey little towns of cold-pressed council houses they went, and onto pebblecast bungalows and mongrel Spanish haciendas with asphalt turnarounds in the strange pure green of land. They passed roadside camps of travellers whose miserable donkeys stood tethered to other people’s fences in the rain, and everywhere there were ruins choked with blackberry and ivy, fallen walls, tilted crosses and mounds like buried cysts in the earth. Rain.

No one spoke. The three of them sucked carefully on the mints they’d been sharing since Dublin and rubbed at the misting screen with their mittened knuckles.

Peter Keneally steered carefully. It was like transporting bone china. He winced at every rut in the roads of the Republic and cast sideways glances at the two of them there up beside him. They were hollow-cheeked, you could say. Subdued. The little one’s scars were like silky patches of sunlight. She had a queer notch in the front of her hair, right there at his elbow. The face of a saint, by God. Now and then the bush of her hair rested on his arm and he felt like singing. Scully had cut himself shaving, which was no surprise the way his hands shook. His eyes were bloodshot, raw as meatballs, and his clothes were clearly not his own. He looked like he’d seen the Devil, but he had a wan sort of smile on his face when they came into familiar country.

In the flat-bottomed valley before the long rise to the Leap, even before the road widened for the scarecrow of a tree that stood as a hindrance to traffic, Scully was pulling off his seatbelt and leaning over to touch his arm. Peter geared down.

Billie watched him get down into the hard icy rain where the van stopped, right there beside the funny tree with the bits of stuff in it. His hair flattened, his shoulders ran with water, but he didn’t seem to hurry. The wipers slushed across in front of her and she watched him reach out for something in the boughs.

‘Aw, now,’ said the man beside her.

She saw the rag in her father’s hands, watched it fall limp to the mud at his feet. She sucked her mint.

Out in the rain Scully held onto the tree wondering how it could happen, how it was that you stop asking yourself, asking friends, asking God the question.

IT WAS THE FIRST NIGHT of the year. Scully woke suddenly, kept his eyes closed and listened to the startling silence of the house. The quiet was so complete that he heard his own heartbeat, his breath loud as a factory. He opened his eyes involuntarily and saw, upon the boards of the floor, a curious light. It ran up the wall as well, like muted moonlight. Then he saw the empty impressed pillow beside him and swung out of bed completely, his naked skin shrinking against the cold.