Tim Winton - The Riders

‘Have you been drinking that poteen again?’

‘Well, you have to consider it from an ignorant Paddy’s point of view. These two boogers come by one day in a Volkswagen, a Volkswagen from London Heathrow on the way to Perth Australia and say, aarrr, that’s a noise hows, arrl boy it mate! Now I figure it’s got to be three things: drugs, rock-and-roll, or fooking brain damage. Buyin this auld bit of shite in the Irish outback.’

‘Here, pull that gutter off while you’re up there.’

The postie dragged the rotten gutter down in a shower of rust and moss.

‘I figure if it’s rock-and-roll, it has to be your lovely wife who’s the star and you carry the bags. I mean, where does a man get a tan like that?’

‘Greece. We lived in Greece.’

‘Thought you said you lived in London.’

‘London first. Lived in Paris, too, most of last year.’

‘Paris. My God.’

‘Then Greece this year.’

‘The three of yez? Wanderin like a bunch of tinkers. Tell me straight, cause I’ve got nephews. Is it drugs?’

Scully looked at him, grinning. ‘Are you serious? Mate, I’m just a poor grafter like you. My wife’s a public servant — well, was a public servant cause she quit at the end of her long service leave. I’m not rich and there’s no drugs and precious little rock ’n’ roll. And no terrorism either, you silly bugger.’

‘Mind your head! Well, that’s the whole gutter gone. I’ve got a good auld piece in Roscrea for ye.’

‘Here comes the rain,’ said Scully retreating down the ladder. It sloped in silently, ignored by the postman, while Scully took shelter in the lee of the barn.

‘And what might you be doin, Scully?’

‘Getting out of the bloody rain, what d’you think?’

‘Afraid of a bit of soft weather, then?’

Scully shrugged.

‘Get used to it, lad!’

‘Bugger that,’ said Scully. He gathered up his tools and went inside.

By the time Pete came in Scully was upstairs prizing out rotten floorboards and setting new ones in their place. The brassy taste of nails was in his mouth. For some reason it reminded him of the cowshed, that taste, the slanting jerrybuilt pile his father kept tacked together for twenty years. He went everywhere with nails in his mouth, the old man. The smell of fresh-sawn wood was sweet now, and the rain pattered against the windows. Scully looked at the attic slope of the upstairs walls. It felt like a cubby house up here. These would be snug cosy rooms, warmed by the chimney that divided them. He could see them waking now on mornings quiet and wet as this, their sleepy voices close in the angled space.

‘Well come on, Scully,’ said Pete, suddenly beside him. ‘Don’t just sit there lookin lovesick, tell me about her.’

‘Jennifer?’

‘Ye tell me nothin, Scully. I’m beginnin to believe you’re English after all. A man works with you all day and ye don’t say fook. Just stand there lookin dreamy.’

‘Well.’

‘Well my ass.’

Scully smiled.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, man, tell me about Jennifer. Make the day go by, boy, give me somethin to chew on. She’s the workin type, you say?’

‘That’s right. Department of Immigration. Got to be a bit of a big-shot.’

‘And now she’s emigratin herself?’

‘Yeah, she’s quit. She hated it. Loved working, you know. She was never the type to stay in and look after the kids. That’s more me.’

Pete clucked. ‘And you claimin to be a workin man.’

‘When Billie — our daughter — was smaller, I worked part-time so I could be with her.’

‘Where did you work? What is it exactly that ye do, Scully?’

Scully laughed. ‘Those days I worked in a tackle shop. Sold lures and things, fixed reels. You ever seen a Mackerel Mauler?’

‘Oh, Jaysus I hate fish!’

‘I left school at fifteen, went north to work the deck of a rock lobster boat. Great money. I spose I’ve done all kinds of things.’

‘So where did you meet her?’

Scully wrenched a board up in a shower of dry rot. ‘Geez, you want details, don’t you?’

Pete poked in the recess with a chisel, searching out pulpy wood. ‘Was it a dance, now?’

‘Australians don’t dance or sing, believe me. No, we met at university, can you believe. I was trying to do architecture. Went back, finished school and got in. We were in a class together. I forget what it was. Something in the English Department, some unit I thought I’d pick up so I could read a few books, you know? She was the bored pube getting paid to improve herself at night. Black hair, pretty. I mean real pretty, and she didn’t say a word. Well, neither did I. I mean, there’s all these kids spouting books and people you never heard of, confident as you like. I just shut up and tried to keep me head down, and she was doing the same.’

Peter fiddled with the blade of the plane, adjusting it absent-mindedly. ‘And, and?’

‘She asked me if I wanted a beer one night.’

‘She asked you’

‘Oh, mate.’ Scully rolled his eyes thinking of it. She bailed him up against the window one night and came out with lines that had to be rehearsed. She’d been practising.

‘What a friggin country it must be. Must be because it’s so damn hot. No time for romance.’

Scully threw a handful of sawdust at him and went back to his sawing. ‘We both quit university and got married,’ he shouted. ‘Eight years!’

‘Well, what’re ye doin here ? She quit a good job to go lurkin through strange places and end up here on a hill with Brereton’s cows?’

‘Well, she was bored with her job, and restless, and I was game for a change. We rented our house and travelled, you know.’

‘With a baby and all.’

‘A five-year-old isn’t a baby, Pete.’ No, he thought. For a baby you needed somewhere still and snug and anchored. Somewhere like this.

‘Whose idea was it?’

‘Hers, I spose.’

‘And you followed.’

‘I was game for a change, yeah. I didn’t exactly follow.’

‘Used to be the women who followed.’

Scully laughed, but it stung somehow. Admit it, Scully, he thought. You followed, you’d follow her anywhere. A few weeks ago you couldn’t sleep for dreams of home, of hot white beaches and the wicked scent of coconut oil and the Fremantle Doctor blowing the curtains inward against the long table there in that house you sweated on all those years. You were a mad dog for it, mate, like a horse in the home paddock, bolting with your nose in the air, kissing Europe goodbye, letting it kiss your cakehole for all you cared, and then wham! you turned on a penny for her sake. On a queer feeling, a thing she couldn’t explain, just to see her happy.

‘Well, maybe it’s our turn to follow anyway,’ he said.

‘Mebbe so. I don’t know about women. These boards need sandin now. You need the power on, Scully. You can’t do all this by hand.’

‘It’s the money, mate. I’m stuffed until the money comes through from home. I’m living on the change from my air ticket. I don’t know if I can even pay what I owe you already.’

‘What, you think I’m lyin awake at night waitin for to be paid? What a proddy you are. I’ll have Con come by in the mornin and put a box in, I shoulda thought of it Monday. I’ll be frigged if I’m comin by to do this shite by hand. And yev got holes in your chimney there, go make some mortar. Make it one part Portland, one of lime and six of good sand. If he don’t show by eleven tomorrow, you must go in and get him. It’s the Conor Keneally Electric in Birr. He’ll be the poor big bastard looks like me.’

BUT CONOR KENEALLY DIDN’T COME, not for days he didn’t, and Scully thought it best to wait it out. He scraped mildew and dirt and pulpy mortar from the interior walls and caulked up holes and cracks, and then rendered the whole surface anew, filling the place with the heady stink of lime. He scraped paint from the low attic ceiling of the upstairs rooms and sugar-soaped it till his hands were raw. The house filled with shavings and sawdust and paint flakes and wall scum and began to look like the galley of a prawn trawler. Scully found himself squatting by the hearth at night, eating with his hands. In his sliver of mirror he looked feral. He worked on without electricity, driving himself, sleeping only on his oak door amid the drifts and draughts. He just couldn’t bring himself to go into Birr and chase Conor Keneally up, not when the man’s brother came by every day with a pair of cover-alls over his postal uniform and a trowel in his hand and a pint of Power’s at the ready. The man came by with a gas bottle, for pity’s sake, and a kitchen sink and beds brought piece by piece atop the mail of the Republic. The two of them would stand about at day’s end silently observing the lack of electricity.