by Tim Winton
Thirty-one
THE TRAIN PULLED OUT INTO the darkness. Billie tried to get comfortable. She bumped Scully’s newspaper and he sighed. People murmured. Some had pillows and eyepatches. Lights, houses, roads began to fall by. Trains weren’t so bad. You could see you were getting somewhere in a train, even at night like this, the darkness just a tunnel out there with you shooting through, roaring and clattering and bouncing through like a stone in a pipe, like the stone Billie felt in her heart now, trying to think of something good, something she could remember that wouldn’t make her afraid to remember. Past the cloud. The white neck, she saw. So suddenly white as if the tan had been scrubbed out in the aeroplane toilet. Beautiful skin. The veins as she sits down. Skin blue with veins. Like marble. And talking now, mouth moving tightly. Cheeks stretched. Hair perfect. But the words lost in the roar, the huge stadium sound in Billie’s ears as the cloud comes down, like smoke down the aisle, rolling across them, blotting the war memorial look of her mother in blinding quiet.
• • •
SCULLY HID BEHIND the Herald Tribune and tried to get a grip. But he was studying the reflections of the other passengers as though Irma might be among them. He was going mad, surely. He wasn’t heading anywhere, he had no purpose – he was just going. Come to think of it he envied Irma her performance on the ferry. Kicking and screaming, head-butting the walls. Some total frigging indecorum, he could do with it. No, too tired. He didn’t have a clue what he was up to. Funny, really, he was just going. Travelling. For the sake of it. It actually made him grin.
The paper fell in a crumple. Night warped by. It could have been anywhere out there. The mere movement of the train was soothing. Billie slept like a dog beside him. He saw himself in the glass smiling dumbly. A boy’s face in a steel milk bucket. The face of a boy who likes cows, reflected in the still oval of milk – white, dreamsome, sleepy milk.
• • •
BILLIE WOKE FOR A WHILE in the night and watched the land and lights slipping by. It meant nothing to her, it had no name, no place that she could see. It was like the walls of a long tunnel just going by and by. She wondered about Granma Scully, if maybe she would come to live with them now in that little dolls’ house. It was just country out there, more country. She thought of wide, eye-aching spaces of brown grass with wind running rashes through it and big puddles of sheep as big as the shadows of clouds creeping along toward lonely gum trees. That was a sight she could get hold of. Or the back step at Fremantle where the snails queued up to die by the tap. The sight of Rottnest Island hovering over the ocean like a UFO in the distance. She went to sleep again, thinking of the island hovering there, like a piece of Australia too light to stay on the water.
• • •
COFFEE AND ROLLS CAME BY at dawn and Scully bought breakfast for them, but Billie slept on twitchy as a terrier. Towns were becoming suburbs out there in the dirty light. Time to freshen up, beat the queues. He clambered into the aisle. It was hard work picking his way through the outflung legs of sleepers. The whole car stank of bad breath and cheap coffee. He had his hand on the latch of the toilet door when he saw her through the glass partition between carriages. Second row, aisle seat. Totally out to it. Mouth open slackly, head back, leg twisted out into the traffic. Two grimy runs of mascara down her cheeks. Irma.
He stood there a moment in awe. Yes, she was something else, something else entirely. You could almost admire her doggedness – until you thought of her souveniring your daughter’s underpants.
He went back down the aisle tripping on the ugly mounds of rancid backpacks and mattress rolls, stockinged feet, hiking boots, slip-ons. The train plunged and juddered. He snatched down their luggage and hoisted Billie to his shoulder. It took sea legs to move through the gut of that train, through doors and curtains of smoke, past suit bags and monogrammed luggage, around suitcases with wheels.
The toilet in first class was quiet and roomy. Scully sat on the closed lid of the seat with Billie still asleep on his lap and the genteel passengers of first class queuing patiently outside. In time the train slowed, but Scully’s mind racketed on. Hit the ground running, he thought. Hit it running.
• • •
ROMA TERMINI WAS A VAST chamber of shouts and echoes, metal shrieks and crashes of trolleys as Scully and Billie ran through the mob of beseechers and luggage grabbers toward the INFORMAZIONE office in the main hall. Scully felt smelly and gritty and wrinkled as he scanned the weird computer board that flashed messages in all languages.
‘Inglese?’ Called a thin dark woman from the counter behind them.
‘Oui,’ said Scully, panting. ‘Si, yes, English.’
He saw the destinations reeling off before him.
8.10 Berne
8.55 Lyon (Part-Dieu)
7.05 Munich
8.10 Nice
7.20 Vienna
7.20 Florence
He looked at his watch. It was 7.02. Too long to wait for Nice or Lyons. Irma was out there somewhere. Wheels yammered on the hard floor. Over the PA a man spoke tonelessly. Along the counter two backpackers argued, grey with fatigue. It had to be the first train north. He opened his wallet.
‘Two tickets for Florence, one adult one child, second class. Please. No, make that first class.’
He slapped the American Express card down and the attendant smiled indulgently.
‘The vacation is a big hurry, sir.’
‘Yes, a helluva hurry. Which track, uh, which binari Firenze?’
‘Train EC30. You will see it.’
‘Thank you. Grazie.’
‘Prego. Sir? Sir?’
‘Yes?’
‘You must write your name. Sign. I have your card.’
‘Oh, yes, what a hurry. What a holiday this is!’ Billie rolled her eyes. He suppressed a hysterical giggle. He was losing his marbles.
• • •
AS THE COUNTRY SOFTENED INTO villages, muddy fields and bare trees, Scully and Billie stretched in their empty compartment with the sweat still drying on them. The upholstery of their long opposing benches was bum-shiny and cool. The air was tart as it rushed in the window. A giddy kind of relief came upon him as the train picked up speed. The sky was low and marbled, black, grey, white, pierced by poplars and the spires of little churches. The land was eked out between stone walls and graveyards, the squiggles of lanes. There was a softness out there, a picturebook safety in the landscape that soothed him. Like Ireland, Brittany. That time, the three of them and Dominique on the omnibus in the Breton farmlands. Scully had the same feeling looking out on it. Everything that there is to be done has been done here. This land will not eat me. It was land with the bridle on, the saddle cinched. In Brittany he found it sad, the loss of wildness, but today, looking out upon the soft swelling hills and symmetrical woodlands he felt his whole body unwinding with gratitude at the arrival of mere prettiness.
Billie squeezed his hand. He sprawled out on his seat, his first-class seat, and smiled.
‘I was worried about you,’ she said.
He raised her hand to his lips. ‘Why, Miss, I do thank you.’
‘Urk, boy bugs!’
‘Get a doctor!’
And for a moment, for a longer moment than he believed possible, they laughed together with their feet all over the upholstery. The feeling burned on warmly after they lapsed into silence. Billie took up her dogeared comic. He found his Herald Tribune. The train jogged and weaved, labouring into the hills.
• • •
FEELING THE TRAIN SLOW ON the steep incline, Billie looked up from Quasimodo and saw an amazing thing. A funny sound came out of her throat as she looked out of the rainstreaked window and saw two boys on horses galloping along the tracks, just behind. Boys, not men. Their hair streamed wet, dancing like the dark manes of the horses as they gained on the train. Trees blurred past. Their parkas bubbled and billowed, hoods bouncing on the back of their necks. Their feet were bare. Billie saw the horses without saddles. She pressed up against t
he glass as they drew alongside. Gypsy boys, for sure they were gypsies. Their white teeth flashed in smiles. The muscles in the horses’ flanks pumped like machinery. It was beautiful – all of it was beautiful, and they saw her.
‘Look! Look!’
Scully sat up, surfacing like a swimmer from his reverie, and the sight made him recoil in shock. The bulging glass eyes of horses. Mud rising in black beads against their bellies. The bare feet of boys. Their knees pinched high on their mounts, manes twisted expertly in their fingers. Scully saw the rain peeling off their faces, off the dun hoods of their rough coats, and their eyes upon him, black and knowing. Perilously close to the rails, they beckoned, each with a grimy hand outstretched, palm upward. Grinning. Madly grinning.
Scully wrenched the shutter down.
‘No!’
Billie scrabbled at the handle until it ricked up again. The riders made a jump, a straining leap across a low wall, making arrows of themselves in the air and an eruption of mud on the other side. They gained again, drawing up beside Billie’s window. Their hands were out bravely across the smear of the rails.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Scully.
She saw him turn away, then back again.
Scully saw the blood along the horses’ flanks where tree branches had left their mark. He was cold right through, slipping, sinking. Icy. He saw the insistence of the outstretched hands, the menace in the gaze. Even in the wicked bend of the crest they kept on, riding without fear, summoning, demanding, begging until he closed his eyes against them and felt the new momentum of the train in the downward run.
Billie waved as they fell back, her heart racing wonderfully. The gouged walls of an embankment filled the window and they were gone. She pressed her palm against the cold glass. Scully lay back licking his chapped lips. Billie felt lightheaded. Her head thumped. She touched him but he flinched.
‘They were only boys,’ she said. ‘Just silly boys.’ Peter Pan boys. Show offs. And they saw her.
Thirty-two
OUT OF THE RUMOURS OF places, of the red desert spaces where heat is born, a wind comes hard across the capstone country of juts and bluffs, pressing heathland flat in withering bursts. Only modest undulations are left here. Land is peeled back to bedrock, to ancient, stubborn remains that hold fast in the continental gusts. Pollen, locusts, flies, red sand travel on the heat, out across the plains and gullies and momentary outposts to the glistening mouth of the sea. And in sight of cities, towers, the bleak shifting monuments of dunes, the wind dies slowly meeting the cool offshore trough of air, stalls the carriage of so much cargo. The sea shivers and becomes varicose with change and in the gentle pause it clouds with the billion spinning, tiny displaced things which twitch and flay and sink a thousand miles from home. Fish rise as blown sparks from the deep itching with the change. Sand, leaves, twigs, seeds, insects and even exhausted birds rain down upon the fish who surge in schools and alone, their fins laid back with acceleration as they lunge and turn and break open the water’s crust to gulp the richness of the sky, filling their bellies with land. And behind them others come, slick and pelagic to turn the water pink with death and draw birds from the invisible distance who crash the surface and spear meat and wheel in a new falling cloud upon the ocean. Out at the perimeter a lone fish, big as a man, twists out into the air, its eye black with terror as it cartwheels away from its own pursuer. There is no ceasing.
Thirty-three
IN FLORENCE THEY FOUND A hotel near the Duomo with slick terrazzo floors and window shutters that peeled into the narrow street. The city air was fat with taxi horns and rain. Bells rang in towers and domes. The plumbing chimed in sympathy, and from below came the smells of espresso coffee, salami and baking bread.
Scully filled a bath and washed their clothes in shampoo. He scrubbed shirts and pounded jeans, rinsed rancid socks over and over and hung it all from shutters and radiators to drip dry. They climbed naked into their separate beds and listened to the plip of water on the floor. For a while they looked at one another, not speaking. Light fell in bands across the bed linen. Before long they slept, surrounded by the shades of their steaming clothes.
It was late in the day when they woke. Billie woke first. She felt shimmery. Her head felt bigger. She pulled a blanket around herself and sat flicking through their passports. She looked at their big, round, happy faces and all the stamps in weird languages. She was smaller in her photo. She liked how smiley they were in their old faces. Scully got up. She watched him brush his teeth till the toothpaste turned pink. He didn’t look in the mirror. His bum wobbled and his nuts rattled stupidly. When Scully was in the nude he didn’t care. It was because he wasn’t beautiful. Only beautiful people cared.
• • •
OUTSIDE IT WASN’T RAINING but the city was wintry and dim. In a self-service place they ate pasta and bread. It was steamy and full of clatter. Chairs scraped on the floor. People shouted and laughed.
Afterwards they just walked. On a bridge there was something like a little town where African people, black people, sold shirts and watches laid out on the wet stones. Across the river they walked in pretty gardens and climbed to a fort that looked like the wrecked castle in Ireland. All across the roofs of the city were pigeons and the sound of bells.
Scully walked along with the kid feeling lightly stitched together, as though the slightest wind would send him cartwheeling. It was quiet between them. They merely pointed or tilted their heads at things, thinking their own thoughts. He wondered where the nearest airport was and whether there was credit left on the Amex card. He felt strangely peaceful. The muddy Arno rolled by. The Ponte Vecchio lighting up the dusk.
They walked in their case-wrinkled clothes past Italians who looked like magazine covers. Dagger heels, glistening tights, steel creases, coats you could lie down and sleep on. Their shoes were outrageous, their peachy arses, male and female, like works of art. Women ran their lacquered nails through Billie’s hair and Scully stared at their glossy lips. Buon Giorno.
Billie saw him in the lights of shop windows. He looked dreamy but his blood was back.
‘All for one,’ she said.
‘And one for all.’
• • •
BEFORE BED BILLIE CUT HER toenails with the little scissors in Scully’s pocket knife. He lay on his bed. Their washed clothes were half dry. All the edges of Billie’s eyes, everything she saw had a shiny edge to it. While he lay there she clipped his toenails, too and marvelled at the glowingness of things.
• • •
UP IN THE FIG TREE with Marmi Watson from next door balancing beside her, Billie pointed down the street to the figure striding along, briefcase swinging, legs scissored, hair falling black from her neck. Afternoon light in her eyes.
‘Look,’ she murmured proudly. ‘That’s my mum. Just look at that.’
• • •
‘ALL FOR ONE!’ THEY SAID, the three of them on the bare floor of the Paris apartment. ‘And one for all!’ Laughing themselves silly in the mess, laughing, laughing.
• • •
IN THE WEAK HEATLESS LIGHT of the piazza next day the kid didn’t look so great. Scully didn’t like the new pucker of her wounds. They seemed moist long after he bathed them. Billie refused to wear her hat but didn’t complain of any pain. She seemed in fair spirits. He watched her feed crumbs to the pigeons. He tried not to bug her with conversation. But he resolved to get a list of English-speaking doctors at the American Express office when he went in to check the state of his account. He wondered if the damp had gotten back into the bothy. Winter solstice. How did the Slieve Blooms look today? He felt odd. Disconnected from himself. Yesterday and today. Without pain – almost without feeling. It was like having come through a tunnel, a roaring, blind, buffeting place and come out into the light unsure for a while, if all of you was intact. The disbelief of the survivor.
The bells of the Duomo tolled into the china bowl of the sky. He looked up at the gorgeous cupola. Look at that. It wasn�
�t just love that flunked him out of architecture – it was visions like this, signs across the centuries that told him to give up and stop pretending. The world could do without his shopping malls, his passive solar bungalows. If it wasn’t the gap of greatness, then nature would sap the remains of your pride. A drive out to the Olgas, to Ayer’s Rock, to a terracotta polis of termite mounds, to the white marble plain of any two-cent salt lake would cure your illusions. Scully had no room left for illusions. What more could be beaten out of him?
• • •
DOWN BY THE PITTI PALACE, the Amex office smelt of flowers and paper and damp coats. They were hallowed, frightening places to Scully. Behind glass and wood and carpet, so much power. Queues of smooth, confident men in pinstripes. The well- oiled clack of briefcases. The casual shifting of currencies and information. The instantaneous nature of things. Like a pagan temple. Scully clutched his precious plastic card. Billie hooked a finger through his belt loop. Gently, conscious of the impression they were already making, he pressed the hat onto her head to cover the worst of her wounds. Cowed by the smell of aftershave, he found his Allied Irish chequebook, and brushed at the creases in his shirt. In five languages, all around, people bought insurance, travellers’ cheques, guidebooks, package tours, collected mail, flaunted their mobility.
Cash the cheque, he thought. Pray it doesn’t bounce. And the list of doctors.
Billie scuffed her RM’s in the carpet. He would give up soon – she could feel his key winding down since yesterday. The money burred down on the counter at the level of her nose, she felt the wind of it against her hot cheeks. That little bed in the attic. A horse. A castle.
‘And a telegram for you, Mr Scully.’
Billie felt his knee jump against her. She let go his belt loop and watched how carefully he opened the envelope. The money still there on the counter, and people in the queue behind them clucking with irritation.
