The Riders

by Tim Winton

  Forty-two

  IN SLEEP SCULLY FELT LIKE A flying fish, a pelagic leaper diving and rising through temperatures, gliding on air as in water. He heard the great oceanic static. He felt seamless. Weightless, free.

  He woke suddenly with Billie’s face close to his, her eyes studying him, her breath yeasty with antibiotic. She ran the heel of her palm across the stubble of his cheek. Her skin was cool, her eyes clear. The surf of traffic surged below.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘I feel ordinary again.’

  He lay there, muscles fluttering, like a fish on a deck, feeling the dry weight of gravity, the hard surprise of everything he already knew.

  • • •

  MIST LAY ACROSS the soupy swirl of the Seine. It hung in the skeleton trees and billowed against the weeping stonework of the quais. The river ran fat with whorls and boils, lumpy with the hocks of sawn trees and spats of cardboard. He felt it sucking at him, waiting, rolling opaque along the iced and slimy embankment. It made him shudder. He held Billie’s hand too firmly.

  ‘This isn’t the way to Dominique’s,’ she murmured.

  ‘Yes it is. More or less.’

  In every piss-stinking cavity the mad and lost cowered in sodden cardboard and blotched sleeping bags. Out of the rain and out of sight of the cops they lay beneath bridges and monuments, their eyes bloodshot, their faces creased with dirt and fatigue. Was it some consolation to imagine that Jennifer might be here among them? Did the idea let him off, somehow, take the shame and rage away? These faces, they were generic. Could you recognize a person reduced to this state? Maybe he’d walk past her and see some poor dazed creature whose features had disappeared in hopeless fright. Would she recognize him, for that matter? Was his face like that already?

  Beneath the Pont Neuf he stepped among these people and whispered her name. The stoned and sore and crazy rolled away from him. Billie tugged at his hand but he stared into their eyes, ignoring their growls of outrage until a big gap-toothed woman reared and spat in his face. Billie dragged him out into the faint light of day. She sat him down in the square at the tip of the island, and pressed the gob away from his face with his own soiled hanky. He let out a bitter little laugh. She hated to see the way he trembled. She hated all of this.

  Scully looked back toward the bridge. Something in the water caught his eye. Something, someone out in the churning current. He shrugged off the child and went to the edge of the embankment to peer upstream. Dear God. He saw plump, pink limbs, tiny feet, a bobbing head. He wrenched his coat off. Please God, no.

  ‘Sit down, Billie, and don’t move! You hear me? Don’t move from this spot!’

  He edged down the slick embankment, grabbing at weeds and holes in the cobbles. The current was solid. He looked about for a stick, a pole, but there was only dogshit and crushed Kronenberg cans. Close to the water he found a ringbolt and he hung out precariously from it, tilted over the water, reaching with one arm as the tiny pink feet came bounding his way. The steel was cold in his anchored hand. His face stung. His heart shrank in his chest. He saw ten perfect toes. Creases of baby fat. Dimpled knees. He poised himself, seeing his chance, and in one sweeping arc he reached out – and missed. Oh God! His fingers sculled hopelessly on the water. And then he saw it clearly as it floated gamely by – cherry mouth pert and cheeky, plastic lashes flapping as it pitched, cupped hands steering it through the soupy convergence at the end of the island.

  ‘I’m not really into dolls,’ called Billie, standing precariously close to the edge. ‘But I’m glad you tried.’

  Scully hung there panting, the sweat cold on him already. He hated this town.

  • • •

  THE RUE JACOB WAS SLUSHY with thawing ice. Scully struggled in through the courtyard door to the quiet world of Dominique’s garden. Cypresses, sunning benches. Banks of tall elegant windows and Romeo and Juliet balconies. At the foyer he buzzed her floor and got nothing. It was early still. He buzzed again, waited a few moments without result. Then he leant on the button half a minute or so, feeling his hopes ebbing. All day yesterday she hadn’t answered. Last night again. But that call at Marianne’s. Where was she? Wherever she was, Marianne would have called her. Told her God knows what.

  In her mail slot there were bills and a plastic-wrapped copy of Photo-Life. He looked at Billie who avoided his gaze. Her nose was rosy, her cap askew. He peered at the postmarks. Yesterday, the day before. She wasn’t in Paris at all.

  He stabbed the button for the apartment next to hers.

  ‘Allo. Oui?’

  ‘Er,’ he stammered. ‘Excuse moi, Madame, je . . . chercher Mlle Latour.’

  In the long pause Scully felt his accent, his foreignness sinking in upstairs, and he knew he was probably buggered.

  ‘Qui? Qui es la?’

  ‘Je m’appelle Fred Scully, un ami. Je suis Australien.’

  Australie?’

  Then the woman spoke quickly, too quick for him to understand, and all he really heard was ‘le train’ and then she signed off sharply and he could get nothing more from her. He hammered the button till his fingertip throbbed. The train? That definitely didn’t mean the Metro. Where would she go by train? What did it matter anyway. She wasn’t here. No help. He still needed money. He couldn’t go back to Marianne. Maybe Jean-Louis, but he’d be at work now, and besides who knows what Marianne had told him. Fat chance there. In a whole city, somewhere he’d lived the better part of a year there was nobody. Not a soul. It was hard to believe. He was water off a duck’s back.

  That left American Express. Or the embassy. Way to go.

  Out in the street a lonely Japanese tourist beckoned for him to take a photo in front of some statue, but Scully waved the camera aside and dragged Billie toward the nearest Metro.

  Underground the city was surging, pressing, breaking into a jumbled run, thick with mittens, caps, greatcoats, mufflers and a foetid steam of damp and overheated wool. The tunnels were sweet and septic, echoing with shouts and the march of feet. A saxophone mooned around some corner. Stalls of flowers, their colours crazy and shocking down here in the monochrome blur, erupted at intersections where masses of bodies merged like forks of the khaki river above.

  Scully stepped over men with scrawled cardboard placards, around women with swaddled babies and rattling cups. In a corner by the paper shop the Flics bailed up an Arab and snatched at his papers. Scully steered Billie down to the platform as a train came gushing out of the darkness on a blast of dry, stale air.

  • • •

  AS THE CARRIAGE HURTLED THROUGH the dark, a gypsy child made her way through the crowd with a small leather purse held open, her voice chirruping gaily down the aisle. When she came to Scully he closed his eyes against her and smiled faintly. She moved to Billie who stared uncertainly at her and then down into the purse. The gypsy child knelt daintily, her black eyes upturned, and Billie reached out and touched her hair. Scully shook his head, still smiling. The train braked hard and wheezed into the next station and the girl stood up, shrugged, smiled brightly at them, and made for the doors.

  ‘I liked her,’ said Billie as they careered off again.

  Scully nodded, preoccupied.

  ‘Was that begging?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘She didn’t look poor.’

  Not as poor and raggedy as us, he thought, and that’s for bloody certain.

  ‘I could do that,’ she murmured. ‘If I had to. To get us home.’

  They bumped snugly on, legs pressed to one another, their wiry curls bobbing enough to catch the eyes of other passengers who exchanged small smiles at the sight.

  The train, thought Scully. Dominique caught the train. She had a house on the Isle of Man, houseboat in Amsterdam. You didn’t catch a train to the Isle of Man. Well, good luck to her.

  • • •

  UP IN THE STREETS AROUND the Opera the air was still and a faint sun caught in brass door trims, on the panels of turning buses. It lit the flowing breaths of shopp
ers as they strode four deep along the pavement; it caught coffee cups, boot heels, earrings; it wrought glory and fire amidst the gilt statuary above the Opera itself and forced a beauty upon the crowded streets lined with oyster stalls and the outlandishly decorative carcasses of pigs and half-plucked poultry. Scully navigated the crush past wine cellars, brasseries, airline offices. He held Billie in against his hip and found the building.

  At the Amex entrance he felt the hot gust of conditioned air and smelled perfume, leather, money. The armed guards frisked him gently and patted Billie down in jovial Christmas spirit. A poster of Karl Malden’s beaming benevolent face looked down on them. That turnip nose – Scully recognized a brother there.

  Inside was a calm civilization. Floors of it. There were slick counters and windows, glossy rails, armchairs. People queued thoughtfully or sat with folders and umbrellas in their laps as though they’d come inside simply for refuge. Midwesterners in checkerboard slacks, and chinos. Golfing shoes, pork pie hats, customized baseball caps. Women in nylon slacks and virginal Nikes, their hair hard with spray, quilted jackets thrown across their knees. Camcorders swung at hip level.

  He’d come here before to change money, and collect rent wired from Fremantle every month. Each time he wondered if the miracle would fail, whether the money would somehow evaporate in the wires, and the hieroglyphs on his plastic card lose their power. He envied these cologned businessmen browsing in the merchandising department, signing cheques and releases with their Mont Blanc pens. They had faith. They were certain of their rating, their status, their on-bookings and connections. They spoke in the plangent tones of the righteous and unselfconscious. There was nothing apologetic about their English or their requests.

  Scully went down the spiral staircase, avoiding the sight of himself in the field of mirrors, and sloped across to the customer service desk.

  The clerk was cool and sympathetic, his English precise, his tailoring exquisite. Scully tried not to think of the figure he himself cut. The man was doing his utmost professional best not to look suspicious or disdainful, but Scully could see his resistance to the story. He repeated it all calmly.

  ‘Before anything else,’ he said, ‘I’d like to know who reported it stolen.’

  ‘Of course you have some identification, sir.’

  Scully laid his passport on the counter. The blue seriousness of it, the emu and kangaroo of the coat of arms were not reassuring.

  ‘Hmm.’ The clerk fingered it and clacked on his keyboard. ‘You have another signatory to this account, sir, do you not?’

  ‘Yes, my wife. J. E. Scully. We share it in my name. Not very modern, I guess.’

  ‘According to records, sir, it was you who reported this card stolen.’

  Scully hopped from foot to foot. ‘Well. Well, as you can see, it’s right here in my hand.’

  ‘In two pieces, monsieur.’

  Scully swallowed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well. I believe we can fix this problem. Hmm.’ The clerk clacked a little further, narrowed his eyes unpleasantly.

  ‘Are you in Paris long?’

  Scully retrieved his passport as casually as he could. ‘I don’t know. No.’

  ‘Will you be making a payment on this account soon?’

  ‘I have credit still, don’t I?’

  ‘Yes, monsieur, you still have twenty-eight American dollars.’

  ‘What?’

  Heads turned. Billie pressed against him.

  ‘The computer says twenty-eight –’

  ‘That’s nearly four thousand dollars. I haven’t spent that much!’

  ‘The account is before me, monsieur.’

  Scully thought about it. With what he had rattling in his pockets he’d never pay off the hotel or even get out of the country.

  ‘Can I see that account?’ he croaked.

  ‘I can read the details off, sir. It would be quicker. If you would prefer –’

  ‘No, read it out.’

  Scully looked at the clear sweatprint of his hand on the counter. There were old scabs on his knuckles. He saw dirt in his nails. It simply wasn’t possible that he’d blown his credit, unless Jennifer had spent up in Australia. Or since.

  ‘Just the places for the moment.’

  The clerk sighed and recited tonelessly.

  ‘In December: Perth. Perth. Birr. Roscrea. London/Heathrow. Dublin. Athens. Rome. Florence. Paris. Paris. Amsterdam. Amsterdam.’

  Scully set his nails against the counter and breathed. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  Amsterdam.

  ‘Sir, here is the form for the reporting of –’

  ‘Can you give me the details on Amsterdam?’

  ‘A restaurant, sir. Three hundred dollars. And a fine art gallery. One thousand two hundred and seventy-five dollars.’

  ‘No hotel?’

  ‘In Amsterdam? No, sir.’

  Scully could see pity in the clerk’s face. A softening somehow.

  ‘The form, sir.’

  ‘No. Don’t bother.’

  ‘Monsieur}’

  Scully turned away, pivoting his whole body as though he was encased in plaster. There was no use waiting for a replacement card. It would be worthless. They’d cut it in two before the day was out. Amsterdam.

  Faces, arms, umbrellas slurred by. He ascended the staircase like an old man, the child holding his elbow. Billie piloted him for the doors.

  ‘Look!’ she cried.

  Scully straightened. He stared at the entrance Billie was heading for. There, accepting the pats and poking of the guards with great pleasure, was Irma. He could not believe it and yet he was hardly surprised. She saw him and her face lit up like a grill and something turned inside him so that he saw clearly, with the logic of a shithouse rat, his ticket out of Paris and the cold sweat of this day. He began to laugh.

  Forty-three

  BILLIE FELT THE SWEET STICKINESS of Irma’s lipstick against her cheek. She smelled of flowers and chocolates and smoke and she was so small compared to Scully. Billie hugged her, surprised that her arms could go all the way around.

  ‘Europe is so small,’ she murmured. ‘And you, Billie, you’re so big.’

  ‘Well, fancy this,’ said Scully.

  They all stood there a moment. Irma’s eyes were bright. She wore black tights under a little denim skirt with pointy boots. Over her saggy jumper was a cracked leather jacket. Her ears jangled with rings and studs.

  ‘I was thinking about a walk,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you have business in here?’ said Scully.

  ‘Oh, it can wait.’

  Scully smiled. It was a surprise to see it. ‘Sure,’ he said.

  They went out into the river of people on the street and just went with the current. Billie walked between the two of them, holding their hands. The town looked polished, all the way down the big streets toward the river. A woman with two dogs came their way and Billie leaned away from them, turning her face.

  ‘Christmas Eve!’ said Irma. ‘Can you believe it?’

  ‘No,’ said Scully and Billie at the same time. He blushed.

  They walked on a long way until her legs got tired. Irma led them into a café. She ordered apple juice for Billie and Pernod for them.

  Irma pulled off her jacket and rolled up her sleeve.

  ‘Look.’

  She had a tattoo of a knife on her white arm. The knife had flowers around it.

  ‘Did it hurt?’ asked Billie.

  Irma laughed. She pulled a flat packet out of her pocket.

  ‘They’re stick-on, silly.’

  Billie tipped them out on the table. One was an anchor. There was a snake. One said MOTHER but the next one was a shark.

  ‘Can I?’ Billie said to Scully.

  He shrugged. The café was full. He looked busy again, in his head.

  Scully watched Irma lick the kid’s arm wet. She looked up as she did it, deliberately engaging his gaze. Billie pressed the shark tattoo to her arm triumphantly.


  ‘Australian,’ said Irma gulping her pastis. ‘She chooses the shark.’

  Billie held her arm up to the long mirror behind them. ‘It’s cool.’

  Scully nodded. ‘Yeah. It’s clever.’

  Irma raised her eyebrows innocently. He thought about Amsterdam. Irma had been in Amsterdam lately herself.

  ‘I have to go,’ said Billie.

  ‘It’s just there,’ said Scully pointing to the WC door beneath the stairs. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No,’ said Irma. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘I’ll go myself,’ said Billie. ‘So embarrassing!’

  ‘Lock the door,’ said Scully.

  ‘What a pair you are.’

  ‘What’s the story, Irma?’ he said when Billie was out of earshot.

  ‘What story?’ She gulped the rest of her pastis and called for another.

  ‘This remarkable coincidence.’ The moment he opened his mouth, he started seeing it clearer. ‘Our meeting at Amex the very day I have to go in and see about my stolen card. The card somebody reported stolen. I’m thinking of the ferry, Irma. Your adventure into my luggage. You got the number then, didn’t you? What is it you want from me? I’ve got no home, no money, no wife. Are you some kind of hustler, a travelling whore?’

  ‘Not professionally, no.’

  ‘Is there an amateur league for whores?’

  Irma smiled. Her cheeks flushed. Around the glass tumbler, her nails were uneven, some bitten, some long and glossy with varnish.

  ‘You’ve been with us since Greece, Irma. That’s a long time.’

  ‘Okay, I followed you.’

  ‘And the rest.’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘The Amex card. Who cancelled it, then?’

  ‘Alright, the card, then.’

  ‘And the note. You were in Florence.’

  ‘No, there was no note from me.’

  Scully rolled his eyes.

  ‘What note?’ She drank greedily and licked her lips.

  ‘And the so-called sighting in Athens. You never saw my wife at the Intercontinental, did you?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’