by Tim Winton
The houseboat people looked at the photo and then at Billie and her father in their rumpled clothes and busted faces and shook their heads sadly. Sometimes they brought out soup or pressed money into Billie’s hand, but no one knew the face and Billie felt bad about her relief each time.
On and on it went through streets and canals with the hugest names while the drizzle fell and her lips cracked and her hands burned up. All the time she waited for him to give up, praying for him to give up, telling him inside her head to wear down and quit at last, but when she looked back he shooed her on without hardly looking up at her and Billie kept going to gangplanks, stepping over ropes and tapping on windows. Every shake of the head, every flat expression was a relief. No, not here, no, no, no, she wasn’t here. Billie was afraid that if they kept at it long enough someone’s face would brighten horribly and recognize the face. That’d be it. That would kill her. She just didn’t know what she would do.
On a corner, surrounded by green posts with rolls on the end like men’s dicks, she saw the closed-up shop with the posters of Greece and Hawaii and big jumbo jets in it. On the wall was a blackboard with long words and prices. A travel place. She felt the money against her leg and walked on like she’d never seen it. Next door was a SNACKBAR with a menu on the window. Sate-saus, Knoflook-saus, Oorlog, Koffie, Thee, Melk. It was closed as well. Everything was closed.
Church clocks bonged and rattled and Billie went on, just going and going while the light slowly went out of the sky and the air went so cold it felt like Coke going down your neck. And then suddenly it was dark and they were standing out on a little bridge looking at the still water and the moons the streetlights made in it.
‘Nothing,’ said Scully.
‘No,’ she said.
People had begun to come back out into the streets. Their bikes whirred past, their bells tinkled, they called and laughed and sang.
‘Scully, it’s cold.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s . . . let’s go somewhere.’
‘Yeah.’
He just stood there looking into the water, his mittens on the green rail of the bridge, until she took him by the sleeve and steered him into a narrow street where the windows were lit and cosy-looking. The first place she came to, she pushed him in and followed, smelling food and smoke and beer. There was sand on the floor and music and hissing radiators on the walls.
Billie followed her father to the big wooden bar and climbed up on a stool beside him.
‘He’ll have a beer, I spose,’ she murmured at the barman. ‘And one hot chocolate. Chocolat chaud?’
The barman straightened. His eyes were enormous. His glasses were thick as ashtrays. Up on the bar he put a balloony glass of beer with Duvel written on the side and plenty of fluff hanging off the top. Billie put her chin in her hands and watched Scully looking at himself in the bar mirror.
‘You have a bad day, huh?’ said the barman.
Billie nodded.
‘He is okay?’ he said, inclining his head toward Scully.
Billie shrugged. Scully gulped down his beer and pushed his glass forward again.
‘You be careful for that stuff, man,’ said the barman kindly. ‘They don’t call him the Devil for nothing. You watch him, kid.’
Billie nodded grimly and looked at the blackboard. ‘You have sausages and potatoes?’
‘Baby, this is Holland. It’s all sausage and potato here,’ he laughed. ‘For two?’
Billie nodded. She pulled out money.
‘Hoh, you are the boss for sure.’
She liked him. People in Amsterdam weren’t so bad. They weren’t afraid of kids like they were in Paris and London. They had sing-song voices and cheeks like apples, and she wondered if Dominique felt the same way. Dominique was sad like Alex. Her pictures were lonely and dark and sad. She was like a bird, Dominique. A big sad bird. Maybe she came here to cheer up, to see rosy people and do happier pictures.
In the corner a man with pencils through his earlobes was chattering on the phone. He looked ridiculous and should have been ashamed of himself. He sounded like a budgie talking away in his language, whatever they talked here. There were too many languages, too many countries. She was sick and tired of it. She climbed off her stool and crossed the sandy floor to where the phone book hung against the wall on a string. She picked up that book and opened it flat against the wood of the wall. But it was hopeless. She didn’t know how to spell Dominique and she forgot her last name.
She should know these things, she knew. She should be in school reading books and writing in pads and playing softball. She should be at someplace, somewhere they knew her name and what she was like. Somewhere she didn’t have to save people.
The phone book fell to the wall with a thump that startled everyone in the bar.
‘How do you spell Dominique?’ she asked Scully.
But he looked at himself in the mirror with his eyes half open. Their food came.
‘Your father need some help, maybe,’ said the barman kindly.
‘Yes,’ said Billie. ‘I’m helping.’
The smell of food was dreamy. It made her feel strong again.
• • •
THE LONGER SCULLY sat there the thirstier he got. The Trappist beer was rich and lovely. It seemed as though pain was behind him. He could calmly think all his worst thoughts, every nightmare flash across the brain-pan, without pain. He was close to her now. It wasn’t just in his mind anymore, no delusion, no desperate wishful thinking. She was here in Amsterdam and it was only a matter of time. A good night’s sleep, an early start, a clear mind, a bit of system.
No pain. Not even thinking about Dominique. There couldn’t be any doubt that she was with Dominique, though in what way she was with her was more of a lottery. Was their friend giving Jennifer sanctuary against her own better judgement? Was she in two minds, at least, her loyalties just a little divided? Or did the two of them share the same – what else could it be? – hatred for him? What else did they share? A bed? The very idea was supposed to make men wild, wasn’t it? It was supposed to be the ultimate humiliation, being left for a woman, but it didn’t seem any worse or any better just now. Whatever it was, however it was, Scully was stuck with a kind of precious disappointment with Dominique. What did it matter how it was? Dominique had held out on him.
No, no pain. Just a thirst.
Shit, for all he knew they could have been at it in Paris right from the beginning, with him so bloody glad she had someone to be with. Marianne, Jean-Louis, they probably knew all along. Their disdain, it was contempt for his blind trust, his weakness. And the baby, the baby was a hoax, just a vicious bloody decoy to free herself with. Setting him loose on the tumbledown bothy, buying time. He’d never laid eyes on an ultrasound image, a doctor’s bill, a test result in Athens, trusting prick he was. He had no other child, then. That still got close to pain. A couple of days ago, knowing that might have broken him. But he’d gone past something. He’d crossed a line. No baby. No wife. No marriage, nothing he could look back on with certainty, nothing that didn’t look like quicksand. And who knows, maybe she’d bolted with all the money as well. In the name of what – love? Personal development? The bohemian life?
It meant he’d done all this to himself, to poor Billie, to Irma, just so he could see a corpse. Across Europe and back to obligingly identify a body. With dignity. Yes, it meant, in the warm light of this bar, feeling no pain, that he had nothing. Not a hole in the ground, not even the dying echo of an idea of his life. In fact, sweet fuck-all.
And that just made him thirsty.
Forty-nine
SCULLY HIT THE HARD CHRISTMAS air of the street at God knows what hour of the night. The kid was pink-eyed and sluggish but he was floating, hovering above the glassy cobbles, four sheets to the wind and free.
The streets were streaming with walkers and riders and scooting cars. The mothwing whirr of bicycles fanned by his ear. Bells tinkled tiny on the road and gross in the air
where pigeons rose from church towers and clouds lay low across the city. Clots of people weaved through traffic bollards and tossed their scarves with gusts of perfume. The tramlines shone, the great paned sashes of glass held figures and furniture and music and the jaunty gables rendered the Calvinistic brickwork severe and silly. It was shaking, this city, shuddering at its moorings as Scully swept down alleys past thickets of voluptuous wrought-iron with the sweet anaesthesia of Trappist beer coming to his cheeks like true belief. God, how pretty everyone was here, how young and apple- arsed on their bikes. The café windows were pats of butter melting at his feet, the air was bright-clear and etching cold.
In the Spuistraat a ramshackle warehouse festooned with gilt chains and aerosol banners in Dutch raged with upstairs light and music. Across its walls was a wild dream of graffiti. They sounded like birds up there, like German birds about to burst into English any second now – as soon as they cleared their throats properly. Look at that, even their squatters were house-proud – what a people.
He elbowed his way into a warm darkwood café, suddenly surprised to find himself inside, and ordered more Duvel and some of that evil clear stuff they were downing all along the bar. The sweet crunch of sand on the boards underfoot buoyed him now against the haggard glare of the kid at his elbow. Shit a brick, look at those students, the belts cinched gorgeously over their navels, the peek of white flesh through carefully ripped Levi’s, the broad bright bands in their hair, the way their foreheads shone, the curve of their calves against the denim.
He threw back the clear shot and chased it with beer and thought for a moment of the mad, glowing ears of Peter Keneally. His own ears were gone now and his eyebrows were melting. His chin was off with the pixies but his mouth held good. The barman’s apron snapped like a spinnaker, the brass taps were winch handles. No sweat, he had the sea legs of an octopus now. Eight legs and six of them Irma’s.
‘To Irma!’ he blurted.
The kid fingered the guts of the wallet and found guilders.
‘To Irma’s Christmas on the lie St Louis.’
The barman took the money and smiled indulgently at his sober, saving daughter.
‘To the six wraparound-suck-me-dry legs of Irma the squirmer.’
He felt the toes of her little boots against his shin and busted out laughing. She pummelled him with fists the size of apricots and her hair was a blur before him. The girls along the bar shifted in their creaking leather jackets and smiled. Scully felt himself leaving backwards, falling across the room, dragged by the belt and waving at those fruit-arsed honeys as the cold and fragrant night air rattled down his neck. He was losing transmission now and then. The kid stood there like a bollard but he was moving. He held out his hand and surged on.
The streets became pink and thumping. Trash clacked underfoot and the alleys were gamy. He couldn’t tell if he was suddenly tired or if maybe everyone was older here.
A chrome-headed little runt stiff-armed him at a sluggish turn in the pedestrian surge, whispering foully at him in a language he couldn’t stay with. Scully shrugged him away and ricocheted into a clownfaced lunatic with a half-inch chain around his neck. There were syringes underfoot and aquarium windows full of whores.
‘Over here!’ someone screamed from a throat-like doorway. ‘See real life focking! Real focking!’
He stumbled through a fresh map of vomit and landed against the hot plane of a plate-glass window which shook with resistance. He pulled himself up to see a field of photographs. It hurt to focus; it puzzled him, that world of images. People, it looked like, well, it might have been people or the inside of an abattoir. Pink, pink flesh and shocked, hurt faces with bared teeth. He found his ears with his hands and held his head there before it, struggling to understand. Yes, that was a woman. Part of a woman. And razor blades. Oh, God help me. There it was, the Auschwitz of the mind, the place you’d never dreamt of going, the hell they said wasn’t real. His face came back to him like a nightmare, the fingers in his jacket held like snared fish. He saw Billie crying, and behind her a rush of black hair in the passing crowd, the blind swoop of his whole life that set him running like a man in flames.
Billie skidded on a half-sucked lemon in the pink piggy light of the doorway and stumbled to her knees. There was a farmyard smell to the street and a look in people’s faces that made animals of them. Low aquarium windows loomed with ladies swimming in purple light, their eyes foxy and shining. Music bashed up out of doors in the ground and hot air gushed in her face pricking her scars with sudden heat. Into the tunnel of hips and legs and voices they veered, her grip slipping as Scully tipped away. Horse manure and food steamed on the uneven cobbles. Away into the tunnel he was falling, against a wall of pink bodies under glass like a graveyard, his hair streaked out against the tangle of fingers and legs and teeth, snarled and hanging. She saw the bottle in the girl’s vagina, the safety pin in the face beside it, the harness, the shocked cattle look of the eyes in the pictures hardened with glass as her father slid down watching someone pass. He was falling, falling, too heavy for her to hold. And then he yelled out that name, his voice hoarse and breaking.
‘Jennifer!’
Billie felt her nails break as he fought clear. She saw his back, his hair sinking in the moving squelch of bodies and he was gone. She could chase him, she knew. She was small enough to worm her way through and catch up to him, but the name froze her where she stood. Did she really see that glossy tail of black hair that moment in the corner of her eye?
Billie stood there, breathing but not moving with the light flickering on her and the canal shimmering like the entrance to the centre of the earth.
Piggy-looking people herded by her, snuffling and clacking and bristling up against the windows. The trough of the canal flattened off under the bridge.
A man in a baseball hat put his hand on her head, talking something she didn’t know and then stopped. ‘You talk Inglis?’
Billie twitched.
‘Ten guilder I be you daddy, uh?’
She stared at him. He had a face like a dog someone had beat up every day, sad and saggy, but with teeth still, and leery like he might snap if you turned your back.
‘I got my own,’ she said, backing up, but the bollard stopped her.
‘You nice little girl.’
She pressed against the bollard and felt it cold against the small of her back.
‘Very nice.’
Billie smelt antiseptic and sick in the street and this man’s sweat through his black coat. His yellow teeth parted his lips. She felt his hand cold on hers, pulling it toward him, right where his coat opened and his belt buckle hung like a falling moon. She punched him right there hard as her fist would go and burrowed into the crowd. She clawed and kicked her way through, going forward, getting clear enough to run and then she saw Scully near the bridge angling like a sailor across the pavement.
• • •
SCULLY ELBOWED THROUGH CONFERENCES of negotiating boys and drooping junkies, outside the Hard Rock Café and saw her make the bridge beneath the tolling church. In the light of the bridge lamps the tan flash of legs. He broke into a run, bouncing against all corners, all handrails, all sudden, surprising gusts of pain. Across the canal he found the corner but the alley was glutted, the heads and shoulders and slit thighs tidal. Steam rose as a cloud before him and the grinding monotony of rap music blasted in his face.
He caught a glimpse of raven hair enamelled by the light of a doorway. He scrambled ahead, his heart truly hurting him now, goading him to keep up. His bad eye closed out on him, bending, twitching the night before him. She hovered in the doorway, a shimmering curtain of hair, and went in. Scully slowed to smooth himself down a little. He tilted against a bollard and ground the fur off his teeth with the collar of his pullover. He ran fingers through his greasy hair and patted himself down hopelessly. This wasn’t what he expected. He wasn’t ready. He shook like a schoolboy, wondering if maybe he should just walk away, show a bit of pride. Bu
t he’d come too far for bloody pride. He made for the door.
Stepping down into the clinical fluorescents, Scully hesitated. It was a kind of sex supermarket, slick-shelved and lit, laid out for tourists and lonely hearts straight off the bus. Everything was wrapped in cellophane and ordered according to genre, like a music store, and it seemed suddenly hilarious. Shit a brick. He didn’t know her at all. Had she lit out for stuff like this? He felt a moron smile split his face and saw her moving between shelves.
‘Of all the sex joints in all the world,’ he blurted, louder than he could have imagined, ‘you’d have to walk into mine!’
The boy at the register, smooth-faced with a pearl earring and a sweater someone’s mum must have knitted, smiled tiredly and looked away. Pink faces, apple cheek faces turned his way as he sailed down into the aisle. Exchanging their Chrissie presents, he thought. Let’s hope they disinfected first.
The hair whirled up the back and his whole chest tightened. To feel the proximity of her. He smelt perfume and heard the snick of heels as he closed the gap.
‘Jennifer?’
The blur of a six o’clock shadow. Scully squinted as he lunged toward her, but already the wig was shifting beneath his hands and the startled bloke with the powdered face was falling off his heels and Scully was bellowing in fright. He staggered and shelves began to fall in sympathy. The fluorescent cavern echoed with screams and crashing. Scully wheeled with the outrage of the wig in his fist and caught the poor open-mouthed bastard in the yellow blazer right in the chops. People began to scramble across a drift of plastic penises. Scully held up his hands to placate them but the nice-looking kid from the register came armed with a circumcised cosh in a cellophane wrapper. Scully put his head down and went him. Just for the sweet feel of the blows on his face, for the quenching anaesthesia of a pain to fill the still darkness opening inside him.
