The Riders

Twenty-eight

THE JADED LIGHTS OF PATRAS silvered the water a long way behind them now, and a train of phosphorescence dragged along in the chunky night water of their wake. The decks of the Adriatica ferry were littered with rucksacks and suitcases, skis and tennis racquets, sleeping bags and drunken Finns. The breeze was fresh and the swell was long and steady before them, more comforting than unsettling. Billie lay back on the bench, her head in Scully’s lap, and they looked out at the stars that hung like lint on a black sheet. She thought about those olden days, when it was all for one and one for all. Just the three of them in it together, like Scully said.

Maybe to him it seemed good and that’s why he didn’t like now. He wanted then, but when she remembered then she saw how hard he tried to be happy, specially in Paris where no one liked them and the sun would never go down at night. She remembered the fights with him outside that rotten school. That school where words came out of people’s mouths like noise from machines, right at the beginning when she didn’t know about languages. Lady teachers with cold smiles and their hair pulled back like elastic. Their shining foreheads. Every morning they waited for her and nearly every morning there was a fight. She saw Scully cry once, he was so mad. The two of them in the cobbled museum street grabbing and pushing like wrestlers. Scully pleading. Sometimes, when she won the fight over school, she went to work with him and saw how he bent up at the top of his ladder, scraping ceilings, how bits stuck in his hair like snow. The apartments were big and full of things she wasn’t allowed to touch. She sat in a corner and played trucks or looked at picture books. Those days she could write names but she couldn’t read. It was him who taught her to read. Afternoons in the café near Notre Dame with books about Spot the Dog. Baby stuff. Reading was like swimming. You can’t do it, you just can’t do it and then one day, like magic, you can. No, in Paris he wasn’t happy. He walked her through the streets and told her about buildings, things she forgot straightaway except the way he said them. He liked buildings. He drew them on envelopes. He was an excellent drawer. But he didn’t remember so great. All for one and one for all. It wasn’t something they said for fun, it was to stop one of them crying, usually Billie. The three of us in it together. It wasn’t such a great idea, it just meant they were all lonely. In Greece it wasn’t so bad; you didn’t get so lonely with the water, and anyway the people were nice. The island people. The kids hurt animals, but they were okay really. But Paris, no, all three of them in Paris were just scared.

Billie listened to Scully’s stomach. It was like a factory in there. She thought about Paris. The apartment they borrowed all that time while Scully fixed it up. Nights at Marianne’s or Dominique’s. The ten times they saw ‘Peter Pan’ in French. The way the French called him Peter Pong. That cracked her up. Rubbish trucks in the street. Sirens. Black men sweeping dog poop off the cobbles.

‘Does this go to Paris?’ she murmured.

‘Brindisi,’ he said. ‘Italy.’

But Billie had seen him staring at Alex’s picture. He was thinking of Paris for sure. Poor Alex. His eyebrows always looked like they were slipping off his face. There was a cloud in Billie’s head — she would think along so far and there it would be, cutting her off, blocking her way. Right at the very thought of… well, Her.

‘Gran Scully says you’re not teaching me about Jesus.’

‘Oh?’

She thought of the picture of him on Gran’s mantelpiece. His old face, before the bung eye.

‘Tell me about Australia,’ he said, a bit excited. ‘How does it look now? Tell me about the Indian Ocean. Could you see Rottnest? Was it hot? Did you hear the sound of people’s voices? Did you forget much? Tell me about Gran.’

She knew the story about his eye. How the skipper Ivan Dimic made him kill every octopus that came aboard because they ate lobsters and cost him money. How they sucked the guts out of lobsters and left the shells. Even octopuses big as your thumbnail he had to kill and he hated it. Scully pretended to kill them. He whacked the deck and slipped them back over the side alive, but the skipper saw it. One day, out over the Shelf, Ivan Dimic came down off the flying bridge with an iron bar big as a horse’s dick. Got him across the arm. There was a fight, just like TV. Sharks in the water. All this time the winch was going, pulling a pot up from the very deep. It was deep as the Eiffel Tower out there. The deck going up and down. The rope winding and tangling with no one to coil it. Ivan Dimic cracked him one across the face with the bar, right across the eye. Nearly popped it out of his head. Imagine. And right then the pot comes up, hits the tipper, and Dimic is right in the way. Steel and wood, heavy as a man. Knocked him flat. Scully brought the boat in himself. His last day fishing. It was before she was born. Billie missed all the good stuff. Look at this eye, he used to say. For an octopus? So look at this face, she thought, feeling the shrinking tightness of her own skin. For a dog?

‘Billie?’

He was like the Hunchback, Scully. Not very pretty. Sometimes he wasn’t very smart. But his heart was good. She pressed against him, hearing that pure heart lunking along like a ship’s engine, and felt sleep coming again.

The deck vibrated beneath them. The lights of Greece faded to pinpricks and then oblivion. In sleeping bags all around, the murmurs trailed off into silence. Scully nursed his disappointment and hugged Billie to him as she slept. He thought of the woman she might make if this whole business didn’t bugger her up forever. She would be strong, funny, confident, wry, and yes, smart as all get-out. Just as she was now. People would be forced to take notice of her the way they always had. Now that he thought of it she was probably everything her mother dreamt of being. Was that it, then? Would that cause you to bolt? Jealousy, discouragement, some meanness of spirit? ‘People like you,’ she used to tell him. ‘You don’t get it, do you? You like your life just fine, you take whatever comes with a sick kind of gratitude. That’s where we’re different.’ He had to agree. He just didn’t get it.

It was plain cold out now, and Scully began to shudder. Without blankets it was hopeless out here. Time to find some corner below. He threaded the pack onto Billie as she slept, and he hefted her and the suitcase to pick his way across to the companionway. It was precarious going, but he came down into a coffee-smelling lounge where Germans and Italians chattered and smoked blearily. It was bright here, too bright for sleeping, so he looked for a nook somewhere along the maze of corridors, but down there it was only toilets and first-class cabins. He returned to the lounge and found an upholstered booth back by the stairs where a bit of fresh air blew in but where it was still warm. He was about to lay Billie down when he saw the watermelon dress.

‘There’s nowhere for her to sleep?’

Scully cursed to himself, smiled and shook his head. The woman from the kastro. She wore a denim jacket over her thin dress and held a bottle of Heineken in one hand.

‘Too cold up on deck,’ he said.

‘I knew you would be on this boat.’

Scully moved to lay the child across the seat, but the woman put a hand on his arm. He flinched and felt his face burn.

‘Please. I have a cabin. Let her sleep in there.’

‘Thanks a lot, but —’

‘Really, she’s tired and it’s so awful out here. It’s no trouble.’

‘She’ll sleep anywhere. She’s a robust kid.’

The woman in the watermelon dress looked at Billie and he followed her gaze. The child didn’t look so robust tonight. Her face was swollen and creased where her cheek had pressed into his jacket. Sleeping children, they have a hold on you.

‘Please.’ The woman was anxious, earnest. Her eyes were sad, pleading. She was somehow alarming to him, but it was true, the kid was stuffed.

‘Alright, thanks. That’d be great for her.’

‘Beautiful, beautiful. Here, this way. Let me take your case. You don’t bring much.’

Scully followed her down the first-class corridor. At her door he smelt smoke on her and some scent. She opened the door and cleared the bottom bunk of bra and panties and a crumpled Herald Tribune.

‘Here.’

Scully hesitated a moment before edging inside and laying Billie along the bunk. She opened her eyes a moment and looked at him wordlessly, and he simply smiled and she went back to sleep. Reaching for a blanket, the woman brushed hips with him, and he flinched again at the closeness of another body. She tucked the blanket around Billie and smiled. The air was cool in here and the ship’s movement reassuring.

‘Can I use your toilet a moment?’ he whispered.

‘Of course.’

He stood inside the neat little cubicle that smelled of antiseptic and corrosion. He took a leak and looked at himself in the mirror. Wild Man of Borneo. What was it he saw there — fatigue, disappointment, desperation? His face was harder than he remembered, more set, like those farmers he knew as a boy, the ones on a long losing streak, whose jaws never deviated into a smile. Men past caring, immovable, expecting the worst, ready to endure. No, he didn’t like that look.

The door opened.

‘Are you seasick?’

Scully shook his head.

‘Let’s get coffee.’

• • •

OUT IN THE LOUNGE a few of the Germans were drunk, some asleep, the Italians murmuring in a cluster and crackling Hallwag maps. Scully sat at the bar with a Turkish coffee and a shot of Metaxa.

‘It’s very nice of you,’ he said to the woman on the stool beside him.

‘It’s good to be nice sometimes.’

‘Where you headed?’

‘Oh, home. Berlin.’

‘I can’t place your accent.’

‘Liverpool.’

‘You must have been in Berlin a good while then.’

‘No. Five years. I studied for an accent.’

‘Well. Ringo meets Sergeant Schultz.’

‘I didn’t like how I sounded before.’

Scully shrugged. ‘You been on holiday?’

‘Oh, it began as one.’

‘Why come this way? You could have gone right up through northern Greece, Austria.’

‘Yugoslavia. I hate it. I’d rather go the long way.’

‘It is a bit like going through a sheep dip, isn’t it?’

‘You’re Australian.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And where is home?’

Scully shrugged. ‘Ireland, maybe.’

‘Australians are sentimental about Ireland.’

‘Not this one.’

‘You’re married.’

‘Yes,’ he said after an unpleasant pause. The ring flashed on his hand. ‘My wife’s… gone on ahead.’

‘Yes.’

He looked at the woman and saw her smile. There was something knowing in it, not quite a smirk.

The barman, a heavy Greek with a birthmark down his arm like an acid burn, called for last drinks before the bar closed, and Scully ordered another brandy.

‘What about you?’

‘I’m organized already,’ she said.

‘If she wakes in the night I’ll be out here with all the barfing Germans. Just send her out here.’

‘You’re welcome to sleep with her. There’s still room on that bunk.’

‘Thanks, but I’ll leave you alone. It’s cramped in there already with all our stuff. I’ll just slip in there in a minute, take her shoes off.’

‘She’s a nice kid.’

‘Yes. She is.’

‘My name’s Irma.’

‘Irma.’

‘It’s Billie and…?’

‘Scully. Everyone just calls me Scully. I’ll be back in a moment.’

‘Scully?’

‘Yeah?’

‘The key.’

He took the key and went back to check on Billie. She slept with her head back and her mouth open. He bent over her in the dimness and eased off her shoes, smelling the bready scent of her breath.

‘Sleep with her.’

It was Irma, standing behind him in the doorway. He could smell her. The ship’s engines stroked away beneath them.

‘I have a bottle of Jack Daniels.’

‘Listen, I —’

‘Have a drink and go to sleep. She’ll be afraid if she wakes and you’re gone. She doesn’t know me.’

Scully straightened. She was right. He’d already frightened the kid once, and he’d promised never again. He wanted to be alone, to avoid complication, conversation, to just organize himself tonight and make a plan. He hated sharing space with strangers, but it was safer this way. He just didn’t like this woman. The memory of her bruises and that proud smile back in the kastro made his bowels contract.

‘Okay,’ he murmured. ‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.’

‘Sure.’

Scully adjusted the porthole a little for some air and saw the black ellipse of sea and night. He pulled off his shoes and shucked his jeans and climbed in beside Billie, pulling the blanket up to his chest. Should have forked out the extra for a cabin, he thought; the money I’ve been blowing, it wouldn’t have been so dumb. I’ll offer her some money. Should have thought. Should have.

• • •

SCULLY WOKE SOMETIME IN THE night and saw Irma crouched on the floor in the yellow light of the toilet. She had his case open and was holding a bent candle and his wallet. He saw the whiteness of her panties, the tongue concentrated in the corner of her mouth, and the half-empty bottle of bourbon on the floor beside her.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he murmured, ‘you’ve lost a contact lens.’

She started, but then smiled. ‘Lost more than that in my time.’

‘There’s nothing worth stealing.’

‘I can see that. You’re broke, Scully, unless you’ve still got credit.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Two.’

‘What’ve you been doing?’

‘Drinking. Watching you two snuggled up there like two bugs.’

‘You’re easy to entertain.’

‘People say that.’ Irma held the wallet open. ‘This is her, then.’

Scully felt pins and needles rush to his right arm as he shifted his weight.

‘Beautiful black hair. Nice face. Good legs. They say good legs mean a good fuck.’

He grimaced. ‘Who says?’

‘Not true, huh? Well, someone must believe it. How long’s she been gone?’

Scully held his hand out for the wallet.

‘You’re abandoned, Scully, I can see it. You’re a sad sight, the two of you. And she wasn’t even good in bed. Must be love.’

‘Gimme the bloody wallet.’

‘And what are these?’ She held up a lint-furred candle.

‘The wallet.’

‘Three of them.’

‘Please.’

‘Show more guts, Scully. Less pride and a bit more guts.’

Scully slid off the bunk and Irma gasped, cowering almost.

‘We’re just gonna go. Pass me those jeans.’

‘No.’

‘Look, I just wanna get dressed. I’m not gonna hurt you or report this.’

‘Don’t go.’

‘It was nice of you to offer us a bed, but I’m not used to strangers going through my stuff.’

‘I’m not a stranger.’

‘Look, you’ve had a lot to drink and —’

‘Don’t wake her up, let her sleep.’

‘She’ll sleep out in the lounge.’

‘You’ve got another thirteen hours, Scully. I’m sorry about your things. I wasn’t stealing, I was curious. Truth is, I need the company. Stay for me.’

‘I want to sleep.’

‘Sleep then. We’re in the same boat, you know.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘I mean our situation. I’m abandoned too.’

‘I need to sleep.’

‘We’ll talk about it later. Get back into bed. Here, your wallet.’

Scully took it and slipped back in beside Billie. He watched Irma pack things neatly back into his case and stow it under the bunk beneath him. For a moment, shoving it under with both arms, she lifted her head and met his gaze, her face so close he could smell the Jack Daniels on her breath.

‘Sleep, Scully.’

He lay back as she climbed the bunk. He saw that watermelon dress floating, saw insect bites or cigarette burns on her legs. Her toenails were silver blue, her heels dirty. The ship moved languorously, as if asleep itself, and he felt Billie’s breath against his neck and slipped back into the long blank of sleep, knowing even as he did that he’d regret this, that he was too tired and weak to change his mind.

Twenty-nine

WHEN SCULLY WOKE the pair of them were playing Uno in the light of the portal. There was a clanging somewhere below.

‘Sleepyhead still in bed,’ said Irma, smiling.

‘You snored,’ said Billie.

Scully lay still. Billie’s hair was brushed and she wore a clean shirt. A pair of her knickers hung damp and wrung out from the knob of the toilet door.

‘Morning,’ he murmured uncertainly.

‘Irma’s a loser at Uno.’

‘She’s probably letting you win. Some people are like that.’

‘No. I can tell.’

‘She’s like you, Scully.’

‘No, she’s her own girl.’

‘You want to go to breakfast?’

‘Gimme a minute.’

Scully nursed his morning hard-on till the card game reached a big enough peak of concentration to allow him to slip out of bed and crib across to the toilet.

‘Morning glory, my favourite flower,’ said Irma.

‘Uno!’ said Billie.

Irma winked and Billie saw how rosy and soft her lips were. She kind of liked Irma. She could reach her own nose with the tip of her tongue and do rolls with it and fifty funny faces. All the time Scully slept there all twisted on the bunk, Irma and her whispered and giggled. Billie remembered her from the taverna, remembered the dress and those mirror sunglasses. Without the sunnies she didn’t look so grown up, and now that she thought of it, listening to Scully trying to pee quietly down the side of the toilet bowl in there, Irma wasn’t really grown up at all. The way she played cards in her greedy way. She never gave you breaks like an old person. Her tongue stuck out and her giggle was a naughty girl’s giggle. And she asked questions, so many questions — why, why, why — like a kid, so many you didn’t bother to answer. She was fun, Billie could see, but you couldn’t tell about her heart.

Billie asked some questions of her own, to see if Irma knew the planets of the solar system and the names of the main dinosaurs (just the basic ones) and who Bob Hawke was. She didn’t have a clue, as if she never went to school or read books at all. She didn’t know about convicts or fish or knots, and she laughed in an embarrassed way, as if she’d been caught out.

‘I don’t know much,’ said Irma. ‘I guess I feel things.’

Billie thought about this. ‘Do you think someone can love too much?’

Irma just went back to her cards with a sad little smile and said nothing.

• • •

SCULLY FLUSHED THE TOILET, pulled the lid down and sat on it. Six hours till Brindisi. Out there he could hear them tittering. Jennifer would never let herself get into a corner like this. She crossed all her T’s and dotted all her I’s. She was organized and he was a fool. Last night this woman had his wallet open and this morning she was dressing his kid. She’s moving in on you, mate, and you’re like a stunned mullet. What is she, a travelling hooker, a rich adventurer, a dipso nutcase? She murdered half a bottle of Jack Daniels last night and this morning she’s giggling, for Chrissake. Still, you had to admit she’s better sober. In the light of day she’s human. But it ate at him, the sound of his daughter chirruping away all of a sudden. After all the sullen quiet. The ache of waiting. Gabbing to a fucking stranger. This Irma. Scully put his elbows on his knees and realized that he was afraid of her and didn’t know why.

• • •

OUT ON THE DECK after their pre-digested breakfast, as Billie ran up and down between hungover Germans, Scully let Irma talk. The woman was bursting with a need to share information he didn’t want to hear.

‘He left me in Athens,’ she said.

‘No explaining people sometimes,’ he said, his irritation not quite concealed. The sea fell by in the soft light and around them bleary backpackers sipped their industrial-blend Nescafé.

‘You never really know them,’ he added as one backpacker began to blurt and gasp foully at the rail. Scully turned his back to the puker and looked unhappily at Irma’s bruises. She had them on her upper arms and around her neck and didn’t mind his noticing them.

‘I met him in Bangkok. He works there in some kind of security thing, I don’t know. Used to be in the Green Berets. Had scars all over him. He’s one of those vets who never came back from Asia. He’s not quite crazy, but, well he is a Texan. Not beautiful, but hard, you know? I liked him. This was last year. I just walked into a bar and there he was, just like in the movies. The best fuck of my life, and free! We stayed together a week.’

Scully half listened to Irma and watched Billie skipping across the aft deck. Her face was blackening now with her own bruises. She looked like a kid with leukemia.

‘So we arranged to meet in Amsterdam, last month. Had a wild time there, really, and then we sort of travelled, you know. Under the influence of various, well, substances as the Americans call them. Had a spree. My God, what a pair we were! Ended up in Athens. He left me at the Intercontinental. I was having a shit, can you believe. He packed his stuff and went. At least he paid the bill.’

‘A gentleman,’ said Scully, hearing the awful priggish note in his voice.

‘That’s where I saw her.’

‘Who?’

‘I got a shock when I saw your wallet. I mean, it was a surprise. Funny, isn’t it, that we’d all been staying together without knowing it.’

Scully looked at her. She was flushed now and nervous. She wore a quilted vest and jeans. Her eyes were hidden by sunglasses and she fingered her bruised throat absently.

‘Saw who? What are you talking about?’

‘The woman in your photograph. Your wife.’

‘You saw her?’

‘At the Intercontinental.’

Scully ran a hand through his hair, looked about momentarily. ‘My wife?’

‘The one in your wallet.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I could be wrong.’

Scully licked his lips.

‘Was she alone?’

Irma sank back a little, looking shaky now. ‘I… I don’t remember. It might have been a woman she was with.’

He looked at her and felt like spitting in her face. She’s making this up. She’s lonely, she wants a bit of mutual misery.

‘So, you and your Green Beret, blasted out of your minds, bumped into them in the lift. And you remember it clearly.’

‘In the reception, the lobby. I didn’t see you. I would have remembered you.’

‘I wasn’t there. I’ve never stayed in an Intercontinental in my life.’

Irma smiled crookedly.

‘You sound proud of it, Scully.’

‘Could be I am.’

‘The working-class hero.’

‘How would you know what class I’m from?’

‘Look at your hands, for God’s sake, and that face. You’re a brawler, Scully.’

He backed off a little, breaking into an angry sweat.

‘A man could drive a truck down your nasty streak, Irma.’

‘And back again, darling. Listen — we sound like the movies.’

Scully turned away and looked at the sea.

‘You never saw her. She was never there, and you probably weren’t either. Is this what you do, attach yourself to people? For a living?’

‘You’re frightened, Scully, thinking of all the possibilities.’

He knew now that he had to get free of her. She was like a foul wind, the whispering breath of nightmares.

‘Billie and I are going for a walk.’

‘Your things are in my cabin.’

‘You want them out.’

‘No. Just reminding you. You can’t ignore me, Scully.’

‘My friend Irma.’

She sighed. ‘Jerry Lewis, I know. You’re such a ground- breaker.’

He went over to where Billie shouted gaily down a ventilator and took her by the hand. He was shaking — he felt it show. The bloody woman was poison. She’d summed him up like a professional, hustling him. For what? Money? Company? A ticket home? She’s sick. Jennifer never even went to Greece, he knew that for a fact. Well, an educated guess. As far as he could tell. Jesus.

• • •

BUT UP IN THE BOW where the air was freshest and the passengers weakest in their illness, Scully stood at the rail and thought of what it could mean if Irma was telling the truth. Jennifer in some flash hotel room with a mini bar and a big view of the Akropolis, a terry-cloth robe and people he didn’t know about. Maybe old Pete-the-Post was right — you never really knew anybody, not even those you loved. People have shadows, secrets. Could be it’s a jaunt with a mate, a few days blowing money and ordering up room service. She’s just sold off a whole previous life back there in Fremantle, a scary thing to do, unnerving, upsetting. Maybe she just needs to blow it out of her system. Wasn’t it the sort of thing men did all the time, going off on a spree and coming home sheepish and headsore? His own father would find a bottle of Stone’s Green Ginger Wine and go off up Bluey’s Knob for a night. Feelin black, he called it. He’d come down and fess up to Mum and they’d get the Bible out and have a howl and make up. That was as rugged as it got at the Scully place, a guilty suck on the Stone’s Green Ginger and a contrite heart in the morning.

Alright. A jaunt then, say it’s true and she has a spree. So who’s the woman? He felt his fresh fortress of certainties crumbling again. A couple of days ago he was certain that Greece was a false start. And a couple before that he felt in his blood she was there. Now he didn’t know what think.

‘Scully?’

Billie tugged at him by the rail and he came back to the salt air, the sea forging and reaching beneath him.

‘Yes, mate? You cold?’

‘Irma wants to be my friend.’

‘Yeah? How d’you know?’

‘She said. She likes our hair. Yours and mine.’

‘You tell her about your mum?’ Scully’s throat constricted as he uttered it. He could not stomach the idea that a stranger might have Billie’s secret before him — he was churning at the thought.

‘Nup.’

‘Nothing at all?’

She shook her head. God, how he wished he could ask her again, know what had happened at Heathrow. But he couldn’t push her now.

‘You’re a good girl.’

‘What was here before the sea?’

He looked out over the Adriatic whose curved grey rim held the sky off and drew the eye beyond it.

‘Nothing, love. There was nothing before the sea. Why?’

‘I just thought of it. Irma said —’

‘Bloody Irma.’

‘She said nothing lasts forever. But I said the sea.’

‘That fixed her. C’mon.’

• • •

IRMA HAD A HEINEKEN and a shot before her on the table when they found her in the lounge at noon. The sea was up a little and it was airless and mostly deserted down there. Most people were up on deck taking in a bit of mild sun, but Irma had settled in.

‘What a pair you are,’ said Irma.

‘Billie, go get yourself a Pepsi.’ Scully gave the kid some drachs and some lire and watched her saunter to the bar and tackle the stool.

‘Tell me about the Intercontinental,’ said Scully.

‘Say please.’

‘You’re going to be ugly about it?’

‘I am the good, the bad and the ugly.’

‘You should stay off the piss for a while,’ he said as kindly as he could. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’

‘Say please,’ she said, tipping the bottle to her lips, eyes on him all the time.

‘Please.’

She smiled around the bottle and he looked down at his meaty hands.

‘You don’t care for me, do you Scully?’

‘Only known you twelve hours, and for most of that I was asleep.’

‘Puritan, that’s the word that comes to mind.’

‘You wouldn’t be the first whose mind it popped into. I was just asking about my wife. You claimed to have seen her.’

‘Claim? You don’t believe me, but you want more.’

Scully looked over at Billie who was using sign language with the big birthmarked barman. She had a Pepsi in front of her and he was showing his broken teeth in a smile.

‘I thought you might tell me what you could.’

‘I wonder.’

‘What?’

Irma sat back, her chin up, neck stretched, some cleavage showing.

‘How much you really want to know. What you’ll do to get it.’

Scully stared at her. She flushed again and emptied the glass of bourbon with a grimace which became a smile. He wanted to grab that neck in both hands and wring it like a towel.

‘You want money.’

‘I prefer adventure.’

He pressed his fingernails together. ‘This other woman she was with, what did she look like?’

‘We haven’t made a deal yet, Scully.’

‘What deal, what do you want, for Godsake?’

‘Come to the cabin.’

‘Tell me here.’

‘Come to the cabin.’

‘What for? You can say it here.’

‘I want to see if you have any guts.’

‘Something must have happened to you once.’

‘You look as though you just trod in shit.’

Got it in one, love, he thought.

‘Let’s go to the cabin.’

‘Oh, goody.’

‘Quick.’

He led her into the corridor and tried to think his way clear, but she came up so close behind him she literally trod on his heels.

‘Scully, you —’

‘Shut up. Where’s the key?’

When the cabin door opened, Scully shoved her inside and she fell giggling to the floor. He grabbed his case and the backpack and looked at Irma sprawled on the floor, legs apart, hair in her eyes.

‘What a fucking disappointment you are,’ she said.

He reached across to grab Billie’s knickers from the toilet door but she beat him to it.

‘Souvenir,’ she breathed.

Scully felt his boot go back. His leg. Felt himself adjusting his balance to kick her, the way you might kick down a toadstool in a winter paddock, turning it into a noxious cloud of shit in a second, and then he saw the look of fear and exultant expectation on the woman’s face and felt sick to his bladder. He staggered, bringing himself short, and almost fell on her.

‘Gutless, gutless!’ she hissed.

Scully reversed out of the cabin as though pressing back into a cold wind.

‘She was beautiful!’ Irma yelled. ‘They spoke French. They were checking out, Scully. She was soooo beautiful. I can see why she made the choice. I saw them! I saw them!’

He bounced off the walls of the corridor, her voice chasing him from every direction, and up against the firehose in a rusty recess he listened to the shocking sound of his heart in his ears, shaming him with every beat.

In the lounge, Billie and the barman looked up in alarm and curiosity. Irma was screaming back there, hollow and faint. Scully swung the luggage into a booth, stood panting beside it and sat down sweating, nursing his fists like stones on the sticky table.

Thirty

THE SOLDIERS STAND MOTIONLESS… Quasimodo’s one eye gleams wildly. They are held at bay for a moment… until one of the more adventurous men can stand it no longer…

Out on the deck, in the fine cold, Billie read her comic and plugged her ears with her thumbs. Now that was a tantrum down there. The Hunchback bounded and raved, cried and shook and poured his bubbling lead down upon the mad masses of Paris. Sailors went bucketing downstairs to see what all the noise was, and Billie read on. It was even a bit funny. But Scully wasn’t laughing. He looked shocking.

In the end it went quiet and birds landed on deck. She squeezed Scully’s hand and tried not to feel the tight burning of her face. Boiling lead. The bells going mad. She knew this story like a song.

A while after Irma gave in and shut up, after passengers quit giving him the evil eye in his seat in the lee of the lifeboats, Scully felt Billie at his side nudging him out of his stupor. Out there, in the late afternoon gloom, the forts and rocks and lights — the houses of Brindisi winking their languid green and gold — raised a cheer from travellers at the rail.

Scully gathered up their gear and bullocked a path toward the exit companionway. It took a cruel time for the engine vibrations to change pitch, a hard foetid wait wondering where Irma was in the shoving crowd but the great hatch finally did crack open and Scully and Billie were amongst the first on the dock. The sun was down beyond the drab blocks of the town’s monuments and the quay was grey and close with the shunt and stink of travellers. Everywhere you looked there were people moving and waiting, watching, many of them without any obvious purpose or destination. They were faceless in the bad light, and sinister. Scully knew right off, clasping Billie’s hand and surging ahead blindly, that he wouldn’t stay in this town. He needed a shower and a sleep and they both wanted a quiet place to lie down but Scully knew they would have to keep travelling. Maybe his nerves were buggered and he was imagining a threat that didn’t exist here, but he wanted the first train out of here. Somewhere behind was Irma, and she was enough excuse to keep going.

Up in the streets there were backpackers and vagrants dossing down for the night in cardboard and torn blankets and bright nylon sleeping bags. Monoxide hung between buildings. Garbage crackled underfoot. Scully kept a straight tack up the main drag, feeling her bounce and lag beside him. Everyone seemed to move in the same direction, from the wharf upward, so he kept on.

‘What is this?’ Billie asked.

‘It’s Hell,’ said Scully.

‘No, that’s underground.’

‘Well this is Hell’s penthouse suite, Bill,’ he murmured. ‘Ah, see, STAZIONE, that’s the stuff. Quick, this way.’

‘Where’s Irma?’

‘Way back.’

‘What a tantrum. I feel sorry for her.’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘She’s like Alex.’

Scully felt a stab at the thought of Alex. Maybe they’d buried him already, the great bearded priests singing dubiously over him, the cats prowling between the headstones behind them. How long had it been? Two days? Three?

He shrugged off touts and buskers as they came to the station, Billie pressed to his side. Scully hissed at anyone who came near. He felt a wild fervour, a queer joy as people made way, sensing that this madman would head-butt and bite his way clear if need be. People’s skin was sallow, their teeth wayward. It was a lunatic asylum in here. Timetables rolled and clattered above their heads. Scully looked for any destination north, anything leaving soon, but there was only Rome at seven-thirty. A ninety-minute wait. It wasn’t ideal but he changed some money and bought two tickets for Rome. At the kiosk he bought a week-old Herald Tribune. People swirled aimlessly about them, pressing, surging, crying out and spitting.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Billie.

‘Okay, let’s get some spaghetti,’ said Scully hoisting her up out of the human current. ‘God, let’s just get out of here.’

• • •

BILLIE SAW SCULLY WINDING DOWN like that organ grinder’s music out there in the street. All the wildness was gone now. He just tooled with some bread in a little puddle of wine and said nothing. He was awake but nearly switched off. She sucked up some spaghetti. It wasn’t as good as he made. Anyway she could taste the antiseptic ointment on everything. It seemed a long time ago that she had spaghetti made by him. Out the window in the lights of the street the grinder’s monkey scratched himself and tipped his head at her. The holes in her head throbbed like music.

‘What country is this?’

‘Italy,’ said Scully.

‘So they speak — ?’

‘Italian.’

‘What town?’

‘Brindisi.’

‘Is it all like this?’

‘Italy, I’ve only ever passed through. No, we stayed in Florence a couple of days, remember?’

Billie shook her head. There were too many places. Stations, airports, the flat heads of taxi drivers. She remembered Hydra and Paris and Alan’s house, but other places were just like television, like they weren’t for real. And that house, that little house Scully made was all in a fog, blurry, swirling, like the cloud that came down on her head when she thought of the plane. The steamy hot towels the stewards brought. The toilet light going off. Her coming, so beautiful down the aisle. Hair all stuck back like perfect. The white neck, so white… and the cloud coming down.

‘All the statues have little dicks,’ she said.

‘I didn’t notice. Wipe your face, you’ve got sauce all over your chin.’

‘Why doesn’t that monkey run away?’

He looked at the monkey in the funny suit on the grinder’s box. ‘Maybe he’s too scared.’

‘Doesn’t look scared.’

‘Maybe he needs the dough,’ he said, trying to crack a smile.

Billie thought of all those people on the wharf and in the skinny streets. Like the ones you see in Paris, in the Metro and the hot air holes lying on boxes and sleeping bags.

‘Are we going to be beggars?’

‘No, love.’

‘We haven’t got much money anymore, have we.’

‘I’ve got a card.’ He got out his wallet, the one with the picture she didn’t want to see. He held up the little plastic card. ‘I can get money with it, see?’

‘They should give them to beggars. Jesus would give em cards, right?’

‘Spose. Yeah. I have to pay the money back later. It can be scary. People go crazy with them.’

‘It wouldn’t help Irma.’

He just looked out the window at that and didn’t want to talk. He had a good heart, her dad, but maybe it wasn’t big enough for Irma.

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 the 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.

‘Billie?’

She grabbed the money and tugged at him. He smiled. It was a look you wanted to Ajax off his face with a wire brush. She pulled him back from the counter to the rear where old people argued over their maps and kicked their luggage.

‘Just let me read it again,’ he said vaguely, but she snatched it from him and pressed it flat on a low table.

SCULLY. MEET TUILERIES FOUNTAIN NOON DECEMBER 23. COME ALONE. WILL EXPLAIN. JENNIFER.

It was hard to breathe, looking at it. Not even the bit about him going alone. Just the idea, like a rock falling from the sky. The wickedness of it. It made Billie’s chest hurt, as if she’d gulped onion soup so hot it was cooking her gizzards.

‘She shouldn’t be allowed,’ she whispered.

The Tuileries. Paris. The part near the English bookshop. All the white gravel. Where she collected chestnuts and made a bag out of her scarf. Paris. It wasn’t fair.

Her mother.

Questions hung like shadows behind Scully’s head. His thoughts went everywhere and no place. Blasts, flickers, comets of thought. A miscarriage, a bleed contained. Missed calls and telegrams. Had she wired every Amex office in Europe to find him? Was she frightened and desperate, circumstances piling up, fear taking her whole body? Could she perhaps believe for a moment that he mightn’t come? That he’d passed a point somehow. Oh God, was she feeling pain and panic like him, aching even in sleep for a break in the smothering static, simply not knowing? Chasing them? How little had they missed each other by? How would they find the distance to laugh about this later, at the comic weirdness of it, taking for granted the great terrifying leaps they’d come to so casually make from time zones and continents, seasons, languages, spaces. You forget so quickly the teetering bloody peril of movement, of travel. The lifting of your feet from the earth.

He flickered on in the wake of his own mind. A jilting, maybe. A thing, an attachment come unstuck. A mistake, a human fuck- up of the heart she’d suddenly seen. In ten days? Or some medical thing, like a blood test, an x-ray she couldn’t bring herself to tell about until now. In Ireland he was so cut off, so bloody preoccupied with physical, urgent things, and his own sad-sack loneliness, for pity’s sake. He wasn’t paying enough attention. Should have called every second day, kept up with progress. Some terrible family thing maybe she’d kept from him all these years for his own sake. Or some… some development, some new coming to terms, some change of heart, some Road-to-Damascus experience, as the Salvos called it. Religion even. Or Art. Some blinding light, some stroke of luck or genius or force — who knows — even a simple, mawkish explanation would do him. A scalding blast of hatred. News of another man, a whole new life — he really felt he didn’t care, that he could take it between the eyes. Because all he could hold in the spaces of his brain for longer than a second was her standing there in boots and a coat, her scarf like an animal round her neck. There on the arid geometry of the Tuileries. Bare trees, low sky. And only steaming breath between them.

He looked up to see Billie press out through the glass doors. He snatched up the telegram and surged out into the street after her.

‘Billie!’

She was doll-like, her hands slack at her sides as she stumped along the cobbles, ankles tilting madly in her riding boots. The street was heady with coffee and cigar smoke.

He drew up beside her, laid a hand on her shoulder. She wrenched aside and kept walking.

‘Billie.’

What if she wants me? Billie thought. You only get one mother.

‘Billie, stop. What about the doctor?’

‘I’ll scream,’ she said hoarsely. ‘If you touch me, if you talk to me I’ll scream and police’ll get me. They’ll take me off you.’

He stood there, stunned. Cars and cobbles shone in a drizzle he hadn’t even noticed. She wiped her face on the dewy arm of her jacket and with a sobering visible force of will she straightened her back and pulled out the wad of lire he had left on the counter.

‘Just don’t talk,’ she whispered.

And they said not a word between them all through the streets to the hotel and the station and the night train to Paris.

Thirty-four

SCULLY PROPPED HIMSELF UP in his bunk to watch the lights of the Italian Riviera peel by. Boats were stranded stars out in the low darkness. Tunnels tipped him into roaring space and gave him gooseflesh. He couldn’t see beaches but in the unlit gaps, in places no steel or concrete would fit, he sensed them out there. Palm-lined boulevards, stretches of sand. Breaking waves.

He recalled that weekend at St Malo in Brittany, the sight of a beach after so long landlocked in London and Paris. The wind off the channel was vile. The sand was ribbed by the outgone tide. It was so strand-like, so strange. In boots and coats the four of them belted up the shoreline, running in the wind, beneath the medieval ramparts of the old city. You could imagine Crusaders on this beach as easily as Nazi soldiers. Protected by a tidal spit, a fortress stood out in the sea as an advance guard. It wasn’t much of a sea but it sharpened his homesickness all the same. Inside the rampart walls overlooking the channel, built into their very cavities, was a labyrinth of marine aquariums, a discovery that delighted him. While the other three charged on through, gasping and nudging on ahead with their girlish voices reverberating in the subterranean dankness, Scully lingered at every tank, studying fish he did not recognize.

It was a good weekend, a relief from Paris. Of all their Parisian friends Dominique was the one Scully came closest to relaxing with. There was no sexual brittleness between her and him, no vast cultural gap. She carried her Leica everywhere, that weekend. Along the waterfront, in the strange old cemetery, in cafés and wintry streets. In the deserted hotel they played pool downstairs and drank hot chocolate and calvados. The sound of the shutter clunking away. Pool balls socking into cushions. The channel wind outside. And sea.

Scully opened the train window and felt the frigid blast on his cheeks.

Paris. This time he’d get the best of the bloody place. This time he was free, just passing through. And he wasn’t as green as he used to be. No pouting landlords to deal with, no scaly ringworm ceilings of the rich and tightarsed, no looks down the Gallic nose that he’d once had to take humbly, thinking of payday. The drudgery and anxiety of illegal work was gone — nights lying awake stinking of turps with fists like cracked bricks. This time he’d kiss no bums. No apologies for his hideous French or his hopeless clothes. No reason why he couldn’t enjoy himself. This time he was taking no prisoners.

He slid the window back down and felt the pleasant numbness of his face. There was no fear tonight, just a wild anticipation. Anything was better than not knowing.

• • •

BILLIE WRUNG THE BLANKET AT her chest as the black tunnel of night blasted by her head. Look at him tonight, like Quasimodo up in the bells. That smiley shine on his face reflected in the glass. His knees up. Like the hunchback kicking the bells, right inside himself, setting bells going that he can’t hear. She pulled the bedclothes up over her head and smelt the sourness of her breath. The train lurched and bucked. It felt like it wanted to leave the rails. Right there with the sheet between her teeth and the blanket like a fuggy tent above her head, Billie prayed for an angel, for a whirlwind, a fire, a giant crack in the world that might save them from tomorrow, from the other side of the cloud.

• • •

IN THE ZIRCON GLARE OF Indian Ocean water — reef water, bombora water, shark water — Scully saw a furrow. He paused at the gunwhale stinking of mackerel blood and running sweat. He peered. A wake, a flat subsurface trail that made him think of dolphins. But this swimmer had limbs. He saw it now — the outline of legs, arms, a kelp fan of hair — and she surfaced beneath him in the clear shade of the boat, naked and slick, breasts engorged, belly huge. Jennifer. Laughing, calling, buoyant. He didn’t even hesitate. He went over the side in his sea-boots and heavy apron, the gloves greedily sucking water at his elbows, and he sank like a ballasted pot, roaring down in a trail of bubbles to the hairy, livid base of the reef where Billie waited smiling, her face ragged from sharks, her body breaking up and the shadow of the swimmer on the surface passing over like the angel of death.

Thirty-five

WITH THE HEATER BLOWING ITSELF into a useless fit and his hands stiff on the wheel, Peter Keneally pulls in off the icy road with the mail of the Republic sliding about behind him. He kills the motor in front of Binchy’s Bothy, and heaves himself out. It’s no damned colder out there. Jaysus, the sky is opaque as frozen ditchwater and the little house stands silent beneath it on the hill. Birds wheel and jockey down at that godawful pile of a castle and cloud spills down from the humpbacked mountains.

The postman unlocks the heavy green door and watches it heel back with a murmur. He’s been wanting to do this for a week now, be in Scully’s house alone. A smell of fresh mildew. Detergent. Paint and putty. The wee curtains all drawn, the womanly things here and there on sills and shelves. He sets a fire in the grate and lights it, goes prowling, hearing his big ugly boots on the boards and the stair.

The little bed, torn open and left. Some books. Madeline, The Cat in the Hat, Where the Wild Things Are, Tin-tin, a big Bible with pictures. The fresh paint on the walls. A whiff of smoke from a chimney crack somewhere. And the big bed all rumpled and strewn with toiletries and clothes dragged out in a hurry. There are books here too. The World According to Garp, for Godsake. Slaughterhouse Five, Monkey Grip. Newspapers, hardware catalogues.

Peter sits on the bed and uncaps his pint of John Jameson. The whiskey goes down like a pound of rusty nails. His heartbeat is up, being in this house. It has the strange fresh feeling of the new. It doesn’t look Irish anymore. The nicely made bookshelf beside the bed, the sanded chairs, the bright rug thrown across the floor. The house of a man who knows a few things, good with his hands and thoughtful. A careful man, and thorough, able to cook and do all these womanly things. A fella with books by his bed and stories of Paris and the red desert and huge blinking fish. A man with a child, no less. Yes, he envies old Scully, no way round it. All that coming and going. Even this little house now — he envies him for what he saw in it.

The postman gets up and opens a few drawers. He touches shirts and pencils, picks up a photograph of a girl with coal black hair and a ghost’s still face. The sky is blue behind her. His mind goes blank just looking at her, and he returns the photo to the drawer and sits back on the bed to look at his boots.

Conor. That’s who Scully reminds him of. The old Conor. Could be why he likes the man for no good reason, could be why he doesn’t move in here and squat, take possession in lieu of payment for all those bills unpaid. Scully’s fierce about life, like old Con. Life’s a fight to the friggin death, it is.

The fire chortles in the chimney and the postman lies back, takes another belt of Jameson and finds himself thinking the Our Father, just thinking it like a man afraid for himself, while the mail of the Republic lies crumpled down there, going nowhere.