The Riders

Thirty-six

IN THE SOUPY LIGHT OF dawn, as the train tocked and clacked languidly into the glass and steel maw of the Gare de Lyon, Scully brushed the child’s hair tenderly and straightened her clothes. With his handkerchief he buffed her little tan boots before repacking their meagre things. Porters and tiny luggage tractors swerved across the platform. Pigeons rose in waves. His joints, his scalp, his very teeth tingled with anticipation. He felt invincible this morning, unstoppable. Today was the day. The Tuileries at noon. Look out, Paris.

‘This morning,’ he said, ‘after we find a hotel, I’ll take you somewhere, anywhere you want to go. You choose. Anywhere at all, okay. You just name it.’

Billie looked up, feverish with prayer and worry. ‘Anywhere?’

He’ll know, she thought. He won’t have to ask. He’ll know where I want to go.

She felt the train stopping. The world swung on its anchor a moment. Everything rested. Nothing moved inside or out of her. It was like a sigh. Billie held on to the moment while the edges of things shimmered.

• • •

WITH HIS FACE IN THE frigid sky and the sweat of the climb turning to glass on him, Scully tilted his head back and laughed. The wind rooted through his hair, billowed his hopelessly underweight jacket and tugged his cheeks. He laid his bare hands on the stone barrier and looked out across the whole city whose gold and green and grey rooftops lay almost vulnerable beneath him. Yes, Paris was beautiful still, but not crushingly beautiful. Up here it had a domestic look — all its intimidatory gloss, all its marvels of hauteur and hubris failed to carry this far. To the north the wedding cake of Sacre Coeur, to the west the rusty suppository of the Eiffel Tower. Even the monochrome turns of the Seine seemed quaint between spires, mansards, quais and balding regiments of trees. It was just a place, a town whose traffic noise and street fumes reached him at a faint remove.

He swept along the parapet, the tour guide barking behind him. The wind made tears in his eyes, blurring his vision of the sculpted rectangle of the Tuileries across the river. Within a spit of the bell tower. Just beneath him. Here, at kilometre zero.

Billie watched him scuttle out along the walkway, bent over in the freezing wind with pigeons scattering before him. He had his arms outstretched like a conqueror, like a kite, but the wind made a rag of him beneath the overhanging twists of carved stone, the laughing goblins and gargoyles. He wouldn’t jump — she knew he wouldn’t — but he was airborne anyway with his face bent by gusts of cold.

The others in the tour were turning already, heading back for the protection of the spiral stairs and the creeping dark of the stone walls, but Billie stayed out with him to see the dull glow of the city, marvelling at the way it stood up. The whole underneath of Paris was an ant nest, Metro tunnels, sewer shafts, catacombs, mines, cemeteries. She’d been down in the city of bones where skulls and femurs rose in yellowing walls. Right down there, in the square before them, through a dinky little entrance, were the Roman ruins like a honeycomb. The trains went under the river. There were tunnels people had forgotten about. It was a wonder Paris stood up at all. The bit you saw was only half of it. Her skin burned, thinking of it. The Hunchback knew. Up here in the tower of Notre Dame he saw how it was. Now and then, with the bells rattling his bones, he saw it like God saw it — inside, outside, above and under — just for a moment. The rest of the time he went back to hurting and waiting like Scully out there crying in the wind.

The tour lady yelled from the archway.

Yes, you could see clearly up here. Sanctuary, sanctuary, sanctuary.

She never wanted to leave.

• • •

THE HOTEL ON THE ILE St Louis was more than he could afford but Scully figured that for one night it was worth it. All that time in Paris he’d passed it, staring in at its cosy, plush interior, on his way to a painting job with his back aching in anticipation. Hotels like this, their lobbies glowed with warmth and fat furniture, their stars hung over their doorways like gold medals. Hell, you deserved it once, and there’d never be a better day.

In the tiny bathroom he shaved carefully and did the best he could with his clothes. He picked the lint from his pullover, poured a bit of Old Spice inside his denim jacket and helped Billie into her stall-bought scarf and mittens. She shook a little under his hands.

‘Nervous?’

She nodded.

‘Tonight we’ll be all together. Look, two beds.’

‘We could go home now,’ she murmured.

‘In the morning. Be home for Christmas.’

Billie’s face mottled with emotion. Wounds stood out lumpy and purple on her forehead. She ground her heels together.

‘We don’t have to,’ she said.

‘I do.’

She pushed away from him. ‘You go.’

‘I can’t leave you here.’

‘You left me before.’

‘Oh, Billie.’

‘You’ll choose her! She’ll make you choose! She said come on your own! I can read, you know! Do you think I’m a slow learner? I can read.’

She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to see, but deep down she heard the tiny voice tell her — you only have one mother, you only have one. She felt his hands on her baking face and knew she would go.

• • •

THEY LEFT THE TINY RIVER island and crossed the Seine at Pont Marie. At the little playground past the quai, Billie stopped to peer through the wrought-iron fence at the kids who yelled and blew steam, skidding in the gravel. She looked at their faces but didn’t know any of them. Granmas stomped their feet. A ball floated red in the air. Scully pulled her and she went stiff-kneed along the street into their old neighbourhood.

Scully steered them past the Rue Charlemagne without a word. There wasn’t time to think of the sandstone, the courtyard, the smells of cooking, the piano students plunking away into the morning air. They walked up into the Marais where the alleys choked with mopeds and fruit shops, delicatessens, boutiques and kosher butchers. The air was thick with smells: cardboard, pine resin, meat, flowers, lacquer, wine, monoxide. At the fishmongers Scully resisted the urge to touch. Cod, sole and prawns lay in a white Christmas of shaved ice. The streets bristled with people. It was a vision — he felt giddy with it.

Billie yanked on his arm. ‘I need to go.’

‘To the toilet? Didn’t you go back at the hotel?’

‘No.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Don’t say that. Gran says you’ve forgotten the true meaning of Christmas.’

‘I’ll parcel you up and post you to Gran if you don’t —’

‘I’m bustin. D’you wanna argue with my vagina?’

‘Keep your voice down, will you?’ He looked up and down the street, saw a café. ‘C’mon.’

He hoisted her into the smoky little joint and found the toilet under the stairs.

‘In there,’ he murmured, nodding to the patrons propped against the bar.

‘Messieurs.’

The proprietor, a fat man with earrings and peroxided curls raised his eyebrows.

‘Et pour monsieur?’

Scully took a moment to get it. No such thing as a free piss. He ordered an espress and sat looking at the bleary men with their English rock-star complexions. They all had moustaches, it seemed, and had taken the night’s revelry into the morning. They looked spent.

His coffee came and Billie emerged from the stairwell.

‘I looked for Femmes.’

‘Yeah?’

‘But they were all Homos.’

‘Hommes.’

‘No, it was Homos on both doors. There was a man in one.’

Scully paused, coffee halfway to his mouth. ‘Oh?’

‘He was asleep on the floor. Too tired to pull his pants up, I spose. He had a flower sticking out his bum.’

The coffee cup clacked back into its saucer.

‘Come on.’

Scully left some francs on the table and hoiked her out into the street.

‘Let’s stick to the automatic toilets from now on, huh?’ The further he got from the little café the sillier he felt.

‘The ones you put money in? The money dunny?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘They have music so no one hears you fart. And they wash themselves, you know. But the music’s the best.’ She looked at him, smiling suddenly. ‘I reckon someone stuck it in for a joke.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The flower.’

‘Oh gawd.’

‘Still,’ she smiled shrewdly, ‘it could have grown there. If he didn’t wash.’

All the way up the Rue de Rivoli, bumping against each other like drunks, they screamed and giggled.

• • •

IT WAS COLD AND STILL in the Tuileries. The long arid promenades of white gravel crackled underfoot. Bare chestnuts and planes stood without shadows. From the Louvre entrance they walked nervously, eyes narrowed with alertness. Now and then, in their path, lay a horse chestnut left over from the time of sunlight and leaves. Only a few people were about. Children in hoods and mittens chased by au pairs. Old men playing boules. Up at the Concorde end the fountain stood in the air straight as a flagpole.

Scully scanned the terraces toward the Orangeries museum. Twenty minutes to spare. His jaw ached with the tension. Billie scuffed in the gravel beside him, hat low on her brow. He dug out five francs for the swings and watched her tip and soar for a while. Bit by bit his sense of triumph was ebbing. What would he say? How could he control himself? He mustn’t frighten her off with the intensity of his feeling. He felt like a ticking bomb. No outburst of questions, no hint of recrimination. No bawling and breastbeating. Just try to be dignified for once in your life.

Scully gave Billie sixteen francs for the carousel. The coins rattled damply in his hands. Billie climbed up onto a white horse with a flaring tail. He sat beside two teenage girls who chattered and admired one another’s cowboy boots. The lights and bright paint of the carousel made a livid whirl in the dull midday. Scully shifted from buttock to buttock in the cold, swivelling now and then to scrutinize the trees behind him. He felt watched. Or paranoid. Or something. The girls beside him grew uneasy and moved off.

Five to twelve. He stood and prowled about the carousel, handed the operator more money, and waved sickly to Billie. Her horse’s teeth were bared, as if striving to bite the tail of the horse in front. They were all the same, each horse bearing down upon the next. The gay antique music set his nerves on edge.

Shit — would she show up? Okay, he’d brought Billie, despite the strict instruction of the telegram, but what alternative did he have? How could she hold it against him? He was without a clue. He had searched himself, as the Salvos said, he had examined his heart and come back to complete incomprehension. After all his guesses, all his agonies, he couldn’t know why she hadn’t shown at Shannon and now he didn’t know why she was turning up here. Faith. He was running on the scrag end of faith. In ten days Jennifer had become a ghost to him, an idea, a mystery. But her telegram crackled against his chest. A sign. It was all he had to go on.

She’d get off at the Concorde Metro and come in by the Jeu de Paume entrance, outlined by the blank expanse of the fountain pool. Their old route from St Paul when they’d come to buy Billie books at W.H. Smith across the road. Yes, that’s the way she’d come. No ghost. His wife. He knew her too well.

Tonight he’d take them out somewhere flash and traditional. Brass, leather, lace curtains. Waiters with their thumb up their arse. Snails, tails and quails — the full Gallic gallop. A good Bordeaux. A stroll on the quais. A return to civilization.

‘I don’t feel good,’ said Billie climbing down.

Noon. The ground felt spongy beneath him.

‘Sit down for a minute. You’re dizzy.’

Billie sat in the spinning shining world. Her skin was bursting and the blood inside her boiled. A chime went off inside her head. She saw sculptures up behind the fountain. They danced in the woozy glow. The seat shook like the floor of a jet. The marbled veins in that white, white face. Billie reaching out, scared to touch, scared not to. Her fingers outstretched to feel the white skin before it sets and goes hard. The smile tight as cement. The skin cold. Right before her, Billie sees it, as the cloud of silence comes down in the air of the plane. Bit by bit, her mother is turning into a statue. Something stopped. Something the rain hits and runs off, something whose eyes pale over. With an open mouth, saying nothing.

Scully saw the hooded figure appear on the terrace and felt a rash of gooseflesh. The figure froze, then turned in a whirl of dark coat as Scully straightened. He watched it stride toward the Orangeries, walking too fast for a stroll in the park. A white flash of face, a quick look and suddenly the figure tipped into a run.

Scully grabbed Billie’s arm and broke for the terrace steps. The fountain hissed. The gravel squinched and cracked like ice underfoot. He felt Billie wheeling and stumbling beside him, her legs too short to keep balance at such speed. She cried out, wrenched away and went skidding on all fours but he didn’t stop. The terrace steps were blows in the spine, the handrail burning cold, and at the moment he made the last step, he saw the shoulders and hood ducking down the street entrance to Place de la Concorde, so he wheeled right, knowing the Metro entrance was out on the corner and he had an even chance of coming down ahead of her. The gravel slurred, gave perilously beneath him. He hit the stairs and went down five at a time, barely in control, and heeled around the corner to the Metro entrance where there were more stairs and steel doors that swung to as he hit them. He burst through into the stink of piss and electricity and the sound of the train doors closing below. Empty stairs, drifts of butts and yellow billets. Four ways she could have gone and a train pulling out. The gritty air hung on him as he stood gasping and impotent against the tile wall.

‘You’re killing us!’ he screamed. ‘Fucking killing us!’

Two kids in a French parody of surfwear came up the steps nudging each other at the sight of him. The doors opened behind him to let in a shock of fresh air that stung his eyeballs and pressed him flat to the wall like the shadow he was.

• • •

UP IN THE COLD CHOKING fog Billie screamed and saw it all about her. Whirling all around were statues and birds and her own frightened voice, and pee ran down her legs hot as molten lead, burning her up, just burning her up.

Thirty-seven

SCULLY CARRIED THE CHILD tightly wrapped in his denim jacket down the Rue de Rivoli. In the steadily rising wind, the Christmas crowd avoided contact, made way, registering the desperate look of them in a second. Billie did not talk. Her face was swollen with weeping and something worse. The wind battered the canopies of oyster stalls and the upturned collars of holly sellers. Wreaths and wrapping paper skidded out into fogged gloss of a thousand gridlocked cars. Outside the glass doors of the BHV department store Scully submitted to the body search with a kind of hopeless rage. The guards smelled the piss on Billie’s jeans and recoiled. Scully hurled the wet jacket into the street and greeted the warm rush of air as the doors opened before him.

• • •

BILLIE TRIED TO PULL THE new jeans up over her knees but the floor was sagging everywhere and her skin was cooking. She looked in the mirror and saw a crybaby, a sook, a beggar with scraped knees and no knickers, glowing like a bushfire.

With an armful of elastic-backed jeans, as Christmas muzak rained on him and women bustled by with chirping kids, Scully stood outside the changing booth and tried to complete a thought — any thought. Knickers, jacket, credit card. Words, things petered out in his mind.

‘Scully?’

Billie’s voice was quavery.

‘You alright?’

He slid the curtain aside a little and saw the kid pressed against the fogging mirror, pants around her shins.

‘Can’t you get them up?’

She turned slowly as a tightrope walker and he saw the glassy sheen of her eyes. ‘I’m… I’m hot.’

Scully fell to his knees and touched her bare skin. She had a fever. God, she was burning. Her wounds pouted nastily beneath their moist plaster strips.

‘Okay,’ he murmured. ‘Let me help you. We’ll get undies on the way out.’

He had the little jeans almost up when he felt the shadow of someone behind the curtain and heard the sharp intake of breath. He swivelled and saw a woman with a hand to her mouth. A livid flush came to her cheeks as he pulled the jeans up and snapped the press-stud without looking down. He tried to shrug casually and smile in a comradely parental way, but the woman turned on her heel. Scully set his teeth and finished up grimly. He gathered Billie in his arms and headed for the register.

Thirty-eight

INTO THE WINDTUNNEL OF THE Rue de Rivoli they come, bent as a single tree, clothes and shopping demented with flapping. She slips back into the bleak doorway to let them pass blindly by without feeling the heat of her love. She knows where they are going. She knows everything there is to know about them the way the dead see the living. The wind pricks her nipples and knees, the tip of her nose, and she watches her life limp by in the weird light of afternoon while she decides how far to follow, wondering when enough is enough, asking herself why it hurts to need so badly.

Thirty-nine

A TELEPHONE, THAT WAS THE first thing. Somewhere out of this wind, a phone. Dominique would be in town. She’d have a GP. She could translate for him. God, Scully how could you let this happen?

The streets were icing up now, the cobbles slick with it. Clochards hauled themselves out of doorways and headed for the shelter of the Metro. Billie’s mittened hand fluttered against his cheek. Car horns bleated in the narrow alleys of the Marais. He knew a place, a good place.

He swung into the fuzzy doorway of Le Petit Gavroche where the goldfish still swam in its glass orb atop the beer tap. The barman greeted him noncommitally, trying to place him. Faces came and went here. Scully slipped past the bashed zinc counter into the blue bank of cigarette smoke and found a table by the payphone. He sat Billie down, unwrapped her a little, and stowed the shopping bags beneath her.

The place was full of the usual crowd, mostly site workers on their lunchbreak. Scotsmen, Paddies, Luxembourgers. The cash work crew, hard men without papers, dodgy truck drivers, some local students, a few old hookers with big smiles and eyelashes like dead crows. It was Scully’s place. He’d heard a lot of stories here. The food wasn’t much but the beer was cheap and there was always someone lonely or drunk enough to talk to you.

Scully ordered hot chocolates and sat down to remember Dominique’s number. He cancelled Billie’s chocolate and made it lemonade. The kid sat there dreamily, trying to pull her mittens off. No, he was a blank. He dragged the butchered phone book out of its slot and looked it up. Yes. What was wrong with him? A simple thing to remember. God, his mind was going.

He stood up, stuck some francs into the phone and dialled. It rang and rang without an answer. The drinks came. Billie drank greedily. He got up and dialled again but no one picked up. Bugger it — that meant he had to ring Marianne. There just wasn’t anyone else. He dialled.

‘Allo, oui?’ The familiar deep voice. She had the timbre of a forties movie star. He paused a second, hesitating.

‘Marianne, it’s Scully.’

‘Scully?’ The mellifluous tone wavered. ‘My Gahd, Scully, where are you?’

‘Just around the corner, as it happens.’

‘Comment? Scully, what did you say?’

‘The Marais. I’m in the Marais.’

There was a considerable lag at the other end, as if Marianne were reaching over to turn something off — coffee pot, word processor, stereo. Scully saw Billie picking at the crust around the lid of the mustard pot.

‘What… what a surprise,’ breathed Marianne.

‘Listen, I’m sorry to call out of the blue but I was wondering if I could drop by for a second.’

‘N-no, it’s not possible,’ she murmured. ‘You understand, I have my work —’

‘Yes, of course, but listen —’

The line went dead. He rang back. Engaged. He flopped back into his seat. Shit — what was all that about? He was not exactly Marianne’s cup of tea, he knew, but they’d always been civil. She was flustered, really put out. And hostile.

He gulped at his coffee.

‘You don’t look good,’ said Billie.

‘Speak for yourself-Jesus.’

‘Don’t say that!’

A coat flapping down the stairs. A hooded coat. A blur, but not a ghost, someone real. I showed up and someone saw me. Jennifer, or someone else. Someone acting for her, maybe. To make sure I would come, to see that I was in town. Dominique? No, she was too decent. She would have talked to us. And she never struck me as that tall, that light on the loafers. But Marianne. Marianne doesn’t fancy me. She wouldn’t have qualms about giving me some stick. In fact, she’d probably enjoy it. Was everyone in on this? Why send a message and not show? Were they playing with him?

Billie licked sweat from her upper lip.

All those people you read about. The bloke who goes out for a packet of fags never to be seen again. Families whose kids go missing. People who live in limbo for years, always expecting the phone to ring, a door to open, a face to appear in a television crowd. Every mail bringing an absurd hope. And all the time really waiting, begging for the coup de grâce, the last swing of the axe to put them out of their misery. Horribly grateful to have the mangled, molested bodies of their loved ones finally uncovered in some vacant lot so that they can give up the poisonous hoping and be free.

Was that how it would be? A life of waiting by the phone? No. He didn’t care what it took. He’d find out for himself. He wouldn’t sit back and go quietly. Bollocks to that. In his soul he’d stepped beyond some mark he didn’t understand. Here, quietly, in a crappy café with a lukewarm chocolate in front of him. No, he was too tired, too scared and pissed off to go quietly.

Forty

SCULLY LEANT INTO THE IRON wind on the Rue Mahler and felt it ride up under his eyelids and whistle in his molars. He skated with Billie across the cobbles and shouldered his way past the sumptuous grey door into the frozen calm of Marianne’s courtyard.

Lights burned up on the third floor. Scully’s heart beat painfully. He felt the metal of the wind in him.

‘Take no prisoners,’ he muttered.

Billie quaked and said nothing.

In the entry hall which smelled of mail and polish he jabbed the intercom button hard enough to feel bone through the numbness. His twenty-five-franc mittens were stiff and damp.

‘Oui, allo?’

‘Me again.’

Nothing. Just static. A blizzard from that little speaker box. He looked at his boots, felt the chill of the wind still in his spine, saw Billie’s feverish eyes and livid cheeks.

‘It’s cold down here, Marianne. And I’ve brought Billie.’

It was a long ugly few seconds before the access door clicked open. He took Billie’s mittened hand and they went up silently in the elevator. It was familiar, that little red box. He remembered coming down in it with Jennifer a couple of times, both of them four sheets to the wind and giggling like kids.

Up on her floor Marianne had the door open. Her thick auburn hair was free and she wore little lace-up shoes and a black woollen suit. She fixed him with a firm smile.

‘Scully, you look —’

‘Terrible, I know.’

She presented her cheeks to him in the ritual manner and touched Billie’s head gravely and then the three of them stood awkwardly in the hallway.

‘We’re house-trained, Marianne. It’s safe enough to let us in.’

She hesitated a moment and turned on her heel. Scully followed across the lustrous timber floor into the kingdom of steam heat and hired help. Marianne’s two fat Persians loped away to hide. The apartment smelled of polish and of the oil of the puce abstracts that hung huge on the white walls. Scully couldn’t help but run his hand across the painted surface of the plaster as he went. His first job in Paris, this place. It was perfect. He worked like a pig on it and took a pittance, setting the tone for the rest of his time here. Still, they were friends, Jennifer’s new friends, and he was eager to please.

But sometimes he wondered if the cheapness of his bill hadn’t caused its own problems. Marianne had been more friendly to him first up — effusive, even. But after the paint job she cooled off. For a few weeks he tried to think of anything he could have done wrong. The job was excellent, but had he spilt primer on something, scratched the floor somehow, pissed on the toilet seat? There was nothing — not even a Rainbow Warrior joke. It was the size of his bill. She wasn’t insulted — Scully always let her know that he knew she and Jean-Louis were loaded — but it was as though she felt he expected something in return. A fresh guardedness lay across the top of her Parisian diffidence. She saw him as a loser, he thought. Not just a tradesman but a cut-rate one at that. Europe — it was hair raising.

‘I’ll have coffee and Billie’ll take a hot chocolate,’ he said brightly. ‘She’s a bit sick. You remember Marianne don’t you, Billie.’

Billie nodded. Marianne stood beneath the big casement windows, mouth contracting on its smile. She was all diagonals — nose, hips, breast, lips — and not at all like Jean-Louis who was more the fulsome type with the lines of a nineteen-forties automobile. Jean-Louis was easier to like, softer in nature as well as in shape.

Not that he’d instantly disliked Marianne. She was smart and funny and seemed genuinely interested in Jennifer, even read her work and showed it around. She worked for a chic magazine and knew people. Her friends were amusing yuppies, handsome, curious and unlike people they’d known before. It felt like a lark to Scully, knowing these people. Jean-Louis had a romantic European fascination for wild places and people. He defended France’s right to test nuclear bombs in the Pacific and yet turned purple at the thought of roo-tail soup. Scully liked to shock him and his friends with redneck stories told against himself and his country. Chlamydia in koalas, the glories of the cane toad. The wonders of the aluminium roo-bar. For a while he felt almost exotic at Marianne’s parties, but it wore off in the end, playing the part of the Ignoble Savage. He kept up a kind of affable relationship with Jean-Louis, without any intimacy, and a diplomatic air of deferral to Marianne for Jennifer’s sake. The parties became a bore. Scully loitered at the bookshelves picking through art books, most of the time, and they left him to it. When Dominique came he relaxed a little more and joined in. And the wine was a consolation. He wouldn’t be drinking that stuff back in the borrowed apartment.

‘I’ll put the kettle on, will I?’

‘Scully, I am busy.’

‘Too busy for a cup of coffee?’

She sighed and went ahead into the white kitchen and he noticed her limp.

‘Hurt your leg?’

‘It’s nothing. I was sitting on it. It will give me bad veins.’

‘Nearly broke my own leg today.’

‘Things are not going well for you. You look wild, Scully.’

‘Oh, I am wild.’

‘Have you done this to Billie?’ she said filling the kettle. Her hands trembled. She was fumbling.

‘You mean her face? Marianne, she was bitten by a dog. That’s what I wanted —’

‘In Paris?’

‘In…’ he caught himself. ‘Doesn’t matter where.’

‘She looks like… un fantome, like a ghost.’

Marianne leaned against the blinding brightness of the bench, sizing him up. Billie came in, her eyes following the cats.

‘I have to pee,’ Billie murmured.

‘Down the hall,’ said Scully. ‘You remember.’ He watched her go.

‘I can’t help you, Scully. You know I never liked you. Such a woman with… un balourd like you.’

‘I won’t even pretend to know what that means.’

‘No, you never did pretend. Such a simple man’s virtue.’

‘Tell me about the park today.’

Marianne’s hoarse laugh was a tiny sound in that bleached space. ‘Scully, you are losing your mind.’

‘Yeah, I’m tired and mean and desperate.’

‘I can call the police. You are a foreigner, remember.’

‘Oh, I remember.’

Marianne reached for a pack of Gauloises and lit up shakily. She smiled.

‘Share the joke, Marianne.’

‘Oh, Scully, you are the joke.’ She dragged hard on the cigarette and blew smoke over him. ‘So you are all alone.’

‘You know, then.’

‘Scully you are the picture of a drowning man. I do not have to know.’

‘Where is she?’

‘If I knew do you really believe I would tell you? My Gahd!’

The kettle began to stir.

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, yes.’

Scully’s skin crawled. A cold anger percolated through him.

‘I figured you were a little nasty, Marianne, but I thought deep down you were probably human.’

She laughed.

‘Listen to me. Try to listen to me,’ he breathed. ‘Forget about me. Forget about Jennifer and the baby and what I’m going through. I have a sick —’

‘Baby?’ Marianne’s glossy lips parted. ‘She’s pregnant?’

‘She didn’t tell you, then.’

Marianne waved her fag non-commitally. ‘It’s ’er body, Scully.’

‘Of course it’s her fucking body. You think I need a night-school course on sexual politics? Do I need permission to be worried out of my bloody mind? I didn’t call the cops, no private detective, I go softly, softly and play the game but I’m sick of playing the game, you hear me?’

He kicked a stool across the floor and watched it cartwheel into the wall, jolting shiny implements from their hooks in a horrible clatter. He saw the whiteness of his own fists and the way Marianne had edged into the corner and he thought of Mylie Doolin and the men who did this all the time. She was afraid and he felt the power. He remembered Irma and the ferry. Oh yes, he was capable of anything — he was no different.

‘I always believed you beat her, Scully,’ she said feebly and then with more defiance. ‘The working man out of his depth… the charming woman with ’opes for something better. Did you beat her much, Scully? Were you rough in bed, were you ’ard on her, Scully?’

Scully forced his hands into his pockets. The kettle began to boil and he felt the sinews locking up in his arms as he listened to her warming to it, sucking on her fag, getting into her stride.

‘You are a basher, aren’t you, Scully? Tell me about your face, your very sad eye. It makes me think of beasts, you know.’

He heard the toilet flush and thanked God Billie hadn’t heard all this. Christ, at least he’d spared her that.

‘This is just entertainment for you, isn’t it?’ he said, choking. ‘Like… that’s all it’s ever been. An amusement. The quaint girl from Australia, the one with the clear skin and sun-bleached clothes with all her dreams and optimism and the way she looked at you like you’re a queen or something. Your little salon with your wonderful accents and all that fucking confidence. You played with her. You took her under your wing for fun, to see what would happen.’

‘You were like a stone on ’er, Scully, an anchor on ’er neck, and now you blame me —’

‘I wouldn’t blame you for anything except not caring enough to tell her the truth. I heard you, Marianne. You beefed her up to her face, got her excited, told her she was a genius and laughed behind her back. She was just the other primitive. Only she didn’t see it. Not even afterwards. She was so keen, so impressed. You kicked the shit out of her and she thanked you for it.’

Marianne sighed. ‘Why did you come to Europe, Scully?’

‘For her,’ he said. ‘Both times.’

‘It’s very touching,’ she said doubtfully.

No, he thought, it’s fucking pitiful.

Both of them flinched when the phone rang. Marianne clutched the benchtop, nails shining, and let it ring until the answering machine kicked in. Scully knew the voice.

‘Why don’t you answer it?’ he murmured.

‘I have visitors,’ she hissed.

The message was breathy and urgent, the French way too fast for him.

Dominique. He reached for the phone but Marianne kicked the socket out of the wall.

‘She does not need to talk to you.’

Scully took a step back from her, his fists hanging off his arms. He saw a pulse in Marianne’s throat. Then Billie came in behind him. She pressed against him, held him round the waist and he felt the heat of her through his clothing, across the flush of his fury.

‘Marianne, I need a doctor. I’m here because Billie’s got a fever. Will you please, please give me a number. Someone who has English, someone close.’

For a while Marianne stood there, arms folded as though to keep herself together. Scully felt the lightheadedness of real hatred. He was almost disappointed when she reached over to the Rolodex and flicked through it with trembling hands.

‘I will call,’ she murmured. ‘It will be faster for you.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, unable to refrain.

Forty-one

‘YOU SAW THE PAPERWORK ON the dog?’

The doctor already had a syringe out. Billie lay on the table, face averted. Scully stood by her, his hand on the radiant nape of her neck.

‘Yes.’

‘You read Greek?’

‘I had a Greek reader with me.’

‘This is Flucloxacillin,’ said the doctor tapping the syringe, his silver specs glinting under the lights. His accent was American but his body language was European. He even pouted like a Frenchman. ‘This should get it, this and the course of tabs. When was her last tetanus shot?’

‘At five. I have the certificate.’

Billie inhaled sharply and squeezed his hand. Scully felt sweat settle in his hair.

‘There you go, Billie. Not so bad, huh? Here, Dad’ll help you with your jeans.’

Billie rolled carefully onto her back, blinking back tears.

‘She’s brave,’ said Scully, for her benefit.

‘You’re South African?’

‘No.’

Scully kissed her hand, let her lie there a moment while the doctor disposed of his tray.

‘Five days, you say.’

‘Yes. I had to use steri-strips.’

‘Well, you could have done worse, I guess. Lucky the big one’s above the hairline.’

‘Yes.’

‘Gimme your address again,’ he said, hovering at his desk.

Scully gave him the old St Paul address, suddenly suspicious.

‘You see out of that eye?’

‘Most of the time.’

‘How’d it happen?’

The doctor came back with some fresh dressings. Billie squirmed as he sponged away the clear seepage of her puckered wounds.

‘Industrial accident,’ said Scully. ‘On a boat.’

‘Uh-huh.’ The quack wasn’t buying it. ‘How do you make your living, Mr Scully?’

‘I’m a builder.’

‘You have a carte du sejour, then.’

Scully smiled. The doctor washed his hands and peeled off his specs, tilting his head gravely.

‘How about seeing me again tomorrow?’

‘Thought you’d be all booked up, Christmas Eve.’

‘No, tomorrow’s good.’

‘No problem,’ said Scully, helping Billie down from the table.

The doctor proffered the prescription. His smooth hands were neatly manicured. Scully took the papers, seeing it in the other man’s face. Tomorrow was something else altogether. He thinks you did it, Scully. The wounds, the grazed knees. He thinks you’re scum, that you’re not fit to be a father. And how wrong is he? Really, how wrong?

‘There’s a pharmacy on the corner. Then straight to bed for you, my girl. Plenty of fluids. Nurse will set your appointment.’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Scully.

‘Au revoir, Billie.’

‘Au revoir,’ she whispered, leaning on Scully’s hip.

At the front desk, Scully presented his credit card and the starched Frenchwoman with the grey chignon made a call to verify its status. He hoisted Billie to his shoulder and stirred at the narrowing of the woman’s eyes. She put the phone down, opened a draw and took out a pair of scissors.

‘This card is cancelled “Mister Scully”.’

‘No, no, it’s valid till next November.’

She snipped it in two. The pieces clicked to the desk.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ He lurched against the desk, grabbing the two halves of his card.

‘Reported stolen,’ she said backing off with the scissors held before her.

‘It can’t be. Only I can do that. Shit a brick!’

‘Of course you have papers of identification?’

‘A passport, yes. Here, I have it…’

Scully had it almost into the woman’s hands before he saw the surge of satisfaction come to her features and he suddenly knew how irredeemably stupid he was. He reeled back, stumbling against a row of waiting patients and stiff-armed his way to the door.

• • •

AT THE END OF HIS triumphant day in Paris, Scully lit three deformed candles in the ashtray on the bedside table and watched his child shivering like a small dog under the blanket. Her hair was flat from the shower and her skin waxy in the yellow light. Her trunk was burning, but her hands and feet were cold, and all her nails blue. It terrified him, seeing her like this.

‘Christ, what’ve I done to you.’

She opened her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘And don’t say Christ.’

Steam hissed in the walls, burbled in the radiator. Billie closed her eyes again and went to sleep.

Scully ate some bread and cheese and opened a bottle of screwtop red that tasted like deckwash. A pile of crumpled francs and lire and drachmae lay on the eiderdown before him, enough to feed them in couscous joints and friteries for a couple of days. He had half a carnet of Metro tickets, an Irish cheque book and some dirty clothes. He stank of sweat and fear and frustration and his bad eye was wild in his head. Sooner or later the hotel would twig to his extinct credit card. He was buggered.

He thought of going back to Marianne and begging for help. No aggro, just butt-kissing humility. Or simply robbing the bitch, just busting in and knocking off stuff he could flog in the flea- markets. But he’d never get past the damn security. Besides, he’d never stolen anything in his life and was bound to stuff it up somehow.

He’d try the Amex office. Sort it out. He’d see Dominique. The way Marianne was acting, not letting him talk to her, it could be that Jennifer was over there at Dominique’s. Well, no one was answering, even now. Maybe Marianne was just pissing him off, prolonging the nasty moment with that pulled-out phone plug. They’d sort it out. Something. Bloody something.

He took a long swig of his eight-franc wine and gasped. He could be back in Ireland tomorrow night. The mournful wind, the turf fire, the valley unrolling out the window. Pete-the-Post dropping by for a pint and a bit of crack.

Dominique would help him. He gulped down more wine. She had plenty of money, some kind of trust fund that let her pursue photography. And she had a heart. ‘Softness’, Marianne called it with distaste. He remembered Dominique’s show on the Ile de la Cité. Scully turned up ancient with paint specks and people made room for him as though he was another kind of painter altogether. Dominique’s photographs were moody tableaux of women in bare rooms into which chutes of light fell. Her subjects’ gazes were outward and self-possessed and they reminded Scully of his mother. Marianne hissed out the side of her mouth that the images were soft, as though that were a sign of feeble-mindedness, but Scully liked them and Jennifer thought they were works of genius.

She said that a lot in the next year or so. Other people were geniuses. They were gifted, remarkable, ahead of their time, special. Scully began to wonder why people couldn’t just be good at things. It went beyond seeing the best in people. All this genius, it was like a blow to her, every stroke a bright light on her failure, her ordinariness. And his too. In Paris she had a way of blinking at him sometimes, as if trying to see something more than steady old Scully. It made him nervous, that blinking stare. It wasn’t the cool look she shot him across the tutorial room back in the beginning. It caused him to put his hands in his pockets and raise his eyebrows, appealing hopelessly, for a flicker of recognition. But she simply blinked and stared, as if he was a tree in her window, something she was looking through to a more brilliant world beyond.

He even mentioned it to Dominique, that look. ‘She is excited,’ she said. ‘Only excited.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. Maybe that’s all it was.

Dominique responded to Jennifer’s enthusiasm right from the start. He watched them become friends in the jerky ritualized way the French and English had. He felt welcome at the huge apartment on the Rue Jacob and he saw Dominique’s effort to cut some slack for Billie whose feral energy seemed to startle her. Billie was not the ornamental child these people were accustomed to. Billie was, she said, very direct.

Scully saw photos of her place on the Isle of Man, the houseboat in Amsterdam, horses, women he didn’t know. It was a calm place, that apartment. He’d go there tomorrow, first thing. He belted the rest of the cheap plonk down and heard a bedhead somewhere butting the wall. A woman was moaning. He finished the bottle and listened to her cry out greedily, and for a moment Billie’s eyes opened and fixed on him fiercely and then closed in sleep.

• • •

BILLIE COULD SEE HIM UP there now, swaying in the blistering cold, dangling there with firelight in his huge eyes, snagged by the hair in the huge bare tree. Scully. Crying, he was, calling out, begging for help and no one down there in the deep mud moving at all. Just the baying of dogs and him calling, the hair tight at the sides of his face and his arms flapping. There was no way back from that final bough, nowhere for someone that size to go anywhere but down and Billie just prayed for an angel, prayed and prayed until she burned like a log and horses shook and suddenly someone else was up there, someone small and quick and crying. Billie saw it now, it was her up there, Billie Ann Scully in her pyjamas with something in her mouth like a pirate. A silver flash. She saw it, the little glowing hand reaching out with the scissors open like the mouth of a dog, and Scully screaming yes and yes and yes, and the sound of his hair cutting like torn paper, Billie cutting his hair free so that he fell, calm and still, falling a long time from that skeleton tree with his eyes open until he hit the mud a long way down and was swallowed up and gone beneath the feet of strangers. Billie saw herself up there, the crying girl with wings, slumped in the tree like a bird.

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 shoppers 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.’

‘Geez, you don’t even know when you’re lying, do you?’

‘Why would I lie, Scully?’

‘Why? Why? Why would you get my credit card stopped? Do people like you have reasons?’

Irma smiled bashfully and licked a crimson smear from her teeth. ‘People like me? You think I’m mad and just do one thing and then the next thing and then something else, don’t you? But that’s exactly what you do, Scully. It’s what you’re doing this very minute, it’s what you’ve been at all day, all this week. You follow whatever moves. We’re not that badly matched.’

Scully’s mind reeled. Was he crazy? Had he lost it so completely?

‘Are you a friend of Jennifer’s?’

‘You might ask yourself the same question, Scully.’

‘You are, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve never met her,’ she said, raising her glass at the waiter and smiling coquettishly at him.

‘Never met her? Not even at the Intercontinental?’

‘Don’t be clever. I told you, I just saw her. You’re clinging to me like… like a Greek to a wooden horse. I saw her. I’m sorry I ever told you. Honestly, can you image Jennifer and me together?’

‘What exactly do you mean by that?’ said Scully hotly.

‘Well, she’s like that’ she said squinching her index finger into a circle so that a pinhole of light showed through at the centre.

Scully held the table by the legs. ‘And you’re, you’re what?’

‘Me? I’m interesting. She’s just trying to be.’

‘Still, you’ve never met her?’

‘I’m like you, Scully. I like being who I am.’

‘Irma, just what you are is not real clear.’

‘I said who, not what. What a sadly male thought. I’m like you, Scully. A little rough around the edges. I can take it as well as dish it out. I already forgave you for bolting on me. The ferry. Remember?’

‘I’m surprised you remember.’

‘Okay, I was blasted. Listen, I like you. I like Billie. I just think I deserve another chance. I know you do.’

Scully shook his head and bit back the stream of abuse that bubbled in his throat. But he smiled despite himself. She was a phenomenon alright. And he needed her if he wanted to get to Amsterdam. Time to suck eggs.

‘You look wild, Scully, but you’re soft.’ She laughed and accepted the new pastis from the waiter.

‘Oh?’ That word again. He felt a ridiculous pang of shame at this. ‘Really?’

‘I meant tender, Scully.’

Irma put her hand on his and for an instant he liked her. She was mad, a liar, a bad dream from hell but she was flesh and blood. Just the touch of a hand, a human touch. God, he missed being wanted. The café smelled warm and friendly with its scents of onions and coffee and tobacco. He felt himself loosen a little.

‘Is it that you’re lonely, Irma? This business?’

‘I’m not lonely,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me.’

Scully looked at her, the way her neck stretched back and her eyes narrowed like a snake about to strike. It cleared his head immediately.

‘Okay, Irma,’ he said, meaning it. ‘I won’t.’

‘You don’t understand simple attraction.’

Scully made a smile. ‘Well, maths was never my thing.’

Billie came back, trying not to smile as she climbed onto her chair.

‘What?’ said Scully.

‘The toilet,’ she burst out, scandalized. ‘It was just a hole in the ground!’

He looked at Irma. ‘My daughter has toilet adventures everywhere she goes. Travel with Billie — see the toilets of the world. It’s a squat, Billie. You’ve seen them all —’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, that bit’s gone. Like someone’s stolen it. It really is just a hole in the ground.’

‘So what took you so long?’

‘I was trying to find the button.’

‘Here,’ he laughed. ‘Take your tablet.’

‘Let’s go shopping,’ said Irma. ‘It’s sad, the two of you on the road at Christmas.’

‘Jesus was on the road at Christmas,’ said Billie.

‘Yes,’ said Irma, flummoxed at last. ‘Yes.’

Forty-four

AFTER LUNCH IN THE CAFE it was a long noisy afternoon in the shops with Irma. She took them to Fnac and bought tapes. Ry Cooder for Scully. Hoodoo Gurus for her. At Les Halles she bought herself Ysatis and splashed it on. In a taxi she took them to Galeries Lafayette where she found the same perfume cheaper and didn’t care. She bought Scully a silk shirt there and little red dancing shoes for Billie. In another taxi they went down to the big street market past Bastille and bought lychees and bananas and oranges. There were so many people and smells you couldn’t move. Irma found a saddle in the fleamarket but Scully said no, they couldn’t carry it. It was disappointing but she knew he was right. Then in a big street of ritzy furniture shops they saw a man with a wallaby in a dog-collar. It was a bad moment, but Irma didn’t notice.

And then, so quickly, it got dark.

• • •

ALL DAY SCULLY LET HER drink and buy while a strange cold calm settled on him. He saw it all pass by as though he weren’t quite in it himself. The feeling intensified in the little brasserie off the Rue Faubourg St Antoine. Amid the platters of Breton oysters, the bottles of champagne, the flash of cutlery and linen, the hiss of butter, the caramelizing scent of roasted garlic, time slipped by almost without him. He knew what he was doing, but he couldn’t actually believe it was happening.

He thought it was the terrible, necessary thing he was about to do, but it could have been the fact that he drank along with Irma. By nine he was cold, calculating and shitfaced.

Irma and Billie laughed at some half-arsed joke and jostled one another. He saw Irma’s even white teeth and the bleary brightness of her eyes. Pressed against his, her leg was warm and comforting, hardly the shock it might have been this morning. There was something complete about her tonight. She looked strangely content, magnanimous, and not all of it was the champagne. Maybe this is her, he thought. Maybe this is the person she must have been once — warm, funny, generous. Tonight her mouth was sensual and without a trace of cruelty. What horrible thing had happened to her between Liverpool and Berlin, between the big stops in her life? Those bruises, they meant other bruises, damage he couldn’t even guess at.

‘Are you dreaming, Scully?’

‘Hm? Yes, a bit.’

‘Billie was telling me about when she was born.’

Billie giggled in embarrassment.

‘Well… she was born fugly, you see.’

‘Fugly?’

‘Like extra-double ugly with cheese. It’s when ugly goes off the scale. She looked like an angry handbag.’

Billie squawked in delight. ‘Tell the truth!’

‘That is the truth. Scout’s honour, I asked for my money back.’

‘Stop!’ said Billie giggling out of control.

‘Here, take another pill.’

Irma’s eyes glistened. She ordered more champagne and held both their hands. She seemed about to cry. She leaned into Scully and he felt her breath on his ear.

‘I hate her for leaving you,’ she whispered.

Scully set his teeth. ‘We don’t know she did,’ he said carefully, awkward in front of the child.

‘Even if she didn’t I’d still feel the same.’

‘Well,’ he chuckled mirthlessly, ‘you’re just hard to get along with.’

‘Try me.’

• • •

LATER THEY STUMBLED UP toward the old neighbourhood. The sound of bells roosted on the wind.

‘Hear the bells?’ cried Billie, exhausted and jumpy. ‘Hear the bells?’

In the Little Horseshoe, where labourers, junkies, transvestites and students gathered to see in Christmas, Irma began to drink Calvados and Scully backed off onto beer. Now that she’d stopped moving, Billie wilted quickly and Scully saw that it was ten o’clock. He tried to steady himself. Not a bad place to say goodbye to Paris. This was it, his last drink. Irma was blasted. This was surely it. He dragged them out into the street.

Beneath the bare chestnuts, her breath billowing back from her, Billie ran ahead on a final burst of energy while Scully helped Irma along the pavement.

‘Did you enjoy the day?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘I hoped you might forgive me.’

‘Of course I forgive you,’ he lied.

‘Christ, look at that.’

Up ahead, outside the Prefecture of Police and the armoured booth at the doorway, Billie danced with two cops, a man and a woman. Round and round they went, the three of them holding hands. Submachine guns clanked at their hips. Their quiet laughter carried on the cold, sulphuric air, rooting Scully to the spot.

• • •

THERE WAS A MERCIFUL CROWD in the tiny hotel lobby, a warehouse of piled luggage and language that Scully weaved through unchallenged with Irma and Billie, grateful he’d kept the room key on him all day. The mob noise echoed up the curving stairwell as Scully urged Irma along. Billie went ahead with the key.

‘Nice place you have here,’ Irma said, slumping against the banister. ‘Is this a spiral staircase or am I just pissed?’

‘Both,’ said Scully looking up at her firm backside and giving her a shove onwards that caused her to shriek and giggle. He was drunk himself but he could still see the whole night ahead.

‘How many more floors?’

‘Next one.’

Irma tipped on her little boots and rested against the wallpaper. Hair fell into her eyes and she tilted her head back to clear it, exposing her long neck, white and marked.

‘Help me, Scully.’

‘Come on, you can make it another flight.’

‘Help me.’

Scully joined her on the step and she opened her eyes but did not look at him. She grabbed his lapel.

‘Can’t you help me, Scully?’

‘You want me to carry you.’

She pulled him to her and looked into his face. She kissed him with her eyes open while her tongue travelled across his teeth, his lips, his chin. Scully felt her pelvis rock into his and he reached behind with one hand and pulled her tighter, feeling her butt clench.

‘It’s what you want,’ she said. ‘To help me.’

Scully picked her up and staggered on with her sucking his neck and pulling at his sweater. Up the stairwell from the ground floor came the screech of brakes and a roaring cheer as somebody’s bus arrived. Scully saw the open door and steadied.

‘And I’ll help you, Scully.’

He couldn’t bring himself to answer, but he knew she was right.

• • •

BILLIE FELL ASLEEP WITH HER shoes on and her backpack still hanging from one arm. Scully lowered Irma into a chair and knelt down to make the kid comfortable. He pulled off her boots, unhooked the pack and her jacket, and rolled her under the covers. He turned out the light and left the bathroom door ajar. The drapes lay open to the soft sandstone light of the city. He leaned his head against the window to get his breath back. Behind him, Irma fished in her bag for a bottle and sighed.

‘Where are you staying?’ he murmured. ‘Where’s your stuff?’

‘Here.’

He turned and saw her holding the bottle out to him. He shook his head. He walked past her and locked the door. He felt the bottle pressed into the small of his back and he turned to where she sat smiling blearily up at him. Irma placed a heel on his thigh. It bit into his skin. He looked down her leg and then back at the sleeping child. Irma tilted the bottle and drank deeply. He watched her, saw her pale neck moving in the dimness.

He took hold of her ankle and she planted the other boot on his free thigh. He moved his hands down her legs. Her tights crackled with static and he was surprised at the softness of her flesh as he held her calves. He held tight to keep his hands from shaking. Weeks of pent-up frustration smoked in him. He watched her pull down her tights and pants, still drinking from the bottle.

‘Billie,’ he whispered hoarsely.

‘Billie’s no longer the point.’

Her skin was ivory in the dark. The bottle fell and Scully lost his clear, hard sight of the night and yanked her to the floor where she grabbed at his belt and ricked up her skirt till her boots ground at the back of his legs. He slid into her with her breasts in his hands and his knees burning on the carpet. Her breath was volatile. It filled his mouth.

‘You need me, don’t you,’ she gasped.

‘Shh.’

He covered her mouth with his hand and felt her tongue between his fingers and then her teeth in his palm and her nails in his buttocks. She was soft to touch, too soft, like something overripe, but he clung to her knowing she was right. He needed her in more ways than he could make plain to anyone. He felt his desperation winding into hers, his lies into hers, his gratitude, his shame, the shocking current that surged down his spine.

Forty-five

NEAR MIDNIGHT SCULLY STOOD dressed in the stark bathroom and emptied Irma’s shoulder bag into the sink. Her snores carried from behind the closed door as he shuffled through dental floss, crumpled tissues, lipsticks, a notebook in scrawled German, old boarding passes, mints, tampons, a condom, a receipt from the Grand Bretagne in Athens, some fibrous strings of dope that lay like pubes against the white enamel, a spectacle case and finally a python-skin wallet.

Inside the wallet was a lock of snowy hair, an EC passport in the name of Irma Blum with a photo of an auburn-haired Irma with a wicked smile on her face, a sheaf of carelessly signed travellers’ cheques in American dollars, a Polaroid snap of a fat baby, and eight hundred francs in crisp new notes.

Scully stuffed the money into his pocket and picked up Billie’s backpack from where he’d put it on the toilet cistern. His mouth tasted of cigarette ash and his head hammered. He looked at the brassy tube of lipstick a moment, hesitated and picked it up. He pulled the cap off, wound the little crimson nub out experimentally. Then he signed the mirror. XXX. Before the idea of it sank in he dropped the tube and turned out the light.

The city glow chiselled in through the open drapes and showed Billie and Irma in deep sleep, their limbs cast about the bed before him as he crept across the room. In sleep they could have been mother and child. He crept closer. Irma’s mouth was open. The room stank of booze and dirty socks. Her arm lay across the counterpane, white and still shocking. Billie bunched up at an angle to her, fist against her own lips.

He picked up Billie’s boots and coat, stuffed them into the backpack looped over his arm, then peeled back the bedclothes a way and gathered her up. Irma snored on like a surgical patient. He held the child to him and looked down a moment upon this strange woman. He felt a twinge of tenderness and a momentary impulse to wake her, but he was heading for the creaky door even before it passed.

Out in the sudden light of the landing he laid Billie on the carpet and pulled the door to without daring to breathe. He put his ear to the door. Nothing but snores.

As he struggled to get her boots on, Billie stirred and muttered.

‘What? What?’

‘Don’t talk — shh.’

Then she opened her eyes; they widened awfully a moment and settled on him. He put a finger to his lips in warning and went back to booting her up. She sat up to receive the coat, her hair upright, her scabs livid.

‘Hop up, love. You’ll have to walk, at least till we get down to the street.’

She began to whimper. ‘I’m tired!’

‘Me too,’ he said, clamping his hand over her mouth. ‘Now shut up.’

• • •

WITHOUT LUGGAGE and with him grotesquely whistling Christmas carols with barely enough breath to get a note, Scully took Billie through the tiny lobby without arousing suspicion from the dozing concierge. Out in the street it was all Scully could do not to break into a mad run. He drank in the frigid air and saw his breath ghosting before him. That’s it, that’s all it took to desert someone, to leave a woman behind with his bag of dirty clothes, his candles, his sodden picture by poor dead Alex, the strewn presents of the drunken day and his strapping hotel bill. This was how it felt to be an empty cupboard, to know you were capable of the shittiest things.

He hoisted Billie onto his back to cross the Pont St Louis as a great barge churned below. The bells of Notre Dame began to toll midnight, plangent and mournful. They rang in the cellar of his belly. Around them the cafés roared, echoing along the shadowy buttresses of the cathedral, setting his teeth on edge.

‘Where’s Irma?’ murmured Billie, twisting her fingers in his hair.

‘Listen to the bells.’

Scully felt the child’s breath against his neck and knew he needed to eat, but he was afraid to miss the Metro at Cité by the flowermarket before the system closed down for the night.

‘Where’d she go?’

‘Don’t talk for a minute.’

‘I’m falling, look out!’

Scully tottered and found the perpendicular again but Billie scrambled down off him.

‘You’ll drop me!’

He’d drunk more than he thought. Now that he was in the open he was all but reeling.

‘I’m cold,’ he said, pulling himself up on the arrowheads of the fence. ‘I’m so cold.’

Billie took the backpack from his arm and shrugged into it. ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ she murmured.

‘I have to get inside for a minute. A café, anywhere.’

‘Here,’ she said, pointing to the great cathedral which fattened with music and the voices of the dead and the living and the tolling of bells in the sky above them.

Scully looked up at its dripping gargoyles and the mist of light that hung over it, spilling faintly down its buttresses like rain. His drunkenness settled heavily on him, his throat burned and his vision was speckled with stars and blips of all kinds. He felt like a man who’d walked through a sheepdip, his skin was so clammy. Oh God, not tonight, not when his hands smelled of Irma and his heart was a clump of oozing peat.

Billie tugged and worried at him. He batted her off. Their shoes chafed on the cobbles.

‘It’s Christmas,’ she said. ‘This is where we should be.’

No, he thought, feeling himself steered like a big stupid animal, no, it’s much worse than that, much worse than Christmas. He was too dizzy to resist her, though. The entrance with its kingdom of faces and upraised fingers and sceptres and staffs rose above him like the opening of a tunnel where he joined a river of figures. They smelled of wine and burnt butter and onions, these people, the slow-moving and dreamy, half-hearted and freezing. Their coats were buttoned and their scarves tight, their midnight mass faces shining in the gloom. Sounds of feet on the smooth stones until the roar of the organ pipes as they made the vast vaulted cave of the cathedral itself with its haze of incense and candle-smoke, the perfumes of a thousand women, the feel of sweat-oiled timber and cool sepulchral air of an underground city.

Scully felt himself a man on sea legs. He sensed people making space for him as though they smelt sex and failure and theft on him. They edged politely but firmly from the sight of his weeping rogue eye, and they saw into him. They knew and it made his teeth chatter. You’re no better, their compressed lips said. No use feeling outraged anymore — you bastard. You know how easy it is to bolt and leave them sleeping.

The bodies of saints flickered all around.

The great kite of the crucified Christ loomed and caused the crowd to vibrate. Like a pyre before him the bank of burning candles waited. The hot pure smell of burning. A woman’s fan of blonde hair in front of him scented like roses as he walked. Billie beside him, her face glowing with hurt and understanding. He lit a candle and held it up before him. God, how his head soared and pitched, how rod-like his blood went in his veins. A candle for the birth of Christ, for the squirming of Job in his own shit, of Jonah running like a mad bastard from the monster he knew he was. A candle for Jennifer, just for the sake of it, for his poor deserted mother, for Alex, and Pete and Irma, poor Irma who was making him cry and laugh right in the middle of things here in the cathedral of Our Lady of Paris. Our friggin lady who let him cry and stumble into that rose-smelling hair with the writhing flame of his candle suddenly spitting and cracking and bursting hilariously into true fire right before him and the others whose mouths were open as if in adoration at the weirdness of miracles. Tongues of living fire as he went falling, falling into the yielding squelch of people, God bless them.