The Riders

Forty-six

WITH HIS HEAD BACK and his mouth open like a clown you put balls into, Scully snored and sprawled across the seats stinking of train stations and fire and cement and the long, horrible night. There’d been so many rotten nights for Billie, it was all rotten almost as far back as she could remember, but last night was the worst. Last night he really was the Hunchback, no pretending about it. Like a hurt animal, he was, frightened and scary, almost setting fire to that lady’s hair and falling over in church with the priest like an angry king up there in his robes. She got him out of there real fast, before people could do anything to him. It was terrible to see, him falling all over like a killed bull trying to lie down and die. He was so heavy and crying and awful that it hurt in her heart and she knew even then that only she could save him.

She swallowed her pill without water. It wormed down her neck as if it was alive. Her hands felt gritty and she needed a glass of milk or a little bottle of jus du pommes, the kind with hips that reminded her of Granma Scully. Her face didn’t hurt but her eyes were sore from staying awake and keeping watch.

There weren’t too many people in the carriage. Some men, some women, no families. Most of them looked like her Scully, as if they’d slept in a train station on Christmas Eve. She could tell they had no roast lunch to go home to, no presents waiting to be opened, no dollar coins hiding in the pudding, no afternoon at the beach, no party hats, no box of macadamia nuts to scoff on till they got crook. Billie didn’t care about all that, herself. She was a bit shocked not to care, but she had a job now. Looking around the train she bet half these people got on this morning just for something to do, somewhere to be that wasn’t Paris.

She looked at the knees of her new jeans and thought about Irma. She felt bad about her. Irma wasn’t a real grown up. She was little inside, but her heart was big. One day Scully would see that. Irma wasn’t a statue. And she would come looking again, she’d find them. She was just like Scully. Maybe that’s why Billie liked her. Yes, she’d find them and Billie wouldn’t mind at all. All anyone needed was a good heart.

Billie’s head ached. She rested it on the seat in front where some doodlehead had burned two holes with a cigarette. The sound of bells still went around in her head. That and him shouting and crying in the Metro tunnels. Paris exploding with bells. Even underground you could hear the bells in all the churches. Him lying across plastic chairs and on the floor in the Gare de l’Est while all those crazy people ran in the tunnels and crashed trolleys and busted bottles. And the old men sleeping in hot puddles and the sleeping bags rolled against the tile walls. Like under the bridges, it was. Paris was pretty on top and hollow underneath. Underground everyone was dirty and tired and lost. They weren’t going anywhere. They were just waiting for the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, the whole town, to fall in on them.

She picked up the last piece of her baguette and munched on it. No one in the carriage said anything. It rocked quietly, thumping on the rails. Rain streaked the windows. She needed to go to the toilet, so she put the tablet bottle back in her pack and took it up the aisle to the hissing glass doors.

In the toilet she listened to the roar of the tracks and felt the cold air spanking at her bum. A hopeless flap of light came in the little window and made her think of her bedroom in Fremantle. The big, big window that looked out on the boats. All the straight trees, the Norfolk pines, like arrows by the water. And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light. The wooden wall. The bare floor with little trucks parked on it and bears asleep in rows. No use thinking of it. It was all gone. There was a room in that little dolls’ house Scully had made in Ireland. And out the window a castle. And a paddock for a horse. It was all in a fog — that whole day was in a fog and she was glad, but fog always rises, she knew that. One day it would be clear, even the parts she didn’t want to see. Even the airport. Even that.

In the toilet mirror she looked dirty, like a gypsy but not so pretty.

She soaped up and cleaned her hands and face and clawed her hair back with her fingers. She was still glad she looked like Scully. He wasn’t pretty either, but pretty people weren’t the kind you need. Pretty people saw themselves in the mirror and were either too happy or too sad. People like Billie just shrugged and didn’t care. She didn’t want to turn into anyone pretty. Anyway, she had scars now, you only had to look.

Billie wet a paper towel and went back down the carriage with it. Scully had four seats now; his boots and legs were across the aisle on hers. His baggy jeans were stained and smelly, and stuff rode up in his pockets.

She stood there poised a moment, the puddles of land slipping by, before she reached into his pocket and eased out the fold of money. She left the coins right down against his leg. This was more money than they had before, much more. She slipped it into her jacket thoughtfully and took up the wet paper towel to scrub him down. He moaned and turned his head, but didn’t wake, not even when she got to his hands. When she finished there were little balls of paper on him here and there but he looked better. Billie stuffed the grey pulp into the ashtray and sat across the aisle from him with the pack on the seat beside her as she looked through their passports, at their old faces, their big watermelon smiles. She counted the money again — five one- hundred francs — and stowed it in her jacket and fell quickly to sleep as Belgium trolled by and by and by without her.

• • •

THROUGH THE STRANGE, neat ornamental suburbs of Amsterdam Scully rested his head against the shuddering glass and felt Billie patting at him like a mother at a schoolboy. The headache had gone ballistic this past half-hour, so frightful that the beating glass made it no worse. His throat, raw with puking, felt like a PVC pipe lately introduced into his body and he smelled like a public toilet. The other poor bastards in the carriage looked ready to climb onto the return train the moment they pulled in. The deadly power of Christmas.

He felt in his pockets for something to chew and came up with change in four currencies.

‘I took the money,’ said Billie across the aisle before it really registered.

‘You? Why?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m scared.’

‘Of me?’

Billie looked at her boots.

‘You’ll need to change it into guilders, then. Dutch money. This is Holland.’

‘Holland.’

‘You know, the boy with his finger in the dike.’

She nodded gravely.

‘Beats having your head down the dike, I guess,’ he murmured against himself.

‘Why are we here?’

‘I have to see Dominique. She’s got a houseboat here.’

She sighed and looked out the window. Scully gathered his limbs brittlely to him and nursed his nausea. Call me Rasputin, he thought. Poison me, chain me up, kick the hell out of me, but I’ll get up and keep coming. A crooked grin came to his lips. Come to think of it I can do it all to myself and still keep coming, so don’t underestimate me, Christmas Day. But deep down he knew he had nothing left. Last night was a dark cloud at the back of his head. His teeth ached, his chest was hollow. Anywhere he walked today, he knew, would just be walking to keep from sinking. The whole earth slurped and waited. It was no use pretending. He had nothing left. Jennifer would be here. He’d find her, he knew it now, but he’d be an empty vessel. She’d get her way in the end.

• • •

CENTRAAL STATION was empty of passengers, its kiosks and shops shuttered, but it was crowded with people who looked as though they lived there. Ghetto blasters and guitars reverberated in every corner. Junkies and drunks lay nodding in hallways. Dreadlocked touts hustled limply by the deserted escalators, disheartened by the holiday. A madman in fluorescent tights shrieked at his own reflection in the windows of the closed-up Bureau de Change. Hippies of seventeen and eighteen who looked German to Scully swilled Amstel and laughed theatrically amongst themselves. Scully snarled at them and pushed by. The air was warm and foul with body odour, smoke and urine so that the street air was a sweet blast to be savoured a second or two. It revived him long enough to sling the pack over one shoulder, raise his eyebrows doubtfully at Billie and stump out dazedly into the feeble light and the unravelling plait of tramlines in the square before them.

A canal, hundreds of uptilted bicycles, a stretch of pretty buildings encrusted and disfigured by neon. A fish sky low enough to make Scully hunch a few moments until he got into some kind of stride that never graduated beyond a victim’s shuffle, a lunatic’s scoot, the derro walk. He was a mess. He was ratshit.

The city was beautiful, you had to notice it. Beautiful but subdued to the point of spookiness. There was almost no one on the streets. Now and then bells rang uncertainly and a pretty cyclist, male or female, whirred past dressed to the gills and intent on being somewhere.

They went down the wide boulevard of closed-up cafés and cheap hotels, change joints, souvenir pits until they came to a big square. Beneath the monument in the square a few dark-skinned men smoked handrolled cigarettes and a sharp young Arab offered cocaine in a hoarse whisper.

‘Piss off,’ said Scully, feeling the spastic twinge of the newcomer, the fear of being in a city he didn’t know. He was surprised to feel anything at all, but there it was, the bowel-clenching sensation he remembered from London the first time, Paris the first time, Athens. An emotion, by God. It was worse without crowds, without currents he could simply slip into, hide in and follow while he got his bearings. Every door was closed to the street. Their footfalls rang clear on the sharp air. Scully had to stand there and look like a rube without a shred of cover. Why should he care? Screw them all. The hell with Amsterdam and Christmas Day.

In time they came to a Turkish joint where they flopped into plastic chairs and ate ancient hommus and tabouleh. They drank coffee and chocolate while young women swept and wiped around them. Scully stared out at bell gables and wrought-iron and immense paned windows. He tried to produce a lasting thought.

‘Where’s the houseboat?’ said Billie, cleaning her teeth with a paper napkin.

‘Dunno,’ he murmured, watching her eyes widen in disbelief.

‘You haven’t got the address?’

‘Nope.’

‘This is a city!’

‘Nice work, Einstein.’

‘Don’t make a joke of me!’ She looked at him with such fury that he shifted in his chair.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I could leave you,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve got the money.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t make me a joke.’

She got up and went to pay their bill. He watched as she carefully unpeeled a hundred-franc note and was amazed that the Turkish girls decided to accept it. They thought she was a scream, you could see. How doggedly she waited for her change. His kid. Billie turned over the bright guilder notes in her hands and thanked them politely before returning to the table.

‘Scully?’

‘Hm?’

‘Let’s go home?’

Scully shook his head.

‘I want to stop looking.’

He shook his head again and felt the pulse jerk in his temples.

‘You don’t even know where to look.’

He smiled. ‘How hard can it be to find a houseboat?’

Billie whumped a fist onto the table and walked out into the eerie street in disgust. For a while he watched her blowing steam out there and kicking the cobbles. Pigeons kept back from her, pumping their necks cautiously. He smiled at her through the glass. She scowled back.

Forty-seven

EVENTUALLY THE KNOCKING GOES AWAY and she lifts herself onto one shaky elbow. A sick noon light lies across the twisted bedclothes. The room is strewn. Pretty red shoes. Black tights. A tartan suitcase pillaged and open. Shopping bags, gift wrap in drifts. The bathroom door is closed. Christmas Day. Of course, the little darlings, they’ll be in church. God, she needs a cigarette, but where is her bag in all this mess?

Slowly, with infinite care, she inches to her feet. Like a rolling boulder, she feels the headache coming. She kicks through the junk — no bag. She knocks on the bathroom door. Opens it slowly. All over the vanity, in the basin even, her stuff. She finds the light switch, hisses at the sudden fluorescence and sees her wallet on the floor. In her hands it still smells of Morocco. Travellers’ cheques, all signed, still there. But no cash.

Her passport, tampons, ticket stubs right there on the vanity. And on the mirror, right in her face, three X’s. Kiss, kiss, kiss.

Irma snatches up the Gauloises, finds the lighter and lights up. She takes a deep scouring drag with her head tilted back and the pain gathering at the base of her skull. XXX. You bastard. You asshole.

She begins to laugh.

Forty-eight

ALONG THE SILVERY CANALS they wandered as the weather fell, Billie and her dad, moving up streets called Prinsengracht, Herengracht, Keizersgracht, words that sounded like talking with cake in your mouth. Drizzle wept from bridges and drowned bikes meshed together beneath the clinching overhang of bald trees. Along the brick banks of the canals, dinghies, runabouts and rubber duckies were tied up beside every kind of houseboat you could dream of. They weren’t yachts, caiques and crayboats like in Greece and Australia, but big heavy things that hardly moved. With their pots and pots of yellow flowers, the houseboats lay low in the water, creamy with paint and varnish, their rudders strapped alongside like wooden shields. They were fat and wide with rounded backsides and windows full of green plants and frilly curtains. From their chimneys rose smoke and gas heat and the smells of cooking. Dog bowls stood out on deck catching the rain and chained bikes and garden chairs and party lights dripped. To Billie they looked made up by kids, painted like dolls’ houses. The whole town looked that way — every skinny house was a cubbyhole and hideout. The little streets and canals were so small you could imagine having built them yourself.

But soon the streets just turned into streets, and the boats just more boats as the rain gave the water goosebumps and she stumped along with Scully coming alone behind like a lame horse. Billie’s collar filled with drizzle and her jeans were wet from brushing the fenders of parked cars, and she began to wonder if saving him was too much for her. The long skinny houses started to look like racks of burnt toast. The sky was misty with rain, a sky that could never hold sun or moon or stars.

Now and then someone emerged from a hatch to pull in washing or hoik a bucket of dirty water over the side or just puff a cigar with a Christmas drink in their hand, and Billie ran toward them with the photo from Scully’s wallet. The black-and-white, cut down and crooked. It was the three of them but she couldn’t look. She just held it out to them as Scully hung back in shame. It burnt her hand, that photo, but she stopped caring. Today was Jesus’ birthday and she had his hands; she felt holes burning there but couldn’t look for fear of seeing Her in the picture. If Billie laid eyes on that face with its smooth chin and black wing of hair and beautiful faraway eyes, she knew all her love, all her strength would break. Pee would run down her legs and her hands catch fire and she would turn to stone herself and be a statue by the water. So she ignored the acid sting in her hands and held up the photo to people with pink cheeks and Christmas smiles.

The houseboat people looked at the photo and then at Billie and her father in their rumpled clothes and busted faces and shook their heads sadly. Sometimes they brought out soup or pressed money into Billie’s hand, but no one knew the face and Billie felt bad about her relief each time.

On and on it went through streets and canals with the hugest names while the drizzle fell and her lips cracked and her hands burned up. All the time she waited for him to give up, praying for him to give up, telling him inside her head to wear down and quit at last, but when she looked back he shooed her on without hardly looking up at her and Billie kept going to gangplanks, stepping over ropes and tapping on windows. Every shake of the head, every flat expression was a relief. No, not here, no, no, no, she wasn’t here. Billie was afraid that if they kept at it long enough someone’s face would brighten horribly and recognize the face. That’d be it. That would kill her. She just didn’t know what she would do.

On a corner, surrounded by green posts with rolls on the end like men’s dicks, she saw the closed-up shop with the posters of Greece and Hawaii and big jumbo jets in it. On the wall was a blackboard with long words and prices. A travel place. She felt the money against her leg and walked on like she’d never seen it. Next door was a SNACKBAR with a menu on the window. Sate-saus, Knoflook-saus, Oorlog, Koffie, Thee, Melk. It was closed as well. Everything was closed.

Church clocks bonged and rattled and Billie went on, just going and going while the light slowly went out of the sky and the air went so cold it felt like Coke going down your neck. And then suddenly it was dark and they were standing out on a little bridge looking at the still water and the moons the streetlights made in it.

‘Nothing,’ said Scully.

‘No,’ she said.

People had begun to come back out into the streets. Their bikes whirred past, their bells tinkled, they called and laughed and sang.

‘Scully, it’s cold.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Let’s… let’s go somewhere.’

‘Yeah.’

He just stood there looking into the water, his mittens on the green rail of the bridge, until she took him by the sleeve and steered him into a narrow street where the windows were lit and cosy-looking. The first place she came to, she pushed him in and followed, smelling food and smoke and beer. There was sand on the floor and music and hissing radiators on the walls.

Billie followed her father to the big wooden bar and climbed up on a stool beside him.

‘He’ll have a beer, I spose,’ she murmured at the barman. ‘And one hot chocolate. Chocolat chaud?’

The barman straightened. His eyes were enormous. His glasses were thick as ashtrays. Up on the bar he put a balloony glass of beer with Duvel written on the side and plenty of fluff hanging off the top. Billie put her chin in her hands and watched Scully looking at himself in the bar mirror.

‘You have a bad day, huh?’ said the barman.

Billie nodded.

‘He is okay?’ he said, inclining his head toward Scully.

Billie shrugged. Scully gulped down his beer and pushed his glass forward again.

‘You be careful for that stuff, man,’ said the barman kindly. ‘They don’t call him the Devil for nothing. You watch him, kid.’

Billie nodded grimly and looked at the blackboard. ‘You have sausages and potatoes?’

‘Baby, this is Holland. It’s all sausage and potato here,’ he laughed. ‘For two?’

Billie nodded. She pulled out money.

‘Hoh, you are the boss for sure.’

She liked him. People in Amsterdam weren’t so bad. They weren’t afraid of kids like they were in Paris and London. They had sing-song voices and cheeks like apples, and she wondered if Dominique felt the same way. Dominique was sad like Alex. Her pictures were lonely and dark and sad. She was like a bird, Dominique. A big sad bird. Maybe she came here to cheer up, to see rosy people and do happier pictures.

In the corner a man with pencils through his earlobes was chattering on the phone. He looked ridiculous and should have been ashamed of himself. He sounded like a budgie talking away in his language, whatever they talked here. There were too many languages, too many countries. She was sick and tired of it. She climbed off her stool and crossed the sandy floor to where the phone book hung against the wall on a string. She picked up that book and opened it flat against the wood of the wall. But it was hopeless. She didn’t know how to spell Dominique and she forgot her last name.

She should know these things, she knew. She should be in school reading books and writing in pads and playing softball. She should be at someplace, somewhere they knew her name and what she was like. Somewhere she didn’t have to save people.

The phone book fell to the wall with a thump that startled everyone in the bar.

‘How do you spell Dominique?’ she asked Scully.

But he looked at himself in the mirror with his eyes half open. Their food came.

‘Your father need some help, maybe,’ said the barman kindly.

‘Yes,’ said Billie. ‘I’m helping.’

The smell of food was dreamy. It made her feel strong again.

• • •

THE LONGER SCULLY sat there the thirstier he got. The Trappist beer was rich and lovely. It seemed as though pain was behind him. He could calmly think all his worst thoughts, every nightmare flash across the brain-pan, without pain. He was close to her now. It wasn’t just in his mind anymore, no delusion, no desperate wishful thinking. She was here in Amsterdam and it was only a matter of time. A good night’s sleep, an early start, a clear mind, a bit of system.

No pain. Not even thinking about Dominique. There couldn’t be any doubt that she was with Dominique, though in what way she was with her was more of a lottery. Was their friend giving Jennifer sanctuary against her own better judgement? Was she in two minds, at least, her loyalties just a little divided? Or did the two of them share the same — what else could it be? — hatred for him? What else did they share? A bed? The very idea was supposed to make men wild, wasn’t it? It was supposed to be the ultimate humiliation, being left for a woman, but it didn’t seem any worse or any better just now. Whatever it was, however it was, Scully was stuck with a kind of precious disappointment with Dominique. What did it matter how it was? Dominique had held out on him.

No, no pain. Just a thirst.

Shit, for all he knew they could have been at it in Paris right from the beginning, with him so bloody glad she had someone to be with. Marianne, Jean-Louis, they probably knew all along. Their disdain, it was contempt for his blind trust, his weakness. And the baby, the baby was a hoax, just a vicious bloody decoy to free herself with. Setting him loose on the tumbledown bothy, buying time. He’d never laid eyes on an ultrasound image, a doctor’s bill, a test result in Athens, trusting prick he was. He had no other child, then. That still got close to pain. A couple of days ago, knowing that might have broken him. But he’d gone past something. He’d crossed a line. No baby. No wife. No marriage, nothing he could look back on with certainty, nothing that didn’t look like quicksand. And who knows, maybe she’d bolted with all the money as well. In the name of what — love? Personal development? The bohemian life?

It meant he’d done all this to himself, to poor Billie, to Irma, just so he could see a corpse. Across Europe and back to obligingly identify a body. With dignity. Yes, it meant, in the warm light of this bar, feeling no pain, that he had nothing. Not a hole in the ground, not even the dying echo of an idea of his life. In fact, sweet fuck-all.

And that just made him thirsty.

Forty-nine

SCULLY HIT THE HARD CHRISTMAS air of the street at God knows what hour of the night. The kid was pink-eyed and sluggish but he was floating, hovering above the glassy cobbles, four sheets to the wind and free.

The streets were streaming with walkers and riders and scooting cars. The mothwing whirr of bicycles fanned by his ear. Bells tinkled tiny on the road and gross in the air where pigeons rose from church towers and clouds lay low across the city. Clots of people weaved through traffic bollards and tossed their scarves with gusts of perfume. The tramlines shone, the great paned sashes of glass held figures and furniture and music and the jaunty gables rendered the Calvinistic brickwork severe and silly. It was shaking, this city, shuddering at its moorings as Scully swept down alleys past thickets of voluptuous wrought-iron with the sweet anaesthesia of Trappist beer coming to his cheeks like true belief. God, how pretty everyone was here, how young and apple- arsed on their bikes. The café windows were pats of butter melting at his feet, the air was bright-clear and etching cold.

In the Spuistraat a ramshackle warehouse festooned with gilt chains and aerosol banners in Dutch raged with upstairs light and music. Across its walls was a wild dream of graffiti. They sounded like birds up there, like German birds about to burst into English any second now — as soon as they cleared their throats properly. Look at that, even their squatters were house-proud — what a people.

He elbowed his way into a warm darkwood café, suddenly surprised to find himself inside, and ordered more Duvel and some of that evil clear stuff they were downing all along the bar. The sweet crunch of sand on the boards underfoot buoyed him now against the haggard glare of the kid at his elbow. Shit a brick, look at those students, the belts cinched gorgeously over their navels, the peek of white flesh through carefully ripped Levi’s, the broad bright bands in their hair, the way their foreheads shone, the curve of their calves against the denim.

He threw back the clear shot and chased it with beer and thought for a moment of the mad, glowing ears of Peter Keneally. His own ears were gone now and his eyebrows were melting. His chin was off with the pixies but his mouth held good. The barman’s apron snapped like a spinnaker, the brass taps were winch handles. No sweat, he had the sea legs of an octopus now. Eight legs and six of them Irma’s.

‘To Irma!’ he blurted.

The kid fingered the guts of the wallet and found guilders.

‘To Irma’s Christmas on the lie St Louis.’

The barman took the money and smiled indulgently at his sober, saving daughter.

‘To the six wraparound-suck-me-dry legs of Irma the squirmer.’

He felt the toes of her little boots against his shin and busted out laughing. She pummelled him with fists the size of apricots and her hair was a blur before him. The girls along the bar shifted in their creaking leather jackets and smiled. Scully felt himself leaving backwards, falling across the room, dragged by the belt and waving at those fruit-arsed honeys as the cold and fragrant night air rattled down his neck. He was losing transmission now and then. The kid stood there like a bollard but he was moving. He held out his hand and surged on.

The streets became pink and thumping. Trash clacked underfoot and the alleys were gamy. He couldn’t tell if he was suddenly tired or if maybe everyone was older here.

A chrome-headed little runt stiff-armed him at a sluggish turn in the pedestrian surge, whispering foully at him in a language he couldn’t stay with. Scully shrugged him away and ricocheted into a clownfaced lunatic with a half-inch chain around his neck. There were syringes underfoot and aquarium windows full of whores.

‘Over here!’ someone screamed from a throat-like doorway. ‘See real life focking! Real focking!’

He stumbled through a fresh map of vomit and landed against the hot plane of a plate-glass window which shook with resistance. He pulled himself up to see a field of photographs. It hurt to focus; it puzzled him, that world of images. People, it looked like, well, it might have been people or the inside of an abattoir. Pink, pink flesh and shocked, hurt faces with bared teeth. He found his ears with his hands and held his head there before it, struggling to understand. Yes, that was a woman. Part of a woman. And razor blades. Oh, God help me. There it was, the Auschwitz of the mind, the place you’d never dreamt of going, the hell they said wasn’t real. His face came back to him like a nightmare, the fingers in his jacket held like snared fish. He saw Billie crying, and behind her a rush of black hair in the passing crowd, the blind swoop of his whole life that set him running like a man in flames.

Billie skidded on a half-sucked lemon in the pink piggy light of the doorway and stumbled to her knees. There was a farmyard smell to the street and a look in people’s faces that made animals of them. Low aquarium windows loomed with ladies swimming in purple light, their eyes foxy and shining. Music bashed up out of doors in the ground and hot air gushed in her face pricking her scars with sudden heat. Into the tunnel of hips and legs and voices they veered, her grip slipping as Scully tipped away. Horse manure and food steamed on the uneven cobbles. Away into the tunnel he was falling, against a wall of pink bodies under glass like a graveyard, his hair streaked out against the tangle of fingers and legs and teeth, snarled and hanging. She saw the bottle in the girl’s vagina, the safety pin in the face beside it, the harness, the shocked cattle look of the eyes in the pictures hardened with glass as her father slid down watching someone pass. He was falling, falling, too heavy for her to hold. And then he yelled out that name, his voice hoarse and breaking.

‘Jennifer!’

Billie felt her nails break as he fought clear. She saw his back, his hair sinking in the moving squelch of bodies and he was gone. She could chase him, she knew. She was small enough to worm her way through and catch up to him, but the name froze her where she stood. Did she really see that glossy tail of black hair that moment in the corner of her eye?

Billie stood there, breathing but not moving with the light flickering on her and the canal shimmering like the entrance to the centre of the earth.

Piggy-looking people herded by her, snuffling and clacking and bristling up against the windows. The trough of the canal flattened off under the bridge.

A man in a baseball hat put his hand on her head, talking something she didn’t know and then stopped. ‘You talk Inglis?’

Billie twitched.

‘Ten guilder I be you daddy, uh?’

She stared at him. He had a face like a dog someone had beat up every day, sad and saggy, but with teeth still, and leery like he might snap if you turned your back.

‘I got my own,’ she said, backing up, but the bollard stopped her.

‘You nice little girl.’

She pressed against the bollard and felt it cold against the small of her back.

‘Very nice.’

Billie smelt antiseptic and sick in the street and this man’s sweat through his black coat. His yellow teeth parted his lips. She felt his hand cold on hers, pulling it toward him, right where his coat opened and his belt buckle hung like a falling moon. She punched him right there hard as her fist would go and burrowed into the crowd. She clawed and kicked her way through, going forward, getting clear enough to run and then she saw Scully near the bridge angling like a sailor across the pavement.

• • •

SCULLY ELBOWED THROUGH CONFERENCES of negotiating boys and drooping junkies, outside the Hard Rock Café and saw her make the bridge beneath the tolling church. In the light of the bridge lamps the tan flash of legs. He broke into a run, bouncing against all corners, all handrails, all sudden, surprising gusts of pain. Across the canal he found the corner but the alley was glutted, the heads and shoulders and slit thighs tidal. Steam rose as a cloud before him and the grinding monotony of rap music blasted in his face.

He caught a glimpse of raven hair enamelled by the light of a doorway. He scrambled ahead, his heart truly hurting him now, goading him to keep up. His bad eye closed out on him, bending, twitching the night before him. She hovered in the doorway, a shimmering curtain of hair, and went in. Scully slowed to smooth himself down a little. He tilted against a bollard and ground the fur off his teeth with the collar of his pullover. He ran fingers through his greasy hair and patted himself down hopelessly. This wasn’t what he expected. He wasn’t ready. He shook like a schoolboy, wondering if maybe he should just walk away, show a bit of pride. But he’d come too far for bloody pride. He made for the door.

Stepping down into the clinical fluorescents, Scully hesitated. It was a kind of sex supermarket, slick-shelved and lit, laid out for tourists and lonely hearts straight off the bus. Everything was wrapped in cellophane and ordered according to genre, like a music store, and it seemed suddenly hilarious. Shit a brick. He didn’t know her at all. Had she lit out for stuff like this? He felt a moron smile split his face and saw her moving between shelves.

‘Of all the sex joints in all the world,’ he blurted, louder than he could have imagined, ‘you’d have to walk into mine!’

The boy at the register, smooth-faced with a pearl earring and a sweater someone’s mum must have knitted, smiled tiredly and looked away. Pink faces, apple cheek faces turned his way as he sailed down into the aisle. Exchanging their Chrissie presents, he thought. Let’s hope they disinfected first.

The hair whirled up the back and his whole chest tightened. To feel the proximity of her. He smelt perfume and heard the snick of heels as he closed the gap.

‘Jennifer?’

The blur of a six o’clock shadow. Scully squinted as he lunged toward her, but already the wig was shifting beneath his hands and the startled bloke with the powdered face was falling off his heels and Scully was bellowing in fright. He staggered and shelves began to fall in sympathy. The fluorescent cavern echoed with screams and crashing. Scully wheeled with the outrage of the wig in his fist and caught the poor open-mouthed bastard in the yellow blazer right in the chops. People began to scramble across a drift of plastic penises. Scully held up his hands to placate them but the nice-looking kid from the register came armed with a circumcised cosh in a cellophane wrapper. Scully put his head down and went him. Just for the sweet feel of the blows on his face, for the quenching anaesthesia of a pain to fill the still darkness opening inside him.

• • •

BILLIE SAW HIM COME OUT handcuffed and bellowing like the Hunchback on the Feast of Fools, blurred by her crying. The crowd shivered with excitement and made way. They didn’t know him. They thought they did but they had no idea. The van flashed and someone touched her on the shoulder and she climbed in front to the smell of cigars and disinfectant. The doors slammed. The police talked their bird language. In the back, behind the glass, he was laughing. Someone, the driver, passed her a hanky.

‘You know him?’ someone asked.

Billie thought about it. She smelled the sweet soapy smell of the hanky and licked her lips. The narrow streets flashed by.

‘Yes,’ she said, without her voice breaking. ‘He’s my father.’

Fifty

SCULLY WOKE WITH A HORRIBLE, head-shattering start and immediately felt the raw bitterness of his throat. His face was hot. The vinyl mattress squawked under him as he sat up in the bare cube of a room. A key gnawed like a rat in its hole and the big door swung open with its sliding window agape. Shee-it! He scrambled sluggishly to his knees, trying to catch up.

‘Billie?’

A woman in a rumpled corduroy suit and a bowl of ash- blonde hair stepped cautiously in. Behind her hovered a bloke in uniform. His moustache was downy on his firm pink face. So where was Billie? Oh God, oh God!

‘Hello?’ said the woman. She was thin and handsome. In her forties, maybe. It seemed she had just climbed out of bed. Her eyes were red. ‘You speak English, huh?’

Scully nodded gingerly, not liking this set-up at all. Billie!

‘My name is Van Loon. I am a doctor.’

Scully nodded. He was still on his knees before her. The door closed a little way.

‘Does your… head hurt?’

He put a hand to the side of his head and twitched.

‘Dildo,’ he murmured, remembering.

The quack wrote something in a notebook.

‘They say you are upset,’ she said. ‘You are laughing.’

Scully looked at her questioningly.

‘Two hours you are laughing.’

By the feel of his throat it didn’t surprise him.

‘What is your name, please?’

‘Anne Frank,’ he said looking around the cell. ‘Have you got Billie?’

The doctor smiled. She pulled out some plastic gloves and put them on.

‘Please take off your jacket. Will you do that for me?’

‘Why?’ he croaked.

‘I want to see your skin. Your arms.’

‘Arms?’ But he peeled off, stiffly and showed her anyway.

‘What drugs have you eaten today?’

‘Booze,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

‘This is why you fight?’

He looked at her hands in their plastic gloves and she shucked them off with a smile.

‘Are you crazy?’ she said kindly. ‘I am here to see if you are crazy. To help you.’

Scully squirmed down off his knees. Two hours of laughing he couldn’t recall. A bloody gaol cell and a shrink. Not good.

‘Okay,’ he murmured. ‘I’m not Anne Frank.’

‘Ah,’ she found the notebook again and squatted before him.

‘Listen, can you ask the cops about my little girl?’

‘You are upset about her, yes?’

‘Can you just ask them? Now? Please?’

Over her shoulder the doctor called in Dutch to the uniform in the corridor. It was a strange, comforting sound. Sweat began to germinate all over him. Scully held his head.

‘They say she is upstairs yet.’

‘Is she okay?’

‘There is someone with her, yes.’

He didn’t like the way it sounded.

‘How old is your daughter?’

‘Six. Seven, seven. In July. She’s just a little girl.’

‘You are British?’

‘Australian,’ he said.

‘You have no papers, no money, no ID?’

He swallowed. ‘Billie. Billie’s got the bag, hasn’t she?’

‘What is your name?’

‘Jesus!’

The policeman leant in and murmured in Dutch.

‘He says there is a bag and passports.’

‘I want to go now,’ he croaked.

She backed away subtly.

‘You are depressed, yes?’

‘Oh yes,’ he admitted. ‘You could say that.’ They’ll take her away, he thought. These people will take her away if you don’t straighten up. But he saw the quack’s eyes on the straining veins in his arms, following them like a map of his hopeless travels. She was wondering if he would burst. He was interested himself. Was this when it would happen, when he’d burst like a watermelon under a car wheel, go off in a curtain of stale juice?

‘I just want my daughter.’

‘She is safe,’ she crooned. ‘She is safe.’

He got up, unfolded himself, licked his lips. She watched him cross the cell and come back.

‘Can… can you tell me your name, please?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

The floor was gritty and suddenly unbearable. The idea of Jennifer was simply a joke, just the notion of her. He was just a raw hole. There was nothing in him, he knew now, nothing to make an explosion, no mad fit of energy to bust him out of here. There just wasn’t any juice left.

‘You are from Australia.’

‘Yes.’

She whistled. ‘Such a long way.’

‘Yes,’ he murmured, feeling it.

‘How… how long have you been in Holland?’

He tried to think, to find his way back through all those streets and lights and bars but he couldn’t see where they began.

‘I know,’ he stammered. ‘I know that.’

‘You are restless.’

‘Scared,’ he breathed.

The uniform opened the door and spoke to the doctor. Scully stopped and watched.

‘Coffee?’

‘What time is it?’

‘Two.’

‘Please. Don’t take her.’

‘Be calm.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He began to weep and stopped.

‘You can cry.’

‘Today,’ he said. ‘We came to Amsterdam today.’

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Lie down.’ Her hands were warm and kind. He felt the plink of his eyelids against his face. She knelt beside him on the vinyl mattress, her downy upper lip quivering into a smile. She looked rag-arsed with fatigue.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘about Australia. The animals with pockets. I want to know.’

Fifty-one

AFTER ALL THE QUESTIONS, Billie sat with her mug of milky tea and ate the cake. It was dry and crumbly. People came and went. The police station smelt of disinfectant. The lights made her squint. She was tired. She thought about Dominique, everything she knew about her. Dominique was pretty. Kind of pretty. She had small hands and her apartment was full of sad photos. She was nice, Dominique, but she watched you. Carefully, like she didn’t know what made you work, like she just didn’t get kids. She looked at Scully sometimes. Billie saw her. He didn’t know how she looked at him. Like he was a cake or something. Maybe she loved him. Billie didn’t care. No one loved him like she did. That was a fact.

Dominique had a mole on her arm. Her shoes went kind of outwards when she walked. The floor of her apartment was all checked with wood. Sometimes, driving trucks across it Billie would look up and see the big poster on the living room wall. A dark face. White words, ATELIER CINQ, PHOTOGRAPHIES. And Dominique’s name. LATOUR.

That was it. That was her name.

Billie put down the mug and the rest of the cake and went to the desk. The phone book was there like a brick. Two policemen told jokes by the window.

AMSTERDAM SCHIPOL

TELEFOONGIDS

PTT TELECOM

She opened it, saying the alphabet in her head. Telefoonnummers. Alarmnummers. Phones rang at desks everywhere. A siren wound up right outside. Dominique had bad breath, that was the other thing.

latour, d herengr. 6 627 9191

The page sounded like rain as it tore softly down the spine. She folded it neatly down into a parcel and put it into her pack.

‘You want more cake, Billie?’ called one of the cops, the one with all the questions before.

She shook her head. He turned away to finish his joke. Billie shifted the pack with the heel of her boot. On the strap was the number Scully had written that day on the road. The postman. Two numbers, she had. She lay down across the bench and went to sleep with sirens all around. In her dream she had wings, silver wings.

Fifty-two

SCULLY WOKE and Van Loon was taking his pulse again. She had fresh clothes on and smelled of soap.

‘All that boose,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was a lot.’

‘You are strong.’

He shrugged, tried to muster some confidence. ‘I feel better.’

‘Good.’

‘Am I crazy?’

‘Not so much. Sad, maybe.’

‘You look sad yourself,’ he said, surprising himself.

‘No,’ she said with a chuckle. ‘Crazy to have this job.’

‘Is Billie still here?’

She nodded. ‘She is like you?’

‘What will the charges be?’

‘No charges. Keep away from the dildos.’

‘Yes,’ he said meekly. ‘You too.’

• • •

THEY LED HIM UP THROUGH the tunnels into the fresher air. Amidst the snarls of desks and glass partitions he signed forms with his hands shaking. A meek daylight tinted the windows. He saw Billie standing by the glass. She waved minutely, face compressed. He felt a kind of remorse he had not felt before, a sense of humiliation that flattened even his relief. They could have taken her. He would have deserved it. He dropped his head a moment, unable to look. The cops seemed relieved to see the back of him. He watched her shaking their hands. A new shift straggled in. He stepped out to meet her.

Fifty-three

FROM THE BIG HIPPED LINE of mountains a mist comes rolling and turning in the frozen light of morning, the sky grinding silent against the earth like the dead against the living. The stones of farm walls creak. Ice holds the grass stiff; the hoofprints of cattle are dead with it. At the head of the valley the lichened crosses lean into the sod and the lanes and boreens meander after their own shadow. In the sheds the slurry steams and the milk comes hot and ringing. Fields hummock and slant all the way to the bare and overreaching oak, it’s a lake of frozen, stippled mud. Above it, the sunless monolith of the castle is ruled by the weft of birds. Rooks launch from the sills of a hundred slots and windows, across ash wood and lane. They settle on the smokeless chimney of the bothy on the ridge, cranking their heads warily. A sculpture of frozen tyremarks is set in the mud before the house. A vapour rises from it, from every surface, every thing. The day hesitates a moment. Nothing moves. Then, from the north, from someplace else, a wind springs up and day comes.

Fifty-four

A SILKY DRIZZLE WAFTED DOWN through the shadows of busted empty warehouses and ships’ masts in the morning light. Billie and Scully picked their way round ochre puddles and crippled bikes with the salty stink of the sea blowing in their numb faces. On the scabby embankment above the wharf were ragged deck chairs and rusted barbeque grills and weeds. Sticking up out of the dirt was a silver slipper. The whole dock looked like a war had been there. Piles of sodden clothes, mattresses, a clock, bent sunglasses, books lying open like fallen birds, a flat soccer ball with a pool of frozen rainwater melting in its cavity. From huge smashed windows hung twisted banners and stained bedclothes. A dog pressed against a wall, wary, and some scruffy boats lay on the water like more rubbish.

Neither of them spoke, they just walked. Billie listened to the snap and flick of her unravelling shoelace. They couldn’t talk, she knew that. It was just too hard. They weren’t really looking for anything, just walking. At first she had been following him, but now it was her leading. She steered him past the floating shed with the BAR sign hanging off the end of its slippery gangplank. The seagulls sounded like TV seagulls. She held his hand. Money lumped in her pockets.

In a windswept square where pigeons bent their necks for shelter and newspapers eddied and wrapped themselves shamelessly about the legs of passersby, a young man with a sheet of livid hair and a windripped kilt played bagpipes. His gingery legs stepped a beat and his red hair was beautiful in its train behind him. The wheezing drone of the pipes wound through the puzzled crowd and hung in the air above them, a sound lonely here amongst the sober bricks.

They walked on.

• • •

AT THE END OF THE alley was a sign and Billie heard a swell of old music, music from black-and-white movies and suits and ties, so she tugged him in out of the wind, beneath the street sign that he mumbled dully in passing.

‘Gebed Zonder End.’

A great gush of warm air blew in their faces as they entered the café with its smells of coffee and cakes and perfume and denim.

Billie felt the sand underfoot and saw the warm wooden walls, the stools, the human faces, round and shiny-cheeked. She met a little table with battered edges and ran her hands along it and sat down. For a moment Scully stood there above her as if he’d forgotten how sitting down went, but he touched the table and slid onto a chair, blinking. Billie put money on the table and they ordered breakfast. Coffee, rolls, cheese, jam, cold cuts of meat.

‘No more chasing,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

Billie put her fingers through holes in the cheese. ‘They wanted to know things,’ she said. ‘All kinds of things.’

He pressed brown bread into the plate. She could see his prints in it when he pulled his hand away.

‘Billie, I’m so ashamed.’

She nodded. ‘I know.’

It was quiet again for a while. She watched him look for words. His big hands lay on the table. She would know them anywhere. Someone said your heart was the size of your fist. She unzipped her pack.

‘Here,’ she said, holding the bunch of paper out to him.

‘What’s this?’

It looked like a flower there in her palm. Billie hoped he didn’t see how it shook.

Fifty-five

BILLIE SAW IT STRAIGHTAWAY. Before they even crossed the narrow street, shuffling on the cobbles like old people in front of those cosy hotels and cafés, she saw it and stopped. She heard kids thumping a soccer ball in the square across the footbridge. A bird warbled in the bare tree above the parked cars on the canal embankment and somewhere a bike bell tinkled. Billie found a bollard and sat on it, feeling the dampness come through her jeans. Scully worked his way along the bank, his hair mad as a sun, his face uncertain, as though he didn’t know whether to look or not. She watched him find the houseboat, the red one with the fat rotting mattress of autumn leaves on its roof, the one with the silly tilt like Granma’s back verandah, and he straightened a moment, blinking.

‘This one,’ he said.

Billie looked away and saw ducks making vees in the black water. She thought of all the places she had seen that she had no names for, all the flats and hotels and houses in streets she couldn’t say, towns she didn’t know, where people spoke languages she didn’t understand. All those people she just didn’t know. All those stations and restaurants and airports and ferries that simply looked the same.

‘We went past it yesterday,’ he said quietly.

‘Yes.’

‘Looks deserted, huh.’

She shrugged. She was cold now and sad.

‘Funny,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve sort of got the creeps.’

Billie looked at the pretty footbridge with its green paint and curly rails. She heard his boots on the deck and looked over to see him knocking at the door at the bottom of the little wooden steps. Maybe this is how it felt to be an angel, to be sad at helping, sad to finish. He cupped his hands to portholes and real windows, climbing up the deck.

‘Come here, Bill.’

She thought about it a moment. That travel place was around here somewhere.

‘Bill?’

She trusted him. If someone was home she had to believe he would understand her. She was not giving him back. He had promised. She trusted him. But her heart sped up anyway.

‘Billie?’

She heard the glass break as she stepped carefully aboard and edged along the handrail to where Scully stood with an old chair- leg in his hand. Ducks rose from the water. Bicycles went past and out beyond the parked cars someone was laughing.

‘You slip in, mate. You’re smaller.’

‘Are we stealing?’ she asked, not really caring.

‘No, just looking. Mind the edge — it’s sharp.’

Billie heard her jacket tear as she wriggled in and fell suddenly headlong. She cried out, but the sofa was beneath her and musty with damp.

‘You alright?’

‘Yes.’

‘Open the door.’

Billie looked about. It was like a big caravan in there. Curtains, cupboards, a desk and proper dinner table with chairs. And photos, Dominique’s photos in frames on the walls.

‘Billie!’

She slipped off the sofa obediently and felt the shock of cold water round her ankles. Her boots drank it up and her toes stung.

‘It’s sinking!’

‘Open the door, love.’

She waded across to the outside door and fumbled with the handle.

‘You got it?’

Her feet began to hurt and her knees knocked. The door came open with a little wave that crept higher up her shins and slapped quietly up against the other end. She climbed onto a chair as he came in wide-eyed, and she saw all the tightness go out of his face. No one had been here for a long time. He looked shocked and relieved and restless. His face changed like the sky. She watched him open the door beside the table. A kind of kitchen. The next door was a toilet. That was it. It was like the end of a tunnel down here.

Scully waded up forward to the brass bed against the bulkhead. In the centre of the quilt lay a single dirty sock and a pale blue pullover he recognized well enough. He picked it up carefully and pressed the cashmere to his face. It smelt of frangipani, of sunlight, of his whole lost life. He lay on the bed and hid his face. This was how it felt in the seconds of dying, the steer on the killing floor with the volts filling his head. Just falling. With the kid beside him, her fingers in his hair, her body pressing in from the living world outside.

‘You’re enough for me,’ she said.

He heard it high above as he went on tipping into space.

Fifty-six

ALL THE QUIET DAY, as rain slipped down the windows and plinked in through the smashed porthole, he lay there and she watched him. He hardly moved at all except to sigh or sniff or move his lips without making sounds. Sometimes tears squelched from his tight-shut eyes, but he never said a word. Billie thought of Quasimodo — she couldn’t help it — his skeleton like a fence of bones on the gypsy girl’s grave. You could die of a broken heart, she knew that.

She made a causeway of chairs from the bed to the table and pulled off her sloshy boots and socks. Her feet were grey and blotchy. She pulled open drawers and cupboards and found socks and pullovers high up that were still dry. She pulled so much stuff on she felt like the Michelin man but she was warm.

On shelves she found lipsticks, postcards, paintbrushes, Kodak boxes and some little china ducks. There was a wide flat carton full of Dominique’s photos. She set it down on the table and went through them carefully. They were of people mostly, and some of streets that looked like Paris. There was one of Marianne in a white chair. Her mouth made a pencil line across her face. She found one of herself with her hair big as a hat and her face laughing. How smooth her face was then. She touched the picture with her fingertips and a little chirp came out of her throat that startled her in the lapping quiet.

Outside ducks pedalled by, laughing among themselves. Bike bells tinkled like goats in the mountains.

Billie kept flipping slowly through the photos. It was like seeing through Dominique’s eyes. She was careful, the way she watched. You could see she looked at everything for a long time. These photos made you look like that, at the hips of the chair, at your own eyes big and warm, at your dad’s paint-freckled face in the café with the coffee cup shining under his chin. Yes, his big funny smile. That was him. She wondered if everyone saw him the way she did, the way Dominique and the camera did.

There were photos of them all in a graveyard. She remembered the day. Scully had one in his wallet. Their faces were moony with laughing. The cross behind them had veins. It looked like a stone flower.

And then without warning, Billie came to the pictures of Her. It was sudden and scary. Billie’s bum closed up and her scars went tight but her heart did not stop. For a moment she just panted and held on to the table. Then she counted them, seven photos. The first one, She was in the street at St Paul in a small dress. There was a tiny smile with those lips that pressed against your ear at bedtime. It was a face that moved, eyes following you across the table, worried for you, wondering how you were. There was blood under that skin. It was a face that loved you. It made your hands shake to see. But that was the only summer picture. In the others, one by one, as she got more wintry and beautiful, you could see her turning to stone. Her chin setting, her dark eyes like marble, cheeks shining hard like something in the Tuileries.

In the last picture she was close, right up in your face and she had a finger pressed against her lips.

It had stopped raining outside and the ducks were gone. She looked at the shattered porthole and then reached up to feel the moisture round it. Then she stuffed those pictures out through it so that they skittered and skied across the deck to fall like lilies on the water.

A boat chugged past. The dark, smelly water beneath her rose in a scummy wave and slapped at the walls and cupboards, back and forth, until it tired itself out and the shag carpet went limp as seaweed.

Billie made little piles of money in all the colours and kinds. She found the address book and smoothed it out beside the money. Next to that she lay her Hunchback comic and then she emptied the rest of the pack into the water: apple cores, ticket stubs, fluff.

In the galley she opened a jar of olives and a stinky flat tin of sardines. She found a jar of hard red jam which she ate with a spoon. The olive seeds she spat against the wall until her lips ached. She tried to light the stove but couldn’t make it work, so she gave up on trying to make him coffee and crawled across her bridge of chairs to the bed. Scully was still breathing, but his eyes were clamped shut. She laid out bits of food for him and shook him gently, but he only shivered. He didn’t open his eyes, he didn’t look at the food. Billie sat beside him and held his clammy hand as the air got colder and harder and her scars burned tightly. When his shivering got worse she foraged in high cupboards and found hairy coats and stretched jumpers that she piled across him till he was barely visible.

Now and then she tested the water on the floor with a broom handle. It was getting deeper. The air was dreamy with cold.

She looked at him. Inside his nest, under his skin he was still searching, still looking. Maybe somewhere in his mind he would always look. You couldn’t blame him. Maybe it would happen to her too. Billie wondered whether she could ever be enough for him.

He opened his eyes a moment and looked about dazed, like someone pulled out of a car crash.

‘Me,’ she said.

He narrowed his eyes a moment and looked at her.

‘You hear me?’

His eyelids fluttered and he was gone again.

• • •

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, a mist came down upon the water to soak up the parked cars, the skeleton trees, the houses and steeples. Billie sat at the table with her teeth chittering and flicked through the grubby address book, saying the names to herself inside her head. The quiet was deep now and the mist moved on the water occasionally as if to let invisible things pass. Billie’s breath became a fog in the dying light, and then it was dark. She sat there a while in the sinking night and then the phone on the wall burred like a cicada.

Billie picked it up. The earpiece burnt her face.

‘Hullo?’

She listened to the fog quiet at the other end.

‘Hullo?’

She heard the clomp of the receiver at the other end and then the peep of the dial tone. Her throat was raw with air. She felt her way across the chairs to the listing bed and climbed in beside her dad who sounded awake and alive and with her. It was strange how happy she felt, strange and sleepy and good.

Fifty-seven

IT WAS COLD WHERE SCULLY went, and the great shifting weight of the earth pressed him from every angle, comforting in the dark. His limbs twisted into him, his tongue pressed against his palate and he felt the freezing weld of his eyelids against his face, the retraction of his balls, his nipples, his lungs. Feet, hands, stones, towns, trees leant on him in layers. The food in his gut turned to coal, while above him, outside, above the crust of everything, an insect rattled on and on in impossible summer. Just the sound of it, the dry, clacking sound of it gave the earth the Christly smell of frangipani and he felt his veins tighten like leather thongs. A single, living insect. Calling.

Afterwards, in the mounting silence, he woke to the dead night breathing. He heard the flinty ring of hoofs on the cobbles above. Billie slept beside him, her fingers hooked into the loose, ricked knit of his sweater as though she’d been trying to lift him, raise him. Her breath was tart and briny. He nested his cheek against hers and felt the life in her. His fingers felt tanned and brittle as he lay them in the blood knots of her hair. A horse snorted. Scully found her hand, settled his thumb into her palm. Her pulse, or his, idled warmly. Above him he heard the deep, toneless murmurs of men and the leisurely gait of horses. Breath hung above his face. The cold was subterranean, sweet and lethal. Even awake he was drowsy with it. Hoof beats faded off into fresh silence. There wasn’t even the sound of the canal against the hull, just his own living breath.

Then he stiffened. Out of the silence the footfalls of a walker. They were boots, hard-heeled boots, coming up the canalside cobbles, rapping up against the high walls of the Herengracht houses as his limbs went hard with recognition.

He unpicked Billie’s fingers, slid out of the cocoon she had built for them and tamped it back around her in the watery inward light. Steady up the canalside came those footfalls as he slid off the bed into the shock of the forgotten bilge water. God Almighty, it was all he could do not to cry out, but his burst of breath rang like a thud in the sepulchral space all the same. The bloody boat was sinking. Against his shins he felt the scabs of forming ice, or maybe it was rubbish, as he waded blindly for the companion- way past the line of chairs.

He cracked the hatch and tasted the colder air outside. His feet burnt away to an absence as he listened. Heels rang awkwardly now and then on the odd surfaces of the cobbles. His socks steamed beneath him. The footfalls stopped outside close by.

Up on deck the rotten leaves were treacherous. A mist buried the streetlamps and smothered the sky so that the only illumination was from muted yellow pillars of lamplight. They cast tidal pools here and there, between parked Opels and VWs, out on the stretch of cobbles where a steaming scone of horse dung revealed itself between the naked bodies of elms.

The air was soupy, maddening. Someone out there. Scully stood there peering until he made out bricks. A fan of streetlight, a sense of the street corner, yes, the narrow alley there, he remembered. The blood beat in his neck. He made out a traffic bollard, some wrought-iron, the flat biscuity bricks of housewall. The mist shifted on itself, sulphuric in his nostrils. He saw it butting the buoyant rooftops of the city. He needed to see. See properly. He wasn’t scared to feel watched like this, but he needed to know.

Scully hobbled numbly around the mulchy deck, keeping low as he could behind the cabin top. A single duck rose off the water, its wings whiffling like the school cane of memory. On the foredeck he crouched beside an ornamental coil of rope and rotten tackle and he saw the denim leg out there in the spill of corner light. The sharp-toed boot disembodied by mist and the angle. His breath quickened. He was calm but his body was loaded.

He measured the jump to the dock. It was close, furry with mist, but close. He figured four feet. It was twenty, twenty-five yards to the street corner. His calves locked up.

But he waited. Was he visible? It seemed unlikely. He saw a knee now. A fresh draught of recognition. He stayed put. Watched. He counted to twenty, forty, ninety. The creak of a heavy leather coat. What if she just crossed the cobbles to the gangplank, just pushed off that righteous Protestant wall and strode across and called out? What would happen, how would he act?

He heard the toes of his frozen socks slipping fractionally on the gritty slime of the foredeck. He gripped the searing metal rail, ready.

Then the boot turned and showed a Cuban heel, two. There was a worldly groan of leather and a shift on the cobbles. Out into the loop of strangled light blurred the hair and moonflash of skin as the figure turned unhurriedly up the sidestreet and was gone, leaving a wake of footfalls that set Scully off automatically. He sprang and lost ground, lifted and fell facedown in hemp and mire and leafy crap at the gunwhale’s edge. He scrabbled hopelessly for a few seconds and then gave up. It was simple. He just desisted and listened in bitter relief to the sound of those boots ringing upward in the mist, rapping against the high bricks of the Herengracht and the muted night.

It was in him to get up, he had the will, the sheer idiot stubbornness in him to do it, he knew, but he heard the clonk of furniture beneath him and the flicker of light and it was enough to lie there alive in the cold and feel the hawser against his face.

• • •

WHEN HE CAME STIFFLY DOWN the steps into the tilting cabin, Billie held out the wavering flame of the cigarette lighter whose plastic was foggy and green, and let him see his way to a chair. She had her pack on the table and the phone in her hand. He blinked in the strange light and peeled off his socks. His whiskery chin shook a little, but his eyes were clear.

‘Okay,’ he murmured. ‘Okay.’

Billie couldn’t tell if this was a question or a command, but she hugged the receiver to her ear and kept dialling anyway. Tiny waves rocked against the furniture. She watched him open cupboards to find some socks. She tilted up her own wrapped feet and shook them at him. At the other end of the phone after the sound of oceans and the land and sky, a man said.

‘This better be fooking good, then. Jaysus Mary and Joseph it better had!’