The Riders (19 page)

‘Pou ine?
Where is he?'

Kufos shrugged, seeing the money elude him.

Scully ordered a bottle of Metaxa for the old man and offered his thanks. Then there was a growl and a scream from outside, and the whole taverna was in uproar.

S
CULLY RAN ACROSS TABLES
to get outside where Billie sat bellowing inside her mask of blood. Her eyes were blank and wide as coins. Scully held her rigid in his arms and spoke quietly to her in the moments before the terrace was overrun with shouting men and women. With his fingers he probed her face for the wounds and found punctures in her cheek, her forehead, an eyebrow. With his handkerchief he wiped the gore away for a moment and saw that there was a gash in front of her ear and a hole in her scalp that showed a flap of fatty tissue. He tried to soothe her, calm her before anything else, but it was impossible with all the yelling and the many hands that reached for her in sympathy. He hoisted her on his hip in time to see old Kufos beating the dog to death with his unopened bottle of Metaxa, and he ran for the hospital.

Along the cobbled alleys slippery as creekbeds, Scully slid and lurched, leaving a bright trail on the stones. He saw the open eyes and mouths of people at their doors as he plunged across the square and through the ghostly trunks of the whitewashed lemon trees to the clinic steps.

He found a dim corridor, an empty room, then a roomful of bored people with their backs to the walls. They rose, startled, fearful, shouting, and then the mob came behind to surge in with their roars and bellows and great indecipherable swathes of language. He wanted to shout, to demand, but his breath was gone and he could not think of enough words in Greek.

Two women in white stiff-armed their way through the crowd and their eyes widened and their businesslike boredom evaporated. The child's face was so disfigured by lumpy, dark blood, and her clothes so spattered and gluey with it, that it was hard to know what she was, let alone what the problem might be. They grabbed her, but Billie clung to him. Her nails pierced his clothes and found his skin. Men shouted across him to the staff who dragged them both into another room where a male doctor waited with a cigarette and a stethoscope.

The doctor motioned kindly, almost jovially as the nurses continued to pry Billie from Scully's chest. At the big stainless steel sink they held her arms and head and swabbed her face. Her eyes were mad. Cattle eyes. Killing yard eyes. Her screams felt as though they could shave paint from the walls. The staff squinched up their faces. They lost any composure they might have planned on displaying when she bared her teeth and lunged at all those dark, hairy forearms locked about her.

‘
Ochi, ochi!'

The doctor howled as Billie latched onto his wrist, gnashing and growling. The others let go in an instant and Billie crashed back against her father's chest.

‘That's it! That's enough. She's fucking hysterical, she's scared out of her mind, for Godsake!'

‘Scully?' someone called behind him.

He wheeled and saw Arthur with Kufos who had blood and brains all down his tunic.

‘Tell them to give me some stuff and I'll fix her up myself! She's shitscared.'

‘What are you going to do, sew her up on your own?' cried Arthur.

‘Just tell em.'

‘What about the scars?'

‘Oh, Jesus Christ, help me!'

Screaming, screaming. Circus. Nightmare. Slow-motion pantomime. Scully's sinews sprang in him like wires. His spine creaked with fear and hatred. He was drowning in noise, flapping hopelessly between words he couldn't recognize. He tried to soothe Billie, almost sobbing his pleas to her, while Arthur and Kufos argued with the staff who shook their heads and waved their hands in outrage. Back and forward, the words, the scowls, the pleading, the slapping of fists and hands, and then when Scully realized he wasn't breathing anymore, he turned with Billie in his arms and bolted from the room with the crowd parting fearfully before him. Down the long antiseptic corridor, the anterooms with their lordly portraits, and out onto the rain fresh steps beneath the sky where he roared until he felt her hands on his bursting throat and her voice in his ear.

‘Stop. Stop, it hurts!'

A
RTHUR BROUGHT ANOTHER BOWL OF
hot water and Scully gritted his teeth and cut the patch of matted hair with the nail scissors. Billie closed her eyes and sucked in a breath as his fingertip pressed the flap of scalp down and took up the disposable razor. Arthur averted his eyes. Scully felt his arse tighten as he applied the blade to the wound and shaved the ragged skin. He saw the tears run from her tight-shut eyes and kept at it until the wound was clean and bleeding freshly again. The scalp lifted enough to sicken him.

‘You can't sew that, Scully.'

‘Gimme those strip things, will you? We'll press it flat and get it together again.'

‘The hospital wants you to sign a form.'

‘Just wash those scissors again, will you?'

Billie began to whimper as he squeezed antiseptic into this last gash.

‘You're a brave girl,' he murmured with a quaver in his voice. ‘Nearly finished.'

‘Kufos came for me,' said Arthur.

‘Yes,' Scully said, wiping the bald patch dry.

‘He said you wanted Nikos Keftedes.'

‘Arthur, the strips, okay? She's in pain here.'

‘The sea's treacherous out there,' Arthur said, wrestling a pack of steri-strips open.

‘Here, hold the flaps down with your thumbs.'

‘Oh, dear. You should have –'

‘Just put your thumbs . . . right, I'll bind it closed. Hold tight, love.'

Billie cried out as the men's fingers pressed at her. Her feet rose into their bellies and her back arched from the sofa. She was sweating and the strips wouldn't stick.

‘More strips.'

No light came in through the unshuttered windows now, and the wind harried the glass. Scully smelled the tobacco closeness of the Englishman as they worked on grimly with the child squirming and crying out. He whispered and crooned, hating the bluntness of his fingers.

‘That's got it.'

‘Thank Christ.'

Scully took Billie in his arms to steady himself. Her face was livid with wounds, swollen and plastered in spots, her hairline ragged above one eye.

‘Thank you, Arthur. Can you sell me a blanket?'

Arthur stopped fussing with the bowl and implements. ‘Sell you?'

Scully reached down and grabbed the small suitcase and the child's backpack in one hand and hefted Billie onto his hip.

‘The cops'll be back about now.'

‘You're not saying you really did it?'

‘I'm saying I want to go.'

‘They might chase you, you know.'

‘Maybe.'

‘What the dickens happened to you?'

Scully laughed sourly. ‘You could say I'm having a bit of a rough trot just now.' He felt his mouth losing shape as he said it, and the Englishman put the bowl down, went to the window and lit a cigar.

‘I just have to know.'

‘Why should you be the only one getting answers?'

‘He was a friend.'

‘He talked about how they threw old people off the cliff in baskets. I didn't think anything of it. I was preoccupied, I guess. I'm really sorry, Arthur. It's horrible.'

Arthur puffed on his cigar, trembling a little. ‘Of course he was making that little bit of folklore up. Vain little prat.'

The house was cold and quiet. Its seaman's furniture gleamed darkly. The Persian rug across the marble floor looked thick and deep enough to sleep in. On the wall across Arthur's shoulder was a small canvas that both of them lit on at the same moment.

‘One of his,' murmured Arthur unsteadily.

‘I know.'

The painting was a luminous landscape, quite simple. Bare, pale rock. Sleep-blue sky. Perched on a granite cliff over the water was a small, white chapel.

‘You know the chapel?'

‘Just before Molos.'

‘Yes. The wine chapel. A sea captain with a load of wine from Crete was caught in the worst storm of his life, just in sight of this island. He prayed to the Virgin to deliver him and he promised that if he lived he'd build a chapel in her honour. That's what happened. He mixed the mortar with his cargo in payment.
Cement and wine. The wine chapel. Alex's favourite. Not hard to see why. At least that piece of folklore is real.'

He left Scully and Billie alone in the living room. Scully looked at the painting and thought of the afternoons he'd swum below the place spearing octopus and
rofos
with the sun on his back and the water moving across his body like a breeze. In the water there was always a stillness denied the rest of the world, a calm hard to recall standing here shitscared and shellshocked. Underwater there was just temperature, no time, no words, no gravity. It was the kind of thing monks disciplined themselves for, junkies destroyed themselves chasing. Is it what dolphins and birds had now and then, a still point in the centre of things? Murderers? Marathon runners? Artists? Is that what Jennifer was after, this total focus? It was something worth feeling, he had to admit.

Arthur came back in with blankets, painkillers and some food.

‘Ten minutes from now, outside the Pirate Bar. Fifteen thousand up front.'

‘Thank you.'

‘I'll help you down there.'

‘I thought Kufos might come by.'

‘He's as pissed as a rat, I'm afraid.'

‘You mean he didn't break the bottle?'

‘The Metaxa? No. He's a big hero tonight.'

‘Poor bloody dog.'

‘Well, it's a quicker death than the traditional mothball in the minced beef.'

‘The owner should be shot.'

‘The owner is Kufos' wife. The Albanian.' Arthur waved aside his open mouth. ‘Don't ask. Let's go, shall we?'

A
LONG THE DARK SHUTTERED WATERFRONT
in the storm, Scully held the shivering child to him and saw Arthur ahead holding grimly to the luggage that bucked and swung in the wind. The sky was starless and whining. Masts lurched amid the shriek of rigging and the seance groan of hawsers. Scully felt himself gone from here. He was almost faint with relief. His eyes ran in the wind and his hair ripped back from his head till it ached at the roots.

Beneath the statue of the hero, its head lit wildly by an upstairs window, the shadow of a man came forth. Arthur met him and Scully heard their hissing. He waited, feeling light, careless, away.

Arthur came back.

‘Forget it, Scully. He wants twenty thousand.'

‘Give it to him,' said Scully, holding out the flapping wad.

‘The price is too high and the sea is too bloody rough.'

‘Tell him we go now.'

‘For God's sake!'

‘Give it to him, Arthur.'

‘You're not thinking!' said the Englishman, the pale palms of his hands flashing. ‘You're overwrought, Scully!'

‘Let's go.'

Scully felt his body unwinding, the heat leaving his temples and feet, and he knew that if the boat didn't leave he'd simply spring from the wharf and hit the water swimming. He saw the flash of Meatballs' teeth, the twinkle of his fingernails as he took the money. The Greek led them down between fishing boats to where his taxi laboured in the swell.

‘Was she here, Arthur?' Scully asked as Meatballs slid the canopy back.

Arthur scowled. ‘I can't get a straight answer out of anybody. Rory and his chums say things, but can you believe them? Seems certain she's not here now.'

‘Fair enough. Thank you.'

‘Well, what a pleasant visit.'

‘I'll miss the funeral.'

Arthur grunted, shrugged and walked back down the mole.

Scully watched him a moment before stepping down into the taxi. The big Volvo started and purred. Meatballs cast off fore and aft and the boat eased out among the pens. Billie lifted her head to see the lights of the town rising above them like Christmas.

Meatballs throttled down hard.

‘You sit! Sit!'

Scully went back to the upholstered bench as the canopy slid shut above them. The Volvo began to bawl. The lights of the Maritime School blurred by above. The boat rose to the plane and then the water beneath them began to harden up as they left the harbour wall.

The first wave crashed across the bow as the navigation lights went on. Water streamed down the windows. Meatballs wore a
green halo from the glow of his dashboard. With the harbour police and the moles out of sight already, they rode down into the trough and broke the back of the next swell with a crash that jarred Billie and Scully to the deck. Shaken, the two of them clawed back up and looked for ways to brace themselves. The luggage raced about at their feet. Meatballs shoved a cassette into the tape deck so that bouzouki music screeched through the little cabin. Scully held himself in position and watched Billie's face as they ploughed on into the darkness.

The sea came at them from every point. The boat pitched, rolled, plunged and fluttered. The prop screamed free of the water and hit again. The fibreglass hull shuddered – Scully felt the impact in his teeth. Already he was withdrawing into the deckhand's stupor, the blankness that kept him sane all those years ago. When it got too awful out there in those days, you simply shut down inside and carried on in autopilot. The deck lurching and heaving, the chop breaking in cold sheets across the wheel- house and the stinking bait washing through the scuppers. Dreamy, that's how he was, with that animal Ivan Dimic at the wheel and the ropes fidgeting from their coils to race over the side. The stinking pots clashing up onto the tipper full of lobsters and sharks and writhing octopus. Yes, Ivan Dimic, last of the fleet to leave and first to return. He fished all day at full throttle, hungover and vicious. From the flying bridge, shrieking down on your dripping head. His was the kind of bestial voice the mad heard, only the man was as real as the torment. Buy first, pay last, and always get your punch in before the other poor cunt sees you coming, that was Ivan's philosophy. Scully stayed with him for the money of course, outrageous in those boom years, and because he believed that things could only get better, that he was capable of getting on top of it. But he didn't come from the
same stock as Ivan and the crews he knew in his fishing days. Scully simply wasn't a fighter and the only way to win Ivan over was by force. The deckhand's revenge. Oops. Over the side twenty miles out. It happened. But not for young Scully. All those February mornings hacking back into the easterly, Scully imagined himself elsewhere. But tonight there was only so far out of himself he could go.