The Riders (32 page)

‘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.

N
EAR MIDNIGHT
S
CULLY 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.'

•  •  •

W
ITHOUT 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.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet

I see her walk away from me

So hurriedly my reason must allow

That I have wooed not as I should

A creature made of clay . . .

‘Raglan Road'

W
ITH 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.