The Riders (33 page)

•  •  •

T
HROUGH 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.

•  •  •

C
ENTRAAL 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.

E
VENTUALLY 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.

A
LONG 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.