The Riders (15 page)

‘Why don't you just tell me what's going on, Arthur?'

‘Why don't you get off my sodding back and find out for yourself? Where did you come from?'

‘Ireland.'

‘To do this?' Arthur waved his cigar at the empty taverna. ‘To make a fool of yourself?'

‘I've always been a fool to you people.'

‘It's only that you were such a terrible working-class puritan, Scully. It embarrasses you to see people having a good time and not paying for their sins.'

‘Most of you can't seem to pay for your drinks, forget sins.'

‘An insecure man is never a heartwarming sight. Less than sparkling company you might say.'

‘Fuck you, Arthur.'

‘Feed your child.'

Arthur stuck the Havana back in his mouth, gathered up his week-old copy of the
Sunday Times
, and left them there with Sofia studying father and child coolly from behind the counter.

F
ATHER AND DAUGHTER SAT IN
the sun on the terrace at the Lyko with plates of calamari, tzatziki and salad barely disturbed before them. Scully bought the food to placate Sofia after driving her custom away with his presence, and besides it was time they both ate, but his gut was tight and acidic and Billie merely picked at a piece of bread, legs dangling lank from her chair. Water flapped at the sea wall. Across the little harbour a donkey bawled itself hoarse.

‘What d'you think, Billie? You think they know? Of course they know. See how they look at us – we're a bloody embarrassment.'

Billie's eyes passed over him a moment, and then she looked away past the mole where a man in a little wooden boat was jigging for squid.

What the hell is the woman doing? he thought. I'm here, I came, and every bastard on the island is watching me squirm. What else does she want? What have I done? What can I do? Give me a clue, something to go on.

Just after one o'clock, Scully ordered a half jug of
kokkineli
and a Milko for Billie. They sipped without speaking as curious islanders sauntered by, shaking their heads. The resinated rosé soothed him a moment.

Wait it out, he told himself. Calm down. Give her time. Just being here is enough for now. Sit tight.

At two, Billie shucked back her chair and went inside to the toilet. Christ, why wouldn't she speak to him? He hurled his glass out into the harbour and sat back. He ate some squid, sponged up a little of the yoghurty dip with the bread, and thought back on his life here with Jennifer to find a wrinkle in things, something that might have brought this on. He'd been patient here. It was easy to be patient in a place you loved, but he honestly believed that he'd acted well here. It wasn't like Paris where he was being ground to a pulp by the city itself, but even in Paris he'd made no waves for her sake. London was the same. Hell, it was always the same; he was always ready to give way for her sake. He loved her. That was all it came down to. In Greece it was easy to love her, easy to wait for her to find whatever it was that might let her relax at last and be herself.

Hadn't they been happy, the three of them?

Look at this place! A world without cars, without paperwork, without a calendar half the time, amongst good simple people who were content to live and let live. Old Fotis the stonemason was a gentle taskmaster and the work was satisfying and inconstant. There were long days on the pebble beach for just the three of them, the mountain walks, mosquito coil evenings out on the terrace with muscat grapes heavy overhead and the rats riffling through like relatives. Long letters home, endless meals, collaborations on the Mickey Mouse colouring book and readings from Jules Verne. There was the golden colour of their always bare skin. Songs. Silly moments. There was the day Billie learnt
to swim, like a Sunday School miracle. In the afternoons he would come down from the mountain where that great house was taking shape in the side of the cliff, to the cool terrace of their place by the shore where a few cold bottles of Amstel waited and Jennifer and Alex wound up the day's lesson. Billie coming in from the Up School on the horse with the neighbours' boys. Oh, yeah, they'd been happy or he was worse than stupid.

He was even more or less happy about Alex and the daily painting lesson which kept the old fart in drinking money. Alex Moore. Worthless, as Scully's mother would have said, but likeable enough. His paintings hung in some good American collections, but all Scully could go on were the canvasses from the sixties that he saw in some of the bigger expat houses on the island. They were better than good, as far as anyone who had finished high school in his twenties and bombed out of university could tell. Alex had pissed it all away and had done nothing but cadge and bludge and weasle and whine since men first went to the moon.

Having the smoke-cured old blight there every day and for half their meals took some taking, it was true, but Jennifer felt she was getting somewhere. She was so infectiously excited that Scully simply wore it. The house at the edge of the sea soothed him. She came to bed at night with the sweet musk of ouzo on her breath and the creamy moonlight on the sheets and they made love like in the old days.

Looking back, Scully saw nothing to strike a real note of warning. True, he occasionally argued with Arthur or one of the expats' summer friends, and he was cranky when the
meltemi
blew its guts out in August, but then everyone was shitty with chalk in their eyes and the sea too dangerous to swim in, and the heat sucking the sweat from you.

Billie returned from the toilet. She had splashed her face with water and her cotton sweater was blotched with it. She moved her sneakers in small circles on the smooth flags.

Scully sat with the taste of resin in his mouth and tried to think. He hated to drink wine during the day. It did exactly this, it stopped your brain.

Just then, Arthur came wheezing back along the wharf, his white ducks sweaty and soup stained.

‘Sofia's trying to shut up shop, Scully.'

‘Hmm?'

‘It's afternoon. She wants a rest. You're sitting out here like yesterday's milk.'

‘I fed my child.'

Arthur sat down. ‘What the sodding hell has happened to you?'

Scully smiled and ran his fingers through a puddle of
kokkineli
on the pine tabletop. ‘That's what I'm here to find out, Arthur.'

‘Get back on the hydrofoil, save yourself a horrible scene.'

‘Now why did Rory leave in such a hurry this morning, you think?'

‘Because he's vain. He was terrified you'd mar his great asset.'

‘Mar, now there's a word.'

‘There's a hydrofoil at six.'

‘I wouldn't have thought Rory, though.'

‘Rory is a dung beetle.'

‘You're quite right, no change. I don't suppose she's up at Lotte's?'

Arthur closed his eyes against him.

‘You're not going to tell, then.'

‘Oh, for Christ's sake, there's nothing I can tell you but get off this island for everybody's sake.'

Scully's head pounded. Some shadow flickered at the back of his mind, something trying to get his attention, but it just wouldn't come. He kept seeing Alex's yellow face, his long smoky forelock.

‘Tell me, where's Alex these days? It's not like him to mar a gathering by his absence.'

Arthur's teeth met beneath his moustache in a click audible enough to startle Billie. A raw nerve there, to say the least.

‘He's not keeping company, just at the moment.'

‘You're kidding. Has the world gone mad?'

‘He's up the mountain.'

‘Now you're just winging it, Arthur.'

‘Shut up, Scully.'

‘It's just that it's a long way from a taverna, isn't it.'

‘That's the point.'

‘He's quit drinking?'

‘Well, it remains to be seen. He's looking after the place you and Fotis built for Bertie's Athenian chum.'

‘Up at Episkopi.'

‘Don't go up there.'

Arthur put a hand on Billie's head with a look of real pity. His skin was smooth and deeply tanned, and with his down- turned moustache he was like a great seal shining there in the sun.

‘Arthur, what do you mean, don't go up there?'

‘I mean, don't go up there! Have the Irish turned you stupid already?'

‘Is he alone?'

‘Sofia wants you to go.'

Scully slapped some money down and stood up. Billie got up mechanically beside him.

‘Go home, boy.'

Scully mouthed that word. Home. He wasn't sure where it was just at the present.

‘How long have you been here, Arthur?'

‘Thirty years. You know that.'

‘Did you stay too long, you think?'

‘That remains to be seen.'

‘You remain to be seen.'

‘I do at that. That's my achievement.'

‘Not everybody remains to be seen, Arthur. Like my wife. She did not remain and neither is she seen. By me, anyway. Every other bastard seems to have a secret, though.'

‘You're drunk.'

‘No, but I'm unsteady. C'mon, Billie.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘Oh, probably back to the hotel. Siesta, you know.'

‘Six o'clock, the boat goes.'

‘I won't be on it.'

‘For Christ's sake, don't go up there!'

•  •  •

S
CULLY LED
B
ILLIE UP
D
ONKEYSHIT
Lane into the maze of houses, steps and alleys built vertically into the hill. They were like teeth in the jaw of the mountain, these houses whose whitewashed walls and bright-painted doors hid lush courtyards and shadowy cellars, whose glossy blue shutters lay ajar for the quiet rest of afternoon. On a small terrace before a taverna that bore no name, they came upon a chained dog that broke Billie from her trancelike gait.

She veered to where it stood beneath a bare fig tree. The dog watched her a moment, ears up, but sank back onto its haunches as she came close. It was the poor dog from the hydrofoil. Scully
recognised the Shepherd and its owner who came out sweeping expressionlessly onto the terrace.

‘Kalimera!'
said Scully.

The woman stopped, inclined her head toward him and went on sweeping. The taverna was closed. Its geraniums stood naked in olive oil tins on the terrace.

Billie patted the dog on the snout and the two of them walked on up the hill, climbing toward the street of the Sweet Wells and the great houses from the buccaneering days of the last century. At Kala Pigadia they found level ground awhile and saw the harbour and its terracotta roofs far below. They walked on past the sound of hens laying behind rubble walls, past a tethered horse and three scrofulous cats eating from the same upturned bin. House shutters were closed and no people were about as they moved along the spine of the mountain and the ridge of ruined mansions that had begun to fall, piece by piece, into the long scree gully that twisted down to the village and marina of Kamini. The air was cooler up here, the Saronic Gulf a mere strip of sea below. Classroom chants floated across the wall of the Up School. Billie pressed her hand against the rubble parapet and listened. He could only wonder what she was thinking. He let her stay till she'd had enough. He said nothing. What could you say? Soon they came to the old people's home with the soughing eucalyptus outside the gate, and then the walls became farm walls, cemetery walls as the land above and below the smooth stone road became orchard and field and the steps began to fall away before them.

Scully just followed his feet. The fields, steep and riven between the trackless bluffs of the mountains, had gone green and were tufted with wildflowers. There were stone sheep folds with thornbrush gates like pictures from a kid's Bible. Shepherds'
huts lay tucked into hollows. A breeze cooled the sweat off their brows as Scully and Billie followed the path down through the rugged gorge country where the breeze became a wind in their faces, funnelled between haggard cliffs and balding bluffs, gulched and rock-strewn all the way down to the tiny village of Vlikos where a dozen whitewashed houses found the water's edge. Scully felt it press into his cheeks, that wind, as he followed Billie beneath the familiar ruin of the stone bridge to the bottom of the scree gully where a donkey stood tethered to a lone pine and boats lay upturned like steeping turtles on the stony beach.

The emotions came like a fresh gust. He was thankful for the closed shutters of the siesta, to be able to pass through unseen and unjudged on the clay track between the houses of his old neighbours. But he paused a moment outside the place with the dark green shutters, knowing Billie would anyway.

The rocky yard fell away to the water in a maze of apricot, almond and plum trees. The figs were finished, the grapes and olives also. Four rivergums sprawled ironically in the ravine beside the house where they once hurled coffee grounds and olive seeds from the terrace of an evening. Sultry nights when bouzouki music trailed across the water from fishing boats and the mauve mass of the Peloponnese glowed on after sunset with the fires of the charcoalers. Just on dark he would climb from the water, his spear catching whatever lights were on, with a bag of octopus or a groper-like
rofos
with its gills still heaving. The air sharp with smoking grills and laughter from other houses.

Scully picked his way alone down the little ravine. Billie stayed up on the path, biting her lips, watching him creep across the dry, crackling ground beside the old house, up to the green shutters, up against the window itself. He crept in under the trellis of the bare grapevine, his heart mad in his neck. The granite terrace,
the cubic substance of the whole house and its mirror shadow. A conspiratorial shush from the shorebreak below, the tumble of pebbles. Hadn't they been happy here? After all the bedsits and borrowed apartments and shitty pensiones, hadn't this been the dream place? So like home, and yet fresh, clear, new.