The Riders (24 page)

‘Souvenir,' she breathed.

Scully felt his boot go back. His leg. Felt himself adjusting his balance to kick her, the way you might kick down a toadstool in a winter paddock, turning it into a noxious cloud of shit in a second, and then he saw the look of fear and exultant expectation on the woman's face and felt sick to his bladder. He staggered, bringing himself short, and almost fell on her.

‘Gutless, gutless!' she hissed.

Scully reversed out of the cabin as though pressing back into a cold wind.

‘She was beautiful!' Irma yelled. ‘They spoke French. They were checking out, Scully. She was soooo beautiful. I can see why she made the choice. I saw them! I
saw
them!'

He bounced off the walls of the corridor, her voice chasing him from every direction, and up against the firehose in a rusty
recess he listened to the shocking sound of his heart in his ears, shaming him with every beat.

In the lounge, Billie and the barman looked up in alarm and curiosity. Irma was screaming back there, hollow and faint. Scully swung the luggage into a booth, stood panting beside it and sat down sweating, nursing his fists like stones on the sticky table.

T
HE SOLDIERS STAND MOTIONLESS
 . . . Quasimodo's one eye gleams wildly. They are held at bay for a moment . . . until one of the more adventurous men can stand it no longer . . .

Out on the deck, in the fine cold, Billie read her comic and plugged her ears with her thumbs. Now that was a tantrum down there. The Hunchback bounded and raved, cried and shook and poured his bubbling lead down upon the mad masses of Paris. Sailors went bucketing downstairs to see what all the noise was, and Billie read on. It was even a bit funny. But Scully wasn't laughing. He looked shocking.

In the end it went quiet and birds landed on deck. She squeezed Scully's hand and tried not to feel the tight burning of her face. Boiling lead. The bells going mad. She knew this story like a song.

A while after Irma gave in and shut up, after passengers quit giving him the evil eye in his seat in the lee of the lifeboats, Scully felt Billie at his side nudging him out of his stupor. Out there, in the late afternoon gloom, the forts and rocks and lights – the
houses of Brindisi winking their languid green and gold – raised a cheer from travellers at the rail.

Scully gathered up their gear and bullocked a path toward the exit companionway. It took a cruel time for the engine vibrations to change pitch, a hard foetid wait wondering where Irma was in the shoving crowd but the great hatch finally did crack open and Scully and Billie were amongst the first on the dock. The sun was down beyond the drab blocks of the town's monuments and the quay was grey and close with the shunt and stink of travellers. Everywhere you looked there were people moving and waiting, watching, many of them without any obvious purpose or destination. They were faceless in the bad light, and sinister. Scully knew right off, clasping Billie's hand and surging ahead blindly, that he wouldn't stay in this town. He needed a shower and a sleep and they both wanted a quiet place to lie down but Scully knew they would have to keep travelling. Maybe his nerves were buggered and he was imagining a threat that didn't exist here, but he wanted the first train out of here. Somewhere behind was Irma, and she was enough excuse to keep going.

Up in the streets there were backpackers and vagrants dossing down for the night in cardboard and torn blankets and bright nylon sleeping bags. Monoxide hung between buildings. Garbage crackled underfoot. Scully kept a straight tack up the main drag, feeling her bounce and lag beside him. Everyone seemed to move in the same direction, from the wharf upward, so he kept on.

‘What is this?' Billie asked.

‘It's Hell,' said Scully.

‘No, that's underground.'

‘Well this is Hell's penthouse suite, Bill,' he murmured. ‘Ah, see,
STAZIONE
, that's the stuff. Quick, this way.'

‘Where's Irma?'

‘Way back.'

‘What a tantrum. I feel sorry for her.'

‘Don't bother.'

‘She's like Alex.'

Scully felt a stab at the thought of Alex. Maybe they'd buried him already, the great bearded priests singing dubiously over him, the cats prowling between the headstones behind them. How long had it been? Two days? Three?

He shrugged off touts and buskers as they came to the station, Billie pressed to his side. Scully hissed at anyone who came near. He felt a wild fervour, a queer joy as people made way, sensing that this madman would head-butt and bite his way clear if need be. People's skin was sallow, their teeth wayward. It was a lunatic asylum in here. Timetables rolled and clattered above their heads. Scully looked for any destination north, anything leaving soon, but there was only Rome at seven-thirty. A ninety-minute wait. It wasn't ideal but he changed some money and bought two tickets for Rome. At the kiosk he bought a week-old
Herald Tribune.
People swirled aimlessly about them, pressing, surging, crying out and spitting.

‘I'm hungry,' said Billie.

‘Okay, let's get some spaghetti,' said Scully hoisting her up out of the human current. ‘God, let's just get out of here.'

•  •  •

B
ILLIE SAW
S
CULLY WINDING DOWN
like that organ grinder's music out there in the street. All the wildness was gone now. He just tooled with some bread in a little puddle of wine and said nothing. He was awake but nearly switched off. She sucked up some spaghetti. It wasn't as good as he made. Anyway she could taste the antiseptic ointment on everything. It seemed a
long time ago that she had spaghetti made by him. Out the window in the lights of the street the grinder's monkey scratched himself and tipped his head at her. The holes in her head throbbed like music.

‘What country is this?'

‘Italy,' said Scully.

‘So they speak -?'

‘Italian.'

‘What town?'

‘Brindisi.'

‘Is it all like this?'

‘Italy, I've only ever passed through. No, we stayed in Florence a couple of days, remember?'

Billie shook her head. There were too many places. Stations, airports, the flat heads of taxi drivers. She remembered Hydra and Paris and Alan's house, but other places were just like television, like they weren't for real. And that house, that little house Scully made was all in a fog, blurry, swirling, like the cloud that came down on her head when she thought of the plane. The steamy hot towels the stewards brought. The toilet light going off.
Her
coming, so beautiful down the aisle. Hair all stuck back like perfect. The white neck, so white . . . and the cloud coming down.

‘All the statues have little dicks,' she said.

‘I didn't notice. Wipe your face, you've got sauce all over your chin.'

‘Why doesn't that monkey run away?'

He looked at the monkey in the funny suit on the grinder's box. ‘Maybe he's too scared.'

‘Doesn't look scared.'

‘Maybe he needs the dough,' he said, trying to crack a smile.

Billie thought of all those people on the wharf and in the skinny streets. Like the ones you see in Paris, in the Metro and the hot air holes lying on boxes and sleeping bags.

‘Are we going to be beggars?'

‘No, love.'

‘We haven't got much money anymore, have we.'

‘I've got a card.' He got out his wallet, the one with the picture she didn't want to see. He held up the little plastic card. ‘I can get money with it, see?'

‘They should give them to beggars. Jesus would give em cards, right?'

‘Spose. Yeah. I have to pay the money back later. It can be scary. People go crazy with them.'

‘It wouldn't help Irma.'

He just looked out the window at that and didn't want to talk. He had a good heart, her dad, but maybe it wasn't big enough for Irma.

T
HE TRAIN PULLED OUT INTO
the darkness. Billie tried to get comfortable. She bumped Scully's newspaper and he sighed. People murmured. Some had pillows and eyepatches. Lights, houses, roads began to fall by. Trains weren't so bad. You could see you were getting somewhere in a train, even at night like this, the darkness just a tunnel out there with you shooting through, roaring and clattering and bouncing through like a stone in a pipe, like the stone Billie felt in her heart now, trying to think of something good, something she could remember that wouldn't make her afraid to remember. Past the cloud. The white neck, she saw. So suddenly white as if the tan had been scrubbed out in the aeroplane toilet. Beautiful skin. The veins as she sits down. Skin blue with veins. Like marble. And talking now, mouth moving tightly. Cheeks stretched. Hair perfect. But the words lost in the roar, the huge stadium sound in Billie's ears as the cloud comes down, like smoke down the aisle, rolling across them, blotting the war memorial look of her mother in blinding quiet.

•  •  •

S
CULLY HID BEHIND
the
Herald Tribune
and tried to get a grip. But he was studying the reflections of the other passengers as though Irma might be among them. He was going mad, surely. He wasn't heading anywhere, he had no purpose – he was just going. Come to think of it he envied Irma her performance on the ferry. Kicking and screaming, head-butting the walls. Some total frigging indecorum, he could do with it. No, too tired. He didn't have a clue what he was up to. Funny, really, he was just going. Travelling. For the sake of it. It actually made him grin.

The paper fell in a crumple. Night warped by. It could have been anywhere out there. The mere movement of the train was soothing. Billie slept like a dog beside him. He saw himself in the glass smiling dumbly. A boy's face in a steel milk bucket. The face of a boy who likes cows, reflected in the still oval of milk – white, dreamsome, sleepy milk.

•  •  •

B
ILLIE WOKE FOR A WHILE
in the night and watched the land and lights slipping by. It meant nothing to her, it had no name, no place that she could see. It was like the walls of a long tunnel just going by and by. She wondered about Granma Scully, if maybe she would come to live with them now in that little dolls' house. It was just country out there, more country. She thought of wide, eye-aching spaces of brown grass with wind running rashes through it and big puddles of sheep as big as the shadows of clouds creeping along toward lonely gum trees. That was a sight she could get hold of. Or the back step at Fremantle where the snails queued up to die by the tap. The sight of Rottnest Island hovering over the ocean like a UFO in the distance.
She went to sleep again, thinking of the island hovering there, like a piece of Australia too light to stay on the water.

•  •  •

C
OFFEE AND ROLLS CAME BY
at dawn and Scully bought breakfast for them, but Billie slept on twitchy as a terrier. Towns were becoming suburbs out there in the dirty light. Time to freshen up, beat the queues. He clambered into the aisle. It was hard work picking his way through the outflung legs of sleepers. The whole car stank of bad breath and cheap coffee. He had his hand on the latch of the toilet door when he saw her through the glass partition between carriages. Second row, aisle seat. Totally out to it. Mouth open slackly, head back, leg twisted out into the traffic. Two grimy runs of mascara down her cheeks. Irma.

He stood there a moment in awe. Yes, she was something else, something else entirely. You could almost admire her doggedness – until you thought of her souveniring your daughter's underpants.

He went back down the aisle tripping on the ugly mounds of rancid backpacks and mattress rolls, stockinged feet, hiking boots, slip-ons. The train plunged and juddered. He snatched down their luggage and hoisted Billie to his shoulder. It took sea legs to move through the gut of that train, through doors and curtains of smoke, past suit bags and monogrammed luggage, around suitcases with wheels.

The toilet in first class was quiet and roomy. Scully sat on the closed lid of the seat with Billie still asleep on his lap and the genteel passengers of first class queuing patiently outside. In time the train slowed, but Scully's mind racketed on. Hit the ground running, he thought. Hit it running.

•  •  •

R
OMA
T
ERMINI WAS A VAST
chamber of shouts and echoes, metal shrieks and crashes of trolleys as Scully and Billie ran through the mob of beseechers and luggage grabbers toward the
INFORMAZIONE
office in the main hall. Scully felt smelly and gritty and wrinkled as he scanned the weird computer board that flashed messages in all languages.

‘Inglese?'
Called a thin dark woman from the counter behind them.

‘
Oui,
' said Scully, panting. ‘
Si,
yes, English.'

He saw the destinations reeling off before him.

8.10 Berne

8.55 Lyon (Part-Dieu)

7.05 Munich

8.10 Nice

7.20 Vienna

7.20 Florence

He looked at his watch. It was 7.02. Too long to wait for Nice or Lyons. Irma was out there somewhere. Wheels yammered on the hard floor. Over the PA a man spoke tonelessly. Along the counter two backpackers argued, grey with fatigue. It had to be the first train north. He opened his wallet.

‘Two tickets for Florence, one adult one child, second class. Please. No, make that first class.'

He slapped the American Express card down and the attendant smiled indulgently.

‘The vacation is a big hurry, sir.'

‘Yes, a helluva hurry. Which track, uh, which
binari
Firenze?'

‘Train EC30. You will see it.'

‘Thank you.
Grazie.'

‘Prego.
Sir? Sir?'