The Riders (25 page)

‘Yes?'

‘You must write your name. Sign. I have your card.'

‘Oh, yes, what a hurry. What a holiday this is!' Billie rolled her eyes. He suppressed a hysterical giggle. He was losing his marbles.

•  •  •

A
S THE COUNTRY SOFTENED INTO
villages, muddy fields and bare trees, Scully and Billie stretched in their empty compartment with the sweat still drying on them. The upholstery of their long opposing benches was bum-shiny and cool. The air was tart as it rushed in the window. A giddy kind of relief came upon him as the train picked up speed. The sky was low and marbled, black, grey, white, pierced by poplars and the spires of little churches. The land was eked out between stone walls and graveyards, the squiggles of lanes. There was a softness out there, a picturebook safety in the landscape that soothed him. Like Ireland, Brittany. That time, the three of them and Dominique on the omnibus in the Breton farmlands. Scully had the same feeling looking out on it. Everything that there is to be done has been done here. This land will not eat me. It was land with the bridle on, the saddle cinched. In Brittany he found it sad, the loss of wildness, but today, looking out upon the soft swelling hills and symmetrical woodlands he felt his whole body unwinding with gratitude at the arrival of mere prettiness.

Billie squeezed his hand. He sprawled out on his seat, his first-class seat, and smiled.

‘I was worried about you,' she said.

He raised her hand to his lips. ‘Why, Miss, I do thank you.'

‘Urk, boy bugs!'

‘Get a doctor!'

And for a moment, for a longer moment than he believed
possible, they laughed together with their feet all over the upholstery. The feeling burned on warmly after they lapsed into silence. Billie took up her dogeared comic. He found his
Herald Tribune.
The train jogged and weaved, labouring into the hills.

•  •  •

F
EELING THE TRAIN SLOW ON
the steep incline, Billie looked up from Quasimodo and saw an amazing thing. A funny sound came out of her throat as she looked out of the rainstreaked window and saw two boys on horses galloping along the tracks, just behind. Boys, not men. Their hair streamed wet, dancing like the dark manes of the horses as they gained on the train. Trees blurred past. Their parkas bubbled and billowed, hoods bouncing on the back of their necks. Their feet were bare. Billie saw the horses without saddles. She pressed up against the glass as they drew alongside. Gypsy boys, for sure they were gypsies. Their white teeth flashed in smiles. The muscles in the horses' flanks pumped like machinery. It was beautiful – all of it was beautiful, and they saw her.

‘Look! Look!'

Scully sat up, surfacing like a swimmer from his reverie, and the sight made him recoil in shock. The bulging glass eyes of horses. Mud rising in black beads against their bellies. The bare feet of boys. Their knees pinched high on their mounts, manes twisted expertly in their fingers. Scully saw the rain peeling off their faces, off the dun hoods of their rough coats, and their eyes upon him, black and knowing. Perilously close to the rails, they beckoned, each with a grimy hand outstretched, palm upward. Grinning. Madly grinning.

Scully wrenched the shutter down.

‘No!'

Billie scrabbled at the handle until it ricked up again. The riders made a jump, a straining leap across a low wall, making arrows of themselves in the air and an eruption of mud on the other side. They gained again, drawing up beside Billie's window. Their hands were out bravely across the smear of the rails.

‘Jesus Christ!' said Scully.

She saw him turn away, then back again.

Scully saw the blood along the horses' flanks where tree branches had left their mark. He was cold right through, slipping, sinking. Icy. He saw the insistence of the outstretched hands, the menace in the gaze. Even in the wicked bend of the crest they kept on, riding without fear, summoning, demanding, begging until he closed his eyes against them and felt the new momentum of the train in the downward run.

Billie waved as they fell back, her heart racing wonderfully. The gouged walls of an embankment filled the window and they were gone. She pressed her palm against the cold glass. Scully lay back licking his chapped lips. Billie felt lightheaded. Her head thumped. She touched him but he flinched.

‘They were only boys,' she said. ‘Just silly boys.' Peter Pan boys. Show offs. And they saw her.

O
UT OF THE RUMOURS OF
places, of the red desert spaces where heat is born, a wind comes hard across the capstone country of juts and bluffs, pressing heathland flat in withering bursts. Only modest undulations are left here. Land is peeled back to bedrock, to ancient, stubborn remains that hold fast in the continental gusts. Pollen, locusts, flies, red sand travel on the heat, out across the plains and gullies and momentary outposts to the glistening mouth of the sea. And in sight of cities, towers, the bleak shifting monuments of dunes, the wind dies slowly meeting the cool offshore trough of air, stalls the carriage of so much cargo. The sea shivers and becomes varicose with change and in the gentle pause it clouds with the billion spinning, tiny displaced things which twitch and flay and sink a thousand miles from home. Fish rise as blown sparks from the deep itching with the change. Sand, leaves, twigs, seeds, insects and even exhausted birds rain down upon the fish who surge in schools and alone, their fins laid back with acceleration as they lunge and turn and break open the water's crust to gulp the richness of the sky, filling their bellies with land. And behind them others come, slick and
pelagic to turn the water pink with death and draw birds from the invisible distance who crash the surface and spear meat and wheel in a new falling cloud upon the ocean. Out at the perimeter a lone fish, big as a man, twists out into the air, its eye black with terror as it cartwheels away from its own pursuer. There is no ceasing.

I
N
F
LORENCE THEY FOUND A
hotel near the Duomo with slick terrazzo floors and window shutters that peeled into the narrow street. The city air was fat with taxi horns and rain. Bells rang in towers and domes. The plumbing chimed in sympathy, and from below came the smells of espresso coffee, salami and baking bread.

Scully filled a bath and washed their clothes in shampoo. He scrubbed shirts and pounded jeans, rinsed rancid socks over and over and hung it all from shutters and radiators to drip dry. They climbed naked into their separate beds and listened to the plip of water on the floor. For a while they looked at one another, not speaking. Light fell in bands across the bed linen. Before long they slept, surrounded by the shades of their steaming clothes.

It was late in the day when they woke. Billie woke first. She felt shimmery. Her head felt bigger. She pulled a blanket around herself and sat flicking through their passports. She looked at their big, round, happy faces and all the stamps in weird languages. She was smaller in her photo. She liked how smiley they were in their old faces. Scully got up. She watched him brush his
teeth till the toothpaste turned pink. He didn't look in the mirror. His bum wobbled and his nuts rattled stupidly. When Scully was in the nude he didn't care. It was because he wasn't beautiful. Only beautiful people cared.

•  •  •

O
UTSIDE IT WASN'T RAINING
but the city was wintry and dim. In a self-service place they ate pasta and bread. It was steamy and full of clatter. Chairs scraped on the floor. People shouted and laughed.

Afterwards they just walked. On a bridge there was something like a little town where African people, black people, sold shirts and watches laid out on the wet stones. Across the river they walked in pretty gardens and climbed to a fort that looked like the wrecked castle in Ireland. All across the roofs of the city were pigeons and the sound of bells.

Scully walked along with the kid feeling lightly stitched together, as though the slightest wind would send him cartwheeling. It was quiet between them. They merely pointed or tilted their heads at things, thinking their own thoughts. He wondered where the nearest airport was and whether there was credit left on the Amex card. He felt strangely peaceful. The muddy Arno rolled by. The Ponte Vecchio lighting up the dusk.

They walked in their case-wrinkled clothes past Italians who looked like magazine covers. Dagger heels, glistening tights, steel creases, coats you could lie down and sleep on. Their shoes were outrageous, their peachy arses, male and female, like works of art. Women ran their lacquered nails through Billie's hair and Scully stared at their glossy lips.
Buon Giorno.

Billie saw him in the lights of shop windows. He looked dreamy but his blood was back.

‘All for one,' she said.

‘And one for all.'

•  •  •

B
EFORE BED
B
ILLIE CUT HER
toenails with the little scissors in Scully's pocket knife. He lay on his bed. Their washed clothes were half dry. All the edges of Billie's eyes, everything she saw had a shiny edge to it. While he lay there she clipped his toenails, too and marvelled at the glowingness of things.

•  •  •

U
P IN THE FIG TREE
with Marmi Watson from next door balancing beside her, Billie pointed down the street to the figure striding along, briefcase swinging, legs scissored, hair falling black from her neck. Afternoon light in her eyes.

‘Look,' she murmured proudly. ‘That's my mum. Just look at that.'

•  •  •

‘A
LL FOR ONE
!'
THEY SAID
, the three of them on the bare floor of the Paris apartment. ‘And one for all!' Laughing themselves silly in the mess, laughing, laughing.

•  •  •

I
N THE WEAK HEATLESS LIGHT
of the piazza next day the kid didn't look so great. Scully didn't like the new pucker of her wounds. They seemed moist long after he bathed them. Billie refused to wear her hat but didn't complain of any pain. She seemed in fair spirits. He watched her feed crumbs to the pigeons. He tried not to bug her with conversation. But he resolved to get
a list of English-speaking doctors at the American Express office when he went in to check the state of his account. He wondered if the damp had gotten back into the bothy. Winter solstice. How did the Slieve Blooms look today? He felt odd. Disconnected from himself. Yesterday and today. Without pain – almost without feeling. It was like having come through a tunnel, a roaring, blind, buffeting place and come out into the light unsure for a while, if all of you was intact. The disbelief of the survivor.

The bells of the Duomo tolled into the china bowl of the sky. He looked up at the gorgeous cupola. Look at that. It wasn't just love that flunked him out of architecture – it was visions like this, signs across the centuries that told him to give up and stop pretending. The world could do without his shopping malls, his passive solar bungalows. If it wasn't the gap of greatness, then nature would sap the remains of your pride. A drive out to the Olgas, to Ayer's Rock, to a terracotta polis of termite mounds, to the white marble plain of any two-cent salt lake would cure your illusions. Scully had no room left for illusions. What more could be beaten out of him?

•  •  •

D
OWN BY THE
P
ITTI
P
ALACE
, the Amex office smelt of flowers and paper and damp coats. They were hallowed, frightening places to Scully. Behind glass and wood and carpet, so much power. Queues of smooth, confident men in pinstripes. The well- oiled clack of briefcases. The casual shifting of currencies and information. The instantaneous nature of things. Like a pagan temple. Scully clutched his precious plastic card. Billie hooked a finger through his belt loop. Gently, conscious of the impression
they were already making, he pressed the hat onto her head to cover the worst of her wounds. Cowed by the smell of aftershave, he found his Allied Irish chequebook, and brushed at the creases in his shirt. In five languages, all around, people bought insurance, travellers' cheques, guidebooks, package tours, collected mail, flaunted their mobility.

Cash the cheque, he thought. Pray it doesn't bounce. And the list of doctors.

Billie scuffed her RM's in the carpet. He would give up soon – she could feel his key winding down since yesterday. The money burred down on the counter at the level of her nose, she felt the wind of it against her hot cheeks. That little bed in the attic. A horse. A castle.

‘And a telegram for you, Mr Scully.'

Billie felt his knee jump against her. She let go his belt loop and watched how carefully he opened the envelope. The money still there on the counter, and people in the queue behind them clucking with irritation.

‘Billie?'

She grabbed the money and tugged at him. He smiled. It was a look you wanted to Ajax off his face with a wire brush. She pulled him back from the counter to the rear where old people argued over their maps and kicked their luggage.

‘Just let me read it again,' he said vaguely, but she snatched it from him and pressed it flat on a low table.

SCULLY. MEET TUILERIES FOUNTAIN NOON DECEMBER 23. COME ALONE. WILL EXPLAIN. JENNIFER.

It was hard to breathe, looking at it. Not even the bit about him going alone. Just the idea, like a rock falling from the sky. The wickedness of it. It made Billie's chest hurt, as if she'd gulped
onion soup so hot it was cooking her gizzards.

‘She shouldn't be allowed,' she whispered.

The Tuileries. Paris. The part near the English bookshop. All the white gravel. Where she collected chestnuts and made a bag out of her scarf. Paris. It wasn't fair.

Her mother.

Questions hung like shadows behind Scully's head. His thoughts went everywhere and no place. Blasts, flickers, comets of thought. A miscarriage, a bleed contained. Missed calls and telegrams. Had she wired every Amex office in Europe to find him? Was she frightened and desperate, circumstances piling up, fear taking her whole body? Could she perhaps believe for a moment that he mightn't come? That he'd passed a point somehow. Oh God, was she feeling pain and panic like him, aching even in sleep for a break in the smothering static, simply not knowing? Chasing
them?
How little had they missed each other by? How would they find the distance to laugh about this later, at the comic weirdness of it, taking for granted the great terrifying leaps they'd come to so casually make from time zones and continents, seasons, languages, spaces. You forget so quickly the teetering bloody peril of movement, of travel. The lifting of your feet from the earth.