The Riders (29 page)

Marianne sighed. ‘Why did you come to Europe, Scully?'

‘For her,' he said. ‘Both times.'

‘It's very touching,' she said doubtfully.

No, he thought, it's fucking pitiful.

Both of them flinched when the phone rang. Marianne clutched the benchtop, nails shining, and let it ring until the answering machine kicked in. Scully knew the voice.

‘Why don't you answer it?' he murmured.

‘I have visitors,' she hissed.

The message was breathy and urgent, the French way too fast for him.

Dominique. He reached for the phone but Marianne kicked the socket out of the wall.

‘She does not need to talk to you.'

Scully took a step back from her, his fists hanging off his arms. He saw a pulse in Marianne's throat. Then Billie came in behind him. She pressed against him, held him round the waist and he felt the heat of her through his clothing, across the flush of his fury.

‘Marianne, I need a doctor. I'm here because Billie's got a fever. Will you please,
please
give me a number. Someone who has English, someone close.'

For a while Marianne stood there, arms folded as though to
keep herself together. Scully felt the lightheadedness of real hatred. He was almost disappointed when she reached over to the Rolodex and flicked through it with trembling hands.

‘I will call,' she murmured. ‘It will be faster for you.'

‘Thank you,' he said, unable to refrain.

‘Y
OU SAW THE PAPERWORK ON
the dog?'

The doctor already had a syringe out. Billie lay on the table, face averted. Scully stood by her, his hand on the radiant nape of her neck.

‘Yes.'

‘You read Greek?'

‘I had a Greek reader with me.'

‘This is Flucloxacillin,' said the doctor tapping the syringe, his silver specs glinting under the lights. His accent was American but his body language was European. He even pouted like a Frenchman. ‘This should get it, this and the course of tabs. When was her last tetanus shot?'

‘At five. I have the certificate.'

Billie inhaled sharply and squeezed his hand. Scully felt sweat settle in his hair.

‘There you go, Billie. Not so bad, huh? Here, Dad'll help you with your jeans.'

Billie rolled carefully onto her back, blinking back tears.

‘She's brave,' said Scully, for her benefit.

‘You're South African?'

‘No.'

Scully kissed her hand, let her lie there a moment while the doctor disposed of his tray.

‘Five days, you say.'

‘Yes. I had to use steri-strips.'

‘Well, you could have done worse, I guess. Lucky the big one's above the hairline.'

‘Yes.'

‘Gimme your address again,' he said, hovering at his desk.

Scully gave him the old St Paul address, suddenly suspicious.

‘You see out of that eye?'

‘Most of the time.'

‘How'd it happen?'

The doctor came back with some fresh dressings. Billie squirmed as he sponged away the clear seepage of her puckered wounds.

‘Industrial accident,' said Scully. ‘On a boat.'

‘Uh-huh.' The quack wasn't buying it. ‘How do you make your living, Mr Scully?'

‘I'm a builder.'

‘You have a
carte du sejour
, then.'

Scully smiled. The doctor washed his hands and peeled off his specs, tilting his head gravely.

‘How about seeing me again tomorrow?'

‘Thought you'd be all booked up, Christmas Eve.'

‘No, tomorrow's good.'

‘No problem,' said Scully, helping Billie down from the table.

The doctor proffered the prescription. His smooth hands were neatly manicured. Scully took the papers, seeing it in the other man's face. Tomorrow was something else altogether. He thinks
you did it, Scully. The wounds, the grazed knees. He thinks you're scum, that you're not fit to be a father. And how wrong is he? Really, how wrong?

‘There's a pharmacy on the corner. Then straight to bed for you, my girl. Plenty of fluids. Nurse will set your appointment.'

‘Tomorrow,' said Scully.

‘
Au revoir
, Billie.'

‘Au revoir
,' she whispered, leaning on Scully's hip.

At the front desk, Scully presented his credit card and the starched Frenchwoman with the grey chignon made a call to verify its status. He hoisted Billie to his shoulder and stirred at the narrowing of the woman's eyes. She put the phone down, opened a draw and took out a pair of scissors.

‘This card is cancelled “Mister Scully”.'

‘No, no, it's valid till next November.'

She snipped it in two. The pieces clicked to the desk.

‘What the hell are you doing?' He lurched against the desk, grabbing the two halves of his card.

‘Reported stolen,' she said backing off with the scissors held before her.

‘It can't be. Only I can do that. Shit a brick!'

‘Of course you have papers of identification?'

‘A passport, yes. Here, I have it . . .'

Scully had it almost into the woman's hands before he saw the surge of satisfaction come to her features and he suddenly knew how irredeemably stupid he was. He reeled back, stumbling against a row of waiting patients and stiff-armed his way to the door.

•  •  •

A
T THE END OF HIS
triumphant day in Paris, Scully lit three deformed candles in the ashtray on the bedside table and watched his child shivering like a small dog under the blanket. Her hair was flat from the shower and her skin waxy in the yellow light. Her trunk was burning, but her hands and feet were cold, and all her nails blue. It terrified him, seeing her like this.

‘Christ, what've I done to you.'

She opened her eyes. ‘Nothing,' she said. ‘And don't say Christ.'

Steam hissed in the walls, burbled in the radiator. Billie closed her eyes again and went to sleep.

Scully ate some bread and cheese and opened a bottle of screwtop red that tasted like deckwash. A pile of crumpled francs and lire and drachmae lay on the eiderdown before him, enough to feed them in couscous joints and
friteries
for a couple of days. He had half a
carnet
of Metro tickets, an Irish cheque book and some dirty clothes. He stank of sweat and fear and frustration and his bad eye was wild in his head. Sooner or later the hotel would twig to his extinct credit card. He was buggered.

He thought of going back to Marianne and begging for help. No aggro, just butt-kissing humility. Or simply robbing the bitch, just busting in and knocking off stuff he could flog in the flea- markets. But he'd never get past the damn security. Besides, he'd never stolen anything in his life and was bound to stuff it up somehow.

He'd try the Amex office. Sort it out. He'd see Dominique. The way Marianne was acting, not letting him talk to her, it could be that Jennifer was over there at Dominique's. Well, no one was answering, even now. Maybe Marianne was just pissing him off, prolonging the nasty moment with that pulled-out phone plug. They'd sort it out. Something. Bloody something.

He took a long swig of his eight-franc wine and gasped. He could be back in Ireland tomorrow night. The mournful wind, the turf fire, the valley unrolling out the window. Pete-the-Post dropping by for a pint and a bit of crack.

Dominique would help him. He gulped down more wine. She had plenty of money, some kind of trust fund that let her pursue photography. And she had a heart. ‘Softness', Marianne called it with distaste. He remembered Dominique's show on the Ile de la Cité. Scully turned up ancient with paint specks and people made room for him as though he was another kind of painter altogether. Dominique's photographs were moody tableaux of women in bare rooms into which chutes of light fell. Her subjects' gazes were outward and self-possessed and they reminded Scully of his mother. Marianne hissed out the side of her mouth that the images were
soft,
as though that were a sign of feeble-mindedness, but Scully liked them and Jennifer thought they were works of genius.

She said that a lot in the next year or so. Other people were geniuses. They were gifted, remarkable, ahead of their time, special. Scully began to wonder why people couldn't just be good at things. It went beyond seeing the best in people. All this genius, it was like a blow to her, every stroke a bright light on her failure, her ordinariness. And his too. In Paris she had a way of blinking at him sometimes, as if trying to see something more than steady old Scully. It made him nervous, that blinking stare. It wasn't the cool look she shot him across the tutorial room back in the beginning. It caused him to put his hands in his pockets and raise his eyebrows, appealing hopelessly, for a flicker of recognition. But she simply blinked and stared, as if he was a tree in her window, something she was looking through to a more brilliant world beyond.

He even mentioned it to Dominique, that look. ‘She is excited,' she said. ‘Only excited.'

‘Yes,' he agreed. Maybe that's all it was.

Dominique responded to Jennifer's enthusiasm right from the start. He watched them become friends in the jerky ritualized way the French and English had. He felt welcome at the huge apartment on the Rue Jacob and he saw Dominique's effort to cut some slack for Billie whose feral energy seemed to startle her. Billie was not the ornamental child these people were accustomed to. Billie was, she said, very direct.

Scully saw photos of her place on the Isle of Man, the houseboat in Amsterdam, horses, women he didn't know. It was a calm place, that apartment. He'd go there tomorrow, first thing. He belted the rest of the cheap plonk down and heard a bedhead somewhere butting the wall. A woman was moaning. He finished the bottle and listened to her cry out greedily, and for a moment Billie's eyes opened and fixed on him fiercely and then closed in sleep.

•  •  •

B
ILLIE COULD SEE HIM UP
there now, swaying in the blistering cold, dangling there with firelight in his huge eyes, snagged by the hair in the huge bare tree. Scully. Crying, he was, calling out, begging for help and no one down there in the deep mud moving at all. Just the baying of dogs and him calling, the hair tight at the sides of his face and his arms flapping. There was no way back from that final bough, nowhere for someone that size to go anywhere but down and Billie just prayed for an angel, prayed and prayed until she burned like a log and horses shook and suddenly someone else was up there, someone small and quick and crying. Billie saw it now, it was her up there, Billie
Ann Scully in her pyjamas with something in her mouth like a pirate. A silver flash. She saw it, the little glowing hand reaching out with the scissors open like the mouth of a dog, and Scully screaming yes and yes and yes, and the sound of his hair cutting like torn paper, Billie cutting his hair free so that he fell, calm and still, falling a long time from that skeleton tree with his eyes open until he hit the mud a long way down and was swallowed up and gone beneath the feet of strangers. Billie saw herself up there, the crying girl with wings, slumped in the tree like a bird.

I
N SLEEP
S
CULLY FELT LIKE A
flying fish, a pelagic leaper diving and rising through temperatures, gliding on air as in water. He heard the great oceanic static. He felt seamless. Weightless, free.

He woke suddenly with Billie's face close to his, her eyes studying him, her breath yeasty with antibiotic. She ran the heel of her palm across the stubble of his cheek. Her skin was cool, her eyes clear. The surf of traffic surged below.

‘I'm hungry,' she said. ‘I feel ordinary again.'

He lay there, muscles fluttering, like a fish on a deck, feeling the dry weight of gravity, the hard surprise of everything he already knew.

•  •  •

M
IST LAY ACROSS
the soupy swirl of the Seine. It hung in the skeleton trees and billowed against the weeping stonework of the quais. The river ran fat with whorls and boils, lumpy with the hocks of sawn trees and spats of cardboard. He felt it sucking
at him, waiting, rolling opaque along the iced and slimy embankment. It made him shudder. He held Billie's hand too firmly.

‘This isn't the way to Dominique's,' she murmured.

‘Yes it is. More or less.'

In every piss-stinking cavity the mad and lost cowered in sodden cardboard and blotched sleeping bags. Out of the rain and out of sight of the cops they lay beneath bridges and monuments, their eyes bloodshot, their faces creased with dirt and fatigue. Was it some consolation to imagine that Jennifer might be here among them? Did the idea let him off, somehow, take the shame and rage away? These faces, they were generic. Could you recognize a person reduced to this state? Maybe he'd walk past her and see some poor dazed creature whose features had disappeared in hopeless fright. Would she recognize him, for that matter? Was his face like that already?

Beneath the Pont Neuf he stepped among these people and whispered her name. The stoned and sore and crazy rolled away from him. Billie tugged at his hand but he stared into their eyes, ignoring their growls of outrage until a big gap-toothed woman reared and spat in his face. Billie dragged him out into the faint light of day. She sat him down in the square at the tip of the island, and pressed the gob away from his face with his own soiled hanky. He let out a bitter little laugh. She hated to see the way he trembled. She hated all of this.

Scully looked back toward the bridge. Something in the water caught his eye. Something, someone out in the churning current. He shrugged off the child and went to the edge of the embankment to peer upstream. Dear God. He saw plump, pink limbs, tiny feet, a bobbing head. He wrenched his coat off. Please God, no.