The Riders (36 page)

She nodded. ‘I know.'

It was quiet again for a while. She watched him look for words. His big hands lay on the table. She would know them anywhere. Someone said your heart was the size of your fist. She unzipped her pack.

‘Here,' she said, holding the bunch of paper out to him.

‘What's this?'

It looked like a flower there in her palm. Billie hoped he didn't see how it shook.

B
ILLIE SAW IT STRAIGHTAWAY
. Before they even crossed the narrow street, shuffling on the cobbles like old people in front of those cosy hotels and cafés, she saw it and stopped. She heard kids thumping a soccer ball in the square across the footbridge. A bird warbled in the bare tree above the parked cars on the canal embankment and somewhere a bike bell tinkled. Billie found a bollard and sat on it, feeling the dampness come through her jeans. Scully worked his way along the bank, his hair mad as a sun, his face uncertain, as though he didn't know whether to look or not. She watched him find the houseboat, the red one with the fat rotting mattress of autumn leaves on its roof, the one with the silly tilt like Granma's back verandah, and he straightened a moment, blinking.

‘This one,' he said.

Billie looked away and saw ducks making vees in the black water. She thought of all the places she had seen that she had no names for, all the flats and hotels and houses in streets she couldn't say, towns she didn't know, where people spoke languages she didn't understand. All those people she just didn't know. All those
stations and restaurants and airports and ferries that simply looked the same.

‘We went past it yesterday,' he said quietly.

‘Yes.'

‘Looks deserted, huh.'

She shrugged. She was cold now and sad.

‘Funny,' he murmured. ‘I've sort of got the creeps.'

Billie looked at the pretty footbridge with its green paint and curly rails. She heard his boots on the deck and looked over to see him knocking at the door at the bottom of the little wooden steps. Maybe this is how it felt to be an angel, to be sad at helping, sad to finish. He cupped his hands to portholes and real windows, climbing up the deck.

‘Come here, Bill.'

She thought about it a moment. That travel place was around here somewhere.

‘Bill?'

She trusted him. If someone was home she had to believe he would understand her. She was not giving him back. He had promised. She trusted him. But her heart sped up anyway.

‘Billie?'

She heard the glass break as she stepped carefully aboard and edged along the handrail to where Scully stood with an old chair- leg in his hand. Ducks rose from the water. Bicycles went past and out beyond the parked cars someone was laughing.

‘You slip in, mate. You're smaller.'

‘Are we stealing?' she asked, not really caring.

‘No, just looking. Mind the edge – it's sharp.'

Billie heard her jacket tear as she wriggled in and fell suddenly headlong. She cried out, but the sofa was beneath her and musty with damp.

‘You alright?'

‘Yes.'

‘Open the door.'

Billie looked about. It was like a big caravan in there. Curtains, cupboards, a desk and proper dinner table with chairs. And photos, Dominique's photos in frames on the walls.

‘Billie!'

She slipped off the sofa obediently and felt the shock of cold water round her ankles. Her boots drank it up and her toes stung.

‘It's sinking!'

‘Open the door, love.'

She waded across to the outside door and fumbled with the handle.

‘You got it?'

Her feet began to hurt and her knees knocked. The door came open with a little wave that crept higher up her shins and slapped quietly up against the other end. She climbed onto a chair as he came in wide-eyed, and she saw all the tightness go out of his face. No one had been here for a long time. He looked shocked and relieved and restless. His face changed like the sky. She watched him open the door beside the table. A kind of kitchen. The next door was a toilet. That was it. It was like the end of a tunnel down here.

Scully waded up forward to the brass bed against the bulkhead. In the centre of the quilt lay a single dirty sock and a pale blue pullover he recognized well enough. He picked it up carefully and pressed the cashmere to his face. It smelt of frangipani, of sunlight, of his whole lost life. He lay on the bed and hid his face. This was how it felt in the seconds of dying, the steer on the killing floor with the volts filling his head. Just falling. With the
kid beside him, her fingers in his hair, her body pressing in from the living world outside.

‘You're enough for me,' she said.

He heard it high above as he went on tipping into space.

A
LL THE QUIET DAY
, as rain slipped down the windows and plinked in through the smashed porthole, he lay there and she watched him. He hardly moved at all except to sigh or sniff or move his lips without making sounds. Sometimes tears squelched from his tight-shut eyes, but he never said a word. Billie thought of Quasimodo – she couldn't help it – his skeleton like a fence of bones on the gypsy girl's grave. You could die of a broken heart, she knew that.

She made a causeway of chairs from the bed to the table and pulled off her sloshy boots and socks. Her feet were grey and blotchy. She pulled open drawers and cupboards and found socks and pullovers high up that were still dry. She pulled so much stuff on she felt like the Michelin man but she was warm.

On shelves she found lipsticks, postcards, paintbrushes, Kodak boxes and some little china ducks. There was a wide flat carton full of Dominique's photos. She set it down on the table and went through them carefully. They were of people mostly, and some of streets that looked like Paris. There was one of Marianne in a
white chair. Her mouth made a pencil line across her face. She found one of herself with her hair big as a hat and her face laughing. How smooth her face was then. She touched the picture with her fingertips and a little chirp came out of her throat that startled her in the lapping quiet.

Outside ducks pedalled by, laughing among themselves. Bike bells tinkled like goats in the mountains.

Billie kept flipping slowly through the photos. It was like seeing through Dominique's eyes. She was careful, the way she watched. You could see she looked at everything for a long time. These photos made you look like that, at the hips of the chair, at your own eyes big and warm, at your dad's paint-freckled face in the café with the coffee cup shining under his chin. Yes, his big funny smile. That was him. She wondered if everyone saw him the way she did, the way Dominique and the camera did.

There were photos of them all in a graveyard. She remembered the day. Scully had one in his wallet. Their faces were moony with laughing. The cross behind them had veins. It looked like a stone flower.

And then without warning, Billie came to the pictures of Her. It was sudden and scary. Billie's bum closed up and her scars went tight but her heart did not stop. For a moment she just panted and held on to the table. Then she counted them, seven photos. The first one, She was in the street at St Paul in a small dress. There was a tiny smile with those lips that pressed against your ear at bedtime. It was a face that moved, eyes following you across the table, worried for you, wondering how you were. There was blood under that skin. It was a face that loved you. It made your hands shake to see. But that was the only summer picture.
In the others, one by one, as she got more wintry and beautiful, you could see her turning to stone. Her chin setting, her dark eyes like marble, cheeks shining hard like something in the Tuileries.

In the last picture she was close, right up in your face and she had a finger pressed against her lips.

It had stopped raining outside and the ducks were gone. She looked at the shattered porthole and then reached up to feel the moisture round it. Then she stuffed those pictures out through it so that they skittered and skied across the deck to fall like lilies on the water.

A boat chugged past. The dark, smelly water beneath her rose in a scummy wave and slapped at the walls and cupboards, back and forth, until it tired itself out and the shag carpet went limp as seaweed.

Billie made little piles of money in all the colours and kinds. She found the address book and smoothed it out beside the money. Next to that she lay her Hunchback comic and then she emptied the rest of the pack into the water: apple cores, ticket stubs, fluff.

In the galley she opened a jar of olives and a stinky flat tin of sardines. She found a jar of hard red jam which she ate with a spoon. The olive seeds she spat against the wall until her lips ached. She tried to light the stove but couldn't make it work, so she gave up on trying to make him coffee and crawled across her bridge of chairs to the bed. Scully was still breathing, but his eyes were clamped shut. She laid out bits of food for him and shook him gently, but he only shivered. He didn't open his eyes, he didn't look at the food. Billie sat beside him and held his clammy hand as the air got colder and harder and her scars burned
tightly. When his shivering got worse she foraged in high cupboards and found hairy coats and stretched jumpers that she piled across him till he was barely visible.

Now and then she tested the water on the floor with a broom handle. It was getting deeper. The air was dreamy with cold.

She looked at him. Inside his nest, under his skin he was still searching, still looking. Maybe somewhere in his mind he would always look. You couldn't blame him. Maybe it would happen to her too. Billie wondered whether she could ever be enough for him.

He opened his eyes a moment and looked about dazed, like someone pulled out of a car crash.

‘Me,' she said.

He narrowed his eyes a moment and looked at her.

‘You hear me?'

His eyelids fluttered and he was gone again.

•  •  •

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON
, a mist came down upon the water to soak up the parked cars, the skeleton trees, the houses and steeples. Billie sat at the table with her teeth chittering and flicked through the grubby address book, saying the names to herself inside her head. The quiet was deep now and the mist moved on the water occasionally as if to let invisible things pass. Billie's breath became a fog in the dying light, and then it was dark. She sat there a while in the sinking night and then the phone on the wall burred like a cicada.

Billie picked it up. The earpiece burnt her face.

‘Hullo?'

She listened to the fog quiet at the other end.

‘Hullo?'

She heard the clomp of the receiver at the other end and then the peep of the dial tone. Her throat was raw with air. She felt her way across the chairs to the listing bed and climbed in beside her dad who sounded awake and alive and with her. It was strange how happy she felt, strange and sleepy and good.

I
T WAS COLD WHERE SCULLY
went, and the great shifting weight of the earth pressed him from every angle, comforting in the dark. His limbs twisted into him, his tongue pressed against his palate and he felt the freezing weld of his eyelids against his face, the retraction of his balls, his nipples, his lungs. Feet, hands, stones, towns, trees leant on him in layers. The food in his gut turned to coal, while above him, outside, above the crust of everything, an insect rattled on and on in impossible summer. Just the sound of it, the dry, clacking sound of it gave the earth the Christly smell of frangipani and he felt his veins tighten like leather thongs. A single, living insect. Calling.

Afterwards, in the mounting silence, he woke to the dead night breathing. He heard the flinty ring of hoofs on the cobbles above. Billie slept beside him, her fingers hooked into the loose, ricked knit of his sweater as though she'd been trying to lift him, raise him. Her breath was tart and briny. He nested his cheek against hers and felt the life in her. His fingers felt tanned and brittle as he lay them in the blood knots of her hair. A horse snorted. Scully found her hand, settled his thumb into her palm.
Her pulse, or his, idled warmly. Above him he heard the deep, toneless murmurs of men and the leisurely gait of horses. Breath hung above his face. The cold was subterranean, sweet and lethal. Even awake he was drowsy with it. Hoof beats faded off into fresh silence. There wasn't even the sound of the canal against the hull, just his own living breath.

Then he stiffened. Out of the silence the footfalls of a walker. They were boots, hard-heeled boots, coming up the canalside cobbles, rapping up against the high walls of the Herengracht houses as his limbs went hard with recognition.

He unpicked Billie's fingers, slid out of the cocoon she had built for them and tamped it back around her in the watery inward light. Steady up the canalside came those footfalls as he slid off the bed into the shock of the forgotten bilge water. God Almighty, it was all he could do not to cry out, but his burst of breath rang like a thud in the sepulchral space all the same. The bloody boat was sinking. Against his shins he felt the scabs of forming ice, or maybe it was rubbish, as he waded blindly for the companion- way past the line of chairs.

He cracked the hatch and tasted the colder air outside. His feet burnt away to an absence as he listened. Heels rang awkwardly now and then on the odd surfaces of the cobbles. His socks steamed beneath him. The footfalls stopped outside close by.

Up on deck the rotten leaves were treacherous. A mist buried the streetlamps and smothered the sky so that the only illumination was from muted yellow pillars of lamplight. They cast tidal pools here and there, between parked Opels and VWs, out on the stretch of cobbles where a steaming scone of horse dung revealed itself between the naked bodies of elms.

The air was soupy, maddening. Someone out there. Scully
stood there peering until he made out bricks. A fan of streetlight, a sense of the street corner, yes, the narrow alley there, he remembered. The blood beat in his neck. He made out a traffic bollard, some wrought-iron, the flat biscuity bricks of housewall. The mist shifted on itself, sulphuric in his nostrils. He saw it butting the buoyant rooftops of the city. He needed to see. See properly. He wasn't scared to feel watched like this, but he needed to know.