The Riders

  ‘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!’

  • • •

  SCULLY LED BILLIE UP DONKEYSHIT 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.

  But the looks on the faces of those worthless mongrels in the Lyko this morning – the downcast eyes, the suppressed giggles, the shuffling embarrassment out in the street. Arthur’s horror at the mention of Alex Moore. It made you wonder. Had he lived in some Pollyanna blur all this time? Was he missing something? Was she miserable and bored? And worse?

  He peered in through the half-open shutter of his old place and saw a man and a woman asleep there. Middle aged. Arms cast about like kelp from the stones of their bodies. Strangers. In his bed. Queer, but the sight of them brought back a memory. That one thing. That old embarrassing thing. He stared in at the twisted sheet and the overturned shoes and thought of the day he came down the mountain from work to the empty house. The strange feeling he had. Billie playing with Elektra’s kids next door, her mile wide accent echoing up the dirt lane. The easel and some daub on the stretched canvas. Alex’s bloody fag ends all over the terrace. And the bed all torn up like a dog had been in it. It took the longest, longest time for the dread to seep into him, that unfamiliar poison hitting him as he casually straightened the sheets and then ricked them back like a lunatic, scrabbling all over for some sign, some nasty wet mark that wasn’t there. Nothing. And somehow there was no comfort in finding nothing. The blind infant rage of jealousy. God, how pathetic. Was there anything more pitiful than a howling man rifling his own bed for someone else’s sperm? She came in on him like that, dripping from the sea and cheerful and he wanted to die from shame. Homesickness, he said, don’t worry. He cried in her arms. She pushed him down on the bed, salty and slick, fierce with lust, and he never gave the business another thought.

  Until today. Just now. Looking in on these strangers. Once you open the door you can’t easily close it. You let your mind off on
its leash and you have to go where it does. What did he expect, coming to the island? A rescue mission? A meeting? A quiet reckoning? Certainly not to be standing outside his old house entertaining the kind of thing he was thinking of now. Of that nicotine-stained old wreck slipping it to his wife. Of the afternoons they had, the bottles of wine and shady grottoes they might have found, of all the stupid brainless things he was letting himself think now, and thinking them with a kind of cold pleasure. Thinking about that baby now, of the marvellous heartwarming fact that it might not be his, and that Jennifer had set him up in some simple Irish decoy and gone home to cash in her chips and fuck off back to the great man. What a shitheaded moron he was! What a blind fuckwit! What an understanding little dickhead.

  He bolted up the ravine and onto the path to where Billie stood mesmerized.

  ‘Someone else lives there now,’ he said, hearing the quaver in his voice.

  She took his hand a moment and he sensed an opening in her, a pressure of tenderness. She tugged him in the direction of the harbour and for a few paces he let himself be led. But then he dug in.

  ‘Episkopi,’ he said. ‘This way.’

  Billie flung his hand away. He reached for her but she fell down in the dirt with her head between her knees. So she knew. God help him, his kid knew. She was told at the airport.

  ‘C’mon,’ he croaked, ‘I’ll piggyback you.’

  He stood there as the wind plied between them. Crickets hissed around. He heard her get up and dust herself off, and when he opened his eyes he saw her setting off along the road to Episkopi.

  • • •

  AT PALAMIDAS, the little oil-streaked bay beneath the island mountain, Scully took Billie on his back and slugged up the winding track through the gnarled olive groves, feeling the child’s breath against his neck, her body relaxing against his as she slipped into sleep. He felt the smoothness of her ankles beneath his callouses. He just didn’t know how something like this could be abandoned. What was there after a child, what could you want more?

  He didn’t know what to expect up at Episkopi, how he would act. Why was it easier to hope that she’d gone crazy? After all, her mother had ‘episodes’. At sixty she’d been found running naked through the streets of Perth. Madness was its own excuse, it was everybody’s absolution. What a shit to think that way, what a coward.

  Sweating and panting Scully came to the pine country and the final doglegs of the track as it found its way to the summit. What a joke it was to think of Alex and her living in the very house he’d been building while they were at it out on the terrace this year. Think of the irony. Such a civilized business, thinking of irony. What a master of self-control he was. Think of the irony, Scully. Don’t go in like a thug. Think of the kid, for Godsake.

  At the brow of the incline in a small clearing stood a chapel white as a star there above the sea. There was fresh dung outside and he stopped a moment and sniffed. His stomach tightened strangely. Horse dung, a magical smell. He stood a few moments, looking at the dung and the chapel, blowing a little after the long climb. He stumped over to the door and touched it, pushed it gingerly back on its hinges. Behind him, a stand of quail flushed unseen and caused him to flinch.

  A musty breeze circled out of the dimness of the place. Scully stepped inside. It was cool. The narrow windows let in rods of light ahead, and against the gable was a simple sanctuary and altar. An ikon, a sad Christ face all gold and burgundy, was animated by the three candles that burned there in the silence. Scully’s mouth went dry and his arms ached. He had a horrible weak urge to kneel here on the concrete floor, but with the child on his back he was spared the exercise. He pursed his lips to speak, but the silence of the chapel was overpowering, so he turned for the door and saw, framed in the light, a woman. He flinched and grunted. She had a black dress and shawl.

  ‘Yassou, Kyria,’ he said in greeting.

  Her eyes were black and on her feet were wide, men’s shoes. She held a twig broom in her hands and inclined her head towards him and stood aside to let him pass.

  ‘Efkharisto,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you.’

  She pointed her broom across the flat ridge where the road continued on across the spine of the island to Episkopi.

  She knows, too, he thought. The wind lapped around her shawl and she did not move. She kept pointing along the road and her face was expressionless. As he came by her through the door, he saw the gob of spit hit the gravel before him and heard it again behind. He turned and saw her calmly making the sign of the cross against her flat chest.

  He stumped off up the road, too angry to pause and drink at the cistern beside the track. The child was a sack on his back. All around him the pines sounded like an inhaling choir. He went on, determined now to get it over with and get on the hydrofoil at six as Arthur suggested. He might just make it. Say his piece, whatever it was he had left to say when it came down to it, and piss off back into the smoking ruins of his life.

  • • •

  UP FROM THE FINAL STONY gully, he came into the ragged conglomeration of huts, hunting lodges and houses that was Episkopi. A few mules were tethered outside a pillarbox lodge that echoed with snores. Scully felt drool running down his neck. He hiked the kid up on his back a little and walked on through to the big fresh whitewashed house at the cliff where the island fell away to the open sea on the other side.

  The house was broad and plain and seemed to have settled into the topsoil of this bony edge of the mountain. The solitary fig stood before it, casting a black rag of shadow at its feet. The grey shutters were ajar and as Scully came up closer, he heard the sound of a tin whistle fidgeting from inside. He was footsore, perspiring, thirsty, and all his rage had left him. He looked up at the house he’d cut and carried the blocks for with nothing more than sadness.

  ‘Alex?’

  The tin whistle faltered and stopped. A low voice. Or voices.

  ‘You there, Alex?’

  A scuffling sound, a chair kicked across a stone floor. Scully slipped Billie from his back and let her stand groggy beside him. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and then his hands, and braced himself at the door. He was way past irony, further past violence.

  In his rumpled cardigan and bifocals, as he tipped the heavy door back, Alex Moore didn’t look anything but guilty. His hand went to his mouth. He stepped back, looked across his shoulder a moment and then back at them.

  ‘Oh. My stars. Billie girl!’

  ‘Hello, Alex,’ said Scully.

  ‘Scully!’

  ‘Ask us in, Alex.’

  Eighteen

  ALEX STOOD IN HIS DOORWAY a moment, swaying, scratching his head, and Scully thought maybe he should thump him one after all, just to get things rolling, but the old man suddenly backed away indoors and Scully took Billie’s hand and followed.

  The interior was a raving shambles. There were bottles underfoot and saucers brimming with fag ends, cheese rind, olive pips. Every surface was covered with old pages of the Observer. The place stank of retsina, of smoke and bad food. On the big pine table lay a block of creamy paper, a bucket of tubes, a jar of pencils and nibs, and a small raw canvas on a stretcher, all lying there ceremonially untouched.

  ‘You heard, then,’ said Alex, pushing open the doors onto the terrace.

  Scully followed him out into the clean air.

  ‘No bastard told me anything.’

  ‘Well, you must have known something.’

  ‘Guess I had my suspicions.’

  ‘Well. Here it is. Here I am.’

  Scully looked at the defeated curve of the little man’s back and then glanced again around the house. It’s a sign, he thought. She’s lost her mind. The little shit’s using her while she’s not in a fit state. No one would come and live like this without having fallen off the edge of the world somehow. This isn’t bohemian, it’s Third World.

  ‘Didn’t last long,’ murmured Alex. ‘I’m a living wreck. It always starts well, doesn’t it, a resolution, a new thing.?
??

  ‘So she’s gone?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Alex, don’t shit me.’

  ‘Well, you are the first to come gloating. If the others were capable of the walk, that’s what they’d all do.’

  ‘What’d you think I came all this way for, the smell of your dirty socks and the view from your terrace? I want my wife.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  Alex’s Adam’s apple twitched.

  ‘Billie, go inside.’

  ‘Scully, I –’

  ‘I just want to take her home, get her some help, Alex. It’s alright, I’m not gonna do anything.’

  ‘Jennifer.’ Alex leaned against the cool wall and looked down the blackened slope to the sea. Billie stood by the door expressionless and unmoving. A cat slid between her feet, leapt up to the parapet and stood before Alex expectantly.

  ‘Where is she, Alex?’

  Alex smiled and looked at him with moist eyes. ‘You’re looking for her here, with me? My dear boy, are you well?’

  ‘I’ll go up myself. Billie, stay here.’

  Room by squalid room, Scully went through the place, his disgust and fear mounting as he opened cupboards and poked under beds. The main room upstairs had its share of bottles and crusts and stubs, and the four-poster bed was tormented with grey linen and blankets which he prodded fearfully in the gloom. He sat on the bed a moment, staring at the assembly of pill bottles on the table beside it, and knew finally that she wasn’t here, that she’d probably never been there at all. There would have been some relief at least to have seen and known the worst. And that was it – he saw how much crueller it was to know nothing at all.

  When he came back down onto the terrace, Billie sat with her back to the house wall and Alex had his head in his hands. A breeze lifted up from the sea, bringing with it the carbon smell of burnt country. He knew that smell from his own continent. The afternoon sun lay across the water and a yellow haze crept up on the horizon to seal out the distance.

  ‘Alex, I’m sorry.’

  The old man wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his cardigan and smiled hopelessly.