‘You’re enough for me,’ she said.
He heard it high above as he went on tipping into space.
Fifty-six
ALL 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.
• • •
LATE 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.
Fifty-seven
IT 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 th
e 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.
Scully hobbled numbly around the mulchy deck, keeping low as he could behind the cabin top. A single duck rose off the water, its wings whiffling like the school cane of memory. On the foredeck he crouched beside an ornamental coil of rope and rotten tackle and he saw the denim leg out there in the spill of corner light. The sharp-toed boot disembodied by mist and the angle. His breath quickened. He was calm but his body was loaded.
He measured the jump to the dock. It was close, furry with mist, but close. He figured four feet. It was twenty, twenty-five yards to the street corner. His calves locked up.
But he waited. Was he visible? It seemed unlikely. He saw a knee now. A fresh draught of recognition. He stayed put. Watched. He counted to twenty, forty, ninety. The creak of a heavy leather coat. What if she just crossed the cobbles to the gangplank, just pushed off that righteous Protestant wall and strode across and called out? What would happen, how would he act?
He heard the toes of his frozen socks slipping fractionally on the gritty slime of the foredeck. He gripped the searing metal rail, ready.
Then the boot turned and showed a Cuban heel, two. There was a worldly groan of leather and a shift on the cobbles. Out into the loop of strangled light blurred the hair and moonflash of skin as the figure turned unhurriedly up the sidestreet and was gone, leaving a wake of footfalls that set Scully off automatically. He sprang and lost ground, lifted and fell facedown in hemp and mire and leafy crap at the gunwhale’s edge. He scrabbled hopelessly for a few seconds and then gave up. It was simple. He just desisted and listened in bitter relief to the sound of those boots ringing upward in the mist, rapping against the high bricks of the Herengracht and the muted night.
It was in him to get up, he had the will, the sheer idiot stubbornness in him to do it, he knew, but he heard the clonk of furniture beneath him and the flicker of light and it was enough to lie there alive in the cold and feel the hawser against his face.
• • •
WHEN HE CAME STIFFLY DOWN the steps into the tilting cabin, Billie held out the wavering flame of the cigarette lighter whose plastic was foggy and green, and let him see his way to a chair. She had her pack on the table and the phone in her hand. He blinked in the strange light and peeled off his socks. His whiskery chin shook a little, but his eyes were clear.
‘Okay,’ he murmured. ‘Okay.’
Billie couldn’t tell if this was a question or a command, but she hugged the receiver to her ear and kept dialling anyway. Tiny waves rocked against the furniture. She watched him open cupboards to find some socks. She tilted up her own wrapped feet and shook them at him. At the other end of the phone after the sound of oceans and the land and sky, a man said.
‘This better be fooking good, then. Jaysus Mary and Joseph it better had!’
VI
For when the angel woos the clay
He’ll lose his wings
At the dawning of the day . . .
‘Raglan Road’
Fifty-eight
RAIN, GREAT UNRAVELLING SHEETMETAL SWATHES of rain fell as the old Transit slushed through the tunnels of hawthorn, through miry bends, past rows of poplars, of larch and oak. Curtains of mud rose at every turn and the wipers juddered across the glass. Through grey little towns of cold-pressed council houses they went, and onto pebblecast bungalows and mongrel Spanish haciendas with asphalt turnarounds in the strange pure green of land. They passed roadside camps of travellers whose miserable donkeys stood tethered to other people’s fences in the rain, and everywhere there were ruins choked with blackberry and ivy, fallen walls, tilted crosses and mounds like buried cysts in the earth. Rain.
No one spoke. The three of them sucked carefully on the mints they’d been sharing since Dublin and rubbed at the misting screen with their mittened knuckles.
Peter Keneally steered carefully. It was like transporting bone china. He winced at every rut in the roads of the Republic and cast sideways glances at the two of them there up beside him. They were hollow-cheeked, you could say. Subdued. The little one’s scars were like silky patches of sunlight. She had a queer notch in the front of her hair, right there at his elbow. The face of a saint, by God. Now and then the bush of her hair rested on his arm and he felt like singing. Scully had cut himself shaving, which was no surprise the way his hands shook. His eyes were bloodshot, raw as meatballs, and his clothes were clearly not his own. He looked like he’d seen the Devil, but he had a wan sort of smile on his face when they came into familiar country.
In the flat-bottomed valley before the long rise to the Leap, even before the road widened for the scarecrow of a tree that stood as a hindrance to traffic, Scully was pulling off his seatbelt and leaning over to touch his arm. Peter geared down.
Billie watched him get down into the hard icy rain where the van stopped, right there beside the funny tree with the bits of stuff in it. His hair flattened, his shoulders ran with water, but he didn’t seem to hurry. The wipers slushed across in front of her and she watched him reach out for something in the boughs.
‘Aw, now,’ said the man beside her.
She saw the rag in her father’s hands, watched it fall limp to the mud at his feet. She sucked her mint.
Out in the rain Scully held onto the tree wondering how it could happen, how it was that you stop asking yourself, asking friends, asking God the question.
Fifty-nine
IT WAS THE FIRST NIGHT of the year. Scully woke suddenly, kept his eyes closed and listened to the startling silence of the house. The quiet was so complete that he heard his own heartbeat, his breath loud as a factory. He opened his eyes involuntarily and saw, upon the boards of the floor, a curious light. It ran up the wall as well, like muted moonlight. Then he saw the empty impressed pillow beside him and swung out of bed completely, his naked skin shrinking against the cold.
Scully rushed to Billie’s room and slapped on the light. The little bed was open and unmade. Her boots and papers lay spread on the floor, her toys lined up neatly. Down the stairs he felt his knees popping against the strain and he stumbled into the kitchen and the living room to find them empty and their fireplaces dead. He stormed upstairs again to check his bed once more and that’s when he passed the uncurtained gable window and saw the world transformed beyond it. He rubbed it clear. A small dark figure trailed down through the bright miracle of the snow, and beyond the wood, beyond his own breath misting up the glass, he saw the lights coming from across the valley and the mountains that stood spectral and white in the cold distance.
• • •
BAREFOOT HE WENT with nothing but a bath
robe about him. The snow was soft and clean and cold enough to stop the pain in his feet after a while. He broke through to stones and gnarled sticks that snagged up in the ash wood, but he felt nothing. The sky was a mere soup bowl above him, his breath a pillar of smoke that led him on in Billie’s footprints.
He found her by the old pumphouse in the castle grounds. Its ruined walls were rebuilt with snow, and snow joined it to hedges that looked solid as stone, a new settlement overnight. She was fully dressed and still, her black Wellingtons gleaming in the light of the riders’ torches as they stood bleakly before the keep. She turned and saw him, smiled uncertainly.
Billie looked at his bare feet, his shivering body as he pushed forward down the slope to the men and their tired horses. Their little fires crackled on the end of their sticks, and steam jetted from the horses’ nostrils and you could see their streaming sides and tarry maps of blood. Some of the men were only boys, and there were women too, here and there, their round dirty faces shining in the firelight, upturned eyes big as money. Scully went down among them, putting his hands up against the horses and talking, saying things she couldn’t hear. Questions, it sounded like.
Billie saw axes and spears and bandaged limbs but she was not afraid. The riders’ hair was white with snow, and it stood like cake frosting on their shoulders and down the manes of their horses. Their shields and leggings were spattered with mud and snow and the shiver of bridles and bits rattled across her like the chittering of her teeth.