The Riders

Scully laughed and leaned his brow against the gutter. The man could work. They’d hardly spoken all afternoon and now the postie seemed determined to make up for it.

  ‘So, where did you learn to throw blocks like a Paddy?’ said Peter.

  ‘London, I spose,’ said Scully looking down the valley. It was beautiful in an eerie, organized, European way.

  ‘Jaysus, throwin blocks for the English!’

  ‘No, an Irishman, actually,’ said Scully climbing down.

  ‘I went to London once.’

  ‘Once is enough.’

  ‘Oh, you got that right.’

  Pete clanged the trowels together and they headed for the well.

  ‘I worked with a gang of Offaly boys,’ said Scully. ‘Hard men, I spose you’d call em. We did cash jobs, you know. Jobs light-on for a bit of paperwork, you might say.’

  ‘Like this one, you mean.’

  Scully smiled. ‘Let’s have a drink, I’m freezin.’

  At the well, as they stood washing the mortar off their arms, Peter hummed a tune, low in his throat. In the dark he sounded like an old man, and it occurred to Scully that he had no idea how old the postie might be. Abruptly, the humming stopped.

  ‘What was her name again? Your wife?’

  ‘Jennifer.’

  ‘They say she’s a beautiful girl.’

  ‘Geez, they’re quick around here, aren’t they?’

  The postman wheezed out a laugh. ‘But are they liars?’

  ‘No, they got it right.’

  ‘Then you’re a lucky man.’

  ‘Mate, she’s a lucky woman.’

  They went in tired and laughing to the swimming warmth of the hearth, and Scully poured them a porter each and they sat on a chair and box to listen to the whine of the fire. Scully wrote out a telegram message on the back of an envelope: GOOD NEWS. ALL WELL HERE. KEEP IN TOUCH. LOVE YOU BOTH. SCULLY.

  ‘Telegram? I’ll send it for you.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘You got snakes there in Australia,’ said Pete thoughtfully.

  ‘You bet. No St Pat out there.’

  ‘Poisonous snakes, eh?’

  Scully grinned. ‘Dugites, taipans, king browns, tigers. A tiger snake once chased me all the way down the back paddock.’

  ‘Are they fast, then?’

  ‘I was on a motorbike.’

  ‘Aw, Jaysus!’

  ‘Snakes and sharks,’ said Scully, hamming it up. He handed Pete the soiled envelope.

  ‘And Skippy the bush kangaroo, beGod!’

  Scully laughed. ‘Not as unpredictable as a Paddy, though. Those Irish boys in London were a wild bunch, I tell you. Talk about take no prisoners.’

  ‘Offaly boys, you say?’

  ‘Yeah, the boss was from Banagher.’

  Pete licked his lower lip, uncrossing his legs slowly. ‘Banagher.’

  ‘Yeah, you probably know the bloke.’

  Pete swallowed. ‘Could be.’

  ‘Bloke called Doolin.’

  ‘Mylie,’ the postie breathed.

  ‘You know him, then?’

  ‘Jaysus, Mary and Joseph.’

  ‘Silly bugger got busted in Liverpool.’

  ‘I heard he was . . . taken.’

  ‘The VAT man, I spose.’

  ‘You don’t need to pretend with me, Mr Scully.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We don’t want any trouble here. I mean we’re all good Catholics here, but . . .’

  Scully looked at him. The man was pale.

  ‘We just want to leave all that behind us. We don’t want the Guards crawlin all over the countryside, unmarked cars, questions at all hours.’

  The postman’s huge ears were red now and a sweat had formed on his brow.

  ‘Pete –’

  ‘We just want to live our lives. I’m sorry to give the wrong impression.’

  ‘There’s something here I’m just not getting.’

  ‘I have two hundred pounds here in cash, and I’m a man who can keep his mouth shut. I should have known, oh God. You turnin up like that out of the blue and wantin this house in the middle of nowhere. It was the accent, I spose. I didn’t think . . . yeah, with Mylie inside you’d be recruitin lads.’

  ‘What lads?’

  ‘The lads,’ said Pete, tilting his head a moment to look directly at Scully for the first time. ‘What d’ye mean, what lads? Are ye playin with me?’

  Scully stood up carefully. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  Pete licked his bloodless lips. ‘You mean you don’t . . . before the Mother of God you’d swear you don’t know?’

  ‘Know what? Tell me what it is I’m supposed to know!’ Now that his blood was up and his eye wandering somewhat, Scully looked threatening to the uninitiated.

  ‘You swear it?’

  ‘Alright, I swear!’

  ‘You’re a Catholic, then?’

  ‘No, I’m nothing.’

  ‘So the name’s false.’

  ‘No, my name’s Scully, I was christened C of E.’

  ‘You mean it might be honestly possible that you don’t know? Oh, Jaysus, Peter, you fookin eejit of a man, what a fright you’ve given yourself! Mr Scully, it wasn’t the VAT man who got Mylie Doolin at Liverpool, it was the Special Branch. You’re fookin luckier than you think. What a sweet, innocent child of God you must be! Mylie is with the Provos.’

  Scully put down his glass. ‘You mean . . . you mean the IRA?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘Fuck a duck, you’re jokin!’

  ‘Do I look like a man enjoyin himself here?’

  ‘Shit. It can’t be.’

  ‘Ah, drink up now and don’t worry yourself,’ said Pete, wiping the sweat from his face and finding his grin again.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Life is mysterious, Mr Scully, but that I know for sure.’

  ‘I never even . . . you think he had anything to do with the Remembrance Day thing? All those bloody kids.’

  Pete-the-Post emptied his glass and shrugged. A wind was moaning outside now. ‘He went in before. Weeks ago. Still, it was all such a fook-up, who could tell. You never know anybody properly, not the whole of em. A man barely knows himself, wouldn’t you say?’

  Scully stared into the fire. Pete chuckled to himself a moment and hauled himself to his feet.

  ‘I’ll be by at one again. Don’t you worry about Mylie Doolin, that booger. By God, I nearly had mud in me trousers tonight! Goodnight, then.’

  ‘Yeah, righto. Watch out for snakes.’

  • • •

  ALONE, WITH THE FIRE WILD in the chimney, Scully drank and thought of that year of high-jinks with Mylie’s lads. He’d known they were hard men. Once, when some blazer-and-cravatted old bastard pleaded sudden poverty at the end of a job, knowing the Irishmen had no recourse to the law, Mylie opened up the fifth floor window and began calmly to hurl TV, microwave and stereo into the street until the cash appeared magically on the table. Another time, at the end of a horrible three-week lightning renovation at Hampstead, they discovered that the landlord had bolted to Mallorca and they would never be paid, so Mylie put instant concrete down all the toilets and sinks. A little Jetset here, a little Jetset there. You could almost hear it turn to stone. Three floors of plumbing utterly stuffed. It wasn’t the same as money in their pockets, but it gave them a bit of a glow in the pub afterwards. Mad Irish boys, he thought they were, but extortionists and bombers? Terrorists and thieves?

  All evening he sat there, forgetting to eat, going through those London months again, wondering and not quite disbelieving, until near midnight he dragged his sleeping bag onto the old door and climbed in.

  Seven

  SCULLY WORKED ON, THAT NOVEMBER week, pausing only to eat and sleep, or to now and again find himself staring out across the valley to the Slieve Blooms and their changing light. He heard his own sounds in the cottage, his breathing, his footfalls and scrapings and hammerings, and knew that th
is was as alone as he’d been in all his life. So busy was he, so driven with getting the place habitable, that he had not even met his neighbours yet, though he knew them by name because of Pete-the-Post who came daily with mail, a newspaper, building materials and more often than not, a few pints of milk, a loaf of soda bread and a packet of bacon for the rough fryups they had on dark afternoons with the rain driving outside and the smell of burning peat in their faces. Pete gave him company most afternoons, made him laugh, and sped up the work enormously. Scully bragged shamelessly about his feisty daughter and all the barefaced things she said to people, how fearlessly she corrected teachers and shopkeepers and policemen. The way she’d sit and read for hours and draw elaborate comic strips of their life in Fremantle, Paris, Greece. How she was their safe-passage through Europe, the one who softened-up officials, won the hearts of waiters, attacked languages like new puzzles to be solved. The things she said, how she wondered what a marlin thought the moment it saw the boat it was attached to, the faces staring down from the transom as it lay exhausted on its side, its eye on the dry world. Scully could see how the idea of her tickled Pete. He did impressions of her little voice for him and the streams of talk she was capable of. Pete listened with his head cocked and his ears aglow. Maybe he didn’t believe him. Perhaps he thought it was just pride, just love. But Scully’s excitement was infectious, he could see it himself. The postie chortled and whanged the trowel approvingly against the stones. Scully liked him better than any man he could remember. He had worked with men all his life, since his fishing days and on farm after farm, where he knew what it was to be ridden, paid out on ruthlessly or ignored on site. Especially the fishing days, they were the worst; seven days a week working deck for a Serb with an iron bar in the wheelhouse. That bastard Dimic paid out on him all the way out and all the way back in to port, and what could you do twenty miles out to sea alone and unsighted? He worked with subdued Italian men in market gardens whose soil stank of rust and chemicals, whose women were boisterous and sexy and dangerous. But the biggest pricks of all were the whitebread heroes at the university, men who’d murder you with words for the sheer pleasure of it. They put an end to his working-class fantasies about the gentleness of the professional life. It was the suits you had to fear. They were the real bastards. He didn’t know what it was with Peter Keneally. It might just have been loneliness, but he was always glad as hell to see him.

  The next Friday Pete brought another telegram with the pint of milk and parcel of chops.

  Scully opened it carefully and stood by the window.

  HOUSE SOLD. SETTLEMENT IN THREE WEEKS. ARRIVE SHANNON AE46, 13 DECEMBER. JENNIFER.

  ‘Shit,’ said Scully. ‘I better open an account at the Allied Irish.’

  ‘Good news?’

  ‘We sold our house. They’ll be here in three weeks.’

  ‘You better get busy, then. You can’t have em livin in a shite-hole, so.’

  Scully folded the telegram soberly. So that was that. Their house was gone. But the idea, the fact of it stuck in his head. The limestone rubble walls he’d pared back himself, the stripped jarrah floorboards, the big-hipped iron roof, the airy verandahs and the frangipani blooms. The morning throb of diesels from the marina. It was the whole idea he had of their life together. The weirdest feeling. A fortnight to sell a house? God knows people had gone stupid in the West in boom, but hadn’t it all fallen over? Maybe they were buying real estate now – he didn’t understand economics. But they were coming. That’s all that counted. He had work to do. There was a house here. Wasn’t that the idea to work to, to the future!

  ‘Are you rich then?’ Peter asked from the top of the ladder that afternoon.

  ‘Rich?’

  ‘I don’t mean to pry,’ he laughed. ‘I just want to know if you’ve got a lot of fookin money.’

  ‘Is that why you won’t send me a bill, you crafty bastard.’

  ‘Now you’re gettin presumptuous,’ said Peter, swinging a bucket of mortar at him.

  ‘Look at these hands,’ said Scully. ‘Are they the hands of a rich man?’

  Pete brushed a broken slate off into the air and they both watched it spear into the mud and disappear.

  ‘Well, that’s a disappointment to me,’ said the big redhead. ‘I thought you might be a drug baron or whatever they call em, cause you’re too ugly to be a rock-and-roll star.’

  ‘Have you been drinking that poteen again?’

  ‘Well, you have to consider it from an ignorant Paddy’s point of view. These two boogers come by one day in a Volkswagen, a Volkswagen from London Heathrow on the way to Perth Australia and say, aarrr, that’s a noise hows, arrl boy it mate! Now I figure it’s got to be three things: drugs, rock-and-roll, or fooking brain damage. Buyin this auld bit of shite in the Irish outback.’

  ‘Here, pull that gutter off while you’re up there.’

  The postie dragged the rotten gutter down in a shower of rust and moss.

  ‘I figure if it’s rock-and-roll, it has to be your lovely wife who’s the star and you carry the bags. I mean, where does a man get a tan like that?’

  ‘Greece. We lived in Greece.’

  ‘Thought you said you lived in London.’

  ‘London first. Lived in Paris, too, most of last year.’

  ‘Paris. My God.’

  ‘Then Greece this year.’

  ‘The three of yez? Wanderin like a bunch of tinkers. Tell me straight, cause I’ve got nephews. Is it drugs?’

  Scully looked at him, grinning. ‘Are you serious? Mate, I’m just a poor grafter like you. My wife’s a public servant – well, was a public servant cause she quit at the end of her long service leave. I’m not rich and there’s no drugs and precious little rock ’n’ roll. And no terrorism either, you silly bugger.’

  ‘Mind your head! Well, that’s the whole gutter gone. I’ve got a good auld piece in Roscrea for ye.’

  ‘Here comes the rain,’ said Scully retreating down the ladder. It sloped in silently, ignored by the postman, while Scully took shelter in the lee of the barn.

  ‘And what might you be doin, Scully?’

  ‘Getting out of the bloody rain, what d’you think?’

  ‘Afraid of a bit of soft weather, then?’

  Scully shrugged.

  ‘Get used to it, lad!’

  ‘Bugger that,’ said Scully. He gathered up his tools and went inside.

  By the time Pete came in Scully was upstairs prizing out rotten floorboards and setting new ones in their place. The brassy taste of nails was in his mouth. For some reason it reminded him of the cowshed, that taste, the slanting jerrybuilt pile his father kept tacked together for twenty years. He went everywhere with nails in his mouth, the old man. The smell of fresh-sawn wood was sweet now, and the rain pattered against the windows. Scully looked at the attic slope of the upstairs walls. It felt like a cubby house up here. These would be snug cosy rooms, warmed by the chimney that divided them. He could see them waking now on mornings quiet and wet as this, their sleepy voices close in the angled space.

  ‘Well come on, Scully,’ said Pete, suddenly beside him. ‘Don’t just sit there lookin lovesick, tell me about her.’

  ‘Jennifer?’

  ‘Ye tell me nothin, Scully. I’m beginnin to believe you’re English after all. A man works with you all day and ye don’t say fook. Just stand there lookin dreamy.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Well my ass.’

  Scully smiled.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, man, tell me about Jennifer. Make the day go by, boy, give me somethin to chew on. She’s the workin type, you say?’

  ‘That’s right. Department of Immigration. Got to be a bit of a big-shot.’

  ‘And now she’s emigratin herself?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s quit. She hated it. Loved working, you know. She was never the type to stay in and look after the kids. That’s more me.’

  Pete clucked. ‘And you claimin to be a workin man.’

  ‘When
Billie – our daughter – was smaller, I worked part-time so I could be with her.’

  ‘Where did you work? What is it exactly that ye do, Scully?’

  Scully laughed. ‘Those days I worked in a tackle shop. Sold lures and things, fixed reels. You ever seen a Mackerel Mauler?’

  ‘Oh, Jaysus I hate fish!’

  ‘I left school at fifteen, went north to work the deck of a rock lobster boat. Great money. I spose I’ve done all kinds of things.’

  ‘So where did you meet her?’

  Scully wrenched a board up in a shower of dry rot. ‘Geez, you want details, don’t you?’

  Pete poked in the recess with a chisel, searching out pulpy wood. ‘Was it a dance, now?’

  ‘Australians don’t dance or sing, believe me. No, we met at university, can you believe. I was trying to do architecture. Went back, finished school and got in. We were in a class together. I forget what it was. Something in the English Department, some unit I thought I’d pick up so I could read a few books, you know? She was the bored pube getting paid to improve herself at night. Black hair, pretty. I mean real pretty, and she didn’t say a word. Well, neither did I. I mean, there’s all these kids spouting books and people you never heard of, confident as you like. I just shut up and tried to keep me head down, and she was doing the same.’

  Peter fiddled with the blade of the plane, adjusting it absent-mindedly. ‘And, and?’

  ‘She asked me if I wanted a beer one night.’

  ‘She asked you’

  ‘Oh, mate.’ Scully rolled his eyes thinking of it. She bailed him up against the window one night and came out with lines that had to be rehearsed. She’d been practising.

  ‘What a friggin country it must be. Must be because it’s so damn hot. No time for romance.’

  Scully threw a handful of sawdust at him and went back to his sawing. ‘We both quit university and got married,’ he shouted. ‘Eight years!’

  ‘Well, what’re ye doin here? She quit a good job to go lurkin through strange places and end up here on a hill with Brereton’s cows?’

  ‘Well, she was bored with her job, and restless, and I was game for a change. We rented our house and travelled, you know.’

  ‘With a baby and all.’

  ‘A five-year-old isn’t a baby, Pete.’ No, he thought. For a baby you needed somewhere still and snug and anchored. Somewhere like this.