by Tim Winton
That vast field of black towered above him.
Spineless, that’s what. A stumblebum. Of course she left you – there’s nothing to you.
Cold eddies tweaked at his limbs. He could feel his body closing down and he began to shake. There were no stars in the sky anymore and his ears roared with a cruel lapping sound. He guessed this was the moment when you were allowed to feel sorry for yourself. The blow to his head shook him right through and suddenly it was more than he could stand for. He rolled angrily on his belly to face down this last humiliation and saw the otherworldly mass of the harbour mole sliding past an arm’s length away. The flashing light of the navigational beacon blurted in his face, and a small wave picked him up and dumped him splayed and spluttering on the cold glossy rocks where he lay too sick and sorry to be either grateful or amused. He held on and thought glumly of his clothes right around the other side of the harbour and the long naked walk under lights that awaited him.
Twenty-one
FROM A DREAMLESS PIT OF sleep, Scully came to himself alone in bed with the shutters shuddering and his head a stone on the end of his neck.
‘Billie?’
He lurched upright. ‘Billie?’
He saw his grazes and bruises as he dragged on his clothes. He lurched out into the corridor and down to the bathroom, but the communal door was ajar and the smelly room empty. Three at a time he went down the stairs into the courtyard where rain speared in and cats congregated in tiny patches of shelter in the corners of walls where withered grapevines and dripping painted gourds rattled in the wind.
‘Kyria? Kyria?’ he called, his voice breaking.
The heavy oak door to the kitchen opened.
‘Neh?’
The little woman wiped her hands on her apron and narrowed her eyes at him contemptuously. Scully stood in the rain and saw behind her, sitting by the range with a bowl of soup in her lap, his daughter who looked up curiously at him.
‘Oh, oh, good-oh.’
Right there in the rain, across the kalamata tins of battered geraniums and the wall of bougainvillea, he stood aside and puked until the door closed on him.
• • •
IT WAS AFTERNOON when Scully woke again. He showered gingerly, packed their things and went down to collect Billie. The rain had not let up and the wind bullied across the courtyard where his mess was long gone. He knocked at the door and the woman looked him up and down, stepped aside to let him in.
‘Signomi, Kyria. Etna arostos. Sick. I am very sorry. Um, we’ll go now. Thank you for looking after my child. How much? Um, poso kani?’
Scully put some bills on the table and the woman shrugged.
‘C’mon, Bill.’
Billie stood up, hair freshly brushed, her mouth and cheeks raw with the spreading rash, and came to him. Kyria Dina stooped and kissed her thick curls, and then Billie put her hand in his and they went out into the rain, across the courtyard, and into the alley where water ran ankle deep in a torrent gathering from the mountain, the high town, the Kala Pigadia. They made their way down, hopping from step to dry step without conversation.
• • •
THE WATERFRONT WAS DESERTED and awash with storm water that spilled across the wharf and into the harbour. Boats lunged against their moorings. The sky was black above the sea and the swell ponderous against the moles.
At the flying dolphin office, the clerk informed them that there would be no hydrofoils and no ferries today. The harbour was closed, and no vessel was allowed to venture out. Scully looked out at the heaving sea. Even the Peloponnese was just a smudge. Things could change, he knew, and a boat from Spetsai or Ermione might come by if the swell dropped. But it would be quick turnover at the water’s edge, so the only way to be sure of a passage was to wait the day out close by. He gathered himself giddily and headed for the Lyko. There was no choice – it was the closest to where the boats pulled in, and besides, nothing else was open. And, God help him, he had to make sure.
The taverna was smoky and full, but aside from the rain thrumming against the fogged panes and the crackling of the charcoal grill, it was quiet. The pale ovals of faces turned momentarily, then obscured themselves. Scully hefted his case between chairs and tables and led Billy to where Arthur Lipp folded his newspaper and cleared space for them at his table beside the bar.
‘You might as well sit.’
‘Hello, Arthur.’
‘You look terrible.’
‘I feel terrible.’
‘Not terrible enough, I fear.’ Arthur pulled at his moustache and regarded him carefully.
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘You went up to Episkopi.’
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘You can’t be told, can you?’
‘What, am I in school? I thought my wife was there, Arthur. I went to see.’
‘Your bloody wife!’ Arthur tossed his paper aside. ‘For God’s sake, man, she’s left you, so why don’t you just take it on the chin and go home!’
‘Why don’t you mind your own business, you pompous little shit?’
‘Because it’s your business and our business now!’ yelled Rory from a table across the way.
Scully stood up. ‘Look at you fuckers sitting around day after day like some soap opera! What business of yours could possibly interest me?’
Arthur Lipp sighed. ‘The final business of Alex Moore.’
Scully looked down at Arthur whose tan had gone yellow and his eyes quite pink.
‘I didn’t interrupt any work, if that’s what you mean. He hasn’t done a thing, poor bugger.’
‘Poor bugger indeed.’ Arthur looked away. ‘What on earth did you say to him?’
‘I had dinner with him – hell, I cooked dinner for him. Stayed a while and walked back. What d’you think I’d do to him, beat him up? He’s an old man. I apologised for busting in, cleaned up his kitchen . . . anyway, he said you could all get stuffed.’
‘Stavros Kolokouris the donkeyman found his body at the bottom of the cliff this morning.’
Scully looked at Billie. She shouldn’t he hearing this, none of this today, or yesterday or the day before. This wasn’t right.
‘The police have set out to recover the body. It’ll take them a good few hours without boats.’
‘He . . . he gave me . . .’
‘They’ll want to know if he was pushed.’
‘There wasn’t a note?’
‘Why, write one, did you?’ yelled Rory.
‘I –’
‘Save your story,’ said Arthur, not unkindly.
‘You mean the cops want to see me?’
‘Well, they know you were up there.’
‘Shit, thanks for putting in a good word.’
‘You were seen,’ said Arthur.
He caught Rory’s glance, grabbed his case and Billie’s backpack and hoisted her along with him, through faces and talk and smoke into the wild clean air of the harbour. In blasting rain he dragged child and luggage along the waterfront. Sponge-crowded windows ran with the blur of water. He came to a lane that led to the Three Brothers. Lying miserably on its leash in the rain, was a big dog so saturated as to barely look like a dog anymore. Scully and Billie swept by it and ran to the door and the smell of frying calamari.
Fishermen, muleteers, old men and loungers drank coffee and ouzo and played tavla. Scully saw a table by the wall and claimed it.
‘Eh, Afstralia!’
It was Kufos – the Deaf One – rising from his chair.
‘Yassou,’ said Scully, dripping onto the plastic tablecloth.
Kufos strode over, gold teeth glinting, his keg chest expanding as he came.
‘Leetle Afstralia!’ he said, digging Billie in the back of the neck with his thumbs. ‘Ti kanis?’
Scully motioned for him to sit down and the old caique captain flicked up the wicker-bottom chair and sat.
‘No happy today, ah?’
Billie shook her head.
‘You come back to Hydra
?’ he said to Scully. ‘So fast.’
‘Only for today,’ said Scully with a shrug. ‘For Piraeus, no boats today.’
‘Ah, too much this!’ said the skipper, making waves with his hands.
‘Yeah.’
Scully always liked Kufos. He was a proud and arrogant old bugger who liked to curse the tourists and take their money. He had been a merchant seaman and he told Scully garbled stories of Sydney and Melvorno and the girls he’d left weeping behind. Nowadays he ferried xeni around the island and fished a little for octopus, but he preferred to sit out under the waterfront marquees and watch the tourist women in their bikinis. He was a fine sailor, and given credit on the island for being the last man to call it quits when it came to a big sea. Scully ordered him an ouzo.
‘Sick, this girl?’
‘Sad.’
‘Kyria in Afstralia?’
Scully smiled noncomittally.
‘We need to go to Piraeus.’
‘Is too much. Finis, today. No dolphin, no boat.’
‘Yeah, I know. But would you go?’ Scully said, leaning into the man whose grey whiskers were as stiff as a deckbrush.
Kufos looked doubtful.
‘For maybe three thousand drachmae, Captain?’
Scully wrote the number in the plastic with his fingernail and the old man pursed his lips.
‘Four thousand?’ Scully murmured.
Kufos scratched his chin.
‘Okay, five, then.’
Plates clashed in the kitchen and men laughed and argued around them. The drinks came and the waiter, unasked, laid a bowl of soup before Billie. She looked at it a moment, its steam rose in her face and she took up the spoon.
‘Five thousand,’ said Scully. ‘It’s fifty dollars. Not even to Piraeus, just to Ermione across the channel.’
Kufos sipped his ouzo and sat back a while, watched Billie eat her soup. She paused after a few moments and the old man wiped her face with a paper napkin.
‘This is good girl. You like my boat?’
Billie nodded. She seemed to have rallied somewhat. She was a little more responsive. He knew he had the old man close to a deal. It was time to go. He didn’t know where to go, but it was definitely time to get off this island. He felt certain Jennifer wasn’t here. She might never have been here. She might have caught the six o’clock hydrofoil yesterday while he was at Episkopi. She had plenty of warning, if she hadn’t wanted to see him. And now with this Alex business he was panicky, feeling trapped. At the very best, if the cops were relaxed about it, it would take time and the trail would cool. What bloody trail – he just had to get off the island.
Outside the rain had stopped and the dog caught his eye, rising to its feet to shake itself. Water blurred from it and Billie slipped off her chair.
‘Don’t go far, love.’
Billie passed by the crowded tables and headed for the door. Scully saw now; it was the dog from the hydrofoil again.
‘Ermione is too much.’
‘Fifteen, twenty kilometres.’
‘Too much this,’ Kufos said with the wave motion again.
‘How about Hydra beach just across there. That’s less than ten.’
‘Signomi, Kyrios Afstralia. My boat she is too much slow for this. You take taxi Niko.’
‘Nick Meatballs?’
‘Neh. Is fast. Volvo Penta.’
Scully sat back. Meatballs was the biggest macho on the island. His taxi was the envy of every man and boy. Seventeen feet. 165 horsepower sterndrive and a sliding perspex canopy like an old Spitfire fighter plane. Forty knots on a smooth sea, no sweat. Joan Collins and Leonard Cohen had been among his passengers last summer. Meatballs was a living legend.
‘Pou ine? Where is he?’
Kufos shrugged, seeing the money elude him.
Scully ordered a bottle of Metaxa for the old man and offered his thanks. Then there was a growl and a scream from outside, and the whole taverna was in uproar.
Twenty-two
SCULLY RAN ACROSS TABLES to get outside where Billie sat bellowing inside her mask of blood. Her eyes were blank and wide as coins. Scully held her rigid in his arms and spoke quietly to her in the moments before the terrace was overrun with shouting men and women. With his fingers he probed her face for the wounds and found punctures in her cheek, her forehead, an eyebrow. With his handkerchief he wiped the gore away for a moment and saw that there was a gash in front of her ear and a hole in her scalp that showed a flap of fatty tissue. He tried to soothe her, calm her before anything else, but it was impossible with all the yelling and the many hands that reached for her in sympathy. He hoisted her on his hip in time to see old Kufos beating the dog to death with his unopened bottle of Metaxa, and he ran for the hospital.
Along the cobbled alleys slippery as creekbeds, Scully slid and lurched, leaving a bright trail on the stones. He saw the open eyes and mouths of people at their doors as he plunged across the square and through the ghostly trunks of the whitewashed lemon trees to the clinic steps.
He found a dim corridor, an empty room, then a roomful of bored people with their backs to the walls. They rose, startled, fearful, shouting, and then the mob came behind to surge in with their roars and bellows and great indecipherable swathes of language. He wanted to shout, to demand, but his breath was gone and he could not think of enough words in Greek.
Two women in white stiff-armed their way through the crowd and their eyes widened and their businesslike boredom evaporated. The child’s face was so disfigured by lumpy, dark blood, and her clothes so spattered and gluey with it, that it was hard to know what she was, let alone what the problem might be. They grabbed her, but Billie clung to him. Her nails pierced his clothes and found his skin. Men shouted across him to the staff who dragged them both into another room where a male doctor waited with a cigarette and a stethoscope.
The doctor motioned kindly, almost jovially as the nurses continued to pry Billie from Scully’s chest. At the big stainless steel sink they held her arms and head and swabbed her face. Her eyes were mad. Cattle eyes. Killing yard eyes. Her screams felt as though they could shave paint from the walls. The staff squinched up their faces. They lost any composure they might have planned on displaying when she bared her teeth and lunged at all those dark, hairy forearms locked about her.
‘Ochi, ochi!’
The doctor howled as Billie latched onto his wrist, gnashing and growling. The others let go in an instant and Billie crashed back against her father’s chest.
‘That’s it! That’s enough. She’s fucking hysterical, she’s scared out of her mind, for Godsake!’
‘Scully?’ someone called behind him.
He wheeled and saw Arthur with Kufos who had blood and brains all down his tunic.
‘Tell them to give me some stuff and I’ll fix her up myself! She’s shitscared.’
‘What are you going to do, sew her up on your own?’ cried Arthur.
‘Just tell em.’
‘What about the scars?’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ, help me!’
Screaming, screaming. Circus. Nightmare. Slow-motion pantomime. Scully’s sinews sprang in him like wires. His spine creaked with fear and hatred. He was drowning in noise, flapping hopelessly between words he couldn’t recognize. He tried to soothe Billie, almost sobbing his pleas to her, while Arthur and Kufos argued with the staff who shook their heads and waved their hands in outrage. Back and forward, the words, the scowls, the pleading, the slapping of fists and hands, and then when Scully realized he wasn’t breathing anymore, he turned with Billie in his arms and bolted from the room with the crowd parting fearfully before him. Down the long antiseptic corridor, the anterooms with their lordly portraits, and out onto the rain fresh steps beneath the sky where he roared until he felt her hands on his bursting throat and her voice in his ear.
‘Stop. Stop, it hurts!’
Twenty-three
ARTHUR BROUGHT ANOTHER BOWL OF hot water and Scully gritted his teeth and cut the p
atch of matted hair with the nail scissors. Billie closed her eyes and sucked in a breath as his fingertip pressed the flap of scalp down and took up the disposable razor. Arthur averted his eyes. Scully felt his arse tighten as he applied the blade to the wound and shaved the ragged skin. He saw the tears run from her tight-shut eyes and kept at it until the wound was clean and bleeding freshly again. The scalp lifted enough to sicken him.
‘You can’t sew that, Scully.’
‘Gimme those strip things, will you? We’ll press it flat and get it together again.’
‘The hospital wants you to sign a form.’
‘Just wash those scissors again, will you?’
Billie began to whimper as he squeezed antiseptic into this last gash.
‘You’re a brave girl,’ he murmured with a quaver in his voice. ‘Nearly finished.’
‘Kufos came for me,’ said Arthur.
‘Yes,’ Scully said, wiping the bald patch dry.
‘He said you wanted Nikos Keftedes.’
‘Arthur, the strips, okay? She’s in pain here.’
‘The sea’s treacherous out there,’ Arthur said, wrestling a pack of steri-strips open.
‘Here, hold the flaps down with your thumbs.’
‘Oh, dear. You should have –’
‘Just put your thumbs . . . right, I’ll bind it closed. Hold tight, love.’
Billie cried out as the men’s fingers pressed at her. Her feet rose into their bellies and her back arched from the sofa. She was sweating and the strips wouldn’t stick.
‘More strips.’
No light came in through the unshuttered windows now, and the wind harried the glass. Scully smelled the tobacco closeness of the Englishman as they worked on grimly with the child squirming and crying out. He whispered and crooned, hating the bluntness of his fingers.
‘That’s got it.’
‘Thank Christ.’
Scully took Billie in his arms to steady himself. Her face was livid with wounds, swollen and plastered in spots, her hairline ragged above one eye.
‘Thank you, Arthur. Can you sell me a blanket?’
Arthur stopped fussing with the bowl and implements. ‘Sell you?’