by Tim Winton
‘Geez, you don’t even know when you’re lying, do you?’
‘Why would I lie, Scully?’
‘Why? Why? Why would you get my credit card stopped? Do people like you have reasons?’
Irma smiled bashfully and licked a crimson smear from her teeth. ‘People like me? You think I’m mad and just do one thing and then the next thing and then something else, don’t you? But that’s exactly what you do, Scully. It’s what you’re doing this very minute, it’s what you’ve been at all day, all this week. You follow whatever moves. We’re not that badly matched.’
Scully’s mind reeled. Was he crazy? Had he lost it so completely?
‘Are you a friend of Jennifer’s?’
‘You might ask yourself the same question, Scully.’
‘You are, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve never met her,’ she said, raising her glass at the waiter and smiling coquettishly at him.
‘Never met her? Not even at the Intercontinental?’
‘Don’t be clever. I told you, I just saw her. You’re clinging to me like . . . like a Greek to a wooden horse. I saw her. I’m sorry I ever told you. Honestly, can you image Jennifer and me together?’
‘What exactly do you mean by that?’ said Scully hotly.
‘Well, she’s like that’ she said squinching her index finger into a circle so that a pinhole of light showed through at the centre.
Scully held the table by the legs. ‘And you’re, you’re what?’
‘Me? I’m interesting. She’s just trying to be.’
‘Still, you’ve never met her?’
‘I’m like you, Scully. I like being who I am.’
‘Irma, just what you are is not real clear.’
‘I said who, not what. What a sadly male thought. I’m like you, Scully. A little rough around the edges. I can take it as well as dish it out. I already forgave you for bolting on me. The ferry. Remember?’
‘I’m surprised you remember.’
‘Okay, I was blasted. Listen, I like you. I like Billie. I just think I deserve another chance. I know you do.’
Scully shook his head and bit back the stream of abuse that bubbled in his throat. But he smiled despite himself. She was a phenomenon alright. And he needed her if he wanted to get to Amsterdam. Time to suck eggs.
‘You look wild, Scully, but you’re soft.’ She laughed and accepted the new pastis from the waiter.
‘Oh?’ That word again. He felt a ridiculous pang of shame at this. ‘Really?’
‘I meant tender, Scully.’
Irma put her hand on his and for an instant he liked her. She was mad, a liar, a bad dream from hell but she was flesh and blood. Just the touch of a hand, a human touch. God, he missed being wanted. The café smelled warm and friendly with its scents of onions and coffee and tobacco. He felt himself loosen a little.
‘Is it that you’re lonely, Irma? This business?’
‘I’m not lonely,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me.’
Scully looked at her, the way her neck stretched back and her eyes narrowed like a snake about to strike. It cleared his head immediately.
‘Okay, Irma,’ he said, meaning it. ‘I won’t.’
‘You don’t understand simple attraction.’
Scully made a smile. ‘Well, maths was never my thing.’
Billie came back, trying not to smile as she climbed onto her chair.
‘What?’ said Scully.
‘The toilet,’ she burst out, scandalized. ‘It was just a hole in the ground!’
He looked at Irma. ‘My daughter has toilet adventures everywhere she goes. Travel with Billie – see the toilets of the world. It’s a squat, Billie. You’ve seen them all –’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, that bit’s gone. Like someone’s stolen it. It really is just a hole in the ground.’
‘So what took you so long?’
‘I was trying to find the button.’
‘Here,’ he laughed. ‘Take your tablet.’
‘Let’s go shopping,’ said Irma. ‘It’s sad, the two of you on the road at Christmas.’
‘Jesus was on the road at Christmas,’ said Billie.
‘Yes,’ said Irma, flummoxed at last. ‘Yes.’
Forty-four
AFTER LUNCH IN THE CAFE it was a long noisy afternoon in the shops with Irma. She took them to Fnac and bought tapes. Ry Cooder for Scully. Hoodoo Gurus for her. At Les Halles she bought herself Ysatis and splashed it on. In a taxi she took them to Galeries Lafayette where she found the same perfume cheaper and didn’t care. She bought Scully a silk shirt there and little red dancing shoes for Billie. In another taxi they went down to the big street market past Bastille and bought lychees and bananas and oranges. There were so many people and smells you couldn’t move. Irma found a saddle in the fleamarket but Scully said no, they couldn’t carry it. It was disappointing but she knew he was right. Then in a big street of ritzy furniture shops they saw a man with a wallaby in a dog-collar. It was a bad moment, but Irma didn’t notice.
And then, so quickly, it got dark.
• • •
ALL DAY SCULLY LET HER drink and buy while a strange cold calm settled on him. He saw it all pass by as though he weren’t quite in it himself. The feeling intensified in the little brasserie off the Rue Faubourg St Antoine. Amid the platters of Breton oysters, the bottles of champagne, the flash of cutlery and linen, the hiss of butter, the caramelizing scent of roasted garlic, time slipped by almost without him. He knew what he was doing, but he couldn’t actually believe it was happening.
He thought it was the terrible, necessary thing he was about to do, but it could have been the fact that he drank along with Irma. By nine he was cold, calculating and shitfaced.
Irma and Billie laughed at some half-arsed joke and jostled one another. He saw Irma’s even white teeth and the bleary brightness of her eyes. Pressed against his, her leg was warm and comforting, hardly the shock it might have been this morning. There was something complete about her tonight. She looked strangely content, magnanimous, and not all of it was the champagne. Maybe this is her, he thought. Maybe this is the person she must have been once – warm, funny, generous. Tonight her mouth was sensual and without a trace of cruelty. What horrible thing had happened to her between Liverpool and Berlin, between the big stops in her life? Those bruises, they meant other bruises, damage he couldn’t even guess at.
‘Are you dreaming, Scully?’
‘Hm? Yes, a bit.’
‘Billie was telling me about when she was born.’
Billie giggled in embarrassment.
‘Well . . . she was born fugly, you see.’
‘Fugly?’
‘Like extra-double ugly with cheese. It’s when ugly goes off the scale. She looked like an angry handbag.’
Billie squawked in delight. ‘Tell the truth!’
‘That is the truth. Scout’s honour, I asked for my money back.’
‘Stop!’ said Billie giggling out of control.
‘Here, take another pill.’
Irma’s eyes glistened. She ordered more champagne and held both their hands. She seemed about to cry. She leaned into Scully and he felt her breath on his ear.
‘I hate her for leaving you,’ she whispered.
Scully set his teeth. ‘We don’t know she did,’ he said carefully, awkward in front of the child.
‘Even if she didn’t I’d still feel the same.’
‘Well,’ he chuckled mirthlessly, ‘you’re just hard to get along with.’
‘Try me.’
• • •
LATER THEY STUMBLED UP toward the old neighbourhood. The sound of bells roosted on the wind.
‘Hear the bells?’ cried Billie, exhausted and jumpy. ‘Hear the bells?’
In the Little Horseshoe, where labourers, junkies, transvestites and students gathered to see in Christmas, Irma began to drink Calvados and Scully backed off onto beer. Now that she’d stopped moving, Billie wilted quickly and Scully saw that it
was ten o’clock. He tried to steady himself. Not a bad place to say goodbye to Paris. This was it, his last drink. Irma was blasted. This was surely it. He dragged them out into the street.
Beneath the bare chestnuts, her breath billowing back from her, Billie ran ahead on a final burst of energy while Scully helped Irma along the pavement.
‘Did you enjoy the day?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
‘I hoped you might forgive me.’
‘Of course I forgive you,’ he lied.
‘Christ, look at that.’
Up ahead, outside the Prefecture of Police and the armoured booth at the doorway, Billie danced with two cops, a man and a woman. Round and round they went, the three of them holding hands. Submachine guns clanked at their hips. Their quiet laughter carried on the cold, sulphuric air, rooting Scully to the spot.
• • •
THERE WAS A MERCIFUL CROWD in the tiny hotel lobby, a warehouse of piled luggage and language that Scully weaved through unchallenged with Irma and Billie, grateful he’d kept the room key on him all day. The mob noise echoed up the curving stairwell as Scully urged Irma along. Billie went ahead with the key.
‘Nice place you have here,’ Irma said, slumping against the banister. ‘Is this a spiral staircase or am I just pissed?’
‘Both,’ said Scully looking up at her firm backside and giving her a shove onwards that caused her to shriek and giggle. He was drunk himself but he could still see the whole night ahead.
‘How many more floors?’
‘Next one.’
Irma tipped on her little boots and rested against the wallpaper. Hair fell into her eyes and she tilted her head back to clear it, exposing her long neck, white and marked.
‘Help me, Scully.’
‘Come on, you can make it another flight.’
‘Help me.’
Scully joined her on the step and she opened her eyes but did not look at him. She grabbed his lapel.
‘Can’t you help me, Scully?’
‘You want me to carry you.’
She pulled him to her and looked into his face. She kissed him with her eyes open while her tongue travelled across his teeth, his lips, his chin. Scully felt her pelvis rock into his and he reached behind with one hand and pulled her tighter, feeling her butt clench.
‘It’s what you want,’ she said. ‘To help me.’
Scully picked her up and staggered on with her sucking his neck and pulling at his sweater. Up the stairwell from the ground floor came the screech of brakes and a roaring cheer as somebody’s bus arrived. Scully saw the open door and steadied.
‘And I’ll help you, Scully.’
He couldn’t bring himself to answer, but he knew she was right.
• • •
BILLIE FELL ASLEEP WITH HER shoes on and her backpack still hanging from one arm. Scully lowered Irma into a chair and knelt down to make the kid comfortable. He pulled off her boots, unhooked the pack and her jacket, and rolled her under the covers. He turned out the light and left the bathroom door ajar. The drapes lay open to the soft sandstone light of the city. He leaned his head against the window to get his breath back. Behind him, Irma fished in her bag for a bottle and sighed.
‘Where are you staying?’ he murmured. ‘Where’s your stuff?’
‘Here.’
He turned and saw her holding the bottle out to him. He shook his head. He walked past her and locked the door. He felt the bottle pressed into the small of his back and he turned to where she sat smiling blearily up at him. Irma placed a heel on his thigh. It bit into his skin. He looked down her leg and then back at the sleeping child. Irma tilted the bottle and drank deeply. He watched her, saw her pale neck moving in the dimness.
He took hold of her ankle and she planted the other boot on his free thigh. He moved his hands down her legs. Her tights crackled with static and he was surprised at the softness of her flesh as he held her calves. He held tight to keep his hands from shaking. Weeks of pent-up frustration smoked in him. He watched her pull down her tights and pants, still drinking from the bottle.
‘Billie,’ he whispered hoarsely.
‘Billie’s no longer the point.’
Her skin was ivory in the dark. The bottle fell and Scully lost his clear, hard sight of the night and yanked her to the floor where she grabbed at his belt and ricked up her skirt till her boots ground at the back of his legs. He slid into her with her breasts in his hands and his knees burning on the carpet. Her breath was volatile. It filled his mouth.
‘You need me, don’t you,’ she gasped.
‘Shh.’
He covered her mouth with his hand and felt her tongue between his fingers and then her teeth in his palm and her nails in his buttocks. She was soft to touch, too soft, like something overripe, but he clung to her knowing she was right. He needed her in more ways than he could make plain to anyone. He felt his desperation winding into hers, his lies into hers, his gratitude, his shame, the shocking current that surged down his spine.
Forty-five
NEAR MIDNIGHT SCULLY STOOD dressed in the stark bathroom and emptied Irma’s shoulder bag into the sink. Her snores carried from behind the closed door as he shuffled through dental floss, crumpled tissues, lipsticks, a notebook in scrawled German, old boarding passes, mints, tampons, a condom, a receipt from the Grand Bretagne in Athens, some fibrous strings of dope that lay like pubes against the white enamel, a spectacle case and finally a python-skin wallet.
Inside the wallet was a lock of snowy hair, an EC passport in the name of Irma Blum with a photo of an auburn-haired Irma with a wicked smile on her face, a sheaf of carelessly signed travellers’ cheques in American dollars, a Polaroid snap of a fat baby, and eight hundred francs in crisp new notes.
Scully stuffed the money into his pocket and picked up Billie’s backpack from where he’d put it on the toilet cistern. His mouth tasted of cigarette ash and his head hammered. He looked at the brassy tube of lipstick a moment, hesitated and picked it up. He pulled the cap off, wound the little crimson nub out experimentally. Then he signed the mirror. XXX. Before the idea of it sank in he dropped the tube and turned out the light.
The city glow chiselled in through the open drapes and showed Billie and Irma in deep sleep, their limbs cast about the bed before him as he crept across the room. In sleep they could have been mother and child. He crept closer. Irma’s mouth was open. The room stank of booze and dirty socks. Her arm lay across the counterpane, white and still shocking. Billie bunched up at an angle to her, fist against her own lips.
He picked up Billie’s boots and coat, stuffed them into the backpack looped over his arm, then peeled back the bedclothes a way and gathered her up. Irma snored on like a surgical patient. He held the child to him and looked down a moment upon this strange woman. He felt a twinge of tenderness and a momentary impulse to wake her, but he was heading for the creaky door even before it passed.
Out in the sudden light of the landing he laid Billie on the carpet and pulled the door to without daring to breathe. He put his ear to the door. Nothing but snores.
As he struggled to get her boots on, Billie stirred and muttered.
‘What? What?’
‘Don’t talk – shh.’
Then she opened her eyes; they widened awfully a moment and settled on him. He put a finger to his lips in warning and went back to booting her up. She sat up to receive the coat, her hair upright, her scabs livid.
‘Hop up, love. You’ll have to walk, at least till we get down to the street.’
She began to whimper. ‘I’m tired!’
‘Me too,’ he said, clamping his hand over her mouth. ‘Now shut up.’
• • •
WITHOUT LUGGAGE and with him grotesquely whistling Christmas carols with barely enough breath to get a note, Scully took Billie through the tiny lobby without arousing suspicion from the dozing concierge. Out in the street it was all Scully could do not to break into a mad run. He drank in the f
rigid air and saw his breath ghosting before him. That’s it, that’s all it took to desert someone, to leave a woman behind with his bag of dirty clothes, his candles, his sodden picture by poor dead Alex, the strewn presents of the drunken day and his strapping hotel bill. This was how it felt to be an empty cupboard, to know you were capable of the shittiest things.
He hoisted Billie onto his back to cross the Pont St Louis as a great barge churned below. The bells of Notre Dame began to toll midnight, plangent and mournful. They rang in the cellar of his belly. Around them the cafés roared, echoing along the shadowy buttresses of the cathedral, setting his teeth on edge.
‘Where’s Irma?’ murmured Billie, twisting her fingers in his hair.
‘Listen to the bells.’
Scully felt the child’s breath against his neck and knew he needed to eat, but he was afraid to miss the Metro at Cité by the flowermarket before the system closed down for the night.
‘Where’d she go?’
‘Don’t talk for a minute.’
‘I’m falling, look out!’
Scully tottered and found the perpendicular again but Billie scrambled down off him.
‘You’ll drop me!’
He’d drunk more than he thought. Now that he was in the open he was all but reeling.
‘I’m cold,’ he said, pulling himself up on the arrowheads of the fence. ‘I’m so cold.’
Billie took the backpack from his arm and shrugged into it. ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ she murmured.
‘I have to get inside for a minute. A café, anywhere.’
‘Here,’ she said, pointing to the great cathedral which fattened with music and the voices of the dead and the living and the tolling of bells in the sky above them.
Scully looked up at its dripping gargoyles and the mist of light that hung over it, spilling faintly down its buttresses like rain. His drunkenness settled heavily on him, his throat burned and his vision was speckled with stars and blips of all kinds. He felt like a man who’d walked through a sheepdip, his skin was so clammy. Oh God, not tonight, not when his hands smelled of Irma and his heart was a clump of oozing peat.
Billie tugged and worried at him. He batted her off. Their shoes chafed on the cobbles.