The Riders

Tim Winton

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476797342
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction
• Index: Literature

An "intelligent...artfully rendered" ( The New York Times Book Review ) exploration of marriage and the rich relationship that can exist between father and daughter, The Riders is a gorgeously wrought novel from the award-winning author Tim Winton. After traveling through Europe for two years, Scully and his wife Jennifer wind up in Ireland, and on a mystical whim of Jennifer's, buy an old farmhouse which stands in the shadow of a castle. While Scully spends weeks alone renovating the old house, Jennifer returns to Australia to liquidate their assets. When Scully arrives at Shannon Airport to pick up Jennifer and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, it is Billie who emerges—alone. There is no note, no explanation, not so much as a word from Jennifer, and the shock has left Billie speechless. In that instant, Scully's life falls to pieces. The Riders is a superbly written and a darkly haunting story of a lovesick man in a vain search for a vanished woman. It is a powerfully accurate account of marriage today, of the demons that trouble relationships, of resurrection found in the will to keep going, in the refusal to hold on, to stand still. The Riders is also a moving story about the relationship between a loving man and his tough, bright daughter.

I

One

WITH THE NORTH WIND hard at his back, Scully stood in the doorway and sniffed. The cold breeze charged into the house, finding every recess and shadowy hollow. It rattled boards upstairs and lifted scabs of paint from the walls to come back full in his face smelling of mildew, turf, soot, birdshit, Worcestershire sauce and the sealed-up scent of the dead and forgotten. He scraped his muddy boots on the flagstones and closed the door behind him. The sudden noise caused an explosion in the chimney as jackdaws fled their fortress of twigs in the fireplace. His heart racing, he listened to them batter skyward, out into the failing day, and when they were gone he lit a match and set it amongst the debris. In a moment fire roared like a mob in the hearth and gave off a sudden, shifting light. The walls were green-streaked, the beams overhead swathed in webs and the floor swimming with trash, but he was comforted by the new sound and light in the place, something present besides his own breathing.

He simply stood there firestruck like the farmboy of his youth, watching the flames consume half-fossilized leaves and twigs and cones. There in the blaze he saw the huge burns of memory, the windrows of uprooted karris whose sparks went up like flares for days on end over the new cleared land. The walls here were a-dance now, and chunks of burning soot tumbled out onto the hearthstone. Scully jigged about, kicking them back, lightheaded with the stench and the thought of the new life coming to him.

The chimney shuddered, it sucked and heaved and the rubbish in the house began to steam. Scully ran outside and saw his new home spouting flame at the black afternoon sky, its chimney a torch above the sodden valley where his bellow of happiness rang halfway to the mountains. It really was his. Theirs.

• • •

IT WAS A SMALL HOUSE, simple as a child’s drawing and older than his own nation. Two rooms upstairs, two down. Classic vernacular, like a model from the old textbooks. It stood alone on the bare scalp of a hill called the Leap. Two hundred yards below it, separated by a stand of ash trees and a hedged lane was the remains of a gothic castle, a tower house and fallen wings that stood monolithic above the valley with its farms and soaklands. From where Scully stood, beneath his crackling chimney, he could see the whole way across to the Slieve Bloom Mountains at whose feet the valley and its patchwork of farms lay like a twisted shawl. Wherever you looked in that direction you saw mountains beyond and castle in the corner of your eye. The valley squeezed between them; things, colours, creatures slipped by in their shadow, and behind, behind the Leap there was only the lowest of skies.

He wasted no time. In what remained of the brief northern day he must seal the place against the weather, so he began by puttying up loose windowpanes and cutting a few jerry-built replacements out of ply. He dragged his tools and supplies in from the old Transit van and set a fallen door on two crates to serve as a workbench. He brought in a steel bucket and a bag of cement, some rough timber, a few cans of nails and screws and boxes of jumbled crap he’d dragged halfway round Europe. By the fire he stood a skillet and an iron pot, and on the bench beside some half-shagged paperbacks he dropped his cardboard box of groceries. All the luggage he left in the van. It was a leaky old banger but it was drier and cleaner than the house.

He lined up his battered power tools along the seeping wall nearest the fire and shrugged. Even the damp had damp. The cottage had not so much as a power point or light socket. He resigned himself to it and found a trowel, mixed up a slurry of cement in his steel bucket, stood his aluminium ladder against the front wall and climbed up onto the roof to caulk cracked slates while the rain held off and the light lasted. From up there he saw the whole valley again: the falling castle, the soaks and bogs, the pastures and barley fields in the grid of hawthorn hedges and drystone walls all the way up to the mountains. His hands had softened these past weeks. He felt the lime biting into the cracks in his fingers and he couldn’t help but sing, his excitement was so full, so he launched rather badly into the only Irish song he knew.

There was a wild Colonial boy,

Jack Dougan was his name . . .

He bawled it out across the muddy field, improvising shamelessly through verses he didn’t know, and the tension of the long drive slowly left him and he had the automatic work of his hands to soothe him until the only light was from the distant farmhouses and the only sound the carping of dogs.

By torchlight he washed himself at the small well beside the barn and went inside to boil some potatoes. He heaped the fire with pulpy timber and the few bits of dry turf he found, and hung his pot from the crane above it. Then he lit three cheap candles and stood them on a sill. He straightened a moment before the fire, feeling the day come down hard on him. It was sealed now. It was a start.

He put one boot up on a swampy pile of the Irish Times and saw beside his instep:

BOG MAN IN CHESHIRE

Peat cutters in Cheshire yesterday unearthed the body of a man believed to have been preserved in a bog for centuries . . .

Scully shifted his foot and the paper came apart like compost.

It was warm inside now, but it would take days of fires to dry the place out, and even then the creeping damp would return. Strange to own a house older than your own nation. Strange to even bother, really, he thought. Nothing so weird as a man in love.

Now the piles of refuse were really steaming and the stink was terrible, so with the shovel and rake, and with his bare hands, he dragged rotten coats and serge trousers, felt hats, boots, flannel shirts, squelching blankets, bottles, bicycle wheels, dead rats and curling mass cards outside to the back of the barn. He swept and scraped and humped fresh loads out to the pile behind the knobbly wall. The norther was up again and it swirled about in the dark, calling in the nooks of the barn. Stumbling in the gloom he went to the van for some turps, doused the whole reeking pile and took out his matches. But the wind blew and no match would light, and the longer he took the more he thought about it and the less he liked the idea of torching the belongings of a dead man right off the mark like this. He had it all outside now. The rest could wait till morning.

Somewhere down in the valley, cattle moaned in their sheds. He smelled the smoke of his homefire and the earthy steam of boiling spuds. He saw the outline of his place beneath the low sky. At the well he washed his numb hands a second time and went indoors.

When the spuds were done he pulled a ruined cane chair up to the hearth and ate them chopped with butter and slabs of soda bread. He opened a bottle of Guinness and kicked off his boots. Five-thirty and it was black out there and had been the better part of an hour. What a hemisphere. What a day. In twenty-eight hours he’d seen his wife and daughter off at Heathrow, bought the old banger from two Euro-hippies at Waterloo Station, retrieved his tools and all their stored luggage from a mate’s place in North London and hit the road for the West Coast feeling like a stunned mullet. England was still choked with debris and torn trees from the storms and the place seemed mad with cops and soldiers. He had no radio and hadn’t seen a paper. Enniskillen, people said, eleven dead and sixty injured in an IRA cock-up. Every transfer was choked, every copper wanted to see your stuff. The ferry across the Irish Sea, the roads out of Rosslare, the drive across Ireland. The world was reeling, or perhaps it was just him, surprised and tired at the lawyer’s place in Roscrea, in his first Irish supermarket and off-licence. People talked of Enniskillen, of Wall Street, of weather sent from hell, and he plunged on drunk with fatigue and information. There had to be a limit to what you could absorb, he thought. And now he was still at last, inside, with his life back to lock-up stage.

The wind ploughed about outside as he drank off his Guinness. The yeasty, warm porter expanded in his gut and he moaned with pleasure. Geez, Scully, he thought, you’re not hard to please. Just look at you!

And then quite suddenly, with the empty bottle in his lap, sprawled before the lowing fire in a country he knew nothing about, he was asleep and dreaming like a dog.

Two

SCULLY WOKE SORE AND FREEZING with the fire long dead and his clothes damp upon him. At the well he washed bravely and afterwards he scavenged in his turp-soaked rubbish heap and found a shard of mirror to shave by. He wiped the glass clean and set it on the granite wall. There he was again, Frederick Michael Scully. The same square dial and strong teeth. The broad nose with its pulpy scar down the left side from a fight on a lobster boat, the same stupid blue that caused his wonky eye. The eye worked well enough, unless he was tired, but it wandered a little, giving him a mad look that sometimes unnerved strangers who saw the Brillopad hair and the severely used face beneath it as ominous signs. Long ago he’d confronted the fact that he looked like an axe-murderer, a sniffer of bicycle seats. He stuck out like a dunny in a desert. He frightened the French and caused the English to perspire. Among Greeks he was no great shakes, but he’d yet to find out about the Irish. What a face. Still, when you looked at it directly it was warm and handsome enough in its way. It was the face of an optimist, of a man eager to please and happy to give ground. Scully believed in the endless possibilities of life. His parents saw their lives the way their whole generation did; to them existence was a single shot at things, you were a farmer, a fisherman, a butcher for the duration. But Scully found that it simply wasn’t so. It only took a bit of imagination and some guts to make yourself over, time and time again. When he looked back on his thirty years he could hardly believe his luck. He left school early, worked the deck of a boat, went on to market gardening, sold fishing tackle, drove trucks, humped bricks on building sites, taught himself carpentry and put himself through a couple of years’ architecture at university. Became a husband and father, lived abroad for a couple of years, and now he was a landowner in County Offaly, fixing an eighteenth-century peasant cottage with his bare hands. In the New Year he’d be a father again. Unbelievable. All these lives, and still the same face. All these goes at things, all these chances, and it’s still me. Old Scully.

He was used to being liked and hurt at being misunderstood, though even in Europe most people eventually took to Scully. What they saw was what they got, but they could never decide what it was they saw – a working-class boofhead with a wife who married beneath herself, a hairy bohemian with a beautiful family, the mongrel expat with the homesick twang and ambitious missus, the poor decent-hearted bastard who couldn’t see the roof coming down on his head. No one could place him, so they told him secrets, opened doors, called him back, all the time wondering what the hell he was up to, slogging around the Continent with so little relish. Children loved him; his daughter fought them off outside crèches. He couldn’t help himself – he loved his life.

As mist rolled back from the brows of the Slieve Bloom Mountains, the quilted fields opened to the sun and glistened with frost. Scully swung the mattock in the shadows of the south wall. The earth was heavy and mined with stones so that every few strokes he struck granite and a shock went up his arm and into his body like a boot from the electric fences of his boyhood. His hands stung with nettles and his nose ran in the cold. The smoke of valley chimneys stood straight in the air.

In the hedge beside him two small birds wheeled in a courting dance. He recognized them as choughs. He mouthed the word, resting a moment and rubbing his hands. Choughs. Strange word. Two years and he still thought from his own hemisphere. He knew he couldn’t keep doing it forever. He should stop thinking of blue water and white sand; he had a new life to master.

The birds lit on an old cartwheel beside the hedge to regard him and the great pillar of steam his breath made.

‘It’s alright for you buggers,’ he...