No, no pain. Just a thirst.
Shit, for all he knew they could have been at it in Paris right from the beginning, with him so bloody glad she had someone to be with. Marianne, Jean-Louis, they probably knew all along. Their disdain, it was contempt for his blind trust, his weakness. And the baby, the baby was a hoax, just a vicious bloody decoy to free herself with. Setting him loose on the tumbledown bothy, buying time. He’d never laid eyes on an ultrasound image, a doctor’s bill, a test result in Athens, trusting prick he was. He had no other child, then. That still got close to pain. A couple of days ago, knowing that might have broken him. But he’d gone past something. He’d crossed a line. No baby. No wife. No marriage, nothing he could look back on with certainty, nothing that didn’t look like quicksand. And who knows, maybe she’d bolted with all the money as well. In the name of what — love? Personal development? The bohemian life?
It meant he’d done all this to himself, to poor Billie, to Irma, just so he could see a corpse. Across Europe and back to obligingly identify a body. With dignity. Yes, it meant, in the warm light of this bar, feeling no pain, that he had nothing. Not a hole in the ground, not even the dying echo of an idea of his life. In fact, sweet fuck-all.
And that just made him thirsty.
Forty-nine
SCULLY HIT THE HARD CHRISTMAS air of the street at God knows what hour of the night. The kid was pink-eyed and sluggish but he was floating, hovering above the glassy cobbles, four sheets to the wind and free.
The streets were streaming with walkers and riders and scooting cars. The mothwing whirr of bicycles fanned by his ear. Bells tinkled tiny on the road and gross in the air where pigeons rose from church towers and clouds lay low across the city. Clots of people weaved through traffic bollards and tossed their scarves with gusts of perfume. The tramlines shone, the great paned sashes of glass held figures and furniture and music and the jaunty gables rendered the Calvinistic brickwork severe and silly. It was shaking, this city, shuddering at its moorings as Scully swept down alleys past thickets of voluptuous wrought-iron with the sweet anaesthesia of Trappist beer coming to his cheeks like true belief. God, how pretty everyone was here, how young and apple- arsed on their bikes. The café windows were pats of butter melting at his feet, the air was bright-clear and etching cold.
In the Spuistraat a ramshackle warehouse festooned with gilt chains and aerosol banners in Dutch raged with upstairs light and music. Across its walls was a wild dream of graffiti. They sounded like birds up there, like German birds about to burst into English any second now — as soon as they cleared their throats properly. Look at that, even their squatters were house-proud — what a people.
He elbowed his way into a warm darkwood café, suddenly surprised to find himself inside, and ordered more Duvel and some of that evil clear stuff they were downing all along the bar. The sweet crunch of sand on the boards underfoot buoyed him now against the haggard glare of the kid at his elbow. Shit a brick, look at those students, the belts cinched gorgeously over their navels, the peek of white flesh through carefully ripped Levi’s, the broad bright bands in their hair, the way their foreheads shone, the curve of their calves against the denim.
He threw back the clear shot and chased it with beer and thought for a moment of the mad, glowing ears of Peter Keneally. His own ears were gone now and his eyebrows were melting. His chin was off with the pixies but his mouth held good. The barman’s apron snapped like a spinnaker, the brass taps were winch handles. No sweat, he had the sea legs of an octopus now. Eight legs and six of them Irma’s.
‘To Irma!’ he blurted.
The kid fingered the guts of the wallet and found guilders.
‘To Irma’s Christmas on the lie St Louis.’
The barman took the money and smiled indulgently at his sober, saving daughter.
‘To the six wraparound-suck-me-dry legs of Irma the squirmer.’
He felt the toes of her little boots against his shin and busted out laughing. She pummelled him with fists the size of apricots and her hair was a blur before him. The girls along the bar shifted in their creaking leather jackets and smiled. Scully felt himself leaving backwards, falling across the room, dragged by the belt and waving at those fruit-arsed honeys as the cold and fragrant night air rattled down his neck. He was losing transmission now and then. The kid stood there like a bollard but he was moving. He held out his hand and surged on.
The streets became pink and thumping. Trash clacked underfoot and the alleys were gamy. He couldn’t tell if he was suddenly tired or if maybe everyone was older here.
A chrome-headed little runt stiff-armed him at a sluggish turn in the pedestrian surge, whispering foully at him in a language he couldn’t stay with. Scully shrugged him away and ricocheted into a clownfaced lunatic with a half-inch chain around his neck. There were syringes underfoot and aquarium windows full of whores.
‘Over here!’ someone screamed from a throat-like doorway. ‘See real life focking! Real focking!’
He stumbled through a fresh map of vomit and landed against the hot plane of a plate-glass window which shook with resistance. He pulled himself up to see a field of photographs. It hurt to focus; it puzzled him, that world of images. People, it looked like, well, it might have been people or the inside of an abattoir. Pink, pink flesh and shocked, hurt faces with bared teeth. He found his ears with his hands and held his head there before it, struggling to understand. Yes, that was a woman. Part of a woman. And razor blades. Oh, God help me. There it was, the Auschwitz of the mind, the place you’d never dreamt of going, the hell they said wasn’t real. His face came back to him like a nightmare, the fingers in his jacket held like snared fish. He saw Billie crying, and behind her a rush of black hair in the passing crowd, the blind swoop of his whole life that set him running like a man in flames.
Billie skidded on a half-sucked lemon in the pink piggy light of the doorway and stumbled to her knees. There was a farmyard smell to the street and a look in people’s faces that made animals of them. Low aquarium windows loomed with ladies swimming in purple light, their eyes foxy and shining. Music bashed up out of doors in the ground and hot air gushed in her face pricking her scars with sudden heat. Into the tunnel of hips and legs and voices they veered, her grip slipping as Scully tipped away. Horse manure and food steamed on the uneven cobbles. Away into the tunnel he was falling, against a wall of pink bodies under glass like a graveyard, his hair streaked out against the tangle of fingers and legs and teeth, snarled and hanging. She saw the bottle in the girl’s vagina, the safety pin in the face beside it, the harness, the shocked cattle look of the eyes in the pictures hardened with glass as her father slid down watching someone pass. He was falling, falling, too heavy for her to hold. And then he yelled out that name, his voice hoarse and breaking.
‘Jennifer!’
Billie felt her nails break as he fought clear. She saw his back, his hair sinking in the moving squelch of bodies and he was gone. She could chase him, she knew. She was small enough to worm her way through and catch up to him, but the name froze her where she stood. Did she really see that glossy tail of black hair that moment in the corner of her eye?
Billie stood there, breathing but not moving with the light flickering on her and the canal shimmering like the entrance to the centre of the earth.
Piggy-looking people herded by her, snuffling and clacking and bristling up against the windows. The trough of the canal flattened off under the bridge.
A man in a baseball hat put his hand on her head, talking something she didn’t know and then stopped. ‘You talk Inglis?’