Read The Riders for Free Online

soft weather, then?’
    Scully shrugged.
    â€˜Get used to it, lad!’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Well come on, Scully,’ said Pete, suddenly beside him. ‘Don’t just sit there lookin lovesick, tell me about her.’
    â€˜Jennifer?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Well.’
    â€˜Well my ass.’
    Scully smiled.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜That’s right. Department of Immigration. Got to be a bit of a big-shot.’
    â€˜And now she’s emigratin herself?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜When Billie – our daughter – was smaller, I worked part-time so I could be with her.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Oh, Jaysus I hate fish!’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜She asked me if I wanted a beer one night.’
    â€˜She asked you’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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!’
    â€˜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