Night in Tunisia

by Neil Jordan

  "But it's white, isn't it."

  "Then," he said, "it couldn't be a whitethorn."

  "But it's white."

  "It's the end of August."

  She turned the key in the ignition and drove again. She thought of his slight, perfect body beside her in bed, of its recurrent attraction for her. She thought of his hatred of loud sounds, his habit of standing in the background, the shadows, yet seeming to come forward. She thought of how his weaknesses became his strengths, with a cunning that was perhaps native to his weakness. She thought of all the times they had talked it out, every conceivable mutation in their relationship, able and disable, every possible emotional variant, contempt to fear, since it's only by talking of such things that they are rendered harmless. She drove the car slowly, on the slight upward hill, the several yards to the pub they had arranged to stop at.

  "It is possible."

  "What is."

  "Everything's possible."

  He asked would they go in then.

  She opened her door and walked around the car and opened his door. She waited till he had lifted his good leg clear of the car, then held his arm while he balanced himself and lifted out the stiff leg.

  She watched him walk across the road and marvelled again at how the stiffness gave him, if anything, a kind of brittle elegance. She saw him reach the pub door, go inside without looking back. Then she looked up the road, curving upwards and the tree off from the road, in the distance. It was still white. Unutterably white.

  The pub was black after the light outside. He was sitting by the long bar, drinking a glass of beer. Beside him was another glass, and a bottle of tonic-water. Behind the bar was a woman with a dark western face, ruined by a pair of steel glasses. She was talking, obviously in answer to a question of his.

  "Cornelius O'Brien lived in the lower one," she said.

  "Owned more than them all put together. A great packer."

  "Packer?"

  "Jury-packer," she said, as if it was a term of office.

  He leant forward, his face eager with another question.

  She slipped into the seat beside him. She poured the tonic-water into the glass, wondering why it was he always bought her that. She must have expressed a preference for it once, but she couldn't remember when. Once she drank whiskey, she remembered, and now she drank tonic. And sometime in between she had changed.

  "Why did you get me this," she interrupted.

  He looked up surprised. Then smiled, a fluid smile.

  "Because you always drink it."

  "Once I drank whiskey."

  The wrinkles formed in clusters round his eyes.

  "I remember. Yes, Why did you stop?"

  She drank it quietly, trying to remember, listening to his further question about the crumbling castles. The woman answered, speaking the way children do, using words they don't understand. She used phrases to describe the dead inhabitants of those castles that were like litanies, that had filtered through years to her, that must have once had meaning. She was cleaning a glass and her eyes looked vacant as her mouth spoke the forgotten phrases.

  She stared at the ice in her tonic water. She watched it melt, slowly. She wondered about phrases, how they either retain the ghost of a meaning they once had, or grope towards a meaning they might have. Then she suddenly, vitally, remembered the taste of whiskey. Gold, and volatile, filling not the tongue but the whole mouth.

  "Whitethorn," she said, loud, out of the blue, as if it were a statement.

  The woman stopped cleaning the glass and looked at her. He put his hand round his glass and looked at her.

  "Have you come far, then," the woman asked.

  He mentioned a town a hundred miles east.

  "A long way alright," the woman said. Then she glanced from him to her.

  "Is it herself who drives?"

  She saw his hand tighten round the glass. She remembered the taste of whiskey. She said:

  "He has a bad leg. There are two things he can't do. Get out of a car, and drive a car. But otherwise everything's fine. Isn't that right John?"

  He had already gone towards the door. She fumbled in her pocket to find fifty pence. She couldn't and so she left a pound.

  He was standing by the door of the car.

  "Why did you have to jabber on like that?"

  "Why did you order me a tonic?"

  "You're impossible."

  "Nothing's impossible."

  "Get in."

  She drove. He swore at her in considered, obscene phrases as she drove. She knew he would swear like that, slowly and sadistically, scraping every crevice of her womanhood, till his anger had died down. So she drove with her eyes on the blaze far up the road, like a surprised fist with its fingers towards the sky, the brilliant cream-white of a dice-cube. As she drove nearer it seemed to swim in front of her eyes, to expand, to explode, and yet still retain its compact white. She could hear their breathing as she drove, hers fast like an animal that is running, his slow, like an animal that must stand in the one place. Then the white seemed to fill her vision and she stopped. She looked at the trunk below the white and the long field between it and the road. Then she looked at him.

  He was crying, and his face looked more beautiful than ever through the tears.

  "I love you," he said.

  "I'm leaving," she said.

  "Again?" he asked.

  He grabbed her, half angry, half afraid, but she had the door open already and she slipped away. She walked round the car and looked at him.

  "I don't—" she began, but her words were drowned by the sudden blast of the horn. His hand was on it, his knuckles white, his body was bent forward as if all his strength was needed to keep the horn pressed. She could hear the awful blare in her ears and could see his lips moving, saying something. She shouted at him to take his hand off and his lips moved again, saying the same something, the same three words. She made out the three words then and turned from his face and ran.

  She ran to the slate wall and clambered over it, scraping her shins. She felt the grass under her feet and put her hands over her ears. She was shocked by the sudden silence, like a sudden immersion in water. She was walking, but it was as if through a mental landscape, no sound but the strange humming of her eardrums. She felt she had closed her eyes and found this field, not driven to it. She knew her feet were walking her towards the tree, but it was as if the tree was coming towards her. The landscape rising with each step and each step bringing the landscape nearer. The tree on the hill, with its white made manageable now, small, tangible, familiar. She counted her steps like a little girl does and each step misplaced her hands and rang in her ears. Then something struck her about the tree, not really white, more an off-grey colour. She took three more steps and it came nearer, with the hill behind it, and its blossoms seemed to flap. But blossoms don't flap, she thought, they are still and pristine, they burst or moult, not flap and she must have run then for it came nearer in several large leaps.

  And it was there then, bare rough whitethorn with scores of tiny rags tied to each branch, pieces of handkerchief, shirttails, underwear, shift, masquerading as blossom. She thought of people wishing, tying these proxy blossoms. She thought of her and her hope that it had blossomed and them, making it blossom with their hope. She wondered again what hope meant, what impossible meant, but there was less scope to her wondering. She saw faded holy pictures nailed to the bottom of the trunk but couldn't read the pleas written on them. She took her hands from her ears to tear one off and the wail of the horn flooded her again, distant, plaintive, pleading. She tore a picture off, parts of it crumbled in her fingers, but she read "To Brigid for favours granted, August 1949." And the horn wailed like pain.

  A LOVE

  THERE WERE NO cars in Dublin when I met you again, the streets had been cleared for the funeral of the President who had died. I remembered you talking about him and I thought of how we would have two different memories of him. He was your father's generation, th
e best and the worst you said. I remembered your father's civil war pistol, black and very real, a cowboy gun. It was that that first attracted me, me a boy beyond the fascination of pistols but capable of being seduced by a real gun owned by a lady with real bullets— I shattered two panes in your glasshouse and the bullet stuck in the fence beyond the glasshouse shaking it so it seemed to be about to fall into the sea and float with the tide to Bray Head. Then you took the gun from me saying no-one should play with guns, men or boys and put the hand that held it in your blouse, under your breast. And I looked at you, an Irish woman whose blouse folded over and was black and elegant in the middle of the day, whose blouse hid a gun besides everything else. But except that you smiled at me with a smile that meant more than all those I would just have been a kid bringing a message from his father to a loose woman. As it was you walked over the broken glass away from me and I stepped after you over the broken pieces to where the view of the sea was and you began to teach me love.

  And when we met again there were no cars and the headlines talked about love and guns and the man who had died and I wondered how different your memory of him would be from mine. It was a stupid pursuit since I had no memory of him other than from photographs and then only a big nose and bulging eyes and spectacles but I knew you would be changed and I knew I was changed and I wanted to stop thinking about it.

  There were no cars but there were flowers in the giant pots on O'Connell Bridge, there was a band somewhere playing slow music and there were crowds everywhere on the pavement, women mostly who remembered him as something important, women who clutched handbags to their stomachs and stared at the road where the funeral would soon pass. I could sense the air of waiting from them, they had all their lives waited, for a funeral, a husband, a child coming home, women your age, with your figure, they had loved abstractly whereas you had loved concretely with a child like me. That was the difference I told myself but it was probably only that I knew you and I didn't know them. But that had always been the difference, all women had been a mother to someone but you had been a lover to me. And I focused my eyes on the empty street with them and wondered had that difference faded.

  I went into the cafe then and it smelt of Dublin, Ireland, the musty femininity of the women waiting on the curb for the men to pass, dead, heroic, old and virginal. I sat by the plate glass window and looked at the shiny chrome espresso machine, a cloud of steam rising from it. A girl in a blue smock with an exhausted face brought me coffee and I felt for the first time that I was back somewhere. I tasted the coffee and got the cheap caffeine bite, details like that, the girl's legs, too thin so the nylons hung in folds around them. Outside I could hear the brass band coming nearer, louder like the slowed step soldiers use in funerals. I knew I was out of step, it was all militarism now, like air in a blister, under the skin, it was swelling, the militarism I had just learned of before, in the school textbooks. Then I remembered something else about him, the man who had died, he had been the centre of the school textbooks, his angular face and his thirties collar and his fist raised in a gesture of defiance towards something out there, beyond the rim of the brown photograph, never defined. And I wondered whether I'd rather be out of step here or in step in London, where the passions are rational. And I felt the nostalgia of the emigrant, but it was as if I was still away, as if here in the middle of it all I was still distant, remembering, apart from it. I shook myself but couldn't get rid of the feeling. Something had happened to me since leaving, something had happened to me long before I left, but then everything changes, I told myself and some things die. So I just looked out the plate-glass window and listened to the slow brass, swelling more all the time.

  Then I saw someone looking like you coming down the street towards the cafe and as that someone came nearer I saw it was you, still you, your hair had got a little greyer but still kept that luxuriant brownness, your face had got thinner and fatter, thinner round the cheekbones, fatter round the jaw and neck. You hadn't seen me yet but I couldn't get myself to rise out of the seat so you would see me, I wanted to look at you like you were a photograph. I was remembering that letter of my father's, the only letter, that said you were sick and you did look sick, in the quiet way of bad sicknesses, cancer and the like. And then you opened the glass door and the brass music grew to an orchestra and the door closed and the music faded again and still I couldn't get up. And you were standing over me.

  "Neil!" you said. "Yes," I said. "Well," you said. "Yes," I said again.

  And then you sat down beside me, I was a child who isn't saying something, the thin girl came over to take your order. We were the only two in the cafe, you were talking, I was listening to you, quite natural, ordinary things after all. We were different, I was a young adult, you were an old adult, we both fingered coffee cups, mine cold, yours hot. I tried obscurely to remember, I had been an Irish boy with greased hair and a collarless leather jacket, you had been a single woman who kept a guest-house in a town called Greystones and now both of us were neither, my hair was dry and short, it came straight down my forehead and my forehead had a few lines, though people still told me sometimes that I looked sixteen, you were living in a house somewhere on the South Side, you didn't work now though the car keys you squeezed in your palm and the fur sleeves that hung dead from your wrists made you look well-off, in an extravagant, haphazard way.

  Then you mentioned the dead man outside.

  And somehow it began to come right. I noticed the black silk blouse under the coat, the loose and mottled skin where your neck met your breast. I remembered the nights lying in your old creaking bed that looked out on the sea, our movements like a great secret between us, silent, shocking movements, our silence a guard against my father who had the room down below, our lovemaking a quiet desecration of the holiday town, of the church at the top of the hill, of the couples you fed so properly at mealtimes, of my embarrassed adolescence, the guilt you tried to banish in me, the country, the place, the thing you tried to hit at through me you taught me to hit through you. And all the time for me there was my father lying underneath, cold most likely, and awake and I wanted him to hear the beast I was creating with you, I wanted him to hear it scratching, creaking through to him from above, for your body was like the woman he must have loved to have me, I had seen her in those brown faded photographs with a floppy hat and a cane, in a garden, like you but fatter, with a lot of clothes that came off, the coloured dresses and blouses first, then the white underclothes, dampened under the armpits, between the legs. And when you undressed on the beach and I watched you from the road, watched each thing falling in a bundle on the sand, you could have been her, you could have been anyone's mother only you were naked with a belly that drooped a little and a triangle of hair underneath it. Only that when you saw me you didn't shy from my frightened stare, you smiled. That smile began it. But what perpetuated it was something outside, my mathematical father lying sleepless on his bed, your civil-war gun, rosaries, that rain-soaked politician with his fist raised, clenched. Against something. Something.

  The brass band seemed much nearer now, going ahead of the same politician's cortege, ceremonial, thudding slow brass. I was watching you drinking your coffee. The brass music was cascading about you. I looked at the thin part of your face, you had no make-up on, your eyes looked almost ordinary. You were different and the same, I was different and the same, I knew that that is how things happen. And yet I'd met you because I wanted something more. We are all different threads, I told myself and once we had woven each other's threads into something like a bow. Once.

  "Well."

  We were stuck on that word. Then I plunged.

  "What are we going to do then, before I go back?"

  "Back where?"

  And I don't know whether you wanted to know, but I told you it all, about the hairdresser's in Kensal Rise, the women who tipped me pound notes if I touched their plump shoulders and told them they were too young for a blue rinse.

  "Is that what yo
u do."

  "Yes."

  And I told you about the cockney queen I shared a room with who I despised but who could be warm when—"And don't you act now—"

  And yes, I told you about the sweaty revues, revue being synonymous with theatrical sex, I told you about the empty stages where we rehearsed in our underwear and fingered each other's goosepimples, simulated copulation. Then I stopped, because you were drinking your coffee again and your unmadeup face looked sad, like an adolescent, the one I had been. And for a moment I was the experienced one, I clutched the gun, under my breasts, between the sheaves of my black blouse.

  "We'll go to Clare. Lisdoonvarna."

  "Why there," I asked.

  "I am past my prime. They are places for people past their prime."

  And I wondered should you say "prime" or "primes," I thought of all the hotels and guest-houses I had never been to. I knew middle-aged people went to those places and met men and took the waters and married maybe and drank sherries looking at the Atlantic, in bars that were probably closed now for De Valera's death.

  "It's autumn and everyone there will be past their prime. I want to see the bachelors court the spinsters. I want to take the waters. I want to drive in a Morris Minor past the Burren and look at the unusual flowers."

  There was an accusation in your voice as if you were trying to tell me something, something I didn't want to hear. I thought maybe you wanted to fit yourself, label yourself and I wondered would your conformity be as bizarre as my attempts at it had been.

  You talked about happiness then, a murderous happiness that followed you round like a pet dog. And I looked at you, you had pressed your unpainted lips together, the blood had gone out of them and I saw the need for happiness that had ravaged you, I wondered what deity it was that would label you old maid or spinster when you had once pressed that happiness on me. Then I heard the band outside, so loud now, and the cortege was passing and the band was playing the old nationalist tunes to a slow tempo. I felt I was watching an animal dying through the plate-glass window, an animal that was huge, murderous, contradictory and I looked up at your face, not much older really than when I had last seen you and I looked out the plate-glass window again at the funeral of the man I didn't remember, the man you would have remembered. I wondered what your memories were, your associations. And I looked at your eyes, bare and washed clean and I somehow knew.