Night in Tunisia

by Neil Jordan

  We walked outside then and the brass music became a deafening thud. We walked slowly down the street, we couldn't talk, the music was so loud. I bought a newspaper at the corner of Abbey Street and saw a headline about the funeral that was crawling along beside us. We passed a TV sales shop where a crowd of people were staring at a white screen, staring at the death being celebrated behind them.

  As I remember you I define you, I choose bits of you and like a child with a colouring-book, I fill you out. The car-keys are swinging on your finger, your forefinger and thumb choose one, insert it in the lock and your whole hand tenses in the turning. Your car is like you said, a Morris Minor. It's grey and covered in dents and the chrome is rusty. Your hand turning is reddish, sunburnt, which accentuates more its many creases. Then a man-sized watch and the sleeve of your coat where the fur has rubbed off.

  Once it was desire I filled you out with, not memory. You were a blown-up photograph to me, a still from a film. I brought the youthful sullenness I learnt from the hit songs to you. I ate chips before I came to you, my fingers stank of vinegar, my breath of nicotine. And you played with me, you let me fill you out, you played Ava Gardner to my James Dean. But I chose, I was arbitrary, I took what I wanted. Your brown hair, your anxious mouth, your bare feet—on the straw bedroom mat. I took some and left the rest, I didn't know what the rest meant, I didn't know what varicose veins meant or fallen arches or lace curtains, respectability, spinsterhood. I plead guilty but ignorant, I didn't know what woman meant.

  "Can you drive?"

  I said no. I said I would like to, I would like to feel machinistic and free but my father never drove so no-one taught me.

  "What do you mean," you asked "Machinistic—"

  And I hadn't known what I meant, I got confused, I said something about the wheel driving, following the white line. Then you were quiet for a while, whether from tactfulness or not I don't know and then—

  "I wasn't made for cars."

  I didn't believe you, you had shaped this car to fit you. You drove it like it fitted you, through the city that was empty, that had put its best side out for the man who had died. The streets were clean, the buildings were respectful, they seemed to curtsy before us as you drove. Then they got thinner and thinner and we were on the dual carriageway, driving west.

  "I idolised him once."

  I meant to ask you about your sickness but the words wouldn't come. So you talked while you drove, abstracted talk.

  "I was taught to idolise him, everyone was. I remember standing at meetings, holding my father's hand, waving a tricolour, shouting Up Dev. My father wore a cloth cap and a trenchcoat, everyone did then."

  Your eyes were squinted towards the road as if you saw what you were remembering on it.

  "His face was like a schoolteacher's. Or maybe all schoolteachers tried to look like him. You could never see his eyes clearly because of his glasses. They were the first thing you noticed after his nose."

  We were passing Monasterevin. The town looped in a semi-circle round your car.

  "Have you ever been to the West?"

  "No," I said.

  "You'll never understand this country till you have."

  Your voice sounded older, consciously older, something valedictory in it that made me remember the night my father took you out and me with him as his fifteen-year-old son, mature enough for adult company, my father being a lecturer in maths and a widower, a natural partner for you who was single, who kept the guest-house he stayed in. We went to a variety in Bray where a Scottish comedian told Irish jokes and a youth with a guitar sang Lonnie Donegan songs and two girls with a ukelele sang George Formby and kicked their legs on either side of the stand-up mike. And afterwards we went for a meal in the Royal Hotel, we ate roast beef and drank sherry. I poured your sherry with the distance he had trained me in and I sat at the far end of the table while you both talked, he at length, you with many pregnant pauses. You talked about life, about friends in public life, who you knew of through your father, who he knew of through his work, he prided himself on both his aloofness from the world and his reserved contact with it. You were beautiful and intimidating in a navy dress and shawl and while in your silences you spoke to me, me in my greased hair and the suit I was told to wear, in your conversation you spoke to him and you managed the pretending so adroitly that in the end I was fooled and I screamed at you afterwards and it took three days for our mutual secret to build up again between us, for me to hold the you I wanted in my unwashed arms, selfishly and viciously, for you to tell me again about love and irreligion, about other countries where women are young at the age of thirty-nine and boys are men at fifteen.

  "Are you happy?"

  "Sometimes," I said.

  "You used to be. You used to be very quiet, very joyful and very sullen."

  We were passing Portlaoise, the barbed-wire towers of the prison and the red wall of the mental hospital.

  "It was all in your face," you said. "In the way your snub-nose twitched—"

  And we both laughed then, it sounded stupid but we laughed and your laugh was like a peal, you could have been standing in the broken pieces of glass again, beside the glasshouse, laughing. I tightened my nose like a rabbit the way I used to do, then I flushed in embarrassment doing it and that made you laugh louder, so loud that you began coughing and had to stop the car and wipe your mouth. There was blood on the kleenex you wiped it with.

  "We're different," you said.

  "Yes," I said. And you looked at me and giggled again. Like someone very young. Too young. You put your arms around me and kissed my face and I stayed very quiet, feeling you again, smelling you again. Your lips opened on my cheek and I could hear a tiny whistle off your breath.

  "Aren't we?"

  "Yes," I said, "We're different" and I kissed you back so you could feel how different. But you stopped me.

  "Don't try and change me."

  "How could I?"

  "You could," you said, "You could change me back."

  But you were happy then, weren't you? You began to drive faster, swerving gaily to avoid pigeons. You asked me about myself and my father and I answered both as well as I could. You still coughed every now and then and once you had to stop the car, your whole body tensed as if you were in pain. Your fingers clenched the wheel, they seemed to get even thinner and the bones on the backs of your hands were thin, leading like a scallop to the fingers. But you got over it then, you began to drive, you told me not to mind you, that you were only dying, it's a common complaint and you laughed like before and I laughed with you. Then we stopped in a pub for a drink and I drank a gin while you drank a pint of stout and the barman remarked on how its normally the other way round.

  When we were driving again we saw a fat girl standing by a petrol-pump following every car that passed her with her eyes and thumb. You wanted to stop but I didn't let you, I thought she'd come between us and the laughing. So we drove on and I had a clear view of the disappointment in her large blue eyes as she fumbled with her handbag, realising the car wasn't going to stop after all. And I felt sorry for a moment but your mad peculiar gaiety filled the car again and stopped me feeling sorry.

  When we came to Limerick you got quieter and I thought we were stopping since it was almost dark. But you said that you hated it there and you drove on till we came to a sign saying Lahinch and a street that was flanked by burrows and summer houses. You stopped. It was fully dark. We were on the street of a seaside town. I could see a beach at the end of the street, then sea, a different sea from the one we had left. But then all seas are the same, I thought and when we walked down to the beach and watched the tide sucking off the long strand I saw it was the same, like the one that had washed your guest-house.

  I began to feel it all again, the seaside town, you beside me, wild and intractable and almost old, the bed and breakfast signs, the guest-houses. In the bars men stared at us, men that looked like weekend golfers but I didn't mind, you drank your guinness while
I drank my gin, you talked about happiness so much that I had to tell you to stop.

  And then we went to a guest-house and it was like yours, it had a grey granite front weeping from the sea-breeze, like yours except that it was a man that signed us in, held out the guest book for us with large, country hands. You paid.

  I went behind you up the stairs. Your breathing was so heavy that it sang in my ears. And then we were in the room and it was so bare, there were two beds, a wash-hand basin, a Virgin and a cinema poster, so seductively bare. You asked me to turn while you undressed. My face must have shown my surprise because before I could answer you turned. And I watched you, I saw your clothes form a little heap around your feet, I saw your shoulders that were very thin and your waist that was almost fat now and your buttocks and your legs. And your skin told me you were definitely older. When you were in your nightgown you turned.

  "Come on," you said.

  There was a knowledge burning through both of us, it was like the yearning that had been there years before, a secret, like blood. But it wasn't a yearning, it was a question and an answer. You knew that with every garment you took off you were stepping into a past self, a self that had that yearning and you could see from my face that I knew too.

  "Come on," you said again.

  And I took off my clothes and I wore the nakedness I had worn for you, I was a boy then, and I took off your nightdress so you could wear it too.

  I didn't look at you, I put my arms around you, standing there, both of us were breathing, our chests touching. You stepped backwards towards the bed.

  "Come on," you said.

  And we were on the bed, the sea was breathing outside like a woman, we were moving together but I wasn't thinking of you, not you now anyway, I was thinking of you before, of the time he brought you out, the second time, the time after which something finished for me and for you and for him too maybe. He brought you to the Great Northern Hotel this time, and me, there were meal-tables there and a small space for dancing to a small three-piece band. And the meal was like before, you laughing with him and being silent every now and then and me pouring sherry for both of you, in good suit and greased hair. And when the meal was finished the reddish lights came on and the dancing began. The band played waltzes and both of you moved across the floor among other shapeless couples, you beautiful, him tall and supremely confident of something as he waltzed. And I sat there looking and saw him for the first time not as my father who wrote equations on sheets of paper into the night and knew a lot about things like sea-shells but as someone young and agile who had the same yearning for you as I had. And as I drank the sherry that you both had left I began to cry, I felt older than him, insanely older, I had the knowledge of you that made him dance so gracefully, that made that difference in him. Then I drank more sherry and saw his hands around your waist almost touching at the back and I knew people do that when they waltz but I began to hate him as I would hate someone my age. Then again I saw his eyes, distant and kind of hopeful, more hopeful than whenever he had looked at me and as I knew the yearning that was behind them I stopped my hate and felt baffled, sad, older than I could bear. The band was playing "The Tennessee Waltz" I remembered and I tried to catch your eye but you were looking the other way, looking strict, virginal, leonine. And then I felt the huge resentment, I couldn't do anything with it, my hands were shaking and I knew something was going to end. And you both came back and I pushed the bottle onto the floor with my hand so it would break, so nobody would know how much I had drunk, hoping it would look like an accident. But the crash was loud and everyone stared and he, my father, lost what he had had with you and went white, and shouted at me and you looked quickly at me and I felt I was a child, being chastened publicly. And later I lay in your bed with this huge resentment and hate. You were asleep when I heard him coming up the first floor landing and opening the toilet door. And I got up and you were still asleep, I took the gun from your drawer and went down and stood outside the toilet door. And when I heard the chain pull and I knew he was standing buttoning his fly I raised your civil-war gun and fired quickly four times into the door. And there were four bangs and four rapid thuds and I saw each shot wedging, hardly piercing the mahogany. And I ran upstairs knowing something had finished and I gave you the gun and cursed you quietly because it didn't work—

  And then I stopped remembering, you were underneath me, I had come inside you in the room in Clare. Your arms were around my neck, hard, rigid and you said what I was remembering, "It's finished" you said. And you kissed me tenderly and I kissed you back so you could feel how different we were. And I got from your bed quietly, you were exhausted, turning to sleep already. I lay in my own bed listening to the sea outside me, listening to your breathing. There was a luminous statue of the Virgin over you on the wall and a cinema poster. It said i WAS HAPPY HERE in bold letters and showed a woman in a romantic pose looming over a matchbox version of the town we were in. Then I looked at you and saw the eiderdown rising each time you breathed and your body clenching itself every now and then as if you were dreaming of pain. And I knew it had ended but I still thought to myself, maybe tomorrow—

  And tomorrow you got up and drove, you drove to the town you had told me about, where the bachelors and the spinsters come, where you take the waters. We passed the fat girl again on the road but you didn't stop. And the town was like any other holiday town only more so, with its square of hotels and its peeling wooden verandas and old-fashioned cane chairs lining the verandas.

  We stopped in the square. It looked strange to me, a holiday town that's inland. I said this to you, why no sea and you said, "There's the sulphur waters."

  We walked up the street a little. A man stared. I bought a guide-book in a shop. I thought of water and holidays, why they go together. Every building seemed to imply a beach, but there was none. It was as if the sea had once been here, but retreated back to Miltown Malbay, leaving a fossil. Somewhere a front door banged.

  It was saying something to us, you were saying something, saying This is it, is me, always has been, the part of me you never saw, didn't want to see. And I believed it then, I knew you had always been coupled in my mind with hotels, with cane-chairs and ball-and-claw armchairs. And I crossed the square and bought a paper and read more about the President who had died, but in small print now.

  We drove out to the Spa, to a building that looked like a Swiss hotel, but with a river that seemed to come from underneath it. You asked me did I want to come in and I said no, so you went through the two glass doors alone. I sat in the car wondering whether you drank the waters or bathed in them. A couple passed, wearing suits that must have been too hot for the weather. I shouted at them "Do you drink the water," I shouted, "or swim in it." The man looked at me and threw his hands up uncomprehendingly. I watched them going through the glass doors and imagined a room with a clean tiled floor through which flowed brackish, slow water. I imagined you taking your clothes off with a lot of older men and women and I watched from the side as you dipped yourself into the spa waters among people who had the minor complaints of middle-age to wash off, who had made the act of faith in water. But then, I might have been quite wrong, maybe you sat on a wooden bench in a line with other people and drank the brackish water from a tap.

  And I knew it was definitely ending anyhow and that I should forget for your sake the peculiar yearning that sprang in me when my cock sprang to attention in my tight trousers that day you put the gun between your breasts into your blouse. You called it love, I remember. And it must have been.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Neil Jordan is the author of four novels: The Past, The Dream of a Beast, Sunrise with Sea Monster, and Shade. He is also the award-winning writer and director of such films as Mona Lisa, Interview with the Vampire, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, The End of the Affair, and The Crying Game, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1993. He lives in Dublin.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  Lino
type Garamond Three is based on seventeenth-century copies of Claude Garamond's types, cut by Jean Jannon. This version was designed for American Type Founders in 1917, by Morris Fuller Benton and Thomas Maitland Cleland, and adapted for mechanical composition by Linotype in 1936.