Night Boat to Tangier

by Kevin Barry

Green eyes, Maurice says. Off the mother she took a lovely set of Protestant eyes.

  Cynthia. God rest her. She’d the palest green eyes.

  They were like the fucking sea, Maurice says.

  *

  Their talk comes in slow drifts, then in quicker attacks. It builds up; it spins out. Leonor and Ana know by experience the patience required for the port of Algeciras when the boats are uncertain, and they know too the strangeness that gathers here always – soon they lie sleeping against their packs. The dogs also are sleeping. Benny is more wary than the girls and cannot sleep – he watches for a gap to open. Maurice lies back across the bench, as though laid out for the deadhouse, with his hands clasped decorously at the chest. Charlie Redmond drops an invisible set of rosary beads into his friend’s palmed clasp, and he makes to speak, his own palms opened and displayed for sincerity. The manic warmth of his smile would light a chapel – Charlie’s smile is, of its own right, an enlivened thing. It travels the terminal as though disembodied from him. It leaves a woven lace of hysterical menace in its wake.

  A man of my seniority? he says. To be scrabbling trying to put the means of a living together? It’s unnatural. I should be gone out to stud by now. I should be on a farm in fucken Wales.

  He turns to Benny, to the dogs, to the sleeping girls.

  Ye know that I don’t have so much as a roof over my head? he says. I should be gone upriver by now. I should be gone westward into the sunset. I should be staring down at a wine-dark sea. I should have no more on my plate than issues of décor and light romantic entertainment. The way I’m thinking? A modern house looking over a moonlit bay. Sound familiar, Maurice? With underfloor heating. A washing machine that’d talk to you. Little dishwasher doing a jig in the corner. West Cork direction. Somewhere out beyond Berehaven, maybe?

  Now he shoots up, dangerously, as though on a starter’s pistol, and he spins about on the bad leg to ravish the imagined room of his retirement.

  Open plan! he cries. I’m loving it! A sense of flow. Oh and these beautiful old floorboards! They’ve buffed up to a very nice finish! What’s-her-face off Channel 4? Sarah Beeny. The makeover shows. Gorgeous. The floorboards warm under me bare feet. In the sunlight. Lovely kind of austerity about the whole look as well. There’ll be nothing gaudy. I’m trying to get away from that side of myself. I was raised at the side of the fucken road. And the way the inside opens to the outside, with the reclaimed boards, the flow, the fields, the sea, the hills . . .

  Charlie? Maurice says.

  Sound familiar to you, Moss? A fine new house outside Berehaven? Laid out in it like the Lamb of God?

  Leave it, Charles.

  Why, Moss?

  Sit down and take the weight off, boy. Relax yourself. You’re getting the anxiety colour on you. The yellowy colour.

  Charlie sits and drains the last dregs from a cava bottle.

  I’m not saying we were down a coalmine, Maurice, he says. I’m not saying we were digging the roads. But there was a lot of work and a lot of travelling and there was a great deal of danger and annoyance. And Uncle Charlie, at his time of life, he needs to feel the proper reward of it.

  I know, Charlie. I know.

  They lean back together on the bench. Their eyes close in a soft, mysterious tandem. Benny, who has waited on his moment, manages to edge away from the men, unseen, and he takes the silent, prowling Lorca with him. Quickly he finds a policía.

  It’s about these men, he says.

  The sleepy cop looks over but just smiles.

  Those two? he says. Don’t worry about them. They’re always here.

  *

  A cold white moon speaks highly of the coming winter. The sea tonight has grown irritable. It guffs up a newsy froth. There is no word from the direction of Tangier. In the ferry terminal, wan beneath its lights, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond stand as a vaudeville pair but the dreadlocked girls lie sleeping still – only the dog, Junior Cortés, is alive for the show.

  We’re down a man and a dog, Charlie.

  Is the way that it goes.

  If they were ever here at all.

  They sit together on the bench. There is long-sufferance. There is woe. They are on a reminiscent drift again.

  We were in a state back then, Maurice says.

  This isn’t news you’re telling me, Charlie says.

  The walls were melting. The clock was coming down the stairs. We were tremendously out of it almost all the time. I have big regrets. There were things I missed. There was a whole chunk of my life that passed me by. I don’t remember 1997, Charles, and I’m not great on ’98. Cynthia? She kept me going.

  Cynthia, she could maintain.

  Though I have every reason to believe that woman was the most deranged of us all.

  Which is saying something, Maurice.

  But oh Jesus, Charlie, at night, the fear that was on us.

  Money brings up the fear, Moss.

  There was so much money and we were pauperised half the time. How the fuck does that work? I mean you know how it was sometimes, Charlie. The way the money was flowing?

  You remember that night in the house on Evergreen Street? We’d lost a tonne of prime Maroc?

  Then we found it again. Outside Midleton.

  We counted out so much fucken money on that couch. We were grinning like cats.

  There was the night of the four Dutchmen in the boat.

  Don’t.

  But the clock isn’t going backwards, Charlie. Cynthia is dead and she’s not coming back.

  Leave it, Maurice. It’s hard. We don’t have to talk about it.

  But Maurice Hearne falls to his knees in a gesture of hysterical collapse. He sighs out the long history of the stage. Leonor wakes and smiles at him.

  Which one are you again?

  Leonor.

  Lovely name, Charlie, isn’t it?

  Gorgeous. Like an air freshener.

  Have you seen this girl, have you? Photo’s a bit old now, but she might have the same kind of look to her still. Dilly Hearne?

  I haven’t seen.

  Why’re ye all lying to us?

  Maurice crawls on his fours across the floor and pants like a dog at the girl’s feet.

  Jesus, she says.

  Bit late in the day for him, Charlie says.

  Tell us this, Leonor, seeing as you have the jaws working. And just out of pure interest. But what’s the nature of the attraction? To this way of life ye’ve picked?

  It’s freedom, she says.

  It’s poverty, Charlie says. Poverty is always for free.

  *

  They sit until the night gives way to morning again. The hard pure light of October 23rd is pushing through. Leonor and Ana sit with their dog, Junior Cortés – the dog has a rogue tongue, conspiratorial eyes. The girls and the dog happily listen to the men, who have woven a ring around them, a ring that shimmers, and it is made of these odd, circling words.

  I no longer love my body, says Maurice Hearne, thoughtfully. I have no time for it.

  I’m resigned to these old bones, says Charlie Redmond, shucking his cuffs.

  I’m like a fucken ape, Maurice says. The long arms and the horrible, thick, solid kind of torso.

  I crawl out of bed in the mornings, Charlie says, and I can barely hear myself for the groans.

  I have the feeling in a perpetual way, Maurice says, that I’m in the next room across and I can’t really hear myself at all.

  You’d understand, Charlie says, darkening, how a spell can come over a man? When he hits on a certain age.

  A spell? Ana says.

  When he tips over the brink of fifty, Maurice says. That kind of direction.

  They talk of ageing and death. They talk of those they have crossed and those they have helped, of their first loves and lost loves, of their enemies and friends. They talk of the old days in Cork, and in Barcelona, and in London, and in Málaga, and in the ghosted city of Cádiz. They talk of the feelings of those places. They talk abo
ut being here, once again, on the coast of Barbary, as though on a magnet’s drag.

  The likes of us have been drawn here for hundreds of years, Maurice says.

  It’s a straight run down the sea road, Charlie says.

  As we look at them now indeed they seem to clarify: their smiles are high and piratical; their jauntiness has a cutlass edge.

  You want to read up on the Riffians, Charlie says.

  Coming off the Rif Mountains, Maurice says. Like a sack of snakes trying to deal with them people.

  Their fathers’ fathers’ fathers? Charlie says. A couple of dozen of them would line up, with lanterns, on a high rise of the shore, and they’d string themselves out, and they’d lift and lower the lanterns in a sequence, rising and falling, slowly, in a rhythm, sweet as music . . .

  Are ye watching it? Maurice says.

  . . . so the effect, from the sea, was like a swaying boat. And that would draw another boat in, just to say hello, how’s the fishing, only to get itself wrecked on the rocks, and here’s the Riffians down with their lanterns and knives to finish the job.

  That way of thinking, Maurice says, can only come from heavy use of the plant cannabis sativa.

  The assassin’s plant, Charlie says.

  The black oily Riffian hashish, Maurice says. Oh, you’d think you’d died and gone to heaven altogether. And do ye realise, by the way, that ye’re lookin’ at a man here beside me who’s opened throats himself?

  And the pirate Charlie Redmond leans back on the bench with a diamond grin.

  *

  But the money no longer is in dope. The money now is in people. The Mediterranean is a sea of slaves. The years have turned and left Maurice and Charlie behind. The men are elegiacal, woeful, heavy in the bones. Also they are broke and grieving. Ana rises up in the shape of a yawn. She stretches out to the full, airy capacities of being twenty-three. She is happy to see the new day light the high windows. She reaches for Junior Cortés. The dog moves in to nuzzle her sweetly about the groin.

  That dog knows which end is the sleeves, Charlie says.

  Can’t be taught, Maurice says.

  Ana scowls at Charlie and squats on the bench and looks Maurice hard in the eye and she says –

  Perroflauta.

  I beg your pardon?

  The Spanish for crusty, she says, is perroflauta.

  It means a-dog-and-a-flute, Leonor says.

  We’re away in a hack, Charlie says.

  Perro . . . flauta, Maurice tries the word, softly, in wonder.

  They say it as a curse, Leonor says.

  Because they don’t like us, Ana says. They say we’re dirty. They don’t want the camps. They don’t want no dogs. That’s why we go to Maroc.

  And who looks after Junior Cortés?

  People come back. We go out. We share the dogs. We can’t bring the dogs across.

  Confirmation, Charlie says.

  Ye have people due in from Tangier?

  Maybe.

  It depends on the boats.

  And if the men are to see the girl Dilly again, they know that it depends also on fate’s arrangements, and on the drifting insistences of youth. Leonor and Ana turn to whisper to each other now and laugh quietly and they stand up and gather their things – they have no fear of these men.

  Thanks for the drinks, Ana says.

  At least tell us more about this witchin’, Charlie says.

  I actually have long experience of witches, Maurice says.

  They were drawn to you, Moss, always, the witchy types.

  Did you know you use green wood to burn a witch, Charlie?

  There’s sense to it. Somehow.

  Spells? Curses? Maurice says. Oh, I been involved with the whole lot of it. Can ye do a spell for me, ladies?

  Who do you want to put a spell on? Leonor says.

  Have you a biro? Maurice says. We can start making a list.

  What you do, Leonor says, is you take a piece of cloth. Maybe from some old clothes of the person you want to reach. And you put things inside.

  Kind of things?

  Hairs . . . from down here?

  Pubes?

  And the finger . . . piece?

  Fingernail?

  Fingernails. Pu-bez. And dry blood on maybe the tampon.

  What kind of people are ye at all? Charlie says.

  Also, Ana says. In the cloth. A chemical.

  It’s called antimony, Leonor says.

  You think there’s a spell can bring my daughter back?

  She’s a small girl.

  She’s a pretty girl.

  She was in Granada maybe?

  And not long ago.

  Dill? Or Dilly? It comes from Dilys.

  Chapter Four

  LOVERS AT THE NORTH GATE

  In the city of Cork, and in the Maam Valley, and in Barcelona, and in London, and in the town of Berehaven, from March 1994 to April 1999

  He believed that the flat was being watched. Mostly he did not sleep at all. What they’d had shipped from Málaga had briefly suppressed the town’s anxieties. Also it had angered its older wolves. We have climbed too quickly above our station. He spoke to Karima from the coin phone on the haunted stairwell of the old house at St Luke’s Cross. There would be a shipment again soon. He was lying in the bed with lumps of money on the floor beside him. Cynthia turned in her sleep and spoke from the far deeps of dread. Her thin haunch was candle pale. They would break into the flat and leave him for dead and take the money. They would batter her senseless or worse. Charlie Redmond was already in hiding in the west of the county. Maurice looked out from their eyrie above the city, weak from sleeplessness, and the smoke that rose from the river in the late-winter morning was dense and ominous.

  *

  As the day came up to the meagre light it possessed, Maurice and Cynthia went out to walk for a while. They had fallen in love in the usual goofy ways. The taste of her black hair. The static that lifted from her. Even the air was excitable around her. They went out to walk in the cold by the river. Their voices fell into conspiracy above the river’s voices. By the North Gate they went – with her hand in his – and across the shaky bridge and out through the waking town. It was so cold you could see the dogs’ barks on the air. They were like waifs out by the river. Out here, it was as if the world had backed off from them for a spell. They believed in fatedness and meant-to-be’s. They believed in the dark star that was theirs to steer by.

  She had a way of talking that made him realise he would not find a way out. She let him know there was no way to escape from himself. She could see what was coming.

  *

  They went to hide in the Maam Valley. He believed the wolves were in pursuit. The wolves wore zip-up tops and Fila trainers. Maurice and Cynthia learned to drive out there. It was comic and strange to be living in the country. It was the last hard bones of the winter, but the evenings were stretching a little and the roads after rain were black sliding tongues and gleamed. Their landlord, John James McGann, of Clifden, gave them the run of a battered Ford Fiesta. It wore neither tax nor insurance. There was a smell of sweet drink off McGann, a sherry. There was a papery film like mothskin stretched over his eyes. He slithered about making goldfish gasps as though traumatised by an otherworld invisible but to his eyes. He wore a corduroy suit in a marmalade shade. He was a cattish sort and slow-gesturing. Maurice and John James could hear each other’s thinking. They talked about money. John James felt like a super-strange mentor type. The rented cottage was at a height above Loch an Oileáin. The lake was pitch and eerie. There was a tiny lake island that sat there oddly, as though unsure of its purpose in the greater scheme. Above, the Maumturks were the most sober mountains. The Maumturks had slow, blank, unobliging faces. Maurice and Cynthia loved each other out there.

  The days were cold as evil but the evenings spread magic from the sea inwards and stretched out and tapped the place until it was open to our dreaming.

  *

  He really fucking li
ked her hands. In the narrow bed in the cottage they whispered and tunnelled together to the bottom of the night and lay there dazed and happy afterwards.

  We’re after making pigs of ourselves again, she said.

  *

  He liked too that the house was at a height. He could see what was coming up the road at them. That there was no phone was ideal. He called his mother from the pub in Maam Cross and told her they were in Barcelona.

  It sounds lively, she said.

  The shipment arranged through Karima had made him one hundred and seven thousand Irish pounds. An equal share was gone to Charlie Redmond. Cynthia phoned her father from the pub in Maam Cross and said they were in London and going to India for a while.

  I think you should put Maurice on the phone to me, her father said, and she hung up.

  From the pub in Maam Cross he phoned Charlie, too, who told him the weather in the south was changeable. It was best to stay hidden for a while.

  He suffered night sweats, heart rattles, bouts of raving. She knelt above him in the bed and hushed him and told him that she loved him. He told her that once, as a young man, his father got so bad he had to be strapped down to a bed in Berehaven.

  It’s just the fear of it, she said.

  The fear of turning into our parents, she said, is what turns us into our fucking parents.

  She was not wrong – the mind designs the body.

  *

  And then for a while they fell into the quietude of the place. Always, as the years passed, they would name it as the best time in their lives. When we had mountain and when we had water.

  Let it be a drowsy time, she said, and turned slowly a white haunch to him.

  She told him that the money couldn’t be left just as money. It had to work for itself. They tried to drive in the evenings as the hours of daylight pushed back against the dark.

  A, b, c, he said. Accelerator, brake, clutch.

  I’m not a fucking halfwit, she said.

  The ditches sang in the evening light, the birds. She drove at twenty miles an hour down a back road outside Maam Cross. Small birds were flung up from the ditches.

  Do you hear a cuckoo?

  Watch the fucken road, Cyn. We’ll end up in the field.

  She was beautiful as she drove – the worms of concentration wriggled on her brow. She said the most important thing was to maintain a distance from Charlie Redmond.