Night Boat to Tangier

by Kevin Barry

  *

  He dropped the rent into McGann in Clifden on Wednesdays. He was out of an old story from somewhere – country auctioneer with a sherried nose. Always he quizzed his tenant oddly.

  Any stirrings on that island, Maurice? On the lake?

  Nothing to report, Mr McGann.

  Keep your eye on the island, I’d say. That place could have news for you. One of the nights.

  He talked with the strange old man about the rain and the sea, the boats that were out, the thinness of the ground in places around here. They talked about houses and the price of land.

  It’d be a time to buy, McGann said.

  Me buying houses?

  What else would you be doing with your money?

  *

  Whenever he looked down on the lake, he knew that bodies had been hidden on the island there. Maybe not in the recent past. They got braver in the Fiesta by quick leaps. She began to talk nightly in bed about cities, life, people. They were too young for the Maam Valley. The idyll was ending and then May was on the doorstep and he bought the cottage from John James McGann for forty thousand pounds. By the end of the month they had it let for the summer entirely and they went to live in Barcelona.

  *

  They fucked each other with fierceness. She spat and bit and swore. He said crazy fucking things. The strip of blue, blue sky visible in the crack between the curtains; his hand between her legs. The cusp and clatch, the tender sips, and we have nothing to do all day, Cynthia, and nothing that wants doing anyway.

  *

  They walked in the afternoons through the Barri Gòtic. On ancient narrow streets the gargoyles lurched, the fountains whispered. They tried on clothes in scuzzy boutiques. They listened to house music sent on cassettes from Cork and to The Pixies but only the first three LPs. A shipment that set out from Ceuta was taken in on a clear night by Eyeries on the coast of the Beara Peninsula and realised another eighty thousand pounds. She wondered if Charlie could not be cut out at this point.

  On a rainy day, at the back of an arcade on Carrer de la Portaferrissa, they were tattooed – each atop the left breast took a tiny ‘13’.

  *

  At the zinc counter of a bar known for its anchovies, in Plaça de la Vila de Gràcia, in the district of Gràcia, Maurice spoke calmly, for more than an hour, over small glasses of Estrella Damm beer, as he attempted to ease the nerves of Charlie Redmond, who had two days previously left a man for dead in Deptford.

  Trouble finds me, Charlie said, and a stray tear rolled down his sentimental cheek. I don’t go looking for it, Maurice. It come knocking for me. Trouble. With a big ignorant face on him.

  You’ll be fine a while here.

  Fine? You haven’t seen what I left behind me on that toilet fucken floor on Barfleur Lane.

  Charlie’s shoulders rolled with injustice. Cynthia did not want him within a thousand miles.

  We could set you up in Málaga, Maurice said.

  You runnin’ me from the place already?

  There was a ragged boy with a flute and an old dog on a rope in the square outside, and as the boy blew tunelessly on the flute and sang some words to his old sick dog, as the broken notes rose up, Maurice came out of his skin, and he could see the scene from above, and the square was taking on the deeper tones of evening – hushed and velvet notes – and now Cynthia moved briskly across the square.

  She entered the café and he was in his body again. She hugged and kissed Charlie on the cheek. She made eyes to Maurice over Charlie’s shoulder – get him the fuck out of here. But it was safer to have Charlie Red close in.

  *

  The streets of Gràcia were in the slow hours of the afternoon almost deserted. He rang his mother from the payphone in the square.

  There was a man come looking for you, Moss, she said. And as quare-lookin’ a hawk as ever stood up in a suit.

  A suit?

  Suited and booted, she said. Any amount of a turn-out.

  He realised that she knew everything.

  I said nothing, Maurice. I stood there and acted the fool. And our friend, he just looks at me, with the little smile on him, and he says . . . ‘Is he still in Spain, missus?’

  Cynthia said –

  When we leave a place, we buy a place. We keep an interest.

  The next day he put a deposit on a bar in L’Eixample. They knew that the city would go up. They walked through it in the evenings. They kept away from the Barri Xinés because heroin sang from its every doorway. They employed a masochist called Laura from Sitges to take over the running of the bar in the evenings. She drew a masochist crowd and soon the takings had doubled.

  But what are we going to do with ourselves, Maurice?

  Well, this is it. The old question.

  I mean who the fuck are we?

  Oh, we’re a very old type, he said. We’re merchant traders.

  *

  The vicinity of Stroud Green. The bones of London. The light was weak and apologetic. Dilly, in the bouncer, was eerily silent, wide-eyed. Cynthia was away to have an hour. There was a white van parked out there all day. Half-a-smile was granted from the elf in the bouncer – my heartbreaker. Maurice smoked a little weed out the window. Charlie Redmond was now in hiding in the Maam Valley. It was all gone to Jesus. Apart from the money, because the money was fabulous.

  And here she came, outside, with the long face on. Harder to read lately. The winter had smashed them.

  She took the joint from his hand. She drew on it grimly. The cold of the day was on her cheeks. February is a godawful month just about everywhere. She’d gone skinnier since the child. He wanted to be back in Spain. Pigeon-grey, fag-ash grey, clay-of-the-graveyard London. The great fear, the vast unspoken – was it drugs in the months of the pregnancy had the child staring up out of the bouncer like a fucking zombie?

  Also, his mother was threatening a visit. You’d put yourself under a fucking lorry altogether. The dim thunder of the evening trains. The face on Cynthia – was there something to read there? What now, what next? She was tired and wan; she was pulled this way and the other. The smoke was shared between them.

  There’s a van down the road, Maurice.

  The white one?

  It was there an hour ago and it’s still there now. Two men sat in it. Big fuckers.

  He shook his head and took up the child – Dilly kicked out her feet in tiny electric jolts to the full stretch of the Babygro.

  It’s nothing.

  There are two men. In a van. Down the fucking road, Maurice.

  And soon it will be dark again – the lights of all the cages came on against the February evening.

  You think they’d just announce themselves?

  She blew a dense, greenish smoke out the gap in the window.

  The fuck do I know?

  He stood on the couch to see down the road. Baby moo-moo in his arms still. Like a fox with its nose in the air. Protect the cub.

  Just before the hackney base, she said.

  Will I swing past?

  Do not go out that fucking door, Maurice.

  She double-bolted the front door. He put the child in the bouncer again. He licked the papers for a joint.

  They could be checking the meters, he said. They could be TV licence.

  What fucking meters?

  They could be Haringey Council.

  The street was quiet most of the day and night. It had a sullen or a watchful air. The baby began softly to cry. He took her up again and brought her to the kitchen and ran the tap. He looked to the long back garden that ran to the steep embankment, the railway line. A train roared into view. Silent faces were lit on the evening train. How the foxes screamed at night. Dilly’s sobbing faded as the tap water circled the sinkhole. She twitched silently in his arms with contentment.

  They’re out of the van, Maurice!

  And two big fucking Spanish heads on them.

  Shoulders the breadth of Madrid.

  They leaned back against the van and smo
ked fervently – they looked down towards the house with calm.

  He wrapped the child warm in her bundling.

  Cynthia threw things in a bag, wallets, cards.

  They went out the back garden – they hid silently in the cold, lifeless February garden.

  Night already was falling.

  They hid in the garden until it was fully dark.

  They edged down the embankment to the track.

  They walked terrified in its lee.

  The gravel swam under their feet.

  Small mammals scurried.

  Night-time across Haringey, Crouch End, Stroud Green.

  Breathing silently the great maw of Finsbury Park.

  Pulsing the mainline vein of the Seven Sisters.

  They stayed a sleepless night at a guesthouse in Crouch End. The night aged slowly as a decade. Maurice was as old now as he’d ever felt, but yes, there was Dilly, who was silent and gorgeous and yes, definitely, he was in love with her. It was time to go back to Ireland.

  Sea-rock; salt-wind; home.

  *

  From above the town of Berehaven its harbour was streaked with knives of cold blue in the April sun. Dilly made a tuneless song on her lips as her eyes followed an early butterfly, the flicker of a whitish yellow as light as her breath. Dilly had a skin delicate and ash-pale, and the builder, Murphy, considered the child, smiling.

  This one’s away on her own little planet, he said.

  Tell me about it, Maurice said.

  The child’s hand was clammy in his. He rubbed his thumb softly against the slick of her palm – this was a reassurance somehow. The three of them walked the raw acres of the site. It was set on a plateau in the stone hills above town. There was a weird mound with a few bushes at one end. The plan was for a crescent of houses. The swathe of a half-moon would be arranged to keep the wind off from the west.

  Are there a few trees we could put around back?

  Well, Murphy said.

  Is there nothing will take?

  The ground’s fucken rock, Murphy said. There’s nothing pretty will take.

  There would be a view at least. Maurice lifted the child into his arms and made groans of protest at her weight. In truth, at three and a half years old, she was pixie weight. He pointed south to the opening world.

  Some view, Dill?

  He drew her eye across the rooftops of the town, over the masts and scrabble of the harbour, to Bere Island beyond.

  Island View Terrace? Maurice said.

  Harbour View? Murphy tried.

  Or something Irishy?

  Now, Murphy agreed.

  How’re you fixed for the Irish, Dilly?

  The child grinned at him shyly.

  Something about croí, Maurice said. Isn’t croí the heart?

  Croí briste, Murphy said, and they laughed.

  Heartbreak Ridge, Maurice said. Fucken right, with that wind in on top of you.

  Murphy kicked at the ground sadly.

  Tell you this much, he said. Me croí will be fucken briste and I trying to put foundations in that.

  When’ll we get a start?

  Depends on a few things.

  Such as?

  He was sorry that he asked. It concerned the circular mound, the whitethorn bushes. He pulled the zip of Dilly’s anorak to the neck against the wind. He brushed her cold cheek with his fingertips. Her mother’s precise frown was set on her lips. Everything was in place already.

  They’re going to be skinned up here, Dill, he said, if we don’t get a few trees down.

  The builder Murphy seemed to take this as personal affront. His brow darkened; he considered sullenly his Caterpillar boots.

  It’s the West of Ireland, he said. There’s a tendency to fucken wind.

  *

  He walked with Dilly through the square in Berehaven. On the dock he bought turbot and a few queenies, some samphire. He promised the child there would be no more mackerel, and she made a happy face.

  We’ll go for our drinks, Dill? Find your mother.

  He was on a slow taper but he had an hour yet. You could drink against it. The pub was heaving at mid-morning. Little wonder the country was gone the way it was gone. A trawler flush with octopus had waddled into port. The crew was in the West End Bar bursting the ball on itself. By the crate the Corona went down, and the vodka Red Bull, and they were roaring out of them – they fell about unpleasantly on sea legs. Holy Thursday. The last year of the century. He arranged Dilly on a high stool and poured her orange drink over ice.

  Your mother will ate me for the Fanta, he said.

  A few beached-up Spanish lads sipped woefully at long-neck bottles to turn the West End into a grim cervecería. Galician probably. Very Irish there. Melancholia, all the rest of it. Redheads. The last was seen of him he was after fucking himself into the Bay of Biscay. Often it was Spanish-feeling this season in Berehaven.

  The bar girl hovered into view with her lip stud gleaming and leaned to Maurice across the counter –

  How ye gettin’ on above? she said.

  Topping, he said.

  He felt a stab of desire for her but it might pass. Cynthia arrived in as vaguely as a rumour of the place. Her eyes were warm on the needle’s tip. She kissed the top of the child’s head and was regarded with dour puzzlement. They were at a remove from everybody else. The questions already had been raised – is it houses ye’re building up there? And the planning came through?

  Is there something wrong with the place? Cynthia said.

  How’d you mean?

  What’s wrong with the fucking site, Maurice?

  It’s windy. It’s a peninsula.

  The Spanish were hunched in a religious aspect. As if summoning the Infant. The octopus crew bawled and grew narkier. They clutched at each other erotically. They twanged each other’s underpants. A thin horizontal of the town square was visible beneath the blind. A holiday SUV coasted to a halt and disgorged a unit of fat kids. The little bastards had the country ate alive. An old man with a smell of fields and disinfectant sidled in beside them.

  Only the Russians, he said.

  I’m sorry?

  Only the cunten Russians, he said, have less class than us when they get a few pound.

  The pub light was a brownish gold and forgiving. Cynthia looked fine in it and the child was beautiful.

  The bones is gone so bad now, the old man said, it’s a class of horse ointment I’m smearin’ into meself. How’re ye getting on with the place above?

  Flying it, Cynthia said.

  Early days, Maurice said.

  How many houses?

  It’s all being worked out, Cynthia said.

  We’ll keep you posted, Maurice said.

  The need had taken hold. Soon he would have to take the pain from the day. He arranged the clock of his day precisely. He would shoot up at one or at ten past in the back bedroom. Cynthia was already looked after. They had worked out between them a schedule adapted for the child.

  *

  They had rented an unfurnished house in a fold of the Caha Mountains. They watched the night move across the moonscape of the peninsula. Dilly turned in a hot bundle in the back room and spoke indecipherably among her dreams. Cynthia and Maurice sat on deckchairs by the naked fire grate. The air was still tonight, and mild. They drank Spanish wine and smoked charas. There would be no heroin until morning. There was such a thing as discipline. She searched him out about the site again and finally he confessed.

  There is some bollocks, he said, about a fairy fort up there.

  With a swirl of the wrist she moved the inky rioja. They smiled at each other.

  You know the kind of moundy bit down the far end? he said.

  I do, yeah, she said.

  Raised earth in a circular run, a scraggle of whitethorn bushes around it – the child always had a moonful look when she played there.

  You’ve kept quiet about this.

  It’s bollocks, Cynthia.

  It’s Murphy is say
ing this?

  He says some of his lads mightn’t build there. The blockies, at least.

  You were going to tell me this when?

  It’s nonsense.

  The men won’t build on a site we’ve paid four hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds for because they think there’s a fairy fort up there. And you felt this was beyond remark?

  Fairy fort is stretching it, he said. It’s just these superstitions you get locally. About places. It’s the moundy bit on the far side. Apparently it has all the characteristics of a fairy fort.

  And since when the fuck, Maurice, would you know the characteristics of a fairy fort?

  There’s such a thing as the fucken internet, he said.

  Dilly was found to be more soundly sleeping. They dialled up the internet – it made noises of strangulation as it at slow length connected. They drank rioja and examined images of fairy forts.

  This is kind of . . .

  It’s kind of precisely what we’ve paid five hundred grand for.

  Four eight five, he said.

  It was not good to dig into the apocrypha. Builders who had no more than cleared the brush from these sites had gone down to sudden collapses, galloping tumours. Motorway schemes had been diverted.

  They took down a bottle of whiskey. The price had seemed generous for the view of harbour and mountains, for the extent of the acreage. They lit a few sticks in the fire and drank whiskey and spoke of what they had read; they spoke of raths and forts and liosanna. There was strange glamour as they remembered these old words on their lips.

  *

  Now they became obsessed with the idea that they had fallen into bad luck. They took heroin against the idea. The measured quantities that had distinguished their previous habits as models of noble restraint went out the fucking window. Now they were horsing into it. And the aura of bad luck was at once everywhere. It was around them like a nervous village. The stone hills spoke out the rumour of the bad luck. The wind blew the rumour in swirls about their feet. Bad luck, bad luck – the idea entertained itself, fattened, came to fruition. They took cocaine in breakneck quantities against the idea of the bad luck. They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror. The child would as well be raised by the cats that sat lazily in what April sun troubled itself to come across the rooftops of Berehaven. The build was a disaster from the get-go. A young fella from Sneem, as broad as he was long, broke his leg on the first morning of construction. Word of the accident was around the fishwives of Berehaven like a fast fucking fire. Up on the wind-blown site, there was a sense that morning of fatalism, unhingedness, morbid introspection. Day two some fucking eejit with a kango hammer nearly took the marriage prospects off himself. Day five a thirty-two-year-old man from Glengarriff had a mini-stroke while he was mixing bags of sand and gravel. The builder Murphy was by now having trouble keeping his numbers up, and he was depressed and drinking heavily the length of the slow evenings in the West End Bar. Maurice drove into Cork city on Thursday mornings to meet the first Dublin train on which was ferried their week’s supply of heroin. The tenth morning of the build – a Friday – they were aware that the week’s supply had been badly cut and were raging about it, and just then Charlie Redmond phoned from Spain to say a speedboat containing a half-tonne of their Moroccan hashish had been taken by the Guardia Civil just as it came into La Línea de la Concepción. Bad luck, bad luck. The boat had been spotted at Ceuta, it seemed, but what were you going to do? Charlie Redmond was affecting a note of blithe indifference which Maurice Hearne was in no fucking form for. Putting foundations in the rocks of the hills above Berehaven was dreadful work. The rocks screamed and whined dangerously as they were drilled into. The children of the rocks cried out. We are making marks here that we have no right to make. We’ll answer for it. Bad luck, bad luck. He was starting to wonder if Cynthia had a thing for the builder Murphy, who was a big handsome uncouth motherfucker, but with dainty touches for the ladies, and his black depression perhaps lent a poetical air. Maurice drove alone above the site and looked down on the construction and masturbated sorrowfully about the girl who worked in the West End Bar in the afternoons. With Cynthia he mixed the cut heroin with cocaine to make speedballs, and they shot them up and fucked each other and then they’d have a fight after it. Bad luck, bad luck. The guards were driving past the site daily with interested little smiles. Another labourer spat blood copiously the first morning of the third week as the trench of foundations edged towards the fairy mound and he was never seen again. Half the builders on site by now were Spanish fishermen beached off the trawlers and good for nothing as they were lacerated by the weather. It had turned into a wet April and it was so cold in the sea-damp and Maurice Hearne was hearing old voices in the night. But they stuck at it. There was such a thing as bullheadedness. The houses started to break out across the hill – a crescent of nine houses to be named Ard na Croí. A boatload of cocaine worth two million pounds was taken a few miles down the coast, and Maurice was brought in and questioned. It was a Wednesday night. That he knew nothing was soon evident. As he left the stationhouse, the detective said – you’ll want an early start in the morning, Moss, get in and meet that Dublin train. He wanted to leave the place again but was rooted to it now. Fucking Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. The way that it closes in.