Night Boat to Tangier

by Kevin Barry

  His father opened his wrists in the bath two days after he got out. He left a note cellotaped to the bathroom door to the effect that she should not enter. Call 999.

  And that’s the way it goes, Charlie.

  First they takes your money, then they takes your clothes.

  *

  The boats have been queued and now another arrives in – there are kids with dreadlocks, and broken packs, and burnt skin, but Dilly Hearne is not among them. It is late afternoon at the Algeciras terminal. With a shudder Maurice Hearne reaches sharply for his upper back and shows a glance of fear –

  Did you ever get a whistling-type pain out the left lung, Mr Redmond?

  Is it one of those sinister-type pains that you’ve never had before, Mr Hearne?

  ’Tis, yeah.

  Give it time, it’ll be like an old pal to you.

  Maurice leans in to his friend, and he speaks with fear and very quietly now.

  I’m fifty-one years to fucken Jesus, Charlie.

  You rang the bell, Maurice. Whatever happens. You got more out of it than I did.

  That’s true.

  I’m a tragic case.

  Ah here.

  Charlie Redmond? I’d bring a tear to a glass eye. I mean I stood up in front of my mother a bright-eyed little boy. Angelic? You could have stuck me on a holy picture. The mother thought she had the Lamb of God on her hands. And did you know that I was a stepdancer, Maurice? As a young child?

  That I did not know.

  I took medals for it. I could have pinned ’em across my chest, one side to the other, and halfway around my back. Tears of pride running down the mother’s little jaws. The woman nearly passing out from the pride. Until she tipped backwards off a balcony in Rosscarbery after three quarters of a bottle of Cork dry gin. Which was another mark left on me. But my big problem was energy.

  Who’re you fucken telling?

  I was a case of too much energy. It had to find its outlets. And you know where it found them.

  Energy is tricky, Charlie. For the males. You know I even gave up on the self-abuse? On account of energy concerns.

  As well off. You had the shoulder hanging out of its socket, Moss.

  I went cold turkey. I put it in a jar altogether. Thinking it would restore the essence in some way.

  How’d you get on?

  Poisoned myself. I was going around the place with the eyes on extensions. There wasn’t a woman aged seventeen to seventy wasn’t taking the lairy glance. I was drooling like a dog, Charlie.

  Self-abuse can’t be left aside lightly, Maurice. It can be a necessary release for a gent at any age.

  Strange the way it don’t get mentioned in adult life. And we’re all at it.

  Hammer and tongs. But why’s it strange we keep quiet? What are you after? Analysis of technique?

  I’m fairly set in my ways at this stage, Charlie. Being honest.

  So you’re back at it?

  Oh, God, I am, yeah.

  Mother Fist and her five daughters.

  That never once let me down.

  *

  The darkness again is falling – it drags its covers across the Straits in a slow, moving tide. There will be boats on the water tonight, but not for a while.

  At the café bar, in the terminal, the fans whine and the note has a glassiness or brittle taint, and there is a low babble of Spanish and Moroccan voices for an undertow.

  Maurice and Charlie take to the high stools at the bar and decide, in silent consultation, on an order of brandies.

  What’s it in the Spanish, Charlie? The brandy?

  Hennessy, Charlie says.

  It might put a tune back into us?

  Might well do, Maurice.

  He calls for two of the Hennessy. As they are poured, the moment seems to flicker and glow, and the past becomes unstable. It shifts and rearranges back there.

  As he slowly turns on his barstool, Maurice Hearne is dialled back to a time almost two decades past, a time in his life of unnatural disturbances, a time that almost brought his girl to her end.

  Chapter Six

  AN ENCHANTMENT

  Around Berehaven, and in Seville, and in Málaga, and around Berehaven again, in December 1999

  This is from her shadow time. She was four years old. It was the end of the century and it felt like such a strange time. It felt like everybody was saying goodbye. The early winter was cold and clear. They were living outside Berehaven. It was raw up on the hill. He was in a serious condition. He was all stirred up and clairvoyant somehow, and he wanted to fuck all around him.

  *

  He was in the spare room mostly. They were having a bad spell. In the mornings he would look in on Cynthia, sleeping. The way that her lips moved. Her dreams, they must have been livid. He’d look in on Dilly, as she halfways slept, and when she turned he spoke to her, and it was crazy stuff – he told her there were tiny elves in her hair. On each strand of her hair they rested and were weightless there. He said they’ll protect you if anything bad should happen to me.

  He was certain the bad times were coming.

  *

  They had named the terrace of nine houses Ard na Croí. It hovered above the town, the cold harbour. They could not sell the houses – the streak of bad luck continued. The terrace was deserted but for the three of them. They were in the last house along – number nine – and in the morning he’d sit and drink coffee out of the Tangier pot and look out to the old mound and it was breathing. He was sure of it. It was a vivid winter and bright, and it was treeless up there, and the birds showed even in the hard season against the bareness and the rocks, a string of bright finches across the grey in a flit like jewels of red and gold, and it was beautiful, and he could take it no more. He’d make words on his lips and not know where they came from. He started to see the sky as a kind of membrane. His head felt like it was the size of the planet. The sky was just a casing for his pulsing brain and it was too thin. He might explode like a star.

  *

  He had been unsettled for months, for the winter long. There were hysterical sunsets. There were jealous rages. In the morning, when the sun came through, there was brief mercy in its light, and he might for a half-hour be passable. In the night, when the sea moaned, it was an insinuation, and he was certain she was fucking around on him. He went along with every mad vision his diseased mind could offer. He could watch every scene as it played. Every man she spoke to was involved in it. He started to keep a fix on the hours of her day. He went out and then doubled back to try and surprise her. He parked on the high road and watched the house in the dark. The engine idling, and his poor heart racing. He hadn’t slept right since they’d moved into the place. In the night he’d lie there and listen to the wind speak, the rain. And how the sea moaned.

  *

  The sunsets were biblical. If they were having a civil day, they’d drive out the road in the evening towards the end of the peninsula and watch the sky fill up with the blood of heaven and say goodbye to the day, and Dilly would flap her little paw at the falling sun and she’d say

  bye now, so long, good luck

  in the strange old woman’s voice she had lately been affecting, as the sun went down behind the dark sea, and these drives were an immense relief, actually, because here we are all safe and counted in the pod of the car – one, two, three – safe and fucking counted.

  *

  The winter days were bright and slow. They were off most of the drugs. The hours were heavy and cumbersome and moved by like old horses. He fucked a crusty girl in Bantry, thinking it would take the rage out of him; the rage intensified. When he phoned his mother in the evenings, she’d ask how things were going, and there was motherly insinuation to the question. Are you not so great in yourself, Moss? He said that it was difficult to say.

  *

  In the car one Sunday morning he performed a sex act on a bar girl he knew from Berehaven and thought it might wipe the brain for him. It did not wipe no fucking brain. In
stead a curious image came to him.

  *

  It was the image of Gulliver pinned to the earth, the skin stretched out in a thousand sharp pulls and tacked, his wife, his child, his mother, his dead father, the green corridor, his crimes and addictions, his enemies and worse, his friends, his debtors, his sleepless nights, his violence, his jealousy, his hatred, his insane fucking lust, his wants, his eight empty houses, his victims, his unnameable fears and the hammering of his heart in the dark and all the danger that moved through the night and all of his ghosts and all that his ghosts demanded from him and the places that he had been to in his life and longed for again, and the great pools of silence in the bone hills above – what lives inside those fucken hills? – and the solitude that he so badly craved, and the peace he so needed, and the love he needed, and he was just a young man still, in essentials, he was really very young – but, yes, he was pinned to the fucken earth all right.

  And oh God how much he wanted to go.

  *

  The boats put out to sea. The trawlers moved their rust in the winter sun. The harbour was a skivvy to itself always. He was in a strange, hybrid state. He thought about driving his car into the ocean.

  At night, beside her, if he was allowed entry to the bed, there in the sodium gloom of the terrace lights through the window, his fingertips trailed lightly the mark of her tattooed tit – the number 13. He wished to cause her pain. He wished to devote the last of his life to her. They had opened old ground they should have left sleeping.

  He looked in on Dilly, as she dreamed and soaked up the early-morning dark, and he thought about a goodbye – a goodbye to his child – and how the fuck that might be.

  *

  His jealousy that winter was a green fever but sometimes it lifted and he could live his own life, even if only for a few hours, breathing from the loins, it seemed, aimed into his life at a projection directly from the loins, and designed to a single purpose only. He knew women in Berehaven and in Bantry. He brought them gifts of cocaine and black cannabis oil. He spoke to them quietly and did not tell any jokes and he could read their sex thoughts before they came to their lips. It was the season of hopeless lust. The seed was telling itself to spread out, to disseminate, and quickly. Also, the seed was telling the news that death would come, and it might even come soon.

  *

  Of course he wanted to be caught at his games and burned alive for them and his ashes scattered to the four winds, the sea.

  Also, if she was fucking somebody else, he had better fuck anyone within his reach, had better fuck anything that was up from its fours, fuck anything with lungs, cognition, opposable thumbs.

  This was the logic that was in place.

  *

  But still there would come a night with Cynthia of reprieve, when they were themselves again, when they were back in their own flesh again, when they could sit silently and alone with each other for three noble hours and stare into the flames. And then calmly and meanly fuck each other on the rug thrown down on the floor.

  And the winter, it was cold and clear.

  If you could only sleep, she said, it might lift from you.

  The century blew out the shapes of its last short beautiful days.

  And in a deep tristesse they sat on the rug on the floor, and outside in the night the black mound sent up its sighs, and they talked for a while about the money that was left and all the money that was gone from them and it was a strange comfort.

  But on the breeze of the tristesse a sour shudder came through the room and she turned to him, as they drank white rioja that had warmed in the glass, and she said that actually she could smell it off him.

  I can smell it off your fucking face, she said.

  *

  I mean what kind of a cunt do you take me for, Maurice? What kind of a fucking halfwit that you think I can’t smell it off you? I’m not supposed to smell it when you bring it home to me? After whatever fucking skank you’ve been with? So who was it today? Who’ve you been fucking today? Tell me it’s not the little cod-eyed cunt below in the Haven Bar?

  Ah, Cynthia, he said, listen to me.

  With her skinny fucking arse! And you know what’s going to happen? You’re going to bring eleven types of fucking disease into this house! Because everything off a fucking boat she’s been hung off! It’ll drop the fuck off you, Maurice! And you might be as well off! But then you come in here? With your doey fucking eyes! You come in here? With your where’ve-you-been, Cynthia? Because your diseased fucking brain, it can’t bear to think you’re with someone that somebody else might want to fuck and you ate my fucking life! You ate it! I was left to fucking lie there and not know if you were dead or alive! In fucking Tangier! In fucking Málaga! I was fucking left, Maurice!

  *

  He stayed until he could bear it no more, and then he stayed for a while longer, and then he went. It was in the middle of the night. He left on the beat of a cold-hearted moment and did so without thinking about it, really. He just got in the car and drove until he was out of road and then he climbed into the sky. He had not said goodbye.

  *

  When he rose up to himself again, alone, it was in the white city of Seville.

  It was night in winter.

  He sat for a while at the base of a monument in the plaza. The image in stone of some old slaughter hound above him. A troupe of Japanese kids milled and smiled. A busker wailed a ballad of gloomy, gypsy love. Maurice clicked his fingers not in time with the song but that he might convince himself of life.

  He walked the plaza and passed a payphone and then another. If he called and heard her voice, or if he heard his daughter’s voice, he would have no choice but to go back, and he could not go back.

  He went to his pension. The interior patio was whispery with ferns. He lay shivering in a room set off from it. It was cold as the moon. It was so cold he could feel his blood move. He must have looked close to death passing through, because the pension owner, unbidden, knocked at the door and gave him a single fat orange and four paracetamol. She said she hoped he’d feel better soon. It was the most perfect orange he had ever seen. It glowed like new love. He was in so much pain he could barely drink.

  These were blue nights in Spain. He finished the bottle that was before him. He lay beneath the thin covers of a bone-hard single bed. There was a guidebook on the bedside locker and he read for a while to distract himself and huddled in misery he turned with brittle fingers the pages and read that in the year 1031 a man called Abu al-Qasim declared that Seville was independent from the Caliphate of Córdoba, and it was thus that he became the King of Seville and was titled Abbad the First.

  The words caught and moved again on Maurice’s lips as he lay in the freezing room –

  the King-of-Seville, the King-of-Seville

  – and even when he put the book down and turned the light off the words continued to roll –

  the King-of-Seville, the King-of-Seville

  – and fell into a kind of rhythm, actually –

  the King-of-Seville, the King-of-Seville

  – a rhythm that was somehow languorous and calming. His new reality might yet hold.

  *

  Could he remove all the hooks of sentiment from himself? The hooks that grapple on the softest parts. A small woodland creature turned over to reveal its soft white belly – this was Maurice Hearne in the winter’s night. Must turn this fucking brain off –

  the King-of-Seville, the King-of-Seville

  – must turn this brain off and try to forget that I have burned my family down.

  *

  All drugs are sexed. Cocaine is male. Heroin is a girl. They had lain together with the girl. Alone in the cold pension he thought of Cynthia quietly and of their time together. He rehearsed all their old times. When they lived first in the flat at St Luke’s Cross – before Dilly even – the flat that looked down on Summerhill, over Kent Station and the sidings, across the river and the docks beyond. They sat on the couch by nigh
t and smoked dope and sometimes a little heroin as they looked out over the lights and bowl of the city and listened to their records. The vinegary note as the heroin burned over foil was the smell that went beyond sex. He spat the stone of a green olive at her bare thigh. She held things unsaid within – sly deposits – and it was her secrecies that enslaved him. They shared a telepathy. They spoke darkly to each other in bed. They threatened violence against each other and bit. They were most of the days and nights together. As they watched from their eyrie at St Luke’s, the winter crept in to smother the city with greys and dense mists and the city fell to a drugged slumber. It was moving to watch its lights burn through the riversmoke at dusk.

  *

  It was too cold to just lie there. He got up and went out to the night and the streets. He walked the turns of the Jewish town under a scimitar moon and found the one bar that was always left open for the night. He sat at the tile counter and ordered a white rum. The barman served him as though from a bad dream disturbed. There was a gaggle of early-morning workers girding themselves for the day ahead – a few cops, it looked like, and a set of stout, short-legged postmen drinking coffee with condensed milk and brandy. Maurice beaked at his rum and it brought up the acid taste of betrayal. But he had to keep his hand moving across the pages of the night.

  There was a payphone mounted on the counter. He knew the number by heart and knew that at half past five in the morning she would answer because in the hills above Málaga his Karima kept foxy hours. She laughed at once at the torture in his voice.

  Oh, Maurice, she said, what have you done now, have you killed somebody?

  She said he must send them a letter. Don’t call, write. He ordered another rum. His life was being arranged somewhere beyond himself. Just over there.

  *

  Cynthia, he wrote, I’m sorry that it’s come to this. I don’t feel I can be healthy for you now or for Dilly. I’m not right in myself. I’d only poison the house. But I’m doing okay here and I’m safe. I’ll be in touch soon. Nothing’s happened. It’s just all these things have got me down. I need to be on my own for a while. I want to kiss you both very much. But I’m very ashamed. I’ve done a lot that’s wrong.