Night Boat to Tangier

by Kevin Barry

  Because Karima’s a schemin’ cunt.

  Jimmy Earls across no-man’s-land made it again to the facilities. He stood once more with the lad in his hand. He looked to the small window set high – there was no way he’d wriggle through. What if a weapon was now produced? Already, even as he passed through the events of the night, Jimmy at the back of his mind was framing the narrative – he was thinking how he would tell it.

  When he passed by the table again, he saw that Maurice had clamped Charlie’s hand to it and he was speaking to him intensely, urgently.

  Nelson had one hand under the bar – we all knew what that meant.

  Well?

  Who the fuck’s Karima and she at home?

  Who?

  A Karima?

  Foreign-sounding.

  And a cunt apparently.

  This is getting heated, Jimmy.

  Hope it’s not someone’s old doll getting put down?

  Should I put them out?

  Might only push it to the edge of things.

  The events quickened –

  Charlie Redmond shot up from the table so quickly he sent his chair toppling backwards.

  Maurice Hearne reclined, and cruelly smiled, and knit his hands behind his head.

  Charlie picked up his glass of vodka and crossed the floor and stood alone at the end of the bar and there he held himself with grace. He sipped from his drink. He looked directly ahead.

  Hard to gauge how long had passed – the air of the room was suspended, taut – before Maurice rose and crossed the floor, glass in hand, and he stood beside Charlie Redmond then and tipped the rim of his glass against his friend’s.

  Of the dozen or so unreliable narrators left in the room at this small hour, all would claim to have seen precisely what happened next – except for Nelson, who considered himself fortunate to be on the other side of the bar – and, in fact, Jimmy Earls would claim even to have heard what happened next, heard precisely the sound that was made when Maurice Hearne in a single movement took the knife from his pocket, dropped to a kneeling position and plunged the knife into the cup of Charlie Redmond’s right knee, but it was the withdrawal of the knife that did the damage, for it was in this motion that he sliced the ligament, and it was this ripping sound that Jimmy Earls vowed he would carry with him to the deadhouse walls, and with it the single dull gasp that Charlie made.

  And it was no more than that, no more than a dull gasp.

  Chapter Nine

  NATURAL MYSTIC

  At the port of Algeciras, in October 2018

  And now, by night, the port of Algeciras is humming. There is movement across the Straits. The skin of the dark water roils up and froths. It’s as if there’s a party going on down there. Rising on the air is a sense of witchery and fever.

  In the terminal Dilly Hearne sits at the café bar. She fades deftly into the scenery. Turning an owlish half-swivel on the stool, she can see that the men are still in place downstairs. She wants to go to them quite badly. This is an astonishment to her. She wants to hear their voices. A tannoy announcement breaks out –

  . . . llegará otro servicio desde Tánger y podrá ir otro servicio . . .

  Another boat will come, and a boat may go. She has the language easily now, but she hears it better than she speaks it. She swivels back to the bar again. She has been a little more than three years in Spain. It feels like half a life has gone by since she left Ireland.

  *

  She walked on the first day through the streets of Málaga, and yes maybe there was a steely look, with a fixed jut to the jaw, as if seeking something mysterious, some new kind of volition, as if decided there was only one thing for it, there is only one thing that can save me now – I have got to leave this skin behind.

  The day was hot; the air so dry. The city felt intense, close-in. An amputee sprawled on the corner of Calle Larios and the Alameda Principal arranged his stump beneath calm, medieval eyes and she was drawn to him oddly.

  She crouched by the wreckage of the man and rested her backpack for a while, and she asked if he had seen the travellers – the Inglese, the Irlandese?

  He said, Do you mean those kids with the dreadlocks in their hair? Those kids who go about with the dogs?

  She said, Yeah, those are the ones.

  She wanted to go to Maroc and live in one of the camps. She wanted a place that did not know the meaning of her grief. She wanted to travel to the far recesses of herself and see what she might find back there.

  *

  She watches without fear as Maurice and Charlie rise up from the bench. Something in the way they move has taken the fear away. They aim for the escalator and the bar again, with their blameless faces, as though on an impromptu expedition.

  Dilly skulls her drink and lays down a few coins and drags her trolley across the floor of the bar – it follows her like a rolling accusation, seems to announce her presence, but she knows how to absent herself from the eyes. She keeps her head moving, her face turning. She looks everywhere but in the direction of the approaching men. The terminal throbs fiercely now. She wades into the bodies –

  There’s a topless old hombre in nylon trackpants drinking an amber spirit and rolling his tongue over his teeth as he watches her go by, and she burns the fucking look off his face with a single, darted stare.

  There’s a grinning scut in a beige corduroy suit sitting on the floor outside the bar and sucking on a tin of Cruzcampo beer and he may have just about pissed himself.

  There’s a blind lottery-ticket seller leaning back into his patch of wall, his palms flat on the marble, as if he’s holding the place up, and the strain is telling in the awful viscous whites of his eyes.

  The crowd has thickened for the last heave of the night.

  The quick gabbling ham-eater mouths are silky-greasy in the hard terminal light.

  There is crazy fucking denim everywhere.

  Maurice and Charlie pass by obliviously within a few feet of her. She stares at the floor and drags her trolley along as the men go into the bar.

  Jesus Christ – the age that’s gone on them.

  She descends by the escalator and goes and sits on their bench near the hatch that is marked . . .

  INFORMACIÓN

  *

  For the first months she lived in Granada in a cheap pension there. There was an atmosphere of old mystery in the city, a tangy resonance at sundown. The place spoke of broken hearts. She had eight hundred euros and then it was seven three five. She kept it under her pillow and counted it first thing in the mornings – it was going in one direction only. Six four zero. She was determined never to go home again. The first of the blue Granada morning came up. She was down to five three five. There was a bleeding Jesus on the wall – she stared at it in the dawn half-light – a sexy bleeding Jesus in a loincloth on the wall. The twisted mouth, the come-hither – fuck off.

  The last thing her mother said to her was you must never come back here, Dilly.

  And in Granada, in those first months, she slept mostly by day, and when she dreamed it was of desert places and sometimes she woke to the cemetery hush of the afternoon lull and she wanted to go and lie on a cold desert floor in the evening among the flowers of the dusk – the dull amethysts, the quiet rubies – and let her blood flow to feed them.

  *

  But now she wants to hear the men speak. She gets up from the bench and drifts a couple of dozen yards east. She leans against the wall and stares into her phone and pretends to scroll as they pass by on their way back from the bar.

  In fact, she never goes online any more, because technology is the pigs’ white evil, and online is where they find you, and it’s how they keep track of you.

  She has thirty-two fake Spanish passports sewn into the lining of her trolley case.

  Maurice and Charlie cross the floor to the bench again.

  She follows but at a measured distance.

  As she goes by, three tall and skinny men from the bad end of Marrakesh loo
k her over from their slouches against the concession wall. They speak quietly, sidemouthedly, to each other.

  She passes slowly rearside of the bench just as Maurice and Charlie resume their positions, and she could almost reach out and touch the backs of their heads. She listens –

  I’d get a dog again, Charlie says, but I don’t know if I have the length of a small dog left in me.

  You definitely don’t have two dogs in you, Maurice says.

  *

  In Granada she moved into a cave in the Albaicín district with a few English people and their dogs. The rent was almost nothing and anyway it was never paid. The dogs were outright comedians. Mostly the cave houses were illegal; they held no permits. Her room was tiny and windowless and wistful. Like a fucking womb. Like a tomb. The walls the colour of bone and ashes, the low roof pressing down – living in the cave turned into a pressure situation. It was not easy to shed the old skin. She was very lonely there. The cave was set on the hills on the vault of the city. The sun raged. She was a lizard of the Albaicín. The English people, she wouldn’t call them friends exactly, but she was among the dogs and that was something. She was a consort of the dogs – of Coco, Ellie and Bo. She let them sleep in the room with her. She whispered to them sometimes about her people. The months in this way passed by.

  And in the Albaicín in the hot afternoon sun some ragged kids in a tangle played a kind of tag or chase game in the square and Dilly laid out the disks of the sun on a cloth of black velvet.

  With her magnifier she had all summer made designs of spirals, fertility symbols, crosses; she had made marks of the occult and a sheela-na-gig.

  She sat on the ground in the square with her back to the warm stone. She no longer felt like a beggar sitting in this way, at supplicant height. It was to do with how you displayed your face.

  *

  There is no word on the next ferry out. There are tannoy messages, but they contradict each other. The men remain on the bench as watchful as hawks and dumb as spoons. She wants to approach them but she cannot yet. She drifts upstairs to the café bar again. She moves in the sequence of a disturbed dream. There are voices at the edges of the dream. They come from the violent past. The dream is in the shape of the ferry terminal at the port of Algeciras.

  She wants to talk to the men. In fact, she wants to be held. She could throw up at this idea. She wants to go further south in Morocco this year. She wants to go into the desert. She orders a slice of tortilla. The barman is as stoned-looking as a fucking koala. The tortilla is too dry. It tastes like a sacrifice. A jangle of bad nerves zips across the bar’s air –

  A stocky man at the counter clutches his groin, groans, unhandles himself, lays his forehead on the metal counter. He clutches his groin once more. Cries out.

  A tiny sultana-faced man wearing lilac slacks and a blazer beneath a pompadour hair-do arrives in and tries to sell socks out of a plastic bag.

  Dilly goes and looks down over the balustrade to the bench downstairs, and now in perfect tandem Maurice and Charlie look up – they have been drawn on the line of her gaze.

  *

  One day she went to Málaga to sell the disks of the sun. She picked a spot by the cathedral walls. Fate sent a long Maghrebi in a djellaba to appear beside her. Fastidiously he unrolled a black cloth. He set down some wooden figurines of princely Africans. Dilly tried to read from her paperback – gore; American; a serial killer loose under the Ohio moon – but the words would not stick. The hours unrolled like a great river. There were no customers for herself or for the Maghrebi.

  She sat with her phone and looked at tattoos on Instagram. Technology was the white evil on the air. She watched clips of laughing dogs. She stood and stretched out the kinks, and she considered the African figurines that so precisely replicated their seller. He was very tall, maybe six and a half feet tall, and he stood like Job in the afternoon heat.

  Where you from? she said.

  He smiled in a tired way and gestured towards the docks, the sea, somewhere that lay beyond the sea.

  You know the policía here? she said. You know what they’re like?

  He just shrugged, lazily, who-knows-anything.

  Are there other places in town? she said. Where the policía won’t move us?

  Maybe, he said.

  She picked up one of his figurines and turned it in her hand.

  The fuck where’d you get these anyhow?

  A place near the airport, he said. You can get the airport bus. It goes right by the place.

  He smiled and crouched and knit his thin limbs to look over the sun disks. She took out the magnifier from her pack and showed it.

  With the sun, she said.

  He nodded at the idea and admired the disks.

  I come from a place, she said, that’s a long way from the sun.

  Where?

  Ireland. Irlandes?

  I’ve never been.

  You’re nearly as well off out of it.

  Is it not nice?

  Oh, it’s a tremendous place but tricky, you know?

  Tricky he did not know. He said she should go to the warehouse by the airport – there was plenty that you could get there wholesale and cheap, jewellery, scarves, whatever.

  Then you will not have to sit all day in the sun, he said, and he picked up her magnifier and held it against his face to make a giant’s eye.

  And it was at the wholesale store, in a scabby retail park near Málaga Airport, that she met Frédérique, who ran the place, and you had to stress the lavish q sound, which forced the mouth into a queasy smile. Frédérique was large and buttery and some kind of trans-sex – it was hard to tell which direction from which – and had a line on all the rackets. The wholesale place was a kind of front. It was peopled day and night by cirrhotic-looking old crooks and wastrel youths with insane mouths. These are my people, was Dilly Hearne’s feeling. Soon she was living in the exurban sprawl of Málaga, and she was in Frédérique’s place daily, and the cops were in and out too, and were on a first-name basis. There were many rackets and games. The money now was in the movement of people. Everybody came from elsewhere. Frédérique, when deep in her cups and on the burn of the pipe – late at night – would tell Dilly stories of the place that she came from. It was in the rainforest of Brazil. It was not two dozen miles, she said, from a tribe of seven families who’d never seen cars or electric light. Dilly imagined for a long time these happy Indians. She was like a kid seeking comfort in a story. She saw their yellow eyes burning electric in the gloom of the jungle by night, and heard the whispered prayer of their incantations, and now the low murmur of a great river is moving unseen, but nearby and – listen – how the unnameable birds shriek against the dark.

  *

  If she speaks to the men, it will mean the end of something. She goes outside for a smoke. There is a disturbance on the atmosphere. The air is tight and charged. She should leave this place at once and never look back. But she wants to speak to them.

  Under the arclights a pack of Moroccan boys kick a ball around the wasteground by the container stacks. The ugly façades of the apartment blocks loom beyond the glow of the harbour lights. It is a plain sister of a town. Dilly passes through here often, and this much she has learned – the uglier the town, the kinder the people.

  A helicopter of the narco police homes in across the water and hovers above the pad on the roof of the terminal and holds a moment, then softly drops, rests. It’s very calming to watch this – she can feel her pulse rate slow with the blades.

  She looks out across the water. She has not yet been told which hotel to stay in when she gets to Tangier. She awaits the instruction from Frédérique.

  She tosses the smoke and tries to go back inside, but she has to approach the automatic door three times before it recognises her as womankind.

  She keeps close to the walls as she examines the concourse, the ticket hatches. She takes the escalator upstairs. From the corner of her eye as she rises she keeps an eye on the
men. Their unmistakable gaatch. Their mien. They look right through her again and she realises now that they cannot see her.

  They are looking for some ghost called Dilly.

  *

  Something else that she had learned – you need to watch yourself at every minute of the day. If you don’t watch yourself, the badness might slide in, or the evil. Watch your words most of all. Watch for the glamorous sentence that appears from nowhere – it might have plans for you. Watch out for the clauses that are elegantly strung, for the string of words bejewelled. Watch out for ripe language – it means your words may be about to go off.

  And sometimes she could feel herself turning into someone else – into something else – and she came up from her meagre sleep in the Spanish night (maybe in Blanes, maybe in Calanda, maybe in Cabo de Gata) to hear her mother calling for one of the dogs on a lost lane on Beara long ago. The dog’s name faded away before she could catch it – was it Shortie around that time?

  She could not control the images that came through on the sleepless nights. She was from a line of insomniacs twelve hundred years long. She would never go back there, but home would always be the place where the light came slant at equinoctial times, in the half-seasons.

  We were really so very far from the sun.

  *

  She watches them from above – two men on a bench, one with a good eye, and one with a good leg. She cannot go to them. Even if she could speak to them, what would she say?

  That I cannot blame you any more.

  When she was a child, there would be callers at strange hours. Men in hats, and laughing women, and sometimes there were raised voices, and sometimes singing. All the lurchy moves and late-night exits – we’ve got to do the splits again, Dilly, will you pack what you need in your dinosaur bag?

  She can see her mother, in the hotel bed – in the old Jurys on the Western Road – and Cynthia pretends that she’s asleep – for the child’s sake – but she’s turning again and again in a hot, awful soak, and she can feel the heat off her, it radiates, she’s like a brick oven, and Maurice sits by the window, it’s very late, it’s summer and such a humid night, and he’s looking out to the car park, smoking a number, and very lowly, under his breath, he’s going