Night Boat to Tangier

by Kevin Barry

  fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

  and she knew then that they were definitely not like other families.

  And Charlie Red would bring her to restaurants for her dinner and everyone seemed to move around them in circles, tighter and tighter circles around them, drawn in, as if they were dazzled or mesmerised, and people would come up out of nowhere and just grip his hand – Charlie Redmond! – and always he’d bring her for dinner, or for cakes and tea – it felt like escaping when she was with Charlie – and he’d give her sips of his wine, and tell her all of his old jokes again, and do all his voices, and buy her ridiculous, expensive things, and he’d whisper to her, he’d say, Dilly?

  You’re a fucking aristocrat.

  And I loved you very much.

  *

  It is night at the port of Algeciras. The ferry is to sail again for Tangier. The crowd moves in spurts and gaggles towards the terminal gates. The two men on the bench survey the crowd carefully. The girl stands at a height above them. She leans on the balustrade and looks down. She needs to make a decision. But she is a prisoner of the past and the past will not relent. She remembers fucking everything. She remembers even that morning when the century was soon to turn, and Maurice took her in the car to the place by the water beyond the sleeping town of Berehaven, and the sound that was made – the resounding shlunk and click – when he locked all the doors, and even at four years old she knew what the dreadful look on his face was made of, it was made out of love.

  Chapter Ten

  THE GESTURE WOUND

  In the cities of Cádiz, Barcelona, Segovia and Málaga, and at the port of Algeciras, from 2000 to 2004

  But yes Ireland closes in like a motherfucker. It turns its crooked mouth in the darkness and whispers of the bad things. It picks its moment and shows the hornèd claws. He fled from it a few weeks after the century turned – Maurice Hearne was not Y2K compliant, was his serious opinion. He had almost killed his girl. He had lost his wife. He had knifed his friend. Death was nearby – he was certain; he felt the whisper of its breath – and he pelted from it. He went to Spain because it was a country vast and made for hiding. He would be lost to it for a long time.

  *

  He roamed the place mindlessly. He tried to coax a pattern from his days, but there was no pattern. He drank like a bastard. He talked to the walls. He gave out to the policía. He got into bad, bad fights. He shot up between his toes. He was in Spain for the brittle greys of its Februarys, the St John’s yellow of its vaulting Junes. He did not take up the language. He was among the wynds of the white cities and the hollows and the bars of the sombre towns. He was lost to the true dark of the Spanish plain by night. He was aboard the train that stopped at every small country station. His loneliness was all of his own making.

  For almost five years he drifted in Spain in this way. He was a young man still, but he did not feel young at all. He ran from the hard-faced gaatch of himself. The sense elements that were most vivid –

  the chemical tang on the wind that came across the beach by night in Tarifa

  the cathedral stone that was hot to the touch in the evening sun of Salamanca

  the migraine whine of gathered voices above the café bar at the estación de autobuses in Granada

  – did not amount to a consciousness of that time but made the textures for it only. He had no grip at that time. He moved on the breeze.

  For a while it was in the city of Cádiz that the morning light found his pale skin, the wet film of his eyes, the knit bones of his face. He lived with skinny Karima in the old town there.

  *

  The fish smell of the market was heavy on the air. Tiny opaque scales and twisted fish bones were everywhere on the streets and in the gutters. The fish blood and its ripe iron smell stirred notions of sexual abandon. He was still in a condition of hopeless lust. He was tormented, flailing, cuntstruck. Karima was forty-seven to his thirty-three and she would fuck half the night away – it was exhausting, exultant, terrific stuff. Karima couldn’t go within a hundred miles of Málaga or certainly she would be killed. She had bad sweats when she slept and so she slept rarely. She fried him sparrows in the mornings. The shapes of the birds were still evident on the brown chipped delf. The scraps of meat were fragrant in the garlicky oil and gamey.

  Karima knew old magic. Strange breezes moved across her features. Unreadable glazes emerged from deep within her face. Sometimes in the course of the act she took his hand and guided his fingers to her arsehole. She made it so that she quivered.

  To recover, he sat in the square and drank red wine in the late mornings, and he had long, hard chats with himself. The flags of the Guardia Civil blew sharply above the barrack house and snapped in the Atlantic wind. He wrote mad letters to his wife (full of screeched insinuations), and to his daughter (whispers of love), but immediately he ripped and binned them.

  *

  He rented the apartment from a yapping Scotsman with a poodle’s face. He was an ex-polis who talked out ceaselessly the plot of a gory thriller he would never write – a killer’s lair, a stack of blood-encrusted animal pelts, a rusty creak of the trapdoor’s hinge. What was wrong with people? That was what Maurice Hearne wanted to know. The world in the new century had slipped into a sordid haze. It was dying of vulgarity. This was his considered opinion. As well as the fucking he was masturbating as much as thrice in the day.

  The days moved past like sentences, the nights.

  And Karima turned – as he knew that she would – and she started to make bad magic for him. She put her spells on him. She wanted all his money or what was left of it. She was out of the business. She had a number on her back. There was a tentful of gaunt brothers pegged high on the Rif to send the money back to.

  She hid strange packages among the plants in the apartment. Clumps of dog hair; bird bones; dried herbs tied up in bundles; once, hysterically, a hen’s foot. He woke in the night to find her crouched on her knees above his chest and muttering darkly. These were not nights without event. He whispered his own cold words to her loins, her belly.

  This was in the city of Cádiz, where the people are Gaditano.

  This was in Andalusia, in the springtime of 2000.

  She told him lots of old stories – she told stories about her father.

  Once, in the port of Algeciras, the policía had brought her father to the barrack house and unlocked a cabinet full of confiscated weapons and told him to take his pick – it was his best chance to get out of the town alive. Rows of machetes and long knives gleamed under the strip lights – there were knuckle-dusters too, and pointed shivs of stainless steel with hooked handles. The native weaponry was ingenious as this was a Catholic place.

  Fathers throw the longer shadows. We get over the mothers, at last, but hardly ever the fathers, she said.

  In Cádiz he drifted on the bone-iron smell of the fish market and he was assailed by images of sexual fury. In fact, he more or less got used to them. Which was the dangerous thing.

  He drank and fucked and ranted. He slept little by night. He was living in the amalgam place of a dream. Cities turned into other cities; streets turned into distant streets. Karima’s kisses tasted of oil and smoke.

  They fucked each other also in the mornings. He found on most mornings the strange packages hidden among the house plants. Chivalrous yet, he disposed of them without remark. He felt it was possible that she might try to poison him.

  Oh, but the dusted brown of her irises was a very beautiful tone – it was a nutty Saharan brown as of a wind-blown dune or a crested lark.

  They told each other in the darkness their dreams and nightmares of the Barbary Coast.

  *

  Karima killed the football from the Bernabéu on the TV set and kicked the wall and announced that they were to break up. No explanations. He fell to his knees and declared tearfully that he loved her and his Cork accent had never been more pronounced.

  She hit him a dig in the face.


  The salt of blood all sexy on his lips.

  She started to fling his stuff from the balcony, marching back and forth, with her vivacious cheekbones, her killer’s mouth.

  Not my fucken records, babe, he said.

  She dragged him from the room. She had the strength of a fucking stallion. She smashed the door shut after him.

  Ah, calm the fuck down, Reem, wouldn’t you?

  But he was talking to the bricks. The picture disintegrated. Now Maurice Hearne was stood up on the street in the rain in his shirtsleeves. Karima continued to fling his belongings from on high.

  Not the fucken vinyl!

  He tried to catch them as they spun through the air.

  Karima! There’s fucken years gone into them records!

  He stood in the evening on the street in the haze of rainflecked light. The backfire of a fucked moto cracked like a gunshot, but he did not flinch from it. He had more on his plate.

  Karima on the balcony with flashing teeth assailed him. She called him a liar, a whoremaster, a faggot.

  The vinyl smashed all around him.

  Notes cracked open on the pavement.

  In Cádiz that year our love was volatile.

  Attraction that slithers towards the cusp of homicide.

  Karima called him a coward, a yellow rat, a cunt.

  Darkness rimmed the sky west above the ramparts and the ocean.

  The Atlantic birds squalled in murderous packs like home.

  But at least now he had a sense of himself. This was without question an event. A dangerous woman in a fitted black dress raged from a balcony in a sidestreet of Cádiz. The way that her long, needle limbs flexed and the overbite of her white teeth was cinema – the teeth were a vampire’s incisors.

  Now he stood with his hands on his hips blithely as his stuff landed on the stones of the street all around him.

  Cádiz breathed low and calmly like a waiting serpent.

  Karima? Go handy on yourself, wouldn’t you?

  She raged for a while yet on the balcony. The rain fell; the moments tumbled; the air was ripe and funky after Carnaval.

  Karima ran down her batteries at last. Now she was draped over the edge of the balcony, exhausted, and he knew that she might turn back to love quickly.

  Down the way –

  The vagrant youth beat their drums and biscuit boxes on the rainy beach and smoked hashish, and the girls and the dogs laughed and barked at the stars and rain.

  This was in the city of Cádiz, back in 2000, on the coast of light and magic.

  *

  It was in Plaça de Catalunya that he first met Remick. She was dark also and from Australia. She attached herself to him like a drugged wombat. He took her to a bar he used to own in the ’90s on a sidestreet of L’Eixample. He displayed the place with a seigneurial flourish. It had cleaned money for him and then he sold it again. The trays of anchovies were laid out still in green oil flecked with garlic. The streets ran into the same streets. He was down to about nine thousand by now. He sat with lovely Remick at the same table he’d always used down back. She had a smile like a home-made explosive device. It did not travel to her eyes.

  He said, Remick, I could say things to you in the night that you would never fucking recover from.

  They lived together for a while in the district of Gràcia. They drank too much and too late. They fought with venom and skill. They smoked rock cocaine. They fought like drunk gorillas. Gràcia was not what it had been even five years previously. There was no longer good heroin. Now there were stores that sold specialist honey – ‘The flower of the mountain’. The new century was a fucking atrocity. He belonged to the previous one. Small elegant dogs waddled in their coats in the Catalan winter sun. Remick headbutted him one morning – she had the manners of a fucken sheep-shearer – and then they made love again. He saw the stars of heaven when he came.

  He was followed everywhere by two Moroccan boys.

  He saw them night and day.

  They lurked around the edges of the square in Gràcia.

  The boys were lank and twentyish.

  He was certain that Karima had sent them.

  Are they looking this way, Remick? Is all I’m fucken asking you.

  But I can’t see who you’re talking about!

  Two fucken Maroc!

  I don’t see anybody.

  Ah, open your eyes and fucken look, would you?

  He spun quickly in the café and maybe caught a flash of them darting to the shadows outside. This was what you were dealing with. Everywhere he walked he could feel their Riffian eyes between his shoulder blades like fucking knives. Here was another place he would need to take his leave of – Barcelona, in 2003.

  *

  He began to lose the ability to speak to people. He was out of his language too long. He was losing his words. This was in a city of the interior. This was in the lyric winter of Segovia. He loved Dilly and Cynthia. He could not see them. Outside the internet café a gypsy kid and his girl sold punnets of chestnuts from a roasting cart and kissed. They looked like the year 1583. The air was dark blue and had the smoke of old poetry at dusklight. He no longer pretended that the cheerful words he scratched down on the back of a card would be sent to his daughter. He could no longer imagine how her face might have changed. He sat at the café window and looked out to the winding street that rose to the cathedral plaza. On a search engine he found images of the Ummera Wood: a ghost of sunflare through a faded Irish place. The odour of its melancholy. He ripped up the postcard.

  He went in dreams inevitable to the old wood of the Ummera in north Cork.

  His first years were spent there with a suffering father and a stoical mother. His father was from further west, from the bone and treeless hills of Beara. At the Ummera his father was unsettled by the trees. This was his mother’s belief. There were strange pulses like worms at the base of the father’s throat. In Segovia the church bells clanged the sombre notes of the hour, the half-hour, the quarter. They laid it on thick enough still around these places. His father had been a great religious. When they moved to Cork city, his father got involved with the Charismatics. He was all but carried home from the meetings. Fainting fits. Speaking-in-tongues. His father also would lose the gist of his sentences. He would lose track of them at the knuckle and turn. There were strange olden words on his lips as he slept in the afternoons. Maurice as a boy watched him, and then as a teenager, as the condition worsened, and in Segovia he felt the impress yet of his father’s unresting spirit.

  He felt older than his time. He feared his own reflection in the lit windows of the Spanish evening. He believed there was age gone onto him. His face had a sunken look. He could make out his own skull in it. He felt the worms in his mouth. His body was a cavern of death. He was thirty-six years to fucken Jesus. (He felt with a cool certainty that he’d be dead by thirty-seven.) He went to a bar on Calle Marqués del Arco and ate fried fish and thin slices of jamón ravenously and drank the inky rioja and cold beer from the tap and wept openly and nobody paid any attention to him at all. A fat blind child sang on a TV talent show and the bar was agog and the patrons began to clap along with the song – it was a Spanish translation of an old Carpenters’ number, and all of the child’s chins rolled. Maurice Hearne was so moved that a seep of vomit rose up in his throat. He stuffed a heel of bread down his throat to tamp it.

  The note in Segovia that winter was tragi-comical, capricious, beautiful.

  *

  South again on the drag of the old sea. The beach at Malagueta was the same as ever it was. Spidery old men and poor brown boys fished from the rocks at the eastern end. It was a hot clean spring. Grand villas loomed expressively on the hills above. Hunting birds hovered on the thermal air. Hale ancient Germans walked the promenade in the sun. Maurice lay down on a boulder of the seabreak. He was a crab at bask in the springtime sun. There were moments of odd, steely belief – he believed that he could get Cynthia back, and Dilly.

  The heat was re
ligious. There were dark rumours in the channels of his body. Surly runners went the length of the prom in steadfast pairs. He listened to the old working city of Málaga and its Catholic bells, its Catholic silences. He squinted to take in the expanse above.

  Oh, look at the white blue sky above me now – should I address my confessions to it?

  He lay a long while on the boulder, until the heat of the sun diminished and the cool of evening came down again like a lowered veil, a kindness.

  In Málaga the evening streets played the same old woozy music still. Hooded eyes on these streets like trapdoors. Cowls of monks and sad little nuns. He sat on the single bed of a room in a pension off Calle Larios. He listened to the drone of the evening paseo, its gossip and murmurs. He rested his eyes. He drank Cruzcampo beer from small tins and pissed his looks down the sink. He felt the worms tunnelling beneath his eyes.

  Right on fucken cue, he said aloud.

  The past shifted and rearranged itself. He could not step out from its reach. The past was fluid in the moment. He addressed a few casual remarks to his father even. Then the not-so-casual –

  I thought I was so much stronger than you.

  Does expression – cold, plain, pure – does it ever find its way through? He was a man no longer quite young pissing in a sink in a thirty-five-euro room in Málaga. With the arch betrayer in his fucking hand. Expression enough.

  He went out to the night and drank with the Algerians in a dockside bar. He needed to organise a shipment again. He believed it was doable. He had made contact with Charlie Redmond. There was a definite thaw. He liked the softness of the Algerians’ quiet, conspiratorial talk. He hadn’t an iota what they were saying to each other. He wished to be made clean in harsh sealight in a place that did not know his name.

  His father’s spells had made the world sway and lean in. When Maurice was a child, his father was taken frequently to the hospital. The stays became longer and longer. His mother explained it all plainly and without emotion.