Night Boat to Tangier

by Kevin Barry

The Bull, the Cow and the Calf were ghost traces in the sea haze.

  And the pattern sound of the family at play down the strand – shrieks, soft coaxing, recrimination.

  In the morning her mother would be brought home from the hospital – all treatments had failed.

  *

  I’m not going to wait it out, Dilly.

  Ah, Mam.

  You know what I mean by that?

  Please, she said.

  Dilly, I have to go. Do you know what I mean, sweetheart?

  Ah, Jesus.

  Dilly, what you have to know? Is that you can’t be around them. You need to go away and not come back. There’s some money still.

  I don’t want your fucking money.

  *

  Drownings give onto drownings – this is everywhere in the annals, everywhere in the lore. Drownings come in patterns; they throng and cluster. The island race had a native talent for the genre.

  Cynthia sat in the late afternoon and looked down on the bay and drank a glass of elderflower cordial just mildly excited by a splash of Hendrick’s gin. The little taste of gin at the edges was giving her that sense of what-the-fuck. As well now as any other time.

  The pain would not relent.

  *

  Dilly sat on the couch in the long room above the bay. There was a guard in uniform, with his cap in his hands to show a monkish bald spot, also a plain-clothes detective, and a doctor. They milled about in a kind of embarrassment and made little eye contact and, what was the phrase, the kid gloves.

  Have you spoken to your father today?

  That I have not.

  Do you have his number?

  He has different numbers.

  The blue lights of emergency had spun along the coast road, across the cliffs.

  The rescue boat was out from Berehaven, but there was no word and there would be weather overnight.

  Her body would not be found.

  *

  She left the place in her mother’s battered Saab. She drove out the sea road. A heron was the sentry to the water’s shallows. It watched for movement across the fields of dull sealight. It stood perfectly still and priestly and turned its head by a clockwork nidge, mechanically. Her heart was chaotic. Her heart it was breaking.

  The peninsula ran its flank along the line of the coast road. The mountain absorbed the evening light and glowed morbidly. A roadside grotto showed the blue virgin. For the souls of the vehicular dead. By ten the moon was visible and drew her strangely. A vivid, late-summer moon. A xanthic was the word moon. She stopped the car and buzzed the window to hear the breath of sea; a strimmer vexed late in a high field; somewhere too the vixen screamed. On the ribs of the sea the last of the evening sun made bone-white marks. The hills for their part vibrated royally. It was close to night and oh-so-quiet again. The stars appeared all at once – a canopy of stars clasped by tidy neutron bridges, each star an atom’s core.

  In new starlight she drove across the lower flanks of the Miskish. How fine it would be – don’t we all sometimes think – to steal away into the sky and night. To be lifted up by those soft hands.

  As she drove Dilly looked back just the once and let her lips move once to say goodbye.

  *

  Cynthia walked to the beach on her last night. She walked alone down a country road in that place out by the sea. The night was still and clear. As she walked she became aware of a solitary figure on the road ahead of her. Even at a distance she could tell it was a man. There was a bunched ferocity to the stance, though he was himself absolutely still, as though cut from stone, and he stared out across the fields and the hills in the direction of Berehaven.

  Her step beat out against the hollows of the road, but the noise of her approach did not stir the man at all and he made the night sinister just by standing there, so still and alone.

  As she came closer, she saw that the man’s hands were gripped tightly to make fists. There was the sensation palpably of a violence stored. She thought that maybe it was just an old man gone in the head a bit but now he clarified.

  He looked to be in his forties, neither old nor young, more stocky than slight, and his eyes were vicious and wide as he stared out across the fields and the hills in the direction of Berehaven.

  She did not dare turn her eyes to the man as she passed by. She gave him a wide berth and kept her face down, but swung it low and discreetly to see that he was barefoot and his trousers were cut off at the ankles. Also, he appeared to be wet, as if he had just walked out of the sea.

  Some lost pirate, it seemed, and she was certain now that the man would break his hold to spring an attack.

  But all remained still, and quiet, but for her step, and but for the slow, swung chains of the sea.

  She walked on down the road and along by the bay, and when she chanced a look back over her shoulder the man remained absolutely tensed and rigid, and she kept walking as she made for the beach but when she looked back again, the road was entirely empty – a void – and she walked out into the last pale dark of the night

  along a jag of the bay,

  by the grey musical sea,

  in the place beyond Berehaven.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A RAINY NIGHT IN ALGECIRAS

  At the port of Algeciras, in October 2018

  It is night in the terminal building at the port of Algeciras. The last ferry has moved out for Tangier. There is almost nobody left on the floor. The tannoys are silent. The café bar is locked down and shuttered. Beneath the sign marked INFORMACIÓN, the desk is empty, the hatch in darkness. Along from the hatch, on the same bench, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit together alone but for their remorse. They have the tune of it easily, by nature almost it seems.

  Another thing you’d say for it, Charlie?

  Is what, Maurice?

  That in a sense it’s a very rich taste of life you get. There’s a special intensity to it.

  Come again, Moss?

  I mean it’s as profound an experience as the world has to offer, in a way, is a broken heart.

  I come from a long line of the same, Maurice. The broken-heartedness.

  Is that right, Charles?

  The Redmond men all wind up with the hearts busted in their boxes. It’s part of the deal with us, apparently.

  They look left, they look right, and in perfect tandem.

  You think she can look after herself? Dilly?

  It’s hard to think about it. A young girl loose in these places. With the quarehawks that’d be roaming about?

  She has a head on her. Is the only thing.

  She has, yeah. Like the mother. There’s a sly and canny element.

  A tired old Maroc breastfeeds a sweeping brush. The girl locks up at the concession stand and waves to the Maroc. A security guard waddles along with all the laments of Andalusia on his brow.

  Do you think about Cynthia, Maurice?

  I try not to. She goes through me sometimes.

  Into the middle distance they train their hard stares. There is a stock of hard knowledge to be drawn on. They know what they had once and what was lost.

  I used to meet her down in the Sextant Bar, Charlie says.

  This is Cynthia?

  This is Cyn.

  Why would you pick the Sextant?

  Because it was off the path a bit. People would have to go out of their ways. You know that mostly all we’d do is sit and talk to each other.

  It’s the mostly is the knife in my heart, Charlie.

  The sound of the night as it is heard now from the terminal at the port of Algeciras –

  the murmur of the night traffic as it travels the coast road, like the drone of a hopeless prayer at the far edges of a life,

  a cry that’s somehow child-like from an exotic bird among the ratty palm trees outside the superSol arcade,

  the low growl and the crackling of a thunderstorm as it travels ever nearer.

  The men slip for their comfort onto a reminiscent line: Barrack Street,
in 1986 –

  Do you remember the days of the Emerald River Chinese, Charlie?

  Stop it, would you? Please? We’ll never get them days back, Moss.

  How many Wong sisters was there for a finish?

  How many Wongs does it take to make a wight?

  The old jokes are best. Was there five of them?

  You couldn’t keep a count, Maurice. The way they was up and down Barrack Street, the Wong girls, and one of ’em gorgeouser than the next.

  There was Tina?

  And there was Debs.

  Debs the eldest? Three others, maybe four. They would have accounted for a share of our dreams in those days, Charlie?

  Of our hot and fetid dreams.

  You know the worst of it, this looking back?

  What’s that?

  The chancy ones. The ones that would have gone for it only you never tried. The ones you were afraid to have a go at.

  We all have our regrets, Maurice. As older gentlemen.

  You might know love again, Charlie.

  I might, yeah. A little ear, nose and throat nurse from Clonmel. She’ll be fucken thrilled to see me coming, I’d say.

  It goes by so quickly, the moments roam, the nights give onto nights, the thunderstorm is directly above now, and a hard rain begins to fall on the port of Algeciras.

  The men look up together to the high windows.

  It’s a heavy rain and it comes in great thundery squalls, and they have nowhere left to go but out to the streets of the port town and into it.

  They walk together through the terminal. Charlie carries the Adidas hold-all and drags his soulful limp after him. They walk into the warm night air and the assault of hot rain. Maurice squints his one good eye into the rain and gauges its intensity. The men walk in the lee of the building to keep the worst of the rain off themselves.

  One of our great talents, Maurice. As a people.

  Which is the what, Charlie?

  Is the walking close-in to buildings to keep the rain off ourselves.

  We’re world-beaters for it, Mr Redmond.

  All these old ports have their native sadnesses. When we move by water, our hearts rise up. The roads and the narrow climbing streets are slick with rain. The colours of the street lights blur and move. The men take shelter on the port front beneath the awning of a ticket agency. Rags of faded posters – the missing. Boats for Ceuta and boats for Tangier. They stare into the rain off the Straits.

  I could never have been what you were to her, Maurice.

  Charlie?

  I could never present myself as a serious proposition, you know?

  We don’t need to do this.

  Ah, we kind of do, really.

  I don’t want to do this, Charlie.

  They look in contrary directions along the port. The arclights smear above the stacks of containers. The old, dark, boxy town looms sombrely behind them – already it is dead for the night. Maurice Hearne counts the times, the years he has passed through this place. Memory trips, and Karima flits in from nowhere. Her eyes that were lit and alive and waited for him in the night until he woke, when he turned and arranged her on the bed, when he whispered conspiracies to her loins.

  You wouldn’t be right in yourself, Maurice.

  No, Charlie.

  I mean that’s a night that would fucken test you now.

  Charlie Redmond throws a mean squint at the sky. It has plenty to say for itself. The rain squalls and whines, and Charlie’s expression is grim as he attempts to read it. He adored Cynthia the first time he saw her. When she turned the twist of a smile on him, he felt like he’d stepped off the earth.

  Fuck me. It’s thirty years ago nearly.

  Which, Charlie?

  Nothin’.

  The past is uncertain, mobile. It shifts and rearranges back there. All might turn and change back there yet. It was a Sunday evening on Barrack Street that Maurice first spoke to her. There was a great stillness on the air. The cathedral bells did not pierce but made a frame for it. He crossed the street to get ahead of her. He turned and smiled, but she did not.

  I’m no good at this, he said. Isn’t it Cynthia?

  She admitted that it was. To say anything at all was the mistake.

  You’re busy-looking for a Sunday, Maurice said.

  He kept step with her down the hill into town. He asked if she would like to go for a drink with him at the Oval Bar. She said that she needed to get home.

  But we look like a couple, he said.

  He went as far as the bus station with her and leaned back against the wall and did not try to be funny.

  Let me know if this is in any way getting to be an annoyance, he said.

  He knew that progress was certain. Tough white gulls ran the air above the river like a precinct. She said nothing but he could see she was wondering what it would be like if they kissed.

  I think it could be quite nice, he said.

  And for the first time she smiled.

  How the fuck did you do that? she said.

  And he just kissed her.

  In Algeciras the rain falls as if to wash our meagre sins away. The gutters run, the rooftops drip.

  Is there any end in sight, Maurice?

  This is the great unfortunate thing, Charlie. We might have a length of road to go yet.

  Dragging ourselves along the fucken thing.

  Like lepers. They’ll be listenin’ out for the little bells.

  It is night again in Algeciras. The rain comes through the lights of the harbour but now more meekly. Charlie Redmond leans back beneath the jut of the ticket agent’s awning. He huddles into the knit of his thin shoulders. The prospect of another November is a mean taste at the back of his throat.

  Maurice Hearne steps out from the held tension of himself, he loosens up, he sticks his head out beneath the jut and gazes blankly to the night sky, there above the port and stacks, and yes, it is clearing, and the stars are the same old stars, and he turns a look to his pal that’s halfways hopeful –

  I think it’s stopping, he says.

  ‘Funny and moving, it’s a small wonder’

  Sunday Times

  ‘The most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years’

  Irvine Welsh

  ‘Packed with emotional intensity’

  Sunday Times