Night in Tunisia

by Neil Jordan

  He felt blamed for that nakedness. He felt he could hate his sister, for blaming him.

  "Really," she said. "Some people."

  He felt the words were false, picked up from grown-ups. Her body was arched forward now towards her drawn-up knees, her arms were placed across her knees and her chin was resting on her arms. Her eyelids were lowered, not quite closed, but sealing him off. He wanted to say sorry, but her eyes lay between him and his words. Then he did hate her. He hated her in a very basic way, he felt he would tear her apart, the way one tears the many wrappings off the parcel in the pass-the-parcel game, to see what's inside. He didn't know whether he'd hate what would be inside.

  "Jean—" he began, but she turned on her stomach, away from him, exposing her long back to the sun.

  He heard a shout behind him and he turned, glad to escape her. He saw the tinker waving his hands some distance down in the burrows, shouting something he couldn't hear. There was something urgent about him, flailing hands against the sky. So he walked, even though he was afraid, leaving his sister with her cheek resting on her linked hands.

  As he walked the tinker grew bigger and the flailing gradually stopped. There was the hot feel of the sand under his bare feet, then the feel of grass, whistling by his calves. Then the boy was in front of him, arms on his hips, waiting for him to approach. He was wearing men's trousers now, sizes too big for him.

  "You want a go on the donkey."

  He nodded dumbly.

  "I'll give you half an hour with the donkey for half an hour with your sister."

  The boy began to laugh at the thought, his sister and the donkey, an even swap. The tinker began to laugh too and that made the boy laugh louder, huge laughs that went right through his body and stretched his stomach muscles tight. The tinker's laugh was softer, more knowledgeable.

  The boy heard this and stopped and looked into the blue eyes which wrinkled in some complicity and kept laughing. Then the boy began to laugh again, loving his laughter, the way he sometimes laughed when adults were laughing. The joke had changed into another joke, a joke he didn't understand, but that made it all the more funny.

  Then the tinker stopped suddenly. He cupped his hands together to make a stirrup and held them out.

  "Here."

  The hands were grimy and lined, skin flaking off them. The boy felt compliant. He was opening a box to let the winds out. He knew and he didn't know. He placed his left foot in the stirrup of flaking hands and swung onto the donkey and the tinker's foot kicked the donkey and the donkey ran.

  He was holding its neck, fearful and exhilarated. It was running like he didn't know donkeys could run with rapid thumps of hoof off the grass, with its spine, hard as a gate, crashing off his groin. He pressed his head against its neck and could hear its breathing, angry and sullen, thumping with its hooves. His knees clutched the swollen belly and his hands, gripping each other under the neck, were wet and slimy with saliva from the open jaw. His eyes were closed and he saw in the black behind his eyelids something even blacker emerging, whorling and retreating again.

  Then it stopped. He slid over its head and fell to the ground. He fell flat out, his cheek against the burrows' grass and heard his sister screaming, a clear scream, clear as silver.

  The donkey's head was hanging and its sides were heaving. Between its legs a black erection dangled, heaving with its sides. The scream still echoed in the boy's mind. Clear and silver, speaking to him, like the reflection of sun on sea-water. He ran.

  He ran faster than the donkey. He saw the green burrows, then the white sand, then the clear blue of his sister's swimsuit then a browned tanned back. The sand was kicking up in clumps around him as he threw himself on that back.

  He felt the naked shoulders under his hand. Then he felt the shoulders twisting and a hard body pushing him downwards, something hot, hard against his stomach. Both of their fists were hitting the other's face until he was hit hard, once and twice and they both, as if by mutual decision, went quiet. He lay until he became conscious of the other's hot hard groin, then squirmed away. He looked up at his sister. Her head was in one hand and the other hand was covering the bare skin above her swimsuit. He heard a rustle of sand and heard the tinker boy getting up.

  "I thought we'd made a swap." There was a spot of blood on his wizened mouth. He bent forward as if to strike again but changed his hand's direction just as rapidly and scratched the hair behind his ear. The boy started. He grinned.

  "I'd only put it through you," he said. Then he hitched up his falling trousers and walked towards the grass.

  When he got there he turned.

  "That's the last you'll see of my donkey," he said. Then he chuckled with infinite sarcasm. "Unless you've got another sister." And he turned again and walked through the grass towards the donkey.

  She was crying, great breathful sobs.

  "You won't—" he asked.

  "I will," she said. "I'll tell it all—"

  The boy knew, however, that she would be ashamed. He picked up her towel and her suntan lotion and began to walk. He had forgotten about his hate. He was thinking of the donkey and the tinker's flaking palms and his sister's breasts. After a while he turned.

  "Stop crying, will you. Nothing happened, did it."

  His hands were wet with the donkey's saliva and to the saliva a fine film of sand was clinging. When he moved his fingers it rustled, whispered, sang.

  MR SOLOMON WEPT

  THE CHILD HAD rolled pennies and the dodgem wheels had smoked for half a morning when Mr Solomon took time off to stand by the strand. He stood where he was accustomed to, on the lip of the cement path that seemed designed to run right to the sea but that crumbled suddenly and inexplicably into the sand. Mr Solomon smoked a cigarette there, holding it flatly between his lips, letting the smoke drift over his thin moustache into his nostrils. His eyes rested on the lumps of rough-cast concrete half-embedded in the sand. His breath came in with a soft, scraping sound.

  The sea looked warm and lazy in midday. Down the beach a marquee was being erected. Mr Solomon looked at the people on the beach, the sunbathers and the men who were unwinding the marquee canvas. He wore a brown suit with narrow legs and wide lapels, his thin face looked like it was long accustomed to viewing sunbathers, people on beaches. Mr Solomon then stopped looking at the people and looked at the sea. He took the cigarette from his mouth, inhaled and replaced it again. The sea looked dark blue to him, the colour of midnight rather than of midday. And though it looked flat and indolent and hot, its blueness was clear and sharp, a sharpness emphasised by the occasional flurry of white foam, the slight swell far out. Mr Solomon knew these to be white horses. But today they reminded him of lace, lace he imagined round a woman's throat, a swelling bosom underneath, covered in navy cloth. He had seen an advertisement for Sherry once with such a picture. He saw her just under the sea, just beneath the film of glassblue. If he lifted his eyes to the horizon again the sea became flat and indolent, and probably too hot for swimming.

  Mr Solomon lifted his eyes and saw the flat sea and the flat yellow strand. He thought of the child he had left, something morose and forlorn about the way he pushed penny after penny into the metal slot. Then he looked down the strand and saw the large marquee pole being hoisted and only then realised that it was race day. And Mr Solomon remembered the note again, he remembered the nights of surprised pain, the odd gradual feeling of deadness, how before it happened it had been unthinkable and how after it happened somehow anything other than it had become unthinkable. Now he dressed the boy, shopped, the boy sat in the change booth staring at the racing page while he drank in the Northern Star over lunchtime. He remembered how his wife had left him on race day, one year ago. How he had come to Lay town three days before the races, to catch the crowds. How on the fourth day he had gone to the caravan behind the rifle-range and found it empty, a note on the flap table. Its message was hardly legible, though simple. Gone with Chas. Won't have to hate you any more. He remembered
how he had wondered who Chas was, how he had sat on the unmade bed and stared at this note that over the length of the first night assumed the significance of a train ticket into a country he had never heard of. For he had long ceased to think of her with the words love or hate, he had worked, rolled his thin cigarettes, she had totted the books while he supervised the rent, those words were like the words school or god, part of a message that wasn't important any more, a land that was far away. And now he saw the note and thought of the world that had lived for her, thought of the second May, the May behind the one that woke first beside him in the cramped white caravan, that was sitting beside the singing kettle when he woke; this was Chas's May—but it mightn't have been Chas, it could have spelt Chad—and the thought that she existed gave him a feeling of surprised pain, surprise at the May he had never known of, surprise at the loss of what he had never possessed. But after three days the pained surprise had died and a new surprise asserted itself—a surprise at how easily the unthinkable became possible. He found it was easy to cook, to tot the books, to supervise the dodgem tracks and shooting-range all in one. The boy helped him, he watched the boy from behind the glass of the change booth emptying the slot machines. When the races finished he stayed on, found the move to another holiday spot too much bother and unnecessary anyway, since less money would do now. Even when the season ended he didn't move, he sat in the draughty amusement hall through winter and made more than enough to keep rolling his thin cigarettes. The rusted slot machines became a focus for the local youths with sullen faces and greased hair and he found forgetting her almost as easy a task as that of living with her had been. She had been shrewish, he told himself as her memory grew dimmer, her hair had often remained unwashed for days, she would have soon, within the year, gone to fat. Thus he killed the memory of another her neatly, he forgot the nights at the Palais in Brighton, the evenings in the holiday pubs, her platinum hair and the rich dark of the bottled Guinness (a ladies' drink then) tilted towards her laughing mouth.

  But he saw the marquee pole stagger upright and suddenly remembered her as if she had died and as if the day of the Lay town Races was her anniversary. He saw the white horses whip and the marquee canvas billow round the pole and thought suddenly of the dress she had called her one good dress with its sad lace frills and the bodice of blue satin that had more restitchings than original threads. A sense of grief came over him, a feeling of quiet sadness, not wholly unpleasing. He began to think of her as if she had died, he thought of the woman who had lived with him and who indeed had died. He imagined flowers for her, dark blood-red roses and felt bleak and clean as if in celebration of her imagined death he was somehow cleansing both him and his image of her.

  He lit another cigarette and turned back on the cement path. He passed a family coming from an ice cream van a little down it, the cones in their hands already sodden. Mr Solomon watched them pass him and felt he had a secret safe, totally safe from them. He felt as if there was a hidden flame inside him, consuming him, while the exterior remained the same as ever, the smoke still drifted over the same thin lip. He passed the green corrugated hall that served as a golf-club and remembered how each year they came through she had got him to pay green fees, how they had both made an afternoon's slow crawl over nine holes. How she had longed to be someday, a proper member in a proper club. "But we never settle down enough, do we Jimmy, 'cept in winter, when it's too wet to play . . ."

  Mr Solomon walked down the cement walk away from the beach and the rising marquee and felt his grief inside him like old port, hot and mellow. He came to the tarmac road and stood, staring at the tottering fagade of the amusements and the dull concrete front of the Northern Star opposite. He wavered for one moment and then headed for the brass-studded door of the Northern Star, the mute lights and wood-and-brass fittings being like night to him at first until his eyes settled. He ordered a drink and gave the barman a sharp look before downing it.

  "This one's for my wife," he said.

  "I didn't know you had one," said the barman, who was always courteous.

  "In memory of her. She died last year."

  "I'm sorry," said the barman. "Her anniversary?"

  "Died on race day," began Mr Solomon but by this time the barman had headed off discreetly for a customer at the other end. He blinked once then finished his drink and began to feel very angry at the courteous barman. He felt the whiskey tickle down his throat, he felt something in him had been sullied by the bland courtesy, the discreet lights of the hotel bar. He left.

  Outside the brightness blinded him as much as the darkness had before. Mr Solomon stared down the lean yellow street. It was packed with people and as he watched them, Mr Solomon began to feel for the first time a hatred towards them, en masse. He felt a malignant sameness in them. He felt they laughed, in their summer clothes. He felt they didn't know, in their summer clothes. He felt like a cog in the mechanism of holidays, of holiday towns, he felt somehow slave to their bright clothes and suntans. He no longer felt she had died, he felt something had killed her, that impersonal holiday gaiety had enslaved them both, had aged him, like a slow cancerous growth, had annihilated her. He felt his grief burning inside now, like a rough Irish whiskey. He crossed the street a little faster than he normally did, though his walk was still lethargic by the street's standards. He went into the pub with the black-and-white gabled roof.

  That afternoon his tale competed with the banjo-playing tinker, with the crack of beer-glasses, with the story of the roadworker's son who returned and bought out three local publicans. Mr Solomon shouted it, wept it, crowed with it, nobody listened, his thin face acquired a weasel look, a sorry look, his eyes grew more glazed and his speech more blurred, the reason for his grief grew hazy and indeterminate. By half-past four he was just drunk, all he knew was there was something somewhere to feel sorry over, profoundly sorry, somewhere a pain, though the reason for it he could no longer fathom, nor why it should be his pain particularly. Why not that Meath farmer's with the flushed face and the tweed suit, and at this Mr Solomon grew offensive, sloppily offensive and found himself removed.

  He went through the hard daylight again into the dark of the Amusement Parlour. He heard a rustle in the left-hand corner and saw the boy starting up guiltily from the peepshow machine. Mr Solomon thought of the near-naked starlets in high heels and out-of-date hairdos and got angry again. "I told you never to go near that," he rasped. The boy replied with a swift obscenity that shocked him silent. He could only stare, at his homemade cloth anorak, his hair clumsily quiffed, sticking out in places, his thin impenetrable face. At his son's face, new to him because he'd never seen it. He made to move towards him, only then realising how drunk he was. He saw the boy's hand draw back and an object fly from it. He raised his hand to protect his face and felt something strike his knuckles. He heard the coin ring off the cement floor and the boy's footsteps running towards the door. He ran after him drunkenly, shouting.

  The boy ran towards the beach. Mr Solomon followed. He saw the horses thunder on the beach, distorted by his drunken run. He saw the line of sand they churned up, the sheets of spray they raised when they galloped in the tide. He saw the boy running for the marquee.

  Mr Solomon could hear a brass band playing. He ran till he could run no longer and then he went forward in large clumsy steps, dragging the sand as he went. The sound of the reeds and trumpets grew clearer as he walked, repeated in one poignant phrase, right down the beach. Mr Solomon came to a crowd then, pressed round the marquee and began to push his way desperately through it. He felt people like a wall against him, forcing him out. He began to moan aloud, scrabbling at the people in front of him to force his way in. He imagined the boy at the centre of that crowd, playing a clear golden trumpet. He could see the precise curve of the trumpet's mouth, the pumping keys, the boy's expressionless eyes. He began to curse, trying to wedge himself between the bodies, there was something desperate and necessary beyond them.

  He felt himself lifted th
en, carried a small distance off and thrown in the sand. He lifted his face and wept in the sand and saw the horses churning the sea-spray into a wide area down by the edge. He heard a loud cheer, somewhere behind him.

  NIGHT IN TUNISIA

  THAT YEAR THEY took the green house again. She was there again, older than him and a lot more venal. He saw her on the white chairs that faced the tennis-court and again in the burrows behind the tennis-court and again still down on the fifteenth hole where the golf-course met the mouth of the Boyne. It was twilight each time he saw her and the peculiar light seemed to suspend her for an infinity, a suspended infinite silence, full of years somehow. She must have been seventeen now that he was fourteen. She was fatter, something of an exhausted woman about her and still something of the girl whom adults called mindless. It was as if a cigarette between her fingers had burnt towards the tip without her noticing. He heard people talking about her even on her first day there, he learnt that underneath her frayed blouse her wrists were marked. She was a girl about whom they would talk anyway since she lived with a father who drank, who was away for long stretches in England. Since she lived in a green corrugated-iron house. Not even a house, a chalet really, like the ones the townspeople built to house summer visitors. But she lived in it all the year round.

  They took a green house too that summer, also made of corrugated iron. They took it for two months this time, since his father was playing what he said would be his last stint, since there was no more place for brassmen like him in the world of three-chord showbands. And this time the two small bedrooms were divided differently, his sister taking the small one, since she had to dress on her own now, himself and his father sharing the larger one where two years ago his sister and he had slept. Every night his father took the tenor sax and left for Mosney to play with sixteen others for older couples who remembered what the big bands of the forties sounded like. And he was left alone with his sister who talked less and less as her breasts grew bigger. With the alto saxophone which his father said he could learn when he forgot his fascination for three-chord ditties. With the guitar which he played a lot, as if in spite against the alto saxophone. And with the broken-keyed piano which he played occasionally.