Night in Tunisia

by Neil Jordan

  He imagined the glistening bodies that littered the beach pulled into a net like that. He imagined her among them, slapping for space, panting for air, he heard transistors blare Da Doo Run Run, he saw suntan-lotion bottles crack and splinter as the Fisher up above pulled harder. He imagined his face like a lifeguard's, dark sidelocks round his muscular jaw, a megaphone swinging from his neck, that crackled.

  He saw the thin band of light had gone, just a glow off the sea now. He felt frightened, but forced himself not to run. He walked in quick rigid steps past the barnacled Virgin then and down the strand.

  "Ten bob for a touch with the clothes on. A pound without."

  They were playing pontoon on the raft. He was watching the beach, the bodies thicker than salmon. When he heard the phrase he got up and kicked the dirt-cards into the water. He saw the Queen of Hearts face upwards in the foam. As they made for him he dived and swam out a few strokes.

  "Cunts," he yelled from the water. "Cunts."

  On the beach the wind blew fine dry sand along the surface, drawing it in currents, a tide of sand.

  His sister laid the cups out on the table and his father ate with long pauses between mouthfuls. His father's hand paused, the bread quivering in the air, as if he were about to say something. He looked at his sister's breasts across a bowl of apples, half-grown fruits. The apples came from monks who kept an orchard. Across the fields, behind the house. He imagined a monk's hand reaching for the unplucked fruit, white against the swinging brown habit. For monks never sunbathed.

  When he had finished he got up from the table and idly pressed a few notes on the piano.

  "Why do you play that," his father asked. He was still at the table, between mouthfuls.

  "I don't know," he said.

  "What galls me," said his father, "is that you could be good."

  He played a bit more of the idiotic tune that he didn't know why he played.

  "If you'd let me teach you," his father said, "you'd be glad later on."

  "Then why not wait till later on and teach me then."

  "Because you're young, you're at the age. You'll never learn as well as now, if you let me teach you. You'll never feel things like you do now."

  He began to play again in defiance and then stopped.

  "I'll pay you," his father said.

  His father woke him coming in around four. He heard his wheezing breath and his shuffling feet. He watched the grey, metal-coloured light filling the room that last night had emptied it. He thought of his father's promise to pay him. He thought of the women who sold their bodies for monetary gain. He imagined all of them on the dawn golf-course, waking in their dew-sodden clothes. He imagined fairways full of them, their monetary bodies covered with fine drops of water. Their dawn chatter like birdsong. Where was that golf-course, he wondered. He crept out of bed and into his clothes and out of the door, very quietly. He crossed the road and clambered over the wire fence that separated the road from the golf-course. He walked through several fairways, across several greens, past several fluttering pennants with the conceit in his mind all the time of her on one green, asleep and sodden, several pound notes in her closed fist. At the fourteenth green he then saw that the dull metal colour had faded into morning, true morning. He began to walk back, his feet sodden from the dew.

  He went in through the green corrugated door and put on a record of the man whose playing he had first heard two days ago. The man played "Night in Tunisia," and the web of notes replaced the web that had tightened round his crown. The notes soared and fell, dispelling the world around him, tracing a series of arcs that seemed to point to a place, or if not a place, a state of mind. He closed his eyes and let the music fill him and tried to see that place. He could see a landscape of small hills, stretching to infinity, suffused in a yellow light that seemed to lap like water. He decided it was a place you were always in, yet always trying to reach, you walked towards all the time and yet never got there, as it was always beside you. He opened his eyes and wondered where Tunisia was on the Atlas. Then he stopped wondering and reached up to the piano and took down the alto saxophone and placed it on the table. He opened the case and saw it gleaming in the light, new and unplayed. He knew he was waking his father from the only sleep he ever got, but he didn't care, imagining his father's pleasure. He heard him moving in the bedroom then, and saw him come in, his hair dishevelled, putting his shirt on. His father sat then, while he stood, listening to the sounds that had dispelled the world. When it had finished his father turned down the volume controls and took his fingers and placed them on the right keys and told him to blow.

  * * *

  He learned the first four keys that day and when his father took his own instrument and went out to his work in Butlins he worked out several more for himself. When his father came back, at two in the morning, he was still playing. He passed him in the room, neither said anything, but he could feel his father's pleasure, tangible, cogent. He played on while his father undressed in the bedroom and when he was asleep he put it down and walked out the door, across the hillocks of the golf-course onto the strand, still humid with the warmth of that incredible summer.

  He forgot the raft and the games of pontoon and the thin boy's jargon. He stayed inside for days and laboriously transferred every combination of notes he had known on the piano onto the metal keys. He lost his tan and the gold sheen of the instrument became quickly tarnished with sweat, the sweat that came off his fingers in the hot metal room. He fashioned his mouth round the reed till the sounds he made became like a power of speech, a speech that his mouth was the vehicle for but that sprang from the knot of his stomach, the crook of his legs.

  As he played he heard voices and sometimes the door knocked. But he turned his back on the open window and the view of the golf-course. Somewhere, he thought, there's a golf-course where bodies are free, not for monetary gain—

  * * *

  He broke his habit twice. Once he walked across the fields to the orchard where the monks plucked fruit with white fingers. He sat on a crumbling wall and watched the darkening and fading shadows of the apple trees. Another night he walked back down the strand to where it faded into the river mouth. He looked at the salmonless water and imagined the lifeguard up above calling through his megaphone. He imagined childhood falling from him, coming off his palms like scales from a fish. He didn't look up, he looked down at his fingers that were forming hard coats of skin at the tips, where they touched the keys.

  And then, ten days after it had started, his face in the mirror looked older to him, his skin paler, his chin more ragged, less round. His father got up at half-past three and played the opening bars of "Embraceable You" and instead of filling in while his father played, he played while his father filled in. And then they both played, rapidly, in a kind of mutual anger, through all his favourites into that area where there are no tunes, only patterns like water, that shift and never settle. And his father put his instrument away and put several pound notes on the table. He took them, put the case up above the piano and went out the green door.

  It was five o'clock as he walked down the road by the golf-course, squinting in the sunlight. He walked down by the tennis-court onto the strand, but it was too late now and the beach was empty and there was no-one on the raft.

  He walked back with the pound notes hot in his pocket and met the fat boy with two racquets under his arm. The fat boy asked him did he want to play and he said "Yes."

  They had lobbed an endless series of balls when the fat boy said "Did you hear?" "Hear what," he asked and then the fat boy mentioned her name. He told him how the lifeguard had rescued her twice during the week, from a part of the beach too near the shore to drown in by accident. He hit the ball towards the fat boy and imagined her body in the lifeguard's arms, his mouth on her mouth, pushing the breath in. Then he saw her sitting on the iron-wrought seat in a green dress now, vivid against the white metal. The pound notes throbbed in his pocket, but he hadn't the courage to stop p
laying and go to the seat. Her eyes were following the ball as it went backwards and forwards, listless and vacant. The light gradually became grey, almost as grey as the ball, so in the end he could only tell where it fell by the sound and they missed more than half the volleys. But still she sat on the white chair, her eyes on the ball, following it forwards and back. He felt a surge of hope in himself. He would tell her about that place, he told himself, she doesn't know. When it got totally dark he would stop, he told himself, go to her. But he knew that it never gets totally dark and he just might never stop and she might never rise from the white seat.

  He hit the ball way above the fat boy's head into the wire meshing. He let the racquet fall on the tarmac. He walked towards her, looking straight into her eyes so that if his courage gave out he would be forced to say something. Come over to the burrows, he would say. He would tell her about that place, but the way she raised her head, he suspected she knew it.

  She raised her head and opened her mouth, her answer already there. She inhabited that place, was already there, her open mouth like it was for the lifeguard when he pressed his hand to her stomach, pushed the salt water out, then put his lips to her lips and blew.

  SKIN

  THE ODD FANTASIES we people our days with; she had just pierced her finger with the knife, and from between the petals of split skin blood was oozing. It was coming in one large drop, growing as it came. Till her detatched face reflects in the crimson.

  But in fact the knife had missed her forefinger. It had cut round the gritty root of the lopped-off stem and was now splicing the orb into tiny segments. Her eyes were running. Cracked pieces of onion spitting moisture at her, bringing tears, misting her view of the enamel sink. The sink that was, despite the distortion of tears, as solidly present as it had been yesterday.

  She was absorbed in the onion's deceit; its double-take. She had peeled layer upon layer from it and was anticipating a centre. Something like a fulcrum, of which she could say: here the skin ends; here the onion begins. And instead there was this endless succession of them, each like a smaller clenched fist, fading eventually into insignificance. Embryonic cell-like tissue which gave the appearance of a core. But in fact the same layers in miniature. Ah, she sighed, almost disappointed, looking at the handful of diced onion on the draining-board. She gathered these in her hands, and shook them into the bowl. She washed her hands, to dispel the damp oily feeling, the acid smell. Then she turned her back on the sink, gazed absently on the kitchen table.

  She had an apron on her, something like a smock. Flowers bloomed on it, toy elephants cavorted on their hind legs. There was lace round the neck and a bow-tied string at the back and a slit-pocket across the front into which she could place her hands or dry her fingers. Above it her face, which was uneventfully trim, and just a little plain. She was wearing high-heeled house slippers and an over-tight bra. Her shoulder was shifting uncomfortably because of it. When one rests one notices such things. She was resting. From the diced onions, carrots, chunks of meat, whole potatoes on the draining-board. From the black-and-white pepper tins on the shelf above it.

  There were two large windows on the sink side of the room. On the wall opposite was a row of small single-paned windows, high up, near the roof. The midday sun came streaming in the large window from behind her. She saw it as a confluence of rays emanating from her. When she shifted, even her shoulder, there would be a rapid rippling of light and shadow on the table cloth. Blue light it was, reflecting the blueness of the kitchen decor. For everything was blue here, the pantry door, the dresser, the walls were painted in rich emulsion, varying from duck-egg to cobalt. And the day was a mild early September, with a sky that retained some of August's scorched vermillion. The image of the Virgin crossed her silent vacant eyes. She had raised her hand to her hair and saw the light break through her fingers. She thought of the statue in the hall; plastic hands with five plastic sunrays affixed to each; streaming towards the feet, the snake, the waterbowl. Mother of Christ.

  She had been humming the first phrases of a tune. She stopped it when she returned abruptly to the sink, to the window, to the strip of lard—sparrow meat—hanging outside. She chopped the meat into neat quarters and dumped them with the vegetables into a saucepan. She placed the saucepan on a slow-burning ring. Then she began washing her hands again. The scent of onion still clung to them. Pale hands, made plump by activity, swelling a little round the wrist and round the spot where the tarnished engagement-ring pulled the flesh inwards. She massaged seperately the fingers of each hand, rapidly and a little too harshly; as if she were vexed with them, trying to coax something from them. Their lost freshness.

  Several inches of water in the sink; a reflection there—two hands caressing, a peering face swimming in the mud-coloured liquid, strewn over with peel. She grabbed hold of the knife and plunged it, wiping it clean with her bare thumb and forefinger. And again came the image—blood oozing, in large crimson drops. But her finger didn't gape. The knife emerged clean.

  She pulled the sink plug then, hearing the suck, scouring the residue of grit and onion-skin with her fingers. She dried her hands, walked with the towel into the living-room.

  There there was a low-backed modern sofa, two older tattered armchairs and a radiogram piled with magazines. She sat in the sofa, easing herself into its cushioned supports. She fiddled with the radio dial, turned it on, heard one blare of sound and switched it off again. The silence struck her; the chirp of a sparrow outside, clinging to the strip of lard. In another minute she was restless again, leafing through the magazines, flicking impatiently over their pages.

  A housewife approaching middle-age. The expected listlessness about the features. The vacuity that suburban dwelling imposes, the same vacuity that most likely inhabited the house next door. But she was an Irish housewife, and as with the whole of Irish suburbia, she held the memory of a half-peasant background fresh and intact. Noticeable in her dealings with the local butcher. She would bargain, oblivious of the demands of propriety. She would talk about childhood with an almost religious awe, remembering the impassioned innocence of her own. And, although house-proud, rigorous tidiness made her impatient; she had a weakness for loose-ends.

  And in her the need for the inner secret life still bloomed. It would come to the fore in odd moments. A fragment of a song, hummed for a bar or two, then broken off. A daydream. She would slide into it like a suicide easing himself into an unruffled canal. She would be borne off, swaying, for a few timeless moments. She would hardly notice the return. And for occasional stark flashes, she would be seized by a frightening admixture of religious passion and guilt, bordering on a kind of painful ecstasy; the need, the capacity for religiously intense experience of living; and in consequence of the lack of this, a deep residue of guilt. At times like this she would become conscious of anything red and bloodlike, anything blue or bright, any play of light upon shade.

  But if she were asked how she lived, she would have replied: happily. And if she were asked what happiness meant she wouldn't even have attempted an answer.

  She found herself rummaging among the magazines searching out one she had been reading yesterday. She recalled a story in it about the habits of Swedish housewives. Certain of them who would drive from their homes between the hours of two and four in the afternoon, out to the country, and there offer themselves to men. The event would take place in a field, under a tree, in a car. And afterwards, they would straighten their clothes, return home to find the timing-clock on the oven at nought, the evening meal prepared. It had disgusted her thoroughly at first glance. But something in it had made her read to the finish. The image, perhaps, of a hidden garden, sculpted secretly out of the afternoon hours, where flowers grew with unimaginable freedom.

  Now she was feeling the same compulsion. "Weekend" was the name, she remembered, selecting one from the pile. She opened it at the centre page. A glaring headline there, in vulgar black print: "SWEDISH HOUSEWIVES' AFTERNOON OF SIN." And a picture; a w
oman standing by a clump of trees, in a shaded country lane. A man in the distance watching her. A parked car.

  She closed it instantly. It had disgusted her again. But as she sat there, the sound of distant cars coming to her from the road, her fingers began drumming impatiently on the wooden top of the radio. Something about it drew her. The sun, the glossy green of the foliage. The man's dark predatory back. Not the cheapness, the titillating obscenity. Not that.

  Then she was moving towards the front door. Her tweed walking coat was hanging in the alcove. Outside, rows of starlings laced the telegraph-wires. Motionless black spearheads, occasionally breaking into restless wheeling flights, to return again to their rigid formations. The same expectant stasis in her, her drumming fingers, like fluttering wings. She was a starling. The sudden, unconscious burst of disquiet. The animal memory of a home more vibrant, more total than this. The origin-track; the ache for aliveness.

  All the way through the hall, out the front door, her fingers drummed. As she turned the ignition-key in the dashboard the engine's purr seemed to echo this drumming.

  Howth was facing her as she drove, answering her desperate need for open spaces. Slim spearlike poplars passed her on her left. Oaks gnarled and knotted to bursting-point. Ash and elder, their autumn leaves discoloured by traffic-dust. She drove mechanically. She hardly noticed the line of cars coming towards her. Only the earth to her right, a dull metal plate today. Beyond it, as if thrusting through its horizon with a giant hand, the Hill of Howth.

  Her forefinger still tapping on the steering-wheel. Scrubbing vegetables had banished most of the varnish from the nail. Today she didn't notice. A car swerved into her lane and away. She had a moment's vision of herself as a bloodied doll, hanging through a sharded windscreen. She drew a full breath and held it, her lungs like a balloon pressing at her breasts.