Night Boat to Tangier

by Kevin Barry

  Maurice read up on it. Electrodes, he learned, would be attached at points to his father’s head. By this means, electricity was passed through in neat measures to stimulate the brain. Brief seizures were induced. He saw the doctors recede from the room and into blue sky as the anaesthetic took hold. New connections were established in the hippocampus.

  But if his father’s mood was steadier when he returned home from hospital, there was also an odd grey calm that possessed him. It was from another world. It broke up all the sleep in the house.

  Málaga eased into its night hours. There was a liner due in from Genoa. The prostitutes arrived on the hoot of its bass-toned call. The bar would be open the length of the night. Maurice Hearne was happy enough to sit quietly on the crest of his old sad dreams.

  *

  At the port of Algeciras the criminal despondency of half Europe had gathered. The air had a medieval tang. The vagrant children of many nations were crouched and high and drunken there. All the drums and the girls and the dogs were arrayed. Tiny fires showed against the dark as the pipes were drawn on. The atmosphere was of solemn ceremony. These were often quite humourless children. The port by night had a hot, diabolic quality. It rang of the past but was of the new century. On such a clear night you could see an hour south to the lamps of Tangier.

  He went to walk the hours of his waiting through the old port streets. Strange hawks watched darkly from the alleyways. It was one of the unsolvable places of the earth. As he moved, he felt watched over or filmed. He felt also like he was closing in on something. He waited for the night crossing across the black water. What was left of the money was hidden in small wads about his person. He had to get his women back.

  When the call for the night boat at last came, it dragged the world back to an older frame. The footsteps that moved over the dockside stones and the gangplank had the certain reminiscence of war. Across an easy water the boat moved. The waves went regularly as troops beneath. The ferry made a jaunty, marching music. He moved out for Tangier with no plan. The night was quick and black around him.

  The next morning at a pension in the Arab quarter of that fatal city he opened his left eye with a razor blade.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE LAST NIGHT OF OUR ACQUAINTANCE

  Leaving the port of Algeciras, in October 2018

  From the ferry boat the lights of Algeciras recede into the October night. The dark mountains above the town are getting smaller. The fortress of Gibraltar is lost behind a cloudbank. Somewhere in the distance a thunderstorm crackles. Dilly’s phone throbs once and she reaches for it and a text from Frédérique names the hotel in Tangier she is to go to – it’s the El Muniria again. That is all she needs – she throws the phone into the water. Fuck your roaming charges and fuck your bundle rates.

  Piercing the black, the searchlight of a narco chopper rakes the sky above the Straits.

  There is a great heaviness on the air – a tension that makes the breath catch in her throat – and the stars tonight are not visible. There is a cool breeze off the water. The thunderstorm comes nearer as an electric wafting.

  Hard smokers line the rails on the top deck – the Moroccans are unquenchably the greatest smokers on the planet, and Dilly lights up among them. These silent travellers in harried conversation with themselves. The music inside plays off the beat.

  Now as the boat moves out further Algeciras goes to slow black.

  When you are twenty-three years old, there are moments when your life is just a film. She peels off her skin and throws it to the water. This winter she will not come back from Maroc. Maybe she’ll go to Essaouira for a season and find a boy or find a girl. Get some dogs of her own at last.

  And picture for me now a slight girl with cropped hair running with the dogs on a winter beach by night – she is gamine; her movement is fleet – and when she calls out to the dogs, her voice is musical, lilting, and still quite Irish, actually.

  On the night boat to Tangier she can let the past recede. In the terminal she walked right by the men as they scanned the crowd and with defiance she turned her face to them. To speak with the men would have been to step back through a screen she had with three years of hard time erected.

  The black water breaks up and reforms again perfectly as the boat passes through.

  The Moroccans smoke and drink bottles of Mahou beer, and now, as Tangier begins to show as a low rim of lights on the southern dark, they talk lowly among themselves.

  Down here it is a mean century. It will disintegrate further. Dilly has enough money to pull away from Frédérique now. The night boat arrows a straight course across the sea. There is a sense of military advance, an army’s passage.

  She goes inside and descends clankily the iron steps to the ferry’s lounge, and she is aware of the glances that she draws as she goes by. She displays her face in a particular way and nobody but nobody approaches the slight girl with the bleached and cropped hair.

  In the early morning she will sit on the terrace at the El Muniria and have coffee and pastries with the camp old Englishmen who stay there always. She may have to wait for three days, she may have to wait for four. Stoic hours. The light will be brilliant with the storm passed over, the air pure and clear. She will hear the muezzin call above the medina and see the great birds hover on the white seafront at evening.

  Now breathe, and step out again, a step further from the past.

  Step into the streets as narrow as bones, the white streets of the labyrinth, and breathe deeply.

  Breathe, and step out once more.

  *

  Do you think it was definitely not her, Maurice?

  I’m certain of it, Charlie.

  All that’s wrong with us, Moss? We been staring into the mass of fucken humanity for so long, our minds are playing tricks.

  Our deranged little minds are acting up. Is all that’s wrong with us, Charles.

  For half a minute, though?

  Stop.

  I halfways thought . . .

  I had a strong suspicion too, Charlie. There was a kind of . . . I don’t know. A gaatch to it?

  I felt kind of . . .

  Yeah.

  Like my legs, like they were . . .

  I couldn’t fucken breathe, Charlie. Being quite honest with you. I still can’t breathe. I’m put me on a fucken drip material.

  She fucken . . .

  The way she turned and looked right through us, Charlie?

  A coldness, kind of . . . Whoever she was.

  Definitely it might not have been her.

  Definitely I think it wasn’t her. It’s just our . . .

  I’m certain. I mean we’re so long in this fucken place now?

  Hallucinations. Is where we’re at, Moss. It’s sorrowful, really.

  The little maggoty brains are playing up.

  Even if it was her, Maurice?

  Yeah?

  There’s no fear of the girl.

  No. She’s going to be fine.

  My heart is going like a fucken greyhound, Moss.

  I know.

  You could tie me down and sedate me.

  Don’t mention the sedation, Charlie. I’ve fucken been there. I don’t ever want to go under again. Not ever.

  A troubled silence descends – the old times are shifting again; they are rearranging like fault lines.

  The past will not relent.

  Chapter Twelve

  IT’S MOVIE NIGHT AT THE BUGHOUSE

  In the city of Cork, in April 2013

  It was one of those hectic April mornings that has the eyes screwed wrong in your head. There was too much busyness on the air. Maurice Hearne had been put out of the Beara house, and she had tried to turn Dilly against him – the old one-two, and he was too weak for it now.

  Quickly he had come loose of himself. He could feel the new season in hard pulses in the glands. On the larches (primly erect, arrogant as surgeons) that lined the avenue to the Psychiatric the buds were rudely swollen – he couldn’
t take his eyes off them, they were like fucken nipples. It’s tricky, always, when the world is coming to life again.

  His mother, Cissie, led him by the arm through the grounds of the old Victorian hospital. They had suffered a week of it together. Days of tears and rage; nights of froth and demon visions; the works. They had taken a taxi out to the strange place, but he did not recall the ride that had ended just a minute previously. They could have been driven out there by an aardvark for all he knew.

  As they walked, his mother shushed him and cajoled. The bird-like pursing of her lips worked up tiny wet sucks – he’d choke her, on the spot, if he had the strength – and her sighs opened pockets of woe in the cold, bright air.

  The ground was waking, and opening: there was a high mustiness like yeast. Gay white flowers tossed back their heads like show ponies. He was under referral to the Psychiatric at his mother’s insistence.

  Come on, Moss, there’s no fault in you, boy.

  Shut the fucken gob, Ma, would ya?

  These were the mean times. Cynthia said no more, no more. Dilly had turned into a compost heap. He had not talked to Charlie Redmond for a couple of years. There were those who wanted him dead still.

  The sun came through the larches in thin, white slants, and his mother relaxed into a state of deep relief – he felt her grip on his arm slacken – as she led him up the stone steps and through the heavy doors.

  The Mental.

  The Bin.

  The Bughouse.

  In the consultant’s waiting room, like a child, he held his mother’s hand for solace.

  *

  He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses – he was the gaunt accumulation of them. He wanted an out, but he could never be a suicide. He could not willingly deprive the world of himself. He was almost forty-six and if fate did not intervene, he would have to sit it the fuck out.

  The consultant was of a type for these places – a squat and antic old time-server who looked madder than Napoleon.

  Arrange your face, doctor, Maurice said.

  Ah, now, Moss, his mother said.

  The consultant shaped his lips in an amused pursing.

  Forgive me, father, for I have sinned, Maurice said. It’s been twenty-eight days since my last chicken supper.

  He could hear what the dogs could hear. He could make as much sense of it. He could smell the tiniest things – he could smell the stale leather of the soles of the consultant’s ox-blood brogues.

  You’re possibly experiencing agitation, Mr Hearne? At the moment?

  Am I the fuck, he said.

  Maurice, his mother said, your tongue.

  It’s all right, Mrs Hearne.

  Delicately, with the tips of his fingers, the consultant lifted a form from the desk.

  Are you prepared to sign the committal, Maurice?

  I’m prepared to hop up on the committal’s back, Maurice said, and give it a pet name.

  This is more of the nonsense talk, doctor. You’re confused, Mossie. Don’t mind the auld talk, would you?

  He scratched out the letters on the form with a prideful flourish. He held the form out in front of his face and he considered the two scrawled words at arm’s length – these were the sum facts of himself.

  You’ll get a grand rest now, Cissie said. You won’t know yourself, Maurice.

  You want me to spell out my disease, doctor?

  Ah, Moss . . .

  H.E.A.R.N.E.

  *

  Three days’ sedation was the first course of the treatment but he was wired so fiercely it was difficult to stay under. He came and went from himself in an off-white room. He was afloat on a kind of sea. Once, he awoke with the startling realisation that he was a criminal – it was the first time in his life he had considered himself as such.

  But he could see the first swallows of the year darting across the patch of sky outside, drawing out their fast, invisible threads, and these, he knew, were holding the world together.

  *

  Slowly, as the days passed and the chemicals were reduced, he emerged from a heavy, dreaming state to a calmer and more wakeful one. The years had leaned into years, one into the next. He had been in and out of his marriage; his love had not reduced. He had bought fourteen apartments in Budapest and sold them at a tremendous loss. He had mislaid, with Charlie Redmond, a tonne and a half of Moroccan hashish. It was never found. He had been in and out with Charlie too. The seasons were relentless; the years turned over. It was a fucking joke life. It was fucking beautiful. They never caught us – that was the important thing.

  He became aware now, a little to the west of himself, of a voice – it was an old, countryish voice – and he realised after some time that it was actual, not internal, and that it was from the bed beside his. There were just two beds to the room and, when he had the strength to turn to the other, he did so, and he saw there the bulky, prone figure of what looked to be an old farmer type.

  Some misfortune netted from the hills of the county, Maurice guessed, who had listened to the rain too insistently, maybe, until he took his instructions from the voices within it.

  The old man lay on a pillow sodden with drool, and his eyes were drawn to the patch of pale sky, its meagre light, and he made words on his cracked lips, accusations, it sounded like.

  If I hadn’t enough on my plate, thought Maurice Hearne, and he felt for the old man.

  *

  Over these April days, as his strength returned, as he began to eat boiled eggs at four in the afternoon and drink mugs of strong tea, Maurice was able to lift himself from the bed and join the procession – at last, inevitably – of the green corridor, and it wasn’t entirely joyless, he found, to be able to drag one foot after the other, and to have no sense of a war inside.

  This time it had been worse than in ’99; it had been worse even than in 2004, when he opened the eye in Tangier. But now he came up to himself slowly again – it was like rising through heavy water – and he was warmed by one of the great consolations: nothing very terrible lasts for very long.

  *

  The farmer recovered too. After a couple of days he sat up in the bed and asked for tea and the Examiner. These old coves read their own weather so closely – there was a quiet satisfaction about the farmer’s mouth that showed he knew the tempest had passed over. They began to talk to each other.

  Kiwi fruits, the old man said, confidentially.

  Go again?

  Kiwi fruits, the farmer said, be your only man for the mental.

  That right?

  I read it in the paper. Scientists have discovered. One a day keep you right in yourself good as the tablets.

  The farmer was dispatched to the free world before Maurice was, which said something about fucking something. He walked the green corridor. His mother chattily visited, and it was as though nothing had happened, as though together on these recent nights they hadn’t been around the rings of Saturn. He spoke to Cynthia by phone.

  You’ll be fine, she said. It’s just the time for it, you know? It’s time for you to be on your own now, Maurice.

  Can I see the girl? he said, and she did not answer.

  One morning, after a long, dreamless sleep, he woke to find a new neighbour installed in the bed beside his, a long, thin figure turning angrily in a drugged fugue.

  It was Charlie Redmond.

  *

  Of course you could pump the River Ganges’ worth of lithium into Charlie Red and there’d be no keeping him down.

  Maurice watched – with the old fond amusement – as Charlie got up out of the bed, paced the room like a single human shriek made flesh and bone, the eyes out on stalks, the face bloodless and intense, the knees climbing up and down the walls, and the arseless gown flapping after him. The attending Nightingale was in and out with her hopeless pleading, trying to get him back in the bed again.

  Trust her, Charlie, she’s a nurse.

  But if Charlie Red was there, also he was not yet there. His eyes we
re open, but they had no recognition in them; he looked at Maurice sometimes in his waking fits but as a visitation only.

  He looked at him as if it were the ghost of Banquo in the bed farside of him.

  *

  Maurice kept watch as slowly his broken friend emerged from the fog, and he was there to present a sly smile when Charlie’s eyes flickered open to focus truly.

  Are you a pillow-over-the-face job, Charles?

  Moss?

  I’m here for you, old pal. And I think I might have the strength back in me arms for it.

  *

  As in the slow push-in of a zoom, the days came into focus. The nights in their own way clarified. The men found a way into their talk again, and fraternity.

  How you doing big-picture wise, Maurice?

  I’m fucked up, Charles. Yourself?

  Shockin’ condition altogether.

  They talked against the boredom and fear. They took their meds with gusto – here come the happy tray, Charlie Redmond said – and they avoided the television room.

  Telly room’d depress the fucken Jesus out of you, Maurice said.

  Telly room, you’d be stringin’ yourself up, Charlie said.

  We could get a laptop brought in, Charlie? Internet dongle? Watch shit?

  A laptop? I’m watchin’ me fucken shoes in this place, Moss.

  *

  They had a laptop brought in. They streamed some old stuff. They lay back into a soak of nostalgia. These were slow nights at the Bughouse. The long stretch of the April evenings was a cruel sentence. They watched Rumble Fish again.

  They had watched it when they were sixteen or seventeen, until the tape had worn thin on the VHS and the footage went snowy, a monochrome dream of violence, death and helpless brotherhood, the Motorcycle Boy and Rusty James, and the lights of Tulsa were coldly burning, and their own world could be redrawn to its dimensions.

  *

  They sold dope up and down Barrack Street. 1983. 1984. It was bought wholesale from a family of nine brothers off an estate in Mahon. All nine brothers went by the name of Sox. Maurice and Charlie stashed their dope behind the cross on the deadhouse wall, under the bonnet of an abandoned car on Evergreen Street, beneath the kneeling cushion of a confession box. They were in and out of the church so often the priest started to lock it up weekday evenings.