Night Boat to Tangier

by Kevin Barry

A woeful fat man from Birmingham arrived just a few minutes late. He had a look of high moral injury as he took a seat opposite Maurice Hearne. His great, fleshy frame came to rest in a soft stack of complaint.

Maurice returns suavely from the concession with three bottles of cheap cava and paper cups. Either we elevate ourselves from the beasts of the fields, he says, or we eat our fucken guns.

Charlie’s smile is, of its own right, an enlivened thing. It travels the terminal as though disembodied from him. It leaves a woven lace of hysterical menace in its wake.

It was so cold you could see the dogs’ barks on the air. They were like waifs out by the river. Out here, it was as if the world had backed off from them for a spell. They believed in fatedness and meant-to-be’s. They believed in the dark star that was theirs to steer by.

It’s in her blood to be hawkin’ us. Her mother was the same way. Crooked as the day. And a tongue on her, Cynthia. When I came back without the eye on me? From Tangier? She took one look, after all I’d suffered, and she said who the fuck do you think you are, Thom Yorke? Never heard of him. Or hang about…He wasn’t a lame boy from Summerhill? He’s the lad out of Radiohead, Charlie.

The Judas drew a low crowd but not an unglamorous one. Night people. Scavengers. A criminal ascendency. They were arranged at low tables in the dim light. There was an aura of trinket menace from their neck chains in the light.

The inclination at the Iscariot was to drink steadily but decorously. Nelson Lavin kept a watchful eye that such decorum be maintained.

These were fabled people. These were tricky times. They were in a moment of dangerous splendour. The men were lizardly, reptilian. They wore excellent fucking shoes. Nelson carefully with Jimmy Earls kept an eye on the confrontation. It was a smiling one, yet, and soft-voiced. These were deliberate people. Why should they meet just here, just now? Maybe it needed to be seen, and recounted.

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.

There is a stab of awareness at the beginning and at the end of love, and the feeling precisely replicates—it’s a twinge of cold certainty at either end of the affair, and it is twice terrifying.

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.