Night Boat to Tangier

by Kevin Barry

But what’s the nature of the attraction? To this way of life ye’ve picked? It’s freedom, she says. It’s poverty, Charlie says. Poverty is always for free.

The fear of turning into our parents, she said, is what turns us into our fucking parents.

She was not wrong—the mind designs the body.

Fucking Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. The way that it closes in.

You look for the quiet spaces in a life, Charles. And do you find them? In your hole you do. Or in love, maybe.

They are at a high vantage atop the stack of their years. They are old enough for the long view in either direction now.

Self-abuse can’t be left aside lightly, Maurice. It can be a necessary release for a gent at any age. Strange the way it don’t get mentioned in adult life. And we’re all at it.

He arranged his face for Irish weather. This was not to be underestimated. He scrunched his eyes against the wind. He twisted his mouth against the rain. Take these gestures and repeat them, times ten thousand for the life, and times the generations, and times the epochs and the eras, and see how the effect digs beneath the skin, enters the racial soul, prepares its affront to the world, and offers it—

The motions of the alcohol are familiar: the easy warming, the calm sustain, and now the slow grading into remorse. A melancholy hour falleth. As afflicts a gentleman of colourful history. But, if he has nothing else to his name, he has his regrets, and these are not without value to the martyr’s self-portrait displayed in his mind’s eye. I am fifty-one years old, he thinks, and still at least halfways in love with meself. All told you’d have to call it a fucken achievement.

Hate is not the answer to love; death is its answer.

The first six months on heroin with Cynthia were the most beautiful days of all time. Love and opiates—this is unimprovable in the human sphere. Like young gods they walked out.

You know why, Charlie? Because if Irish people are martyrs for the drink, they’re worse again for the dope, once they get the taste for it, because it eases the anxiety, and we’re a very anxious people.

Dilly passes through here often, and this much she has learned—the uglier the town, the kinder the people.

She can see her mother, in the hotel bed—in the old Jurys on the Western Road—and Cynthia pretends that she’s asleep—for the child’s sake—but she’s turning again and again in a hot, awful soak, and she can feel the heat off her, it radiates, she’s like a brick oven, and Maurice sits by the window, it’s very late, it’s summer and such a humid night, and he’s looking out to the car park, smoking a number, and very lowly, under his breath, he’s going fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck and she knew then that they were definitely not like other families.

and he was warmed by one of the great consolations: nothing very terrible lasts for very long.

late one morning, a moment opened that allowed the words to be spoken— You know I think the girl could be mine, Maurice? I mean there is a possibility. I know there is, Charlie. I know that.

The countryside was trying to shuck the last of the winter from its shoulders.

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.

Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit together alone but for their remorse. They have the tune of it easily, by nature almost it seems.

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

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.