With her magnifier she had all summer made designs of spirals, fertility symbols, crosses; she had made marks of the occult and a sheela-na-gig.

She sat on the ground in the square with her back to the warm stone. She no longer felt like a beggar sitting in this way, at supplicant height. It was to do with how you displayed your face.

*

There is no word on the next ferry out. There are tannoy messages, but they contradict each other. The men remain on the bench as watchful as hawks and dumb as spoons. She wants to approach them but she cannot yet. She drifts upstairs to the café bar again. She moves in the sequence of a disturbed dream. There are voices at the edges of the dream. They come from the violent past. The dream is in the shape of the ferry terminal at the port of Algeciras.

She wants to talk to the men. In fact, she wants to be held. She could throw up at this idea. She wants to go further south in Morocco this year. She wants to go into the desert. She orders a slice of tortilla. The barman is as stoned-looking as a fucking koala. The tortilla is too dry. It tastes like a sacrifice. A jangle of bad nerves zips across the bar’s air

A stocky man at the counter clutches his groin, groans, unhandles himself, lays his forehead on the metal counter. He clutches his groin once more. Cries out.

A tiny sultana-faced man wearing lilac slacks and a blazer beneath a pompadour hair-do arrives in and tries to sell socks out of a plastic bag.

Dilly goes and looks down over the balustrade to the bench downstairs, and now in perfect tandem Maurice and Charlie look up – they have been drawn on the line of her gaze.

*

One day she went to Málaga to sell the disks of the sun. She picked a spot by the cathedral walls. Fate sent a long Maghrebi in a djellaba to appear beside her. Fastidiously he unrolled a black cloth. He set down some wooden figurines of princely Africans. Dilly tried to read from her paperback – gore; American; a serial killer loose under the Ohio moon – but the words would not stick. The hours unrolled like a great river. There were no customers for herself or for the Maghrebi.

She sat with her phone and looked at tattoos on Instagram. Technology was the white evil on the air. She watched clips of laughing dogs. She stood and stretched out the kinks, and she considered the African figurines that so precisely replicated their seller. He was very tall, maybe six and a half feet tall, and he stood like Job in the afternoon heat.

Where you from? she said.

He smiled in a tired way and gestured towards the docks, the sea, somewhere that lay beyond the sea.

You know the policía here? she said. You know what they’re like?

He just shrugged, lazily, who-knows-anything.

Are there other places in town? she said. Where the policía won’t move us?

Maybe, he said.

She picked up one of his figurines and turned it in her hand.

The fuck where’d you get these anyhow?

A place near the airport, he said. You can get the airport bus. It goes right by the place.

He smiled and crouched and knit his thin limbs to look over the sun disks. She took out the magnifier from her pack and showed it.

With the sun, she said.

He nodded at the idea and admired the disks.

I come from a place, she said, that’s a long way from the sun.

Where?

Ireland. Irlandes?

I’ve never been.

You’re nearly as well off out of it.

Is it not nice?

Oh, it’s a tremendous place but tricky, you know?

Tricky he did not know. He said she should go to the warehouse by the airport – there was plenty that you could get there wholesale and cheap, jewellery, scarves, whatever.

Then you will not have to sit all day in the sun, he said, and he picked up her magnifier and held it against his face to make a giant’s eye.

And it was at the wholesale store, in a scabby retail park near Málaga Airport, that she met Frédérique, who ran the place, and you had to stress the lavish q sound, which forced the mouth into a queasy smile. Frédérique was large and buttery and some kind of trans-sex – it was hard to tell which direction from which – and had a line on all the rackets. The wholesale place was a kind of front. It was peopled day and night by cirrhotic-looking old crooks and wastrel youths with insane mouths. These are my people, was Dilly Hearne’s feeling. Soon she was living in the exurban sprawl of Málaga, and she was in Frédérique’s place daily, and the cops were in and out too, and were on a first-name basis. There were many rackets and games. The money now was in the movement of people. Everybody came from elsewhere. Frédérique, when deep in her cups and on the burn of the pipe – late at night – would tell Dilly stories of the place that she came from. It was in the rainforest of Brazil. It was not two dozen miles, she said, from a tribe of seven families who’d never seen cars or electric light. Dilly imagined for a long time these happy Indians. She was like a kid seeking comfort in a story. She saw their yellow eyes burning electric in the gloom of the jungle by night, and heard the whispered prayer of their incantations, and now the low murmur of a great river is moving unseen, but nearby and – listen – how the unnameable birds shriek against the dark.

*

If she speaks to the men, it will mean the end of something. She goes outside for a smoke. There is a disturbance on the atmosphere. The air is tight and charged. She should leave this place at once and never look back. But she wants to speak to them.

Under the arclights a pack of Moroccan boys kick a ball around the wasteground by the container stacks. The ugly façades of the apartment blocks loom beyond the glow of the harbour lights. It is a plain sister of a town. Dilly passes through here often, and this much she has learned – the uglier the town, the kinder the people.

A helicopter of the narco police homes in across the water and hovers above the pad on the roof of the terminal and holds a moment, then softly drops, rests. It’s very calming to watch this – she can feel her pulse rate slow with the blades.

She looks out across the water. She has not yet been told which hotel to stay in when she gets to Tangier. She awaits the instruction from Frédérique.

She tosses the smoke and tries to go back inside, but she has to approach the automatic door three times before it recognises her as womankind.

She keeps close to the walls as she examines the concourse, the ticket hatches. She takes the escalator upstairs. From the corner of her eye as she rises she keeps an eye on the men. Their unmistakable gaatch. Their mien. They look right through her again and she realises now that they cannot see her.

They are looking for some ghost called Dilly.

*

Something else that she had learned – you need to watch yourself at every minute of the day. If you don’t watch yourself, the badness might slide in, or the evil. Watch your words most of all. Watch for the glamorous sentence that appears from nowhere – it might have plans for you. Watch out for the clauses that are elegantly strung, for the string of words bejewelled. Watch out for ripe language – it means your words may be about to go off.

And sometimes she could feel herself turning into someone else – into something else – and she came up from her meagre sleep in the Spanish night (maybe in Blanes, maybe in Calanda, maybe in Cabo de Gata) to hear her mother calling for one of the dogs on a lost lane on Beara long ago. The dog’s name faded away before she could catch it – was it Shortie around that time?

She could not control the images that came through on the sleepless nights. She was from a line of insomniacs twelve hundred years long. She would never go back there, but home would always be the place where the light came slant at equinoctial times, in the half-seasons.

We were really so very far from the sun.

*

She watches them from above – two men on a bench, one with a good eye, and one with a good leg. She cannot go to them. Even if she could speak to them, what would she say?

That I cannot blame you any more.

When she was a child, there would be callers at strange hours. Men in hats, and laughing women, and sometimes there were raised voices, and sometimes singing. All the lurchy moves and late-night exits – we’ve got to do the splits again, Dilly, will you pack what you need in your dinosaur bag?

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 Charlie Red would bring her to restaurants for her dinner and everyone seemed to move around them in circles, tighter and tighter circles around them, drawn in, as if they were dazzled or mesmerised, and people would come up out of nowhere and just grip his hand – Charlie Redmond! – and always he’d bring her for dinner, or for cakes and tea – it felt like escaping when she was with Charlie – and he’d give her sips of his wine, and tell her all of his old jokes again, and do all his voices, and buy her ridiculous, expensive things, and he’d whisper to her, he’d say, Dilly?

You’re a fucking aristocrat.

And I loved you very much.

*

It is night at the port of Algeciras. The ferry is to sail again for Tangier. The crowd moves in spurts and gaggles towards the terminal gates. The two men on the bench survey the crowd carefully. The girl stands at a height above them. She leans on the balustrade and looks down. She needs to make a decision. But she is a prisoner of the past and the past will not relent. She remembers fucking everything. She remembers even that morning when the century was soon to turn, and Maurice took her in the car to the place by the water beyond the sleeping town of Berehaven, and the sound that was made – the resounding shlunk and click – when he locked all the doors, and even at four years old she knew what the dreadful look on his face was made of, it was made out of love.