At the port of Algeciras, in October 2018
The girls with the dog turn out to be witches from the province of Extremadura.
Which is a turn-up for the books, says Charlie Redmond.
The girls’ names are Leonor and Ana. Their English is limited. Their dog is named Junior Cortés. Their smiles are glazed and alive. Their ink shows symbols of the occult. They claim not to know Benny from previously; Benny agrees that he has never seen these particular girls before. Lorca and Junior Cortés are wary of each other but also interested. It’s as if a little family is coming together.
Maybe that’s all that’s wrong with us in the first place, Charlie says. Families. Or the absence of.
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.
Dilly Hearne is the girl’s name, Charlie says. Dill or Dilly?
Three years she’s been gone, Maurice says, and here’s me, her old dad, with the heart hangin’ sideways out of me chest.
We’re going to need the Spanish for crusty, Moss. She took off with yere own kind, girls . . . Ye know what I’m saying?
She was in Granada maybe? Not long ago?
I don’t know Dilly, Leonor says.
We just come from Cádiz, Ana says.
Cádiz! Maurice says. Did I ever tell ye one time I was in love with an older lady in Cádiz?
There wasn’t a sparrow safe for miles, Charlie says.
Gorrión! Maurice cries, and pours the drinks with an excess of wristy flourishes.
Leonor and Ana laugh uneasily and accept the drinks and sip at them. Benny takes a drink and finds that it steadies the nerves. The dogs relax into each other and lie back. The night ages. The port of Algeciras has seen stranger times. Now Maurice and Charlie find themselves on the precipice of a great reminiscence. (Algeciras, always, is a reminiscent town.)
Families? Maurice says. Don’t be talking to me about families.
Maurice Hearne? Charlie says. A man that’s been through the ringer like ye wouldn’t fucken believe.
Maurice stands, shows in a sad smile his earned wisdom, and gazes towards the high windows.
Did ye know there are only seven true distractions in life? he says.
Name ’em, Moss.
Top banana? The want-of-death.
Of course it is, Charlie says.
We know this, Maurice says. We’re all looking for the ticket to ride. And there’s lust, certainly, because we all want to get our ends away.
At some sort of reasonable level anyhow, Charlie says.
I fully accept there’s a thing called love, Maurice says. Haven’t I been half my born days up to my sucker eyeballs in it? And there’s sentimentality, which is all tied up with the love and the lust. There’s grief and the longer we go on, the more of it we’ve the burden of.
It accretes, Charlie says, like a motherfucker out of control. Does the old grief.
There’s pain, Maurice says. Mental and physical divisions.
My stomach is talking to me, Charlie says, and my arse is only trotting after it.
I had the dry heaves there a while ago, Maurice says, and a mystery pain out my left lung.
Will we go into the mental, Moss?
No, we will not, Mr Redmond. Because we’d be here for the fucken night.
You’ve only listed six, Maurice. Of the distractions.
On account of I’m leaving the kicker till last, Charlie.
Being?
Being avarice, Charles. Being our old friend avarice.
*
The night is slowly passing. There is no word on the next boat. There are difficulties at port on the Tangier side. Difficulties are not unknown on either side. There is no sign of Dilly Hearne. Charlie Redmond knits his long, bony fingers behind his head. He is patient as a statue. Maurice Hearne turns his derby hat in his hands and considers its slowly turning rim, as if all the years are turning back.
This old Charlie? he says. A man with a very attractive personality. In lots of ways. I’m not saying he’s an angel. I mean back in the day? We were an awful pair. Savages. Oh, what we didn’t get up to? And there was a lot of money, which complicates everything. That’s when our old friend avarice comes a knock-knock-knockin’ along.
Shoot-the-bastard, shoot-the-bastard, Charlie says.
Ah, listen, my sweet darlings. The stories I could tell ye? About what I’ve been through? You wouldn’t put an idle fucking dog through it. No offence, Lorca. No offence, Junior Cortés. You see the money comes into everything. You have to do the accounts at some stage. You have to settle the books. And, actually, me and this fella, we go back so long, we were in the same classroom together. We did Inter Cert-level business studies together. Biz org! Isn’t that what we used call it, Charlie? Tuesday morning, double biz org, you’d have the eyes clawed out of your head. This is in Cork city I’m talking about, the rain outside, oh, it’s heaving down. Ferocious little self-abusers. The haircuts on us! And we trying to crawl up the Prez Convent skirts. Till the eyes were crooked in our heads. The waft of it alone enough to break a boy’s heart.
Estuarine, Charlie Redmond says.
But over the years? What happened was the money. There was a lot of money. Oh, it was really moving for us. Whatever way our luck turned? The horse was after coming in at forty-to-one. Metaphorical speaking. There was a lot of money, and I’m not saying for one minute that Cynthia shouldn’t have had a lovely house to her name and our daughter well looked after. And of course we needed to have the money coming in the way it was coming. Charlie had his exes that were being catered for.
The likes of Fiona fucken Condon? Charlie says. The woman like a pump the way she suck money out of you. And I paying out for her children from a previous? Three thousand, eight hundred euro a month at one stage I had going out to Fiona Condon alone. The young fella need football boots, et cetera. Do he need ’em made out of fucken gold? Unbelievable.
There was a lot of money unaccounted for, Maurice says. It remains so. Cynthia couldn’t have spent it all. Despite her very best efforts. And I’m not saying for one minute she didn’t deserve her comforts. The fucken sofas she had going on? She was going to Copenhagen for the sofas. And, in my opinion, the woman deserved it all, and more.
Dilly Hearne, Charlie says. She’s a small girl. She’s a pretty girl.
She may just possibly have done us over, Maurice says.
It’s in her blood to, Charlie says.
Green eyes, Maurice says. Off the mother she took a lovely set of Protestant eyes.
Cynthia. God rest her. She’d the palest green eyes.
They were like the fucking sea, Maurice says.
*
Their talk comes in slow drifts, then in quicker attacks. It builds up; it spins out. Leonor and Ana know by experience the patience required for the port of Algeciras when the boats are uncertain, and they know too the strangeness that gathers here always – soon they lie sleeping against their packs. The dogs also are sleeping. Benny is more wary than the girls and cannot sleep – he watches for a gap to open. Maurice lies back across the bench, as though laid out for the deadhouse, with his hands clasped decorously at the chest. Charlie Redmond drops an invisible set of rosary beads into his friend’s palmed clasp, and he makes to speak, his own palms opened and displayed for sincerity. The manic warmth of his smile would light a chapel – 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.
A man of my seniority? he says. To be scrabbling trying to put the means of a living together? It’s unnatural. I should be gone out to stud by now. I should be on a farm in fucken Wales.
He turns to Benny, to the dogs, to the sleeping girls.
Ye know that I don’t have so much as a roof over my head? he says. I should be gone upriver by now. I should be gone westward into the sunset. I should be staring down at a wine-dark sea. I should have no more on my plate than issues of décor and light romantic entertainment. The way I’m thinking? A modern house looking over a moonlit bay. Sound familiar, Maurice? With underfloor heating. A washing machine that’d talk to you. Little dishwasher doing a jig in the corner. West Cork direction. Somewhere out beyond Berehaven, maybe?
Now he shoots up, dangerously, as though on a starter’s pistol, and he spins about on the bad leg to ravish the imagined room of his retirement.
Open plan! he cries. I’m loving it! A sense of flow. Oh and these beautiful old floorboards! They’ve buffed up to a very nice finish! What’s-her-face off Channel 4? Sarah Beeny. The makeover shows. Gorgeous. The floorboards warm under me bare feet. In the sunlight. Lovely kind of austerity about the whole look as well. There’ll be nothing gaudy. I’m trying to get away from that side of myself. I was raised at the side of the fucken road. And the way the inside opens to the outside, with the reclaimed boards, the flow, the fields, the sea, the hills . . .
Charlie? Maurice says.
Sound familiar to you, Moss? A fine new house outside Berehaven? Laid out in it like the Lamb of God?
Leave it, Charles.
Why, Moss?
Sit down and take the weight off, boy. Relax yourself. You’re getting the anxiety colour on you. The yellowy colour.
Charlie sits and drains the last dregs from a cava bottle.
I’m not saying we were down a coalmine, Maurice, he says. I’m not saying we were digging the roads. But there was a lot of work and a lot of travelling and there was a great deal of danger and annoyance. And Uncle Charlie, at his time of life, he needs to feel the proper reward of it.
I know, Charlie. I know.
They lean back together on the bench. Their eyes close in a soft, mysterious tandem. Benny, who has waited on his moment, manages to edge away from the men, unseen, and he takes the silent, prowling Lorca with him. Quickly he finds a policía.
It’s about these men, he says.
The sleepy cop looks over but just smiles.
Those two? he says. Don’t worry about them. They’re always here.
*
A cold white moon speaks highly of the coming winter. The sea tonight has grown irritable. It guffs up a newsy froth. There is no word from the direction of Tangier. In the ferry terminal, wan beneath its lights, Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond stand as a vaudeville pair but the dreadlocked girls lie sleeping still – only the dog, Junior Cortés, is alive for the show.
We’re down a man and a dog, Charlie.
Is the way that it goes.
If they were ever here at all.
They sit together on the bench. There is long-sufferance. There is woe. They are on a reminiscent drift again.
We were in a state back then, Maurice says.
This isn’t news you’re telling me, Charlie says.
The walls were melting. The clock was coming down the stairs. We were tremendously out of it almost all the time. I have big regrets. There were things I missed. There was a whole chunk of my life that passed me by. I don’t remember 1997, Charles, and I’m not great on ’98. Cynthia? She kept me going.
Cynthia, she could maintain.
Though I have every reason to believe that woman was the most deranged of us all.
Which is saying something, Maurice.
But oh Jesus, Charlie, at night, the fear that was on us.
Money brings up the fear, Moss.
There was so much money and we were pauperised half the time. How the fuck does that work? I mean you know how it was sometimes, Charlie. The way the money was flowing?
You remember that night in the house on Evergreen Street? We’d lost a tonne of prime Maroc?
Then we found it again. Outside Midleton.
We counted out so much fucken money on that couch. We were grinning like cats.
There was the night of the four Dutchmen in the boat.
Don’t.
But the clock isn’t going backwards, Charlie. Cynthia is dead and she’s not coming back.
Leave it, Maurice. It’s hard. We don’t have to talk about it.
But Maurice Hearne falls to his knees in a gesture of hysterical collapse. He sighs out the long history of the stage. Leonor wakes and smiles at him.
Which one are you again?
Leonor.
Lovely name, Charlie, isn’t it?
Gorgeous. Like an air freshener.
Have you seen this girl, have you? Photo’s a bit old now, but she might have the same kind of look to her still. Dilly Hearne?
I haven’t seen.
Why’re ye all lying to us?
Maurice crawls on his fours across the floor and pants like a dog at the girl’s feet.
Jesus, she says.
Bit late in the day for him, Charlie says.
Tell us this, Leonor, seeing as you have the jaws working. And just out of pure interest. 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.
*
They sit until the night gives way to morning again. The hard pure light of October 23rd is pushing through. Leonor and Ana sit with their dog, Junior Cortés – the dog has a rogue tongue, conspiratorial eyes. The girls and the dog happily listen to the men, who have woven a ring around them, a ring that shimmers, and it is made of these odd, circling words.
I no longer love my body, says Maurice Hearne, thoughtfully. I have no time for it.
I’m resigned to these old bones, says Charlie Redmond, shucking his cuffs.
I’m like a fucken ape, Maurice says. The long arms and the horrible, thick, solid kind of torso.
I crawl out of bed in the mornings, Charlie says, and I can barely hear myself for the groans.
I have the feeling in a perpetual way, Maurice says, that I’m in the next room across and I can’t really hear myself at all.
You’d understand, Charlie says, darkening, how a spell can come over a man? When he hits on a certain age.
A spell? Ana says.
When he tips over the brink of fifty, Maurice says. That kind of direction.
They talk of ageing and death. They talk of those they have crossed and those they have helped, of their first loves and lost loves, of their enemies and friends. They talk of the old days in Cork, and in Barcelona, and in London, and in Málaga, and in the ghosted city of Cádiz. They talk of the feelings of those places. They talk about being here, once again, on the coast of Barbary, as though on a magnet’s drag.
The likes of us have been drawn here for hundreds of years, Maurice says.
It’s a straight run down the sea road, Charlie says.
As we look at them now indeed they seem to clarify: their smiles are high and piratical; their jauntiness has a cutlass edge.
You want to read up on the Riffians, Charlie says.
Coming off the Rif Mountains, Maurice says. Like a sack of snakes trying to deal with them people.
Their fathers’ fathers’ fathers? Charlie says. A couple of dozen of them would line up, with lanterns, on a high rise of the shore, and they’d string themselves out, and they’d lift and lower the lanterns in a sequence, rising and falling, slowly, in a rhythm, sweet as music . . .
Are ye watching it? Maurice says.
. . . so the effect, from the sea, was like a swaying boat. And that would draw another boat in, just to say hello, how’s the fishing, only to get itself wrecked on the rocks, and here’s the Riffians down with their lanterns and knives to finish the job.
That way of thinking, Maurice says, can only come from heavy use of the plant cannabis sativa.
The assassin’s plant, Charlie says.
The black oily Riffian hashish, Maurice says. Oh, you’d think you’d died and gone to heaven altogether. And do ye realise, by the way, that ye’re lookin’ at a man here beside me who’s opened throats himself?
And the pirate Charlie Redmond leans back on the bench with a diamond grin.
*
But the money no longer is in dope. The money now is in people. The Mediterranean is a sea of slaves. The years have turned and left Maurice and Charlie behind. The men are elegiacal, woeful, heavy in the bones. Also they are broke and grieving. Ana rises up in the shape of a yawn. She stretches out to the full, airy capacities of being twenty-three. She is happy to see the new day light the high windows. She reaches for Junior Cortés. The dog moves in to nuzzle her sweetly about the groin.
That dog knows which end is the sleeves, Charlie says.
Can’t be taught, Maurice says.
Ana scowls at Charlie and squats on the bench and looks Maurice hard in the eye and she says –
Perroflauta.
I beg your pardon?
The Spanish for crusty, she says, is perroflauta.
It means a-dog-and-a-flute, Leonor says.
We’re away in a hack, Charlie says.
Perro . . . flauta, Maurice tries the word, softly, in wonder.
They say it as a curse, Leonor says.
Because they don’t like us, Ana says. They say we’re dirty. They don’t want the camps. They don’t want no dogs. That’s why we go to Maroc.
And who looks after Junior Cortés?
People come back. We go out. We share the dogs. We can’t bring the dogs across.
Confirmation, Charlie says.
Ye have people due in from Tangier?
Maybe.
It depends on the boats.
And if the men are to see the girl Dilly again, they know that it depends also on fate’s arrangements, and on the drifting insistences of youth. Leonor and Ana turn to whisper to each other now and laugh quietly and they stand up and gather their things – they have no fear of these men.
Thanks for the drinks, Ana says.
At least tell us more about this witchin’, Charlie says.
I actually have long experience of witches, Maurice says.
They were drawn to you, Moss, always, the witchy types.
Did you know you use green wood to burn a witch, Charlie?
There’s sense to it. Somehow.
Spells? Curses? Maurice says. Oh, I been involved with the whole lot of it. Can ye do a spell for me, ladies?
Who do you want to put a spell on? Leonor says.
Have you a biro? Maurice says. We can start making a list.
What you do, Leonor says, is you take a piece of cloth. Maybe from some old clothes of the person you want to reach. And you put things inside.
Kind of things?
Hairs . . . from down here?
Pubes?
And the finger . . . piece?
Fingernail?
Fingernails. Pu-bez. And dry blood on maybe the tampon.
What kind of people are ye at all? Charlie says.
Also, Ana says. In the cloth. A chemical.
It’s called antimony, Leonor says.
You think there’s a spell can bring my daughter back?
She’s a small girl.
She’s a pretty girl.
She was in Granada maybe?
And not long ago.
Dill? Or Dilly? It comes from Dilys.