There was a payphone mounted on the counter. He knew the number by heart and knew that at half past five in the morning she would answer because in the hills above Málaga his Karima kept foxy hours. She laughed at once at the torture in his voice.

Oh, Maurice, she said, what have you done now, have you killed somebody?

She said he must send them a letter. Don’t call, write. He ordered another rum. His life was being arranged somewhere beyond himself. Just over there.

*

Cynthia, he wrote, I’m sorry that it’s come to this. I don’t feel I can be healthy for you now or for Dilly. I’m not right in myself. I’d only poison the house. But I’m doing okay here and I’m safe. I’ll be in touch soon. Nothing’s happened. It’s just all these things have got me down. I need to be on my own for a while. I want to kiss you both very much. But I’m very ashamed. I’ve done a lot that’s wrong.

*

It was one of those old Andalusian bars that had not closed in years. In the small hours it made a dismal music. The barman drooped a heavy eye over the football pages. He had the look of a long shift off him. A truck went over the cobblestones, grumbling. What does a child of four know? How soon might she forget him?

Karima said that he should come to stay with her and he could rest and be well. The ridiculous facts of his life paraded past on the tile counter of the bar, grinning like minstrels and taunting. He was from a line of madmen centuries deep. Who have all these years crawled beneath the skin of the night and trembled there. Who were found shaking in the corners of wet Irish fields. Who were found crawling the rocks and in the seacaves. Found on hospital wards, and in bars, and in the depths of the woods.

The morning at its slow length came.

*

A week passed. He went to walk for a while in the hills above Málaga. A jet from the army base screamed to open the sky. A dead hotel was chained up, its windows blind. A dog carcass rotted down to salty bones. Far beneath, the blue sea trembled and broke up. As he walked his lips made words – he spoke again to Dilly and Cynthia quite madly, beseechingly.

The gist of it: would ye not be as well off without me?

Karima waited at the bottom of the road in her tiny blue Japanese car. She drove fucking hairdryers always. She smiled at him: her broken mouth, her beautiful eyes. Shoot me up between the toes and tell me that you love me.

They went instead to a bar in a mountain village. They picked at a ración of tortilla and drank cortados and Jameson whiskey. A television played high and silently in the corner. The barman switched channels for a mystic show. The mystic lady stared into the camera blackly. Here we go again, Maurice Hearne thought. It was a provincial show, low budget – somebody who looked like she might be the mystic’s sister passed in behind her with Lidl bags as the prophecy was made. A phone number for private consultations appeared beneath the mystic. Maurice took a pen from the corner and made a note of it. Karima laughed. The barman turned up the sound.

*

He called the mystic’s line that night. He said that he did not have the language but he was told that was no problem. He entered the details of his card. He was put through to her. In slow, careful English she said that she could hear the trouble in his voice. It was of a yellow colour. It was anxiety. He told her that yes, he was in a bad way. No kidding, she said. He told her that he had done a terrible thing and the worst of it was that maybe it was the right thing. He said that he felt turned in a certain direction by a power that was beyond himself. He said the feeling of this was not always terrible. She said that it might be God, or it might be his enemy, or perhaps it was encantamiento – she did not have the word in English but he could guess at it, enchantment. She said that it could be a white or a black enchantment. It might forever be impossible to say. She asked him to be silent for a few moments and only to sound his breath to the phone and try to slow it. In this way he sounded out the hollows of himself. After a few moments had passed, the mystic said –

What’s the first word that comes to your mind?

Ummera, he said.

*

Karima lived among a splay of cluster pines in the mountains that looked down to the city, the sea. There was a weird owl above them articulating by night mournfully in the pines. The lights of the city burned coldly down there. Karima lay her skinny bones in the tub and Maurice shot her up between the toes. His palm rested on her thin brown calf as it flexed, as she travelled, her brown eyes closing, her broken mouth softening.

I love you, he said.

Oh fuck off, she said.

He stroked her calf and she slid an eye halfways open and made a wry and dismissive sound and she had almost the strength to laugh his hand away. They could talk to each other without speaking.

What the fuck am I made of, Karima?

The same, she implied, as each or any of us is made of, of all the words we have whispered in the night, and all the promises betrayed.

Again an army jet broke the sky.

The cluster pines bunched, trembled, shook out; the owl in outrage hooted still louder.

Beneath, the lights of the city swam briskly.

It was a week to Christmas. He helped Karima to dry off and they lay down together on the couch by the low window that looked down to the city, and after a while she could talk again. She said to forget about boats of dope. Not for long now would the money be in boats of dope.

*

When I put my hand here, he said, you have a slight . . . I’d call it a startle in the eye. A little . . . surprise?

There is no surprise, she said. I’ve been touched there since I was nine years old.

Ah Jesus, Karima. Send me over to the fucken dark side, why don’t you?

Not dark, she said. This is life.

She lit a cigarette. She blew the smoke into his face. She tipped the rim of her glass off his and they drank a white spirit.

What does it make you think of? he said. When I touch you there?

Candy, she said.

You know how to destroy me, he said. Always. You remember when we met first? I was such a kid.

You’re still a kid.

Can I give you head, Karima?

I won’t feel anything.

Neither here nor there. Also what’s known as a gauntlet.

What’s gauntlet?

It’s what you’ve just laid down to me.

We could live in Cádiz for a while, she said.

Why Cádiz?

I stay here, I get shot or worse, she said.

And the weird owl again made its haggard call.

*

When he woke it was still dark and the wind was low in the cluster pines. He had a bad headache. He drank half a glass of beer with some pills. He looked in on Karima, and she lay face up in the bed and she was very sick in her sleep. He went to her without making a sound and leaned down and put his lips to her forehead and said goodbye and maybe he would be back soon.

Then he stole her car and drove five miles down the mountain to the city in the dark, as he couldn’t figure out the fucking lights, and at the first break of the chill winter sun he sat on the beach at Malagueta and he knew that his enchantment was a black one.

Bad luck, bad luck.

*

He flew back to Cork. He rented a car. He drove out the Macroom road. It was the shortest day of the last year. Everything craved a grand ending. Everything wanted the fade-out. As he came before the Ummera Wood, the sky was filling with the first of night and the trees were banked up densely against the sky to make a dark edifice.

The world was at its cusp and turned to begin the long, slow slide into new light, new time, and he couldn’t fucking bear it.

He parked the car and got out and felt the evil of the cold damp air. He listened to the ghosts of the wood. He arranged his face for Irish weather. This was not to be under-estimated. 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 King-of-Seville, the King-of-Seville

– he made the words on his lips to seek calm, but the refrain was lost to the whipping wind, the assaults of rain.

He walked into the thick dark of the Ummera Wood and into the old growth as the longest night descended like a great sombre bird roosting.

He came to what felt like a radial point and sat on the cold wet ground, and he asked his dead for forgiveness and for permission that he might join them.

*

But he was turned by a force outside of himself. Steered on a drag of the starlight, he went back to the car and drove the narrow roads west through the sleeping county to Beara.

He drank Powers whiskey from a naggin clamped between his thighs and slowed for the bends that he knew by touch.

When he dragged through the town of Berehaven like something the devil had brought in, it was past five in the morning.

He sat by the harbour’s cold lights for a while and finished the whiskey and let the seat back and tried to sleep the need away, but he could not – he had unravelled.

He drove towards Ard na Croí. He parked on the road above it. He walked along the crescent swathe of the terrace and watched the old mound breathing.

He let himself in without so much as a key scratch. He climbed the stair. He listened for their breathing. On the upstairs landing he let his breath slow until the air settled around him. His eyes came down to the gloom. He did not blurt a single movement.

He looked in on Cynthia and saw that she was not alone – the long, needle-thin figure of Charlie Redmond was beside her.

Is this going on again, he said, but quietly, and they did not wake.

He found Dilly in a hot bundle, sleeping. He leaned in and whispered to her. She moved in her sleep and spoke. He lifted her from the bed and carried her down the stairs still sleeping and out of the house – they left as quietly as he’d entered and with her arms around him, waking, she nested against the cold on his shoulder.

Dilly, he said.

*

He drove the child through the sleeping town. The movement of the car quickly closed her eyes again. He drove out to Cametringane and stopped by the slipway to the water. She rolled up from her sleep and shivered and said Daddy? Where are we, Dad? Where are we going?

We’ll go home, Dill.

The long night lowered itself along the last notches of its spine – the lizard night – and if I start the car and if I just let it roll, then all of this is quickly over.

Will we, Dill?

What, Dad?

He sat in the car by the slipway and felt the tightness of the handbrake, its tension grip, and he flicked the key to lock all the doors.

You know that I love you, Dilly?

Can we go home? she said. I’m cold.

And as she started to cry he ascended from himself – it was a shooting motion, sudden and violent, as though on a hoist – and he saw himself parked there, with the child, on the verge of their ending, not far from the town of Berehaven, on a morning in the dead of winter, and he saw the enchantment as a black aura around him.

But he breathed deeply, and then he did so once more, and he felt the life pass through himself –

let it out and let it in.

She reached to hold his hand and her touch was clammy. He licked the tears from her face like a dog. Now a new light entered the pod of the car –

From beyond the long shadow of Bere Island, the rim of the sun at last came up and Dilly’s face was lit by the weak sun and she greeted the sun in her strange, olden voice –

Oh hi, hello, howya, she said.