At the port of Algeciras, in October 2018
And now, by night, the port of Algeciras is humming. There is movement across the Straits. The skin of the dark water roils up and froths. It’s as if there’s a party going on down there. Rising on the air is a sense of witchery and fever.
In the terminal Dilly Hearne sits at the café bar. She fades deftly into the scenery. Turning an owlish half-swivel on the stool, she can see that the men are still in place downstairs. She wants to go to them quite badly. This is an astonishment to her. She wants to hear their voices. A tannoy announcement breaks out –
. . . llegará otro servicio desde Tánger y podrá ir otro servicio . . .
Another boat will come, and a boat may go. She has the language easily now, but she hears it better than she speaks it. She swivels back to the bar again. She has been a little more than three years in Spain. It feels like half a life has gone by since she left Ireland.
*
She walked on the first day through the streets of Málaga, and yes maybe there was a steely look, with a fixed jut to the jaw, as if seeking something mysterious, some new kind of volition, as if decided there was only one thing for it, there is only one thing that can save me now – I have got to leave this skin behind.
The day was hot; the air so dry. The city felt intense, close-in. An amputee sprawled on the corner of Calle Larios and the Alameda Principal arranged his stump beneath calm, medieval eyes and she was drawn to him oddly.
She crouched by the wreckage of the man and rested her backpack for a while, and she asked if he had seen the travellers – the Inglese, the Irlandese?
He said, Do you mean those kids with the dreadlocks in their hair? Those kids who go about with the dogs?
She said, Yeah, those are the ones.
She wanted to go to Maroc and live in one of the camps. She wanted a place that did not know the meaning of her grief. She wanted to travel to the far recesses of herself and see what she might find back there.
*
She watches without fear as Maurice and Charlie rise up from the bench. Something in the way they move has taken the fear away. They aim for the escalator and the bar again, with their blameless faces, as though on an impromptu expedition.
Dilly skulls her drink and lays down a few coins and drags her trolley across the floor of the bar – it follows her like a rolling accusation, seems to announce her presence, but she knows how to absent herself from the eyes. She keeps her head moving, her face turning. She looks everywhere but in the direction of the approaching men. The terminal throbs fiercely now. She wades into the bodies –
There’s a topless old hombre in nylon trackpants drinking an amber spirit and rolling his tongue over his teeth as he watches her go by, and she burns the fucking look off his face with a single, darted stare.
There’s a grinning scut in a beige corduroy suit sitting on the floor outside the bar and sucking on a tin of Cruzcampo beer and he may have just about pissed himself.
There’s a blind lottery-ticket seller leaning back into his patch of wall, his palms flat on the marble, as if he’s holding the place up, and the strain is telling in the awful viscous whites of his eyes.
The crowd has thickened for the last heave of the night.
The quick gabbling ham-eater mouths are silky-greasy in the hard terminal light.
There is crazy fucking denim everywhere.
Maurice and Charlie pass by obliviously within a few feet of her. She stares at the floor and drags her trolley along as the men go into the bar.
Jesus Christ – the age that’s gone on them.
She descends by the escalator and goes and sits on their bench near the hatch that is marked . . .
INFORMACIÓN
*
For the first months she lived in Granada in a cheap pension there. There was an atmosphere of old mystery in the city, a tangy resonance at sundown. The place spoke of broken hearts. She had eight hundred euros and then it was seven three five. She kept it under her pillow and counted it first thing in the mornings – it was going in one direction only. Six four zero. She was determined never to go home again. The first of the blue Granada morning came up. She was down to five three five. There was a bleeding Jesus on the wall – she stared at it in the dawn half-light – a sexy bleeding Jesus in a loincloth on the wall. The twisted mouth, the come-hither – fuck off.
The last thing her mother said to her was you must never come back here, Dilly.
And in Granada, in those first months, she slept mostly by day, and when she dreamed it was of desert places and sometimes she woke to the cemetery hush of the afternoon lull and she wanted to go and lie on a cold desert floor in the evening among the flowers of the dusk – the dull amethysts, the quiet rubies – and let her blood flow to feed them.
*
But now she wants to hear the men speak. She gets up from the bench and drifts a couple of dozen yards east. She leans against the wall and stares into her phone and pretends to scroll as they pass by on their way back from the bar.
In fact, she never goes online any more, because technology is the pigs’ white evil, and online is where they find you, and it’s how they keep track of you.
She has thirty-two fake Spanish passports sewn into the lining of her trolley case.
Maurice and Charlie cross the floor to the bench again.
She follows but at a measured distance.
As she goes by, three tall and skinny men from the bad end of Marrakesh look her over from their slouches against the concession wall. They speak quietly, sidemouthedly, to each other.
She passes slowly rearside of the bench just as Maurice and Charlie resume their positions, and she could almost reach out and touch the backs of their heads. She listens –
I’d get a dog again, Charlie says, but I don’t know if I have the length of a small dog left in me.
You definitely don’t have two dogs in you, Maurice says.
*
In Granada she moved into a cave in the Albaicín district with a few English people and their dogs. The rent was almost nothing and anyway it was never paid. The dogs were outright comedians. Mostly the cave houses were illegal; they held no permits. Her room was tiny and windowless and wistful. Like a fucking womb. Like a tomb. The walls the colour of bone and ashes, the low roof pressing down – living in the cave turned into a pressure situation. It was not easy to shed the old skin. She was very lonely there. The cave was set on the hills on the vault of the city. The sun raged. She was a lizard of the Albaicín. The English people, she wouldn’t call them friends exactly, but she was among the dogs and that was something. She was a consort of the dogs – of Coco, Ellie and Bo. She let them sleep in the room with her. She whispered to them sometimes about her people. The months in this way passed by.
And in the Albaicín in the hot afternoon sun some ragged kids in a tangle played a kind of tag or chase game in the square and Dilly laid out the disks of the sun on a cloth of black velvet.