Crossed Bones (30 page)

So much for subtlety. ‘Are you married?’

Idriss shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Never?’

‘Never.’

He was not exactly being forthcoming. ‘Why not?’ I pressed.

He put down his fish. ‘It has just… never happened.’ There was a pause as I wondered what to say next, then he said into the silence, ‘And you?’

‘Ah, no. Same reason.’ I could feel my lips pressing together as if to keep the unsavoury truth imprisoned safely behind the bars of my teeth.

‘That surprises me.’ His dark eyes scrutinized me with the same ruthless attention he had applied to flensing his fish. ‘Here we say, “A woman without a husband is like a bird without a nest.”’

At that instant the waitress passed: I signalled her urgently, but it was to Idriss she spoke. He began to dig in his pocket, but I pushed two hundred dirhams across the table. ‘On me, please.’

I could feel the waitress’s keen gaze flickering between us and could imagine exactly what she was thinking, but at that moment all I wanted was to be out in the air, refocusing our conversation back on to the safely dead and buried.

The medieval squalor of the river bank gave way to a sudden burst of modern development, wide streets lined with French colonial villas, and after that the ochre walls of the old city reared up.

We passed into the medina by the Bab Bou Haja, and from there into a wide square containing lovely gardens. Idriss led me through these and out the other side into a street where the houses almost touched one another across the narrow span. Little shops were set into niches, selling ironware, shoes, jewellery, groceries, mobile phones, computer parts – it was bizarre to see evidence of the modern world in this medieval setting. Scents began to fill the air – fish, which seemed ubiquitous in this part of the city, spices, frying food and other less identifiable smells. We turned down an alley, and there was shade: looking up, I saw that the alley was covered by a rough thatch of reeds. Around another corner and we were in the heart of the souk, the traditional market. It was like an anthill: a heaving mass of humanity, noise, music, shouting, laughing, sizzling oil, all confined within this labyrinth of tunnelled passages. I didn’t know what to look at first: the sensory overload was total. Things loomed out at me as we wove our way through the jostling shoppers: exquisitely worked leather goods, shoes and slippers the colour of jewels, clothing, brassware, piles of bright fruit, olives and candles, garlands of dried figs and apricots. Spices had been ranged in perfectly formed pyramids, their colours vivid, their scents pungent, persuasive – the reds of powdered chilli and paprika, rich browns of cinnamon and nutmeg, paler cumin and ginger, the yellow ochre of turmeric, stars of aniseed, spikes of clove. The smells became rank, and then we were surrounded by stalls of meat selling objects I could hardly believe I was seeing – cows’ feet, ears, noses; sheep’s heads, goats’ heads, veiny white testicles, piles of tripe.

‘Ugh.’ I held my nose.

Idriss laughed at me. ‘I forgot your delicate Western sensibility. Come, we’ll go this way.’

We passed more odd sights – a woman surrounded by geese, ducks and rabbits, with people gathered around her to choose their dinner for the night. Bundles of dried snakeskins hanging from the rafters. A cage of monkeys, and one of some strange-looking reptiles with swivelling eye-sockets and little hand-like claws. We passed them at a clip and were some way further on before I realized what they were.

‘Weren’t those chameleons in those cages back on the corner there?’

‘I should imagine so. Some people use them against the evil eye.’

‘What do you mean “use them”?’

‘If you have a specific trouble, you can throw a chameleon on the fire: if it explodes, then your trouble will disappear with it. But if it just melts down,’ he said, shrugging, ‘then your trouble is here to stay.’

‘You are joking.’

‘We are a very superstitious people, we Moroccans.’

‘So are the English, but I don’t think we’d ever throw a living creature on a fire merely out of superstition.’

‘No? What about all the witches you burned? I believe your Queen Elizabeth even burned cats at her coronation.’

‘She did not!’ The idea of our sensible, stolid old Queen doing anything so barbaric made me laugh out loud.

‘The first Queen Elizabeth – she burned them to prove that witchcraft had been purged from her kingdom.’

‘You are a fund of arcane knowledge.’

We turned another corner and emerged into a market square. In the middle of it, an old man was weighing fleeces into a huge pair of brass scales. ‘This is the wool market,’ Idriss said. ‘The Souk el-Ghezel. In the seventeenth century it was one of the places where Christian slaves were auctioned.’

I stood there looking at the old man and the brass balance. With his flowing white beard and his long cream djellaba, the wool-seller looked as if he might very well have stepped out of the same crowd that witnessed the corsairs’ prisoners being auctioned at the slave blocks.

What would those untravelled, sequestered people of Cornwall’s Penwith peninsula, most of whom had never crossed the River Fal, let alone the River Tamar, have made of this supremely alien place? It continued to shock and amaze me at every turn, yet I had travelled to a dozen countries in the world, and been exposed by television to images of hundreds more. Already traumatized by their abduction and the horrors of their voyage, they must have moved through these foreign streets as if in a drugged-out, psychedelic dream.

Idriss’s touch on my arm brought me back to myself. ‘Let me show you something else. I think you will like it.’

He led me around the city walls until we reached a monumental gateway, towering twenty feet and more above us. Despite its enormous size and the massive nature of the stonework, it possessed astonishing beauty, for the arch seemed poised overhead as if held by some invisible inner tension between the two towers on either side and by the delicate traceried net of its mystical, interweaving patterns and scripts.

‘This is the Bab Mrisa,’ Idriss told me as we both gazed up at it. ‘“The Little Harbour”. In the seventeenth century, before the river silted up and changed its course, the corsairs sailed their ships right into the fortified heart of the city through this gate. It was through the Bab Mrisa that your Robinson Crusoe was brought. “Our ship making her course between the Canary Islands and the African shore, was surprised in the grey of the morning by a Turkish rover of Sallee,”’ he quoted suddenly.

I stared at him.

‘I majored in English for two years. One of the visiting tutors was a Defoe enthusiast – I read them all –
Journal of the Plague Year
,
Moll Flanders
,
Roxana
.’

What on earth would a man from a Muslim culture make of a rumbustiously bawdy romp like
Moll Flanders
? I couldn’t imagine. ‘You’re better read than me,’ I said laughingly, but also rather uncomfortably, for I began to suspect that it might be true. ‘But tell me: why do you have a touch of an American accent?’

His hand went to his mouth. ‘Really?’ He thought about it a beat too long. ‘My tutor was American, I guess that’s why.’

‘He seems to have made quite an impression.’

‘She.’ He turned away and started to walk so fast up the thoroughfare into the city that I had to run to catch up.

‘So, Idriss, what do you do – what’s your job, when you’re not shepherding tourists around the sights? Are you teaching at the university yourself now?’

‘I drive a taxi.’

‘Oh.’ I didn’t know how to react to this. His cousin’s house was opulent, and he was clearly well educated. So, although I was sure that driving a taxi was a perfectly good and respectable occupation, it wasn’t what I had expected.

‘And you?’

I laughed. ‘Good question. At the moment I don’t do anything at all.’

‘You aren’t married, you aren’t employed, you have no children, no?’

‘No, no children.’

‘So, Julia Lovat, if you were to disappear somewhere in the backstreets of an obscure Moroccan town, would nobody miss you?’ He turned to scrutinize me, and with the sun behind him I could see only the glint of his eyes.

He had struck a painful chord: who, indeed, would miss me? A few friends, eventually. Michael, but only because he wanted the book. Alison, certainly…

I stared at him, suddenly terrified. ‘I want to go back now. I’m very tired.’

He looked puzzled. ‘Of course,’ he said.

It was late afternoon by the time we made it back to the riad, and I was indeed exhausted. My feet ached, my back ached, and my head was stuffed with images and information. All the way from Old Salé to Rabat’s medina, I kept myself going with the promise of a long, fragrant soak in the beautiful bath that awaited me in my room.

But, as we stepped across the threshold, Naima Rachidi intercepted us. She said something very fast in their shared language to her cousin, who looked visibly shaken; then she turned to me.

‘Your husband was here looking for you.’

‘My… husband?’

‘Yes. I told him you were taking a guided tour of the city and wouldn’t be back till this evening, so he said he would go for a walk and come back later.’

I could feel my eyes growing huge and round. ‘Ah… thank you. How… how was he looking?’

She frowned. ‘How? Tired, a bit annoyed, though he was very polite.’

‘I mean, are you sure he was my… husband? Could you describe him? Perhaps it’s a mistake.’

‘About fifty, middle aged. Taller than you, not as tall as Idriss, dark hair – how you say – bald, here.’ She touched her temples. ‘Dark eyes, not big built, a bit of fat here –’ She indicated her belly.

Naima Rachidi was a very observant woman, though I wasn’t sure Michael would have approved of her description, particularly her significant overestimation of his age or her hawk-eyed pinpointing of the beginnings of a spare tyre. The light-headed feeling was returning, along with a horrible nausea. I took a deep breath. ‘Did he say when he’d be back?’ I could feel Idriss’s glower as a tension in the air behind me.

Naima shook her head. ‘No, but he said that he had left you a note in your room.’

‘In my –!’

‘I’m sorry, should I not have let him in?’

‘No, no, it’s fine.’ I ran a hand over my face. ‘Thank you.’ I turned, dreading Idriss’s reaction, but my guide’s dark face was inscrutable. I managed to blurt out: ‘And thank you, Idriss. I very much enjoyed the day.’ And then I ran away.

My room looked as if a bomb had hit it. Michael had tried so carefully to cover his tracks at the London flat, but he’d made no effort to hide his search here. The bedclothes lay in a rumpled heap on the floor, my suitcase had been upended in the middle of the room, the wardrobe doors flung open, my clothes thrown everywhere. Even the bathroom toiletries lay scattered and the towels left piled up on the edge of the bath.

I clutched my bag to me. I had meant to leave
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
safe in the riad when I went out that morning, but somehow couldn’t bear to be parted from it: perhaps some sixth sense at work; perhaps Catherine herself had been prompting my actions.

An envelope had been left on top of the disaster that was the bed. Very symbolic, I thought, my heart thumping.

My name was scratched on it in Michael’s terrible scrawl, so there could be no mistake. He had followed me all the way to Morocco, had tracked me to this very room. Shaking, I opened the envelope. There were some sheets of paper inside, one folded around the rest. The top one read:

The next sheet was a photocopy of an old-looking letter. I scanned the beginning and made out:

Suddenly the room was stifling. Heart beating a sharp tattoo, I refolded the papers and tucked them into the back of Catherine’s book, which in turn I stowed deep inside my handbag. Then, in a flurry of panic, I stuffed my belongings into my suitcase and canvas bag, and hauled both out into the courtyard. For all my tiredness, for all the riad’s comfort and beauty and elegance, I could stay here no longer.

‘Running away?’ Idriss sat at a table, cigarette in hand, a curl of smoke spiralling up into the roses above him. His long dark eyes regarded me curiously. ‘I thought you might want help.’

‘What sort of help?’

‘Well, you said you’d never married… and now a “husband” turns up, and you look as pale as the moon. I thought I could offer my services.’ He eyed my bags. ‘Even if it’s just as a porter.’

‘I need somewhere to go, just for the night,’ I said in a rush, but even as I said it I knew that was exactly what I did need: somewhere to stay, somewhere to hide from Michael. ‘Can you recommend a decent hotel? I hate to let Naima down, and of course I’ll pay her what I owe her, but I can’t stay here.’

Idriss stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. ‘Here, let me take your bags. I will talk to Naima, don’t worry about that.’

A few minutes later I found myself sitting in the back of a small blue Peugeot with a taxi sign on top of it. Amulets and sigils hung from the rear-view mirror, twirling wildly as the elderly suspension groaned under the weight of my luggage.

‘Where are we going?’ I was alone in Africa. Now that I had left the riad no one knew where I was; no one would miss me if I disappeared. Could I trust Idriss? I remembered how nervous he had made me that afternoon and felt doubt gnawing at my stomach, as insistent as a plague-rat.

‘I am taking you to my home,’ he said without turning.

Which didn’t make me feel any easier.