As the bus hit another bump my husband jumped awake, finding my hand on his crotch.
‘You trying to tell me something?’ he asked.
‘Maybe I am,’ I said, leaning up to kiss him on the lips.
‘Where are we?’
‘No idea.’
‘How long have we been on the bus?’
‘Too long.’
‘And still without AC.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
He reached over and touched my face.
‘How did I get so lucky?’ he asked.
‘We’re both lucky.’
‘Do you really mean that?’
‘Yes. I do.’
‘Even though I’ve driven you mad sometimes.’
‘Paul . . . I love you. I want this marriage to work.’
‘If we can get through this fucking bus trip together we can get through anything.’
I laughed – and gave him such a full and deep kiss that, when the bus hit another bump and disengaged me from my husband’s lips, I saw that everyone around us was either embarrassed or disapproving.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I whispered to the elderly man sitting just in front of us. He turned away, showing me his back. Paul whispered to me:
‘They’ll be a little more open in Essaouira. They’re far more used to hippy-dippy foreigners.’
‘We’re hardly hippy-dippy.’
‘Correction – you are hardly hippy-dippy.’
I found myself laughing again and causing more disapproving glances by kissing my husband once more. A moment like this – when everything seemed so right between us – was so pleasing, wondrous, reassuring. Paul was right: if we could get through this bus ride we could get through anything.
Around ten minutes later the bus pulled into a tiny concrete depot off the side of the road. The landscape here was rocky, scrubby, flat and uninspiring.
‘You think there’s a toilet here?’ I asked Paul.
‘No idea – but that line over there looks huge.’
He nodded towards around a dozen women, all but three hidden by burqas, lining up in front of a single hut.
‘Maybe I should just try and hold it.’
‘But there’s at least another hour and a half to go. We should try to slip around the back of the depot.’
Which is exactly what we did – finding a patch of ground festooned with trash, broken bottles, two burnt-out fires, even a dead mouse charred by the sun.
‘You expect me to pee here?’ I asked Paul.
‘There is the toilet option.’
The stench enveloping us was nothing short of toxic: an aroma of faecal matter and festering rubbish. But I was desperate to empty my bladder. So finding a patch of ground that was free of glass shards and trash, I undid my loose-fitting cargo pants, squatted down and let go. Paul, meanwhile, was standing some feet away, peeing against a wall, laughing.
‘Gracious living, eh?’ he said.
The driver began to beep his horn. We had to get back on the bus. But as we came aboard we discovered that two young toughs – they must have been around twenty years old, both scowling and menacing, both wearing nylon bomber jackets and black plastic sunglasses – had taken our seats. They saw us heading towards them as we negotiated the tiny aisle, sidestepping all the bags and two very parched dogs (German shepherds, rendered inert by the heat). When we reached the back, Paul informed them in French that they were sitting in our place. Their response was to ignore us. I glanced around. Every other seat on the bus was taken. Paul quietly asked them to move. Their response again was to act as if we didn’t exist.
‘Vous êtes assis à nos places,’ Paul reiterated, his tone getting edgier. ‘Vous devriez en chercher d’autres.’
Again, nothing.
‘S’il vous plaît,’ Paul added.
The two guys exchanged a cool, amused glance and continued to say nothing.
At this point the other young guy, who’d been singing along to his iPod, turned around and said something in Arabic to the two toughs. One of them shot back a short verbal response – which, from its menacing vehemence, was clearly a warning to stay out of this. The young guy remained cool in the wake of this exchange. He just quietly shook his head, then popped his earphones back on his head.
Meanwhile the elderly man suddenly erupted in an angry flow of Arabic. So angry that all eyes in the bus were on us: the two foreigners standing in the aisle. The same guy who had hissed at our friend with the headphones now said something to the elderly man that was so unpleasant that several people nearby – including a large woman, her face completely baffled by a burqa – began to shout back at the pair. Again they sat there silently, refusing to budge, refusing to listen to reason, determined to play out this scenario to some sort of unpleasant conclusion.
‘I’m getting the driver,’ Paul said to me.
But the driver – a harassed, constricted man with sunken eyes and a pencil-thin moustache – was already on his way, looking less than pleased. He walked into a sea of raised voices, as the elderly man, the woman with the burqa and three others began to tell him what had just transpired. The driver asked Paul something in fast French. Paul responded rapidly, indicating that he had politely asked these two boys (they couldn’t have been more than seventeen) to vacate the seats which we’d had since Casablanca. The driver started yelling at them, staring into their menacing black sunglasses. But as before, they refused to respond. The driver’s voice now ticked up another angry octave. As he put his face close to them, the more verbal of the pair did something startling: he spat at the driver, catching him directly in one eye.
The driver looked beyond stunned. To his credit he didn’t lash out, didn’t explode into understandable fury. Rather, with immense quiet dignity, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the spittle from his eye, then hurried away down the aisle, leaving the bus and heading into the depot.
The young dude with the headphones stood up. Gently touching my shoulder, he motioned that I should take his seat.
‘Ce n’est pas necessaire,’ I said, trying out my French.
‘J’insiste,’ he said. The man seated next to him – a quiet businessman-type in his forties, bespectacled, wearing a light blue striped suit – also slid out of his seat.
‘J’insiste.’
Paul thanked them as he gently directed me towards the window seat, then positioned himself next to me, ensuring that I was out of range of the aisle should anything violent happen.
‘You OK?’ Paul whispered as I reached for his hand.
‘What’s this about?’
‘Macho bullshit. Showing they can stand up to a Western woman.’
‘But I said nothing to them.’
‘Doesn’t matter. They’re idiots. Fortunately everyone else around us thinks that too.’
At that moment two policemen entered the bus, both looking as hot as the rest of us. The driver was right behind them. Seeing us now seated he explained something to the officers in rapid-fire Arabic. One of the officers turned and actually saluted us. The elderly man began to get angry, pointing an accusatory finger at the two toughs, expressing his outrage at what had transpired with the driver. The second officer now picked up the nastier of the pair by his shirt, whipped off the kid’s sunglasses and threw them to the floor, stamping on them with his foot. With his eyes exposed the boy’s gangster image suddenly vanished. He was just a sallow adolescent. The other officer did likewise with his cohort. Only this time, when the dark glasses were pulled from his face, all I could see was sheer fear.
Within moments they were both being frogmarched down the aisle and out of the bus. As soon as they were clear of the front door, the driver was back in his seat, revving the engine, wanting to put immediate distance between himself and all the events that had just transpired. Paul and I stood up, offering to move back to our previous seats. But the businessman and the young headphone dude insisted we stay put. I glanced out the window and regretted doing so. I saw t
he tougher of the tough guys trying to break free of the grasp of one of the officers. Immediately the cop had his baton out and slammed it directly in the boy’s face. He fell to his knees and the cop responded with a direct blow to the head. The other tough began to cry out, but was slapped across the mouth with an open hand by the officer holding him. The bus picked up speed, shrouding this brutal tableau in a cloud of dust. Behind me the young headphones dude began to sing his toneless song again. I buried my face in Paul’s shoulder, feeling profound guilt, as if my presence here had caused all this. Sensing my distress, Paul tightened his arm around me.
‘It’s all in the past now,’ he said.
And the bus sped off into the future.
Five
THE CAT LOOKED as though she was trying to figure out: What am I doing here? She was dusty, grubby, world-weary; a cat who lived on the streets and had no human home to which to retreat. And tonight – for reasons only she must have understood – she was hanging off a wall. The way that her claws were dug into the chalky texture of the brickwork meant that she appeared to have been glued into place, her back in perfect parallel with the wall. There was something spectral and unsettling about the way she seemed to be frozen. I was reminded of images I’d once seen of wildlife that had been caught in a volcanic lava flow and had fossilised into place; their final steps as sentient creatures frozen in time. I must have spent a good minute looking at the cat and the place in which she now found herself. How was she able to sustain this absurd, improbable position? And what fear or apprehension had forced her to take refuge on a crumbling bit of whitewashed stone down a dark alleyway within the labyrinthine confines of a walled city?
What was she doing here?
And what was I doing down this black passageway in the middle of the night?
To jump back around fifteen hours . . .
The bus deposited us at its terminus – the depot at Essaouira – in the early afternoon. As we staggered off that motorised steam bath, the headphones dude – still singing that ludicrous tune (was that the only song on his iPod?) – gave us an amused wave goodbye. The bus driver, smoking what was evidently a much-needed cigarette, also nodded farewell as we grabbed our luggage and fended off several touts who were trying to convince us to take up their offer of cheap accommodation.
‘You want room . . . very clean . . . good price.’
‘Nous avons déjà une chambre,’ Paul replied, steering me towards a line of beat-up taxis nearby.
‘But I have better room . . . you come with me, I show you everything in Essaouira . . .’
Paul waved him away. Just as I had to sidestep several women holding up woven shirts, multi-coloured shawls and cheap beaded necklaces. The afternoon sun was still punishing. This concrete plaza was thick with gas fumes and dust. I grabbed my scrunched-up field hat out of my shoulder bag, then pulled it down so squarely over my head that it shielded my eyes. The crowd of hawkers followed us as we moved towards the taxis. They were relentless in their need to hound us. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.
‘Just keep walking,’ Paul told me. ‘They’re a nuisance, but harmless.’
The first cab we approached – a cream-coloured Peugeot which appeared to have been in a demolition derby – was driven by a man who looked like he’d last slept in 2010. He had a cellphone to his ear, into which he was shouting. Paul approached him and gave him the name of our hotel.
‘Two hundred dirhams,’ he said in English, even though Paul addressed him in French.
‘But the hotel is maybe ten minutes’ walk from here.’
The cabbie put down the phone for a moment, taking in all our luggage.
‘That’s the price. You don’t like it, walk.’
‘Charmant.’
The cabbie just shrugged. Paul, shaking his head, led us to the car behind this unpleasant fellow. When the first cabbie saw us approaching the next driver he was immediately out of his taxi, shouting. The new cabbie – a rather stubby man with a look of fatigued resignation on his face – ignored the protestations of Mr Charm.
‘Vous allez où?’ he asked Paul.
‘Vous connaissez l’hôtel Les Deux Chameaux?’
‘Bien sûr. Ça vous coûtera environ trente dirhams.’
Thirty dirhams. An honest man.
‘D’accord,’ Paul agreed and we loaded our bags into his trunk. As we drove off we ran into a small flotilla of geese and chickens, herded by a man in a white djellaba and skullcap alongside the city walls. The driver honked his horn in a short nonchalant manner, indicating that the shepherd should get his livestock out of the way. A shepherd guiding barnyard animals by city walls. Nearby was a man wheeling a barrel filled with unrefined cotton. And – now this was hallucinatory – a fellow sitting in front of a basket, intoning a tune on a reedy instrument as a python ascended upwards from the straw hoop.
Paul could see me taking this all in. The taxi followed a route along the walls of Essaouira; walls that looked like fortifications from some medieval bulwark.
‘It gets even stranger,’ he said, clearly at home amidst all this vivid chaos.
We hugged the road adjacent to the wall for another minute, then turned in through a narrow archway and down a back alley with blue walls and tiny lanes branching off it. At the end of the alley was a latticed doorway, also painted a deep blue. This was the entrance to our hotel. Les Deux Chameaux. The Two Camels. Inside, the lobby was dark, shadowy, austere. An elderly man was asleep behind the reception desk. He was dressed for a day out at the races: a flowery shirt, a gold chain with the Moroccan star which heaved up and down with his snores, gold rings on his fingers, heavy dark sunglasses hiding his eyes.
I looked around. Old Moroccan furnishings – all heavy wood. Once-luxuriant brushed velvet upholstery – now dust-ridden and showing serious signs of neglect. There was a loud 1920s railway-station clock hanging next to the reception area: a clock which counted off each passing second with an ominous click. And there was a half-starved cat on top of the reception counter, eyeing us warily: intruders, outsiders, here to disturb the soporific order of things.
As we approached the counter where the old man was asleep, Paul took the initiative, whispering ‘Monsieur’, then raising his voice several decibels with each additional rendition of ‘Monsieur’. When this proved pointless I tapped the hotel bell near the open guest register. Its loud clang jolted him back to life, the shock on his face coupled with bemusement, as if he didn’t know where he was. As he tried to adjust his gaze Paul said:
‘Sorry to have woken you so abruptly. But we did try . . .’
‘You have a reservation?’
‘Yes.’
‘Name?’
Paul gave him this information. The man stood up and, using the index finger on each hand, spun the register around towards him. He peered at today’s page, then rifled back through several more, shaking his head, muttering to himself.
‘You have no reservation,’ he finally said.
‘But I made one,’ Paul said.
‘You received confirmation from us?’
‘Of course. I made it on the Internet.’
‘You have a copy of the confirmation?’
Paul looked sheepish. ‘Forgot to print it,’ he whispered to me.
‘Surely if you went online,’ I said, ‘you’d find it.’
‘I think I deleted it.’
I stopped myself from saying: ‘Not again.’ Paul was always clearing out old mail and frequently removed essential correspondences.
‘But you still have rooms?’ I asked the guy behind the desk.
‘Yes and no.’
He now picked up an ancient house phone – of the sort that seemed to belong in some movie set during the German occupation – and started speaking Arabic in a loud, fractious voice. This was something I was beginning to notice: how Arabic was often a language declaimed in a stentorian manner, making it seem aggressive, swaggering, bordering on the hostile. It reminded me that I should really
resuscitate my still-reasonable, if rusty, French while here; something I’d been promising myself to do ever since leaving Montreal behind.
The desk clerk finished his conversation. Turning back to us he said:
‘My colleague, he gets the owner now.’
We had to wait ten minutes for the arrival of the man in charge. His name was Monsieur Picard. He was French, in his mid-fifties, short, fit, dressed in a crisp white shirt and tan trousers, formal, chilly; his face reflecting, I sensed, a lifetime of enforced diffidence and the dodging of emotion.
‘There seems to be a problem?’ he asked, his tone borderline supercilious.
‘We booked a room, but you don’t seem to have a record of it,’ Paul said.
‘Do you have the confirmation?’ Monsieur Picard asked.
Paul shook his head.
‘Nor do we. So a reservation mustn’t have been made.’
‘But I made the reservation . . .’ Paul said.
‘Clearly not.’
‘Well, you do have rooms, yes?’ I asked.
‘Has not Ahmed here told you that we have just one room free?’
‘And how much does that cost?’
‘It is a room with a balcony and a sea view. And you will need it for how long?’
‘A month,’ Paul said. ‘That’s what we booked it for.’
Monsieur Picard pursed his lips, then turned to Ahmed. He directed him in French to scan the ledger. Ahmed thumbed through its many pages, glancing down, clucking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, seeing if they could house us for all that time. I began to wonder: did Paul actually make the reservation, or was this one of his many ‘little oversights’ (as he called them) that seemed to decorate our lives? Now I was starting to feel angry with myself for not checking up on the reservation before departure. Another part of me was castigating myself for questioning him; that given the sliminess of the hotel owner and the sleepwalking style of his desk clerk, who’s to say they didn’t lose the reservation or were playing games to get a better price from us?
This latter scenario began to seem more plausible after the next exchange. Ahmed turned to the owner, nodding his head, saying something that sounded positive. The owner now spoke to us.
The Heat of Betrayal Page 4
