by Primula Bond
Then I realise I’m alone, in a strange dark room.
I’m shivering and sweating as I lie back. Wisps of hair are sticking to my neck and I’m wearing nothing but some kind of slip. It’s not mine. My clothes have been taken off me.
The digital letters of Pierre’s text glow across my mind.
Ashram.
Danger.
Cold fingers of panic grip and galvanise me now. What did he mean? Was he just teasing? I try to calm down. I’m still feverish, that’s all. Pierre sent that text just before I lost Polly in the market, so he had no idea I was in any kind of trouble. In fact, when I speak to him or Gustav they’ll probably be relieved that I bumped into Tomas.
I sit up straighter. My eyes are clearing, but then I realise that it’s because light is coming into the room through a keyhole-shaped doorway. It’s a muted light, not the bright outdoors of the ashram. So I wasn’t imagining it. I may not be in danger, whatever Pierre meant, but I’m still stuck at the riad. Which at the very least is bloody inconvenient.
Someone’s pulling back a curtain, or a screen. I must be up high, in one of the riad bedrooms, because through the archway I see the ornate railings that run round the galleried floors, the plants and flowers twining and cascading, and the plash of the pool is now far below.
A little lamp goes on in the corner of the room, and to my relief I see Chloe pacing round the carved screen that surrounds my bed. I realise that the little pinpricks of flickering light come from wavy goatskin lanterns placed around the tiled floor.
I heave myself upright again, swing my legs over the edge of the bed. I’m not shackled, but that grating feeling is a heavy anklet that Tomas or someone has seen fit to clamp round my foot. And I don’t like it.
‘It’s so incredible to see you, Chloe. And incredible to see where you’ve been staying. But hey, I can’t stop. This is all very nice but I need to get my phone and my clothes and be on my way. You can help me, can’t you? You’re my only hope before any more time runs away with me!’ I give a bright laugh to enhance my easy façade. ‘How about we catch up over a coffee or a beer? You must know some cool places near here. But first, could you find my phone for me?’
‘Why do you need a phone?’
I swallow, and lace my fingers together to stop them shaking.
‘The thing is, Chloe, I only came here to get it charged up. But I’m in a real hurry now. I don’t think Tomas realises how important it is for me to find my cousin. She’ll be wondering where I am. It’s time I was off.’
‘I don’t know where your phone is.’ She glances round the stark room. ‘We all switched ours off when we got here, and I’ve no idea what they did with them. It’s all free love and free everything here. Why would I want to make a call? Everyone and everything I want is in this house.’
Her words are euphoric, but beads of sweat are breaking out on Chloe’s forehead. She’s not wearing the veil today. Her lovely blonde hair is tied up in a stringy, messy knot. Either there are some serious substances doing the rounds in here or she must have had the same dodgy drink as I did earlier.
‘Tomas wasn’t very nice to me, actually Chloe. And as for that disgusting medicine—’
‘That wasn’t medicine. We all drink it. That’s the cocktail he gives us to keep us mellow.’ She pulls a strand of hair out of its loose knot and starts chewing it. ‘Oh, he’s a dreamboat. You’ll love it here.’
I resist the urge to jump up and shake her – I’ve got to keep her on side if I’m to get out of here anytime soon. Instead I cross one leg over the other, swinging my weighted ankle. The jangling of it against the bone keeps me alert.
‘So this is the holiday you said you were owed, Chloe? It’s amazing. When are you flying back to New York?’
‘Don’t you love these anklets? Our personal passes! You shouldn’t look so freaked out, Serena. You’re perfectly safe here.’
‘I’m not freaked out, Chloe. I’m just pissed off.’ I count slowly to five. ‘I’m very grateful and all that, and you may love it, but I’m not supposed to be here.’
‘Nonsense. This is the best place in the world. An endless free vacation.’ She runs her hands over the silver anklet circling my leg then lifts her own long brown leg to show me hers. ‘Why would I want to go back to New York? Tomas and I are going to live here forever.’
The clearer-headed I feel, the more robotic she sounds. I stand up and walk unsteadily over to a mirror. My hair has been fixed in a messy knot like hers. My face looks sweaty like hers, too. I look awful.
‘Remember you brought your portfolio to my gallery, Chloe? I never got the chance to take a look, but when I’ve got all my stuff we could go back to the US together and you could show me.’ I say it softly, as if I’m coaxing a child, leaning against the wall because I still feel dizzy. ‘How is your talent ever going to be recognised if you’re hiding it?’
‘We spend all day painting and drawing and singing right here. You could take some fantastic photographs of all the naughty things happening, because there are no doors, except the main one. Otherwise it’s only curtains and mushrabiyya screens. That word means “not see”. But you can see, if you peer very closely.’
‘What day is it, Chloe? How long have I been here?’ I take a step towards the door, aware of how high and tight my voice sounds as renewed impatience threatens to blow my cover.
‘Not long. You came here yesterday afternoon and slept all last night and most of today.’
‘I’ve been in this place more than 24 hours? My God, this has cocked up everything! Polly will be going out of her mind with worry! Why didn’t someone wake me?’
‘You weren’t well. You had some kind of fever. You still look awful.’
‘Well, I feel awful, but I can’t linger. So I’d love it if you could show me where to find my phone, because you all might be having a nice holiday here, but I’ve got places to go, people to see, and also my cousin will be worried sick. I don’t want to bother Tomas. He’s probably stoned and forgotten about me. So help me out, hun. If I don’t go now I’m going to miss my plane.’
‘You haven’t booked the ticket yet, he says. Or got your passport. Oh, and you won’t get out. The main door is usually locked.’ She looks steadily at me, but the brief glimmer of life I just saw in her eyes has snuffed out again. Her pupils are so dilated that her blue eyes look black. She gets up with a sigh and wanders towards the door. ‘I’ll just go find Tomas.’
‘Oh, we don’t need to tell him, do we? If you’re not going to come with me, surely you can find my belongings and just quietly let me out? That would be great.’ My legs start shaking with fatigue. I sit down on the bed and feel the weight of exhaustion descending on me again. ‘Because I’m ready to go home.’
When I wake up after another long sleep, I realise from the way my head feels rinsed and fresh that another night and day must have passed. As far as I can tell, Chloe hasn’t come back. Eventually I sit up. I’m still dirty and sweaty, but I feel tons better. Enough to make sure I’ve got my camera. Enough to be seriously annoyed. I’ve been left all alone in this strange, disconnected place by a man who may have helped me out of a tight spot, but now that I’m better, I need to get back to the real world.
Most of all I need to find Gustav.
I step out of the pretty bedroom and on to the landing. The sun canopy up above has been rolled up and the night sky is now a square of purple velvet. The moon is a perfect sickle surrounded by dots of stars. It’s so beautiful it looks like a Venetian ceiling.
The courtyard below is lit by flickering candles, but it is deserted. I can only hear the murmur of voices coming from various places around the riad, and the odd burst of gentle laughter. I give myself a mental shake. The fever has lifted, both physically and mentally. I’m still desperate to get out. Polly will kill me when she catches up with me, but this strange pocket of a place doesn’t seem so menacing now. After all, a switched-on New Yorker like Chloe wouldn’t swap her existence for somethi
ng nasty or illegal. It’s just some kind of hippy commune. When I get my phone I’ll find dozens of messages from Polly, an explanation from Pierre and some loving reassurance from Gustav. And then I’ll get my ass over to London, or New York, or wherever he wants me to be.
I call softly into the silence. ‘Tomas? Anyone?’
I’m drawn along the landing by the murmur of voices, and up a winding staircase which leads out on to the roof. The terrace is set out like a bar, with striped tents heaped with cushions arranged around the central atrium, low seats and tables with multicoloured, scented candles flickering.
The slight breeze on my cheeks cools me as I stare out at the jumble of rooftops where the washing lines and cooking pots and potted plants of each house are all dominated by the round white eye of a satellite dish.
Under a striped tent at the far end of the terrace I can see the source of the murmuring sounds. There is movement, and as I draw closer I can see there’s a couple, no, three people, writhing on the cushions. I remember Chloe’s invitation to spy. I’ll take a couple of brief photos if the scenario presents itself, but decide to keep my distance. It could be the owners, after all, assuming all their guests are out.
Through the long lens I can see the long-haired boy I saw earlier playing the flute. He’s lounging on his elbows. Two girls are swaying around him, pushing him down and pulling down his shorts to smother him with oils. The girls are already naked, except that both of them are wearing their filmy yashmaks, trimmed with sequins. They look fresh and alert and their eyes, heavily painted, are bright.
The Arabian version of a Venetian mask is somehow all the kinkier by comparison.
I take a picture and the quick flash distracts them. The huge female eyes ringed in blue kohl spot me. I can see no smile or facial expression, but both girls wave across the roof, then one of them takes the boy in her hands and starts to massage him into hardness. The other girl crawls over his face.
I take another picture. I can’t resist. I know I’m in a hurry but this is the kind of surreal set-up I thrive on. There will be a soft moonlit wash to these shots. The secretive kinkiness of this evening compared with all that laid-back vibe of the daytime is seductive. It looks as if it’s not just the living that’s communal. Everyone seems at liberty to do what the hell they like, with whomever the hell they like. No wonder I can’t drag Chloe away.
On the other side of the terrace, a boy in another tent is just entering his girl from behind. She, too, is veiled, and gazes calmly at me as my camera wanders up her limbs, over the formation of their two bodies. They pause for my benefit before retreating into their dream and going at it. None of them looks surprised to see me.
I turn back to the staircase. I really need to find my phone and my clothes, but I’ll see if I can sniff out a few more scenes to film on my way down to the main door. I’m on to an incredible voyeuristic theme. Similar to those Parisian photographs of the prostitutes awaiting their punters, and the actors in the château. But brought up to date. A modern Arabian Nights. An exotic, subversive new exhibition is forming in my mind. I could even get Chloe to contribute, if only I knew where she was.
But as I glance around this balmy rooftop, with its swaying potted palms, the velvet sky and the distant mountains draw my eye and I come to my senses. Somewhere between here and that horizon, Maria and Polly are pacing and fretting in the ashram, wondering where I am.
My throat goes tight. However lovely this riad is – if you’re in the mood – I long, more desperately than I’ve longed since I was a child trapped in the house on the cliffs, to be gone. To be far away with my Gustav.
A burst of party laughter reaches me from the street below. The thought of Polly, of Gustav, clings where the others have fallen away.
They’ll be wondering where I am.
I leave the lovers and run down the staircase. But I’ve no idea which of the keyhole arches punctuating the gallery leads to my room. I peer into the warm darkness of each one, see nothing, hearing only the faint sounds of breathing or whispering.
This must be it, on the opposite side of the gallery. I recognise the large red lantern flickering outside. The curtain has been pulled aside just as I left it. But there are voices behind the screen concealing my bed. A man’s deep voice murmuring, then laughing.
Goddammit. I’m going to have to walk right in. All very well photographing copulating couples with the protection of my camera. Quite another trying to pull my belongings out from under their hot, sweaty bodies.
I step into the room. It is not in darkness as it was before. The cupboard has fallen open and the fluorescent internal strip light spreads its garish gleam into the room. A square of light flickering by the fireplace comes from a small television, as does the murmuring and moaning.
Maybe I’m in the wrong room, but I can’t resist having a look anyway. There are clothes tightly packed in the cupboard which don’t belong to me. Dresses and shirts and business suits which look too formal or dressy for the hippy vibe going on here. I grope along to the end. The last hanger falls off with a rustle of cellophane and a white shirt drops into my hands.
I gasp out loud. Who have I been kidding, rushing around staring at everything through a lens, letting my passion for photography blind me to why I’m really here?
The tentative calm of the last half-hour is splintered like glass.
Because on the shirt is a silver tiepin engraved with the initials GL.
Why is it here? Does that mean Gustav is here? The hopeful question dissolves as soon as I ask it, because wafting off the shirt and the cellophane, getting behind my eyes, that cloying, sickly scent is seeping into everything, just as it seeped through that garish apartment in New York.
This is the wedding shirt that was in Margot’s apartment, only now it’s wrapped in the same protector used by Gustav’s dry-cleaner in Manhattan. My hands shake as I check the sleeves. I can’t remember whether it was the left or the right that the cufflink was in before, but it no longer matters. Because there are two cufflinks now. The matching pair. The odd link that Gustav kept has been retrieved from his cigarette box in our bedroom and reunited with its twin.
There’s a burst of female laughter from the television, and then a deep voice as familiar to me as my own.
‘So this is a lovely surprise, but – hey, you little minx! Get this off my eyes!’
The shirt drifts like a corpse to the floor. I step closer and there is Gustav, close up on the video. He’s smiling, but he’s wearing a leather executioner-style mask which covers his head and his eyes but leaves his mouth free. A lock of his glossy black hair has somehow escaped and fallen over one eye.
A mosquito dances past me. I bat it away and peer closer. This is a video shot in Baker Street. It must date from when he lived there. I recognise the bare panels and plasterwork behind him. Tomas or Chloe or someone who knows I’m here must have gotten hold of it, and the shirt, but how? Why? Is it for my benefit? Could this be Pierre’s doing? Does he know I’m here? Has he set this up for some reason? Or is it another warning?
Danger. Ashram. Go back to Polly.
‘This is to teach me for leaving you, isn’t it?’ Gustav chuckles on the screen.
My mind is whirling, torn between the voices of the two brothers. The filmed Gustav, and Pierre’s inexplicable text and garbled phone call.
Nausea tightens and loosens in my stomach like a fist. Gustav’s voice is so clear that he could be right next to me. He’s fixed inside that television, still married to Margot.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Polly’s voice, pleading with me.
I back away blindly. I’m his fiancée and this video reminds me that, at this moment, I don’t know where he is or who he’s with. I bash my shin painfully against the coffee table, and as I bend to rub my leg, I notice the antique copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses which Gustav gave me in Paris. I frown. It should be in my luggage, back at the ashram, but maybe it dropped out of my bag in the souq and Tomas retrieved it. I�
�m surprised he didn’t stash it away with my phone. He probably thought it was some old tat.
I pick it up absently, slipping my finger into the page where Gustav wrote the loving inscription I’ve committed to memory.
Serena. Ma chérie. Ma femme.
‘These handcuffs are too tight.’ Still smiling, the Gustav on the video tries to twist round. ‘Unlock them, darling. I’m happy to play. But no punishment.’
There is a pause on the film. The diesel engine of a black cab rumbles down Baker Street. Nothing has changed. Ten years ago taxis sounded the same. People walked, shopped, ate, visited the Sherlock Holmes museum nearby. But that was Gustav’s old house. His old life, when he called someone else ‘darling’.
Back in this riad in Marrakesh, the only sound I can hear, apart from the sickening thump of my pulse, is the whine of that mosquito. I swipe at it and it spirals into the candle and frazzles to a crisp.
I haven’t got time to work out why this film is playing. I need my phone. I need to get home to Gustav. I need to contact Pierre and ask him what he meant about not leaving the ashram. And where the hell Gustav is now.
Footsteps approach along the landing. Small, tripping female steps in some kind of clacking heel, accompanied by the thump of slower, masculine ones. No one wears shoes here, and certainly not high-heeled, clacking ones. Instinct and fear make me hide.
I crouch down behind the mushrabiyya screen, but that places me close to the TV where my fiancé is so far away in time and space, smiling as his ex-wife prepares him for a sex session.
His gorgeous, sexy mouth, the one that knows exactly which parts of me to kiss, the mouth that was running over me and passing grapes between his lips to mine just over a week ago in our luxurious eyrie in Paris, looks just the same. Relaxed, open wide with amusement. He hasn’t aged one jot in the last ten years.
