Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “That’s all you can say?”

  It was the climb, decided the boy. She must have known he was staring or else realized that not doing so was next to impossible.

  “Here,” said Chuang Tzu, picking up his shirt. He wrapped the garment around Lin Yao and then put his old jacket on top. “You need to get warm.” They sat in silence after that. Which was to say that not a word passed between them, although icy water continued to roll over the lip of the fall and crash into the pool below while buzzards circled high in the sky overhead, their cry harsh and unlovely.

  Down in the valley a boy shouted and army trucks ground their gears as they began to climb towards the pass. In short, the world continued around them as they sat, side by side, on rough grass in the weak sunlight of a late afternoon.

  “I’m sorry,” Lin Yao said finally.

  Chuang Tzu glanced across. “For what?”

  “Being cross.”

  It was the first time she’d ever apologized to him and the very fact she had gave Chuang Tzu a tiny, flawed advantage. “You weren’t cross,” he said, “you were furious.”

  When Lin Yao blushed, Chuang Tzu reached across and took her chin gently in his first finger and thumb, turning her head until she faced him. Their kiss was slow and tentative, her lips softening just as he was about to bring the kiss to an end.

  “Love you,” he said, the only time he’d said that to anyone. With Wu and Wu’s sister it would have seemed clumsy and provincial and there had been no one else to whom he could say those words.

  Grandfather Luo would have laughed at him and talked of selfish genes and bonds of affinity, while Madame Mimi would have grown tight-lipped and angry. Any talk of emotion within the family had that effect on her.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “About stuff,” the boy said.

  “What stuff?”

  “Families. Children. Stuff like that.”

  Lin Yao’s eyes went wide and for a second she looked shocked. Then she looked puzzled as if she might have misunderstood what he said. Which she had, but Chuang Tzu only realized that later and by then the SZ Loyal Prince was beyond the moon and he was accelerating out of her life.

  Lin Yao let the boy lower her onto the rough grass and gently spread her knees. They began with Dragon Turns, in which the man lies between the legs of the woman. Missionary, Grandfather Luo called it. Suitable only for nervous young women and foreigners.

  Chuang Tzu sucked the fingers of his right hand and carefully cupped her entire vulva, smoothing one finger between dry lips. Then he did it again, pushing the finger slightly inside her.

  Sore from their previous attempt, Lin Yao tensed at his touch.

  “I’ll take it slowly…”

  The boy waited for her to say no but she just looked at him. A third helping of saliva and Chuang Tzu knelt himself between the girl’s legs. In the end it took two of them, Lin Yao spreading herself with her fingers while the boy used his own hand to position himself against her.

  “Slowly,” she warned.

  So Chuang Tzu pushed forward, very slowly, feeling the tiniest jolt as Lin Yao’s body opened just enough to let him almost enter and then tightened around him. Not knowing whether to push deeper or pull back and try that bit again, Chuang Tzu waited. With Wu’s sister it had been easy. She just performed Jade Girl Plays the Flute and then jumped on top of him, there was nothing fragile about it.

  In the end, Lin Yao solved the problem for him, pushing up with her hips. One wince and the thing was done.

  They stayed so for a while, Lin Yao still wrapped in his shirt and coat and the boy naked above her with a cold, almost autumnal wind blowing across his bare back.

  Eyes open and watching, they kissed and kept kissing until their eyes closed and the world disappeared. Lin Yao was grinding against him now, her teeth biting at his lower lip. So the boy bit back, hard and then more softly, feeling her body tense and her arms lock suddenly across his back.

  A yelp like a wildcat released her. Lin Yao’s head falling back, pillowed on her blouse and the rough grass. When her breath had returned and small tremors stopped running the length of her abdomen, the boy pulled back and then slid slowly in again, feeling an answering ache begin to build in his own body.

  He should pull out, Chuang Tzu knew that. Spurt his hunger onto her thin belly or roll the girl over and release himself against the groove of her buttocks, but instead he gripped Lin Yao’s arms and lost everything in the moment.

  “You okay with that?”

  Lin Yao nodded. She was sitting on her heels, Chuang Tzu’s shirt still wrapped tight around her, a darkness between her legs where he’d so recently been. The boy could smell himself on her, the scent of sex rising like steam from her body, richer than musk and dark as gun-powder tea.

  “We should get back,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because my grandmother will be worried.”

  “And you worry when your grandmother is worried?”

  “Of course.” Chuang Tzu looked at her. “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t live with my grandmother,” said Lin Yao. And Chuang Tzu suddenly realized he knew almost nothing about who made up Lin Yao’s own small household.

  “Well, your mother,” he said.

  “My mother’s dead.” Lin Yao’s voice was slightly surprised, as if she’d expected him to know this and perhaps he had.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally.

  “It was years ago,” said Lin Yao, and Chuang nodded, although that hadn’t been what he meant. And so they sat in silence for a few more minutes, while the sun snagged on a distant mountain like a lost balloon and the water in the pool changed from gun-metal silver to black.

  “I need to go,” Chuang Tzu said. “First I’ll walk you home.”

  “Walk me home…” Lin Yao glanced at him, eyes wide. A thousand colours reduced to rust. “Am I going to see you tomorrow?”

  “Of course…I promise.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Tears rolled down Lin Yao’s beautiful cheeks and hid themselves beneath the neck of Chuang Tzu’s jacket as she dressed in silence, with her back turned to him.

  “Tomorrow,” promised Chuang Tzu, when they reached the gate of her tiny farm.

  Lin Yao shook her head.

  It was late when the boy got home and later still when his grandmother gave him the letter which had arrived that afternoon from Wu. Only now, instead of a lieutenant, Wu was a major commissar and the youngest member of a panel headed by General Wu, his father.

  Chuang Tzu’s one-time friend wrote to say that great opportunities awaited those who joined the newly built SZ Loyal Prince and both Wu and his sister had taken the liberty of mentioning their friend’s talents to the General, who was delighted with the suggestion.

  Enclosed with the letter came a travel permit, a ticket for a government flight from Leshan to Wuhai and a letter, signed by General Wu himself, congratulating the young man on being chosen for the most important project undertaken since Qin Shi Huangdi ordered that slaves join together some small and rather useless defences to make the Great Wall.

  Chuang Tzu left before dawn, dressed in the one good suit his grandmother hadn’t reduced to rags and carrying an untidy sheaf of poems, a few of them dedicated to a girl who slept in a village twenty minutes’ walk from the house he was leaving.

  CHAPTER 23

  Marrakech, Summer 1977

  While the foreigners stood at the front desk filling out infinitely shorter forms which stated they weren’t planning to fill out the forms required to report a robbery, Moz sat at the table in room three and watched Major Abbas make notes in his tatty notebook.

  “Where did we first meet?” the Major asked suddenly.

  Moz swallowed.

  “Was it in here?”

  “No.” The boy shook his head. “There was a dead American.”

  “Ah,” said the Major. “How could I forget? Only he was English, not American, and his father
was a diplomat. It was all very irritating.” The small man made a few additional notes in his book and then snapped it shut, inserting his pencil into a gap in its spine.

  “You had one hand twisted behind your back.”

  Now he’d remembered the first meeting. The Major had problems removing the picture of a small boy casually stripping to show one arm tied into an impossible position, oblivious both to his nakedness and the bruises speckling his body like camouflage.

  “What happened?”

  Moz thought about it. “I started hitting back.” This wasn’t quite true. He’d got a job, the winter his mother died, but he wasn’t about to tell the policeman that.

  “For you,” said the Major as he reached into his pocket. Peeling off a hundred-dirham note he glanced from the new note to the boy and sucked his teeth. Carefully replacing the hundred-dirham note, he extracted a handful of smaller notes, all of them scuffed along their edges and dark with grease from the fingers of those who’d handled them before.

  “That’s more like it,” said the Major, but he was talking to himself.

  The boy stared at the notes.

  “Take them,” Major Abbas said, his words an order.

  Moz counted the money, to make sure it added up to a hundred. Ten notes in all, originally pink like the walls of Marrakech, with a drinking bowl on one side and a picture of the Sultan, as most of those who lived in the Medina still called King Hassan II.

  Without being told, Moz folded the notes in half and then in half again, stuffing the money into the side of his shoe.

  “What must I do?”

  Major Abbas smiled. “Who said you had to do anything?”

  In many ways, playing simple seemed the safest way to behave around this man so that was what Moz did. And besides, how could he not want something?

  “You remember what I said last time?”

  Moz knew word for word what the Major had said the time before. Moz was to bring him rumours. And there were always rumours, that the Algerians planned to invade or the Polisario, as the leaders of the Saharan tribes now called themselves, intended to thrust north and attack Marrakech. That one of the King’s own ministers had been behind the last plot to kill the King.

  In the fifteen or so short years of Moz’s life, rioting students in Casablanca had been arrested, tortured and jailed, exiled trade unionists had been murdered in Paris, the old colonial companies had tried to bribe their way out of nationalization and two of the coups against the King had come dangerously close to succeeding.

  Truth or rumour, these were not things that anyone sensible would repeat to the police. And besides these dangerous truths, there were lesser rumours of gangs and robberies, rapes, murder and infidelity. Only those were not what Major Abbas required.

  He wanted only the first kind, the bigger and darker rumours. Moz was just unsure why the Major thought he might be the person to hear them.

  “So,” said the Major, “you’ll keep in touch this time?”

  Moz nodded.

  “Good. Now take those two home.” He jerked his chin towards the front office. “And suggest she wears something over that shirt.” Flipping open his notebook, Major Abbas found the address. “They’re staying at Hotel Gulera. You know where that is?”

  The Major stopped himself. “No, of course you don’t.” He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper and handed it to the boy, who glanced at it once and carefully left the scrap on the table between them.

  When Moz was gone, the Major made a new note in his book, upgrading the boy’s usefulness from four to five. He’d always suspected the boy to be at least semi-literate.

  “You realize,” Jake said, shifting his rucksack, “that the little shit’s probably a police spy.”

  “Jake!”

  “I mean it. Look at him.”

  Celia shot a quick glance at the boy walking slightly ahead of her. He was staring up at walls as he passed, checking for street signs, she imagined.

  “Looks just like a kid to me.”

  The spiky-haired man nodded heavily. He was wearing black Levi’s and a Ramones T-shirt, his rucksack was made from black rubber. A pair of lizard-skin shoes seemed moulded to his feet.

  “Not far,” Moz said. His accent was a little more sing-song than usual and his words a little less clear. The Major obviously intended him to report back on these two and Moz wanted to put them at their ease.

  Ignorance usually worked.

  “That’s what you said five minutes ago.”

  Moz shrugged and dodged neatly between a scooter and a cart laden with melons. When the couple didn’t immediately follow, Moz waited.

  “This thing’s heavy,” Jake said, shrugged his shoulders to indicate the bag.

  “I’ll take it.” Moz held out a hand.

  “Good idea,” said Jake, as he began to shuffle his way out of the straps.

  “Jake, you can’t—”

  “Yes, I can. He offered.”

  “The kid’s half your size.”

  “So, he still offered.”

  “I carry it,” Moz said. “You pay me when we get there.”

  “Welcome to Marrakech,” said Jake.

  They walked in silence after that, cutting down the side alleys that Moz indicated, passing through small souks, dusty squares which were anything but square and a market selling leather slippers made in the tannery in El Moukef.

  “Over there,” said Moz.

  The entrance to that alley looked to Celia and Jake like all the rest. They’d been lost at least twice on the walk from Avenue Houman to Rue Bab Ailen, but the boy doubted if either of them realized that. Once they’d even circled past the same small mosque from two different directions and neither appeared to notice.

  “Wait…” The woman was standing in front of a stall.

  “We haven’t got time!” Jake’s voice was impatient.

  “Yes, we have,” Celia said. “Besides, I want to look at this.” In her hand was a belt made from discs of leather laced in a row. Circles cut from hubcaps and beaten into a traditional Berber pattern had been stitched to each disc, their centres augmented with a five-peseta coin from the Spanish territories, each coin hammered flat and welded in place.

  “They’re amazing. Ask him how much…Go on.” The woman was talking to him, Moz realized.

  “Ssalamu ’lekum.”

  “Ssalamu ’lekum.”

  Civilities done, Moz pointed to the belt Celia held. “Bshhal?”

  “Khamsa ú ’ashren.”

  The boy almost choked. “Twenty-five dirham,” he told the woman, who reached into her leather satchel for a purse. “It’s way too much,” Moz said hastily. “Offer five.”

  “Five?”

  “Khamsa,” Moz said, turning back to the stallholder.

  “Ashrin.”

  “He says twenty.”

  “Okay.”

  “La.” Moz shook his head. “Ghali bezzaf. Akhir Taman shhal?”

  The man scowled at the boy and told him to tell the foreigner how good the work was, how fine the leather, the quality of the silver used to make the circles and the fact that they were real Spanish five-peseta pieces. “Akhir ttaman dyali huwa hada.” A shrug closed the conversation. A shrug and a quick spread of the hands, universal gesture for what more can I say?

  “He says twenty is his best price.”

  “That’s fine,” Celia said.

  “No, it’s not,” Moz said. “Walk away…that way,” he added, “towards the other side of the square.”

  “But I want—”

  “Do it,” Jake said. He might have been talking to Celia but he was looking at Moz and for the first time there was a smile on his face, albeit sour. “Go on,” he told Celia. “Walk away. Isn’t that what you do best?”

  The stallholder sent a boy after them with the belt. Although he waited until they had actually entered a side alley.

  “Fifteen,” he told Moz.

  “Nine.”

  “Fifteen.”
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  The boy and Moz looked at each other. The kid was about eleven, Arab rather than Berber, small for his age and worried. Any smiles from his father were reserved for the customers, Moz could see that in the boy’s eyes.

  “Twelve,” Moz suggested. It was an outrageous price for a belt, at least it seemed so to him. Very reluctantly, the boy nodded.

  “Sixteen,” Moz told the woman. He took the money from a purse she handed him, one note and six coins, counting the dirham carefully into his own palm. While Celia was busy putting the purse back into her satchel, Moz turned to the boy and put the ten and two coins into his hand.

  “That’s for the belt,” he said. Equally quickly, he pocketed two coins for himself and gave the final two to the boy. “Yours,” he said. “The price we agreed for the belt was twelve. Those are for you to keep.”

  “Thank you,” said the boy, hand over his own heart.

  “Bessalama.”

  “M’a ssalama.” Returning the peace, the boy trotted back to his stall, a hand-me-down jellaba dragging behind him in the dirt.

  “What was all that about?” Jake asked.

  “All what?”

  “The talking.”

  “We were saying goodbye.”

  “What?” Jake snorted. “You telling me everyone in Morocco is that polite?”

  “I don’t know everyone in Morocco,” Moz said, reasonably. “But most people in Marrakech have manners.”

  Celia smiled at the boy still laden with Jake’s rucksack. She found it hard to guess his age because everybody in the city seemed so small, but she imagined it was around fourteen, maybe a little older. She had a brother that age, away at school.

  “You’ve insulted him,” she said, transferring her gaze to Jake.

  “Insulted him?”

  “Yeah.” Celia nodded. “You know. What you do best. You need to apologize.”

  For a moment it seemed like Jake might refuse, then he nodded grudgingly. “I can be a prick sometimes,” he said.

  Celia nodded.

  “You know…” Jake Razor looked at the boy, face thoughtful. “Maybe you can help me.”

  “If I can,” said Moz.

  “You know where I can get some dope?”