Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  At dawn Chuang Tzu fed the chickens and set off for school before either of his grandparents came down for breakfast. When they did, they found a jug of fresh water drawn from the well, ready for Madame Mimi to make tea.

  “You should have beaten him earlier,” she said. “I told you it would work.”

  “So you did,” agreed the old man. “So you did…”

  At the age of eleven other dreams began. In each Chuang Tzu was a hero, brave beyond imagining and strong enough to fight his way through torrents and climb sheer cliffs. This puzzled the boy, who much preferred intelligence and cunning, until he realized that every dream ended with him rescuing a girl and that rescuing her somehow involved removing her clothes.

  Beyond the window of the painted Red Room were mountains, a whole range of them, or so Chuang Tzu had always assumed. A smear of grey and a slash of black, narrow strokes like some childish exercise in calligraphy to denote fir trees. A wash of blue, overlapped at the end where the brush turned back on itself.

  While beyond the window of the room in which he woke was…As Chuang Tzu watched, the blue deepened and the smear of grey swam through a rapid sequence of changes, like smoke in a bell jar. The calligraphy acquired roots and branches and frostings of snow. Only the sun stayed static, a glowing ember within a sharp, pen-edged circle.

  “Weird,” said Chuang Tzu and somewhere inside his head came a voice.

  “Interesting,” it said.

  And as Chuang Tzu watched, the sun became brighter and its edge flared. At least he thought it did. Only by the time he began to notice this, the sun was already too bright to be stared at directly.

  CHAPTER 26

  Marrakech, Summer 1977

  Moz stayed the night that first time he led Jake and Celia back to their hotel. Only Major Abbas was wrong, Jake and Celia weren’t staying at Hotel Gulera. The nasrani couple had a pink-walled riad near Bab Doukkala, a rambling, four-storey town house slung around a small courtyard. And from what Moz could work out they’d bought the place, or rather Jake had, at a cost so insignificant it was less than his first electric guitar.

  “Lost in Mythik Amerika” read the heading on a square of cardboard nailed to a wall in the courtyard. Four boys snarled from the album cover and it took Moz a minute or two to realize that one of them was the figure who pouted from the front of a dozen discarded magazines.

  “Razor splits,” said one. “Is this the end?” asked another. So many magazines were balanced on one corner of a half-emptied packing case that they’d slid over the edge onto the floor. When he looked again, Moz realized there were actually only two, Sounds and NME, but someone had bought at least a dozen copies of each.

  “He must be really famous.”

  “Famous?”

  “To afford…” Moz gestured at the guitar cases, a keyboard on black metal legs, a big tape machine. Resting against a huge Marshall amp was a black Triumph with silver mudguards and chrome pipes. Someone had wheeled it in from the alley, across a battered carpet in the hall and parked it behind a wooden pillar, one of four supporting an open balcony that ran around the courtyard, ten feet or so above their heads.

  “All that belongs to his record company,” said Celia. “I work for them, sort of.”

  “And the house?”

  “Oh no,” Celia said dismissively. “It was his idea to buy this shi—” Then she caught herself and smiled at the boy. “Let me change and then I’ll show you round.”

  When Celia came back, she was wearing a silk shirt with the cuffs turned up once and the neck undone to the third button. And every time she bent forward to open a box or retrieve something from the floor Moz could see a flash of breast and a glimpse of nipple as Celia’s shirt fell away from her body.

  “Come on,” Celia said. “This way.”

  They fed him something Jake cooked from a book. It involved chicken cut into small bits, unripe olives and yellow peppers. At best it was a distant cousin to tagine.

  And having fed him, Jake handed him a Spéciale and watched while Moz sipped from the squat brown bottle and Celia rolled spliff after spliff on the back of Television’s Marquee Moon, lining them up like little torpedoes.

  Jake and Celia smoked three each, very carefully, not passing to each other, although they both offered to share with Moz.

  “I should get back now,” Moz said.

  “In a while,” said Celia, grinding out her roach. “You don’t need to go anywhere yet.”

  Moz said it again about an hour later, when the square of sky above their heads had grown completely black and the night wind was restless enough to disturb the leaves which had dropped from a desiccated vine on the far side of the courtyard.

  “It’s too late,” Jake said, “the streets won’t be safe.”

  Moz resisted the urge to point out that he’d been wandering the Medina’s streets after dark since he was old enough to walk. Something about Jake interested him, his casual attitude to life probably.

  The boy knew exactly what interested him about Celia and he knew that she knew. Since discarding the jacket Moz had made her put on for their walk through the streets that afternoon, she’d worn a man’s shirt, a gold jacket for supper and now she was back in that afternoon’s silk blouse, side-lit by the light of a dozen candles, her breasts in silhouette beneath the thinnest silk he’d ever seen and her nipples erect with cold.

  “You should stay,” Jake said. “Go in the morning.”

  So the three of them sat in that half light until the candles burnt down to stumps and Moz couldn’t shake the feeling that Celia and Jake were trying to outmanoeuvre each other.

  “Okay,” Jake said eventually, “I surrender.” Picking up the last two spliffs, he stuffed them into the back pocket of his black Levi’s, took a single copy each of NME and Sounds and headed indoors without saying goodnight to either Celia or Moz.

  “Let him be,” Celia said, when Moz stood up to follow. “He gets like that sometimes…” She patted the rattan sofa beside her. “We’ll go up in a moment,” she said. “But sit here first. I’ve got a proposition I think you’ll like.”

  Even having looked the word up several weeks later in a dictionary which Celia kept on the kitchen table, Moz was still unsure which bit of what happened next she’d been talking about.

  Jake was planning to rebuild, replaster and repaint the riad himself but he would be needing help. That was where Moz came in. Celia wanted Moz to introduce Jake to craftsmen willing to pass on their skills. Moz resisted the urge to tell Celia exactly what he thought of this idea. Instead he talked a little about when he worked on the dog woman’s house, making his rubble-carrying, concrete-mixing and trench-digging sound more professional than it was.

  And so Moz found himself being offered the job of houseboy and all-round helper and sometime in the hours to come he woke beside Celia in a vast bed, both of them naked and her arm thrown across his flat stomach.

  “Shit,” Moz said to himself.

  Rolling onto his side, he slid his legs out of the bed and stood as quietly as he could. The first call to prayer had come and gone, Moz could tell that just from looking at the sky above Celia’s balcony. If he moved now he could be back in the Mellah before Malika woke.

  No one would believe him anyway.

  “Shit,” Moz said again. It was difficult to say how old the foreign woman was. Older than him and older than Jake, beyond that…Finding his jellaba, Moz turned it right side out and draped it over an old chair, looking for his shoes.

  “Moz?”

  He turned and a camera flashed, its light blinding. “I’m making a record,” said Celia, “for posterity.” She looked at the naked boy whose glance was flicking between the door, his clothes and her bare breasts. “Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Come back to bed.”

  The third fight happened in Café Georgiou in Gueliz two weeks after Celia first slept with Moz. Called for by Malika, who was angry at having been sent to do Hassan’s bidding, Moz went reluctantly
with Celia’s salt taste still on his tongue, her ripeness sour on his fingers and the memory of her body heavy behind his eyes.

  Nothing else mattered.

  “You okay?” Malika asked finally, when Moz’s silence began to outweigh her anger.

  “Of course I’m okay,” Moz said.

  “You don’t seem it.”

  “Believe me,” said Moz, “life’s never been better.”

  Celia screamed in a way he’d heard no woman scream and at night in the Mellah nothing was hidden. Moz had heard his share of sheets made and quarrels mended.

  She ripped raw lines in his back and never turned him away. He took her on the warm tiles of the courtyard, in every bed of Riad al-Razor and bent over sacks of concrete in the hall. Jake only had to vanish in search of obscure building materials for Celia to hunt Moz down or Moz to come looking for her.

  Once he’d followed her into a downstairs lavatory and taken her against the side wall before she had time to squat and relieve her bladder. And Celia hadn’t known whether to throw him out or be furious when he came before she did.

  He forgot his friends and ignored the first summons from Hassan. Soon he was cooking for Jake and Celia and running errands, collecting mail from post restant and buying their provisions at the Thursday market. They never asked for their change and seemed surprised if he offered it.

  One Monday he went to collect a parcel of clothes for Jake from the local post office. It had been shipped by a shop in London called Seditionaries and when Moz glanced longingly at the old jeans and Ramones shirt Jake promptly assigned to the bin, Jake waved one hand in easy permission and grinned at the sight of Moz scrabbling into black Levi’s and a torn T-shirt.

  Sex, clothes and free drugs. And for this Celia and Jake paid him twenty dirham a day. More than a grown man could earn working from dawn to dusk.

  It was the summer of ’77. The sky over the squat wall of Marrakech was the blue of Persian tiles and the afternoon heat was strong enough to fell stray dogs, until even the wildest hugged the shadows and lay as if dead in the red dust.

  The war against the Polisario was entering its second phase, Johnny Thunders, the Heartbreakers and the Buzzcocks had recently opened the Vortex Club in London’s Wardour Street. The US Senate was busy banning economic aid to Vietnam and Jake decided that now would be an excellent time to introduce Moz to cooking speed, the really cheap kind. But Moz was to remember that summer for a different reason.

  His argument with Malika was short, pointless and entirely his fault. An argument he should never have won. He should never have won his fight with Hassan either. And it was the second that led to the first.

  Having walked in silence, he and Malika had found Hassan waiting for them at a pavement table outside the café in Gueliz.

  “You’re late,” said Hassan.

  Moz shrugged behind his shades. “If you don’t like it,” he said, “I can always fuck off again.”

  Things went downhill from here.

  Hassan needed Moz to do him a favour. Agreeing would go a long way to cancelling the obligations Moz owed to Hassan’s uncle, Caid Hammou. The exact details of the favour would be revealed later.

  “You don’t really have a choice,” Hassan said, when Moz said he’d think about it, meaning that he wouldn’t…

  “There’s always a choice.” Moz didn’t actually believe this. In fact everything about life suggested that true choices were few and came rarely, but it was something to say and had the added advantage of upsetting Hassan.

  “Not for you,” Hassan said and gave Moz his stare, the one he’d learnt from watching his uncle. “Not with this.”

  “Why not?” asked Malika.

  “Because Moz owes my uncle,” said Hassan. “And Caid Hammou is calling in the obligation…Look,” he added, his voice more gentle. Malika still had that effect on him, even now. “I’m just the messenger on this.”

  “That’s all you’ve ever been,” said Moz, scraping back his chair.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To shit.” Moz used a term so crude that a man in a suit at the table next door put down his paper and turned round.

  Moz stared him out and the suit looked away.

  “Make sure you come back.”

  “Of course I’m coming back,” said Moz. “You think I’d leave her here with you?” He jerked his chin at the girl. Malika was still sulking about his silence on the way from Riad al-Razor.

  The loo was modern. A ceramic standing pad with raised bits for his feet and a metal hose for washing himself afterwards. A maker’s name at the top gave a company address in Paris. The door locked with a little catch that switched a sign outside from occupé to libre.

  It made Moz wonder how much the coffees were costing Hassan. And that made him wonder why Hassan had chosen him. Hassan would have his reasons, of course. He was one of those people who never gave anything unless he wanted something bigger himself, usually help removing goods from where they belonged to somewhere they didn’t.

  Not this time, Moz decided. Things had changed.

  Moz hosed clean the fingers of his left hand and pulled up his jeans without bothering to dry his fingers first, even though there was a towel attached to a roller on the nearest wall. Then he reached into the back pocket of his Levi’s to extract a small polythene envelope that read “Lloyds Bank,” with a silhouette of a prancing horse. The envelope belonged to Jake and so did its contents.

  “Cooking speed,” Celia called it, which made no sense at all until Jake explained that speed was amphetamine sulphate and cooking, used like that, meant common or cheap.

  Cracking an off-white crystal between his teeth, Moz swallowed and felt its bitterness bite at the back of his throat. It took a handful of seconds for cold lines to begin to draw themselves around the tiny basin and the edges of the small window to become hard and luminous.

  Moz liked amphetamines.

  Half a dozen crystals and already he knew that chemicals which made his brain work faster were more fun than those which slowed him down. Hard tuning, Jake called it. Maybe Jake was right, maybe Moz should become Jake’s roadie when they left.

  Except, of course, there was Malika.

  At the table outside and still in a sulk but sliding her gaze in his direction whenever she thought he wouldn’t notice.

  “Okay,” said Moz, shutting the loo door behind him. “Let’s get this over with…”

  The café had a long zinc bar with a single beer handle for Spéciale, half a dozen ashtrays, olives in little saucers and a wooden drum containing Corona cigars. And behind the zinc stood Georgiou, an old Greek in a white apron, who only stopped staring at Moz when the spiky-haired boy finally rejoined Hassan and Malika.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Me?” Moz glanced from Hassan to the next table, where the man in the suit had gone back to his paper. “I told you. I’ve been having a—”

  “Never mind,” Hassan said hurriedly and for a moment Moz could have sworn that the older boy looked almost embarrassed.

  Tough.

  “Si Muhamed.” Moz clicked his fingers for a waiter. “A beer and my girlfriend will have…” He grinned at Malika. “What do you want?” he said.

  Malika asked for the first thing that came into her head.

  “With ice,” Moz added. “And lemon.”

  “Marzaq…” There was a tightness to Hassan’s voice. At first Moz thought this was because Georgiou’s was actually owned by Caid Hammou and Hassan was worried that Moz’s rudeness might get back to his uncle. And then Moz realized the real reason. He’d just called Malika his girlfriend.

  Well, double tough.

  “It’s okay,” Moz said. “We haven’t forgotten you.” He nodded to the waiter. “His Excellency will have an espresso.”

  It was Moz’s belief that Hassan didn’t even like espresso and would have been happier joining Malika in a Coke or ordering mint tea, but espresso was what those who’d been educat
ed in Paris drank, even now two decades after the French had gone.

  Of course, Caid Hammou’s nephew had never been to Paris, which probably explained his rigid adherence to the rules of those who had.

  After Moz’s beer, the coffee and Malika’s Coke arrived and the customer in the suit had stood stiffly and stalked off in the direction of Place du 16 Novembre, Hassan sat back and stared at Moz.

  “Okay,” he said. “Idries will pick you up from the dog woman’s house late tomorrow afternoon. I need both of you to be there when Idries arrives…” Hassan talked about his absent cousin as if the rat-faced boy was some employee, and maybe he was.

  “What exactly,” Moz said, “are we stealing?”

  “It’s a delivery,” said Hassan. “Idries will give you the details.”

  “No,” said Moz. “You. Now.”

  “Idries,” said Hassan, pushing back his chair. “Tomorrow.”

  Moz also stood up. “Then it’s not going to happen,” he said, “because I won’t be there. Jake’s taking the car to Mogador.”

  “That’s what you want me to tell my uncle? That your nasrani’s taking his bum boy to the beach?”

  “Tell Caid Hammou whatever the fuck you want,” Moz said, managing a sneer straight from the front of Mythik Amerika. “I’m out of here…Come on,” he added to Malika. “Let’s leave the little prick to his coffee.”

  A scrape of leather sole on concrete was all the warning Moz got of an anger so tight that Hassan tried to keep it silent.

  Five…four…three…two…

  Twisting sideways, Moz ducked. Only not quite fast enough because Hassan’s left fist caught the side of his head and dropped Moz to one knee.

  “Stop it!”

  Malika’s plea reached Moz through swimming darkness. And as Hassan positioned himself in front of Moz, the kneeling boy was faced with a flash of expensive clothes, smoky buttons on a cotton shirt. A belt of tan leather with dark spots in it. Black leather loafers that settled themselves and then moved again as Hassan prepared himself for a kick.

  “No!” Malika shouted.