We made our way back to the shed. The older man had laid out three plates. He served a small portion of rice with the vegetables on two metal dishes, then heaped a generous portion on a porcelain plate with a Chinese scene in dark blue. He gave me the pretty plate. He said something to the other man and, when they both chuckled with laughter, I tried to read their banter in their body language. Now that each in his own way had left his seed on me, they displayed no interest in me sexually and treated me merely as a curiosity as Europeans during the age of discovery must have shown the indigenous peoples brought back from the jungles of Africa or the crumbling cities of South America to be exhibited in music halls and travelling shows.
We went outside, out of the smoke, and sat cross-legged on the sand watching the boat growing larger as it approached. There were no forks or spoons and, copying the men, I made little balls with the rice and vegetables and popped the food in my mouth. Not only my body, my taste buds seemed to have burst into life and nothing I had ever eaten before had tasted quite so marvellous. I ate quickly, hot oil dribbled from my fingers on to my breasts and the momentary sting on my bare flesh was a reminder of what it is to be fully alive.
When I had finished, the man in blue indicated the shed with his thumb, pointing behind him, and I went hurrying inside like Oliver Twist hungry for more.
When I returned, the two men were still eating their modest rations. They appeared to chew each grain of rice, savouring the food, and I realised I had a lot to learn, that in my cappuccino life I always left two thirds of the almond croissant, the pizza crusts, the glass of white wine I didn’t want even when I ordered it. My friends and I and everyone talked about the melting ice caps and vanishing forests without doing anything more than talk. We consumed and chattered and contacted the BBC and the cable channels to promise that this author and that author was a witty raconteur, hilarious but at the same time deep and interesting, really great television. Even in the book business you are selling dreams.
My belly was swollen by the time I had finished and I stretched out on the sand staring up at the sky. When the men lit up, I fancied a cigarette and lay there breathing in their smoke. I ran my palms over my tummy and felt like a turkey that was being fattened for Christmas.
Why, when the men ate so little, had I been given a heaped plate of food and then, like a fat girl at boarding school, gone scurrying off for seconds? Why had I been given the one china plate? They were mocking me, having fun, I decided. As the white European, would I not normally expect special treatment? Didn’t we as a people always take the best and leave the scraps for the natives?
Now I was the native. With the stripping away of my clothes, I had been stripped of identity, a past, of preconceptions. I was stuffing my belly because I didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. I possessed nothing. I wore nothing. I was nothing. I was grateful for the plate of food, for the feel of the warm sun on my skin, for any small kindness.
Three
Escape
THE BOAT WAS RUST-COLOURED, probably an old fishing vessel, although it looked as if it had been patched together from the cannibalised parts of many boats. At the stern, the flag moving idly on the breeze was from a country I couldn’t identify, the pale configuration on a dark background suggesting the Skull and Crossbones and making me wonder if on my long swim I had slipped through a time warp into NeverLand.
The tide had gone out another hundred yards or so and the boat dropped anchor almost as far again beyond the low-water mark. A spiral of fumes rose up in a pale corkscrew, the motor booming like a heartbeat that echoed over the sea, the sound intrusive after the long hours of silence; there was no electricity on the island, no wailing radios or fizzing neon, no car horns or rowdy crowds.
When the motor died, the fumes dispersed and there was a momentary calm before the lap of the waves and the night birds continued their song. The sun was going down, staining the sky orange, but the light lingered and from where I stood between the two men I could see people emerging on deck, the numbers swelling until the side of the boat was a wall of bodies like passengers waiting for a delayed train on the Underground. A white dinghy was lowered over the side and, while some of the men loaded it with sacks and containers of water, others climbed one at a time down a rope ladder into the sea.
They waded towards us through waist deep water like survivors from a shipwreck. They were carrying sports bags, rucksacks, baskets, parcels tied with twine; I saw one man in a shiny suit and tie balancing a well-travelled suitcase on his head. As they left the boat, they appeared as silhouettes, one indistinguishable from the next, but as they drew closer I saw that the people coming ashore were weary Africans, black as ebony, some with tribal marks scarred into their cheeks and foreheads, the whites of their eyes vivid in the fading light.
Behind the men were four women in bright dresses and headscarfs. The first moved nimbly down the rope ladder. One of the men on board leaned over the deck and dropped an infant into her outstretched arms in the same casual way that his two companions were lowering sacks to the man in the dinghy. The other three women were having difficulty negotiating the rope ladder and the same man climbed down, either to help or hurry them along.
Once they were off the boat, the women moved towards us with the slow rhythm of buoys bobbing on the tide. When they were closer, I realised that the three women were pregnant, their great bellies swollen to the point that I thought one or all of them might at any moment have given birth right there in the sea.
As the men waded ashore, my first thought was that I was the only white person among those dark-skinned people. Then it struck me like a revelation, like the sudden lash from a bamboo cane, that I alone was without clothes. Since the beachcomber had found me, I had been defiled, flogged, fucked and pissed on. I had been treated abominably, yet the fact that I was naked had gone clean out of my mind until those tired people in their modest finery wandered across the sand and flopped exhausted against the dunes.
Most of the men scarcely gave me a glance although others, the younger ones, the boys, gazed at me as children gaze at television with amazement and wonder. Was this a glimpse of their dream? Of the future? Did the girls in Europe really bare their bodies for the newspapers and magazines and parade in the gold-paved streets half naked? That was the question in their eyes and it made me ask myself if I, if we, if all of us were lost in surface desires and pleasures, in materialism and individualism, in the lust for instant reward and gratification. Was I with my tabloid breasts and blonde curls the symbol of a world gone wrong? That’s how it seemed to me at that moment with the eyes of those black women sweeping over my body. That it was all my fault, the fault of PR and advertising and fashion and greed and celebrity gossip, that I, a naked blonde, was the root of all evil.
I followed the progress of the three pregnant women. They had joined arms and, as they caught sight of me, they slowed to a standstill and stared in the way of people confronted by something shocking and inexplicable, a village in flames; dry river beds; boy soldiers. They studied my hair, my breasts, my long legs, and they looked into my eyes, their gaze switching from shock to disappointment and foreboding. If they were going to find naked savages in the lands of the north, it was hardly the best place to rear their unborn children.
That’s what I read in their long pause for reflection. I wanted to explain, to apologise, to move my uncovered self from their path, but my feet had grown roots into the sand; I was a hare in headlights mesmerized by their gleaming eyes. As they finally continued up the beach, I had a vision of the three witches in Macbeth and recalled their terrible curse.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
I was cursed. I was lost. I was going nowhere. I wanted to be like those people with a mission and hope. Those women would have saved every precious penny over a very long time, years probably, and
were leaving Africa in this precarious way to start a new life. They had timed their journey precisely and, should they give birth once they arrived in Tenerife or Cadiz or Almeria, their new babies would be entitled to Spanish citizenship. They would have passports, a future, all the things we take for granted and I had left behind.
Articles I had read on the black diaspora questioned whether the schools and health services and work forces could absorb the flood of new immigrants with new colours and cultures and religions. I had no idea if this was true or not, we only know what we read and what we conclude through the prism of our own experience and prejudices. Europe to me seemed to be bursting at the seams, growing dusty and worn, decaying from within like an apple with a worm at its core. There must have been countless numbers of people like me anxious to escape from that world without knowing why or what exactly we were trying to escape from. It made sense that this subconscious craving to go and be some place else was echoed across the continents by others, that at heart we are all nomads travelling in search of something that will never be found and may not exist.
The women sat together on the dry sand and my attention turned to the white dinghy soaring over the water, the motor like a slow hand clap getting gradually louder until the craft glided on to the beach and stopped. The man who stepped out was dressed in white, a carefully turned turban, leggings, baggy around the top, tight over his calves, and an embroidered shirt that reached below his waist. His skin was pale, the colour of ivory piano keys, and in his expression was a look of surprise he was trying to conceal.
Like the three women, he looked at me, not so much at my nudity, but into my eyes; he looked away and looked back again. He studied my face as if it were a puzzle and, unable to unravel the mystery, he shouted impatiently, clicking his fingers, and the beachcomber hurried towards us, spine bent almost double, his silky words sounding like a servant’s entreaty, each line a refrain ending in the word sheikh, which I assumed is what the man in white must have been. He was much younger than the beachcomber, about my age, I thought, clean shaven and clearly in charge. He had arrived on the beach in the dinghy and stepped out without getting wet while three other men in turbans waded through the sea behind him.
The man in white fluttered his fingers in a dismissive gesture and stood watching as I helped the beachcomber unload the dinghy. The sacks weren’t so heavy, but the water came in round containers like you see in offices and weighed a ton. As I bent to lift those bottles one at a time on to my shoulder, the sheikh just stared with the vaguely bored expression an employer might show someone surplus to requirements.
You’re fired!
It was a line from an inane television programme that entered my mind like a magpie in a starling’s nest. I shook my head, shaking out the nonsense, and adjusted the weight of the bottle.
As I picked my way back through the crowd of immigrants to the fishing shed, my first thought was that the sheikh was annoyed that I was parading around like some porn star in a skin flick. But, of course, it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t my state of undress that had made him cross, but its potential consequences. The Africans were being smuggled into Europe. It was illegal, dangerous, lucrative, I’m sure, and something I should not have been allowed to witness.
If the people were captured by the authorities when they landed in Spain, when they described their journey, they would all remember seeing a naked white girl. When my being missing was reported, as it would be when my two weeks holiday came to an end, the police and Coast Guard would know where to begin their search and who exactly they were searching for.
The feeling of optimism I’d had when I first saw the boat on the horizon had gone. I was in terrible danger. In swimming away from La Gomera without my costume, I had placed myself in the hands of fate and my fate it seemed was now inextricably entwined with the man in the white turban. As I came back out of the shed, I glanced at him again. He was standing there like he owned the world and, in that warm night, a cold chill ran up my back bone.
We made several trips to unload the provisions from the dinghy into the shed. The beachcomber lit oil lamps and filled plates with rations of vegetables and rice. I was taken aback, although I shouldn’t have been, and embarrassed, too, when I was sent out, two plates at a time, to feed the people on the sand. I gave food to the women first and they watched my every move, the dance of my blonde curls, the sway of my breasts as I bent to give them the plates, my green eyes full of desperation and shame.
‘Do you speak English?’ I whispered. ‘Parlez vous Francais?’
I spoke, a woman to women, but it wasn’t that they didn’t understand, it was as if they didn’t hear me at all. They took the food, but behaved as if I were a ghost, invisible, some demon that might damage their unborn children. I went back into the shed and returned again with more plates. I spoke to the men, but the only response I got was a shake of the head, and mostly nothing at all. One young boy ran his palm over my thigh, but the man at his side pulled his hand away and, as he glanced nervously at the man in white, I knew my fear of the sheikh was justified.
When I was making my way back into the shed for the sixth or seventh time, the woman with the child, a boy of about two, hissed and beckoned me in a soft melodic voice. From out of her straw basket she produced a folded sarong which she held in her outstretched hands. She was trying to give it to me. My heart beat faster. This small act of kindness was more than I could bare. Perhaps this woman knew what it was like to be a slave.
‘I can’t,’ I said.
The woman stood and opened the sarong. In the remains of the daylight, I could make out the blue pattern on a white background, the same colours as the porcelain plate from which I had eaten my own rations before the boat arrived. I wanted to see this accident of fate, these matching colours, as another link in a chain, that more than coincidence, destiny was at work and my being there in the middle of nowhere had some purpose, that I would be delivered from this ordeal and be a better person after the experience. I would leave PR and join a voluntary group in Africa, dig wells, feed the hungry. I would do something.
Our eyes met and she smiled. The woman wrapped the material around me, covering my breasts, tucking it expertly so that it didn’t open. The hem of the sarong reached my knees and, dressed in this unexpected gift, I stopped feeling like an object, an outsider. I didn’t belong. I didn’t want to belong. But I didn’t not belong either. The tears that trickled over my cheeks moistened the dry surface of my heart and filled me with new hope.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
I continued going back and forth with plates until all the people had been fed. Enough food remained for the man in white and his three sailors, and I was impressed that the beachcomber had worked out exactly how much he was going to need, that there was no waste, that these people had learned to use everything, to throw away nothing. I stacked the dishes. I thought the beachcomber was going to instruct me to wash them, but he had something else in mind when he grabbed one of the oil lamps and crossed the shed to the display of found objects laid out on the long shelf.
He rooted around for a few minutes and, when he called me, he held in his palm a St Christopher on a tarnished chain. He hooked it around my neck and stood back, expressionless, studying me in the necklace and sarong as if we were a couple about to go out to a party. This man was a bully quick to take advantage of any opportunity; he’d sold me for a fuck for 50 euros, yet he had stopped his companion from beating me when the man in black was still warming up.
It was all so confusing, so hard to interpret, so foreign. The beachcomber inhabited a world of harsh realities and constant uncertainty. He survived on whatever the sea brought to shore. He was primitive, uncompromising and it was little wonder when he found a naked girl on the beach that he softened her up with a spanking and used her mouth to unload his semen. If the facts had been laid out for me in court I would have said guilty with extenuating circumstances, a conditional discharge, don’t do it again.
/> I was dressed now, my costume completed with a Christian token and again in this world without language I could only assume one thing: I was with the St Christopher about to begin a journey.
Outside, the orange light had faded and a few hesitant stars appeared in the sky. The man in the black turban, the mechanic, joined the three sailors who had arrived with the sheikh and, in pairs, carried the Zodiacs down to the sea. Two of them made their way back to the fishing shed to collect containers of water which they loaded on board with the gasoline cans; the last fresh water and fuel before the refugees reached Spain.
The sheikh spoke for several minutes to the beachcomber. The older man then scurried rodent-like among the Africans, fluttering his hands like the wings of a bird as he urged them down the beach to the boats. The woman who had given me the sarong lifted her little boy into her arms and, as she hurried behind the others, the child raised his small hand to wave.
Just the sheikh and I were left in the flickering pool of light made by the oil lamps ranged along the entrance to the shed. As he approached, I squeezed my fists tightly together, took a deep breath to slow my pulse and turned to face him. I drew my hair from my eyes, batted my eye-lashes and smiled.
‘I swam here from La Gomera,’ I said. I spoke slowly and pointed. ‘La Gomera,’ I said again, trying emphasise that I belonged somewhere.
Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) Page 5
