by Tim Kindberg
****
Camel-breath slipped out of one of the many cubby-holes that surrounded the courtyards and stood behind Deobia. His oily voice made Deobia jump.
“I don’t forgive, you know. Never. But I’ll talk to you, even though no one else will. What do you know about the arrangements?”
“I thought he’d sent you away,” Deobia whispered.
“No, no little one, I’m essential to him.”
“But you failed and now the girl has found what he’s looking for. Where does that leave you?”
“And you? You didn’t find him, either. Where does that leave you?”
“But I found the mother, and that was the key.”
“Have you seen him — the son?”
Deobia wanted to tell Camel-breath to clear off but he couldn’t be sure where he stood with Morchid. He must indeed still be on Morchid’s business of some kind, otherwise how could he remain here?
“I haven’t seen him. But I know she has found him.”
“You realise he’ll put you all in boxes, don’t you. You never come out, you know, you’re in a box forever, like a beetle, waving about and unable to help yourself. If I were you, I’d get her out of here.” They both looked up at the window. “There is still time to save her. All of you should leave, go to the mountains. Or better still the Sahara. Lose yourselves.”
“You’re lying. It’s an exchange. He agreed to it.”
“You think he’s honourable?!” Camel-breath laughed his oil and gravel laugh, the skin wobbling under his chin.
“I’m here to speak to him. I’ll make my own mind up what to do.”
“Oh, little one, don’t make me choke. He doesn’t need you. You’ll be the first for a boxing.”
“You’re lying. I’m going to speak with him now.”
****
Deobia laid aside his moped, and walked towards Morchid’s inner sanctum, towards the guards posted there, his mind racing to work out what he was going to say when Morchid asked awkward questions. The figure who was suddenly standing in front of him tore him from his preoccupations. It was Morchid, the creature of the souks himself, who seemed to grow like a genie from the ground, and tower in front of him.
Deobia thought about all the books he had read in the dusty library in cracked Marrakech, the centuries of learning. Nothing prepared you for life itself. If cracked Marrakech was brought about by a bug in reality, then this was unadulterated reality whose darkness scotched any doubt: Morchid breathing, looming, unknowable. Morchid was saying something, looking past him as he spoke, his eyes fixed on something unseen by anyone else.
As he listened to Morchid’s instructions, made in the fewest words that would convey his commands, Deobia considered how he could fetch Radia, appear to walk her to the rendezvous with Chemchi, but at the last moment, get out of here. Take her into cracked Marrakech, and leave it this time. Walk across the dunes to one of the other cracked places. It didn’t matter that the under-eyelid lights would descend. They could keep on walking, he could take her hand and lead her as though he knew his way. To one of the other cracked places, where they would find the carpet, or whatever form the portal took, and emerge into another place. Would that be an uncracked place, without bugs? How could you tell the difference — the absence of anomalies like the broken-off edges? Was it only ever a question of what one was used to, of how life was itself in its own particular way?
And what of the slavery and trafficking in this place, that was real surely, not a bug. Was it cracked or uncracked reality we should be afraid of? The people in cracked Marrakech might be like clockwork but no one had ever hurt him there. There was just a gentle, perpetually sunlit to-ing and fro-ing, looping like a see-saw hinged about one moment. Perhaps cracked Marrakech was what they called heaven here.
****
There were times when Ali could put anything out of his mind, and just watch the world wend its way past him. The smells of cooking meat and cinnamon, the dust, the sunlight searing as it slanted onto the streets, Ali loved this home, this Marrakech. He loved to tell his tales. It didn’t matter who would listen. Sitting on his stool in the Rue Mouassine by the mosque, he watched the human traffic pass. As always, he greeted locals with a raised hand. When a tourist stopped to consult a map, he said, “May I help you, please — a lamp, a carpet, somewhere to stay?” This one, like most, viewed him with suspicion, at least at first. But he had nothing to sell to them. Those who responded would indeed be told of the best stalls, the restaurants with the finest tagines, interleaved with stories from Ali’s life; stories to make them smile, stories to be re-told when they returned to their homes and praised the friendliness of the natives of Marrakech; stories of how open and straightforward the people of Marrakech were, how Marrakech was suffused with colour, with life, the people so sunny and helpful.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
IT WAS DEEPEST night, not long before the time of the tryst with Morchid the butcher.
Chemchi led Akimbe to the side-door of the abandoned restaurant.
“I don’t need to tell you to take the bracelet. And follow the circuitous route to the chamber, like I told you.”
“I gave it to Deobia.”
“You did what?”
“For safe-keeping. In case I don’t come back. It will survive.”
“You will come back.”
Moonlight fell through the glass above the door. It would be the everlasting day in cracked Marrakech, a total shock from cool to heat, from real to cracked when Akimbe went through.
She looked at his ritually scarred face, met his searching look. He is himself now, she thought. It never suited him to be the proud son of Shango. He has cast that off. Being at the world’s mercy has brought that about. Yet how alone he looks, and that’s my fault. She was too pent with grief about her mother still to hug him. Instead she placed a hand on his shoulder, He took it off and opened the door, letting more moonlight spill in for a second before he clicked it closed.
****
When she stepped out later, not long before the call to prayers, a stretched list of stars hung above the rooftops. The stalls stood shut and silent. The daddy long-legs and bumble bees were in bed. She kept moving, like a ghost through the souks, wishing she could return to the deserted restaurant, to go back and hide and never face the world again, to leave it to its own devices. Ibtissam moved ahead of her, her look-out.
When she entered the chamber, the carpet stretched all around, bigger than before like a tide that had come in, its tracery of golden threads caught in the candlelight. And there was Akimbe’s shadow, a deeper dark on the carpet’s palimpsest of souls, which the golden network had not yet embroidered itself around.
“Lovely!” Camel-breath ghouled out of a corner.
“I thought I’d see you here,” she said.
“Oh, did you now, lovely.” His lips glistened with spit.
“Yes, so I came prepared.”
The sickly smile disappeared, amid the yellow bruises from his beating by Deobia.
She went on. “You want Morchid out of the way as much as I do, don’t you? To take over the operations. But you’re too weak to topple him by yourself. You’re waiting for me to do it for you. You’re pathetic, in fact.”
“I don’t know what he sees in you,” he hissed. “You’re just a girl. I’m here for the sport of it, my lovely. To see you sucked into a box when he realises your deception, when you fail to deliver the package you say you have for him.”
All the time he spoke, Ibtissam spat at him, her fangs wide. The cabinets, chairs and bookshelves kept their silent witness around them.
“But I have what he wants,” she said.
“I don’t believe you but, be that as it may, you don’t think he’ll let you have your mother back, do you? It’ll be both of you in boxes. Maybe the two of you sucked like pond-water into one box toget
her if you’re lucky, you can each hear the other clatter around it. Better to side with me, lovely. I’ll let you go. I’ve no further use for you or grudge to bear. You and your friends.” He spat the word ‘friends’ out like it was a shard of bone in his meat.
“That’s good to hear. I’ve left something for you in cracked Marrakech,” she said.
“What?”
“His son.”
“Eh?” Camel-breath was like a lizard with a fly just centimetres from its tongue.
“The deal is that you fetch him, bring him back and get the credit. We can say that I knew only roughly where he was. But you: you dragged the information out of me and captured him. You’ll be in his favour. But you have to promise me to persuade him to spare us. Is it a deal? There’s very little time. You’d better be quick.”
“I’ll send someone.”
“No, I told the one looking after him to expect you. You were easy to describe.” She looked him up and down. “And no one else will do.”
“It’s a trick.”
“But what could I do to trick someone like you? You know what’s what in cracked Marrakech better that anyone, don’t you? You’ve been many times, looking for him.”
“But even I could not find him there.” Camel-breath almost looked disappointed in himself for a second. Chemchi had to stop herself from laughing, despite the life-and-death situation.
“You’re like everyone,” she said. “You can’t see what’s in front of your nose. Or don’t want to.”
He was getting angry now, “Oh and why, lovely, would I avoid the very thing he wants and therefore I want too?”
“It’s what you see in the mirror that I’m talking about.”
“Mirror?”
“Yes. Why would a creature like you ever bother looking in a mirror? So, are you going or not? Do you promise to let us go, if I tell you? Meanwhile, I’ll be telling Morchid all about your heroic help.”
“I don’t need your help. I’ll follow him, your little friend.”
He lay on the carpet next to Akimbe’s still pure-black shadow. The threads gladly weaved and sucked and slewed at him until he disappeared, his hunched shape flattening to shadow.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHEMCHI LEANT AGAINST a chest of drawers while she composed herself, ridding the encounter with Camel-breath from her mind. She called to Ibtissam, who appeared from a corner, walking warily around the carpet’s edge to spring up beside her.
Suddenly a bookcase moved with a loud scraping, swinging to the side to reveal a brute of a man. Het ignored her, and took a place beside the opening. She might have known Morchid would have his own way in.
No one else came through. The brute examined his fingernails. She went up to the revealed doorway. The brute shifted his eyes up to her in case she tried anything.
“Where is he?” she said.
He moved his eyes back to his fingernails.
It was about thirty minutes until they appeared. The wait drove her spare. Every conceivable reason for the delay went through her mind, all the terrible things that could have taken place. Radia could have run away. Ali could have said something in one of his boastful, effusive moments to give the game away; a word in the ear of someone who turned out not to be as trustworthy as he thought. And Morchid: she kicked herself for believing Morchid to be predictable in any respect.
A woman appeared, looking tense, as though someone unseen had pushed her through. Was this her ‘mother’? Supposing Morchid had brought someone to test her. Why hadn’t she thought to see or ask about her stand-in?
Chemchi searched the woman’s eyes, just as the woman searched hers. She looked so sad. Chemchi didn’t think she had ever seen anyone looking so crushed. There was no resemblance — how could there be? — didn’t Morchid see that? Chemchi covered her mouth with her hand, ready equally to show emotion or hide the lack of it.
The woman took a few steps into the chamber. There was a pause. Another woman came through.
Then Morchid. He stood blocking the doorway with one of the women on either side.
Chemchi looked from woman to woman. Both of them said, “Chemchi!”
So it was clear. She had to identify her ‘mother’ when neither was she.
Morchid said nothing but watched her intently, searching for every nuance of her reaction as she looked from one to the other. She mustn’t delay.
He said, “Well? Is there a problem?”
“It’s just — it’s been so long. And who is this other?”
And there it was, the tell: the woman on the right lifted her hand to her heart and as her sleeve fell away, Akimbe’s mother’s bracelet glinted in the candlelight.
“You’ve come back to me,” Chemchi said to her, “at last.”
Deobia emerged from the doorway as Chemchi and Radia were embracing. They clung together long and hard, each wishing this could be over and done with, each feeling a stranger’s bones, without warmth.
After what felt like an appropriate time under the burning of Morchid’s stare, they separated, faced one another and held both pairs of hands.
“Don’t make me wait any longer,” said Morchid. “I’ve shown you what you sought. Now do the same for me.”
“Come,” said Chemchi, releasing Radia’s hands and walking over to where the carpet lay. Its network of gold sparkled within its blackness, disappearing down the corridor to where the invisible velvet drape led into the souks. Her heart was trying to leave her chest. The two fresh shadows of Akimbe and Camel-breath lay beside one another.
“What do you know about this carpet, Morchid?”
Morchid tilted his beastly head atop a thick, muscular neck. “I know all about it. I am weary of it.”
“Oh, really?” she said. “Deobia?”
Deobia flinched when she said his name. The carpet’s twinkling reflected off his goggles, like stardust. He had been looking at the carpet as though it were a runway, a strip to take off from, to soar and to keep on soaring.
“Yes, Deobia. Show Morchid about the carpet, please. Walk onto the middle of it.” Deobia could have no idea what she was up to. She didn’t know why he should trust her at such a moment of crisis but she hoped that he would feel he had no other option.
“But he knows, doesn’t he?” He stepped past the two new shadows. The threads licked at him.
“Further, into the middle,” she said.
He walked on and turned to face them, picking up his feet to stop the threads gaining too great a hold on his ankles, treading in place, confident of being able to stay there while the women’s faces showed horror and disbelief at what they were seeing. He might as well have walked far, far away.
Morchid was impatient at this performance. “I didn’t ask for games.”
“I need to show you something.” Chemchi took out her torch. She shone it on Akimbe’s shadow and kept the torch on him. Akimbe started to appear, as he had when she first encountered him. A nose, two eyes, ears.
“Can you hear me, Akimbe? What does she say?” The boy was only just poking into this world, the rest of him in the other.
“She says to tell him: The boy was taken. The boy has grown.”
“Thank you. That is all I wanted for now.”
Chemchi took the beam off him, and the black stitches claimed him back as shadow.
“What is this?” said Morchid.
“The old woman. Don’t you know her? But you must.”
She turned the torch onto Morchid’s legs. His body became the under-eyelid lights. The others gasped. Chemchi’s powers had grown so that, for the first time, others could see what she could see. Morchid looked down at himself with what for him was interest. The swirling shapes blew in the emptiness like clouds.
She lifted the beam, revealing the lights all the way up to his arms and chest but stopped before his face, and said: “I don’t think we want to see any more. It’s to protect ourselves: we would go mad if we truly saw what lives in that countenance.”
She shone the torch on Radia and the other women. Their blinking faces were like any other flesh and blood.
Then she shone the torch on Deobia.
There, on the one hand, was the ethereal, brainy youth in his drainpipe clothes, blinking and screwing up his eyes, and putting up his hand to shield them without complaint, as if he were used to thinking of himself as part of an experiment, as an object of curiosity.
And yet there was a faint fog over him of the under-eyelid lights. And much more than that, from the first moment when Chemchi’s torch beam fell upon his face and illuminated him, they all saw what she saw. Deobia was Morchid’s son.
And when they looked closer, nothing had changed. Not the lines of his face, the jib of his nose, the curl of his mouth or the craters of his eyes; not his electric afro hair or his goggles. Nothing had changed except that they could all see what was right in front of their eyes. Including Morchid.
Morchid let out an animal cry.
“You are grown!”
Deobia looked from one to the other, now terrified, and speechless. His eyes came to rest on Radia.
“Oh Deobia,” she said. “Deobia. What are you?”
“Stay where you are,” said Chemchi. “It’s very important not to move. Don’t worry.”
“You see it,” she turned to Morchid, “don’t you.” Morchid stood in the grip of something stronger than he had ever known, his arms fallen by his sides. It was shocking to see him reduced to this state, for another being to have this effect, for another’s existence to amount to more than something to be swept aside.
“Touch him.” Chemchi’s mind was being hurtled forwards in an unknown direction.
Morchid’s torment rearranged his face so that he was unrecognisable, almost human. He stepped onto the carpet. “No,” he roared, pulling himself together. “You come here,” he commanded Deobia.
“Don’t move,” said Chemchi.
“He can go back to where he came from, to where you put him, where you can’t go,” she said to Morchid. And back to Deobia: “Move further onto the carpet and lie down.”
Haltingly, Deobia lowered himself, watching for Morchid’s reaction.
