Stewart, Angus (16 page)

The boy climbed on to the back. Caroline was pulled up into the cab. The lorry appeared to have come to collect the harvest of esparto grass. But after a second Caroline ceased to ponder the economics that could make the destruction of a motor vehicle worthwhile. She felt like a passenger in some tank demonstration on Salisbury Plain. After half an hour the ceased to feel very much at all. Achmed's whoops of delight reached her through the butter muslin rag that formed the cab's rear window. When the truck hove to on a hillside pitted with boulder, Caroline had virtually to be lowered from it. Evidently it went no further. Children, and Berber women in straw hats and candy-striped skirts, were cutting the coarse grass.

'Give him one  dirham,' Achmed said flatly, indicating the Spanish driver.

Doubtfully making to do so, Caroline was met by astonishment. 'Please! I was unable to offer you even a cigarette. Now buy yourself some,' she said, covering the blunder with a fast flow of words. The Spaniard laughed, shaking his head. Caroline now followed behind Achmed again, muttering murder at the boy. Achmed seemed to be among peripheral kinsmen. He would pause to exchange greetings with one; drawing himself up to his full height, and conscious of his city superiority. As they progressed the greetings became more concerned; the exchange of news lengthier. His home village must be near at hand. Eventually they reached it. The dwellings were
scattered over a wide area of broken ground; each one surrounded by a camelthorn hedge, serving as a coral for limping dogs, and sometimes a cow or chickens. The houses themselves had adobe walls, no more than five foot high, and surmounted by a dome of brushwood.

'My father, Achmed said; and
the man confronting Caroline took her hand, kissed his fingers bemusedly, and looked straight through her. His expression didn't change et all.

'Much
kif
,'
Achmed said in English, with mixed compassion and contempt.

The man now produced another arm from beneath his
djellaba
,
and gestured towards the house. A woman emerged from the doorway, bent double to clear the low brushwood eaves. She had an infant bound to her back. Caroline's hand was taken once more; only when the woman kissed her own fingertips immediately afterwards, it was with a quick, almost shamefaced gesture.

'This one Hassan—good baby, eh?' Achmed announced. At once he became completely absorbed fussing about his stepbrother.

His stepsister Fatomha and Melika were out with the goat, Achmed explained when, having kicked off their shoes, they had entered the tiny hut. The ragged woman passed Caroline a Mobiloil tin half-filled with milk. She drank several mouthfuls of the sweet-sour-tasting liquid while they watched her intently. A
mishma
was raked into life on the threshold, and bellows applied to the smouldering charcoal. A kettle, filled from a water skin, was placed on the earthenware bowl of embers. Caroline signalled to Achmed to produce the sugar, and the seated man began to hammer at it violently with a stonemason's chisel. The burred end of the implement proved subsequently to be also a pestle, whose mortar was an expended shell-case. Achmed paused in his arrangement of the fragile glasses to ask Caroline whether she liked mint tea.

This had evidently been at the instigation of his father, whose dialect—Moghrebi indiscriminately mixed with what she took to be Chleugh—Caroline could barely decipher at all. The brittle glasses, with archway-like patterns Stamped into them in gold, were perhaps new, for the Man, Mocktar, began to pass a tentative finger about their rims to discover whether there was any roughness that might cut Caroline's lips. This must already have been meticulously investigated in the market place. In no time at all the concoction of mint, molten sugar, and green
tea had been stewed, tasted, rejected, and was stewing some more. Now the little metal teapot itself was on the
Mishma
. Everyone's eyes watched it curiously.

Shortly before nightfall Achmed summoned Caroline outside. Ostensibly, it was to mount guard over
her while she made use of a convenient bush. More practically, it was to claim, and smoke a surreptitious cigarette. When both needs were accomplished, he suggested that they call on his grandmother, who he said was dying.

Pale surfaces found curious incandescence beneath a sky that was without a moon: the peeled trunk of a lone eucalyptus; scar tissue on laurel leaves. Their way led along undulating sandy tracks and the dried out bed of a stream. Outcrops of rock and gnarled bushes assumed dramatic prominence in the deep, indigo darkness. Dogs were startled into furious barking. The mongrel assembly seemed to have been recruited from medieval prints of damnation, and had little resemblance to creatures Caroline had seen before. It was easy to imagine pack instinct as still governing their deployment about a stranger. This sense of brute calculation frightened her. In contrast, communication between humans seemed to have ceased with nightfall. Other travellers passed them silently.

 The old woman could well have been dying. She lay alone in a tidy house, larger than Achmed's. Beside her floor-mat a kerosene lamp was burning, and there was a small
morvah
, an ornamental wooden shelf incorporating a mirror, set high on the lime-washed wall. After some semblance of formal greeting, Caroline abandoned protocol in favour of smoking a cigarette on the open threshold. Achmed was clearly emotionally involved with a relation whom he would most probably never see again. It was better that she literally turn her back. But she was no sooner settled on the doorstep looking out into the night than two infants materialised from the darkness before her. They stood a second in wild indecision, then squeezed their way past her into the house like frightened mice. One of them seized and kissed the elbow of her pullover as he did so, impelled, as it might have been, by a magical afterthought.

'Why did the child do that?' Caroline asked, as they walked back.

'He thought you have
baraka
,'
Achmed said.

'Do I have?'

'I don't know Achmed shrugged carelessly. He thought little about these things in the city. Like the
djnoun
,
it was a power one only remembered in the
bled
.

At the house, the two small girls had returned with the goat. Achmed greeted them with unabashed delight, and the three tormented each other boisterously in the wandering lamp-light. Sometimes one of the little girls, over-excited and close to tears, would take refuge in her mother's skirts. Hassan, although big enough to have his feet forced into shoes which Achmed produced from his bundle, fed loudly at the breast. The dresses Achmed had brought for his step-sisters were folded away into a large wooden box, which was the house's only item of furniture, and the second pyramid of sugar, and the packets of tea, went to join them.

Caroline elected to buy a chicken from a neighbour who was said to have some, and Achmed was dispatched to fetch it. Its improbable cost—something like ten shillings—struck her as a not unreasonable exploitation of the Nazarene. When the boy returned with the trussed fowl, a conference was at once convened. The family maintained that the bird could not be killed now because it must be alive for Caroline to take back to Tanja, in a month's time, or whenever she chose to leave them. With growing desperation and lessening charm Caroline continued to insist that the bird was food for immediate consumption. Lunch had been bread dipped in warm olive oil, and she doubted whether the family had eaten anything more substantial for weeks. Certainly the prettier of the little girls had some body-building to do before she could begin to fill the dusty section of American flour sack in which she was dressed. Bad manners finally prevailed. An hour later the chicken was sectioned and simmering on the
mishma
.
Achmed told long, scandalous stories about the police, filled with meaningless brutalities, which for him, apparently, defined their sole function. A lurid description of the murder seemed to Caroline to be inevitable. But Achmed made no reference to it at all. Similarly, there was no mention of his own radically altered state.

A plate was produced for Caroline, and this she didn't refuse. However she managed to resist the suggestion that two-thirds of the chicken be placed upon it for herself alone. The family ate in silence, tearing handfuls of unleavened bread from flat discs like cold, limp pancakes, and dipping them in the common bowl Mocktar passed choice bits of chicken across to his children, eating little himself. There was no excitement or anticipation among them. Perhaps they were now near to sleep. Caroline had the feeling that she herself, and the meal, were things that had been written, and so might be received without surprise. She thought of the advent of a chicken
in her own childhood: how claims to particular portions or quantities were either roundly stated or else implied beneath a righteous innuendo, both of which were necessary ritual play, and yet had disguised real contention, whose roots it would have been unedifying to probe. Fatomha and Melika's faces were beautiful in their patience. And yet this composure troubled Caroline. The resignation seemed a product of sentience rather than of thought. Both children's ankles were swollen from chronic malnutrition, and they were all very young; far younger than their brash city brother.

The sleeping arrangements were easily made. Caroline occupied a raised platform, hard against the wall, and some two feet above the ground, while the family disposed themselves in a row on the central floor area. With the hurricane lamp extinguished, Mocktar smoked a last pipe of
kif
, blowing the still sizzling ball of ash out on to the earth not covered by tile straw matting. After that Caroline fell asleep, to be woken in the early hours by Hassan's hungry feeding at the breast, and an unprecedented agony from insect bites.

The picture of the lions Achmed had torn from the book in Frederick's shop lay carefully preserved in his bundle. He had not wanted to show it to his stepsisters while Caroline was there. Now he thought that this didn't matter, and that he would show it to them despite her. What he mustn't discuss with the English woman was the question of his inheritance. Waking in the early morning, he lay thinking about this. The English people he knew in Tanja liked him. Perhaps he should go to England where there would be more. Jay was in London. He wondered whether he knew enough English to ask for Jay around the shops. In London there were special gaols for boys which had sheets. But they said the policemen had no guns. If they beat him up with knives or whatever they used, then he'd have to go into the hills. Perhaps he could save up enough money to take a bus to Hollywood. He tried to envisage buses so big that people sat on two storeys and the driver had to climb stairs to collect the money. And where did he drive from? Then they said that in London or America the king was a woman. He'd seen her picture on stamps. She had a husband who didn't count. That could only mean he was a criminal they'd sent out of London into the hills. Or perhaps he was impotent. He must ask Raphael whether America was a part of London. If they were different Raphael might know which place it was better for him to get a job as a waiter in. Then all he would need would be enough money to get to London, and a passport so that the police would let him out of Morocco. Achmed knew several grown men who were not criminals who had tried for years to get passports from the police. But he was pretty sure that the gold he wore about his neck would be sufficient to buy one. But before all that Frederick's sister would come, and they must sell the shop. She would know who to sell it to.

Achmed was roughly roused by his father. They had no
fham
he said, and Achmed must go to the charcoal-burner's and buy some. Mocktar thought the Nazarene woman might have money. Peremptorily Achmed asked Caroline for one dirham, and grumbled off on his errand.

Caroline's embarrassment was acute. It was less social awkwardness at having so openly to apply Caladryl to the excruciatingly itching lumps which her hosts' ticks had raised in lurid, nobbly belts about her waist and thighs, than that the family, mystified by the extent to which her skin had reacted, must all minutely inspect the damage with unabashed curiosity; and an incredulousness devoid of any sympathy. She was almost in tears of rage as they dumbly watched her squeezing the last vestiges of ointment from the flattened tube. It was then that Mocktar's wife muttered something to him in Chleugh, and he reached his hand up into the brushwood ceiling low above their heads. What he produced was a nearly expended tube of penicillin eye-ointment, perhaps an inch long. This he tentatively offered to Caroline. She could only smile away the extreme irritation of her skin as quite recovered. The dated antibiotic was, in any case, dead by three years; but this she felt unequal to explaining. The medicine, for trachoma presumably, went back to its hiding place in the rafters. At that moment Achmed returned, and was called upon to explain the mysterious disease that had overtaken their guest's person. Why, Achmed wanted to know, had he not been
similarly affected, He peeled off his shirt to make closer inspection. Caroline, anxious now to end the whole enquiry, suggested drily that perhaps he was stale, familiar meat for the parasites, while the was something new, and altogether better tasting.

Achmed produced the coloured illustration of the lions. The shiny paper seemed to fascinate the little girls. Curiously, they ran their fingers over its surface, tilted it towards the light, tried, to Achmed's fury, to erase the picture with their knuckles. Eventually Achmed put the severed page possessively back in his bundle. They were, he said wisely, a cat as big as a cow. What's more they ate people, and could walk in tonight. There were probably rivers between the lions and the house. But they could swim rivers. He didn't think they could swim seas, but then he didn't think there were any seas they would have to cross. And suddenly Caroline found herself called upon to adjudicate as to just how many kilometres away the lions really were. She guessed four thousand; but this produced only dumb stares, as if she had somehow failed their expectations of her. There was the Sahara between themselves and the lions, she explained; and the great sands were more than fifty times bigger than all Morocco. They couldn't possibly cross it. Eventually, and quite unknowingly, she fell back on the descriptive device Frederick Halliday had used when defining to Achmed the distance his sister was from Tangier. 'Perhaps seven days and seven nights in a taxi,' she said. Then that wasn't as far away as Pretoria, Achmed said at once; and when Caroline asked him about this sudden access of knowledge, he simply looked vague. 'But the lions can run as fast as a taxi,' he said, sensing that some threat had been made to his original point. And they never get tired.