Dark Places

by Evans, Jon

  We all stared silently into the guttering embers of the fire.

  "Lawrence?" Nicole asked, her voice barely audible.

  "Sorry," Lawrence said, shaking his head. "I've been lucky. Never had anything that bad happen to me. Not even close."

  "Steve?"

  Steve shook his head. "I don't know, mate," he said. I didn't think I had ever heard him sound serious before. "I just don't know. There was this one time… "

  He hesitated.

  "What happened?" Lawrence asked.

  "Well," Steve said. "There was this bit of a bloody misunderstanding, see? So I spent a couple years up in Darwin. And this one time, about midway through, there was another bloody cock-up and they went and blamed me for it, so I went and spent a few weeks helping build this road across the arse end of the world up there. Bloody hot it was. And the flies, Christ. But I'd gotten to be mates, a bit like, with one of the overseers, see? Fixed up his bike for him on the side. Old Triumph, it was, classic piece of work. So this one time, I got him to take me out, before dawn like, and bring this eskie full of ice cream to where they picked us up at the end of the day. Just as a treat for all the mates I was working with. And the whole day, I reckon it was the hottest fucking day of my life, I was telling them all about it this bloody big eskie full of ice cream waiting at the end of the day." He sighed and looked forlorn. "But I'd forgotten to lock down the eskie, hadn't I? And something got in there. Roos or camels or I don't know what. And when we got there, all excited like, the eskie was open and all the ice cream had melted."

  He fell silent.

  After a moment Nicole said, incredulously, "That's the worst thing that ever happened to you?"

  Steve nodded tragically.

  "Losing your ice cream? That was your worst moment? Didn't you get stabbed once in prison? Didn't you tell me once that your father left you when you were eight?"

  "Oh, sure," Steve said. "I've been in my share of scraps, and I took a shiv once, and my dad left me young, and my mum drank too much. But she was a good mum still, and he probably wouldn't have been much of a bloody father so I reckon that all worked out all right. No, that wasn't so bad. But when I saw that empty eskie, after telling all my mates about the treat I had for them. Well." He sighed. "Bit of a disappointment, that was. Bit of a bloody big — what?"

  For we had all started laughing. Once we started we couldn't stop, and eventually Steve joined in, and we all laughed until we had tears in our eyes. Looking back I guess it was the first time I had laughed since Laura's death. And the last for months thereafter.

  * * *

  The Moroccan ferry system had grown no more efficient in the last two years. "Welcome to Africa," Lawrence said dryly when we finally cast off, ninety minutes late, "please drop your watches over the side as they will only serve to confuse you for the next five thousand miles."

  Most of the hundred or so passengers were returning Moroccans. Maybe coming home to their families from their backbreaking agricultural jobs in Portugal and Spain, maybe just returning after a day of shopping in Europe. There were a dozen or so backpackers, but no overland truck. I was relieved at that. It would have made the nostalgia so intense as to be actually painful.

  We got our passports stamped by a bored official, maybe twenty years old, who was engrossed in his calculus homework. Then we crowded to the front of the boat to watch the sun set over the Atlantic. It was a glorious sight, a huge red disc disappearing beneath the endless ocean to the west, the pale half-moon rising to the east behind us, and the coasts clearly visible five miles on either side. Gibraltar and Morocco, Europe and Africa; the Pillars of Hercules. We stayed for a long time, the salt Atlantic wind in our hair, until the coasts were visible only as broken chains of light, we could no longer see the dark water that the ship surged through, and the sky had filled with stars.

  We smoked incessantly. Lawrence made increasingly catty comments about it, starting with "I would have thought you were all smart enough to have quit by now," and moving up to "A filthy habit for filthy people." We knew it was mostly in good fun. Just like the old days.

  It was nearly midnight when we finally arrived in Tangiers. A bad old town. Once upon a time it had been an International Zone with no real laws to enforce, and it still maintained a lot of that anything-goes, watch-your-back atmosphere. The moment the gangplank dropped a huge shoving contest began, and continued all the way through customs, where an officer plucked the five of us from a scrum of grimly determined Moroccans and opened a desk just for us. I felt bad about the reverse racism, but not bad enough to turn down the special treatment. Which probably went for all of us.

  Once outside a sea of violently aggressive taxi drivers accosted us and demanded our business. We picked the first one who said "please." It's an arbitrary rule, but it beats no rule at all. He took us into the winding streets of the medina and to the Pension Palace, a crumbling but ornately majestic hostel near the Petit Socco crossroads. Naturally he initially told us it was closed and he knew another place at a very special price, but I think when we all broke out laughing he realized that that particular dog was not going to hunt.

  We took four rooms, locked our bags inside, and went to the cafes of the Petit Socco.

  "God, I forgot that about this place," Lawrence said sorrowfully as we sat down. "They're not going to have any beer, are they?"

  "I'm sure if you ask nicely and wave a couple of hundred-dirham notes around they'll be more than happy to bring you a cold six-pack of San Miguel from somewhere… " I said.

  "That's all right. I seem to remember they'll serve you in Marrakesh. One dry night shouldn't kill me," he said, as if trying hard to convince himself of this.

  We shooed off all the would-be guides and ordered mint tea, in French. We could have used Spanish, and probably English if we had to, all three were tourist languages here. It tasted nothing like the mint tea in Nepal; the mint was the same, but here in Morocco the tea was so supersaturated with sugar that it is opaque even before they add the mint. It is no mystery why most Moroccan men of a certain age have rotting teeth.

  "It feels so odd to be here," Nicole said.

  "Always a bit odd to go back somewhere," Steve agreed.

  "That's not really what I mean," Nicole said. "I mean it's odd to be here for… ah, hell. It's really fucking upsetting to be here to kill a man, even if he does deserve it. And Lawrence, don't you dare call me a weak sister," as he opened his mouth.

  "No," he said. "I was going to agree."

  "Cold feet?" Hallam asked.

  Lawrence shook his head. "Not that. It's just, it's a serious thing, you know? I think our decision is well-taken, but it's a serious decision, and let's not pretend that it's not. It is upsetting."

  "I've never done it before," Steve said. "I don't mind saying I'm not bloody looking forward to it either. I'm thinking of it as like pulling a bloody tooth."

  "You won't need to." I hesitated, searching for the right words. "I brought you here. I'm the one he came after. I'm the one who should finish it."

  "You didn't drag us off at gunpoint," Nicole said. "We're all in this together now."

  "Right to the end," Lawrence agreed.

  "It's… " Hallam began. We all fell silent as he found the right words. "It's not the end of the world. I reckon I'm the voice of experience here for… the deed in question… and the sad truth is it's not that difficult a thing. Either to do or to live with. Not saying that it's easy, or that it should be taken lightly, but… it's a lot easier than walking straight after a Dixcove spacecake."

  We all laughed at that.

  "A lot easier than finding a beer in Mauritania," Lawrence added.

  "A lot easier than rescuing an abandoned cookpot full of lentils," from Nicole.

  "A lot easier than crossing the border into bloody Nigeria," Steve said.

  "A lot easier than the Ekok-Mamfe road," I threw in.

  "A lot easier than climbing Mount Cameroon."

  "A lot easier than shop
ping in Bamako."

  "A lot easier than surviving food poisoning in Djenne."

  "A lot easier than me trying to squeeze into a bloody tro-tro."

  "A lot easier than spin bowling in coconut cricket."

  "A lot easier than getting a new passport in Burkina Faso."

  We raised our glasses and clinked our mint teas together, laughing. But when the laughter ended there were no smiles left on our faces.

  The next morning we bought train tickets for Rabat. With a few hours yet to kill we went for a wander around Tangiers, to see what we could see. We saw sheep grazing peacefully on a hillside in the middle of the city; shoe shiners by the dozen; stairways and streets and tunnels and alleys branching at every angle and incline; the uttermost edge of Europe, seen through a salt-laden wind from the ramparts of the Casbah. We saw decay everywhere, crumbling walls and pitted roads, as if the city had been crumbling for a good fifty years. It probably had.

  The train left only twenty minutes late. It was only three-quarters full, but there was little room, because most of the women carried enough goods to choke an army beneath their voluminous robes, doubling their width and making them waddle like overstuffed ducks. We rattled past rolling green countryside, farms fenced by walls of cacti, black bulls grazing so slowly they seemed like statues as we passed. We were paced by a flock of doves for a good half-hour.

  We changed at a station called Sidi-Kacem, where we had to wait for an hour because the connecting train was light. The station was in view of an oil rig, its highest spire topped by an eternal flame that burned away the runoff gas. There were orange trees all around and Lawrence climbed up into one and picked enough for us all. The smell reminded me of Florida.

  We nearly missed Rabat station, where we were told we had almost missed our connecting train to Marrakesh, and we ran to the wrong platform and then the right platform and frantically pulled ourselves into the train. "It's just so wrong to be in a hurry in Africa," Nicole panted. And indeed another fifteen minutes elapsed before the train finally shook off its slumber and began to trudge along the parallel iron tracks. By the time we finally got to Marrakesh it was nearly ten o'clock and we were all exhausted even though we'd spent most of the day sitting around waiting for something to happen.

  We weren't up for wandering about the medina looking for a lodge so we took rooms on Boulevard Mohammed V, which was the main drag, just as it was in all the other towns in Morocco. It's always good civic policy to name the most significant street after your eternally-beloved king. It was a very Westernized lodge, with clean sheets and wallpaper, very boring after the crumbling courtyard and ornate filigree of the Pension Palace last night. We had a beer apiece in the common room, more out of habit than need, and crashed.

  I was woken by a loud banging on my door and I started out of bed, alarmed, and was frantically looking around for a weapon when Nicole called out from the other side of the door: "Time for your OJ, Mr. Wood! Stall Number Nine awaits!"

  I groggily pulled some clothes on and joined the others in the hall. We crossed the street and headed straight for the heart of Marrakesh, the Djamme el-Fnaa, the great central square between the medina and the modern city. I was amazed by how well we all remembered the geography here. None of us had been here since our visit two years ago, which had only lasted ninety-six hours, most of which had been spent very drunk.

  By night the Djamme was an intoxicating melange of food stalls, sword swallowers, henna tattooists, snake charmers, dancers, gamblers, hashish salesmen, and buskers who were odd even by Moroccan standards — I wondered if Cigarette Eating Man was still performing. But in the morning it was crowded by some thirty stalls selling fresh orange juice for about a quarter per glass. Stall Number Nine, we all remembered well, gave you an extra half-glass for your ten dirhams. Unspeakable luxury. We added some fresh-baked baguettes and pain au chocolat, and breakfasted like emperors.

  This was the day that Morgan was due to fly into Casablanca. Nicole's mate was supposed to watch for him at Stansted to see whether or not he was on the plane.

  We went to the bus station and bought overnight bus tickets to Todra Gorge, which would give us a full day to prepare for him there. We spent the intervening time wandering around the medina, which as always reminded me of a line from that old video game Zork: "You are in a maze of narrow, twisting passages, all alike." Narrow, high-walled, cobblestoned streets, lined by countless alcove-sized shops selling leather, ornaments, carpets, spices, textiles, hats, daggers, food, medicine, musical instruments, live animals, every article imaginable. Kids played soccer, shopkeepers hawked their wares, hustlers attached themselves to us like leeches. It was dizzying and fascinating and a little bit frightening in its teeming, noisy, unmappable confusion.

  We didn't talk much. I think we were all thinking mostly about what it was we had come here to do. We didn't want to talk about it directly, and it didn't leave room for much levity. Nobody bought anything or even tried to have some fun haggling with a shopkeeper. Mostly we just talked about things that we observed or nostalgically called each other's attention to some reminder from two years before. I felt impatient. I wanted today and tomorrow to be over with, and I particularly wanted the day after that to have ended. I think the others felt the same. I smoked more cigarettes than I ever had in a single day, and Steve and Hallam and Nicole were puffing away at a record pace too. At this rate we'll all die of lung cancer before he even shows up, I thought.

  At one point we passed a tall pretty dark-haired European girl in the medina, and for one crazy moment I thought it was Talena here to join me. I couldn't help thinking that she might come to find me here the same way she had in Indonesia. I imagined her sneaking up on me from behind as I walked through the medina, tapping me on the shoulder, me turning around to see her there with a fondly amused smile beneath those mesmerising blue eyes. A nice fantasy. But I knew it would never happen. She had made it very clear that she wanted no part of this. I wished I had some excuse to call her. But I didn't really have anything to say, and I was far from certain that she wanted to hear from me. Later, I told myself. When it's all over. When I get home.

  * * *

  Laura and I had our first actual one-on-one conversation on a rooftop cafe overlooking the Djamme el-Fnaa. I was sipping a Coke and writing postcards, after which I planned to go meet a gang of the others in the nearest hotel that served beer. My subconscious must have recognized her when she walked in, because I looked up for no reason and saw her enter the cafe. She saw me, smiled, and sat down at my table.

  "Hi," she said. "What are you writing?"

  I looked down at the postcard and pretended to read. "Dear Mom. I have been kidnapped by a strange cult of African nomads who are starving me of meat and forcing me to wash dishes and dig toilets. Please send military assistance. PS I need more money."

  She laughed. "Is that a dig at my strictly vegetarian cook group?"

  "It might be."

  "I didn't notice any steaks the last time your group cooked."

  "That's different. We're vegetarian out of sheer laziness. You guys do it out of principle. That's just wrong."

  "It's not my fault," she protested. "Melanie's the only real veggie in our group. The problem is she's also the only one who knows how to cook."

  "And whose fault is that?"

  "My lazy parents."

  "Well, as long as laziness is involved in some way all is forgiven," I said. "Where's Lawrence?"

  She grimaced and waved her hands in a curt who-knows-who-cares-I-wash-my-hands manner.

  "Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise?"

  She sighed. "It's not… well. He's a good man. And, it seemed like a good idea at the time… and… and I vote we change the subject."

  "Sure thing," I said, though I was very interested in the subject. I looked out at the Djamme for inspiration and saw one of the snake charmers. "You know what I think?" I asked. "I think the truck needs a pet. You know, a truck mascot. One of those big snakes ought to do nice
ly."

  "That's a really good idea," she said seriously. "It can ride under the floorboards. Or in the locker space. We can feed it rats. I don't know if we have any rats yet but we could start a rat farm, too, where they keep the spare engine parts."

  "Also we could feed it Michelle if she starts giving us any trouble."

  "Good point. And I bet she will. That girl has trouble written all over her. Or at least she will when the henna-tattoo salesmen are finished with her."

  "Let's do it," I said. "Sure, we could talk to everyone about it and have a vote, but like they say, easier to ask forgiveness than permission. We can go buy the snake right now and bring it back to the truck. I think Steve's on guard tonight. He'll never notice."

  "Even if he does he'll probably just think it's Michael," Laura said, and I barely managed to keep my expression rigid. "But what if it's shy? Then it will have to meet all these other people tomorrow. Poor thing will be psychologically scarred for life. I bet it's better off with small groups, so we should probably just go around tonight introducing it to people in ones and twos. You know, set it loose inside people's tents and hotel rooms."

  "That's an even better idea," I agreed.

  We nodded at each other in a serious, self-satisfied way before allowing two wide grins to creep onto our faces.

  "Thanks," she said. "I needed that."