Sam shrugged. ‘Spanish, more likely. Do you have anything smaller?’
‘What? Oh. No, I don’t. This is it. Just came from the bank, you see.’ He stared down into the wallet, as if it would magically sprout small change. ‘I don’t suppose he’d accept pounds?’
Sam grimaced. He already regretted coming over, but then again, there was that wallet …
‘Here,’ he said, pulling a few santimat from his pocket. ‘Let me.’
‘I couldn’t possibly …’ the young man began to protest, but Sam had already dropped the coins on to the waiter’s tray. The waiter nodded to him before walking off, rolling his eyes and shouting to a co-worker near the kitchens.
‘That was very decent of you,’ the young man said, collecting a leather briefcase. It seemed he wanted to be out of the café as fast as possible. ‘I can pay you back.’
‘It’s only a dirham,’ Sam murmured. Twenty-seven, he thought bleakly.
‘Nonsense. I’ll pay you back right now, if you come with me to my hotel. It’s just down the road. Surely they will have change.’
Stepping out of the café was like diving into a pool of colour and smell and noise. Sam sometimes felt as if he was swimming, when he walked the streets during the day, coming up for air when he stepped into a café or a bar or up to a rooftop. It was different at night, of course. But in the day, the city seethed. He watched the young Englishman sweating in his suit as they walked. The man’s eyes kept darting everywhere, from the stray cat that washed itself at the edge of the kerb, to the old woman crouched in a doorway, her hands pushed out to them, her face creased by the world.
Did I look like him? Sam wondered. That mix of panic and concentration, all out of rhythm with the street? Probably, he thought. Amazing what a couple of months could do.
‘I’m Ellis, by the way.’ The young man was holding out a hand. ‘Ellis Norton.’
‘Sam Hackett.’ He shook quickly, conscious of the dirt beneath his nails. ‘You’re British?’
‘Yes.’ The man sounded breathless. ‘Arrived from London last night. You’re American?’
‘Got it in one.’
‘You seem to know your way around,’ Norton said, ducking past a group of women laden with shopping. ‘How long have you been in this hellhole?’
‘Here? A few months. Two, nearly three, I guess. I’ve lost track.’
‘I hope I get used to it.’ Norton stopped on the street, where two potted palms flanked a recessed door. ‘Well, this is me. Come in and I’ll get you that change.’ He glanced inside. ‘Actually, there’s a bar here too. Let me buy you something stronger, to say thanks.’
Sam stared at him, then beyond into the dark lobby, where a uniformed bellhop waited. The El Minzah was one of the good hotels. He shifted in the sticky espadrilles.
‘I’m not exactly dressed for it.’
For the first time, Norton seemed to look at him properly, eyes roaming from the tangled hair brushing his shoulders, to his jeans. ‘I’m sure that won’t matter,’ he said uncertainly. Then his eyes brightened. ‘Here,’ he said, loosening his tie and passing it over. ‘They won’t say a thing if you’re wearing that.’
Sam dropped the loop of fabric over his head, feeling stupid, knowing that he looked it too. The man must be desperate for company, he thought. About as desperate as I am for a proper drink.
He followed Norton into the lobby, trying not to duck his head. Inside, it was quiet, marble-cool. A record was playing somewhere, soft jazz. For a second the lobby and the streets seemed to curdle around him, like milk and orange. Norton was sighing in what sounded like relief, walking up a short flight of steps, and Sam had to follow.
He’d heard of the bar at the El Minzah, but had never been in. Too expensive. Not his scene. Ahead, he saw a cavernous space, where red carpets made the air drowsy with dust, barely disturbed by a breeze, despite the open windows. It was empty, except for a pair of older women who sat stiffly on a sofa, small glasses before them. It wasn’t yet noon.
‘God,’ said Norton, dropping into a chair. ‘What a day.’
Sam followed suit. He had the odd feeling that he had tripped, somewhere on his way up the Avenue Pasteur, and had fallen into a different reality. It was all too strange; Norton and his fat wallet, the stuffy bar with its promise of booze. What if the man was a fake and wanted something from him? He watched as Norton craned around to summon a waiter, and decided that he didn’t have the energy to care, not for an hour. Perhaps in that time, he’d work up the courage to ask about borrowing a few dirhams.
‘What’ll you have?’ Norton said, shucking off his jacket.
‘I don’t know.’ Sam’s head felt light from the coffee and the sugar and the lack of nicotine. ‘Are the beers cold here?’
‘No idea, but I’m having a whisky soda. Want one of those?’
Sam nodded. He’d never have ordered one himself.
‘Two whisky sodas,’ Norton told the waiter.
The waiter nodded blandly, and went away. Sam was just beginning to feel uncomfortable when Norton took out a packet of cigarettes. He accepted one eagerly.
‘So,’ Norton asked, settling back in his chair. ‘What brings you to Tangiers?’
His manner had changed entirely. Gone was the flustered youth, the anxiety. Here, he was at home. Old money, Sam thought. You could hear it in the way he said Tangiers the old-fashioned way, with an s, as if the city was more than itself, as if it was somehow plural. He took a drag on the cigarette, wondering how to answer Norton’s question. To someone else he might have said: ‘Just to be’, or ‘Just the road’, but those kinds of answers would sound ridiculous, here.
‘I’m a writer,’ he said cautiously.
The man’s eyes widened. ‘No, really? But so am I.’ He reached for his jacket, and pulled out a card.
ELLIS NORTON
JUNIOR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
INTERPRESS
‘This is my first job out,’ he said, watching with obvious pride as Sam read the card. ‘I wanted one of the bureaux in Paris or Rome, but then everybody does. A year in the trenches, they said, and I can move on to somewhere more civilized.’
Sam made a vague noise and offered the card back.
‘Keep it –’ Norton waved ‘– in case you want to get in touch.’
Sam pocketed it. He couldn’t imagine a world where he and Norton were regular drinking buddies, but then, being an ex-pat did strange things to people.
The whiskies and sodas arrived. Norton took a sip of his, then downed it, almost before the waiter had finished laying a napkin before Sam. ‘Bring another couple, would you?’ he said.
Unperturbed, the waiter nodded. He was obviously used to such behaviour. Sam took a sip of the drink. The whisky was strong, almost shocking, softened by the mineral dash of soda. There was something illicit about it, drunk on an empty stomach. A shiver ran down the back of his neck. It felt wonderful.
‘What do you write then?’ Norton was asking. ‘Don’t say you’re a journo too.’
‘No, I was never quick enough for that.’ He spun the ashtray a few times. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ he admitted.
‘A novel! A Great American one?’
Sam laughed. ‘I doubt it.’
‘Are you published?’
‘A few short stories.’ He concentrated on his cigarette. He wasn’t about to confess that the last time he’d sold anything was more than a year ago, and for a pittance. ‘I’ve been travelling, mostly. France, Spain, England. As research.’
That got Norton talking about his travels in Italy and Switzerland, the summer he’d spent in the south of France. Sam nodded along, finishing the first drink and starting work on the second, which disappeared far too quickly. He was starting to feel quite drunk.
‘One more?’ Norton asked, checking his watch. ‘I’ve got to find my way to the damn office, but that can wait until this afternoon. I’m told everyone lunches like the French, here.’
‘All right,’ Sam
said, accepting another cigarette. He was beginning to like Norton more. It was easy to let the chatter wash over him.
‘Must say, I’m glad I bumped into you,’ Norton said, when the third glasses were empty. ‘This has done me the world of good. I was feeling wretched in that café. But you can give me the lay of the land here, can’t you? Be my Dante through the inferno?’
‘Sure,’ Sam said, feeling a warm glow of booze and superiority. ‘There’s a little bar where ex-pats meet, I can take you there.’
‘You’re a pal.’ Norton pushed back his chair and fished the wallet from his jacket. ‘Must use the gents. Here, pay the waiter if he comes by.’ He handed over the fifty dirhams. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem this time, eh?’
Sam held the note in front of him as Norton hurried off towards the lavatories. The man was crazy, he had to be. There was nothing to stop Sam from pocketing the money and walking nonchalantly out of the door, never to be seen again. That much money would buy him another two weeks. His hand twitched towards his shirt pocket. If he was careful …
His hand fell back to the table. Norton might be an idiot, but he was a generous idiot. And Tangier was a small place. He sighed, and called the waiter over.
Have a Heart
Take a jigger of gin and a pony each of Swedish Punsch, fresh lime juice and imported grenadine. Shake the ingredients together in a well-iced glass, before straining. A drink of sharpness and spice.
Ifrahim used to have a phrase, for whenever I was cowardly or hesitant about something. ‘Ale,’ he would say – for he knew I preferred to be called that, rather than Alejandra – ‘Ale, hacer de tripas corazón.’
Ale, make a heart out of your guts.
I first remember him saying it when I was little, perhaps six or seven. I had tripped over in the yard and was crying to see blood on my knee. He sat me on the kitchen table, washed it off and told me solemnly to make a heart out of my guts. I didn’t understand him fully, and had wondered at the idea of my guts squirming up through my body to wrap around my heart. My heart must be too soft, I thought. That’s why it needed the guts to protect it. It was good advice to a child growing up in that place.
Ifrahim was the inn’s cook, and he had been there almost as long as I. Mama Morales hired him after she found out that María, the old cook, had been cheating her on prices and pocketing the difference. I don’t know what happened to María. People said that Morales paid a man to break her hands, but that might just be rumour.
Ifrahim was as different to María as could be. Where she was loud and sour he was quiet and gentle. He wore a faded red shirt and never opened his eyes too wide, as if it hurt to look at things. No one was sure where he came from, with his deep brown skin that seemed almost silver beneath, and his wiry, pepper-black beard. I once heard him say that his father was from Zanzibar, and was a sailor. One of the girls told me that his mother had been a fine French lady from Réunion Island, but that he had been given up, and raised by a ‘grandmother’ in Lisbon. Any of that was enough to make people at the inn sneer at him, especially Morales. For all her defiance of others, she was a fierce Spaniard, and a proud cordobesa, and that was why she despised me, I think, for my aimless blood.
Everyone wondered why she had hired Ifrahim, until we tasted his food. I was just a child, but I still remember it, that first meal. He served salmorejo; poor man’s food, made from bread too hard and tomatoes too soft to be of use. But Ifrahim’s salmorejo tasted different. Beneath the hot blue sky, that cool soup calmed and kindled at once; it bit with acid and licked with oil, rewarded us with salty little stars of ham. We wiped the bowls of every last trace, and all the while Ifrahim sat at the door of the kitchen, smiling quietly and shelling hard-boiled eggs. There was never any question of his employment, after that.
Later, I found out that Ifrahim had a bad heart and had been thrown out of the Foreign Legion on account of it. Sometimes, in the night he’d cry out and we would rush to where he slept in the storeroom to find him sweating and clutching at his chest. We would steady him, and spoon him oil and milk of magnesia until the racing began to slow, until his heart stopped trying to escape through his ribs. Perhaps it was an ill fit, too big or tender to last in our world.
Anything good I took from the inn, I took from Ifrahim. I wouldn’t be here now, speaking, if not for him. It was he who spoke for me, when not another soul would have.
I should explain. There are things you must be wondering about me, about the inn. You must have already guessed, with the little you know about her, that Mama Morales would not have kept me there for free.
Morales took guests and served meals and charged peasants and farmers to water and stable their mules while they were in town. She also kept girls, and that was where most of the inn’s money came from. About half a dozen year-round, who had to double up and share their beds with newcomers during the busy months. Most didn’t last too long, a year perhaps, or two. There were only five people who were constant: the old groom called Antonio who barely spoke, Ifrahim, when he came, Mama Morales and Elena and me.
Elena was Morales’ daughter.
People said she had hidden herself in Morales’ belly until it was too late to be rid of her, that even when Morales tried, the little thing wouldn’t be budged. She was a year older than me. Morales told me that if she hadn’t still been paying a woman to breastfeed Elena when I came along, I would’ve starved and died, for she certainly would not have fed me.
That was Morales for you.
The girls looked after Elena and me, and when we were old enough Morales sent us to school in the mornings, saying that she didn’t want ignorant lumps in her house who couldn’t figure a bill or read a name. The rest of the time we skivvied. Elena got an easier time of it, because she had fairer skin than me, and nice hands, and Morales didn’t want them spoiled by too much sun or hard work. It wouldn’t make a difference to mine, she observed.
I didn’t mind. Kitchen and stable, courtyard and storeroom, those were my domain. I didn’t like to venture up the stairs too often, on to the wooden balcony that surrounded the central yard, where the rooms were. If I did, it was only to collect chamber pots or laundry. I wasn’t fond of the sickly stab of violet perfume, covering the reek of men’s sweat and cologne, or the way they always forgot that the inn leaked sound like a sieve and we could all hear their noises, even through a closed door. I thought they were foolish, the men. Still, I couldn’t help but watch as they strolled uncaring along the corridor, their trousers half-buttoned and their jackets over their shoulders. Something made me want to follow them, to walk as they did, out into the night. There was a power in their lifted chins, in the way they paused at the edge of the street to light a cigarette, and though I imitated them in secret, I knew it was a power that could never be mine.
Elena spent more time upstairs than me, especially during the day, before business started. Then, she would let the girls fuss over her and make her up with waxy lipstick and powder, while I played with the kittens in the warm stink of the stables, or helped Ifrahim among the old cooking fat and fresh peelings of the kitchen. But at night, the pair of us shared a bed, in the smallest wedge-shaped room under the eaves, lulled to sleep by the creaking of the gate, the snorting of horses and the noises of the girl working the room next door.
It went on like that, slow winters and busy summers, morning lessons and chores and the smell of Elena’s hair against my nose at night, until my thirteenth year. That was when everything changed.
It happened during the feria, the festival of our Señora de la Salud: Our Lady of Health. Morales always laughed and said we should rename her Our Lady of the Health Inspector. It was May, our busiest month, and the city was overrun. People came in from all over to drink and dance at the festival; farmers, miners, factory workers, even people from as far away as Extremadura.
As a child, I’d been excited by the feria. Elena and I would run to the river to see the old, striped canvas tents go up, to watch the gitanos arrive to en
tertain the crowds with their wailing, roaring songs and their feverish guitars and clacking heels.
We’d have performances at the inn too, whether we wanted them or not. Motorcars from Granada and Seville would bring the swells, slumming it in fine clothes that they would ruin with sweat and wine. They’d drink and weep and turn their starveling eyes on the girls and the gitanos, and the air would become raw with smoke and lust and gut on wood, and by the end of the first evening, the whole of Córdoba would have lost its mind.
On the night it happened, there were four of them; four men determined to drink the deep wells of each other’s pockets dry. They were from Jaén, and I wondered why they should have come all the way to Córdoba, when they had their own feria at home. If I’d looked closer, I would’ve found the answer in their indifferent laughter, in their loosened clothes, in the way they sucked on their cigars and put their boots on the chairs and never once lowered their voices. They were here precisely because this was not their home; here, they had the freedom to act how they pleased.
The four of them had already spent a great deal of money when they asked to see Morales. Their request, whatever it was, did not take long to convey, for she soon came weaving through the crowded courtyard towards the kitchen door, where Elena and I were shirking our table-clearing duties, laughing as we watched a large gitano woman try to sing her throat right out of her mouth. We jumped up when Morales approached.
‘Go and wash and put your Sunday clothes on,’ she told us.
We stared at her. Elena was silent. I was the one to ask why.
‘Because I say so.’ She turned and beckoned over one of the older girls, ‘Caterina!’ I did not hear what Morales murmured in her ear.
Was it the heat of the night that made Caterina’s hand so slick in mine? ‘Why must we wash?’ I asked her, as she pulled us up the stairs. ‘No one is looking at us.’
‘Someone’s always looking,’ she said, and gave us both a push into our room. We did as we were told, with a cloth and pitcher of water. Grumbling, I scrubbed my face and neck, my underarms, and did Elena’s while she shrugged into her blouse. She had breasts now, mostly, whereas I only had vague swellings that sometimes hurt in the night.
An Echo of Scandal Page 2