An Echo of Scandal

by Laura Madeleine

  ‘If I have to clear tables, I’ll get this blouse dirty and Morales will beat me for it on Sunday,’ I complained. Elena said nothing. Her face, always paler than mine, was paler than ever.

  Caterina eyed us critically as she led us along the corridor. ‘Be good,’ she said, and her grip was hard. ‘Don’t talk back.’ She stopped outside the parlour. ‘Don’t cry.’

  She pushed open the door. Inside were the four gentlemen from downstairs, almost done with a bottle of sherry. Abruptly, I realized what they wanted us for.

  I couldn’t move. I had always known that I would have to do this one day, but Caterina and the others were older, fifteen or sixteen at least. Elena grabbed my hand, dragging me with her into the room as the door swung shut behind us.

  I forgot how to do anything but breathe. One of the gentlemen was saying something, gesturing to a pair of chairs at the table. He was smiling, his whiskers damp with sweat and spirits. Another man eyed us, mouth occupied with his cigar, another blinked rapidly, as if he could not see us through the smoke.

  ‘Señoritas,’ greeted the first, ‘have a drink with us. Do you like sherry?’

  Elena’s face was red to the eyes as she nodded, looking down at the tablecloth. I gripped her hand and stared into the corner. At the edge of my vision, I saw a little glass, brimming with sherry, pushed in my direction.

  ‘We have ordered some pasteles from the kitchen,’ the blinking man said, ‘and we have these for you. Sweet things, for sweet girls.’

  He pushed a box across the table. It looked expensive, creamy pink cardboard decorated with golden swirls and the words Delicia Turca.

  Elena was still staring at the cloth. ‘Gracias,’ she whispered.

  ‘Well,’ the first man said, ‘salud.’

  I watched as Elena reached out and took hold of the glass before her. Her hands were trembling, and the sherry slipped over the rim on to her fingers. As she raised it, she glanced at me. Please, her look said, don’t leave me alone. That’s what made me copy her. I picked up my own glass and raised it to my lips and drank the sherry down in one.

  It was disgustingly sweet.

  The men were laughing at something. I looked up at last and found that it was me they were mocking. At my side, Elena still held her sherry. She had only sipped it.

  ‘That one might be dull but she’s got fire,’ the man with the cigar observed. ‘That’s how they make them on the streets: slow in every way but one.’

  His lip curled at me. My stomach gave a lurch and a shudder, as if my guts were creeping upwards. I couldn’t take my eyes from his starched white collar, from his beautiful suit. I kept wondering what he’d done to get those fine clothes.

  ‘Come here,’ he said.

  I wouldn’t have moved if Elena hadn’t let go of my hand, so abruptly that I swayed. It was as if she was backing into a corner without moving an inch, leaving me exposed. I stood, cold sweat on my back and a strange, bitter taste in my mouth. If I ran, could I reach the door? If I did, where would I go? My guts squirmed, climbing higher, making their way towards my heart, to wrap it, to shield it, to keep it from being crushed by the world.

  When I stood before him, the man stared at me critically, chin to toe. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

  I opened my mouth to tell him ‘thirteen’, but what came out was not sound. Instead, a sudden rush of vomit surged from the guts that were now in my chest, hot and furious, all over the man’s beautiful shirt front.

  Through my stinging eyes, I saw his face and almost laughed. Then he was shouting in disgust and kicking me away from him, screaming that I was diseased. I fell back against the table, and something shattered, but I couldn’t see what; all I could think about was the nausea and my roiling guts as I vomited again. I heard voices, Morales’ voice, saying that I wasn’t diseased, just a stupid girl who wasn’t used to drink, and that if the gentlemen came with her, she would have the girls arrange baths for them, and another bottle of Tío Pepe, on the house.

  When the scraping of chairs and curses finally stopped, I looked up, my lips shaking, my nose and eyes streaming. Only Morales remained, and Ifrahim, who must have arrived amidst the chaos, the tray of pasteles forgotten in his hand.

  Morales hit me then, harder than she ever had before. It made me bite my tongue, but the wash of blood tasted clean, after the sherry and the sick.

  ‘You disgusting maggot,’ she said, wiping her hand on the tablecloth. ‘I always knew you’d cost me.’

  I risked a glance at her face. The anger was gone, or trampled down deep where it didn’t show.

  ‘Out,’ she said.

  I tried to speak, and choked. She didn’t mean out of the room, but the inn. It was impossible. The men, the clients, they might simply get up and leave, walk out of the gates and into the world, but I wasn’t like them. I had no money, no family, no name or friends to call upon. There wasn’t anywhere else for me.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please, I’ll work.’

  ‘You think they’ll want you after that?’ She looked at me, still revolted. ‘What use do I have for a thing like you anyway? Your youth is the only thing of value, and if I can’t sell that …’ She turned towards the door. ‘Ifrahim, make sure she—’

  ‘Camila.’

  For all my pain and terror and sickness, I remember being stunned by that. I had never heard anyone call Morales by her first name. She stopped moving. I couldn’t see her face from where I stood, but I could tell her eyes were fixed on Ifrahim’s.

  ‘I’ll use her in the kitchen,’ he said, softly, the way he always spoke. ‘God knows I could do with the help.’ He winced and shifted his chest, and I knew his heart was paining him. Morales knew it too, because I saw her lower her head a fraction, as if to look through his ribs. ‘If she doesn’t work,’ he said, ‘I’ll throw her out myself.’

  I don’t know what passed between them in that silence. I could only see Ifrahim’s face, his brown eyes betraying nothing as he held Morales’ gaze.

  She never agreed. Never disagreed either, just turned her head and walked from the room.

  It was Ifrahim’s heart that caused him to speak for me that day, I am sure of it. In the kitchen, he helped me clean my face and gave me a lump of precious ice from the box to soothe my tongue, and let me sleep in front of the stove, so that I wouldn’t have to tread the corridors of the inn, where the men might still be at their business.

  The next morning, early, he set me to chopping onions and peeling potatoes, while he went to the plaza to argue for meat. Vegetable tears stung my eyes as I worked, and I wished that they were tears of love, so I could give them to Ifrahim.

  That day, we made tortilla. We used eggs from the market and oil from the huge canister by the stove and my own cut onions and potatoes. And when I saw the gusto with which the guests greeted those plates of tortilla, when I saw them cramming it down with bread and beer, a strange realization crept into my mind.

  Without us, those people would have gone hungry. Ifrahim and I kept them in their seats; we held them there spellbound with only a few humble ingredients. It was a kind of magic – slender but potent – and I understood for the first time that Ifrahim lived by it. Being a cook gave him authority; he wasn’t like the men upstairs, with their clean shirts and their deep pockets, but he had a control they didn’t, and he could wield it in ways they never would have imagined.

  Later, my hands cracked from scrubbing soap and blistered from the kitchen knife, I moved my things out of the room I had shared with Elena. I can’t say exactly what made me do it, only the knowledge that something had shifted for us both. She did not look at me while I collected my few clothes, only sat on the edge of the bed, holding the hem of a beautiful white lace mantilla between her fingers. I supposed it was a gift from the señor with the cigar. The box of Turkish Delight was there too, open beside her. They were untouched save for one, chewed and glistening, spat out amongst the others.

  ‘Take them away,’ she said, when she saw
me looking, ‘I don’t want them.’

  I didn’t want them either but I picked them up, chewed lump and all. I thought about giving them to Ifrahim, in thanks, but I knew it wouldn’t be right. I burned them instead, in their pretty box, until the whole kitchen smelled of animal bones and roses.

  I slept in the kitchen every night after that, on an ancient truckle bed wedged next to the stove. On colder nights, I’d wake to find the inn’s cats tailoring themselves to my body, beneath my arms, against my neck, in the gap between my knees, purring for warmth. I didn’t mind them. They had fleas, but they kept the rats away. With them, and Ifrahim in his storeroom near by, I felt safe.

  I told him that one night, a few weeks after he’d spoken for me. We had finished our labours in the kitchen, the inn gates were closed, and everyone else had moved upstairs, to sleep or entertain. He’d nodded slowly.

  ‘There’s safety here,’ he agreed. ‘Cooking saved my life.’ He took a drag on his pipe then, and looked at me through the stove light. ‘Feed them, Ale,’ he said softly. ‘Feed them well and they will want you, they will need you. Make them forget you’re a girl and think of you instead as a kitchen-thing, a duende, a stove-spirit. Then, they will want you for your usefulness, and leave you be.’

  We looked at each other in the silence. The memory of Morales’ words hung between us, and I shifted, hunching further beneath the kitchen smock, willing my growing breasts to remain flat, to stay away. In that moment I wished I was Ifrahim’s son; I wished we truly were kitchen-spirits, untouchable and free. But I wasn’t, and we weren’t. Ifrahim closed his eyes, and I could tell he too was thinking about his body, his heart made of guts. He was thinking about the day it would unravel, and take his life with it.

  But before that day, he taught me everything he could. He taught me how to make a batter and coat chunks of aubergine and drop them into hot oil. I got burns from that – my forearms and hands speckled with red marks – but it was worth it. Because when the platters went out, drizzled with molasses, I smiled to see people gobbling the morsels, burning their tongues and saying hoh hoh and reaching for their wine. I had done that. I had burned them, as surely as if I’d walked up and singed their tongues with a coal. The thought made me almost savage with delight.

  I didn’t realize it fully at the time, but by teaching me to cook, Ifrahim was also teaching me how to live, how to carve a space for myself in a world that didn’t want me. He taught me how to bewitch people; how to change the course of their thoughts – if only for an evening. Our ingredients were humble; salt and fruit, meat and oil and wine. But Ifrahim could spin them into a hundred different pleasing shapes.

  ‘Watch them close, and they will tell you what they want, Ale,’ he whispered, as we stood together at the kitchen door, watching a hard-faced English merchant in the courtyard, who sweated and fidgeted in his pressed suit, eyeing the girls with a nervous scowl. ‘They won’t even know they’re doing it, but watch them and they’ll spill all.’ He smiled down at me. ‘We’ll be their confessors.’

  That was the day he taught me to make sangria; a drink as old and false as rouge. He set me to chopping leftover fruit, the peaches that had burst from their skins at the market, slices of bitter orange and shrivelled grapes that no one wanted. I watched as he glugged Málaga over the lot, so that the fruit began to drink, sucking the sweet wine into withered flesh until it seemed full and luscious once more.

  ‘Now, how much brandy?’ he asked, nodding at the stern Englishman who sat in the courtyard, fretfully breaking toothpicks into shards.

  ‘A cup,’ I said slowly. ‘No, two cups.’

  Ifrahim smiled. ‘For a fish as cold as that, I believe we will need three.’

  The brandy was followed by red wine – cheap stuff from the cooking cask that would leave a headache, but no matter – and seltzer from the glass dispenser. Finally, Ifrahim stirred in his secret: a pinch of pepper, ‘to warm the heart’.

  That jug of drink turned the Englishman’s sour face pink, made his narrowed eyes big and bright. It undid his cravat and sent his hat flying across the dusty ground of the inn. It sent him upstairs with a girl on one arm and a second jug clutched to his chest. Most importantly, that drink reached into his pocket and emptied his wallet a note at a time with its sticky, red fingers.

  All of Ifrahim’s lessons were like that, two-faced as a conjuror’s coin. He taught me how to gild bad fish with pimentón, how to hammer horsemeat and soak it in wine until the stallion-loving bastards who slummed it at the inn would have made their own mothers swear it was beef. He taught me how to pilfer more than I paid for at the market, how to protest my innocence if I was ever caught being light-fingered and swear that it was a mistake, that it was only ‘the sun in my eyes’.

  Four years of those lessons. Milk puddings and how to cheat at Nap. Fish ‘à la française’ and how to tell a person’s wealth by what they ordered to drink.

  ‘Watch what comes out of their mouths, as well as what goes in,’ he told me, ‘and you will know them for what they are.’

  One January day, Ifrahim’s heart finally came loose, and he died. It left me terrified; I was seventeen, and that alone would surely be enough to make Morales rethink her decision – to give me the choice once more of a room upstairs, or the road.

  I would choose the road, I told myself fiercely in the night, as the cats whirred against my belly. I would take my chances outside the inn. But in reality, the prospect was unthinkable. The world was not kind to girls like me, with no money and no name. Even taking what Morales offered might be better than being forced into the same thing miles away, where no one, not even the cats knew me.

  So I tried to do what Ifrahim had instructed. I tried to make everyone forget that I was a young woman and become instead a kitchen-thing, a witch of cook-smoke and cleaver, of red face and blistered fingers and saffron-stained nails: desirable to no one, useful to everyone.

  I hid beneath the kitchen smock, wore Ifrahim’s rough work trousers and kept my hair tight beneath a scarf, so that if anyone did look at me, they might see a sullen, grubby boy, rather than a woman to be bought.

  It was the same with Morales. Whenever she saw me, I made sure my hands were full of something, red to the wrist with blood and gristle or slick with fish tripe and scales. I kept the kitchen ledger as regular as Ifrahim had, the columns of numbers neat. I blagged and bartered and stole more from the market than ever, to make her see that I could be economical, that I could run the kitchen better than anyone else.

  I asked for nothing, and Morales seemed to accept my presence. So long as I was more valuable at the stove than I was on my back, so long as I charmed and conned the clients with food and drink and kept the accounts straight, I would be safe.

  At least, that was what I told myself. In truth, I knew my safety wouldn’t last, just as Ifrahim had always known that the knots of his heart would slip and tumble back into guts in the end.

  I just never imagined it would happen the way it did. I never imagined that everything – myself included – would change, so unrecognizably, for ever.

  Tangier

  July 1978

  It was the call to prayer that woke him. For a bewildering moment, he thought it was morning. But the air smelled wrong for that; it still held the heat and the dust scuffed up by the day’s passage.

  Seven in the evening, then. He opened an eye. He was lying on his hard, narrow bed, still fully dressed. The muezzin’s chant crackled and echoed from a loudspeaker on the nearby rooftop and for a long moment he kept still, just listening. It was all drifting back to him. Norton, with his whisky and sodas and smokes in the El Minzah, shuffling home in a careless haze, managing to avoid Madame Sarah for long enough to get into his room. There was something he didn’t want to do, he remembered that. Whatever it was, he’d thought a nap would help.

  Blinking hard, he sat up. His tongue was powdered with the lingering taste of cigarettes, stomach a tight ball of wax. After a moment, he made himself s
tand and open his door a crack, peering along the corridor and out on to the roof terrace. Madame Sarah sometimes sat up here and smoked when she thought no one was watching, but now it was deserted. He stepped out beneath the sky.

  A haze hung over the city, ochre-blue with evening. The call had finished, and from somewhere near by came the sound of a radio playing a French pop song. He took the lid off the water container, dipped the bowl and drank. It was warm and stale and a little plasticky, but it washed the sandpaper from his tongue, made his headache retreat a few paces. Another bowlful went over his neck and head. He used another to wash his hands, and felt better.

  The second he stepped back into his room, a reminder of the thing he had to do – the thing he didn’t want to do – was sitting there, waiting for him. He stared. Orange and white, the keys a little dirty, a sheet of paper flopping back. His Hermes Baby. The only thing of value he had left.

  The page in it was half covered in type, abandoned mid-sentence. He ripped it out and let it fall to the floor, on to a pile of other sheets. You’re not writing anyway, he thought as he extricated the cover from under the bed. So what the hell use is a typewriter?

  Madame Sarah was in the kitchen, clattering a tray, preparing tea for herself and for Pierre, the other lodger. Pierre was a teacher, always prompt with his rent, always neatly dressed. Madame Sarah treated him like another son. As Sam crept past, Aziz – Madame Sarah’s youngest – looked up and caught his eye. Sam had bought his loyalty early on with an old football shirt. The child was wearing it now as he sat eating a peach, CONNECTICUT HUSKIES emblazoned in white across the worn blue cotton. Sam put his finger to his lips as he edged towards the door. Aziz nodded solemnly.