I know where they put the bodies when they are in too much of a hurry to bury them. I know from stories about the conflicts Ali was always so interested in. Conflicts in our neighbouring countries, during what they now call the Arab Spring. Ali told me how his Berber cousins had fled violence and conflict between rebels and government forces, how many had attempted to escape on boats to Europe. Those who didn’t survive, he told me, his blue eyes flashing in anger, were simply tossed overboard into the sea. But where else is there to put a body that would otherwise begin to rot and smell and attract disease?
And so, because I have no choice, because I can guess what she will do to me if I don’t help her, I tell Dora, ‘We must put him in the river.’
‘I can’t bear to look at him,’ Dora says, and I follow her gaze and see that Max’s head, which I thought had simply bled a little, has in fact caved in at the top. There is stuff leaking from the gash – not just blood, other matter. I flinch with horror at the thought that it must be his brains.
I wretch, fighting back the urge to be sick, but I can’t look away. I stare at the material oozing from the open wound, the black parting in his fine hair filling with froth. I visualise the thoughts that this very matter must have contained, until he slipped so violently on the steps and his poor head shattered under the weight of the statue. Intelligent, kind thoughts. Thoughts that were going to help me. Where are they going? Are they leaking out with the offal that is bubbling up like the sputum at the edge of the sea, vanishing as they meet the air?
Dora must have moved in these few seconds, for she emerges now from Charles’s flat, holding a bundle of fabric in her hands. She squats and dabs at the blood with a towel and, when the towel is saturated, she lifts Max’s messy head and slips some more fabric – one of the overalls she bought me, the one I left on the floor when I got into bed last night – beneath his head and then draws it tightly around and around his face, until his whole head is wrapped up. She fastens the overall by tying the sleeve in a tight knot, so that the fabric is bundled around his face, shrouding it.
‘At least now I won’t have to look at this ghastly mess,’ she mutters. ‘We’ll cover his body with a blanket. Fetch the one from your bed. Mona. Quickly! And while you’re there’ – she tosses me the bloodied towel – ‘stuff this in Daddy’s bin. We’ll sort it out later.’
In the silent flat, I glance into Charles’s room. He is sleeping soundly on his side. Whatever Max gave him earlier to calm him must have had a sedative effect. I push the towel into the bin and pull the blanket from my makeshift bed.
Dora is shivering as she takes her coat off Max and slips her own arms back into it. Together, Dora and I wrap Max in the blanket, until he resembles no more than a heap of bedding or dirty laundry that we are bringing out of the flat.
‘Now, you take his feet, Mona, and I’ll take his shoulders.’ She puts her hands under his arms and hoists him up, his bound head against her chest, and I lift his feet. It’s impossible to get a grip on the blanket, so I push it out of the way and pull his bare legs up on either side of me, the way I sometimes carry Leila.
As we begin to climb the steps, trying not to slip on the ice, Max’s white feet dangling out of the bundle to either side of me, my throat fills with an acrid scent that I mistake first for a mixture of frost and diesel fumes. It is the smell of blood. It’s dripping on the steps as we go, leaving a dark trail in the frost.
At the top of the steps, the weight grows too much for me. My arms are going to give way.
‘Please, Dora. Can we rest for a moment?’ I gasp, and she, in relief, lowers his blue head to the ground. We stand for a moment in the icy night, panting. Already one side of the overall tied around his head is saturated, dark with the blood that has seeped out on our way up.
‘We can’t be long,’ Dora pants. ‘We’ve left Daddy all alone in his flat.’
‘He was sleeping soundly. Max . . .’ My voice falters. ‘Max gave him something to relax him.’
‘I need my car keys,’ Dora gasps, and she darts across the garden, leaving me alone with the body. The only light comes from the streetlamp in the alley, which just misses Max’s shrouded form. It occurs to me in that moment that I could just run. Run as fast as I could away from all of this. Disappear.
I look about me. I have nothing: no money, no papers. And where would I go? And how soon before Dora alerted the police that her undocumented maid had disappeared just as her lover had died violently in the night? My heart begins to hammer against my chest.
‘Mona, we need to move.’ Dora’s back. ‘Lift him. Come on, we haven’t time to lose.’
Can this really be happening? Is she really determined to take Max’s body to the river without seeking help from the police or a doctor?
Why? Can it be due to her fear of what his wife will say when she learns of his affair? There must be something else, something that Dora wants to hide. But if I ask, Dora has the power to make it look as though I had something to do with the death of the doctor. And so I say nothing.
After this we don’t speak again. We work silently together. And, because I am thinking more clearly than Dora is, she lets me take charge.
She does exactly as I tell her.
‘Wait!’
I point up at Desiree’s windows next door. Dora hasn’t thought of this. Alhamdulillah, the woman’s house is dark, her curtains drawn. In fact, the curtains are drawn at the backs of all the houses along the terrace. No one is looking.
Dora goes ahead, carrying Max’s top half, across the garden where the frost is beginning to harden. Along the little alley by the side of the house.
‘Stop,’ I whisper as we come to the street. ‘First we must check there is no one.’
We rest the dead weight of Max on the ground for a moment, out of sight of the road in the entrance to the alley.
The street is empty but for Endymion who sits on the wall by the steps blinking slowly, like a lion, half-asleep.
‘You can open the car,’ I tell Dora.
Dora gets the keys out of her coat pocket, presses them and the locks clack open noisily.
She lifts the boot.
We heave Max up again, and try to get him in, head first. He’s almost there, when the head slips from Dora’s grasp and Max tumbles back onto the road.
‘We must bend him over,’ she says, heaving him from around the waist this time, so his head flops forward onto his knees. She then struggles to drag him upwards into the boot again. At last, with me clasping his thighs and Dora his waist, we manage between us to manoeuvre him, until he is half in, his legs and head lolling out. Then we have to exert ourselves and find the energy to push and shove until, at last, he is in.
He lies crooked, his head awkwardly rammed against the back seat. The blanket falls open, and the towelling dressing-gown, so hastily thrown on, gapes to reveal a white chest, greying hairs coiling over it. His bare feet hang out of the boot, large and white and grotesque in the moonlight. I yearn momentarily for Ali’s smooth brown ones, but now is not the time to pine.
Dora heaves his legs, shifting them around, bending them, before she can press the boot door shut.
She gets into the driving seat.
I glance behind me before I get in on the other side. A light has come on in the house two doors down, where the big family live, with the kids who throw stones out on the street. When I look up, the light goes off.
I get in the passenger seat, closing the door quietly, and Dora waits a few minutes before she starts the engine. It splutters and dies.
She turns the key again.
‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘I’m shaking so much I’m not sure if I can drive.’
‘You want me to?’
‘Can you?’
‘I know how to. But I don’t have a licence.’
‘We don’t have to worry about that now!’ she whispers. She tells me to get out and go round to the driver’s door. Then she shifts across into my seat and slithers down, her head bow
ed, so she is out of sight of the road though there’s no one about to see us.
I glance up at the next-door window. Is that a face I can see, pressed to the glass? Impossible to say, in the dark. It could be a reflection, a trick of the light. The shadow of trees opposite, their bare branches frantic, batting this way and that in the wind.
The engine, at last, starts up. We leave the headlights off.
I press the pedals and we lurch forward, bumping over the cobbles down the street that I have walked along so many times with Charles. Strange to sit on this side of the car, holding the steering wheel on the wrong side. I turn right along the High Street. It’s empty. The shops are shut up, many with metal grilles over their windows and doors. At the end, the lights are on red. The main road silent.
‘Go!’ Dora says from her position low down in the passenger seat. ‘Just go, ignore the lights!’
And so I drive across the red lights, over the road that is so busy by day, and down the back streets past the apartment blocks towards the river. I glance in the mirror. There’s one other car, some distance behind us, moving slowly in the same direction. I shudder.
‘Stop over here,’ Dora says, ‘where the road curves to the right. There’s a gap in between the buildings on the corner. Turn the car, we’ll park, and then we can get him out and carry him straight down through the gap into the water.’
It’s hard for me to turn; several times the engine splutters and dies. The car that was some distance behind us stops, its lights on, about 100 metres up the street, I see it in the mirror.
Dora grows impatient.
‘I’ll do it,’ she says, and we swap places again. She turns the car round and then reverses it again into the gap between a building site and a high wall, a dark passageway that leads to the steps down into the river.
I’ve seen how hidden this place is by day, on my walks with Charles, but it’s utterly concealed at this time of night. You would never know the steps were here unless someone had shown you.
‘What is it, Mona?’ Dora asks. ‘You are trembling terribly. You must be strong and help me.’
We get out, and I feel the cold water seep into my shoes from puddles encrusted with a thin layer of ice. The wall is graffitied with white lettering glowing against the brick.
We slide the body that is stiffening already – is it to do with the cold? – out of the boot.
I, being smaller than Dora, take his legs, and she takes his shoulders. The ground is slippery and I drop him; his feet fall to the floor with a flump.
‘Hurry.’
I struggle to get a better grasp on him, holding him under the knees.
The steps are slick with ice and river water. We cling to the algae-covered walls, and I pray we won’t lose our footing and slip too far, towards the place where the water swirls below us. I am numb, my mind as well as my body.
The river flings itself against the steps. It sucks and snarls.
‘Wait.’
A light slides across the road behind us, the sound of a car in a low gear.
‘Move back,’ Dora hisses. I step into the shadows, press my spine against the wall, against the white graffiti-ed lettering. We squeeze Max to us, me his legs, Dora his shoulders, his weight distributed in a heavy sausage, like one of the rolled-up rugs Ummu used to weave in the Tapis Cooperative that weigh so much more than you imagine.
The car stops. A door slams. Footsteps come hurrying along the road. There are voices, a squeal. I hold my breath. I daren’t breathe. Seconds go by. Minutes. I’m sealed to the spot, too petrified to move. As I stand frozen against the wall, I think of my first sighting of this river, how I saw it as deep and broad and serious and forbidding. But never did I imagine, when I was full of desperate hope, determined to build a future for Leila and my mother and, in my wildest dreams, Ali, too, that my journey would lead me so close to its dark heart.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
My arms ache with holding Max, my fingers feel like dead things. When we reach the third slippery step, the water just beneath us, I tell Mona to let go of her end. I want to be the last person to hold him.
She lays his feet down, and I lower his head. He lies, the water lapping at the sleeve of the blue overall, moving it this way and that in the current. His feet are uppermost on the steps, as if he’s resting, ready to slide backwards into the river.
I have to walk down the steps in order to get a purchase on him. I let the water slop over my boots as I descend, trying to ignore the way the cold bites into my legs, clamps its jaws around my muscles so they contract. A shocking pain sears through my calf. I’m unable to move. I clutch the wall with one hand.
‘Mona – my leg, it’s so painful. I’ve got cramp.’
A light sweeps across the street at the top of the step.
Voices approaching.
I look at Mona, pleading with her to help me. They will see us, two women holding a dead man between us, unable to move either forward or back.
Frozen forever on these hidden steps.
I scrabble at the wall, trying to get a grip on it with my fingernails, to prevent myself from continuing helplessly to the bottom of the steps, to be concealed under the water’s surface.
Just as I imagined doing the night of Mother’s funeral.
The voices are coming closer.
I stare at Mona, wanting her to speak, to tell me what to do, but she just looks ahead, her mouth set, the way it was when I accused her of taking things from my home. Impassive, impossible to read.
Then there’s another sound, the gentle purr of a boat’s engine, and the water begins to slop more violently against the steps, splashing up and wetting my clothes and enveloping me in cold waves that fill me with horror at the reality of what we’re doing.
We stand for a little longer as the boat passes, lighting up the water around us; the beam reaches into this inlet, but just misses us as we draw back again into the shadows.
The voices from the street fade. The engine starts up again and the car draws away.
The cramp in my leg eases. Now urgency makes me strong. I grasp Max under the arms and pull.
‘Mona, you’re going to have to get around the other side and help me.’
Max is dressed only in boxer shorts and the towelling robe he always travels with. I have a foolish desire to wrap him up warm in the blanket again before he goes into the water but there isn’t time. I gaze at his legs, his naked thighs, and feel a shudder of thwarted desire. I want to give him a last hug, a last kiss. I still desire you, Max. You are, after all, my lover. I still need you. Still want you. I misjudged you. Your fantasy about my maid was just that. You let it go no further. In fact, when you saw her, the person, you felt only concern for her. But look where this led you!
It doesn’t do to be too kind, too full of compassion. It’s a curse. Look what’s happened to me.
I heave again and his body gathers momentum, slithering at last into the water.
He’s in, and bobbing out of reach. I find a brick lying on the side of the path, and throw it, so it plummets onto his head, knocking him off-kilter so his head is submerged. I have to make it look as if this was a random attack, a mugging maybe. Some burglars must have broken into the place where he was staying, stolen his things, beaten him up, driven him here and deposited him.
I shut myself off to all feeling. I must not weaken. I remind myself that Max as I knew him, his shining eyes, his lovely American smell, is gone. This is just a figure in the water, like one of the stone or bronze statues we have always met beneath, unseeing, unfeeling.
Then I look at Mona. And strangely, as he flops and turns in an eddy, one toe elegantly pointing out of the water, I feel as if this is the biggest job I’ve asked her to do when it comes to sorting out my life. His sinking will leave everything clearer, cleaner. I loved Max, but he caused me so much pain! Because he would never leave Valerie. Because I could only have him in brief, desperate bursts. Because tearing myself from him afterwards made me won
der if it was worth it at all. And the terror that has accompanied me to these steps all of a sudden vanishes and I rise up on a high, with a feeling of possibility and opportunity opening up before me. Once he’s gone and forgotten, I will return to the radio, run a cookery programme and receive adulation again from listeners across the nation.
I basked in Max’s admiration for me, it’s true, but I will never miss the hollow feeling I’m left with each time he leaves. The abject fear that when he saw the real Theodora underneath the one he had placed on a pedestal, he would abandon me for a better woman.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
It’s colder than ever in Charles’s flat when I wake. There’s an eerie silence. The light that comes through the curtain has an unearthly, silver quality to it.
I reach over and light the gas fire, pull the thin blanket over me, try to create a warm cocoon. I lie listening to Charles grunt and cough in the next room. The events of last night were so bizarre, I struggle to believe they were real. But the ache in my arms tells me yes, we did lift a dead man, shift him to the car.
The dark ends of my tracksuit trousers, lying on the chair, damp from the water, tell me that yes, we did slide him into the river.
I shiver. Hug myself. Why, if he slipped, did Dora not call an ambulance?
It comes back to me, the recurring nightmare of Ali, running in, covered in sweat and tears. How he lay in my arms, shaking, twitching. Related to me bit by little bit what had happened. How he swore me to secrecy. How good I am at remaining silent when I have to.
I promised that of course I would never utter a word of what he told me, that I would do anything for him, to keep him safe.
‘He went one step too far,’ Ali sobbed. I knew straight away he was talking of Driss, his rival. Ali was working as a guide to finance his medical studies, to support me and Leila. Time and again he would talk of the way Driss would undercut him. How he enjoyed watching Ali grow enraged.
And now, back in a similar situation, I let myself remember the whole story, to confront the full extent of what Ali did. He had taken his group of tourists up to the top of the kasbah, when Driss appeared and accused him of stealing business from him. To Ali’s chagrin, the tourists dropped him then and there, said they were going with Driss.
The Darkening Hour Page 26