The Heat of Betrayal (7 page)

So I pulled him closer. And reached down and felt him grow even harder as my hand covered his crotch. Looking briefly over his shoulder to ensure that the door was closed and our bags now in the room, I walked him backwards to the bed. The two of us fell on top of it. And then we were pulling off each other's clothes. I was already so wet, so in need of him, that I pulled him immediately inside me. I threw my legs around him to take him even deeper. My desire was immediate, all encompassing, and I came twice within moments. That only seemed to embolden Paul even more; his thrusts became deeper, slower, bringing me again to the edge of a certain crazed abyss, over which I tumbled again, every nerve ending electrified. I could feel, as always, the slow, relentless build-up within Paul of his own release – and how, like the extraordinary lover that he was, he held back the moment of climax, wanting us to remain fused, deranged, hungry for each other. When the build-up became unbearable, and his moans grew louder, I could feel his loins tensing wildly and his penis within me becoming even more rigid, more penetrating. Suddenly he burst forth, letting out a cry followed by shudders, and I whispered: ‘Love of my life, love of my life,' feeling that to be the truth right now. Hoping against hope that, this time, a baby would come of it all.

Paul rolled off me. After over thirty hours of travel – and all the inherent tension accompanying that long, difficult journey – a siesta was desperately needed. So I reached down and pulled the white sheet over us, the ceiling fan circling overhead at a speed reasonable enough to generate a bit of chilled air against the heat. Putting my arms around my already passed-out husband, I shut my eyes.

Then it was pitch dark. Drifting back into consciousness I had absolutely no idea where I was for several strange moments, the clip-clip rotor movement of the ceiling fan overhead intermingling with a voice of incantation from a loudspeaker. I opened my eyes. The windows were still open, no curtains pulled against the stars shining with astonishing clarity in the night sky. And then that voice started again – a loudspeaker crackle, then ‘
Allahhhhhhhhhhhhh
', the last ‘h' held as a long intoned note, wafting through the darkness. Reality began to reassemble itself. Morocco. Essaouira. The hotel. The suite where we would be spending the next month. My husband, now curled up in a corner of the bed, still closed down and unconscious. And me holding the dial of my watch close to my face and discovering from the glowing hour and minute hands that we had been asleep for almost twelve hours. I had an urgent need to pee. I got to my feet, my balance just a little askew after such a deep sleep. The fan overhead kept up its percussive rattle as my bare feet touched the cool stone of the floor. The middle of the Moroccan night was temperate; an antidote to the immense heat through which we had travelled yesterday. I reached the bathroom, tiled in a shade of ultramarine that called to mind the sky above, the Essaouira rooftops below. The ceramic floor was also an intriguing blue and white, and like everything else about the suite it was clean. Monsieur Picard might be a bit of an oily customer, but there was something raffishly stylish about his hotel.

I was feeling very awake. Twelve hours of sleep does that. Having last washed almost two days ago in Buffalo I was also rank. I dug out my toiletries and made a beeline for the shower. There was proper hot water and it remained hot throughout the twenty minutes I stayed under its spray. When I got out, wrapping my hair in a towel and using the other spare towel around my body, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and shuddered. Not because I looked wretched and aged and beaten up by life. All that sleep had actually restored some vitality to a face that had been capped with dark, exhausted rings. What the mirror told me this morning was: I too am fighting the inevitable forward momentum of time.

When finding yourself grappling with uncertainties, there is only one solution: organise. I opened my bag and got dressed: loose linen pants, a blue linen shirt. Then I opened the wardrobe and spent the next fifteen minutes hanging up and arranging all my clothes before turning to Paul's bag. I hesitated for a moment, but I knew how grateful he was whenever I took charge of the domestic details of our lives, so I unzipped it. I found chaos. Shirts, underwear, jeans, socks, pairs of shorts all in an unwashed, beyond disordered state. Dumping them into the room's wicker laundry basket I put on a pair of sandals. Then, hoisting the basket, I let myself out and down the two flights of darkened stairs to the reception. A different man was asleep behind the counter: thin, brown teeth, dressed in a djellaba, mid-forties, a lit cigarette still fuming away between two fingers, his mouth open wide. I put the wicker basket down beside him and reached for a notepad and pen on the counter to write a note, asking him to get our clothes washed. But suddenly he mumbled something in his sleep, then snapped awake, squinting at me.

‘Sorry, sorry,' I whispered. Then, pointing to the basket, I said: ‘
Linge
.'

The man's watery eyes began to come into focus. He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was now four-twenty-eight.

‘
Maintenant?
' he asked. ‘
On est au beau milieu de la nuit
.'

Before I could tell him the laundry could wait he disappeared through a back doorway, returning a few minutes later with a shy young girl – I guessed she was around fourteen – in a simple gingham dress, her hair covered by a headscarf. She looked half-awake.

‘There was no need to have gotten her now,' I said.

He just shrugged, then spoke in rapid-fire Arabic to the young girl while pointing to the basket. She answered back, her voice hesitant, demure. The man asked me:

‘
Laver et repasser
?'

‘Yes, yes,' I said. ‘And I need them this morning.'

More Arabic to the little girl. Again she looked shy about speaking in front of these two adults – especially one who was so far outside her language. Nonetheless she answered him back. The man turned to me and said:

‘You will have to wait for the sun to dry your clothes.'

‘I can't argue with that,' I said, smiling at the young girl. She smiled back.

‘
Shukran
,' I said, Arabic for ‘
thank you
' and just one of a small handful of words I knew in that language. I pressed a 50-dirham note in her hand; an apology for her being woken so early.

‘
Afwan,
' she replied, all smiles.
You're welcome.

And she disappeared with the laundry basket.

‘I have one last favour to ask,' I said to the man. ‘Since all my husband's clothes are being washed, do you have a robe or something he could wear?'

‘
Une djellaba pour votre mari?
'

‘Oui, oui.'

‘
Attendez là.
' Then he disappeared through the door behind him.

At that precise moment, that voice began to incant again over the loudspeaker.
Allahhhhhhhhhhhhh
. The ‘h' was held so long and in such a haunting, mellifluous way that I felt compelled to step outside and see if I could find where it was coming from.

Leaving the blue carved archway of the hotel I looked down the back alleyway, which was unpaved, narrow enough for one vehicle but little else. The amplified voice started chanting again. I moved away from the doorway. Just ten or so paces from the hotel and I was enshrouded in darkness: hostile doorways, shuttered shops, tiny laneways filtering off this constricted street. I knew I shouldn't be here. It was like falling into a blackened maze. But the voice kept beckoning me forward, inviting me deeper into the shadows, making me fearless.

Then I saw the cat. Hanging off a wall directly in front of me as if she had been glued onto its crumbling stone surface. So emaciated, so grubby, so spooked. Had something truly terrifying thrown her against that wall? She was clinging to it, perpendicularly paralysed. Catching sight of her threw me. The impossibility of her position – as if all four paws had been hammered into the wall – was so unnerving that I felt as if an ice-cold hand had been placed on one of my bare shoulders.

Then an ice-cold hand was placed on one of my shoulders.

I found myself surrounded by three men. They had come out of nowhere. A guy in his fifties with a grizzled half-shaven face, three teeth, wild eyes. A plump kid – he couldn't have been more than eighteen – wearing a T-shirt that failed to cover his hairy stomach, his face oleaginous, his eyes darting up and down my body, a goofy smile on his lips. The hand belonged to a hunched young man, sallow skinned, his countenance glassy, disturbed. The touch of his fingers made me jump. I shrugged him off, spun around, saw him gazing at me with loon-like eyes. The plump kid whispered: ‘
Bonjour, madame
,' the grizzled old guy puffed on a stub of a cigarette, a half-smile on his face. Immediately the hand reattached itself to my shoulder. Immediately I shrugged it off again.

‘Leave me alone,' I hissed.

‘No problem, no problem,' the plump kid said, his face even more greasy as he came right up to me. ‘We're friends.'

I tried to move forward, but the hunched guy had his bony fingers around my arm. Not in a restraining way, more as if he just wanted to touch me. My mind was racing. I figured the plump kid would make a grab for me, though at the moment he was simply hovering behind me, laughing a low laugh. And the old guy, though now in close, was just watching, clearly enjoying my fear.

‘We like you,' the plump kid said with another unnerving laugh. The hunched guy's hand was tightening around my right forearm. I took a deep steadying breath, quickly calculating that I was close enough to catch him squarely, cripplingly, in the groin. I began to count to myself: one, two . . .

Then all hell broke loose. A man came running towards us, a stick in his hand, shouting one word over and over again:

‘
Imshi, imshi, imshi
.'

It was the night man from the hotel, brandishing the cane over his head, ready to lash out. All three men scattered, leaving me there, frozen to the spot, terrified.

As soon as he reached me the night man took me by the arm the way a father would reach for a child who had gotten herself into deep trouble, pulling me along the alley and out of danger.

When we reached the hotel he all but pushed me inside. He had to sit down for a moment and compose himself. I too slumped in a chair, shocked, benumbed, feeling beyond stupid.

The night man reached for his cigarettes, his hands shaking as he lit one. After taking a steadying drag he spoke two words:

‘
Jamais plus
.'

Never again.

JAMAIS PLUS. JAMAIS
plus. Jamais plus
.

I sat on the balcony of our room, watching light break through the night sky, still reeling from that incident in the alleyway.

Jamais plus. Jamais plus. Jamais plus
.

But my ‘never again' exhortations had less to do with the behaviour of those men and more to do with my arrogance and inanity. What was I thinking? Why did I even dream of following the loudspeaker voice out into the shadows? The accountant in me was trying to separate the menace and dread of the scene from the hard cold facts of what I'd walked into. Would they have actually attacked me, tried to rape me? Or was I just an object of curiosity for them?

My hero from the front desk served me mint tea, deftly entering the room and placing it on the balcony table without waking Paul. He was still collapsed flat out in the bed, oblivious to all that had just transpired. Sitting there, looking out at constellations diminishing with the emerging dawn, I came to the conclusion that, though deeply creepy and offensive, this encounter hadn't had a serious sexual threat behind it. But there had been, without question, some sort of recklessness on my part that sent me out into the shadows. And I wouldn't forgive myself for such impetuousness until I fathomed what had pulled me towards trouble.

‘Well, hello there.'

Paul was standing in the doorway of the balcony, dressed in the white djellaba that the night man had brought up along with the mint tea.

‘You really slept,' I said.

‘And you?'

‘Oh, I was out almost as long as you.'

‘And I see that I have no clothes.'

‘They're being washed as we speak. That djellaba suits you.'

‘The French have a word for an ageing hippy still dressing as if he's just come off an ashram – a “
baba-cool
”
.
Even during my year here I never wore a djellaba.'

‘But it now suits your ageing-hippy look.'

He leaned down and kissed me on the lips.

‘I walked into that, didn't I?' he said.

‘Indeed you did.'

Now it was my turn to lean over and kiss my husband.

‘Tea?'

‘Please.'

I poured out two glasses. We clinked them.

‘
À nous
,' he said.

‘To us,' I repeated.

He threaded his hand in mine. We both stared up at the emerging daylight.

‘Do you know what this time of day is called?'

‘You mean, besides “dawn”?'

‘Yes, besides “dawn” or “the break of day”.'

‘The last one's poetic.'

‘So is “the blue hour”.'

There was a pause while I let the phrase resonate for a moment or so. Then I tried it out myself:

‘The blue hour.'

‘It's rather lovely, isn't it?'

‘Indeed. Neither darkness nor light.'

‘The hour when nothing is as it seems – when we are caught between the perceived and the imagined.'

‘Clarity and blur?'

‘The pellucid and the obscure? Simplicity masking enigma?'

‘Nice image,' I said.

He leaned over again and kissed me deeply. And said:

‘
J'ai envie de toi
.'