The Lost Letter from Morocco
The Lost Letter from Morocco
Adrienne Chinn
A forbidden love affair. A long-buried secret. A journey that will change everything.Morocco, 1984. High in the Atlas Mountains, Hanane’s love for Irishman Gus is forbidden. Forced to flee her home with the man she loves, Hanane is certain she’s running towards her destiny. But she has made a decision that will haunt her family for years to come.London, 2009. When Addy discovers a mysterious letter in her late father’s belongings, she journeys to Morocco in search of answers. But instead, she finds secrets – and is quickly pulled into a world that she doesn’t understand.And when history starts to repeat itself, it seems her journey might just change the person she is forever…A heartbreaking story of impossible love and dark family secrets that readers of Dinah Jeffries and Tracy Rees will love.
Copyright (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Adrienne Chinn 2019
Cover design © Becky Glibbery 2019
Cover photographs © Shutterstock
Adrienne Chinn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008314552
Version: 2019-01-29
Dedication (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
For H.
Contents
Cover (#uf9242a4a-ffd5-585f-9d61-88227a387365)
Title Page (#u63ba607e-edb3-5876-a72a-1801bab4716e)
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Marrakech, Morocco – March 2009
Addy steps away from the window and runs her hand through her short red hair. She looks in the mirror and rubs a finger along the downy gingery growth of her eyebrows. She’ll need to pencil them in, but she’s used to that now. An expert.
The hotel room could be in London, Montréal or Philadelphia, the walls yellow-white, the furniture cheap wood, the bedcovers brown nylon. Only the framed desert print of a palm tree and a camel hints at the exotica outside in the Marrakech streets. Addy grabs her new digital camera off the chest of drawers and leans on the windowsill. Several storeys below, the hotel’s swimming pool shines like a turquoise kidney in the spring sunshine. A hotel is going up next door, the steel frame silhouetted against the blue sky. Men lean from scaffolding and shout as they haul up plastic buckets and pieces of metal. Addy focuses her lens and snaps several photos. Warming up. Getting into the groove. So many more images to capture in her camera before her visa expires in three months’ time. Then the book will be done and it’s back to London, God help her.
Chapter One (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
London, England – January 2009
Addy watches the crimson poison run down the plastic tube that loops like a roller coaster through the disinfected air. Over the green vinyl arm of the chair, over her father’s old navy cable-knit jumper that she’s pulled on, until it disappears down the roll-neck to a tube inserted in her chest. She’s named it the Red Devil. Killing everything in its path. Good cells and bad cells. Hopefully more bad than good.
The chemo room is full today. The girl, Rita, lies back in her chair and watches a nurse insert a cannula into her hand. Her long curly black hair twists around her earbud wires and bunches on her shoulders where she leans against the beige vinyl. Addy grimaces and turns her face away. She raises her arms and examines the purple bruises yellowing like spilt petrol on her arm. Collapsed. Every single vein. They’ve had to insert a Hickman into the veins leading to her heart. She hides the tubes inside her bra. So much easier than the cannula. She’d recommend it to anybody.
‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ Rita howls. ‘That fuckin’ hurt!’
Rita is only nineteen. Breast cancer sucks.
‘God, the lift was out again. I mean the one for normal people. Visitors aren’t allowed in the sick people’s lift, apparently. Where do they get these orderlies, anyway? Rude little bastards.’
Addy’s half-sister, Philippa, drops her Louis Vuitton sample bag onto the mottled green linoleum and dumps a stack of magazines onto Addy’s lap as she leans in to air kiss Addy’s cheeks.
‘You’re wet, Pippa.’
‘Yes. Blasted English weather.’
Philippa shrugs out of her Burberry raincoat and flaps it around, spraying Addy with the winter damp. She drapes the raincoat over the back of Addy’s chair and drags a metal-legged stool across the linoleum. She perches on the stool, her slender knees neatly together.
Philippa rifles through the magazines on Addy’s lap. She folds over a page of House & Garden and hands it to Addy.
‘I’m in it this month. That place I did for the Russians in Mayfair? God, what a trial. Your photos don’t look too shabby either.’
Addy examines the plush interiors – an artful mix of bespoke English sofas, pop art, Gio Ponti originals and Georgian antiques.
‘Well done, Pips. It’s good publicity for you.’
Philippa wrinkles her elegant nose. ‘Don’t call me that. You know I hate it. Your pictures are in House & Garden, Addy. Do you know what that means? It’s a fresh start. You should thank me. That little photo shop of yours was bogging you down. Just as well it went bust. I don’t know how you could stand doing those dreadful kiddie and doggie pictures.’
‘We can’t all be David Bailey.’
‘Well, indeed. I don’t understand why you feel so terrible about it closing. It’s a bloody recession. Everyone’s going bust. Even my dentist is downsizing, which tells you something. He’s had to sell his Porsche and buy an Audi. Not even a sports model.’
Addy stares at her sister. ‘It’s hard out there.’
‘Absolutely,’ Philippa says, missing the sarcasm in Addy’s voice. ‘There’s no shame in your business going bankrupt, so I wish you’d stop fretting. Frankly, it’s getting on my nerves.’
Addy drops the magazine into her lap and picks up Heat. She flips through the flimsy pages trying to spot a celebrity she’s heard of.
‘It’s easy for you to say, Pippa. You’ve got Alessandro’s divorce settlement to live off.’
Philippa folds her arms across her chest. ‘Money isn’t everything, Adela. Status and reputation are much more important.’ She draws her groomed eyebrows together. ‘Well, at least as important as money.’
‘I’ll tell that to the supermarket cashier next time I try to pay for my groceries with my reputation.’
Philippa takes the magazine out of Addy’s hands and places it neatly on top of a tin of Cadbury’s Roses chocolates someone has left on the metal table beside Addy’s chair.
‘I was reading that.’
‘Don’t be absurd. There’s nothing in there but tat.’ Philippa brushes a stray hair out of her eye with a pink lacquered fingernail. ‘Didn’t I tell you I’d set you on the right track, Addy? What good are strings if you can’t pull them?’
Philippa perches on the stool, straight-backed and attentive like a fashion editor in the front row of a catwalk show. Her grey tweed suit hugs her yoga’d and Pilate’d body, every dart and seam tweaked to perfection. How is it possible that they share the same DNA? Addy wonders. The pale, curvy, ginger-haired Canadian and the stylish English gazelle.
Addy taps her chest. ‘I was the one who got us the House & Garden gig, Pippa. I’m the one who sent the photos in on spec.’
Philippa’s eyebrows twitch. ‘Oh. Did you?’
‘I did.’
Philippa purses her lips, fine lines feathering up from her top lip to her nose. ‘Well, anyway, you’re finally getting somewhere with this photography lark.’ She picks up the House & Garden and pages through the article. ‘I do have a knack though, don’t I? I’m not one of Britain’s top-fifty interior designers for nothing. My psychic told me the Russians would be good for me. Thank God someone’s got money in this godforsaken recession. All it took was blood, sweat and tears.’
‘Your blood or your clients’?’
‘Mostly the curtain-maker’s this time. The builder told me they call me Bloody Philly.’
Addy shakes her head. At forty-six, Philippa is six years older, a successful interior designer, a short-lived marriage to an Italian investment banker behind her, a tidy divorce settlement in the bank. A stonking big house in Chelsea. On all the charity ball committees. In with the ‘in crowd’. Busy, busy Philippa. Nothing like herself – the gauche one at the party in a cheap dress from the vintage stall in Brick Lane and flat shoes from Russell & Bromley hanging out by the kitchen door to grab the canapés. The grit in Philippa’s oyster.
Their father, Gus, couldn’t leave Britain behind fast enough after his divorce from Philippa’s mother, Lady Estella Fitzwilliam-Powell. The ‘Ethereal Essie’ as Warhol christened her in the Sixties when she’d become a fixture at Warhol’s Factory in New York after the divorce.
Her father had told her once that he’d met Essie on a July afternoon in the Pimm’s tent at the Henley Regatta in the summer of 1962. Addy had seen pictures of him at that age – handsome in the fair-skinned, black-haired Black Irish way. Like Gene Kelly or Tyrone Power. Essie was eighteen, famous for her boyish figure and pale beauty. You could find pictures of her online now. Impossibly slender in minidresses and white go-go boots, her thick dark hair in a geometric Vidal Sassoon cut. Their father was fresh out of Trinity College with a degree in geology, the first of his working-class family to earn a degree. Philippa came along six months after the wedding. The marriage lasted a year. After the divorce, their father headed to Canada to find oil for a big multinational. By forty, Essie was dead on the bed of her rented flat in New York. Drugs overdose. Withered and desiccated. No longer ethereal.
Now their father was dead, too. Alone in his garden on the coast of Vancouver Island, on a bed of his favourite dahlias.
‘Pip, I’ve been thinking—’
‘Thinking? What do you mean, you’ve been thinking, Addy?’ Philippa waves the magazine at the plastic bag of Red Devil hanging from its drip stand. ‘You’ve got enough on your plate right now with all this palaver. Nigel’s chosen a wonderful time to run off on you. You have to stop expecting men to be there for you. They’ll always let you down.’
‘Don’t go there.’
Philippa holds up her hands. ‘Sorry.’
Philippa’s words stick into Addy like pins in a voodoo doll. She hasn’t told Philippa that she’s been scrabbling to cover Nigel’s half of the mortgage as well as her own share for the past four months while he ‘recovers from the cancer trauma’. Didn’t they say disasters come in threes? They were wrong. A break-up, a bankrupt business, cancer and her father’s heart attack – four things. More than her fair share.
Addy rubs her hand over the short red wig, reaching a finger underneath to scratch her sweaty scalp.
‘I’ve only got one more chemo session, Pippa. Then some radiotherapy for a few weeks. They told me that’s a doddle. Then Tamoxifen for five years. If I can stay clear for that long, I’m back to being a normal human being. Even the insurance companies say so. That’s assuming I’m not dead.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic.’ Philippa tosses the Heat magazine onto the metal table and prises the lid off the tin of chocolates. ‘Someone’s taken all the caramels. Sod’s law.’ She drops the lid back on and reaches into the pocket of her suit jacket, pulling out her cell phone.
‘You can’t use that in here, Pippa. It interferes with the equipment.’
Philippa slides the phone back into the pocket of her tailored grey jacket. Her body is tense with what Addy takes to be the desire to leave and get on with the job of being Bloody Philly. ‘You were saying?’
‘It’ll be the spring when the radiotherapy’s done. It’s been a long year. I’m tired.’
‘Of course you’re tired. You have cancer.’
‘I had cancer.’
Philippa gestures at the women in various stages of baldness flaked out in vinyl hospital chairs the colour of dirty plasters. ‘What’s all this? Performance art?’
Addy rolls her eyes. ‘It’s insurance. To make sure there’s nothing hanging around.’
Philippa adjusts her grey wool skirt to rest just so on her kneecap. ‘Fine. You had cancer.’ She folds her arms, her lips in the tight line that sets Addy’s teeth on edge. The lipstick is leaching into the fine lines running up to her sister’s nose. ‘What’s this big idea of yours?’
Addy clears her throat. The Red Devil has created a hunger inside her. With every drop the hunger has sharpened until she’s become ravenous for life. Time is short. You hear it all the time. But now she knows time is short. She’s not going to waste one moment longer. Faffing around with a cheating boyfriend while working in a failing photography shop. No. She’ll become the photographer she’s always dreamed of being. Travel the world and capture it in her camera. Leave her footprint on the earth before it’s too late.
‘I’ve been thinking of working on a travel book. Julia at the photo agency thinks it’s a great idea. A “Woman’s Guide to Travelling Alone” kind of thing. On spec but if it’s good enough, Julia’s got contacts with some literary agents. Travel stories are big right now. Everyone’s trying to escape the recession one way or another.’
‘Seriously?’
Addy thrusts out her lower lip. ‘I’m not an idiot. I’ve thought this through. I need to get out of London for a while. I’m worn out. I just need to decide on a country. It needs to be exotic. And cheap.’
Philippa shudders. ‘Exotic? That sounds hot, and … unhygienic. Your career’s doing beautifully here. House & Garden. Do you know what that means? It’s a calling card. All my designer friends will be clamouring to have you photograph their work. And you want to leave on a silly jaunt to some hot, dirty, dusty, filthy fleapit? That can’t be good for you in your weakened condition. Do have some sense, Adela.’
Addy glares at her sister, knowing from countless past stand-offs that arguing is pointless. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’
‘Of course I’m right. And how on earth are you going to afford something like that? Your money’s all tied up in your flat.’
‘I can manage a few months if I’m careful with the money Dad left me. I’ll find somewhere cheap to travel to. Then, when the book sells—’
‘If it sells.’
‘—when the book sells, I’ll have some money. It might even lead to another commission.’
‘Obviously you know best. Heaven forbid you listen to your sister.’
Philippa rises and smooths her bobbed hair, a sleek sheet of brown silk. She reaches for her raincoat and rests it over her shoulders like a cape.
‘Must go now. My Russian clients are taking me to lunch at The Wolseley. They’ve just bought a house in Berkshire from some impoverished earl.’
‘I thought you hated the Russians.’
‘Don’t be daft. Of course I do. Pushy, gaudy nouveau riche with more money than sense. Which is why they’re perfect clients. I’m hardly going to let my feelings stand in the way of decorating a stately home. I’ll do a fabulous job and get you in to do the photos. I won’t even charge you a finder’s fee.’
Addy smiles feebly, wishing that Philippa wouldn’t try so hard to impose her idea of what her life should be.
‘Oh, mustn’t forget.’ Philippa picks up her sample bag and pulls out three tattered photo albums and a bulky manila envelope, adding them to the magazines on Addy’s lap. ‘It looks like you’re not the only photographer in the family. Father’s solicitor sent these to me with a stack of documents for me to sign.’ She rolls her blue eyes. ‘Like I have time. I’ve had a quick look. Tourist photos, mainly. More your kind of thing.’
Addy clutches at the albums as they slide off her lap. ‘I never knew Dad took photos.’
Philippa leans in for a quick air-kiss. ‘Who knew?’ She grimaces. ‘I hope they don’t charge the estate for the postage from Canada. Those albums weigh a ton. I’ve asked the solicitor to clear the house and sell off the contents.’
‘I might have liked to go out to Nanaimo and do that myself. I did grow up in that house.’
‘In your condition? Don’t be ridiculous. Trust me, I did you a favour. I’ve asked her to send me anything else she finds of value, though I can’t imagine there’d be much. Once the estate clears his debt, we’ll split anything left. Enough for a meal out at Pizza Hut, if we’re lucky.’
‘Were my mother’s or Dad’s Claddagh rings in with the things the solicitor sent? I haven’t seen them in ages.’
‘No, I have no idea where those are. But Dad’s pen’s in the envelope.’
Philippa gives Addy another quick air-kiss then picks her way around the other patients, carefully avoiding the nausea buckets. She raises her hand and wiggles her fingers without looking back.
Addy unties the string on the manila envelope and shakes out her father’s fat black Montblanc fountain pen with the silver nib. She flips open the faded red cover of the top album and flicks through the stiff cardboard pages. Parisian landmarks, the Coliseum in Rome, a red-sailed dhow bobbing on the water in front of the Hong Kong skyline, the evening sun silhouetting the pyramids. Images displayed like butterflies between cellophane and sticky-backed cardboard pages.
A white envelope slips out of the album, its flap dog-eared and torn. She reaches into it. More Polaroids tumble from the folds of a sheet of thin blue airmail paper, its two sides covered in her father’s blue-inked scribble.
She opens the letter:
3rd March, 1984
Zitoune, Morocco
My darling Addy,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. You know how crazy things can be when I’m over in Nigeria. I loved your letter about your initiation week at Concordia, but please tell me that was a purple wig and that you didn’t dye your lovely titian hair. Just like your mother’s.
Well, I’m not in Nigeria any more. Things are still unsettled here with the politics and all that, and with the glut of oil on the market right now, they terminated my contract early. No need to have a petroleum geologist searching for oil when they have more of it than they can sell!
The job down in Peru doesn’t start till May, so I’ve headed up to North Africa for a bit before going there. It’s dinosaur land up here, so I thought I’d do a little independent oil prospecting. Remember what I used to tell you when you were little? Where there were dinosaurs, there’s probably oil. I might try to stop by Montréal to see you when I get back before flying back to Nanaimo. Is The Old Dublin still there? They do a cracking pint of Guinness.
Addy, my darling, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking up here in the mountains. It’s a beautiful place – you must come here one day. I know how much you love the Rockies. There’s something about mountains, isn’t there? Solid and reassuring. A good place to come when life wears you down.
I know it hasn’t been easy for you since your mother died. You know there was no option but the boarding school, what with me having to travel so much for work. You made a good fist of it, though. Honour student. I never told you how proud you made me. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for a lot of things … I hope you know how much I love you and your sister.
There’s something I need to tell you. I’m not sure how you’ll feel about it. I’ve met someone here. Up here in a tiny village in the Moroccan mountains. You know they talk of thunderbolts? It was like that. I can’t explain it. Maybe you’ll feel it yourself one day. I hope you do.
She’s a lovely young woman from the village. She writes poetry. She has such spirit. She’s only twenty-three, Addy – nineteen years younger. I only hope
Addy peers into the envelope. Nothing. Where was the rest of the letter? What did her father hope? Who was this woman?
She looks at the Polaroids fanned out across her lap. The colours faded – the red turning into orange, the purple into pale blue, the green into yellow. The images slowly disappearing into memory. The splayed imprint of the footprint of a large bird in red clay. Something that looks like prehistoric cave carvings. An old man on a bicycle in an ancient clay-walled alleyway. A circular stone opening in a seaside wall. The shadows of a couple silhouetted on a sandy boardwalk – their loose clothing billowing about them, caught by a gust of wind. A woman’s slender brown hands holding an intricately carved wooden box inlaid with mother of pearl veneers.
Addy holds the photo up and squints at the fading image. The ring on the woman’s left ring finger. Golden hands clasping a crowned sapphire heart. A Claddagh ring. Her mother’s wedding ring. Hazel’s ring.
One by one, she turns the photographs over. Her father’s handwriting. The blue ink from his fountain pen. Dinosaur footprints, Zitoune, December 1983 – with H and … Addy squints. She can’t make out the other initial. Cave art, near Zitoune, February 1984 – with H; Alley in the Marrakech medina, March 1984 – with H; On the fortifications, Essaouira, April 1984 – with H; Le Corniche boardwalk, Casablanca, May 1984 – with H.
With H? Who’s H? Is she the woman in the letter?
Addy shifts in the chair and a final Polaroid slides out of the envelope into her lap. Its corners crushed and bent, the gloss cracking. Her father. In his forties, still fit and handsome, standing in front of a fairy-tale waterfalls. He has an arm around a woman. She’s young, with long black hair falling onto her shoulders. Her skin is a warm brown, her eyes the colour of dark chocolate.
They’re both smiling. Her father has never looked so happy. But it isn’t his smile that draws her gaze. It’s the round bump straining the fabric of the purple kaftan. Addy turns the photo over. The blue ink. The familiar impatient t’s and g’s. Zitoune waterfalls, Morocco, August 1984 – with Hanane.
Chapter Two (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Zitoune, Morocco – November 1983
‘Higher, Hanane. You can do it.’
Hanane glances down at the laughing boys, her fine black eyebrows raised in doubt. ‘You think so? It looks a lot higher when you’re up here.’
‘Look, I’ll show you.’ Omar grabs a low branch of the olive tree, swinging his lithe body up onto the bough. He jiggles a branch, raining fat black olives over his older brother, Momo, and their friends, Driss and Yassine Lahcen.
‘Stop! Stop, Omar!’ Momo yells. ‘They hurt!’
‘Don’t whine, Momo,’ Hanane says. ‘Get the basket and fill it up. We don’t want them to go to waste. They’ll make good oil this year.’
Omar reaches down through the branches. ‘Take my hand, Hanane. I’ll help you.’
Hanane peers up through the grey-green canopy of the olive leaves. ‘How did you get up there so quickly, Omar? You’re like one of the monkeys by the waterfalls.’
‘I’m the best climber in Zitoune, you have to know it.’
‘I’m not as small as you. It’s harder for me to squeeze through the branches.’
‘Is it true you will be married soon?’ Momo’s best friend, ten-year-old Driss Lahcen, shouts up to her.
‘Who told you that?’
‘I heard your brother talking in the café. He said your father made a deal with your uncle in Ait Bougmez for you to marry your cousin, Mehdi, after Ramadan, and Ramadan finished already.’
Hanane grimaces and shakes her head, her long black braid swinging across the back of her blue djellaba. She’d never marry fat, ugly Mehdi, no matter what her father and Mohammed said.
She had a plan. She needed to convince her father to send her to university in Beni Mellal to study as a teacher. The new school rising up on the hill would need teachers. She was lucky that her poor mother had demanded that she learn to read and write at the village school, even though it had meant sitting behind a curtain so as not to distract the boys.
It had been wonderful, learning the magic of transcribing her thoughts into words that she’d scribble with her mother’s kohl stick onto the scraps of paper she’d collect from the alleyways and hoard in her cupboard, rolled up in the folds of a hijab. Behind the dirty flowered curtain in the schoolroom, she’d discovered a talent that was hers and hers alone. Poetry. Short, sweet aches of life. The poems sprung from her like water flowing from the fountain of the garden of Paradise.
Then her mother had died. The baby hadn’t managed more than two days of breath before he’d joined her. Her father had pulled Hanane out of school. A home needed a woman to cook the tagine and wash the clothes, he’d said. Someone needed to feed and care for him and her older brother, Mohammed. Even though she was only twelve. When her father had married the dull girl Hind the following year, nothing changed. Her education was over. But Hanane would escape her duties in the house whenever she could to range around the valleys and fields, helping the shawafa find the plants for her medicines and potions. In the mountains, she was free.
She was twenty-three now and the world was changing. Even here in the mountains. She’d often pause from washing the clothes in the river to watch a group of giggling white-smocked girls heading up the hill to the old school, their slates and chalk clutched against their chests. And the tourists were coming in from Marrakech more and more often to see the waterfalls. She’d even seen a lady on a motorcycle not three weeks ago! But since her twenty-third birthday in June, all her father and her brother, Mohammed, could talk about was her marriage.
‘I’ll never marry Mehdi. Mohammed only says it because his stupid wife, Bouchra, wants her brother here.’
‘Oh, c’mon, Hanane,’ seven-year-old Yassine Lahcen protests. ‘We want to go to dance at a wedding.’ Yassine pokes his brother on the arm. ‘Look, Driss.’ He waggles his shoulders and wiggles his hips like he’d seen the women do at Mohammed’s wedding in the summer.
Driss shoves his brother’s shoulder. ‘What are you, a girl? Stop it. Don’t be stupid.’
‘What’s wrong with being a girl, Driss?’ Hanane calls down from the tree. ‘You wouldn’t be here without your mother. You must be respectful.’
An oily black olive smacks Driss on his forehead. He peers up into the branches just as Omar launches another one at him, hitting him square on the nose.
Omar bursts into giggles. ‘It’s raining. It’s pouring. Driss Lahcen is snoring.’
A deep chuckle wafts over from the river path. A tall, black-haired European man in beige trousers and a navy jumper rolled under his chin stands on the compacted earth, holding an odd black object.
‘May I take a picture?’ he asks in accented French.
‘Hey, mister,’ Omar shouts from his perch. ‘What’s that thing?’
‘It’s a camera. But it’s a special camera. It can make the pictures here, right in front of your eyes.’
‘Serious?’
‘Definitely serious.’
‘Let him take our picture, Hanane,’ Omar shouts down through the branches. ‘I want to see it come out of the magic box.’
Hanane sweeps her eyes over the tall man. He’s much older than her brother, Mohammed, but there’s still a youthfulness about him, despite the lines that sweep out from his eyes when he smiles. His skin is very white and even from this distance, his eyes reflect the sharp blue of the November sky. His short, straight black hair shines blue where it’s caught by sunlight. He carries himself with assurance, she thinks, like a man who’s comfortable with his place in the world. What can he think of her, up here in the tree with a boy? What would her father think if he saw her talking to a foreigner?
‘I don’t think so, Omar. It’s not proper.’
Omar breaks into a wide smile. ‘She says it’s fine, mister.’
‘Omar!’ Hanane hisses. ‘You’re a bad boy.’
‘For sure, I’m a bad boy. Even Jedda says it and she loves me a lot.’
‘I don’t believe that at all. Your grandmother thinks you’re the prince of Zitoune.’
‘Wait there,’ the man shouts up to them. ‘I’ll take a picture of you two first, just as you are.’
Hanane bites her lip. Omar kicks her shoulder with his foot.
‘Your brother stinks of cumin.’
She giggles despite herself.
‘Perfect.’
The man presses a button. A whirring sound and a square of shiny grey-and-white card slides out of the camera’s mouth. The boys cluster around as the man waves it in the air.
Momo wrinkles his nose. ‘It’s smelly.’
Yassine pinches his nose with his fingers. ‘Like donkey piss.’
Driss squints at the grey paper. ‘Nothing’s happening.’
The man laughs. ‘You won’t see it until I peel back this piece of paper. We have to count one minute. Then you’ll see a picture appear’ – he waves his hands like a magician – ‘like magic.’
Omar scampers down the tree. ‘C’mon, Hanane. Come see the magic picture.’
Hanane peers through the leaves at the cluster of black heads huddled over the shiny square of card. She’d have to swear the boys to secrecy. Her honey cookies should do the trick.
‘Who wants to peel back the plastic to see the picture?’
Omar shoots his arm into the air. ‘Me! Me, mister!’
The man laughs and hands over the card. ‘There,’ he says, indicating a loose corner of the grey plastic film. ‘Pull there.’
The boys huddle closer as Omar peels back the film.
‘It’s there!’ Momo shouts. ‘It’s you and Omar in the tree. Hanane, come see.’
Hanane grabs a branch and shimmies down through the leaves. The man takes the photograph from Omar and holds it in front of Hanane. She’s there, laughing in the tree with Omar, in black-and-white. Like magic.
‘Take it. Please. So you’ll always remember your day up in that olive tree.’
Hanane shakes her head. ‘You are kind, but I couldn’t.’
Bouchra would be sure to find it, no matter how well she hid it. Only yesterday, Hanane had found her rifling through her scarves. Luckily, she’d hidden her poems in Jedda’s potion shed. If her lazy sister-in-law found the poems or a photo like this, Bouchra would frighten the devil Shaytan Iblis with her curses. Because, of course, Bouchra would betray her secrets, now that she considered herself the mistress of the Demsiri household. Bouchra would do anything to topple Hanane from her place as favourite.
‘Well, then, I’ll keep it. As a memento of a happy day.’ The man tucks the glossy photograph in his back pocket and turns to the boys. ‘Now, how about a picture of all of you boys there by the river?’
Hanane watches the boys jostle for the best place, which is taken, naturally, by Omar.
‘I’m Gus Percival,’ he says to her as he squints into the viewfinder. ‘I’m a geologist. I’m staying in Zitoune for a few months doing some research in the area.’ He waves at the boys to squeeze more closely together. ‘Say cheese.’
Hanane watches the shiny square of paper spew out of the camera’s mouth. The man waves it in the air to dry, out of reach of the excited boys.
‘Can I ask your name?’
Hanane hesitates. Why would he want to know her name? He had no place in her world, nor she in his. But why, then, did she suddenly feel like the earth had tilted and everything she’d known, everything she’d dreamed, had shifted to an unknowable place?
Omar jumps up and grabs the photograph from Gus’s hand. He peels back the grey film as the others fight to see. ‘Hanane! Come see!’
‘Hanane,’ Gus repeats. ‘It’s lovely to meet you.’
Chapter Three (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Marrakech, Morocco – March 2009
The reedy whine of the snake charmers’ flutes flutters through the baseline of African drums and the water sellers’ bells as Addy weaves through the crowds in Jemaa el Fna Square. Women with veiled faces sit on stools, bowls of green mud and syringes balanced on their laps. They grab at Addy as she walks past and point to photo albums showing hands and feet covered in intricate henna patterns. A band of boy acrobats in ragged red trousers jumps and tumbles in the square. Addy snaps a string of photos as they leap from one tableau to another. A small boy grins a gap-toothed smile and thrusts a dirty wool cap at her. She digs into her pocket and grabs a handful of change, tossing it into the cap.
‘Shukran,’ the boy shouts, then he turns and runs along the line of tourists jangling the coins in his cap.
Addy wanders into the shaded alleyways of the souks, clicking photos of anything that catches her eye: a green gecko sitting on lettuce in a bamboo cage, antelope horns hanging from an apothecary’s shop front, two men eating snails from steaming bowls by a snail seller’s three-wheeled stand. Overhead, loosely woven bamboo obscures the blue sky, and shards of sunlight slice through the dust and incense that clouds the air.
Addy jostles against short, stout women in citrus-coloured hooded djellabas and hijab headscarves. Some of the women are veiled, but many of the younger women are bare-headed, with long, glossy black ponytails trailing down into the discarded hoods of their djellabas. There are girls in low-rise skinny jeans, tight, long-sleeved T-shirts with CHANNEL and GUCHI outlined in diamante, their eyes hidden behind fake designer sunglasses studded with more diamante. They totter arm-in-arm down the alleyways in high-heeled sandals, ignoring the catcalls of the boys who buzz through the crowds on their motorbikes. ‘How are you, baby? Come here, darling! I love you!’
Addy stops in front of a stall selling tote bags and straw bowls. She points to a wide-brimmed hat hanging by a loop from a nail in the wall.
‘How much for the hat?’
‘You like the hat?’ The shop seller’s lips curl back, exposing large yellow teeth. ‘No problem, mashi mushkil.’ He grabs the hat and presents it to Addy like a crown.
She sticks her finger through the loop and swings the hat back and forth.
‘I’ve never seen a hat with a loop before.’
‘It’s for hanging. It’s very clever design.’
‘How much?’
‘Two hundred dirhams.’
Addy makes a mental calculation. Around eighteen pounds. ‘Okay.’
The shop seller leers at her and Addy sees the brown rot eating through the yellow enamel.
‘It might be you would like a bag, madame? It’s very beautiful quality. The best in Marrakech.’
‘No, just the hat. Thanks.’ She hands him two crumpled dirham notes.
The shop seller eyes her as he slips the money into the pocket of his beige djellaba. He holds up a fat finger. ‘One minute, madame. Please, you wait. I am sure you will like a special bag. It’s from Fes. Very, very nice quality. Louis Vuitton.’
When he disappears behind the curtain, Addy puts on the hat and dodges out of the shop. She’s halfway down the alley towards Jemaa el Fna when she hears his shouts.
‘Come back, madame! I make you very good deal. A very beautiful bag. The best quality original fake in Marrakech!’
The sun is blazing hot when Addy steps into the square. She skirts along the perimeter in the shade of the restaurant canopies, picking her way around the café tables crowded with tourists sipping tepid Cokes and local men smoking Marlboros with tiny glasses of thick black coffee on the shaded terrace of the Café de France.
She heads down an alley towards the Koutoubia mosque, stopping short in front of a display case of cream-stuffed French pastries crawling with black flies, shaded from the sun by a faded red-and-white striped canopy. A sandwich board plastered with excursion photographs leans crookedly on the cracked paving in front of the pastry shop: desert camel trekkers silhouetted on the crests of towering dunes, blue fishing boats carpeting a seaside harbour, fairy-tale waterfalls coursing down red clay cliffs. Under the waterfalls a handwritten scrawl in blue marker fuzzy at the edges where the ink has leached into the flimsy card:
COME TO VISIT THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WATERFALLS OF NORTH AFRIQUE. ITS MAGIQUE IS AMAZING! THE CASCADES DE ZITOUNE WILL BE A WONDERFUL MEMORY FOR YOU. COME INSIDE TO BOOK A TOUR VISIT. ONLY 3 HOURS FROM MARRAKECH TO PARADISE.
Zitoune. Where her father had met Hanane. Where Hanane and her child may still be. She’d been wondering how she’d get there. Addy ducks under the frayed canopy into the pastry shop.
That night, Addy wakes up with an image in her mind’s eye. The waxing moon casts a muted light over the hotel room furniture, the shapes like hulking animals lurking in the shadows. She shuts her eyes and the image pulses against her eyelids. The figure wears a gown and turban of vivid blue. Addy lies in bed, the blueness staying with her until she falls back to sleep.
Chapter Four (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
The Road to Zitoune, Morocco – March 2009
The tour bus rattles across the plains of Marrakech. A wall of towering snow-capped mountains thrusts skywards at the edge of the olive groves spreading out over the plains like a green sea to the right of the road. The March sky is achingly blue. Addy unzips her camera bag. She takes out her camera and the 24–105 mm zoom lens, changes the lens and screws on the polarising filter and lens hood. Leaning out of the window, she braces her elbows against the window frame.
As the bus bounces along the potholed asphalt, she snaps pictures of the squat olive trees, cactus sprouting orange prickly pears, and green fields dotted with blood-red field poppies. Towns of pink earth buildings materialise from the land, lively with mongrel dogs chasing chickens, women riding donkeys and men with prune-like faces shooing flocks of sheep.
The sun is warm on her face and her naked arms. She settles back into her seat. The faded blue vinyl is ripped at the seams and burns her hand when she touches it. She fans her face with her straw hat. Philippa’s voice rattles around her head: Are you mad, Addy? You’re probably suffering from post-traumatic stress or something. A woman alone in the Moroccan mountains for three months? You can’t be serious.
Philippa had obviously missed the envelope of Polaroids. Missed the photo of Gus and Hanane and the letter. She’d have said something, definitely. Gloated. Anything to show up their father as a feckless, irresponsible wanderer, leaving abandoned women and children in his selfish wake. That wasn’t the father Addy knew. The doting father she’d adored. But who was this Hanane? Why was she wearing her mother, Hazel’s, Claddagh ring? Why had their father never said anything about Hanane and the baby after he’d come back from Morocco? Surely he wouldn’t have just abandoned them. But he’d done it once before, with Essie and Philippa, hadn’t he?
Maybe she and Philippa had a Moroccan brother or sister living in Morocco. A twenty-three-year-old now. Surely someone in Zitoune would know where Hanane and her child were now. Once she’d found out what had happened to them, she’d let Philippa know. That would be soon enough.
She leans her head against the vinyl seat, the bumps and sways of the bus lulling her into a dozy torpor. Nerves flutter in the pit of her stomach. Just three months. Three months to see what she can find out about Gus and the pregnant Moroccan woman in the photograph. Three months to work on the travel book. Three months to change her life.
The tour bus arrives at a junction in front of a one-storey building constructed of concrete blocks. A donkey stands tethered to a petrol pump with red paint faded by the sun. Above a window a Coca-Cola sign in looping Arabic script hangs precariously from a rusty hook. Someone’s nailed a hand-painted sign of waterfalls to a post, an arrow pointing towards mountains in the distance. The driver grinds the gears and steers the bus towards the mountains.
A half-hour later, the bus pulls into a dirt square surrounded by a jumble of buildings in various stages of construction. A group of men sits on the hill overlooking the square. The younger men wear designer jeans and hold cell phones close to their ears. The faces of the older men are deeply creased, like old leather shoes. Some suck on cigarette stubs. They wear dusty flannel trousers under brown hooded djellabas. Many of them have bright blue turbans wrapped around their heads. They’re like hungry eagles eyeing their prey.
One of the younger men separates from the group and jogs down the hill. He moves lightly like a deer, his feet finding an easy path down the rocky hillside. He wears a bright blue gown embroidered with yellow symbols over his jeans. The long tail of his blue turban flaps behind him as he lopes down the hill.
‘Sbah lkhir,’ he calls to the driver.
The driver laughs at something he says and offers him a cigarette from a crumpled Marlboro packet. The young man shakes his head and slaps the driver on the back. The driver shrugs and holds the Marlboro packet up to his lips then pulls out a cigarette with his teeth. He grabs a green plastic lighter from his dashboard, clicking under the end of the cigarette until it glows. Sucking in his cheeks, he blows out the smoke with an ‘Ahhh.’
The young man turns to face the passengers. He’s tall and slim and his blue gown floats around his body. His face is angular, his jaw strong, and his amber eyes are almond-shaped and deep-set. His lips are full and when he smiles a dimple shadows his right cheek.
‘Sbah lkhir. Good morning. Allô,bonjour, comment ça va?’ He flashes a white smile. ‘I am Omar. I am your tour guide, votre guide touristique.’ He thumps his chest with the flat of his hand and gestures around him. ‘You are welcome to my paradise and to the place of the most beautiful waterfalls in Morocco, the Cascades de Zitoune. In English, the Waterfalls of the Olive.’
He claps his hands together and flashes another white-toothed smile. ‘So, you are all happy? You are ready for the big adventure of your life?’
Addy waves at him.
‘Yes, allô?’
The blood rises in her cheeks as she feels the eyes of the other tourists on her.
‘I’m sorry. I’m not here for the tour. I just caught a lift on the tour bus because it was the easiest way here. I need to find the house I’m renting.’
‘I’m so, so sorry for that.’ His accent is heavy, the English syllables embellished with Arabic rolls of the tongue. ‘You’ll miss the best tour with the best tour guide in Morocco. But, anyway, what is the address? Is it Dar Fatima? The Hôtel de France? I can take you.’
‘No, it’s a house near the river. I can manage. I don’t want to delay your tour.’
Omar waggles his finger at her. ‘Mashi mushkil. I know the house. It’s the place of Mohammed Demsiri. Where’s your luggage? Your husband is coming soon?’
‘No. Just me. My bags are at the back. I don’t have much.’
‘No problem. I’ll make a good arrangement for you.’
‘I, but … I don’t want to be any trouble.’
Omar says something to the driver, who tosses his cigarette out of the window and starts the ignition. The door’s still open and Omar hangs half in and half out, his feet wedged against the opening. As the tour bus cuts across the square towards a small rusty bridge, he calls out to acquaintances in a guttural language. Addy sucks in her breath as the bridge’s loose boards clatter beneath the bus’s tyres.
The tour bus turns right down a narrow lane and stops in front of a squat mud house. A large inverted triangle is centred on the blue metal door and two tiny windows protected by black metal grilles have been cut into the orange pisé wall. Omar jumps out of the bus and bangs on the blue door. A woman’s voice calls out from behind the door.
‘Chkoun?’
‘Omar.’
The door opens. A young woman in pink flannelette pyjamas and a lime green hijab stands on the threshold. She wears purple Crocs and carries a wooden spoon dripping with batter. She has the same full lips and high cheekbones as Omar in her dark-skinned face. Omar gestures at the bus, his guttural words flying at her like bullets. The girl waves her spoon at Omar, flinging batter over his blue gown as she volleys back a shrill response.
Omar catches Addy’s eye. ‘One minute, one minute.’ He grabs the girl by the arm and they disappear behind the door.
A few minutes later he emerges and beckons to Addy.
‘Come.’
‘This isn’t the house on the Internet.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s the house of my family. We’ll put the luggage here and you can come on the tour. I’ll bring you to your house later.’
‘But …’
He presses his hand onto his chest. ‘I am Omar. Everybody knows me here. It’s no problem. Don’t worry.’
Philippa’s voice echoes in her head: Whatever you do, Addy, don’t trust those Moroccan men. They’re only after one thing. A British passport.
Omar shrugs. ‘Okay, so no problem. You don’t trust me, I can see it. It’s not a requirement for you to come to my house. We go to the waterfalls.’
‘No, it’s fine. I’m coming.’
‘About bloody time, too,’ a girl with a Geordie accent grumbles from the back of the bus. ‘We could’ve crossed the bloody Sahara by camel by now.’
Omar stands in a dirt-floored courtyard with the girl and two older women. A woman who looks about fifty-five stands ramrod straight and wears a red gypsy headscarf, an orange blouse buttoned to her chin, and a red-and-white striped apron over layers of skirts and flannelette pyjamas. Silver coins hang from her pierced ears and the inner lids of her amber eyes are ringed with kohl.
Beside her, an old woman in a flowered flannel housecoat and red bandana leans heavily on a knotty wooden stick. A thick silver ring marked with crosses and X’s slides around one of her gnarled fingers. Her left eye is closed and the right eye that peers out from her wrinkled face is a translucent blue. She has a blue arrow tattooed on her chin.
‘It’s my mum, my sister and my grandmother,’ Omar says, waving at the women.
Addy sets down her camera bag and her overnight bag. A clothesline has been strung across the yard and fresh washing hangs on the line dripping onto the dirt floor. A couple of scrawny chickens scratch in the red dirt. Addy extends her hand to his mother.
‘Bonjour.’
The woman takes hold of Addy’s hand in both of hers then smiles and nods. Her eyes sweep over Addy’s naked arms. She says something to Omar, who chuckles.
A small boy barges in through the door dragging Addy’s suitcase and tripod bag and deposits them next to her other luggage. Omar retrieves a coin from the pocket of his blue robe and flips it to the boy, who catches it, shouting ‘Shukran’ as he runs out of the door. The metal door bangs against its loose hinges.
The old woman waves her stick at the door and shuffles off through an archway, mumbling. Omar’s mother and sister pick up Addy’s luggage and follow the old woman into the next room.
‘Where are they going?’
‘Don’t worry. They put them in a safe place so the chickens and donkey don’t break them.’
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘No problem. Mashi mushkil.’
‘Mashy mushkey.’
‘It’s a good accent. It’s Darija. Arabic of Morocco.’
‘It sounds different here from what I heard in Marrakech.’
‘Here we speak Tamazight mostly. It’s Amazigh language.’
‘Amazigh?’
‘Yes. We say Amazigh for one person and Imazighen for many people. Everybody else says Berber, but we don’t like it so well, even though we say it for tourists because it’s more easy. The Romans called us that because they say we were like barbarians. It’s because we fight them well. We are the first people of North Africa. We’re free people. It’s what Imazighen means. We’re not Arab in the mountains.’
‘Oh. I didn’t know that.’
‘So, I’m a good teacher, isn’t it? My sister speaks Darija and some French from her school, but my mum and grandmother speak Tamazight only.’
‘And your father?’
‘My father, he’s died.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’
Omar shrugs. ‘Don’t mind. It’s life.’ Omar pinches the fabric of his blue gown between his fingers. ‘It’s the special blue colour of the Imazighen. It used to be that the Tuareg Berbers in the Sahara crushed indigo powder into white clothes to make them blue to be safe from the djinn. But when it was very hot the blue colour make their faces blue as well. People called them the blue men of the desert.’
Omar drapes the loose end of his blue turban across his face, covering his nose and mouth. ‘It’s a tagelmust. It’s for the desert, but the tourists love it so we wear it everywhere now. For us, it’s the man who covers his face, not the ladies.’ He folds his arms across his chest and spreads his feet apart. ‘I’m handsome, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sure you break the hearts of all the women tourists.’
Omar tugs at the cloth covering his face. ‘I never go with the tourist ladies. It’s many ladies in Zitoune who want to marry me, but I say no. My mum don’t like it. She want many grandchildren.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend …’
Omar tucks the tail of the tagelmust into his turban. ‘Mashi mushkil.’
A black-and-white cat brushes against her legs and Addy reaches down to brush its tail.
‘What a pretty cat.’
Omar shifts on his feet. ‘It’s the cat of my grandmother. It’s very, very old.’
‘Really? It doesn’t look old.’
‘She had it a long time anyway. It always follows her. It’s very curious all the time.’
Omar clears his throat. ‘It must be that I know your name.’
She stands up quickly and thrusts out her hand. ‘Addy.’
A wet pant leg wraps around her wrist like a damp leaf. She tries to shake it loose but the clothesline collapses, throwing the damp laundry into heaps on the dusty ground. The cat shoots across the courtyard and out through a crack in a thick wooden door.
Addy stares at the dust turning to red mud on the clothes. She stoops to pick up the dirty laundry.
‘I’m so sorry. I’ve messed up your mother’s laundry.’
Omar lifts the wet bundle out of Addy’s hands. ‘No mind, Adi.’ The vowels of her name curl and roll off his tongue, the accent on the last syllable. Omar stacks the wet laundry on top of a low wooden table. ‘It’s a boy’s name in Morocco. You have short hair like a boy anyway.’
Addy runs her fingers over her cropped hair. The softness still surprises her. Hair like a baby’s. A side effect of the Red Devil.
Omar wipes his muddy hands on his gown. ‘So, Adi of England. Yalla. We go.’
Chapter Five (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Zitoune, Morocco – March 2009
The tour group trails behind Omar as he leads them on a path through an olive grove beside the river. Stopping, Omar points out donkeys saddled with bright-coloured blankets, eating the fresh spring grass in the dappled shade.
‘These are Berber four-by-fours. They fill up on the gasoline when the drivers go to the market. The donkeys eat the marijuana there. You can see?’
Addy squints at the donkeys. ‘That’s not marijuana.’
Omar slaps his leg and laughs. ‘You know marijuana, Adi?’
The tourists laugh and the colour rises in Addy’s face. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Everyone knows what marijuana looks like.’ She searches the faces of the other tourists for affirmation. Surely she wasn’t the only one who’d gone to university in the Eighties.
‘Mashi mushkil. It’s so nice to know if a lady like marijuana.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Don’t be mad. I’m joking with you.’
‘Fine.’ Addy looks over at Omar and frowns. Was he chatting her up? He was handsome, there was no denying that. But, so what? She was here to work and to find Hanane and the baby. The last thing she needed was to get involved with a cocky Moroccan ten years younger than herself.
Omar presses a hand against his heart. ‘Now the lady of England is angry at me, I can tell it well. My heart is crushed like an egg for the Berber omelette. I must apologise.’
He wades out into the green meadow grass and picks a red poppy. He makes his way back to the path and holds out the flower to Addy.
Addy’s irritation dissipates. A sweet gesture. She reaches for the flower and Omar closes his hand around hers. She meets his gaze. A waft of memory. She looks away in confusion. His hand slides from hers. When she looks back, he’s on the path, the tourists clustered around him.
Around a bend in the river they come across several local women washing clothes in the clear water. Jeans and T-shirts in the colours of European football teams hang to dry over pink flowering oleander bushes. The women laugh and chatter, their skirts and aprons tucked into the waistbands of their flannelette pyjama bottoms, which are rolled up over their knees. Their hair is hidden by colourful bandanas. Many of them have blue arrow-like tattoos on their chins like Omar’s grandmother.
‘This is the manner the ladies wash the clothes in the village,’ Omar explains as the group stops to take photos.
Addy rests her camera on top of a large boulder and peers into the viewfinder. What do the women think of us, stealing their souls with our cameras? She presses the shutter then loops the strap around her neck, letting the camera flop against her chest as she replaces the lens cap.
She looks over at Omar, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. ‘So, where do the men wash their clothes?’
Omar laughs. ‘I’m very clean, even if I don’t wash my own clothes.’ He raises his arms and approaches her. ‘You can smell me.’
Addy stumbles away, holding her nose. ‘Men should share the housework. It’s only fair.’
‘That’s a big pity for your husband,’ Omar teases. ‘It’s a job for ladies to wash the clothes. At least I hope you cook well.’
‘Afraid not. I hate cooking. But I’m great at desserts. I have a sweet tooth.’
‘That’s good at least. Moroccans love sugar. Our blood is made of honey.’
The dimple appears on Omar’s right cheek. Addy’s heart thumps. She looks down at her sandals. The dry earth coats her toes in a fine red dust.
The sun dances on the river, shining silver on the swirling ripples. Addy falls back behind some newlyweds from France. A couple of Geordie girls from Newcastle flutter around Omar as he teases them with stories of djinn and the evil eye.
She looks away at the river, at the water glittering like diamonds. Ridiculous to be feeling like a teenager at her age. She needs to focus on her purpose. She sucks in a deep breath of the mountain air and exhales slowly, letting the warm air brush over her lips. Better. The yoga classes Philippa had forced her into were paying off at last.
Her thoughts wander to her father and Hanane. Whether they’d walked along this path on their way to the waterfalls. Why had her father never said anything to her about visiting Morocco? He’d obviously intended to, or he’d never have written her that letter. And where were the missing pages? What really happened to Hanane?
He was always travelling for his work. There had been times when she and her mother didn’t see him for months. She still had the postcards he’d sent her from all over the world. Mexico. Peru. Nigeria. Russia. Kuwait. After her mother had died, Addy had plastered her bulletin board in her room at St Margaret’s in Victoria with them. But none from Morocco.
She eyes Omar, who’s busy pointing out turtles sunning on a rock in the river. He was definitely too old to be her half-brother. Around thirty, she’d guess. He would’ve been a child when her father was in Zitoune. Probably too young to remember him. But what about Hanane? Would he remember her? She’d ask him, when she had a chance. Show him the old Polaroid. It was as good a place to start as any.
Addy’s mind settles as she listens to Omar’s voice resonating in the warm morning air. Further along the path, he points out beehive-shaped clay structures in which, he explains, the village women take steam baths. He pokes a stick with his foot and it metamorphoses into a thin green grass snake, prompting squeals from the two Geordie girls. Every now and then, Omar catches Addy’s gaze as he spins his multilingual patter about carob trees, petrified tree roots, or the wiry, grey-furred macaque monkeys that live in the caves and crevices of the cliffs.
The French newlyweds, Sylvain and Antoinette, ask to be photographed next to a donkey. Omar suggests that Antoinette climb up onto the animal as Sylvain holds the lead. Omar unwinds his tagelmust and wraps it around Sylvain’s head. He pulls off his blue gown, revealing well-worn Levis and a white T-shirt, and offers it to Antoinette. It’s like a tent around her tiny body.
The tourists shout out instructions to the pair as Omar snaps the photos. Ouistiti! Mirar al pajarito! Käsekuchen! Say cheese! Addy hovers at the edge of the group, watching Omar. He’s lean and muscular and the white of his T-shirt glows against his brown skin. His hair is a close-cropped cap of tight black curls. He moves like a swimmer, lithe and graceful and unselfconscious.
They continue through a dense olive grove, following a narrow path in a gradual descent through the trees. The morning is filled with the noisy peace of the countryside – a dog’s bark, a donkey’s bray, the underlying buzz of cicadas. The group breaks out of the shade into a meadow where the sky opens above, blue and cloudless.
Addy takes off her new straw hat. She closes her eyes and breathes in the clear air, letting the heat penetrate her skin. The weight of all the worry and anxiety of the previous months slowly falls away until she’s light and new again.
Tessa and Nicky, the two Geordie girls, buzz around Omar like chubby bees. They wear tight halter tops, cropped shorts and flip-flops. On the bank of a wide hill stream, Omar stands by to help as the group steps over the rocks to the other side. When he offers his hand to Tessa and then to Nicky, Addy sees him eye the English girls’ angel wing tattoos, which stretch across the tanned skin of their lower backs.
Addy’s the last one to cross the stream. Her breath catches when his fingers close around hers. On the other side of the stream, Omar places his hands on her waist to steady her. His breath is warm on her neck. She rests her hands on his for an instant, then steps forwards onto the path.
An hour into the hike, the group reaches a lookout platform facing the waterfalls.
Omar sweeps his hand towards the view. ‘This is my Paradise.’
The tourists crowd towards the flimsy bamboo railing, hurrying to pull out their cameras. Foaming water crashes over a red earth cliff, forming pools and mini-waterfalls as the water thunders into a churning pool at the base. A rainbow arches across the pool, its colours hazy in the river mist. The waterfalls in the Polaroid. Her father and Hanane had stood here, on this very spot, smiling for the photo that August day in 1984.
There’s a modest café at the lookout and Addy buys herself a warm bottle of Coca-Cola from a slender, sharp-faced Moroccan about Omar’s age at a bar cobbled together from produce crates. The Moroccan makes a show of wiping the Coke bottle clean with the tail of his tie-dyed turban and his fingers linger on her palm when he hands her the Coke.
When Addy returns to the lookout, Omar’s talking to the Geordie girls.
‘I studied at university,’ Omar’s saying. ‘English literature. Chakespeare. “To be or not to be, that is the question.”’ He thumps his chest with the flat of his hand. ‘I’m a graduate of the university in Beni Mellal. Nobody else in Zitoune is graduated from university.’
Addy leans against a bamboo post and sips the tepid soft drink. ‘English literature? I studied that, too. Did you study Milton? Donne? Marlowe? The Romantics?’
‘I know Chakespeare.’
Nicky rolls her blue-lined eyes. ‘You’ve got to be flipping kidding me. I’m on bloody holiday in Morocco and you’re talking about Shakespeare? I think I’m gonna gag.’ She points a long pink fingernail at the Coke bottle. ‘Where’d you get the Coke?’
‘Over there.’
‘C’mon, Tessa. Let’s get a Coke. I’m gasping.’
Omar nods at the turbaned barman. ‘It’s my friend, Yassine. He sells the best Coca-Cola in Zitoune, even if it’s not so cold. It’s better like that. Not so many calories.’
Nicky grabs Tessa’s arm. ‘Oo-er. He’s a bit of all right. C’mon, Tess, I’m getting thirstier by the minute.’
Tessa, a sun-streaked blonde with a generous cleavage and pink gloss lipstick, squints at Yassine. He gives her a slow, appreciative smile.
‘Oh, all right. I can’t be doing with Shakespeare, either. I’m on my hols.’
The girls saunter over to the bar, their flip-flops slapping on the compacted earth. Yassine flashes them a white-toothed smile as he sets out two bottles of Coca-Cola on the worktop.
Omar nods. ‘Yassine will make them happy. He likes English girls. He likes to practise his English. More tea, Vicar? See you later, alligator.’
‘In a while, crocodile.’
‘In a while, crocodile.’ Omar grins. ‘I like it.’
Addy sets her empty Coke bottle down on the ground. She lifts up her camera and focuses the lens on the rainbow. ‘Paradise Lost.’
‘What?’
‘Paradise Lost. Anyone who studied English literature would’ve heard of Paradise Lost. It’s a classic. Le Morte d’Arthur? Maybe something more modern. George Orwell? Virginia Woolf?’
‘I studied at university. It’s the truth.’
‘If you say so.’
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘Never mind. It’s not important.’
Addy glances over at Omar. His hands are on the bamboo railing and he’s staring out at the waterfalls. Why had she been so rude? If he wants to chat up girls with lies, what business is it of hers? It wasn’t like her to be so mean. That was Philippa’s domain.
‘I’m sorry. I was rude. Of course you went to university.’
‘No problem.’
She rests her hands on the railing and looks out at the waterfalls, willing her heart to calm its bouncing inside her chest. ‘I had an unusual dream last night.’
‘Yes?’
‘I dreamt about someone wearing a blue gown and turban. I couldn’t see his face. Then I saw you today and you were wearing exactly the same thing.’
Addy looks over at Omar, who’s staring at her.
‘What? What is it?’
‘It was Allah who send you this message.’
She shakes her head. ‘It was just a dream.’
‘No. Allah sent me to you in your dream. It’s our fate to meet today.’
A couple of rafts constructed of bamboo poles and blue plastic oil drums bob on the water at the base of the waterfalls. Scavenged wooden chairs are festooned with garish fabrics and plastic flowers.
Omar points to the rafts. ‘Everybody, we must take the boats to the other side. These are the Titanics of Morocco. But don’t worry, it might be they will not sink today, inshallah.’
A fine mist hangs in the air, settling on Addy’s skin like dew. Omar directs the group onto the two rafts, grabbing hands and elbows to steady the tourists as they step onto the lurching rafts. Addy settles down on a damp chair beside Sylvain and Antoinette. A middle-aged German couple in safari outfits and laden down with binoculars and cameras shift onto the chairs at the rear.
Omar jumps onto the other raft with the Geordie girls and a retired Spanish couple. Addy feels a stab of disappointment.
‘What are you doing over there, when the lady is here?’ Sylvain calls over to Omar.
The blue gown whips around Omar in the breeze. ‘Because I can see her better from here.’
Halfway up the hill, Omar settles everyone at rusty circular tables on a restaurant patio overlooking the waterfalls. A flimsy bamboo latticework fence is the only barrier between the patio and a vertical drop to the churning pool far below.
Addy sits at a small table beside the fence. A smiling boy looking about nineteen or twenty jogs down the stone steps to the patio, four large bottles of water tucked under his arms as he carries two in his hands. A blotch of white skin covers his left cheek and his brown hands are mottled with dots of white.
‘Amine, ici,’ Omar shouts to the boy, pointing to the tables occupied by his group.
Omar moves between the tables taking orders for lamb tagine and chicken brochettes, translating into Tamazight for Amine. The boy nods, his shiny black hair flopping into his large brown eyes. Omar follows Amine into the restaurant and returns with large plastic bottles of Coca-Cola and plastic baskets of flat discs of bread. He sets a bottle of Coke and a basket of bread on Addy’s table.
‘Everything’s okay, Adi?’
‘Fine. Thank you.’
‘It’s okay for me to sit with you to eat my lunch?’
‘Sure. Fine.’
Omar’s knees brush against hers as he sits in the empty chair. He tears off a chunk of bread and rolls it into marble-sized balls with his fingertips.
‘I’m so sorry for disturbing you.’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’
He tears off another piece of bread and begins the rolling motion again. He squints at her in the sharp sunlight, his light brown eyes glowing almost amber.
‘You have to know I never eat my lunch with tourists.’
A cat rubs itself against Addy’s legs, purring. The thunder of the waterfalls, a fine mist on her skin. A table littered with dough marbles.
Chapter Six (#ulink_e706fee0-f6c0-5f62-b48b-8a9da49b6389)
Zitoune, Morocco – November 1983
From his perch on an aspen branch, Omar watches the Irishman knock in the final tent peg with a rock. The man – Gus he’d said his name was – has chosen a good location. No one comes up here to the source of the waterfalls with the Roman bridge. No olive trees up here. And tourists never find the path. They only want to see the waterfalls then go back to Marrakech for their supper.
This Gus isn’t like the other tourists. Omar has spied on him at the weekly market, bargaining for mutton and vegetables in Arabic. Like the Arabic he’s learning in school, not like Darija. It’s probably why no one understands Gus well. Sometimes Gus tries to speak Arabic to the Amazigh traders from Oushane and the villages even further in the mountains, which is crazy. Everyone knows they speak only Tamazight.
Yesterday, Gus bought a small round clay brazier and a tagine pot from the market. Old Abdullah charged him too much: fifty dirhams. And the man paid! Omar will try this when he sells the ripe olives to the tourists. ‘Fresh olives from Morocco. Fifty dirhams!’ He’ll make a big profit. He’ll give his brother, Momo, and his friends, Driss and Yassine, olives to sell, as well. Pay them one dirham each. He’ll be a rich boy soon, especially since he steals the olives. Almost one hundred per cent profit. Maths is the only subject he likes at school. Maths and French, because he needs to talk to the tourists. He rubs the angry red welt on his arm. His grandmother was right to punish him with the hot bread poker for missing his classes. If he was to be rich one day, he couldn’t be lazy. One day he won’t have to sleep by the donkey, and he’ll build his mother a fine big house, better even than the house of the policeman. And they’ll all have new clothes from the shops in Azaghar, not the old clothes his mother brought back from helping the ladies with the babies in the mountains. One day for sure he’ll be a rich man.
Hunching over the brazier, Gus takes a silver lighter out of his shirt pocket and lights the coals he’s stacked inside. Too many. Jedda would punish Omar if he used so many coals.
Omar’s eyes follow a flash of silver from the man’s shirt pocket to his fingers. Gus flicks the silver lighter. A thin blue flame waves in the air. Gus leans over the brazier with the flame until a coal catches light. He flips back the lighter’s lid. Back into his pocket. Silver. Gus must be rich.
Gus throws a handful of sticks onto the coals and sets the grille on top of the brazier. He sits back onto a low wooden stool. A pan of water is on the ground by his feet. He reaches into a canvas rucksack and pulls out a potato. His other hand in his trouser pocket. A red pocket knife. The knife scraping against the potato skin. Shavings falling onto the earth. Fat chunks of white potato plopping into the water. Gus doesn’t know how to make tagine well.
Omar shimmies down the skinny aspen, its yellow autumn leaves falling around him like confetti.
‘Mister Gus! Stop!’
‘Looks like I’ve got a spy. Omar, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Everybody knows me here.’
Omar lopes over to Gus, his Real Madrid football shirt loose on his slender body. His toes poke out from the torn canvas of his running shoes under the rolled-up cuffs of his jeans.
‘That’s not how you cut vegetables for tagine. They will never cook like that.’
‘A spy and a professional chef. You’re a very talented boy.’
Omar sticks out his hand. ‘Give me the knife.’
The corners of the man’s eyes crinkle as he smiles. He hands Omar the pocket knife.
‘So, Mister Boss. Show me how it’s done.’
Omar picks a potato out of the sack and squats next to the pot of water. After scraping off the skin, he cuts the potato into four long white slices.
‘Like this,’ he says. ‘Like fat fingers. Then the heat will cook them well.’
He pulls out a long carrot and rasps the blade against the skin, the dirty orange shreds spiralling onto the ground. He chops off the leafy top and the tip, then slices the carrot into two vertically. Then he scoops out the green core and cuts the carrot into thin strips.
‘Like that.’ He drops the slivers into the pot. ‘Very good.’
Gus holds out his palm. ‘Let me try.’
Omar hands back the knife. ‘Mashi mushkil.’
‘No problem. That bit of Darija I’ve learned.’
Omar rests his elbows on his thighs as he watches Gus scrape the skin off a carrot.
‘You sound different than the French tourists from Marrakech.’
‘I’m Irish, but I live in a very faraway place called Canada. A very beautiful place by the sea. But really I’m a nomad. I travel the world to search for oil in rocks. That’s why I’m here. There were a lot of dinosaurs in Morocco. Wherever there were dinosaurs, there’s usually oil.’
‘I know where there are some footprints of dinosaurs. Not so far from here.’
‘Really? Will you show me?’
Omar shrugs. ‘For fifty dirhams.’
‘Twenty dirhams.’
Omar’s eyebrows shoot up: twenty dirhams? He would’ve shown the man for free. He screws up his small angular face.
‘Thirty dirhams.’
Gus raises an eyebrow and holds out his right hand. ‘Highway robbery – thirty dirhams. Deal.’
Omar puts his small brown hand into the man’s large, square-fingered hand and they shake.
‘It might be that you will need a guide here, Mister Gus. I know all the good places to visit around Zitoune. I know a place of dinosaur feet and a cave with many old drawings. We can make a good negotiation.’
‘You’ll make me a poor man, for sure, Omar. What about if I teach you English so you can talk to any English tourists who visit the waterfalls, not just the French? You can corner the tourist market. No one here speaks English.’
Omar squints at the glowing coals as he mulls over the offer. Dirhams now would be good. But then once the man leaves, the money stops. But, if he learns English, even when Gus leaves, he can still earn money. Lots of money. Omar holds out his hand.
‘Deal.’
Chapter Seven (#ulink_b235b900-4d32-56f5-b7c5-f7ee8b166b9d)
Zitoune, Morocco – March 2009
A flat-roofed house of orange sandstone rocks sits on a hill thick with cacti. Blue shutters frame the square windows and a basement level hugs the hillside, jutting out to provide the base for a veranda shaded with a twisted grapevine. An olive tree with a gnarled trunk as thick as Addy’s waist leans over the house. A donkey is tethered in its shade. Scrawny black chickens scratch around the donkey’s hooves.
Omar sets down Addy’s luggage on the gravel path. ‘You like it?’
‘It’s perfect.’
‘It’s okay. It’s a bit small. I’m making a big house.’
Addy shades her eyes from the stabbing rays of the late afternoon sun with her hand. ‘For your family?’
‘One day, inshallah. Or maybe it will be a guest house for tourists. I must to be rich one day.’
Addy shifts her camera bag to her left shoulder. ‘Let’s wait on the veranda for Mohammed.’
On the veranda, she sets down her camera bag on a long wooden table and leans on the stone railing. Below the house the river winds its way towards the waterfalls through budding oleander bushes and shivering ash trees. Across the river the sandstone cliffs of the Middle Atlas Mountains ripple around the valley, while in the distance the snowy peaks of the High Atlas Mountains stand resolute against the fading blue of the sky. Addy sighs.
Omar leans against the railing. ‘You don’t like it?’
‘No, I love it. This is just what the doctor ordered.’
‘Your doctor told you to come here?’
Addy laughs. ‘It’s just an expression. It means it’s perfect.’
‘Just what the doctor ordered. I like it.’ Omar nods his head towards the blue door. ‘Why do we wait to go inside?’
‘I texted Mr Demsiri to tell him I’ve arrived. He needs to bring me the key.’
Omar strolls over to a flowerpot spilling with red geraniums. He tilts the pot over and holds up a key.
‘You knew where the key was?’
‘Everybody knows. Mashi mushkil. Don’t worry. It’s very safe in Zitoune. You don’t need to lock the door. Nobody will bother you.’ The dimple in his cheek. ‘Except me.’
‘Omar …’
A crunch of footsteps on gravel.
‘Allô, madame! You find the house okay?’
A tall, bald middle-aged man climbs up the path, his brown djellaba straining at his sturdy belly. An impressive hooked nose lends him the regal appearance of a Roman emperor.
Omar gestures to the older man. ‘Adi, honey, this is Mohammed Demsiri. He owns many places in Zitoune. He’s a rich man.’
Addy raises an eyebrow at Omar. Honey? She extends her hand to the older man. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you. The house looks lovely. It’s such a beautiful setting.’
Mohammed smiles, two bright gold teeth where his canines should be. Ignoring Addy’s extended hand, he pats his broad chest and nods. A thick silver watch encircles his wrist and several chunky silver rings decorate his fingers.
‘It’s a pleasure for me to welcome you to Morocco, madame. I remember you well.’
‘You remember me?’
Mohammed slaps Omar on the back. ‘I was at the restaurant today when you ate the lunch with Omar. He came into the restaurant to tell me he met a beautiful lady with hair like fire. I looked outside and I saw you. I told Omar he choosed well, Adi, honey.’
Omar chokes. ‘Laa. Her name is Adi. It’s only me who calls her honey. It’s like habibati.’
Mohammed’s face freezes into a look of horror. ‘I’m so, so sorry, madame. Please excuse me.’
‘Don’t worry. Mashy mushkey. Just call me Addy.’
Mohammed gestures towards the bright blue wooden door studded with large black nail heads. ‘Please to come into the house. You will like it very much. It’s the most beautiful guest house in Zitoune.’
‘Until I build my guest house.’
Mohammed chuckles. ‘You can see already Omar will be a rich man one day, inshallah. He’s a hard worker. I must be careful. He will make me to look like a poor man.’
‘You’ll never be a poor man, Mohammed. Amine is a lucky boy.’
Omar picks up Addy’s suitcase and slings the black nylon tripod bag and the brown leather overnight bag over his shoulder. The wine bottles clink and Addy winces.
‘Who’s Amine?’
‘It’s my nephew.’ Mohammed opens the blue door, waving them to enter. ‘He work in my restaurant. He serve you the lunch today.’
‘Oh, yes. He seemed very nice, although Omar ran him off his feet.’
Mohammed furrows his forehead and asks Omar something in Tamazight. Omar shrugs.
‘Excuse me, madame. Amine still have his feet.’
Addy laughs as she swings the camera bag over her shoulder. ‘I mean Omar kept him busy. Ran him off his feet is just an expression.’
Mohammed nods. ‘I run Amine off his feet every day. It’s good to learn English well.’
Addy stands on the veranda and waves at the two men as they trek down the gravel path towards the village. Golden light from the waning sun falls across the sides of the mountains. Somewhere in the village a dog barks. A clatter of metal against metal. Sharp feedback from a microphone slices through the stillness. ‘Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.’ The amplified voice of the village’s muezzin echoes around the valley as he recites the call to prayer: God is great. Addy listens until the last words dissipate on the cooling air.
The night is drawing in fast. The sun has turned fat and orange, and streaks of red splay across the darkening sky. She wanders back into the house. The large whitewashed living room is furnished with low, round wooden tables. Banquettes strewn with colourful striped cushions line two of the walls and pierced tin lanterns hang from the beamed ceiling. A thick white wool rug marked with crossed black diamonds covers the polished grey concrete floor.
She enters the larger of the two cool white bedrooms. The solid wooden bed is draped in a blue-and-green striped bedcover and a filmy white mosquito net bunches on the floor around the bed. Addy opens her overnight bag and pulls out a plastic duty-free bag. She unwraps the two bottles of white wine. Good French Chablis. Luckily screw top.
In a kitchen cupboard Addy finds a water glass and pours out a generous serving. She kicks off her sandals and crosses the cool concrete leading out to the veranda. She feels like a butterfly shrugging off its chrysalis. Free of London. Free of Philippa. Free of Nigel. Free of cancer. The scar on her left breast throbs and she touches the coin-sized divot in her flesh.
She leans against a stone pillar and gazes out over the branches of the olive trees towards the mountains. What’s she going to do about Omar? She’d be an idiot to get involved with him. She was probably just one of a slew of women he’s charmed over the years. Yes, it would be diverting. Fun. But she had too much to do and only three months to do it in. A fling isn’t what she’s come here for. No, she has to nip that in the bud. She takes a sip of wine and watches the sun set.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_55c2b0a5-5a5d-5039-b8f0-483957326aa1)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
‘Philippa?’
‘Addy. Wait. I’m reading my online Tarot cards.’
Addy tucks her phone under her chin. She props her bare feet on the wooden table, careful not to knock off the stack of research notes.
‘How’s the job going for that banker couple in Fulham, Pips?’
‘Don’t get me bloody started. They’ve gone and bought sofas from the Ugly Sofa Company. They’re covered with that leatherette rubbish that takes your skin off when you sit on it. Burgundy. When was burgundy ever fashionable? I’ll tell you when. Never. Bloody humungous things. What in the name of Nicky Haslam am I supposed to do with those?’
‘Maybe call it tongue–in-cheek chic.’
‘Oh, ha ha. That’d be my career down the loo. I swear this interior design rubbish isn’t getting any easier. Damn. The Tower card. That’s not good. Probably something to do with the Russians. How is everything, anyway? You’re still alive at least.’
Addy lets the cell phone slip from under her chin into her hand. ‘Still alive. The Internet’s finally working. Well, mostly working. I’ve had to get a dongle thingy. The water supply’s a bit iffy, so I’ve been washing with bottled water for the past two days. There’s nothing on TV except reruns of Desperate Housewives in Arabic and Turkish soap operas, so that’s not a distraction. I’ve managed to stock up on some food from the local market and I’ve still got a bottle of wine from duty-free. So, aside from desperately needing a shower, I’m fine.’
‘Good. Good.’
Addy sifts through the stack of research notes and slides out the Polaroid of Gus and Hanane that she’s tucked into his unfinished letter. She examines Gus’s face.
‘Pippa, do you remember when Dad spent those two years working for the oil company down in Nigeria?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Are you listening?’
‘What? Nigeria? Yes, yes. Sorry, I’m just trying to remember what the Three of Swords means. I’d just married Alessandro, more fool me. Dad stopped by London on his way back to Canada to wish us well. Too little too late if you ask me.’
‘What was he like when you saw him in London? Did he seem happy?’
‘How am I supposed to remember that? I can barely remember my phone number.’ Philippa sighs heavily into the phone. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Nothing. He was away so much when I was growing up. Just trying to fill in the dots.’
‘Well, he wasn’t all that keen on Alessandro, I can tell you. Maybe I should’ve taken the hint. They argued a lot. Dad was very touchy. I remember that. Our father fancied himself as some kind of bloody adventurer. He loved to say he had gypsy blood. I honestly don’t know why he ever married your mother. She was such a little homebody.’
Addy grimaces. ‘You know what they say. Opposites attract.’
Her pretty red-haired mother, Hazel, packing a suitcase for Addy’s peripatetic father. One of Addy’s strongest memories of her mother. The big, old Victorian house on the Vancouver Island shore that was never enough for him. Hazel and Addy were never enough for him, even though Addy had tried hard to be Daddy’s girl when he was home. Digging in the spring bulbs with him in the autumn, sitting with him watching for the black triangles of the orcas’ dorsal fins skimming along the surface of the Strait through the telescope he’d set up on the veranda. He’d promise that he’d stay. But then the suitcase would come out and he’d be gone again. Another postcard to add to her collection.
Addy swings her legs off the table and slides her feet into her new turquoise leather babouches.
‘I found some old photos Dad took in Morocco in the stuff you gave me. He must have spent some time here after Nigeria. Lots of pictures of donkeys, monkeys, mosques, palm trees, camels, that kind of thing. I’m using them as inspiration for the travel book. Following in Dad’s footsteps. It’s a nice hook, don’t you think?’
‘You live in the clouds. You’re going to end up broke again. You’re just like your father.’
‘Your father, too.’
‘Ha! The closest I had to a father was Grandfather’s valet.’
Addy stares at her father’s smiling face in the Polaroid. At least she’d had a doting mother until she was thirteen, and a loving, if often absent, father. Philippa had had a huge stately home to rattle around in, but only Essie’s elderly father and a handful of servants for company when she wasn’t away at boarding school. A runaway father and a drug-addled mother. It explained a few things.
‘Didn’t he write you? Call you?’
‘It’s not the same thing, Addy.’
Addy folds the blue letter around the Polaroid and slides it under the pile of papers.
‘Anyway, I’ve finished the book outline and plotted out the places I need to photograph based on Dad’s photos. Marrakech, a fishing village called Essaouira, Casablanca, the desert.’
‘Desert? Which desert?’
‘The Sahara.’
‘Is that where the Sahara desert is?’
Addy rolls her eyes. The line goes silent.
‘What card did you just turn over?’
‘The Ten of Swords. It’s a dead body full of swords. I’ll have to look it up. I bought a Tarot book.’
‘I don’t think Tarot cards are meant to be literal.’
The sound of shuffling cards.
‘Can’t you get the book done any faster than three months, Addy? I need you to photograph a penthouse I’ve just finished in Mayfair for some Chinese clients. Never met them. Did it all through their PA. A million pounds on the interiors and they’re only going to use it for a week at Christmas. Apparently, it’s an investment.’
Addy swats at a fly. ‘The visa lasts for three months and I need the time to do this book. And …’
‘And what?’
Addy sighs. ‘Oh, Pippa. I met someone. I don’t know what to think. He’s a Berber mountain guide. Well, Amazigh, actually. He’s very nice. A bit younger than me.’
‘Oh, good grief. Define younger.’
‘Thirty-ish. Nothing’s happened. It’s just … I don’t know.’
‘My sister, the cougar.’
Addy watches a black-and-white cat slink across the gravel path as it eyes a rooster strutting under the olive tree with a harem of chickens.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve been avoiding him. I’ve still got Nigel to deal with. But then sometimes I think maybe a fling would do me a world of good. I mean, what’s the harm, Pips? It’s not like it’d ever be a long-term relationship.’
‘You don’t want to know what’s inside my mind. It’s a dustbin in there.’ The cat pounces. The rooster and chickens scrabble, flapping away in a cloud of dust and ear-splitting cackles. ‘What’s that racket?’
‘A cat chasing some chickens. His name’s Omar.’
‘The cat?’
‘No. The Berber guide.’
‘Have you slept with him?’
‘Pippa! I just got here.’
‘Why not just be on your own for a while? You’re always looking for a man to rescue you.’
‘I’m not!’
‘Really? When was the last time you were single?’
‘I was single in Canada.’
‘Twenty years ago. Don’t you think it’s time for you to stand on your own two feet instead of going after inaccessible men?’
‘I am standing on my own two feet! I’m in Morocco, aren’t I?’
‘Running away, more like.’ Philippa huffs into the phone. ‘What’s a Berber, anyway?’
Addy sighs and shifts the phone to her right ear. ‘I’ve been doing some research online for my travel book.’ She shuffles through her papers and pulls out a piece of paper covered in scribbled notes. ‘Berbers, or Imazighen as they call themselves – Amazigh singular – are the indigenous population of North Africa. The Arabs converted them to Islam in the eighth century. Before that they practised everything from paganism to Christianity and Judaism.’
‘The Fool. Bloody hell. I want the Lovers, not the Fool. That one’s probably meant for you.’
‘You’re not listening.’ Addy sips her coffee. It’s gone stone-cold. She sets down the mug and peers out over the railings.
‘It’s all very interesting, Addy. Good research for your book.’
A donkey emerges from the olive grove ridden by a bare-footed boy. Amine. The boy with vitiligo from the restaurant. He smiles and waves at her as he passes by. She waves back.
‘What do you think I should do, Pippa? About the man, I mean.’
‘You can’t seriously be considering a relationship with a Moroccan goatherd. It’s not so bad being on your own. Look at me. Divorced twenty years and I couldn’t be happier. Free as a bird. I can tango every night till dawn if I want to. If only the knees would hold up.’
‘C’mon. You’re always talking about wanting to find a man.’ Addy picks up the mug and pads over the cool stones into the house. ‘You’re glued to that house in Chelsea. The world’s a bigger place than Redcliffe Road. You should travel more.’ She dumps the cold coffee in the kitchen sink and turns on the tap to rinse the cup. The pipes groan. ‘Bugger.’
‘Bugger? There’s nothing wrong with Redcliffe Road. It’s a very good address.’
‘No water.’
‘Exactly. How can you live like that? You want my advice? Get on the first plane back to London and sort out your life. As for men, well, I’ve given up on the whole bloody lot of them. Everybody my age wants a twenty-year-old bimbette or someone to nurse them through their dotage. Once you hit forty you’re done for, Addy. I may as well have “Danger, Radioactive” tattooed on my forehead. Thank God I’ve got a career.’
‘What about the tango guys?’ Addy heads across the living room’s cool concrete floor back to the veranda.
‘A bunch of mummy’s boys and sexual deviants. But at least I get to touch a man, otherwise it’s just me and the neighbour’s cat. The Wheel of Fortune. That’s more like it.’
Addy flops into the chair. ‘That can go up or down.’
‘Let’s say it’s on the way up, shall we? Seriously, this Omar person probably makes eyes at all the girls. Though you’re way past the girl phase.’
‘I don’t think he’s like that.’
‘He’s a mountain guide. In Morocco. Of course he’s like that.’
‘He’s a university graduate.’
‘Really?’
‘In English literature.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘And you believed him.’
‘Well …’
‘You’re naive. That’s part of your problem. You trust people. Everyone’s out for themselves. It’s a Me! Me! Me! world.’
Addy massages her forehead with her fingertips. ‘What do you mean “part of my problem”?’
‘You have terrible taste in men.’
An image of her ex-fiancé, Nigel, plants itself in Addy’s head. Floppy brown hair, ‘trust me’ hazel eyes, the teasing grin. Despite how much he’d hurt her, she couldn’t help but feel some lingering affection towards him. They’d had some fun together, when Nigel wasn’t off somewhere climbing the ladder to a legal career. They’d play hooky to catch a mid-week movie matinee at the Clapham Picture House, or check out a band at the Brixton Dome. All that petered out as Nigel got busier with work. But then she’d been busy with her photography studio too. It had just all gone wrong at the end. Badly wrong.
‘Nigel wasn’t so bad. He was under a lot of pressure at work. He was trying to get taken on as a partner at the law firm. My cancer was hard on him. It couldn’t have been easy holding my bald head over the toilet while I puked my guts out.’
‘My heart bleeds. Did I ever tell you he used to come crying on my shoulder when you were sick? I was completely taken in. I was the one who pulled strings to get him into that law firm in the first place. More fool me. He’s a bastard for fooling around when your hair fell out.’
Finding the bill from The Ivy was a shock. Dinner for two. But it wasn’t as bad as finding the hotel invoice. Both dated the night she was in hospital having the blood transfusion. Nigel should’ve been more careful. Shoving the receipts in an envelope on their shared desk was stupid. Cancer did strange things to people. There was a lot of collateral damage.
‘I guess.’
‘I don’t mean to upset you. It’s just that when I think of Nigel, I want to poke his eyes out with a burning poker. I hate being taken for a fool.’
‘Never mind about Nigel. That’s over. Mashy mushkey.’
‘Mashy what?’
‘It means no problem.’
‘So, now you’re speaking Moroccan.’
‘Darija, actually.’
The rooster rends the air with an ear-splitting crow. Addy watches him strut across the path. He stops and stares at her with a cold black eye. Thrusting out his red feathered chest, he bellows out another piercing crow.
‘Good God, what a racket. The Devil card. Addy, that one’s definitely for you.’
Chapter Nine (#ulink_383bb6c3-6892-5f8f-be4e-5e0ad68c5846)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
‘It’s working?’
Omar’s mother, Aicha, flicks through the TV remote but the images on the large flat-screen TV wobble and fizz like the European soft drinks Omar brings them from Azaghar for the Eid al-Adha celebration dinner.
Aicha walks through the archway from the living room and yells up the steps to the roof. ‘Laa! Not yet!’
Fatima pops her head around the kitchen door. ‘Maybe it’s not a good television. It’s not new like the one Yassine bought for his wife.’
‘Yassine never bought it for Khadija, one hundred per cent.’ Omar’s head appears in the patch of blue sky over the open courtyard. ‘He only buys stuff for himself, you have to know about it. Anyway, this is a good television. It’s a bit new. You’ll be able to watch your Turkish shows better.’ Omar’s head disappears from view. ‘Yamma, try now!’ he yells. ‘I fixed the satellite with the clothesline.’
Aicha hands the remote to Fatima. ‘You do it, Fatima. It’s too complicated for me.’ She heads up the rough grey concrete steps to the roof of the extension Omar’s building. Stepping over a stack of wood, Aicha grabs a rusty iron strut to steady herself. Omar is by the satellite dish, tightening her clothesline around the white disc to correct its tilt.
Fatima’s voice floats up to the roof. ‘It’s working! Don’t move it! Just like that!’
Omar steps back from the satellite dish and slaps the dust off his hands. ‘Good. I’ll buy you another clothesline, Yamma. Don’t worry.’
‘Mashi mushkil.’ Aicha steps over the discarded paint cans and bends down to collect the workers’ dirty tagine pot. Finally, she has Omar on his own. It’s time to discuss the situation.
‘Zaina’s mother was here yesterday.’
Omar’s eyebrow twitches. ‘Oh, yes? She’s well? Everyone’s well?’
Aicha props the tagine pot on her hip as she picks dead leaves off her pots of pelargoniums. ‘Everyone’s well. But, you know, Zaina is getting older. Her parents are worried about her.’
Omar begins stacking concrete blocks into a neat pile. ‘No reason to worry about her. She’s a clever girl.’
‘Omar. You know what I’m talking about. You’re not so young. You must think about marriage. Zaina is waiting for you. You promised …’
‘Yamma, I didn’t promise anything. You promised her parents I’d marry her. Full stop.’
‘I don’t understand what the problem is. She cooks well. She cleans her parents’ house well. She’s young and healthy and very pretty. She’ll be a good mother.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
‘So, why are you waiting? They’ll marry Zaina to someone else soon.’
‘If Allah wills.’
‘Omar, I’m only thinking of you and your happiness. All you do is work. Your life is passing you by. Don’t you want to have a fine son?’
‘I think you want to have a fine grandson.’
Aicha twists her mouth into a pout. ‘What’s wrong with that? Yes, I want many grandchildren. We must think about Fatima as well. She must be married soon, even though she says no to everybody.’
‘Fatima can do as she likes. She’s a free Amazigh woman like the Queen Dihya of history. I won’t put my sister in a prison to make her marry someone she doesn’t want, like what happened to Uncle Rachid’s daughter. Fatima must be happy when she gets married. That’s my responsibility to her.’
‘Fatima thinks only of romance like she sees on the television. She has to be practical. It’s not easy to find her a husband because of her black skin, even if she’s your sister. It’s easy to find a good wife for you because you’re a hard worker. If you don’t want to marry Zaina, tell me. Everybody wants their daughter to marry you.’
Omar stacks the last concrete block onto the pile and sits down on it with a sigh. He rubs at the crease between his eyes.
‘I don’t like to talk about this situation. Anyway, maybe I’ll marry a foreign lady. It’s possible.’
Aicha bolts upright, dropping dried pelargonium leaves over the concrete.
‘You shouldn’t say things like that. You’re Amazigh. You must have an Amazigh wife.’
‘Uncle Rachid doesn’t have an Amazigh wife.’
‘He has an Arab wife, and this has caused many problems for him in his life.’
‘Yamma, I’m Amazigh, so I’m a free man. I can marry who I like. Anyway, I like a foreign lady. You met her.’
The beautiful woman with the red hair like a boy. Aicha shakes her head.
‘This is not a good situation, Omar. You’ll have problems with a foreign lady. Will she live in Zitoune? I don’t think so. She’ll want to be with her own people. She’ll make you live far away.’
Omar chews on his lip. His eye catches a movement and he looks up to see a falcon fluttering high in the blue sky, eyeing the green fields for prey. He couldn’t explain it. Why his heart jumped in his chest whenever he saw her. How her face haunted his mind. It wasn’t just Addy’s dream of seeing him the night before they met, though that was incredible. The moment he saw her in the bus, her face, red and sweaty from the ride, under the farmer’s hat, it was like they were magnets being drawn together. Like they knew each other already. Like all the days he’d lived had been steps to the moment they finally met.
‘I’ll have a big problem, then.’ He looks at his mother, at her still handsome face lined with worry. ‘She has captured my liver.’
Chapter Ten (#ulink_48d80c21-6056-52d9-b85f-f358444cf7fc)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
Omar shouts through a window grille into his mother’s house. ‘Yamma! Fatima! Jedda!’
The blue metal door creaks open and Fatima steps out into the alley. Addy waves at her shyly from across the lane. Fatima pushes past Omar and runs up to Addy and kisses her on both cheeks.
‘Bonjour. Marhaba à la maison de Fatima,’ she says, welcoming Addy to her home. She grabs Addy’s hand and pulls her towards the door. ‘Viens avec moi pour le thé.’
Omar shakes his head. ‘Now my sister takes you away from me, Adi honey. It will be so hard for me to get you from her.’
Omar’s cell phone rings out the first notes of ‘Hotel California’. He wrinkles his nose at the screen and rejects the call. He slips the phone back into his pocket.
‘Was that the plumber, Omar? Shouldn’t you tell him you’re on your way to my house?’
‘He knows I’m coming. It’s urgent to fix the problem with your water.’
Fatima tugs at Addy’s hand and pulls her into the house.
Omar follows his sister and Addy into the narrow room that serves as both the living room and Fatima’s and Jedda’s bedroom. A low wooden table is set with a chocolate cake and plates of homemade cookies. Aicha greets Addy with several ‘Marhaba’s as she pours a stream of fragrant mint tea into tiny gold-rimmed glasses.
Fatima pats a place on the banquette next to her grandmother, Jedda, who grumbles and points to the opposite banquette with her cane. When Addy has settled sufficiently far enough away from Jedda, Fatima sits beside her and gives her a hug.
‘Stay with me, not with Omar,’ Fatima says to Addy in French. ‘You can be my sister.’
Omar picks up a handful of cookies and turns to leave. ‘Now I’m really jealous.’
Addy licks the sugary chocolate icing off her bottom lip, leans back against the flowered cushions and pats her stomach. ‘Shukran. Le gateau c’est très bon.’
Aicha smiles widely. She points to the chocolate cake sitting on a blue-and-white Chinese plate in the centre of the low round table. ‘Eesh caaka.’
Addy shakes her head. ‘Laa, shukran.’ Another piece of cake and she’d explode.
The Polaroid presses against her thigh. Aicha and Jedda would surely recognise Hanane. Zitoune was a small village. The type of village where everyone knew everyone else’s business. She reaches into her jeans pocket and pulls out the Polaroid, wrapped in her father’s blue letter. Leaning over the table, she hands the photo to Aicha.
‘Baba Adi,’ she says, pointing to Gus. My father.
Aicha squints at the photo, fine wrinkles fanning out from her deep-set amber eyes. Jedda taps Aicha’s arm impatiently with her stick. Aicha hands the old woman the Polaroid.
‘It’s my father in the picture,’ Addy says in French to Fatima. ‘He came to Zitoune many years ago. I’m trying to find the woman in the picture. I think she was from Zitoune. Can you ask your mother and your grandmother Jedda if they recognise her?’
Fatima translates for Addy. Aicha takes the photo from Jedda and frowns at it before handing it to Fatima, her coin earrings dangling against her cheeks as she shakes her head.
Fatima runs her fingers along the Polaroid’s frayed edges. ‘Your father is very handsome. You have the same nose and blue eyes.’
‘They don’t recognise her?’
Fatima shakes her head as she hands the photo back to Addy. ‘No. My mum and grandmother are the medicine women of the village. They know everybody in the mountains here. If she was from Zitoune, they would know her.’
Addy brushes cookie crumbs off the plastic tablecloth into her hand. She picks up her empty tea glass. Aicha nods and smiles, her coin earrings bobbing against her neck. Jedda sits on the banquette like a wizened oracle, eyeing Addy’s every move.
Addy follows Fatima out into the courtyard and through a green door into a tiny windowless kitchen. The room is a random mix of wooden cupboards and tiles painted with seashells and sailboats. An enormous ceramic sink propped up on cement blocks takes up most of one wall. Across from it a four-ring hob sits on top of a low cupboard next to a battered black oven connected to a dented green gas canister. Utensils and ropes of drying tripe hang from a wire hooked across the room.
‘Ssshhh,’ Fatima hisses, flapping a tea towel at the rangy black-and-white cat who’s poking its head into a bread basket. The cat slinks out, a crust of bread in its mouth. ‘Moush,’ she says, pointing at the cat.
Addy makes a circle around the room with her hand.
Fatima smiles. ‘Cuisine. Comme français.’
‘En anglais, kitchen.’
‘Smicksmin.’ Fatima shakes her head. ‘Très difficile.’
Omar pokes his head into the kitchen. ‘Come, Adi honey, we go.’
‘You missed some delicious chocolate cake.’
He thrusts his hand into the room. It’s full of cake. ‘I don’t miss nothing.’ He takes a bite and wipes the crumbs from his chin with the back of his hand.
‘Did the plumber show up? Is the water fixed? I haven’t been able to get a hold of Mohammed. He hasn’t been answering his phone.’
‘I know, I know. Mohammed is very busy. It might be he is in Marrakech. He goes there a lot for business. The plumber went to Azaghar. He’ll be back later.’
Addy frowns. ‘The water’s still not fixed? What took you so long?’
‘I did a tour by the waterfalls. I earned five hundred dirhams, so I’m happy for that. I want to buy a refrigerator for Fatima, but it’s very, very expensive.’
Omar beckons at Addy with a crumb-covered finger. ‘Come, let’s go for a walk by the waterfalls. Say goodbye to my grandmother. If you kiss her on her head, it shows her good respect. She’ll love you for that.’
‘I don’t think she wants me anywhere near her.’
‘She does, she does. You’ll see.’
Addy kisses Fatima on her cheeks and follows Omar into the living room. She edges around the low table past Aicha and bends over Jedda, kissing her on the top of her red polka-dot bandana. Jedda waves Addy away with her stick. Aicha grabs Addy’s hands and smiles. ‘Thank you for the tea and the cake and cookies of deliciousness,’ Addy says to her in rusty French. ‘I appreciate your hospitality of kindness. It would be my honour to invite you at my house for tea.’
Aicha smiles broadly and Addy realises with a shock that her teeth are false. Omar says something to his mother, who nods vigorously, setting her earrings swinging.
‘What did you say?’
‘I say you love chicken brochettes. We’ll come later for dinner.’
‘Oh, no, Omar. I don’t want to impose on your family. I’ve just eaten my weight in cake.’
‘It’s no imposition, Adi. She don’t like for you to eat by yourself. It makes her feel sad. It’s not normal for people to be alone in Morocco.’
Addy looks at Jedda. The old woman’s one good eye bores into her like she’s trying to excavate Addy’s soul. ‘Except for your grandmother.’
Omar shrugs. ‘My grandmother don’t like tourists. Don’t mind for it.’ He takes hold of Addy’s elbow and steers her across the courtyard to the front door. ‘Anyway, you are not a tourist to me. You are like an Amazigh lady. Even my mum says it.’
‘She did?’
‘Maybe she didn’t say it, but I know she think it.’ He opens the metal door. ‘She love your red hair and blue eyes for her grandchildren.’
‘Omar, honestly, I—’
Omar laughs. ‘Don’t mind, Adi. Don’t believe everything I say. Oh, and Adi? My mum, she don’t speak French. It’s lucky because you don’t speak it so well.’
The daylight is fading when Omar and Addy reach a terrace paved with stones overlooking the waterfalls. A young Moroccan couple sits on the stone wall holding hands. The man speaks quietly and the woman leans her head in to listen. He plays with her fingers.
Omar and Addy sit on the wall. The last of the day’s sun throws a beam of light across the waterfalls, setting off sparks like fireflies on the water.
‘It’s a romantic place here, Adi. Sometimes couples come here to be private.’
‘Are they single?’
‘No. Everybody marries young here. But maybe there are children and parents and grandparents in the house. It’s the Moroccan manner. It’s difficult to be private.’
Addy feels a pang of sadness. As a child she’d wished on a star every night, hoping for a brother or sister to play with in the big house by the sea.
‘It must be nice to have a big family.’
Omar takes hold of her hand and plays with her fingers. ‘You have brothers and sisters, darling?’
‘A half-sister.’
Omar draws his black eyebrows together. ‘What’s that?’
Lights are coming on in the restaurants below, forming pools of yellow around the waterfalls.
‘Her name’s Philippa. She had a different mother. My father married twice.’ Addy presses her lips together into an apologetic smile. ‘We don’t get on very well. We’re very different.’
Omar nods. ‘It’s possible for a man in Morocco to marry four wives. It’s good to have many children. Then your heritage continues even when you go to Paradise.’
‘Oh, my father didn’t have two wives at the same time! He divorced his first wife and then married my mother. We don’t marry more than one person at a time. In fact, it’s illegal.’
Omar drops Addy’s hand and rests his arm around her shoulders. ‘I know it, honey. It might be that it’s better like that, anyway. It’s hard to have many wives. It’s very expensive.’ He rolls out the ‘r’ in very for added emphasis. ‘Each wife must have a house. Often, the ladies don’t like each other. Anyway, now it doesn’t happen so often. Only if the first wife doesn’t have babies, then you marry a second wife. But the first wife is the boss.’
‘Why don’t you just adopt or get fertility treatment?’
‘You must know your blood is the same in your children for your heritage, so nobody adopts here. It’s very hard to have fertility treatment – you must be very rich for that. Nobody in the mountains can do that. Anyway, they think you’re crazy to do it since it’s easy to marry a second wife.’
‘I see.’ Addy’s head is spinning. Why does she care if Omar gets married? Has two wives – three wives – four … And kids. Lots of kids. If they got involved, it could only ever be a holiday romance.
‘You know, Adi, some men come to ask me for Fatima to be their second wife. Fatima tells me “No.” She says no to everybody. It’s a big problem for me, but I don’t make her do nothing she doesn’t want. It’s for her to decide, even if my mum wants her to marry quick to have babies. She must go where her heart tells her to go.’ He looks at Addy out of the corner of his eye. ‘Me too. My mum wants me to marry quick to have babies.’
‘Oh.’ It’s like she’s been wading out into the sea and suddenly steps off a sandbar.
Omar squeezes her shoulder. ‘Don’t mind. I’m making a joke with you. I don’t mind for ladies. I look only for one lady.’ He kisses Addy on the top of her head. ‘So, maybe you have a boyfriend in England?’
‘I wouldn’t be sitting here with you if I had a boyfriend.’
‘Maybe you had a boyfriend before?’
Addy remembers the last time she’d seen Nigel, in the kitchen of their flat the night before she’d flown out to Morocco, when he’d made her so angry she’d thought she might hit him. So angry that she’d stormed out and walked around the park for an hour to calm down. Alone in a London park after midnight. She must have been crazy.
‘Once I did. But it’s over now.’
‘I’m jealous.’
What was the harm in a holiday flirtation? Maybe it was just what she needed. Nothing serious. Short and sweet and then back to London. She wasn’t looking for a man to rescue her. What was Philippa talking about?
‘There’s no reason to be jealous, Omar. You must have had girlfriends before.’
‘There’s no boyfriend–girlfriend situation in Morocco, Adi. It’s not a possibility. We must wait to be married to be together.’
‘What about the tourist girls?’
‘I don’t like that situation, even though it’s true it happens sometimes. My friend Yassine has a wife and two children and a Dutch lady in Holland who visits him. She bought him a car. She bought a refrigerator for his wife. It’s where I get the idea for the refrigerator for Fatima. But, you have to know, it’s not my cup of tea. I feel bad for Yassine’s wife, Khadija.’
Cash cow. Addy could hear Philippa’s voice in her head. He’s playing nice just to get you into bed. What if Omar knew that she was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy? Would he be so keen on her then? He couldn’t be that good an actor. Or could he?
Below their perch on the stone wall, the lights of Mohammed’s restaurant switch on. Amine is setting out large bottles of water on the tables. A macaque monkey the size of a large cat leaps out of the branches of an olive tree onto a table. Amine shoos it away with a tea towel.
‘What about me? I’m a tourist.’
‘You’re not a tourist, Adi. You are the honey of my life. When you came to Zitoune my world was opened.’ He waves his hand out towards the waterfalls in a sweeping gesture. ‘It’s you I’ve been waiting for.’
‘Omar …’ Addy’s head spins with confusion. ‘I … I’m not Muslim.’
‘Mashi mushkil. I can marry a Muslim lady, or a Christian lady or a Jewish lady. No problem for that because we are all people of the book. We all have Moses and Ibrahim and Adam. But Muslim ladies can only marry Muslim men.’
‘That doesn’t seem fair.’
Omar shrugs. ‘It’s like that.’ Omar reaches for Addy’s hand and slides his fingers through hers. ‘Adi, when you told me about your dream, I knew for sure you are the lady I wait for. I made a prayer to Allah today. It’s the first time in a long time I did it.’
‘What did you pray for?’
‘I prayed to Allah to thank Him for making me for you. And for sending you to me.’
Addy gazes at the haloes of light below. It’s like a door is opening, but does she dare step over the threshold?
‘Omar, you asked me about my family. My mother died when I was young. My father died last fall.’
‘I’m so, so sorry for that, Adi.’
She concentrates on the waterfalls, avoiding his gaze. ‘I grew up in Canada. When I graduated from university I moved to London. My father travelled a lot for work, so there wasn’t any reason to stay in Canada. I thought I’d have more opportunities in London as a photographer. Lots of magazine work, you know? That’s when I finally met my half-sister, Philippa. I was looking forward to meeting her, but …’ Addy remembers Philippa’s frosty welcome, her absolute disinterest in her Canadian half-sister.
‘She was married to a rich Italian banker then, but she’s divorced now. I live on my own. Philippa and I aren’t … close.’ Better that Omar doesn’t know she still shares a flat with Nigel. Another problem to deal with when she gets back to London.
‘But she’s your sister. You must be close.’
Addy grunts. ‘Let’s just say that I don’t aspire to her way of life and this has caused us some conflict.’ She smiles at Omar ruefully. ‘I’m a constant disappointment to her.’
Omar shuts his eyes tight. When he looks at her again, his eyes are glazed with tears.
‘Me too. My father died. I’m so, so sorry for that, habibati. It’s a hard fate to be alone. It never happens like that in Morocco. We have many relatives here. We can visit all of Morocco and you will see I have family everywhere. The doors of my family are open to you.’
Addy rests her hand on her thigh. She feels the glossy card of the Polaroid through the soft denim.
‘Omar, how old are you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How old are you? When were you born?’
‘I have thirty-three years. Anyway, don’t mind for age, Adi. It doesn’t matter for a man and lady to be the same age.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ Addy reaches into her pocket and slides out the photo wrapped in her father’s letter. ‘Do you remember an Irishman who came here around 1984? He had a Moroccan wife. I think she was his wife. I think she might have been from Zitoune. I don’t know for sure.’ She hands Omar the photo. ‘I have a picture of them.’
A deep crease forms between Omar’s black eyebrows as he examines the Polaroid. ‘It’s a long time ago. I was a small boy.’ He looks out at the waterfalls and shakes his head. ‘I don’t remember them. Why you ask about it?’
‘You don’t recognise the woman in the picture?’
Omar rubs his thumb across the fading image of Addy’s father and Hanane. He flips it over.
‘“Zitoune waterfalls, Morocco, August 1984 – with Hanane”.’ He hands the Polaroid back to Addy. ‘No, I don’t know her.’
She stares down at the faces of her father and Hanane smiling at the unseen photographer in front of the Zitoune waterfalls, then she carefully wraps the blue letter around it and slips the picture back into her pocket.
Back at Aicha’s house, the aroma of grilled chicken, garlic and ginger wafts through the courtyard. Women’s voices float over the spiced air from the kitchen. The afternoon’s tea is pressing on Addy’s bladder.
‘Toilet?’
Omar points to a door flaking with red paint. ‘You might need some tissue.’
Addy pulls a pack of tissues out her jeans pocket and waves it at Omar.
The reek of bleach assaults her nose when she opens the door. It does little to mask the underlying odour of sweat, urine and faeces. A string brushes her cheek. When she tugs at it a light bulb flickers on. The room is no bigger than a phone booth. The tiler has made an attempt at a pattern on the white-tiled walls with tiles printed with pink stars, but halfway up the pink stars have been replaced by tiger stripes. A tap sticks out of the wall at knee height with a blue plastic bucket underneath. A large white ceramic square with a hole in the centre is set into the concrete floor. Ridges shaped like feet flank the hole.
Peeling down her jeans and underwear, Addy steps tentatively onto the ridged feet. As she squats, her cheek slaps up against the pink stars. She wobbles around to face the door, propping herself up with one hand on the door and one on a tiled wall. She teeters over the hole and sprays her loafers with wee.
A knock on the door. ‘Honey, are you okay?’
‘One minute. Where do I wash my hands?’
‘Put water in the bucket and pour it down the toilet.’
When she opens the door, Omar’s leaning against the courtyard wall waiting for her. He examines her loafers.
‘You made your shoes wet.’
Addy peers down at the dark splotches on the tan leather.
‘I know. It’s hard for me to squat. I kept falling over. I tried to clean them with some water.’
Omar shouts for his sister. ‘Fatima!’
Fatima emerges from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron printed with apples and oranges. She’s followed by a pretty girl in purple velour pyjamas and a pink hijab with matching pink babouches. Omar says something to Fatima. The girls look at Addy’s shoes and break into giggles. Fatima disappears behind a blue wooden door beside the kitchen. The other girl says something to Omar and he laughs. Fatima returns with her purple plastic Crocs.
‘Give her your shoes, honey. She’ll clean them for you.’
‘She doesn’t have to do that.’
He takes the Crocs from Fatima and pushes them into Addy’s hands. ‘She’s happy to do it.’
‘If you’re sure …’
‘It’s fine. Mashi mushkil.’
Gripping Omar’s arm to steady herself, Addy changes her shoes. Omar picks up her discarded loafers and shoves them into the hands of Fatima’s friend. Fatima bursts into another fit of giggles. The girl drops the loafers like they’re infectious and storms out of the courtyard, slamming the metal door behind her.
Addy stoops down to pick up the offensive shoes. ‘Who was that?’
‘Zaina,’ Omar says as he takes the shoes from Addy and hands them to Fatima. ‘She’s a friend of Fatima.’
Addy watches Fatima disappear into the kitchen with her loafers. ‘I don’t think Zaina likes me.’
‘She don’t like foreign ladies. It’s normal.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Amazigh ladies don’t like foreign ladies because they go with Amazigh men. They’re jealous.’
Fatima rests her chin on Addy’s shoulder and wraps her arms around her waist. ‘Come, sister,’ she says in French. ‘It’s the time of supper. I make delicious brochettes of chicken for my sister, Adi.’
‘You go eat, honey.’ Omar turns and heads towards the front door.
‘Where are you going? Aren’t you eating?’
‘Later. I’ll go to find the plumber. Enjoy.’
Fatima reaches for Addy’s hand and leads her into the living room. Aicha smiles her white smile and pats a place for Addy beside her on the flowery banquette. The low table is laid out with stacks of glistening chicken brochettes, a salad of chopped tomatoes, onions and olives dressed with olive oil, and fragrant discs of warm bread dusted with semolina.
Aicha grabs a disc of bread out of the blue plastic basket and tears off a large chunk. She offers it to Addy. ‘Eesh, Adi. Marhaba.’
‘Shukran.’
Addy tears off another piece and bites into its warm yeastiness. As she chews, she looks around the narrow whitewashed room. A poster of a girl praying at Mecca is tacked over the banquette on the opposite wall. Beside it a framed photograph, garlanded with pink and yellow plastic flowers, shows a sharp-suited King Mohammed VI. At the far end of the room, a large flat-screen television hangs on the wall, the dark screen filmy with pink dust.
Fatima picks up the remote. The television screen springs to life. She flips through the channels until she comes to a Turkish soap opera. Addy wonders where Jedda is. The black-and-white cat slinks into the room and settles on the mat by Addy’s feet.
They’re silent as they climb the steps to Addy’s veranda. She’s conscious of his warmth behind her, the gentle pressure of his hand on her waist when she stumbles on the final step. She walks over to the railing and gazes out at the night-cloaked mountains. The air is cool and stars cluster like glass chips in the black sky. A low buzz of cicadas underpins the silence.
Omar joins her and looks out at the inky outline of the High Atlas Mountains in the far distance.
‘It’s dark tonight, honey. No moon.’
‘Yes. But you can see the stars really well.’
‘The plumber called me when I was at Mohammed’s restaurant watching the football. He said he fixed your water. It might be I should check it for you.’
‘No, it’s okay. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
‘Adi …’
It happens before she knows she’s done it. Her lips on his neck. Softness. A pulse. His moan. A kiss. His body warm against hers. Her arms around his neck.
‘Adi …’
No. She can’t. She mustn’t. It’s too complicated. Her life’s already a mess. She drops her arms and steps back from his embrace. She presses her fingers against her burning lips.
‘I’m so sorry, Omar. I shouldn’t have done that. Please forget I’ve done that.’
He reaches out to her. ‘Adi, what happened? Don’t worry.’
She hurries to the blue door and into the house. Her heart’s in her throat, pounding, pounding. Oh, my God. What was I thinking?
Chapter Eleven (#ulink_e28c8255-c955-5177-bf3d-2a564f36afb8)
Zitoune, Morocco – December 1983
Hanane skids through a slick of thick blood-red mud.
She laughs. ‘Omar, the surprise had better be worth it. I’m getting splattered with mud.’
The boy waves his hand in the air on the path in front of her. ‘Mashi mushkil. It’s not so far now.’
Hanane stops to catch her breath. Wisps of her thick black hair escape the purple scarf draped loosely over her head. The sky is a canopy of blue over the damp red earth. Nothing but rocks and mud. A few leafless bushes. The river, about ten metres below, courses roughly on its path through the canyon walls.
‘If I’d known we’d be walking to Oushane, I’d never have come.’
Omar turns around, smiling broadly as he opens his arms wide. ‘So, why would I have told you, then?’ He flicks his eyes over her shoulder.
Hanane glances back but sees nothing but the narrow goat path they’ve just descended.
‘What is it, Omar?’
‘Nothing.’ Breaking into a jog, he waves at her to follow him. ‘Not far now, Hanane. Yalla.’
‘I’m not running, Omar.’ She steps gingerly along the muddy plateau. ‘I’ll break my leg.’
‘Stop.’ Omar shoots his right palm into the air like the traffic police she’s seen in Azaghar. ‘Stop. There, just there. Where you are.’
‘What? Why?’
He points at the muddy path in front of her. ‘Look down.’
Pressed into the mud is a huge, three-toed footprint.
‘What is it?’
‘Dinosaur.’ Omar curls his hands under his armpits, staggering around the ground like a cross between a monkey and a wounded chicken. He lets out a howl.
Hanane looks around nervously. ‘Be quiet. There might be another one.’
Omar bursts out laughing, slapping the knees of his dirty jeans. ‘Don’t be stupid, Hanane. The dinosaurs are all dead now. I learned about it in school.’ He points to the ground ahead of him. ‘Yalla, there are more. Lots of them. Big and little. A whole family.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes, seriously.’
Hanane spins around. The Irishman with the black hair jogs down the final metre of the goat path, the big black camera on its strap slapping against his chest.
‘Be carefu—’
Too late. His foot slips and the man’s booted feet fly out from under him, sending him sprawling on his back into the red mud.
Hanane giggles then, remembering her manners, composes her face into a frown of concern. ‘Are you all right?’ she asks in French.
Gus sits up, holding up palms coated in thick red goo. ‘Fine. I’ve only hurt my pride.’ He holds out a hand to Omar. ‘Here, boss. Give us a hand.’
Omar picks his way across the mud to the Irishman. Holding out a skinny hand, he yanks Gus to his knees.
‘Thanks, boss.’ Gus winks at Omar as he gets to his feet. ‘I can take it from here.’
‘Mister Gus, show her the other footprints, over there.’ Omar points to the ground a few metres away.
Hanane raises an arched black eyebrow at Omar. ‘So, this is your surprise.’
Omar’s right cheek dimples. ‘The dinosaur footprints were the surprise.’ He points at Gus. ‘He’s just extra. He promised me not to tell you.’
‘Boss,’ Gus says as he adjusts the camera strap around his neck, ‘did anyone ever tell you that you talk too much?’
Hanane shifts on her feet, sinking deeper into the mud. ‘I really have to get back. I need to feed the chickens.’
‘You never feed the chickens, Hanane. Mohammed’s wife does that.’
Hanane glares at Omar. ‘Well, today I need to feed the chickens.’
‘I’m sure the chickens can wait half an hour,’ Gus says. ‘Since we’re here, why don’t we have a look? Think about it. A whole herd of dinosaurs walking over this very ground millions of years ago.’ He tromps through the mud in the direction Omar had pointed. He hunkers down to look at something in the ground. ‘Hanane, come and look. They really are amazing. You must come and see.’
He beckons Omar over and points out some detail to the boy. He has so much enthusiasm, Hanane thinks. So much energy. He seems so much younger than the older men of the village. All of them have somehow shrunk from their prime, like dates left to dry in the sun. But this Irishman still looks at the world with the eyes of a curious boy. Still bears himself like a man in the prime of his life. Still glows with the vitality of a man half his age. But with an assurance missing in the village boys she’s grown up with.
The two black-haired heads lean together as they inspect the marks in the ground. Man and boy. The Irishman looks over at her. His blue eyes are the colour of the sky. He smiles at her, lines carving themselves into the fine skin around his eyes.
‘Come, Hanane. Come and have a look. It’s marvellous. Obviously some large theropods. I’ve seen something similar in the Kem Kem Beds by the Algerian border.’
Marvellous. Such a beautiful word. A word of treasures beyond imagination. She takes a step forwards, knowing, as she does, that she’s walking into her future.
Chapter Twelve (#ulink_4889fceb-e8c9-5e7e-8a25-26258cabd2b9)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
A knock on Addy’s front door.
‘Come in,’ she calls as she tinkers with a close-up of a grey-furred macaque on her laptop.
The blue wooden door squeaks open and Omar sticks his blue-turbaned head around the door, smiling broadly. ‘Good morning. It’s okay for me to come in?’
Addy glances over at him then turns back quickly to the laptop. ‘Yes, okay. Fine. I’m editing the pictures I took of the monkeys the other day. I’ve got some good images of the shop sellers, too. I’ve made a start on the text.’
Omar leans over her shoulder, his breath warm on her neck as she manipulates the mouse to add a richer grey tone to the monkey’s fur.
‘It’s clever what you do.’ He brushes his fingers along Addy’s neck.
She shifts away from his fingers and rubs at her neck where he’s touched her. ‘Just lots of practice.’
Omar drops his hand. From the corner of her eye, Addy watches him wander over to the kitchen. He turns on the tap over the sink. The pipes groan and ping. A fan of water sprays out across his gown, turning the bright blue a deep navy. Omar flaps the wet fabric in the air.
‘The plumber didn’t fix it well.’
‘I thought it would be fine. The shower’s a nightmare, too. The water’s cold and it stopped just when I put the shampoo in my hair. I used up all my bottled water rinsing it out.’
He flops into a wooden chair. ‘It’s a rubbish situation. Did you tell Mohammed?’
‘He said he’ll get it fixed “next tomorrow”.’
Omar grunts. ‘I’ll arrange it for you. Don’t worry. I’ll take you to the public shower later so you can have a hot shower. Or you can have a hammam with my sister and my mother.’
Addy looks up from her laptop. ‘A hammam?’
‘It’s like a room for steam. I showed it to you when I made the tour the first time. The buildings like the beehive behind the houses.’
‘Oh. Like a sauna.’
Omar shrugs. ‘It might be.’
‘Maybe I’ll try it another time. A proper hot shower would be great.’
She stares at the blinking cursor on her laptop screen, her concentration dissolving like sugar in hot tea. She’ll be back in London at the end of June. There’s no point getting involved with Omar. Tempting, but … it would be stupid. Someone would end up getting hurt, and she was damned if it was going to be her.
She was getting nowhere in her search for Hanane here in Zitoune. With every squint through her camera lens, she’d been searching for a hint of a mature Hanane, or a glimpse of her father’s features in the faces of the young men swimming under the bridge, or in a passing young woman’s shy smile. Hanane’s child would be twenty-three now. Not a child, even though all Addy could picture was a baby swaddled in white blankets.
No one she’s shown the Polaroid to recognises her father and Hanane. If was as though Hanane had never existed. What happened to her? Where’s her child now? Maybe Hanane wasn’t from Zitoune or one of the nearby villages, after all. But then why did her father’s photos ‘with H’ start in Zitoune?
Omar picks up a pencil and drums it on the table. ‘You would like to come to the waterfalls today, Adi? A driver called me from Marrakech. He has twenty tourists on his bus. It’s good business for me.’
Addy looks over at Omar and chews her lip. She’d like to take some more photos around the waterfalls. What harm could it be? She’d be with a group of tourists. Safety in numbers.
‘Adi, you don’t have to worry for me. If you don’t like me, I can accept it, even though it hurts my heart.’
She nods. ‘Okay. I’ll bring my camera and the tripod.’
Omar drops the pencil onto the table and stands, tipping the chair over in his haste. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He rights the chair and slides it under the table. ‘Come to the bridge in half an hour. You can test me to see if I’m a good tour guide or not.’ He turns to Addy, his hand on the door handle. ‘Fatima don’t let me eat the crêpes she made this morning. She say they are for you, full stop.’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s difficult to be the man in my house since you came to Zitoune. Soon I will be starving.’
‘Poor you. She brought me the crêpes for breakfast. They were delicious.’
‘Never mind, Adi. I took some already this morning from the kitchen. Even if she say no, I take them anyway. Nobody can say no to me.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘It’s true.’
‘Maybe one day I’ll say no to you.’
Omar steps out onto the veranda. ‘It’s impossible.’
‘Why’s it so impossible?’
The dimple appears in his cheek. ‘Because I’m so charming.’
Addy smiles as she reaches for her camera and loops the strap around her neck. ‘Que sera sera.’
‘What you said?’
‘What will be, will be. It’s Latin.’
Omar nods. ‘It’s like fate. Even so, you’ll never say no to me. I’m sure about it.’
Half an hour later, Addy’s on the old iron bridge, stepping carefully over the loose wooden boards. Resting the tripod against an iron girder, she leans her elbows on the rusting railing and watches the river sliding past, underneath her feet. She can see through the clear water to the pebbles and stones on the sandy bottom. It’s still early, and the village boys haven’t yet congregated on the riverbanks to dive and swim in the cool water. Only boys, never girls. The girls are in their homes, Addy guesses, helping with the cooking and cleaning. Being dutiful while the boys have all the fun.
Addy gazes up the hill towards the mosque’s thick minaret. A sheep’s carcass hangs from a hook in front of the butcher’s stall next door to the new concrete tower. The butcher leans against a bamboo post holding up an awning constructed from an old Méditel hoarding advertising cell phones. He swats at the flies buzzing around the carcass with a goat tail.
Leaning her chin in her hand on the rusted iron railing, Addy watches three women carry baskets of laundry down a path to the river. They stop at a flat rock, set down their baskets, and tuck the hems of their skirts and aprons into their pyjama bottoms. They roll their pyjamas over their knees and lay out T-shirts on the rock. A tall, slender, black-skinned woman showers the shirts with a snowy sprinkling of laundry detergent. When the T-shirts are sufficiently soap-laden, the women wade out into the river and dunk the shirts into the water. They scrub and pummel the cloth until Addy feels her own knuckles burn.
Fatima and her friend, Zaina, emerge, chatting and laughing, from the shadows of the olive trees, carrying brightly coloured plastic baskets spilling over with clothes. Addy waves at them, calling out Fatima’s name. Fatima smiles and waves back. Zaina stares up at Addy, the humour erasing from her pretty face.
Addy leans back against the rail and inhales the fresh spring air with a deep breath. So Zaina doesn’t like her. So what? But the others – Aicha, Jedda, Fatima, Omar … Why do the people here touch her in a way no one in London touches her? Certainly not Philippa, who loves to play the role of her disapproving and long-suffering older sister. She loves Philippa, of course. She’s her sister. She just doesn’t like her very much most of the time.
And Nigel? Addy tries to dredge up the memory of her ex-fiancé, but his face is like a puzzle whose pieces she can’t quite fit together. Nigel got close. She’d let her guard down because he could make her laugh with his dry humour. Then he’d left her heart as torn and bloodied as the raccoon she’d once seen caught in a hunter’s trap in the Québec woods. Another selfish man. Wrapped up in his career. What did Philippa say? Always falling for inaccessible men. Selfish and inaccessible. Just like her father.
‘Adi!’ Omar waves at her from the road leading down from the car park.
She watches him stride down the dusty road, trailed by a crowd of sunburnt tourists in floppy sun hats and baseball caps, cameras bumping on their chests. Despite herself, her heart flutters.
Omar points out the donkeys tethered to the olive trees, saying something she can’t hear. The tourists laugh. In his turban, Omar towers over them. As he approaches, she follows the line of his neck to the point where it meets his angular jaw. The soft spot just under his jaw where she’d kissed him last night, in the moonlight on her veranda. She remembers his quiet moan, and her cheeks flush. But that was before she came to her senses. Retreating back into her shell, like a turtle hiding from the world.
‘Everybody, this is a tourist lady who’ll join us for the tour.’
Addy waves at the group. A few middle-aged European couples and a clique of Spanish students. The girls flick their eyes over her. She’s of no interest to the boys. Omar collects her tripod and tucks it under his arm. He heads through the olive grove to the river path. Addy follows at the rear of the group, just like the first time.
Omar stops on the riverbank by the women washing clothes. The tourists congregate around him and snap photos of the toiling women.
‘This is the manner we do wash the clothes in the village.’
‘So, it’s only the women who are clean, then?’
Omar snaps his head around and stares at Addy. The dimple appears in his cheek. A Scottish man asks him a question, but Omar doesn’t answer. The man repeats his question. Omar shakes his head as if to wake up.
‘I’m sorry. I been sleeping.’
The group trails Omar through the twisting trunks of the olive trees, past the lookout by Yassine’s café. Rather than heading to the bottom of the waterfalls where the rafts bob in the pool, Omar veers right onto a different path. He stops in front of a red mud wall of petrified tree roots. He stumbles over his words, forgetting his English.
The path leads to a pool of clear water fed by mini-waterfalls. Addy peers down the river towards sun-baked canyon walls in the distance and sees half a dozen pools, feeding lazily into each other, veiled by pink oleander bushes and branches of the old olive trees on the riverbanks. The freshness of the early morning has succumbed to a dry heat and sweat trickles down her neck. She fans herself with her hat.
Omar leans her tripod against the grey trunk of an olive tree and leaps onto a rock in the pool.
‘Everybody, it’s very, very hot even if it’s not summer yet. So, you can swim if you would like. We will stay here thirty minutes. It’s very safe, no problem. The water is very clean. Enjoy.’
The older tourists roll up their trousers and Bermuda shorts and wade cautiously into the water. The Spanish students strip off their clothes in a burst of Latin enthusiasm, revealing surfing shorts and bikinis. They clamber across the rocks to the mini-waterfalls and leap into the pool, screaming as they slam into the cold water. The girls are tanned and slim in their bikinis. Addy runs her hand along the waist of her jeans, conscious of her white skin and the roundness of her belly, hips and breasts under her clothes.
Omar laughs and shouts at the Spanish boys as he unwinds his tagelmust. He jumps back to the riverbank and loops the blue cloth around Addy’s waist.
‘So, I capture you, Adi.’ He leans over and plants a quick kiss on her lips.
A Spanish boy shouts out a catcall. Omar answers him in Spanish, putting off the boy’s timing, and he belly-flops into the pool. The boy’s friends erupt into peals of glee.
‘What did he say?’
‘He say I am a robber of the ladies. I tell him I am the robber of one lady only.’ Omar laughs. ‘I tell him he have to make a good dive because all the Spanish ladies watch him. So, he is nervous and he made a bad dive.’
The students’ carefree spirits are infectious and Addy ignores the alarm going off in her head.
‘What are you going to do now that you’ve trapped me? Carry me off?’
‘It’s so, so hot, darling. There’s no way for me to carry you.’
‘Maybe you’d like one of the Spanish girls instead. They’ve been eyeing you.’
‘I don’t mind for Spanish ladies.’ Omar drapes the tagelmust around them like a blanket and slides his hand under Addy’s T-shirt, cupping her right breast. He runs his fingers over the lace of her bra and expels a whisper of breath. ‘Come with me, Adi.’
For a moment they stare at each other. Addy drapes the blue cloth around her shoulders.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To be alone, darling. We can swim.’
‘I didn’t bring a swimsuit.’
‘Mashi mushkil. You can wear your underwear. It’ll dry quick in the sun. No one will see. It’s a private place.’
He leads Addy along the riverbank until they reach a flat rock jutting into a quiet pool. It’s hidden from view of the others by a screen of oleander bushes. He pulls off his blue gown and white T-shirt. His faded Levis cling to his hips. His naked chest is lean like a swimmer’s, tanned to the colour of milky coffee.
Addy lifts the camera strap from around her neck and sets the camera down on a rock, covering it with her straw hat. She begins to undo her belt, but Omar brushes her hands away.
‘It is for me to do it.’
He unfastens the belt and discards it on the riverbank. Slowly, he peels off her jeans, running his hands over her body as her skin is revealed to the sun. She stops him as he is about to lift her T-shirt over her head.
‘I think I’ll keep this on, if you don’t mind.’ She ties the T-shirt into a knot under her bra.
He smiles, his teeth gleaming against his brown skin. ‘As you like, Adi. Anyway, it’s better to imagine. It’s more spicy.’
Omar shrugs out of his jeans and sandals until he wears only red jockey shorts, which cling to the contours of his body. He climbs over rocks to the top of the cascade feeding the pool. He looks over at Addy to see that she’s watching, then he executes a perfect dive into the centre of the pool.
Addy scans the surface of the pool, waiting for his head to surface.
‘Omar?’ She searches for a sign – bubbles on the pool’s mirror-like surface, the gleam of skin under the water. ‘Omar?’
His hands grab her ankles. He surfaces, spouting water.
‘You been worried, weren’t you, darling? I watched you underneath the water.’
Addy splashes his face with water. ‘I was worried about how I was going to get the tourists back to the village if you drowned.’
‘That’s not nice.’ He pulls at her ankles and she loses her balance, splashing into the pool. She surfaces next to him, spewing water and blinking.
‘Bastard! I’ve got contact lenses.’
‘What you say?’
She slaps the water, spraying Omar’s face. ‘Bastard.’
‘It’s rude, Adi.’ He dives underneath.
Addy treads water, scanning the surface for where he’ll reappear. The tight wool of his head brushes between her legs. He slides up the front of her body, running his lips over her naked belly as he rises to the surface.
He bursts through the water, gasping. ‘I forgot to breathe, darling. I wanted to stay to kiss you under the water and I lost my air.’
Addy reaches her arms around his neck and folds her legs around his body. He leans his head back, closing his eyes as she kisses her way across his neck. His hand cups her head and he kisses her. She’s hungry, ravenous, wanting to taste him, to devour him, until there’s no Addy and no Omar. Only their essences, together, in a pool of water under the hot Moroccan sun.
‘Alli estan!’
A gigantic splash. And another.
Addy pushes away from Omar. The Spanish students have found them.
Omar slaps the water. ‘Habss. It’s a place for us to be private. Not to have people here.’
Addy swims to a rock by the riverbank and heaves herself out of the water. Her heart’s racing. She wipes the dripping water from her eyes. She’d almost made a huge mistake.
Omar swims over to her, but she’s already pulling on her jeans.
‘Fuckers,’ Omar says, gesturing rudely at the laughing students. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I wanted to make a special day for you. I knew you would love it here.’
‘It’s okay.’ She unties the knot in her T-shirt and twists it to wring out the water.
He hoists himself up onto the rock. ‘Wait, darling.’
She shoves on her straw hat and reaches for her camera. ‘I should be getting back. I have a lot of work to do.’
She turns away, unable to meet his eyes. Is she a coward, or just being sensible? She knows what Philippa would say. You’re making a fool out of yourself, Adela. He just wants to shag you. And get you to pay for things. You’d be stupid to think anything else.
She’s damaged goods. How could she let him see her breast? No one has seen it outside the hospital. Not Philippa. Not Nigel. No, it’s better to stop this right now, before it was too late.
Chapter Thirteen (#ulink_cc2b95dd-c87f-5403-8997-1434bab4f8ec)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
Omar and Addy stand outside a whitewashed building beside the mosque. A hand-painted sign reading Douches Publiques hangs over the door. On the left, men sit on a covered terrace drinking orange juice and watching European football in French on a large plasma-screen television.
‘Wait here, honey.’
Addy hovers in the shadows and tries to make herself inconspicuous. She lifts her T-shirt away from her soaking bra. A few of the men glance at her, but when the television commentator’s voice rises in anticipation of a goal, they quickly turn back to the screen. A collective moan when the player overshoots the goal.
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Adrienne Chinn
A forbidden love affair. A long-buried secret. A journey that will change everything.Morocco, 1984. High in the Atlas Mountains, Hanane’s love for Irishman Gus is forbidden. Forced to flee her home with the man she loves, Hanane is certain she’s running towards her destiny. But she has made a decision that will haunt her family for years to come.London, 2009. When Addy discovers a mysterious letter in her late father’s belongings, she journeys to Morocco in search of answers. But instead, she finds secrets – and is quickly pulled into a world that she doesn’t understand.And when history starts to repeat itself, it seems her journey might just change the person she is forever…A heartbreaking story of impossible love and dark family secrets that readers of Dinah Jeffries and Tracy Rees will love.
Copyright (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Adrienne Chinn 2019
Cover design © Becky Glibbery 2019
Cover photographs © Shutterstock
Adrienne Chinn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008314552
Version: 2019-01-29
Dedication (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
For H.
Contents
Cover (#uf9242a4a-ffd5-585f-9d61-88227a387365)
Title Page (#u63ba607e-edb3-5876-a72a-1801bab4716e)
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Marrakech, Morocco – March 2009
Addy steps away from the window and runs her hand through her short red hair. She looks in the mirror and rubs a finger along the downy gingery growth of her eyebrows. She’ll need to pencil them in, but she’s used to that now. An expert.
The hotel room could be in London, Montréal or Philadelphia, the walls yellow-white, the furniture cheap wood, the bedcovers brown nylon. Only the framed desert print of a palm tree and a camel hints at the exotica outside in the Marrakech streets. Addy grabs her new digital camera off the chest of drawers and leans on the windowsill. Several storeys below, the hotel’s swimming pool shines like a turquoise kidney in the spring sunshine. A hotel is going up next door, the steel frame silhouetted against the blue sky. Men lean from scaffolding and shout as they haul up plastic buckets and pieces of metal. Addy focuses her lens and snaps several photos. Warming up. Getting into the groove. So many more images to capture in her camera before her visa expires in three months’ time. Then the book will be done and it’s back to London, God help her.
Chapter One (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
London, England – January 2009
Addy watches the crimson poison run down the plastic tube that loops like a roller coaster through the disinfected air. Over the green vinyl arm of the chair, over her father’s old navy cable-knit jumper that she’s pulled on, until it disappears down the roll-neck to a tube inserted in her chest. She’s named it the Red Devil. Killing everything in its path. Good cells and bad cells. Hopefully more bad than good.
The chemo room is full today. The girl, Rita, lies back in her chair and watches a nurse insert a cannula into her hand. Her long curly black hair twists around her earbud wires and bunches on her shoulders where she leans against the beige vinyl. Addy grimaces and turns her face away. She raises her arms and examines the purple bruises yellowing like spilt petrol on her arm. Collapsed. Every single vein. They’ve had to insert a Hickman into the veins leading to her heart. She hides the tubes inside her bra. So much easier than the cannula. She’d recommend it to anybody.
‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ Rita howls. ‘That fuckin’ hurt!’
Rita is only nineteen. Breast cancer sucks.
‘God, the lift was out again. I mean the one for normal people. Visitors aren’t allowed in the sick people’s lift, apparently. Where do they get these orderlies, anyway? Rude little bastards.’
Addy’s half-sister, Philippa, drops her Louis Vuitton sample bag onto the mottled green linoleum and dumps a stack of magazines onto Addy’s lap as she leans in to air kiss Addy’s cheeks.
‘You’re wet, Pippa.’
‘Yes. Blasted English weather.’
Philippa shrugs out of her Burberry raincoat and flaps it around, spraying Addy with the winter damp. She drapes the raincoat over the back of Addy’s chair and drags a metal-legged stool across the linoleum. She perches on the stool, her slender knees neatly together.
Philippa rifles through the magazines on Addy’s lap. She folds over a page of House & Garden and hands it to Addy.
‘I’m in it this month. That place I did for the Russians in Mayfair? God, what a trial. Your photos don’t look too shabby either.’
Addy examines the plush interiors – an artful mix of bespoke English sofas, pop art, Gio Ponti originals and Georgian antiques.
‘Well done, Pips. It’s good publicity for you.’
Philippa wrinkles her elegant nose. ‘Don’t call me that. You know I hate it. Your pictures are in House & Garden, Addy. Do you know what that means? It’s a fresh start. You should thank me. That little photo shop of yours was bogging you down. Just as well it went bust. I don’t know how you could stand doing those dreadful kiddie and doggie pictures.’
‘We can’t all be David Bailey.’
‘Well, indeed. I don’t understand why you feel so terrible about it closing. It’s a bloody recession. Everyone’s going bust. Even my dentist is downsizing, which tells you something. He’s had to sell his Porsche and buy an Audi. Not even a sports model.’
Addy stares at her sister. ‘It’s hard out there.’
‘Absolutely,’ Philippa says, missing the sarcasm in Addy’s voice. ‘There’s no shame in your business going bankrupt, so I wish you’d stop fretting. Frankly, it’s getting on my nerves.’
Addy drops the magazine into her lap and picks up Heat. She flips through the flimsy pages trying to spot a celebrity she’s heard of.
‘It’s easy for you to say, Pippa. You’ve got Alessandro’s divorce settlement to live off.’
Philippa folds her arms across her chest. ‘Money isn’t everything, Adela. Status and reputation are much more important.’ She draws her groomed eyebrows together. ‘Well, at least as important as money.’
‘I’ll tell that to the supermarket cashier next time I try to pay for my groceries with my reputation.’
Philippa takes the magazine out of Addy’s hands and places it neatly on top of a tin of Cadbury’s Roses chocolates someone has left on the metal table beside Addy’s chair.
‘I was reading that.’
‘Don’t be absurd. There’s nothing in there but tat.’ Philippa brushes a stray hair out of her eye with a pink lacquered fingernail. ‘Didn’t I tell you I’d set you on the right track, Addy? What good are strings if you can’t pull them?’
Philippa perches on the stool, straight-backed and attentive like a fashion editor in the front row of a catwalk show. Her grey tweed suit hugs her yoga’d and Pilate’d body, every dart and seam tweaked to perfection. How is it possible that they share the same DNA? Addy wonders. The pale, curvy, ginger-haired Canadian and the stylish English gazelle.
Addy taps her chest. ‘I was the one who got us the House & Garden gig, Pippa. I’m the one who sent the photos in on spec.’
Philippa’s eyebrows twitch. ‘Oh. Did you?’
‘I did.’
Philippa purses her lips, fine lines feathering up from her top lip to her nose. ‘Well, anyway, you’re finally getting somewhere with this photography lark.’ She picks up the House & Garden and pages through the article. ‘I do have a knack though, don’t I? I’m not one of Britain’s top-fifty interior designers for nothing. My psychic told me the Russians would be good for me. Thank God someone’s got money in this godforsaken recession. All it took was blood, sweat and tears.’
‘Your blood or your clients’?’
‘Mostly the curtain-maker’s this time. The builder told me they call me Bloody Philly.’
Addy shakes her head. At forty-six, Philippa is six years older, a successful interior designer, a short-lived marriage to an Italian investment banker behind her, a tidy divorce settlement in the bank. A stonking big house in Chelsea. On all the charity ball committees. In with the ‘in crowd’. Busy, busy Philippa. Nothing like herself – the gauche one at the party in a cheap dress from the vintage stall in Brick Lane and flat shoes from Russell & Bromley hanging out by the kitchen door to grab the canapés. The grit in Philippa’s oyster.
Their father, Gus, couldn’t leave Britain behind fast enough after his divorce from Philippa’s mother, Lady Estella Fitzwilliam-Powell. The ‘Ethereal Essie’ as Warhol christened her in the Sixties when she’d become a fixture at Warhol’s Factory in New York after the divorce.
Her father had told her once that he’d met Essie on a July afternoon in the Pimm’s tent at the Henley Regatta in the summer of 1962. Addy had seen pictures of him at that age – handsome in the fair-skinned, black-haired Black Irish way. Like Gene Kelly or Tyrone Power. Essie was eighteen, famous for her boyish figure and pale beauty. You could find pictures of her online now. Impossibly slender in minidresses and white go-go boots, her thick dark hair in a geometric Vidal Sassoon cut. Their father was fresh out of Trinity College with a degree in geology, the first of his working-class family to earn a degree. Philippa came along six months after the wedding. The marriage lasted a year. After the divorce, their father headed to Canada to find oil for a big multinational. By forty, Essie was dead on the bed of her rented flat in New York. Drugs overdose. Withered and desiccated. No longer ethereal.
Now their father was dead, too. Alone in his garden on the coast of Vancouver Island, on a bed of his favourite dahlias.
‘Pip, I’ve been thinking—’
‘Thinking? What do you mean, you’ve been thinking, Addy?’ Philippa waves the magazine at the plastic bag of Red Devil hanging from its drip stand. ‘You’ve got enough on your plate right now with all this palaver. Nigel’s chosen a wonderful time to run off on you. You have to stop expecting men to be there for you. They’ll always let you down.’
‘Don’t go there.’
Philippa holds up her hands. ‘Sorry.’
Philippa’s words stick into Addy like pins in a voodoo doll. She hasn’t told Philippa that she’s been scrabbling to cover Nigel’s half of the mortgage as well as her own share for the past four months while he ‘recovers from the cancer trauma’. Didn’t they say disasters come in threes? They were wrong. A break-up, a bankrupt business, cancer and her father’s heart attack – four things. More than her fair share.
Addy rubs her hand over the short red wig, reaching a finger underneath to scratch her sweaty scalp.
‘I’ve only got one more chemo session, Pippa. Then some radiotherapy for a few weeks. They told me that’s a doddle. Then Tamoxifen for five years. If I can stay clear for that long, I’m back to being a normal human being. Even the insurance companies say so. That’s assuming I’m not dead.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic.’ Philippa tosses the Heat magazine onto the metal table and prises the lid off the tin of chocolates. ‘Someone’s taken all the caramels. Sod’s law.’ She drops the lid back on and reaches into the pocket of her suit jacket, pulling out her cell phone.
‘You can’t use that in here, Pippa. It interferes with the equipment.’
Philippa slides the phone back into the pocket of her tailored grey jacket. Her body is tense with what Addy takes to be the desire to leave and get on with the job of being Bloody Philly. ‘You were saying?’
‘It’ll be the spring when the radiotherapy’s done. It’s been a long year. I’m tired.’
‘Of course you’re tired. You have cancer.’
‘I had cancer.’
Philippa gestures at the women in various stages of baldness flaked out in vinyl hospital chairs the colour of dirty plasters. ‘What’s all this? Performance art?’
Addy rolls her eyes. ‘It’s insurance. To make sure there’s nothing hanging around.’
Philippa adjusts her grey wool skirt to rest just so on her kneecap. ‘Fine. You had cancer.’ She folds her arms, her lips in the tight line that sets Addy’s teeth on edge. The lipstick is leaching into the fine lines running up to her sister’s nose. ‘What’s this big idea of yours?’
Addy clears her throat. The Red Devil has created a hunger inside her. With every drop the hunger has sharpened until she’s become ravenous for life. Time is short. You hear it all the time. But now she knows time is short. She’s not going to waste one moment longer. Faffing around with a cheating boyfriend while working in a failing photography shop. No. She’ll become the photographer she’s always dreamed of being. Travel the world and capture it in her camera. Leave her footprint on the earth before it’s too late.
‘I’ve been thinking of working on a travel book. Julia at the photo agency thinks it’s a great idea. A “Woman’s Guide to Travelling Alone” kind of thing. On spec but if it’s good enough, Julia’s got contacts with some literary agents. Travel stories are big right now. Everyone’s trying to escape the recession one way or another.’
‘Seriously?’
Addy thrusts out her lower lip. ‘I’m not an idiot. I’ve thought this through. I need to get out of London for a while. I’m worn out. I just need to decide on a country. It needs to be exotic. And cheap.’
Philippa shudders. ‘Exotic? That sounds hot, and … unhygienic. Your career’s doing beautifully here. House & Garden. Do you know what that means? It’s a calling card. All my designer friends will be clamouring to have you photograph their work. And you want to leave on a silly jaunt to some hot, dirty, dusty, filthy fleapit? That can’t be good for you in your weakened condition. Do have some sense, Adela.’
Addy glares at her sister, knowing from countless past stand-offs that arguing is pointless. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’
‘Of course I’m right. And how on earth are you going to afford something like that? Your money’s all tied up in your flat.’
‘I can manage a few months if I’m careful with the money Dad left me. I’ll find somewhere cheap to travel to. Then, when the book sells—’
‘If it sells.’
‘—when the book sells, I’ll have some money. It might even lead to another commission.’
‘Obviously you know best. Heaven forbid you listen to your sister.’
Philippa rises and smooths her bobbed hair, a sleek sheet of brown silk. She reaches for her raincoat and rests it over her shoulders like a cape.
‘Must go now. My Russian clients are taking me to lunch at The Wolseley. They’ve just bought a house in Berkshire from some impoverished earl.’
‘I thought you hated the Russians.’
‘Don’t be daft. Of course I do. Pushy, gaudy nouveau riche with more money than sense. Which is why they’re perfect clients. I’m hardly going to let my feelings stand in the way of decorating a stately home. I’ll do a fabulous job and get you in to do the photos. I won’t even charge you a finder’s fee.’
Addy smiles feebly, wishing that Philippa wouldn’t try so hard to impose her idea of what her life should be.
‘Oh, mustn’t forget.’ Philippa picks up her sample bag and pulls out three tattered photo albums and a bulky manila envelope, adding them to the magazines on Addy’s lap. ‘It looks like you’re not the only photographer in the family. Father’s solicitor sent these to me with a stack of documents for me to sign.’ She rolls her blue eyes. ‘Like I have time. I’ve had a quick look. Tourist photos, mainly. More your kind of thing.’
Addy clutches at the albums as they slide off her lap. ‘I never knew Dad took photos.’
Philippa leans in for a quick air-kiss. ‘Who knew?’ She grimaces. ‘I hope they don’t charge the estate for the postage from Canada. Those albums weigh a ton. I’ve asked the solicitor to clear the house and sell off the contents.’
‘I might have liked to go out to Nanaimo and do that myself. I did grow up in that house.’
‘In your condition? Don’t be ridiculous. Trust me, I did you a favour. I’ve asked her to send me anything else she finds of value, though I can’t imagine there’d be much. Once the estate clears his debt, we’ll split anything left. Enough for a meal out at Pizza Hut, if we’re lucky.’
‘Were my mother’s or Dad’s Claddagh rings in with the things the solicitor sent? I haven’t seen them in ages.’
‘No, I have no idea where those are. But Dad’s pen’s in the envelope.’
Philippa gives Addy another quick air-kiss then picks her way around the other patients, carefully avoiding the nausea buckets. She raises her hand and wiggles her fingers without looking back.
Addy unties the string on the manila envelope and shakes out her father’s fat black Montblanc fountain pen with the silver nib. She flips open the faded red cover of the top album and flicks through the stiff cardboard pages. Parisian landmarks, the Coliseum in Rome, a red-sailed dhow bobbing on the water in front of the Hong Kong skyline, the evening sun silhouetting the pyramids. Images displayed like butterflies between cellophane and sticky-backed cardboard pages.
A white envelope slips out of the album, its flap dog-eared and torn. She reaches into it. More Polaroids tumble from the folds of a sheet of thin blue airmail paper, its two sides covered in her father’s blue-inked scribble.
She opens the letter:
3rd March, 1984
Zitoune, Morocco
My darling Addy,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. You know how crazy things can be when I’m over in Nigeria. I loved your letter about your initiation week at Concordia, but please tell me that was a purple wig and that you didn’t dye your lovely titian hair. Just like your mother’s.
Well, I’m not in Nigeria any more. Things are still unsettled here with the politics and all that, and with the glut of oil on the market right now, they terminated my contract early. No need to have a petroleum geologist searching for oil when they have more of it than they can sell!
The job down in Peru doesn’t start till May, so I’ve headed up to North Africa for a bit before going there. It’s dinosaur land up here, so I thought I’d do a little independent oil prospecting. Remember what I used to tell you when you were little? Where there were dinosaurs, there’s probably oil. I might try to stop by Montréal to see you when I get back before flying back to Nanaimo. Is The Old Dublin still there? They do a cracking pint of Guinness.
Addy, my darling, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking up here in the mountains. It’s a beautiful place – you must come here one day. I know how much you love the Rockies. There’s something about mountains, isn’t there? Solid and reassuring. A good place to come when life wears you down.
I know it hasn’t been easy for you since your mother died. You know there was no option but the boarding school, what with me having to travel so much for work. You made a good fist of it, though. Honour student. I never told you how proud you made me. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for a lot of things … I hope you know how much I love you and your sister.
There’s something I need to tell you. I’m not sure how you’ll feel about it. I’ve met someone here. Up here in a tiny village in the Moroccan mountains. You know they talk of thunderbolts? It was like that. I can’t explain it. Maybe you’ll feel it yourself one day. I hope you do.
She’s a lovely young woman from the village. She writes poetry. She has such spirit. She’s only twenty-three, Addy – nineteen years younger. I only hope
Addy peers into the envelope. Nothing. Where was the rest of the letter? What did her father hope? Who was this woman?
She looks at the Polaroids fanned out across her lap. The colours faded – the red turning into orange, the purple into pale blue, the green into yellow. The images slowly disappearing into memory. The splayed imprint of the footprint of a large bird in red clay. Something that looks like prehistoric cave carvings. An old man on a bicycle in an ancient clay-walled alleyway. A circular stone opening in a seaside wall. The shadows of a couple silhouetted on a sandy boardwalk – their loose clothing billowing about them, caught by a gust of wind. A woman’s slender brown hands holding an intricately carved wooden box inlaid with mother of pearl veneers.
Addy holds the photo up and squints at the fading image. The ring on the woman’s left ring finger. Golden hands clasping a crowned sapphire heart. A Claddagh ring. Her mother’s wedding ring. Hazel’s ring.
One by one, she turns the photographs over. Her father’s handwriting. The blue ink from his fountain pen. Dinosaur footprints, Zitoune, December 1983 – with H and … Addy squints. She can’t make out the other initial. Cave art, near Zitoune, February 1984 – with H; Alley in the Marrakech medina, March 1984 – with H; On the fortifications, Essaouira, April 1984 – with H; Le Corniche boardwalk, Casablanca, May 1984 – with H.
With H? Who’s H? Is she the woman in the letter?
Addy shifts in the chair and a final Polaroid slides out of the envelope into her lap. Its corners crushed and bent, the gloss cracking. Her father. In his forties, still fit and handsome, standing in front of a fairy-tale waterfalls. He has an arm around a woman. She’s young, with long black hair falling onto her shoulders. Her skin is a warm brown, her eyes the colour of dark chocolate.
They’re both smiling. Her father has never looked so happy. But it isn’t his smile that draws her gaze. It’s the round bump straining the fabric of the purple kaftan. Addy turns the photo over. The blue ink. The familiar impatient t’s and g’s. Zitoune waterfalls, Morocco, August 1984 – with Hanane.
Chapter Two (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Zitoune, Morocco – November 1983
‘Higher, Hanane. You can do it.’
Hanane glances down at the laughing boys, her fine black eyebrows raised in doubt. ‘You think so? It looks a lot higher when you’re up here.’
‘Look, I’ll show you.’ Omar grabs a low branch of the olive tree, swinging his lithe body up onto the bough. He jiggles a branch, raining fat black olives over his older brother, Momo, and their friends, Driss and Yassine Lahcen.
‘Stop! Stop, Omar!’ Momo yells. ‘They hurt!’
‘Don’t whine, Momo,’ Hanane says. ‘Get the basket and fill it up. We don’t want them to go to waste. They’ll make good oil this year.’
Omar reaches down through the branches. ‘Take my hand, Hanane. I’ll help you.’
Hanane peers up through the grey-green canopy of the olive leaves. ‘How did you get up there so quickly, Omar? You’re like one of the monkeys by the waterfalls.’
‘I’m the best climber in Zitoune, you have to know it.’
‘I’m not as small as you. It’s harder for me to squeeze through the branches.’
‘Is it true you will be married soon?’ Momo’s best friend, ten-year-old Driss Lahcen, shouts up to her.
‘Who told you that?’
‘I heard your brother talking in the café. He said your father made a deal with your uncle in Ait Bougmez for you to marry your cousin, Mehdi, after Ramadan, and Ramadan finished already.’
Hanane grimaces and shakes her head, her long black braid swinging across the back of her blue djellaba. She’d never marry fat, ugly Mehdi, no matter what her father and Mohammed said.
She had a plan. She needed to convince her father to send her to university in Beni Mellal to study as a teacher. The new school rising up on the hill would need teachers. She was lucky that her poor mother had demanded that she learn to read and write at the village school, even though it had meant sitting behind a curtain so as not to distract the boys.
It had been wonderful, learning the magic of transcribing her thoughts into words that she’d scribble with her mother’s kohl stick onto the scraps of paper she’d collect from the alleyways and hoard in her cupboard, rolled up in the folds of a hijab. Behind the dirty flowered curtain in the schoolroom, she’d discovered a talent that was hers and hers alone. Poetry. Short, sweet aches of life. The poems sprung from her like water flowing from the fountain of the garden of Paradise.
Then her mother had died. The baby hadn’t managed more than two days of breath before he’d joined her. Her father had pulled Hanane out of school. A home needed a woman to cook the tagine and wash the clothes, he’d said. Someone needed to feed and care for him and her older brother, Mohammed. Even though she was only twelve. When her father had married the dull girl Hind the following year, nothing changed. Her education was over. But Hanane would escape her duties in the house whenever she could to range around the valleys and fields, helping the shawafa find the plants for her medicines and potions. In the mountains, she was free.
She was twenty-three now and the world was changing. Even here in the mountains. She’d often pause from washing the clothes in the river to watch a group of giggling white-smocked girls heading up the hill to the old school, their slates and chalk clutched against their chests. And the tourists were coming in from Marrakech more and more often to see the waterfalls. She’d even seen a lady on a motorcycle not three weeks ago! But since her twenty-third birthday in June, all her father and her brother, Mohammed, could talk about was her marriage.
‘I’ll never marry Mehdi. Mohammed only says it because his stupid wife, Bouchra, wants her brother here.’
‘Oh, c’mon, Hanane,’ seven-year-old Yassine Lahcen protests. ‘We want to go to dance at a wedding.’ Yassine pokes his brother on the arm. ‘Look, Driss.’ He waggles his shoulders and wiggles his hips like he’d seen the women do at Mohammed’s wedding in the summer.
Driss shoves his brother’s shoulder. ‘What are you, a girl? Stop it. Don’t be stupid.’
‘What’s wrong with being a girl, Driss?’ Hanane calls down from the tree. ‘You wouldn’t be here without your mother. You must be respectful.’
An oily black olive smacks Driss on his forehead. He peers up into the branches just as Omar launches another one at him, hitting him square on the nose.
Omar bursts into giggles. ‘It’s raining. It’s pouring. Driss Lahcen is snoring.’
A deep chuckle wafts over from the river path. A tall, black-haired European man in beige trousers and a navy jumper rolled under his chin stands on the compacted earth, holding an odd black object.
‘May I take a picture?’ he asks in accented French.
‘Hey, mister,’ Omar shouts from his perch. ‘What’s that thing?’
‘It’s a camera. But it’s a special camera. It can make the pictures here, right in front of your eyes.’
‘Serious?’
‘Definitely serious.’
‘Let him take our picture, Hanane,’ Omar shouts down through the branches. ‘I want to see it come out of the magic box.’
Hanane sweeps her eyes over the tall man. He’s much older than her brother, Mohammed, but there’s still a youthfulness about him, despite the lines that sweep out from his eyes when he smiles. His skin is very white and even from this distance, his eyes reflect the sharp blue of the November sky. His short, straight black hair shines blue where it’s caught by sunlight. He carries himself with assurance, she thinks, like a man who’s comfortable with his place in the world. What can he think of her, up here in the tree with a boy? What would her father think if he saw her talking to a foreigner?
‘I don’t think so, Omar. It’s not proper.’
Omar breaks into a wide smile. ‘She says it’s fine, mister.’
‘Omar!’ Hanane hisses. ‘You’re a bad boy.’
‘For sure, I’m a bad boy. Even Jedda says it and she loves me a lot.’
‘I don’t believe that at all. Your grandmother thinks you’re the prince of Zitoune.’
‘Wait there,’ the man shouts up to them. ‘I’ll take a picture of you two first, just as you are.’
Hanane bites her lip. Omar kicks her shoulder with his foot.
‘Your brother stinks of cumin.’
She giggles despite herself.
‘Perfect.’
The man presses a button. A whirring sound and a square of shiny grey-and-white card slides out of the camera’s mouth. The boys cluster around as the man waves it in the air.
Momo wrinkles his nose. ‘It’s smelly.’
Yassine pinches his nose with his fingers. ‘Like donkey piss.’
Driss squints at the grey paper. ‘Nothing’s happening.’
The man laughs. ‘You won’t see it until I peel back this piece of paper. We have to count one minute. Then you’ll see a picture appear’ – he waves his hands like a magician – ‘like magic.’
Omar scampers down the tree. ‘C’mon, Hanane. Come see the magic picture.’
Hanane peers through the leaves at the cluster of black heads huddled over the shiny square of card. She’d have to swear the boys to secrecy. Her honey cookies should do the trick.
‘Who wants to peel back the plastic to see the picture?’
Omar shoots his arm into the air. ‘Me! Me, mister!’
The man laughs and hands over the card. ‘There,’ he says, indicating a loose corner of the grey plastic film. ‘Pull there.’
The boys huddle closer as Omar peels back the film.
‘It’s there!’ Momo shouts. ‘It’s you and Omar in the tree. Hanane, come see.’
Hanane grabs a branch and shimmies down through the leaves. The man takes the photograph from Omar and holds it in front of Hanane. She’s there, laughing in the tree with Omar, in black-and-white. Like magic.
‘Take it. Please. So you’ll always remember your day up in that olive tree.’
Hanane shakes her head. ‘You are kind, but I couldn’t.’
Bouchra would be sure to find it, no matter how well she hid it. Only yesterday, Hanane had found her rifling through her scarves. Luckily, she’d hidden her poems in Jedda’s potion shed. If her lazy sister-in-law found the poems or a photo like this, Bouchra would frighten the devil Shaytan Iblis with her curses. Because, of course, Bouchra would betray her secrets, now that she considered herself the mistress of the Demsiri household. Bouchra would do anything to topple Hanane from her place as favourite.
‘Well, then, I’ll keep it. As a memento of a happy day.’ The man tucks the glossy photograph in his back pocket and turns to the boys. ‘Now, how about a picture of all of you boys there by the river?’
Hanane watches the boys jostle for the best place, which is taken, naturally, by Omar.
‘I’m Gus Percival,’ he says to her as he squints into the viewfinder. ‘I’m a geologist. I’m staying in Zitoune for a few months doing some research in the area.’ He waves at the boys to squeeze more closely together. ‘Say cheese.’
Hanane watches the shiny square of paper spew out of the camera’s mouth. The man waves it in the air to dry, out of reach of the excited boys.
‘Can I ask your name?’
Hanane hesitates. Why would he want to know her name? He had no place in her world, nor she in his. But why, then, did she suddenly feel like the earth had tilted and everything she’d known, everything she’d dreamed, had shifted to an unknowable place?
Omar jumps up and grabs the photograph from Gus’s hand. He peels back the grey film as the others fight to see. ‘Hanane! Come see!’
‘Hanane,’ Gus repeats. ‘It’s lovely to meet you.’
Chapter Three (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Marrakech, Morocco – March 2009
The reedy whine of the snake charmers’ flutes flutters through the baseline of African drums and the water sellers’ bells as Addy weaves through the crowds in Jemaa el Fna Square. Women with veiled faces sit on stools, bowls of green mud and syringes balanced on their laps. They grab at Addy as she walks past and point to photo albums showing hands and feet covered in intricate henna patterns. A band of boy acrobats in ragged red trousers jumps and tumbles in the square. Addy snaps a string of photos as they leap from one tableau to another. A small boy grins a gap-toothed smile and thrusts a dirty wool cap at her. She digs into her pocket and grabs a handful of change, tossing it into the cap.
‘Shukran,’ the boy shouts, then he turns and runs along the line of tourists jangling the coins in his cap.
Addy wanders into the shaded alleyways of the souks, clicking photos of anything that catches her eye: a green gecko sitting on lettuce in a bamboo cage, antelope horns hanging from an apothecary’s shop front, two men eating snails from steaming bowls by a snail seller’s three-wheeled stand. Overhead, loosely woven bamboo obscures the blue sky, and shards of sunlight slice through the dust and incense that clouds the air.
Addy jostles against short, stout women in citrus-coloured hooded djellabas and hijab headscarves. Some of the women are veiled, but many of the younger women are bare-headed, with long, glossy black ponytails trailing down into the discarded hoods of their djellabas. There are girls in low-rise skinny jeans, tight, long-sleeved T-shirts with CHANNEL and GUCHI outlined in diamante, their eyes hidden behind fake designer sunglasses studded with more diamante. They totter arm-in-arm down the alleyways in high-heeled sandals, ignoring the catcalls of the boys who buzz through the crowds on their motorbikes. ‘How are you, baby? Come here, darling! I love you!’
Addy stops in front of a stall selling tote bags and straw bowls. She points to a wide-brimmed hat hanging by a loop from a nail in the wall.
‘How much for the hat?’
‘You like the hat?’ The shop seller’s lips curl back, exposing large yellow teeth. ‘No problem, mashi mushkil.’ He grabs the hat and presents it to Addy like a crown.
She sticks her finger through the loop and swings the hat back and forth.
‘I’ve never seen a hat with a loop before.’
‘It’s for hanging. It’s very clever design.’
‘How much?’
‘Two hundred dirhams.’
Addy makes a mental calculation. Around eighteen pounds. ‘Okay.’
The shop seller leers at her and Addy sees the brown rot eating through the yellow enamel.
‘It might be you would like a bag, madame? It’s very beautiful quality. The best in Marrakech.’
‘No, just the hat. Thanks.’ She hands him two crumpled dirham notes.
The shop seller eyes her as he slips the money into the pocket of his beige djellaba. He holds up a fat finger. ‘One minute, madame. Please, you wait. I am sure you will like a special bag. It’s from Fes. Very, very nice quality. Louis Vuitton.’
When he disappears behind the curtain, Addy puts on the hat and dodges out of the shop. She’s halfway down the alley towards Jemaa el Fna when she hears his shouts.
‘Come back, madame! I make you very good deal. A very beautiful bag. The best quality original fake in Marrakech!’
The sun is blazing hot when Addy steps into the square. She skirts along the perimeter in the shade of the restaurant canopies, picking her way around the café tables crowded with tourists sipping tepid Cokes and local men smoking Marlboros with tiny glasses of thick black coffee on the shaded terrace of the Café de France.
She heads down an alley towards the Koutoubia mosque, stopping short in front of a display case of cream-stuffed French pastries crawling with black flies, shaded from the sun by a faded red-and-white striped canopy. A sandwich board plastered with excursion photographs leans crookedly on the cracked paving in front of the pastry shop: desert camel trekkers silhouetted on the crests of towering dunes, blue fishing boats carpeting a seaside harbour, fairy-tale waterfalls coursing down red clay cliffs. Under the waterfalls a handwritten scrawl in blue marker fuzzy at the edges where the ink has leached into the flimsy card:
COME TO VISIT THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WATERFALLS OF NORTH AFRIQUE. ITS MAGIQUE IS AMAZING! THE CASCADES DE ZITOUNE WILL BE A WONDERFUL MEMORY FOR YOU. COME INSIDE TO BOOK A TOUR VISIT. ONLY 3 HOURS FROM MARRAKECH TO PARADISE.
Zitoune. Where her father had met Hanane. Where Hanane and her child may still be. She’d been wondering how she’d get there. Addy ducks under the frayed canopy into the pastry shop.
That night, Addy wakes up with an image in her mind’s eye. The waxing moon casts a muted light over the hotel room furniture, the shapes like hulking animals lurking in the shadows. She shuts her eyes and the image pulses against her eyelids. The figure wears a gown and turban of vivid blue. Addy lies in bed, the blueness staying with her until she falls back to sleep.
Chapter Four (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
The Road to Zitoune, Morocco – March 2009
The tour bus rattles across the plains of Marrakech. A wall of towering snow-capped mountains thrusts skywards at the edge of the olive groves spreading out over the plains like a green sea to the right of the road. The March sky is achingly blue. Addy unzips her camera bag. She takes out her camera and the 24–105 mm zoom lens, changes the lens and screws on the polarising filter and lens hood. Leaning out of the window, she braces her elbows against the window frame.
As the bus bounces along the potholed asphalt, she snaps pictures of the squat olive trees, cactus sprouting orange prickly pears, and green fields dotted with blood-red field poppies. Towns of pink earth buildings materialise from the land, lively with mongrel dogs chasing chickens, women riding donkeys and men with prune-like faces shooing flocks of sheep.
The sun is warm on her face and her naked arms. She settles back into her seat. The faded blue vinyl is ripped at the seams and burns her hand when she touches it. She fans her face with her straw hat. Philippa’s voice rattles around her head: Are you mad, Addy? You’re probably suffering from post-traumatic stress or something. A woman alone in the Moroccan mountains for three months? You can’t be serious.
Philippa had obviously missed the envelope of Polaroids. Missed the photo of Gus and Hanane and the letter. She’d have said something, definitely. Gloated. Anything to show up their father as a feckless, irresponsible wanderer, leaving abandoned women and children in his selfish wake. That wasn’t the father Addy knew. The doting father she’d adored. But who was this Hanane? Why was she wearing her mother, Hazel’s, Claddagh ring? Why had their father never said anything about Hanane and the baby after he’d come back from Morocco? Surely he wouldn’t have just abandoned them. But he’d done it once before, with Essie and Philippa, hadn’t he?
Maybe she and Philippa had a Moroccan brother or sister living in Morocco. A twenty-three-year-old now. Surely someone in Zitoune would know where Hanane and her child were now. Once she’d found out what had happened to them, she’d let Philippa know. That would be soon enough.
She leans her head against the vinyl seat, the bumps and sways of the bus lulling her into a dozy torpor. Nerves flutter in the pit of her stomach. Just three months. Three months to see what she can find out about Gus and the pregnant Moroccan woman in the photograph. Three months to work on the travel book. Three months to change her life.
The tour bus arrives at a junction in front of a one-storey building constructed of concrete blocks. A donkey stands tethered to a petrol pump with red paint faded by the sun. Above a window a Coca-Cola sign in looping Arabic script hangs precariously from a rusty hook. Someone’s nailed a hand-painted sign of waterfalls to a post, an arrow pointing towards mountains in the distance. The driver grinds the gears and steers the bus towards the mountains.
A half-hour later, the bus pulls into a dirt square surrounded by a jumble of buildings in various stages of construction. A group of men sits on the hill overlooking the square. The younger men wear designer jeans and hold cell phones close to their ears. The faces of the older men are deeply creased, like old leather shoes. Some suck on cigarette stubs. They wear dusty flannel trousers under brown hooded djellabas. Many of them have bright blue turbans wrapped around their heads. They’re like hungry eagles eyeing their prey.
One of the younger men separates from the group and jogs down the hill. He moves lightly like a deer, his feet finding an easy path down the rocky hillside. He wears a bright blue gown embroidered with yellow symbols over his jeans. The long tail of his blue turban flaps behind him as he lopes down the hill.
‘Sbah lkhir,’ he calls to the driver.
The driver laughs at something he says and offers him a cigarette from a crumpled Marlboro packet. The young man shakes his head and slaps the driver on the back. The driver shrugs and holds the Marlboro packet up to his lips then pulls out a cigarette with his teeth. He grabs a green plastic lighter from his dashboard, clicking under the end of the cigarette until it glows. Sucking in his cheeks, he blows out the smoke with an ‘Ahhh.’
The young man turns to face the passengers. He’s tall and slim and his blue gown floats around his body. His face is angular, his jaw strong, and his amber eyes are almond-shaped and deep-set. His lips are full and when he smiles a dimple shadows his right cheek.
‘Sbah lkhir. Good morning. Allô,bonjour, comment ça va?’ He flashes a white smile. ‘I am Omar. I am your tour guide, votre guide touristique.’ He thumps his chest with the flat of his hand and gestures around him. ‘You are welcome to my paradise and to the place of the most beautiful waterfalls in Morocco, the Cascades de Zitoune. In English, the Waterfalls of the Olive.’
He claps his hands together and flashes another white-toothed smile. ‘So, you are all happy? You are ready for the big adventure of your life?’
Addy waves at him.
‘Yes, allô?’
The blood rises in her cheeks as she feels the eyes of the other tourists on her.
‘I’m sorry. I’m not here for the tour. I just caught a lift on the tour bus because it was the easiest way here. I need to find the house I’m renting.’
‘I’m so, so sorry for that.’ His accent is heavy, the English syllables embellished with Arabic rolls of the tongue. ‘You’ll miss the best tour with the best tour guide in Morocco. But, anyway, what is the address? Is it Dar Fatima? The Hôtel de France? I can take you.’
‘No, it’s a house near the river. I can manage. I don’t want to delay your tour.’
Omar waggles his finger at her. ‘Mashi mushkil. I know the house. It’s the place of Mohammed Demsiri. Where’s your luggage? Your husband is coming soon?’
‘No. Just me. My bags are at the back. I don’t have much.’
‘No problem. I’ll make a good arrangement for you.’
‘I, but … I don’t want to be any trouble.’
Omar says something to the driver, who tosses his cigarette out of the window and starts the ignition. The door’s still open and Omar hangs half in and half out, his feet wedged against the opening. As the tour bus cuts across the square towards a small rusty bridge, he calls out to acquaintances in a guttural language. Addy sucks in her breath as the bridge’s loose boards clatter beneath the bus’s tyres.
The tour bus turns right down a narrow lane and stops in front of a squat mud house. A large inverted triangle is centred on the blue metal door and two tiny windows protected by black metal grilles have been cut into the orange pisé wall. Omar jumps out of the bus and bangs on the blue door. A woman’s voice calls out from behind the door.
‘Chkoun?’
‘Omar.’
The door opens. A young woman in pink flannelette pyjamas and a lime green hijab stands on the threshold. She wears purple Crocs and carries a wooden spoon dripping with batter. She has the same full lips and high cheekbones as Omar in her dark-skinned face. Omar gestures at the bus, his guttural words flying at her like bullets. The girl waves her spoon at Omar, flinging batter over his blue gown as she volleys back a shrill response.
Omar catches Addy’s eye. ‘One minute, one minute.’ He grabs the girl by the arm and they disappear behind the door.
A few minutes later he emerges and beckons to Addy.
‘Come.’
‘This isn’t the house on the Internet.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s the house of my family. We’ll put the luggage here and you can come on the tour. I’ll bring you to your house later.’
‘But …’
He presses his hand onto his chest. ‘I am Omar. Everybody knows me here. It’s no problem. Don’t worry.’
Philippa’s voice echoes in her head: Whatever you do, Addy, don’t trust those Moroccan men. They’re only after one thing. A British passport.
Omar shrugs. ‘Okay, so no problem. You don’t trust me, I can see it. It’s not a requirement for you to come to my house. We go to the waterfalls.’
‘No, it’s fine. I’m coming.’
‘About bloody time, too,’ a girl with a Geordie accent grumbles from the back of the bus. ‘We could’ve crossed the bloody Sahara by camel by now.’
Omar stands in a dirt-floored courtyard with the girl and two older women. A woman who looks about fifty-five stands ramrod straight and wears a red gypsy headscarf, an orange blouse buttoned to her chin, and a red-and-white striped apron over layers of skirts and flannelette pyjamas. Silver coins hang from her pierced ears and the inner lids of her amber eyes are ringed with kohl.
Beside her, an old woman in a flowered flannel housecoat and red bandana leans heavily on a knotty wooden stick. A thick silver ring marked with crosses and X’s slides around one of her gnarled fingers. Her left eye is closed and the right eye that peers out from her wrinkled face is a translucent blue. She has a blue arrow tattooed on her chin.
‘It’s my mum, my sister and my grandmother,’ Omar says, waving at the women.
Addy sets down her camera bag and her overnight bag. A clothesline has been strung across the yard and fresh washing hangs on the line dripping onto the dirt floor. A couple of scrawny chickens scratch in the red dirt. Addy extends her hand to his mother.
‘Bonjour.’
The woman takes hold of Addy’s hand in both of hers then smiles and nods. Her eyes sweep over Addy’s naked arms. She says something to Omar, who chuckles.
A small boy barges in through the door dragging Addy’s suitcase and tripod bag and deposits them next to her other luggage. Omar retrieves a coin from the pocket of his blue robe and flips it to the boy, who catches it, shouting ‘Shukran’ as he runs out of the door. The metal door bangs against its loose hinges.
The old woman waves her stick at the door and shuffles off through an archway, mumbling. Omar’s mother and sister pick up Addy’s luggage and follow the old woman into the next room.
‘Where are they going?’
‘Don’t worry. They put them in a safe place so the chickens and donkey don’t break them.’
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘No problem. Mashi mushkil.’
‘Mashy mushkey.’
‘It’s a good accent. It’s Darija. Arabic of Morocco.’
‘It sounds different here from what I heard in Marrakech.’
‘Here we speak Tamazight mostly. It’s Amazigh language.’
‘Amazigh?’
‘Yes. We say Amazigh for one person and Imazighen for many people. Everybody else says Berber, but we don’t like it so well, even though we say it for tourists because it’s more easy. The Romans called us that because they say we were like barbarians. It’s because we fight them well. We are the first people of North Africa. We’re free people. It’s what Imazighen means. We’re not Arab in the mountains.’
‘Oh. I didn’t know that.’
‘So, I’m a good teacher, isn’t it? My sister speaks Darija and some French from her school, but my mum and grandmother speak Tamazight only.’
‘And your father?’
‘My father, he’s died.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’
Omar shrugs. ‘Don’t mind. It’s life.’ Omar pinches the fabric of his blue gown between his fingers. ‘It’s the special blue colour of the Imazighen. It used to be that the Tuareg Berbers in the Sahara crushed indigo powder into white clothes to make them blue to be safe from the djinn. But when it was very hot the blue colour make their faces blue as well. People called them the blue men of the desert.’
Omar drapes the loose end of his blue turban across his face, covering his nose and mouth. ‘It’s a tagelmust. It’s for the desert, but the tourists love it so we wear it everywhere now. For us, it’s the man who covers his face, not the ladies.’ He folds his arms across his chest and spreads his feet apart. ‘I’m handsome, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sure you break the hearts of all the women tourists.’
Omar tugs at the cloth covering his face. ‘I never go with the tourist ladies. It’s many ladies in Zitoune who want to marry me, but I say no. My mum don’t like it. She want many grandchildren.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend …’
Omar tucks the tail of the tagelmust into his turban. ‘Mashi mushkil.’
A black-and-white cat brushes against her legs and Addy reaches down to brush its tail.
‘What a pretty cat.’
Omar shifts on his feet. ‘It’s the cat of my grandmother. It’s very, very old.’
‘Really? It doesn’t look old.’
‘She had it a long time anyway. It always follows her. It’s very curious all the time.’
Omar clears his throat. ‘It must be that I know your name.’
She stands up quickly and thrusts out her hand. ‘Addy.’
A wet pant leg wraps around her wrist like a damp leaf. She tries to shake it loose but the clothesline collapses, throwing the damp laundry into heaps on the dusty ground. The cat shoots across the courtyard and out through a crack in a thick wooden door.
Addy stares at the dust turning to red mud on the clothes. She stoops to pick up the dirty laundry.
‘I’m so sorry. I’ve messed up your mother’s laundry.’
Omar lifts the wet bundle out of Addy’s hands. ‘No mind, Adi.’ The vowels of her name curl and roll off his tongue, the accent on the last syllable. Omar stacks the wet laundry on top of a low wooden table. ‘It’s a boy’s name in Morocco. You have short hair like a boy anyway.’
Addy runs her fingers over her cropped hair. The softness still surprises her. Hair like a baby’s. A side effect of the Red Devil.
Omar wipes his muddy hands on his gown. ‘So, Adi of England. Yalla. We go.’
Chapter Five (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)
Zitoune, Morocco – March 2009
The tour group trails behind Omar as he leads them on a path through an olive grove beside the river. Stopping, Omar points out donkeys saddled with bright-coloured blankets, eating the fresh spring grass in the dappled shade.
‘These are Berber four-by-fours. They fill up on the gasoline when the drivers go to the market. The donkeys eat the marijuana there. You can see?’
Addy squints at the donkeys. ‘That’s not marijuana.’
Omar slaps his leg and laughs. ‘You know marijuana, Adi?’
The tourists laugh and the colour rises in Addy’s face. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Everyone knows what marijuana looks like.’ She searches the faces of the other tourists for affirmation. Surely she wasn’t the only one who’d gone to university in the Eighties.
‘Mashi mushkil. It’s so nice to know if a lady like marijuana.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Don’t be mad. I’m joking with you.’
‘Fine.’ Addy looks over at Omar and frowns. Was he chatting her up? He was handsome, there was no denying that. But, so what? She was here to work and to find Hanane and the baby. The last thing she needed was to get involved with a cocky Moroccan ten years younger than herself.
Omar presses a hand against his heart. ‘Now the lady of England is angry at me, I can tell it well. My heart is crushed like an egg for the Berber omelette. I must apologise.’
He wades out into the green meadow grass and picks a red poppy. He makes his way back to the path and holds out the flower to Addy.
Addy’s irritation dissipates. A sweet gesture. She reaches for the flower and Omar closes his hand around hers. She meets his gaze. A waft of memory. She looks away in confusion. His hand slides from hers. When she looks back, he’s on the path, the tourists clustered around him.
Around a bend in the river they come across several local women washing clothes in the clear water. Jeans and T-shirts in the colours of European football teams hang to dry over pink flowering oleander bushes. The women laugh and chatter, their skirts and aprons tucked into the waistbands of their flannelette pyjama bottoms, which are rolled up over their knees. Their hair is hidden by colourful bandanas. Many of them have blue arrow-like tattoos on their chins like Omar’s grandmother.
‘This is the manner the ladies wash the clothes in the village,’ Omar explains as the group stops to take photos.
Addy rests her camera on top of a large boulder and peers into the viewfinder. What do the women think of us, stealing their souls with our cameras? She presses the shutter then loops the strap around her neck, letting the camera flop against her chest as she replaces the lens cap.
She looks over at Omar, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. ‘So, where do the men wash their clothes?’
Omar laughs. ‘I’m very clean, even if I don’t wash my own clothes.’ He raises his arms and approaches her. ‘You can smell me.’
Addy stumbles away, holding her nose. ‘Men should share the housework. It’s only fair.’
‘That’s a big pity for your husband,’ Omar teases. ‘It’s a job for ladies to wash the clothes. At least I hope you cook well.’
‘Afraid not. I hate cooking. But I’m great at desserts. I have a sweet tooth.’
‘That’s good at least. Moroccans love sugar. Our blood is made of honey.’
The dimple appears on Omar’s right cheek. Addy’s heart thumps. She looks down at her sandals. The dry earth coats her toes in a fine red dust.
The sun dances on the river, shining silver on the swirling ripples. Addy falls back behind some newlyweds from France. A couple of Geordie girls from Newcastle flutter around Omar as he teases them with stories of djinn and the evil eye.
She looks away at the river, at the water glittering like diamonds. Ridiculous to be feeling like a teenager at her age. She needs to focus on her purpose. She sucks in a deep breath of the mountain air and exhales slowly, letting the warm air brush over her lips. Better. The yoga classes Philippa had forced her into were paying off at last.
Her thoughts wander to her father and Hanane. Whether they’d walked along this path on their way to the waterfalls. Why had her father never said anything to her about visiting Morocco? He’d obviously intended to, or he’d never have written her that letter. And where were the missing pages? What really happened to Hanane?
He was always travelling for his work. There had been times when she and her mother didn’t see him for months. She still had the postcards he’d sent her from all over the world. Mexico. Peru. Nigeria. Russia. Kuwait. After her mother had died, Addy had plastered her bulletin board in her room at St Margaret’s in Victoria with them. But none from Morocco.
She eyes Omar, who’s busy pointing out turtles sunning on a rock in the river. He was definitely too old to be her half-brother. Around thirty, she’d guess. He would’ve been a child when her father was in Zitoune. Probably too young to remember him. But what about Hanane? Would he remember her? She’d ask him, when she had a chance. Show him the old Polaroid. It was as good a place to start as any.
Addy’s mind settles as she listens to Omar’s voice resonating in the warm morning air. Further along the path, he points out beehive-shaped clay structures in which, he explains, the village women take steam baths. He pokes a stick with his foot and it metamorphoses into a thin green grass snake, prompting squeals from the two Geordie girls. Every now and then, Omar catches Addy’s gaze as he spins his multilingual patter about carob trees, petrified tree roots, or the wiry, grey-furred macaque monkeys that live in the caves and crevices of the cliffs.
The French newlyweds, Sylvain and Antoinette, ask to be photographed next to a donkey. Omar suggests that Antoinette climb up onto the animal as Sylvain holds the lead. Omar unwinds his tagelmust and wraps it around Sylvain’s head. He pulls off his blue gown, revealing well-worn Levis and a white T-shirt, and offers it to Antoinette. It’s like a tent around her tiny body.
The tourists shout out instructions to the pair as Omar snaps the photos. Ouistiti! Mirar al pajarito! Käsekuchen! Say cheese! Addy hovers at the edge of the group, watching Omar. He’s lean and muscular and the white of his T-shirt glows against his brown skin. His hair is a close-cropped cap of tight black curls. He moves like a swimmer, lithe and graceful and unselfconscious.
They continue through a dense olive grove, following a narrow path in a gradual descent through the trees. The morning is filled with the noisy peace of the countryside – a dog’s bark, a donkey’s bray, the underlying buzz of cicadas. The group breaks out of the shade into a meadow where the sky opens above, blue and cloudless.
Addy takes off her new straw hat. She closes her eyes and breathes in the clear air, letting the heat penetrate her skin. The weight of all the worry and anxiety of the previous months slowly falls away until she’s light and new again.
Tessa and Nicky, the two Geordie girls, buzz around Omar like chubby bees. They wear tight halter tops, cropped shorts and flip-flops. On the bank of a wide hill stream, Omar stands by to help as the group steps over the rocks to the other side. When he offers his hand to Tessa and then to Nicky, Addy sees him eye the English girls’ angel wing tattoos, which stretch across the tanned skin of their lower backs.
Addy’s the last one to cross the stream. Her breath catches when his fingers close around hers. On the other side of the stream, Omar places his hands on her waist to steady her. His breath is warm on her neck. She rests her hands on his for an instant, then steps forwards onto the path.
An hour into the hike, the group reaches a lookout platform facing the waterfalls.
Omar sweeps his hand towards the view. ‘This is my Paradise.’
The tourists crowd towards the flimsy bamboo railing, hurrying to pull out their cameras. Foaming water crashes over a red earth cliff, forming pools and mini-waterfalls as the water thunders into a churning pool at the base. A rainbow arches across the pool, its colours hazy in the river mist. The waterfalls in the Polaroid. Her father and Hanane had stood here, on this very spot, smiling for the photo that August day in 1984.
There’s a modest café at the lookout and Addy buys herself a warm bottle of Coca-Cola from a slender, sharp-faced Moroccan about Omar’s age at a bar cobbled together from produce crates. The Moroccan makes a show of wiping the Coke bottle clean with the tail of his tie-dyed turban and his fingers linger on her palm when he hands her the Coke.
When Addy returns to the lookout, Omar’s talking to the Geordie girls.
‘I studied at university,’ Omar’s saying. ‘English literature. Chakespeare. “To be or not to be, that is the question.”’ He thumps his chest with the flat of his hand. ‘I’m a graduate of the university in Beni Mellal. Nobody else in Zitoune is graduated from university.’
Addy leans against a bamboo post and sips the tepid soft drink. ‘English literature? I studied that, too. Did you study Milton? Donne? Marlowe? The Romantics?’
‘I know Chakespeare.’
Nicky rolls her blue-lined eyes. ‘You’ve got to be flipping kidding me. I’m on bloody holiday in Morocco and you’re talking about Shakespeare? I think I’m gonna gag.’ She points a long pink fingernail at the Coke bottle. ‘Where’d you get the Coke?’
‘Over there.’
‘C’mon, Tessa. Let’s get a Coke. I’m gasping.’
Omar nods at the turbaned barman. ‘It’s my friend, Yassine. He sells the best Coca-Cola in Zitoune, even if it’s not so cold. It’s better like that. Not so many calories.’
Nicky grabs Tessa’s arm. ‘Oo-er. He’s a bit of all right. C’mon, Tess, I’m getting thirstier by the minute.’
Tessa, a sun-streaked blonde with a generous cleavage and pink gloss lipstick, squints at Yassine. He gives her a slow, appreciative smile.
‘Oh, all right. I can’t be doing with Shakespeare, either. I’m on my hols.’
The girls saunter over to the bar, their flip-flops slapping on the compacted earth. Yassine flashes them a white-toothed smile as he sets out two bottles of Coca-Cola on the worktop.
Omar nods. ‘Yassine will make them happy. He likes English girls. He likes to practise his English. More tea, Vicar? See you later, alligator.’
‘In a while, crocodile.’
‘In a while, crocodile.’ Omar grins. ‘I like it.’
Addy sets her empty Coke bottle down on the ground. She lifts up her camera and focuses the lens on the rainbow. ‘Paradise Lost.’
‘What?’
‘Paradise Lost. Anyone who studied English literature would’ve heard of Paradise Lost. It’s a classic. Le Morte d’Arthur? Maybe something more modern. George Orwell? Virginia Woolf?’
‘I studied at university. It’s the truth.’
‘If you say so.’
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘Never mind. It’s not important.’
Addy glances over at Omar. His hands are on the bamboo railing and he’s staring out at the waterfalls. Why had she been so rude? If he wants to chat up girls with lies, what business is it of hers? It wasn’t like her to be so mean. That was Philippa’s domain.
‘I’m sorry. I was rude. Of course you went to university.’
‘No problem.’
She rests her hands on the railing and looks out at the waterfalls, willing her heart to calm its bouncing inside her chest. ‘I had an unusual dream last night.’
‘Yes?’
‘I dreamt about someone wearing a blue gown and turban. I couldn’t see his face. Then I saw you today and you were wearing exactly the same thing.’
Addy looks over at Omar, who’s staring at her.
‘What? What is it?’
‘It was Allah who send you this message.’
She shakes her head. ‘It was just a dream.’
‘No. Allah sent me to you in your dream. It’s our fate to meet today.’
A couple of rafts constructed of bamboo poles and blue plastic oil drums bob on the water at the base of the waterfalls. Scavenged wooden chairs are festooned with garish fabrics and plastic flowers.
Omar points to the rafts. ‘Everybody, we must take the boats to the other side. These are the Titanics of Morocco. But don’t worry, it might be they will not sink today, inshallah.’
A fine mist hangs in the air, settling on Addy’s skin like dew. Omar directs the group onto the two rafts, grabbing hands and elbows to steady the tourists as they step onto the lurching rafts. Addy settles down on a damp chair beside Sylvain and Antoinette. A middle-aged German couple in safari outfits and laden down with binoculars and cameras shift onto the chairs at the rear.
Omar jumps onto the other raft with the Geordie girls and a retired Spanish couple. Addy feels a stab of disappointment.
‘What are you doing over there, when the lady is here?’ Sylvain calls over to Omar.
The blue gown whips around Omar in the breeze. ‘Because I can see her better from here.’
Halfway up the hill, Omar settles everyone at rusty circular tables on a restaurant patio overlooking the waterfalls. A flimsy bamboo latticework fence is the only barrier between the patio and a vertical drop to the churning pool far below.
Addy sits at a small table beside the fence. A smiling boy looking about nineteen or twenty jogs down the stone steps to the patio, four large bottles of water tucked under his arms as he carries two in his hands. A blotch of white skin covers his left cheek and his brown hands are mottled with dots of white.
‘Amine, ici,’ Omar shouts to the boy, pointing to the tables occupied by his group.
Omar moves between the tables taking orders for lamb tagine and chicken brochettes, translating into Tamazight for Amine. The boy nods, his shiny black hair flopping into his large brown eyes. Omar follows Amine into the restaurant and returns with large plastic bottles of Coca-Cola and plastic baskets of flat discs of bread. He sets a bottle of Coke and a basket of bread on Addy’s table.
‘Everything’s okay, Adi?’
‘Fine. Thank you.’
‘It’s okay for me to sit with you to eat my lunch?’
‘Sure. Fine.’
Omar’s knees brush against hers as he sits in the empty chair. He tears off a chunk of bread and rolls it into marble-sized balls with his fingertips.
‘I’m so sorry for disturbing you.’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’
He tears off another piece of bread and begins the rolling motion again. He squints at her in the sharp sunlight, his light brown eyes glowing almost amber.
‘You have to know I never eat my lunch with tourists.’
A cat rubs itself against Addy’s legs, purring. The thunder of the waterfalls, a fine mist on her skin. A table littered with dough marbles.
Chapter Six (#ulink_e706fee0-f6c0-5f62-b48b-8a9da49b6389)
Zitoune, Morocco – November 1983
From his perch on an aspen branch, Omar watches the Irishman knock in the final tent peg with a rock. The man – Gus he’d said his name was – has chosen a good location. No one comes up here to the source of the waterfalls with the Roman bridge. No olive trees up here. And tourists never find the path. They only want to see the waterfalls then go back to Marrakech for their supper.
This Gus isn’t like the other tourists. Omar has spied on him at the weekly market, bargaining for mutton and vegetables in Arabic. Like the Arabic he’s learning in school, not like Darija. It’s probably why no one understands Gus well. Sometimes Gus tries to speak Arabic to the Amazigh traders from Oushane and the villages even further in the mountains, which is crazy. Everyone knows they speak only Tamazight.
Yesterday, Gus bought a small round clay brazier and a tagine pot from the market. Old Abdullah charged him too much: fifty dirhams. And the man paid! Omar will try this when he sells the ripe olives to the tourists. ‘Fresh olives from Morocco. Fifty dirhams!’ He’ll make a big profit. He’ll give his brother, Momo, and his friends, Driss and Yassine, olives to sell, as well. Pay them one dirham each. He’ll be a rich boy soon, especially since he steals the olives. Almost one hundred per cent profit. Maths is the only subject he likes at school. Maths and French, because he needs to talk to the tourists. He rubs the angry red welt on his arm. His grandmother was right to punish him with the hot bread poker for missing his classes. If he was to be rich one day, he couldn’t be lazy. One day he won’t have to sleep by the donkey, and he’ll build his mother a fine big house, better even than the house of the policeman. And they’ll all have new clothes from the shops in Azaghar, not the old clothes his mother brought back from helping the ladies with the babies in the mountains. One day for sure he’ll be a rich man.
Hunching over the brazier, Gus takes a silver lighter out of his shirt pocket and lights the coals he’s stacked inside. Too many. Jedda would punish Omar if he used so many coals.
Omar’s eyes follow a flash of silver from the man’s shirt pocket to his fingers. Gus flicks the silver lighter. A thin blue flame waves in the air. Gus leans over the brazier with the flame until a coal catches light. He flips back the lighter’s lid. Back into his pocket. Silver. Gus must be rich.
Gus throws a handful of sticks onto the coals and sets the grille on top of the brazier. He sits back onto a low wooden stool. A pan of water is on the ground by his feet. He reaches into a canvas rucksack and pulls out a potato. His other hand in his trouser pocket. A red pocket knife. The knife scraping against the potato skin. Shavings falling onto the earth. Fat chunks of white potato plopping into the water. Gus doesn’t know how to make tagine well.
Omar shimmies down the skinny aspen, its yellow autumn leaves falling around him like confetti.
‘Mister Gus! Stop!’
‘Looks like I’ve got a spy. Omar, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Everybody knows me here.’
Omar lopes over to Gus, his Real Madrid football shirt loose on his slender body. His toes poke out from the torn canvas of his running shoes under the rolled-up cuffs of his jeans.
‘That’s not how you cut vegetables for tagine. They will never cook like that.’
‘A spy and a professional chef. You’re a very talented boy.’
Omar sticks out his hand. ‘Give me the knife.’
The corners of the man’s eyes crinkle as he smiles. He hands Omar the pocket knife.
‘So, Mister Boss. Show me how it’s done.’
Omar picks a potato out of the sack and squats next to the pot of water. After scraping off the skin, he cuts the potato into four long white slices.
‘Like this,’ he says. ‘Like fat fingers. Then the heat will cook them well.’
He pulls out a long carrot and rasps the blade against the skin, the dirty orange shreds spiralling onto the ground. He chops off the leafy top and the tip, then slices the carrot into two vertically. Then he scoops out the green core and cuts the carrot into thin strips.
‘Like that.’ He drops the slivers into the pot. ‘Very good.’
Gus holds out his palm. ‘Let me try.’
Omar hands back the knife. ‘Mashi mushkil.’
‘No problem. That bit of Darija I’ve learned.’
Omar rests his elbows on his thighs as he watches Gus scrape the skin off a carrot.
‘You sound different than the French tourists from Marrakech.’
‘I’m Irish, but I live in a very faraway place called Canada. A very beautiful place by the sea. But really I’m a nomad. I travel the world to search for oil in rocks. That’s why I’m here. There were a lot of dinosaurs in Morocco. Wherever there were dinosaurs, there’s usually oil.’
‘I know where there are some footprints of dinosaurs. Not so far from here.’
‘Really? Will you show me?’
Omar shrugs. ‘For fifty dirhams.’
‘Twenty dirhams.’
Omar’s eyebrows shoot up: twenty dirhams? He would’ve shown the man for free. He screws up his small angular face.
‘Thirty dirhams.’
Gus raises an eyebrow and holds out his right hand. ‘Highway robbery – thirty dirhams. Deal.’
Omar puts his small brown hand into the man’s large, square-fingered hand and they shake.
‘It might be that you will need a guide here, Mister Gus. I know all the good places to visit around Zitoune. I know a place of dinosaur feet and a cave with many old drawings. We can make a good negotiation.’
‘You’ll make me a poor man, for sure, Omar. What about if I teach you English so you can talk to any English tourists who visit the waterfalls, not just the French? You can corner the tourist market. No one here speaks English.’
Omar squints at the glowing coals as he mulls over the offer. Dirhams now would be good. But then once the man leaves, the money stops. But, if he learns English, even when Gus leaves, he can still earn money. Lots of money. Omar holds out his hand.
‘Deal.’
Chapter Seven (#ulink_b235b900-4d32-56f5-b7c5-f7ee8b166b9d)
Zitoune, Morocco – March 2009
A flat-roofed house of orange sandstone rocks sits on a hill thick with cacti. Blue shutters frame the square windows and a basement level hugs the hillside, jutting out to provide the base for a veranda shaded with a twisted grapevine. An olive tree with a gnarled trunk as thick as Addy’s waist leans over the house. A donkey is tethered in its shade. Scrawny black chickens scratch around the donkey’s hooves.
Omar sets down Addy’s luggage on the gravel path. ‘You like it?’
‘It’s perfect.’
‘It’s okay. It’s a bit small. I’m making a big house.’
Addy shades her eyes from the stabbing rays of the late afternoon sun with her hand. ‘For your family?’
‘One day, inshallah. Or maybe it will be a guest house for tourists. I must to be rich one day.’
Addy shifts her camera bag to her left shoulder. ‘Let’s wait on the veranda for Mohammed.’
On the veranda, she sets down her camera bag on a long wooden table and leans on the stone railing. Below the house the river winds its way towards the waterfalls through budding oleander bushes and shivering ash trees. Across the river the sandstone cliffs of the Middle Atlas Mountains ripple around the valley, while in the distance the snowy peaks of the High Atlas Mountains stand resolute against the fading blue of the sky. Addy sighs.
Omar leans against the railing. ‘You don’t like it?’
‘No, I love it. This is just what the doctor ordered.’
‘Your doctor told you to come here?’
Addy laughs. ‘It’s just an expression. It means it’s perfect.’
‘Just what the doctor ordered. I like it.’ Omar nods his head towards the blue door. ‘Why do we wait to go inside?’
‘I texted Mr Demsiri to tell him I’ve arrived. He needs to bring me the key.’
Omar strolls over to a flowerpot spilling with red geraniums. He tilts the pot over and holds up a key.
‘You knew where the key was?’
‘Everybody knows. Mashi mushkil. Don’t worry. It’s very safe in Zitoune. You don’t need to lock the door. Nobody will bother you.’ The dimple in his cheek. ‘Except me.’
‘Omar …’
A crunch of footsteps on gravel.
‘Allô, madame! You find the house okay?’
A tall, bald middle-aged man climbs up the path, his brown djellaba straining at his sturdy belly. An impressive hooked nose lends him the regal appearance of a Roman emperor.
Omar gestures to the older man. ‘Adi, honey, this is Mohammed Demsiri. He owns many places in Zitoune. He’s a rich man.’
Addy raises an eyebrow at Omar. Honey? She extends her hand to the older man. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you. The house looks lovely. It’s such a beautiful setting.’
Mohammed smiles, two bright gold teeth where his canines should be. Ignoring Addy’s extended hand, he pats his broad chest and nods. A thick silver watch encircles his wrist and several chunky silver rings decorate his fingers.
‘It’s a pleasure for me to welcome you to Morocco, madame. I remember you well.’
‘You remember me?’
Mohammed slaps Omar on the back. ‘I was at the restaurant today when you ate the lunch with Omar. He came into the restaurant to tell me he met a beautiful lady with hair like fire. I looked outside and I saw you. I told Omar he choosed well, Adi, honey.’
Omar chokes. ‘Laa. Her name is Adi. It’s only me who calls her honey. It’s like habibati.’
Mohammed’s face freezes into a look of horror. ‘I’m so, so sorry, madame. Please excuse me.’
‘Don’t worry. Mashy mushkey. Just call me Addy.’
Mohammed gestures towards the bright blue wooden door studded with large black nail heads. ‘Please to come into the house. You will like it very much. It’s the most beautiful guest house in Zitoune.’
‘Until I build my guest house.’
Mohammed chuckles. ‘You can see already Omar will be a rich man one day, inshallah. He’s a hard worker. I must be careful. He will make me to look like a poor man.’
‘You’ll never be a poor man, Mohammed. Amine is a lucky boy.’
Omar picks up Addy’s suitcase and slings the black nylon tripod bag and the brown leather overnight bag over his shoulder. The wine bottles clink and Addy winces.
‘Who’s Amine?’
‘It’s my nephew.’ Mohammed opens the blue door, waving them to enter. ‘He work in my restaurant. He serve you the lunch today.’
‘Oh, yes. He seemed very nice, although Omar ran him off his feet.’
Mohammed furrows his forehead and asks Omar something in Tamazight. Omar shrugs.
‘Excuse me, madame. Amine still have his feet.’
Addy laughs as she swings the camera bag over her shoulder. ‘I mean Omar kept him busy. Ran him off his feet is just an expression.’
Mohammed nods. ‘I run Amine off his feet every day. It’s good to learn English well.’
Addy stands on the veranda and waves at the two men as they trek down the gravel path towards the village. Golden light from the waning sun falls across the sides of the mountains. Somewhere in the village a dog barks. A clatter of metal against metal. Sharp feedback from a microphone slices through the stillness. ‘Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.’ The amplified voice of the village’s muezzin echoes around the valley as he recites the call to prayer: God is great. Addy listens until the last words dissipate on the cooling air.
The night is drawing in fast. The sun has turned fat and orange, and streaks of red splay across the darkening sky. She wanders back into the house. The large whitewashed living room is furnished with low, round wooden tables. Banquettes strewn with colourful striped cushions line two of the walls and pierced tin lanterns hang from the beamed ceiling. A thick white wool rug marked with crossed black diamonds covers the polished grey concrete floor.
She enters the larger of the two cool white bedrooms. The solid wooden bed is draped in a blue-and-green striped bedcover and a filmy white mosquito net bunches on the floor around the bed. Addy opens her overnight bag and pulls out a plastic duty-free bag. She unwraps the two bottles of white wine. Good French Chablis. Luckily screw top.
In a kitchen cupboard Addy finds a water glass and pours out a generous serving. She kicks off her sandals and crosses the cool concrete leading out to the veranda. She feels like a butterfly shrugging off its chrysalis. Free of London. Free of Philippa. Free of Nigel. Free of cancer. The scar on her left breast throbs and she touches the coin-sized divot in her flesh.
She leans against a stone pillar and gazes out over the branches of the olive trees towards the mountains. What’s she going to do about Omar? She’d be an idiot to get involved with him. She was probably just one of a slew of women he’s charmed over the years. Yes, it would be diverting. Fun. But she had too much to do and only three months to do it in. A fling isn’t what she’s come here for. No, she has to nip that in the bud. She takes a sip of wine and watches the sun set.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_55c2b0a5-5a5d-5039-b8f0-483957326aa1)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
‘Philippa?’
‘Addy. Wait. I’m reading my online Tarot cards.’
Addy tucks her phone under her chin. She props her bare feet on the wooden table, careful not to knock off the stack of research notes.
‘How’s the job going for that banker couple in Fulham, Pips?’
‘Don’t get me bloody started. They’ve gone and bought sofas from the Ugly Sofa Company. They’re covered with that leatherette rubbish that takes your skin off when you sit on it. Burgundy. When was burgundy ever fashionable? I’ll tell you when. Never. Bloody humungous things. What in the name of Nicky Haslam am I supposed to do with those?’
‘Maybe call it tongue–in-cheek chic.’
‘Oh, ha ha. That’d be my career down the loo. I swear this interior design rubbish isn’t getting any easier. Damn. The Tower card. That’s not good. Probably something to do with the Russians. How is everything, anyway? You’re still alive at least.’
Addy lets the cell phone slip from under her chin into her hand. ‘Still alive. The Internet’s finally working. Well, mostly working. I’ve had to get a dongle thingy. The water supply’s a bit iffy, so I’ve been washing with bottled water for the past two days. There’s nothing on TV except reruns of Desperate Housewives in Arabic and Turkish soap operas, so that’s not a distraction. I’ve managed to stock up on some food from the local market and I’ve still got a bottle of wine from duty-free. So, aside from desperately needing a shower, I’m fine.’
‘Good. Good.’
Addy sifts through the stack of research notes and slides out the Polaroid of Gus and Hanane that she’s tucked into his unfinished letter. She examines Gus’s face.
‘Pippa, do you remember when Dad spent those two years working for the oil company down in Nigeria?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Are you listening?’
‘What? Nigeria? Yes, yes. Sorry, I’m just trying to remember what the Three of Swords means. I’d just married Alessandro, more fool me. Dad stopped by London on his way back to Canada to wish us well. Too little too late if you ask me.’
‘What was he like when you saw him in London? Did he seem happy?’
‘How am I supposed to remember that? I can barely remember my phone number.’ Philippa sighs heavily into the phone. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Nothing. He was away so much when I was growing up. Just trying to fill in the dots.’
‘Well, he wasn’t all that keen on Alessandro, I can tell you. Maybe I should’ve taken the hint. They argued a lot. Dad was very touchy. I remember that. Our father fancied himself as some kind of bloody adventurer. He loved to say he had gypsy blood. I honestly don’t know why he ever married your mother. She was such a little homebody.’
Addy grimaces. ‘You know what they say. Opposites attract.’
Her pretty red-haired mother, Hazel, packing a suitcase for Addy’s peripatetic father. One of Addy’s strongest memories of her mother. The big, old Victorian house on the Vancouver Island shore that was never enough for him. Hazel and Addy were never enough for him, even though Addy had tried hard to be Daddy’s girl when he was home. Digging in the spring bulbs with him in the autumn, sitting with him watching for the black triangles of the orcas’ dorsal fins skimming along the surface of the Strait through the telescope he’d set up on the veranda. He’d promise that he’d stay. But then the suitcase would come out and he’d be gone again. Another postcard to add to her collection.
Addy swings her legs off the table and slides her feet into her new turquoise leather babouches.
‘I found some old photos Dad took in Morocco in the stuff you gave me. He must have spent some time here after Nigeria. Lots of pictures of donkeys, monkeys, mosques, palm trees, camels, that kind of thing. I’m using them as inspiration for the travel book. Following in Dad’s footsteps. It’s a nice hook, don’t you think?’
‘You live in the clouds. You’re going to end up broke again. You’re just like your father.’
‘Your father, too.’
‘Ha! The closest I had to a father was Grandfather’s valet.’
Addy stares at her father’s smiling face in the Polaroid. At least she’d had a doting mother until she was thirteen, and a loving, if often absent, father. Philippa had had a huge stately home to rattle around in, but only Essie’s elderly father and a handful of servants for company when she wasn’t away at boarding school. A runaway father and a drug-addled mother. It explained a few things.
‘Didn’t he write you? Call you?’
‘It’s not the same thing, Addy.’
Addy folds the blue letter around the Polaroid and slides it under the pile of papers.
‘Anyway, I’ve finished the book outline and plotted out the places I need to photograph based on Dad’s photos. Marrakech, a fishing village called Essaouira, Casablanca, the desert.’
‘Desert? Which desert?’
‘The Sahara.’
‘Is that where the Sahara desert is?’
Addy rolls her eyes. The line goes silent.
‘What card did you just turn over?’
‘The Ten of Swords. It’s a dead body full of swords. I’ll have to look it up. I bought a Tarot book.’
‘I don’t think Tarot cards are meant to be literal.’
The sound of shuffling cards.
‘Can’t you get the book done any faster than three months, Addy? I need you to photograph a penthouse I’ve just finished in Mayfair for some Chinese clients. Never met them. Did it all through their PA. A million pounds on the interiors and they’re only going to use it for a week at Christmas. Apparently, it’s an investment.’
Addy swats at a fly. ‘The visa lasts for three months and I need the time to do this book. And …’
‘And what?’
Addy sighs. ‘Oh, Pippa. I met someone. I don’t know what to think. He’s a Berber mountain guide. Well, Amazigh, actually. He’s very nice. A bit younger than me.’
‘Oh, good grief. Define younger.’
‘Thirty-ish. Nothing’s happened. It’s just … I don’t know.’
‘My sister, the cougar.’
Addy watches a black-and-white cat slink across the gravel path as it eyes a rooster strutting under the olive tree with a harem of chickens.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve been avoiding him. I’ve still got Nigel to deal with. But then sometimes I think maybe a fling would do me a world of good. I mean, what’s the harm, Pips? It’s not like it’d ever be a long-term relationship.’
‘You don’t want to know what’s inside my mind. It’s a dustbin in there.’ The cat pounces. The rooster and chickens scrabble, flapping away in a cloud of dust and ear-splitting cackles. ‘What’s that racket?’
‘A cat chasing some chickens. His name’s Omar.’
‘The cat?’
‘No. The Berber guide.’
‘Have you slept with him?’
‘Pippa! I just got here.’
‘Why not just be on your own for a while? You’re always looking for a man to rescue you.’
‘I’m not!’
‘Really? When was the last time you were single?’
‘I was single in Canada.’
‘Twenty years ago. Don’t you think it’s time for you to stand on your own two feet instead of going after inaccessible men?’
‘I am standing on my own two feet! I’m in Morocco, aren’t I?’
‘Running away, more like.’ Philippa huffs into the phone. ‘What’s a Berber, anyway?’
Addy sighs and shifts the phone to her right ear. ‘I’ve been doing some research online for my travel book.’ She shuffles through her papers and pulls out a piece of paper covered in scribbled notes. ‘Berbers, or Imazighen as they call themselves – Amazigh singular – are the indigenous population of North Africa. The Arabs converted them to Islam in the eighth century. Before that they practised everything from paganism to Christianity and Judaism.’
‘The Fool. Bloody hell. I want the Lovers, not the Fool. That one’s probably meant for you.’
‘You’re not listening.’ Addy sips her coffee. It’s gone stone-cold. She sets down the mug and peers out over the railings.
‘It’s all very interesting, Addy. Good research for your book.’
A donkey emerges from the olive grove ridden by a bare-footed boy. Amine. The boy with vitiligo from the restaurant. He smiles and waves at her as he passes by. She waves back.
‘What do you think I should do, Pippa? About the man, I mean.’
‘You can’t seriously be considering a relationship with a Moroccan goatherd. It’s not so bad being on your own. Look at me. Divorced twenty years and I couldn’t be happier. Free as a bird. I can tango every night till dawn if I want to. If only the knees would hold up.’
‘C’mon. You’re always talking about wanting to find a man.’ Addy picks up the mug and pads over the cool stones into the house. ‘You’re glued to that house in Chelsea. The world’s a bigger place than Redcliffe Road. You should travel more.’ She dumps the cold coffee in the kitchen sink and turns on the tap to rinse the cup. The pipes groan. ‘Bugger.’
‘Bugger? There’s nothing wrong with Redcliffe Road. It’s a very good address.’
‘No water.’
‘Exactly. How can you live like that? You want my advice? Get on the first plane back to London and sort out your life. As for men, well, I’ve given up on the whole bloody lot of them. Everybody my age wants a twenty-year-old bimbette or someone to nurse them through their dotage. Once you hit forty you’re done for, Addy. I may as well have “Danger, Radioactive” tattooed on my forehead. Thank God I’ve got a career.’
‘What about the tango guys?’ Addy heads across the living room’s cool concrete floor back to the veranda.
‘A bunch of mummy’s boys and sexual deviants. But at least I get to touch a man, otherwise it’s just me and the neighbour’s cat. The Wheel of Fortune. That’s more like it.’
Addy flops into the chair. ‘That can go up or down.’
‘Let’s say it’s on the way up, shall we? Seriously, this Omar person probably makes eyes at all the girls. Though you’re way past the girl phase.’
‘I don’t think he’s like that.’
‘He’s a mountain guide. In Morocco. Of course he’s like that.’
‘He’s a university graduate.’
‘Really?’
‘In English literature.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘And you believed him.’
‘Well …’
‘You’re naive. That’s part of your problem. You trust people. Everyone’s out for themselves. It’s a Me! Me! Me! world.’
Addy massages her forehead with her fingertips. ‘What do you mean “part of my problem”?’
‘You have terrible taste in men.’
An image of her ex-fiancé, Nigel, plants itself in Addy’s head. Floppy brown hair, ‘trust me’ hazel eyes, the teasing grin. Despite how much he’d hurt her, she couldn’t help but feel some lingering affection towards him. They’d had some fun together, when Nigel wasn’t off somewhere climbing the ladder to a legal career. They’d play hooky to catch a mid-week movie matinee at the Clapham Picture House, or check out a band at the Brixton Dome. All that petered out as Nigel got busier with work. But then she’d been busy with her photography studio too. It had just all gone wrong at the end. Badly wrong.
‘Nigel wasn’t so bad. He was under a lot of pressure at work. He was trying to get taken on as a partner at the law firm. My cancer was hard on him. It couldn’t have been easy holding my bald head over the toilet while I puked my guts out.’
‘My heart bleeds. Did I ever tell you he used to come crying on my shoulder when you were sick? I was completely taken in. I was the one who pulled strings to get him into that law firm in the first place. More fool me. He’s a bastard for fooling around when your hair fell out.’
Finding the bill from The Ivy was a shock. Dinner for two. But it wasn’t as bad as finding the hotel invoice. Both dated the night she was in hospital having the blood transfusion. Nigel should’ve been more careful. Shoving the receipts in an envelope on their shared desk was stupid. Cancer did strange things to people. There was a lot of collateral damage.
‘I guess.’
‘I don’t mean to upset you. It’s just that when I think of Nigel, I want to poke his eyes out with a burning poker. I hate being taken for a fool.’
‘Never mind about Nigel. That’s over. Mashy mushkey.’
‘Mashy what?’
‘It means no problem.’
‘So, now you’re speaking Moroccan.’
‘Darija, actually.’
The rooster rends the air with an ear-splitting crow. Addy watches him strut across the path. He stops and stares at her with a cold black eye. Thrusting out his red feathered chest, he bellows out another piercing crow.
‘Good God, what a racket. The Devil card. Addy, that one’s definitely for you.’
Chapter Nine (#ulink_383bb6c3-6892-5f8f-be4e-5e0ad68c5846)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
‘It’s working?’
Omar’s mother, Aicha, flicks through the TV remote but the images on the large flat-screen TV wobble and fizz like the European soft drinks Omar brings them from Azaghar for the Eid al-Adha celebration dinner.
Aicha walks through the archway from the living room and yells up the steps to the roof. ‘Laa! Not yet!’
Fatima pops her head around the kitchen door. ‘Maybe it’s not a good television. It’s not new like the one Yassine bought for his wife.’
‘Yassine never bought it for Khadija, one hundred per cent.’ Omar’s head appears in the patch of blue sky over the open courtyard. ‘He only buys stuff for himself, you have to know about it. Anyway, this is a good television. It’s a bit new. You’ll be able to watch your Turkish shows better.’ Omar’s head disappears from view. ‘Yamma, try now!’ he yells. ‘I fixed the satellite with the clothesline.’
Aicha hands the remote to Fatima. ‘You do it, Fatima. It’s too complicated for me.’ She heads up the rough grey concrete steps to the roof of the extension Omar’s building. Stepping over a stack of wood, Aicha grabs a rusty iron strut to steady herself. Omar is by the satellite dish, tightening her clothesline around the white disc to correct its tilt.
Fatima’s voice floats up to the roof. ‘It’s working! Don’t move it! Just like that!’
Omar steps back from the satellite dish and slaps the dust off his hands. ‘Good. I’ll buy you another clothesline, Yamma. Don’t worry.’
‘Mashi mushkil.’ Aicha steps over the discarded paint cans and bends down to collect the workers’ dirty tagine pot. Finally, she has Omar on his own. It’s time to discuss the situation.
‘Zaina’s mother was here yesterday.’
Omar’s eyebrow twitches. ‘Oh, yes? She’s well? Everyone’s well?’
Aicha props the tagine pot on her hip as she picks dead leaves off her pots of pelargoniums. ‘Everyone’s well. But, you know, Zaina is getting older. Her parents are worried about her.’
Omar begins stacking concrete blocks into a neat pile. ‘No reason to worry about her. She’s a clever girl.’
‘Omar. You know what I’m talking about. You’re not so young. You must think about marriage. Zaina is waiting for you. You promised …’
‘Yamma, I didn’t promise anything. You promised her parents I’d marry her. Full stop.’
‘I don’t understand what the problem is. She cooks well. She cleans her parents’ house well. She’s young and healthy and very pretty. She’ll be a good mother.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
‘So, why are you waiting? They’ll marry Zaina to someone else soon.’
‘If Allah wills.’
‘Omar, I’m only thinking of you and your happiness. All you do is work. Your life is passing you by. Don’t you want to have a fine son?’
‘I think you want to have a fine grandson.’
Aicha twists her mouth into a pout. ‘What’s wrong with that? Yes, I want many grandchildren. We must think about Fatima as well. She must be married soon, even though she says no to everybody.’
‘Fatima can do as she likes. She’s a free Amazigh woman like the Queen Dihya of history. I won’t put my sister in a prison to make her marry someone she doesn’t want, like what happened to Uncle Rachid’s daughter. Fatima must be happy when she gets married. That’s my responsibility to her.’
‘Fatima thinks only of romance like she sees on the television. She has to be practical. It’s not easy to find her a husband because of her black skin, even if she’s your sister. It’s easy to find a good wife for you because you’re a hard worker. If you don’t want to marry Zaina, tell me. Everybody wants their daughter to marry you.’
Omar stacks the last concrete block onto the pile and sits down on it with a sigh. He rubs at the crease between his eyes.
‘I don’t like to talk about this situation. Anyway, maybe I’ll marry a foreign lady. It’s possible.’
Aicha bolts upright, dropping dried pelargonium leaves over the concrete.
‘You shouldn’t say things like that. You’re Amazigh. You must have an Amazigh wife.’
‘Uncle Rachid doesn’t have an Amazigh wife.’
‘He has an Arab wife, and this has caused many problems for him in his life.’
‘Yamma, I’m Amazigh, so I’m a free man. I can marry who I like. Anyway, I like a foreign lady. You met her.’
The beautiful woman with the red hair like a boy. Aicha shakes her head.
‘This is not a good situation, Omar. You’ll have problems with a foreign lady. Will she live in Zitoune? I don’t think so. She’ll want to be with her own people. She’ll make you live far away.’
Omar chews on his lip. His eye catches a movement and he looks up to see a falcon fluttering high in the blue sky, eyeing the green fields for prey. He couldn’t explain it. Why his heart jumped in his chest whenever he saw her. How her face haunted his mind. It wasn’t just Addy’s dream of seeing him the night before they met, though that was incredible. The moment he saw her in the bus, her face, red and sweaty from the ride, under the farmer’s hat, it was like they were magnets being drawn together. Like they knew each other already. Like all the days he’d lived had been steps to the moment they finally met.
‘I’ll have a big problem, then.’ He looks at his mother, at her still handsome face lined with worry. ‘She has captured my liver.’
Chapter Ten (#ulink_48d80c21-6056-52d9-b85f-f358444cf7fc)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
Omar shouts through a window grille into his mother’s house. ‘Yamma! Fatima! Jedda!’
The blue metal door creaks open and Fatima steps out into the alley. Addy waves at her shyly from across the lane. Fatima pushes past Omar and runs up to Addy and kisses her on both cheeks.
‘Bonjour. Marhaba à la maison de Fatima,’ she says, welcoming Addy to her home. She grabs Addy’s hand and pulls her towards the door. ‘Viens avec moi pour le thé.’
Omar shakes his head. ‘Now my sister takes you away from me, Adi honey. It will be so hard for me to get you from her.’
Omar’s cell phone rings out the first notes of ‘Hotel California’. He wrinkles his nose at the screen and rejects the call. He slips the phone back into his pocket.
‘Was that the plumber, Omar? Shouldn’t you tell him you’re on your way to my house?’
‘He knows I’m coming. It’s urgent to fix the problem with your water.’
Fatima tugs at Addy’s hand and pulls her into the house.
Omar follows his sister and Addy into the narrow room that serves as both the living room and Fatima’s and Jedda’s bedroom. A low wooden table is set with a chocolate cake and plates of homemade cookies. Aicha greets Addy with several ‘Marhaba’s as she pours a stream of fragrant mint tea into tiny gold-rimmed glasses.
Fatima pats a place on the banquette next to her grandmother, Jedda, who grumbles and points to the opposite banquette with her cane. When Addy has settled sufficiently far enough away from Jedda, Fatima sits beside her and gives her a hug.
‘Stay with me, not with Omar,’ Fatima says to Addy in French. ‘You can be my sister.’
Omar picks up a handful of cookies and turns to leave. ‘Now I’m really jealous.’
Addy licks the sugary chocolate icing off her bottom lip, leans back against the flowered cushions and pats her stomach. ‘Shukran. Le gateau c’est très bon.’
Aicha smiles widely. She points to the chocolate cake sitting on a blue-and-white Chinese plate in the centre of the low round table. ‘Eesh caaka.’
Addy shakes her head. ‘Laa, shukran.’ Another piece of cake and she’d explode.
The Polaroid presses against her thigh. Aicha and Jedda would surely recognise Hanane. Zitoune was a small village. The type of village where everyone knew everyone else’s business. She reaches into her jeans pocket and pulls out the Polaroid, wrapped in her father’s blue letter. Leaning over the table, she hands the photo to Aicha.
‘Baba Adi,’ she says, pointing to Gus. My father.
Aicha squints at the photo, fine wrinkles fanning out from her deep-set amber eyes. Jedda taps Aicha’s arm impatiently with her stick. Aicha hands the old woman the Polaroid.
‘It’s my father in the picture,’ Addy says in French to Fatima. ‘He came to Zitoune many years ago. I’m trying to find the woman in the picture. I think she was from Zitoune. Can you ask your mother and your grandmother Jedda if they recognise her?’
Fatima translates for Addy. Aicha takes the photo from Jedda and frowns at it before handing it to Fatima, her coin earrings dangling against her cheeks as she shakes her head.
Fatima runs her fingers along the Polaroid’s frayed edges. ‘Your father is very handsome. You have the same nose and blue eyes.’
‘They don’t recognise her?’
Fatima shakes her head as she hands the photo back to Addy. ‘No. My mum and grandmother are the medicine women of the village. They know everybody in the mountains here. If she was from Zitoune, they would know her.’
Addy brushes cookie crumbs off the plastic tablecloth into her hand. She picks up her empty tea glass. Aicha nods and smiles, her coin earrings bobbing against her neck. Jedda sits on the banquette like a wizened oracle, eyeing Addy’s every move.
Addy follows Fatima out into the courtyard and through a green door into a tiny windowless kitchen. The room is a random mix of wooden cupboards and tiles painted with seashells and sailboats. An enormous ceramic sink propped up on cement blocks takes up most of one wall. Across from it a four-ring hob sits on top of a low cupboard next to a battered black oven connected to a dented green gas canister. Utensils and ropes of drying tripe hang from a wire hooked across the room.
‘Ssshhh,’ Fatima hisses, flapping a tea towel at the rangy black-and-white cat who’s poking its head into a bread basket. The cat slinks out, a crust of bread in its mouth. ‘Moush,’ she says, pointing at the cat.
Addy makes a circle around the room with her hand.
Fatima smiles. ‘Cuisine. Comme français.’
‘En anglais, kitchen.’
‘Smicksmin.’ Fatima shakes her head. ‘Très difficile.’
Omar pokes his head into the kitchen. ‘Come, Adi honey, we go.’
‘You missed some delicious chocolate cake.’
He thrusts his hand into the room. It’s full of cake. ‘I don’t miss nothing.’ He takes a bite and wipes the crumbs from his chin with the back of his hand.
‘Did the plumber show up? Is the water fixed? I haven’t been able to get a hold of Mohammed. He hasn’t been answering his phone.’
‘I know, I know. Mohammed is very busy. It might be he is in Marrakech. He goes there a lot for business. The plumber went to Azaghar. He’ll be back later.’
Addy frowns. ‘The water’s still not fixed? What took you so long?’
‘I did a tour by the waterfalls. I earned five hundred dirhams, so I’m happy for that. I want to buy a refrigerator for Fatima, but it’s very, very expensive.’
Omar beckons at Addy with a crumb-covered finger. ‘Come, let’s go for a walk by the waterfalls. Say goodbye to my grandmother. If you kiss her on her head, it shows her good respect. She’ll love you for that.’
‘I don’t think she wants me anywhere near her.’
‘She does, she does. You’ll see.’
Addy kisses Fatima on her cheeks and follows Omar into the living room. She edges around the low table past Aicha and bends over Jedda, kissing her on the top of her red polka-dot bandana. Jedda waves Addy away with her stick. Aicha grabs Addy’s hands and smiles. ‘Thank you for the tea and the cake and cookies of deliciousness,’ Addy says to her in rusty French. ‘I appreciate your hospitality of kindness. It would be my honour to invite you at my house for tea.’
Aicha smiles broadly and Addy realises with a shock that her teeth are false. Omar says something to his mother, who nods vigorously, setting her earrings swinging.
‘What did you say?’
‘I say you love chicken brochettes. We’ll come later for dinner.’
‘Oh, no, Omar. I don’t want to impose on your family. I’ve just eaten my weight in cake.’
‘It’s no imposition, Adi. She don’t like for you to eat by yourself. It makes her feel sad. It’s not normal for people to be alone in Morocco.’
Addy looks at Jedda. The old woman’s one good eye bores into her like she’s trying to excavate Addy’s soul. ‘Except for your grandmother.’
Omar shrugs. ‘My grandmother don’t like tourists. Don’t mind for it.’ He takes hold of Addy’s elbow and steers her across the courtyard to the front door. ‘Anyway, you are not a tourist to me. You are like an Amazigh lady. Even my mum says it.’
‘She did?’
‘Maybe she didn’t say it, but I know she think it.’ He opens the metal door. ‘She love your red hair and blue eyes for her grandchildren.’
‘Omar, honestly, I—’
Omar laughs. ‘Don’t mind, Adi. Don’t believe everything I say. Oh, and Adi? My mum, she don’t speak French. It’s lucky because you don’t speak it so well.’
The daylight is fading when Omar and Addy reach a terrace paved with stones overlooking the waterfalls. A young Moroccan couple sits on the stone wall holding hands. The man speaks quietly and the woman leans her head in to listen. He plays with her fingers.
Omar and Addy sit on the wall. The last of the day’s sun throws a beam of light across the waterfalls, setting off sparks like fireflies on the water.
‘It’s a romantic place here, Adi. Sometimes couples come here to be private.’
‘Are they single?’
‘No. Everybody marries young here. But maybe there are children and parents and grandparents in the house. It’s the Moroccan manner. It’s difficult to be private.’
Addy feels a pang of sadness. As a child she’d wished on a star every night, hoping for a brother or sister to play with in the big house by the sea.
‘It must be nice to have a big family.’
Omar takes hold of her hand and plays with her fingers. ‘You have brothers and sisters, darling?’
‘A half-sister.’
Omar draws his black eyebrows together. ‘What’s that?’
Lights are coming on in the restaurants below, forming pools of yellow around the waterfalls.
‘Her name’s Philippa. She had a different mother. My father married twice.’ Addy presses her lips together into an apologetic smile. ‘We don’t get on very well. We’re very different.’
Omar nods. ‘It’s possible for a man in Morocco to marry four wives. It’s good to have many children. Then your heritage continues even when you go to Paradise.’
‘Oh, my father didn’t have two wives at the same time! He divorced his first wife and then married my mother. We don’t marry more than one person at a time. In fact, it’s illegal.’
Omar drops Addy’s hand and rests his arm around her shoulders. ‘I know it, honey. It might be that it’s better like that, anyway. It’s hard to have many wives. It’s very expensive.’ He rolls out the ‘r’ in very for added emphasis. ‘Each wife must have a house. Often, the ladies don’t like each other. Anyway, now it doesn’t happen so often. Only if the first wife doesn’t have babies, then you marry a second wife. But the first wife is the boss.’
‘Why don’t you just adopt or get fertility treatment?’
‘You must know your blood is the same in your children for your heritage, so nobody adopts here. It’s very hard to have fertility treatment – you must be very rich for that. Nobody in the mountains can do that. Anyway, they think you’re crazy to do it since it’s easy to marry a second wife.’
‘I see.’ Addy’s head is spinning. Why does she care if Omar gets married? Has two wives – three wives – four … And kids. Lots of kids. If they got involved, it could only ever be a holiday romance.
‘You know, Adi, some men come to ask me for Fatima to be their second wife. Fatima tells me “No.” She says no to everybody. It’s a big problem for me, but I don’t make her do nothing she doesn’t want. It’s for her to decide, even if my mum wants her to marry quick to have babies. She must go where her heart tells her to go.’ He looks at Addy out of the corner of his eye. ‘Me too. My mum wants me to marry quick to have babies.’
‘Oh.’ It’s like she’s been wading out into the sea and suddenly steps off a sandbar.
Omar squeezes her shoulder. ‘Don’t mind. I’m making a joke with you. I don’t mind for ladies. I look only for one lady.’ He kisses Addy on the top of her head. ‘So, maybe you have a boyfriend in England?’
‘I wouldn’t be sitting here with you if I had a boyfriend.’
‘Maybe you had a boyfriend before?’
Addy remembers the last time she’d seen Nigel, in the kitchen of their flat the night before she’d flown out to Morocco, when he’d made her so angry she’d thought she might hit him. So angry that she’d stormed out and walked around the park for an hour to calm down. Alone in a London park after midnight. She must have been crazy.
‘Once I did. But it’s over now.’
‘I’m jealous.’
What was the harm in a holiday flirtation? Maybe it was just what she needed. Nothing serious. Short and sweet and then back to London. She wasn’t looking for a man to rescue her. What was Philippa talking about?
‘There’s no reason to be jealous, Omar. You must have had girlfriends before.’
‘There’s no boyfriend–girlfriend situation in Morocco, Adi. It’s not a possibility. We must wait to be married to be together.’
‘What about the tourist girls?’
‘I don’t like that situation, even though it’s true it happens sometimes. My friend Yassine has a wife and two children and a Dutch lady in Holland who visits him. She bought him a car. She bought a refrigerator for his wife. It’s where I get the idea for the refrigerator for Fatima. But, you have to know, it’s not my cup of tea. I feel bad for Yassine’s wife, Khadija.’
Cash cow. Addy could hear Philippa’s voice in her head. He’s playing nice just to get you into bed. What if Omar knew that she was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy? Would he be so keen on her then? He couldn’t be that good an actor. Or could he?
Below their perch on the stone wall, the lights of Mohammed’s restaurant switch on. Amine is setting out large bottles of water on the tables. A macaque monkey the size of a large cat leaps out of the branches of an olive tree onto a table. Amine shoos it away with a tea towel.
‘What about me? I’m a tourist.’
‘You’re not a tourist, Adi. You are the honey of my life. When you came to Zitoune my world was opened.’ He waves his hand out towards the waterfalls in a sweeping gesture. ‘It’s you I’ve been waiting for.’
‘Omar …’ Addy’s head spins with confusion. ‘I … I’m not Muslim.’
‘Mashi mushkil. I can marry a Muslim lady, or a Christian lady or a Jewish lady. No problem for that because we are all people of the book. We all have Moses and Ibrahim and Adam. But Muslim ladies can only marry Muslim men.’
‘That doesn’t seem fair.’
Omar shrugs. ‘It’s like that.’ Omar reaches for Addy’s hand and slides his fingers through hers. ‘Adi, when you told me about your dream, I knew for sure you are the lady I wait for. I made a prayer to Allah today. It’s the first time in a long time I did it.’
‘What did you pray for?’
‘I prayed to Allah to thank Him for making me for you. And for sending you to me.’
Addy gazes at the haloes of light below. It’s like a door is opening, but does she dare step over the threshold?
‘Omar, you asked me about my family. My mother died when I was young. My father died last fall.’
‘I’m so, so sorry for that, Adi.’
She concentrates on the waterfalls, avoiding his gaze. ‘I grew up in Canada. When I graduated from university I moved to London. My father travelled a lot for work, so there wasn’t any reason to stay in Canada. I thought I’d have more opportunities in London as a photographer. Lots of magazine work, you know? That’s when I finally met my half-sister, Philippa. I was looking forward to meeting her, but …’ Addy remembers Philippa’s frosty welcome, her absolute disinterest in her Canadian half-sister.
‘She was married to a rich Italian banker then, but she’s divorced now. I live on my own. Philippa and I aren’t … close.’ Better that Omar doesn’t know she still shares a flat with Nigel. Another problem to deal with when she gets back to London.
‘But she’s your sister. You must be close.’
Addy grunts. ‘Let’s just say that I don’t aspire to her way of life and this has caused us some conflict.’ She smiles at Omar ruefully. ‘I’m a constant disappointment to her.’
Omar shuts his eyes tight. When he looks at her again, his eyes are glazed with tears.
‘Me too. My father died. I’m so, so sorry for that, habibati. It’s a hard fate to be alone. It never happens like that in Morocco. We have many relatives here. We can visit all of Morocco and you will see I have family everywhere. The doors of my family are open to you.’
Addy rests her hand on her thigh. She feels the glossy card of the Polaroid through the soft denim.
‘Omar, how old are you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How old are you? When were you born?’
‘I have thirty-three years. Anyway, don’t mind for age, Adi. It doesn’t matter for a man and lady to be the same age.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ Addy reaches into her pocket and slides out the photo wrapped in her father’s letter. ‘Do you remember an Irishman who came here around 1984? He had a Moroccan wife. I think she was his wife. I think she might have been from Zitoune. I don’t know for sure.’ She hands Omar the photo. ‘I have a picture of them.’
A deep crease forms between Omar’s black eyebrows as he examines the Polaroid. ‘It’s a long time ago. I was a small boy.’ He looks out at the waterfalls and shakes his head. ‘I don’t remember them. Why you ask about it?’
‘You don’t recognise the woman in the picture?’
Omar rubs his thumb across the fading image of Addy’s father and Hanane. He flips it over.
‘“Zitoune waterfalls, Morocco, August 1984 – with Hanane”.’ He hands the Polaroid back to Addy. ‘No, I don’t know her.’
She stares down at the faces of her father and Hanane smiling at the unseen photographer in front of the Zitoune waterfalls, then she carefully wraps the blue letter around it and slips the picture back into her pocket.
Back at Aicha’s house, the aroma of grilled chicken, garlic and ginger wafts through the courtyard. Women’s voices float over the spiced air from the kitchen. The afternoon’s tea is pressing on Addy’s bladder.
‘Toilet?’
Omar points to a door flaking with red paint. ‘You might need some tissue.’
Addy pulls a pack of tissues out her jeans pocket and waves it at Omar.
The reek of bleach assaults her nose when she opens the door. It does little to mask the underlying odour of sweat, urine and faeces. A string brushes her cheek. When she tugs at it a light bulb flickers on. The room is no bigger than a phone booth. The tiler has made an attempt at a pattern on the white-tiled walls with tiles printed with pink stars, but halfway up the pink stars have been replaced by tiger stripes. A tap sticks out of the wall at knee height with a blue plastic bucket underneath. A large white ceramic square with a hole in the centre is set into the concrete floor. Ridges shaped like feet flank the hole.
Peeling down her jeans and underwear, Addy steps tentatively onto the ridged feet. As she squats, her cheek slaps up against the pink stars. She wobbles around to face the door, propping herself up with one hand on the door and one on a tiled wall. She teeters over the hole and sprays her loafers with wee.
A knock on the door. ‘Honey, are you okay?’
‘One minute. Where do I wash my hands?’
‘Put water in the bucket and pour it down the toilet.’
When she opens the door, Omar’s leaning against the courtyard wall waiting for her. He examines her loafers.
‘You made your shoes wet.’
Addy peers down at the dark splotches on the tan leather.
‘I know. It’s hard for me to squat. I kept falling over. I tried to clean them with some water.’
Omar shouts for his sister. ‘Fatima!’
Fatima emerges from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron printed with apples and oranges. She’s followed by a pretty girl in purple velour pyjamas and a pink hijab with matching pink babouches. Omar says something to Fatima. The girls look at Addy’s shoes and break into giggles. Fatima disappears behind a blue wooden door beside the kitchen. The other girl says something to Omar and he laughs. Fatima returns with her purple plastic Crocs.
‘Give her your shoes, honey. She’ll clean them for you.’
‘She doesn’t have to do that.’
He takes the Crocs from Fatima and pushes them into Addy’s hands. ‘She’s happy to do it.’
‘If you’re sure …’
‘It’s fine. Mashi mushkil.’
Gripping Omar’s arm to steady herself, Addy changes her shoes. Omar picks up her discarded loafers and shoves them into the hands of Fatima’s friend. Fatima bursts into another fit of giggles. The girl drops the loafers like they’re infectious and storms out of the courtyard, slamming the metal door behind her.
Addy stoops down to pick up the offensive shoes. ‘Who was that?’
‘Zaina,’ Omar says as he takes the shoes from Addy and hands them to Fatima. ‘She’s a friend of Fatima.’
Addy watches Fatima disappear into the kitchen with her loafers. ‘I don’t think Zaina likes me.’
‘She don’t like foreign ladies. It’s normal.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Amazigh ladies don’t like foreign ladies because they go with Amazigh men. They’re jealous.’
Fatima rests her chin on Addy’s shoulder and wraps her arms around her waist. ‘Come, sister,’ she says in French. ‘It’s the time of supper. I make delicious brochettes of chicken for my sister, Adi.’
‘You go eat, honey.’ Omar turns and heads towards the front door.
‘Where are you going? Aren’t you eating?’
‘Later. I’ll go to find the plumber. Enjoy.’
Fatima reaches for Addy’s hand and leads her into the living room. Aicha smiles her white smile and pats a place for Addy beside her on the flowery banquette. The low table is laid out with stacks of glistening chicken brochettes, a salad of chopped tomatoes, onions and olives dressed with olive oil, and fragrant discs of warm bread dusted with semolina.
Aicha grabs a disc of bread out of the blue plastic basket and tears off a large chunk. She offers it to Addy. ‘Eesh, Adi. Marhaba.’
‘Shukran.’
Addy tears off another piece and bites into its warm yeastiness. As she chews, she looks around the narrow whitewashed room. A poster of a girl praying at Mecca is tacked over the banquette on the opposite wall. Beside it a framed photograph, garlanded with pink and yellow plastic flowers, shows a sharp-suited King Mohammed VI. At the far end of the room, a large flat-screen television hangs on the wall, the dark screen filmy with pink dust.
Fatima picks up the remote. The television screen springs to life. She flips through the channels until she comes to a Turkish soap opera. Addy wonders where Jedda is. The black-and-white cat slinks into the room and settles on the mat by Addy’s feet.
They’re silent as they climb the steps to Addy’s veranda. She’s conscious of his warmth behind her, the gentle pressure of his hand on her waist when she stumbles on the final step. She walks over to the railing and gazes out at the night-cloaked mountains. The air is cool and stars cluster like glass chips in the black sky. A low buzz of cicadas underpins the silence.
Omar joins her and looks out at the inky outline of the High Atlas Mountains in the far distance.
‘It’s dark tonight, honey. No moon.’
‘Yes. But you can see the stars really well.’
‘The plumber called me when I was at Mohammed’s restaurant watching the football. He said he fixed your water. It might be I should check it for you.’
‘No, it’s okay. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
‘Adi …’
It happens before she knows she’s done it. Her lips on his neck. Softness. A pulse. His moan. A kiss. His body warm against hers. Her arms around his neck.
‘Adi …’
No. She can’t. She mustn’t. It’s too complicated. Her life’s already a mess. She drops her arms and steps back from his embrace. She presses her fingers against her burning lips.
‘I’m so sorry, Omar. I shouldn’t have done that. Please forget I’ve done that.’
He reaches out to her. ‘Adi, what happened? Don’t worry.’
She hurries to the blue door and into the house. Her heart’s in her throat, pounding, pounding. Oh, my God. What was I thinking?
Chapter Eleven (#ulink_e28c8255-c955-5177-bf3d-2a564f36afb8)
Zitoune, Morocco – December 1983
Hanane skids through a slick of thick blood-red mud.
She laughs. ‘Omar, the surprise had better be worth it. I’m getting splattered with mud.’
The boy waves his hand in the air on the path in front of her. ‘Mashi mushkil. It’s not so far now.’
Hanane stops to catch her breath. Wisps of her thick black hair escape the purple scarf draped loosely over her head. The sky is a canopy of blue over the damp red earth. Nothing but rocks and mud. A few leafless bushes. The river, about ten metres below, courses roughly on its path through the canyon walls.
‘If I’d known we’d be walking to Oushane, I’d never have come.’
Omar turns around, smiling broadly as he opens his arms wide. ‘So, why would I have told you, then?’ He flicks his eyes over her shoulder.
Hanane glances back but sees nothing but the narrow goat path they’ve just descended.
‘What is it, Omar?’
‘Nothing.’ Breaking into a jog, he waves at her to follow him. ‘Not far now, Hanane. Yalla.’
‘I’m not running, Omar.’ She steps gingerly along the muddy plateau. ‘I’ll break my leg.’
‘Stop.’ Omar shoots his right palm into the air like the traffic police she’s seen in Azaghar. ‘Stop. There, just there. Where you are.’
‘What? Why?’
He points at the muddy path in front of her. ‘Look down.’
Pressed into the mud is a huge, three-toed footprint.
‘What is it?’
‘Dinosaur.’ Omar curls his hands under his armpits, staggering around the ground like a cross between a monkey and a wounded chicken. He lets out a howl.
Hanane looks around nervously. ‘Be quiet. There might be another one.’
Omar bursts out laughing, slapping the knees of his dirty jeans. ‘Don’t be stupid, Hanane. The dinosaurs are all dead now. I learned about it in school.’ He points to the ground ahead of him. ‘Yalla, there are more. Lots of them. Big and little. A whole family.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes, seriously.’
Hanane spins around. The Irishman with the black hair jogs down the final metre of the goat path, the big black camera on its strap slapping against his chest.
‘Be carefu—’
Too late. His foot slips and the man’s booted feet fly out from under him, sending him sprawling on his back into the red mud.
Hanane giggles then, remembering her manners, composes her face into a frown of concern. ‘Are you all right?’ she asks in French.
Gus sits up, holding up palms coated in thick red goo. ‘Fine. I’ve only hurt my pride.’ He holds out a hand to Omar. ‘Here, boss. Give us a hand.’
Omar picks his way across the mud to the Irishman. Holding out a skinny hand, he yanks Gus to his knees.
‘Thanks, boss.’ Gus winks at Omar as he gets to his feet. ‘I can take it from here.’
‘Mister Gus, show her the other footprints, over there.’ Omar points to the ground a few metres away.
Hanane raises an arched black eyebrow at Omar. ‘So, this is your surprise.’
Omar’s right cheek dimples. ‘The dinosaur footprints were the surprise.’ He points at Gus. ‘He’s just extra. He promised me not to tell you.’
‘Boss,’ Gus says as he adjusts the camera strap around his neck, ‘did anyone ever tell you that you talk too much?’
Hanane shifts on her feet, sinking deeper into the mud. ‘I really have to get back. I need to feed the chickens.’
‘You never feed the chickens, Hanane. Mohammed’s wife does that.’
Hanane glares at Omar. ‘Well, today I need to feed the chickens.’
‘I’m sure the chickens can wait half an hour,’ Gus says. ‘Since we’re here, why don’t we have a look? Think about it. A whole herd of dinosaurs walking over this very ground millions of years ago.’ He tromps through the mud in the direction Omar had pointed. He hunkers down to look at something in the ground. ‘Hanane, come and look. They really are amazing. You must come and see.’
He beckons Omar over and points out some detail to the boy. He has so much enthusiasm, Hanane thinks. So much energy. He seems so much younger than the older men of the village. All of them have somehow shrunk from their prime, like dates left to dry in the sun. But this Irishman still looks at the world with the eyes of a curious boy. Still bears himself like a man in the prime of his life. Still glows with the vitality of a man half his age. But with an assurance missing in the village boys she’s grown up with.
The two black-haired heads lean together as they inspect the marks in the ground. Man and boy. The Irishman looks over at her. His blue eyes are the colour of the sky. He smiles at her, lines carving themselves into the fine skin around his eyes.
‘Come, Hanane. Come and have a look. It’s marvellous. Obviously some large theropods. I’ve seen something similar in the Kem Kem Beds by the Algerian border.’
Marvellous. Such a beautiful word. A word of treasures beyond imagination. She takes a step forwards, knowing, as she does, that she’s walking into her future.
Chapter Twelve (#ulink_4889fceb-e8c9-5e7e-8a25-26258cabd2b9)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
A knock on Addy’s front door.
‘Come in,’ she calls as she tinkers with a close-up of a grey-furred macaque on her laptop.
The blue wooden door squeaks open and Omar sticks his blue-turbaned head around the door, smiling broadly. ‘Good morning. It’s okay for me to come in?’
Addy glances over at him then turns back quickly to the laptop. ‘Yes, okay. Fine. I’m editing the pictures I took of the monkeys the other day. I’ve got some good images of the shop sellers, too. I’ve made a start on the text.’
Omar leans over her shoulder, his breath warm on her neck as she manipulates the mouse to add a richer grey tone to the monkey’s fur.
‘It’s clever what you do.’ He brushes his fingers along Addy’s neck.
She shifts away from his fingers and rubs at her neck where he’s touched her. ‘Just lots of practice.’
Omar drops his hand. From the corner of her eye, Addy watches him wander over to the kitchen. He turns on the tap over the sink. The pipes groan and ping. A fan of water sprays out across his gown, turning the bright blue a deep navy. Omar flaps the wet fabric in the air.
‘The plumber didn’t fix it well.’
‘I thought it would be fine. The shower’s a nightmare, too. The water’s cold and it stopped just when I put the shampoo in my hair. I used up all my bottled water rinsing it out.’
He flops into a wooden chair. ‘It’s a rubbish situation. Did you tell Mohammed?’
‘He said he’ll get it fixed “next tomorrow”.’
Omar grunts. ‘I’ll arrange it for you. Don’t worry. I’ll take you to the public shower later so you can have a hot shower. Or you can have a hammam with my sister and my mother.’
Addy looks up from her laptop. ‘A hammam?’
‘It’s like a room for steam. I showed it to you when I made the tour the first time. The buildings like the beehive behind the houses.’
‘Oh. Like a sauna.’
Omar shrugs. ‘It might be.’
‘Maybe I’ll try it another time. A proper hot shower would be great.’
She stares at the blinking cursor on her laptop screen, her concentration dissolving like sugar in hot tea. She’ll be back in London at the end of June. There’s no point getting involved with Omar. Tempting, but … it would be stupid. Someone would end up getting hurt, and she was damned if it was going to be her.
She was getting nowhere in her search for Hanane here in Zitoune. With every squint through her camera lens, she’d been searching for a hint of a mature Hanane, or a glimpse of her father’s features in the faces of the young men swimming under the bridge, or in a passing young woman’s shy smile. Hanane’s child would be twenty-three now. Not a child, even though all Addy could picture was a baby swaddled in white blankets.
No one she’s shown the Polaroid to recognises her father and Hanane. If was as though Hanane had never existed. What happened to her? Where’s her child now? Maybe Hanane wasn’t from Zitoune or one of the nearby villages, after all. But then why did her father’s photos ‘with H’ start in Zitoune?
Omar picks up a pencil and drums it on the table. ‘You would like to come to the waterfalls today, Adi? A driver called me from Marrakech. He has twenty tourists on his bus. It’s good business for me.’
Addy looks over at Omar and chews her lip. She’d like to take some more photos around the waterfalls. What harm could it be? She’d be with a group of tourists. Safety in numbers.
‘Adi, you don’t have to worry for me. If you don’t like me, I can accept it, even though it hurts my heart.’
She nods. ‘Okay. I’ll bring my camera and the tripod.’
Omar drops the pencil onto the table and stands, tipping the chair over in his haste. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He rights the chair and slides it under the table. ‘Come to the bridge in half an hour. You can test me to see if I’m a good tour guide or not.’ He turns to Addy, his hand on the door handle. ‘Fatima don’t let me eat the crêpes she made this morning. She say they are for you, full stop.’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s difficult to be the man in my house since you came to Zitoune. Soon I will be starving.’
‘Poor you. She brought me the crêpes for breakfast. They were delicious.’
‘Never mind, Adi. I took some already this morning from the kitchen. Even if she say no, I take them anyway. Nobody can say no to me.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘It’s true.’
‘Maybe one day I’ll say no to you.’
Omar steps out onto the veranda. ‘It’s impossible.’
‘Why’s it so impossible?’
The dimple appears in his cheek. ‘Because I’m so charming.’
Addy smiles as she reaches for her camera and loops the strap around her neck. ‘Que sera sera.’
‘What you said?’
‘What will be, will be. It’s Latin.’
Omar nods. ‘It’s like fate. Even so, you’ll never say no to me. I’m sure about it.’
Half an hour later, Addy’s on the old iron bridge, stepping carefully over the loose wooden boards. Resting the tripod against an iron girder, she leans her elbows on the rusting railing and watches the river sliding past, underneath her feet. She can see through the clear water to the pebbles and stones on the sandy bottom. It’s still early, and the village boys haven’t yet congregated on the riverbanks to dive and swim in the cool water. Only boys, never girls. The girls are in their homes, Addy guesses, helping with the cooking and cleaning. Being dutiful while the boys have all the fun.
Addy gazes up the hill towards the mosque’s thick minaret. A sheep’s carcass hangs from a hook in front of the butcher’s stall next door to the new concrete tower. The butcher leans against a bamboo post holding up an awning constructed from an old Méditel hoarding advertising cell phones. He swats at the flies buzzing around the carcass with a goat tail.
Leaning her chin in her hand on the rusted iron railing, Addy watches three women carry baskets of laundry down a path to the river. They stop at a flat rock, set down their baskets, and tuck the hems of their skirts and aprons into their pyjama bottoms. They roll their pyjamas over their knees and lay out T-shirts on the rock. A tall, slender, black-skinned woman showers the shirts with a snowy sprinkling of laundry detergent. When the T-shirts are sufficiently soap-laden, the women wade out into the river and dunk the shirts into the water. They scrub and pummel the cloth until Addy feels her own knuckles burn.
Fatima and her friend, Zaina, emerge, chatting and laughing, from the shadows of the olive trees, carrying brightly coloured plastic baskets spilling over with clothes. Addy waves at them, calling out Fatima’s name. Fatima smiles and waves back. Zaina stares up at Addy, the humour erasing from her pretty face.
Addy leans back against the rail and inhales the fresh spring air with a deep breath. So Zaina doesn’t like her. So what? But the others – Aicha, Jedda, Fatima, Omar … Why do the people here touch her in a way no one in London touches her? Certainly not Philippa, who loves to play the role of her disapproving and long-suffering older sister. She loves Philippa, of course. She’s her sister. She just doesn’t like her very much most of the time.
And Nigel? Addy tries to dredge up the memory of her ex-fiancé, but his face is like a puzzle whose pieces she can’t quite fit together. Nigel got close. She’d let her guard down because he could make her laugh with his dry humour. Then he’d left her heart as torn and bloodied as the raccoon she’d once seen caught in a hunter’s trap in the Québec woods. Another selfish man. Wrapped up in his career. What did Philippa say? Always falling for inaccessible men. Selfish and inaccessible. Just like her father.
‘Adi!’ Omar waves at her from the road leading down from the car park.
She watches him stride down the dusty road, trailed by a crowd of sunburnt tourists in floppy sun hats and baseball caps, cameras bumping on their chests. Despite herself, her heart flutters.
Omar points out the donkeys tethered to the olive trees, saying something she can’t hear. The tourists laugh. In his turban, Omar towers over them. As he approaches, she follows the line of his neck to the point where it meets his angular jaw. The soft spot just under his jaw where she’d kissed him last night, in the moonlight on her veranda. She remembers his quiet moan, and her cheeks flush. But that was before she came to her senses. Retreating back into her shell, like a turtle hiding from the world.
‘Everybody, this is a tourist lady who’ll join us for the tour.’
Addy waves at the group. A few middle-aged European couples and a clique of Spanish students. The girls flick their eyes over her. She’s of no interest to the boys. Omar collects her tripod and tucks it under his arm. He heads through the olive grove to the river path. Addy follows at the rear of the group, just like the first time.
Omar stops on the riverbank by the women washing clothes. The tourists congregate around him and snap photos of the toiling women.
‘This is the manner we do wash the clothes in the village.’
‘So, it’s only the women who are clean, then?’
Omar snaps his head around and stares at Addy. The dimple appears in his cheek. A Scottish man asks him a question, but Omar doesn’t answer. The man repeats his question. Omar shakes his head as if to wake up.
‘I’m sorry. I been sleeping.’
The group trails Omar through the twisting trunks of the olive trees, past the lookout by Yassine’s café. Rather than heading to the bottom of the waterfalls where the rafts bob in the pool, Omar veers right onto a different path. He stops in front of a red mud wall of petrified tree roots. He stumbles over his words, forgetting his English.
The path leads to a pool of clear water fed by mini-waterfalls. Addy peers down the river towards sun-baked canyon walls in the distance and sees half a dozen pools, feeding lazily into each other, veiled by pink oleander bushes and branches of the old olive trees on the riverbanks. The freshness of the early morning has succumbed to a dry heat and sweat trickles down her neck. She fans herself with her hat.
Omar leans her tripod against the grey trunk of an olive tree and leaps onto a rock in the pool.
‘Everybody, it’s very, very hot even if it’s not summer yet. So, you can swim if you would like. We will stay here thirty minutes. It’s very safe, no problem. The water is very clean. Enjoy.’
The older tourists roll up their trousers and Bermuda shorts and wade cautiously into the water. The Spanish students strip off their clothes in a burst of Latin enthusiasm, revealing surfing shorts and bikinis. They clamber across the rocks to the mini-waterfalls and leap into the pool, screaming as they slam into the cold water. The girls are tanned and slim in their bikinis. Addy runs her hand along the waist of her jeans, conscious of her white skin and the roundness of her belly, hips and breasts under her clothes.
Omar laughs and shouts at the Spanish boys as he unwinds his tagelmust. He jumps back to the riverbank and loops the blue cloth around Addy’s waist.
‘So, I capture you, Adi.’ He leans over and plants a quick kiss on her lips.
A Spanish boy shouts out a catcall. Omar answers him in Spanish, putting off the boy’s timing, and he belly-flops into the pool. The boy’s friends erupt into peals of glee.
‘What did he say?’
‘He say I am a robber of the ladies. I tell him I am the robber of one lady only.’ Omar laughs. ‘I tell him he have to make a good dive because all the Spanish ladies watch him. So, he is nervous and he made a bad dive.’
The students’ carefree spirits are infectious and Addy ignores the alarm going off in her head.
‘What are you going to do now that you’ve trapped me? Carry me off?’
‘It’s so, so hot, darling. There’s no way for me to carry you.’
‘Maybe you’d like one of the Spanish girls instead. They’ve been eyeing you.’
‘I don’t mind for Spanish ladies.’ Omar drapes the tagelmust around them like a blanket and slides his hand under Addy’s T-shirt, cupping her right breast. He runs his fingers over the lace of her bra and expels a whisper of breath. ‘Come with me, Adi.’
For a moment they stare at each other. Addy drapes the blue cloth around her shoulders.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To be alone, darling. We can swim.’
‘I didn’t bring a swimsuit.’
‘Mashi mushkil. You can wear your underwear. It’ll dry quick in the sun. No one will see. It’s a private place.’
He leads Addy along the riverbank until they reach a flat rock jutting into a quiet pool. It’s hidden from view of the others by a screen of oleander bushes. He pulls off his blue gown and white T-shirt. His faded Levis cling to his hips. His naked chest is lean like a swimmer’s, tanned to the colour of milky coffee.
Addy lifts the camera strap from around her neck and sets the camera down on a rock, covering it with her straw hat. She begins to undo her belt, but Omar brushes her hands away.
‘It is for me to do it.’
He unfastens the belt and discards it on the riverbank. Slowly, he peels off her jeans, running his hands over her body as her skin is revealed to the sun. She stops him as he is about to lift her T-shirt over her head.
‘I think I’ll keep this on, if you don’t mind.’ She ties the T-shirt into a knot under her bra.
He smiles, his teeth gleaming against his brown skin. ‘As you like, Adi. Anyway, it’s better to imagine. It’s more spicy.’
Omar shrugs out of his jeans and sandals until he wears only red jockey shorts, which cling to the contours of his body. He climbs over rocks to the top of the cascade feeding the pool. He looks over at Addy to see that she’s watching, then he executes a perfect dive into the centre of the pool.
Addy scans the surface of the pool, waiting for his head to surface.
‘Omar?’ She searches for a sign – bubbles on the pool’s mirror-like surface, the gleam of skin under the water. ‘Omar?’
His hands grab her ankles. He surfaces, spouting water.
‘You been worried, weren’t you, darling? I watched you underneath the water.’
Addy splashes his face with water. ‘I was worried about how I was going to get the tourists back to the village if you drowned.’
‘That’s not nice.’ He pulls at her ankles and she loses her balance, splashing into the pool. She surfaces next to him, spewing water and blinking.
‘Bastard! I’ve got contact lenses.’
‘What you say?’
She slaps the water, spraying Omar’s face. ‘Bastard.’
‘It’s rude, Adi.’ He dives underneath.
Addy treads water, scanning the surface for where he’ll reappear. The tight wool of his head brushes between her legs. He slides up the front of her body, running his lips over her naked belly as he rises to the surface.
He bursts through the water, gasping. ‘I forgot to breathe, darling. I wanted to stay to kiss you under the water and I lost my air.’
Addy reaches her arms around his neck and folds her legs around his body. He leans his head back, closing his eyes as she kisses her way across his neck. His hand cups her head and he kisses her. She’s hungry, ravenous, wanting to taste him, to devour him, until there’s no Addy and no Omar. Only their essences, together, in a pool of water under the hot Moroccan sun.
‘Alli estan!’
A gigantic splash. And another.
Addy pushes away from Omar. The Spanish students have found them.
Omar slaps the water. ‘Habss. It’s a place for us to be private. Not to have people here.’
Addy swims to a rock by the riverbank and heaves herself out of the water. Her heart’s racing. She wipes the dripping water from her eyes. She’d almost made a huge mistake.
Omar swims over to her, but she’s already pulling on her jeans.
‘Fuckers,’ Omar says, gesturing rudely at the laughing students. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I wanted to make a special day for you. I knew you would love it here.’
‘It’s okay.’ She unties the knot in her T-shirt and twists it to wring out the water.
He hoists himself up onto the rock. ‘Wait, darling.’
She shoves on her straw hat and reaches for her camera. ‘I should be getting back. I have a lot of work to do.’
She turns away, unable to meet his eyes. Is she a coward, or just being sensible? She knows what Philippa would say. You’re making a fool out of yourself, Adela. He just wants to shag you. And get you to pay for things. You’d be stupid to think anything else.
She’s damaged goods. How could she let him see her breast? No one has seen it outside the hospital. Not Philippa. Not Nigel. No, it’s better to stop this right now, before it was too late.
Chapter Thirteen (#ulink_cc2b95dd-c87f-5403-8997-1434bab4f8ec)
Zitoune, Morocco – April 2009
Omar and Addy stand outside a whitewashed building beside the mosque. A hand-painted sign reading Douches Publiques hangs over the door. On the left, men sit on a covered terrace drinking orange juice and watching European football in French on a large plasma-screen television.
‘Wait here, honey.’
Addy hovers in the shadows and tries to make herself inconspicuous. She lifts her T-shirt away from her soaking bra. A few of the men glance at her, but when the television commentator’s voice rises in anticipation of a goal, they quickly turn back to the screen. A collective moan when the player overshoots the goal.
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Adrienne Chinn
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A forbidden love affair. A long-buried secret. A journey that will change everything.Morocco, 1984. High in the Atlas Mountains, Hanane’s love for Irishman Gus is forbidden. Forced to flee her home with the man she loves, Hanane is certain she’s running towards her destiny. But she has made a decision that will haunt her family for years to come.London, 2009. When Addy discovers a mysterious letter in her late father’s belongings, she journeys to Morocco in search of answers. But instead, she finds secrets – and is quickly pulled into a world that she doesn’t understand.And when history starts to repeat itself, it seems her journey might just change the person she is forever…A heartbreaking story of impossible love and dark family secrets that readers of Dinah Jeffries and Tracy Rees will love.