Stewart, Angus (14 page)

As in the past the pace of the familiar procession was governed by Corbet's wind. One of many pauses halted them near the
garconnière
where Jay had rented a room so cheaply as to be economical simply as a washing place with running water. Its horror had been enhanced by the provision of a convict's blanket bearing black arrow-heads. Achmed and he had slept there whilst painting the interior of the native house. By comparison with either of these resting places Jay's present accommodation was palatial. Yet now, as much as then, his tenure in the city was so bizarre as to make responsibility for Achmed impossible. Achmed was a reproach to his inadequacy, because the boy sought a permanence which Jay could not give, but whose possibility he equally would not deny. It was a question of deciphering priorities; and, moreover, of doing so within the framework of a foreign culture upon which Europe had imposed the cruellest selective emancipation conceivable. There were thousands of Achmeds in Africa. His mistake, if it had been a mistake, was in having let one work his way into his own life.

He hardly listened to Corbet They were perched on bar stools staring at bottles. The limp Beni Salem flowed regularly into their glasses. That Achmed's condition had insinuated itself deeply into his consciousness Jay had no doubt. The laxity of his mind looked to no scheduled future. Time had passed, and once more the settlement of Achmed was void as his own. The bitterness lay in this mirror image. As far as physical survival went they were alike confined to little consideration beyond the present moment. And yet this was a condition with which an oriental mind was more easily content than was a western one. The attraction Achmed exercised for Jay lay in just this careless spontaneity.  Otherwise the chords the urchin struck in him were so primeval as to be inaccessible to reason.

 Corbet had risen unsteadily from his stool and was being a matador. Ali was charging him with a folding chair. The patient barman looked on grinning. The middle of the day
was quite empty with white sunlight lying outside in the suburban road. It remained only to apportion the bill with dignity, so that Ali, who handled all Corbet's cash transactions, paid their share.

'Have you seen Achmed around lately?' Jay asked Ali suddenly.

'
Achmed
?'
Corbet interrupted. 'But I thought you'd got rid of him
ages
ago!'

'Did, in a way,' Jay said. He was anxious to avoid discussion.

'
Prince
!'
he's dangerous!' Corbet announced, affecting to back away from Jay. 'Go home at once and lock up your daughters
and
your sons!'

'Oh, no, Thor, no!' Ali said, adopting his most obsequious gestures.

'
Prince
,
let's start on the gin,' Jay said on a perverse impulse. After signalling the barman, he beat a rapid tattoo on the counter with the pads of his fingers, and continued to regard Ali questioningly over his tumbler.

'Oh, thank you! Thank you ver' march, Jay!' Ali said, coming forward. 'As mat'har fact Achmed stop a-me only other day. In-a small market place. I told
a-him
that you had gone-ha back to England. . .'

Ali broke off nervously like a child expecting to be reprimanded. Jay turned to him in amazement.

'We
did
think you'd gone, Corbet said, joining them at the bar.

'Just when was this "other day"?' Jay asked slowly.

'Perhaps a-two weeks—no mebe ah-less.'

'And you thought I'd gone!' Jay echoed incredulously. He felt at once outraged and relieved. If Achmed really had been convinced that he had left the country it would explain why he had not appeared. Yet he would hardly have accepted the unverified word of Ali, as their suspicion had always been mutual. He might of course have turned up when Jay was out.

'Who else did you convince that I had gone?' Jay asked, making light of the matter, now that Achmed's apparent defection seemed capable of being explained away.

'I don't think anyone else
asked
,'
Corbet put in impishly.

'Perhaps Farid told Abdullah—the friend you a-know of Achmed,' Ali said.

It fits, Jay thought. A casual sequence of accidents. Aloud he asked, 'But where did this crazy idea come from? That's what I'd like to know!'

Corbet was becoming unsteady on his stool. He flapped his arms in ostrich-like gesture. 'Just not seeing you
around
!
Gone are the footprints of
Livingstone
!'

'Then I'm deeply offended,' Jay said, playing along with their mood. He looked at the
prince
,
whom gin invariably made tearful. By ordering he had drawn them all knowingly into drunkenness.

To that small table behind him he and Achmed had
often come through the rain and November darkness to eat the omelette, bread and olives, which was the only food the bar provided. It had been owned then by a Spaniard with a beautiful daughter, whom Jay had loved strangely from afar.

Why afar, he wondered now? How the rain could fall! In minutes the suburban streets became ankle-deep streams; the open ground outside their house squelching mud—
rhais
in Achmed's dialect. On such nights the steep path to the well was a nightmare of
rain-slippery stones; a trapeze act with laden buckets. But, once painted, the house itself was not entirely comfortless. It was curiously wedge-shaped, built on two floors, and so minute that the lower level comprised only a passage to a primitive lavatory and the stair well. Above, the single room was persuaded to accommodate Jay's camp bed, a table, a chair, a freshwater jar, and a straw mat and blankets which divided Achmed's slumbering form from the neat black and white tiles. An area at the head of the stairs
was just large enough to stack a couple of suitcases. Primitive cooking could be accomplished on the stairs themselves; washing, water purification and other housekeeping processes, in the narrow passageway below. Using the lavatory had involved a weird but oddly pleasing ritual. One reversed carefully into the small room and positioned oneself over the four-inch diameter open drain, clutching a box of matches between one's teeth. The toilet paper was deposited in a loose cairn and burned, since the cistern would not otherwise accept it. As a final operation a bucket of water was taken from the passageway outside and emptied spiritedly over the concave floor.

As Jay conjured these scenes before him once more, it was to see Achmed in many different guises. There was the conference with the master of the Koranic school, who had removed his shoes downstairs, and was now sitting reluctantly on the only chair. Ali was there to interpret finer points as they arose. Achmed was quite unco-operative, sulking, whining, and muttering to himself by turns. He was suspicious of all three adults; but also jealous of the intrusion of Ali and the schoolmaster. Achmed felt trapped, while, for his own part, Jay also only wanted the conference to fail quickly, as fail it must, and disperse. He would go on trying to persuade Achmed of the virtues of learning himself.

His drinking also recalled the night when, after careful financial accountancy, he had decided to treat Ali to an evening on the town. Bar, bar, restaurant and bar, the escapade had ended with an abortive attempt to enter a brothel at around half past two in the morning. They had come lurching back to the suburb in a taxi, Ali convinced, as he often was when drunk, that they were in imminent danger of being attacked and of having to fight for their lives. Jay had made the mud gradient from where the road ended to his house with a growing sense of guilt. There were no windows on the ground floor, but upstairs he could see that the light was burning. At first Achmed queried his identity suspiciously, but Jay stood back where he could be seen from the window and called out, 'Fus? It's me,' Achmed came down to open the door. He was fully dressed, wide awake, and the relief on his face made it radiant. He kissed Jay with a rush of passion. It was a long time before the boy would let him rest. As Jay slowly sobered Achmed's indignation clarified itself into a deep-stated puritan concern about the evils of
kif
and wine.

His harangue took the form of near hysteria, a buffering, laughing, violent admonition, filled with mimicry, which produced terrible echoes in Jay's bruised and scoured-out senses. Achmed's particular curiosity was as to the expenditure of money. He wanted to know exactly what had been paid out and to what end. He was inwardly furious that he had not been allowed to guide Jay through what he clearly envisaged as a sequence of particularly vicious commercial snares. So thoroughly did he convince himself that the pathetic Ali was an evil
djinn
who had led Jay astray that at one point he announced his intention of going out for Ali at once with a knife, and Jay recognised with a sudden start into soberness that the impassioned child fully meant it. He was restrained. Then, sitting on the bed, he proceeded to an absurd parody of the musicians at the restaurant where they had eaten. Strumming an imaginary lute, and clocking up equally imaginary sums of money like a gasmeter, the performance had gone something like: 'Tidily tum ti ti
ti
!
Deux mille francs
!
Bing bong to ti
bim
!
Trois mille francs
!'
Then more passionate morality: 'Beer,
si
;
aqui—in dar. Vino, no
! No bar!
Mañana noche no bar
—eh, Jay?
Kif
not good.
Nada
!
Kif
—whew—whizee—zonk
Tu comprends
?'
And he staggered round the tiny room clutching his head. Jay was convulsed beneath waves of tenderness and laughter. About an hour before dawn he was released as from a whirlwind.

The talk in the bar had grown sporadic. Corbet and Ali would drink on for perhaps another couple of hours. Any time between three and five o'clock All would serve a solitary and rather greasy 'lunch' to his master; after which Corbet would retire to bed, his day ended. Jay excused himself and strayed out into the dazzle of midday, having first swollen Corbet's own praise over a folio of water-colours, one of which he was proposing to sell to the wife of the American Consul, and another to the Jaqueline, whom Jay had met the previous afternoon.

There was nothing he might do before nightfall. He passed once more from Spanish suburbs through native ones, skirting beneath the dark, wooded rise of the Mountain, and making for the Atlantic shore, whose isolation was so unlike the crescent
mile of
the famous
Plage
.
He paused only at an
alimentation générale
to buy a bottle of Stork beer and have a roll stuffed from the eternally open tin of tuna. No one noticed him out here and he strolled unremarked carrying these provisions out. A very black, rag-bound Moor passed him on a donkey, his knees drawn up almost beneath his chin, and his bare feet both supported to one side of him on the bulging straw panier. Coffee children scurried into doorways with fistfuls of mint, or with skirts drawn up, making a basket for charcoal. Others sat with concentration to the manufacture of mud pies A shower must have fallen in the area earlier in the day for the earth smelt fresh and wisps of vapour arose from parches of open ground. Occasionally Jay passed groups of young, middle-class women, moving with sinuous dignity in the sheath-like robes which fell straight from their neatly tailored shoulders to their ankles. The muted greys, greens or blues of the women's
djellaba
invariably had a matching headpiece which, lying low down and quite square across the brow, dramatically emphasised the eyes by contrasting with the triangle formed by the light chiffon
litham
drawn over the bridge of the nose. The veil alone, and sometimes a handbag, or the glimpse of high heels, broke the uniformity of colour. The elegance of these women was peculiarly commanding beside the formless white
haik
of those either older or poorer, who would often only cover their faces with a raised handful of the anonymous drapery.

Leaving the houses and people behind him, Jay walked out along the rough dirt track to Merkala until he came to the sea. At some time a metalled road had been built along the coast, but this had fallen into complete neglect. The Atlantic breakers had undermined its seaward side, leaving a treacherous, jagged lip hanging over the void, while from the cliffs behind falls of
rust-coloured rock had made passage difficult even for a pedestrian. Once Jay passed a hermit's cave, the natural excavation in the cliff face having had its entrance partly blocked with corrugated iron and sacking. After about two miles the road began to show signs of ending entirely, and he clambered down on to the rocks beneath it. The sea was a pale, translucent green, stained with ragged patches of deep indigo. The surface of the light swell was untroubled by wind and broke reluctantly into spray only where it met the shore.

Jay settled to his sandwich. He and Achmed had often picnicked here during the preceding autumn, bathing tentatively amongst the smoothly contorted rock formations, and jealously absorbing whatever warmth the sun had to offer after the bitterly cold night. It was the nearest point at which one could escape entirely both from the sleeziness of the cosmopolitan city and from the cramped, familiar, though restless environment of the native suburb. Jay lay back in hollow of rock. He was consumed now less by immediate anxiety for the boy, whom Abdullah must surely find before nightfall, than by his own responsibility in the matter of his future. The weakness lay—and would continue to lie—in his vacillating determination.

He began the long walk back, determining to circle left this time, climbing up through the Kasbah before plunging  down into the Medina, and so to the European town. He was prone to building an hysterical case about Achmed's abandonment, through attributing to it those fears which were elementally his own. Now, as he walked, other vignettes passed through his mind. Achmed, refusing to be sent home for a few days, and sobbing himself into a desperate nosebleed on the doorstep. Of course he had not gone. Then there was Achmed peremptorily removing Beethoven
from the gramophone: 'This one not good, Jay', or acting out his favourite mime whereby it was understood that he had hold of Jay's ears (always the ears) and Abdullah Jay's feet for the purpose of rhythmically swinging him back and forth before finally launching him from the balcony. Then there was Achmed, morose with dysentery, and trapped between the suspect merits of sulphatriad and the certain ones of magic, most fortunately resorting to both. Nicest of all perhaps was the evening when Jay had
found the boy reclining in the bath beneath mounds of Hollywood-style foam. '
Tide
,'
Achmed had explained, giving the word its French pronunciation, and pointing at the packet of detergent.