Furnace Read online

  The big guy walks over to me. I can hear his footsteps coming and that’s when I look. You’re Alfie’s brother? he says.

  I nod and look up but I can hardly see his face for the blood-lamps still drifting across my eyes.

  He shakes his big untidy face. Leave him alone, he growls to all of us. He’s got work to do. I catch you messing with him again, I’ll mess with you, brother or no brother. Everyone understand?

  He goes on staring at me for quite a while, but doesn’t say anything else. In the end he turns and trudges back to the sheds.

  I look over at the others. Alfie’s got his rake back and he’s stood in a bunker but looks like he’s forgotten what to do. He keeps shrugging and repeating something quiet to himself, over and over, too quiet for me to hear the words.

  Jez goes and rolls the ball onto the nearest tee-mat with his foot. You do it, he tells Fisher, and hands him the club. A jet screams low, leaving the base and climbing.

  A Buccaneer, says Fisher, and his mouth stays open. They’re just trainers, he goes on to no one in particular, disappointed, but he watches after it anyway until it’s just a speck in the hot blue.

  Hit the ball for Christ’s sake, Jez tells him.

  But neither of them care much now and Jez doesn’t even crow when Fisher scuffs the ball sideways into long, dead grass. Fisher grunts, but not like it matters.

  Then someone sets a car horn going, three long blasts, and I know it’s Carol. Alfie knows it too – he shuffles out of the sand and makes for the sheds, leaving the rake half-cocked over the bunker’s edge.

  Jez and Fisher give each other a look then set off after him.

  Where are you going? I call, my heart speeding.

  Fisher mumbles something to Jez and laughs, then he turns and tosses the club to me. It lands upright with a bump, bounces and cartwheels into the bunker, just missing my legs. Jez keeps hold of the putter, swinging it from the metal head like a walking stick.

  I stay where I am, churning my feet into the gritty sand. It seems to take forever before they all come trooping over to me – Carol first, then Jez and Fisher, then poor old Alfie following last with his big wide simple face, though now it’s twitching with nerves.

  Carol stops a couple of paces away from the bunker and sweeps her long fringe from the side of her face, holding it back for a second; then she lets it drop back exactly the way it was. Look after Alfie for a while, she says.

  What?

  You heard. Look after Alfie.

  Why? I realise my feet are twisting more quickly now, but not getting any deeper, almost like they’re waving at her out of their burrows. I stop it and pull them up clear. She looks at them hard, like they mean something.

  Why? I say again.

  I glare up at Fisher and Jez, both standing just behind Carol, one on either side. Fisher keeps darting quick looks from me to Carol to Jez and back again. Jez won’t look me in the eye. He’s looking kind of dreamily out over the airbase, though I know there’s nothing to see.

  We’re just going for a drive, Carol says. With the windows down. To get cool. She flicks her hair back again. Ten minutes, she says.

  I snort and she rolls her eyes.

  Jez frowns in whatever kind of dream he’s in, but still doesn’t look at me.

  Just mind Alfie, okay? Ten minutes, she says.

  Fisher turns to wave and wink at me as they go.

  Leave him alone, Carol says, sounding tired, and I watch their backs until they disappear round the side of the sheds, the long tin roofs shimmering in the heat.

  I wait until the engine coughs and starts, then stand up and turn to Alfie. You’re wondering where Carol’s gone, I tell him.

  He’s staring after them, red-faced, big wet lips working slowly but not making words.

  I get out of the bunker and stand on its brim. Over in the airbase compound a blue minibus is filling up with private-school kids in their dark grey air-corps uniforms. A tall, young-looking teacher in the same outfit slams the back doors behind them, jogs around to the driver’s seat and climbs in. Then the bus just sits there on the hot black tarmac, not moving. Further out, on one of the distant runways, another Buccaneer accelerates, then roars into the air. It makes a low circle and thunders over the driving range before heading out towards the sea.

  * * *

  All these years on, and Alfie a long time dead, it’s strange to think of the airbase, the jets and runways, hangars and fences all buried or broken up. All of it carried away like the whole thing was made of playing cards. It’s grazing land now, rough and wide open and empty except for young heifers or sometimes a solitary, wandering bull. The driving range too of course: all vanished. Strange to think of thistles growing up tall and hooves cutting in where the combed white bunkers, neat fairways and smooth, clipped greens were. You take the quiet drive out there now to the headland and there’s no way of knowing.

  The ten minutes passed somehow. A couple of times I tried to distract Alfie from staring spellbound after them, but it didn’t really help – whatever I said he kept his blank, wide-awake eyes fixed on the gravel road beyond the sheds. I picked the golf club out of the sand, found the ball in the tangled grass and chipped it up and down the little fairway a few times, back and forth. It was pleasant seeing the new white ball hop and roll so true on the neat strip of turf, shaved out so carefully from the scrub and thick weeds pressing in. It was the feeling of finding somewhere tended, cared for, where it didn’t really need to be. It just was. Though we were in a place half the town and airbase had trampled over one Saturday afternoon or another, it suddenly felt set apart and private to us, and safe.

  Is it you that cuts this grass? I called up the fairway to Alfie.

  He rocked on his heels, still staring after Carol.

  It’s nice, I called again. Really nice.

  I clipped the ball up the gentle slope towards him, then laid down the club and looked all around, standing tip-toe on the bunker’s raised lip. The minibus with its uniformed kids was gone. We must have been waiting half an hour at least by that time. Alfie was grunting to himself, swaying almost imperceptibly from side to side. There was no sign of the car returning.

  I’m not waiting, I said to Alfie, I’m going now, and to my amazement he followed when I started walking. I stopped and turned. Keep close to me and do what I do, I said, and for the first time in my life, as far as I remember, felt myself a companion to him. Soon, we’d climbed the golf course’s white picket fence and were in open country. Behind me I heard the big, bearded manager call out after us but he didn’t call for long and by the time Carol and Jez and Fisher must have spilled from her car we were out of sight and out of sound, swallowed up completely by the same spreading fields that come back always and would swallow up everything soon enough.

  THE WEDDING FLOWERS

  It was a slow, hard climb through the Muslim graveyard. There was no path between the graves and the way was steep and shadeless, but it was a shortcut to the ruined chapel, saving at least half a mile, the English boy reckoned. Besides, he was desperate to escape the main route, winding and dusty, that followed the stream to the springs at Ras el Ma. All along the river, under the old town walls, gangs of brown, half-naked children had crowded the shallow pools, splashing and shrieking and begging when they noticed him; and above them, lining each pocket of shade above the path, lounged the older youths, interrupting their endless conversations to call out tirelessly as he passed, ‘Hey, mon ami! Amigo! Hashish? Hey! My friend – good hash! Very cheap. Si? Hey, venez ici! Sit here. Yes? Hey!’ And always one or two standing and following until he reached the next strip of shade and the next gathering, the reek of kif heavy in the hot air again, and in every brittle tree and bush the invisible cicadas screaming as if on fire, and then a new volley of offers, and another stranger stalking behind him, dropping away only when the path twisted out of the shadows and into the painful glare of the sun, leaving him to the next link of shade and waiting smokers in the long, watchf
ul, murmuring human chain. It was exhausting and he had chosen the shorter, steeper climb as soon as he’d noticed it, though it took him away from the river where he’d been able to drench his burning face and neck. His bottled water was already running low, but he could pace his drinking more carefully now that he was alone at last. He’d had to drink wastefully as he walked the gauntlet of the local youths, sucking from the bottle when they called out so that he’d seem preoccupied and purposeful. It was the same in the souks and markets of the medinas. In Tangier, Marrakech, Fez, and now here: always the bottle ready to seal his mouth, though he knew it was probably exactly that which singled him out as a tourist and brought him the attention he was warding himself against.

  He stopped, wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the linen sleeve of his shirt and for the first time noticed properly the scattered, whitewashed graves surrounding him. They were almost identical: just narrow troughs of stone, around four feet in length. Even the largest were shorter and narrower than any adult coffin. The newest were dazzling under the late morning sun. At their ends they were stepped or arched, sculpted very simply and set low to the ground, many of them nearly hidden by the clumps of parched, wiry mountain grass that lay matted in between. A few carried short Arabic inscriptions but most were plain and there were no flowers, nor any other kind of offering, just pale gravel or more of the tough hillside grass inside the shallow walls of each rectangle. He wondered idly how deep the graves could be dug in the rocky soil. It looked unpromising: knuckles of grey Rif limestone jutted through the grass in every part of the burying ground. The clean, wordless graves were pleasing, though. Blank headstone after blank headstone, blocky and white, as if the blazing sun had bleached even their meanings away.

  But Christ, it was hot. Too hot to linger in the open. The high sun seemed focused to a single, burning cone on the crown of his head and the glare and repetition of the white graves was making him dizzy. Just a few hundred yards further on, at the highest boundary of the graveyard, a skirt of trees fringed the last steep rise before the chapel. He could make for their shade or turn back and face the hustlers again at the river. With his left hand shielding the top of his head, he squinted up at the ruin and started to climb again.

  The hunched figure sharing the shade of the trees, a little way above him and to his right, was silent, though the boy knew he was being watched as he dried the streams of sweat on his face, took a little water and recovered his breath. Behind them both, from the ruin, drifted the sound of cheerful Spanish voices. Eventually, two young couples carrying small, bulging day-packs on their backs came picking their way down a stony path between the shrubs and olive trees. The figure in the shade called out to them familiarly in Spanish and the two boys answered with laughs and a few fragments of conversation. It seemed to be the continuation of an earlier exchange, the English boy thought, though he could understand none of it except the adios the figure finally called out as they vanished into the scrub. Other than the endless background sawing of the crickets and cicadas there was silence for a while, then the sound of a match being struck. As if on cue, the stranger called over to him: Amigo. Español?

  He turned and shook his head, examining the other man for the first time. No, he called back. The stranger was small and wiry, clearly a local. Older than the youths at the river, the boy decided - his scant goatee beard had streaks of grey in it, though the rest of his face was youthfully smooth and sharp-boned. He was staring again now, knees drawn up almost to his T-shirted chest, and smoking a black wooden sebsi. The smell of the struck match rolled by the boy, then the aroma of kif.

  English? Yes?

  The boy nodded.

  The stranger grunted and puffed on the short pipe.

  The boy turned away, ignoring the rattle of pebbles behind him as the Moroccan rose to his feet and made his way to the boy’s side, settling himself on a smooth stone close by.

  From London?

  No. A smaller place. Nottingham.

  Ah! Nottingham Forest. Brian Clough!

  Despite himself the boy laughed. You’ve heard of him?

  The stranger grinned toothily. All great coaches famous in Maroc!

  The boy shook his head, still smiling. Dead now, he said.

  Yes. You have smoke?

  No thanks. I’m fine. He toyed with the cap of the bottle but resisted the impulse to open it and drink. The water was warm through the plastic and his fingers were slippery with sweat.

  No smoke?

  No. No smoke. I’m here to see the mountains.

  Good. Very good. Many fine mountains here in the Rif. He cleared his throat. My name – Ibrahim, he announced abruptly, and reached over to offer his right hand.

  The boy hesitated, then shook it. It was slender but the grip was strong. Hello, he said flatly.

  For smoking I ask just once, said Ibrahim. In town, they say hash, hash, hash, yes? Always the hash. Me, I ask once.

  Okay, the boy said. All around them the cicadas were deafening: an endless, grating chirr. It set the boy’s nerves on edge the way a baby crying always did when he was a child.

  Very hot, yes? Ibrahim went on. Rest before more walking.

  Very hot, the boy agreed. Too hot.

  Yes. Even for August. Very hot.

  They fell silent for a while. A calm, watchful immobility seemed to settle on the stranger’s face whenever he stopped speaking. It gave him a detached, superior air.

  You live in town? the boy asked at last, uncomfortable with the silence. Without speech as a distraction, the cicadas’ uproar was maddening.

  In Chouen, no. My village – that way. Ibrahim pointed with the stem of his sebsi towards the broad stony valley running east from the town and the chapel. Sometimes I stay in Chouen, he added, and shrugged. You travel far in Maroc?

  The boy nodded. I was in Tangier to start, then Fez and Marrakech, then headed back north. I was hoping it would be cooler in the mountains.

  Ibrahim listened with a tilted head, as if straining to catch the words. He paused for a moment after the boy had finished speaking, then straightened his neck and grunted. Marrakech – too hot, he said. In Marrakech now, fifty-five degrees, maybe more. Centigrade, he added. Very bad. Better here. But today, not so good. Very hot in Chouen, too. He took several quick puffs on his pipe. Then, as if suddenly struck by the idea: I show you the mountains, yes? Show you the spring – cold water. Very clean. Good to drink. I know all the ways in the mountains. Good places for photographs. Very high up.

  A wave of weariness and irritation ran through the boy but he fought to keep it from his voice. I don’t know. I was planning on that anyway, you know? Walking in the mountains. You understand? I was going there anyway.

  Of course, of course, said Ibrahim, smiling.

  Well, okay, the boy finished lamely.

  Of course. Ibrahim tapped the debris from his pipe. You see my village too, yes? I show you the farms where they make the kif and the hash. Tourists not permitted, but I take you.

  The boy yawned helplessly. It was suffocatingly hot, even out of the sun, and being hustled always made him feel strangely drained. Ever since arriving in the country and breaking with his girlfriend who had taken an early flight home, he had become more and more aware of a weakness in himself, like a painless but sapping wound that each hustle opened up afresh; now, sensing it opening again he felt a wave of despair. He closed his eyes, remembering his first night in Tangier. Within minutes of strolling onto the palm-lined Corniche he’d been cajoled by two guides into buying his evening meal at an empty beach restaurant where they’d promised he could find cold beer. They’d plied him with fresh sardines, American beer and pipes of kif until well past midnight, then pretended to collect the bill from inside the bar before presenting him with a crudely scribbled note in Arabic demanding more money than he’d set aside for a week’s accommodation. When he’d tried to reason with them they’d called the big, taciturn waiter to the table and the boy had understood, suddenly fearful, that all t
hree of them were in on the scam. The most bewildering part of it though was that once he had paid, defeated and furious, the two guides had acted as if nothing untoward had happened. They’d insisted on escorting him back to his hotel, making friendly, broken conversation and the younger one had been completely at ease jostling at his shoulder, even showing off the creased scraps of paper, scrawled with names and addresses of various foreign girls, that he kept stuffed in a bulging nylon wallet. As they’d approached his hotel a café-owner, watching the late night stragglers along the Corniche from his doorway, had called a greeting in Arabic to the guides and the older hustler had answered in English, calling back over his shoulder with a barked laugh: ai, like a hambourger!

  Afterwards, in his hotel bed, he’d lain awake, humiliated, for most of the airless night and every shout and commotion in the back street below his window seemed to be the raised, impatient voices of his guides, waiting for him to slot neatly between them again in the morning. He had learned his one word of Arabic that evening, at the older guide’s insistence: Shukran. Thank you. Shukran.

  Since then he’d used silence more or less successfully in navigating the streets and souks of each city. In Marrakech he’d even found a source of hash without having to deal with the local sellers: a ravaged, middle-aged Frenchman called Pierre who seemed to be living year-round all alone on the shared balcony of a cheap hostel.

  Still, he thought, conscious again of Ibrahim stirring beside him and relighting his sebsi, what was happening now wasn’t so much a hustle as a kind of bargaining. If he wanted, he could simply fix a small price for a hike in the mountains. It would be just a hundred dirham, maybe, for the whole afternoon – easily affordable and probably worthwhile, especially if he got to see the huts where they processed the local hash. Pierre had told him that in the huts, when they beat the resin out of the plants, you could get high for free by breathing the thick golden dust that hung in the air. Yawning again, he fought the impulse to drop his head to his chest, sensing Ibrahim’s watchful eyes on him.