Chapter 2: Taroudannt

Phillippa flicked the ash at the end of her cigarette onto the dusty earth outside the window. She watched it fall from where she sat on the passenger seat of the rented four-wheel drive and contemplated its dispersal in the slight breeze.

She inhaled another centimetre of cigarette and reluctantly tossed the butt onto the earth where it smouldered. It burnt off its final centimetre of ash before extinguishing itself. She regarded it sadly and wondered whether she might have to light up another to fend off her boredom. She glanced up at the people in the walled town. Some of them wore djalabas. Some wore jeans and tee-shirts. And one wore the very stiff and awkward-fitting uniform of a hotel porter. Phillippa was still not sure whether his services might be needed.

And then David emerged from inside the hotel foyer. Phillippa could see it wasn't good news.

"They're fully booked, too!" he announced as he jumped into the driver's seat.

"Fuck! You're taking the piss, aren't you?"

David sighed. "I wish I was."

"This is the fourth fucking hotel in this fucking town! And that was only a fucking two-star. We've done the five, four and three stars. What's left? A fucking manger?"

"I dunno," David sighed. "Anyway, there's no other hotel in this town with even one star. I don't know what it is. Maybe, the fucking package tours have taken all the rooms."

"I can't fucking believe it! What do we do? Drive to the next town?"

"I don't think we can. We're fucking miles from anywhere. And anyway it'll be after midnight before we get anywhere. All that's left is that hippy place mentioned in Lonely Planet."

"Hippy place!" sighed Phillippa. "You've got to be out of your mind. I don't want to sleep in a room full of cockroaches and a bog that doesn't flush."

"The choice is we sleep in the car."

"Fucking hell! You're kidding, right?"

David sighed again. He gripped the wheel. It was obvious to Phillippa that after that long drive over the mountains, the last thing he relished was to drive to another town. Shit! If they'd left Marrakech a few hours earlier, they might have stood a chance of making it all the way to Agadir.

"Okay!" she relented. "The hippy place, it is. Surely they'll have some rooms vacant."

David pushed his key into the ignition and backed the vehicle out of the parking bay. Working as a team, the couple navigated to the Atlas, a place that was described by Lonely Planet as funky but basic, but after having taken a few of the guidebook's recommendations in the past this testimonial did not fill either of them with any great hope.

It was all Hamid's fault. Well, not so much his fault as theirs for not wanting him to leave so soon after this their third night together. Hamid had really come into his own when he'd lost that weird melancholy of his. Phillippa still relished the memory of his prick in her arse with David's in her mouth. She'd just about got used to the taste of his circumcised penis with that strange hardness that the fully exposed glans had developed.

"Well, this time there must be some rooms," Phillippa commented outside the Atlas as David readied to get out of the car. "No one would want to stay in this dump unless they had to."

Indeed, the Atlas really wasn't at all prepossessing. It reminded Phillippa of those places she'd stayed in India when she'd gone backpacking in her student days. Those were dives that only an enormous amount of dope could make tolerable. They were worse even than those shitty places in the Australian outback, and without the certainty of a huge amount of dope and beer to lessen the discomfort.

"We're in luck!" announced David when he emerged from the hotel foyer, this time with no stiffly suited porters in visible attendance. "They had several rooms free, actually, but I slipped the girl at the desk a few dirhams so we might just get a decent one."

"I fucking hope so!" Phillippa snorted. "I'm fucking knackered!"

If this was the best room in the house, then fuck knows what the others were like, Phillippa groaned as she plumped herself on the sagging mattress whose springs twanged under her weight. The en suite toilet and shower were divided from the rest of the room by a thick curtain. The framed portraits of badly painted mountains didn't disguise at all the dinginess of the plastered walls. Like everywhere in Morocco, the floor was covered by cold tiles, but these were cracked and almost certainly infested with the most disgusting germs. Phillippa knew that any moment now, one of those horrible cockroaches would appear, probably from the shower, and scamper noisily across the floor, its antennae flickering cheekily as it did so. She opened her packet of cigarettes, only three left now, and lit one up.

"What do we do now?" she asked blowing a cloud of smoke about the room.

David sighed again.

"We unpack. We smoke a joint. And we see what's going down in the bar."

"Bar? Does a shit-hole like this have a bar?"

"Yeah. I saw a sign pointing to it when we came in."

"I didn't see it."

"Well, it wasn't obvious. It was kinda painted on a bit of old wood, you know, fashioned into an arrow. But it showed definite promise."

"Okay. Sounds promising. But if it's crap, I vote we go to the five-star for a beer. Or even one of those crappy Moroccan wines."

"I'd rather have crappy beer than crappy wine," David replied throwing a suitcase onto the bed and watching it bounce up and down.

"Whatever!"

When they arrived in the bar, slightly mellower after their shared joint, they found they weren't the only people there. Several of the clientele were Moroccan men. No Moroccan women, so not an obvious place to find a prostitute. Most of the people gathered around on the battered banquettes in the dingy shadowy light underneath the fading tourist tat nailed to the wall were clearly Western. And yes, judging from the ethnic clothes many of them wore and the plethora of facial jury, if not hippy exactly, certainly in that tradition. Despite having once been not too unlike them herself in appearance, Phillippa felt quite ill at ease.

Four battered cane armchairs of the type Moroccans seemed to like so much surrounded a couple of empty wooden tables. One of those chairs was occupied by an attractive young woman.Perhaps this evening wouldn't be such a dead loss, after all!

"What are you having?" David asked, gesturing his head towards the bar where a Moroccan man with untypically long hair was serving.

"A beer. Any kind of fucking beer. And try and get some cigs as well."

As David strode off, Phillippa approached the table she'd previously spotted. Although she and David had dressed down in relatively casual clothes, she couldn't help feeling almost overdressed in this place. But sod them! She wasn't in her twenties any more!

"You don't mind if we sit here, love?" she asked, as she plonked herself in one of the cane chairs.

The young woman she addressed was intent on writing a letter and was visibly startled to be spoken to. She nodded her head.

"Yes. Why not?" she said in a distinctly North European accent, and then bowed her head and returned to her writing.

Phillippa snarled. What was the point of seeking company if it just ignored her? She lit another cigarette, her last, and hoped her husband wouldn't disappoint her with regards to her nicotine requirements. She flicked the ash into the huge pottery ashtray in the middle of the table and regarded the young woman. She had long hennaed hair that fanned over her shoulders and wore an interesting mixture of ethnic clothes that Phillippa could see included only a few Moroccan items. Indian beads, a West African tie-dyed tee-shirt, and a brightly coloured ankle-length skirt that could have come from anywhere in the developing world. She wore flat-heeled sandals and her toenails were painted in crude red enamel.

"Where do you come from, love?" she asked.

The young woman raised her head. She must have been in her mid-twenties with freckles that spread out and merged on her richly tanned skin. There was a ring through one of her eyebrows and another through a nostril. She wore no make-up at all and huge dangling ear-rings fell out from underneath her bush of reddened hair.

"Excuse me?"

"Which country do you come from? Are you Dutch?"

"No, I don't come from Germany. I am Danische, er, Danish."

"Danish? Copenhagen?"

"Kristianer," she nodded. And then she lowered her head again to continue writing.

Shit! Was that all she had to say for herself, Phillippa wondered.

David wandered back carrying two bottles, two small glasses and, Phillippa was pleased to see, two packets of Marlboro Lite.

"Well, it's better than Casa Bleu," sniffed Phillippa taking the cigarettes off her husband, who didn't smoke. "Or worse, Gauloise."

"They make shit rolling tobacco," affirmed David. He bent his head towards the young woman and raised a querying eyebrow.

Phillippa shrugged.

Then David touched her gently on the knee and pointed at the bar hehind her. Phillippa turned her head, but the smell already alerted her to what he was referring to. The barman was sharing a joint with a couple of Moroccan men, one quite old in a djalaba, who were standing at the bar. Phillippa smiled.

She dug into her pocket, and pulled out a sachet and a packet of king-size Rizlas.

"At least we don't have to go back to our room," she said with a smile.

As she busied herself in assembling the joint, she noticed the young woman watching her fingers as she crumbled some of Morocco's finest into the pulled-thin contents of a Marlboro cigarette.

"It's from the Rif," Phillippa said.

"The Rif?"

"Hash-growing area of Morocco. Somewhere in the North. Never been there."

"I've been there," the young woman remarked. "But that looks very good. Better than the hash I bought."

"A friend of ours in Marrakech got it for us," Phillippa replied, remembering Hamid's rather shy smile.

"You've been to Marrakech?"

"Just drove down from there this morning. Over the Tizi-n-Test."

"It's a beautiful road."

"It was cloudy when we came down," David commented. "We didn't see anything until we'd driven through it. Not so much fun driving, though. What's your name?"

"My name? Marla."

"David and Phillippa. We're from London. Have you ever been there?"

"No. Never."

And then Marla dropped her head down and continued writing.

Shit! Phillippa sighed. She thought they were getting somewhere. Anyway, you couldn't tell with these hippy girls. Some of them were pretty uptight. But at least she knew Marla smoked dope.

In fact, it was only after they'd shared the joint between them that Marla opened up at all. She pushed her hair off her face and smoked it in a very strange way, cupping her fist and holding it between her forefingers.

"That's all right, love," remarked Phillippa as the joint was passed to David. "We've not got Hepatitis or anything!"

"But you don't know if I might," remarked Marla with a smile. "Anyway, I like it cool. I don't smoke cigarettes, so the smoke hurts my lungs."

"It does me, too," smiled David, mimicking Marla's pose and inhaling deeply from the hole between his thumb and fingers.

The conversation began haltingly, but bit by bit Phillippa established that Marla was travelling around Morocco by herself on public transport following an itinerary taken from her Danish-language guidebook. She had been touring with a male friend, but they'd had a quarrel in Meknes and had chosen to go their separate ways. During her journey, she'd mostly been staying in places rather like the Atlas and was fairly contemptuous of the more expensive places Phillippa and David preferred.

"You never meet anyone in places like that," she opined.

"Well, at least there's no television here," remarked David. "Everywhere you go there's a TV. And they're always showing another atrocity in Palestine. That fucking Sharon! He's a real cunt."

"I mean," agreed Phillippa, "if he thinks he's going to resolve the intifada by driving tanks into the Gaza strip, he must be fucking mad! It's a real hornet nest he's stirring. Fuck knows where it'll end!"

Normally when David and Phillippa expressed their opinions in front of hippy types they expected a sympathetic response. After all, if anything united those of liberal opinion it was a general disgust of Israel's atrocities, but Phillippa noticed that Marla looked distinctly uncomfortable.