“Pssst! ”
It’s the Boy. I can’t see him, only hear him. The medina is crammed with noise, its maze of tiny streets choked with the scents of paraffin, leather, spit-roast meats, sour sweat, baked earth and strong rough tobacco. Here and there, the souk opens out, exposing its squinting stallholders to a livid blue sky. But for now we’re in the thick of it, two clueless pink-skins in an ancient labyrinth, lost among beggars, hawkers, shoppers, mopeds, donkey carts and big wire cages squawking with heaps of angry hens. The Boy’s hiss slices through the chaos, clean as a whistle, but I can’t spot him anywhere.
I’m disappointed. I’m supposed to be relieved because the official line is, he’s been annoying us from the off, prancing around like some mad imp of consumerism, urging us to buy this, buy that, buy the other. The thing is, we do want to buy a carpet, a nice Berber runner for the hallway, but he’s probably on commission and, besides, we’d rather do it in peace.
My disappointment tempers the arousal I’m half ashamed to acknowledge. At first, I couldn’t be sure it was sexual although I suspected it was. Heck, it usually is with me. And then I knew damn well it was when my groin flickered its need and I grew aware of my inner thighs, filmy with sweat, sliding wetly as I walked, my sarong flapping around my ankles. But it’s a weird kind of sexual. It’s not as if I fancy him, this slip of a lad with the calm, creepy eyes, but I’m drawn to him in a way I can’t identify. He keeps dropping back from us to sidle among the crowd or prowl at a distance, elegant and stealthy, stalking us like prey. My money’s in a belt. I must have checked it a dozen times. I don’t think he’s a thief though.
I don’t know what he is. All I know is he’s sparked off in me some intrigue, some furtive hunger that makes me not quite trust myself. We keep walking, Tom and I, and within the humid fabric of my knickers, I’m as sticky and swollen as a Barbary fig.
“Pssst!”
His call sounds so close I actually look over my shoulder, expecting him right there, but no sign. It’s as if he’s invisible, some mythical djinni up to no good or a golem from the old Jewish quarter, laughing to himself as I pat my money belt once again.
“Seem to have shaken him off, the little shit,” Tom says mildly as he unscrews his water bottle.
I realize Tom’s not hearing what I hear, making me question my senses. The heat in this place stupefies me and I haven’t been sleeping well either. At night, after an evening of jugglers, magicians, fire-eaters and snake-charmers, the bedsheets tangle themselves around my legs, cobras for the pipe-player, and my mind whirls with madness and enchantments. To soothe me, I think of the stillness beyond the town: snow-capped mountains, endless deserts and a black velvet night sprayed with silver stars. But I sleep fitfully, slipping in and out of dreamscapes, grotesque and lewd, and I wake each morning sloppy with desire. When I sink onto Tom’s cock, drowsy and heavy, I feel fucked already, post-coitally limp, as if I’ve been possessed by an incubus, a gleeful demon who screwed me senseless as I slept. My limbs seem to liquefy as I ride Tom, awash with vagueness, remembering feral creatures, how they pawed at my flesh, and priapic monsters with gas-mask faces, rutting in steamy swamps.
I don’t imagine we’ll buy a carpet today. I’m not really in the mood. Feeling a tad psychotic, to tell the truth. But I hide it well. I’m probably just premenstrual.
A few minutes later and the Boy’s with us again. I don’t see him but I smell him, a pungent sexual whiff as we pass stalls selling metalware, shards of sunlight glancing off pewter, copper and brass. Then, in the shadows behind, I see two green beads peering out from the gloom, points of luminescence, freakishly bright. My heart pumps faster. Among so many brown-eyed folk, those eyes are hauntingly strange, non-human almost. He doesn’t belong to these people, I think. An outsider, perhaps; a man who leaps across gullies high in the Atlas mountains, surviving on thin air.
“Oh, God, there’s that smell again,” complains Tom.
A few yards ahead, the Boy darts beneath a tatty awning. He’s wearing filthy, calf-length shorts and his legs, I notice, are dark with hair. He’s a youth, I think, and then some. Old enough, I’m quite sure, to go snuffling under my sarong.
“It’s foul,” says Tom. “Really fucking rank.”
I think he’s talking about the Boy. I think he’s smelled his appetite and is repulsed. Then it dawns on me he’s talking about the tannery. When we were last here, I was about ready to retch with the stink of it but now the tannery’s just a backnote and it’s the Boy’s odour I’m getting. It’s as if my senses are tuning in to him, to the sound, smell and sight of him, and everything else recedes. The whole thing’s starting to make me nervous.
Tom offers me the water before taking a swig himself. He has beautiful manners, partly because he’s from Surrey but stemming too from a naturally submissive streak he doesn’t fully acknowledge. He’s no pushover, believe me, but his gentle manner combined with a curious intellect, makes him tend to the deferential or at least a fascinated passivity. Give him a good book and he’s lost for hours. Give him a good woman – or better still a bad one – and he’s lost for months. I took him away from someone else. Well, he left her for me at any rate. Two years down the line and we’re still in love, half daft and quite besotted.
But I’m no fool. I know damn well if some other woman caught his heart he’d be gone in a flash, leaving me spitting with rage. I like Tom a lot. I want to hang on to him. I want to keep him mine. But all I can do is hope for the best. And meanwhile, I try to catch him as I can, all those impossible charcoals and pencils, all that seductive permanent ink.
My favourite sketches are the ones I do in bed at night, Tom lying there with his mouth agape, dreaming eyeballs quivering beneath his lids. I love him so much when he’s fast asleep, when he doesn’t even know he exists. Tom doesn’t realize I do this. I keep the sketches well hidden, my treasured possessions, proof of all the hours I stole from him while I watched him sleep. I have bouts of insomnia, you see. It’s not only out here.
“Half a mo’. Batteries,” says Tom. He edges past slow, swathed people, and I wait for him by a spice stall. Black strips of tamarind and threaded figs hang like jungle vegetation over sacks heaped with nuts, dried fruit, tea leaves and herbs. SNORING CURE – never fail! says a sign and aphrodisiac for the KING! proclaims another. The air is powder dry and colours catch in my throat: scarlet, copper, ochre and rust, an earthy rainbow of seasonings that makes me cough like a hag. “I have medicine! Never fail!” cries a djellaba-hooded man, and I protest my health, realizing there’s some seriously dodgy shit for sale here: a turtle strapped to the canopy’s scaffold, bunches of goats’ feet, dried hedgehogs, chameleons, snake skins and live lizards flicking around in giant-sized jars.
“Pssst! Lady!”
His voice goes straight to my cunt. The sensation’s so strong he might have tongued me there. My senses reel and I turn, catching a glimpse of sharp brown shoulder blades before he’s swallowed up by the crowd. Across the way, Tom’s holding a pack of batteries, appealing to a stallholder who looks out with a half-blind gaze, his eyes veiled with cataracts. A woman with a wispy beard jostles me. Instinctively, I check my money belt and I see the Boy just feet away, throwing a backwards glance, an invitation to follow. I cannot refuse him. I don’t even question my options. I just go.
As I move, Tom turns. He catches my eyes, nodding acknowledgement of my direction. It’s fine, he’s cool. He rarely makes a fuss. And, should we lose each other, we’ve both got our phones. An image comes to me of my mobile trilling away, whiskery rats nosing the screen where the words “ Tom calling…” glow for no one. I push the image away. It’s not important. But the Boy is.