Rocks, The by Peter Nichols

Author:Peter Nichols [Nichols, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-26T04:00:00+00:00

Five

Shirts?” said their concierge the next morning after he’d asked them what they were looking for in the souk.

“Yes.” Aegina opened her bag and pulled out the black shirt. She held it up. “I want to buy shirts like this one. Do you know where we can find them?”

His head lolled backward and he emitted a high quavering note, a private giggle of sorts. “How many shirts you want to buy?”

“Maybe a hundred. It depends on the price,” said Aegina.

“One hundred shirts?”

“Yes.”

The hotelier motioned with his hand for them to sit at the table by the fountain in the courtyard. “In twenty minutes I will have someone take you to the shirts. Sit, I bring you tea.”

“We’ve been through the souk and seen most of the shirts there,” said Aegina.

The hotelier waved a finger and clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “Not souk. You will see.”

Fifteen minutes later, he reappeared with a boy of about twelve. Not a scrofulous street urchin but healthy and clean, neatly dressed in blue shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt that looked like a school uniform. “This is Yusef. He is my son. He will take you to see shirts.”

“Thank you so much,” said Aegina.

Yusef, shy but full of the gravity of his mission, nodded at them. They followed him outside.

The boy led them along indistinguishable streets, away from the Djemaa El-Fna. He walked steadily ahead, looking over his shoulder occasionally to see that his charges were following him. When Luc and Aegina tried to come alongside him, he walked faster. They reached a district that was not the souk, not picturesque: trash-strewn lots filled with carts, oil drums, toppling shanty sheds cobbled together from scraps of wood, corrugated leftovers; carpenters’ shops drifted up with sawdust; upholsterers’ yards windblown with cotton flotsam; sheds housing ironworks, stacks of rusted plate.

“Luc,” said Aegina, tugging at his sleeve, “it’s the polígono.” The Spanish word for the industrial park at the edge of large towns in Spain. As a child, Aegina had often gone with her father to the polígono at Manacor when Gerald took some broken piece of mechanical contrivance to be welded or bought paper bags full of nails or galvanized screws.

“I guess,” said Luc. He’d not been much of a polígono-goer himself.

Yusef, following his nose as unerringly as a dog padding home to dinner, led them through a warren of smaller alleys. They passed long sheds holding bolts of cloth, poles draped with dripping bundles of vegetable-dyed variegated yarn. Luc and Aegina trotted, almost stumbling with distraction, after him.

The boy slowed and stepped into the doorway of an unmarked shopfront. They followed him into a room that might once have been a small travel agency. Pinned to the walls were sunbleached TWA posters: one showing the Liberty Bell, PHILADELPHIA above, FLY TWA below; in another, cartoon saguaro cacti and golf clubs erupting out of a fat, cartoon cowboy boot, with the legend: ARIZONA—FLY TWA. Small models of Air France jets and Royal Air Maroc DC-3s sat on the room’s single desk.

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