The Random Reader by Various Authors

Author:Various Authors [Random House]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869799359
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Inside a Pomegranate

Sarah Laing

Tangier was Ari’s idea; I would have chosen Paris. We had come over on the ferry from Algeciras, sticking close to the bare-headed tourists. Moroccan women wore djellabas, hair tucked beneath hijabs, their moustached husbands carrying televisions in cartons. The bar served wine, but we feared disapproval. Anyway, we’d drunk too much in Spain. Our guidebook said we’d be ripped off upon disembarking; someone would offer us a taxi ride and charge us too much money. We practised our la, shukran, non, merci because the map said Hotel el Muniria was within walking distance.

Only, it was dark when we arrived. We watched three sooty-faced stowaways being led off in handcuffs by armed police. We walked along a dirt road surrounded by barbed wire, our backpacks digging ditches in our shoulders. I felt the panic I always had in a new city, with nothing familiar to guide me. Taxis cruised, their doors half-open like Venus flytraps. ‘English? Español? Deutsch?’ they called.

We succumbed to a beat-up Mercedes. The driver grunted when we told him the hotel, turning one corner then another, squeezing up a street, stopping, reaching round to open our door. We were handed a bill too big for such a short journey, and already we had failed.

The woman who opened the curtain wanted our passports. ‘But what if she doesn’t give them back?’ I whispered to Ari, sliding them into the gap beneath the glass. ‘What if she locks us out and sells them on the black market?’

Security, she said. This way we’d be sure to pay for our Willam S. Burroughs room, which was booked by junkies and romantics, blowing their money on hashish and carpets. We wrote our names and marital details onto a form to be exchanged for keys. The woman wasn’t wearing a headscarf and I heard her children yelling in the background. She looked about my age.

The room was spartan, wooden-floored, pale green walls. The mattress formed a shallow bowl within its frame. French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking flat Moorish roofs, down to the black harbour.

That night I dreamed of scorpions creeping out of the cracks in the bedhead, crawling over my face. They sat at the end of my bed, tails like mermaids, and swelled into human size. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar, they sang.

But they didn’t. That was the muezzin, in the tower not far from us. ‘God, so early,’ said Ari, who liked sleeping till noon.

‘Better prayer than sleep,’ I said. I’d read that in the guidebook too.

It was too early to get up, and besides we had been married, weeks before, on the beach in Fiji, ankles in the water, my wedding dress tucked into my knickers. Ari had worn his trousers rolled and our friends had beamed, their necks strung with hibiscus flowers. We still had lots of recreational sex.

At nine we dressed for coffee. The morning sun revealed a skyline of TV aerials and satellite dishes, washing flapping on rooftops. We stepped over the cleaner scrubbing the stairs, opening the main door to a street only a few blocks from the waterfront.

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