5

They drive east, sunlight stretched across their upper legs. Estepona, Marbella, the sea is never far. The Cordillera Bética rises up on their left, hazy in the afternoon light. Ilham’s winded breathing. ‘His mother,’ she says. ‘Someone has to tell her.’

‘Saleh.’

‘You think so?’

‘No.’

Trucks crawl up the incline.

‘He’ll go back and cash in on the rest,’ Thouraya says, ‘and they’ll never hear from him again.’

Ilham nods. ‘It’s the mother’s fault too, actually,’ she says then. ‘She more or less forced him into it. Her own son. Can you imagine?’

‘She had to do something, right?’

‘Yeah, and now he’s dead.’

‘She knew the risks. So did he.’

A burl in briarwood, tough as iron, Thouraya. The axe hits and sticks. The flash of anger in Ilham. You were just as keen about it, she feels like shouting, but bites her lip. After all, Thouraya would only say, you agreed to it too, didn’t you …?

In the end, yes, in the end.

The rusty soil here is pocked with scrub. The road rises and drops. Málaga, 126 kilometres. They follow the coast, no plan in mind. At Málaga they will turn north, that’s all they know, following the caravan route of their parents into the killing heat of the Spanish plateau. Like those summers in the past, lolling in the back of the packed van with their brothers and sisters, their clammy legs, the drops of sweat on their noses.

Thouraya’s father, her friend had told her as they drifted over endless asphalt on their way down, couldn’t read; he had simply followed the cars of friends and family on their route south. That was how they got to Algeciras. Everyone knew the stories about robbers along the way, bandits pretending to be policemen. That was why they travelled in a convoy of a few cars; at the rest areas along the highway they stood close together, like covered wagons in Indian territory.

At the harbour, it was the customs men.

Even as a young girl, Thouraya had looked down on her father. He was, she felt, as tough as he was stupid. She had inherited the former from him. He knew what it was to bear up. He bore up under the scraping of tanker holds in the harbour and a family with six children when he got home, his wife as she pined away. His own father, in turn, had borne up under the years of starvation in the Rif, when the birds fell dead from the sky. She knew the stories about the people who, before they could reach the city, were buried where they fell beside the road. Time had erased the stories’ sharp edges — only the solid core remained, a volcanic monolith: the suffering, the hunger, the dying.

When you see her, you can’t help but realise that she is proud of being a Berber, hard and rough as the mountains of her forefathers. But she looked down on her father. His endurance was that of a beast that did as it was told, and that bore up until its legs buckled and collapsed.

One day he had fallen forty feet and shattered his hip. ‘God was out to kill him, but got the height all wrong,’ Thouraya said. Drawn into the gearwheels of the labour-disability machine, he lived on to terrorise his family in their single-storey flat in Delfshaven.

The first time she ran away from home, she was sixteen. She did it two more times before leaving for good. She preferred the shame of the family’s lost honour to a forced marriage. While staying at the young women’s shelter, she took the opportunity to finish high school; she now worked as a beauty consultant at a salon on Nieuwe Binnenweg in Rotterdam, where she fitted Cape Verdean and Caribbean women with hair extensions and long nails. Someday she was going to start her own hair and nail salon. That was how her future looked: a strictly materialistic vision.

The road’s surface shimmers in the afternoon heat. It is thirty-six degrees out. Whenever Thouraya smokes a cigarette she opens the window a crack. Her hair floats up in the rush of hot air.

‘So what are we going to do, Thour?’

‘You’re asking me?’

‘I can’t ask him.’

Thouraya grimaces. ‘How should I know? We have to get rid of him, I guess.’

‘How were you going to do that? Just dump him along the road somewhere?’

‘Why not?’

She’s already thought about all of this. The orange lights in the roof of a tunnel slide by rhythmically.

Two highways run parallel along the Costa del Sol; they’ve taken the southern one, the one with no toll.

It is, Ilham thinks, disgraceful to feel hungry when you’re travelling with a dead person. Still, she feels hungry. They’ve barely eaten a thing since they left Rabat that morning. She can smell her own breath.

Her friend nods. ‘We’ll stop somewhere in a bit.’

‘He was nice,’ Ilham says. ‘Even though you couldn’t really talk with him. He seemed really nice to me.’

‘Don’t think about things like that. You’ll only make it harder for yourself.’

‘I can’t turn off my mind, can I?’

No reply.

Ilham asks for a cigarette.

‘But you don’t smoke during the day,’ Thouraya says.

‘I do now.’

The cigarettes are packed tightly together; she worms one out of formation. She had smoked on board too, while the boy was suffocating in the hold. Her life had been the same back then, his perhaps already over.

Thouraya hooks up her iPod to the car stereo. ‘Aïcha.’ Comme si je n’existais pas, elle est passée à côté de moi. She turns up the volume, and Cheb Khaled’s fragile voice fills the car. She sings along loudly, as though trying to drown out her thoughts. J’irai ou ton soufflé nous mène dans les pays d’ivoire et d’ébène. Thouraya makes sounds without knowing what she’s singing, like a child, and Ilham has tears in her eyes because the nice boy’s ears will never hear lovely music like this again. J’effacerai tes larmes, tes peines …

The coast is built up: gravel drives, hotels. Golf courses of green silk. Every once in a while, a viaduct spanning a mountainside wadi. All those dreary tourist lodgings, one after the other, and everywhere the turquoise sparkle of pools. She longs to float, her ears underwater, her closed eyes turned to the sun, to make the heaviness disappear along with the sounds.

Days long ago — the heat of the sun on her skin, the light’s embrace. The mesmerised stare at the nimble glistening of water in the pool. What she liked most was to float on her back and listen to phantom snatches of sound, the shout of children’s voices, bodies hitting the water. A huge distance between her and the rest. She heard her own deep breathing. She drifted; she was not afraid.

At times, they drive right beside the sea. The car parks are full; the high season is running full throttle. Ilham experiences the exhaustion that overtakes her sometimes when she walks into a round-the-clock service station, the fatigue in everything, transferred to her, too.

She sees bathers, their dark heads far out at sea. How will they ever get rid of him? There are people everywhere. Cranes sling their loads through the air; cars, vans, trucks everywhere; it is as though all those eyes can look right through their car. Hey, did you see that dead guy in the back?

The nerve-wracking milling about of people, descending from the mountains to the coast, which they have colonised, occupied, right down to the last square metre. From outer space this coastal strip can be seen as a long, stretched-out haze of stars, jammed between the blackness of the sea and the mountains; in the mountainous interior there glistens only here and there a single, feeble star, surrounded by deep darkness.

Their future consists of a couple of hundred kilometres and scarcely a hundred euros. Never have her chances been so slim. On the far side of those kilometres and euros, a wall looms.

‘We could sell the cigarettes,’ she says suddenly.

‘What?’ Thouraya turns down the music.

‘We could sell the cartons of cigarettes.’

Thouraya turns the music back up again. She’s alone with herself.

Why doesn’t she drive a little slower? If they get pulled over, they’re done for. Again, Ilham wonders: do they have the death penalty in Spain? Is being an accessory to the boy’s death enough to get you the death sentence? How would they carry out that sentence here? She remembers a sura about retribution: a soul for a soul, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth … On Al Jazeera she’d heard that punishments like that were still imposed sometimes: the surgical removal of both eyes for someone who had attacked a woman with acid. She has taken Murat Idrissi’s life. She took it by giving in. Her ‘yes’ was his death sentence. A soul for a soul: symmetrical retribution. He descends from heaven to fetch her. Together they rise up. His teeth are straight and clean.

At Fuengirola they exit to a McDonald’s. At the top of the incline, cars tear by on the A-7. The car park is lined with palms and rubber plants. They manoeuvre up to the McDrive.

‘Chicken nuggets,’ Thouraya says into the intercom. ‘And a milkshake. Strawberry.’

A question is asked.

‘Six nuggets,’ Thouraya says, as though arguing with the two-way speaker. She listens intently to the voice coming back, then turns to Ilham. ‘They don’t have milkshakes — I think that’s what she’s saying. Ridiculous.’

Then Ilham shouts her order from the passenger seat.

As they wait at the pick-up window, Thouraya says: ‘A McDonald’s without milkshakes … come on.’ And, after she’s been handed the paper bag with food and beverages: ‘Without milkshakes, they shouldn’t even be allowed to call it a McDonald’s.’

They find a spot to park the car and unpack their meal. Ilham puts the paper cup of cola down at her feet and unwraps her hamburger. Thouraya stares for a while at the box of chicken nuggets on her lap, then says: ‘Hey, I’m not going to sit in here and eat with that in the back.’

She climbs out; the car door slams.

‘I’m not scared of you, man,’ Ilham says over her shoulder. She eats her hamburger calmly. In the shade, beneath a stretch of canvas that spans the terrace, Thouraya is sitting with the untouched cardboard box on the table in front of her.

We would have been better off buying petrol with this money, Ilham thinks.

She gets out and crosses the road. The heat bites; she slips under the shade of the canvas. She shakes the ice in her cup, the cola draws a cold trail through her innards. Then she sees it: a light-blue Polo — the boy in the backseat: Mo, with his camel face, looks out the back window at her just as she looks at him, in a moment of extreme sharpness and clarity, then it is over.

‘Thour!’ she stammers. ‘That was them, there! There they are, there …’ She points; they catch a glimpse of the back of the Polo as it disappears up the ramp towards the highway.

They run to the car. The energising desperation — they have to catch up with them; it’s their only chance.

The rotunda, the turn-off, and they shoot back onto the highway. A tourist bus blows clouds of diesel fumes; they can’t get past it. Then, with a hard twist of the wheel, Thouraya dives into the tight space between two cars in the left lane. The Audi has the most powerful engine — it can do 280 — but the traffic is skittish. The coast road has one exit after another; it’s stop and go. The boys, if that’s who it was, might take any exit and lose them for good.

Ten kilometres, twenty kilometres. Fuengirola is far behind them now, and the two highways merge into one. They realise that it’s hopeless: they’ll never find the boys again. The country is huge and endless, and the roads fan out in all directions.

‘I’m positive that I saw him,’ Ilham says sheepishly.

They have enough petrol for 450 kilometres. They have almost 2200 to go.