7

The truck drivers looked up when they walked into the roadside restaurant. Their gazes swung from Thouraya to Ilham and back again. The bar was covered in saucers, each one waiting with a teaspoon at its edge. The television was showing the football scores. A young woman with an angular face was polishing the crockery, then wrapping the knives and forks in paper napkins. There was a tinkling sound every time she dipped into the cutlery tray. Every once in a while, she paused to take a drag on her cigarette. Smoke coiled up from the ashtray.

They took a table somewhere halfway to the back of the restaurant, beside a window from which they could see a sun-bleached plastic playhouse in a little playground. The swings were swaying gently. Thouraya laid her phone beside her knife and fork, then made a face and snatched it back off the sticky tabletop. She shifted uneasily in her chair. ‘Hey. Listen. Smell me, would you?’

Ilham leaned across the table.

‘Can you smell it?’

‘No,’ Ilham said. She shook her head and sank back in her chair. ‘Maybe a little,’ she said then.

Thouraya blinked her eyes, aghast. ‘Pffff … You’re kidding, right?’

Ilham could smell it on herself too. It was in her hair, her clothes.

One of the men got up and went out of the door. Light, sharp as a scalpel, entered the room.

The skinny young woman came over to them. She wore white stockings with frills and black patent-leather shoes, like she was taking her first communion.

‘I never drink coffee,’ Thouraya said. ‘But now I’m going to.’

‘Café,’ Ilham said, holding up two fingers.

She had no idea why she’d ordered the same. Maybe to keep the moment of contact as short as possible. Before the waitress smelled it too. Before she smelled it and told the men at the bar that those two over there smelled like a corpse, and the men wouldn’t be able to keep their eyes off them.

They fell silent. Ilham jumped every time the purple insect lamp crackled, each time another fly was electrocuted.

‘We have to get rid of him,’ Thouraya said quietly. ‘Really.’ And a little later: ‘What I actually feel like is leaving the whole fucking car right here.’

A grisly undertaking, somewhere over the horizon. Ilham stared at the dust-coloured hills, the wrinkles in the rock, which from this distance looked soft and pliable. Who he was — a son, a brother, a boy with long lashes and slender fingers — didn’t matter anymore. He was nothing but a body they had to get rid of. A dead body that dragged them with its stench halfway into the underworld themselves. It had to happen: they had to be rid of him because he already belonged there and they still belonged here.

It had been the stench, Ilham realised, that finally alienated her from him.

Thouraya lifted the saucer, keeping the cup balanced with her other hand. ‘I’m going outside. Oh man, this is so hard for me to take. Really, so hard …’ She was on the verge of tears. She was always so careful to keep herself clean. All right, she didn’t pray anymore — you had to be clean for that — but she showered two or three times a day if she had the chance. She washed her hands more often than anyone else Ilham knew. A neurosis inherited from her mother, who turned up her nose at the homeless people in Rotterdam, whose life on the street started with dirty fingernails and ended as human garbage. The homeless were the focal point of her mother’s fear of contamination.

The patio was deserted. They sat in the wind that tumbled from the slopes. Ilham was startled by her desperation. ‘We’ll find someplace,’ she said. ‘Somewhere away from the road. We’ll do it there, okay?’

Thouraya nodded, her eyes on the ground.

Ilham went inside to pay. The drivers glanced up from the television; the waitress had disappeared. Ilham stood at the bar and waited. It took an awfully long time.

‘Maria!’ one of the men shouted, his eyes still fixed on the screen.

Ilham looked outside; she heard voices and laughter on the patio. Boys — they were talking to Thouraya across the tables. Moroccans, she figured; she heard Dutch.

The waitress appeared from behind the swinging doors, her hands fastening her apron strings behind her back. Ilham slid a ten-euro note across the bar. They were more or less the same age. They looked at each other briefly as she received the change, their eyes searching around in the other.

‘Gracias,’ Ilham said.

‘De nada.’

At the door, she looked back. The waitress was setting cups on the rows of saucers. ‘Hasta luego,’ she said to Ilham, as though passing along a secret message, an SOS for rescue.

Wolves, Ilham thought. There were three of them. One was sitting across from Thouraya, his legs straddling the back of the chair like a cowboy.

‘Jesus, Il, take that look off your face.’ The transformation was complete. She had pepped herself up to her old, radiant self, ready for action.

‘As-salamu alaykum, princess,’ said the boy on the chair.

‘And who might these be?’ Ilham asked.

‘The Rotter-Damned Posse,’ the boy said.

‘Maassluis,’ Thouraya said. ‘Don’t let them kid you.’

Ilham could tell by the way she raised her eyes, the little twist at the corners of her mouth.

The boy laughed and ruffled his hair with one hand. ‘0–10’s the code, baby.’ He held his head tilted to one side, a frisky dog. Then he introduced Ilham to his friends — ‘Driss, Jalal’ — and, finally, to himself. ‘Noureddine. Noor for you. It looks like we’re heading in the same direction.’

‘Oh,’ Ilham said, ‘is that what she’s been telling you?’

‘We figured,’ said the boy whose name was Driss, ‘that we could go to some motel later and chill. Spliff, little vodka maybe. That you two could go along. Fun, right?’

‘Ugh,’ Ilham said, ‘you guys are too slick for your own good.’

They had been to the coast; they’d spent almost the whole month of August on the beach and cruising the streets of Nador. They had been on the same boat as the girls. They were taking it easy. ‘Tomorrow is another day,’ said Noureddine. He laced his fingers together at the back of his head. ‘Lectures won’t be starting for another week.’

‘Well, well, Mr Higher Education,’ Thouraya said.

‘Is that what they call them these days, lectures, at vocational school?’ Ilham asked.

His friends laughed. Noureddine leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at her. There was something like amusement in his eyes, something vaguely superior that she hadn’t seen before in boys like him. It made her waver. Her natural defences faltered.

Jalal went in and got drinks, Driss looked at his phone; the sun glistened on the pavement.

‘Hamdullah!’ Driss said suddenly. ‘An Etap. Eighty kilometres from here.’

Noureddine sighed contentedly. ‘Yeah, man, kickin’ back.’

‘It’s hotter than a witch’s tit, wallah,’ said Driss.

‘You wish,’ Ilham said.

Thouraya got up. ‘Come on, Il.’

‘Where are we off to now, ladies?’ Noureddine asked.

‘Girl stuff,’ Thouraya said.

She walked into the cafe, Ilham on her heels.

Thouraya pulled the door of the ladies’ room closed behind them and lit into her right away. ‘Why are you acting so bitchy? I’m trying to fix this up. I smell like a goddamn’ — here she lowered her voice — ‘corpse, I feel filthy, I want to get out of this shit country. They’re from Holland, Il, these guys are our ticket — don’t you get it?’

‘He’s a snake, just like Saleh,’ Ilham said, intimidated.

‘So what? We need these guys. Have you got a better idea? We’ve got nothing, Il. Zero, nada.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘Let me fix this. You stay out of it.’

Ilham disappeared into one of the cubicles and shut the door behind her.

‘Okay?’ Thouraya said.

Ilham could see Thouraya’s mother-of-pearl toenails in her gladiator sandals. ‘Okay?’ she heard her ask again.

‘Suit yourself,’ Ilham said. She heard the sound of an atomiser. The floral scent of Anaïs Anaïs wafted under the door. ‘I’ll leave it here for you,’ Thouraya said, and went out.

They kept the windows open. The stench was unbearable, but after a few kilometres the dry retching had stopped. In late, gritty light they drove the empty highway, the boys out in front. Driss was driving — it was his car. Sometimes the boys dropped back beside them, showing off, laughing. Noureddine was lying in the back seat, his tanned feet sticking out the window. Thouraya waved.

A hedge of sunflowers ran on for kilometres, their leaves withered and limp, the big flower heads languishing on tall, thin stalks. Then, once again, tunnels and viaducts across deep ravines; for a while, the road followed a dry riverbed in the depths. At the end of the pass a high plateau opened before them, the catchment area of the Guadalquivir.

They turned off at an area de servicios. The city coming up, Ilham saw, was Jaén.

Thouraya parked the car far away from the boys. She spritzed a bit of perfume on herself and handed the bottle to Ilham. Behold the female of the species, approaching the pack across the hot asphalt. It was second nature to Thouraya; somewhere in early puberty she had realised that the erotic economy was a promissory one. Keeping a little fire going, sometimes a few little fires at once. Stirring it up a bit, blowing softly across the coals now and then. Sometimes you didn’t have to do anything at all.

A chain restaurant. A little further on, at the end of the parking lot, the Etap hotel, rectangular as a domino.

Ilham was reconciled to her role as the beauty’s friend. She didn’t want anything from them. On the patio behind the restaurant she drank cola through a straw and stayed out of everything — the conversation, the hormonal stuff. Only when Noureddine spoke did she assay him quickly, as though listening to him. He had the grin of a Bedouin on horseback. His hair was not short and trimmed up tight at the sides, like most Moroccan boys had it, but full and gleaming. His existence ran of its own accord. He was desired. By friends, women, by life itself. Ilham knew girls who were like that. A couple of them, not many; graceful, subdued creatures with long fingers. Even their knees were pretty. Boys like that were even rarer. Gijs Loman was the only one she could think of. From the first year of secondary school, they’d had what they called an ‘intellectual friendship’. They talked about politics and culture; sex and gossip were inferior. She was the one who watched over the ground rules, and only rarely did anything intrude.

She kept the existence of Gijs Loman a secret from her parents. They would have pulled her out of school right away if they’d known she was seeing a Dutch boy. Her mother reminded her regularly and laboriously of the gap between the Dutch and Moroccans — the idiotic huma hollandiyen, wa hna mgharba was etched into her consciousness — it was a chasm that was not to be bridged.

It ended when he was scouted and went to play field hockey for Bloemendaal. He started on an elite sports curriculum, and so she saw him only rarely. All that time she had been in love with him, she realised, and had hidden it away beneath grave conversation.

Darkness crept into the valley. Two women on a bench watched silently over their children in the fenced-in playground. Demonstrative Spanish faces. The playground equipment was built on a substrate of soft, bilious-green astroturf.

Gijs Loman seemed like centuries ago; it was as though the hope and energy of her schooldays had deserted her, and she had been expelled for good from the world she’d once wanted to be a part of so badly. The only Dutch people she saw these days were at the call centre where she worked, in the basement room where she spent her days looking at feet and ankles passing on the pavement outside, while her lips, tickled by the mike’s foam cover, paid service to savings plans. Her life was slipping backwards, she felt, while those of her former classmates and college friends kept moving on. Or maybe it wasn’t so much that her life was slipping backwards but underwards, if you could even say that; she was sinking slowly into the deep, and looking up from below at the rush of human legs. She drifted further and further away from the others, tired and defeated.

At times, she wasn’t all that far from giving in — all she had to do was nod and her life would take on its form. Before she knew it, there would be a Moroccan Dutchman at her side, she would have henna tattoos on her hands, and she’d be a watermelon on stilts. Even though her husband had sworn he was as modern as the next man, it wouldn’t be long before they’d be having arguments about the wearing of the hijab. And that would be her last argument. After that she would still experience moments of rage and desperation, but generally speaking it was better this way, quieter and better. That’s the way it had gone with her mother and with her grandmother, and all those women before them whose bones had long ago been absorbed by the stony soil of the Rif.