Thirty-seven

On the western edge of Casablanca, not far from the fashionable Corniche, stood an ancient-looking outcrop of low white buildings, the shrine of Sidi Abdur Rahman. Clustered together like barnacles on a sea-wall, they were remote, haunting, and only easily reached from the mainland at low tide.

A figure moved across the beach towards them, stumbling and off-balance on impossibly high heels. Wrapped in a jet-black cashmere scarf, she reached the rocks, and found a barrier of water ebbing and swirling.

A fisherman appeared from nowhere, a giant rubber inner-tube his one-man ferry service to the islet. After a short and clumsy voyage, in which she was soaked through, Ghita made landfall. Clambering out, she ascended a steep set of steps, and made her way hesitantly to a whitewashed shed on the right side of the tomb.

The door was open and she went inside.

A crone was sitting cross-legged in the corner beside a brazier. Murmuring incantations, she held a lump of burning incense between finger and thumb. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be barely conscious.

‘Did you not receive your prince, my daughter?’ she asked, without opening her eyes.

‘Peace be upon you, Hajja,’ Ghita responded. ‘Yes, yes, I did, but I am here with another request.’

The sehura moved the incense in a circle around her head. She appeared agitated, her eyelids quivering, her breathing shallow.

‘Your father,’ she said.

‘Yes...’

‘I am sensing that he has wronged you...’

‘Yes... yes he has...’

‘Sit down on the floor.’

Ghita sat. The sorceress took her hand, and felt the knuckles one by one.

‘I want revenge,’ Ghita said, her voice charged with emotion.

The old woman’s expression soured.

‘The flames of revenge burn as a wild fire,’ she said. ‘Once alight they cannot be tamed.’

‘But I’ve already been burned.’

‘Are you prepared to face the consequences?’

‘Yes. I am more than prepared.’

The witch opened her eyes. She rooted about in a small wooden box, and took out some scarlet thread. Winding a piece of the thread around Ghita’s thumb, she tied a second strand around a lump of coal. Then she threw the coal onto the brazier, and spat out a spell.

After that, she melted a strip of lead foil in a little porcelain crucible, and poured the silvery liquid into a cup of cool seawater. Fizzing, it sunk to the bottom. The sorceress fished it out and inspected its contorted form.

‘Your father will taste the pain he has brought to you,’ she said. ‘But for this to take place, there must be blood.’

Ghita put a hand over her mouth.

‘Blood?’

‘You must make a sacrifice.’

Outside in the lane the sehura presented to Ghita a live chicken by the feet. It was flustered and fretting.

‘Kill it,’ she said.

‘But I don’t know how.’

‘You must break its neck. Only then can you hope for true revenge.’

Grimacing and gasping, Ghita fumbled for the bird’s neck. Holding it between her hands, she snapped. A great deal of flapping followed.

Hunched there in sodden clothes, her back to the city, her face to the Atlantic horizon, and with death on her hands, Ghita felt powerful in a way she had not experienced before.

‘When will I have my revenge?’ she asked, the words blown out to sea.

The sorceress closed her eyes, and touched a hand to her brow.

‘Immediately,’ she said.