CHAPTER 26

Marrakech, Summer 1977 [Then]

Moz stayed the night that first time he led Jake and Celia back to their hotel. Only Major Abbas was wrong, Jake and Celia weren't staying at Hotel Gulera. The nasrani couple had a pink-walled riad near Bab Doukkala, a rambling, four-storey town house slung around a small courtyard. And from what Moz could work out they'd bought the place, or rather Jake had, at a cost so insignificant it was less than his first electric guitar.

"Lost in Mythik Amerika" read the heading on a square of cardboard nailed to a wall in the courtyard. Four boys snarled from the album cover and it took Moz a minute or two to realize that one of them was the figure who pouted from the front of a dozen discarded magazines.

"Razor splits," said one. "Is this the end?" asked another. So many magazines were balanced on one corner of a half-emptied packing case that they'd slid over the edge onto the floor. When he looked again, Moz realized there were actually only two, Sounds and NME, but someone had bought at least a dozen copies of each.

"He must be really famous."

"Famous?"

"To afford..." Moz gestured at the guitar cases, a keyboard on black metal legs, a big tape machine. Resting against a huge Marshall amp was a black Triumph with silver mudguards and chrome pipes. Someone had wheeled it in from the alley, across a battered carpet in the hall and parked it behind a wooden pillar, one of four supporting an open balcony that ran around the courtyard, ten feet or so above their heads.

"All that belongs to his record company," said Celia. "I work for them, sort of."

"And the house?"

"Oh no," Celia said dismissively. "It was his idea to buy this shi--" Then she caught herself and smiled at the boy. "Let me change and then I'll show you round."

When Celia came back, she was wearing a silk shirt with the cuffs turned up once and the neck undone to the third button. And every time she bent forward to open a box or retrieve something from the floor Moz could see a flash of breast and a glimpse of nipple as Celia's shirt fell away from her body.

"Come on," Celia said. "This way."

They fed him something Jake cooked from a book. It involved chicken cut into small bits, unripe olives and yellow peppers. At best it was a distant cousin to tagine.

And having fed him, Jake handed him a Spéciale and watched while Moz sipped from the squat brown bottle and Celia rolled spliff after spliff on the back of Television's Marquee Moon, lining them up like little torpedoes.

Jake and Celia smoked three each, very carefully, not passing to each other, although they both offered to share with Moz.

"I should get back now," Moz said.

"In a while," said Celia, grinding out her roach. "You don't need to go anywhere yet."

Moz said it again about an hour later, when the square of sky above their heads had grown completely black and the night wind was restless enough to disturb the leaves which had dropped from a desiccated vine on the far side of the courtyard.

"It's too late," Jake said, "the streets won't be safe."

Moz resisted the urge to point out that he'd been wandering the Medina's streets after dark since he was old enough to walk. Something about Jake interested him, his casual attitude to life probably.

The boy knew exactly what interested him about Celia and he knew that she knew. Since discarding the jacket Moz had made her put on for their walk through the streets that afternoon, she'd worn a man's shirt, a gold jacket for supper and now she was back in that afternoon's silk blouse, side-lit by the light of a dozen candles, her breasts in silhouette beneath the thinnest silk he'd ever seen and her nipples erect with cold.

"You should stay," Jake said. "Go in the morning."

So the three of them sat in that half light until the candles burnt down to stumps and Moz couldn't shake the feeling that Celia and Jake were trying to outmanoeuvre each other.

"Okay," Jake said eventually, "I surrender." Picking up the last two spliffs, he stuffed them into the back pocket of his black Levi's, took a single copy each of NME and Sounds and headed indoors without saying goodnight to either Celia or Moz.

"Let him be," Celia said, when Moz stood up to follow. "He gets like that sometimes..." She patted the rattan sofa beside her. "We'll go up in a moment," she said. "But sit here first. I've got a proposition I think you'll like."

Even having looked the word up several weeks later in a dictionary which Celia kept on the kitchen table, Moz was still unsure which bit of what happened next she'd been talking about.

Jake was planning to rebuild, replaster and repaint the riad himself but he would be needing help. That was where Moz came in. Celia wanted Moz to introduce Jake to craftsmen willing to pass on their skills. Moz resisted the urge to tell Celia exactly what he thought of this idea. Instead he talked a little about when he worked on the dog woman's house, making his rubble-carrying, concrete-mixing and trench-digging sound more professional than it was.

And so Moz found himself being offered the job of houseboy and all-round helper and sometime in the hours to come he woke beside Celia in a vast bed, both of them naked and her arm thrown across his flat stomach.

"Shit," Moz said to himself.

Rolling onto his side, he slid his legs out of the bed and stood as quietly as he could. The first call to prayer had come and gone, Moz could tell that just from looking at the sky above Celia's balcony. If he moved now he could be back in the Mellah before Malika woke.

No one would believe him anyway.

"Shit," Moz said again. It was difficult to say how old the foreign woman was. Older than him and older than Jake, beyond that... Finding his jellaba, Moz turned it right side out and draped it over an old chair, looking for his shoes.

"Moz?"

He turned and a camera flashed, its light blinding. "I'm making a record," said Celia, "for posterity." She looked at the naked boy whose glance was flicking between the door, his clothes and her bare breasts. "Don't just stand there," she said. "Come back to bed."

The third fight happened in Café Georgiou in Gueliz two weeks after Celia first slept with Moz. Called for by Malika, who was angry at having been sent to do Hassan's bidding, Moz went reluctantly with Celia's salt taste still on his tongue, her ripeness sour on his fingers and the memory of her body heavy behind his eyes.

Nothing else mattered.

"You okay?" Malika asked finally, when Moz's silence began to outweigh her anger.

"Of course I'm okay," Moz said.

"You don't seem it."

"Believe me," said Moz, "life's never been better."

Celia screamed in a way he'd heard no woman scream and at night in the Mellah nothing was hidden. Moz had heard his share of sheets made and quarrels mended.

She ripped raw lines in his back and never turned him away. He took her on the warm tiles of the courtyard, in every bed of Riad al-Razor and bent over sacks of concrete in the hall. Jake only had to vanish in search of obscure building materials for Celia to hunt Moz down or Moz to come looking for her.

Once he'd followed her into a downstairs lavatory and taken her against the side wall before she had time to squat and relieve her bladder. And Celia hadn't known whether to throw him out or be furious when he came before she did.

He forgot his friends and ignored the first summons from Hassan. Soon he was cooking for Jake and Celia and running errands, collecting mail from post restant and buying their provisions at the Thursday market. They never asked for their change and seemed surprised if he offered it.