The Road to McCarthy (11 page)

“Are you kidding? They hate the feckin’ English most of all. Particularly the posh ones from the south. Can’t stand the smug bastards.”

Have I told him I live in the south? I can’t remember. It’s been a long day. Back on the mint tea tomorrow, that’s for sure.

“You don’t seem English, but.”

There’s another pause. I don’t know whether it’s a good one or a bad one.

“I don’t usually feel at ease with English people. There is one thing that worries me, mind.”

I think he’s smiling in the dark, but I can’t be sure.

“What’s that?”

“This tremendous interest you have in food. It’s very un-Irish, you know.”

I walk back to the hotel past countless stray cats and find myself thinking of life’s imperfections. In an ideal world, it would have been the beer first, then the red wine, and then the whiskey. I suppose we can only try our best.

Café Portes
is a split-level confection of swirling ceilings, marble floors and wrought-iron banisters and balustrades, an elegant Moorish art deco extravagance straight out of
Casablanca
. Since its heyday it’s gone teetotal and the cocktail bar, though not removed, has been emphatically bricked up. The original Madame Porte was a fascist sympathizer and the place was once a hotbed of Italian and German spies, though you can’t help thinking they mustn’t have been very good spies if everyone knew where to find them. “The Pimpernel? He is eating cake in Café Portes with the Silver Eagle.”

Petit déjeuner complet
is very good and costs next to nothing. I’m halfway through a wafer-thin grilled cheese sandwich filled with deliciously un-Gibraltarian melted cheese, when a cloak-and-dagger voice hisses in my ear in a peculiar mockney accent.

“Tellygraph
, sir?
Dily Tellygraph?
Aww this moanin’s Inglish pipers!”

I turn and find a wizened Moroccan newspaper vendor brandishing the full range of English titles. RAILTRACK, say the headlines, reminding me what I’m missing at home. PARKER BOWLES. big brother. FOOT AND MOUTH.

“Piper, sir? ‘Ow are you t’day sir? Lavely moanin’.”

I can only imagine that he must be a survivor of the postwar anything-goes years, when the street traders of Tangier were renowned for their ability
to mimic the many different accents they heard. I haven’t said a word though, so how did he know which accent to pick?

“Go on, sir.
Tellygraph
. ’Ave a quick shufty if you like.”

Cor luv-a-duck, ’ees gawn over the top now. At the moment, life is strange enough without the added complication of a
Daily Telegraph
editorial. I decline with all the dignity I can muster: “No fanks, me old cock spar-rar,” pay my bill and leave.

I’m walking back towards the hotel along Boulevard Pasteur when another Moroccan Cockney impersonator marks me out from the mid-morning crowds and falls in step alongside me. “No money, no honey,” he incants, in a strange monotone that sounds not unlike Radiohead. “No money, no honey.” Why is he doing this? Is he trying to tell me he has neither money nor honey, but would like some of each? “No money, no honey.” Or is he letting me know that I won’t be getting any honey unless I can guarantee cash up-front? “No money, no honey.” Perhaps it’s Moroccan rhyming slang. “No money, no honey, no money no honey—Gawd bless you, sah!” And with that he turns away and crosses the road, for all I know on his way to the British consulate to audition for the new Guy Ritchie movie.

At the top of the street I bump into Tommy and Conor, who have selected the outside tables of the Café de France as their early-morning smoking venue.

I join the brothers for coffee, and we are immediately besieged by the entire black-market economy of Tangier. Three times in as many minutes Conor is propositioned by shoeshine boys who don’t give Tommy and me a second glance, and three times he declines. A boy with withered arms asks for money and we give him some, then a woman tries to sell us a tray of things, but we don’t know what they are. She says they’re very good, mind. And then there’s a loud noise in my right ear. “Miaoowh!”

I turn and see a lady in traditional dress, smiling sweetly at me. She leans forward.

“Miaoowh! Meee-owwh!”

“Ah,” says Conor, assessing the situation in an instant. “It’s the lady who miaows.”

“How are you today?” enquires Tommy. She seems fine. She’s washing her paws now.

The queue of street people waiting to perform for us is taking on the proportions of a medium-sized carnival, so we leave and walk down into the medina. We’ve passed through the crowds and are heading down a deserted alley when someone hisses from a doorway.

“Hash!”

This time there’s no reassuringly comic Britpop accent. A tough-looking young man has stepped out in front of us, brandishing a huge lump of cannabis on the palm of his hand.

“Hash? You like? You like? Speak English? American?”

Or perhaps he’s selling henna. Or Oxo.

“Tá faitíos orm nach geaitheann muid tobac,”
says Conor.

“Tá sé go dona don tsláinte,”
adds Tommy.

The man narrows his eyes, then disappears back into the shadows.

“Whenever things get heavy, we just speak Irish,” says Conor.

“Confuses the fuck out of them,” explains Tommy.

At the top of the alleyway, on a hill looking out across the harbor to Spain, is the Hotel Continentale. It’s a masterpiece of decaying fin-de-siècle opulence that was probably never that opulent in the first place. The lobby is a riot of stained glass, ancient tiles, and cushions to lie down on while you wait for something to happen. The check-in desk is straight out of all those movies where someone’s trying to find a cheap room to hide from the bad guys, but you know they’ll find him because as soon as he’s gone upstairs the clerk will phone a sinister man in a cheap suit and dob him in. A numbered board behind the desk hangs heavy with the kind of big metal key-shaped keys you used to get before they invented those useless plastic cards you stick in the lock but the red light keeps coming on, so you have to go back downstairs and ask some grumpy youth for help.

I’ve always been a sucker for clapped-out colonial hotels. The Bella Vista in Macau, Raffles in Singapore and the Eastern & Oriental in Penang were all impossibly seductive in the days when it cost next to nothing to stay and everything was either broken, peeling, or scuttling across your bedroom floor. They’ve all been refurbished now. One day it will probably happen
here, and a minibar corporation and CNN provider will move into the Continentale and lay on conference facilities, complimentary sewing kits and those paper seals across the toilet that have finally taken the bottom-related paranoia out of international travel.

Just off the lobby is a large bazaar selling carpets and lamps and antiques.

“Come and meet Jimmy,” says Conor. We’re immediately and vigorously embraced by a thickset Moroccan in his fifties. “Ah, my boys!” He beams. “My Irish boys!” He turns towards a young couple who are browsing on the other side of the shop and shouts. “Where you from?”

“Canada,” says the man.

“Pogue Mahone!” shouts Moroccan Jimmy.

“I’m sorry?” says the Canadian.

“It means ‘Kiss my arse’ in Irish,” says Jimmy.

“Interesting,” says the Canadian.

Jimmy listens to me speak for a few seconds, then says, “Where you from? Yorkshire?”

“No,” I say, “but good try. Lancashire.”

“Eccleston?” asks Jimmy.

This is unnervingly accurate. Eccleston is the small suburb of St. Helens where the Christian Brothers beat me relentlessly for seven years, with occasional pauses for lessons and exams. To this day, if I see a man in a long black gown with a white collar, I instinctively bend over and lift my blazer up. Luckily there’s no one who fits that description in the shop.

I tell Jimmy he’s very good at accents.

“I have very good man in Eccleston. East Lancs Road. Export-import. Tom Digby. You know him?”

Strangely enough there was a Tom Digby a couple of years above me at school. Top mod. Fourteen-inch center vent and a silver Lambretta with aerials and fur. He used to go and see Georgie Fame at the all-nighters at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, and I used to go to the youth club on a push-bike and have to be home by half-past nine. I’d like to think he’s a dealer in Moroccan antiques now. It must have been an ideal career option for someone with a taste for expensive mohair suits.

Jimmy embraces us several more times and promises me big discount when I return, and we head down through the medina towards the beach. The breeze has dropped and it’s sunny and warm. At five minutes to one we hear the call to prayer, not broadcast on loudspeakers as in some Islamic countries, but unamplified and strangely atmospheric. Conor says that the king has banned the use of speakers. “When the fundamentalists objected he pointed out that they were a Western invention unknown to the Prophet. That foxed them.”

As we turn a corner our way is blocked by a small crowd gathered in a tiny square. They are watching two guys in suits pushing and slapping a frightened and impoverished-looking youth in a cheap leather blouson. No one is attempting to intervene and I’m wondering what to do when a film camera bursts through the doors of a café, gliding along a gleaming set of tracks I’d somehow failed to notice. Clustered around it are a dozen or so extremely good-looking people of all ages and sexes, olive-skinned and wearing exquisite clothes that are casual, stylish and expensive. The cameraman has the luxuriantly flowing black curly hair, the charisma and the trousers of a classical god who has landed among mortals. It is an Italian film crew, I realize, as my almost threadbare, not recently ironed Australian pub T-shirt clings to my clammy back in shame.

Why do Italians pursue us around the globe like this with their impeccable dress sense? Until now, Tommy, Conor and I have been coping quite well, doing our best to blend into the surroundings, and not looking too shabby, considering where we’re from. But now the bloody Italians are here, making us look like three aging potatoes in need of a good scrub and peel—a fact that hasn’t been lost on one of the local shoeshine boys, who singles out Conor and offers to buff his boots until he can see the Italians’ ear studs reflected in them. For the fourth time this morning Conor says no, but he’s clearly rattled by the overwhelming Moroccan consensus on the state of his footwear.

We’re about to remove ourselves from the Italians’ sphere of influence when I look up and see Mohammed standing in a doorway, smiling knowingly in my direction. I realize that for the first time since I’ve been here I haven’t been worried about bumping into him, and now I’ve bumped into
him. His timing is impeccable. It seems possible that he is shadowing me twenty-four hours a day, waiting for the moment of maximum impact. As I pour the Soberano and switch on CNN at one o’clock in the morning, he may be lying face down on top of the wardrobe, taking notes and waiting till the time is right.

“So, Peter. You find your friends?”

He gives Tommy and Conor a lingering look as if to say, “I know your game.”

“You stay in Rue des Postes? Is there one small hotel there?”

“Tá muid ag obair do Rúnseirbhís na hÉireann”
says Tommy.

“Tá phan ag Éirinn Maracó a thógáil,”
agrees Conor.

“Where you go now?” asks Mohammed.

“An bhfuil a fhios ag do mháthair go bhfuil tú amuigh?”
says Tommy.

I’m feeling guilty about trying to avoid him, even though any escape can only be temporary.

And then he says, “Peter. I watch you. You like writing. So maybe you like to meet famous Moroccan writer. Friend of Paul Bowles. Makes translations with him. Storyteller. He is my friend also. Many years.”

While the MacCarthy brothers smoke heavily in Irish by my side, Mohammed tells me he has been watching me sitting at cafés, writing in books or sometimes reading them. He probably also knows my PIN number, my postcode and my mother’s birthday, but he’s holding them back for another occasion.

“So, you like to meet famous Moroccan writer? Good man. Old man now, with nice house not far from here. His wife make pilgrimage to Mecca. His name is Mohammed Mrabet.”

I’m shocked rigid. This is impossible! I’ve never taken the book I’ve been reading about Bowles and Mrabet out of the hotel. So how does he know? Why is he making up such an outlandish story? What is he setting me up for? Where does he really want to take me?

“We can go tomorrow? I tell him you come. Make a time. What time you like?”

Mrabet was a big name here in the 1950s. Surely he must be dead by now? And even if he’s not, he wouldn’t be hanging out with a lowlife like
Mohammed. This is madness. I mustn’t go off anywhere with this man. I could end up chained to a radiator, or worse.

“Two o’clock tomorrow? Outside your hotel?”

I feel tired and powerless to resist.

“Okay. Two o’clock.”

He smiles and is gone.

“You should be careful there,” wheezes Tommy, finishing the packet. “They could be after your kidneys.”

The beachfront has a dilapidated feel, run-down but not without charm. It hasn’t had the global brand makeover yet, but I suppose that’s only a matter of time. Games of soccer are in progress on the wide, sandy spaces. New apartments, built with hashish-generated dirhams that can’t be exported, stand half-finished among the builders’ rubble.

We install ourselves in one of the few beach cafés that seems to open all the year round. We’re the only customers on a covered blue veranda looking out on some kids playing beach volleyball. Our three beers are served with a plate of grilled sardines, some boquerones, a dish of paella and some octopus and rice salad. The next round comes with meat and potato stew, and a tomato, green bean and coriander salad. The third beer is accompanied by stewed fish and vegetables and spiced chicken wings. We finish with just the one for the road, plus two whole grilled plaice and a platter of shell-on prawns fried in garlic. Pogged, tipsy and ready for a siesta, we ask for the bill. The twelve beers come to twelve pounds. Lunch, on the other hand, is free. The owner explains that the banquet was just a complimentary bar snack; like a free whelk in a Southend pub on a Sunday lunchtime, I suppose, only better. He says he does this every day. So there you are. Provided you’re prepared to drink yourself to a standstill twice a day, you could dine extremely well in Tangier for absolutely nothing. It must be the best value in the Mediterranean.