'How would you know?' I demanded. 'How the fuck would you know?'
'You're not the only person to have a terrible thing happen to them,' she said quietly.
'Yeah? What happened to you?'
There was a moment of silence as Nicole considered my challenge. She exchanged glances with Hallam, and then she spoke.
'I had an older sister,' she said. 'Four years older than me. She had cystic fibrosis. You know what that is? It's when fibres grow in your lungs and slowly, over a period of many years, choke you to death. It starts young. Usually you're dead by twenty-one. But Helen was a fighter. She lasted until twenty-three. The last three years, the way she breathed, it was like living with Darth Vader. And she knew, of course, she knew all along that she was going to die soon. So she was angry. Furious. And sick, and weak, and demanding, and manipulative. And who could blame her? You know? Who could blame her? I'll tell you who. Her little sister. Try living in the same room as your dying sister for three years, trying not to hate her for dying and for being the center of everyone's life, especially yours. Will that do? Is that terrible enough for you?'
I had never seen Nicole lose control of her emotions, never seen her even faintly aggressive before. 'I'm sorry,' I muttered, looking down. 'I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.'
'I am too,' she said, immediately contrite. 'Paul. That didn't come out right. I'm not angry at you. I'm not. I'm sorry.'
There was a moment of silence.
'The worst thing that ever happened to me was in Bosnia,' Hallam said. 'Peacekeeping. A little town, I still can't pronounce it, one of those names that don't have any vowels. There was a woman there, about fifty years old. She was Serbian, but it didn't matter to her. She was the only one there who didn't go crazy, absolutely bugfuck crazy, about whether you were Serb or Croat or Bosnian. She lived all alone in this little house outside the village. I never really found out her story. I always had business to talk to her about. She'd spent a year in London, so she could translate. And we were busy. We were very busy. And one day she says that she thinks she knows where this local warlord is hiding. War criminal. Pretty penny-ante by Bosnian standards, we're not talking Srebrenica here, a little monster, but still a monster. She says she'll find out from her nephew, the next day.' He paused. 'We found her about a week later, about five miles from town. Her and her nephew both. What was left to them. Tied to a tree. It was… ' Again he hesitated. 'I'll spare you the details. It was ugly. It was extremely ugly.' Another pause. 'We never got the fucker either.'
We all stared silently into the guttering embers of the fire.
'Lawrence?' Nicole asked, her voice barely audible.
'Sorry,' Lawrence said, shaking his head. 'I've been lucky. Never had anything that bad happen to me. Not even close.'
'Steve?'
Steve shook his head. 'I don't know, mate,' he said. I didn't think I had ever heard him sound serious before. 'I just don't know. There was this one time… '
He hesitated.
'What happened?' Lawrence asked.
'Well,' Steve said. 'There was this bit of a bloody misunderstanding, see? So I spent a couple years up in Darwin. And this one time, about midway through, there was another bloody cock-up and they went and blamed me for it, so I went and spent a few weeks helping build this road across the arse end of the world up there. Bloody hot it was. And the flies, Christ. But I'd gotten to be mates, a bit like, with one of the overseers, see? Fixed up his bike for him on the side. Old Triumph, it was, classic piece of work. So this one time, I got him to take me out, before dawn like, and bring this eskie full of ice cream to where they picked us up at the end of the day. Just as a treat for all the mates I was working with. And the whole day, I reckon it was the hottest fucking day of my life, I was telling them all about it this bloody big eskie full of ice cream waiting at the end of the day.' He sighed and looked forlorn. 'But I'd forgotten to lock down the eskie, hadn't I? And something got in there. Roos or camels or I don't know what. And when we got there, all excited like, the eskie was open and all the ice cream had melted.'
He fell silent.
After a moment Nicole said, incredulously, 'That's the worst thing that ever happened to you?'
Steve nodded tragically.
'Losing your ice cream? That was your worst moment? Didn't you get stabbed once in prison? Didn't you tell me once that your father left you when you were eight?'
'Oh, sure,' Steve said. 'I've been in my share of scraps, and I took a shiv once, and my dad left me young, and my mum drank too much. But she was a good mum still, and he probably wouldn't have been much of a bloody father so I reckon that all worked out all right. No, that wasn't so bad. But when I saw that empty eskie, after telling all my mates about the treat I had for them. Well.' He sighed. 'Bit of a disappointment, that was. Bit of a bloody big — what?'
For we had all started laughing. Once we started we couldn't stop, and eventually Steve joined in, and we all laughed until we had tears in our eyes. Looking back I guess it was the first time I had laughed since Laura's death. And the last for months thereafter.
The Moroccan ferry system had grown no more efficient in the last two years. 'Welcome to Africa,' Lawrence said dryly when we finally cast off, ninety minutes late, 'please drop your watches over the side as they will only serve to confuse you for the next five thousand miles.'
Most of the hundred or so passengers were returning Moroccans. Maybe coming home to their families from their backbreaking agricultural jobs in Portugal and Spain, maybe just returning after a day of shopping in Europe. There were a dozen or so backpackers, but no overland truck. I was relieved at that. It would have made the nostalgia so intense as to be actually painful.
We got our passports stamped by a bored official, maybe twenty years old, who was engrossed in his calculus homework. Then we crowded to the front of the boat to watch the sun set over the Atlantic. It was a glorious sight, a huge red disc disappearing beneath the endless ocean to the west, the pale half-moon rising to the east behind us, and the coasts clearly visible five miles on either side. Gibraltar and Morocco, Europe and Africa; the Pillars of Hercules. We stayed for a long time, the salt Atlantic wind in our hair, until the coasts were visible only as broken chains of light, we could no longer see the dark water that the ship surged through, and the sky had filled with stars.
We smoked incessantly. Lawrence made increasingly catty comments about it, starting with 'I would have thought you were all smart enough to have quit by now,' and moving up to 'A filthy habit for filthy people.' We knew it was mostly in good fun. Just like the old days.
It was nearly midnight when we finally arrived in Tangiers. A bad old town. Once upon a time it had been an International Zone with no real laws to enforce, and it still maintained a lot of that anything-goes, watch-your-back atmosphere. The moment the gangplank dropped a huge shoving contest began, and continued all the way through customs, where an officer plucked the five of us from a scrum of grimly determined Moroccans and opened a desk just for us. I felt bad about the reverse racism, but not bad enough to turn down the special treatment. Which probably went for all of us.
Once outside a sea of violently aggressive taxi drivers accosted us and demanded our business. We picked the first one who said 'please.' It's an arbitrary rule, but it beats no rule at all. He took us into the winding streets of the medina and to the Pension Palace, a crumbling but ornately majestic hostel near the Petit Socco crossroads. Naturally he initially told us it was closed and he knew another place at a very special price, but I think when we all broke out laughing he realized that that particular dog was not going to hunt.
We took four rooms, locked our bags inside, and went to the cafes of the Petit Socco.
'God, I forgot that about this place,' Lawrence said sorrowfully as we sat down. 'They're not going to have any beer, are they?'
'I'm sure if you ask nicely and wave a couple of hundred-dirham notes around they'll be more than happy to bring you a cold six-pack of San Miguel from somewhere… ' I said.
'That's all right. I seem to remember they'll serve you in Marrakesh. One dry night shouldn't kill me,' he said, as if trying hard to convince himself of this.
We shooed off all the would-be guides and ordered mint tea, in French. We could have used Spanish, and probably English if we had to, all three were tourist languages here. It tasted nothing like the mint tea in Nepal; the
