At least, that was what I told myself. In truth, I knew my safety wouldn’t last, just as Ifrahim had always known that the knots of his heart would slip and tumble back into guts in the end.

I just never imagined it would happen the way it did. I never imagined that everything – myself included – would change, so unrecognizably, for ever.

Tangier

July 1978

It was the call to prayer that woke him. For a bewildering moment, he thought it was morning. But the air smelled wrong for that; it still held the heat and the dust scuffed up by the day’s passage.

Seven in the evening, then. He opened an eye. He was lying on his hard, narrow bed, still fully dressed. The muezzin’s chant crackled and echoed from a loudspeaker on the nearby rooftop and for a long moment he kept still, just listening. It was all drifting back to him. Norton, with his whisky and sodas and smokes in the El Minzah, shuffling home in a careless haze, managing to avoid Madame Sarah for long enough to get into his room. There was something he didn’t want to do, he remembered that. Whatever it was, he’d thought a nap would help.

Blinking hard, he sat up. His tongue was powdered with the lingering taste of cigarettes, stomach a tight ball of wax. After a moment, he made himself stand and open his door a crack, peering along the corridor and out on to the roof terrace. Madame Sarah sometimes sat up here and smoked when she thought no one was watching, but now it was deserted. He stepped out beneath the sky.

A haze hung over the city, ochre-blue with evening. The call had finished, and from somewhere near by came the sound of a radio playing a French pop song. He took the lid off the water container, dipped the bowl and drank. It was warm and stale and a little plasticky, but it washed the sandpaper from his tongue, made his headache retreat a few paces. Another bowlful went over his neck and head. He used another to wash his hands, and felt better.

The second he stepped back into his room, a reminder of the thing he had to do – the thing he didn’t want to do – was sitting there, waiting for him. He stared. Orange and white, the keys a little dirty, a sheet of paper flopping back. His Hermes Baby. The only thing of value he had left.

The page in it was half covered in type, abandoned mid-sentence. He ripped it out and let it fall to the floor, on to a pile of other sheets. You’re not writing anyway, he thought as he extricated the cover from under the bed. So what the hell use is a typewriter?