As Rich as the King E-Book

Abigail Assor

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 273

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A coming of age tale and twisted love story, set amid the beaches, streets and mansions of Nineties CasablancaSarah is poor, but at least she's French, which allows her to attend the city's elite high school for ex pats and wealthy locals. It's there that she first lays eyes on Driss. He's older, quiet and not particularly good looking - apart from his eyes, which are the green of thyme simmering in a tagine. Most importantly he's rumoured to be the richest guy in the city. She decides she wants those eyes. And she wants a life like his.But to get to Driss she will have to cross the gaping divide that separates them and climb to the top of the city's society, from street corner merguez and frites to mansions overlooking the ocean. Provocative, immersive, sensual, As Rich as the King is a a twisted love story amidst the streets of Casablanca.

Leseprobe

‘With this book, Abigail Assor announces herself as one of the most distinctive voices in North African literature. This is a vibrant, sensual, subversive novel with an unforgettable heroine’

LEÏLA SLIMANI

‘Abigail Assor’s writing is precise, sensual, subversive and wildly lyrical. Astonishing’

LE PARISIEN

‘The shooting star of French literature… Her style is powerful, poetic, precise, clever and rousing. Whoever can write like this, without affect, drama, acrobatics or tricks is a great writer’

KULTUR & SERVICE

‘Stunning in its truth, cruelty and style’

PARIS MATCH

Contents

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1

Once a boy told her that in other places, far away, the sand was velvety soft, white as clouds. He talked about seashells and the smell of salt, the music of the waves. She didn’t believe him. Those kids from the Carrières Centrales, they’re always telling stories to bewitch you, the jerks. Here, beneath her, the sand was yellow and grey; it smelt of stubbed-out cigarettes, and if she rubbed against it, it nicked her skin. It was gross, but that’s what it was like, Casablanca sand. At least it was real.

They must have been asleep in the sun for three hours by then. At least the Casablanca sun never disappoints—every time, it’s like drowning in light, it cloaks you, envelops you, melts you up entirely. Maybe, lying there together, they’d die, melt away, vanish, one by one they’d turn into slimy globules of fat, and when their parents came looking for them, when they got to Beach 56 they’d just find a big, murky, greenish puddle, they wouldn’t even know the puddle was their children’s melted bodies. Well, the others’ parents probably wouldn’t even bother to come looking for them, they were twenty-three. But her mother would come to find her, definitely.

She couldn’t tell anymore where their bodies began and ended, where the limits of her skin were; there were legs, hot and weltering, all the grains of sand, the corner of a rough towel, her nose in someone’s arm. Everyone dozing, and the footballs bouncing in the water and splashing everyone, the sound of kids yelling in the streets, the shriek of car horns on the avenue behind them, none of it mattered—the sounds of life, as Yaya liked to say. Reminding us we’re not dead.

Eventually, slowly, everyone began to uncouple. From the shapeless mass, one after another, bodies unravelled; it was like a dance—not a dance from here, a modern dance from France. The boys clasped their legs between their arms and the girls lay on their stomachs, bending their legs like little Lolitas. Sarah didn’t pose like that. She sat with the boys. They chatted a bit, drank some expensive Sidi Ali water, agreed that actually it had a bit of a sour tang. Yaya threw stones into the Atlantic, he said one day he’d end up killing a seagull, not on purpose, it would be the seagull’s fault, because it should have known Yaya threw stones into the Atlantic at that exact spot every day. He was right, Sarah thought. The thing that got on her nerves was the way Driss didn’t look at her at all. He was acting like he used to six months ago, the bastard, like he used to before the whole thing started. All the boys looked at her, even the really angry ones, even after she’d told them the most terrible lies, they all carried on looking at her. That guy from La Notte, when he found out she was only sixteen, he kept on looking at her—he looked at her even more. But Driss sat there with his notebook writing down bullshit and getting sand everywhere like he didn’t give a damn about her. He wasn’t even good-looking. He was pretty ugly, actually.

‘Fuck’s sake, is he ever going to give up?’ It was Chirine who spoke, still lying on her front like an American starlet. A street kid was trying to sell her a black-market cigarette or a piece of Flash Wondermint chewing gum. They could be really insistent, those little urchins. They’d be like, ‘Flash Wondermint, please, madame, Flash Wondermint, please.’ They always spoke in French because it made them look polite.

‘What’s the problem, Chirine?’ said Alain.

‘That brat’s asked me ten times.’

‘He’s annoying you?’

‘Yeah. Ten times.’

Alain got up and went towards the kid. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen, skinny, with blemishes on his dark  skin.

‘Hey, kid, what’s your name?’ asked Alain in Arabic.

 ‘Abdellah.’

‘Abdellah. Abdellah, my girlfriend has told you ten times to get lost. You leave her alone, all right?’

 ‘But monsieur, just one cigarette, monsieur, just one, please.’

‘You see? He’s a nightmare,’ Chirine said.

‘What about a chewing gum, monsieur, please.’

Alain patted the kid gently on the back and told him to get going, coaxing him in the direction of the road. But the kid was going nowhere. His threadbare trainers planted in the sand, he was wired, a warrior, ready to fight. He kept saying, ‘One cigarette, please, monsieur, one cigarette,’ his voice beseeching, but there was nothing beseeching in his eyes. His eyes were full of fight.

‘Just ignore him,’ said Chirine, but before she finished speaking, something came flying through the air, swift and violent, and hit the kid on the arm; scared, he ran off.

It was Badr. He’d thrown his shoe.

‘Good riddance,’ he said.

They went back to their lazing, skin sweaty and sticky, dozing on and off, laughing. A few hours later the sun began to go down, it was time to go. Sarah pulled on her dress and flip-flops, and they all walked towards the main avenue filled with the roar of traffic and hawkers selling corn on the cob. They kissed each other goodbye, and when she embraced Driss she tried to give him a lingering kiss on the cheek that would mean something, make him understand. It didn’t work. The second she’d finished pressing her lips to his skin he turned to the road without a word, eyes fixed to the ground, and walked towards the carpark behind McDonald’s, where he’d left his motorbike.

The others were leaving too, everyone heading in different directions. Sarah made as if she was going north, towards Anfa Supérieur, where the beautiful villas basked, but she soon turned east towards Hay Mohammadi. She walked for nearly an hour. It was dark by the time she reached home.

Home was a falling-down brick building. There was never any hot water. Since there were no curtains or shutters on the windows, she could see from the street that the lights were out, that her mother wasn’t back. Further along on the right, behind some rusty fencing, loomed the bidonville. There the shacks were built of old flattened petrol cans, and all around you could see the names and colours of service stations, Afriquia, Mobil, Total. At least her house was made of brick, thought Sarah, and even if they weren’t amazing bricks, and it was damp, it wasn’t so bad; her mother always said that so long as you’re on the right side of the tracks, you’re not on the wrong side of the tracks.

She was about to open the front door when she heard a voice—she knew he’d be here, the little shit.

‘Sarah! Sarah!’ Without turning round, she said in Arabic, ‘Sorry, but honestly you deserved it.’ He chuckled. On the other side of the fencing, Abdellah balanced like a monkey on some railings. ‘You think you’re better than we are, Lalla Sarah, because you hang out with the rich kids?’

He was always coming out with this thing about the rich kids. It made him laugh to call her Lalla, giving her a swanky title because he thought she fancied herself a queen. But she knew one day she really would be addressed as Lalla, and the little Arab brat would still be stuck in this slum.

‘Of course I’m better than you. I’m French. We’re not the same, idiot.’

As she went inside, she distinctly heard Abdellah hiss, ‘We’re exactly the same.’

2

Six months earlier

Driss had this way of not looking at girls. The very first time she ever saw him, at the beginning of 1994, his eyes had slid right over her. As if she’d been a current of air—there was nothing about her that caught his eye. Suddenly she was a little girl again, sneaking snake-like into the Lynx cinema on Avenue Mers Sultan. She’d plunge her entire being into the dark pupils of the Egyptian stars; and those beautiful Cairene eyes, staring straight out of the screen, gave her nothing back. They too slid right over her.

That day, six months before Beach 56, before it all kicked off, she was with Kamil at the Campus, the café opposite the lycée’s Building K, the one where the rich kids, pretty girls and boys in leather jackets, hung out. A bit further down, there was a pool café she sometimes went to. As well as shooting pool, you could smoke whatever you wanted there and eat the tuna and tomato sauce sandwich that you’d got on credit from Moustache, the old guy at the shop on the next street. But she’d never have admitted to Kamil that she went to the pool café. He’d held the door open a little for her as they went into Café Campus, and she listened to him tell her he worked in telecoms with his father. Which meant whatever it meant.

He wasn’t bad-looking, Kamil, not exactly good-looking either, and she liked that. She sometimes thought he went on a bit about his car and his fancy pad in a swanky neighbourhood where everyone went to play cards in the evening; but for that kind of a guy, he could have been a lot worse. He watched her from behind his black coffee and banana split. He seemed astonished, she could feel every feature of her face fluttering towards him. Her long, straight nose, he saw it, loved it, the same for her dark skin and princess eyes that stretched towards her temples. All of it, he loved it all, wanted to possess it all. This was the third time he’d brought her to the café. Sarah had figured out the technique the year before. To wait before she took off her clothes. It worked. Boys were such fools, they’d buy you endless coffees to get a result. And sometimes they kept it up afterwards, when they thought they were in love. Kamil was the worst, they hadn’t even kissed yet. She thought it was sweet.

He talked non-stop. ‘My villa in Dar Bouazza, five bedrooms, six bathrooms, I’ll take you there sometime if you like,’ he said. ‘It’s not bad in Casa, it’s true, but what I want to see is America, the other side of the Atlantic. You realize, right,’ he said, ‘when we’re on Beach 56, on the other side of the ocean it’s America? I’ll take you there—hey, why are you laughing, I’m serious, I’m telling you.’

Sarah laughed anyway. She didn’t doubt it for a moment. She laughed because suddenly he was very handsome, and she was even prettier, with him there on the other side of the water. She was wearing a broad-brimmed green hat, he had a moustache, they were strolling like aristocrats along a quayside, among a crowd of people hurrying towards the boats. Lightheaded and nervous, she laughed at these American beauties, because they were so beautiful it should be illegal. Kamil faltered, discouraged by her laughter, but Sarah said, ‘No, tell me more.’

He started telling her about some hot and sticky New York nightclub, then he broke off suddenly.

‘Hey, man!’

He’d caught sight of someone behind Sarah; she turned to see a young man taking off his motorcycle helmet, framed in the doorway. He had stocky, short legs and a little paunch. At Kamil’s words he smiled, and little canine teeth appeared, smashed against thick gums, which folded under the shadow of a crooked nose, pointing to the ground. Yeah, pretty ugly.

Driss made his way over to them.

‘Been a while, Driss! Your old man working you like a dog?’

‘Not too bad, not too bad. How’re you doing?’

Kamil prattled away about telecoms and America. And then Sarah saw the eyes. They were tiny but they were green, a complicated green, the green of the outdoors, nature, thyme leaves from the High Atlas, nothing like any eyes she’d ever seen—and this green slid right over her. Driss did not look at her once.

He turned to go, with a duck-footed gait that made his little belly wobble, and Kamil whispered, ‘That guy is the richest of the rich. Richer than both of us. Maybe as rich as the king. But still, he’s a good guy, you know.’

That was how it had begun: because Driss was rich. Richer than the lot of them, as rich as the king, richer than Kamil with his villa in Dar Bouazza. But maybe it was also because in his tiny green eyes there was thyme and bay, whose leaves she had seen melting into the beef tagines Loubna used to cook when she was a child. Loubna was her friend Séverine’s au pair. She went there for lunch every Wednesday in the last year of primary school. Séverine used to call her the au pair rather than the maid, because she was polite, and she was French. And Sarah, with her mouth full and her teeth all greasy, would say, ‘Me too, we have a Loubna too, at my house, with thyme leaves and beef and olives and cooking pots made of terracotta, like you. And we have gold and diamonds on the floor, and we trip over them, in my big house, like you do here.’ It didn’t matter if Séverine didn’t believe her.

Yes, thyme certainly has its share of responsibility in this story. Later she wondered if it hadn’t been for his eyes, and the way they brought back the tajine, Séverine, the last year of primary school, she might not have gone so far; she’d have picked another guy, also rich, maybe not as rich, but quite rich all the same. But the thing was, after that first encounter, she saw those eyes of thyme everywhere. In the café Kamil’s face turned pale, grew wider, folded in on itself, until it morphed into Driss’s face, with its crooked nose, its gums, its little canines, those eyes. It was as if it was Driss she’d been speaking to all along over the banana split at the Café Campus. When Kamil paid for her cinema ticket a few days later, it was Driss’s hand she saw pulling apart the Velcro on his wallet, Driss’s hand she felt gripping hers as they watched Amina Rachid being lectured on the big screen for having opened the door to the sheep delivery man with the sleeves of her djellaba rolled up. Kamil was licking an ice lolly and laughing at the husband’s cries—‘You show up naked like that even for the delivery man, and what am I, the fourth sheep?’—but it was Driss’s laugh Sarah heard in the dark. The week after, it was as if she were playing cards with Driss in the villa in Dar Bouazza, and as if it was with Driss that she finally made love, praying it didn’t sound the death knell of the Campus coffees, the cinema, the villa in Dar Bouazza. By the time she was fourteen, Sarah was going to bed with boys mainly for the paninis at lunch, but they always ended up spitting in her face a few days later with their friends in the school corridor, calling her a slut, and never paying for anything again. The girls talked about her too, with an air of disgust: ‘She’s not a virgin, the French girl. C’est la hchouma. Shameful.’ Sarah didn’t care, there were plenty of other rich guys in Casa, and plenty more paninis to be had. But every so often she didn’t even get a panini out of it, and that was horrible. She learnt her lesson. By the time she was fifteen she’d changed her target: only older guys, at least nineteen, who’d left school already and had a fancy car. She’d pretend to be a shy little thing, madly in love, like the other girls; when they went to bed together, she’d say it was her first time. That worked better—even after she’d spent the night at Kamil’s he didn’t stop coming to pick her up from school and buying her lunch. In his open-top Porsche he told her he loved her, she held his hand. It smelt faintly of thyme.

People said Driss’s father owned a Rolls Royce. She carved his name into the wood of the desks at school with the tip of her biro. At home, staring out of the window, she didn’t see the laundry swaying or the boys sniffing glue. She saw, for the thousandth time, the movement of Driss’s stubby legs as he climbed onto his motorbike. Richer than them all, as rich as the king; while she, instead of a helmet, placed a crown on her curly hair, a queen’s crown, as rich as the queen.

3

The good thing about living next to the Carrières Centrales bidonville, rather than actually in it, was that you were a step closer to the west, to Anfa Supérieur, and so to America. Even if the gap spanned no more than the width of a fence, at least you were outside the slum, so it was like you’d almost escaped already. When Sarah saw Abdellah coming back from town lugging fifteen litres of water in plastic canisters bigger than he was, she rushed into the little kitchen, washed one of the two glasses and filled it with tap water. Then she went back outside and sat down nonchalantly on the front step, legs crossed, eyes closed, glass of water in hand, pretending to sunbathe. Abdellah was approaching the wire mesh fence now, panting, dragging the water canisters behind him, and when she heard him Sarah opened her eyes and mouth at the same time in her prettiest exclamation of surprise:

‘Oh, hi, Abdellah! It’s hot today, no?’ Then, tilting her head and fluttering her eyelashes, she gave him her broadest American smile and took a sip from her glass. ‘It’s hot today, no?’ was something actors said in the telenovelas that played on a loop at the pool café, and she thought it sounded cool. She’d stand front of the mirror in the girls’ toilets at school, repeating it with different intonations, sometimes in an English accent, and using the stained towel that everyone used to dry their hands, but no one ever washed, to wipe her forehead. Sometimes the other girls watched her, sniggering, but Sarah didn’t care. ‘It’s hot today, no, Abdellah?’ It wasn’t actually as hot as all that. Abdellah barely glanced at her through the fence as he dragged the canisters one by one to his door. Sarah carried on taking tiny sips from her glass. She waited till Abdellah had gone inside before spitting it out; no way was she really going to drink that foul water.

He was a right little bastard, Abdellah, even if he was kind of sweet too. He totally deserved her putting on a show like that. Once he’d said to her, ‘Lalla Sarah, you’re on the other side of the fence, and you really think you’re outside? Maybe it’s us who are outside and you’re the one on the inside.’ That was a really mean thing to say, the kind of thing that sticks to your skin and gets under your fingernails like dirt. Ever since then, at night, she sometimes had this dream of a stretch of sand in which she was swimming with a wire mesh over her mouth that let flurries of sand pour down her gagging throat, and she would try to scream, but the sand was inside her, and it was outside her too. Somewhere she could hear the sound of running water.

But a week after she saw Driss in the café, something happened—something to do with eyes, specifically eyes that are the colour of thyme and slide over girls. That was when Sarah knew she would never again have that dream at night, because soon she would only be drinking bottles of Sidi Ali water, and one day she was going to bathe in it, in a pale marble tub that could hold her a hundred times over, with a view onto a garden.

She was sitting in Kamil’s convertible waiting for him outside the villa in Anfa Supérieur, when all of a sudden she heard the growl of a motorbike. She turned her head. She saw Driss behind her, he was looking from the numberplate to the villa and back. The fool took ages to notice her in the passenger seat. When he finally saw her, he lifted the visor on his helmet and called out in his reedy, high-pitched voice, ‘Is this where Kamil lives?’

‘Yeah,’ she said.

‘Tell him Driss says hi.’ He started the engine and drove off.

But it didn’t matter; those eyes of thyme and bay had seen her. Since that day in the Café Campus, all she’d been able to think about was him, with her by his side, the two of them raised up on brass platters borne by the outstretched arms of their servants beneath the night sky, dancing opposite each other to the rhythm of Arabic wedding songs and the adoring cries of the guests, stippled with light reflecting off the gold threads of her caftan and the rubies on her tiara. She saw herself stepping off the brass platter, and a maid, all dolled up for the occasion, wiping her forehead; Sarah would not thank her.

One morning, instead of going to school, she’d walked all the way to a little lane at the other end of Anfa, along the Rue de la Méditerranée—it was lined with hibiscus and waist-high hemlock, and trees that tilted towards each other until they touched, and when they touched they made a bridal canopy; she walked beneath it, slowly, unobserved. The days that followed, she made a list of the Rolexes he would give her—the same as the ones Kamil wore—and invented names for the gardeners she’d employ and get rid of according to her whim, with a click of her fingers. They’d fight to work for her, she’d pay so well. And then, at last, one warm January day, a little before noon, in front of Kamil’s house, Driss’s eyes darted towards her, and this time they didn’t slide over her. Sarah knew that once a boy saw her, he could never take his eyes off her again.

She had this urge to go up to the fence, to call over to Abdellah and tell him, ‘Abdellah, I don’t care if I’m inside, if being inside means being surrounded by hibiscus trees in the greenery of Anfa, drinking Sidi Ali water you don’t have to spit out, firing gardeners who aren’t as poor as you, I don’t care, I don’t care if I’m inside.’

4

At the beginning she imagined that if she kept going out a bit longer with Kamil, she’d end up seeing Driss again. It wasn’t the case. Kamil always wanted to see her alone, the imbecile. He’d say, ‘We could go for a spin in my car, if you like.’ Or, ‘Shall we go up for a smoke on the roof?’ They’d drive at full speed on the road to Azemmour, or fall asleep in the sun high above Casa, among the laundry and the giant satellite dishes. They’d wake up to the song of the muezzin summoning the faithful for evening prayer, and all the white roofs would already be orange from the setting sun. It wasn’t so bad, to be honest, but if it went on like this, she was never going to see Driss again.

The problem was she couldn’t get Kamil to understand she wanted to see people; you can only ask that kind of boy things at the right moment, or he’ll panic. Sarah knew how it worked. At the beginning you’ve got to ask for very simple things.

For example, you say you want to eat sardines, even if the truth is you don’t really feel like eating sardines. Making demands like that lets them know you’re not just any girl, and anyway sardines are easy enough to find. What happens next is the boy takes you to eat sardines and that makes him feel very pleased with himself. And when a boy is pleased with himself, he’s completely overawed by it, starts mixing everything up and thinks that’s what love is. Anyway, it’s not very complicated. It’s only after a while that you can move on to the next stage of demands, like ‘I want this bottle of perfume’, or ‘I want to see lots of people.’ At this point she knew it was better not to hurry Kamil, to leave him in peace so he’d pay for sardines and Coca Cola, and kiss him from time to time in exchange. She had another strategy for seeing Driss again—she went to talk to Yaya.

Yaya knew everyone, and no one knew how old he was. No one really knew what he did either, except that he was always hanging around near school, or at the pool café, at the table in the back, eating cans of tuna in oil. He said he had tuna oil running through his veins, and he had to eat cans and cans of it to stay alive. But that was probably a load of rubbish.

One afternoon she pushed open the door of the pool café; there he was, as usual, sitting in the back, eating tuna. She went and sat down opposite him.

‘Hi. I’m Sarah.’

He pretended not to see her, but she knew he’d look at her eventually. All the boys looked at her eventually, and Yaya, even if people tended to forget it, was still a boy.

‘I’ve got something to ask you.’

‘No.’

He said it like that, without even lifting his eyes from his can of tuna, his mouth glistening with oil. The whole place reeked of his tuna fish, and of cigarettes, weed and the eau de cologne the older boys at school sprayed themselves with.

‘Why not?’

‘You have nothing, little French girl. You have nothing to give me.’

The way he threw the truth in her face like that upset her. But the self-assurance in Yaya’s voice banished the temptation to lie.

‘How do you know I have nothing?’

‘I know everything.’

He raised his head as he answered and looked at her with such intensity that she thought maybe he did really know everything about her, the grimy mosaic over the washbasin at home, the floor tiles, her mother, every panini she’d ever earned, even what was flowing in her veins—maybe it was true, the thing about tuna oil. He must have seen she was upset, either that or he’d been seduced, because immediately after he let out a sigh and said, ‘Okay, what is it you want?’

‘Driss.’

He spat out some oil when she said that—through his nose.

‘Driss? The rich guy with the motorbike?’

‘Yes.’

‘A face like yours, and it’s Driss you want?’

‘Yes.’

He said nothing for several seconds. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, then used his index finger to pick up one by one all the tiny shreds of tuna he’d just spat out and put them back in his mouth. Then he let out another sigh, and said, ‘You must really be shit poor, petite.’

5

Yaya was often at the pool café, and equally often on the pavement on Rue Al Kabir, near the French lycée, squatting between the traffic light and the Jus Ziraoui snack bar, elbows on his knees, smoking and humming old Tunisian tunes. He told people his mother was Tunisian, and this was the song she used to sing to him there, back when he was young and happy. He said he was going to go back one day, soon, next year for sure—because Sidi Bou Saïd was way better than this lousy pavement, way better than the pool café, the cars, the pollution; he said he’d find his spot in Sidi Bou Saïd, somewhere among the orange and lemon trees that lined the streets, the guitars, the castanets, the white robes, the girls. He’d been saying it for ever, but he still hadn’t gone back. Other times Yaya denied it, all the stories about Tunisia, and swore on the tomb of the Prophet that he wasn’t singing tunes from Sidi Bou Saïd but sura from the Qur’an; that he’d learnt them from his grandfather who’d been to Mecca, and that one day he was going to give up all this bullshit and go to Mecca too. He told other people that his father was Tunisian, a wealthy shopkeeper from Hammamet. Once he told Chirine his mother had been an actress in Constantine. Anyway. It was complicated.

He often disappeared just before Ramadan. It took a little while for people to notice that Yaya’s usual hangouts were vacant—no one on the pavement, no smears of oil on the table. People said he must be around somewhere—a bit like the way the moon is still there even when you can’t see it. It was reassuring. Then gradually people would begin to ask, ‘Have you seen Yaya lately?’ After two or three weeks everyone would decide he must have gone back to Tunisia, like he’d always said he would. After all, surely you can see the moon in Tunisia too. He always turned up eventually, and when anyone asked where he’d been, he’d say, ‘But I never left.’

Sarah was expecting him to pull the same trick on her—promise her Driss and then simply vanish. But the day after they spoke at the pool café he turned up for their rendezvous at Jus Ziraoui. Sarah saw him from a distance, squatting and humming something beneath his red baseball cap—probably some Qur’anic sura from Sidi Bou Saïd. She was about to sit down beside him, but he scrambled to his feet.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Sitting down.’

Yaya shook his head in distress.

‘You think you can just sit down on my pavement like that?’

He put his skinny arm around Sarah’s shoulder and led her into the snack bar.

She’d been there a few times with Kamil, though he loathed the place. He said the milkshakes there were the most revolting in the whole of Casablanca, and if that was what she wanted he could ask the maid to make her one, it would be much nicer. But every time, Sarah stood at the counter jiggling with anticipation, gawping at all the fruit, the bars of chocolate, the milk cartons and the dripping blender. Kamil paid five dirhams and the madness began. She pointed at the fruit, scanning the names: orange! banana! dates! avocado! She asked for chunks of Merendina cake, Henry’s biscuits, whole milk, honey. The guy behind the counter cracked jokes as he blended it all up, squashing the occasional cockroach with his elbow. Drink in hand, Sarah headed to the table by the wall, Kamil feeling so nauseous that he kept his arms crossed to avoid touching anything while she drank. She slurped it through a straw with her elbows on the table, the thick mixture rising slowly. Kamil asked her, ‘Don’t the ants on the glass bother you?’ They did not bother her. When she was finished she felt sick, but she always asked for another.

‘What do you want?’ asked Yaya.

‘Nothing.’

She stared at the bananas, the little sablé biscuits, watermelons, crème fraîche, and in her head she could picture all the different combinations.

‘Nothing? Are you sure?’

‘Yeah.’