Light Errant Read Free Page B

alien tongues; more I’d picked up from gossip with staff and students at the college. Sallah’s parents had come here from Morocco years ago, and long outstayed their visas. They didn’t hide, they sold leatherwork from a stall right on the promenade; and they had a longstanding and easy relationship with the chief of police, I’d heard, paying a gentle bribe every month to be sure he continued to overlook their lack of official papers.
    But that complaisant policeman had retired, Marina told me, his pension no doubt comfortably swollen by all those backhanders; and, “The new man,” she said, “he is not so convenient.”
    â€œHe can’t want to deport them, surely?” I demanded; then, when she frowned, “Not to send them back, Marina? After so long?”
    â€œNo,” she said slowly. “But he threats this, yes? Unless...”
    Threatens , but I didn’t say it. There are times to worry about a pupil’s grammar, and times definitely not. “Unless what?”
    Now she was awkward, she was embarrassed—for Sallah, not for herself: I read that in the glance aside, in the hand that reached for her friend’s—and she didn’t want to answer. And that reluctance was answer enough, I could read the truth also, I wasn’t that naïve.
    â€œ Jesus...! ”
    Marina the sometimes-good Catholic girl scowled at me for the blasphemy, but nodded also. “He has seen Sallah, and he says, he says he will not take money, but...”
    He would take her instead, a tribute to his new-won authority. Regularly, no doubt; monthly, perhaps, his own version of a mensal bribe; very much against her will, it went without saying. Sallah would do a great deal for her family, that I knew. I had thought before that she might even marry according to their choice and not her own, though it would be her own choice to do so. This, though—no. Or I thought not; or that was my first thought, at least. But for her parents’ livelihood, for her parents’ life —and what was it, after all? The conjunction of bodies, only an animal act, and no more than she did with me already, and sweetly, fiercely more than once a month...
    The impossibility of decision, she couldn’t and yet she must: this, then, was the thing too great even for her mind to encompass, what had forced her gears out of mesh.
    â€œDoes your brother know?” I asked her directly. She shook her head, mute and appealing, don’t tell him . I nodded my understanding. Her brother Mahmout was at the college, though she was not. I knew him by sight, and by reputation: a hothead, too streetwise too young, a charmer with a ready smile and a knife just as ready, or so rumour said.
    â€œMahmout would kill him,” Marina murmured. I believed that, as absolutely as they did. For his family’s honour, he would kill; and with that killing his family would be destroyed, himself jailed and perhaps his parents also, for a year or two before they were deported.
    So no, Mahmout was not to know. They had come to me instead, with or more likely without her parents’ consent or knowledge. What was I? Publicly, Sallah’s English tutor; privately, her lover; more private still, I was a young man who knew too much about bribes and blackmail and all the excesses of power. My own family was expert in such practices. Marina knew something of that, if Sallah didn’t. This must have been her idea; she’d be looking to me for a solution, a way out of a brutal maze.
    And yes, I could give them that, I had it in me. There would be a price, of course, and it would be mine to pay; and yes, I owed them. I owed them both, more than they knew; so what matter if they were asking more than they could possibly know?
    Besides, I was angry. Coldly, furiously angry, sick with anger in a way I’d not felt for years. I knew vileness, I was an old hand at recognising the stink of it; and oh, this