The Road to McCarthy Read Online Free Page B

camera out.
    “Hey, stand back so you get them all in.”
    “Okay.”
    Click.
    Gone.
    As they disappear up the damp steps in the direction of Lisa’s voice, I realize that at no time did they remark, or even speculate, on what the figures might be. What will they say to the folks back home when they show them their vacation pictures?
    “Here are some little guys in a cave.”
    “That’s neat.”
    “They’re kinda cute. Who are they?”
    “I dunno. And this is us outside the cave with a gorilla.”
    Back outside I discover that the road is a circular one, so I just continue straight ahead to go back down into town. For the first couple of hundred yards there are lots of people, their numbers almost matched by the free-loading, panhandling apes. One of them is sitting on a railing with a big view behind him, having his picture taken with the people from Parody and Bland. There’s a parked van with six of them sitting on top. A little girl is crying inconsolably. Her father is telling her mother that it’s nothing, it’s just that one of them leaped out in front of her, but it didn’t mean any harm. Yeah, right. Some father. He hasn’t even considered the possibility that the beast was after her sausages.
    I head off down the hill and soon it’s deserted again, with no sign of people or monkeys. I take the opportunity to stop for a pee in the lush vegetation, and suddenly one of them is standing there, watching me. It seems interested. Bloody hell. How am I meant to behave? Brash? Embarrassed? Mysterious? Under the circumstances I don’t think I can do mysterious. What if ….? What if ….? Fingernails like razors, apparently. They fancy a snack, they get a snack.
    It lets me finish though, and when I do, I swear it winks.
    I’m back at the hotel eating an apple from the ornamental display at reception and planning what to do tonight—according to the paper, Scrabble Club meets in the hall in the square at 7:30—when the concierge tells me he’s just heard that the Algeciras-to-Tangier ferry is running again. There’ll be nothing from Gibraltar for at least thirty-six hours, but Algeciras is only forty minutes across the border by taxi. Once again I check out of the hotel I checked out of and into earlier in the day.
    In less than ten minutes I’m in the back of a taxi heading for the Spanish border.
    “Sodom was a church picnic and Gomorrah a convention of girl scouts compared to Tangier, which contained more thieves, black marketeers, spies, thugs, phonies, beachcombers, expatriates, degenerates, characters, operators, bandits, bums, tramps, politicians and charlatans than any place I’ve ever visited.” So wrote Robert Ruark in 1950. Samuel Pepys made Tangier sound pretty sexy too: “A nest of papacy where Irish troops and Roman bastards could disport themselves unchecked.” “Spectacular view,” raved Tennessee Williams, “every possible discomfort.”
    I’m just thinking that someone at the tourist board should collect all these quotes and stick them on the front of a nice glossy brochure when the Spanish taxi driver catches my eye in the rear-view mirror. I look up from the book I’m reading.
    “You been in Tangier before?”
    I tell him I haven’t.
    “Take care, my friend. My cousin is in prison there for smuggling tobacco. Eight years. All food and clothes must be taken in to him, or there is just bread and water. Naked. If you want even to wash your friends must bring the water. This place makes
Midnight Express
look like a top hotel with pool.” Perhaps noticing that I’m about to burst into tears he turns his head, looks me in the eye and grins.
    “But don’t worry. Morocco treats tourists very well. You want to change some currency?”
    It’s early evening as the ferry leaves Algeciras under a cover of gray cloud, with a late winter chill in the air. I seem to be the only English speaker on board apart from a backpacker across the bar who’s reading a novel called
Backpack
.