Mauritania

 IT CAME AS NO surprise next morning when I found the lateen sail hurrying us

along in a stiff breeze and the boat coated in sand. I watched Samir running his

fingertips through the fine red dusting on the side rail. He was gazing out at the

coastline, unchanging, veiled in mist. He turned, smiling.

'Sahara,' he said in that tone people have when they speak of home.

I touched the St Christopher at my throat. The journey was coming to an end

and another was about to begin.

Mohammed in his loincloth, eyes closed, was bowing in prayer, his words a

chant, rhythmic and familiar, though I had no idea what they meant. When Samir

called, Umah leaned out of the wheelhouse and listened like a nervous bird as

the sheikh rattled out his orders.

I followed Samir back to the cabin. Beside the chest where the whip lay coiled

was a trunk with a curved lid that Samir threw open. He tossed out pieces of

clothing I had never seen him wear, cotton shirts, pantaloons, robes, a scarlet

kaftan, cloth for turbans, decorative belts, a brooch with a spider like the pendant

he wore, the golden-limbed creature holding a pearl in its claws. He held up

different garments to see how they would look on me, rejecting one thing after

the other before shouting again for Umah.

The boy appeared in a moment, hurrying down the three narrow steps with a

pair of shears, a pincushion, white thread on a spool, a needle gripped in his lips.

The sheikh gestured dismissively, flicking his fingers as if to remind us that we

each had our place in the great scheme of things, and his wasn't dressing a

woman. He pulled the door shut as he left the cabin, the drapes danced in the

rush of air, then stilled as if fatigued by the clammy heat.

It was the first time I had been alone with the boy. He said something, the

words spilling out, meaningful to him, meaningless to me, and his fingers

trembled as he unsnapped the fold in the sarong.

He had seen me naked many times, every day, but gazed at me now as if he

had never seen me before, as if he had never seen a woman before. The look in his eyes wasn't so much lust as surprise, and I wondered if he didn't so much

desire me, as desire to be me, to share the cabin with the sheikh, and for all I

knew perhaps he had.

'Kanga no,' he said, as if he felt the need for explanation.

Kanga was one of the words I had learned. My sole piece of clothing was the

blue length of cloth, but when the woman had given me this gift on the beach it

had been a sarong and so it remained in my mind.

Umah circled me as you might a sculpture and, just as we are tempted to touch

the carved marble figure in a museum, he ran his fingers over the six red welts

carved into my backside. They were a badge of honour, not shame, and I wore

them with pride. They defined my position. What the boy didn't know was that I

had offered myself up to be whipped. I had learned that my capacity for pleasure

reached the heights of ecstasy through pain, and was about to learn that in

ecstasy's foothills there was pleasure too in treachery.

The inspection complete, Umah tutted and fussed as he went through the

scattering of clothing around the cabin, folding some pieces and putting them

back in the trunk, putting others to one side to reconsider. He finally settled on a

white hijab that he held up for me to try on. The tunic was open down the front

and had long ties that passed through slits on the opposite seams before circling

my waist and tying in a knot. The hijab was three-quarter length and

embroidered from neck to hem in dark green, the colour of my eyes.

'As-salaam,' he said; that's OK, that's fine.

'Shukra,' I replied; thank you.

He released the ties and went to get the pincushion. I raised my arms like a

Christian on the Cross, and as he pinned the first seam, his hands fluttered like

the wings of a bird over my sides. His cheeks brushed my breasts and I felt their

warmth. The boy was burning. I could hear the stroke of the waves lashing the

hull of the boat. The cabin was an oven. My breath quickened. My nipples grew

hard and my spine quivered like the string on a bow after the arrow has taken

flight, its journey unfolding on the flow of the air and the mystery of its own

sense of purpose. Zen archers hit their targets by closing their eyes. The lids

dropped over my eyes and it felt as if my body didn't belong to me but belonged

to some force inside me, a girl with merely a vague resemblance to me; a

simulacrum.

You are what you think and being touched by a man, any man, made me think

of only one thing. I tried to refocus and ran the words I knew in Arabic through

my head.

Ruz – rice.

Samak – fish Mahia – water.

Shi – tea.

Insh'allah – if Gods wills it; it's in the lap of the Gods; so it goes. It was the

word that defined me. Insh'allah.

The men said as salamu alaykum, which seemed to mean hello or peace be

with you. Samir called me habibi, his baby, his sweetheart. The crewmen called

me Chengi, which I thought meant girl, and I responded automatically when the

word left their lips. Without my red passport for reference I was beginning to

forget my name and it seemed so unimportant.

The boat rolled on the tide. I thought I heard a seagull which meant land was

close by. Was I embarrassed standing there with my nipples bristling and my

pussy damp? Was I embarrassed swimming naked in the sea with Samir. Or

coming up on deck after long afternoons screaming in elation?

Such concepts and uncertainties had disappeared from my mind. On the boat

there was no space for shame, for reflection, for privacy. I was a fugitive from

the past. The future like the African coast was veiled in its secrets. There was

just that second, fleeting, fragile, one puff and it's gone. We are different people

at different times. The face we wear for our mother is not the face we show the

girls at school, your boyfriend, the shop assistant when we try on a new pair of

shoes. All things are in flux.

At sunset, the sky splashed in red and pink, I would wear the sarong as we sat

with the sailors to eat, this ritual having no meaning; the rituals we cling to most

fervently are constantly shaking loose from their roots: heredity, significance.

But I enjoyed the concept of dressing, the formality. During the day such

thoughts never entered my mind; dressed, undressed, spotless or grubby, hair

combed or uncombed, they were considerations left behind on the beach in La

Gomera.

I had always had confidence in my body and on the boat beneath the hot sun

on the sea to nowhere that confidence had become a new, primeval sort of poise.

I was grounded. Renewed. Like a photographer making adjustments to the lens

on a camera, we are constantly changing focus, light, distance, becoming and

discarding, learning and forgetting. I was lean, lithe, healthy. I was someone

else. I adored being filled by my lover. I enjoyed being naked. We discover the

depths of our humanity when we let go of reality and enter the realm of the

senses.

The boat to me was like the sea to the fish, I was on it and of it; I had

disconnected and become reconnected. People live their lives without ever

knowing who they really are, what they really want, what they can do and

achieve, or not do and not want to achieve. It was a relief to leave all that behind and be me, Chengi, the girl with one driving passion that I sensed might be my

one fatal flaw; the two like yin and yang, each swirled together, complimentary

and opposites, the seed of one sewn in the heart of the other, mutually dependent

like mothers and sons, like fathers and daughters.

I was reminded for some reason of the tale of the injured snake. Walking

home from the fields one early evening, a man took pity on the snake, took it

home and nursed it back to life. The snake grew strong again and one day, it

sank its fangs into the man's neck. The man asks in his dying breath: but why

after I have cared for you did you do that? Because I'm a snake, said the snake.

There is a similar story about a frog carrying an injured scorpion across a pond

only to be repaid by the scorpion's sting. The scorpion explains to the frog that

the deed is merely his nature. I prefer the snake's story. He doesn't attack the

man merely because it is his nature, he does so with a hunger for betrayal.

Umah had finished the seams on the hijab and was pinning the shoulders from

behind. My back was wet. I could smell nervous sweat and didn't know if it

belonged to me or to him. I could feel his erection through the thin fabric and

wasn't sure if I were pushing gently back into him or if he were pushing gently

into me. Rocking with the roll of the boat, the rhythm of the tides, the drum of

the big diesel engines.

Was I ashamed that my body reacted so intensely to a man other that the

sheikh?

I was, yes. I was ashamed. I was surprised and excited and confused. I wasn't

thinking, planning, conscious of consequences. I was a little girl running naked

in the garden. I was all instinct and lunacy as I pushed my bottom back harder.

All the time the boy had been peeping at me from the wheelhouse and from

behind the sail, following me, observing me, I had never imagined it was with

longing and lust. I had been wrong. His eyes that burned with melancholic

brightness had been burning with his unquenched desire for me.

He had climbed into the baking shadows beneath the tunic I was wearing and,

among the points of the pins, a metaphorical hair shirt, I could feel the warm

throbbing flesh of his hard cock knocking on the bruised mounds of my

backside.

What should I have done? What could I have done? My brain was in free fall.

With my eyes pressed closed, I could see myself from outside myself as I spread

my legs for balance and, with a momentary pang of guilt, a spice to the pleasure,

I allowed his erection to glide through the cheeks of my bottom and into my wet

vagina.

My mouth dropped open. Agh! I sighed, releasing the hot air trapped in my

lungs. My mouth turned in a rictus of pleasure as I heard the gentle slap, slap, slap of flesh against flesh.

I always felt as if there were something missing and was made complete with

a man inside me. As much as I had despised the beachcomber spanking my

bottom, as much as I had hated the man in black throwing me over the side of

the inflatable and casually fucking me, in my raised voice weeping for more was

the truth of my deepest needs; the veracity of who I was when you peeled back

the layers of culture and education and conditioning.

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We

are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams,

pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain

what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's

milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion, craving shoes, houses,

cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and

opinions. We grow into our parents. We become clones, robots, matchstick men

thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating

in books and films and art shows those things we already recognise and

understand.

The swish of the cane and the snap of the whip change all that. The free spirit

transmutes physical pain into a mysterious joy so refined the wires fuse and the

programme is wiped clean. It is this pleasure that turns on the light and, in those

dark places filled with shadows and fear, we see in that moment of brightness

the hidden parts of our nature. When you take off all your clothes and swim out

to an unknown dot on the horizon, when you have survived being abused and

humiliated, you understand what it is to be fully human, animal and divine.

For ten days, two weeks, three weeks, it was hard to know, but on those long

hot days and long hot nights, I had become Chengi, a girl with no past and

whose one desire was for sex and more sex in all its erotic combinations. I loved

fucking. My short skirts and the sway of my hips as I paraded through the streets

of London were a glimpse of what I wanted to become and what I had become.

Lead a girl to the erotic well and she will bend over and wiggle her backside. It

is the will of our primordial genes. We don't want to be an earth mother,

superwoman, the head of the company, we want to lie on our backs with our legs

spread and our vacant places filled. I had never known this before. But I knew it

now. And I had a suspicion that in those dark places we are afraid to go, all girls

have the same yearning, the same driving force, the same secret desire. In the

vagina of every girl there is a snake waiting for the magic that will bring the

creature to life.

Slap, slap, slap. The sound of flesh against flesh. Umah's hot breath warmed my neck as he thrust into me with frustration, with hunger, with a sharp and concentrated fear. He would have seen from the deck of

the ship as the sheikh lifted the cane above his head and beat the man in black

again and again, beat him until I yelled for him to stop. The boy knew he would

be punished if he were caught. It would mean his life. Mine, too, perhaps. But

the boy's longing was greater than his fear and I responded to that urgency, that

anarchic challenge to order and destiny. In me he had seen a glimpse of his own

earthly paradise and any sacrifice was worth the mortal risk. To be fully alive is

to walk in the shadow of death. In fucking like this, like animals in the wild, we

were triumphing over life to the point where death loses its chains and mystery.

His breath grew more urgent. I felt the dribble on my shoulder roll down my

neck and over my breast. His fingers clasped my hips like he was holding the

grips on a motorcycle and driving flat out on a mountain road. My mouth had

dropped open. My eyes opened and I gazed bug-eyed at the cabin door, half

expecting, half perhaps hoping that Samir would appear.

Sex like this, stolen, illicit, was the innate extension of what I had turned into

under the sheikh's hand. I was fucking as a bird sings, as the waves roll out one

after the other, as the sun rises and sets. I was fucking because that was what I

was born to do, designed to do. I was doing what came naturally and knowing

that we might be caught in flagrante delicto warmed the fluids of my womb and

made my heart beat faster. This was insane. This was bad. This was life.

The drapes over my head were swirling about like a fog. I leaned forward,

gripped my knees and opened my body to take his full length into the depths of

my vagina. I could smell my own arousal. I could hear the squelching of my wet

parts like water running from a bath. I was like a female machine that had to be

oiled with male semen every day, three times a day. Like a violin, I improved by

playing, a Stradivarius superfluous without the bow, stroked by the bow,

completed by the bow. My body was an overture. I could hear the tolling bells

and the distant roar of the cannon bringing Tchaikovsky's 1812 to a crescendo.

Contractions gripped my stomach, a fist squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and

relaxing. The nerve endings in my vagina began to sing and as the boy heard my

song he burst in a swelling orgasm that pumped his sticky liquids inside me. He

groaned and sighed. The muscles in the walls of my vagina took a firm grip on

his throbbing cock and my tummy lurched on the wave of a slow rippling

climax.

Spent, relieved, panting for breath, the boy's cock grew limp. He slipped

down on his knees and, as I stood up straight, he pushed his head between my

legs and sucked his spunk from the sopping lips of my vagina, a criminal

cleaning away evidence from the scene of the crime.

It was over. It didn't matter. It was past. I was doing that thing I do. Why cry over spilled sperm?

The boy lifted the hijab from my shoulders, scurried to the corner of the cabin

and began altering the garment, sewing in swift stitches, transferring the pins to

his lips and then back into the pincushion. I tried on a pair of pantaloons that

were tight around the calves and baggy at the thighs. He pinned them, too, and

continued sewing. I wrapped the sarong around me and, as I gazed from the

porthole, a poem from fifth-year literature slipped into my mind:

With fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread –

Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

She sang the "Song of the Shirt".

Thomas Hood's words came to me like the crackly sound of a far away radio,

a message from that other world. I put an inch of water in the brass pot and

washed the snail trails of semen from my thighs. I stared at myself in the mirror.

My lips were swollen. Pink smudges like the sky at sunset coloured my cheeks.

As I stared into my eyes, I caught a glimpse of Chengi, the sheikh's concubine,

his prize. I decided not to feel guilty. If I felt guilty, he would know. Lovers

always know. You must hide your guilt then forget where it is hidden.

I went back to my place at the porthole. The mist had cleared. The coast was

closer now. I could see the beach, mile after mile of sand without towels,

umbrellas, ice cream, unspoiled, unpopulated.

When Samir returned to the cabin, I was still staring out to sea. I turned. He

smiled. I smiled. He didn't know. He must never know. He said something to the

boy and the boy's eyelashes flashed. The work would soon be done. That's what

I thought he said, his fingers busy plying the needle and thread, stitch, stitch,

stitch, and I tried to recall the second verse of Hood's poem but it had gone,

concealed in that place where the guilt was hidden. I had a new set of clothes

and I had a secret. It was more than I'd had when I left the island.

Samir came to put his arms around me. To hold me. Possess me. Could he

sense my treachery through his palms on my bare shoulders, through his fingers

that had caressed the red sand and now brushed my collarbones? The thought

that he might was something new to savour, an added spice to a favoured dish.

He ran his hand over my breast and down through the fold of the sarong to my

belly. I wasn't wearing knickers. I never wore knickers. My pubic hair had grown lush, a furry creature that he stroked as you would stroke a sleeping cat. I

closed my eyes and grew tense. I was ready for him. I was always ready. My

clitoris peeked from its cowling and I felt the soft pad of his fingertip circling

that vibrating little nub of eternal yearning. My breath caught in my throat. A

quickie standing up with the boy was an hors d'œuvre. I was ready for the main

course.

He knew. He knew me well enough. He removed his hand and stroked my

shoulders, calming me. He said something, people need to say things, and I

opened my eyes as I turned towards him.

'Habibi,' he said, and kissed me gently, something he had learned to do but

still didn't come naturally to him.

He said something to the boy then left the cabin, closing the door behind him

again.

The view through the porthole remained the same, the silver sand, the

occasional clump of tall palms, but I could now also make out a point on the

horizon where the coast turned and disappeared. I could smell change on the air,

the push and pull of humanity, the reek of people crowded into one place. I

thought about London, my job, the Underground where men watched me. I had

always suspected what lay behind the shadows in their eyes, what they wanted to

do to me, to girls like me, but had been wired to misread their signals, to be

confused and upset when I should have been celebrating my unplumbed gift.

I recalled my bedroom in Fulham, the cupboard so full it was impractical to

take anything out or to add anything new to the sagging rail; knickers and bras

like silken sprites fleeing from open drawers; skirts and blouses back from the

dry cleaners suspended from the curtain rail on wire hangers under bags of

plastic. My shoes paraded across the room like shoes at a sale, red heels, black

heels, trainers, mules, cowboy boots, Crocs, espadrilles, French ankle boots.

I was a slender size 7 with a shoe fetish and there were times when Bobby

slipped his feet into my shoes. He squeezed into my pants and bras, filling the

cups with balls of tissue. He ran my stockings up his legs, snapping them to a

garter belt, he abhorred tights and adored the frippery and fantasy of being a girl

as he wriggled into my skirts, holding his breath to button blouses and pull up

zips. I painted his face, his long lashes, his sulky lips. In the red wig I had

bought for a fancy dress party, with his high cheekbones and small features, he

made a far more likely lady of the night than the trannies we saw hurrying on

clip-clopping heels to clubs in Soho. I am sure had he surrendered to my whims

and gone out cross-dressed he would have found something in himself he didn't

know was missing. It is something every man should do, every woman should

do. How do we know who we are if we haven't tried all the costumes in the wardrobe?

Dressed as Roberta, he liked me on top and cried fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,

an echo of all things subtly connected, our life a glorious puzzle, a road map

where all things lead everywhere else. We are a mass of dissociative

personalities, potentials and promise. Bobby at his all boys boarding school

always took the female leads in the drama club, as did boys in Shakespeare's

time. He was Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia, Portia and Beatrice. He had a taste for

greasepaint and, as a journalist, he was a performer feigning interest in the

celebrities in which he had no interest at all. Bobby was a toff, a snob, a slender

boy with a silver spoon and a silver tongue, lanky and girlish with his narrow

waist, long legs, a pert little bottom I'm sure the masters must have considered in

need of discipline.

I enjoyed Roberta more than Bobby and had realised on board the boat as I

gazed at the orderly world of the shifting tides that when I had left my

underwear littered about my flat it was to tempt the her from him; that at those

times with Roberta deeply inside me it felt as if I were embedded in him, in her,

that I had grown a phallus and had the power to release in us both the spectral

majesty of the ultimate orgasm as surfers travel the oceans of the globe in search

of the ultimate wave.

My new suit of clothes when I put them on brought back these memories in a

sudden rush and they seemed like false memories; memories that belonged to

someone else, the doppelganger Chengi who remembered Bobby like a character

from a film or a book; so real as to seem real when the reality was Umah tying

the ties on the hijab, adjusting the shoulders, admiring the fine stitching, a slave

to his art. I stepped into the pantaloons. They were snug now, made-to-measure.

'Perfect,' I said, and he grinned.

Umah had flawless teeth, white and even, full lips. Like the sheikh. I had let

this boy fuck me. Just like that. It was unbelievable. It was wonderful. And it

meant nothing. It was just sex. I was living the reality of who I was, of what I

was capable of becoming, and didn't know that one day it would save my life.

The boy produced a long white scarf edged in a green curlicue pattern that

matched the embroidery on the hijab and matched my eyes. He dug into his

tunic and, like a magician, pulled out a handful of hairpins that he used to pin up

my hair before wrapping the cloth in coils around my head. He tucked the tail of

the scarf below my ear and showed me how I could tuck in the remaining short

length of material in such a way that I concealed my mouth and chin.

I stepped away and looked in the mirror. With the turban covering my hair

and the tunic hiding my shape, I looked like a boy, like an Arab prince from a

story by Scheherazade. I looked as Bobby would have looked wearing these clothes. Umah made some adjustments to the turban. Our eyes met and he held

his finger to his lips.

'As-salaam,' he said.

'Insh'allah,' I answered, and he nodded with great seriousness. We are, each

one of us, in the hands of fate.

When I climbed the steps to the deck, I could see the waves swelling over the

rounded boulders at the point. I could see fishing boats rocking in the swell,

some buildings painted in pastel colours, the paint faded; the tower and dome of

a mosque like a white lighthouse and a white egg poking above the line of the

horizon. I could smell civilization, salt, dust, fish, history.

Samir spent a long time looking at me and nodding. I tried to read every tic

and change in his features. The sheikh and the sailors communicated with shrugs

and gestures, by the most minute ripple in their brow, an eye opening or closing

a fraction, a nose flaring, a chin jutting, by an array of movements and

manoeuvres that registered shock, anger, doubt, joy and indecision. When the

sheikh beat the man in black and when he flogged me with the bullwhip, his

expression had been the same even though the thoughts running through his

mind must surely have been different.

Umah was standing to one side, shoulders bowed. When the sheikh spoke, the

boy raced back to the cabin and returned with the spider brooch which Samir

pinned at that place where my cleavage peeked through the fold of the hijab. I

studied Samir's features as he connected the clasp and didn't know if this

addition to my costume was for reasons of modesty, if the brooch were a gift, or

if the spider motif marked me as his now the six welts on my backside were

hidden.

Azar climbed on deck, wiping sweat from his face like a miner rising from the

pit, eyes blinking constantly against the noon day sun. He lit a cigarette and

nodded with approval when the sheikh presented me to him. He said something

and Samir danced about guffawing with laughter.

What had Azar said? What was their humour? I was like a baby without

language, a plaything to be adored and protected, and like a baby I laughed, too,

as Samir swung me round to check my rear view. He turned me back to face

him, his features like chips in a kaleidoscope arranged in expressions I had never

seen before. Samir liked me dressed like this, like a boy, like a pasha, like

Aladdin, like I was somebody else, and that's what love needs, to be constantly

changing positions and personas.

He adjusted the spider and said something.

'Insh'allah,' I said.

When they laughed I hid my face with the tail of the turban, and they laughed more.

Azar went back below decks and Umah started to take down the sail. The drum

of the engines slowed as we rounded the point and an earth-coloured shanty

town began to develop before my eyes, the small fishing boats in the foreground

each with a man dressed in a loincloth and turban standing and casting a net by

hand, their skin baked black by the sun, their limbs sinewy and strong. The

beach was littered with boxes and crates, broken boats and bits of machinery.

The walls of an ancient fort spilled in ruins down from the hills and, below, the

buildings rose up without pattern or design, arches and towers shoulder to

shoulder at different heights and styles, the architecture of chance.

The sheikh's boat had a name but the script was in Arabic and I had never

learned what it was. Before us was an interchangeable row of similar boats tied

hull to hull along a jetty that could have been thrown together by the tide, by the

same hand of chance, the uprights made from the trunks of palm trees, all at

different heights, the deck pieced together from tea chests and packing cases, the

landing place, the buildings, the very town, an illustration of the impermanence

of all things.

Seagulls wheeled through the air above, screeching. Men on shore and the

men on board cried out, the combination of voices an operetta. I could smell

food and sweat and dust and smoke. The boy threw an anchor far off from the

stern and I stood with the sheikh at the prow as we slowed to a stop by hitting

the end of the jetty, the jolt making the entire structure rock back and forth

before settling once more. Mo stepped out from the wheelhouse with a rare

smile, his gold tooth gleaming, his pointed beard neatly combed, and I realised

that this was home and they were happy to be home in a way that I never felt

when I had been away and returned to England; that for me growing up in

Washington and Geneva, nowhere was home.

The men unloaded the sacks we had brought with us from the island. They

contained the shells the beachcomber had fondly displayed in the fish shed on

the island. I had no idea why they had brought them, why conch shells from the

Canary Islands would be any different or have greater value than the shells that

must surely lie along the shore beyond town. That was the extent our cargo.

Three sacks of shells. And me.

Samir stepped ashore. He looked away as I jumped down behind him and

didn't take my hand. He looked back, hooked the turban across my face, and his

malleable expression seemed to set and harden.

Mo leapt down to the jetty and went to make sure the man securing the rope

from the prow to one of the palms was doing a good job. Umah lashed the boat to the boat on our left before joining us, and when Azar appeared he was

carrying two guns of the sort I had seen on television; AK-47 rifles, as far as I

knew. I physically felt my heart skip a beat as he tossed one to Mohammed and

jumped ashore with the other over his shoulder.

The man who had tied up the boat sidled up looking suitably deferential. The

sheikh produced a big, soft leather wallet, pulled out a note and the man slipped

away tucking the money in his blue tunic. I had no idea if this were a gift, a tip,

baksheesh, or a landing fee. For all I knew, the man could have been a customs

official or an immigration officer.

On the journey, Samir had shown me where we were going on a chart, his

finger running down the coast of Africa, El Andaluz, Maroc, Mauritania, our

destination, a land where I new no one and nothing, although I liked the roll of

the vowels – Mauritania, a word and a sound that summoned up a world of

intrigue, mystery and danger. The sun above baked my skull. I was paperless and

penniless amongst men with deadly weapons, and as we set off along the

swaying jetty I recalled Chekhov's law: the gun revealed in the drama goes off

before the story ends.