Singular life
Tales from the souk
Petronella Wyatt
y back was jammed against the pink, sand-encrusted wall of the souk. He was grasping my arm so hard that it had caused a nervous reaction in my left shoul- der which hit a window with mechanical regularity. He was screaming in my ear, `You make me so happy. I am so very pleased to meet you. Give me kiss.'
That was it. The straw that broke the camel's back, Literally. I had been brought up on A Thousand and One Nights, Rider Haggard's She and so forth. Obviously places like Morocco were teeming with dashing Arab guide chappies. They were as thin as papyrus plants: silent, amusedly cynical. They had dark, saturnine faces with eyes like questing panthers'.
Imagine my disappointment at the man who greeted me in the lobby of the hotel. Not so much Richard Burton, the great 19th-century Orientalist, as Richard Tauber, the fat opera singer. He was short, as round as a bowl of couscous and red in the face. 'What is more, in an instant a myth was shattered. Instead of carrying a jewelled dagger in his hands he clasped, oh my god, a mobile phone.
`Hey, girl,' he said, in a manner less Sin- bad than Dennis Skinner, 'I'm Abdullah.' He added, 'You make me very happy.' Eh? Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around? My mother and I asked him to take us to a certain textile shop. We gave him the name on a piece of paper. He looked at it contemptuously and then threw it on the ground. 'I take you to my shop. Better.' We protested we wanted to go to the first establishment. He shrugged, `Okay, but I take you to my shop first.'
Morocco. T.E. Lawrence used to com- plain about it. The situation came about because the French colonies were run dif- ferently to ours. The French liked to mould their subject peoples into Frenchmen. So; many Moroccans have the arrogance of the French and the ineptitude of some Africans. It's a winning combination.
All the way to his shop AbduIlah kept jabbing at his mobile phone. Unfortunately he spotted mine. Give me the number, he demanded. Did I slap him in the face for his impertinence? Did I raise myself up and put on a voice like Joyce Grenfell? I did not. I rather feebly gave him the num- ber. American gangsters in the Twenties used to practise something called the Hot Foot. This involved slipping a match into someone's shoe between the sole and the heel, lighting it and then standing back. Abdullah practised the Hot Phone. Every 20 seconds, from a distance of a few yards, he rang my telephone and yelled, 'It's me, Abdullah.' Local women, huddled over stands of vegetables and herbs, jumped in fright. 'Ho, ho, good joke,' he said.
After 20 minutes or so we reached his shop, deep in the souk. It was full of brie-a- brac and jewellery, most of which was glass. We looked askance but Abdullah was having none of it. He held out his arm out and seized me by the neck. `Me not joshing you. Me know everyone, friend of Chelsea Clin- ton.' He shoved me into a room containing photographs. There he was indeed, posing with Chelsea, holding her in a vice-like grip by a lamp shop. Poor girl. 'And here I am with my very good friend Ronnie Cooper.' Who? We looked up. In another photograph Abdullah was with Ronnie Corbett. He was holding him like a captor holds a hostage.
This was all very well but then he began to be fresh, and I don't mean his odour. `You come out with me tonight.' No."You come tomorrow night. I own three hotels. All mine. I drive you around in a Mer- cedes.' I wondered what had happened to moonlit desert oases and camels. 'Maybe we get married, you never know.' He leered at my mother. 'Hello, mama.'
Was this act thrown in for nothing, or would I have to pay for it? Worse still, what if it wasn't an act? 'My sister will bake you a cake,' he said. 'All by herself. I bring it to your hotel tomorrow."Erm, don't worry."No, I come. Now give me a kiss.' I ducked. 'I call you 10 o'clock tomorrow morning to give you present.' Take me back to the hotel,' I ordered him. 'Okay, darling.' Later that night there was a mes- sage on my mobile. It was unrepeatable in a well brought up magazine. Next morning I put on a pair of dark glasses and hoped he wouldn't be hanging around. He was. `Hey, woman. You not answer my mes- sages. I brought you present.' He held out a white cardboard box tied with string. You come with me now.' I leapt into a nearby horse-drawn carriage of the kind that pulled tourists round the town. Having neglected the traditional riding skills of his forefathers he was unable to follow me. When I opened the cardboard box I saw that it contained some small pastries that had been on the hotel restaurant pudding trolley the night before. In Morocco they know all about stolen love, all right.
I don't understand the younger generation.'
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