The Road to McCarthy by Pete McCarthy Page A

stick-your-head-through-the-hole-in-the-plywood jobs you see on the pier. As I get up to leave after a gray and greasy chicken tagine, the band are passing the hat round, bowing and smiling at the tourists and repeating over and over again the same Berber word: “Thank you,” perhaps, or possibly “Asshole.”
    I spend the afternoon reading and dozing in the hotel garden, where the orange trees are jiggling in a gentle breeze. It’s like a perfect English summer’s day, warm enough to have any self-respecting Brit stripped to the waist drinking a can of Stella in the lottery queue; but officially it is still winter.Mediterranean etiquette demands that the pool remain closed, and that the Moroccans, Spanish and French who are my fellow guests remain fully kitted out in winter woollies and cashmere coats.
    In the hotel bookcase I found a copy of
Tangier: City of the Dream
by Iain Finlayson. It documents the recent history of the city, and bristles with scandalous tales of Burroughs, Paul Bowles and the artistic demimonde. I’m fascinated by his account of Mohammed Mrabet, a storyteller who dictated his tales onto Bowles’s tape recorder and won a reputation as a major figure in modern Arab literature. He was also a wild and crazy guy, a Moroccan Marlon Brando lookalike who became sexually involved with a variety of Western women, men and couples. I’m intrigued by the sound of his book,
Love With a Few Hairs
, published in London in 1967, a tale, according to Finlayson, of “a European being taken for a ride by a young Moroccan man who skillfully plays him for personal advantage.” It sounds like it might shed some light on my situation with my own Mohammed, and I decide to find a copy, even though I haven’t seen a bookshop yet.
    By evening I need a walk but I’m worried that Mohammed will nab me again as soon as I leave the hotel. I edge out into the street and scan the likely doorways and alcoves, but there’s no sign of him. He’s brilliant. As soon as you think you know how he operates, he changes the pattern to keep you guessing. Wait a minute—is that him over there?
    No.
    It’s just after dark when I find myself a seat on the outside terrace of a run-down café just outside the medina, where three tiny pedestrian streets packed with shops and market stalls converge. There’s a cassette stall with loud Islamic music distorting from speakers that aren’t big enough to cope. Closest to me is an increasingly desperate-looking man who keeps arranging and rearranging stonewashed jeans and denim handbags on a blanket on the ground. He hasn’t made a sale in the hour I’ve been here. I’ve been watching life come and go and reflecting on the beautiful energetic confusion of it all, thinking how redistribution of the West’s wealth is probably a jolly good thing, when a guy comes and sits too close to me. It’s clear that he’s going to try and strike up a conversation and scam me in some way, so I’m ready for him.
    “Hello, my friend.”
    “Hello.”
    “You know me?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “I see you earlier, in hotel? Remember? I change my clothes now.”
    It seems unlikely. I can’t think of a hotel in the world that would let him through the door, let alone offer him a job. He looks like a particularly unscrupulous pirate, or the kind of assassin you’d be forced to hire if you were on a very limited budget, yet even as I’m thinking this I’m chiding myself for making such a glib and superficial judgment. Why think the worst of the guy? All right, so he’s another poor Moroccan, but that doesn’t give me the right to condemn him. Yes, it’s unlikely he works at my hotel, but what’s so special about a fancy hotel? Who the hell do I think I am anyway?
    “My name is Mustafa.”
    He offers me his hand and I shake it.
    “What is your name?”
    In an instant I consider a plethora of misleading pseudonyms, noms de plume and aliases to throw him off the scent. I know I mustn’t give