Page 18 of The Last Postcard

‘Too much of this stuff will make you paranoid,’ Norton said, smacking it away from his tongue.

‘You know what they say, “A pipe of kif in the evening is worth a dozen camels in the courtyard.”’

‘Who says that?’

Sam laughed at Norton’s expression, feeling his shoulders ease for the first time since the morning.

The Hold was open. Sam could tell, because the dark rectangle in the white, salt-damp wall was slightly darker than usual, and music was spilling out, the scratchy, warbly jazz the old-timers liked to play. At the threshold, Norton faltered and glanced at the peeling, hand-painted sign.

‘Hackett. Where are we?’

Sam smiled. ‘We can’t drink at the El Minzah every day, old chum,’ he said, mimicking Norton. ‘And anyway, you said you wanted to meet other ex-pats.’

‘I meant Peruvian oil barons and Russian heiresses,’ Norton muttered, ‘not ex-cons.’

‘What’s the difference?’

A shallow set of stairs led down to the bar, where it was cooler, away from the fierce heat. As Sam stood blinking, with Norton at his back and the bright streets in his eyes, he heard someone exclaim:

‘I’ll be damned. Is that Samuel Hackett?’

Squinting, he took a few steps across the uneven floor. Slowly, the bar resolved itself from the gloom. A padded bench ran around the edge of the cellar, low tables before it. A record player sat at the end of the bar, next to a crate of records, where Roger, the owner, could keep a watchful eye. Leaning next to it was a woman. She was smiling at Sam, her blue eyes startlingly bright against skin that was as tanned and creased as hide. There was a cigar in her hand, unlit.

‘We’d given you up for dead,’ she said, her lips forming a smile. ‘Some of us before others.’

‘I don’t owe you money too, do I?’

She snorted. ‘Well, I never did expect to get it back.’ Her eyes settled on Norton, lingering at the bottom of the stairs. ‘But what have you brought us?’

‘A compatriot of yours,’ Sam said, enjoying Norton’s expression. ‘This is Ellis Norton, he’s here with Interpress, fresh off the boat.’

‘How dreadful for you.’ The woman smiled at Norton with all her teeth. A great many of them were gold. ‘I’ll bet you wanted Rome.’

Norton flushed, extending a hand. ‘I’m determined to make the best of it, Mrs …?’

Sam winced and leaned over the bar to call Roger from the back room.

The woman was staring Norton down. ‘Mrs Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s Captain. Captain Elizabeth Lowe.’

‘Bet used to have a ship,’ Sam murmured over his shoulder.

Norton seemed at a loss, before clapping a hand to his jacket pocket. ‘Ah, perhaps a drink?’

‘Now, young man,’ Bet said, biting off the end of the cigar, ‘you are speaking our language.’

Roger appeared, limping and gruff as always, and got them a round of beers. He’d grown even hairier since Sam had last seen him. No one really knew how the Welshman had ended up in Tangier, running a hole in the wall. There were a dozen stories about him. Someone said he’d been in a secret desert task force during the war, and couldn’t bring himself to go back to Swansea with all the blood on his hands. Others said he’d been in the Merchant Navy, and had gone AWOL one night only to wake up in the casbah two weeks later with the keys to a bar in his pocket.

And you, Sam asked himself, draining the glass of beer, what great story can you tell? A dropout, begging from his parents? The writing case sat beside him, bringing back a memory of the letter; a first chapter of something new. Perhaps not, he thought.

The bar soon began to fill up with regulars, many of whom had been coming for so long they’d worn the grooves of their arses into the bench. Sam knew better than to try and sit in their places. Bet sat at her table, next to the record player, nearest to the bar. Next to her sat Dr Halligan who taught at the American school and usually had a few college students in tow – undergrads who’d lost the sheen of home. Giles from the British Embassy, sipping his Benedictine; Kline from – nobody knew where Kline was from. Germany, perhaps. Or Switzerland. Anyway, he had something to do with shipping, and was perpetually murmuring to Bet about tide times and anchorage. Wizened Derek Bluff and his glamorous wife Lina. Sam couldn’t help but blush when she leaned in to kiss him on both cheeks, filling his nose with powder and perfume. Roger once told him that Lina was a White Russian who had been a spy, and that Bluff was the British Service man who had unmasked her one fateful night in Gibraltar, only to fall unaccountably in love.

Sam exchanged pleasantries with them, brushing off questions about his writing, about where he had been. He wasn’t sure why he’d stopped coming to The Hold. He’d begun to feel as if it was a strange hinterland, a twilight zone between the denouement of a story and a coda that never came. Everyone there had a past; a wild, dangerous, murky past, yet now they lingered, the crescendo behind them. He felt so blank in comparison. High school, college, summer work, bumming around England and France and Spain. In Connecticut, that made him adventurous, but here …

He glanced over at Norton, who was holding forth to Giles about his golf handicap. Sighing, he called to Roger for another couple of beers.

Over at her table, Bet was peering down at a map that Kline had spread before her, and was marking things in pencil, talking softly. When he appeared, they both looked up abruptly.

‘Here,’ he said, passing her the beer. ‘Am I interrupting?’