Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 30

exercise is quite as requisite for girls as it is for lions and tigers

Muli takes you to Yves St Laurent’s public garden, sheltered and cool within high walls. The noise of Marrakech falls away as you enter. This would be Theo’s kind of place. It’s spiky and seductive with cacti and palms and splashes of blue paint and bougainvillaea-pink cascading over walls. You take a photo for her. You’ll tuck it in an envelope, with some rose petals from the room.

You escape the press of the heat in the winding coolness of the market alleyways. You love the souks, the instrument shop that could have existed several hundred years ago next to a shop selling live iguanas next to one crammed with Sylvester Stallone T-shirts. Love the donkeys in the alleys and skinny cats and red Coca-Cola signs in Arabic, the attacking light, the dust heavy on your skin and clotting your hair, the mountains rimming the city, the talking dark, the crickets and dogs and frogs. There’s the call to prayers and Muli excuses himself for ten minutes. You love the pervasiveness of religion in this place, how the chant wakes you in darkness and plots your day. Cole admires the colours of the city, the vaulting blue of the sky and rich ochres and pinks but he can’t bear the dust and the cram and the heat, he’s very loud about all that, he’s not enjoying being dragged around.

Your confidence is softly leaking as a wife. You’d never tell him. That you sometimes feel as if all the men through your life, the lovers, colleagues, bosses, with their clamour and demand, have been rubbing you out.

Cole’s in another meeting. He’s resorted to watching Pokemon cartoons in French, a language he doesn’t understand, for the English stations carry just rolling news and the stories aren’t changing enough. There are also local news broadcasts with items that run for twenty minutes and seem to be made up entirely of long shots of the King on parade or men in suits on low chairs. The news anchor’s young, with the most beautiful eyes, it’s as if they have kohl round them. You wonder what he’d be like as a lover, if he’d be different. You’ve heard that Muslim women are shaved and all at once you feel a soft tugging between your legs, thinking of that; and of being robed, for your husband’s eyes only. Muli told you both that no one’s ever laid eyes on the Queen, she’s not seen in public, is hidden.

I like that, Cole had laughed.

And was playfully hit.

Later, over gin and tonics in the piano bar Cole holds his cheek to yours and whispers that he wants to lock you up and never allow you out and he wants another wife as well as you, whom you’ll have to sleep with, while he’s watching, and your hands cup his face: You are so predictable, McCain, you chuckle and kiss him gently on each cheek and it stirs something in you, memories of Edinburgh and rolling off a bed and making love with a hand clamped across your mouth.