I'm here for the night, at least. They've put me in a crappy hotel, at no extra charge. I've also got a token for some food, which is OK I suppose. The stop has enabled me to reflect on my trip.
Kent, two weeksm four days ago.
Winter is on its way and I am yet to take any holiday this year from the job which is destroying my life force a little more every day. I've put on weight over the summer, not left the house much except to go to work, where I sit like a zombie in front of a screen, putting numbers into XL tables, copying them and pasting them into new XL tables all day, trying to avoid everyone's eye and parying to God I won't have to go for a piss and walk past all their accusing eyes. The rest of the time this past summer I smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot of brandy and ale; put untold numers and variations of different powders up my nose and festered in a self-important and pseudo-adolescent bubble of my own pathetic depression. I am the guy you hope your children will never become. I am the junkie you warn them about. I am the man for whom you have no sympathy.
And yet you don't think about what drove me to this; and to be honest with you, neither did I until quite recently. I toyed with different ideas -was it Jane leaving me? Was it my Uncle's recent death? Was it when I ran out of washing-up liquid halfway through doing the dishes and sat down on the lino to weep for about 3 hours before masturbating furiously in the shower, smoking a little op-ah and sleeping for an entire day?
No, it was none of these things, just as it was all of them. The single dominating factor, however, had to be my pure, intense hatred for this country and everybody who inhabits it. I had this epiphony at 4am in a park near to the house -my face covered in misty rain, staring into the river under the willows. A "moment of clarity" perhaps.
And I decided to go to Morocco. I wanted to smell the hot winds blowing North off the Sahara. I wanted to get lost down narrow little alleyways, stroll through the balmy streets at night, drink sweet black coffee and smoke hookahs and absorb myself in my own anonymity a long way (culturally, if not Geographically) from England and its festering bloated footsoldiers of ingorance, decay and debauchery.
Purge
Cliche though it may sound, I wanted to get away from my life for a while. So I booked three weeks off work and on the first day of my holiday filled 32 black bin bags with all of the possessions I felt were weighing me down. Most of them. When I was finished all that remained in my flat were the utensils in my kitchen, a few books, my bed clothes and a pile of dog-eared, much-loved books. Everything else: clothes, television, CDs, piles and piles and piles of documents (unopened mail, vehicle papers, postcards etc.) magazines, mobile phone (not the first time I have parted with one. if you have never tried, I strongly recommend it. The feeling of freedom is quite tremendous.) was ditched. Wonderful. I have kept my out-of-date, small and ugly laptop computer, which I am typing into right now. My other posessions are gone and good riddance to them. I was staggered at how many bin bags it took.
I calculated, however, that almost half of them contained genuine rubbish: packaging and refuse. Another ten or so contained the kind of items which are almost rubbish: a yoga ball (unused), a hockey stick, the mouthpiece from a clarinet, a tea set, a plastic Yoda. The remaining few binbags contained the tainted baggage of my life as I have come to know it -the very life I wished to purge. Out it went.
Shopping
I went shopping that day; my desire to flee from England (and be prepared) for a while a little more pressing than my revulsion of shopping centres and my boiling, bubbling disgust for shoppers, capitalism, people, crowds and public places of all kinds.
I bought simple, cheap unbranded clothes. Dark grey shirts and black linen trousers. Anonymous brown leather lace-up shoes, a plain, featureless black suit jacket. A single suitcase. A pair of chep-but-not-too-cheap sunglasses. Navy blue boxer shorts. Black socks. A wash bag. I had everything I needed to begin anew.
And off I went.
I have no pictures, I'm afraid. i didn't take any pictures. I went on holiday for me, not for the bloggers, not for my remaining family members who I never see, not for my small group of distant and degenerate friends. For me, no camera. The following picture I just found online. It will have to do.
Marrakech is the correct spelling of the city I fly into. It's the perfect place to disconnect; reassemble. I have a lot of respect for Morroccans. I have a lot of respect for Arabs. Their lives seem less tainted, less flabby and wasteful than ours. They're a beautiful people, in a harsh and unforgiving sort of way. They say it like it is, they don't mince words. They live by their beliefs and yet demonstrate a moral felxibility which can result in acts of astounding deceit and cruelty. Twice I was ripped off, once by a cab driver and another time by the police. Still, less than a hundred pounds of my money was taken and I am not angry by either incident. I was stupid enough to fall victim to fraud and deserved it, I suppose.
I stayed in a hotel on the south side of the town. A simple, clean place full of natives and coloured tiles. No AC here, just old wooden fans and many windows. There was no television in my room, just a lamp and a small desk fan. In the evenings on the first couple of days I would walk through the town and then return to my room and write down my thoughts, before falling asleep and dreaming of orange sands and white sunlight.
Danny
On the third or fourth day I met Danny. I was drinking tea out of a tiny glass cup at a table in a narrow alleyway (my wish came true) and watching an old, hunched woman in black robes making slow and doddery progress along the cobbles, a basket of oranges in one hand, a walking cane in the other. Danny sat down opposite me with no invitation and gestured to the waiter, who instantly poured him tea. He sipped from his glass several times before looking at me for the first time and extending his hand in greeting. I shook it and introduced myself. He told he he was Danny. He told me he lived in Marrakech; and had done for three years. He used to live in London. Now he lived here.
We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in relative silence, our glasses being topped up occasionally, watching Marrakechians come and go on their daily business. Every now and then Danny would light his pipe and puff dirty brown clouds of hashish smoke into the airr. He had no fear of arrest, he had no fear of anything, from the look of it. He would hand me his pipe and I would furtively gulp back a few draws and quickly hand it back to him and there was a twinkle in his eye -he found my nervousness amusing.
Heroin
Danny wrote for an English newspaper. He lived alone in a filthy ground-floor apartment with a mangey cat called Samson who came and went as he chose, often dragging the twitching remains of dead rodents with him, shedding his flees and his brown hairs on the floors, counters and windowsills. Stinking the place up. Danny seemed to have little affection for Samson, and shared his accommodation with the ungrateful beast in much the same way as one might co-exist with a selfish, smelly flatmate. They would exchange uninterested looks with one another, invade each other's space. I did not care for Samson.
Danny read a great many books. they were heaped in piles all over his apartment. Some had leather covers. Some of the piles of books were used as work surfaces, cluttered with teacups and ashtrays. I felt strangely at home when I was in Danny's home, and had to remind myself from time to time that my home now looked very different to this place, very empty and very anonymous.
Danny smoked a great deal of heroin. One of the reasons I chose to leave my life behind for a while was to get away from the hard stuff, but in those surroundings and in that company it would have been absurd to decline, so join in I did. And for eight days I barely left his apartment, except after the sun had set. We sat and chattered and mused and pondered and pontificated and at night we walked thorugh the streets and soaked in the city through our seeping pours until it was time for me to leave.
And here I am, shivering in a hotel in Malaga, preparing myself for the journey ahead.
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