They came across a man slapping an octopus on the ground over and over. They stopped to watch.
“What is he doing?” asked Florence.
“Tenderizing it,” said Helen. “It’s too tough to eat if you don’t slap it around a little first.”
They ate lunch outside at one of the seafood places on the harbor rather than walk back up into town. The breeze coming off the water seemed to blow in more of the same hot, heavy air. They each ordered octopus fresh from the ocean, or advertised that way, with a variety of grilled vegetables and bottles of the local beer, Casablanca. As the sun climbed toward its apex, the shade of their umbrella shifted and exposed Helen’s bare legs. She asked Florence to switch seats with her.
“Your young skin can handle the sun,” she said.
Florence frowned at this justification; she was only six years younger. But then she reminded herself that she wouldn’t even be here if not for Helen and quickly stood up.
Under the sun’s glare, Florence felt herself wilt. She held the bottle of beer to her forehead and neck. She could barely look at the octopus. She thought of it being pounded to death on the ground. She pushed the plate away.
“You’re not eating?” Helen asked.
Florence shook her head.
Helen pulled the plate toward her. “I’m starving.”
When Helen finished her meal, she lit a cigarette and tapped the ash onto the uneaten tentacles on her plate. Florence looked away in disgust.
The walk back up to the square under the scorching sun was steeper than Florence remembered. She recalled that she had wanted to buy a hat. “It’s hot as blue blazes,” she said under her breath.
“What was that?” Helen asked.
“Nothing.”
Florence hadn’t thought to park in the shade, and they had to bunch up their dresses in their hands to grasp the door handles. The air-conditioning was still broken.
*
That afternoon they both retreated to their rooms. Florence tried to nap but she slept fitfully and woke up feeling less rested than she had before she lay down. It was past eight by the time they left for dinner. Florence was wearing a white cotton dress and a pair of leather sandals she’d splurged for in Hudson along with her new bag. Her face was pink from the sun.
She knocked on Helen’s door. “Ready?”
“One minute,” Helen called from inside. “Just finishing up some work.”
Florence heard a drawer slam roughly then Helen swung open the door. She was wearing a navy dress that buttoned up the front, with a blue-and-white-striped scarf over her shoulders. “Let’s hit it,” she said, with the short stub of a cigarette sticking out of the corner of her mouth. Her whole room reeked of tobacco. So much for the no-smoking clause in their rental agreement, Florence thought.
In the hallway, Helen flicked her cigarette butt over the side of the railing with ink-stained fingers. It floated down fifteen feet or so to the hard tiled floor below. Florence grimaced at the thought of Amina stooping to pick it up later. At the door, Helen handed her belongings to Florence once again.
The night was nearly as warm as the day, the air scented with jasmine. They drove with the windows open and the sea air whipping their faces. They were going to a restaurant up in the hills, just north of Semat, which a friend of Helen’s had recommended to her.
“What friend?” Florence had wanted to ask, but didn’t.
“So you haven’t really explained what type of research you want to do for the book,” she said instead.
“Hm?” Helen asked, looking out her window.
“I mean, is there anything you want me to do while we’re here? Talk to anyone? Visit anyplace? I’m still not exactly sure what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Oh, nothing so regimented. I just want to get a feel for the place, that’s all.”
The car’s engine hummed as the road climbed upward. Both the town and Villa des Grenades receded in the rearview mirror. The road clung to the coastline even as it rose ten, then twenty, then thirty feet above the churning Atlantic below. Florence gripped the steering wheel tightly. It was a windy night, and sudden gusts kept buffeting the car. She inched it closer to the right side of the road, as far from the drop as she could.
“This is rather treacherous, isn’t it?” Helen said.
Florence just nodded without taking her eyes off the road in front of her. She hadn’t wanted to betray her nervousness; she’d assumed Helen would mock her for it.
They arrived at the restaurant without incident fifteen minutes later. Florence rubbed a tight knot in her shoulder as Helen pulled open the door, fighting against the wind.
The restaurant was empty except for two other patrons, a British couple in their sixties who were already on dessert.
The host greeted them warmly. “Bienvenue, welcome,” he said.
“Two whiskeys,” said Helen in response, holding up two fingers.
Florence had discovered only after they’d booked their trip that they were missing Ramadan by just a few days. It would have been nothing short of a disaster if Helen hadn’t been able to drink.
They were led to their table by a waiter who looked like he was pushing ninety. A few moments later, the whiskey arrived in glasses smudged with greasy fingerprints.
“When in Rome…” Florence said with a shrug, reaching for her drink.
“…get salmonella,” Helen finished.
They tapped their glasses together. “To new beginnings,” Helen pronounced. They both took a long swallow.
*
Helen had ordered them both the house specialty, camel, but when their food arrived, Florence was put off by the pile of meat in front of her. She was feeling the effects of the sun and the heat, and she suspected she had drunk too much on an empty stomach. Tinny Arabic music played from a speaker mounted above their table, and it seemed to be getting louder, strobing in conspiracy with the lights.
Helen was talking but she seemed very far away. Everything felt very far away. Florence felt as if her whole self, her whole consciousness, had shrunk down to the size of a pebble and was knocking around inside her skull. Her insides felt dark and vast, the outer world too distant to matter, like a movie projected on a remote screen. The meat on her plate seemed to be sweating. Do you keep sweating after you die? No, no, that was toenails and hair that kept going. Growing.
The music quieted down then. Everything got quieter. As if underwater. Sounds were swallowed up by the water. She felt lulled by a swift current, swept away by the waves, pulled back by strong hands, then swept away again, and all the while Helen’s voice was deep and pulsating, like a whale’s song, like an echo, like a shadow in sound, like it had all been said before and would be said again but deeper and richer until it faded away entirely and all that was left were the waves. Lapping softly, softly, softly—
PART IV
26.
Madame Weel-cock?”
The next time Florence woke, she was more lucid. She’d been in a car accident, she remembered the doctor had said. And she remembered, too, that he had called her Madame Wilcox. What did that mean? Where was Helen? Perhaps in another bed, in another room, being called Madame Darrow?
When the nurse returned, Florence asked, “The woman who was with me in the car, is she here?”