Ann Cleeves - Burial of Ghosts

The bus would take eight hours and cost me less than half the meal I’d bought the night before. It would cross the flat plain of the Souss valley, then head up into the mountains. The other passengers seemed to be local, mostly women and young children going to visit their families. The older women were wrapped up, so all I could see of them were curious eyes and a henna tattoo on the ankle. On the back seat a couple of teenage boys were full of themselves and giggling. At first I thought I would be the only European on it, but then, just as the bus was about to start, a man jumped on. He was middle-aged but lean and fit as a Berber hillsman, not a scrap of flesh on him. He was blond. It was hard to tell from his hair, which was shaved convict short, but his eyebrows and lashes were almost white. There were other seats available, but only next to Moroccan women, who were already looking away from him, willing him to keep his distance. I knew he’d come up to me.

‘Do you mind?’ He smiled in a shy, self-deprecating way which made him seem half his age.

I did mind but I could hardly say so. How could I explain? Actually I had a near-mystical experience wandering around a bunch of date palms with a girl and a donkey. I want to see if I can re-create it crossing the High Atlas.

As I nodded for him to sit down, I was thinking too about his voice. Only three words, slightly accented, but I could place him on that. North of the Tyne and south of the Scottish border. He came from the same place as me. Except, of course, I could make no assumptions about my place of birth.

We talked.

‘Lizzie Bartholomew,’ I said, turning in my seat and holding out my hand, mock formal, a Brit keeping up appearances away from home.

‘Philip.’ No last name. I wondered fleetingly if he had plans for the encounter. Was he saving himself from embarrassing consequences even then? The impression was confirmed when he took my hand. He was wearing a wedding ring. It was slightly too loose on his finger. ‘And where, exactly, do you come from, Lizzie Bartholomew?’ My fellow Northerner had placed me too.

‘Newbiggin-by-the-Sea.’

Mocking. The full name made the town sound attractive – picture-postcard pretty. You’d imagine a little harbour, children playing on the beach. I was drawn to it. I loved the big church on the headland, the double-fronted stone houses on Front Street. In one sense it was precisely where I’d come from, where I’d been created. But pretty it wasn’t. He’d know of Newbiggin by reputation. He’d have heard stories of kids marauding round the council estate, burnt-out cars on the golf course, the black beach caused by washed-up coal dust. I doubted if he’d ever been there.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Upmarket, eh?’

It wasn’t said cruelly. He was curious, that was all. We both laughed.

‘And you?’

‘Newcastle originally. Further up the coast now.’ Still giving nothing away.

‘You’re a long way from home,’ I said lightly. ‘Holiday?’

‘Fulfilling a dream,’ he said, deadly serious.

‘What dream would that be?’

‘Trekking in the Atlas Mountains. When I was a kid there was a picture in a geography textbook. For some reason it caught my imagination. Exotic, I suppose. A bit different from Heaton.’

Heaton was a Newcastle suburb. Not rough like the West End, but hardly smart either. From his voice I’d have said he’d gone up in the world.

‘You’re on a bus,’ I said. ‘Hardly trekking.’

He smiled slowly. Everything he did was slow and deliberate. I thought he’d be a good lover. Patient. I wondered what he planned to do when we arrived in Marrakech. Jessie always said I was shameless.

‘Today I’m on a bus. I’ve been walking in the hills for three weeks with local guides. I came back for a few days to rest in a decent hotel.’

That would explain the lean, fit look.

‘The Palais Salaam?’

He nodded.

‘I was there last night.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I saw you swimming.’

‘Travelling alone?’

‘Ah.’ He leaned back in his seat and narrowed his eyes. ‘My wife’s a saint. She’d deny me nothing.’

I waited for him to continue, but he drifted into sleep. He slept for the first hour, his breathing regular and shallow, not waking even when we stopped in noisy squares to drop off and pick up passengers. I looked out of the window at endless citrus orchards surrounded by vivid orange walls, then at acacia scrub, the trees grazed bare by the goats which scrambled through the branches. When the bus started climbing he woke and continued the conversation as if the nap had never occurred.

‘Why are you in Morocco, Lizzie Bartholomew?’

I mumbled something about needing a break. ‘Sometimes things are complicated, you know?’

‘What sort of complications could you possibly have?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘It’s a very long bus ride.’

So I told him my story. Not all of it. But the stuff I’d spilled out over and over again, trying to impress new acquaintances, to get sympathy, to explain my choice of career. And he was hooked. I could tell.

‘I spent most of my childhood in care. Lots of different children’s homes.’

‘I thought they tried to find foster homes these days.’

‘Oh, they tried. Just not very hard. And I wasn’t an easy kid… Some of the homes were OK. Some were awful. Even in the good ones, the staff were distant. I suppose they had to stay detached or they’d go crazy. But you don’t understand when you’re a kid. Occasionally there’d be someone I really liked, but they always moved on in the end or I’d be shunted away. Then there’d be the first day at another school, more kids to laugh, because however hard the staff tried, we always looked different. Clothes that didn’t quite fit, no parents to come to open evenings or school plays.’

I was getting absolutely the response I wanted. I should have been on the stage. He was almost in tears.

‘Tough,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I replied with a bit of a sneer. ‘Tough.’ What would he know? ‘When I was sixteen I left. Or was thrown out. They didn’t like me much. Too lippy. Bolshy. Stirring up insurrection among the rest of the kids. And I drank too much. Way too much. They found me a place in a hostel, a sort of B&B for losers, dropouts and druggies, in Newbiggin. A social worker came once a week to check I was OK. I hated her. If I offered her a cup of tea she always said she’d just had one. She was afraid of catching germs. Or something worse.’

‘And were you OK?’

‘I was brilliant.’

Then I told him about Jess, who owned the place. ‘She wasn’t paid to be kind to me or worry about my psychological welfare, only to wash my sheets and cook my breakfast. So when she was kind it counted.’

Jess had been a dinner lady in the primary school. Her aunt had died and left her the big stone house with its view of the sea. It was too big for her, but she couldn’t bear to sell it. So she set up in business. Perhaps she’d been hoping for respectable guests – the birdwatchers who turned up in the autumn, businessmen, students, reps – but she ended up with us. If she had space she never turned anyone away. We were like the bairns from the infant class she used to treat for grazed knees and elbows. She gave us more sympathy than we deserved.

‘Jess persuaded me to go to the tech to take A-levels.’

She was a stubborn woman, as wide almost as she was high, dressed usually in charity-shop jumble, jogging bottoms and a man’s checked shirt. That day she’d smartened herself up. She dragged me to the college open day, stood with me at the enrolment desk.

‘What do you fancy then, bonny lass?’