Irlam likes to pat the necks of camels. He says they are beautiful creatures.

I say camels are ugly, and smell.

Irlam loves the desert.

I say the desert is just a patch of ground there to make you burn and starve.

 

Irlam’s been here before. He says he knows better than me. He wants to be a hero, he wants to be an upstanding man, a guide to the helpless, the unknowing. Irlam tries to fool me with his romantic wonder and Lawrence of Arabia nonsense. I only refer to Irlam by his surname. He thinks it sounds more exotic than John.

I think Irlam is full of shit. Especially now as we stand here alone and suddenly very lost and the morning has hardly begun. And I can’t find anything to make a drink in.

When I woke this morning the first thing I noticed was Ahmed’s empty hillock. Ahmed, our guide, our man of practicalities and knowledge.

Last night, as we slept, Ahmed must have left us. We had been camping out. Irlam said we should feel the desert sky on our faces, the intense cold, the purity, the sound of the sky. Me in one sleeping bag, covered up from the cold, Irlam next to me. Ahmed was Bedouin, Irlam said, he could watch from beyond. I said he’d freeze. Irlam said he could cope with that, he’s Bedu! Ahmed just shrugged his shoulders and went away from us, away from the fire, to a hillock of sand.

 

Irlam brushed down his shirt and said he’s gone to cleanse himself, or something. I point out that his possessions have gone, the spare flask, his chained spicy amulet and his sleeping bag.

We wait. The city is somewhere west. Irlam had been hoping to get to the centre of the desert with Ahmed’s help. The sand stretches for miles and miles. This is the desert. I stand, awed by the glass-like chill of the air, the infinitesimal grains of sand and the geometry of the horizon, wondering if there is a heart to it.

 

Tall Irlam. Thin, gangling. He stands at the edge of the desert and surveys, one arm tucked at right-angles behind his back, the other hand protecting his eyes from the sun.

We’d been going deeper into the desert. As if searching for something but it feels like going round and round in widening circles. Would we ever come out again? Irlam says he knows what we are doing. I have to believe him. But now, without Ahmed?

 

Been through the desert on a horse with no name – that is what he was singing as he came towards me, when we first met, looking slightly drunk. People scattering, looking bemused. He latched onto me. I was white, young, vulnerable.

 

Irlam says I’ll do.

Irlam says I am pretty enough for his purposes.

 

I smile. He kicks the sand, turns round and round, looks up into the sky and mumbles something in Arabic, a phrase he’d picked up from the back of a chocolate bar and had got Ahmed to pronounce it for him. Yet being who he is, what he is, he has no idea what it means. He just repeats it over and over like he is saying something profound. He has charm, knowledge, wit. He has purpose. I do like him though. Poor Irlam, poor boyish Irlam.

 

 

I pack up our belongings. Irlam stares at the horizon. I miss Ahmed’s conspiratorial smiles.

 

We have jeeps; we can drive till we find the city or find what it is people look for in the desert. Irlam says that is just bullshit. Nothing can be found in the desert but sores and scorpion bites and dark nights of the soul. I smile enigmatically saying nothing, knowing that’s precisely the point. But it’s all clichés! He says he hates my Mona-lisa smile. Mona-Lisa was a boy, he says, making a dervish shape, whirling. Arms outstretched.

 

Irlam is a romantic fool.

 

We have water. We can survive. Aren’t you glad, I say, that I said I loathed camels? I look at the jeep. Battered, hardly salubrious but compared to camels…

Camels are eco-friendly, Irlam replies, standing on a hillock pointing east, Sousse must be that way.

 

We’d been there before. It was where we met, outside the Medina walls. Me standing there, him singing. Sousse. On the beach there where that inept tourist train stops, there where Andre Gide lost his virginity, he tells me. Andre who?

 

Sometimes he likes to wander away from me and watch me without him. I know I am being watched so I smile enigmatically. I know what he is capable of. I go with him. I play up to him and feed his fantasies. Out here, far from help, phones, Starbucks, the Sunday papers, you have to trust someone.

 

At the caves of Matmata he was in his element pretending to be Luke Skywalker, pretending to be Darth Vader as a boy. He grinned at the people who live there. And handed out CDs like a missionary. Play these, play these. They walked away smiling strangely, shaking their heads at his lack of understanding.

 

Without him here I don’t know what I would do. I’d be lost.

Lost in Sousse! He laughs at my ineptitude. Lost in Sousse. Once, he confesses, I was lost in Sousse. A guide, just after I had arrived, we are all green at that point, took me deep into the heart of the Medina, saying he would show me the grand Mosque. I had a map but it was useless, the streets are a maze of twists and turns. I was frightened but pretended I wasn’t. After all who am I to agree with cultural stereotypes and believe this man would lead me astray?

 

Cultural stereotypes, I say, like what?

That Arabs are untrustworthy, that Americans know what they are doing, that the English are snobbish.

They’re not true?

He says nothing but looks at me: Irlam unamused.

What did you do? I say finally.

I smiled a lot and watched every corner, but I’d rather not talk about it. He turns away and jumps into the jeep. Are you coming? He can’t get the jeep started – the gearbox for a moment confuses him as if he has forgotten how to work it.

Been through the desert on jeep with no name.

I wonder what it’s like to be really alone out here.

 

 

 

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