Read Online Lulu in Marrakech by Diane Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

me. I had been thinking of horrible things I had seen on television as a child, a house burning in Los Angeles, with people inside, and the voice of the announcer at the scene, quivering and tearful. I also thought of a reality police show I’d seen, watching a meth lab go up. With these thoughts, at the same time, a rising smell of ammonia became almost intolerable. The others cupped their hands over their noses or fished for Kleenex, but I was all at once somehow unable to raise my arms. I had never felt so strange, leaden limbs and nerveless fingers. The flames were lurid colors of purple and green, dazzling my eyes, and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, with the others bending over me, fanning me with Posy’s scarf. People helped me up, me protesting that I was all right. Apparently I had fainted, with a sort of amnesia making me unable to remember hitting the ground and with no sense of how long I’d been lying there. Ian said, “We should get everyone away from here. There’s nothing to be done here anyhow.”
    “Right,” said Robin Crumley. “This can’t be good for Posy, or any of us. The baby.” They believed my fainting was some reaction to the smell, but as I thought about it later, I came to think I’d also fainted from from a sudden perception of the metaphorical significance of flames, the force engulfing the English man’s building, the country of Morocco, the region of North Africa, as if the poisonous vapors were coming up through a chink from a terrible netherworld.
    That seems melodramatic, but anyway, I now believe I was terrified at a sort of unconscious level, and I saw that I’d been scared ever since I got here, of something I couldn’t exactly explain. It had been scary enough in Kosovo, where people didn’t hide in baggy robes and veils.
    Ian instructed Rashid to drive Posy and me back to the Palmeraie in the car. They were obliged to wait for some sort of bomb squad from Rabat. Robin Crumley, the personification of uselessness, insisted on staying with Ian, his gangly arms flapping with almost Victorian officiousness as they stuffed us into the car.
    “You should both take showers; there might be fallout,” Ian said.
    So we left, worrying about Posy’s baby and the extent of the toxicity and wondering what had made me faint. I had no way of knowing whether this fire was the thing that Taft had heard might happen or if it was coincidence, or even some projection of my own will for a dramatic event.
    Posy and I had gone to bed before Ian and Robin came home, after midnight. I could hear their voices in the patio, evidently talking to Ian’s other female guest, Nancy Rutgers, and her friend, David, who must have been getting home at the same time. Then Ian came up. I heard him showering for a long time. Eventually he knocked, so quietly it wouldn’t have waked me unless I’d been awake. He came into my room and sat on the chair some way away.
    “I’m worried there may have been someone in there,” he said, his voice shaky with fatigue or emotion. “The watchman and maybe his little boy. No one has seen the little boy and he was there this morning.” His face was drawn with horror. “It has to be an accident. We just don’t have sabotage or arson in Morocco.”
    “Those bombs in Casablanca?”
    “There’s been no trouble in Marrakech. I keep asking myself, could it be personal, some revenge thing, but for what? It’s important that it not be deliberate, not just for the insurance, but think of what it would portend. The Moroccan security people are all over it already.”
    “You think it wasn’t an accident?”
    “No, no, I think it was an accident, a ghastly accident,” he said.
    “I think Rashid was dismayed that I was defying you by making him drive us up there,” I apologized. I needed to know if I was authorized to command Rashid or not.
    “I don’t remember saying he couldn’t,” Ian said. “Probably he just didn’t want to.”
    “We met