The Desert Run Read online

  And while I was doing that, Ben got back on eBay and bought three more boards.

  16

  It took two weeks before I finally heard about the job—my dream job, as I’d thought of it for a while. The email they sent me read like a copy-and-paste affair, and I remembered what Mo had said, about keeping an eye on the news section of the company’s website. I logged on and, sure enough, there was a photograph of Pete, and a short announcement saying how thrilled everyone was that he’d accepted the offer.

  I could tell you I didn’t care by then, but it wouldn’t be true. I stared at the screen for a long while, at Pete’s smug smiling face, and it hurt. Somehow, it reminded me of when Mum died: it was a moment when the reality of life showed too clearly through the cracks. It wasn’t fair, not the random underlay of life, where good people were picked out to die from cancer and bad people lived to be a hundred. Nor the overlay of life, society—where politicians went on and on about equality and how if you work hard, you can make something of yourself, and then they voted through a massive hike in student fees or got caught hiding millions in tax havens.

  I looked from the laptop screen in Ben’s room to the paddleboard I was still working on. I’m not trying to draw too direct a line, I’m not saying I agreed to smuggle drugs because this firm didn’t give me a job, or because I’d lost my hours on the petrol station job. That would be too simplistic. That’s not it. But it wasn’t unrelated either.

  But if I’m really honest, it was mostly about Julia. I’d fallen for her so hard by then I’d built up a whole false reality based around us and how we were going to get together. Impressing her with my sensible job hadn’t worked so now I was trying the opposite, wowing her by becoming an exciting, daring international drugs smuggler.

  Of course I wasn’t really telling her anything at all. In reality we lived together but we didn’t even talk. Nonetheless she commanded my attention. If she was home, I was always alert to where she was in the flat. My pulse would quicken when she walked into the room; I’d stop whatever I was doing. I’d try not to look, but my eyes followed her as if drawn by some irresistible force. I took a thousand mental photographs of the back of her head. I thought it was love. It felt like love. The most powerful, physical form of love I’d ever experienced. It hurt that we weren’t together, but it was an easy pain to like, it distracted me from reality, it gave me something to feel that was at least about her.

  I couldn’t tell her, of course I couldn’t tell her. Ben and I had agreed we wouldn’t tell anyone, except those who had to know. But I think I always knew I’d crumble in the end.

  It happened late one night. Ben and Anna had gone to bed, and I was about to, when I heard the front door, and Julia came in. She’d been out with Andy, and I’d assumed she’d stay over at his place. I listened in case he was with her, but all I heard was her in the kitchen, making a drink. So instead of going to bed, I waited in the lounge, hoping she’d come in.

  She did, with a mug of coffee, blowing steam off the top, then she sat down. Not next to me this time. In the armchair, at the opposite end of the sofa.

  “Hi Jake,” she said. “You’re up late.”

  “Yeah. I’m just working on something,” I replied, surprising myself. Suddenly I sensed this was where my fantasy became reality. Earlier Ben and I had been writing a list of stuff we needed to take and I quickly grabbed it from the table, along with a pen.

  “Another job interview?”

  “No. Something else.” I gave a half pause. “Something a bit more interesting.”

  She went back to her coffee, and I fought back the urge to fill the silence.

  “Well, go on,” she said when she’d taken her sip. “Is it a secret?” She gave a little roll of her eyes, as if telling me she knew what I was doing.

  “It’s just a list. You know, for the trip me and Ben are going on.”

  “Oh, your holiday?” We’d told them we were going away, we couldn’t just disappear.

  “What if I told you it’s not just a holiday?”

  “What?” She blew again on her coffee, as if that was more interesting than what I was saying.

  “This trip. What if I told you it was something else?”

  Her face didn’t exactly light up, but I had her attention. But she misinterpreted me.

  “What, like it’s travelling or something? Jake, you’re only going away for two weeks. Proper travelling is at least six months. Or maybe a year.” There was a magazine on the table, and I saw her eye go to it. She was about to pick it up; then I’d lose her in celebrities and their vacant lives.

  I shouldn’t do this, I thought. I knew I shouldn’t do this. Ben would kill me. No. Ben would understand.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” I said, aiming for a sly tone of intrigue in my voice. “What I mean is there might be another purpose to this trip.”

  Those lovely grey eyes came back to me, and widened slightly.

  “Like what?”

  “Well, you know we’re going to Morocco, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said slowly.

  “And you know we’re taking those new stand-up paddleboards that Ben’s got in his room?”

  A little pause here from Julia, then:

  “I haven’t seen them...”

  “But you know he has them? I heard you talking with him about them the other week.”

  “Yes...”

  “Well, let’s just say when we come back from Morocco, those boards might be a little heavier.”

  She looked like I’d gone too far. She put her coffee down and wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Jake, what are you talking about?”

  I didn’t answer, but Ben’s box was on the table in front of me, and very deliberately, I opened it. I pointed at the little block of hashish inside, and watched her face as her eyes followed my finger.

  “What are you talking about, Jake?” she said again.

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve already said too much.” I gave a short, half-hearted laugh, and watched her face. It was like she tried to hide that she understood.

  “Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?” she said, swallowing carefully.

  I nodded very deliberately, and then, as if I were pretending we might have people spying on us, or bugging the room. “I’ve no idea what you think I’m telling you.”

  “Are you telling me you’re planning to smuggle drugs back from Morocco?” She said it harshly, there was none of the smile or delighted laugh I’d hoped for. But before I could frame an answer, try and bring things back on track, she softened on her own. I couldn’t read this girl. I was blinded by how I felt for her.

  “Jake, Jake, Jake. You do surprise me. What a dark horse.” And there it was, the smile I’d known was there all along. She tilted her beautiful head on one side and watched me.

  “We’ve already got this guy we’re going to buy it from…” I began, but she put her finger to her lips.

  “Shhh…" She shook her head. "It’s better you don’t tell me,” she said. “Better you don’t tell anyone.”

  Neither of us spoke for a moment but our eyes were locked together. But having told her I suddenly felt stupid.

  “It’s just a one off. Just to clear our debts, and—you know, grab a bit of adventure.”

  “No Jake. I don’t want to hear it.”

  I felt deflated again. How come I always got it wrong with this girl? I sat in silence for a minute thinking if there was a way to restart the conversation with something else, but before I had regained enough composure to try, she set her coffee cup down, still nearly full.

  "I'm pretty tired. I think I'm going to go to bed," she said, and I just nodded my head and watched her get up and walk to the door.

  "Maybe you can tell me all about it when you get safely back?" She smiled one last time and disappeared, leaving me alone. Wishing there was something I could do or say that would make her talk to me and love me back.

&nb
sp; I suppose it wasn’t much to sustain my obsession, but I was used to existing off scraps. So it was plenty to keep me distracted from the madness of what I was doing with Ben.

  17

  By then Ben was exchanging regular messages with Mo’s cousin Ahmed. I didn’t play a big part in what he called the “negotiations.” I was happy enough making sure my epoxy cured properly and my surfaces were sanded perfectly smooth. But sometimes, Ben would give me updates, when he wanted a break from sitting with his laptop and his phone beeping every few minutes as another flurry of messages went back and forth.

  And it took a lot of work. He was using an app with encryption software built in, so in theory, he could talk freely, but Ben was worried that just using encryption might flag up the messages they were sending on some government database. He did as much as he could using a set of invented code words. But then, Ahmed’s English wasn’t perfect, and there was another problem—we didn’t really know what it was we wanted to buy.

  When you buy a little bit of hash from a dealer, you basically buy what they’ve got. But when you want to buy in bulk, it’s a bit different. You see, cannabis varies hugely in lots of ways. We first noticed that when we went to Morocco that summer. The colour can vary from a dark green to turd brown. The texture can vary, and most importantly, the effect it has on you can vary massively. And that’s just solid; I’m not even talking about weed.

  Think of it a bit like wine. Sure, you might think that people who claim to know the difference between a five-pound bottle and a twenty-pound bottle are just wankers—you’re probably right. But the truth is, if you drink enough of it, you probably do start to notice the subtle little differences. It’s the same with dope.

  And just as with wine, you have to pay a lot more for the higher-quality product. But just try negotiating that with a guy who doesn’t speak English that well, a thousand miles away, and using code words. That was why Ben was looking so stressed with the whole thing.

  We knew by then we wanted hash, not grass. It lasts longer, it smells less, and most importantly, it packs down much smaller, so we could fit more of it in. But what type of hash? From Ahmed’s texts, it seemed there were about a million different types of the stuff, and they all had wildly different prices.

  Ben seemed to be stuck in a loop where Ahmed would suggest a type of hashish he could get us, and Ben would read all about it on the Internet and get some idea of what it should be worth here. Then Ahmed would give him a price that was probably more than we could sell it for here. Then Ben would go back to him and say we couldn’t possibly pay even a tenth of that price, and Ahmed would sound all offended, and we wouldn’t hear back from him for a few hours. But when he did come back to us, he’d tell us about a different type of hash we could have if that was what we were prepared to spend, and the whole thing would start again. He’d text us photos too; when we stripped off the encryption, there’d be these big, shiny blocks of sticky brown dope. In the background, I could see the workshop he had; it looked a lot like how I’d imagined it would. And all the dope he sent us looked a whole lot fresher and better than whatever we could get here.

  Ben persevered, and he got there in the end.

  18

  And so the days ticked down. Ben booked the ferries, and we sorted the route we’d take. I handed Ben all the money I had access to, taking my debts to new heights. He put in more than me, but he was generous. We were partners, fifty-fifty.

  These felt like significant milestones, but there always seemed room to back out. I’m not sure I really believed Ben’s van would get all the way down to Morocco, or if it did, that anything would happen when we got there. There’d be no dope. We’d find out Ahmed was just stringing us along, or the crop would fail. We’d just end up having a holiday like we had the other time. We’d probably smoke a load of gear for a week and come home. And everything would go back to normal, whatever normal meant by that time.

  Maybe that’s denial. Maybe that was me sticking my head in the sand. Maybe that's how everyone gets themselves ready to do something stupid. Truth is I didn’t even think about it much. There were plenty of practical things to keep me busy. I had to work out what equipment and material I’d need to open up and fix the paddleboards with the gear inside. There was the van to get ready, serviced, and packed up with sleeping bags and all the other stuff we’d need driving down and back. There was the issue of where we would stay to sort out. And when I wasn’t busy with that, I had to fit in a lot of daydreaming about Julia.

  One thing we didn’t spend much time on was what we were going to do with the dope when we got it back to the UK. If I did ask him, Ben would always tell me it was sorted, but I didn’t bring it up much. Like I say, I didn’t really believe there ever would be any dope, so this didn’t feel that important. If Ben said it was sorted, that was fine, one less thing for me to worry about.

  The days passed. Other-worldly days spent in a lightly scented haze of dope smoke. I still had no hours at the petrol station. I’d stopped bothering with job applications by then too. Handing my money to Ben felt like handing over responsibility for the debt too. At some level I knew I’d have to face reality again after our ‘holiday’, but for a short while I was content to let it all be something I would worry about later.

  They were days tainted only by my longing for Julia, a longing that was made worse by her knowing our secret, but refusing to talk about it. I made it bearable by living mostly in my fantasy world in which she loved me as much as I thought I loved her.

  And then, suddenly, I discovered that all the days had ticked by. We had to pack up the van and drive to the port. We were off.

  19

  France is big. Really big.

  We saved a bit of cash by taking the Dover-to-Calais route, but it added about five thousand miles to the distance. I’m exaggerating, of course, but in a van like Ben’s, it really seemed like it. We had the boards strapped to the roof, two on each side, which meant we couldn’t go much above sixty before the noise made us worry the whole lot might be ripped off. We took it in turns to drive, stopping only for refuelling, and to pay the tolls. That and those little coffees you get from the machines in service stations where everyone stands around, looking French.

  We put ourselves back an hour getting lost around Paris, and then another hour when we hit Bordeaux in the rush hour, but slowly, we crawled southward through France. Our plan was to just keep at it, taking it in turns to sleep, but at three a.m., we gave up and both crawled in the back for a sleep, somewhere just shy of the Spanish border.

  Spain’s pretty big too, but the thing about driving long distances is you get into it. Spain’s empty too. Apart from the cities, and for what seemed like hour after hour, we seemed to be the only people there at all, barrelling across the high plateau, vultures circling above us and a yellow, dusty landscape stretching all around forever. When we stopped to refuel, the petrol stations were dirtier, and we had to rely on the basic Spanish my mum taught me for what we needed. Mostly that meant pointing at sandwiches and holding out handfuls of euros. But by the time we approached Algeciras, in the southern tip of Spain, neither of us wanted to stop driving. It was like we were on some video game hell mission. Totally addicted to the objective of eating up mile after mile after mile.

  The ferry across to Africa felt suitably Third World, compared to the slick Dover-Calais experience two days and two hundred cups of coffee before. And then arriving in Morocco was exactly how we’d remembered it two summers before. Noisy, dirty, chaotic. Hot. Just generally mad as hell.

  That other summer, we’d fallen into an annoying tourist trap. We’d driven out of the port slowly, a big unfolded map clearly visible, making it obvious we’d just arrived. We stopped when a young guy stepped out in front of us, offering to help show us around. Somehow, he talked his way in, and then it took hours to get rid of him. He told us about his cousin in Manchester, or Leeds, or wherever we said we were from. We figured out in the end he just wanted to get us to
his carpet shop. So this time, we kept the windows up and ignored the confident waving arms of the guys who prey on the newly arrived. We just followed the satnav until it led us out of town.

  And driving in Morocco is a shock to the system, but with three days’ solid travel behind us, we were basically driving machines. So the live cows strapped to the roofs, the mental overtaking, the driving at night with the lights off: we took it all in our stride. We enjoyed it.

  We kept on the coast road all the way down to Casablanca, sleeping for a few hours again on a bluff overlooking the ocean. Next morning, we diverted inland toward Marrakesh, and then we were there. It’s amazing how easy it is, really. You type a few letters and numbers in your GPS in England, and three days later, you arrive at exactly the right place in a whole new continent, right in the middle of nowhere.

  The reason it had taken so long to find somewhere on Airbnb was we had very particular requirements. It had to have somewhere suitable for me to fix up the boards, and it had to be out of the way. We didn’t want anyone wondering what we were up to. We didn’t want to meet the owner either, picking up the key from under a rock suited us just fine. The one we found was perfect, owned by a French guy who ran it as a peaceful, out-of-the-way desert retreat. It was cheap too.

  It looked like a small castle, square, with a little courtyard or garden in the middle that had a narrow opening to the sky. The walls were deep orange red, and the tops of the doors and windows were all pointed; I guess you call that Arabic style. That courtyard—I couldn’t have hoped for a better workroom. It was totally hidden, and it felt deliciously cool, with plants growing everywhere, and even a little fountain in one corner so you had the sound of running water to work to.