The June Editor's Pick Story is by Christopher Fowler

Please feel free to email Christopher at: Chrisfowler@London.com

THE THREADS

by Christopher Fowler

“I don’t know how people can bring themselves to live like this.”

Verity studied her surroundings in clear discomfort. She had perfected a way of standing with her fist on her left hip, legs apart, her fawn skirt stretched across her thighs, in a manner that unsettled the Muslims who passed around her. Even when she was well covered, she had a way of appearing faintly indecent if she chose it. She wore heels, even though the earth floor was rutted and muddy. At this time of the morning the souk had yet to fill with tourists. Sunlight filtered through the overhead slats, casting matchstick stripes across the confluence of winding narrow alleyways. In front of each store sat a boy, usually aged somewhere between ten and sixteen. Too many kids with nothing to do, too many vendors selling the same things, shoes and bags and lamps, shopkeepers peering out of the shadows to collar passing trade. Outside of the medina, the warm dry desert air was starting to rise. Here it was still cool.

“Well, I believe it’s a less evolved society, but not much worse for that,” said her husband, Alan Markham. “They’ve a tendency to retreat to the safety of religious dogma which is rather touching but not especially harmful, except in extremis. And bribery happens. A service is performed and money changes hands; seems to me it’s completely normal here.” He leaned in to smell the cardamom seeds and cumin powder that lay in the great raked trays of a shop. A young man popped up in an opened panel among the spices, so that he appeared to be buried to his shoulders. All of the vendors stood like this, at the centre of their wares. “You have to strike a bargain that’s less than half the original price they suggest. It’s all part of the game. Give them too much and they’ll have no respect for you.”

“Nothing looks very clean. Mind you, they have to wash five times a day, so I suppose that counts for something. The hotel has Moulton Brown shampoo in the bathroom, did you notice?” Verity tried not to be too judgmental, but always found it difficult. Her husband, on the other hand, found it very easy to judge others.

Markham set off again, brushing aside the entreaties from the spice seller. Verity had difficulty keeping up. She had seen how most of the English tourists behaved, the wives clutching their husbands’ arms as if expecting to be torn from their sides by madmen. The secret of enjoying North Africa, she felt, was not to be afraid of people simply because they were different. Somewhere far away from the medina were modern roads, shops and offices, although they were probably run with hopeless inefficiency. But here in the medina, this was how everyone wanted to imagine those yellow clay towns built on the edge of the Sahara, all back alleys and burkas, the call of the muezzin, the stench of the market.

She watched her husband waving away the vendors as he studied the storefronts with an anthropological eye. One last chance to start again, he had pleaded, let’s get out of London, just the two of us. Things will be better this time. They needed to be; the money had all but dried up and she did not want to return to work, just to bail him out of another failed business. Truth be told, she no longer had much faith in him. These days, most of their conversations were really arguments that neither side could win.

Verity backed against a wall as a moped driven by a small boy hurtled past. Incredibly, he was holding fifteen cardboard trays filled with eggs between his body and the handlebars. On the way in from the airport they had passed a couple on motor scooters carrying a bed between them.

“In London you don’t say a word when the restaurant bill comes to an absolute fortune, but here you’ll haggle over a few pence just because they tell you to do it in the guidebook,” she admonished, stopping to look at a handful of sickly chameleons climbing over each other in bamboo cages.

A huge-eyed brown child smiled up at her from behind the cages. She and her husband had chosen not to have children. She had seen how other people’s had grown up, spoiled, rude, lost. The children here were different. They helped their parents, and appeared to enjoy doing so. Families were involved in the great adventure of living. They weren’t shut away from each other.

“I know what I’m doing. If you want to buy silks, you have to be patient and let me do the negotiating. It’s my job, after all. You at least used to have some respect for that. It was what brought in the money.”

Alan Markham had cut away from the octagonal blue and white fountain that piddled feebly in the centre of the medina, where the men washed their hands and feet at prayer-call, and was heading into the manufacturing quarters. Here there were virtually no women to be found, only boys with blackened, poisoned nails, hammering at curlicued spiderwebs of metal, bed-heads and chandeliers, and men with ruined lungs, seated cross-legged in the dense, dust-filled air of their workshops, chipping away delicate white triangles of plaster. Here, too, were the tanners and dyers, working beneath hanging pelts and skeins of crimson wool that were draped above them like the guts of great beasts.

“God, it stinks.” Verity held her handkerchief against her nose.

“This is where we have to go, away from the tourist traps. You said you wanted to visit somewhere different.” He shouted above the sound of blacksmiths hammering, backlit by sunsprays of sparks. It was as if they had stepped backstage, behind the artifice of tourist-friendly exotica, to where the real work was done. In one workshop a hundred crimson lanterns hung at different heights, bathing the walls blood red. Alan had bought and sold Anatolian and Kurdish silks for several years. He knew what was valuable, and what was rubbish. When he found the store he was looking for, he walked straight in, ignoring the sales pitch of the boy who had been left outside to hector passers-by.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he examined the neatly folded stacks of rugs in burnt oranges and reds that had been stacked from floor to ceiling around the narrow shop.

“Tell me what you are looking for,” said the middle-aged man with the gap in his white teeth, welcoming them. Markham’s peppery hair and striped cuff-shirt had marked him as an Englishman. The shopkeeper was always earnest, but especially serious when he recognized potential in a customer. Selling was an art he had carefully studied for nearly fifty years. The Englishman was more than a casual browser trying to keep his wife amused. There was something in the way he turned and regarded the towers of cloth. The shopkeeper’s boy was unrolling silk scarves in razor-blue and sunset red, but only the wife was bothering to cast her eyes over them. She seemed less comfortable than he, which was unusual. It was the women who tended to lead the way into his shop. Markham accepted a dark plum from a brass tray and sucked at it as he browsed.

“Upstairs?” he asked, indicating the floor above, his index finger raised. With a deferential nod, the storekeeper led the way up a narrow staircase lined with tablecloths. The room over the shop had no more than four square feet of space free at its centre. Every other inch of space was filled with silks, tapestries, scarves, runners, and cloths graded by shade and shape, endlessly refolded and arranged. The lathe-and-plaster ceiling bulged threateningly inwards, making the room even smaller.

A tiny filigree table had been set out for mint tea. The boy appeared and poured three glasses, not from a great height, as waiters did for tourists, but with the spout lowered.

Markham was looking for something in particular. The air was full of tiny iridescent carpet fibres that turned in the shaft of sunlight angled from the single high window. Verity leaned back against the rolls of material, lifting the weight from her heels. It was December, a pleasant temperature, a good time to come here, but the heavy food exhausted her, and the arid air made her thirsty all the time. No wonder they valued their shade so much, designing their public buildings to capture and display the shadows in appealing arrangements. She eyed the glass of tea and decided not to risk the germs that might lie on the rim.

“This is for your wife,” said the shopkeeper, waiting for the boy to unroll more fabrics, each brighter than the last.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Markham raised his leonine head and puffed out his cheeks, affecting an air of diffidence. “Something heavier, in blue perhaps. . . something more special.”

The shopkeeper instructed the boy in Arabic, then followed him to find the cloth. Verity shot her husband a look, raising an eyebrow. He pursed his lips faintly. Code; don’t say anything. He had seen something in the corner, and was moving toward it. Casually examined the material, pouting, pulling, rubbing.

“I like this one.” She pulled out an indigo silk square with a scarlet rose at the centre. Slender white tendrils snaked from its core to the outside edges.

“Put it down, it’s tourist shit.” He could be most dismissive of her tastes. He suddenly stopped examining the object of his interest, dropping his hand as the shopkeeper returned. She had seen him do this before, but never with such studied nonchalance. He had to be very excited about something to appear this bored.

He glanced at the bolts the boy and the old man unfolded before him, but she knew he was barely seeing them, even though he launched into a half-hearted negotiation for two sparkling ocean-green tablecloths.

“I think I need to discuss this with my wife for a minute,” he told the shopkeeper in respectful French. The old man understood, nodded and withdrew downstairs.

Markham leapt back to the cloth he had seen and pulled it free, showing her, a slit tapestry of geometric designs in red, yellow and black. “Look at this. It’s a Shahsevan Kilim from the Hastari area of Northwestern Persia, around 1900, they’re normally about six by twelve but this one’s a runner, a weft-substitution weave finished in cotton. God knows what it’s doing here. There’s a name in the corner. I’ve never seen anything of this shape and size in the catalogues, but it’s quite authentic. It’s worth a small fortune.”

She could see the sweat beading above his ears. He was already wondering if there were others. Markham wiped his fidgety wet hands on his jacket. This was the equivalent of finding a signed first edition of ‘Bleak House’ in a roomful of Jeffrey Archers. He called to the shopkeeper and went to work.

She had to grant him some grudging respect. He played the game very cleverly, slipping the cloth between a range of similar but worthless panels, offering to buy some little thing for his wife—would there be a discount if he bought several, this one, this one, perhaps this one? Carelessly casting them aside as if he didn’t much care one way of the other—pour amuser la dame.

But it was not to be. The shopkeeper smiled politely and removed the one essential item, replacing it carefully on the stack, lapsing back into French with a wagging finger. “Pas en vente, désolé.”

“But she likes it.” Markham indicated his weary wife. Don’t rope me into this, she thought. He gave a little shrug. “I think it’s rather a nice little thing.” He could not help looking back at the runner. The implication: Too bad it’s not for sale; your loss.

The old man seemed to consider for a moment, but a cloud passed over his eyes, and he became intractable. Markham offered what he considered to be a good sum, then a little more, but only because he knew that the tapestry was worth a hundred times that amount.

Two American girls bustled into the tiny attic and acted as if no one else was there, climbing over the bolts to pull down the surrounding stacks. To Verity’s surprise, her husband suddenly clapped his hands and gave in with good grace. “Never mind then, just these silks. The big shawl for my wife, and these two as a gift for my mother.”

The shopkeeper seemed relieved. He and the boy immediately started to prepare the purchase as Markham made way for his wife and another bundle toppled over behind them, cascading rainbows of satin down the staircase. Verity thought he would insist on bullying the price lower, but he did not. The boy was dealing with the American girls, and the old man was deftly tying ribbons over brown paper as Markham took another plum from the hospitality tray, leaving it in his mouth as he thumbed notes from his back pocket.

As they moved into the street outside, he took her elbow and guided her into the first turn-off. “Slow down—my heels,” she said, but he kept up the pace. “Why didn’t you use plastic to pay?”

She knew something was up, and realized what it was when she saw the tip of the fabric protruding from his jacket. “Tell me you didn’t steal it.”

“He had no idea of its value. It would have gone to waste up there, simply waiting to be attacked by weevils.”

The sun was high in the market square. Fortune tellers, street pharmacists, tumblers, acrobats, water-bearers and snake charmers were out in force. Markham and his wife made for the post office behind the colonnade, and queued in the hard bright hall beneath slow-turning fans as Markham repacked the item, folding it tightly into the brown paper parcel. He seemed uncharacteristically indecisive, breaking out of line at the last moment.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “If you’re feeling guilty, take it back.”

“I was going to post it home, but I’m thinking about customs.” He tapped the package. “This is extremely valuable. And I don’t feel guilty. I don’t approve of returning antiquities, not if they’re only going to be stored in some filthy old museum with poor security, or worse still in a tradesman’s shop.”

“Then let’s go back to the rhiad and get some lunch. I’m hot and tired. I want a shower.”

He was leading her out of the post office when she heard a sharp crack. He had bitten down on the plum stone. “Christ.” He clutched his jaw and winced. “Jesus.” The pain was bad enough to make him stop dead.

“You’re making a fuss. Show me.” It had sounded awful, like a cap exploding. She forced him to open his mouth. The stone had split an upper left molar clean in half. He shook her hand aside and spat blood on the ground. A piece of tooth came out with it. He let out a groan.

“How many times have I told you before? You had to go and—” She tried to keep her annoyance in check. “You should get the rest of the tooth taken out. They’ll be able to find someone at the rhiad.”

The girl at their hotel appeared unconcerned. “There are many dentists,” she said.
“Well, where are they?” asked Verity with impatience, as if expecting one to walk through the curtained entrance to the reception office.

“In the square. I can arrange for a boy to take you—”

“In the square? No, no—” She had seen the ones in the square, seated cross-legged before pyramids of brown pulled teeth arranged on dirty squares of cloth. The higher the pile, the more successful they were considered to be. “My husband has broken his tooth. He needs to have all of the pieces removed or there could be an infection.”

“Yes, yes, the square. Choose a dentist who displays the most teeth.” The girl was trying to provide her guests with the best solution. She watched blankly as they headed off to their room, arguing with each other.

After half an hour of reading brochures and making incomprehensible calls, Verity rose from the bed and went to change her shoes. “Well, nobody else seems to be available, and if you’re absolutely sure you can’t wait until we get back to London, we’ll have to do as she suggested,” she said. “Come on, you won’t be able to eat if we don’t do something. Just have it cleaned up. You can get it replaced back in Harley Street.”

“A street dentist, are you mad? They are primitive people. Their practices are two hundred years out of date. Do you have any painkillers on you?”

“Did you see anything remotely resembling a pharmacy near here? We can try to find one, but don’t look at me—I took my last Valium yesterday.”

“All right, we’ll go back to the square and I’ll walk past, but I’m not going to use one if he’s not clean.”

They returned to the square to find three dentists still sitting cross-legged in the winter sunshine, patiently waiting for custom. Markham regarded each in turn before settling on the third, who was at least the most senior. “Might as well be this one,” he said. “He’s got the biggest pile of teeth in front of him.”

The dentist gestured at his triangular footstool. When he smiled, he revealed a row of white teeth too peppermint-perfect to be real. “Don’t be worried,” he said in perfect English. “I have never lost a patient yet.”

Markham seated himself while the dentist rinsed his hands with bottled water. Verity eyed the antique instruments spread out on his sheet with suspicion. She watched while the dentist pushed Markham’s head back and made his examination. He soaked a white cotton pad in something from a fluted amber bottle and rubbed it over her wincing husband’s gum. “To numb your mouth,” he explained.

“He’s right,” Markham assured his wife, gape-mouthed, “it’s already working.”

“This is your wife?” asked the dentist, smiling.

“Yes,” Verity confirmed, stepping nearer.

“Perhaps you should go away for a few minutes. It is better.”

“No, I’m perfectly fine. I don’t get squeamish.”

“I mean it is better for me.”

“Oh.” The local women were never seen on the streets unless they were shopping. Feeling vaguely affronted, Verity turned away and looked at the distant shops edging the souk.

Selecting a fearsome instrument that looked as if it had been designed to pull up floorboard nails, the dentist began to extract the pieces of Markham’s broken tooth.

A few minutes later, Markham came across the square to find her. She was seated in the faded first floor café of the Hotel De Paris. “Fifty dirhams,” he said, pleased with himself. “He wanted more but I didn’t see why I should.” He drew out a seat and looked around for a waiter.

“Show me,” said Verity. “Oh, he’s put a cap in there.”

“Just a temporary replacement until I get back, to stop any germs from getting in. He got all the pieces out and cleaned up the wound, then dried it with some kind of herbal paste to stop infection. I daresay one could go to a homeopathy clinic in Mayfair and pay a fortune for the same thing.”

“Well, you’ve changed your tune,” she said with a rueful smile. “Half an hour ago you were practically calling him a savage.”

“No, you must have heard me wrong.”

Ignoring that, she asked, “Do you think you should be drinking anything?’

“He said it would be fine. I’m not at all numb. It wasn’t like one of those injections that turns your face into a piece of slack meat for three hours.” Still, he grimaced when he sipped a glass of chocolate.

They returned to the rhiad, read cheap paperbacks and lounged around until early evening, when they strolled out into the medina once more. Smoky stalls had been set up to serve evening meals of snail stew, lamb and pigeons pastry-baked in cinnamon and icing sugar, but most of the shops were still open, the same bored teens seated before stacks of slippers and leather handbags, stained-glass lanterns and mosaic vases. In clothing stores, sinister shop dummies cast from fifty year-old moulds sported crooked dry wigs and faded fashion items.

Verity was bored. After a while, becoming endlessly lost in the backstreets of the medina was a very repetitive part of the exotic experience. She watched her husband tipping the guide book into the shafts of dying sunlight, trying to find a particular restaurant that had signposted itself by being more expensive and harder to find that any of the rest, and wondered when their mutual affinity for one another had divided, leaving them with this marriage of inconvenience.

He found the place. They ate pastilla beneath a vast wrought-iron chandelier in a courtyard of topaz tiles, beside other Western couples who had run out of conversation. He was telling her about some colleague at work who was about to be fired when the food fell out of his mouth and he clutched the tablecloth so hard that their wineglasses shook to the floor, shattering. The waiters were solicitous, fearing the attack might be construed as food poisoning, and quickly helped him to his feet.

“What kind of pain is it?” she asked, trying to understand.

He was clutching his cheek on the side where the tooth had been removed. “Let me see,” she pleaded, opening his mouth in the light of the restaurant foyer, but there was nothing beyond a little inflammation of the upper gum to indicate the source of the problem. Even so, she understood that it emanated from the replaced tooth. “I’m taking you back to that dentist,” she insisted, knowing that the dentists had probably left their pitches for the night.

Back in the square, a pall of orange smoke hung over the great arena of food stalls. She was strong, and held him upright as they passed a row of lolling sheep heads laid out on a trestle table, their tongues protruding as if in mockery, their marbled eyes still and unflinching as flies danced across them. The area seemed less safe now. The colorfully costumed water bearers had been replaced by loitering rent-boys and matchstick-chewing men with watchful eyes. Drums played somewhere, badly amplified scratch beats aimed at luring Westerners into an empty bar.

“We should never have come here,” she said under her breath. “We should have taken accident insurance.” He was growing heavy in her arms.

The dentists’ pitches had been taken by hawkers selling cheap jewelry. A fight was breaking out nearby. She looked around. “I don’t know—”

A teenaged boy was slouching at the counter of a small café, flicking nuts into his mouth, watching the world pass. He wore a dust-stained burnous and fez. When he spotted Verity, he stood up and stepped forward.

“You are looking for the dentist. I see you today. Your husband.” He mimicked a painful tooth.

“Yes, my husband—” she began gratefully, allowing him to slip from her arm to a chair. “He is in terrible pain. We must see the dentist at once.”

“He has gone to my uncle for dinner, but I can take you there.” He reached down and placed Markham’s arm around his waist, pulling him up. “It is not far.”

They headed back into the souk, Verity following with her husband’s panama hat gripped between her hands. The stores were lit with lanterns now. Fast food chefs were turning pungent chunks of fried meat on skillets, decanting them into folds of bread. There were more women around. They hurried through alleys filled with beetling dark yashmaks, keeping close to the walls in order to avoid being run down by mopeds. Verity had a vague idea that they were near the tanneries once more, but every street looked the same.

“Here, here.” The boy led them into a store, then through the back into a second saleroom where the dentist sat drinking tea with his uncle.

“We meet again,” said the uncle, a rotund man with a gap in his teeth, rising to give them room. Verity struggled to place his face and failed.

“I sold you some silks,” the man explained. “The dentist is my nephew, and this is his boy. We have been waiting for you.”

She felt suddenly fearful, but Markham appeared not to understand. They had been deliberately returned here, she was sure, as part of some cruel plot. She wanted to be home, to be done with all this—foreignness. The dentist was nodding and smiling inanely, as if to confirm her worst thoughts.

“Come, let us show you the source of the trouble,” said the shopkeeper, leading her husband to a stool. He pushed gently down on Markham’s shoulders, maneuvering him into position so that the dentist could get a better look, then wedged his hand into Markham’s mouth. His fingers tasted of old carpets. Markham tried not to gag.

“Good, good.” The dentist smiled and nodded at his uncle. He reached into Markham’s mouth and worked the cap loose, pulling it off and examining the inside. Her husband’s groan of pain subsided into a whimper.

“Come, look.” The dentist beckoned her, tipping the cap so that she could see. Unnerved, Verity found it difficult to approach him. Something inside the tooth appeared to be moving. When she saw them, her hand flew to her mouth.

“I want my tapestry back,” said the shopkeeper. “All you have to do is return it to me.”

“What is it?” asked Markham miserably. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know what they are,” said his wife, unable to tear her eyes from the writhing crystalline threads that remained in the sticky blackness of the tooth cap. They looked like eel larvae, but finer, longer, like strands of living silk.

With mounting dread, she peered inside his mouth. The tiny worms had burrowed deep into the bloody, swollen cavity where his tooth had been, creating small mushroom-white boils. Silvery threads wriggled and vanished into livid flesh as the light from the overhead lanterns hit them. Markham released a terrible, rising howl of agony.

“We kill a sheep and grow them inside, they are parasites, very good for breaking down meat and making it tender. Very painful in someone who is still alive.”

She saw now how the security system worked, how they were all connected, the girl in the hotel, the dentist, the boy at the bar, how they all knew and protected each other, guiding tourists from place to place, manipulating them. She saw how they punished transgressions. “For Christ’s sake, Alan, will you explain to these people?”

Markham studied the shopkeeper with contempt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he persisted. She knew he would not admit to being wrong—he never did. He would not lose face, whatever the consequences. It was the nature of the beast.

“There is something you can take to kill them, and the pain will stop. It is very easy, and takes no more than a few minutes. If you don’t they will continue to breed—and to eat.”
Markham tried to speak, but spluttered droplets of blood onto his chin.

“The tapestry,” the shopkeeper repeated. The dentist and the boy stood beside him in solidarity.

“How dare you accuse me of something I haven’t done,” said Markham, his sense of outrage glinting through winces of agony. “I’m British, and the British don’t steal from people.”

“Please, Mr. Markham, this can easily be resolved.” He had recalled the name from the credit card slip. “We are all civilized human beings.”

“Civilized!” Markham spat the word back at them. “Is that what you call yourselves? You hide away your women while you sell us your trash at inflated prices, and we buy from you because we pity you. You think we want to take home this sort of crap?’ He threw his arm wide at the display of dazzling silks, almost falling. “You force your children to weave your rugs and we buy them out of pity. Don’t tell me you’re civilized. You’re nothing more than desert nomads who’ve been given calculators. You pray to Allah but you’re working for the white man. Pigs and monkeys can be raised to do that.”

The shopkeeper rose, indicating that the dentist and the boy should do the same. They gently ushered Markham and his wife back out of the shop, speaking across each other in Arabic. As soon as the couple were off the premises, they dropped the steel shutter with a slam.

The street was emptier now, and looked different. Verity supported her husband through the alleyways, but could not find the right route back. They moved deeper into the medina, where the streets were hardly lit at all, and the mud track became almost impassable in places. She lost track of the time. Markham was slowing down, his breath growing shallower.

She could no longer hold him upright. She let him rest, studying his face in the lamplight. His right eye was bloodshot and swollen. Tiny threads of red and white had traced themselves across the shimmering cornea. His slick skin had yellowed, as the worms drew their vitality from within, leaving dead cells behind as they burrowed.

A tiny woman in a billowing chador hurried past. Verity held up her hand to indicate that she needed help but the woman darted out of the way, disappearing down a side alley.

Her skirt was stained with mud. She pulled the big shawl they had bought around her husband, wrapping his head tightly in it, and tied the other half around herself. Exhausted, they rested in the doorway of a derelict mosque, beneath the only street light, sliding slowly down into the shadows until they were sitting on their haunches. Markham was shaking hard now. He could no longer speak.

“Someone will come for us,” she assured him, whispering gently. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Someone will come for us.”

He rested his head on her shoulder and fell into a stupor. The overhead light went out.

In the gloom of the African night, they looked for all the world like any of the other Muslim beggars in the market.

Christopher Fowler is an English novelist living in London, where he is best known for his dark urban fiction. His books all contain elements of black comedy, anxiety and social satire. As well as novels, Chris writes short stories, scripts, press articles, and reviews.

Currently, Chris is writing the Bryant and May mystery novels, which are six volumes chronicling the adventures of two elderly detectives.

Chris writes reviews for The Independent on Sundays and he also writes for many other periodicals, as well as for the BBC. He has had stories published in Time Out, The Third Alternative, Smoke, Pure, Dazed and
Confused, and Big Issue. He wrote a graphic novel for DC Comics with artwork by John Bolton. His short story “Master Builder” became a CBS movie starring Tippi Hedren of The Birds fame and Marg Helgenberger of CSI fame entitled “Through the Eyes of a Killer.”

Chris’s film “Left Hand Drive” won Best British Short Film of 1993. Another, titled “On Edge,” starred Doug Bradley and Charley Boorman. Altogether, six of Chris’s short stories have been made into films. Chris Fowler encourages any film students who may be interested in his stories as screenplays to contact him.

Be sure to visit Chris at: http://www.christopherfowler.co.uk/