clean and then she said make me clean once again and then she said fuck me.
It had been one of the best moments of his life, and one of the most complex.
David was unnerved, and remained unnerved, because their lovemaking was so charged, so fierce, so freshly different. He had experienced nothing like it. The sex left them both breathless, shining with perspiration, with the balcony doors flung open to the cool night breezes off the sea, cooling their nakedness. And so it had continued ever since: agitated and wild. Fucking. Her scratches on his back were so deep they stung him when he showered in the morning.
Sometimes David wondered why their sex was so exquisitely savage – so tenderly brutal. Their twinned loneliness? The unhappy past they shared? The fact that death had seemed so close? Sometimes she talked of her Jewishness, her family, her dead father – even her relatives killed in the Holocaust – and he detected a kind of deep-rooted guilt. Survivor guilt. And maybe that’s what he had too. Survivor guilt.
And maybe that was it – what drove them together with such passion. They were alone and they were survivors. They were like starving people falling on the first food in many weeks: they craved each other’s bodies, feasted on each other, grabbed at each other, sometimes she bit his shoulder until he almost bled, sometimes he pulled her hair very hard, and often she swore when he turned her over, fighting him, then yielding, then fighting, her sweet brown legs kicking at the sheets. Screaming into the pillow, clawing the bedboard.
Harder, she said, do it harder.
And all of it, everything, was haunted by Miguel. The memory of Miguel ravishing her in the witch’s cave. David wanted to deny it but he couldn’t. Miguel was always there. He was there even when they had sex. Maybe especially when they had sex.
Eusak Presoak! Eusak Herrira! Otsoko.
And now they had been here five days and he knew he was falling in love with her and he was wondering what to do next.
David turned from the balcony, and went back into the hotel room. He heard a key in the lock; it was Amy. He glanced her way – quizzically – she’d been to the internet cafe: she had been going there several times a day – they reckoned her fluent French and Spanish made her less conspicuous than David. So she went there more than him.
He could tell from Amy’s face that she had news.
‘An email?’
‘Yes.’ She sat down on the bed and slipped off her sandals. She was wearing slender jeans and a grey cashmere jumper; the autumn weather in Biarritz was sunny but cool. Gazing at her bare ankles, David repressed his desires, they had already had sex twice this morning: it was too much. It was all too much. It was wonderful. He was hungry. He wanted an enormous breakfast with brioche and baguette with sweet Bayonne confit de cerise. He wanted to see her naked, touch her there, the wounded pelt; the she-wolf shot by hunters, bleeding in the snow. Too much.
‘Eloise emailed.’
She lay back on the bed. Staring up. Blue eyes staring at the ceiling like the blue sea laid out beneath the sun.
‘You were right. She’s in Namibia. She says she is OK. We mustn’t worry about her…She says if we want to come, she can tell us where. She gave me…instructions.’
‘What?’
‘Namibia. She won’t say exactly where but she promises we can be safe there. We have to meet someone in a hotel when we get there. He will tell us more.’
‘She’s with that guy. Angus Nairn.’
‘Just like you guessed. Nairn gave her the money. Apparently –’ Amy reached out as David came over and held his hand ‘– Nairn has been trying to persuade her to come to Namibia for a while.’
‘Yeah?’
Amy held David’s hand, tighter. And said: ‘He wanted to do blood tests on her, and her family.’
‘Because they are Cagots.’
‘Of course. He’d been pestering her for months – but her mum and dad always said no, even though he offered money.’
Her hair smelt of citrus shampoo. David kissed her neck. She pushed him away, gently.
‘And then after the murders, she got scared. And then, apparently, Angus Nairn offered her safety again – when she was with us in Campan, she sneaked off, read an email from him. And he offered to fly her straight out, to somewhere a long way away. Where no one can reach her.’ Amy