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blue tiles. But the staff were friendly and eager to please and to complain about anything seemed decadent, even immoral in the circumstances, and so we smiled and made a joke of it, heating water in a kettle for Veronica to wash her hair, spending our free time sitting in the gardens sipping the sugary lemonade. What the bar served on any one day seemed to vary with their current reading of the regime’s fluctuating, erratic fundamentalism.
    Stanfield had organized a boat trip out to the reef, but only Martine and I took up the offer. We were chaperoned by Oman, who worked in the hotel and was occasionally employed by the Agency. He guided us down a dirt path through the gardens and opened a locked gate. Then he led us across a narrow strip of scrub grass and down to the beach. It was about four in the afternoon and the intense heat of the day had not yet spent itself, with the cloudless sky – a perfect mirror of the sea – stretching into the haze of the distance. Far out at sea the shadowy shapes of tankers slunk nose to tail like a convoy in silhouette. Groups of men squatted along the beach, some playing a game in which they threw objects on to a square of green cloth, their cries of excitement sharp-edged against the soft stillness of the air. A woman and a young girl, the lower parts of their faces veiled, sat with a red blanket spread in front of them, its corners weighted with stones, and on it jewellery, shells, painted combs, trinkets. They held up their hands to us as we passed but we walked on, skirting a group of boys playing football with a yellow, misshapen ball, the goalposts empty oil cans. They followed the ball in a pack, their thin arms and legs angular rods, their white soles kicking up spurts of silvery sand. In the surf a man led a camel, slapping its neck with a thin stick as its feet splashed eddies of white. A boy tried to sell us what looked like watermelon, but Oman shooed him away and apologized for the nuisance, and as we walked the mile to the old harbour he talked of how he was going to get a job with the Ministry of Tourism, pass their exams and become a guide for modern tourists. He attempted to impress us with his knowledge of our countries, but he knew nothing about Ireland and very little about France. What he did know about was America and Michael Jackson and Rambo and Terminator. Some day he would go to America, be big in films. As we passed some broken ruins, with worked stones scattered in the sand, he told us they were the remains of the Arab slave stations where their catches were brought to be loaded and shipped away.
    The old harbour was formed by a natural curve of shore, its white-walled breakwaters draped with many-coloured canvas sails and fishing nets. Small, flimsy boats, no more than hollowed shells, were tied up beside more solid craft. A group of boys dived off a raft of bobbing oil barrels, disappearing under the water before surfacing again, the sun glinting off their damp skin. I thought for a second of my father and tried to recall the beach I played on as a child but could not; it seemed a transitory, paltry thing that could not replace what enveloped me now.
    We stopped at an open fire where two friends of Oman sat cooking fish. A dozen small white fish were skewered on a rod, their mouths open, their eyes black spots. One of the men lifted a chunk of fish from the fire and offered it to me on the end of a stick, and I reached out and took it, tumbling it from palm to palm to stop it burning my hands, then ate the crumbling fragments as the two men laughed at my clumsiness. They shared a joke with Oman and I suspected it was at my expense. As they talked, a gaggle of children flocked round us, tugging our clothes lightly and peering into our faces with undisguised curiosity until Oman waved them away.
    We found Hanif, who turned out to be Oman’s brother, stretched out in the shade of a beached rowing boat. By his head was a radio with its insides