Morning Sea Read Online Free

complains. A Somali man helps him. He holds his knife in the flame of his lighter. He cuts the man’s foot, then wraps it in a leaf, like dates before they’re closed into a box for tourists.
    They start walking again.
    The rumble of a motor. A quad bike appears on the horizon.
    A fat man is driving it. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a Pepsi bottle on it and words underneath, Ishrab Pepsi .
    Farid looks at the T-shirt that triggers a thirst from another world.
    The man takes over the package tour group. He will lead them to the sea.
    They all walk behind the quad bike, which looks like some kind of lunar tractor. The black man drags his foot wrapped in green. One person drops a mattress; another drops a cooking pan. Too heavy. They proceed in absolute silence. Before, they talked, but now, no. There’s no sound but the moans of a pregnant woman, though she seems stronger than the men. She conceals her condition beneath black layers of cloth, fearful perhaps that she’ll be left behind.
    A line of cockroaches crosses the dunes.
    They leave the ancient track of wandering Bedouins, a trail of footprints the sand will sweep away. They’ve returned to their destiny – finding their way in nothingness.
    Grandfather Mussa didn’t want to leave. He stayed in the garden, his feet soaking in a basin, and watched the eagles on the lookout for lizards in the desert.
    Jamila is not sad. She sinks, catches her breath before a new wall of sand. Farid is on her shoulders now, wrapped in a womb of cloth, like when he was little.
    Jamila is young, just past twenty. A young widow with her child. The desert is their seashell.
    Farid wears an amulet round his neck.
     
    The horizon changes. It is punctuated by sun-baked greenery, a wall of carob trees. Oleanders in bloom line their gradual descent.
    Farid has never smelled this smell before, wild and deep.
    Is this how the sea smells, the bright expanses and blue depths?
    Now they all run, heads low between thorny prickly pears. Farid jumps off Jamila’s shoulders, leaves his little camel. He runs and rolls between the sand and the tamarisks. It’s the first time he’s left the desert.
     
    A hand gathering money on the beach, another man in a turban but wearing city clothes, his pale jacket damp with sweat at the neck and on his shoulders. The fat man yells. The bottle of Pepsi jiggles on his soft belly. They have to hurry. They’re out in the open. Though of course the situation is under control. The colonel’s henchmen have given orders to allow the boats to leave. Now the colonel wants desperate people to fill the Mediterranean and strike fear into European hearts. This is his best weapon, the rotten flesh of the poor. It’s dynamite. It blows up the refugee centres and the hypocrisy of governments.
    Now on the beach, they’re all protesting.
    They look in dismay at the rusty hulk on the water. It looks like an overturned bus, not a motorboat.
    They yell and shake their heads.
    The boat is too expensive, too old. The boat is a wreck.
    The man in city clothes says, What did you expect, a cruise ship? He shouts that the deal is off. He’ll find another bunch of boatpeople to cram onto this boat, people who aren’t as stupid as they are. He shakes his arm, says they have to leave, clear out, go back into the bushes, the desert. He spits on the ground and says he hasn’t got time to waste on rats.
    He throws the money onto the sand. A young man picks it up, but the city man wants nothing more to do with it. He climbs onto the jeep. The young man follows him, begs through the window, Please, for Allah . There are many women in the group, including his pregnant wife. He asks the city man if he has children. The city man opens the door of the jeep straight into him. He steps forward and puts the money in his wallet. This time no one breathes a word. The human trafficker walks across the sand in his shiny shoes. He opens the trunk of the jeep and flings plastic-wrapped packs of bottled