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Several years ago, when I finished college, I went with my girlfriend to Gibraltar. We’d planned on looking for work there but failed so miserably that we spent the next month in Morocco where it was a lot cheaper.
In Tangiers we were threatened with death within an hour of getting off the ferry - a nice welcome. We spent about a week in Tangiers and ended up becoming friends with two English guys who seemed to live there. Jack was a true character; a grizzled man of about fifty who’d been everywhere; he had stories galore and was endlessly fascinating as well as being quite mad. His sidekick was called Peter and he was a slight man in his forties who was incredibly annoying; he went on endlessly about his various times in jail and how he knew the penal code back to front. He told us, without irony, how he used to constantly reaffirm his rights to various prison guards who, from time to time, dragged him into a cell for a kicking. I remember thinking that if I’d been there, I would have happily given him a slap myself. Jack was far more placid but still railed on about anything and everything; he was convinced that grapes were the cure for AIDS, and people who were HIV Positive should eat nothing but grapes and they’d soon be well. Again, without irony, he told us how he’d written to all the top medical journals about the healing properties of grapes, and they hadn’t even deigned to reply. I was enjoying his company far too much to say the obvious, “They didn’t reply to you Jack because you are completely mad!”
Jack and Peter had a Moroccan sidekick who was called Mustapha, a man in his late twenties. We never figured out what the three of them were up to or why they were there; international men of mystery and petty crime was my best guess. My girlfriend found the three of them tiring, so I’d venture off to their flat of an evening and smoke hash with them and listen to their stories.
We decided to head along the coast to a seaside town called Martil. We said goodbye to Jack and Peter, and they told us that Mustapha would come on the bus with us as far as Tetouan where he’d get another bus back to the mountains where he lived. When we got to Tetouan, Mustapha ended up coming along with us to Martil. We were suspicious of Mustapha and kept trying to say goodbye. However, he didn’t go away.
Luckily, Mustapha found accommodation in a different place to us, but it didn’t stop him spending an awful lot of time in our company. He acted like a tour guide and came with us to the beach, and to the Wall of Death which was so dangerous and exciting that we kept going back.
As well as accompanying us around the small town, Mustapha kept plying us with high quality hashish of which he seemed to have an endless supply. When we’d finally shake him off at the end of each day, we’d get utterly wrecked in our little room and attempt to figure out what Mustapha was up to – if anything at all. Smoking so many joints helped us to develop several ‘feasible’ conspiracy theories.
Mustapha never once asked us for money, even for the hash he gave us. He often bought a round of Cokes in the café, and was a polite and friendly man who spoke English very well. He did mention that he came from Ketama where all the hashish was produced, and he often mentioned that he could arrange it for us to smuggle large quantities back to Europe. Every time he even mentioned this subject we made it as plain as we could that we weren’t interested in becoming drug smugglers. He seemed to get the message and backed off.
The people who ran the hotel where we stayed were suspicious that something was going on, and even some of the people on the street made remarks to us about our friendship with Mustapha. We felt decidedly uncomfortable with the whole situation, but seeing as Mustapha was being so kind and friendly, we knew that as long as we were careful nothing could really go wrong. One day, upon returning from the beach, the hotel family had ‘cleaned’ our room. This cleaning had involved almost tearing the place apart, no doubt in search of the contraband we were planning to smuggle. Fortunately, I kept my ever growing hash collection in a bag that never left my side.
Mustapha stayed in Martil for over a week, and then he told us he had to go back to his family. This, we thought, is where the crunch comes; something has to happen because this whole week has been simply too strange. We walked Mustapha to the bus, shook hands and waved goodbye as he left. Even then, we were certain that something was going to happen.
You know, nothing ever did happen. Several days, and after smoking lots of Mustapha’s hash, it dawned upon us that it had taken Mustapha leaving us for us to realise that he was nothing other than a friendly guy; sure he would have helped us become smugglers, but he just wanted to hang out with us, and we were too paranoid to let him in, too untrusting to think he could simply be out for anyone but himself.
There must be hundreds of good people who I’ve been too wary of to befriend over the years, but Mustapha takes the cake. In the final instance, we had certainly taken more from him than we’d given back, and that makes me feel a little sad.
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