Win three nights at top Greek retreat

Kivotos is one of the most exclusive and charming boutique hotels in Mykonos and a favourite with Europe's jet-set. For the chance to soak up the late summer, simply sign up to our monthly newsletter or re-register your details during the month of August.

Need ideas?

Try the TI hotel hotlists for shortcuts to some of our favourite hotels around the world.

Legend

Recommended
tour operators

Africa & Middle East > Morocco > Marrakech > Marrakech > Disaster Travel > Articles > Souks and the Single Girl

Souks and the Single Girl

by Isabella Tree

The hammam was not how I imagined. I had pictured something bustling and sociable, a traditional courtyard thronged with women in towels like a scene from Steaming

In association
with

Articles

The hammam was not how I imagined. I had pictured something bustling and sociable, a traditional courtyard thronged with women in towels like a scene from Steaming. It would be comfortable, reassuring, relaxing, indulgent. But not like this.

I had come alone, leaving my friend to fight the effects of one lamb tajine too many, in bed at our hotel. Two days of stifling heat and haranguing in the souks had taken their toll and sightseeing was no longer an irresistible option. In siege mentality I sought haven in the luxury of a massage.

I followed a doorman, his long white robes gathered at the waist by a deep red sash, an ornate silver dagger curling at his hip. His pointed Moroccan slippers whispered against the tiles as we passed through one airy colonnade to another. He left me at the head of a flight of stairs leading to the basement. There, convention and I parted company.

A pilgrimage of giant publicity bottles - Chanel and Drakar - paved the way to reception. A middle-aged peroxide blonde was just leaving, smoothing her black leather mini-skirt with satisfaction over her buttocks. The man behind the desk smiled ingratiatingly and raised his eyebrows for my request.

When he led me along the traditional tiled water channel and over it, via an incongruous Perspex bridge, I was still bolstered by respectable expectations. The world of kitsch had cast an unnatural sheen over the old-style Arabic, but it did not convey anything to me but good business and bad taste.

It was when I realized there were no communal rooms, only private, one-person cubicles, that I felt a little out of sync. I was shown into one of these and curtly introduced to Najim, a man lavishly oiling his hands over a masseur’s bench.

The receptionist bowed out and closed the door. I was stunned to find myself alone with strange man, naked except for the meagrest of shorts, who was asking me, in French, to take off my clothes. With no time to reconsider, I slipped into the adjoining bathroom to disrobe. I heard the click of a switch as the light went off next door, plunging the awaiting table into darkness.

Call me prudish, but I hesitated to part from my Marks & Spencer knickers. I had only ever been massaged before by a woman - English at that - who had been almost excessively discreet, averting her eyes, turning her back when I turned over, providing a generous footage of towel to cover every area not under direct manipulation. There had also been a bathrobe to ease the transition from clothes to nakedness. Here there was nothing.

I took off and put on my underwear several times before I decided in favour of boldness. It would be more embarrassing, I judged, if I was requested to remove them on the slab.

What was more, I was determined to defy the frigidity of my race, that ancient shameful legacy of inhibition. I did not want to preserve the old cliche. “Remember that English client?” I heard Najim say, decades in the future. “The one too shy to remove her undergarments? How was I supposed to perform my massage through a layer of cotton and polyester?”

So I stalked awkwardly without them into the blackened room and flopped face down onto the table.

“Tournez-vous, si’il vous plaît,” said Najim through the darkness.

Already? I thought. Why can’t he start on my back? Yet I obeyed and lay diligently facing the ceiling like a patient awaiting the anaesthetist.

“Ouvrez un peu,” said Najim from the bottom of the table, trying to prize apart the vice-like marriage of my feet. I complied, but only enough for Najim to begin working on the stiffened hinges of my toes.

There was something alarmingly sensuous about Najim’s technique. Mrs Whitting had never paid much attention to my instep or the inside calf. Where was the pain of probing the pressure points, the exquisite agony of muscular crystals breaking up under relentless fingers? This was too much like pleasure for my liking.

As Najim’s hands travelled further up my legs I grew increasingly alarmed. Try as I might I could not relax. I longed for the psychological security of my Marks and Sparks’ twinset. But in the darkness my judgement grew confused. Perhaps I was imagining it; perhaps I was still fearful of the macho insistence of the hawkers in the souk; perhaps I had been affected somehow by the uncertainty of foreign ways; perhaps Najim was really as wary of me as I was of him? I almost began hoping my nakedness had not offended any Moslem sensitivities.

Then, almost imperceptibly, I felt his hand brushing where Mrs Whitting’s would never have strayed in a million years. I expected him to apologize, but all I could hear was a faint hoarse breathing. Oh my God, I said to myself, I could not have imagined that.

“Ca vous plaît?” asked Najim simply, sensing some resistance.

“Non,” I almost shouted into the stillness of the room, too thunderstruck to move. But he had not stopped.

“Ca fait mal?” he asked.

“Non,” I said, “Mais…”

And where was the French when you needed it? They would never have had a phrase for this in the guidebook.

Slowly, like the tide in retreat, Najim’s hands crept back down my legs and finished with a flourish at my toes. “Ca va?” he asked, and before I could give him the chance of an encore, I leapt off the table with a brief ‘merci’, and bolted for the bathroom.

As I was fumbling for the correct order of my clothes, Najim came in with a towel and began, with measured deliberation, to rub me down. He was surprised to be shooed away so abruptly.

Already, in the clinical sanity of electric light, I was beginning to doubt my reactions. My face was beetroot with embarrassment, but as Najim walked me back to reception, he betrayed no sign of disgust or disappointment.

“Massage,” he announced, “demi-heure.”

“C'est tout?” asked the receptionist, without a hint of surprise or the suggestion of a snigger. I was none the wiser. I handed over my dirhams and escaped upstairs into the tranquility of sunlight.

My T-shirt was on back to front. Somewhere, from the direction of the Koutoubia, came the call to evening prayer. I felt more English and more exposed than ever.