Authors: Esther Freud
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There were still five tins of sardines left when Bea and I took them to the edge of the Barage and threw them in.
‘What are we going to do now?’ I asked her, peering into the empty cardboard box. Mum and Bilal were sleeping in the washing-line tent. It was mid-afternoon. ‘We could visit Charlie,’ I suggested. ‘I think he lives somewhere near the well.’
We crept away through the trees. The dogs followed, across the road and towards the well. We had given up trying to cure them of ticks and it was days since there had been any food to spare, but they still came diligently to visit every afternoon. We sat by the well and waited aimlessly for Charlie to appear.
‘Have we been here for a very long time?’ I asked Bea.
‘Where?’
‘At the Barage.’
‘I think so.’ She splashed her face with water from the plastic bucket.
‘When we go back, will you go to school again?’
‘I might do,’ she said.
‘What do you want most in the whole world?’
Bea closed her eyes. Little drops of water glistened on her eyelids. ‘Mashed potato…’ she said, ‘and a Mars Bar.’
I threw sticks for the dogs. They lay on their sides and let the flies settle on the black skin of their smiles. ‘Fetch. Good dog. Fetch.’ They looked at me with sleepy eyes.
‘They’re not stupid,’ Bea said.
I leant down for another stick. Something rustled by my hand. I pulled away to see a scorpion, furious, trembling on its ice-thin, razor-sharp legs, scuttle towards me. It had poison in its tail, and its arms were whips of iron. ‘One sting from a scorpion and you could be dead within three hours.’ That’s what I’d heard. ‘If you don’t get to a hospital within the first hour…’ I was paralysed with fear. What if there weren’t any hospitals on the Barage? I was waiting for the sliver of scorpion to dart through the slits in my plastic sandal. It glided over the ground like a streak of lightning and at the last moment disappeared under a stone.
I fought for air. ‘Did you see it?’
‘What? See what?’
‘A scorpion.’ I pointed, my hands still trembling.
‘It was probably a lizard.’ Bea took a stick and went to prise up the stone.
‘Don’t,’ I pleaded. ‘Please don’t.’
‘Stand behind me,’ she ordered. ‘And if it comes out, we’ll run.’
I thought about the man who visited us in the Mellah. He let six scorpions run over his hands like water. Then he put them back in their box and asked for money. Mum said he must have done something to them, taken out their sting or something, but she gave him money anyway. The scorpion man. Once I found a dead scorpion in the garden and Akari crushed it between two stones and left it on our doorstep. ‘It will be a warning to all scorpions,’ he said, ‘not to enter this house.’ Like a magic spell.
Bea tipped the stone over. As it fell away, a swarming nest spilt out of the hollow and spread over the ground like a sheet of fire, tails flailing in the light. Bea pulled at my hand and we ran. Our feet barely skimming the ground and my heart beating loud enough to burst my ears. We ran through the field of sheep and out on to the road. We ran until we could no longer see the well. When we stopped running I had a stitch, and I remembered we’d left the dogs behind. Bea put her fingers in her mouth and whistled but they didn’t come.
We set off again at a marching pace. ‘Left, left, left my wife and five fat children.’ I copied Bea, swinging my arms. ‘Right, right, right in the middle of the kitchen floor.’ We marched on and on, hopping from one foot to the other at the end of each stanza until our breathing was low and calm again.
We turned off the road and cut back to the edge of the Barage. There was no beach at this point, just a ridge of rock where the water swirled and tumbled as it pulled away with each wave. We sat on the edge and threw stones into the water. There was something comforting about the sound they made as they hit the surface and disappeared. We watched the sun hanging just above the water and tried to catch it moving. At times it seemed to stay exactly still and it was the lake that rose up to engulf it.
By the time we started for home the sky was striped with gold and pink and green and we knew that in a moment it would be dark. Bea told me ‘Missee Piggin and the Forty Thieves‘. ‘Missee Piggin’ was a story Bea had made up about me. I was Missee Piggin and Bea, there had never been any doubt, was the Forty Thieves.
Mum held us just above the elbow and shook us. ‘Where have you been?’
I could see her teeth flash in the dark. The silver bracelets she wore on her arm were digging into my flesh. All I could think of was the nest of scorpions and that was hours and hours ago.
‘A man followed us with a knife,’ Bea said in a terrifying whisper. Mum loosened her grip.
‘We hid until it was dark. We hid behind a tree.’
Mum rocked backwards on her heels. ‘My God!’ she said, and she hugged us both so tight I could hardly breathe. ‘Please, please, don’t wander off on your own again.’ She turned to Bea and looked at her straight in the face. ‘I’m going to tell you this because you’re the eldest.’ Her voice was low and serious. ‘There are people out there who are dangerous. This time you’ve been lucky, but I want you to promise me to be careful.’
‘I promise,’ Bea said, very solemnly.
‘I promise too,’ I vowed, unasked.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We could hear Mob’s familiar cry as we trudged up the dusty, tiled steps of the Hotel Moulay Idriss. There was no one in the courtyard or on the terrace but the air was full of steaming couscous and the smell of chopped coriander. Low murmurings and the clinking of glasses drifted out through open doorways. In our room something was burning. Linda was bending over the mijmar and the room was full of smoke.
‘Thank God you’re back.’ She was close to tears as she greeted us. ‘I’ve been so worried.’
Mob’s screams rose above the commotion. Mum picked her up and laughed in surprise. ‘And what’s happened to you?’ She said, bouncing her in her arms.
‘We ran out of powdered baby food.’ Linda indicated Mob’s changed appearance. ‘And she doesn’t seem to like anything else.’
Mob was no longer the solid pink baby she had been. She had transformed into a thin brown child with only the same puzzled eyes to know her by.
‘Also…’ Linda sat down lumpily on a mattress. ‘We’ve run out of money.’
‘What about your job?’
‘There turned out to only be ten poems in his head. So there was nothing else for me to type.’
‘Surely he could have thought up some more?’
‘That’s what I kept saying.’ Mum and Linda began to giggle. ‘But apparently not.’
Mum collected her letters from the Post Office and the money that had arrived at the bank, and we all went to eat at our old café in the Djemaa El Fna. The waiter, the cook and the manager all welcomed us as if we had been away for ever, and we took a table right on the edge of the square, half in and half out of the shade.
Mum was wearing her Biba dress and her eyes sparkled. ‘Whatever you want for lunch,’ she announced.
‘Fanta please,’ I sang every time the waiter passed. ‘Fanta please.’
We ate Moroccan salad and a plate of chicken tajine that was almost the size of the table and arrived with its flowerpot hat on.
As we ate Mum looked through her letters. ‘My mother is praying that we’ll all be home safe and sound for Christmas,’ she read.
‘Christmas? Do you get Christmas here?’
‘And she hopes the children are looking after their teeth.’ She frowned. Our one tube of toothpaste had run out in the first few weeks of spring in the Mellah. My Fanta gurgled through its straw.
‘John and Maretta are having a baby.’ She turned to Linda.
‘A baby? Haven’t they got one already, a little girl?’
‘Yes.’ My mother lowered her voice. ‘But she was taken into care.’
Linda sighed. ‘I remember now.’
‘What’s care?’
Mum folded up the letter and slipped it into its envelope. ‘And that’s enough Fanta for one day,’ she said.
‘Now Mob isn’t so heavy, can I carry her on my back?’ Bea asked quickly, gulping down die remainder of her bottle before any more serious ban could be declared.
Linda shook out her shawl and strapped Mob on, tight across Bea’s back. ‘Don’t go too far,’ she shouted after us as we slipped off into the crowd to find Khadija and the beggar girls who roamed the square.
We stopped to watch the Gnaoua as they danced like Russians to their brass clackers and drums. Mob stared transfixed over Bea’s shoulder as the men squatted and kicked out their legs.
‘It’s the Fool,’ Bea whispered, pointing to a dirty and dishevelled man dancing wildly on the fringes of the group. ‘I’ve seen him before.’
As we watched, the Fool took a particularly abandoned leap, tripped, and landed on his back, ripping his threadbare djellaba so that it fell away and left him stretched out naked on the ground. The crowd tittered. The Fool picked himself up and, with a moment to fasten his cloak, worked himself back into the dance.
When the music stopped, the Gnaoua offered him a drink. He grinned, dribbling at his new friends, and tried to clasp them in his arms. They smiled down on him, tall and gentle and shimmering blue-black against his dusty face.
The drummer girls called to us as we passed. ‘Waa, waa.’ They leapt up from their display of painted drums and surrounded us, flapping like butterflies in their brightly coloured caftans. They unstrapped Mob and carried her off to crawl among their rows of drums while they tapped out tunes for her on the tight skin tops. The drummer girls had lengths of braid plaited into their oiled hair and mostly their earrings were a loop of plastic wire hung with beads. They pressed the drums we admired into our hands and before we had a chance to refuse, Mob had smashed hers on the cobbles and was cramming the pieces of broken clay into her mouth. One of the girls who had a baby of her own shook Mob till her hands and mouth were empty and helped to restrap her on to Bea’s back. I caught Bea’s eye as we moved away.
‘They are forever giving the children things,’ Mum had despaired to Linda, ‘and they must be so poor.’
‘Poorer than Khadija’s mother?’ I had asked.
But she had gone on mumbling. ‘Nothing, they have nothing, and they give the drums away…’ As if she could unravel the mystery with words.
Clutching our drums we passed among the stalls of fruit. Water melons, oranges, prickly pears that were too dangerous to eat. We passed the women at the mouth of the market who sat like sentries in their high boxes with bread for sale. Some sold round white loaves, and others black. An old lady squatted by a pile of six oranges and while we watched she sold one, taking the coins and stowing them carefully away inside her djellaba, before settling back to wait patiently by her five remaining oranges for the next customer to pass.
‘What do you think happens if nothing gets sold?’ I asked Bea as we passed a man dozing in front of a box of peppers.
‘They just eat them,’ she said.
Khadija, Zara and Saida were engrossed in tormenting a tourist. ‘Tourist, tourist,’ they chanted. We watched as a man bought a cup of water from the waterman and a woman in a blue dress stood back to take a photograph. ‘Tourist, tourist.’ They held out their hands.
‘Tourist,’ I muttered under my breath, but my newly washed trousers with BilaPs patch blazing on the knee stopped me from joining in.
‘Waa Khadija.’ We called them. ‘Waa Saida, Waa waa Zara.’ And they ran over to us, leaving the couple to wander unchaperoned back to their hotel. We squatted in a circle to exchange news. Mob stared into the black eyes of Khadija’s baby sister as her head bobbed against Bea’s shoulder. Saida inspected Bilal’s patch. Saida was smaller than me and thin with big black eyes and straight shiny hair. She began to pick at the patch with her fingers and then when it wouldn’t come loose she held out her hand for it. I looked at her, my mouth dry, and shook my head so violently she pulled away.
That evening as I sat on Bilal’s knee begging a scrape of majoun, I asked, ‘Can I keep my trousers and just wear them when we live in England?’
‘If they still fit you,’ Bea said.
‘Yes, of course,’ Mum agreed and ordered another pot of mint tea.
The square was lit with the lights of a hundred stalls of food. They appeared at sunset and were set out in lanes through which you could wander and choose where to eat your supper. There were stalls decorated with the heads of sheep where meat kebabs grilled on spits, and others that sold snails that you picked out of their shells with a piece of wire. There were cauldrons of harira – a soup that was only on sale in the evening – and whole stalls devoted to fried fish, and others that sold chopped spinach soaked in oil and covered in olives like a pie. Each stall had a tilley lamp or two which they pumped to keep the bulbs burning and metal benches on three sides where you could sit and eat. Single women crouched in the reflected light of this maze of restaurants and sold eggs from under their skirts.
I leant against Bilal’s shoulder. ‘When we do live in England,’ I continued, my mind on another life, ‘will you be coming too?’
Bilal closed his eyes and began to hum along with Om Kalsoum, whose voice crackled and wept through a radio in the back of the café.
‘Tomorrow,’ Mum said eventually, when the song had cried itself out, ‘Bilal will be starting his work with the Hadaoui.’
‘Here? In the Djemaa El Fna?’
‘Yes, for a day or two. And then in other places.’
‘In Casablanca?’
‘Yes, and others.’
‘Can I be the flower girl?’
Bilal nodded, his eyes still closed.
‘And Bea? Can she be a flower girl too?’
‘I might be at school,’ Bea said. ‘Tomorrow,’ she announced, sitting up very straight, ‘I am going back to school.’
‘But are your things ready?’ Mum asked doubtfully.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I washed them this afternoon. They’re hanging out to dry.’
‘That’s if they haven’t been stolen,’ Linda muttered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bea disappeared down the steps of the Hotel Moulay Idriss, hand in hand with Ayesha. The Henna Ladies had no use for her white uniform. They walked around the terrace and ran their fingers through my hair that now hung halfway down my back. They sat and talked with Mob and me on the doorstep while Mum did her morning’s meditation and Linda stayed inside and continued to declare war. I wished the Henna Ladies would come to the Djemaa El Fna to see Bilal working his Hadaoui magic with the crowd, but they never left the hotel. They stayed on their landing, lounging in worn-down babouches and wearing their caftans like nighties with their hair loose. They had friends who would visit them, men who disappeared into the thick perfumed stillness of their double rooms and sometimes sat through whole afternoons on their cushioned doorstep to smoke and drink tea while the Henna Ladies smiled serenely over them like the proudest of mothers.
‘You notice they don’t steal when there’s a man in the house,’ Linda said. It was the morning after Bilal had left with the Hadaoui and another nappy was missing.
For a week of afternoons the Hadaoui had performed in the square to an enormous crowd. Everyone came to watch. Akari the Estate Agent, Moulay Idriss, the drummer girls, various members of the Gnaoua and the Fool. Even Bea finished school in time.
Khadija and I watched the Hadaoui as he sat quite still in the middle of his carpet, his purple turban nodding as he blew bubbles of smoke out of his pipe. We hovered on the carpet’s edge and waited for our moment. Bilal having lifted each dove out of its box, began to shoulder his way through the crowd, heckling and calling until finally the Hadaoui lifted up his head and cried ‘Umwi, Umwi’, making the people roar with laughter to see such an old man calling for his Mummy.
‘Umwi, Umwi.’ I tried to attract my mother’s attention, but she was talking to one of the Gnaoua wives and she wouldn’t look round.
The Gnaoua wives, like the men, were tall and thin. They kept their faces covered with a veil. The lady Mum was talking to looked just like the other wives, but as she stood with her back to me I noticed that the long wrists and delicate hands that hung from the sleeves of her caftan were white. A Gnaoua lady with white hands! I tried to point her out to Khadija, but she wouldn’t take her eyes off the Hadaoui.
‘Umwi, Umwi, Mum…’ I called again, hoping the Gnaoua lady would turn around, but they carried on talking and Kahdija tugged at my arm to draw my attention back to the show. The Fool had begun to follow Bilal, mimicking him and snorting with laughter whenever Bilal spoke, but always remaining watchful not to let his feet disrespectfully cross over on to the tasselled edges of the carpet. The Hadaoui continued to smoke and roll his eyes. ‘Umwi, Umwi,’ he sighed from time to time and shook his head. Eventually he stood up and entered into a heated discussion with Bilal which I could not follow, but which made Khadija rock on her heels as she giggled and her usually solemn face light up. I squatted next to her and held my breath for the show to be over, counting the minutes before it was my turn to cross over on to the Hadaoui’s magic carpet.
Now Bilal was on his way to Casablanca and Bea was at school. Even Linda was talking about going back to London. She had received a letter from her mother, who had not only discovered where she was but that she had had a baby.
‘She’s our only grandchild,’ Linda read aloud, ‘she must be nearly a year old, and we don’t even know her name.’
Mum and Linda laughed so hard that I had to pat their backs to stop them choking.
‘Well, my mother still wouldn’t know,’ Mum said when she had recovered, ‘except a friend of hers saw me waiting at a bus stop in Camden Town with a baby in a pushchair and Bea who was nearly three. “I didn’t know your daughter was married,” she said to her when they next met.’ Mum wiped her eyes. ‘I’d have given a lot to have seen her face.’
Linda had been persuaded to stay until after Christmas.
‘Will we have a stocking?’ I looked around anxiously, realizing for the first time there were no chimneys in the Hotel Moulay Idriss.
‘I’m sure Father Christmas will think of something,’ Mum assured me.
Last Christmas we hung up a pair of Mum’s long socks. A sock each. This year she didn’t have any socks. She hadn’t packed any. I thought about our Christmas tree all glittering with tinsel and wondered if it was still standing on the front lawn where we’d planted it, its cut-out golden angel on top. Bea and I had waved at it through the back windows of John’s van as we drove away. I sat on the doorstep while Mum meditated and Linda counted nappies, and tried to remember all the things and people and places Bea and I had waved at.
*
‘Would you like to visit Luna and Umbark?’ Mum sat down beside me on the step. We could hear Linda hissing inside the room. ‘… five, six… Aha!… I knew there were eight of those. One… two… Damn.’
Luna was the lady with the white hands. She was married to Umbark who was a dancer with the Gnaoua. Luna was from Denmark. We had sat with them the evening before at a table in the outside café waiting for the sun to set. Until the sun set we were not allowed to eat or even drink Fanta because it was the first day of Ramadan.
‘What is Ramadan?’ I asked.
‘It’s a Muslim festival. For twenty-eight days you mustn’t eat, drink or smoke between the hours of sunrise and sunset and for a month no one must have sex.’
‘What’s sex?’
Linda started to explain, but Mum quieted her so we could listen to Luna’s story.
Luna had come to Morocco three years before. ‘Looking for some fun times and adventure.’ She nodded at Mum from under her veil. ‘But then I met Umbark.’ She had met Umbark soon after she arrived in Morocco and they had fallen in love.
Umbark sat silently by and listened to Luna’s story. He was as tall and thin and black as Luna was tall and thin and white. Twins from a fairy tale. Since their marriage Luna lived her life as a strict Muslim woman. She even stayed at home in Marrakech when Umbark travelled to Germany in the summer months to work as part of a human pyramid in the circus. By the time Luna finished her story the sun had almost set. The tables in our café and in the other cafés in the square were fast filling up and the waiters rushed about placing steaming bowls of harira in front of each customer.
‘It is traditional to break the fast each evening with a bowl of this soup,’ Luna told us.
So we ordered our harira and sat staring at it, waiting for night to officially descend. A silence settled over the square. Then as the sky turned red behind the Koutoubia a siren rang out and lamps were lit in the minarets of every mosque. The swollen voice of a holy man chanted the day’s end from the top tower, his voice drifting in and out of the breeze, and as the prayer tailed away a calm settled over the city.