by Esther Freud
Dedication
For my mother and my father
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
About the Author
Also by Esther Freud
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
It wasn’t until we were halfway through France that we noticed Maretta wasn’t talking. She sat very still in the back of the van and watched us all with bright eyes.
I crawled across the mattress to her. ‘Maretta will you tell us a story?’
Maretta sighed and turned her head away.
John was doing the driving. He was driving fast with one hand on the wheel. John was Maretta’s husband. He had brought her along at the last minute only because, I heard him tell my mother, she wasn’t well.
Bea glared at me.
‘Maretta . . .’ I began again dutifully, but Maretta placed her light white hand on the top of my head and held it there until my skull began to creep and I scrambled out from under it.
‘You didn’t ask her properly,’ Bea hissed. ‘You didn’t say please.’
‘Well, you ask her.’
‘It’s not me who wants the story, is it?’
‘But you said to ask. I was asking for you.’
‘Shhh.’ Our mother leaned over from the front seat. ‘You’ll wake Danny. Come and sit with me and I’ll read you both a story.’
I looked hopefully at Bea. ‘Oh all right,’ she relented, and we jumped over Danny’s sleeping body and clambered up between the two front seats.
‘“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail. “There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.”’
I sat warm against her and joined in when she got to ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?’ ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?’ until we heard the rustle of Danny’s sleeping-bag as he sat up in the back.
‘D’you want me to take over soon?’ he yawned.
John kept his eyes on the road. ‘Half an hour.’
Danny was my special friend. The first time we’d met he’d magicked a sweet, a white sugared almond, out of a pipe for me. I had been waiting ever since for a good opportunity to ask him to do it again. Now he was always either driving or sleeping. Or Bea was there. Bea was two years older than me and there were some things you had to keep secret about. Anyway, I thought, however magic Danny said these almonds were, they’d be bound to run out like any others.
That evening we stopped to cook. My mother made soup with carrots and potatoes in a metal pot on a camping stove. We sat on the grass verge and ate.
‘Maretta?’ My mother held out a bowl to her.
Maretta looked at the ground.
‘Maretta would you like some soup?’
She turned her face away.
My mother’s hand began to tremble. It made the spoon rattle on the tin side of the bowl as she stretched it out to her.
We waited.
‘Well, all the more for us,’ she said finally, pouring the soup back into the pot. Her voice was high and tight. Maretta smiled serenely.
A truck roared by. A wave of hot and cold laughter swept over me and I bit my lip and stirred my spoon noisily.
John stood in front of my mother, between her and Maretta. ‘She’ll be all right once we get to Marrakech. She’ll be all right.’ He put his arm around my mother’s waist. ‘I was married to her for four years. I should know.’
She let her head rest limply on his shoulder. ‘I still think we should take her back.’
They stood by the side of the road rocking gently from side to side.
‘Danny?’ I felt this might be my lucky moment. ‘Will you magic me a sweet?’
Bea, who was sitting nearer than I thought, raised her arched eyebrows. I screwed up my face in warning.
‘Damn and blast.’ Danny slapped his hand on his knee. ‘I’ve gone and forgotten my pipe.’ He lowered his voice and said with a laugh, ‘Well maybe we should go back to London after all.’ And he squeezed my disappointed face between his fingers.
Late the following afternoon we arrived at Algeciras and drove the van on to the ferry. We got out and stood on deck. Bea and I leant against the railings and waved enthusiastically at the straggle of Spaniards on the quay. The air was thick with the smell of fish and oil. Some men in blue overalls waved back. Almost before we lost sight of Spain, Morocco began to appear at the other end of the boat. A long flat shadow across the water.
‘Land ahoy!’ Bea shouted out over the sea. ‘Land ahoy!’
We ran fast from one end of the boat to the other waving goodbye to Spain and shouting ‘Land ahoy!’ to Morocco. The sun was sinking fast and the gulls had stopped circling. As we leant over the railings, Morocco faded into the night and we could only guess at the layers of blackness where the sea stopped and the land began. We went back to the van. Maretta was sitting in the front seat.
‘Where are the others?’ I asked, climbing in, forgetting for a minute.
She didn’t answer. Bea stood by the door.
‘Come on. Let’s go and find them.’
‘Would you like to come?’ I touched Maretta’s hair. It was thick and damp with dirt.
Bea pulled my arm. ‘I’ll race you to the deck.’
Maretta didn’t move. Not even her eyes.
‘All right then,’ I said, and I started after her on a hopeless challenge.
The ship was lit now by the white froth of the waves. We edged along where earlier we had run. At the front of the boat we heard laughter and snatches of familiar voices. We crept forward, our eyes on the red tips of cigarettes.
‘Land ahoy!’ Bea jumped out of the darkness and put her hands over my mother’s eyes. She screamed with mock alarm.
‘Your money or your life.’
Mum put her hands in the air and pleaded for mercy. ‘I don’t have any money,’ she said. And everybody laughed.
A slow, low hoot rose into the air and we all jumped. Danny picked me up and swung me over his shoulder. ‘Right. Back to the van,’ he said.
I called to Bea as I hung, the blood rushing to my head, ‘I’ll race you,’ and I drummed my hands on Danny’s back to make him go faster.
We sat in the dark in a queue of cars waiting for our turn to drive off the ferry. My mother showed us our photographs under hers in a black leather passport.
‘In a minute a man will come to check that it’s really us,’ she said, tucking my hair behind my ears. John was in the driving seat, and Danny and Maretta were awake in the back. The line moved slowly forward car by car.
‘Once we’re through customs it should only take a couple of hours along the coast road and we’ll be in Tangier,’ Danny said.
He talked with a rolled cigarette unlit and hanging between his lips. ‘I just wish they’d get on with it.’
We were edging now towards a white barrier. Two men in uniform inspected each car before the barrier lifted into the sky and let them through.
There was a tapping on the glass. We sat very still and John rolled down the window, letting in a blast of cold and salty air and a whiskery face with bright blue eyes. ‘Hi, where you heading?’ he said, sticking his head right in and peering at us in the semi-darkness.
‘Tangier tonight . . . and then on to Marrakech.’
‘Hey, I’m heading that way myself. Dave. Call me Dave.’ And he rested his elbows in the open window and smiled.
Dave ambled along beside us as we neared the barrier. ‘So this is your first trip, you’ll love it, you won’t want to leave. Where you from? Let me guess? London. Forget London, man. Marrakech. That’s where it’s at.’ He had a scarf tied round his head and his pale ginger hair hung over it in strands. He had no bag and no coat. ‘Hey brother,’ he slapped John on the shoulder, ‘you’re going to need some introductions. I’ll tell you what. I’ll ride into Tangier with you. What do you say?’ And he whipped open the van door and leapt in.
Dave settled himself in the back.
‘Hey lady, how you doing?’ he grinned at Maretta.
She didn’t answer.
Another face appeared at the window. A dark, serious face with a thick moustache. My mother leant over and handed him our stack of passports. He flicked through them and glanced at us each in turn. A quick flick of a glance and he handed them back. The customs man nodded towards Dave who was hovering on a mound of cushions by the back doors. He said something I didn’t understand. John and my mother both shook their heads but Dave stuck out his long white neck and nodded. The officer was silent for a moment and then he jerked his thumb backwards. He was telling the van to turn around. Back, round, and on to the boat. Back towards Spain.
The barrier stayed firmly closed.
We ate our breakfast in Algeciras. Bread rolls and Fanta. Maretta sipped a cup of black coffee and forgot to wipe away the marks it left on either side of her mouth. Mum said it was lucky they hadn’t stamped ‘undesirables’ in our passports. She said if we saw Dave or anyone who looked like Dave at the barrier at Tangier we mustn’t talk to him.
‘Is it very hideous to be an undesirable?’ Bea asked. Hideous was Bea’s and my favourite word. ‘Hideous’ and ‘Kinky’. They were the only words we could remember Maretta ever having said.
‘Hideous kinky. Hideous kinky,’ I chanted to myself.
‘It is . . . if you want to get into Morocco,’ Mum answered.
When we arrived in Tangier later that day after a short and sunny second crossing there was no Dave in sight. The officers waved us through with only a glance at our passports and everyone except Maretta shouted and yelled as loud as they could to celebrate.
Chapter Two
We were still hours away from Marrakech when the van backfired, veered sharply off the road into a field, and shuddered to a halt. John got out and opened up the bonnet. He stood for a long time peering in at the engine with his hands in his pockets and a knowing, not-to-be-disturbed look on his face. ‘Actually, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing,’ he said eventually, and he and Mum began to giggle.
Bea was worried. ‘We can’t stay here for ever,’ she said. The field stretched as far as I could see. There was nothing much in it, just grass and a lot of flowers. Poppies and daisies.
‘No we can’t stay here for ever,’ I repeated, because it was always safest to be on Bea’s side. We both got back into the van and waited for Mum and John to stop laughing.
Maretta lay on her side with her arm over her face and her eyes closed. You could tell she wasn’t asleep. First she stopped talking, I thought to myself. Then she stopped eating, and now she is never going to move again. Maretta still had the coffee stains from two days ago around her mouth.
Danny had only wanted to go as far as Tangier. We had dropped him off outside a café with an orange and white striped canopy. Danny said goodbye to everyone and then, just as he was leaving, he bent down and tweaked my nose. ‘My God, how did that get there?’ he said, and a large pebble-white sweet lay in the palm of my hand.
‘Do you think they sell sweets in Morocco?’ I asked Maretta.
She didn’t answer, and Bea said she didn’t know.
We sat on the side of the road and watched John grow smaller and smaller as he went off in search of someone who knew something about cars.
Mum stretched out in the grass. ‘Tell us a story,’ she said.
Bea lay down next to her. ‘Go on, tell us a story.’
So I told them about how on the day before we left London I heard two birds talking. I told them all the things the birds had talked about. Breadcrumbs. Other birds. The weather. I told them about the argument they had had over a worm.
‘That’s stupid, no one understands bird language,’ Bea said.
My eyes stung. ‘I do.’ But my voice didn’t sound very convincing.
‘Liar.’
I flushed. How could I be lying if I remembered every single word? The more I thought about it the more I wasn’t sure. ‘Mum . . . ?’
But she had fallen asleep in the sun.
We followed John into the tiled café. It was set back from the road and was not so far from where our van was now parked.
‘It’s a French hotel,’ John whispered. ‘I think it might be a bit expensive.’
‘We’ll just have some tea,’ Mum reassured him, and we sat down in the shade of the terrace.
The tea they brought was made from mint leaves and was very, very sweet. Mum looked into the pot. ‘It’s like syrup in there,’ she said.
John had returned with three Moroccan boys in cloaks with pointed hoods. They helped us push the van along the road to the hotel. Maretta refused to get out. The Moroccan boys didn’t seem to mind at all. They smiled and waved at her through the windows in the back door.
We stayed at the café all day while John squinted dismally into the engine. ‘I suppose it’s a miracle it got us this far,’ he said when it began to grow dark.
Mum dragged blankets out on to the road. She made an open-air bed for us in the hotel garden. It was nice to go to sleep on ground that wasn’t rushing away from under you.
‘I’ll have to use those insurance stamps to have us towed into Marrakech,’ John said from the other side of Mum.
‘Insurance? You?’ Mum’s astonished voice came back. And Bea asked, ‘What’s “towed”?’
We sat in the truck, even Maretta, and watched our van dangling along behind us on a rope with John at the wheel. At first Maretta hadn’t wanted to move, so John had picked her up and put her in the truck himself. He picked her up easily like a child and she didn’t struggle or even move. Now she sat in the front with the Arab man who was driving and who had looked for a long time at the insurance which John said was like money but was really just a lot of bits of paper.
I kept wondering how we’d get home again now that our van had to be dragged everywhere. I thought it might be easier if we could take a boat straight to London. Then I must have fallen asleep. I dreamt about John and Maretta and their little girl who had stayed behind in England, waving to us from a gangplank. We were on a ship and everyone was throwing rolls of toilet paper to their friends on land but we didn’t have any toilet paper to throw.
When I woke up I was sitting on Mum’s lap in a tiny white room. Mum was talking in French to a small, plump man who smiled when he spoke and clapped his hands together and laughed at the end of every sentence. Bea looked out of a window through which bright white sunlight was falling. The van was parked opposite. It looked tired and dusty. A small crowd of children and flies were beginning to gather.
Akari the Estate Agent, whose shop we were in, poured mint tea into glasses. He poured it from a great height without spilling a drop and then, when the glasses were full,
he tipped the tea back into the pot and poured it out again in as high and perfect an arc as before. The tea that was finally allowed to settle was thick and yellow like the eye of a cat.
‘Ask him if I can leave the van here,’ John said, ‘just until I can sell it or get it going again.’
Akari nodded and smiled in response to the translation.
‘He says he has a house we can rent in the Mellah. He’ll take us round to see it now.’
Akari was already locking up his little shop.
The Mellah was the Jewish quarter of the city. Our house was plain and whitewashed with three bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen and sitting-room below. There was a yard with flowers pushing up between the paving-stones. Maretta walked straight into the house and sat down on the floor. The floors were all tiled with tiles that went halfway up the walls. There was no furniture.
‘Akari says we’ll need a mijmar,’ Mum said, looking round the bare kitchen.
‘What’s a mijmar?’
‘It’s a stove for cooking. With charcoal. And we’ll need some bellows.’
‘I’ll get someone to bring the mattresses from the van,’ John said, and he disappeared.
‘What are bellows?’
‘Bea, what are bellows?’ But she was out in the garden, kicking at the poppies and the marigolds and searching for salamanders among the loose stones of the wall.
That night, when Mum read to us in the upstairs bedroom, I leant against her and asked, ‘Are we there?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’re there. Is it what you thought it would be like?’
I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought what it would be like.
‘How long are we going to stay?’ Bea asked.
‘Oh I don’t know. As long as we want.’ She started to read our story to herself. Bea and I waited for her to finish. ‘You could go to school here if you wanted,’ she added.
‘What about me? Couldn’t I?’
She stroked the top of my head. ‘Maybe in another year or so. When you’re as old as Bea.’
I started to sulk, but I was too tired to keep it up. Before I knew it my clothes were being pulled away, up over my head, and I felt the unfamiliar smoothness of a cool, clean sheet catch against my legs.
