by Esther Freud
The women poured a heap of green powder into a bowl and, with Bea’s water, stirred it into a thick mud that smelt like mud but with something sweet and something sour mixed in. They patted the henna, cold and slimy, into every strand of my hair, coiling it up on top of my head so that when they’d finished I felt like I was wearing a soft clay helmet. They dipped the corner of the towel in water and wiped away the streaks of green from my face and ears.
I was led triumphantly back on to the balcony, where Mum was still sipping wine in the sun. She laughed when she saw me.
‘Isn’t Bea going to have her hair hennaed too?’ I asked, desperate suddenly not to be the only one, the only experiment. The women smiled, and as sharply as if I had ordered it they took her inside.
Soon Bea and I were both sitting in the sun, weighed down and sleepy with the mud cakes drying on our heads. We had resigned ourselves to a long, hot day on the terrace of the Hotel Moulay Idriss, watching the comings and goings of the various inhabitants and from time to time catching a glimpse of Moulay Idriss himself when he emerged from the gloom of his office on the ground floor.
‘Can I take it off now?’ I asked Mum, once she had started to prepare the evening meal, but she shook her head and said, ‘It would be best to keep it on until tomorrow morning.’
I began to protest.
‘That’s what the Ladies said. If you keep it on until the morning, your hair will grow thicker and longer than anyone else’s.’
‘The morning!’
I sat against the wall between the doors of our room, playing with Mum’s box of buttons and beads, thoughts of Rapunzel dancing through my mind, and wondered how I’d be able to get to sleep that night.
The next morning when I tapped at the top of my head it echoed like a clay drum. Mum sent us round to the Ladies to have the henna taken off. The hardest pieces were cracked away, catching and pulling at strands of baked hair, and the rest was soaked out in a bowl of water. The water, when I looked at it, was a dark, steamy red that grew thinner and paler with every rinse. When the water was clear and my hair had been combed straight down on either side of my face, I was sent outside to look at myself in a tiny round mirror.
At first I thought it must only be a reflection of the sun beating down through the banana leaves, but once I’d pulled my hair around in front of my eyes, I was not so sure. I looked at it hard, then again in the mirror, then attempted to match up the two colours, which were in fact one colour. The colour of my hair. Orange.
Still clutching the mirror, I ran along the landing to find Mum.
‘Look. They’ve tricked me,’ I sobbed, throwing myself down on the floor. ‘It’s horrible. I hate it. And I hate them.’ And I hate you, I added to myself, for conspiring in this master trick against me.
Mum knelt down and lifted up my face. She pushed the still-damp hair out of my eyes. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she soothed. ‘Beautiful. It’s a rich dark red, it’s copper, it’s auburn . . .’
‘It’s orange,’ I wept.
‘Haven’t you noticed,’ she continued, ‘all the most beautiful girls in Marrakech have hennaed hair?’
I shook my head.
‘You haven’t noticed? I’ll take you for a walk and show you.’
Just then Bea appeared in the doorway. She was a dark shadow in a blazing halo of red and gold.
‘What do you think?’ she said.
The sun behind her picked out a thousand colours in her hair and set them flying against one another like the fighting flames of a torch.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Mum and I both said in one breath and she squeezed me tight in spite of myself.
Chapter Eight
‘Will you run and bring our towel back,’ Mum asked Bea, as we were about to leave for the square. ‘And take the Ladies’ mirror . . . and say thank you,’ she shouted after her.
We waited in the courtyard. I had tucked all my hateful hair up inside a hat in the shape of a fez. It was a hat made from cotton covered in tiny holes for cross-stitch, which Bilal had embroidered pink and green before he left for Casablanca. I was hot and I felt Mum’s scornful eye on me.
‘Come on,’ she grumbled.
Finally Bea appeared. ‘They won’t give it back,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The towel. It was hanging in their room but when I tried to take it, they said it belonged to them.’
Mum laughed and looked up at their landing. The curtain hung heavily across the entrance to their room, and even though we waited neither one nor the other appeared.
The square was very busy. We sat outside a café while Mum drank black coffee and Bea and I sucked warm Fanta through a straw. It was unbearably hot under my hat. Little streams of sweat fell down around my ears and into my eyes, but it had been too big a fight to get the hat on to enable me to take it off. I sweated and suffered.
There was a man selling majoun on the corner. He was not always there. Mum bought a piece like a little chunk of rock. She let us both break off a sliver with our teeth. It tasted delicious, like crystallized sugar with soft honeycomb that hid something sharp that made you want more to cover the trace of bitterness.
‘Please can we have a piece? Please?’ we begged, forced on by the delicious sweetness of it.
‘It’s not meant for children. It’ll make you . . .’ – she was searching for the word – ‘drunk.’
‘Please, please,’ we insisted. ‘Majoun, majoun, majoun,’ and we set up a chant rising in volume with every refrain.
‘Shhh,’ Mum tried to quiet us, frantic, but giggling herself. ‘All right you can share a piece, but for God’s sake be quiet about it.’
We handed over our dirham and pointed and whispered, ‘Majoun,’ as we had seen it done. We were handed a twist of newspaper inside which was a small lump of hashish pounded into a sweet like fudge. We sat at the table and took turns scraping fragments off with our teeth. It seemed to me the most delicious taste in the world. Sand mixed with honey and fried in a vat of doughnuts. We passed it back and forth, giggling a conspiracy of joy and adventure.
‘Let’s make it last for ever,’ I said, barely touching it with the tip of my tongue.
‘Let’s go and see if Luigi Mancini’s in town.’ Bea slid off her chair.
I glanced at Mum. ‘We’ll meet back here,’ she said.
Looking for Luigi Mancini had become our favourite game. We investigated one café at a time, reporting to each other the movements of any tall man dressed in white. Sometimes we would settle on a particularly suspicious Luigi Mancini look-alike and follow him through his afternoon’s business.
‘Don’t forget,’ Bea would say, ‘he might have dyed his hair, shaved off his moustache, or given up smoking.’
Today, light-headed and bursting with laughter, it was hard to remain unnoticed by anyone. We crept up staircases, across terraces and around the tables of the largest cafés, whispering ‘Luigi Mancini’ almost inaudibly, and then standing like statues to monitor the reaction.
Today there was no one who could possibly be mistaken for Luigi Mancini, or even Luigi Mancini’s brother. There was no one in the café who was not Moroccan.
Then I heard a woman’s voice. ‘Excuse me, hello, can anyone speak English? Hello?’
‘Listen.’ I pulled at Bea’s sleeve.
Then we both heard it.
‘Hello, do you speak ENGLISH? I’m trying to find . . . oh dear . . .’
‘It’s Linda,’ Bea said.
‘Linda?’ But she had already darted off in the direction of the small crowd of waiters that had gathered.
Linda stood surrounded by suitcases, a fat and sleeping baby propped on one hip. She was holding out a crumpled scrap of paper.
‘Hello, Linda. What are you doing here?’ We squeezed into view between the legs of the onlookers.
Linda sat down on a bulging duffle bag and burst into tears.
‘I’ll go and get Mum,’ Bea said and disappeared.
‘Wha
t’s your baby called?’ I asked as she wiped her eyes with toilet paper from a roll.
‘Mob,’ she said.
‘Can I hold it?’
‘Her.’ She passed the baby over.
As soon as Mob was on my lap she woke up and began to scream.
‘Have I met you before?’ I asked.
Linda nodded.
‘Did you have a baby when I last saw you?’ I had to shout over Mob’s yells.
‘No.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Six months.’
‘Why’s she called Mob?’
Linda sighed. ‘Because her father was an Anarchist.’
‘What’s an Anarchist?’
Mum and Bea had arrived. Linda stood up and blew her nose. ‘Didn’t you get my letter?’
And Mum said, ‘Didn’t you get mine?’
Then they both began to laugh and hugged each other and we all helped to carry Linda’s luggage back to the Hotel Moulay Idriss.
‘I bought you a dress with the money you sent.’ Linda riffled through her suitcase. ‘From Biba.’
We watched as Mum tried it on. It was a soft cotton dress in golden browns and oranges, like a park trampled with autumn leaves. It had bell-shaped sleeves that buttoned at the wrist.
‘I love it,’ Mum said, spinning around in a dance.
I heaved a private sigh of relief. Surely this meant now she would stop wearing her Muslim haik that turned her into someone’s secret wife, with or without a veil.
‘You look beautiful.’ Linda was still heaping clothes on to the floor.
‘Yes, beautiful, beautiful,’ I agreed, eager to encourage.
Bea didn’t say anything. Her face was set and worried.
‘And I bought these for you.’ Linda held out a pair of faded black trousers. ‘From the Portobello Road.’
I gasped with excitement as I tried them on. They even had a zip.
‘Do I look like a boy?’
‘Not really.’ Mum was rolling up the legs in thick wedges round my ankles.
‘I thought she’d have grown . . .’ Linda said.
‘Not even with my hat?’ I looked around for it. In my excitement I had forgotten the horror of my orange hair.
Bea had a striped T-shirt that was long enough to be a dress. It had a hole under one arm.
‘Are you Linda who was going to bring the baby powder?’ I asked.
Bea jumped up. ‘So you did know she was coming. You did know.’ She turned on Mum.
‘I didn’t know exactly when . . .’
Bea’s face was dark. ‘You should have told me.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Linda looked as if she were going to cry again.
‘Don’t be silly.’ Mum held Bea at arm’s length. ‘Everything will be fine. Linda and Mob can stay here. There’s plenty of room.’
‘There’s plenty of room.’ Bea mimicked, almost under her breath but loud enough to strangle the air in the room. Mob gurgled in Linda’s arms and was sick. Linda mopped it up with toilet roll.
‘In the toilets in Morocco they only have a water tap and sometimes they just have stones,’ I told her.
Bea walked out on to the landing and hung her head over the railings. It was beginning to grow dark and the grey shadows outside, for a moment, exactly matched the half-light in the room. Mum lit a lamp and Bea disappeared into sudden darkness.
She kicked at the door-frame as she came back in. ‘I have to start school,’ she said.
Relief clouded my mother’s face. ‘Of course. Well you can.’
‘How can I?’ Bea was unimpressed. ‘I need a white skirt – which I don’t have. I need a white shirt – which I don’t have. I need a satchel.’ She stood in the middle of the room, victorious. ‘You see. I can’t.’
‘Tomorrow first thing we’ll go to the bank and see if our money has arrived and if it has we’ll buy you a uniform before we do anything else.’
‘And if it hasn’t?’
‘We’ll just have to wait a few days.’
‘And if it still hasn’t?’
‘We’ll think of something,’ Mum promised.
‘Will you think of something for me as well?’ I asked.
‘You don’t want to go to school.’ Her voice was decisive where it concerned me. ‘School is for big girls like Bea and Ayesha next door.’
Chapter Nine
A few days turned into a few more days and Mum borrowed some money from Linda. We went to the market to choose material. A large piece of white cotton. We left Bea to bargain for it while we waited at the next stall.
‘How did she learn to speak Arabic like that?’ Linda asked, as Bea haggled over the price.
Mum and I exchanged vague looks. ‘She just seemed to pick it up.’
‘Bea does all the shopping now,’ I told her, ‘because she’s got brown eyes and mine and Mum’s are green.’
‘They think she’s a little Moroccan girl,’ Mum explained. ‘We save a lot of money that way.’
Mum sat at home all that day and into the night sewing a pleated skirt and a white shirt with short sleeves. Ayesha was invited into our room so that Mum could inspect her uniform. She brought her schoolbook with her.
‘It must be my turn to look at it now,’ I whined when it seemed to have gone round the room at least twice. Ayesha watched anxiously as we pored over her book. On the front were two children: a boy and a girl. They were holding hands and about to take a step. The girl had a bright yellow dress against a red background and the boy was red on yellow. They both had short black hair. On the first page there were pictures of animals in different coloured squares.
‘Wasp, bat, ant, crocodile.’ I held my breath for a scorpion.
‘You’re meant to say them in Arabic, stupid.’ Bea started to rattle through the animals. She had a little help from Ayesha. Tortoise, for example. There were pages and pages of animals and objects of every kind. Telephones, syringes, shoes. All in coloured boxes and some of them had black squiggles above.
‘What’s this?’ I pointed to the black.
‘That’s Arabic writing. That,’ Mum pointed, ‘presumably means snail.’
‘Are you going to learn to read in Arabic?’ I asked Bea in amazement.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I already know that you have to start from the right of the page.’
I bowed my head. I wished I knew what side that was.
‘Look, there’s a picture of a girl with blonde hair.’ I leafed through for an orange one. ‘Why are all the people dressed in English clothes?’ There was one picture of a boy in a djellaba and a round cap but he was a shepherd and he wasn’t at school. He was on a mountain like Abdul, surrounded by sheep.
As soon as Bea’s clothes were ready she started school. My heart was swollen with envy and pride and fear for her. Mum, Linda, Mob and I watched her set off, hand in hand with Ayesha, her stiff white clothes standing out around her like wrapping. Even Ayesha’s grandmother gave us a smile as she shook her rugs into the courtyard.
‘My nappies,’ Linda suddenly shrieked. ‘My nappies have gone. I hung them out last night. Five nappies and a vest.’
‘Here’s the vest,’ I said. It was still hanging on the railing. ‘It’s dry.’
‘Maybe they fell into the courtyard,’ Mum suggested.
Linda was already heading for the stairs.
‘They’re not here,’ she bawled up a minute later, drawing several people out on to the landing. ‘Has anyone seen NAPPIES?’ Linda shouted to them. ‘NAPPIES?’ She drew a square in the air with her hands.
I crouched in the doorway. Icy with embarrassment. The Henna Ladies had come out and were watching from their landing. They waved at me.
I heaved Mob up in my arms and took her inside as my excuse.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ I looked down into her pale blue eyes. ‘About nappy thieves?’
Mob and I sat side by side on the mattress that was now my and Bea’s bed and listened to the high-pitched shrieks and bitt
er explanations as Linda interrogated one after another of the inhabitants of the hotel.
‘When we go out can I carry Mob on my back like the girls in the square?’
Linda was still distracted over her loss.
‘You know Khadija? And the beggar girls in the Djemaa El Fna?’
‘Yes,’ Linda said.
‘Well, they carry their baby brothers and sisters around on their backs. They tie them on with a piece of material. We could use a bedspread.’
Linda was counting through her pile of remaining nappies in varying shades of grey and white. ‘All right, if you really want to,’ she agreed.
A bell was being rung as we waited at the gates of Bea’s school. Children began to appear.
I pulled out the bedspread. ‘Will you tie her on now?’
I stood with my feet squarely apart to keep from being toppled over by the wriggling weight. Mob’s damp towelling body pressed against my back as she was knotted tightly on, over one shoulder and across my chest. I sweated to think of Khadija gliding through the crowds, her bundle of baby borne lightly as a shawl. I longed to sit down.
At that perfect moment Bea appeared. I took a few unsteady steps towards her. Mob began to yell and pull my hair.
‘Bea! Yoo-hoo!’ Mum and Linda waved and called to attract her attention.
My legs were beginning to shiver with the strain. Bea took one look at me and I heard like a prayer, ‘Can I have a go?’
I twisted up my mouth and paused for as long as I could bear. ‘Seeing as it’s your first day . . .’ I said, and I sat down heavily and too fast and began fumbling with the knot.
Mob was transferred to Bea’s back and we set off for lunch in the square. I watched her face for signs of strain, and was soon rewarded by a definite loss of colour, a breathy voice, dawdling behind, and ‘She’s quite heavy, isn’t she?’
There was a burst of laughter. ‘Well, you lasted five minutes longer than your sister.’ Linda tweaked her cheek. ‘She’s not been fed on Heinz baby food for nothing.’
As we dipped bread into the circles of olive oil that floated on our scalding bowls of soup, Bea told about her day.
