by Esther Freud
‘We sat in a room and copied everything the teacher said. One girl got beaten with a stick.’
Mum was horrified. ‘Why?’
‘Because she peed in the classroom. The teacher beat her until the stick broke, and then when the stick broke everyone was very happy, and then a boy from the school next door who is her favourite boy brought over a new stick.’
‘My God.’ Mum put her head in her hands.
‘Are you going to go again tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’ Bea was adamant.
‘Linda had five nappies stolen.’ I wanted her to know what she’d missed. ‘Mum thinks it might be the Henna Ladies.’
‘No, I do not. They probably just blew away.’
Linda muttered under her breath and fed Mob another piece of bread. ‘Prostitutes,’ she hissed.
Chapter Ten
Each morning I dressed in my black trousers and tucked my hair up into a hat. I was keeping watch for Bilal. I waited in the courtyard, amusing myself by walking along the white lines between the tiles, precariously balancing, one foot in front of the other, as if it were a tightrope. I was also on the lookout for stray nappies. Every day, whatever time of day or night Linda hung out her washing, when she came to take it in, at least one nappy would be missing. I was sure I had seen one of the Henna Ladies coming out of the downstairs toilet wearing one on her head like a turban. So far not one had been recovered.
‘If things carry on like this I shall have to think of going home,’ Linda said more than once.
I woke to the pounding on wood of feet and fists, and the screaming voice of a woman. I jumped up. Linda was not in her bed. Mum sat up sleepily, but on hearing the roar that was beginning to build outside, she sprang up and rushed out in her nightie. I watched her race round to where Linda was hammering. She was beating on the closed door of the Henna Ladies – the Nappy Thieves. She was shouting for them to come out. Ayesha’s grandmother hobbled out on to the landing. She stumbled to help drag Linda away. Linda clung, swearing, to the railings, and then the door opened and the two women stepped out, draped in bright silk, their hair loose.
‘Quick, Bea, come and look,’ I screamed.
The gallery was a flurry of cloth and hair and the woman from our left whose cushion had been ruined was hurling slippers at my mother’s head. Slippers, fruit, anything she could find. Her husband stood in the doorway and shouted. I looked over the railings for Moulay Idriss to come out of his little room but he was not at home. Mum picked up an orange that rolled along the landing. She held it in her strong hand and flung it back, hitting the cushion woman on the ear with a smack so ferocious that for a moment everything else was quiet.
I dragged on my trousers and ran round along the other side of the landing. I wanted to pull at the skirt of my mother’s nightdress and force her back into our room. I wanted her to be still and calm and never go out again. As I ran I slipped and fell, scraping my knee across the stone floor. I curled up on the ground and stared into the jagged cut across my trouser leg. Inside a graze was filling up with blood. I sobbed. Now Bilal would never see my trousers with a zip. I pulled myself up, blind with pity, my forehead swelling to a bruise. I headed for home, forgetting.
There was Mum, dragging the stove from John’s broken-down van. She was dragging it through the door. Dragging it with her along the landing. The people shrank away. She was trying to lift it. Throw it. Finally she hurled it. Her hands bleeding. It bounced and scraped along the landing, forcing people back into doorways. She followed in its wake. The blood from her fingers running down her arms. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ I could hear myself screaming as if it were someone else’s voice. Bea was behind me shouting in Arabic. The metal of the stove still clanked and smashed against the railings.
A hand on my shoulder made me turn and a woman’s arm drew me through a doorway into a lamplit room. Bea and I crouched behind a mound of cushions under a wall thick with hangings. The room was heavy with the clamour of outside and the woman stood in the middle of the room, anxiously watching the door. She was young and beautiful, dressed in a caftan threaded with gold. I had seen her husband, a rich man, waiting his turn to use the toilet by the stairs.
‘They want to find out how the poor people live,’ Ayesha had told us. ‘They have a big house with servants. But now they live here.’
The woman looked at us with gentle eyes. She knelt down and touched the fraying edges of my trousers.
‘Take them off,’ Bea nudged, in response to the woman’s murmurings.
My ears were full of the pounding of the fight behind the door. The echo of it rose and fell in waves. She pulled me up and began carefully to peel away my precious trousers, lifting each foot as she slipped them off. I did nothing to help. She sat me on a stool and washed the cut with water and a soft cloth. She smeared it with bright red cream that looked like blood. I smiled at the gore of it.
‘Come through,’ she said with her eyes. Bea and I followed her into a smaller room. A baby was sleeping on a bed piled high with cushions, on to which we climbed. From this windowless room only the occasional shout drifted in from outside. The lady brought us glasses of milk and coils of bright orange pastry filled with honey, so sweet it stung your mouth. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, flickering my lids against a haunting of my mother’s bleeding hands.
I was being carried through bright sunlight. I struggled against strong unfamiliar arms.
‘Put me down.’ I kicked, and a dark face swam into my vision. Smiling at me.
‘Bilal.’ I clung to him, my arms twisting round his neck. We were on the landing outside our room. A quiet lunchtime breeze murmured through the hotel – the smell of food behind closed doors. My mother was walking just behind, holding Bea by the hand and carrying my trousers in the other.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said, as if by chance she hadn’t seen me for a long time.
Lunch was spread out on a cloth on the floor. Bilal set me down and admired the red gash on my knee. ‘It really, really hurts,’ I said, knowing he knew it didn’t.
Linda was changing Mob.
‘Did you get the nappies back?’ Bea asked.
‘Only one.’ She pointed to a tattered rag soaking in a bucket. ‘They were using it as a dishcloth.’
‘They’ve been stealing Mob’s nappies to wear as turbans,’ I told Bilal.
He laughed as if he knew the story. Then I remembered the gash in my trousers. I pulled them on and looked mournfully at the ruined knee. ‘Do you think I look like a boy?’
Bilal ruffled my hair. It was growing thicker and longer as predicted, and the orange of it was not so bright as it had been. Bilal heaped his plate with bread and tomato salad. He turned to Bea. ‘So you are a schoolgirl now?’
Bea nodded.
‘A schoolgirl who would like a holiday? A holiday on the Barage?’
‘But I’ve only just started.’
Mum scowled at her. ‘You’d like to go to the seaside for a few days. Surely?’
‘I’ll fall behind.’
‘She might get hit with a stick,’ I chimed in, longing to go.
Bea looked hard at her plate.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.
Chapter Eleven
We packed the food we’d bought into a cardboard box. Packets of rice, chick-peas, tomatoes. A round soft cheese in hard paper. Pomegranates, and a mound of tiny oranges. Mum dressed us both in loose caftans for the long, hot journey to come.
‘We’ll have breakfast on the bus,’ she said hurrying.
Linda had taken a job typing poems for a blind poet she’d met in the Djemaa El Fna. She and Mob were staying at the hotel. We waved goodbye to Ayesha, the beautiful lady in the gold caftan, and the two nappy thieves who smiled and waved as if life were too short to bear grudges.
Bilal carried the box of food, on top of which sat a saucepan, a bowl and a sharp knife. His bag rattled with cups and a tin-opener. Mum carried the tartan duffle bag, borrowed fro
m Linda, and Bea and I had a blanket each. We walked in procession through the streets.
As our bus pulled out of Marrakech, Bilal took a square of green corduroy from his pocket and straightened it carefully on his knee. ‘A patch for your trousers,’ he said.
‘But I didn’t bring them with me.’
Bilal winked in the direction of the duffle bag. He took a mesh of silk embroidery thread and borrowed a needle and a tiny pair of scissors from Mum. I leant against Bilal’s arm as he sewed, remembering only now and then to look out of the window, at the flat orange countryside that was gradually turning to sand. A flower began to appear on the corduroy in shimmering blue and green thread, a pink leaf curling round the side of it. As the hours slipped by and the sun beat through the metal walls of the bus, a bird grew, perching on the flower’s top in profile, its tiny claws clinging and its beak open in song. The talk and laughter of the other passengers faded away as the driver’s recorded prayers turned to harsh readings of the Koran that boomed through the bus at top volume.
The bus jolted to a stop. The driver gave a long shout and turned off the engine. We were in a red and green town. The street was one long arched terrace of rust-coloured houses with green shutters over every window and green tiles in a row just below the flat roof. We shuffled sleepily off the bus. We were expected. Men busily fried skewers of meat over roadside fires, and the small round loaves of bread for sale were still warm. There were hard-boiled eggs with a sprinkling of salted cumin that came separately in newspaper twists and deep-fried sweets made with orange-flower water. Bilal ordered us each a bowl of soup in a painted clay bowl. It was ladled up from a vat above a tiny flame.
‘What is it?’ Mum asked as we stood by the side of the road and dipped wooden spoons into the brimming white stew.
Bilal tasted it and smiled in delight. He went into a rapturous explanation.
‘Tripe,’ Mum said when he had finished, and refused to elaborate.
After lunch Bea and I sat in the shade of the arched houses and looked through her book. She was teaching me the animals.
‘Which one do you think is a tripe?’ I asked.
She didn’t know. ‘It might be a relation of the turnip,’ she said, and pointed to another animal whose name I had forgotten.
‘Helufa!’ I shouted in triumph when we arrived at the pig with the curling tail.
The bus driver, who had started up his bus, blasted alternate warning notes on his two horns, and as he rumbled slowly out of town everyone ran, clinging to the doors, to pull themselves back on.
‘Was that the Barage?’ I asked Mum.
‘No,’ she said. ‘That was just lunch.’
The Barage was not the seaside but an enormous lake. If you stood on the shore in the early morning before it became too dazzlingly hot, you could see the other side, but for most of the day it was easy to forget there was anything out there at all.
The bus set us down on a sandy stretch of land where pine trees grew in clusters. We were the only people to get off. It was late afternoon and the sand was still hot enough to scorch the soles of your feet. We threw our luggage down at the foot of a tree that was one of a circle of five and Mum began to spread out the rugs and blankets. She made a soft bog of bedding wide enough for us all to sleep in.
Bilal picked up the saucepan and whistled. He turned inland and trudged off through the sand. He also had a large plastic bottle with a screw top and a canvas flask that hung from his belt. Bea and I followed him up the soft slope of the beach into a cool ridge of trees. We walked single-file along a path, taking deep breaths of pine-sweetened air and stamping hard from time to time to watch the salamanders disappear into nowhere. I could see the lake, blue and shimmering a little below me on one side, and on the other the road down which our bus had passed.
Bilal helped us over a low wall into an amber dry field full of sheep. The sheep raised their heads to watch us as we passed. They flicked their lashes against a swarm of flies, and kept their eyes on us. In the corner of the field, shaded by a clump of palm trees, was a high circle of stone.
‘A well,’ Bea shouted, leaning in. Her voice echoed. ‘Well-ell-lll.’
It gave off an ancient damp smell. A shiny black reflection bounced back at me as I stared into its depths. There was a plastic bucket tied to the wall by a length of string. Bilal let the bucket drop. Silence. Then a sharp splash as it hit the water. The bucket floated far away on the surface, sinking slowly until with a tightening of the rope and a sound like a gulp it went under. Bilal pulled it up fast. He set the two bottles and the saucepan on the ground and filled them with great care. I squatted near to watch as not a drop was lost. He offered up his canvas flask for us to drink from. Long, hard swallows of the clear water. It gurgled inside my stomach, pushing it out like a football. Bilal refilled the flask. He tipped the remaining water back into the well.
The camp was deserted. We shouted for Mum, scanning the beach, shading our eyes against the sun which had sunk towards the lake, turning it to gold and spreading shadows from the foot of each tree. I heard laughter and a shout on the breeze. There she was, her arms waving at us from the water.
‘She’s swimming!’ I shouted to Bea.
‘Hideous kinky!’ she shouted back.
Bilal, Bea and I stood at the edge of the lake, ankle-deep in water, and watched Mum floating on her back.
‘Come in,’ she said, as if it were her own watery kingdom.
Bilal flung off his clothes and waded out to her. Just before he reached my mother’s floating body, he took a dive and swam right under her. She screamed and tipped over. Bilal struck out into the middle of the lake.
‘Take everything off,’ Mum scolded, as I stepped gingerly into the shallows, one hand clutching at the weak elastic of my knickers. I sat down quickly, the water up to my waist. Mum laughed and flitted about like a mermaid.
I lay in the silky sand letting the waves wash me back and forth. The lake was as warm as a puddle. With one hand I held on to my waterlogged pants and with the other I clutched at any shell or rock large enough to hold me to land each time the waves dragged back into the lake.
‘Shall I teach you to swim?’ Bea asked.
‘No thanks.’ I was clinging to a piece of seaweed.
‘Doggie paddle.’ She splashed up and down in front of me, kicking her legs. ‘Watch. Just hold your breath and close your eyes. One two three. Go.’
A few seconds later I opened my eyes. It seemed I had only moved a matter of inches. The water swirled around me thick with sand and tiny shells.
‘My pants!’ I leapt after them, plunging up to my neck as I grabbed at a dark blue shadow.
‘Mum, I’ve lost my . . .’ But she had swum out to Bilal and now they were two black specks against the sinking sun.
I fought back to the shallows, the sand slipping from under my feet.
‘Mum . . .’ I shouted over the water. I knew she wouldn’t hear me. Tears as warm as the lake trickled down my face.
Bea held up her identical pair of navy pants. I looked at her. She was going to give them to me. Pretend she’d found them. That they were mine. When really they were hers.
But she didn’t. She screwed them up into a ball and threw them as far out as she could. We watched them float away on a current.
‘Knock, knock,’ she said.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Nicholas.’
‘Nicholas who?’
‘Nicholas girls shouldn’t climb trees.’
We screamed with laughter. We lay on our stomachs in the waves and discussed whether we’d prefer to be a water baby or a chimney sweep. And who we’d least like to meet under the sea. Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. Or Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. I thought I’d prefer to be Tom the chimney sweep once he’d become a water baby. We lay in the lake covered up to the chin. The water was warmer now than the air.
Mum and Bilal rose silently up out of the lake, making us jump.
‘Did you swim right the way acro
ss?’ I asked.
‘No, just along the shore a little. Have you seen the sunset?’
I turned around. The sun was a smouldering crescent, lying on the edge of the world. Fingers of light streamed away from it up through a wafer-thin purple cloud and into the dome of the sky. We sat shivering and watched the sun sink, giving up the sky to a moon that had hovered high since late afternoon, waiting for its chance of glory.
Chapter Twelve
‘Have you been here before?’ I asked Bilal as we sat cross-legged around last night’s burnt-out fire, sucking the juice from oranges.
He pointed to the lake. ‘You see that?’
I jumped up. A red tractor was gliding noiselessly over the water. It had four enormous wheels that turned mysteriously without sinking. There was someone driving it. A man. And I could see a lady in a pink bikini sitting by his side.
‘Is it going to sink?’ I had watched it for five minutes, my heart in my mouth.
‘It’s made from plastic.’ Bilal hardly gave it a glance. ‘With pedals.’
I shouted for Bea. ‘Quick, look, there’s a giant pedal car on the lake. Come and see.’
Bea stood transfixed. ‘Where did it come from?’
Bilal motioned further up the beach, beyond where the bus had set us down. The land there jutted out into the lake and swept in again, out of our sight. ‘There is a large hotel. It has boats and a swimming-pool.’ His voice was flat and careless. ‘I have worked there one summer.’
Bea and I threw ourselves at him. ‘Can we go? Please? Will you take us on a pedal car?’
Bilal shook us off. I had never seen him angry before. ‘You don’t want that. It’s rubbish. Of no use.’ He kicked a half-burnt piece of wood along the beach. Bea and I followed it with longing eyes. ‘Here we have everything.’ He spread his arms. ‘Everything in the world.’
The pedal boat began to turn slowly round and head back towards the invisible hotel.
Mum stirred under her blanket. ‘Is there any tea made?’
