by Esther Freud
When the meal was over and our plates had been cleared away, Bea, without warning, sank her head on to her hands and burst into tears. I stared at her bobbing head. I couldn’t remember ever having seen Bea cry. Bea didn’t cry. It was me and Mum who cried.
‘If we do go home,’ she sobbed into the table, ‘does it mean we won’t ever be able to come back?’
Mum put her arm around her. She stroked her despairing head. ‘If you look up at the sky,’ she told her, ‘you can see seven stars that make a pattern.’ Bea raised her head and I followed her gaze. The sky dripped with stars, they hung in a mist behind the orange glow of the city. ‘Those stars are the seven brothers of the seven prophets and whoever makes a wish to them, it will come true.’
Bea lifted her head high, her tears already drying on her cheeks. ‘Oh that’s all right then,’ she said, and she closed her eyes and with her face tilted up towards the seven stars she moved her lips silently in a long and complicated prayer.
‘I think it would be nice to buy Khadija a present,’ Mum suggested. It was the day our money had arrived at the bank.
‘And Zara and Saida,’ Bea added.
We found the three friends sitting in a circle around an empty bottle of Fanta. ‘Waa, waa,’ they called to us as we approached. Mum took Saida by the hand and led us around the edge of the Djemaa El Fna and into the covered market on the far side. We followed her down aisle after aisle of slippers and purses and gold belts until we came to the stall where I had bought my first caftan. I was wearing it now and the orange-and-raspberry pink of the cloth seemed hardly to have faded. Khadija, Saida and Zara looked up at the rows of dresses with longing eyes.
‘Choose one,’ Mum urged, and they looked at Bea and me for confirmation. ‘Choose one. Choose one,’ we insisted.
The man in the shop would not let them touch. They pointed and giggled and sighed over each dress as he held up one after the other for their inspection. Khadija chose a pale green dress with the crescent-shaped pattern of leaves embossed into the material. She wanted to put it on right then, but Mum insisted that it be wrapped in paper, and she carried it under her arm. Zara and Saida both chose dresses in thick, shiny nylon. One in blue and pink and the other in a swirling paisley of red and yellow. Mum held all three packages under her arm and we followed her on down the avenues of everything you ever dreamed of.
Mum wouldn’t say where we were going. She walked fast through the old city and we followed her, all five dancing and skipping to keep up. She stopped at the doors of the Hammam. ‘Have you been here before?’ she asked them. They hadn’t.
They peeled off their ragged dresses which was all they wore and Mum took a bottle of shampoo out of her bag. She stood them in a line and poured water over their heads. Bea and I showed them how you could stand your hair on end when it was thick with the lather of the shampoo so that you looked as if you had seen a ghost or you were a ghost. Mum rubbed us down with the Hammam stone and then she left us in a warm and steamy room to drip and chatter while she washed her own hair which was much too long and heavy to ever stand on end. When we were dry she combed our hair through with almond oil. Otherwise, she said, it would break the hair-brush. I wished we still had our tin of powder so that they could know how silky it felt between your toes but, when Mum unpacked the caftans and dropped each one over their heads, Khadija, Zara and Saida looked at themselves with such wonder that nothing else mattered.
The following morning a woman tapped on our door. She had grey hair and a bent back. She was Khadija’s mother. She thanked Mum over and over, and every time she thanked her a tear rolled down her cheek and over the top of her veil. After she had gone Mum cried too but she wouldn’t say why.
We went to visit Akari in his shop and Bilal came with us and carried Mum’s sewing-machine as a present for Akari’s wife. Akari tried to convince us to stay. He said he had a house we could rent in the French quarter. We could live there free if Mum were to sew an English dress every month for his little girls. He said he would even take us to another camel festival.
I didn’t like to think about the camel festival. The camel, garlanded in flowers, had collected us from our house in the Mellah, and we had followed it out of the city and high into the mountains in a procession of singing. We had walked for the whole day and only arrived in time to see the camel sinking to its knees, forcing itself up again, staggering, and all the time its severed head was bouncing and grazing down the mountainside. Bea said it hadn’t rolled down the mountain at all, and that she had seen the camel’s head with her own eyes being packed into a straw basket. Mum had lagged behind with Akari and only arrived at the top in time to eat a slice of camel cheese and negotiate a donkey ride for the journey down.
We said goodbye to Luna and Umbark and their tiny baby. Luna was so happy that even though she was sad when she said goodbye I could still see her smiling underneath. We packed all our things into the tartan duffle bag and what was left over into a sack Mum had made out of a bedspread. I left my black trousers out to wear on the journey.
‘When you are too big for your trousers,’ Bilal said to me, ‘I want you to take off my patch and sew it on to something else.’ He made me promise. That was when I knew he wasn’t coming with us.
Chapter Thirty
The streets of Marrakech were lined with people on the morning that we said goodbye to the Nappy Ladies and Ayesha and her grandmother and Moulay Idriss and made our way to the train station. There were rows of flags strung up above the crowd, and in the distance short, sharp volleys of gunfire rang out. Bilal carried our bags. He edged his way through the people who streamed down the avenues of orange trees towards the gates of the city and I held tightly on to the tail of his djellaba so as not to be swept away. ‘We’re going to miss our train,’ Mum shouted over my head.
I saw Khadija standing in a wall of people holding a flag. She ran out to us.
‘What’s going on?’ Bea shouted to her.
‘It’s the birthday of the King.’ And she waved her flag and danced.
Then I noticed Khadija’s dress. She was wearing her old caftan, torn and filthy with the rip that went up above her knees.
‘What happened to your new dress?’ Mum bent down to her.
Khadija darted away into the crowd. We pressed ourselves against the wall of people and waited for her, but she didn’t come back.
A crack like thunder shook the air. The street where we stood cleared as if by magic and the people pressed themselves back against the buildings and craned their necks to see. Bilal lifted me on to his shoulders. A group of men with guns marched into view. They were followed by an army of horses that trotted and scampered, their tails arched and their heads held high. Their riders wore swords that curved down from their belts, and their clothes were trimmed with braid. I could feel the hearts of a thousand people stopping and starting. And then an open carriage rolled into view. It was drawn by four black horses. Inside sat the King of Morocco. The voice of the crowd burst out in a frenzy of delight. They shouted and strained and waved their arms at him, and in return the King stood up in his carriage and put his hand over his heart.
We streamed after the King’s carriage. We were squeezed through the gate of the city and emerged on the plain where once we had tried to sell Mary, Mary-Rose and Rosemary. As the King’s carriage rolled through the gates, a line of Berber horsemen, who had been waiting in a silent salute, raised their guns and at sudden speed charged the carriage. The city froze as the horses thundered down on the King. Until with a simultaneous ringing shot of their rifles they skidded to a halt. I watched spellbound from Bilal’s shoulders. The men charged and the Berber women danced. They accompanied themselves with a noise like a Red Indian whoop that made me laugh. It ended on a short shriek like a marsh bird.
‘We’ve missed our train, surely,’ Mum called, and we began to extricate ourselves from the crowd, to squeeze and shoulder our way back through the hustle of the celebrations to find a taxi that was not on h
oliday.
Our train was waiting. Bilal got on with us and found a place where we could sit beside a window. He packed our bags into the racks above the seat. I was wrong. He is coming with us, I thought, and as I thought it, Bilal was walking backwards, smiling with his smiling eyes until, without a word, he had disappeared among the last-minute passengers. Bea and I searched the length of the train and hung out of every window, willing him to reappear.
‘Bilal! Bilal!’ we shouted as the train began to pull away. ‘Bilal!’ But I couldn’t pick him out among the crowd dispersing on the platform.
The train rumbled down a track banked with the first flowers of spring, with wild hollyhocks and tiny clinging roses, and entered the gloom of an avenue of eucalyptus trees. Marrakech stretched behind us in the distance.
‘Does this train go all the way home?’ I asked Mum, who was braiding and unbraiding her hair with quick, distracted fingers.
‘No,’ she said. I had to pinch her for the answer.
Bea had climbed up into an empty luggage rack and was using it as a hammock. ‘Hideous, hideous, hideous kinky, hideous, hideous kink,’ she chanted softly to the rhythm of the wheels.
I badly wanted to climb up and join her, but I thought it would be safest to stay on the seat in case Mum changed her mind about going home and decided at the last minute to jump off at one of the stations along the way.
About the Author
ESTHER FREUD trained as an actress before writing her first novel, Hideous Kinky, which was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and made into a film starring Kate Winslet. After publishing her second novel, Peerless Flats, she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. Her other books include Lucky Break and Mr. Mac and Me, which won an East Anglian Book Award. She contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines, and teaches creative writing. Her first full-length play, Stitchers, was produced at London’s Jermyn Street Theatre in 2018, and in 2019 she was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her ninth novel, I Couldn’t Love You More, was published in 2021.
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Also by Esther Freud
I Couldn’t Love You More (2021)
Mr. Mac and Me (2014)
Lucky Break (2011)
Love Falls (2007)
The Sea House (2003)
The Wild (2000)
Summer at Gaglow (1997)
Peerless Flats (1993)
Hideous Kinky (1992)
Copyright
HIDEOUS KINKY. Copyright © 1992 by Esther Freud. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover art © Tali Yalonetzki
FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 1998
REISSUED BY ECCO IN 2021
First published by Ecco Press in 1992
Digital Edition JULY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-321102-5
Version 05252021
Print ISBN: 978-0-88-001688-9
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