by Esther Freud
Bilal winked at us. ‘Nearly.’ We helped him scrape out the white ash and rebuild the fire. The plastic bottle was still half-full. Bilal poured it into the saucepan. ‘One cup each,’ he said, as if it were already made.
When the water boiled he added a handful of wilting mint. Mum got up and came to sit by the fire. She had slept in her blue caftan. The caftan Ahmed’s aunt had given her when she was brought back from the brink of death. It was crumpled and warm around her body. I leant against her. The sun tickled patterns of heat into my back as we sat and drank our tea and watched the fire go out.
I went with Bilal to refill our bottles from the well. I wanted to ask him about the hotel: whether you could get there by walking along the beach or whether it could only be reached by sea. He silently forbade it. Once we were out of sight of the others he hoisted me up on to his shoulders so that I could practise balancing the empty saucepan on my head. The third time Bilal had to stop and stoop for it, he didn’t pass it back. We walked on in silence.
‘Take hold of my hands,’ he said. We had arrived at the well.
I held on.
‘Now bend your head and roll.’
I sat still.
‘It’s a trick,’ he whispered. ‘A special trick.’
I held my breath and trusted him. I rolled forward, sliding into nothing. I twisted, felt myself spin round and and then with a thud I landed on the ground. Squarely on both feet. Bilal let go of my hands and clapped.
‘Was that really a trick?’
Bilal nodded.
‘Can I do it again?’
He lifted me back up. This time I kept my eyes open. Forward, turn, land. Bilal let my hands twist gently inside his, so that my arms wouldn’t lock. After the fourth landing it seemed almost too easy.
‘Now we must work on the speed. We must hear you whistle through the air.’
‘Did I whistle that time?’ I rubbed my wrists.
‘Like a little mosquito.’
He threw the bucket into the well. As we waited for the hollow splash, something rustled. Bilal swung round. A young man with very blond hair and a sunburnt face greeted us in Arabic.
‘Hello,’ I replied.
He laughed and knelt down. ‘So you’re the travelling circus. I saw you from the road. I thought this man here was going to drop you down the well.’ He looked up at Bilal.
‘I can sing too,’ I said.
‘Sing? Well, you’ll have to come over and sing for us.’
I wasn’t sure.
‘I’ll give you something,’ he encouraged.
‘Like what?’
He thought for a while. ‘A car that you wind up and then it drives along on its own?’
‘All right.’ I tried to contain my excitement.
‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.
Bilal pointed towards our particular clump of trees. ‘On the Barage.’
‘Charlie.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’ll drop by.’
‘My wife is English,’ Bilal said as if in explanation.
I looked at him hard. I’d never heard him say ‘wife’ before. I wondered if they’d got married and forgotten to say.
‘Bee-lal,’ I said, drawing out the sound of his name. We were walking home hand in hand.
‘Yes?’
‘Am I your little girl?’
There was a long pause.
‘Yes,’ he said finally and he squeezed my hand very tight.
Bilal showed Bea and me how to keep water cool by tying the bottle to a stone and letting it lie floating in the lake. We took down the wall of stones around the fire and scattered the ashes away with branches, sprinkling handfuls of sand over the ground to settle the dust and make it clean and smooth again. Mum tied lengths of string between the trees and hung our bedding out to air.
‘If Linda was here,’ she said, ‘she could have her own private washing line.’
The ground was littered with wood to be collected for that night’s fire. Bilal broke the branches with his foot, stamping them into little pieces, while we dashed about bringing him new supplies.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Enough.’
Bea and I ran down to the lake, pulled off our clothes and slid into the water. It was cold only for a moment. We lay on our backs with everything but our faces covered and cooled, the sun forcing our eyes shut against the glare.
When I tried to speak the muddy water trickled into my mouth. ‘Did you know they got married?’ I said to Bea. It was half interrogation, half news.
Bea lay still beside me. ‘Mum and Bilal?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who says?’
‘Bilal told Charlie at the well.’
She rolled towards me. ‘Liar!’ she spat. ‘You’re a liar.’ Her eyes had turned to stone.
‘We met a man called Charlie at the well and he’s going to give me a car that winds up.’
Bea kept her ears under the water and pretended not to hear.
‘I promise, I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.’ I couldn’t think what else to say.
We lay there for a long time. Side by side. The sun beating down through my eyelids made my head throb.
‘I’m going to get a drink,’ I said. But Bea wouldn’t even open her eyes.
There was no one around when I got back to the camp. I rummaged through the box of food and took out two tomatoes and a piece of bread. I slid between the folds of a bedspread draped over the line. The bedspread made a cool and narrow tent. The juice from the tomato softened the bread as I chewed them together in my mouth.
I could hear voices calling my name. Voices I knew and others I didn’t recognize. It was dark and the thin material flapped against me. I rolled into the open. The voices cursed and called, but I couldn’t see anyone.
‘I’m here,’ I said. ‘I’m over here.’ Then I stood up and yelled. ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m HERE!’
Mum ran out through the trees. She grabbed my arm and slapped me. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I was asleep.’ I started to cry.
She gave a long sigh and hugged me too tightly. ‘We thought you’d been kidnapped or something. We even asked the shepherds to help search.’
Bilal appeared with two men. Their dogs leapt about but didn’t bark. One of the shepherds whistled and the dogs slunk to the ground. Bea raised an eyebrow as she passed me. ‘Hideous kinky,’ she whispered and she went off to talk to the dogs.
The shepherds stayed and ate with us around the fire. Under cover of darkness we fed their dogs little pieces of bread. They were big and shaggy with soft eyes that knew how to beg. Their hair was thick and matted and filthy.
‘Maybe we could get them into the lake and wash them,’ Bea said.
The dogs were covered in lumps like blisters that I could feel through their fur when I stroked them.
‘If we give them lots of food they’ll come back.’
The dogs were not fussy. They ate rice, carrots, beans, the inside of a pomegranate.
The next afternoon they were back. All three. They lay down, wagging their tails in the sand.
‘Come and look.’ Bea had uncovered a blister along the spine of the largest dog’s back. It was dark red and swollen, fat and round as a bilberry. I touched it with my finger. The dog didn’t flinch.
‘Ticks,’ Bilal said. He bent down. ‘They suck the blood.’
‘Do you mean they’re alive?’ I moved back involuntarily. Like body lice, but bigger, I thought.
Bilal flicked his hand through the dog’s coat, uncovering whole colonies of blood-swollen ticks.
Bea was staring into the dog’s mournful eyes. ‘Couldn’t we pull them off?’
Bilal shook his head. ‘Then it is worse for the dog. If you pull them off, they leave their legs behind, and they grow again, a new body.’
We were horrified.
‘The only thing to do’ – Bilal took out a cigarette and lit it – ‘is to burn them.’
I was sure I could hear the tick�
�s scream as it retracted its hundred sharp legs and shrivelled into a ball, dropping grey on to the sand. The dog lay motionless, its head on its paws. It understood we were only trying to help. Bilal left us his cigarette and a box of matches. We worked through the afternoon, searching out the bloodsuckers to watch them shrivel and roll dying on to the sand. There was not time to kill each and every tick before the shepherds in the field began to whistle, and, pricking up their ears, the dogs sprang up and trotted away through the trees.
The next afternoon the dogs were back. We rewarded them with bread and chick-pea salad saved especially from lunch. Once they had eaten we set to work. There was only one dog left to do.
‘We’ve almost finished.’ I hopped around as Bea pulled, red hot, on the cigarette. I ruffled the first cured dog, stretched out asleep, his eyebrow twitching. As I stroked his matted fur, my hand caught against something, up by his neck. I fingered through and found, nestled close in to the skin, that there were fresh ticks, smaller and less swollen, but growing.
‘Bilal!’ I called with such urgency that he came running half naked from his siesta. ‘He’s got new ticks,’ I sobbed, pointing at the dog.
There was nothing Bilal could say. ‘When they roll in the grass, the ticks, they jump back on.’
‘Don’t roll in the grass,’ Bea shook her finger at the dog. It wagged its tail sleepily.
Each day when the dogs came to ‘scrounge’ as my mother called it, we attempted to keep the ticks at bay with the cigarette-end Bea kept folded in a handkerchief especially. I secretly worried that they would never be cured. Our food supplies were running low and were most stringently watched by Mum, and without the promise of any reward I was sure the dogs would lose patience. They would lose patience, run out of blood and die.
Chapter Thirteen
There were fewer pedal boats on the lake, and at night it was cold enough to wrap up in a blanket and wait for supper to be ready. Mum made a soup with potatoes and a sprinkling of rice and lentils.
‘Not soup again,’ we moaned most nights. We bought bread from one of the shepherds’ wives who baked early each morning. She gave us goat’s milk in a flask which Bea and I refused to drink. There was almost nothing left in the cardboard box. No honey. No oranges. Only dried things in packets. That was why, Mum said, we should drink the milk.
One morning when I woke it was later than usual and Bilal was nowhere to be seen.
‘Has he gone to the well without me?’
Mum didn’t answer. She was sitting cross-legged with her back very straight. Her eyes were closed.
‘She’s meditating,’ Bea said.
‘Oh.’
‘Do you remember she used to do meditating in England?’
I shook my head. On a beach? I wondered.
‘Where’s Bilal?’
Bea shrank her voice to a whisper in response to the angry flickering of Mum’s eyelashes.
‘He’s gone to find some food.’
‘Where from?’
‘I don’t know.’
Our eyes travelled in the direction of the big hotel where the water tractors moored up. We knew that it must be very far away. Twice we had set off on a secret mission to find it. We had followed the shore line, expecting the hotel to appear in all its splendour around each jut of land, but as the hours passed and the sun began to sink towards the lake, we were forced back each time without even a glimpse of it.
We waited all day for Bilal to return. We didn’t even risk going in for a swim. In the afternoon when it was at its hottest we made a camp of blankets and took it in turn to keep watch. I watched for Bilal from all directions but mostly I waited for him to come from the direction of the hotel.
The sky was already turning a dusty red when I saw a small black shadow on the curve of the beach. It was Bilal. He was walking with his feet in the water. As he drew closer I saw that he had a cotton bag over one shoulder. It bulged as it swung against his hip. We ran to meet him.
‘Sardines,’ he shouted when he saw us, and taking out several small silver tins he began to juggle with them as he ran.
‘Sardines . . . and nothing else?’ Mum tried not to show her disappointment.
Bilal emptied his bag. The tins poured out on to the ground like coins. There were twenty-seven of them. Twenty-seven tins of sardines. Bilal cut one open with his knife and scooped up a little silver fish. ‘It’s good,’ he smiled, as he ate, the oil running down his chin. We dipped our fingers into the tin and broke off pieces of tightly packed fish. Rich and salty and drenched in oil. Even Mum agreed it was good.
We sat around the fire with plates of sardine chopped with tomato. There was a delicious silence as we all took our first mouthful.
‘Aha, so I’ve found you.’
A man stood just outside our circle of firelight. The flames picked out his bleached hair and the pink of his nose and cheeks.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ I said, my mouth full of sardine.
He stepped a little closer. He held his hand out to Mum. ‘So you must be the English wife?’
Mum laughed and looked at Bilal. ‘Well, not quite . . .’
Bea nudged me with a sharp elbow. ‘See.’
Charlie sat and looked at our heaped plate.
‘Tonight we can actually offer you something to eat,’ Mum said.
Charlie smiled. ‘Sardines.’ He looked as if he knew what that meant. ‘Thank you.’
I waited for Charlie to swallow his first mouthful before nudging him. ‘Did you bring my wind-up car?’
He dug deep into the pocket of his shorts. ‘Here it is.’ It sat in the palm of his hand, the size of a mouse. There was a tiny key that Charlie turned until it was wound and then he let the car drive, ticking, down the length of his arm until it shot over the edge and lay, wheels spinning, in the sand. I reached for it, but Charlie closed his hand over mine.
‘I thought you were going to sing me a song.’
I looked at his expectant face. Between trips to the well, collecting firewood, perfecting my one and only acrobatic trick and preserving the lives of three tick-ridden dogs, there had been no time to practise Charlie’s song. I looked from the toy car to the four faces around the fire. They were all waiting. Waiting for me to sing. I struggled to my feet and closed my eyes. I didn’t know any songs. I had never known any songs. All I knew was that I wanted the car. I opened my mouth and let out a low wailing chant. A poor imitation of Ahmed’s tearful singing. It had no beginning and no end. I added a word. An animal name from Bea’s schoolbook. I half opened my eyes on Charlie’s smiling mouth. I took courage and let my voice rise and fall and catch and quaver. I began to throw in some English, anything that came to mind. ‘Hair grip,’ I wailed. And, ‘Marzipan.’ Then all the sounds that seemed like songs to me flooded into my mind and I sang them. The waterman calling ‘L-ma’ through the city as he clanked his tin cups. The children begging in the square. ‘Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola.’ And the tinkling of Mrs Maynard’s sweetshop door on the pantiles in Tunbridge Wells as it closed behind each customer. My song ended on a refrain of ‘Helufa, Helufa, Helufa’, which was met with wild applause. Charlie pressed the car into my hand.
I wound it carefully and set it on the ground. Its wheels spun against the pine needles and pebbles, but it moved an inch or two. I thought of the long, smooth terrace of the Hotel Moulay Idriss. ‘Thank you,’ I said and knotted it tightly into the hem of my caftan.
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 spar
e, 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.