by Esther Freud
Bea brought her babouche back to bed. I waited for her. I had learnt to be wary of Bea on occasions like this. The year before in Tunbridge Wells she had forced me to creep under the Christmas tree and unwrap my present, just enough to see inside, and then the next day I had to pretend to be surprised and delighted at a jigsaw puzzle I already knew turned into a picture of a train.
Bea began to unwrap her package. There was something familiar about the cone-shaped wicker basket protruding from the shoe. It was full of soft fruit that spilt on to the sheet when I tipped it up.
‘Stawberries!’ we both shouted, waking Mob who began to scream. Mum stirred under her blanket and eventually got up to pray.
‘Thank you. How lovely,’ she said, when presented with her present. ‘Mulberries.’
‘Mulberries!’ We were devastated.
Mum tried to check our disappointment. ‘They’re exactly the same as strawberries only more delicious and much, much rarer.’ Bea gave her a look usually reserved for Akari the Estate Agent, but as it was Christmas we decided to let it go. We sat up in bed and ate our mulberries. Mob also had a carton, and Mum let Linda eat half of hers.
‘The sun’s only just risen,’ Linda said, eating guiltily, ‘and after all it is Christmas.’
Mum saved her share for later.
She said there was a surprise for us. She made us close our eyes. My heart leapt. Bilal. It had to be Bilal. I could see him in my mind’s eye juggling with sardines and Christmas presents, somersaulting across the room.
‘All right, you can open your eyes now,’ Mum’s voice came from far away.
Bea gave me a shove. ‘Open your eyes.’
In the centre of the room was a large brown parcel. It was wound round and round with Sellotape and covered in stamps. Mum cut at it with a knife. We pulled and scratched until finally one of its cardboard sides came away and a white paper bag of Liquorice Laces fell out. There were Sherbet Fountains, Black Jacks, Midget Gems, Gobstoppers, Flying Saucers, but the real present was three tall books with pictures of animals on the front. Orlando the Marmalade Cat, Babar the Elephant and a Rupert Bear book. Bea and I began to devour the sweets.
‘Don’t you want to know who they’re from?’ Mum asked as we ripped off wrappings, spraying the room with sherbet.
‘Your Daddy,’ she said. ‘From England.’
My teeth were stuck together with Black Jack. I opened up Babar the Elephant. I wondered if he was there with Luigi Mancini or not. Bea didn’t say anything. She started to explain to me about Orlando and his magic carpet. She showed me a picture of Orlando’s wife, Grace, and their three children, Pansy, Blanche and Tom the kitten. I pored over the pictures, forcing her to tell me the names of each new character. For a while I forgot about Bilal and the mystery man in waistcoats who magicked sweets out of a cardboard box, falling in and out of love with Grace in her elegant hats, Rupert’s friend Bill the Badger, and Babar’s three children, Flora, Alexander and Pom.
Chapter Nineteen
Linda was leaving for London. Bea and I insisted on wearing our pyjamas to see her off. They were the pyjamas Aunty Rose had given us on Boxing Day. After all, we were only waving goodbye to the bus that goes to the airport and not to the plane.
A terrible mistake had been made over the pyjamas. One pair was pale blue and obviously meant for Bea, the other, smaller pair were the colour of honeycomb and scattered with teddy bears, running, jumping and standing on their heads. I reached eagerly for them, but Aunty Rose stopped me, saying, ‘Bea, seeing as you’re the eldest would you like to choose which pyjamas you’d prefer?’
I stood still, willing her under my breath, ‘The blue ones, the blue ones,’ until I saw Bea slip her caftan over her head and take up the wrong pair. The trousers hung high above her ankles and the sleeves were ridiculously short. She buttoned up the shirt and beamed. ‘I’ll take these.’
She even said, ‘Thank you.’
Aunty Rose dressed me in the blue pyjamas. She tied the cord across my stomach in a bow, and turned the sleeves over three times. I kept expecting her to notice something was wrong, but she hummed contentedly and knelt to roll up the trouser legs.
We wore our pyjamas home. Mum admired them without criticism, only advising us to take them off before getting into bed.
We stood at the bus station and waved goodbye to Linda and Mob. Linda was crying and Mob was scrambling about all over the seat. ‘Take care of yourselves,’ she kept saying.
The bus began to pull away. ‘Good luck!’ Mum shouted, and Linda waved one of Mob’s nappies out of the back window to make us laugh.
Ramadan was over and Mum was allowed to eat with us again. No one could think of anything to say as we waited for our soup to cool. I volunteered a song to cheer Mum up, but for once she was unenthusiastic. She bought a piece of majoun and began to chew it slowly. I wondered if now that Linda and Mob had gone away Bilal would come back. Each time I went to ask about him the words stopped in my mouth. A distant fairy-tale voice told me that if you kept a wish secret long enough it would eventually come true. I bit my lip.
Akari the Estate Agent pulled up a chair. I forgot that we weren’t talking and offered him a sip of Fanta. Akari had a plan. He said it was a plan that he had dreamed especially for us. His cinema venture had fallen through. No one wanted to go to the cinema in Sid Zouin, so he had decided to turn the garden behind his house, which was already a café, into a hotel. We, he had decided, were to be his very first guests.
‘It is the most beautiful garden in the world,’ he sighed, his eyes half closed. ‘When the cinema seats have gone. . . Ha . . .’ He clapped his hands. ‘Then you will see.’
Mum said she thought it sounded lovely, but Bea still hadn’t forgiven Akari for the murder of Snowy, and I was worried that if we went away from Marrakech Bilal wouldn’t be able to find us when he came home. Akari extolled the virtues of Sid Zouin until he had moved himself to tears, and Mum pressed his hand and swore that it would be an honour for us to be the first guests at his hotel.
Mum promised Akari that as soon as our money arrived from England we were going to Sid Zouin. Every day she went to the bank to ask, but the man there just shook his turban at her and looked serious. We stopped eating at the cafés in the Djemaa El Fna and cooked in our room over the mijmar which smoked furiously under the broken bellows, making it impossible to breathe unless both doors were left open. The nights had become so cold Mum said sometimes she thought it was a good thing we were being forced to wait until spring before going to the country.
One morning early I was woken by her murmurings as she knelt on the mat. She sniffed between each prayer. In a pause that I hoped was the end I ventured, ‘Mum . . .’
‘Hello.’
I couldn’t think what else to say. ‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Neither can I,’ she said, and she knelt over my bed and whispered, ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’
We dressed quickly, careful not to wake Bea, and crept out into the beginnings of the morning. We walked hand in hand through the crisp, empty streets, the hoods of our burnouses warm and muffled round our ears. The maze of streets narrowed as we walked deep into the old walled city, the dawn lighting up the faded pink cement of the crumbling buildings.
We saw it from a distance, the wool street, in a flash of new white light. It lay in front of us, a carpet of dancing colours. The street was lined with factories where the wool was dyed and hung out to dry in skeins on lines between the buildings, and at night, when the wool was cut down, the snippets and loose ends of a multitude of colours fell to the ground. We arrived like thieves before the road sweepers and ran about scooping up handfuls of the soft new wool.
Mum stopped. She stood still with a wide smile on her face and let her handful of wool petals fall to the floor. ‘I’ll make dolls,’ she said, ‘with woollen hair.’
‘For us?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she yelled, ‘dolls to sell. Now look for wool in black, yellow and red.
Pieces long enough for hair.’
I searched the ground, draping each new strand over my arm until I had enough wool to make a hairpiece for even the most life-sized of dolls. Mum sorted the wool into separate skeins and tied them round her wrist. Then she knelt down and swept up a multicoloured pile of leftovers, motioning for me to turn around so she could pack them into my hood.
‘Stuffing,’ she explained.
Mum spent that whole day sewing the dolls. She made the bodies out of an old white T-shirt of Bea’s and stuffed them tight with wool, poking it into the ends of their legs and arms with a pencil. She embroidered blue eyes and red mouths on to their smooth oval faces and sewed on hair in a middle parting. The first doll she finished had black hair that reached down to her waist.
‘It looks like Mum,’ Bea said.
She made a dress out of a pink-and-grey flowery skirt I hadn’t worn since the Mellah. Mum had made it for me in Tunbridge Wells out of a cushion I didn’t want to leave behind.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’
I shook my head.
She worked all day on her sewing-machine until there were three perfect dolls. Mary, Mary-Rose, and Rosemary. Mum was delighted. ‘Tomorrow we’ll sell them in the market,’ she laughed. ‘And then all our troubles will be over.’
The next day we got up early and walked to the flea market by the south gate of the Medina. We took a blanket which we spread on the ground, arranging our three dolls in the centre. The flea market was on the edge of a flat plain that stretched away to the mountains, the same mountains you could see from the flat roof of the Hotel Moulay Idriss, where it snowed all year round. From where I sat on the corner of the blanket it seemed that the plain was a desert of people, all selling mysterious objects from blankets of their own.
Mary, Mary-Rose and Rosemary attracted a great deal of attention, even at times drawing a crowd, but no one showed the slightest inclination to buy.
‘It’s not an exhibition,’ Mum grumbled as the dolls were poked and admired but never bartered for.
As the afternoon began to fade away and the various salesmen and merchants packed up their blankets, we had no choice but to give up.
‘I expect this is how Akari felt when no one wanted to go to the cinema,’ Mum reflected.
I had never had a doll before and now I had three. They slept with me in my bed, becoming more and increasingly more demanding of my time. There were various complicated ministrations and attentions at particular and specific times of the day and night, and especially in the morning when Bea was at school and Mum was praying or on a visit to her bank.
Chapter Twenty
Akari closed up his shop to take us to Sid Zouin. We arrived by communal taxi with three other men and a cage of rabbits. Akari’s house was the first building in the village. It was a low, dark room full of tables and chairs. Men in white turbans sat in the gloom and drank coffee.
A silence fell as we entered and every man’s eye fixed on Mum. ‘This is Akari’s café,’ Akari said, and hurried us back out on to the street.
He opened a door in a high arch in the wall.
Akari had been right to sit in the Djemaa El Fna and cry for his garden. In Marrakech spring was just beginning, but in Akari’s magic garden it was in full bloom. Almond trees drooped under snowdrifts of blossom. Petals from the peach and apricot trees covered the ground in a blanket of white: tiny oranges and lemons clustered among the leaves of trees that grew against the garden wall, barely visible behind a brier of pink roses that clung to its mud-baked bricks. In every remaining patch of grass, daisies, hollyhocks and snapdragons grew tall.
Our room was a short walk across the garden. It was built on to the back of the café, and if I stood by the adjoining wall I could hear the murmur of the men as they drank their coffee and talked. The room was white and newly painted and had two shelves built into the bricks. There was a mijmar in one corner and a pot to cook in. For sleeping there were straw mats and blankets. There was not a scorpion or even a cockroach in sight.
At the other end of the garden was a long, low room, built on top of the wall. It could only be reached by wooden steps and made me think of the witch’s house in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. It was called the Projection Room. Opposite the Projection Room was a whitewashed wall.
‘That,’ Akari said, ‘is where the films are showing. The people sit on benches in the garden and watch the films in the wall.’
Now the whitewashed wall stood in the middle of the garden as if it knew it had no purpose, and all the benches were gone.
‘Akari please start the cinema again,’ Bea begged him, but he shook his head stubbornly. ‘Now I am in the hotel business,’ he declared.
I had only ever seen one film. It was a film of Hamlet in Russian with Arabic subtitles. Even Mum couldn’t understand it. Mum said that Bea and I had sat through Bambi twice without a break at the Classic, but I didn’t remember.
That night, as we were preparing for bed, two men burst into our room. They were dressed in the baggy trousers and loose shirts of men who worked in the fields, and they stared at Mum with bright, hopeful eyes. Mum stared blankly back at them. No one spoke. Then one of the men made a circle with his thumb and index finger and pointed through it with his other hand. Encouraged, the second man did the same, and I watched entranced as they stood in earnest mime. Bea put her hands over her face and began to giggle and Mum’s bewildered frown knit into a furious flash of the eyes. She jumped up and in one swift movement shooed the men out like hens.
‘What did they want?’ I asked, but Mum couldn’t stop laughing long enough to tell me. Bea ‘crossed her heart and hoped to die’ she didn’t know.
Early each morning a group of men, in trousers so full they could be skirts, arrived in the garden to make Akari’s hotel dream come true. Where the benches for the outside cinema had been, a row of small rooms was to be built. The builders began by making bricks from mud and straw, casting them with oblong wedges in a wooden mould. Once the brick had set, it was tipped on to the ground to bake rock-hard in the sun. As the builders worked they chanted, filling the garden with a mysterious song that echoed between its walls. The chanting was led by the lead builder amidst a series of heavy breaths that matched the rhythm of his work. It was picked up and developed into a chorus by the others, eventually coming back to the first man who breathed new life into it and passed it on.
The whitewashed wall stayed where it was. Sometimes Bea and I would creep up into the Projection Room and stare at it for hours on end hoping to catch a story from the moving shadows thrown up by the men. When nothing happened I begged Bea to tell me the story of Bambi. Over and over again. There were bits of it she couldn’t remember and she said it was the singing builders that were putting her off.
The men worked until midday, when they laid down their tools, ate their lunch and fell asleep under the almond trees. During their siesta Bea and I began to build our own house. I hoped it might be a summer house for Mary, Mary-Rose and Rosemary, but Bea had plans on a grander scale. She wanted it to be a home for us. We started, like the builders, by making bricks. We moulded our mud and straw by hand, kneading it into a cake with water. We carried our first brick to a secret place and watched over it jealously as it dried. When we had baked twelve bricks, Bea decided, building would begin.
On the day set for construction to start we were disturbed by unusual movement in the Projection Room. Bea put her finger to her lips and gestured for me to follow. We crept through the garden, camouflaged by wild flowers, running from tree to tree for cover. When we reached the garden wall, Bea scrambled up the twisted wooden vine of a climbing rose and pulled me up after her. I stopped to rub my knee but Bea was already tiptoeing fast along the wall. We crouched under the Projection Room window and listened. The suppressed voices of a man and a woman arguing drifted out to us, drowned by the occasional twang of a guitar. Bea stretched up to look.
‘There’s a lady with white socks on,’ she reported. ‘One m
an with a beard, and another man with a beard and patches on his bottom.’
‘Can I look?’
‘All right. But be careful.’
I craned my neck and peered through the window. One of the men was trying to light the mijmar without using any candlewax or paper. Every time the woman tried to help he said in a very warning voice, ‘Jeannie . . .’
The other man was tuning a guitar.
We ran along the wall, climbed down the rose vine and went to tell Mum. Mum brushed her hair and put on her purple caftan. She walked with us across the garden, up the wooden steps and knocked on the door of the Projection Room.
Jeannie started when she saw Mum, but the man who was called Scott gave up on the fire and came over and shook her hand. Mum told them we were living just across the garden, but that really we were from England. Jeannie and Scott said they had only just arrived from Canada when they had had the good luck to meet up with Akari.
‘We had to get out of that city,’ Scott explained. ‘Poor Jeannie, she just couldn’t stand to see another beggar.’
Jeannie shivered.
Pedro was from Argentina. He had dark curly hair that had been bleached in streaks by the sun. He sat on the windowsill and played his guitar softly.
‘Pedro Patchbottom, Pedro Patchbottom,’ we called through the open door of our room as Pedro and Mum sat deep in conversation over a pattern of cards that told your fortune. ‘Please, Pedro Patchbottom, please come and build our house with us.’
‘Later, later, I promise.’ Pedro picked up a card on which a tall woman in a crown brandished a magic wand. ‘This card you have chosen’ – he looked deep into Mum’s eyes without blinking – ‘is a true card of power and . . .’ – he paused – ‘of love.’