by Esther Freud
The colour rose in Mum’s face and she looked away.
‘Mum . . .’ I sidled into the room and sat close to her. ‘When is Bilal coming back?’
Mum, who was about to reach for Pedro’s magic card, let her hand fall into her lap. ‘Bilal?’
‘Bilal,’ Bea reminded her from just inside the door.
And I repeated, ‘When’s he coming back?’
Pedro shuffled and reshuffled the cards.
Mum was lost for words. She looked blankly from me to Bea as if after all this time we should have forgotten who Bilal was. The rash that had been growing on the inside of my arm began to crawl with an army of ants. I scratched and scratched, my throat growing tighter, stinging my nose and squeezing the tears up into my eyes.
‘I want to see Bilal,’ I wailed, banging my fists on the floor. ‘I want to see Bilal.’ My chest ached and tears splashed into my mouth. Now I had started I couldn’t stop. I could hear my voice, dull and desperate, calling hoarsely for Bilal, who I knew could never be found before I had to stop. Bea, swollen and blurred, watched me from the doorway. Her face was full of curiosity and a mild alarm. I searched between sobs for an excuse to stop, but each time Mum moved to comfort me I lashed out with my arms and held her off. I lay on the floor with my salty cheek against the tiles and howled with fury and exhaustion. Occasionally I scratched my arm which had turned a raw red.
‘She’ll be all right when she wakes up,’ I heard Mum explain to Pedro before I fell into a black sleep.
Mum read aloud from the Ant and Bee book while I sat, wrapped in a blanket, on her lap.
‘Feeling better?’ she asked when it was finished, which was very soon as there was only one word on most of the pages.
‘Are you going to write a letter to Bilal and tell him to come and visit?’ I asked.
Mum flicked her finger through the book. ‘I will,’ she answered hesitantly, ‘but first we’ll have to wait until he writes to us. If I wrote a letter now I wouldn’t know where to send it.’
There was a silence as Mum continued to flick through the pages. Bea lay on her back and stared up at the ceiling.
‘Doesn’t he know where we are then?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Mum said.
‘But if we don’t know where Bilal is and Bilal doesn’t know where we are,’ I was working it out, ‘then even if he wanted to write a letter he wouldn’t be able to, would he? Would he?’
I was delighted by my theory.
Mum shifted me off her lap. ‘He knew where to write when we were at the hotel for months and months . . .’ She sneezed and then she began to cry. ‘He knew where to write then.’
Bea came and held Mum’s hand and stroked her hair. Mum went on crying. She kept blowing her nose between her fingers and flicking them clean outside into the grass like the Moroccans always did because they didn’t believe in handkerchiefs. Mum said they thought the idea of carrying a piece of snot wrapped in material around in your pocket for days and days was disgusting. Bea kept talking to Mum. She was saying all sorts of things to try and cheer her up. I couldn’t think of anything to say except, ‘Oh Mum, please stop crying,’ which made her cry even harder so that her shoulders shook.
Eventually Mum stood on the doorstep and blew her nose for the last time. Bea made supper from the bread and honey left over from breakfast and we sat in the garden and ate and watched the sun set on the other side of the stone wall.
‘Let’s stay here for as long as you want, Mum,’ Bea said, and I agreed by nodding my head enthusiastically.
Chapter Twenty-One
Akari’s builders spent days digging ditches so that the walls of the hotel could begin underground. They sang and worked and pretended not to notice when we stole straw from their stack or borrowed the sieve to sift stones out of the dry earth. We decided against building foundations for our house even though Pedro tried his hardest to persuade us of their importance. ‘One earthquake,’ he said, ‘and BANG!’
Every day we moulded new oblongs of mud and laid them in the sun to dry.
‘Pedro Patchbottom, Pedro Patchbottom, please come and help us build our house.’ Bea and I followed him through the garden, pulling at the patches of material that held his jeans in place, but he said if we wouldn’t take his advice about the foundations then he couldn’t help us any further. Pedro Patchbottom was lying. It was easy to see he just didn’t want to help. All he ever wanted to do was to sit under the almond trees with Mum and listen to her read in her story-telling voice. She read to him from a thick book with a picture of a yogi on the front.
‘What is a yogi?’ I asked.
‘A very holy man.’
‘Like the Hadaoui?’
‘Yes, a little like the Hadaoui.’
The picture on the front of the book was of an old man with long white hair sitting cross-legged with the soles of his feet turned upwards.
‘What happened to him?’ Bea asked.
‘He’s sitting in the lotus position,’ Mum explained. ‘It’s called the lotus position because his feet look like the petals of a lotus flower.’ She crossed her right foot over to demonstrate how it could be done and pulled the left into place, turning the soles of both feet upwards. She froze for five seconds before her legs sprang apart and she sighed with relief.
‘Look, I can do it.’ Bea sat straight-backed and proud, her legs bent in front of her like little flowers. She proved her point by remaining like that while Mum finished the chapter. As hard as I tried, I could only bend one leg at a time without tipping over backwards. For once I was grateful Bilal wasn’t there.
‘Is he holy like the man with the mantras?’ I asked.
‘That’s right.’ Mum was impressed. ‘So you remember the guru?’
I did.
‘And do you remember the mantra he gave you?’
Bea looked slyly at me.
‘Don’t tell anyone your secret word,’ the Indian guru had said, ‘but repeat this mantra every day one hundred times.’ He tied a piece of dark red cotton around my wrist. I wanted to tell him I could only count to four which was how old I was, but the room was dark and thick with incense and Mum had told me to try hard and behave.
There were a lot of people waiting to be given mantras. The Indian guru, John had said, was only in London for a few days and we were lucky to catch him before we set off for Morocco in the van. Out of all the people who had come to see the guru I was the first to be taken into his room because I was the youngest. As I waited for Bea, and then Mum, to come back out, I could feel people staring at me. I played with my new bracelet and said my mantra over and over, wondering what would happen if I were ever to reach a hundred.
As soon as Bea had seen the guru she came and stood very close to me and whispered menacingly in my ear, ‘I’ll tell mine if you tell yours.’
I flushed and my heart began to beat with the effort of pretending to be deaf. I kept my eyes fixed on a woman who wore a dress covered in tiny round mirrors. She had a duffle coat over the top.
Eventually Bea gave up.
At some point on a long journey by van or train or communal taxi, I regretted my pious attitude and relented. But Bea had changed her mind. ‘You had your chance,’ she said, ‘and you missed it.’
I pleaded and begged, even offering to tell mine first, but she was hard as steel, open to no bribes and holier than thou.
It was late in the afternoon and Mum still lay with Pedro under the almond trees. Bea and I sat on the garden wall and waited for the singing women to return from the fields. They travelled to and from their work in open trucks, their bright caftans fluttering over the heads of the babies that slept on their backs. We listened for their singing when the trucks were just a cloud on the road, and as they drew near we perched on the very edge of the wall and prepared to wave. The trucks rattled down the one street into the village in a burst of noise and colour. The women wore scarves over their hair and the shiny cloth of their dresses stood out in blocks of pink and gree
n. They didn’t wave back. Their rich voices filled the afternoon quiet, soon fading away again as the trucks, half empty now, rumbled out along the road.
‘All right then . . .’ Bea said when the dust in the street had resettled. I knew what she was about to suggest. I could tell she had been thinking about the mantra. ‘I’ll tell mine if you tell yours.’
‘All right,’ I began, but just as I was forming the words in my mouth into my unspoken prayer, I realized I’d forgotten it.
‘Go on then,’ Bea was impatient.
I caught my confession just in time. I turned to her with great solemnity. ‘Don’t tell anyone your secret word,’ I said in the guru’s husky voice.
Bea nearly pushed me off the wall. ‘Helufa!’ she cursed as she clambered down the rose vine.
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. I promise,’ I called, my moment of triumph fading fast.
‘You had your chance and you missed it.’ Bea danced across the garden and slammed the door into our room.
I sat on the wall and wondered how it was that Bea always won, whatever the game. However hard I copied and stored the rules, at the last moment she always twisted them, added something new, and won. I tried to conjure up the missing word. I had a suspicion it had been forgotten a very long time ago, long before I had begun offering to swop it in the back of the van. I concentrated hard and hoped my mantra would separate itself from all the other words I knew. I waited, watching the sun set slowly over the fields as the crickets whistled and every cock in the village crowed the end of the day.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I woke up to find I was lying in thick grass. It was the middle of the night and the air was full of the sounds of animals. Donkeys screaming to one another, dogs barking, chickens squawking and the songs of birds that never sang at night. All around my head a thousand crickets hummed and buzzed. I shifted in my blanket. I was so tightly wrapped I could hardly move my arms. Bea was lying next to me, similarly wrapped, softly and peacefully sleeping.
I struggled to sit up. I could see the open doorway of our house flickering in candlelight, but not a shadow to be seen of Mum. Then I heard voices from across the garden. Jeannie worrying and crying and Pedro swearing in his own language. The voices moved nearer, and my mother appeared with Scott, half dragging, half carrying, a limping Pedro. Jeannie zigzagged through the trees. She had nothing on except a pair of Aertex knickers.
‘My God, I can’t believe this is happening,’ she wailed. Her body was white and lumpy in the moonlight.
Scott was wearing blue pyjamas a little like my own, except I never wore mine for sleeping. Mum was still dressed in her caftan. Pedro limped naked between them. They laid him gently in the grass. He moaned and closed his eyes.
‘You silly fool,’ Mum laughed fondly and kissed him on the lips. Pedro moaned even louder and then began to laugh.
Bea woke up. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked, untangling herself from the blanket.
‘Pedro jumped out of the Projection Room window,’ Mum said as if it were an everyday occurrence.
‘Why?’
Pedro opened his eyes. ‘Because where I come from that’s what we do.’
Scott was feeling Pedro’s leg between the ankle and the knee. ‘I don’t think it’s broken.’
Pedro groaned.
‘You’ve probably just sprained it.’
‘Do you think it’s safe to go inside yet?’ Jeannie asked. She was shivering. Mum offered her my blanket.
‘No, never go back inside.’ Pedro was adamant. He shifted on to his elbow. ‘Not until the animals are quiet.’
We sat in the grass and listened to the alarm of every bird and animal for miles and miles around.
‘I was sitting up reading, and feeling unusually peaceful and happy,’ Mum said, ‘when I heard a convoy of articulated lorries travelling at great speed down the village road. I carried on reading and then I thought: how can there be a convoy of lorries travelling at great speed through Sid Zouin? It wasn’t until the house began to shake that I realized it was an earthquake. An earthquake! I thought. How lovely.’
Pedro sat up and looked at her as if she were mad.
‘And then I remembered that I was meant to be a responsible adult. I grabbed the children and carried them out into the garden, like you’re supposed to, but the most fantastic thing was’ – she looked at us, her eyes soft with pride – ‘they both slept through the whole thing.’
Bea was furious. ‘You should have woken me,’ she said.
I lay back and pressed my body through the dewy grass, hard against the earth. I was hoping to catch a last tremor. ‘I’m a very heavy sleeper,’ I could tell Bilal or Aunty Rose or anyone. ‘I even sleep through earthquakes.’
We stayed up all night waiting for the animals to quiet and listening to Pedro’s earthquake stories. When he told how at the first rumble he had jumped out of bed, flung himself through the nearest window only to sprain his ankle and hit his head on a brick, no one could restrain themselves from laughing.
With the glimmer of morning we discovered the café to be unshaken and the Projection Room, much to Pedro’s annoyance, was still safely perched on the wall. The only thing in the garden that had suffered any damage was Bea’s and my nearly finished house. It lay transformed into a pile of broken bricks.
Pedro cheered up immediately. ‘Foundations . . .’ he said. ‘What did I tell you? One earthquake and . . .’
‘We know,’ Bea said, ‘and BANG!’
The Cadi who was the mayor of the village examined Pedro’s ankle and declared it sprained.
‘But badly sprained,’ Pedro insisted.
From then on the seven wooden steps that led up to the Projection Room became an impossible hurdle. Mum invited Pedro to move in with us. Bea was not pleased. Bea was so angry I couldn’t decide if I minded one way or the other. All the same I joined her in a ‘persecute Pedro Patchbottom’ campaign that ended a week later when we rose at dawn to unpick his one and only pair of trousers. We worked away through the early morning until his trousers hung unpatched and feebly together in a web of white cotton. Pedro was still sleeping naked under his blanket when Mum sprang up and slapped us both, fast and sharp with the flat of her hand. Then she got back into bed and slept until it was nearly time for lunch.
By the time the Sufis arrived Pedro had forgiven us and his trousers were repatched and wearable again. The Sufis were two Americans on a pilgrimage to Algeria. They were on their way to visit the Zaouia, a mosque where the third Sufi sheikh, Sheikh Bentounes, lived.
As Akari’s hotel rooms were still unfinished, the American men were to sleep in the garden. Mum sat up with them. She had a thousand questions to ask. She wanted to learn the ritual breathing techniques they used in prayer. The two Americans agreed that it wasn’t something you could learn in a night and that if she was really interested she should go to the Zaouia and learn all these things for herself.
Mum’s eyes sparkled.
Pedro played sad songs on his guitar. His songs grew sadder and louder as the night wore on. Then they switched into his own language and took over the conversation.
I forced myself to stay awake, keeping a watchful eye on Mum, convinced that if I let my guard drop for even a moment, she would slip out of the garden and turn into a Sufi.
The Black Hand was a disembodied hand that travelled the world strangling its victims. The Black Hand left one clue on the necks of its victims. The sooty print of its thumb. I heard its tread on the stairs.
One. Thump. Silence.
Two. Thud. Still. Waiting stillness. Strangling quiet.
Three . . .
And then the rattle of the doorknob as it . . . as its fingers twisted . . . as the handle turned . . .
I woke up bathed in sweat.
The Sufis were gone and Mum was nowhere to be seen.
‘Mummeeeee!’ I wailed into the dark, my heart breaking. I sat on the doorstep and howled. ‘Mummeeeee!’
An irritable and s
leepy voice grumbled from inside the room. ‘Oh please shut up, darling, and get back into bed.’
It was Mum.
Mum began to pray again, facing east on her mat. She practised yoga positions, including the lotus, and talked about a new adventure. The more restless she became the more Pedro enthused about spending the whole summer at Sid Zouin. Bea, having worked through to the last lesson in her book, said she should really be getting back to school, preferably in England. I thought about Bilal searching for us, wandering through the cafés, standing in the empty rooms of the Hotel Moulay Idriss. I practised tightrope walking on the garden wall, threw myself into handstands that were meant to turn into backflips but never did, and tried to pluck up the courage to extinguish the burning head of a match in my open mouth.
Bea and I sat in the taxi and waited for Mum and Pedro to say goodbye. They stood together in the arched doorway of the garden wall and held hands.
‘Come on,’ we whined at intervals.
Scott and Jeannie didn’t come to see us off. Jeannie hadn’t forgiven Mum for refusing to listen to her offers of advice. ‘That language will get them into trouble,’ she had warned and, ‘Children need discipline.’
‘I had plenty of discipline,’ Mum said, ‘and it didn’t do me any good.’
Pedro stood in the street and watched our car as it drove away. His face looked sad. Mum put her hand out of the side window and waved but she didn’t turn round.
As soon as Pedro was out of sight, she began to explain her plan: ‘We’ll stay in Marrakech for a few nights, wait for some money to arrive and then we’re off to Algiers to visit the Zaouia.’
‘What about school?’ Bea said.
‘And what about Bilal?’
‘If Bilal’s in Marrakech,’ Mum assured me, ‘we’ll be sure to find him.’
‘The Gnaoua might know, or the Fool,’ I suggested, ‘or the Nappy Ladies at the hotel.’
Moulay Idriss welcomed us with smiles of surprise, and tea, and explained there was not one spare room in the hotel. Not even for a night. The Nappy Ladies appeared in the doorway. They had seen us from the terrace of the second floor. Moulay Idriss invited them to join us in his abundantly cushioned room and drink a second glass of tea. Mum blushed. The crushed pink velvet of her favourite trousers were stretched tight to bursting over the legs of one of the ladies. Mum had made these trousers on her sewing-machine and worn them every day for a week, until one morning, after queuing with me for the toilet on the landing for over half an hour, she came back to our room to find them gone. Mum stared at the pink legs crossed in front of her and up at the open smiling face of the nappy thief.