Hideous Kinky (13 page)

We heard them before they arrived. A murmur of voices and the occasional giggle as they drew near. We stopped playing and listened. Ali appeared in the doorway. He was carrying something in his arms. He squatted down over our cards and unwrapped his bundle. Three round white loaves of bread. Their hot, sweet smell filled the hut. Ali urged us to eat.

‘You must thank your sister from us.’ Mum was deeply moved. ‘Many times.’

There were two other boys with Ali. They hovered in the doorway. One of them carried a portable record-player and the other gripped a pile of records. While we devoured Ali’s bread, his friends set up the machine and soon the heavy, sweeping sounds of Egyptian music wove magic into the air like scent.

We found where the track joined the main road and waited in hope for our next lift. Ali and his friends had packed up their records and disappeared at dawn. They had to milk the goats, they said. After they were gone Mum mumbled something about making an early start. Then she fell asleep. Now it was scorchingly hot. I tucked my hair into a turban. When I wore it I could decide whether I wanted to be a boy or a girl.

A car stopped. It was the first car we had seen since leaving the vineyard. It was driven by a French lady who was on her way to look at rock paintings in the Sahara Desert. She invited us to go with her. I was very keen. One of my new ambitions was to see a mirage and according to Tintin books the desert was the place to find one. Mum, I could see, was tempted, but she had set her heart on the Zaouia and she would not be persuaded otherwise. The French lady was going to spend the night at the house of another French lady on her way to the Sahara and she said the least we could do was to accept one night’s hospitality. The next morning she would drop us at the Zaouia herself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Henning, Mum and I stood in the courtyard of the mosque and waited for someone to appear. Henning had been told several times that this was the Zaouia and not Algiers and that Algiers was further down the road, but he followed us into the courtyard anyway.

A man came out to meet us. He had a wild red beard that submerged his face up to the eyes, and his mouth was a crescent when he smiled. We followed him into a room made completely of tiles like the Hammam where we washed in Marrakech. We sat on cushions and drank mint tea while Mum talked. The man listened and kept up his smile, sometimes interrupting her with a mumbled and ecstatic ‘Allah akhbar’, which I knew meant ‘God is great’, and he made me think of the Hadaoui and wonder if they knew each other.

I waited for hours and hours for Mum to finish talking. Henning had fallen asleep on his cushion and every so often he began to snore. I shook his shoulder so that he groaned and rolled over and there was a gap of a few minutes before he started up again.

After a final pot of tea the red-bearded man led us out into the courtyard. He walked us through the garden to the gates, which he opened himself. For a moment Mum looked blankly at him.

‘We can’t stay?’ She asked, incredulous, her voice rising to a shout. ‘But we’ve come so far!’

I pulled at her dress. Don’t shout. Don’t shout, I prayed. Mum’s voice rang through the calm courtyard with its rose bushes and its well-raked garden. The holy man walked calmly away without a backward glance and disappeared into the mosque. We stood in the road: Mum flushed with anger, me with my eyes on the ground, and Henning, sleepy and baffled, a little cheerful smile on his lips that now we would be travelling together after all on the last lap of the journey.

We went straight to the British consulate in Algiers to see if our money had arrived. It hadn’t.

‘But that’s impossible,’ Mum insisted.

‘I’m afraid it’s very possible,’ the clerk said and grinned as if he had told a funny joke. Mum sat down on a bench and burst into tears. The British consulate clerk turned pale. He pulled out a large newly ironed handkerchief and edged round the counter to comfort her.

‘I absolutely don’t have a penny,’ she sobbed, ‘and then there’s the child…’

He looked over at me. I was standing by a potted plant pretending to be someone else. I’d prefer to starve! I thought grandly as I watched him produce a thick leather wallet from his trouser pocket and offer personally, in a hushed voice, to lend my mother money. We sat on the steps of the British consulate while Mum wiped her eyes and counted out the notes.

‘What with your father and the Moroccan postal service it’s a miracle anything ever gets through at all,’ she sighed.

A man who was originally from Hastings invited us to stay. He had come to the consulate to apply for a permit to marry his girlfriend. He was teaching English as a foreign language and his girlfriend who was German was teaching German.

‘What about Henning?’ I asked. He had gone off to find a friend of a friend. We hadn’t said goodbye or anything.

‘Oh, Henning will be all right,’ Mum said, and we followed the teacher along a wide avenue of orange trees.

We stayed in the teacher’s flat for a few days and then in the flat of a friend of his who also taught languages. Mum made me sing to them and asked them to guess what language it was. They pretended they didn’t know. I told them it was the language I had used in my last life. No one said anything but I could tell they were impressed.

Every day we returned hopefully to the consulate to ask about our money. Every day the answer was the same. Rather than outstay our welcome with the teachers, Mum decided we would wait for our money in a Youth Hostel she had heard was cheap and on the outskirts of Algiers. We had a little borrowed money left and we took a bus.

The bus ride, it turned out, was a full day’s journey and we arrived at the Youth Hostel late in the afternoon. The Youth Hostel was a large white house covered in a clinging pink vine of bougainvillaea. It stood in the shade of a palm tree and the land behind it ran down to the sea. I was glad we had come.

‘Of course. A room for two.’ The man who appeared seemed pleased to see us. ‘A room that looks over the sea with two beds.’ Then he frowned a deep frown and reconsidered. ‘But first there is a question you must answer.’ He fixed Mum with an interrogative stare. ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Youth Hostels Association?’

Mum was tired. She reached for my hand. ‘Is that important?’

‘Important? But of course it is important. Otherwise there is no point in a Youth Hostel. I have to abide by the rules of the Association.’ He pointed to a small triangular plaque by the side of the door. His word ‘Association’ lasted for a long time.

Mum clutched my hand so tightly her rings cut into my flesh. ‘I am a foreigner in your country and the book of Islam tells me that it is the duty of every servant of Allah to give hospitality to strangers. Surely,’ she said, her voice calm, ‘it is more important to abide by the laws of Islam than by those of a Youth Hostel.’

There was a silence and then his face changed. ‘You are right, of course…’ he said and he showed us to our room.

There was no one else staying at the Youth Hostel. The owner’s nephew worked there as a caretaker and slept in a small room by the kitchen. Each morning before setting off for school he left a plate of bread and dates on the table for our breakfast. His uncle was a sculptor. He lived in a house in the village where he would often hold parties and the people who came to them were also sculptors or painters or what Mum called the Intellectual Set. Some were from the village and some travelled a long way especially. Sometimes the only food at the party was a tray of biscuits that I was never offered. One night I helped myself. The biscuit crumbled in my mouth and tasted of majoun. I ate another, and then the tray was lifted up above my head and whisked away and a lady in a shimmering red caftan tousled my hair and laughed into my face. I spent the evening looking for Bea. I wandered from group to group of talking, dancing people, staring into their faces for a sign of her. And all the time I knew she was at Sophie’s house, and even if she wanted to find us she wouldn’t know where we were. I wanted her to play a game of Hideous kinky tag with me.

Mum and I discovered the ruins of a forgotten village. We went there most days to eat our lunch and trace our way through the mosaic of streets and courtyards and the rooms of houses that had once been a Roman town. Wild freesias and clumps of silver grass grew between the stone foundations, and the scent of the flowers hung over the town in an aromatic haze. We lounged in the sun and looked over the town and out to sea.

Mum was making me sandals. The soles were cut from thick leather in the shape of my feet, and the leather was sewn on to rubber from the tyre of a car. Now she was stitching short strips to the sides of each shoe. One round loop for my toe and two more to hold my feet in.

I drew pictures of houses. The houses weren’t houses that I had actually seen, they were houses from books. I copied from memory the house that Madeleine had lived in when she woke up in the night with appendicitis and the house that was a hospital where they took her for an operation. I drew the house that was a shop from which Charlie bought his first bar of chocolate and the very small and shabby house where his grandparents George and Georgina and Joe and Josephine slept in two double beds and never got up.

‘When we go home, can we live in a house with a garden?’

‘All right.’ Mum was decorating my sandals with beads.

‘Do you mean all right yes or all right maybe?

‘I mean,’ she said, rethreading her needle, ‘all right hopefully.’

We put off going back to Algiers and the overly sympathetic clerk from the British consulate for as long as we could. We spent whole days in the Roman town and sometimes stayed on with pockets full of dates to watch the sun setting over the sea. No one else ever arrived at the Youth Hostel and our room with two beds began to feel like home.

One day Mum worked out that we had exactly enough money to pay the sculptor and get a bus back to the city and not a dirham more. Regretfully we said goodbye to the caretaker, who was still as shy and quiet as on the first day and, it seemed, had never got used to sharing his house with strangers, and went back to Algiers.

To the relief of everyone, especially the clerk, our money had arrived. We paid our debts and caught a train to Marrakech.

I was a babble of questions. ‘How long will it take to get there?’ ‘What’s the first thing we’ll do when we arrive?’ ‘Do you think Bea will be glad to see us?’ and ‘Will Bilal be back?’

Mum read her book. She was the only person I knew who could turn off their ears like shutting an eye. Sometimes I resorted to hitting her with my closed fist to get the answer to a question. Even that didn’t always work.

The train stopped at its first station. Mum shifted restlessly as I besieged her with questions. ‘Are we nearly there?’ ‘Will we stop at lots of stations?’ ‘When can I have something to eat?’

She stood up. The train was rumbling in its tracks and the trees on the other side of the platform were slipping slowly backwards. She grabbed my arm and, using our bag as a barricade, she pushed her way along the corridor, until through a blur of noise and panic we stood in the empty station and watched as our train thundered into the distance.

Mum didn’t offer any explanation. I decided not to mention the fact that my new sandals were now travelling on alone to Marrakech, tucked under a recently vacated train seat. Mum led the way out of the station.

The town looked familiar even though I couldn’t see why it should. It was only when we reached the iron gates opening on to the formal garden that I realized why we’d jumped from a moving train. We stood in the courtyard of the Zaouia and waited.

‘I just want to apologize to the Sufi.’ Mum was talking to me again. ‘I want to say that I understand now that their decision was probably right.’

The same red-bearded man came out to meet us. He nodded and smiled and gestured for us to follow him. ‘Allah akhbar,’ he muttered as he rushed us down an outside corridor, through the open doors of which the sounds of children playing seeped into the stillness of the courtyard.

The holy man threw open a door and showed us into a roughly whitewashed room. ‘You see we were expecting you,’ he said and he left us alone to rest before dinner.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The men were all in white and they knelt in a circle around Sheikh Bentounes, who lived with his family in the residential corridor two doors down from us. Sheikh Bentounes was a holy man. He was the head of the Zaouia and the leader of the Sufis. Mum kept a black-and-white photograph of him in our room.

The boys sat in the circle with the men and wore white skull caps like their fathers. Mum and I sat with the women in their everyday clothes. We sat in a separate group half shielded by a curtain and sometimes the women joined in the praying and sometimes they didn’t. I seized on this opportunity of showing off my turban, and secretly longed to sit strictly in full white uniform and pray in a circle around the sheikh.

The prayers sounded a little like the singing of the builders in the garden at Sid Zouin. Sheikh Bentounes breathed in deeply through his nose, pushing his stomach out under his soft white robes and then letting his voice turn into a song as he controlled his exhaling breath for minutes on end. The men and boys that faced him joined in a chorus that rose to a violent crescendo and then sank to a sigh as row after row bent their heads to rest their faces on the ground, leaving a soft silence hanging in the air with no noise but the whisper of perspiration trickling down the walls.

The prayers lasted for a whole afternoon and by the evening the walls of the room were awash with water. It collected in gullies and soaked into the carpet. One by one the children at the back of the room curled up on the floor and fell asleep as the men’s voices rose up and up like sounds of the distant sea.

Early on each day of prayer a sheep arrived and was tethered to a post in the courtyard. I preferred the sheep’s uncomprehending gaze to that of the children of Sheikh Bentounes. The sheikh with the red beard didn’t have any children. He spent the mornings tending his roses. Sheikh Sidi Muhammad of the red beard was my enemy. He had shouted at me on the first day when I climbed into the rose bed to sniff the scent of a giant yellow rose. Sheikh Sidi Muhammad had shouted and waved his arms and rushed over to me and pulled me out of his garden by one ear. I tried to explain about smelling the flowers not picking them, but he interpreted the tears that sprang to my eyes as a sign of guilt and now he kept a stern watch over me at all times.

I confided in my sheep that he must be a very stupid man not to understand the difference between smelling and picking. Mum defended him. She said he lived in a state of extended spiritual ecstasy and that when he came down to earth it often made things rather difficult.

Everyone who had attended prayers was invited to eat at the Zaouia. That morning’s sheep turned on a spit in the outside kitchen and the smell of the roasting meat drifted through the mosque in a haze of herbs and mouthwatering temptation.

‘Are we going to stay here for ever?’ I asked Mum, as, dazed and still half asleep, I waited for my kebab.

But Mum only said, ‘As long as we need to,’ and went to talk with Selina.

Selina was a lady who had been living at the Zaouia for years and years. Selina was sixty. Before she was a Sufi she had been a magician’s assistant. I liked her better than anyone else even though she refused to show me any tricks. She said she couldn’t remember tricks now she was a Sufi and even though I thought she was beautiful with her white hair and almond eyes, whenever Mum talked to her it made me worry and I thought of Bea and how she must think we had forgotten her.

Whether it was Selina’s magic’s fault or not, we stayed at the Zaouia – and the longer we stayed the more I hated it. Not because of the mosque, or the days themselves, which were a calm round of courtyards and prayers and whispering corridors, but because of the nights. Because of the Black Hand. I was convinced the disembodied hand was only waiting for its moment to close its sooty fingers round my throat. I lay awake against the warmth of Mum’s sleeping body and waited for the slow thud of its approach. With every night’s reprieve my anxiety did not lessen, but a new fear, a wild and uncontrollable fear, took hold of me. The Black Hand was going to strangle Mum.

Now I stayed awake at night with all the vigilance of a bodyguard, and when I could hardly bear to breathe in case I missed a noise, a clue, the thud of a thumb, I lifted my trembling hands and held them gently round her neck, lacing my fingers together so that not a chink of flesh was exposed. If Mum were strangled, my thoughts whirred in the stillness of our white room, I would be stranded for ever at the Zaouia. I saw Bea sitting at a window in Sophie’s house hating us both for forgetting her and never knowing that I was trying to escape over the wrought-iron gate with the red-bearded sheikh close and grasping at my ankles.

I woke every morning, clammy and damp in a tangle of sodden sheet, but always in time to remove my fingers from around Mum’s neck, the threat of the Black Hand seemingly insubstantial beside the misery of yet another ruined mattress. Mum didn’t speak about my accidents but began wrapping our mattress in a plastic sheet that creaked and crackled as I lay in wait for the inevitable murder to be carried out.

Soon our white sheet, hand-washed by Mum, was a daily, dismal reminder of the night before, flapping dry on its line in the courtyard. I was sure I could detect a smirk of satisfaction on the face of Sidi Muhammad as he glanced from me to it, as though a punishment dreamt up by him were being carried out. I decided that if the worst came to the worst, I would run away and join a circus. Joining a circus would mean learning a trick. A new trick. Or any trick. I leant against the waxy wool of that day’s sheep and dreamt.

I saw myself trumpeted into the ring in silver sequinned tights, heralded as the youngest ever walker of the tightrope. The lions in their cages growled in suspense and the crowd gasped while I, high above them, shimmied across the roof of the circus tent on a hairline wire.

I would have to practise. I glanced over at the washing line. It drooped, wall to wall with drying clothes.

I could learn to juggle. I thought of my frustrated efforts in the garden at the Mellah as I tried to catch the bruised and sagging orange as it plummeted from one hand to the floor. Bilal had been encouraging at first, but as the days went by and the heap of squashed and abandoned oranges piled up in the garden he remained silent.

I decided I would teach myself to walk on my hands.

I began training that afternoon in a deserted yard behind the outside kitchen. It was where the sheep was dragged, its hind legs rigid in resistance, to have its throat cut with one slash of a knife.

‘Hup, hup, hup,’ I yelled, raising my arms for a flying dive as I raced across the yard, but at the last moment, as my hands touched down, my legs, which had been ready to soar into the air, lost confidence. They clung to my body at a pathetic angle, so that the flying leap that was to result in a handstand ended in yet another head-over-heels.

I lay on the ground and stared up at the sky. I thought about balancing acts on Bilal’s shoulders and the well at the Barage where I had learnt to somersault from such a height. I dreamt about the acrobats that performed like red and green lizards in the square in Marrakech and how happy I would be if only I’d been born into their family. I lay in the sun and thought about the people who believed me when I told them I remembered my last life and how it had been lived out as an angel. I wondered if them believing me meant it could be true. I made a decision. I would start sleeping in the afternoons. If I slept in the afternoons I could stay awake at night. Then not only would I be on guard at the moment when the Black Hand rattled the handle of our door, but I would have a way of proving to Mum that I was too old to need a plastic sheet.

My plan seemed to me a great success. That first night I was convinced I had stayed awake till morning and even congratulated myself on getting up to pee in the bucket by the door. But even though I felt the shiver of the cold metal on my flesh, and remembered distinctly the sound of water drumming, I caught myself off guard, waking up to find it had only been a dream. There was the warm and familiar smell of my nightie sticking damply to me, and the bucket was empty.

‘I think it would be nice to get home in time for Bea’s birthday,’ Mum said one day as we waited for prayers to begin. I had curled up on the floor of the mosque for my regular afternoon sleep. ‘Would you like that?’

I was so excited I couldn’t answer.

Bea’s birthday meant that very soon it would be my birthday. Bea did everything first. It was useful because once Bea had done it I always knew what to expect. That was what was wrong with the Zaouia. Bea hadn’t done it first. Or ever. If Bea were here, sleeping on a mattress on the other side of the room, maybe the Black Hand would turn itself back into a horror story in John’s voice, loud and pretending to be scary.

Last year on my birthday we went on a picnic to the woods outside Marrakech in a horse-drawn taxi. Bilal had been there and Linda and Mob. Mum had given me a wooden box with leaves carved on it. I wondered what had happened to it. I leant against the damp wall of the mosque, perspiration dripping into my turban, and tried to remember what we had done last year on Bea’s birthday. I knew it had been a surprise and, after two weeks of waiting, mine, even with the horse-drawn taxi, was a disappointment.