Hideous Kinky (5 page)

Mum opened the book. The old lady was sitting a little straighter with her shawl held tightly around her shoulders. Mum began to read. ‘Persistence brings good fortune. It will be of advantage to cross the great river. The Superior Man will pass this time in feasting and enjoyment…’ Bilal translated in a low murmur as she read and the old lady blinked in concentration with her head slightly on one side. Mum read on and on about lakes and rivers and turning-points until my mind began to wander away from the room.

‘Do you think we’ll get a chapter
of Bluebeard
tonight?’ I whispered.

‘Shhh.’

‘We haven’t had any story for ages.’

The reading was over. There was a silence. Then the old lady smiled and, looking towards Ahmed, commanded him in a startlingly strong voice to bring mint tea and bread. Ahmed hurried out like a small boy. I could hear him shouting out the order as he ran through the house.

Once she had drunk a glass of tea and chewed at the soft inside of a roll, the old lady pushed back the covers and began to climb out of bed. Ahmed smiled a tender smile as her narrow feet touched the floor. She walked slowly over to a painted chest which stood under the window and, opening it, took out a sky-blue caftan. She reached up and held it against my mother’s shoulders.

‘Thank you,’ my mother said, taking it from her.

With the faintest of smiles the old lady climbed back into bed and motioned for us all to go away.

It was mid-morning when we arrived back in Bilal’s village. I could see Fatima standing in the doorway of her father’s house. I waved and began to run towards her, but instead of coming to meet us she turned and darted inside letting the curtain fall across the door.

‘Fatima,’ Bilal called after her. ‘Fatima,’ he ordered, and she reappeared, limping slightly and with a split across her lip.

‘What happened to you?’ Mum gasped, but Bilal took his sister roughly by the shoulders and began to question her in a voice which shook with anger. Fatima spoke a few tearful words with her head bowed and her eyes on the ground.

‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Bilal said. ‘Let’s get inside.’

The familiar cool of the house had turned so cold it made me shiver. Finally Bilal spoke. ‘It is important that Fatima will not make bad her reputation. If she is not good, she will not be married.’

Mum was silent. She looked at him with cold, accusing eyes.

‘Fatima has behaved very badly at the festival,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘She was seen without her veil – watching the dancing. At night she must stay inside the tent.’

‘So she was beaten,’ Mum said flatly.

I looked over at Fatima, huddled in the corner, her fingers moving through a bowl of string beans.

‘My brothers tied her in the barn and beat her…’ Bilal looked away, ashamed, then added, ‘But now she will be good and then she will be married.’

Fatima lifted the bowl in her arms and hobbled silently to the back door.

Mum watched her go. ‘I think maybe it’s time to go home,’ she said.

‘Tomorrow,’ Bilal insisted. ‘Stay until tomorrow and we will all go back to the Mellah.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Bilal could not find any work in Marrakech. The Hadaoui was still on holiday and our money had not arrived at the bank. ‘I have friends in Casablanca who have work,’ he said, ‘they are expecting me.’

‘Casablanca. Where’s that? Can I come?’

‘I’ll come back and visit.’ Bilal knelt down so I could climb on to his back. I clung to him as he wandered around the house gathering up his things.

Bilal left with one half-empty bag, dressed in the same faded clothes I’d first seen him in. We stood by the garden wall and waved to him until he disappeared.

That night we ate supper in the kitchen. We didn’t go out to the square as we usually did. No one even mentioned going.

‘If our money doesn’t come this week,’ Mum said, ‘we’ll have to move.’

‘What’ll happen to Snowy if we move?’ Bea’s voice was a challenge.

‘We’ll take her with us,’ Mum soothed, but absent-mindedly. She lit the paraffin lamp with a twist of paper.

‘Couldn’t you make Akari’s little girl another dress?’ I asked.

Mum didn’t think so.

‘Luigi Mancini,’ Bea said in a flash of inspiration. ‘Let’s go and visit Luigi Mancini.’

‘Maybe he’ll give us lots of money!’ I shrieked.

Bea kicked me under the table.

Mum was thinking. ‘Yes we could visit Luigi Mancini.’ She ran the idea over in her head. ‘But don’t you dare ask him for any money. Do you understand?’

We all agreed that this was the exact spot where Luigi Mancini’s palace had stood. Now there was nothing here but a thin, dry wood of larches that rustled eerily in the late afternoon. We walked back to the taxi. It was a horse-drawn taxi with two horses.

‘Luigi Mancini…?’ Bea tried for the hundredth time to ignite a flicker of recognition in our driver, but he shook his head sadly.

‘We passed through this village and took a turning to the right,’ Mum insisted, even though we’d tried every turning, right and left, within miles of the village. This village that had mysteriously never heard the name Luigi Mancini. By the time we gave up the search it was almost night.

‘A genie must have cast a spell,’ I said, ‘that picked up his house and garden and all the peacocks and moved them to a different place. He probably woke up one morning and looked out of his window to find he was in Casablanca or on the top of a mountain or in England, a bit like – ’

‘The Wizard of Oz,’ Bea interrupted in her most bored voice.

‘Will you shut up both of you,’ Mum snapped and she leant back in the taxi and closed her eyes.

A week later we moved into the Hotel Moulay Idriss. It stood in a narrow street behind the Djemaa El Fna and was built around a courtyard of multipatterned tiles in the centre of which grew a banana tree that was taller than the top floor. Snowy would have loved to play among the tree roots and make dust baths in the earth, but the only room they had to offer was on the second floor. It was a large room with two doors that looked out on to the courtyard and no window. We brought our mattresses from the Mellah to sit and sleep on and Mum set up a kitchen in one corner with the mijmar. The leaves from the banana tree cast a soft green shadow.

Bea made a nest for Snowy with straw. She encouraged her to sit in it and maybe even lay an egg, but Snowy wanted to explore. She set off at a run along the landing that linked the rooms on all four sides of the hotel.

‘All right, I’ll train her to find her own way home.’ And Bea scattered liberal handfuls of corn over both our doorsteps. Snowy liked the Hotel Moulay Idriss. Soon she was striding about with confidence, clucking and pecking her way into other people’s rooms and leaving little piles of yellow-white droppings wherever she went.

Next door lived a family with five children, and a grandmother who slooshed down her stretch of landing first thing each morning with water from a metal bucket. Each time Snowy dared to pass her by, she hissed and shooed and flicked the ground with the edge of her djellaba.

Once the corridor was dry, a girl, not much taller than Bea, appeared. She stood patiently on the landing to be checked over by the fierce old lady. Her hair was braided into two plaits and she wore a white pleated skirt and sandals. Over one shoulder she carried a leather satchel.

‘Where’s she going?’ Bea asked.

‘Who?’ Mum said sleepily.

‘The girl next door. Come and look.’

‘I expect she’s just going to school.’ Mum stretched out under the covers and then in a coaxing voice she said, ‘If you make some strong tea with sugar in, I’ll get up. I promise.’

*

The next morning we were woken by the lady who lived in the room on our other side. She stood in the doorway and shouted, loud enough to wake the whole hotel. She held a dark red sequinned cushion in one hand, carefully like a tray, on which was a murky yellow stain. She pointed an accusing finger at Snowy who sat innocently in her nest of straw, chattering happily, her feathers up around her neck. The woman stood there, holding out her cushion and shouting. Mum struggled out of bed and tried to reason with her, but the woman continued to point at the cushion, at Bea, and at herself, and then with a vicious kick in Snowy’s direction she swept out of the room. Bea rushed over and picked Snowy up in her arms. Her eyes were spinning with alarm. The woman’s shouts of fury continued through the dividing wall.

Mum sat on the end of Bea’s bed. ‘It looks like we’re going to have to find Snowy another home.’

Bea didn’t answer. Then she said in a very small voice, ‘I’ll train her.’

‘I’ll talk to Akari,’ Mum said. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

That afternoon Akari came and took Snowy away.

‘I will look after her. Very special,’ he beamed as he hurried down the corner stairs.

We refused to return his smile. ‘Like hell,’ Bea said under her breath.

The only people who commiserated with us on the loss of our pet were the two women who lived on the opposite side of the landing. When they saw Akari disappear down the stairs with Snowy clucking her last in a cardboard box, they came across and offered Mum Turkish cigarettes and a glass of wine. They were big women who wore brightly coloured djellabas with silky hoods halfway down their backs, and their hands and feet were covered in an intricate web of design.

‘Tattoos,’ Bea whispered.

‘Henna,’ the woman nearest me laughed, noticing my fascinated stare. She took my face and held it still with one hand, while with the fingers of the other she twisted a strand of my hair between her fingers. It made a dry, brittle sound in her hand like the scratching of an insect. ‘Henna,’ she said, turning to Mum and switching to French to convince her.

‘They say you need henna on your hair to make it grow thick and long.’

I looked at their heavy black plaits.

‘All right,’ I agreed.

I was taken through the curtain into the dark recess of their room. It smelt of perfume and night-time, as if they had lived in it for ever. Bea was sent to get a towel and to fill a bucket from the tap in the corner of the courtyard. My hair was brushed back off my face in preparation.

The women poured a heap of green powder into a bowl and, with Bea’s water, stirred it into a thick mud that smelt like mud but with something sweet and something sour mixed in. They patted the henna, cold and slimy, into every strand of my hair, coiling it up on top of my head so that when they’d finished I felt like I was wearing a soft clay helmet. They dipped the corner of the towel in water and wiped away the streaks of green from my face and ears.

I was led triumphantly back on to the balcony, where Mum was still sipping wine in the sun. She laughed when she saw me.

‘Isn’t Bea going to have her hair hennaed too?’ I asked, desperate suddenly not to be the only one, the only experiment. The women smiled, and as sharply as if I had ordered it they took her inside.

Soon Bea and I were both sitting in the sun, weighed down and sleepy with the mud cakes drying on our heads. We had resigned ourselves to a long, hot day on the terrace of the Hotel Moulay Idriss, watching the comings and goings of the various inhabitants and from time to time catching a glimpse of Moulay Idriss himself when he emerged from the gloom of his office on the ground floor.

‘Can I take it off now?’ I asked Mum, once she had started to prepare the evening meal, but she shook her head and said, ‘It would be best to keep it on until tomorrow morning.’

I began to protest.

‘That’s what the Ladies said. If you keep it on until the morning, your hair will grow thicker and longer than anyone else’s.’

‘The morning!’

I sat against the wall between the doors of our room, playing with Mum’s box of buttons and beads, thoughts of Rapunzel dancing through my mind, and wondered how I’d be able to get to sleep that night.

The next morning when I tapped at the top of my head it echoed like a clay drum. Mum sent us round to the Ladies to have the henna taken off. The hardest pieces were cracked away, catching and pulling at strands of baked hair, and the rest was soaked out in a bowl of water. The water, when I looked at it, was a dark, steamy red that grew thinner and paler with every rinse. When the water was clear and my hair had been combed straight down on either side of my face, I was sent outside to look at myself in a tiny round mirror.

At first I thought it must only be a reflection of the sun beating down through the banana leaves, but once I’d pulled my hair around in front of my eyes, I was not so sure. I looked at it hard, then again in the mirror, then attempted to match up the two colours, which were in fact one colour. The colour of my hair. Orange.

Still clutching the mirror, I ran along the landing to find Mum.

‘Look. They’ve tricked me,’ I sobbed, throwing myself down on the floor. ‘It’s horrible. I hate it. And I hate them.’ And I hate you, I added to myself, for conspiring in this master trick against me.

Mum knelt down and lifted up my face. She pushed the still-damp hair out of my eyes. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she soothed. ‘Beautiful. It’s a rich dark red, it’s copper, it’s auburn…’

‘It’s orange,’ I wept.

‘Haven’t you noticed,’ she continued, ‘all the most beautiful girls in Marrakech have hennaed hair?’

I shook my head.

‘You haven’t noticed? I’ll take you for a walk and show you.’

Just then Bea appeared in the doorway. She was a dark shadow in a blazing halo of red and gold.

‘What do you think?’ she said.

The sun behind her picked out a thousand colours in her hair and set them flying against one another like the fighting flames of a torch.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Mum and I both said in one breath and she squeezed me tight in spite of myself.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘Will you run and bring our towel back,’ Mum asked Bea, as we were about to leave for the square. ‘And take the Ladies’ mirror… and say thank you,’ she shouted after her.

We waited in the courtyard. I had tucked all my hateful hair up inside a hat in the shape of a fez. It was a hat made from cotton covered in tiny holes for cross-stitch, which Bilal had embroidered pink and green before he left for Casablanca. I was hot and I felt Mum’s scornful eye on me.

‘Come on,’ she grumbled.

Finally Bea appeared. ‘They won’t give it back,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The towel. It was hanging in their room but when I tried to take it, they said it belonged to them.’

Mum laughed and looked up at their landing. The curtain hung heavily across the entrance to their room, and even though we waited neither one nor the other appeared.

The square was very busy. We sat outside a café while Mum drank black coffee and Bea and I sucked warm Fanta through a straw. It was unbearably hot under my hat. Little streams of sweat fell down around my ears and into my eyes, but it had been too big a fight to get the hat on to enable me to take it off. I sweated and suffered.

There was a man selling majoun on the corner. He was not always there. Mum bought a piece like a little chunk of rock. She let us both break off a sliver with our teeth. It tasted delicious, like crystallized sugar with soft honeycomb that hid something sharp that made you want more to cover the trace of bitterness.

‘Please can we have a piece? Please?’ we begged, forced on by the delicious sweetness of it.

‘It’s not meant for children. It’ll make you…’ – she was searching for the word – ‘drunk.’

‘Please, please,’ we insisted. ‘Majoun, majoun, majoun,’ and we set up a chant rising in volume with every refrain.

‘Shhh,’ Mum tried to quiet us, frantic, but giggling herself. ‘All right you can share a piece, but for God’s sake be quiet about it.’

We handed over our dirham and pointed and whispered, ‘Majoun,’ as we had seen it done. We were handed a twist of newspaper inside which was a small lump of hashish pounded into a sweet like fudge. We sat at the table and took turns scraping fragments off with our teeth. It seemed to me the most delicious taste in the world. Sand mixed with honey and fried in a vat of doughnuts. We passed it back and forth, giggling a conspiracy of joy and adventure.

‘Let’s make it last for ever,’ I said, barely touching it with the tip of my tongue.

‘Let’s go and see if Luigi Mancini’s in town.’ Bea slid off her chair.

I glanced at Mum. ‘We’ll meet back here,’ she said.

Looking for Luigi Mancini had become our favourite game We investigated one café at a time, reporting to each other the movements of any tall man dressed in white. Sometimes we would settle on a particularly suspicious Luigi Mancini look-alike and follow him through his afternoon’s business.

‘Don’t forget,’ Bea would say, ‘he might have dyed his hair, shaved off his moustache, or given up smoking.’

Today, lightheaded and bursting with laughter, it was hard to remain unnoticed by anyone. We crept up staircases, across terraces and around the tables of the largest cafés, whispering ‘Luigi Mancini’ almost inaudibly, and then standing like statues to monitor the reaction.

Today there was no one who could possibly be mistaken for Luigi Mancini, or even Luigi Mancini’s brother. There was no one in the café who was not Moroccan.

Then I heard a woman’s voice. ‘Excuse me, hello, can anyone speak English? Hello?’

‘Listen.’ I pulled at Bea’s sleeve.

Then we both heard it.

‘Hello, do you speak ENGLISH? I’m trying to find… oh dear…’

‘It’s Linda,’ Bea said.

‘Linda?’ But she had already darted off in the direction of the small crowd of waiters that had gathered.

Linda stood surrounded by suitcases, a fat and sleeping baby propped on one hip. She was holding out a crumpled scrap of paper.

‘Hello, Linda. What are you doing here?’ We squeezed into view between the legs of the onlookers.

Linda sat down on a bulging duffle bag and burst into tears.

‘I’ll go and get Mum,’ Bea said and disappeared.

‘What’s your baby called?’ I asked as she wiped her eyes with toilet paper from a roll.

‘Mob,’ she said.

‘Can I hold it?’

‘Her.’ She passed the baby over.

As soon as Mob was on my lap she woke up and began to scream.

‘Have I met you before?’ I asked.

Linda nodded.

‘Did you have a baby when I last saw you?’ I had to shout over Mob’s yells.

‘No.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Six months.’

‘Why’s she called Mob?’

Linda sighed. ‘Because her father was an Anarchist.’

‘What’s an Anarchist?’

Mum and Bea had arrived. Linda stood up and blew her nose. ‘Didn’t you get my letter?’

And Mum said, ‘Didn’t you get mine?’

Then they both began to laugh and hugged each other and we all helped to carry Linda’s luggage back to the Hotel Moulay Idriss.

‘I bought you a dress with the money you sent.’ Linda riffled through her suitcase. ‘From Biba.’

We watched as Mum tried it on. It was a soft cotton dress in golden browns and oranges, like a park trampled with autumn leaves. It had bell-shaped sleeves that buttoned at the wrist.

‘I love it,’ Mum said, spinning around in a dance.

I heaved a private sigh of relief. Surely this meant now she would stop wearing her Muslim haik that turned her into someone’s secret wife, with or without a veil.

‘You look beautiful.’ Linda was still heaping clothes on to the floor.

‘Yes, beautiful, beautiful,’ I agreed, eager to encourage.

Bea didn’t say anything. Her face was set and worried.

‘And I bought these for you.’ Linda held out a pair of faded black trousers. ‘From the Portobello Road.’

I gasped with excitement as I tried them on. They even had a zip.

‘Do I look like a boy?’

‘Not really.’ Mum was rolling up the legs in thick wedges round my ankles.

‘I thought she’d have grown…’ Linda said.

‘Not even with my hat?’ I looked around for it. In my excitement I had forgotten the horror of my orange hair.

Bea had a striped T-shirt that was long enough to be a dress. It had a hole under one arm.

‘Are you Linda who was going to bring the baby powder?’ I asked.

Bea jumped up. ‘So you did know she was coming. You did know.’ She turned on Mum.

‘I didn’t know exactly when…’

Bea’s face was dark. ‘You should have told me.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Linda looked as if she were going to cry again.

‘Don’t be silly.’ Mum held Bea at arm’s length. ‘Everything will be fine. Linda and Mob can stay here. There’s plenty of room.’

‘There’s plenty of room.’ Bea mimicked, almost under her breath but loud enough to strangle the air in the room. Mob gurgled in Linda’s arms and was sick. Linda mopped it up with toilet roll.

‘In the toilets in Morocco they only have a water tap and sometimes they just have stones,’ I told her.

Bea walked out on to the landing and hung her head over the railings. It was beginning to grow dark and the grey shadows outside, for a moment, exactly matched the half-light in the room. Mum lit a lamp and Bea disappeared into sudden darkness.

She kicked at the door-frame as she came back in. ‘I have to start school,’ she said.

Relief clouded my mother’s face. ‘Of course. Well you can.’

‘How can I?’ Bea was unimpressed. ‘I need a white skirt – which I don’t have. I need a white shirt – which I don’t have. I need a satchel.’ She stood in the middle of the room, victorious. ‘You see. I can’t.’

‘Tomorrow first thing we’ll go to the bank and see if our money has arrived and if it has we’ll buy you a uniform before we do anything else.’

‘And if it hasn’t?’

‘We’ll just have to wait a few days.’

‘And if it still hasn’t?’

‘We’ll think of something,’ Mum promised.

‘Will you think of something for me as well?’ I asked.

‘You don’t want to go to school.’ Her voice was decisive where it concerned me. ‘School is for big girls like Bea and Ayesha next door.’