Hideous Kinky (11 page)

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 green. 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 die 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 die time die 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 sleepy 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.

‘Of course I always knew it was her,’ she said afterwards, ‘but to taunt me! She must have run and put them on when she saw us arrive.’

Once three polite glasses of tea had been drunk and Mum had given up on Moulay Idriss to find us a room, we set off for the Djemaa El Fna to look for Bilal. Mum refused the Ladies’ offer to mind our bags.

We wandered from café to café searching out a familiar face. The square, lit with its bulbs of light and smelling warm of city food, lulled me with memories and made me happy to be home. We set down our bags at the large open café where we had first met Luigi Mancini. Mum ordered meat tajine and went to buy cigarettes from the man who sold them singly in the square. The Fool appeared at our table. He smiled, his one tooth hovering in his mouth as if it were about to drop.

‘It’s the Fool! It’s the Fool!’ I sang with delight. I held on to his hand until he sat down.

Bea and I cross-examined him. ‘Bilal? Khadija? Aunty Rose? The Hadaoui? Bilal? Bilal? Bilal? …’

The Fool nodded and smiled and repeated each name lovingly. I searched his eyes for information. They were dark and far away. ‘Bilal…’ he mused.

Mum returned to our table with Luna and Umbark. Luna lifted her veil and kissed Bea and me on both cheeks. She gazed into our faces. ‘From day to day they change,’ she said, tears glistening in the edges of her eyes. Luna sat down. It wasn’t us but Luna who had changed. She had swollen up strangely since we went away and the blue veins in her face, flowing so near the surface, gave her a glassy look. Luna noticed the red rash in the crook of my arm. I had rolled up the sleeve of my caftan to cool it after an attack of itching. Luna inspected the raw and slimy rash. It ached under her scrutiny.

Mum dug into her bag and brought out the round tin she had bought from the salesman in Sid Zouin. After my arm had been shown to the Cadi, Pedro, Scott, Jeannie, and almost every other inhabitant of the village, a travelling salesman had inspected it and assured us he possessed the cure. The one and only cure. He sold us a small, flat tin of cream. It wasn’t until he had trotted out of town on his donkey that Mum realized the tin didn’t actually open. Pedro nearly broke a finger in his attempt to wrench it apart and Scott tried each one of the sharp instruments on his penknife. Like my arm the tin was inspected first by the Cadi and then by every other member of the village before it was finally returned to us, battered, but still firmly closed.

Mum passed the tin around the table. When it reached the Fool, he held it up to the light and nodded thoughtfully over its secret contents. Without a word he pocketed it in the folds of his djellaba.

I soaked my bread in the steaming juice of the mutton tajine, burning my fingers as I ate. Luna and Umbark had neither seen nor heard of Bilal since he left with the Hadaoui.

‘Maybe they are travelling in the desert. He and the Hadaoui,’ Luna said, and Mum agreed and told them about her plan to make a pilgrimage to the Zaouia.

We stayed that night with Luna and Umbark in their tiny room, and the next day Mum went alone to visit her bank.

Luna was taking Bea and me to lunch. ‘I want you to meet some friends of mine,’ she said.

Luna’s friends were an English family who lived in the new French city. They had two children. A baby younger than Mob and a boy called Jake who clung to his mother’s legs as she moved about the kitchen.

Bea was very impressed with lunch. So was I. Mostly it was mashed potato. We had three helpings each. I ate my meal in greedy silence while Bea talked. She told Jake’s mother Sophie all about school. What she had learnt there and what she hadn’t and how many times the children got beaten, and about the time the stick broke. She told her things that she usually kept to herself.

After lunch I played with Jake on a red plastic telephone. He rang up Father Christmas and I rang Luigi Mancini. Bea helped Sophie with the washing-up.

I could hear Bea telling Sophie all about how Mum was going to go and live in a mosque with lots of sheikhs who sat all day in the lotus position and that really she didn’t want to go. Luna interrupted her to say that Mum was only going to visit for a short time, not to live, but Bea said she didn’t care – she still didn’t want to go.

As we were about to leave, Bea turned to Sophie. ‘Could I stay with you when Mum goes to the mosque?’ she asked, her eyes round with hope.

Sophie was silent. ‘If that’s all right with your Mummy,’ she said finally, hesitantly, ‘then of course that would be fine with us.’ She glanced towards a closed door through which the clattering of her husband’s typewriter could be heard, muffled between long silences. ‘Yes I’m sure that would be fine,’ she said again as she opened the front door.

We met up with Mum in the Djemaa El Fna. Her money hadn’t arrived and she was in a bad mood. I waited anxiously for Bea to break the news. Whenever I caught her eye, she looked away. Luna said nothing.

‘We’ll stay one more night with you if that’s all right.’ Mum looked to Luna. ‘And then we’ll be off. I think if we get a couple of good lifts it should only take a day to get there.’

‘You’re going to hitch?’