Hideous Kinky (14 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Mum and I boarded the same train for Marrakech we’d jumped from all those weeks before. Selina came to the station to see us off. I watched her hopefully as our train gathered speed, convinced that at the last moment she would relent and let fly at least one white dove from the sleeve of her djellaba.

It was early evening when we arrived in Marrakech and we went straight to Sophie’s house to collect Bea. The house was shuttered and dark and there was no sign of anyone at home. Mum said they had probably all gone out for supper and if they weren’t in the Djemaa El Fna someone would be sure to know where to find them.

They weren’t in the Djemaa El Fna. Even the Fool, who wiped tears from his eyes as he sat at our table, didn’t seem to have ever heard of Sophie. Bea, he was sure he had seen, but he couldn’t remember when. Mum ordered two bowls of bissara, but by the time it came a hard lump had risen up in my throat making it difficult to swallow, and with the first scalding spoonful I stripped the skin from the roof of my mouth. I kept thinking Mum must know where Bea was. Maybe she was keeping it a secret so that it would be a surprise when we found her, but late that night when we arrived at Luna and Umbark’s, it was Luna who was surprised.

‘I was beginning to think you’d emigrated,’ she said. Umbark was not at home.

Mum apologized. ‘It’s just that we’ve tried Sophie’s house three times now and there’s no one at home.’

Luna looked puzzled. ‘They moved,’ she said. ‘Not long after you went away. He decided he needed the countryside to write.’

‘Whereabouts in the countryside?’ There was panic in Mum’s voice.

‘I’m not sure. I expect I could find out.’ Luna was pouring tea. ‘But Bea didn’t go with them. In fact there was a bit of a scene.’ Luna paused to concentrate as she raised the silver pot high like a Moroccan, cooling the tea in an arc before it settled in its cup. ‘No. Bea wouldn’t go,’ she said admiringly. ‘She refused to go. I think she was frightened that if she went away anywhere, you might not be able to find her when you came back.’

‘Well, where is she then?’

‘I would have had her here, but…’ Luna glanced down at her stomach. It had ballooned under her clothes while we’d been gone. She looked around the room as if reminding herself how small it was. ‘There’s a man who lives in a communal house in the Medina… the man’s name I don‘t know, but he has a dog, the dog is Mashipots.’

‘And Bea went there?’

Luna had to restrain Mum from going to find her right then in the middle of the night. She made up a bed for us in the corner of the room and pretended not to notice when Mum took out the plastic sheet and slipped it under me.

We arrived at the communal house so early that we had to hammer on the door before even the dog began to bark. Finally a shutter clattered open and a man looked out.

‘Bea? I’ve come to get Bea?’ Mum shouted up.

The man frowned. ‘Who?’ ‘Sophie? Are you a friend?’

‘What?’ The man rubbed his eyes.

‘Do you have a dog called Mashipots?’ Mum‘s voice was strained.

The man disappeared. We waited. Another shutter opened.

‘What’s Mashipots done now?’ A new man leant out, naked.

‘Is Mashipots your dog?’

‘What if she is?’

‘I’m Bea’s mother.’

The man pulled back into the room and drew the shutters tight together. Eventually the door opened and a square–faced, white-and-tan dog flew out and jumped up to lick my face.

The man stood in the doorway. He was wrapped in a woman‘s dressing–gown. ’Bea‘s old lady, eh?’ he said. ‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, man, but she‘s not here. Me an’ Bea –we didn’t quite see eye to eye.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I mean is that she ran off. Went out to buy a packet of cigarettes like, and, well, never came back.’

‘Didn’t you look for her?’ Mum was pale. ’Down, Mashipots.‘ She kicked the dog who had its front paws on my shoulders.

‘Easy, lady,’ he said as Mashipots whimpered away. ‘I didn’t look for her because I thought if she wants to stay missionary–style with that old girl at the polio school, it’s all the same to me.’

Mum didn’t wait to hear any more. She tightened her grip on my hand and dragged me away.

There had been a party, and the trestle–tables were covered in half–eaten sandwiches and long pools of spilt lemonade. The room was full of children – boys with cropped hair, some even shaved, and mostly they had sticks to help them walk. Mum and I stood in the doorway and watched Bea coming towards us. She had grown taller and wore a dress that I had never seen before. It was checked a little like the tablecloths and had puffed sleeves. She carried a plate of cake in her hand.

‘Would you like some of my birthday cake?’ she said when she reached us and I took the plate and began to cram the yellow sponge into my mouth.

‘Happy birthday, darling,’Mum said and went to hug her.

Bea stiffened. She pulled back and introduced Patricia. Patricia was older than Mum and taller, and was dressed very smartly with lace–up shoes. She watched as I gobbled my cake.

‘So you made it. Just in time,’ she said, resting her hand on Bea’s shoulder. ‘come and join the party.’

Patricia took a plate and loaded it with sandwiches and fruit and biscuits from the table and handed it to me. ‘It’s my birthday soon,’ I told her. ‘Really?’ Her voice was cold and she walked away to lift a boy off the floor who was dragging himself away from the table, using his hands and nothing else.

Bea was on Patricia’s side. They sat together over English tea with milk and sugar and talked about their own private things. They talked as if they had known each other for ever.

‘Why did you run away from Peter’s?’ Mum asked.

Peter was the owner of Mashipots.

Bea looked at her as if it were obvious. ‘He made me

do hours and hours of maths homework and when I

wanted to go to the toilet he said I could only go if I called

it “the shithouse”.’

I started to giggle.

‘But I bet you’ve never had a birthday party like this before,’ Patricia said consolingly.

Bea shook her head. ‘Never.’ And she fixed Mum with her Malteser eyes that were rounder than anyone else’s.

‘Me, neither,’ I said. I wanted to be on Patricia’s side too and have a birthday party like never before.

I asked Mum why Patricia didn’t like me.

‘Don’t worry,‘ she said, ’she can’t stand me, either.’

In the middle of that night, when I crawled into her bed to avoid the chill of my wet sheet, she whispered, ‘We’ll leave before she finds out,‘ and then added with a shiver, ‘she reminds me of my mother.’

Patricia thought of all the polio boys as her children. She was very strict and dressed them in spotless white. She kept their hair so short it bristled. Bea talked to the boys and played with them, complicated games with pebbles and sticks that had to be caught and counted on the back of your hand. I tried to join in, but I was frightened by their twisted and emaciated legs and the boniness of their skulls with so little hair to hide behind.

Bea and I waited at the polio school while Mum looked for somewhere else to live. Patricia had objected to us going because it would mean missing lunch.

I sat with Bea on the steps of her dormitory. ’Don‘t you want to come and sleep in our room with us?’ I asked her.

‘No, I like it here,’ she said. ‘It’s like being at boarding–school.‘

‘Have you ever been at boarding–school?’

‘No, stupid.’

I was losing track of what Bea had and hadn’t done.

‘Do you like Patricia better than Mum then?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Mum’ll be very unhappy.’

‘Really?’ she sounded like Patricia, and she skimmed a stone hard across the concrete.

I tried to think of something else to say. Everything in my head was jumbled and arguing. Bea continued to throw stones that were pieces of concrete that had come loose from the base of the step and I looked at my feet and wondered if I should tell her about the sandals that I left on the train.

‘So tomorrow we’ll move back to the Hotel Moulay Idriss,’ Mum announced. She sat down on the step between us and took a packet out of her bag. She handed it to Bea. ‘Happy birthday.’

Bea unwrapped her present slowly. Inside was a necklace of black and orange beads. Bea lifted up her hair for it to be fastened. It fitted tightly round her neck. She smiled a small smile in spite of herself.

That night Patricia and Mum had an argument. It started after supper when Bea spilt coffee on her checked dress. Patricia said it was ridiculous that a child of her age should be allowed to drink coffee just because she liked it, and then she put her arm around Bea and called her ‘my little orphan’. Mum’s eyes blazed and she cracked her plate down on the table so that it splintered. Patricia stood up. She insisted if they were going to argue they move into another room. The polio boys were taken off to bed, and Bea and I hovered as near to the closed door as we dared.

‘What’s she saying?’ I whispered.

‘Who?’

‘Mum.’

‘I don’t know,’ and Bea tapped me on the shoulder and hissed a murderous ‘Mashipots’ into my ear as she danced off down the row of tables.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

‘Akari said he saw Bilal. He was in a crowd at the Gnaoua.’ We were walking through the narrow and familiar streets that led towards Nappy House.

‘Bilal, Bilal, Mashipots and Mob,’ I sang as we trudged along in the dark. Bea and I dragged the tartan duffle bag between us. ‘Polio, powow, Zaouia and shithouse.’ I was composing a new song especially for Bilal. ‘Trampolining, fire–eating, central heating, shithouse.’

Moulay Idriss showed us to our old room and even donated two candles to unpack by and to light our way back and forth from our room to the toilet on the landing.

Mum read aloud a whole chapter of
Monkey
before she tucked us in. The Black Hand will never find us here, I thought as I lay on my mattress with Bea breathing softly by the other wall and Mum reading on by candlelight as she always did.

When I woke in the blackness of the shuttered room to find my bed still dry, I fumbled my way across to Mum’s mattress to tell her the good news and to crawl in against the shininess of her nightdress, but as I edged my way under the covers I nudged up against the hard limbs of another body. A man. My face crimson I crept silently back to my own bed.

When I woke in the morning, Bilal was lighting the mijmar as if he had never been away. I leapt up with a Red Indian war cry and threw myself at him. He stood and spun me round so fast I thought I would faint.

‘There was a strange man in Mum’s bed last night,’ I told him when I had recovered my breath, but he just tickled the soles of my feet until tears rolled down my face and I begged and pleaded with him to stop.

Bilal was my Dad. No one denied it when I said so.

‘Did you really used to know Luigi Mancini,’ I asked him, ‘when you wore silver and gold waistcoats?’

Bilal didn’t think so. He didn’t remember. He was working on a plan to make money out of my songs.

We went to the square to do research. ‘Maybe Mum could sit inside a tent and tell people’s fortune while I sing behind a curtain,’ I suggested.

‘And what would she tell them about their fortune?’

‘She could find out from her
I Ching
book. Or maybe she could go to people’s houses and heal the sick,‘ I said, remembering Ahmed’s aunt in the mountains. ‘And then I wouldn’t have to sing at all.’

‘Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.’ Bilal set me down in front of our favourite acrobats as if to remind me that in his country children also have to work for a living.

Khadija came and squatted beside me. Her thin cotton caftan was ripped right along a seam and it made me think how in all the time I’d known her I’d never seen her in any other clothes. She rested her solemn face on her knees and watched the show. I wanted to give her something. I almost cried at the thought of the lost amethyst. If I’d only been able to carry some home I could have given her a splinter of purple glass to hang on the empty loops of plastic thread she wore as earrings. Even the drummer girls had beads.

On the morning of my birthday I was taken to the Henna Ladies to have my ears pierced. It was what I had asked for. ‘Really it won’t hurt a bit,’ Mum assured me as we walked along the terrace. ‘Just think of all those babies with little gold studs in their ears.’

‘Will I have little gold studs?’

Mum paused. ‘One day you will.’

The Henna Ladies sat me down on a mound of cushions. One of them began to thread a needle. The needle was a particularly fat needle, and knotted to the length of plastic thread that hung from its eye were three orange beads. I sat on my cushion and waited. I was expecting some kind of miracle so that I wouldn’t be scared. I watched the point of the needle as it came towards me. The nearer it got, the further into the cushions I sank. The Henna Lady reached down and took hold of my ear and as the cold flat point of the metal pressed against my skin I began to scream.

‘My God. What a fuss,’ Mum said when we were safely back in our room.

‘Maybe on my next birthday,’ I said doubtfully.

Even if I’d gone through with the ear–piercing I still wouldn’t have had anything to give Khadija. Three orange beads – I was scornful – and the promise of a gold stud.

It was the day after my birthday that Bea‘s lips went blue. She came home from school looking as if she‘d been blackberry–picking.

Mum inspected the inside of her mouth. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘Of course it hurts.’

When Bea was ill there was nothing you could say. She had a way of turning things around and making you feel stupid.

‘I have a mouth infection,’ she said.

All Bea could eat was soup. Cold soup. Bilal suggested taking her to Umbark and the Gnaoua to see what they could do, but Bea refused point–blank. She sat with her hand over her mouth and scowled indignantly at us as we scooped up grains of couscous with our fingers and attempted to swallow them without appearing to chew.

That night when we were in bed Bea told me that if she closed her eyes and imagined biting down on a piece of toast she felt as if she were going to be sick. I’d never been sick. I asked her to show me how it was done. Bea turned towards the wall with one glum sweep of her blanket and refused to speak to me again.

Soon Bea’s mouth had swelled up like a bluebottle. The bluer her lips became the whiter her face. Mum took her to see Aunty Rose. Mum had never met Aunty Rose, but she said she sounded like the kind of person who might know what to do.

Aunty Rose looked at Bea’s lips and inspected the inside of her mouth. ‘She has a gum infection.’

‘You see,’ Bea narrowed her eyes.

‘All I can suggest is that you gargle with hot salt water. I don’t expect you have any medical insurance?’

Mum said she didn’t.

Aunty Rose made me open my mouth too. She tutted and put one finger right in. ‘Thank heavens they’re only your baby set,’ she said.

Aunty Rose boiled a kettle and showed Bea how to gargle. ‘Ow, ow, ow,’ Bea moaned between mouthfuls of salt water.

‘If I were you, my dear’ – Aunty Rose looked at Mum as if she were a child – ‘I’d think about getting home.’ She said ‘home’ in a certain way that made me know she wasn’t talking about the Hotel Moulay Idriss. ‘I’ll pray for you,’ she said as we left.

Aunty Rose was a Christian. She had been living in Morocco for twenty years and she had one convert. Mum didn‘t like her much. She didn’t say so, but she was quiet on the way home. We walked single file, Bea with her hand over her mouth in case she saw anyone from school, and me furious that I hadn’t had a chance to mention my birthday.

Mum boiled water over the mijmar and Bea stayed home from school to gargle and spit into a bucket. Bilal brought her goat’s yoghurt and figs from the market and I offered to give up one of my dolls. Bea wasn’t interested in dolls. She lay on the mattress in the darkest corner of the room and made me tell her stories. I told a story about Aladdin and his friend Bea the Bad who overheard Aladdin mumbling ‘Open Sesame’ in his sleep. Bea the Bad used the magic password to open the stone walls of the secret cave and steal all the treasure. Bea the Bad became Bea the Beautiful and moved into a palace next door to Luigi Mancini where they lived happily ever after.

When I finished the story she said, ‘Just one more. Go on. I‘ll owe you.’ She never even minded if I told her the same story twice.

On the day Mum took Bea to the doctor she owed me twenty-two stories. I waited at home with Bilal. We sat in the courtyard under the banana tree and Bilal smoked and I watched the Henna Ladies talking to their men on the upstairs landing. One of them was wearing Mum’s stolen trousers under her caftan. I could see the pink velvet bell-bottoms flapping when she walked.

Bilal was still racking his brains for a plan to make some money. He scratched little patterns in the dust and when Moulay Idriss crossed the courtyard he didn’t lift his eyes to greet him but hissed, ‘Don’t stare or he’ll start asking for his rent.’

When Bea came home from the doctor, she went straight upstairs and lay down on her bed. I stood in the doorway.

‘Did he give you any medicine?’

At first she didn’t say anything but then, when I went on standing there shuffling my feet, she mumbled furiously, ‘If you really want to know, my teeth are going to fall out.’

‘All of them?’

Mum was very worried. She made Bea take the different pills the doctor had prescribed and stayed in with her all day. She rubbed cream from a tube on to her mouth. Bea lay still and waited. Whenever she woke, she stared hard at her pillow as if she expected to see it scattered with little lumps of tooth. For a week we waited for them to drop out. Mum even promised that as soon as we had enough money we would go back to England where you could get a false set on the National Health.

Bilal and I spent our days wandering through the market looking for soft things for Bea to eat. Sometimes the Fool came too. I studied him carefully at mealtimes, hoping to pick up some useful tips. But there was a difference: the Fool had one tooth, whereas Bea’s doctor had said ‘All’. The Fool just spiked his food and swallowed.

One day I looked at Bea and realized that her lips were no longer blue. I had been waiting so patiently for her teeth to drop out that I hadn’t noticed she was getting better. I tried to hide my disappointment. I liked having Bea at home and even though I made a show of protest, being bullied into telling her stories was in fact my favourite pastime.