Hideous Kinky (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

We were still hours away from Marrakech when the van backfired, veered sharply off the road into a field, and shuddered to a halt. John got out and opened up the bonnet. He stood for a long time peering in at the engine with his hands in his pockets and a knowing, not-to-be-disturbed look on his face. ‘Actually, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing,’ he said eventually, and he and Mum began to giggle.

Bea was worried. ‘We can’t stay here for ever,’ she said. The field stretched as far as I could see. There was nothing much in it, just grass and a lot of flowers. Poppies and daisies.

‘No we can’t stay here for ever,’ I repeated, because it was always safest to be on Bea’s side. We both got back into the van and waited for Mum and John to stop laughing.

Maretta lay on her side with her arm over her face and her eyes closed. You could tell she wasn’t asleep. First she stopped talking, I thought to myself. Then she stopped eating, and now she is never going to move again. Maretta still had the coffee stains from two days ago around her mouth.

Danny had only wanted to go as far as Tangier. We had dropped him off outside a café with an orange and white striped canopy. Danny said goodbye to everyone and then, just as he was leaving, he bent down and tweaked my nose. ‘My God, how did that get there?’ he said, and a large pebble-white sweet lay in the palm of my hand.

‘Do you think they sell sweets in Morocco?’ I asked Maretta.

She didn’t answer, and Bea said she didn’t know.

We sat on the side of the road and watched John grow smaller and smaller as he went off in search of someone who knew something about cars.

Mum stretched out in the grass. ‘Tell us a story,’ she said.

Bea lay down next to her. ‘Go on, tell us a story.’

So I told them about how on the day before we left London I heard two birds talking. I told them all the things the birds had talked about. Breadcrumbs. Other birds. The weather. I told them about the argument they had had over a worm.

‘That’s stupid, no one understands bird language,’ Bea said.

My eyes stung. ‘I do.’ But my voice didn’t sound very convincing.

‘Liar.’

I flushed. How could I be lying if I remembered every single word? The more I thought about it the more I wasn’t sure. ‘Mum…?’

But she had fallen asleep in the sun.

We followed John into the tiled café. It was set back from the road and was not so far from where our van was now parked.

‘It’s a French hotel,’ John whispered. ‘I think it might be a bit expensive.’

‘We’ll just have some tea,’ Mum reassured him, and we sat down in the shade of the terrace.

The tea they brought was made from mint leaves and was very, very sweet. Mum looked into the pot. ‘It’s like syrup in there,’ she said.

John had returned with three Moroccan boys in cloaks with pointed hoods. They helped us push the van along the road to the hotel. Maretta refused to get out. The Moroccan boys didn’t seem to mind at all. They smiled and waved at her through the windows in the back door.

We stayed at the café all day while John squinted dismally into the engine. ‘I suppose it’s a miracle it got us this far,’ he said when it began to grow dark.

Mum dragged blankets out on to the road. She made an open-air bed for us in the hotel garden. It was nice to go to sleep on ground that wasn’t rushing away from under you.

‘I’ll have to use those insurance stamps to have us towed into Marrakech,’ John said from the other side of Mum.

‘Insurance? You?’ Mum’s astonished voice came back. And Bea asked, ‘What’s “towed”?’

We sat in the truck, even Maretta, and watched our van dangling along behind us on a rope with John at the wheel. At first Maretta hadn’t wanted to move, so John had picked her up and put her in the truck himself. He picked her up easily like a child and she didn’t struggle or even move. Now she sat in the front with the Arab man who was driving and who had looked for a long time at the insurance which John said was like money but was really just a lot of bits of paper.

I kept wondering how we’d get home again now that our van had to be dragged everywhere. I thought it might be easier if we could take a boat straight to London. Then I must have fallen asleep. I dreamt about John and Maretta and their little girl who had stayed behind in England, waving to us from a gangplank. We were on a ship and everyone was throwing rolls of toilet paper to their friends on land but we didn’t have any toilet paper to throw.

When I woke up I was sitting on Mum’s lap in a tiny white room. Mum was talking in French to a small, plump man who smiled when he spoke and clapped his hands together and laughed at the end of every sentence. Bea looked out of a window through which bright white sunlight was falling. The van was parked opposite. It looked tired and dusty. A small crowd of children and flies were beginning to gather.

Akari the Estate Agent, whose shop we were in, poured mint tea into glasses. He poured it from a great height without spilling a drop and then, when the glasses were full, he tipped the tea back into the pot and poured it out again in as high and perfect an arc as before. The tea that was finally allowed to settle was thick and yellow like the eye of a cat.

‘Ask him if I can leave the van here,’ John said, ‘just until I can sell it or get it going again.’

Akari nodded and smiled in response to the translation. ‘He says he has a house we can rent in the Mellah. He’ll take us round to see it now.’

Akari was already locking up his little shop.

The Mellah was the Jewish quarter of the city. Our house was plain and whitewashed with three bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen and sitting-room below. There was a yard with flowers pushing up between the paving-stones. Maretta walked straight into the house and sat down on the floor. The floors were all tiled with tiles that went halfway up the walls. There was no furniture.

‘Akari says we’ll need a mijmar,’ Mum said, looking round the bare kitchen.

‘What’s a mijmar?’

‘It’s a stove for cooking. With charcoal. And we’ll need some bellows.’

‘I’ll get someone to bring the mattresses from the van,’ John said, and he disappeared.

‘What are bellows?’

‘Bea, what are bellows?’ But she was out in the garden, kicking at the poppies and the marigolds and searching for salamanders among the loose stones of the wall.

That night, when Mum read to us in the upstairs bedroom, I leant against her and asked, ‘Are we there?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’re there. Is it what you thought it would be like?’

I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought what it would be like.

‘How long are we going to stay?’ Bea asked.

‘Oh I don’t know. As long as we want.’ She started to read our story to herself. Bea and I waited for her to finish. ‘You could go to school here if you wanted,’ she added.

‘What about me? Couldn’t I?’

She stroked the top of my head. ‘Maybe in another year or so. When you’re as old as Bea.’

I started to sulk, but I was too tired to keep it up. Before I knew it my clothes were being pulled away, up over my head, and I felt the unfamiliar smoothness of a cool, clean sheet catch against my legs.

CHAPTER THREE

After wandering for some time through the lanes of the indoor market, we stopped at a stall that was very much like the others. There were rows and rows of shiny, coloured dresses packed against the walls, and also soft white caftans with thick embroidery round the neck. We stood at the entrance, which was like the mouth of a cave of treasure, and watched as dress after shimmering dress was pulled and shaken and laid on the ground before us. I chose a caftan that looked as if it had been painted. It had blocks of red in it like red liquorice and purple and orange flames. Mum said it made me look a little pale. But if that was what I wanted.

I slipped it over my T-shirt and shorts and felt the slippery nylon swish around my ankles. ‘Can I keep it on?’

Mum was busy dressing in a pale purple caftan. It swept the floor and made her look tall and mysterious with her black hair loose and hanging thickly down her back.

Bea chose one in cotton. It had patterns of leaves and stalks and flowers that swirled all over it in blue and green. ‘Of course it’ll fit,’ she said holding it up to her chin.

‘Don’t you want a shiny one like me and Mum?’ I asked, hoping she’d change her mind. But Bea folded up the dress and held it under her arm, so I knew that she’d made her decision.

A cloud of drumming hung above the main square, which Akari the Estate Agent called the Djemaa El Fna. Groups of men moved tirelessly from one spectacle to the next, forming circles to watch the dancers and the tambourine players, the African who dressed as a woman with cymbals on his wrists and a full silver tea-set on his head, the acrobats, and the snake charmers whose songs seeped across the square and mingled with a wailing like a bagpipe I couldn’t trace. A waterman roamed from corner to corner clanking his brass cups and calling to the thirsty to buy a drink of his warm and rusty water. I felt cool in my new dress. It was a smart, clean version of what the beggar girls wore, the beggar children who roamed the Djemaa El Fna, chattering and chasing each other, always on the lookout for a tourist to torment. ‘Tourist, tourist. Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola,’ they chanted in reedy voices as they marched beside their victim, until, unable to endure it a moment longer, the tourist would stop, open up his purse and send the beggar children spinning off, laughing and clutching a shiny new coin. The tourists, having shaken off their entourage, headed for the terraced hotel at the far side of the square. They sat in the shade and ate melon already sliced.

A few days before, Bea and I had slipped up there while Mum was shopping. She was buying dates and oranges to tempt Maretta. We sat at an empty table and fixed our hungry, mournful gaze on a lady with white hair. We watched unblinking as she skewered lump after sliced lump of melon with a silver fork.

But she’s only eating half of it, I thought, as the thick and discarded rind piled up. By the time the woman called us over I had convinced myself that I was really starving.

‘You win,’ she said, giving us each a slice. She spoke with an American accent.

We devoured the fruit right there in front of her, letting the sweet juice run down our arms until there was nothing left but a rind so thin it turned transparent when I held it up to the sun.

‘Well, well,’ she said, as I placed the rind proudly on the table. I was hopeful of another slice.

Bea pointed out our mother who was wandering between the stalls looking as if she were lost.

”That’s our Mum,’ I said, forgetting we were meant to be in disguise as Moroccan beggar girls, and we ran out of the hotel to be found.

We chopped vegetables – onions, potatoes, green beans, peppers and tomatoes – on the floor of the tiled kitchen. My mother lit the mijmar and began to cook. The mijmar was a large clay pot that had a fire alight inside it. The tajine was a dish that sat above it with a lid like an upside-down flowerpot, and everything that was going to be cooked had to cook in the tajine, unless it was couscous which could be steamed in a bowl above it.

‘Why don’t you go up and see if Maretta is eating with us tonight?’ Mum said to me when supper was nearly ready. I dragged my feet. We had been in the Mellah for over a week now and Maretta had hardly left her room. I opened the door a crack and looked in. She was lying face down on her mattress, one arm stretched above her head.

‘Maretta…’ I whispered from the doorway. My voice rasped unexpectedly.

‘Maretta…’ I moved towards her. I could tell that she wasn’t asleep. She was never asleep. I knelt down by her bed and went to touch her shoulder. Something moved. Something tiny. A grey speck in her hair. I flinched away. Then I saw another. A speck like a grain of dirt alive and moving over her body. Along her neck. Crawling. Crawling. My hands began to twitch as I edged away from her. I shrieked as I clattered downstairs. I ran into the garden and shook myself in a frenzy.

John, who had been rolling a cigarette against the wall, pushed past me and into the house. I heard him running up the stairs and then there was silence. I twitched occasionally and waited.

After a while Bea came out and said in a calm voice, as if she had expected it all along, ‘Maretta’s got body lice. John is going to take her to the hospital.’

So we stood in the garden and waited for him to bring her out.

John didn’t come home that night and my mother gave us both showers standing in a bucket in the kitchen. She heated up a bowl of water and poured it over us with a cup. I flinched at anything that moved. A strand of hair on my neck. Water squelching grey slugs between my toes.

‘You don’t get lice in England, do you?’ I asked as she worked her fingers through my hair.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘You can get lice anywhere. If you’re really dirty they might even follow you right round the world.’

Bea giggled. ‘Just waiting to hop on.’

‘It’s not funny.’

I started abruptly as the sleeve of Mum’s caftan brushed my leg. I jolted round in my bucket so fast I almost knocked it over. Mum wrapped me in a towel and lifted me out.

‘Where do they come from?’

She hesitated and I could feel Bea listening hard.

‘Eggs,’ she said. ‘They lay eggs. It just takes one lice. Or is it louse? One lousy lice to hop on to you, lay some eggs and then the eggs hatch into lice and then they lay more eggs, and those eggs –’

‘Stop it, stop it!’ I screamed. I ran upstairs and pulled the covers off my bed and inspected the sheet until I was sure it was all unbroken white. I got in and curled up in the blankets.

When Bea came up I asked her, ‘Do you think Maretta is going to die?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know.’

What I really wanted to ask was: ‘Can body lice kill you?’ and: ‘Can they kill you between going to sleep one night and waking up the next morning?’

Two days later I was still twitching every time a blade of grass caught my ankle or a fly whistled past my ear. When, at lunch, the specks of ground black pepper crawling in my soup made me choke on my spoon, Mum had an idea. She packed a bag with towels and soap and shampoo and a tube of Macleans toothpaste.

‘Today,’ she said, ‘we are going to the Hammam.’

The Hammam was a building that was one enormous bath. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered in brick-shaped tiles in blue and green. We stood in a small, warm room streaked with sunlight which slanted from a window high up, almost in the roof, and took off our clothes. A wooden door at the end of the room opened and a woman, wearing just a thick bead necklace, greeted us and held the door for us to go through. A large, damp, steam-clouded room opened on to another, slightly warmer, and another, and another so hot I had to yawn to catch enough breath to breathe.

In the farthest room, which was cooler, there was a cold-water tap and a bucket. As I stood and watched, a woman with overlapping stomachs and hair down to her waist tipped a full bucket of water over the head of a very thin girl who stood with her eyes closed, dark brown and shining. My mother picked up a cake of smooth, soft soap that looked like oatmeal blended with olive-green oil. I followed her back through the hottest rooms into a milder steam, through which I could make out children sleeping stretched out on the floor, and in one corner an old woman rubbing her arms with a grey stone that looked like concrete.

We sat against a wall that dripped with water and blew long breaths. The woman with the necklace appeared, smiling broadly and gesturing with her hand, in which she held a rippled washing stone and a bar of soap. She spoke in Arabic without interrupting her smile.

‘Would you like to have a special Hammam wash by this lady?’ my mother asked us both, but I couldn’t tell from her voice whether she thought it was a good idea or not. I shook my head sideways.

‘All right, I will,’ Bea said, and I immediately regretted my decision and tried to change the movement of my head without anyone noticing so that I felt dizzy.

Bea stood in the middle of the room. The Hammam woman squatted next to her and rubbed her body with the stone until grains of black dirt stood out all over her.

‘Doesn’t it hurt?’

She shook her head.

She was splashed clean with water from the cold-water bucket. The Hammam woman lathered soap soft in her hands and, taking each part of Bea’s body, rubbed it down as if she were polishing a piece of furniture. Then she took up the bucket, which she poured slowly over Bea’s head so that the cold water flattened her hair and the soap ran off her in a frothy river. When the last drip had fallen, she opened her eyes and looked down at her body that glimmered and sparkled in the misty room.

‘Is it my turn now?’ I said, taking Bea’s place, and the lady held my arms and began rubbing them with short swift strokes of the Hammam stone. When my body was so clean it felt like silk, we all washed our teeth under the cold tap, and the Hammam lady and the three small children who had been sleeping in a corner stood and watched.

We were getting ready to go home when my mother opened her purse and took out two coins. ‘Bea, go in and give the lady this and say thank you.’

Bea disappeared through the wooden door and returned a few minutes later clutching a brand new stone. ‘It’s mine.’ She waved it triumphantly. ‘She gave it to me for a present.’

‘How do you know? Maybe it was meant for me.’

‘Shh. It can be for all of us.’ And Mum pushed the door open on to the noise and dust of the narrow street.