Hideous Kinky (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

As promised, Bilal took us to visit his family in the mountains. We travelled through a whole day on a bus packed with people and then shared a taxi with a man Bilal knew and was happy to see. We had presents of a large packet of meat and three cones of white sugar for Bilal’s mother.

The whole village was waiting to greet us at the end of a narrow track that joined the road. ‘They welcome you like a wife,’ Bilal whispered as Mum stepped out of the taxi. She was dressed in a swirling blue cloak of material that covered her hair and swathed her body in folds that reached the floor. When she walked she drew up the cloth and let it hang over her shoulder.

Bilal introduced us to his mother. She was a large lady with a throaty voice that billowed out from under her veil. Bilal’s father was really an old man and half her size.

The women threw flower petals into the air and sang a low lilting song as we walked back along the path. From time to time they let their fingers brush against my hair. I held tightly on to my mother’s hand.

The village was a cluster of low white houses at the foot of a hill that was almost a mountain. We followed Bilal into the dark inside of his family’s house. Bilal’s family trooped in after us, and we all stood about smiling. Bea nudged Mum and she remembered and handed over the meat and the sugar.

‘You see, she likes the presents,’ Bilal whispered as his mother nodded, unwrapping and rewrapping her gifts. I had tried to convince him that she might prefer a Tintin book or a clay drum.

That night Mum, Bilal, Bea and I all slept on rugs in the room that was the house, and Bilal’s parents, his brothers and sisters, their wives and children all slept outside in the garden. It was a clear warm night and very light from so many stars.

‘I wish we could sleep in the garden too,’ I said to Bea and she agreed.

‘Where’s Abdul?’ Bea asked next morning over breakfast. We were drinking coffee sweetened with the sugar we had brought. Abdul was Bilal’s youngest brother and the same age as Bea. We had tried to teach him hopscotch the evening before.

‘Abdul goes to look after the sheep,’ Bilal said. ‘He is up before the sun.’

‘Where?’ I asked, looking round for even a single sheep.

‘On the other side of the mountain.’ Bilal pointed into the hazy distance. ‘Over there are all the sheep of the village.’

‘Are there other people helping?’

‘No, just Abdul.’

So Abdul was a shepherd. I had seen a shepherd that wasn’t old and frozen and on the front of a Christmas card. By lunchtime he was back from his day’s work. He sat with the sun on his back and ate bread and tajine, his feet covered in dust from the long walk home.

‘Bea, would you like to be a shepherd?’ I asked her.

‘No, not really.’

‘What would you like to be then?’

‘I don’t know. Normal, I think.’ She was marking out a new game of hopscotch with the toe of her plastic sandal.

*

The next morning when I woke, Bea was not there. Mum was sitting on the end of my bed sewing.

‘She went into the hills.’

‘When?’

‘At sunrise. She wanted to see what it was like to be a shepherd.’

I was close to tears. ‘But you knew I wanted to go.’

‘I did try and wake you.’

I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her. ‘Wouldn’t I wake up?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You just started talking in your sleep.’

‘Did I?’ I cheered a little at this. I liked the idea of talking in my sleep. ‘What did I say? Please remember.’

‘Something about roofracks, I think,’ she said, folding up the dress she was making for Akari the Estate Agent’s little girl. He said it could be rent until our money arrived from England. Roofrack. That was a good word. Roofrack. Roofrack. Hideous kinky. Maybe we could teach Abdul to play tag.

It was midday and I sat at the edge of the village and waited for them to come down from the hills. Eventually two specks turned into stripes and then into Bea and Abdul, both barefoot and in shorts. I ran to meet them. As I neared, I stuck out my hand and, touching Bea’s shoulder, shouted, ‘Roofrack!’ Picking up speed, I circled away for the inevitable chase. I ran hard for a few minutes before I realized she wasn’t following. I looped back round, keeping a little distance in case it was a trick.

‘Aren’t you playing?’

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I’ve been working, haven’t I?’ And she marched on towards the village.

I followed them to where lunch was being served. The whole family ate from one enormous bowl. It was couscous with a sauce of seven vegetables. I tried to copy the exact movement of Bilal’s hand as he collected the tiny grains of couscous in the crook of his finger, swept them into a ball with his thumb, and placed it in his mouth without a crumb being spilt or wasted.

‘Tomorrow can I go to the mountains with Abdul?’ I asked him when the meal was over.

Bilal shook his head. ‘No. Because tomorrow we are going to the festival of the marabouts.’

The festival was a little like a market.

‘What’s a marabout?’ I wanted to know.

Mum pointed out a small white building with a domed roof and a bolt on the door. ‘Marabouts are holy men, like saints, who live in these little houses.’

‘Is he in there now?’

Mum wasn’t sure. She asked Bilal.

‘Oh yes. He’s in there.’

‘Will he come out once the festival starts?’

Bilal looked amused. ‘No. It is only his spirit we celebrate.’

We walked towards the building. I peered on tiptoe over the white wall surrounding it.

‘For many years,’ Bilal said, ‘he is lying dead inside.’

Mum and I both pulled away.

Bilal’s brothers were erecting a large white tent. It was a tent like others that were going up around the edges of the festival. Round and cool inside. The women from each section of the family were laying out rugs and cotton spreads of material to sleep on. They sat and talked from under their veils while their smallest children slept.

‘They wanted Mum to wear a veil,’ Bea whispered.

‘Who did?’

‘The mother and the brothers and everyone else.’

‘Why didn’t she then?’

‘She said she wouldn’t.’

‘Are they angry?’ I looked over at the women resting, their eyes sharp above a square of black.

‘It’s hard to tell,’ Bea said.

If you stood very close to the veil you could see through the black and tell whether someone was wearing lipstick or not. I wondered if it was a special magic cloth.

‘Nylon,’ Mum said when I asked her.

When I woke, Ahmed had arrived. Ahmed was Bilal’s brother-in-law.

‘Ahmed is married to Bilal’s sister,’ Mum explained.

‘No,’ Bilal corrected her. ‘Ahmed is divorced from my sister.’

Ahmed had two other wives with him and several children. They spread out their belongings near to ours and the youngest wife tried to settle her baby who was crying. As she wrestled with her child, her veil floated up and I saw her face. She was pale and looked a little like Bilal’s sister Fatima who was fourteen and wearing a veil for the first time.

The baby kept on crying. Ahmed’s other wife took it from her and began to walk around the tent, rocking and soothing it with words.

Bea and I wandered out into the warm night. The circle of white tents had grown, stretching away round the marabout’s shrine. Outside each tent fires were burning and meat roasted on twisting sticks. Ahmed, Bilal and Mum sat by our fire. They were smoking a clay pipe. Passing it from one to another in a circle.

Ahmed began to sing. His voice was sad. He sang the Egyptian songs that played in the outdoor cafés in Marrakech. His voice rose and fell and caught in his throat with such pure sorrow that I was surprised not to see tears running down his face. Bilal joined in on a lower note with a smile on his lips as if to say it wasn’t his sad story he was singing.

I crawled on to Mum’s lap and basked in the melancholy music and the warmth of the fire. The sour smell from the burning pipe mingled with the roasting meat turning on its spit. It looked like a sheep and I wondered whether or not it was one of Abdul’s. If it was, I decided, thinking of Snowy, I would refuse to eat it. Much later that night, when the singing had spread from tent to tent and supper was finally ready, I forgot about my earlier resolutions and, along with Abdul, held out my hands for a kebab.

Mum washed my feet and hands in a bowl of cold water and insisted I change into my nightie. Abdul and his cousins were sleeping where they’d fallen, wrapped tight in their djellabas.

‘Can I have some powder on my feet, please?’ I asked, as much to keep Mum in the tent as to feel it, silky smooth between my toes.

She took a tin of Johnson’s baby powder out of her bag and sprinkled me a ration. Ahmed’s youngest wife, still rocking her tireless baby, watched us darkly from behind her veil. As I patted each toe dry, she laid her baby down and slowly unwrapped its clothes, revealing a damp red ring around its neck. Mum leant over and offered her the tin. She stared uncomprehending, until Mum shook a fine layer of white on to the baby’s neck. She smoothed it gently and the crying seemed to quiet a little. The lady held on to Mum’s hand. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she said in Arabic.

Mum pressed the tin into the woman’s hands. ‘Sprinkle a little every day,’ she said, pointing at the baby.

‘What about me?’ I hissed at her.

‘Shh.’

‘But it’s our only tin.’

Mum glared.

I put my head under the blanket. ‘I want Bilal,’ I wailed. When I refused to come out even to kiss her goodnight she relented a little and promised to ask Linda to bring some powder with her when she came to visit.

‘When will that be?’ I asked.

Mum tucked me in and sneaked a butterfly kiss that tickled before going out to rejoin the party.

‘Who’s Linda, anyway?’ I asked Bea, when she eventually came to bed.

‘You know… Linda.’ Bea said.

‘Linda?’

But Bea said she’d only tell me if I told her a story first and by the time I’d finished ‘The Adventures of a Spooky Carpet’ she was asleep.

There was everything for sale at the festival. Donkey-loads of water melons, pomegranates, blood oranges – the insides of which you could suck out through a hole in the skin. There was a stall with hundreds of pairs of babouches, the softest most beautiful shoes. They were mostly in yellow or light brown leather but some were black and patterned with stars of silver or gold. There was one pair, red with a zigzag of green, the toes of which curled up like magicians’ slippers, that made my eyes burn with wanting them. I was frightened to pick them up or even touch them, and the old man who sat among his slippers gave me no smile of encouragement.

‘If you could have any babouches you wanted in the whole world, which ones would you choose?’ I asked Mum.

She bent down to finger the leather. ‘I was thinking of making you and Bea some sandals…’ she said.

My heart fell.

‘Out of leather. With rubber soles. They’ll be very nice.’

‘But they won’t be like these.’

‘No, they won’t be quite like these,’ she said, and she drew me away.

By that evening news of Mum’s miracles with the baby powder had spread throughout the tent.

‘Oh yes, she is the wise woman from the West,’ Bilal said proudly, and he put his arm around her.

‘There is a lady Ahmed wants you to help,’ Bilal told Mum on our last night around the fire. Ahmed had been particularly impressed by the baby-powder cure. ‘He has invited us to visit with him.’

The white tent came fluttering down. We said goodbye to Bilal’s family who we would see again in a few days, and to Fatima who was my favourite sister and Abdul. We set off in a different direction with Ahmed and his two wives and their children. The baby’s rash had almost vanished, but it still screamed unceasingly. No one took the slightest bit of notice.

During our journey on a bus crowded with people who had all been at the festival, Ahmed explained through Bilal what he wanted Mum to do. ‘There is an aunt of Ahmed,’ he said, ‘who is sad because she has lost her favourite nephew in a car crash. Since he is dead she will not be happy to live.’

‘But what does he want me to do?’ Mum asked.

Bilal didn’t translate her doubts to Ahmed. ‘Just talk with her,’ he said, smiling assuredly. ‘Just visit and talk with her.’

The old lady lived in a room at the back of Ahmed’s house, which was large and airy with tiled floors and slatted shutters covering the windows, filtering in just enough light to see. Ahmed wanted Mum to go to her right away.

‘I want to come too,’ I said. I wouldn’t let go of her hand. I couldn’t let go. She mustn’t go alone into a dark room with a woman who wanted to die, I thought. She might never come out again.

‘Stay with the women,’ Mum ordered.

I looked over at the silent veiled wives who waited for me, and my breath caught in my throat. ‘Please,’ I appealed, my voice wild. ‘Bilal, tell her please.’

Mum stood unsure. I could feel her staring at me. ‘It’s just that they’re tired,’ she said, and we all walked in silence round to the back of the house.

The old lady was lying in her bed when Ahmed ushered us into the room. Startled by the light, she sat up. Her face was striped with thin lines of dried black blood where she had dragged her nails hard across it. My mother sat on the edge of the bed and rummaged in her bag. She pulled out a large bound book. It was her copy of the
I Ching
. She undid the twist in the velvet pouch Bilal had made for her and poured the three large coins into her hand, warming them in her palm as she always did before she told a fortune. Ahmed’s aunt watched her with a glimmer of light in her yellow eyes. Mum handed her the coins. They were Arabic coins with stars on one side and the head of the King on the other.

‘I want you to throw the coins for me,’ Mum said. Bilal spoke to the aunt softly in Arabic and she scattered the three coins on to the bedspread with a thin worn hand.

Mum made a line in pencil in the back of the book and nodded for her to throw again. The old lady threw the coins six times and Mum made a pattern of six broken and unbroken lines, three on each side of a space.