Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,18

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