of black coffee and forgot to wipe away the marks it left on either side of her mouth. Mum said it was lucky they hadn’t stamped ‘undesirables’ in our passports. She said if we saw Dave or anyone who looked like Dave at the barrier at Tangier we mustn’t talk to him.
‘Is it very hideous to be an undesirable?’ Bea asked. Hideous was Bea’s and my favourite word. ‘Hideous’ and ‘Kinky’. They were the only words we could remember Maretta ever having said.
‘Hideous kinky. Hideous kinky,’ I chanted to myself.
‘It is… if you want to get into Morocco,’ Mum answered.
When we arrived in Tangier later that day after a short and sunny second crossing there was no Dave in sight. The officers waved us through with only a glance at our passports and everyone except Maretta shouted and yelled as loud as they could to celebrate.
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