stick.’
‘My God.’ Mum put her head in her hands.
‘Are you going to go again tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’ Bea was adamant.
‘Linda had five nappies stolen.’ I wanted her to know what she’d missed. ‘Mum thinks it might be the Henna Ladies.’
‘No, I do not. They probably just blew away.’
Linda muttered under her breath and fed Mob another piece of bread. ‘Prostitutes,’ she hissed.
CHAPTER TEN
Each morning I dressed in my black trousers and tucked my hair up into a hat. I was keeping watch for Bilal. I waited in the courtyard, amusing myself by walking along the white lines between the tiles, precariously balancing, one foot in front of the other, as if it were a tightrope. I was also on the lookout for stray nappies. Every day, whatever time of day or night Linda hung out her washing, when she came to take it in, at least one nappy would be missing. I was sure I had seen one of the Henna Ladies coming out of the downstairs toilet wearing one on her head like a turban. So far not one had been recovered.
‘If things carry on like this I shall have to think of going home,’ Linda said more than once.
I woke to the pounding on wood of feet and fists, and the screaming voice of a woman. I jumped up. Linda was not in her bed. Mum sat up sleepily, but on hearing the roar that was beginning to build outside, she sprang up and rushed out in her nightie. I watched her race round to where Linda was hammering. She was beating on the closed door of the Henna Ladies – the Nappy Thieves. She was shouting for them to come out. Ayesha’s grandmother hobbled out on to the landing. She stumbled to help drag Linda away. Linda clung, swearing, to the railings, and then the door opened and the two women stepped out, draped in bright silk, their hair loose.
‘Quick, Bea, come and look,’ I screamed.
The gallery was a flurry of cloth and hair and the woman from our left whose cushion had been ruined was hurling slippers at my mother’s head. Slippers, fruit, anything she could find. Her husband stood in the doorway and shouted. I looked over the railings for Moulay Idriss to come out of his little room but he was not at home. Mum picked up an orange that rolled along the landing. She held it in her strong hand and flung it back, hitting the cushion woman on the ear with a smack so ferocious that for a moment everything else was quiet.
I dragged on my trousers and ran round along the other side of the landing. I wanted to pull at the skirt of my mother’s nightdress and force her back into our room. I wanted her to be still and calm and never go out again. As I ran I slipped and fell, scraping my knee across the stone floor. I curled up on the ground and stared into the jagged cut across my trouser leg. Inside a graze was filling up with blood. I sobbed. Now Bilal would never see my trousers with a zip. I pulled myself up, blind with pity, my forehead swelling to a bruise. I headed for home, forgetting.
There was Mum, dragging the stove from John’s broken-down van. She was dragging it through the door. Dragging it with her along the landing. The people shrank away. She was trying to lift it. Throw it. Finally she hurled it. Her hands bleeding. It bounced and scraped along the landing, forcing people back into doorways. She followed in its wake. The blood from her fingers running down her arms. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ I could hear myself screaming as if it were someone else’s voice. Bea was behind me shouting in Arabic. The metal of the stove still clanked and smashed against the railings.
A hand on my shoulder made me turn and a woman’s arm drew me through a doorway into a lamplit room. Bea and I crouched behind a mound of cushions under a wall thick with hangings. The room was heavy with the clamour of outside and the woman stood in the middle of the room, anxiously watching the door. She was young and beautiful, dressed in a caftan threaded with gold. I had seen her husband, a rich man, waiting his turn to use the toilet by the stairs.
‘They want to find out how the poor people live,’ Ayesha had told us. ‘They