Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,29

long time?’ I asked Bea.

‘Where?’

‘At the Barage.’

‘I think so.’ She splashed her face with water from the plastic bucket.

‘When we go back, will you go to school again?’

‘I might do,’ she said.

‘What do you want most in the whole world?’

Bea closed her eyes. Little drops of water glistened on her eyelids. ‘Mashed potato…’ she said, ‘and a Mars Bar.’

I threw sticks for the dogs. They lay on their sides and let the flies settle on the black skin of their smiles. ‘Fetch. Good dog. Fetch.’ They looked at me with sleepy eyes.

‘They’re not stupid,’ Bea said.

I leant down for another stick. Something rustled by my hand. I pulled away to see a scorpion, furious, trembling on its ice-thin, razor-sharp legs, scuttle towards me. It had poison in its tail, and its arms were whips of iron. ‘One sting from a scorpion and you could be dead within three hours.’ That’s what I’d heard. ‘If you don’t get to a hospital within the first hour…’ I was paralysed with fear. What if there weren’t any hospitals on the Barage? I was waiting for the sliver of scorpion to dart through the slits in my plastic sandal. It glided over the ground like a streak of lightning and at the last moment disappeared under a stone.

I fought for air. ‘Did you see it?’

‘What? See what?’

‘A scorpion.’ I pointed, my hands still trembling.

‘It was probably a lizard.’ Bea took a stick and went to prise up the stone.

‘Don’t,’ I pleaded. ‘Please don’t.’

‘Stand behind me,’ she ordered. ‘And if it comes out, we’ll run.’

I thought about the man who visited us in the Mellah. He let six scorpions run over his hands like water. Then he put them back in their box and asked for money. Mum said he must have done something to them, taken out their sting or something, but she gave him money anyway. The scorpion man. Once I found a dead scorpion in the garden and Akari crushed it between two stones and left it on our doorstep. ‘It will be a warning to all scorpions,’ he said, ‘not to enter this house.’ Like a magic spell.

Bea tipped the stone over. As it fell away, a swarming nest spilt out of the hollow and spread over the ground like a sheet of fire, tails flailing in the light. Bea pulled at my hand and we ran. Our feet barely skimming the ground and my heart beating loud enough to burst my ears. We ran through the field of sheep and out on to the road. We ran until we could no longer see the well. When we stopped running I had a stitch, and I remembered we’d left the dogs behind. Bea put her fingers in her mouth and whistled but they didn’t come.

We set off again at a marching pace. ‘Left, left, left my wife and five fat children.’ I copied Bea, swinging my arms. ‘Right, right, right in the middle of the kitchen floor.’ We marched on and on, hopping from one foot to the other at the end of each stanza until our breathing was low and calm again.

We turned off the road and cut back to the edge of the Barage. There was no beach at this point, just a ridge of rock where the water swirled and tumbled as it pulled away with each wave. We sat on the edge and threw stones into the water. There was something comforting about the sound they made as they hit the surface and disappeared. We watched the sun hanging just above the water and tried to catch it moving. At times it seemed to stay exactly still and it was the lake that rose up to engulf it.

By the time we started for home the sky was striped with gold and pink and green and we knew that in a moment it would be dark. Bea told me ‘Missee Piggin and the Forty Thieves‘. ‘Missee Piggin’ was a story Bea had made up about me. I was Missee Piggin and Bea, there had never been any doubt, was the Forty Thieves.

Mum held us just above the elbow and shook us. ‘Where have you been?’

I could see her teeth flash in the dark. The silver bracelets she wore on her arm were digging into my flesh. All I could think of was the nest of scorpions and that was hours and hours ago.

‘A man followed us with a knife,’ Bea said in a terrifying whisper. Mum loosened her