Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,3
was nice to go to sleep on ground that wasn’t rushing away from under you.
‘I’ll have to use those insurance stamps to have us towed into Marrakech,’ John said from the other side of Mum.
‘Insurance? You?’ Mum’s astonished voice came back. And Bea asked, ‘What’s “towed”?’
We sat in the truck, even Maretta, and watched our van dangling along behind us on a rope with John at the wheel. At first Maretta hadn’t wanted to move, so John had picked her up and put her in the truck himself. He picked her up easily like a child and she didn’t struggle or even move. Now she sat in the front with the Arab man who was driving and who had looked for a long time at the insurance which John said was like money but was really just a lot of bits of paper.
I kept wondering how we’d get home again now that our van had to be dragged everywhere. I thought it might be easier if we could take a boat straight to London. Then I must have fallen asleep. I dreamt about John and Maretta and their little girl who had stayed behind in England, waving to us from a gangplank. We were on a ship and everyone was throwing rolls of toilet paper to their friends on land but we didn’t have any toilet paper to throw.
When I woke up I was sitting on Mum’s lap in a tiny white room. Mum was talking in French to a small, plump man who smiled when he spoke and clapped his hands together and laughed at the end of every sentence. Bea looked out of a window through which bright white sunlight was falling. The van was parked opposite. It looked tired and dusty. A small crowd of children and flies were beginning to gather.
Akari the Estate Agent, whose shop we were in, poured mint tea into glasses. He poured it from a great height without spilling a drop and then, when the glasses were full, he tipped the tea back into the pot and poured it out again in as high and perfect an arc as before. The tea that was finally allowed to settle was thick and yellow like the eye of a cat.
‘Ask him if I can leave the van here,’ John said, ‘just until I can sell it or get it going again.’
Akari nodded and smiled in response to the translation. ‘He says he has a house we can rent in the Mellah. He’ll take us round to see it now.’
Akari was already locking up his little shop.
The Mellah was the Jewish quarter of the city. Our house was plain and whitewashed with three bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen and sitting-room below. There was a yard with flowers pushing up between the paving-stones. Maretta walked straight into the house and sat down on the floor. The floors were all tiled with tiles that went halfway up the walls. There was no furniture.
‘Akari says we’ll need a mijmar,’ Mum said, looking round the bare kitchen.
‘What’s a mijmar?’
‘It’s a stove for cooking. With charcoal. And we’ll need some bellows.’
‘I’ll get someone to bring the mattresses from the van,’ John said, and he disappeared.
‘What are bellows?’
‘Bea, what are bellows?’ But she was out in the garden, kicking at the poppies and the marigolds and searching for salamanders among the loose stones of the wall.
That night, when Mum read to us in the upstairs bedroom, I leant against her and asked, ‘Are we there?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’re there. Is it what you thought it would be like?’
I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought what it would be like.
‘How long are we going to stay?’ Bea asked.
‘Oh I don’t know. As long as we want.’ She started to read our story to herself. Bea and I waited for her to finish. ‘You could go to school here if you wanted,’ she added.
‘What about me? Couldn’t I?’
She stroked the top of my head. ‘Maybe in another year or so. When you’re as old as Bea.’
I started to sulk, but I was too tired to keep it up. Before I knew it my clothes were being pulled away, up over my head, and I felt the unfamiliar smoothness of a cool, clean sheet catch against my legs.
CHAPTER THREE
After wandering for some time through the lanes of the indoor market, we stopped at a stall that was very much like the others. There were rows and rows of shiny, coloured dresses packed against the walls,