Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,30

grip.

‘We hid until it was dark. We hid behind a tree.’

Mum rocked backwards on her heels. ‘My God!’ she said, and she hugged us both so tight I could hardly breathe. ‘Please, please, don’t wander off on your own again.’ She turned to Bea and looked at her straight in the face. ‘I’m going to tell you this because you’re the eldest.’ Her voice was low and serious. ‘There are people out there who are dangerous. This time you’ve been lucky, but I want you to promise me to be careful.’

‘I promise,’ Bea said, very solemnly.

‘I promise too,’ I vowed, unasked.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We could hear Mob’s familiar cry as we trudged up the dusty, tiled steps of the Hotel Moulay Idriss. There was no one in the courtyard or on the terrace but the air was full of steaming couscous and the smell of chopped coriander. Low murmurings and the clinking of glasses drifted out through open doorways. In our room something was burning. Linda was bending over the mijmar and the room was full of smoke.

‘Thank God you’re back.’ She was close to tears as she greeted us. ‘I’ve been so worried.’

Mob’s screams rose above the commotion. Mum picked her up and laughed in surprise. ‘And what’s happened to you?’ She said, bouncing her in her arms.

‘We ran out of powdered baby food.’ Linda indicated Mob’s changed appearance. ‘And she doesn’t seem to like anything else.’

Mob was no longer the solid pink baby she had been. She had transformed into a thin brown child with only the same puzzled eyes to know her by.

‘Also…’ Linda sat down lumpily on a mattress. ‘We’ve run out of money.’

‘What about your job?’

‘There turned out to only be ten poems in his head. So there was nothing else for me to type.’

‘Surely he could have thought up some more?’

‘That’s what I kept saying.’ Mum and Linda began to giggle. ‘But apparently not.’

Mum collected her letters from the Post Office and the money that had arrived at the bank, and we all went to eat at our old café in the Djemaa El Fna. The waiter, the cook and the manager all welcomed us as if we had been away for ever, and we took a table right on the edge of the square, half in and half out of the shade.

Mum was wearing her Biba dress and her eyes sparkled. ‘Whatever you want for lunch,’ she announced.

‘Fanta please,’ I sang every time the waiter passed. ‘Fanta please.’

We ate Moroccan salad and a plate of chicken tajine that was almost the size of the table and arrived with its flowerpot hat on.

As we ate Mum looked through her letters. ‘My mother is praying that we’ll all be home safe and sound for Christmas,’ she read.

‘Christmas? Do you get Christmas here?’

‘And she hopes the children are looking after their teeth.’ She frowned. Our one tube of toothpaste had run out in the first few weeks of spring in the Mellah. My Fanta gurgled through its straw.

‘John and Maretta are having a baby.’ She turned to Linda.

‘A baby? Haven’t they got one already, a little girl?’

‘Yes.’ My mother lowered her voice. ‘But she was taken into care.’

Linda sighed. ‘I remember now.’

‘What’s care?’

Mum folded up the letter and slipped it into its envelope. ‘And that’s enough Fanta for one day,’ she said.

‘Now Mob isn’t so heavy, can I carry her on my back?’ Bea asked quickly, gulping down die remainder of her bottle before any more serious ban could be declared.

Linda shook out her shawl and strapped Mob on, tight across Bea’s back. ‘Don’t go too far,’ she shouted after us as we slipped off into the crowd to find Khadija and the beggar girls who roamed the square.

We stopped to watch the Gnaoua as they danced like Russians to their brass clackers and drums. Mob stared transfixed over Bea’s shoulder as the men squatted and kicked out their legs.

‘It’s the Fool,’ Bea whispered, pointing to a dirty and dishevelled man dancing wildly on the fringes of the group. ‘I’ve seen him before.’

As we watched, the Fool took a particularly abandoned leap, tripped, and landed on his back, ripping his threadbare djellaba so that it fell away and left him stretched out naked on the ground. The crowd tittered. The Fool picked himself up and, with a moment to fasten his cloak, worked himself back into the dance.

When the music stopped, the Gnaoua offered him a drink. He grinned, dribbling at his new friends, and tried to clasp