nearly a year old, and we don’t even know her name.’
Mum and Linda laughed so hard that I had to pat their backs to stop them choking.
‘Well, my mother still wouldn’t know,’ Mum said when she had recovered, ‘except a friend of hers saw me waiting at a bus stop in Camden Town with a baby in a pushchair and Bea who was nearly three. “I didn’t know your daughter was married,” she said to her when they next met.’ Mum wiped her eyes. ‘I’d have given a lot to have seen her face.’
Linda had been persuaded to stay until after Christmas.
‘Will we have a stocking?’ I looked around anxiously, realizing for the first time there were no chimneys in the Hotel Moulay Idriss.
‘I’m sure Father Christmas will think of something,’ Mum assured me.
Last Christmas we hung up a pair of Mum’s long socks. A sock each. This year she didn’t have any socks. She hadn’t packed any. I thought about our Christmas tree all glittering with tinsel and wondered if it was still standing on the front lawn where we’d planted it, its cut-out golden angel on top. Bea and I had waved at it through the back windows of John’s van as we drove away. I sat on the doorstep while Mum meditated and Linda counted nappies, and tried to remember all the things and people and places Bea and I had waved at.
*
‘Would you like to visit Luna and Umbark?’ Mum sat down beside me on the step. We could hear Linda hissing inside the room. ‘… five, six… Aha!… I knew there were eight of those. One… two… Damn.’
Luna was the lady with the white hands. She was married to Umbark who was a dancer with the Gnaoua. Luna was from Denmark. We had sat with them the evening before at a table in the outside café waiting for the sun to set. Until the sun set we were not allowed to eat or even drink Fanta because it was the first day of Ramadan.
‘What is Ramadan?’ I asked.
‘It’s a Muslim festival. For twenty-eight days you mustn’t eat, drink or smoke between the hours of sunrise and sunset and for a month no one must have sex.’
‘What’s sex?’
Linda started to explain, but Mum quieted her so we could listen to Luna’s story.
Luna had come to Morocco three years before. ‘Looking for some fun times and adventure.’ She nodded at Mum from under her veil. ‘But then I met Umbark.’ She had met Umbark soon after she arrived in Morocco and they had fallen in love.
Umbark sat silently by and listened to Luna’s story. He was as tall and thin and black as Luna was tall and thin and white. Twins from a fairy tale. Since their marriage Luna lived her life as a strict Muslim woman. She even stayed at home in Marrakech when Umbark travelled to Germany in the summer months to work as part of a human pyramid in the circus. By the time Luna finished her story the sun had almost set. The tables in our café and in the other cafés in the square were fast filling up and the waiters rushed about placing steaming bowls of harira in front of each customer.
‘It is traditional to break the fast each evening with a bowl of this soup,’ Luna told us.
So we ordered our harira and sat staring at it, waiting for night to officially descend. A silence settled over the square. Then as the sky turned red behind the Koutoubia a siren rang out and lamps were lit in the minarets of every mosque. The swollen voice of a holy man chanted the day’s end from the top tower, his voice drifting in and out of the breeze, and as the prayer tailed away a calm settled over the city.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Luna and Umbark lived in one small room in a street in the Mellah not far from our old house. Luna opened the door to us dressed in a plain white caftan and without her veil. Her face was round and golden white and her blue eyes watered when she smiled.
‘Come in, come in,’ she said, leaning down to kiss me.
There was nothing in the room except a mattress covered in woven rugs and a mijmar on which an iron pot bubbled and stewed, giving out the delicious smell of tajine.
‘Please, I am not expecting you to fast also.’ Luna glanced at the pot. ‘So I have made something for your lunch.’
Mum’s