Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,39
other, smaller pair were the colour of honeycomb and scattered with teddy bears, running, jumping and standing on their heads. I reached eagerly for them, but Aunty Rose stopped me, saying, ‘Bea, seeing as you’re the eldest would you like to choose which pyjamas you’d prefer?’
I stood still, willing her under my breath, ‘The blue ones, the blue ones,’ until I saw Bea slip her caftan over her head and take up the wrong pair. The trousers hung high above her ankles and the sleeves were ridiculously short. She buttoned up the shirt and beamed. ‘I’ll take these.’
She even said, ‘Thank you.’
Aunty Rose dressed me in the blue pyjamas. She tied the cord across my stomach in a bow, and turned the sleeves over three times. I kept expecting her to notice something was wrong, but she hummed contentedly and knelt to roll up the trouser legs.
We wore our pyjamas home. Mum admired them without criticism, only advising us to take them off before getting into bed.
We stood at the bus station and waved goodbye to Linda and Mob. Linda was crying and Mob was scrambling about all over the seat. ‘Take care of yourselves,’ she kept saying.
The bus began to pull away. ‘Good luck!’ Mum shouted, and Linda waved one of Mob’s nappies out of the back window to make us laugh.
Ramadan was over and Mum was allowed to eat with us again. No one could think of anything to say as we waited for our soup to cool. I volunteered a song to cheer Mum up, but for once she was unenthusiastic. She bought a piece of majoun and began to chew it slowly. I wondered if now that Linda and Mob had gone away Bilal would come back. Each time I went to ask about him the words stopped in my mouth. A distant fairy-tale voice told me that if you kept a wish secret long enough it would eventually come true. I bit my lip.
Akari the Estate Agent pulled up a chair. I forgot that we weren’t talking and offered him a sip of Fanta. Akari had a plan. He said it was a plan that he had dreamed especially for us. His cinema venture had fallen through. No one wanted to go to the cinema in Sid Zouin, so he had decided to turn the garden behind his house, which was already a café, into a hotel. We, he had decided, were to be his very first guests.
‘It is the most beautiful garden in die world,’ he sighed, his eyes half closed. ‘When the cinema seats have gone… Ha…’ He clapped his hands. ‘Then you will see.’
Mum said she thought it sounded lovely, but Bea still hadn’t forgiven Akari for the murder of Snowy, and I was worried that if we went away from Marrakech Bilal wouldn’t be able to find us when he came home. Akari extolled the virtues of Sid Zouin until he had moved himself to tears, and Mum pressed his hand and swore that it would be an honour for us to be the first guests at his hotel.
Mum promised Akari that as soon as our money arrived from England we were going to Sid Zouin. Every day she went to die bank to ask, but the man there just shook his turban at her and looked serious. We stopped eating at the cafés in the Djemaa El Fna and cooked in our room over the mijmar which smoked furiously under die broken bellows, making it impossible to breathe unless both doors were left open. The nights had become so cold Mum said sometimes she thought it was a good thing we were being forced to wait until spring before going to the country.
One morning early I was woken by her murmurings as she knelt on the mat. She sniffed between each prayer. In a pause that I hoped was the end I ventured, ‘Mum…’
‘Hello.’
I couldn’t think what else to say. ‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Neither can I,’ she said, and she knelt over my bed and whispered, ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’
We dressed quickly, careful not to wake Bea, and crept out into the beginnings of the morning. We walked hand in hand through the crisp, empty streets, die hoods of our burnouses warm and muffled round our ears. The maze of streets narrowed as we walked deep into the old walled city, the dawn lighting up the faded pink cement of the crumbling buildings.
We saw it from a