and also soft white caftans with thick embroidery round the neck. We stood at the entrance, which was like the mouth of a cave of treasure, and watched as dress after shimmering dress was pulled and shaken and laid on the ground before us. I chose a caftan that looked as if it had been painted. It had blocks of red in it like red liquorice and purple and orange flames. Mum said it made me look a little pale. But if that was what I wanted.
I slipped it over my T-shirt and shorts and felt the slippery nylon swish around my ankles. ‘Can I keep it on?’
Mum was busy dressing in a pale purple caftan. It swept the floor and made her look tall and mysterious with her black hair loose and hanging thickly down her back.
Bea chose one in cotton. It had patterns of leaves and stalks and flowers that swirled all over it in blue and green. ‘Of course it’ll fit,’ she said holding it up to her chin.
‘Don’t you want a shiny one like me and Mum?’ I asked, hoping she’d change her mind. But Bea folded up the dress and held it under her arm, so I knew that she’d made her decision.
A cloud of drumming hung above the main square, which Akari the Estate Agent called the Djemaa El Fna. Groups of men moved tirelessly from one spectacle to the next, forming circles to watch the dancers and the tambourine players, the African who dressed as a woman with cymbals on his wrists and a full silver tea-set on his head, the acrobats, and the snake charmers whose songs seeped across the square and mingled with a wailing like a bagpipe I couldn’t trace. A waterman roamed from corner to corner clanking his brass cups and calling to the thirsty to buy a drink of his warm and rusty water. I felt cool in my new dress. It was a smart, clean version of what the beggar girls wore, the beggar children who roamed the Djemaa El Fna, chattering and chasing each other, always on the lookout for a tourist to torment. ‘Tourist, tourist. Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola,’ they chanted in reedy voices as they marched beside their victim, until, unable to endure it a moment longer, the tourist would stop, open up his purse and send the beggar children spinning off, laughing and clutching a shiny new coin. The tourists, having shaken off their entourage, headed for the terraced hotel at the far side of the square. They sat in the shade and ate melon already sliced.
A few days before, Bea and I had slipped up there while Mum was shopping. She was buying dates and oranges to tempt Maretta. We sat at an empty table and fixed our hungry, mournful gaze on a lady with white hair. We watched unblinking as she skewered lump after sliced lump of melon with a silver fork.
But she’s only eating half of it, I thought, as the thick and discarded rind piled up. By the time the woman called us over I had convinced myself that I was really starving.
‘You win,’ she said, giving us each a slice. She spoke with an American accent.
We devoured the fruit right there in front of her, letting the sweet juice run down our arms until there was nothing left but a rind so thin it turned transparent when I held it up to the sun.
‘Well, well,’ she said, as I placed the rind proudly on the table. I was hopeful of another slice.
Bea pointed out our mother who was wandering between the stalls looking as if she were lost.
”That’s our Mum,’ I said, forgetting we were meant to be in disguise as Moroccan beggar girls, and we ran out of the hotel to be found.
We chopped vegetables – onions, potatoes, green beans, peppers and tomatoes – on the floor of the tiled kitchen. My mother lit the mijmar and began to cook. The mijmar was a large clay pot that had a fire alight inside it. The tajine was a dish that sat above it with a lid like an upside-down flowerpot, and everything that was going to be cooked had to cook in the tajine, unless it was couscous which could be steamed in a bowl above it.
‘Why don’t you go up and see if Maretta is eating with us tonight?’ Mum said to me when supper was nearly ready. I dragged my feet. We had been in the Mellah