Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,41

ground in a blanket of white: tiny oranges and lemons clustered among the leaves of trees that grew against the garden wall, barely visible behind a brier of pink roses that clung to its mud-baked bricks. In every remaining patch of grass, daisies, hollyhocks and snapdragons grew tall.

Our room was a short walk across the garden. It was built on to the back of the café, and if I stood by the adjoining wall I could hear the murmur of the men as they drank their coffee and talked. The room was white and newly painted and had two shelves built into the bricks. There was a mijmar in one corner and a pot to cook in. For sleeping there were straw mats and blankets. There was not a scorpion or even a cockroach in sight.

At the other end of the garden was a long, low room, built on top of the wall. It could only be reached by wooden steps and made me think of the witch’s house in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. It was called the Projection Room. Opposite the Projection Room was a whitewashed wall.

‘That,’ Akari said, ‘is where the films are showing. The people sit on benches in the garden and watch the films in the wall.’

Now the whitewashed wall stood in the middle of the garden as if it knew it had no purpose, and all the benches were gone.

‘Akari please start the cinema again,’ Bea begged him, but he shook his head stubbornly. ‘Now I am in the hotel business,’ he declared.

I had only ever seen one film. It was a film of Hamlet in Russian with Arabic subtitles. Even Mum couldn’t understand it. Mum said that Bea and I had sat through Bambi twice without a break at the Classic, but I didn’t remember.

That night, as we were preparing for bed, two men burst into our room. They were dressed in the baggy trousers and loose shirts of men who worked in the fields, and they stared at Mum with bright, hopeful eyes. Mum stared blankly back at them. No one spoke. Then one of the men made a circle with his thumb and index finger and pointed through it with his other hand. Encouraged, the second man did the same, and I watched entranced as they stood in earnest mime. Bea put her hands over her face and began to giggle and Mum’s bewildered frown knit into a furious flash of the eyes. She jumped up and in one swift movement shooed the men out like hens.

‘What did they want?’ I asked, but Mum couldn’t stop laughing long enough to tell me. Bea ‘crossed her heart and hoped to die’ she didn’t know.

Early each morning a group of men, in trousers so full they could be skirts, arrived in the garden to make Akari’s hotel dream come true. Where the benches for the outside cinema had been, a row of small rooms was to be built. The builders began by making bricks from mud and straw, casting them with oblong wedges in a wooden mould. Once the brick had set, it was tipped on to the ground to bake rock-hard in the sun. As the builders worked they chanted, filling the garden with a mysterious song that echoed between its walls. The chanting was led by the lead builder amidst a series of heavy breaths that matched the rhythm of his work. It was picked up and developed into a chorus by the others, eventually coming back to the first man who breathed new life into it and passed it on.

The whitewashed wall stayed where it was. Sometimes Bea and I would creep up into the Projection Room and stare at it for hours on end hoping to catch a story from the moving shadows thrown up by the men. When nothing happened I begged Bea to tell me the story of Bambi. Over and over again. There were bits of it she couldn’t remember and she said it was the singing builders that were putting her off.

The men worked until midday, when they laid down their tools, ate their lunch and fell asleep under the almond trees. During their siesta Bea and I began to build our own house. I hoped it might be a summer house for Mary, Mary-Rose and Rosemary, but Bea had plans on a grander scale. She wanted it to be a home for us. We started, like the builders, by making bricks. We moulded our mud and