Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,43

sleep.

Mum read aloud from the Ant and Bee book while I sat, wrapped in a blanket, on her lap.

‘Feeling better?’ she asked when it was finished, which was very soon as there was only one word on most of the pages.

‘Are you going to write a letter to Bilal and tell him to come and visit?’ I asked.

Mum flicked her finger through the book. ‘I will,’ she answered hesitantly, ‘but first we’ll have to wait until he writes to us. If I wrote a letter now I wouldn’t know where to send it.’

There was a silence as Mum continued to flick through the pages. Bea lay on her back and stared up at the ceiling.

‘Doesn’t he know where we are then?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Mum said.

‘But if we don’t know where Bilal is and Bilal doesn’t know where we are,’ I was working it out, ‘then even if he wanted to write a letter he wouldn’t be able to, would he? Would he?’

I was delighted by my theory.

Mum shifted me off her lap. ‘He knew where to write when we were at the hotel for months and months…’ She sneezed and then she began to cry. ‘He knew where to write then.’

Bea came and held Mum’s hand and stroked her hair. Mum went on crying. She kept blowing her nose between her fingers and flicking them clean outside into the grass like the Moroccans always did because they didn’t believe in handkerchiefs. Mum said they thought the idea of carrying a piece of snot wrapped in material around in your pocket for days and days was disgusting. Bea kept talking to Mum. She was saying all sorts of things to try and cheer her up. I couldn’t think of anything to say except, ‘Oh Mum, please stop crying,’ which made her cry even harder so that her shoulders shook.

Eventually Mum stood on the doorstep and blew her nose for the last time. Bea made supper from the bread and honey left over from breakfast and we sat in the garden and ate and watched the sun set on the other side of the stone wall.

‘Let’s stay here for as long as you want, Mum,’ Bea said, and I agreed by nodding my head enthusiastically.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Akari’s builders spent days digging ditches so that the walls of the hotel could begin underground. They sang and worked and pretended not to notice when we stole straw from their stack or borrowed the sieve to sift stones out of the dry earth. We decided against building foundations for our house even though Pedro tried his hardest to persuade us of their importance. ‘One earthquake,’ he said, ‘and BANG!’

Every day we moulded new oblongs of mud and laid them in the sun to dry.

‘Pedro Patchbottom, Pedro Patchbottom, please come and help us build our house.’ Bea and I followed him through the garden, pulling at the patches of material that held his jeans in place, but he said if we wouldn’t take his advice about the foundations then he couldn’t help us any further. Pedro Patchbottom was lying. It was easy to see he just didn’t want to help. All he ever wanted to do was to sit under the almond trees with Mum and listen to her read in her story-telling voice. She read to him from a thick book with a picture of a yogi on the front.

‘What is a yogi?’ I asked.

‘A very holy man.’

‘Like the Hadaoui?’

‘Yes, a little like the Hadaoui.’

The picture on the front of the book was of an old man with long white hair sitting cross-legged with the soles of his feet turned upwards.

‘What happened to him?’ Bea asked.

‘He’s sitting in the lotus position,’ Mum explained. ‘It’s called the lotus position because his feet look like the petals of a lotus flower.’ She crossed her right foot over to demonstrate how it could be done and pulled the left into place, turning the soles of both feet upwards. She froze for five seconds before her legs sprang apart and she sighed with relief.

‘Look, I can do it.’ Bea sat straight-backed and proud, her legs bent in front of her like little flowers. She proved her point by remaining like that while Mum finished the chapter. As hard as I tried, I could only bend one leg at a time without tipping over backwards. For once I was grateful Bilal wasn’t there.

‘Is he holy like the man with the mantras?’ I asked.

‘That’s right.’ Mum was impressed. ‘So you remember the