guru?’
I did.
‘And do you remember the mantra he gave you?’
Bea looked slyly at me.
‘Don’t tell anyone your secret word,’ the Indian guru had said, ‘but repeat this mantra every day one hundred times.’ He tied a piece of dark red cotton around my wrist. I wanted to tell him I could only count to four which was how old I was, but the room was dark and thick with incense and Mum had told me to try hard and behave.
There were a lot of people waiting to be given mantras. The Indian guru, John had said, was only in London for a few days and we were lucky to catch him before we set off for Morocco in the van. Out of all the people who had come to see the guru I was the first to be taken into his room because I was the youngest. As I waited for Bea, and then Mum, to come back out, I could feel people staring at me. I played with my new bracelet and said my mantra over and over, wondering what would happen if I were ever to reach a hundred.
As soon as Bea had seen the guru she came and stood very close to me and whispered menacingly in my ear, ‘I’ll tell mine if you tell yours.’
I flushed and my heart began to beat with the effort of pretending to be deaf. I kept my eyes fixed on a woman who wore a dress covered in tiny round mirrors. She had a duffle coat over the top.
Eventually Bea gave up.
At some point on a long journey by van or train or communal taxi, I regretted my pious attitude and relented. But Bea had changed her mind. ‘You had your chance,’ she said, ‘and you missed it.’
I pleaded and begged, even offering to tell mine first, but she was hard as steel, open to no bribes and holier than thou.
It was late in the afternoon and Mum still lay with Pedro under the almond trees. Bea and I sat on the garden wall and waited for the singing women to return from the fields. They travelled to and from their work in open trucks, their bright caftans fluttering over the heads of the babies that slept on their backs. We listened for their singing when the trucks were just a cloud on the road, and as they drew near we perched on the very edge of the wall and prepared to wave. The trucks rattled down the one street into the village in a burst of noise and colour. The women wore scarves over their hair and the shiny cloth of their dresses stood out in blocks of pink and green. They didn’t wave back. Their rich voices filled the afternoon quiet, soon fading away again as the trucks, half empty now, rumbled out along the road.
‘All right then…’ Bea said when the dust in the street had resettled. I knew what she was about to suggest. I could tell she had been thinking about the mantra. ‘I’ll tell mine if you tell yours.’
‘All right,’ I began, but just as I was forming the words in my mouth into my unspoken prayer, I realized I’d forgotten it.
‘Go on then,’ Bea was impatient.
I caught my confession just in time. I turned to her with great solemnity. ‘Don’t tell anyone your secret word,’ I said in the guru’s husky voice.
Bea nearly pushed me off the wall. ‘Helufa!’ she cursed as she clambered down the rose vine.
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. I promise,’ I called, my moment of triumph fading fast.
‘You had your chance and you missed it.’ Bea danced across the garden and slammed the door into our room.
I sat on the wall and wondered how it was that Bea always won, whatever the game. However hard I copied and stored the rules, at the last moment she always twisted them, added something new, and won. I tried to conjure up the missing word. I had a suspicion it had been forgotten a very long time ago, long before I had begun offering to swop it in the back of the van. I concentrated hard and hoped my mantra would separate itself from all the other words I knew. I waited, watching the sun set slowly over the fields as the crickets whistled and every cock in the village crowed the end of the day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I woke up to find I was lying in thick grass. It was the middle of the