Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,45

night and the air was full of the sounds of animals. Donkeys screaming to one another, dogs barking, chickens squawking and the songs of birds that never sang at night. All around my head a thousand crickets hummed and buzzed. I shifted in my blanket. I was so tightly wrapped I could hardly move my arms. Bea was lying next to me, similarly wrapped, softly and peacefully sleeping.

I struggled to sit up, I could see the open doorway of our house flickering in candlelight, but not a shadow to be seen of Mum. Then I heard voices from across the garden. Jeannie worrying and crying and Pedro swearing in his own language. The voices moved nearer, and my mother appeared with Scott, half dragging, half carrying, a limping Pedro. Jeannie zigzagged through the trees. She had nothing on except a pair of Aertex knickers.

‘My God, I can’t believe this is happening,’ she wailed. Her body was white and lumpy in the moonlight.

Scott was wearing blue pyjamas a little like my own, except I never wore mine for sleeping. Mum was still dressed in her caftan. Pedro limped naked between them. They laid him gently in the grass. He moaned and closed his eyes.

‘You silly fool,’ Mum laughed fondly and kissed him on the lips. Pedro moaned even louder and then began to laugh.

Bea woke up. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked, untangling herself from the blanket.

‘Pedro jumped out of the Projection Room window,’ Mum said as if it were an everyday occurrence.

‘Why?’

Pedro opened his eyes. ‘Because where I come from that’s what we do.’

Scott was feeling Pedro’s leg between the ankle and the knee. ‘I don’t think it’s broken.’

Pedro groaned.

‘You’ve probably just sprained it.’

‘Do you think it’s safe to go inside yet?’ Jeannie asked. She was shivering. Mum offered her my blanket.

‘No, never go back inside.’ Pedro was adamant. He shifted on to his elbow. ‘Not until the animals are quiet.’

We sat in the grass and listened to the alarm of every bird and animal for miles and miles around.

‘I was sitting up reading, and feeling unusually peaceful and happy,’ Mum said, ‘when I heard a convoy of articulated lorries travelling at great speed down the village road. I carried on reading and then I thought: how can there be a convoy of lorries travelling at great speed through Sid Zouin? It wasn’t until the house began to shake that I realized it was an earthquake. An earthquake! I thought. How lovely.’

Pedro sat up and looked at her as if she were mad.

‘And then I remembered that I was meant to be a responsible adult. I grabbed the children and carried them out into the garden, like you’re supposed to, but the most fantastic thing was’ – she looked at us, her eyes soft with pride – ‘they both slept through the whole thing.’

Bea was furious. ‘You should have woken me,’ she said.

I lay back and pressed my body through the dewy grass, hard against the earth. I was hoping to catch a last tremor. ‘I’m a very heavy sleeper,’ I could tell Bilal or Aunty Rose or anyone. ‘I even sleep through earthquakes.’

We stayed up all night waiting for the animals to quiet and listening to Pedro’s earthquake stories. When he told how at the first rumble he had jumped out of bed, flung himself through the nearest window only to sprain his ankle and hit his head on a brick, no one could restrain themselves from laughing.

With the glimmer of morning we discovered the café to be unshaken and the Projection Room, much to Pedro’s annoyance, was still safely perched on the wall. The only thing in the garden that had suffered any damage was Bea’s and my nearly finished house. It lay transformed into a pile of broken bricks.

Pedro cheered up immediately. ‘Foundations…’ he said. ‘What did I tell you? One earthquake and…’

‘We know,’ Bea said, ‘and BANG!’

The Cadi who was the mayor of the village examined Pedro’s ankle and declared it sprained.

‘But badly sprained,’ Pedro insisted.

From then on the seven wooden steps that led up to the Projection Room became an impossible hurdle. Mum invited Pedro to move in with us. Bea was not pleased. Bea was so angry I couldn’t decide if I minded one way or the other. All the same I joined her in a ‘persecute Pedro Patchbottom’ campaign that ended a week later when we rose at dawn to unpick his one and only pair of trousers. We worked away through die early morning