me and talked, fixing me with eyes that glowed pale. Sunstroke, Mum would have said if she’d been awake. Henning talked on, hardly pausing for breath. I set my mind on the distant crackle of the radio and the chorus of crickets that hummed all around the truck. A dog began to whine, bursting into a frenzied bark. Henning hardly blinked. His words were heavy and laden and from time to time he stretched his throat and gulped.
I kept to my side of the truck. ‘Sufi, Medina, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola,’ I sang quietly. ‘Ramadan, Calisha, earrings and jellybeans.’ My voice gained strength. ‘Waa waa Khadija.’
Henning was silent.
‘Waa waa Khadija,’ I quavered. ‘Waa waa believe her. Waa waa cat fever. Waa waa Bea, Bilal. Beetroot, Beetrootlal. Lal lal Beeeelal.’ My voice rose and fell in an ever more practised imitation of Om Kalsoum.
Henning had stopped talking. I carried on mumbling and singing small victorious phrases. ‘The grand old Duke of York, Sheikh Bentounes, hey Helufa, he had ten thousand men… Mashed potato…’
Henning began to snore.
The air was sharp and cold and there was a pink sunrise turning the sky white. Our truck groaned up a steep hill. I stared at the wall of rock stretching away from the road in a gentle curve. I watched as it dissolved into sky. On the other side, the road fell away in a gulf of nothing. Sunrise and the occasional wheeling bird. The tyres scrunched along the cliff, sending showers of dry earth and pebbles falling forever over the edge. We were climbing a mountain. The road was not a road but a narrow ledge. A flat plain unfolded below, stretching away like a sea of brown paper. Scorched fields dotted with struggling trees and specks that might be goats nibbling a rare new overnight shoot.
Through the window of the high cab I could see the head and shoulders of the driver. He had one hand on the wheel as he steered the truck. He looked as though he might be whistling. I woke Mum. ‘We’re in the mountains.’
She stood up shakily. First she looked at the rock-face on her side of the truck and then she peered over my side into the chasm below. She started back.
‘I don’t remember there being mountains on the map,’ she said. ‘But then again…’
She gazed in silence at the stretch of plain, at the fields and tiny houses and at the changing colour of the earth.
‘Mum,’ I tried to coax her back.
‘Yes?’ She continued to hang, her arms and head dangling over the edge.
‘Mum, please…’ I begged, pulling at her dress.
‘I hope nothing decides to come the other way.’ She squinted past the driver to the steep and narrow road that twisted in a single lane ahead.
As the morning wore on the truck slowed to a crawl. Black and white goats looked down at us from paths in the rock. It was cooler in the mountains and the air was sweet and fresh. Mum draped a cloth over Henning’s head. ‘So he won’t be so crazy when he wakes up,’ she said.
Mum and I finished our loaf of bread and ate an orange each. The juice stuck to my hands and face and my arm began to itch.
‘I need to go to the toilet.’
Mum banged on the window of the cab. The driver looked round, taking his eyes off the road for a long, terrifying minute. I scratched my arm ferociously.
‘Stop. Stop. Arrête,’ Mum mouthed at him through the glass. The driver creased his eyes in incomprehension and turned away.
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ I moaned.
Mum slapped my hand to stop me scratching. ‘I’ll hold on to you and you pee over the edge,’ she said, hoisting me up on to the metal wall.
Henning lay motionless under his scarf.
Mum held me tight by the arms while I squatted on the ledge and tried to pee on to the road and not into the truck. As I was lifted back to safety a horn began to blare. It wasn’t our horn. It came from further up the mountain. It wound round the corners nearer and louder with each bend of the road. Our truck slowed right down and stopped. The driver opened his door and got out.
‘Algiers?’ Henning asked. He had woken up.
A truck almost identical to ours but carrying a half-load of sheep came to a halt a few feet away. The two men stood in the middle of the road and argued. They were making