Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,52

grow dark you only had to notice and it was dark. It seemed pointless to keep on walking. We sat down on a wall.

I closed my eyes and imagined Bea lying in a bedroom full of toys under a smooth white sheet, too full of mashed potato to sleep. Maybe she’d go back to visit Aunty Rose and Aunty Rose would give her presents and home-made biscuits and glasses of lemonade. She would have Khadija all to herself and then if Bilal came back she might tell him that me and Mum had left her behind and he’d feel sorry for her and she’d become his favourite. I wondered what Mum’s face would have looked like if I’d said that I wasn’t going to the Zaouia either. Little shivers ran across my skin. I knew I could never have done it.

I must have fallen asleep because when Ali stepped out of the darkness and introduced himself I woke up with a start. Ali knew of somewhere we could spend the night. It was a mud hut with a roof made of straw. The hut had one room and it was round. Moonlight flooded in through the doorway and lit up the rush mats that covered the floor.

Henning had a pack of cards. Henning, Mum and I sat in a circle and played snap. Ali had disappeared without a word as soon as we were settled in. It was very hard to play snap by moonlight but it was the only game we could get Henning to understand. Every time someone said ‘snap’ Mum lit a match to see if they were right. The game went on for ever, and when eventually Henning won we started again. I was too hungry to sleep.

We heard them before they arrived. A murmur of voices and the occasional giggle as they drew near. We stopped playing and listened. Ali appeared in the doorway. He was carrying something in his arms. He squatted down over our cards and unwrapped his bundle. Three round white loaves of bread. Their hot, sweet smell filled the hut. Ali urged us to eat.

‘You must thank your sister from us.’ Mum was deeply moved. ‘Many times.’

There were two other boys with Ali. They hovered in the doorway. One of them carried a portable record-player and the other gripped a pile of records. While we devoured Ali’s bread, his friends set up the machine and soon the heavy, sweeping sounds of Egyptian music wove magic into the air like scent.

We found where the track joined the main road and waited in hope for our next lift. Ali and his friends had packed up their records and disappeared at dawn. They had to milk the goats, they said. After they were gone Mum mumbled something about making an early start. Then she fell asleep. Now it was scorchingly hot. I tucked my hair into a turban. When I wore it I could decide whether I wanted to be a boy or a girl.

A car stopped. It was the first car we had seen since leaving the vineyard. It was driven by a French lady who was on her way to look at rock paintings in the Sahara Desert. She invited us to go with her. I was very keen. One of my new ambitions was to see a mirage and according to Tintin books the desert was the place to find one. Mum, I could see, was tempted, but she had set her heart on the Zaouia and she would not be persuaded otherwise. The French lady was going to spend the night at the house of another French lady on her way to the Sahara and she said the least we could do was to accept one night’s hospitality. The next morning she would drop us at the Zaouia herself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Henning, Mum and I stood in the courtyard of the mosque and waited for someone to appear. Henning had been told several times that this was the Zaouia and not Algiers and that Algiers was further down the road, but he followed us into the courtyard anyway.

A man came out to meet us. He had a wild red beard that submerged his face up to the eyes, and his mouth was a crescent when he smiled. We followed him into a room made completely of tiles like the Hammam where we washed in Marrakech. We sat on cushions and drank mint tea while Mum talked. The man listened and kept up