Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,53

his smile, sometimes interrupting her with a mumbled and ecstatic ‘Allah akhbar’, which I knew meant ‘God is great’, and he made me think of the Hadaoui and wonder if they knew each other.

I waited for hours and hours for Mum to finish talking. Henning had fallen asleep on his cushion and every so often he began to snore. I shook his shoulder so that he groaned and rolled over and there was a gap of a few minutes before he started up again.

After a final pot of tea the red-bearded man led us out into the courtyard. He walked us through the garden to the gates, which he opened himself. For a moment Mum looked blankly at him.

‘We can’t stay?’ She asked, incredulous, her voice rising to a shout. ‘But we’ve come so far!’

I pulled at her dress. Don’t shout. Don’t shout, I prayed. Mum’s voice rang through the calm courtyard with its rose bushes and its well-raked garden. The holy man walked calmly away without a backward glance and disappeared into the mosque. We stood in the road: Mum flushed with anger, me with my eyes on the ground, and Henning, sleepy and baffled, a little cheerful smile on his lips that now we would be travelling together after all on the last lap of the journey.

We went straight to the British consulate in Algiers to see if our money had arrived. It hadn’t.

‘But that’s impossible,’ Mum insisted.

‘I’m afraid it’s very possible,’ the clerk said and grinned as if he had told a funny joke. Mum sat down on a bench and burst into tears. The British consulate clerk turned pale. He pulled out a large newly ironed handkerchief and edged round the counter to comfort her.

‘I absolutely don’t have a penny,’ she sobbed, ‘and then there’s the child…’

He looked over at me. I was standing by a potted plant pretending to be someone else. I’d prefer to starve! I thought grandly as I watched him produce a thick leather wallet from his trouser pocket and offer personally, in a hushed voice, to lend my mother money. We sat on the steps of the British consulate while Mum wiped her eyes and counted out the notes.

‘What with your father and the Moroccan postal service it’s a miracle anything ever gets through at all,’ she sighed.

A man who was originally from Hastings invited us to stay. He had come to the consulate to apply for a permit to marry his girlfriend. He was teaching English as a foreign language and his girlfriend who was German was teaching German.

‘What about Henning?’ I asked. He had gone off to find a friend of a friend. We hadn’t said goodbye or anything.

‘Oh, Henning will be all right,’ Mum said, and we followed the teacher along a wide avenue of orange trees.

We stayed in the teacher’s flat for a few days and then in the flat of a friend of his who also taught languages. Mum made me sing to them and asked them to guess what language it was. They pretended they didn’t know. I told them it was the language I had used in my last life. No one said anything but I could tell they were impressed.

Every day we returned hopefully to the consulate to ask about our money. Every day the answer was the same. Rather than outstay our welcome with the teachers, Mum decided we would wait for our money in a Youth Hostel she had heard was cheap and on the outskirts of Algiers. We had a little borrowed money left and we took a bus.

The bus ride, it turned out, was a full day’s journey and we arrived at the Youth Hostel late in the afternoon. The Youth Hostel was a large white house covered in a clinging pink vine of bougainvillaea. It stood in the shade of a palm tree and the land behind it ran down to the sea. I was glad we had come.

‘Of course. A room for two.’ The man who appeared seemed pleased to see us. ‘A room that looks over the sea with two beds.’ Then he frowned a deep frown and reconsidered. ‘But first there is a question you must answer.’ He fixed Mum with an interrogative stare. ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Youth Hostels Association?’

Mum was tired. She reached for my hand. ‘Is that important?’

‘Important? But of course it is important. Otherwise there is no point in a Youth Hostel. I have