to abide by the rules of the Association.’ He pointed to a small triangular plaque by the side of the door. His word ‘Association’ lasted for a long time.
Mum clutched my hand so tightly her rings cut into my flesh. ‘I am a foreigner in your country and the book of Islam tells me that it is the duty of every servant of Allah to give hospitality to strangers. Surely,’ she said, her voice calm, ‘it is more important to abide by the laws of Islam than by those of a Youth Hostel.’
There was a silence and then his face changed. ‘You are right, of course…’ he said and he showed us to our room.
There was no one else staying at the Youth Hostel. The owner’s nephew worked there as a caretaker and slept in a small room by the kitchen. Each morning before setting off for school he left a plate of bread and dates on the table for our breakfast. His uncle was a sculptor. He lived in a house in the village where he would often hold parties and the people who came to them were also sculptors or painters or what Mum called the Intellectual Set. Some were from the village and some travelled a long way especially. Sometimes the only food at the party was a tray of biscuits that I was never offered. One night I helped myself. The biscuit crumbled in my mouth and tasted of majoun. I ate another, and then the tray was lifted up above my head and whisked away and a lady in a shimmering red caftan tousled my hair and laughed into my face. I spent the evening looking for Bea. I wandered from group to group of talking, dancing people, staring into their faces for a sign of her. And all the time I knew she was at Sophie’s house, and even if she wanted to find us she wouldn’t know where we were. I wanted her to play a game of Hideous kinky tag with me.
Mum and I discovered the ruins of a forgotten village. We went there most days to eat our lunch and trace our way through the mosaic of streets and courtyards and the rooms of houses that had once been a Roman town. Wild freesias and clumps of silver grass grew between the stone foundations, and the scent of the flowers hung over the town in an aromatic haze. We lounged in the sun and looked over the town and out to sea.
Mum was making me sandals. The soles were cut from thick leather in the shape of my feet, and the leather was sewn on to rubber from the tyre of a car. Now she was stitching short strips to the sides of each shoe. One round loop for my toe and two more to hold my feet in.
I drew pictures of houses. The houses weren’t houses that I had actually seen, they were houses from books. I copied from memory the house that Madeleine had lived in when she woke up in the night with appendicitis and the house that was a hospital where they took her for an operation. I drew the house that was a shop from which Charlie bought his first bar of chocolate and the very small and shabby house where his grandparents George and Georgina and Joe and Josephine slept in two double beds and never got up.
‘When we go home, can we live in a house with a garden?’
‘All right.’ Mum was decorating my sandals with beads.
‘Do you mean all right yes or all right maybe?
‘I mean,’ she said, rethreading her needle, ‘all right hopefully.’
We put off going back to Algiers and the overly sympathetic clerk from the British consulate for as long as we could. We spent whole days in the Roman town and sometimes stayed on with pockets full of dates to watch the sun setting over the sea. No one else ever arrived at the Youth Hostel and our room with two beds began to feel like home.
One day Mum worked out that we had exactly enough money to pay the sculptor and get a bus back to the city and not a dirham more. Regretfully we said goodbye to the caretaker, who was still as shy and quiet as on the first day and, it seemed, had never got used to sharing his house with strangers, and went back to Algiers.
To the relief of everyone, especially the clerk, our money