had arrived. We paid our debts and caught a train to Marrakech.
I was a babble of questions. ‘How long will it take to get there?’ ‘What’s the first thing we’ll do when we arrive?’ ‘Do you think Bea will be glad to see us?’ and ‘Will Bilal be back?’
Mum read her book. She was the only person I knew who could turn off their ears like shutting an eye. Sometimes I resorted to hitting her with my closed fist to get the answer to a question. Even that didn’t always work.
The train stopped at its first station. Mum shifted restlessly as I besieged her with questions. ‘Are we nearly there?’ ‘Will we stop at lots of stations?’ ‘When can I have something to eat?’
She stood up. The train was rumbling in its tracks and the trees on the other side of the platform were slipping slowly backwards. She grabbed my arm and, using our bag as a barricade, she pushed her way along the corridor, until through a blur of noise and panic we stood in the empty station and watched as our train thundered into the distance.
Mum didn’t offer any explanation. I decided not to mention the fact that my new sandals were now travelling on alone to Marrakech, tucked under a recently vacated train seat. Mum led the way out of the station.
The town looked familiar even though I couldn’t see why it should. It was only when we reached the iron gates opening on to the formal garden that I realized why we’d jumped from a moving train. We stood in the courtyard of the Zaouia and waited.
‘I just want to apologize to the Sufi.’ Mum was talking to me again. ‘I want to say that I understand now that their decision was probably right.’
The same red-bearded man came out to meet us. He nodded and smiled and gestured for us to follow him. ‘Allah akhbar,’ he muttered as he rushed us down an outside corridor, through the open doors of which the sounds of children playing seeped into the stillness of the courtyard.
The holy man threw open a door and showed us into a roughly whitewashed room. ‘You see we were expecting you,’ he said and he left us alone to rest before dinner.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The men were all in white and they knelt in a circle around Sheikh Bentounes, who lived with his family in the residential corridor two doors down from us. Sheikh Bentounes was a holy man. He was the head of the Zaouia and the leader of the Sufis. Mum kept a black-and-white photograph of him in our room.
The boys sat in the circle with the men and wore white skull caps like their fathers. Mum and I sat with the women in their everyday clothes. We sat in a separate group half shielded by a curtain and sometimes the women joined in the praying and sometimes they didn’t. I seized on this opportunity of showing off my turban, and secretly longed to sit strictly in full white uniform and pray in a circle around the sheikh.
The prayers sounded a little like the singing of the builders in the garden at Sid Zouin. Sheikh Bentounes breathed in deeply through his nose, pushing his stomach out under his soft white robes and then letting his voice turn into a song as he controlled his exhaling breath for minutes on end. The men and boys that faced him joined in a chorus that rose to a violent crescendo and then sank to a sigh as row after row bent their heads to rest their faces on the ground, leaving a soft silence hanging in the air with no noise but the whisper of perspiration trickling down the walls.
The prayers lasted for a whole afternoon and by the evening the walls of the room were awash with water. It collected in gullies and soaked into the carpet. One by one the children at the back of the room curled up on the floor and fell asleep as the men’s voices rose up and up like sounds of the distant sea.
Early on each day of prayer a sheep arrived and was tethered to a post in the courtyard. I preferred the sheep’s uncomprehending gaze to that of the children of Sheikh Bentounes. The sheikh with the red beard didn’t have any children. He spent the mornings tending his roses. Sheikh Sidi Muhammad of the red beard was my enemy. He had shouted at me on the first