Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,56

day when I climbed into the rose bed to sniff the scent of a giant yellow rose. Sheikh Sidi Muhammad had shouted and waved his arms and rushed over to me and pulled me out of his garden by one ear. I tried to explain about smelling the flowers not picking them, but he interpreted the tears that sprang to my eyes as a sign of guilt and now he kept a stern watch over me at all times.

I confided in my sheep that he must be a very stupid man not to understand the difference between smelling and picking. Mum defended him. She said he lived in a state of extended spiritual ecstasy and that when he came down to earth it often made things rather difficult.

Everyone who had attended prayers was invited to eat at the Zaouia. That morning’s sheep turned on a spit in the outside kitchen and the smell of the roasting meat drifted through the mosque in a haze of herbs and mouthwatering temptation.

‘Are we going to stay here for ever?’ I asked Mum, as, dazed and still half asleep, I waited for my kebab.

But Mum only said, ‘As long as we need to,’ and went to talk with Selina.

Selina was a lady who had been living at the Zaouia for years and years. Selina was sixty. Before she was a Sufi she had been a magician’s assistant. I liked her better than anyone else even though she refused to show me any tricks. She said she couldn’t remember tricks now she was a Sufi and even though I thought she was beautiful with her white hair and almond eyes, whenever Mum talked to her it made me worry and I thought of Bea and how she must think we had forgotten her.

Whether it was Selina’s magic’s fault or not, we stayed at the Zaouia – and the longer we stayed the more I hated it. Not because of the mosque, or the days themselves, which were a calm round of courtyards and prayers and whispering corridors, but because of the nights. Because of the Black Hand. I was convinced the disembodied hand was only waiting for its moment to close its sooty fingers round my throat. I lay awake against the warmth of Mum’s sleeping body and waited for the slow thud of its approach. With every night’s reprieve my anxiety did not lessen, but a new fear, a wild and uncontrollable fear, took hold of me. The Black Hand was going to strangle Mum.

Now I stayed awake at night with all the vigilance of a bodyguard, and when I could hardly bear to breathe in case I missed a noise, a clue, the thud of a thumb, I lifted my trembling hands and held them gently round her neck, lacing my fingers together so that not a chink of flesh was exposed. If Mum were strangled, my thoughts whirred in the stillness of our white room, I would be stranded for ever at the Zaouia. I saw Bea sitting at a window in Sophie’s house hating us both for forgetting her and never knowing that I was trying to escape over the wrought-iron gate with the red-bearded sheikh close and grasping at my ankles.

I woke every morning, clammy and damp in a tangle of sodden sheet, but always in time to remove my fingers from around Mum’s neck, the threat of the Black Hand seemingly insubstantial beside the misery of yet another ruined mattress. Mum didn’t speak about my accidents but began wrapping our mattress in a plastic sheet that creaked and crackled as I lay in wait for the inevitable murder to be carried out.

Soon our white sheet, hand-washed by Mum, was a daily, dismal reminder of the night before, flapping dry on its line in the courtyard. I was sure I could detect a smirk of satisfaction on the face of Sidi Muhammad as he glanced from me to it, as though a punishment dreamt up by him were being carried out. I decided that if the worst came to the worst, I would run away and join a circus. Joining a circus would mean learning a trick. A new trick. Or any trick. I leant against the waxy wool of that day’s sheep and dreamt.

I saw myself trumpeted into the ring in silver sequinned tights, heralded as the youngest ever walker of the tightrope. The lions in their cages growled in suspense and the crowd gasped while I, high above