on the table so that it splintered. Patricia stood up. She insisted if they were going to argue they move into another room. The polio boys were taken off to bed, and Bea and I hovered as near to the closed door as we dared.
‘What’s she saying?’ I whispered.
‘Who?’
‘Mum.’
‘I don’t know,’ and Bea tapped me on the shoulder and hissed a murderous ‘Mashipots’ into my ear as she danced off down the row of tables.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Akari said he saw Bilal. He was in a crowd at the Gnaoua.’ We were walking through the narrow and familiar streets that led towards Nappy House.
‘Bilal, Bilal, Mashipots and Mob,’ I sang as we trudged along in the dark. Bea and I dragged the tartan duffle bag between us. ‘Polio, powow, Zaouia and shithouse.’ I was composing a new song especially for Bilal. ‘Trampolining, fire–eating, central heating, shithouse.’
Moulay Idriss showed us to our old room and even donated two candles to unpack by and to light our way back and forth from our room to the toilet on the landing.
Mum read aloud a whole chapter of Monkeybefore she tucked us in. The Black Hand will never find us here, I thought as I lay on my mattress with Bea breathing softly by the other wall and Mum reading on by candlelight as she always did.
When I woke in the blackness of the shuttered room to find my bed still dry, I fumbled my way across to Mum’s mattress to tell her the good news and to crawl in against the shininess of her nightdress, but as I edged my way under the covers I nudged up against the hard limbs of another body. A man. My face crimson I crept silently back to my own bed.
When I woke in the morning, Bilal was lighting the mijmar as if he had never been away. I leapt up with a Red Indian war cry and threw myself at him. He stood and spun me round so fast I thought I would faint.
‘There was a strange man in Mum’s bed last night,’ I told him when I had recovered my breath, but he just tickled the soles of my feet until tears rolled down my face and I begged and pleaded with him to stop.
Bilal was my Dad. No one denied it when I said so.
‘Did you really used to know Luigi Mancini,’ I asked him, ‘when you wore silver and gold waistcoats?’
Bilal didn’t think so. He didn’t remember. He was working on a plan to make money out of my songs.
We went to the square to do research. ‘Maybe Mum could sit inside a tent and tell people’s fortune while I sing behind a curtain,’ I suggested.
‘And what would she tell them about their fortune?’
‘She could find out from her I Chingbook. Or maybe she could go to people’s houses and heal the sick,‘ I said, remembering Ahmed’s aunt in the mountains. ‘And then I wouldn’t have to sing at all.’
‘Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.’ Bilal set me down in front of our favourite acrobats as if to remind me that in his country children also have to work for a living.
Khadija came and squatted beside me. Her thin cotton caftan was ripped right along a seam and it made me think how in all the time I’d known her I’d never seen her in any other clothes. She rested her solemn face on her knees and watched the show. I wanted to give her something. I almost cried at the thought of the lost amethyst. If I’d only been able to carry some home I could have given her a splinter of purple glass to hang on the empty loops of plastic thread she wore as earrings. Even the drummer girls had beads.
On the morning of my birthday I was taken to the Henna Ladies to have my ears pierced. It was what I had asked for. ‘Really it won’t hurt a bit,’ Mum assured me as we walked along the terrace. ‘Just think of all those babies with little gold studs in their ears.’
‘Will I have little gold studs?’
Mum paused. ‘One day you will.’
The Henna Ladies sat me down on a mound of cushions. One of them began to thread a needle. The needle was a particularly fat needle, and knotted to the length of plastic thread that hung from its eye were three orange beads. I sat on my cushion and waited. I was expecting some kind of miracle so that I wouldn’t be scared.