Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,64
He had a kind face and he lifted me up on to a tottering mountain of prayer mats before he read it. He read carefully and nodded while he did so. Mum had told me what it said: ‘In the name of God I am a stranger in your town, fallen on a hard moment…”
Bea’s face was blank. ‘Hideous,’ I whispered at her but she wasn’t playing.
The carpet man handed the letter back to Mum and without a word took some coins from a box at the back of his shop and presented them to her.
‘I’m hungry,’ I said once we were outside. We had left home before the mijmar was alight and I couldn’t remember having had any breakfast.
Mum hurried on towards a shop which sold things made from brass – weighing-scales and pots and pipes in different shapes and sizes. There were two men smoking inside the shop. They looked like brothers. Mum took a deep breath before she entered. Once the brothers had read the letter, each in turn, they insisted we sit down and they called to a woman to bring us mint tea. Bea shrugged her shoulders at me and asked for a second cup. The men in the brass shop were very generous. They gave Mum a handful of dirhams, which she put with the others in her purse.
We only visited the larger shops that sold carpets or boxes and bags made from leather, and the more money Mum collected the more courageous she became. As we moved through the streets between the shops, she held the letter out in front of her for everyone to see.
Bea and I kept our eyes on the ground.
People stopped. They glanced at the letter and stared at us, but before they moved away they always added at least a centime to our collection.
The only person who questioned us was an American. He scrutinized the letter. Who was Mum? Where was she from? Why didn’t she have any money? He said he wanted to help us, but until he was utterly convinced by our story he didn’t feel he could. At first Mum tried to answer his questions. Then she became irritable. ‘You are interrupting my begging time,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see I’m working?’ And she took Bea and me by the hand and moved away.
We worked all day. We moved around the square, traipsing in and out of shops and standing in the street to stop the people who were coming from the market. We never even paused to talk or drink coffee with our friends. Once I saw Abu Kier watching us from the corner of the street. I tried to point him out to Mum, but in the moment that I looked away he’d vanished. As the day wore on I didn’t mind so much about the letter and the fact that we were begging, and from time to time even Bea forgot and lifted her eyes from the ground.
Mum’s purse was full. It rattled when she walked. She rolled the letter back into its scroll and tucked it inside her burnous.
‘That is a once in a life-time kind of thing,’ she said, to my relief.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Moulay Idriss was waiting patiently. He watched us as we trudged up the corner stairs. Mum tipped the money out on to the floor and Bilal began to count. He heaped the coins into separate piles, arranging them into towers of various size and colour. When every coin was in formation, Bilal jumped up and called Moulay Idriss in to take away his rent. He put his arms around Mum and held her close.
‘Bilal, Bilal,’ I said after more than a minute. I had crawled across the floor and was hanging on to his leg. ‘What are we going to do with the rest of the money?’
Bilal let go of Mum. He picked me up by my feet and dangled me upside down. I could see four towers of coins swimming.
‘I’m hungry,’ I said between gulps of laughter. ‘And Bea wants a Mars Bar.’ Bilal didn’t know what a Mars Bar was. ‘When we go to England,’ I said, ‘I’ll buy you one with my pocket money.’
It was some time since we had eaten in the square and we ordered meat kebabs and snails and bowls of oily spinach. ‘If our money ever does come through,’ Mum said, once we had started to eat, ‘maybe we really should think about getting home.’
She wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular.