CHAPTER SEVEN

Bilal could not find any work in Marrakech. The Hadaoui was still on holiday and our money had not arrived at the bank. ‘I have friends in Casablanca who have work,’ he said, ‘they are expecting me.’

‘Casablanca. Where’s that? Can I come?’

‘I’ll come back and visit.’ Bilal knelt down so I could climb on to his back. I clung to him as he wandered around the house gathering up his things.

Bilal left with one half-empty bag, dressed in the same faded clothes I’d first seen him in. We stood by the garden wall and waved to him until he disappeared.

That night we ate supper in the kitchen. We didn’t go out to the square as we usually did. No one even mentioned going.

‘If our money doesn’t come this week,’ Mum said, ‘we’ll have to move.’

‘What’ll happen to Snowy if we move?’ Bea’s voice was a challenge.

‘We’ll take her with us,’ Mum soothed, but absent-mindedly. She lit the paraffin lamp with a twist of paper.

‘Couldn’t you make Akari’s little girl another dress?’ I asked.

Mum didn’t think so.

‘Luigi Mancini,’ Bea said in a flash of inspiration. ‘Let’s go and visit Luigi Mancini.’

‘Maybe he’ll give us lots of money!’ I shrieked.

Bea kicked me under the table.

Mum was thinking. ‘Yes we could visit Luigi Mancini.’ She ran the idea over in her head. ‘But don’t you dare ask him for any money. Do you understand?’

We all agreed that this was the exact spot where Luigi Mancini’s palace had stood. Now there was nothing here but a thin, dry wood of larches that rustled eerily in the late afternoon. We walked back to the taxi. It was a horse-drawn taxi with two horses.

‘Luigi Mancini…?’ Bea tried for the hundredth time to ignite a flicker of recognition in our driver, but he shook his head sadly.

‘We passed through this village and took a turning to the right,’ Mum insisted, even though we’d tried every turning, right and left, within miles of the village. This village that had mysteriously never heard the name Luigi Mancini. By the time we gave up the search it was almost night.

‘A genie must have cast a spell,’ I said, ‘that picked up his house and garden and all the peacocks and moved them to a different place. He probably woke up one morning and looked out of his window to find he was in Casablanca or on the top of a mountain or in England, a bit like – ’

‘The Wizard of Oz,’ Bea interrupted in her most bored voice.

‘Will you shut up both of you,’ Mum snapped and she leant back in the taxi and closed her eyes.

A week later we moved into the Hotel Moulay Idriss. It stood in a narrow street behind the Djemaa El Fna and was built around a courtyard of multipatterned tiles in the centre of which grew a banana tree that was taller than the top floor. Snowy would have loved to play among the tree roots and make dust baths in the earth, but the only room they had to offer was on the second floor. It was a large room with two doors that looked out on to the courtyard and no window. We brought our mattresses from the Mellah to sit and sleep on and Mum set up a kitchen in one corner with the mijmar. The leaves from the banana tree cast a soft green shadow.

Bea made a nest for Snowy with straw. She encouraged her to sit in it and maybe even lay an egg, but Snowy wanted to explore. She set off at a run along the landing that linked the rooms on all four sides of the hotel.

‘All right, I’ll train her to find her own way home.’ And Bea scattered liberal handfuls of corn over both our doorsteps. Snowy liked the Hotel Moulay Idriss. Soon she was striding about with confidence, clucking and pecking her way into other people’s rooms and leaving little piles of yellow-white droppings wherever she went.

Next door lived a family with five children, and a grandmother who slooshed down her stretch of landing first thing each morning with water from a metal bucket. Each time Snowy dared to pass her by, she hissed and shooed and flicked the ground with the edge of her djellaba.

Once the corridor was dry, a girl, not much taller than Bea, appeared. She stood patiently on the landing to be checked over by the fierce old lady. Her hair was braided into two plaits and she wore a white pleated skirt and sandals. Over one shoulder she carried a leather satchel.

‘Where’s she going?’ Bea asked.

‘Who?’ Mum said sleepily.

‘The girl next door. Come and look.’

‘I expect she’s just going to school.’ Mum stretched out under the covers and then in a coaxing voice she said, ‘If you make some strong tea with sugar in, I’ll get up. I promise.’

*

The next morning we were woken by the lady who lived in the room on our other side. She stood in the doorway and shouted, loud enough to wake the whole hotel. She held a dark red sequinned cushion in one hand, carefully like a tray, on which was a murky yellow stain. She pointed an accusing finger at Snowy who sat innocently in her nest of straw, chattering happily, her feathers up around her neck. The woman stood there, holding out her cushion and shouting. Mum struggled out of bed and tried to reason with her, but the woman continued to point at the cushion, at Bea, and at herself, and then with a vicious kick in Snowy’s direction she swept out of the room. Bea rushed over and picked Snowy up in her arms. Her eyes were spinning with alarm. The woman’s shouts of fury continued through the dividing wall.

Mum sat on the end of Bea’s bed. ‘It looks like we’re going to have to find Snowy another home.’

Bea didn’t answer. Then she said in a very small voice, ‘I’ll train her.’

‘I’ll talk to Akari,’ Mum said. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

That afternoon Akari came and took Snowy away.

‘I will look after her. Very special,’ he beamed as he hurried down the corner stairs.

We refused to return his smile. ‘Like hell,’ Bea said under her breath.

The only people who commiserated with us on the loss of our pet were the two women who lived on the opposite side of the landing. When they saw Akari disappear down the stairs with Snowy clucking her last in a cardboard box, they came across and offered Mum Turkish cigarettes and a glass of wine. They were big women who wore brightly coloured djellabas with silky hoods halfway down their backs, and their hands and feet were covered in an intricate web of design.

‘Tattoos,’ Bea whispered.

‘Henna,’ the woman nearest me laughed, noticing my fascinated stare. She took my face and held it still with one hand, while with the fingers of the other she twisted a strand of my hair between her fingers. It made a dry, brittle sound in her hand like the scratching of an insect. ‘Henna,’ she said, turning to Mum and switching to French to convince her.

‘They say you need henna on your hair to make it grow thick and long.’

I looked at their heavy black plaits.

‘All right,’ I agreed.

I was taken through the curtain into the dark recess of their room. It smelt of perfume and night-time, as if they had lived in it for ever. Bea was sent to get a towel and to fill a bucket from the tap in the corner of the courtyard. My hair was brushed back off my face in preparation.

The women poured a heap of green powder into a bowl and, with Bea’s water, stirred it into a thick mud that smelt like mud but with something sweet and something sour mixed in. They patted the henna, cold and slimy, into every strand of my hair, coiling it up on top of my head so that when they’d finished I felt like I was wearing a soft clay helmet. They dipped the corner of the towel in water and wiped away the streaks of green from my face and ears.

I was led triumphantly back on to the balcony, where Mum was still sipping wine in the sun. She laughed when she saw me.

‘Isn’t Bea going to have her hair hennaed too?’ I asked, desperate suddenly not to be the only one, the only experiment. The women smiled, and as sharply as if I had ordered it they took her inside.

Soon Bea and I were both sitting in the sun, weighed down and sleepy with the mud cakes drying on our heads. We had resigned ourselves to a long, hot day on the terrace of the Hotel Moulay Idriss, watching the comings and goings of the various inhabitants and from time to time catching a glimpse of Moulay Idriss himself when he emerged from the gloom of his office on the ground floor.

‘Can I take it off now?’ I asked Mum, once she had started to prepare the evening meal, but she shook her head and said, ‘It would be best to keep it on until tomorrow morning.’

I began to protest.

‘That’s what the Ladies said. If you keep it on until the morning, your hair will grow thicker and longer than anyone else’s.’

‘The morning!’

I sat against the wall between the doors of our room, playing with Mum’s box of buttons and beads, thoughts of Rapunzel dancing through my mind, and wondered how I’d be able to get to sleep that night.

The next morning when I tapped at the top of my head it echoed like a clay drum. Mum sent us round to the Ladies to have the henna taken off. The hardest pieces were cracked away, catching and pulling at strands of baked hair, and the rest was soaked out in a bowl of water. The water, when I looked at it, was a dark, steamy red that grew thinner and paler with every rinse. When the water was clear and my hair had been combed straight down on either side of my face, I was sent outside to look at myself in a tiny round mirror.

At first I thought it must only be a reflection of the sun beating down through the banana leaves, but once I’d pulled my hair around in front of my eyes, I was not so sure. I looked at it hard, then again in the mirror, then attempted to match up the two colours, which were in fact one colour. The colour of my hair. Orange.

Still clutching the mirror, I ran along the landing to find Mum.

‘Look. They’ve tricked me,’ I sobbed, throwing myself down on the floor. ‘It’s horrible. I hate it. And I hate them.’ And I hate you, I added to myself, for conspiring in this master trick against me.

Mum knelt down and lifted up my face. She pushed the still-damp hair out of my eyes. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she soothed. ‘Beautiful. It’s a rich dark red, it’s copper, it’s auburn…’

‘It’s orange,’ I wept.

‘Haven’t you noticed,’ she continued, ‘all the most beautiful girls in Marrakech have hennaed hair?’

I shook my head.

‘You haven’t noticed? I’ll take you for a walk and show you.’

Just then Bea appeared in the doorway. She was a dark shadow in a blazing halo of red and gold.

‘What do you think?’ she said.

The sun behind her picked out a thousand colours in her hair and set them flying against one another like the fighting flames of a torch.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Mum and I both said in one breath and she squeezed me tight in spite of myself.