CHAPTER ELEVEN

We packed, the food we’d bought into a cardboard box. Packets of rice, chick-peas, tomatoes. A round soft cheese in hard paper. Pomegranates, and a mound of tiny oranges. Mum dressed us both in loose caftans for the long, hot journey to come.

‘We’ll have breakfast on the bus,’ she said hurrying.

Linda had taken a job typing poems for a blind poet she’d met in the Djemaa El Fna. She and Mob were staying at the hotel. We waved goodbye to Ayesha, the beautiful lady in the gold caftan, and the two nappy thieves who smiled and waved as if life were too short to bear grudges.

Bilal carried the box of food, on top of which sat a saucepan, a bowl and a sharp knife. His bag rattled with cups and a tin-opener. Mum carried the tartan duffle bag, borrowed from Linda, and Bea and I had a blanket each. We walked in procession through the streets.

As our bus pulled out of Marrakech, Bilal took a square of green corduroy from his pocket and straightened it carefully on his knee. ‘A patch for your trousers,’ he said.

‘But I didn’t bring them with me.’

Bilal winked in the direction of the duffle bag. He took a mesh of silk embroidery thread and borrowed a needle and a tiny pair of scissors from Mum. I leant against Bilal’s arm as he sewed, remembering only now and then to look out of the window, at the flat orange countryside that was gradually turning to sand. A flower began to appear on the corduroy in shimmering blue and green thread, a pink leaf curling round the side of it. As the hours slipped by and the sun beat through the metal walls of the bus, a bird grew, perching on the flower’s top in profile, its tiny claws clinging and its beak open in song. The talk and laughter of the other passengers faded away as the driver’s recorded prayers turned to harsh readings of the Koran that boomed through the bus at top volume.

The bus jolted to a stop. The driver gave a long shout and turned off the engine. We were in a red and green town. The street was one long arched terrace of rust-coloured houses with green shutters over every window and green tiles in a row just below the flat roof. We shuffled sleepily off the bus. We were expected. Men busily fried skewers of meat over roadside fires, and the small round loaves of bread for sale were still warm. There were hard-boiled eggs with a sprinkling of salted cumin that came separately in newspaper twists and deep-fried sweets made with orange-flower water. Bilal ordered us each a bowl of soup in a painted clay bowl. It was ladled up from a vat above a tiny flame.

‘What is it?’ Mum asked as we stood by the side of the road and dipped wooden spoons into the brimming white stew.

Bilal tasted it and smiled in delight. He went into a rapturous explanation.

‘Tripe,’ Mum said when he had finished, and refused to elaborate.

After lunch Bea and I sat in the shade of the arched houses and looked through her book. She was teaching me the animals.

‘Which one do you think is a tripe?’ I asked.

She didn’t know. ‘It might be a relation of the turnip,’ she said, and pointed to another animal whose name I had forgotten.

‘Helufa!’ I shouted in triumph when we arrived at the pig with the curling tail.

The bus driver, who had started up his bus, blasted alternate warning notes on his two horns, and as he rumbled slowly out of town everyone ran, clinging to the doors, to pull themselves back on.

‘Was that the Barage?’ I asked Mum.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That was just lunch.’

The Barage was not the seaside but an enormous lake. If you stood on the shore in the early morning before it became too dazzlingly hot, you could see the other side, but for most of the day it was easy to forget there was anything out there at all.

The bus set us down on a sandy stretch of land where pine trees grew in clusters. We were the only people to get off. It was late afternoon and the sand was still hot enough to scorch the soles of your feet. We threw our luggage down at the foot of a tree that was one of a circle of five and Mum began to spread out the rugs and blankets. She made a soft bog of bedding wide enough for us all to sleep in.

Bilal picked up the saucepan and whistled. He turned inland and trudged off through the sand. He also had a large plastic bottle with a screw top and a canvas flask that hung from his belt. Bea and I followed him up the soft slope of the beach into a cool ridge of trees. We walked single-file along a path, taking deep breaths of pine-sweetened air and stamping hard from time to time to watch the salamanders disappear into nowhere. I could see the lake, blue and shimmering a little below me on one side, and on the other the road down which our bus had passed.

Bilal helped us over a low wall into an amber dry field full of sheep. The sheep raised their heads to watch us as we passed. They flicked their lashes against a swarm of flies, and kept their eyes on us. In the corner of the field, shaded by a clump of palm trees, was a high circle of stone.

‘A well,’ Bea shouted, leaning in. Her voice echoed. ‘Well-ell-lll.’

It gave off an ancient damp smell. A shiny black reflection bounced back at me as I stared into its depths. There was a plastic bucket tied to the wall by a length of string. Bilal let the bucket drop. Silence. Then a sharp splash as it hit the water. The bucket floated far away on the surface, sinking slowly until with a tightening of the rope and a sound like a gulp it went under. Bilal pulled it up fast. He set the two bottles and the saucepan on the ground and filled them with great care. I squatted near to watch as not a drop was lost. He offered up his canvas flask for us to drink from. Long, hard swallows of the clear water. It gurgled inside my stomach, pushing it out like a football. Bilal refilled the flask. He tipped the remaining water back into the well.

The camp was deserted. We shouted for Mum, scanning the beach, shading our eyes against the sun which had sunk towards the lake, turning it to gold and spreading shadows from the foot of each tree. I heard laughter and a shout on the breeze. There she was, her arms waving at us from the water.

‘She’s swimming!’ I shouted to Bea.

‘Hideous kinky!’ she shouted back.

Bilal, Bea and I stood at the edge of the lake, ankle-deep in water, and watched Mum floating on her back.

‘Come in,’ she said, as if it were her own watery kingdom.

Bilal flung off his clothes and waded out to her. Just before he reached my mother’s floating body, he took a dive and swam right under her. She screamed and tipped over. Bilal struck out into the middle of the lake.

‘Take everything off,’ Mum scolded, as I stepped gingerly into the shallows, one hand clutching at the weak elastic of my knickers. I sat down quickly, the water up to my waist. Mum laughed and flitted about like a mermaid.

I lay in the silky sand letting the waves wash me back and forth. The lake was as warm as a puddle. With one hand I held on to my waterlogged pants and with the other I clutched at any shell or rock large enough to hold me to land each time the waves dragged back into the lake.

‘Shall I teach you to swim?’ Bea asked.

‘No thanks.’ I was clinging to a piece of seaweed.

‘Doggie paddle.’ She splashed up and down in front of me, kicking her legs. ‘Watch. Just hold your breath and close your eyes. One two three. Go.’

A few seconds later I opened my eyes. It seemed I had only moved a matter of inches. The water swirled around me thick with sand and tiny shells.

‘My pants!’ I leapt after them, plunging up to my neck as I grabbed at a dark blue shadow.

‘Mum, I’ve lost my…’ But she had swum out to Bilal and now they were two black specks against the sinking sun.

I fought back to the shallows, the sand slipping from under my feet.

‘Mum…’ I shouted over the water. I knew she wouldn’t hear me. Tears as warm as the lake trickled down my face.

Bea held up her identical pair of navy pants. I looked at her. She was going to give them to me. Pretend she’d found them. That they were mine. When really they were hers.

But she didn’t. She screwed them up into a ball and threw them as far out as she could. We watched them float away on a current.

‘Knock, knock,’ she said.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Nicholas.’

‘Nicholas who?’

‘Nicholas girls shouldn’t climb trees.’

We screamed with laughter. We lay on our stomachs in the waves and discussed whether we’d prefer to be a water baby or a chimney sweep. And who we’d least like to meet under the sea. Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. Or Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. I thought I’d prefer to be Tom the chimney sweep once he’d become a water baby. We lay in the lake covered up to the chin. The water was warmer now than the air.

Mum and Bilal rose silently up out of the lake, making us jump.

‘Did you swim right the way across?’ I asked.

‘No, just along the shore a little. Have you seen the sunset?’

I turned around. The sun was a smouldering crescent, lying on the edge of the world. Fingers of light streamed away from it up through a wafer-thin purple cloud and into the dome of the sky. We sat shivering and watched the sun sink, giving up the sky to a moon that had hovered high since late afternoon, waiting for its chance of glory.