CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We could hear Mob’s familiar cry as we trudged up the dusty, tiled steps of the Hotel Moulay Idriss. There was no one in the courtyard or on the terrace but the air was full of steaming couscous and the smell of chopped coriander. Low murmurings and the clinking of glasses drifted out through open doorways. In our room something was burning. Linda was bending over the mijmar and the room was full of smoke.

‘Thank God you’re back.’ She was close to tears as she greeted us. ‘I’ve been so worried.’

Mob’s screams rose above the commotion. Mum picked her up and laughed in surprise. ‘And what’s happened to you?’ She said, bouncing her in her arms.

‘We ran out of powdered baby food.’ Linda indicated Mob’s changed appearance. ‘And she doesn’t seem to like anything else.’

Mob was no longer the solid pink baby she had been. She had transformed into a thin brown child with only the same puzzled eyes to know her by.

‘Also…’ Linda sat down lumpily on a mattress. ‘We’ve run out of money.’

‘What about your job?’

‘There turned out to only be ten poems in his head. So there was nothing else for me to type.’

‘Surely he could have thought up some more?’

‘That’s what I kept saying.’ Mum and Linda began to giggle. ‘But apparently not.’

Mum collected her letters from the Post Office and the money that had arrived at the bank, and we all went to eat at our old café in the Djemaa El Fna. The waiter, the cook and the manager all welcomed us as if we had been away for ever, and we took a table right on the edge of the square, half in and half out of the shade.

Mum was wearing her Biba dress and her eyes sparkled. ‘Whatever you want for lunch,’ she announced.

‘Fanta please,’ I sang every time the waiter passed. ‘Fanta please.’

We ate Moroccan salad and a plate of chicken tajine that was almost the size of the table and arrived with its flowerpot hat on.

As we ate Mum looked through her letters. ‘My mother is praying that we’ll all be home safe and sound for Christmas,’ she read.

‘Christmas? Do you get Christmas here?’

‘And she hopes the children are looking after their teeth.’ She frowned. Our one tube of toothpaste had run out in the first few weeks of spring in the Mellah. My Fanta gurgled through its straw.

‘John and Maretta are having a baby.’ She turned to Linda.

‘A baby? Haven’t they got one already, a little girl?’

‘Yes.’ My mother lowered her voice. ‘But she was taken into care.’

Linda sighed. ‘I remember now.’

‘What’s care?’

Mum folded up the letter and slipped it into its envelope. ‘And that’s enough Fanta for one day,’ she said.

‘Now Mob isn’t so heavy, can I carry her on my back?’ Bea asked quickly, gulping down die remainder of her bottle before any more serious ban could be declared.

Linda shook out her shawl and strapped Mob on, tight across Bea’s back. ‘Don’t go too far,’ she shouted after us as we slipped off into the crowd to find Khadija and the beggar girls who roamed the square.

We stopped to watch the Gnaoua as they danced like Russians to their brass clackers and drums. Mob stared transfixed over Bea’s shoulder as the men squatted and kicked out their legs.

‘It’s the Fool,’ Bea whispered, pointing to a dirty and dishevelled man dancing wildly on the fringes of the group. ‘I’ve seen him before.’

As we watched, the Fool took a particularly abandoned leap, tripped, and landed on his back, ripping his threadbare djellaba so that it fell away and left him stretched out naked on the ground. The crowd tittered. The Fool picked himself up and, with a moment to fasten his cloak, worked himself back into the dance.

When the music stopped, the Gnaoua offered him a drink. He grinned, dribbling at his new friends, and tried to clasp them in his arms. They smiled down on him, tall and gentle and shimmering blue-black against his dusty face.

The drummer girls called to us as we passed. ‘Waa, waa.’ They leapt up from their display of painted drums and surrounded us, flapping like butterflies in their brightly coloured caftans. They unstrapped Mob and carried her off to crawl among their rows of drums while they tapped out tunes for her on the tight skin tops. The drummer girls had lengths of braid plaited into their oiled hair and mostly their earrings were a loop of plastic wire hung with beads. They pressed the drums we admired into our hands and before we had a chance to refuse, Mob had smashed hers on the cobbles and was cramming the pieces of broken clay into her mouth. One of the girls who had a baby of her own shook Mob till her hands and mouth were empty and helped to restrap her on to Bea’s back. I caught Bea’s eye as we moved away.

‘They are forever giving the children things,’ Mum had despaired to Linda, ‘and they must be so poor.’

‘Poorer than Khadija’s mother?’ I had asked.

But she had gone on mumbling. ‘Nothing, they have nothing, and they give the drums away…’ As if she could unravel the mystery with words.

Clutching our drums we passed among the stalls of fruit. Water melons, oranges, prickly pears that were too dangerous to eat. We passed the women at the mouth of the market who sat like sentries in their high boxes with bread for sale. Some sold round white loaves, and others black. An old lady squatted by a pile of six oranges and while we watched she sold one, taking the coins and stowing them carefully away inside her djellaba, before settling back to wait patiently by her five remaining oranges for the next customer to pass.

‘What do you think happens if nothing gets sold?’ I asked Bea as we passed a man dozing in front of a box of peppers.

‘They just eat them,’ she said.

Khadija, Zara and Saida were engrossed in tormenting a tourist. ‘Tourist, tourist,’ they chanted. We watched as a man bought a cup of water from the waterman and a woman in a blue dress stood back to take a photograph. ‘Tourist, tourist.’ They held out their hands.

‘Tourist,’ I muttered under my breath, but my newly washed trousers with BilaPs patch blazing on the knee stopped me from joining in.

‘Waa Khadija.’ We called them. ‘Waa Saida, Waa waa Zara.’ And they ran over to us, leaving the couple to wander unchaperoned back to their hotel. We squatted in a circle to exchange news. Mob stared into the black eyes of Khadija’s baby sister as her head bobbed against Bea’s shoulder. Saida inspected Bilal’s patch. Saida was smaller than me and thin with big black eyes and straight shiny hair. She began to pick at the patch with her fingers and then when it wouldn’t come loose she held out her hand for it. I looked at her, my mouth dry, and shook my head so violently she pulled away.

That evening as I sat on Bilal’s knee begging a scrape of majoun, I asked, ‘Can I keep my trousers and just wear them when we live in England?’

‘If they still fit you,’ Bea said.

‘Yes, of course,’ Mum agreed and ordered another pot of mint tea.

The square was lit with the lights of a hundred stalls of food. They appeared at sunset and were set out in lanes through which you could wander and choose where to eat your supper. There were stalls decorated with the heads of sheep where meat kebabs grilled on spits, and others that sold snails that you picked out of their shells with a piece of wire. There were cauldrons of harira – a soup that was only on sale in the evening – and whole stalls devoted to fried fish, and others that sold chopped spinach soaked in oil and covered in olives like a pie. Each stall had a tilley lamp or two which they pumped to keep the bulbs burning and metal benches on three sides where you could sit and eat. Single women crouched in the reflected light of this maze of restaurants and sold eggs from under their skirts.

I leant against Bilal’s shoulder. ‘When we do live in England,’ I continued, my mind on another life, ‘will you be coming too?’

Bilal closed his eyes and began to hum along with Om Kalsoum, whose voice crackled and wept through a radio in the back of the café.

‘Tomorrow,’ Mum said eventually, when the song had cried itself out, ‘Bilal will be starting his work with the Hadaoui.’

‘Here? In the Djemaa El Fna?’

‘Yes, for a day or two. And then in other places.’

‘In Casablanca?’

‘Yes, and others.’

‘Can I be the flower girl?’

Bilal nodded, his eyes still closed.

‘And Bea? Can she be a flower girl too?’

‘I might be at school,’ Bea said. ‘Tomorrow,’ she announced, sitting up very straight, ‘I am going back to school.’

‘But are your things ready?’ Mum asked doubtfully.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I washed them this afternoon. They’re hanging out to dry.’

‘That’s if they haven’t been stolen,’ Linda muttered.