CHAPTER NINETEEN

Linda was leaving for London. Bea and I insisted on wearing our pyjamas to see her off. They were the pyjamas Aunty Rose had given us on Boxing Day. After all, we were only waving goodbye to the bus that goes to the airport and not to the plane.

A terrible mistake had been made over the pyjamas. One pair was pale blue and obviously meant for Bea, the other, smaller pair were the colour of honeycomb and scattered with teddy bears, running, jumping and standing on their heads. I reached eagerly for them, but Aunty Rose stopped me, saying, ‘Bea, seeing as you’re the eldest would you like to choose which pyjamas you’d prefer?’

I stood still, willing her under my breath, ‘The blue ones, the blue ones,’ until I saw Bea slip her caftan over her head and take up the wrong pair. The trousers hung high above her ankles and the sleeves were ridiculously short. She buttoned up the shirt and beamed. ‘I’ll take these.’

She even said, ‘Thank you.’

Aunty Rose dressed me in the blue pyjamas. She tied the cord across my stomach in a bow, and turned the sleeves over three times. I kept expecting her to notice something was wrong, but she hummed contentedly and knelt to roll up the trouser legs.

We wore our pyjamas home. Mum admired them without criticism, only advising us to take them off before getting into bed.

We stood at the bus station and waved goodbye to Linda and Mob. Linda was crying and Mob was scrambling about all over the seat. ‘Take care of yourselves,’ she kept saying.

The bus began to pull away. ‘Good luck!’ Mum shouted, and Linda waved one of Mob’s nappies out of the back window to make us laugh.

Ramadan was over and Mum was allowed to eat with us again. No one could think of anything to say as we waited for our soup to cool. I volunteered a song to cheer Mum up, but for once she was unenthusiastic. She bought a piece of majoun and began to chew it slowly. I wondered if now that Linda and Mob had gone away Bilal would come back. Each time I went to ask about him the words stopped in my mouth. A distant fairy-tale voice told me that if you kept a wish secret long enough it would eventually come true. I bit my lip.

Akari the Estate Agent pulled up a chair. I forgot that we weren’t talking and offered him a sip of Fanta. Akari had a plan. He said it was a plan that he had dreamed especially for us. His cinema venture had fallen through. No one wanted to go to the cinema in Sid Zouin, so he had decided to turn the garden behind his house, which was already a café, into a hotel. We, he had decided, were to be his very first guests.

‘It is the most beautiful garden in die world,’ he sighed, his eyes half closed. ‘When the cinema seats have gone… Ha…’ He clapped his hands. ‘Then you will see.’

Mum said she thought it sounded lovely, but Bea still hadn’t forgiven Akari for the murder of Snowy, and I was worried that if we went away from Marrakech Bilal wouldn’t be able to find us when he came home. Akari extolled the virtues of Sid Zouin until he had moved himself to tears, and Mum pressed his hand and swore that it would be an honour for us to be the first guests at his hotel.

Mum promised Akari that as soon as our money arrived from England we were going to Sid Zouin. Every day she went to die bank to ask, but the man there just shook his turban at her and looked serious. We stopped eating at the cafés in the Djemaa El Fna and cooked in our room over the mijmar which smoked furiously under die broken bellows, making it impossible to breathe unless both doors were left open. The nights had become so cold Mum said sometimes she thought it was a good thing we were being forced to wait until spring before going to the country.

One morning early I was woken by her murmurings as she knelt on the mat. She sniffed between each prayer. In a pause that I hoped was the end I ventured, ‘Mum…’

‘Hello.’

I couldn’t think what else to say. ‘I can’t sleep.’

‘Neither can I,’ she said, and she knelt over my bed and whispered, ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’

We dressed quickly, careful not to wake Bea, and crept out into the beginnings of the morning. We walked hand in hand through the crisp, empty streets, die hoods of our burnouses warm and muffled round our ears. The maze of streets narrowed as we walked deep into the old walled city, the dawn lighting up the faded pink cement of the crumbling buildings.

We saw it from a distance, the wool street, in a flash of new white light. It lay in front of us, a carpet of dancing colours. The street was lined with factories where the wool was dyed and hung out to dry in skeins on lines between the buildings, and at night, when the wool was cut down, the snippets and loose ends of a multitude of colours fell to the ground. We arrived like thieves before the road sweepers and ran about scooping up handfuls of the soft new wool.

Mum stopped. She stood still with a wide smile on her face and let her handful of wool petals fall to the floor. ‘I’ll make dolls,’ she said, ‘with woollen hair.’

‘For us?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she yelled, ‘dolls to sell. Now look for wool in black, yellow and red. Pieces long enough for hair.’

I searched the ground, draping each new strand over my arm until I had enough wool to make a hairpiece for even the most life-sized of dolls. Mum sorted the wool into separate skeins and tied them round her wrist. Then she knelt down and swept up a multicoloured pile of leftovers, motioning for me to turn around so she could pack them into my hood.

‘Stuffing,’ she explained.

Mum spent that whole day sewing the dolls. She made the bodies out of an old white T-shirt of Bea’s and stuffed them tight with wool, poking it into the ends of their legs and arms with a pencil. She embroidered blue eyes and red mouths on to their smooth oval faces and sewed on hair in a middle parting. The first doll she finished had black hair that reached down to her waist.

‘It looks like Mum,’ Bea said.

She made a dress out of a pink-and-grey flowery skirt I hadn’t worn since the Mellah. Mum had made it for me in Tunbridge Wells out of a cushion I didn’t want to leave behind.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’

I shook my head.

She worked all day on her sewing-machine until there were three perfect dolls. Mary, Mary-Rose, and Rose-mary. Mum was delighted. ‘Tomorrow we’ll sell them in the market,’ she laughed. ‘And then all our troubles will be over.’

The next day we got up early and walked to the flea market by the south gate of the Medina. We took a blanket which we spread on the ground, arranging our three dolls in the centre. The flea market was on the edge of a flat plain that stretched away to the mountains, the same mountains you could see from the flat roof of the Hotel Moulay Idriss, where it snowed all year round. From where I sat on the corner of the blanket it seemed that the plain was a desert of people, all selling mysterious objects from blankets of their own.

Mary, Mary-Rose and Rosemary attracted a great deal of attention, even at times drawing a crowd, but no one showed the slightest inclination to buy.

‘It’s not an exhibition,’ Mum grumbled as the dolls were poked and admired but never bartered for.

As the afternoon began to fade away and the various salesmen and merchants packed up their blankets, we had no choice but to give up.

‘I expect this is how Akari felt when no one wanted to go to the cinema,’ Mum reflected.

I had never had a doll before and now I had three. They slept with me in my bed, becoming more and increasingly more demanding of my time. There were various complicated ministrations and attentions at particular and specific times of the day and night, and especially in the morning when Bea was at school and Mum was praying or on a visit to her bank.