Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud Read Free Book Online

accusing eyes.
    ‘Fatima has behaved very badly at the festival,’ he said.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘She was seen without her veil – watching the dancing. At night she must stay inside the tent.’
    ‘So she was beaten,’ Mum said flatly.
    I looked over at Fatima, huddled in the corner, her fingers moving through a bowl of string beans.
    ‘My brothers tied her in the barn and beat her…’ Bilal looked away, ashamed, then added, ‘But now she will be good and then she will be married.’
    Fatima lifted the bowl in her arms and hobbled silently to the back door.
    Mum watched her go. ‘I think maybe it’s time to go home,’ she said.
    ‘Tomorrow,’ Bilal insisted. ‘Stay until tomorrow and we will all go back to the Mellah.’

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