Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud

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.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    Bea disappeared down the steps of the Hotel Moulay Idriss, hand in hand with Ayesha. The Henna Ladies had no use for her white uniform. They walked around the terrace and ran their fingers through my hair that now hung halfway down my back. They sat and talked with Mob and me on the doorstep while Mum did her morning’s meditation and Linda stayed inside and continued to declare war. I wished the Henna Ladies would come to the Djemaa El Fna to see Bilal working his Hadaoui magic with the crowd, but they never left the hotel. They stayed on their landing, lounging in worn-down babouches and wearing their caftans like nighties with their hair loose. They had friends who would visit them, men who disappeared into the thick perfumed stillness of their double rooms and sometimes sat through whole afternoons on their cushioned doorstep to smoke and drink tea while the Henna Ladies smiled serenely over them like the proudest of mothers.
    ‘You notice they don’t steal when there’s a man in the house,’ Linda said. It was the morning after Bilal had left with the Hadaoui and another nappy was missing.
    For a week of afternoons the Hadaoui had performed in the square to an enormous crowd. Everyone came to watch. Akari the Estate Agent, Moulay Idriss, the drummer girls, various members of the Gnaoua and the Fool. Even Bea finished school in time.
    Khadija and I watched the Hadaoui as he sat quite still in the middle of his carpet, his purple turban nodding as he blew bubbles of smoke out of his pipe. We hovered on the carpet’s edge and waited for our moment. Bilal having lifted each dove out of its box, began to shoulder his way through the crowd, heckling and calling until finally the Hadaoui lifted up his head and cried ‘Umwi, Umwi’, making the people roar with laughter to see such an old man calling for his Mummy.
    ‘Umwi, Umwi.’ I tried to attract my mother’s attention, but she was talking to one of the Gnaoua wives and she wouldn’t look round.
    The Gnaoua wives, like the men, were tall and thin. They kept their faces covered with a veil. The lady Mum was talking to looked just like the other wives, but as