‘Makes a change from Río Salado, doesn’t it?’ Bertrand tried to smile, but he was sweating and pale with fear. I was scared too, but my terror vanished when I saw Peg-Leg standing outside his stall. The poor devil had lost a lot of weight. He looked ten years older. He gave me the same puzzled frown he had the last time he had seen me – half surprise, half delight.
‘Can you give me the address of your guardian angel, blue eyes?’ he shouted. ‘Because if there is a God, I want to know why he looks out for you and not for us lot here.’
‘That’s enough of your blasphemy,’ called the barber. ‘It’s probably your ugly mug that made God turn his back on us.’
The barber had not changed, though he now had the scar of a razor slash across his face. Jenane Jato was clearly on the move, but where it was headed I could not tell. The shacks behind the jujube hedges had been cleared away to leave a vast expanse of red clay surrounded by a wire fence into which had been dug the foundations for a bridge that was to span the railway line. Where the old barracks had stood rose the towers of a huge new factory.
Peg-Leg jerked a thumb at his jar of sweets.
‘You want one, kid?’
‘No thanks.’
Crouched beneath a rotting lamp post, a waffle-seller clicked a pair of metal castanets. He offered us waffles in paper cornets and the gleam in his eyes sent shivers down our backs. Bertrand urged me on, clearly not prepared to trust a face or a shadow in this place.
When we came to the courtyard, he said, ‘I’ll wait for you outside. Take all the time you need.’
Opposite, where Ouari’s chicken coop had once been, there was a new brick house with a low stone wall that ran along what had been the patch of waste ground where a gang of boys had once tried to lynch me. I thought about Ouari, remembered him teaching me to catch goldfinches; I wondered where he was now.
Badra peered at me when she saw me step into the courtyard. She was hanging out her washing, the hem of her dress tucked into the rainbow-coloured cord she used as a belt, revealing her bare legs. She stood, feet apart, hands on her broad hips, barring my way.
‘So it’s only now that you remember you have a family?’ Badra looked different. She had put on weight. Her strong face had slipped to join a double chin, her fearsome energy had waned and she now seemed flabby and listless.
I didn’t know whether she was teasing or scolding me.
‘Your mother and your sister are out.’ She nodded to our curtained room. ‘But they should be back soon.’
She pushed her laundry pail aside with her foot and shoved a stool towards me
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Kids! You’re all the same! You suckle till you’ve sucked us dry, and as soon as you learn to walk, you clear off and leave us to starve. You’re just like your fathers; you creep out and you don’t give a thought to what happens to us.’
She turned and went back to hanging out her laundry. I could see only her shoulders rising and falling. She stopped for a moment to wipe her nose or brush away a tear, shook her head then went back to hanging clothes on the old hemp washing line that bisected the courtyard.
‘Your mother’s not been well,’ she said. ‘Not well at all. I’m sure something terrible has happened to your father, but she won’t believe it. Lots of men walk out on their families, they go away and start again somewhere. But that’s not the only possibility . . . There’s a lot of violence these days. I’ve got a bad feeling about your father. I think he was murdered and dumped in a ditch. He was a good man, not the kind of man who walks out on his kids. I’m sure he’s dead. Like my poor husband. Cut down for three soldies – three lousy cents. In broad daylight they killed him – stabbed him in the middle of the street. A single stab and it was all over. How can it be so easy for a man to die when he has hungry mouths to feed? How could he let himself be stabbed in the back by a kid not much older than you are?’
Badra chattered on, never pausing for breath, as though someone had opened up a Pandora’s box inside her. It was as though this was all there was left for her: to talk about her tragedies, a casual gesture here, a sudden silence there. Above the clothes she was hanging out I could see her shoulders; beneath them, her bare legs, and sometimes, in the gap between the clothes, a glimpse of her plump hips. She told me that Bliss had evicted the beautiful Hadda, with her two kids trailing after her and nothing but a bundle of clothes. She told me that one night, when her drunken husband beat her yet again, poor Yezza had thrown herself into the well and killed herself. She told me how Batoul, the psychic, who had managed to extort a tidy sum from the poor wretches who came to consult her, finally amassed enough to buy a house and a Turkish hammam in the Village Nègre, and she told me about the new tenant who had shown up from God knew where and, in the afternoon, when all the shutters were closed, admitted every kind of deviant into her room. Badra told me that Bliss, now there were no men living in the courtyard, had become a pimp.
When she had finished hanging out her washing, she tipped the dirty water into the drain, untucked the hem of her skirt from her belt, and went back into her dingy rat hole, where she continued to rail and curse until my mother came back.
My mother did not seem surprised to see me sitting there on a stool in the courtyard. She barely seemed to recognise me. When I went over to kiss her, she took a step back. It was only when I pressed myself to her that her arms – hesitating for an instant – finally wrapped themselves around me.
‘Why did you come?’ she asked me over and over.
I proffered the money Germaine had given me. Hardly had I held it out than, like lightning, my mother had whipped the few grubby banknotes from my hand and conjured them away like a magician. She pushed me into the poky little room where we had lived, and as soon as we were safe, took the money out and counted it over and over to assure herself she wasn’t dreaming. I was ashamed by her greed, ashamed of the unkempt hair she had clearly not brushed for ages, ashamed of the tattered haik draped like an old curtain round her shoulders, ashamed of the hunger and the pain that distorted her face, this woman who, once, had been as beautiful as the dawn.
‘It’s a lot of money,’ she said. ‘Did your uncle tell you to give it to me?’
Fearing she might react the same way my father had, I lied:
‘I saved it up.’
‘Are you working?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve stopped going to school?’
‘I still go to school.’
‘I don’t want you to leave school. I want you to be educated and get a good job so you can live happily for the rest of your life. Do you understand? I don’t want your children to have to live like dogs.’
Her eyes burned as she grabbed me by the shoulders.
‘Promise me, Younes, promise me that you’ll go to university like your uncle, that you’ll have a proper house and a proper job . . .’
Her fingers dug into my shoulders until I thought they might break.
‘I promise . . . Where is Zahra?’
Warily she took a step back. Then, remembering that I was her son and not some envious evil neighbour, she whispered:
‘She is learning a trade . . . She is going to be a seam-stress. I got her a post as an apprentice in a dressmaker’s shop in the New Town. I want her to make something of herself . . .’
‘Is she better?’
‘She was never sick and she wasn’t mad; she’s simply deaf and dumb. But she understands people and the senior dressmaker told me she’s a quick learner. She’s a good woman, the dressmaker. I work for her three days a week. I do the cleaning. Here or there, what’s the difference? Besides, you do what you have to to survive.’