Hideous Kinky

PENGUIN BOOKS

HIDEOUS KINKY

Esther Freud was born in 1963 in London, but grew up mostly in Sussex. She trained as an actress and has since worked in television and theatre as both an actress and a writer. In 1993 she was chosen by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists. Penguin also publish
Peerless Flats, Gaglow
, and her most recent novel,
The Wild. Hideous Kinky
was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

ESTHER FREUD

HIDEOUS KINKY

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1992
Published in Penguin Books 1993
30

Copyright © Esther Freud, 1992
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-195612-1

For my mother and my father

CHAPTER ONE

It wasn’t until we were halfway through France that we noticed Maretta wasn’t talking. She sat very still in the back of the van and watched us all with bright eyes.

I crawled across the mattress to her. ‘Maretta will you tell us a story?’

Maretta sighed and turned her head away.

John was doing the driving. He was driving fast with one hand on the wheel. John was Maretta’s husband. He had brought her along at the last minute only because, I heard him tell my mother, she wasn’t well.

Bea glared at me.

‘Maretta…’ I began again dutifully, but Maretta placed her light white hand on the top of my head and held it there until my skull began to creep and I scrambled out from under it.

‘You didn’t ask her properly,’ Bea hissed. ‘You didn’t say please.’

‘Well, you ask her.’

‘It’s not me who wants the story, is it?’

‘But you said to ask. I was asking for you.’

‘Shhh.’ Our mother leaned over from the front seat. ‘You’ll wake Danny. Come and sit with me and I’ll read you both a story.’

I looked hopefully at Bea. ‘Oh all right,’ she relented, and we jumped over Danny’s sleeping body and clambered up between the two front seats.

‘ “Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail. “There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.” ’

I sat warm against her and joined in when she got to ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?’ ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?’ until we heard the rustle of Danny’s sleeping-bag as he sat up in the back.

‘D’you want me to take over soon?’ he yawned.

John kept his eyes on the road. ‘Half an hour.’

Danny was my special friend. The first time we’d met he’d magicked a sweet, a white sugared almond, out of a pipe for me. I had been waiting ever since for a good opportunity to ask him to do it again. Now he was always either driving or sleeping. Or Bea was there. Bea was two years older than me and there were some things you had to keep secret about. Anyway, I thought, however magic Danny said these almonds were, they’d be bound to run out like any others.

That evening we stopped to cook. My mother made soup with carrots and potatoes in a metal pot on a camping stove. We sat on the grass verge and ate.

‘Maretta?’ My mother held out a bowl to her.

Maretta looked at the ground.

‘Maretta would you like some soup?’

She turned her face away.

My mother’s hand began to tremble. It made the spoon rattle on the tin side of the bowl as she stretched it out to her.

We waited.

‘Well, all the more for us,’ she said finally, pouring the soup back into the pot. Her voice was high and tight. Maretta smiled serenely.

A truck roared by. A wave of hot and cold laughter swept over me and I bit my lip and stirred my spoon noisily.

John stood in front of my mother, between her and Maretta. ‘She’ll be all right once we get to Marrakech. She’ll be all right.’ He put his arm around my mother’s waist. ‘I was married to her for four years. I should know.’

She let her head rest limply on his shoulder. ‘I still think we should take her back.’

They stood by the side of the road rocking gently from side to side.

‘Danny?’ I felt this might be my lucky moment. ‘Will you magic me a sweet?’

Bea, who was sitting nearer than I thought, raised her arched eyebrows. I screwed up my face in warning.

‘Damn and blast.’ Danny slapped his hand on his knee. ‘I’ve gone and forgotten my pipe.’ He lowered his voice and said with a laugh, ‘Well maybe we should go back to London after all.’ And he squeezed my disappointed face between his fingers.

Late the following afternoon we arrived at Algeciras and drove the van on to the ferry. We got out and stood on deck. Bea and I leant against the railings and waved enthusiastically at the straggle of Spaniards on the quay. The air was thick with the smell offish and oil. Some men in blue overalls waved back. Almost before we lost sight of Spain, Morocco began to appear at the other end of the boat. A long flat shadow across the water.

‘Land ahoy!’ Bea shouted out over the sea. ‘Land ahoy!’

We ran fast from one end of the boat to the other waving goodbye to Spain and shouting ‘Land ahoy!’ to Morocco. The sun was sinking fast and the gulls had stopped circling. As we leant over the railings, Morocco faded into the night and we could only guess at the layers of blackness where the sea stopped and the land began. We went back to the van. Maretta was sitting in the front seat.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked, climbing in, forgetting for a minute.

She didn’t answer. Bea stood by the door.

‘Come on. Let’s go and find them.’

‘Would you like to come?’ I touched Maretta’s hair. It was thick and damp with dirt.

Bea pulled my arm. ‘I’ll race you to the deck.’

Maretta didn’t move. Not even her eyes.

‘All right then,’ I said, and I started after her on a hopeless challenge.

The ship was lit now by the white froth of the waves. We edged along where earlier we had run. At the front of the boat we heard laughter and snatches of familiar voices. We crept forward, our eyes on the red tips of cigarettes.

‘Land ahoy!’ Bea jumped out of the darkness and put her hands over my mother’s eyes. She screamed with mock alarm.

‘Your money or your life.’

Mum put her hands in the air and pleaded for mercy. ‘I don’t have any money,’ she said. And everybody laughed.

A slow, low hoot rose into the air and we all jumped. Danny picked me up and swung me over his shoulder. ‘Right. Back to the van,’ he said.

I called to Bea as I hung, the blood rushing to my head, ‘I’ll race you,’ and I drummed my hands on Danny’s back to make him go faster.

We sat in the dark in a queue of cars waiting for our turn to drive off the ferry. My mother showed us our photographs under hers in a black leather passport.

‘In a minute a man will come to check that it’s really us,’ she said, tucking my hair behind my ears. John was in the driving seat, and Danny and Maretta were awake in the back. The line moved slowly forward car by car.

‘Once we’re through customs it should only take a couple of hours along the coast road and we’ll be in Tangier,’ Danny said. He talked with a rolled cigarette unlit and hanging between his lips. ‘I just wish they’d get on with it.’

We were edging now towards a white barrier. Two men in uniform inspected each car before the barrier lifted into the sky and let them through.

There was a tapping on the glass. We sat very still and John rolled down the window, letting in a blast of cold and salty air and a whiskery face with bright blue eyes. ‘Hi, where you heading?’ he said, sticking his head right in and peering at us in the semi-darkness.

‘Tangier tonight… and then on to Marrakech.’

‘Hey, I’m heading that way myself. Dave. Call me Dave.’ And he rested his elbows in the open window and smiled.

Dave ambled along beside us as we neared the barrier. ‘So this is your first trip, you’ll love it, you won’t want to leave. Where you from? Let me guess? London. Forget London, man. Marrakech. That’s where it’s at.’ He had a scarf tied round his head and his pale ginger hair hung over it in strands. He had no bag and no coat. ‘Hey brother,’ he slapped John on the shoulder, ‘you’re going to need some introductions. I’ll tell you what. I’ll ride into Tangier with you. What do you say?’ And he whipped open the van door and leapt in.

Dave settled himself in the back.

‘Hey lady, how you doing?’ he grinned at Maretta.

She didn’t answer.

Another face appeared at the window. A dark, serious face with a thick moustache. My mother leant over and handed him our stack of passports. He flicked through them and glanced at us each in turn. A quick flick of a glance and he handed them back. The customs man nodded towards Dave who was hovering on a mound of cushions by the back doors. He said something I didn’t understand. John and my mother both shook their heads but Dave stuck out his long white neck and nodded. The officer was silent for a moment and then he jerked his thumb backwards. He was telling the van to turn around. Back, round, and on to the boat. Back towards Spain.

The barrier stayed firmly closed.

We ate our breakfast in Algeciras. Bread rolls and Fanta. Maretta sipped a cup of black coffee and forgot to wipe away the marks it left on either side of her mouth. Mum said it was lucky they hadn’t stamped ‘undesirables’ in our passports. She said if we saw Dave or anyone who looked like Dave at the barrier at Tangier we mustn’t talk to him.

‘Is it very hideous to be an undesirable?’ Bea asked. Hideous was Bea’s and my favourite word. ‘Hideous’ and ‘Kinky’. They were the only words we could remember Maretta ever having said.

‘Hideous kinky. Hideous kinky,’ I chanted to myself.

‘It is… if you want to get into Morocco,’ Mum answered.

When we arrived in Tangier later that day after a short and sunny second crossing there was no Dave in sight. The officers waved us through with only a glance at our passports and everyone except Maretta shouted and yelled as loud as they could to celebrate.