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collecting flowers one by one and standing straight and still to present them, while the assistant, sharing her solemnity, accepted them with a ritual nod of his head. I hovered in my place, envying her bare feet as they padded over the carpet, until, unable to resist a moment longer, I slipped off my plastic sandals and skidded across to join her. The man smiled quizzically as I handed him my first flower. He looked over my head and I saw his eye meet my mother’s and so identify me as her child and a foreigner despite my caftan and dusty feet.
    Khadija and I watched as the doves were collected one by one and replaced in their cardboard box. ‘We’ve got a pet,’ I said to her. ‘Not a dove. A hen.’ I pointed at the cooing boxes. ‘At home. Would you like to see?’
    Khadija shook her head, but I could tell she didn’t understand. ‘Mum, Mum,’ I shouted as I ran towards her. ‘What’s Arabic for hen?’ But I stopped before I got there because she was deep in conversation with the magic man’s assistant. They were talking in a mixture of French and English and laughing. They turned to me as I ran up.
    ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I saw you earlier on, helping Bilal.’
    Bilal smiled at me. He had the most beautiful smile of all smiles and his dark eyes twinkled in a face smooth and without a trace of anything unfriendly. It was then that I noticed the necklace. It hung around his neck in a string of silver and gold beads.
    ‘Mum,’ I said, willing her to bend down so I could whisper in her ear, and when she finally did I pressed my face close to hers and said, ‘Is Bilal my Dad?’
    She stood up and took my hand and patted it.
    ‘Goodbye,’ she said, a little abruptly, ‘maybe we’ll see you here tomorrow.’
    ‘Oh yes,’ Bilal answered. ‘Tomorrow. Inshallah. God willing.’ And he began to roll up the carpet.
    The Hadaoui, Bilal and the white doves stayed in Marrakech for a week, attracting a large crowd every afternoon. Each day Khadija and I waited impatiently for the entertainment to end so we could take up our important role as official helpers to Bilal. The old man remained forever too full of mystery and magic to approach. I kept to the edges of the carpet and avoided meeting his eye.
    ‘When you’re old, will you turn into the Hadaoui?’ I asked Bilal on the afternoon of his last performance.
    ‘I am the Hadaoui. Now. You don’t believe me?’ he said in his funny broken English.
    ‘But you’re not magic,’ Bea said.
    ‘And you don’t have a beard.’
    Bilal laughed. ‘Maybe children can tell about these things. Today the Hadaoui stops here. And from tomorrow I am working as a builder.’
    ‘Here? Staying here?’
    ‘Yes. The Hadaoui must have a holiday. So I become a builder. Here in Marrakech.’
    I looked over at Mum to see if she was as excited as me that Bilal wasn’t to be going away. She was smiling, but she looked as if she might have known all along.
    Bilal came to live with us in the Mellah. Every morning he went out early to work on a building site. In the afternoons when it was too hot to work he took us to the square. Best of all he liked to watch the acrobats. There were a troupe of boys, all about seven or eight years old, dressed in red and green silk like little dragons, who did double somersaults from a standing position and tricks so daring the people gasped and clapped and threw coins into a hat. Bilal instructed us to watch them very carefully.
    One day over lunch in our cool tiled kitchen Bilal revealed his plan. ‘We will have our own show in the Djemaa El Fna!’ he declared triumphantly. Bilal was to be Ring Master. Mum was to make the costumes from silk on the sewing-machine we’d brought with us from England, and Bea and I would be the star guests, performing acrobatic tricks. ‘People will love to see the English children do the tricks.’ Bilal’s eyes sparkled. ‘We will have a crowd as big as the Hadaoui and we will collect many