Читать книгу A Fucked Up Life in Books - Литагент HarperCollins USD, J. F. C. Harrison, Professor J. D. Scoffbowl - Страница 15

I was about 12 or 13 when Mum decided that she was taking my brother and me on holiday to Gibraltar. She chucked some Goosebumps books at my brother and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole at me to shut us up. About her reading selection for me, she said, ‘You probably won’t understand most of it, but it’s funny.’ I read some of it on the plane over, and it was funny, but rather than making me want to read more Sue Townsend, it just made me keep an incredibly cynical diary for the next two years.

Mum had made all these plans for stuff to do in Gibraltar. Gibraltar is not that big at all, so once we’d gone up the rock and looked at the monkey things (scary, grabby, I didn’t like them) she decided that we were going to get on a ferry the next day and have a trip over to Tangier in North Africa. A very common thing to do after you’ve spent a day in Gibraltar, apparently.

Gibraltar, if you’ve never been, is very, very English. Tangier is not very, very English. It was very foreign and exciting and frightening. I’d never been abroad before and nipping over the water to North Africa was my first experience of being completely surrounded by a difference culture and way of life.

I loved it. We wandered around the markets, and ate some weird food, and watched a bloke with a snake do some weird shit, and stroked a camel. It was brilliant. Then we went into an indoor market thing, where Mum and my brother went off to look at rugs, and I was left wandering around some pots.

A man approached me and asked me where I was from. I told him that I was from England. He nodded and looked very thoughtful. He asked my age and where my Mum was. I told him and pointed to the room with all the carpets in.

He said, ‘Come with me.’

I walked with him up to my Mum. He introduced himself to her as a very rich man and then pointed to me.

‘I like your daughter. She is very beautiful. How much for your daughter?’

My Mum laughed. ‘She’s not for sale.’

He looked puzzled.

‘I want to marry your daughter when she is sixteen. I take her now and pay you. How much?’

Mum laughed a little less easily this time and told him again, no.

He looked thoughtful.

‘I give you thirty camels for your daughter.’

My Mum’s eyes bulged. She turned to me.

‘Thirty camels! Thirty fucking camels!’

‘Mum, what the fuck are you going to do with thirty camels?’

She looked back at the man and said again, no.

He upped his offer. Forty camels.

‘FORTY CAMELS! Forty FUCKING camels!’ she said to me, a kind of weird pleading look on her face.

‘Mum,’ I said, ‘you are not selling me for forty camels to this man. You don’t need any camels. Where would you keep forty camels?’

‘I could sell them!’ she said, seemingly delighted that she’d found a solution.

Time to put my foot down. ‘Mum, if you sell me to this man I will never speak to you again.’

She looked at me for a long time, and then turned to the man and told him for the last time:

‘No.’

We left the weird indoor market and got back on a ferry over to Gibraltar. Mum drank a lot of wine. My brother and I stood out on the deck watching North Africa vanish.

I still don’t know whether she actually would’ve sold me.