23

Turkish Delight

We were all in a great mood on Monday morning before registration. Liam had borrowed one of Lily’s hairbands and was carefully putting Ryan’s hair up into a topknot. Ryan looked ridonkulous! But he took a quick selfie, looked at it critically and announced, ‘I want bunches too,’ so Chloe and Kara handed over their hairbands as well.

Then Elly got out her make-up. ‘Let me do your lashes, Ryan!’ She waggled her mascara at him.

‘Nooooo!’ yelped Ryan, leaping out of his seat.

Nadima and I were killing ourselves laughing.

So we were all too busy mucking about for me to get the chance to tell her about my spectacular Turkish Delight business plan before lessons.

The first lesson was drama (groan) and Nadima and I were meant to be coming up with ideas for our box story (double groan). So I got out my phone and tried to explain that to her.

I typed ‘we mak up stroy’ into my phone. Then I looked at the Kurdish translation.

Fyi, Kurdish must be the hardest language to read in the entire world. I showed the screen to Nadima, but she frowned and shook her head. ‘I not understand.’

So I made it easier and just put ‘stroy’

Which turned out to be:

She shook her head again., Pointing at the screen, she said, ‘What is “stroy”?’

‘Stroy?’ I said, confused. Then I looked at what I’d typed. Maybe I’d spelt story wrong. So I typed ‘stroy’ into a text and it autocorrected to ‘story’.

‘Doh!’ I laughed, face-palmed and corrected my mistake.

‘Ah! Yes!’ She laughed, nodding.

So then I put ‘we mak story’ and got … and my heart sank. The Kurdish word ‘çîrok’, (which apparently means ‘story’) wasn’t there. None of the words had a ‘c’ with a little squiggle under it followed by an ‘i’ wearing a hat thing, and a ‘k’ at the end. Even I could see that. So the Kurdish sentence couldn’t be about making up a story at all.

‘Yes, yes! I understand!’ said Nadima.

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. You can’t.’

‘Yes, yes!’ she insisted.

‘Seriously, no, you don’t.’ I told her. She looked very confused.

So I gave up and decided to tell her about my brilliant Turkish Delight business instead. Well, our Turkish Delight business.

I opened my drama book and drew lots of little square chunks. ‘Turkish Delight,’ I said.

Then I added a picture of a stick person stirring a big saucepan. I wrote ‘Nad’ on the picture.

‘You make Turkish Delight,’ I said.

‘OK.’ She nodded.

Then I drew us standing at a table and labelled us ‘Nad + Jaz’ and added lots of Turkish Delight.

Then I drew a stick person holding a 50p piece, standing by the table. (I had thought about charging more, but I decided it would be good to make it cheaper than a bar of chocolate. See – good business thinking.)

Then I put an arrow from the coin to us, and another one from a bag Turkish Delight to the stick person.

‘We sell Turkish Delight. Here at school,’ I said.

It was the work of a genius, if I say so myself. Well, it must have been, because she immediately understood me.

‘Yes! Yes!’ She grinned. ‘We sell Turkish Delight. We get money!’

‘Yes!’

We were so engrossed we didn’t notice Mrs P looming up to see how we were getting on. I didn’t have time to shut my book. I froze and Nadima flicked me a quick look of panic. We both held our breaths as Mrs P scanned the drawing. But then she said, ‘Brilliant, brilliant, girls! That looks like a wonderful story idea. Well done!’

I nearly exploded with laughter. As soon as Mrs P left, we both collapsed giggling.

When we’d recovered I said, ‘Will your mum be OK? Making lots of Turkish Delight?’

‘I make!’ said Nadima, tapping herself. ‘Not mum. Me!’

‘Er … when?’ I asked, wondering how she was going to make enough of the stuff. There’s no point launching a product if you don’t have plenty of stock. (See? That’s why dyslexics make good businesspeople. We think about everything. It’s called ‘Big Picture Thinking’.)

‘Tonight. I make three … er …’ She mimed a square shape with her hands.

‘Tins?’ I suggested.

‘Yes, three tins!’

‘Oh, OK.’

While I was mentally working out how many chunks that would make, she said, ‘And tomorrow – three tins!’

‘Seriously? Six tins?’ I asked. ‘In two days?!’

‘Huh!’ she scoffed. ‘Make Turkish Delight is easy-peasy, lemming squeezy!’

I burst out laughing.

Six tins would be plenty, I reckoned, so that meant we could sell it on Wednesday.

We were going to make a killing.

Except that on the day it didn’t quite go to plan.