He must have guessed everything. You really couldn’t hide anything from him: he’d probably developed intuition along with his chess skills. Just then his father gave him a bag of food for lunch.

“Hey,” I said, “aren’t you having lunch in the canteen?”

“No, because it’s pork chops today,” replied my Honourable Egyptian.

“But you had sausages last week.”

“That’s just how I am. Sometimes I eat kosher, sometimes I don’t.”

“Because sometimes you’re Jewish and sometimes you’re not?” I asked.

“Exactly. You’ve got it. Now all you need to do is learn to play chess and then you’ll be really quite respectable.”

I smiled. There’s a certain pleasure in feeling less important than people you love and admire a lot. Just then, there was a hubbub in the playground and the sound of a murmur going through the crowd. I left Haisam because I had a nasty feeling about it, and headed towards the students’ noticeboard. There was a big group of kids huddling around it.

The photos of the tongue soup from the other evening were pinned up, enlarged out of all proportion. It was Van Gogh who’d rounded everyone up. I thought the earth would swallow me, and actually that wouldn’t have been a bad end right then: goodbye, world, you’ll have to get along without me! Luckily, I was still concealed by the crowd and no one had noticed me. I put the collar of my jacket up as I waited to see what would happen next, scanning the faces for Marie. I had to find her before some well-intentioned person brought her up to speed. I felt a sort of groundswell behind me: it was Haisam. Perhaps not everything was lost after all.

“This is going to hit the fan!” I said, from deep down inside my jacket. The collar was pulled up to my ears.

He put his great paw on my shoulder, in that comforting way of his.

“It does you good to feel shame once in a while.”

I came across it later in the dictionary:

Shame humiliation caused by the consciousness of dishonourable behaviour. See abjection, unworthiness, disgrace, ignominy.

Judging by the number of synonyms, it must be quite a common experience.

“Maybe it will do me good one day, but for the moment it’s checkmate, over and done with.”

He smiled. I think he still had a piece of Turkish delight in his mouth.

“Not yet. The Nimzo-Indian Defence is exceptionally versatile. It’s useful for undermining your opponent’s strategy. The defence consists of rigorously demonstrating to your opponent that you have a full grasp of the complexity of your situation, which outweighs any traps that may have been set for you.”