The following week, things got complicated. Things have a natural tendency to get complicated, I find. First of all, the geography teacher got mad at me when he was giving back our work because for the question about the climate in the South of France, I’d answered that “there is snow and sometimes low tide”. I understood what I meant, but I was certainly the only one who did. The whole class burst out laughing, especially a group of snotty, stuck-up girls who look like they’re reciting a mathematical theorem when they laugh. I bet their farts don’t even smell. Even Haisam smiled, but in his case it was just friendly affection.

I’d forgotten to revise the stuff on the climate because of the piston pins. Dad had wanted to replace the old five ring pistons with modern four groove ones, so he’d had to dismantle the whole engine and take out the chrome pins. I’d fetched the Krebs manual from my room and we’d looked it up. We’d realized that we’d need to check the connecting rod and cylinder to avoid the pistons jamming, because you know what that would have led to. Anyway, it was because of all this that I forgot about the climate in the South of France. It’s not that I have anything against geography. My Honourable Egyptian’s father had shown me where Egypt was on a map, and I’d seen that it was a country with a lot of water everywhere except where there was desert.

“What about Turkey?” I’d asked.

He’d pointed very precisely at a spot on the map that was tacked to the wall. His fingernail, as polished as a pearl, made a little tapping noise.

“There’s Turkey. Just there.”

“Huh, that’s strange, I thought that was India.”

During the break, after the geography lesson, I hung around on my own so that I could think about what Dad was going to say and how I could explain my bad mark.

I watched the footballs streaking across the playground and thought to myself that when it came down to it, perhaps I just wasn’t cut out for studying. I got the impression that the girls in the class were taking the mick, because they were looking up at the sky and saying loudly, “I wonder when it’s going to snow…” And then they snorted with laughter, in a snotty, stuck-up sort of way. Haisam had disappeared and I didn’t know where to turn for support. I thought back to my father’s test question from last night, “At the time of the 1901 Paris–Berlin motor race, what technical innovations would you have found in the Panhard cars?” I couldn’t find the answer even in the Krebs manual.