On the personal details form, I was wondering what I could put down as “father’s profession”. I wrote down “buyer”, because that’s what seemed to fit best. He sold things as well, of course, but I thought that “buyer” sounded more mysterious, and also more distinguished.

Then my mind wandered back to the car. Had Dad remembered to leave 0.15 mm slack on the Panhard’s inlet and exhaust valves? If not, the rocker arms were unlikely to last very long. I worried about it for a little while and lost track of what the teacher was saying.

After the last lesson, I met Haisam in the playground. We headed towards the caretaker’s lodge, where his father would be waiting for him, sitting at the chessboard, with a pyramid of translucent Turkish delight beside him. It was slow progress, because Haisam never hurried.

I called him Haisam the Honourable because he always introduced himself in the same way, like a recorded message, “I’m Haisam: it’s an honourable Egyptian name.”

He was a sort of philosopher: once he’d told me that in his opinion the Egyptian pyramids were clear proof that human beings never learn their lesson, and that their natural inclination is to lose heart and get lazier and lazier. I didn’t really understand, so that evening I’d asked Dad. At first he’d nearly choked laughing and then he’d advised me to watch out, because Haisam was clearly a pessimist. I’d looked in the dictionary that Dad had given me as an incentive to study and this is what I found:

Pessimism a tendency to believe that the worst will happen.

I always liked being the last to leave school – and the last to arrive too for that matter – and Lucky Luke couldn’t understand why. (It was Haisam, by the way, who’d pointed out the similarity between the Head of Year and Lucky Luke, the cartoon cowboy.) So that day after school I watched Haisam and his father play chess for a while as the school emptied, lining my stomach with Turkish delight. Haisam moved his pieces very slowly and ceremoniously, like a magician. His father always had a little smile playing on his very thin lips, but the two of them hardly ever spoke to each other during a game. My dear friend took a piece of Turkish delight after each move, chewing slowly while he waited for his father to respond. Before the icing sugar fell on his checked shirt, it floated for a moment above the chessboard. There was something secretive and cosy about the peaceful silence and the little cloud of sugar hiding us from the world. Now and then someone would look into the lodge to ask Haisam’s father something, and he would reply with a vague wave of his hand.