I told him I had an appointment and left him to the garden. Walking back down the cool corridor I thought: I got him out. Even if Egypt went to shit. I don’t abandon them.

Café Rakka was nearby. Early in my career I had sought out London cafés popular with various émigré groups, and used them to practise going grey, becoming unnoticed. At the time, I thought maybe I would pick up snippets of information, but people didn’t often talk politics and when they did it was usually to parrot the editorials of the popular Arabic newspapers. Still, the food in this one was good, as was the fresh mint tea. You found yourself searching faces. Who might have made it over? Café Rakka had yellowed tourist posters on the walls: the Al-Madina souq, the Great Mosque, Palmyra with the Temple of Bel, all bombed to memories now. Early in the uprising, they had installed a TV and kept it on news, but at some point it had been switched off.

I ordered tea and kibbeh, balls of bread stuffed with ground meat and walnuts. The men wore harsh eau de colognes and ragged moustaches, cracking sunflower seeds with their teeth. Stirring sugar into their mint tea, with the sound of small bells ringing. Sometimes, in Egypt, you would hear that sound as you spoke on the phone: security officers from the dreaded Amn al-Dawla stirring their tea as they listened in. A group of four young Yemeni men entered, accompanied by an older man. I eavesdropped on them, talking about their trips to the Home Office to claim asylum. I tried to ascertain which towns they’d come from, but couldn’t glean any details. One of them put in a call to his parents, who had made it to South Korea, by the sound of it, but had experienced trouble of a kind that I failed to ascertain before his credit ran out.

The Royal Mail delivery office on Harrow Road housed the Post Office box to which my own post got diverted, serviced fortnightly by the housekeeping team. The care with which they propped up my clandestine existence seemed suddenly oppressive, dependency-inducing. Currently inside the box was post that had arrived since the last visit: a postcard from a university girlfriend, Laura, showing Marrakech at night: On honeymoon. We visited Morocco and I thought of you. Did you get the wedding invitation? Don’t worry – I know you’ve been out of the country.

According to her Facebook, the wedding had been six weeks ago. It looked lovely. Neither the groom’s name nor face meant anything to me. For some reason, the image that came to mind was a Saudi facility for returnees from Guantanamo. I had been shown around, as their Chief of Intelligence explained that marriage was central to the programme of deradicalisation: a wife and a job.

I called the number listed on her page.