But before that day, he taught me everything he could. He taught me how to make a batter and coat chunks of aubergine and drop them into hot oil. I got burns from that – my forearms and hands speckled with red marks – but it was worth it. Because when the platters went out, drizzled with molasses, I smiled to see people gobbling the morsels, burning their tongues and saying hoh hoh and reaching for their wine. I had done that. I had burned them, as surely as if I’d walked up and singed their tongues with a coal. The thought made me almost savage with delight.

I didn’t realize it fully at the time, but by teaching me to cook, Ifrahim was also teaching me how to live, how to carve a space for myself in a world that didn’t want me. He taught me how to bewitch people; how to change the course of their thoughts – if only for an evening. Our ingredients were humble; salt and fruit, meat and oil and wine. But Ifrahim could spin them into a hundred different pleasing shapes.

‘Watch them close, and they will tell you what they want, Ale,’ he whispered, as we stood together at the kitchen door, watching a hard-faced English merchant in the courtyard, who sweated and fidgeted in his pressed suit, eyeing the girls with a nervous scowl. ‘They won’t even know they’re doing it, but watch them and they’ll spill all.’ He smiled down at me. ‘We’ll be their confessors.’

That was the day he taught me to make sangria; a drink as old and false as rouge. He set me to chopping leftover fruit, the peaches that had burst from their skins at the market, slices of bitter orange and shrivelled grapes that no one wanted. I watched as he glugged Málaga over the lot, so that the fruit began to drink, sucking the sweet wine into withered flesh until it seemed full and luscious once more.

‘Now, how much brandy?’ he asked, nodding at the stern Englishman who sat in the courtyard, fretfully breaking toothpicks into shards.

‘A cup,’ I said slowly. ‘No, two cups.’

Ifrahim smiled. ‘For a fish as cold as that, I believe we will need three.’

The brandy was followed by red wine – cheap stuff from the cooking cask that would leave a headache, but no matter – and seltzer from the glass dispenser. Finally, Ifrahim stirred in his secret: a pinch of pepper, ‘to warm the heart’.

That jug of drink turned the Englishman’s sour face pink, made his narrowed eyes big and bright. It undid his cravat and sent his hat flying across the dusty ground of the inn. It sent him upstairs with a girl on one arm and a second jug clutched to his chest. Most importantly, that drink reached into his pocket and emptied his wallet a note at a time with its sticky, red fingers.