The letter was thin, flimsy as carbon paper. A miracle it had made it across a vast ocean in one piece. He moved aside and tore at the red-and-blue chevron edges, opening it carefully to catch …

Nothing. Just one sheet of airmail paper and his mother’s handwriting in thick ballpoint.

‘Monsieur,’ he called. ‘Are you sure there is not …?’

His eyes caught a word, the shape of an s followed by a tightness of r’s and a blunt-tailed y.

Sorry.

He closed his mouth. No one had heard him anyway.

The post office was in the new town, all dust and fumes from motorbikes and restaurant kitchens, the light coming off the buildings in a flat slap. He ducked into the shade of a doorway.

Your father and I have agreed. Your return fare will be covered. We will pay for a one-way ticket home and arrange for you to collect it from a reputable travel bureau. But there will be no more money. I’m sorry, Sam, this is for the best. We’ve been more than fair.

He didn’t take in the rest of the letter. Something about a vacation in Cape Cod and Steven moving to a new office, and the prospect of a job for him in a local printing firm. He could see his mother now, sitting at her dressing table, slippered feet neatly crossed, pressing each letter deliberately into the thin paper, while the TV warbled distantly through the rug, and his father sucked and sucked at his pipe. He crumpled the letter carelessly and shoved it into his shirt pocket, alongside the empty packet of cigarettes.

When he stepped out on to the pavement, the sun hit him like a sheet of aluminium. Not eleven a.m. and already baking. He kept his head down. The shades he’d bought in London were gone, pawned to Abdelhamid to help pay last week’s rent. He squinted, feeling a headache coming. Probably dehydration and heat and noise and the knowledge he was one hundred per cent screwed.

He swore and kicked at an empty can. It spewed out something sticky as it clattered away, soaking the toe of his espadrille. He swore again, only for a passing woman to give him a faintly disgusted look and pull her scarf a little higher over her face.

He turned and headed up the Avenue Pasteur. It was a main artery of the city, where life teemed hot, pushing itself up from the docks, hurtling around the Grand Socco before breaking off and draining through the thread veins of the casbah, back into the bay. There, ships floated, like torn white paper on a poster of livid blue.