‘Who cares? It’s the same difference.’

‘Bullshit, it’s not the same at all, my parents are Muslims, Islam is the greatest religion in the world,’ shouted Momo.

‘My mother does the Salat, and she wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ added Idir-Quoi.

‘It’s Muslims that end up becoming Islamists, though, isn’t it?’ said Manchot.

‘No, there’s Christians too, like Raymond,’ said Idir-Quoi.

‘Okay, Momo, look it up in the dictionary, tell us the difference.’

‘There’s no difference if you ask me,’ said Bidochon.

‘Just look it up, Momo . . . under I, no that’s J . . . it’s comes before that . . . Idir-Quoi, you look it up.’

Idir-Quoi might have trouble saying words, but when they’re on a page he’s a genius. It took him two minutes to find the definition but it took him ten minutes to read it out, so I’ll skip the stammering.

‘Islamic: of, or relating to, Islam, and Islamist means . . . um . . . I can’t find it. It’s not in here, it doesn’t exist . . . what the fuck?’

‘That’s an old dictionary, they didn’t have Islamists back then.’

‘No, it was published in 1990, we had jihadists back then.’

‘Yeah but dictionaries are serious, they don’t just put every single word in there.’

‘Okay, let’s say anti-Islamist.’

‘And what exactly is it supposed to do, this league of yours?’

‘Take down the Islamists.’

‘How?’

‘We’ll run them off the estate!’

‘How?’

‘. . .’

An hour later we still hadn’t got anywhere. The conversation went off in all directions, but every time we hit a brick wall. We knew what the problem was, we just didn’t have the solution. Stopping Islamism is like trying to catch the wind, you need a bit more than a sieve or a bunch of muppets like us. It wasn’t enough to know. It wasn’t enough to understand. It wasn’t enough to want it. What we didn’t have the Islamists had in spades: determination. We’re like the concentration camp prisoners, caught up in the Machine, paralysed by fear, fascinated by evil, clinging to the secret hope that passivity will save us.

I didn’t tell them about Papa, about his past. They’re my friends, I didn’t want them spooked, didn’t want them running out on me. And besides, they are what they are, they’re harmless enough but they get wound up easily. They might start thinking their fathers were hiding some terrible secret in their past. I didn’t want Togo suddenly remembering his great-grandfather was a cannibal and that the only way they cured his father was by feeding him raw steak from the day he was born, it would kill him. My father never told me anything, Rachel said. It’s true fathers never have anything to say.