‘I have so little time with you, I just didn’t want to waste it cooking,’ Sharif said, using a cheeky grin to mask his sincerity.

Candida looked at him coyly. ‘Well, we’re alone in the flat for once. Aren’t we wasting time right now?’ Sharif raised a quizzical eyebrow, and then leaped out of his chair and picked her up, carrying her screaming with delight to his bedroom.

Afterwards, with wine so cold it was almost frozen, and picking at the cold, chewy pizza in bed, Sharif explained, ‘I think the funny thing about my parents breaking up is that I always thought of them as one person. Like lying here in bed, we’re two people, Candida and Sharif, who are choosing to share the same space. But with my parents, it was like one person, one creature in the bed, an Amma-Abbu-Amma beast, so you couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended, like they were physically joined together. When we were little, Omar and I would come into bed with them some mornings, and I swear you couldn’t get between them, they were so moulded together in their sleep. We always had to go on either side.’

‘I think that’s so sweet,’ said Candida. They must have been very much in love. Don’t forget they had you when they were very young.’

‘The thing is, I don’t think they were in love for so very long,’ said Sharif. ‘But they were still joined together in this thing called a marriage - joined isn’t even a strong enough word, it’s like they were conjoined, like Siamese twins; they were still tightly wound together in the mornings when they slept, like they didn’t have a choice. Like that thing in Dr Dolittle, a push-me-pull-you, the same creature but with two heads that wanted to pull in different directions. I could see that they were falling apart, I saw it more and more, but I didn’t think they’d ever break up, because they were just … stuck together.’

‘Marriage is like that,’ said Candida wisely. ‘It provides an odd kind of glue that sticks you together when you should have split up ages ago. My daddy was married once before he met Mummy, an arranged marriage. He never talks about it much, but he said that once you’re stuck in an arrangement like that, you feel bound to it; even though it never had anything to do with love.’

‘Why don’t you ever talk about love?’ Sharif asked curiously.

‘What do you mean?’ Candida asked, widening her eyes.

’I guess I mean, why don’t you ever say that you …’ He paused with embarrassment. ‘Oh, you know, don’t make me say it …’

‘Say what?’ asked Candida, looking at him in genuine confusion.