The fun of the moment had already passed, and Shona took a deep breath, fighting the urge to snap at Parvez for his silliness. ‘Yes, Parvez,’ she said patiently, ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m also making a cup of tea if you want one.’

A month later, Shona was sitting at home during the mercilessly damp autumn half-term break. She had too much time on her hands, which she had begun to find was a Bad Thing. Too much time meant that she started thinking, and when she started thinking, she found she wasn’t thinking particularly happy thoughts. Thoughts like - This isn’t the real me; maybe once it was, but it’s not any more. This isn’t my real life; maybe once it was, but it’s not any more. Maybe I’m just waiting for my real life to begin … Consequently, Shona started to find herself chasing away time as urgently as most people chase away boredom. She cleaned her already clean house, making their Ugandan cleaning lady’s job deeply unfulfill-ing. She baked chocolate-chip cookies from a packet recipe, and, realizing she had no one to share them with, ate half of them miserably herself in front of daytime TV until she remembered that cookies were the sort of food you could send by post and packed up the remainder to go to Omar and Sharif. She listened distractedly to French radio, and flipped listlessly through the Ikea catalogue. She considered visiting her father, whom she hadn’t seen in months, but didn’t know how she would answer his first and most obvious question: ‘So, how are you, Jaan?’

She remembered that she had a chore to do, something that she had been saving for just such a rainy, listless day. She went up to the attic, pulled out a large cardboard box of photos, collected in their little packets from the developers, and the smart grey albums that she had recently bought to arrange them into, and brought them down with her to the sitting room. It wouldn’t take too long to stick the photos in - what would take the time was organizing them into some kind of order.