‘Do ye get homesick?’ he asked and she felt tired now, all this talk of the river running to rest in the sea. She had never talked like that before.

‘Things I should miss I don’t miss. Instead I miss things I didn’t think I would miss. The azan, the Muslim call to prayer from the mosque, I don’t know if you know about it. I miss that. At dawn it used to wake me up. I would hear ‘prayer is better than sleep’ and just go back to sleep – I never got up to pray.’ She looked down at her hands on the table. There was no relief in confessions, only his smile, young, with something like wonder in his eyes.

‘We did Islam in school,’ he said. ‘Ah went on a trip to Mecca.’ He opened out his palms on the table.

‘What!’

‘In a book.’

‘Oh.’

The coffee was finished. They should go now. She should go to the library before the next lecture and photocopy previous exam papers. Asafa, full of helpful advice, had shown her where to find them.

‘What is your religion?’ she asked.

‘Dunno, nothing ah suppose.’

‘That’s terrible! That’s really terrible!’ Her voice was too loud, too concerned.

His face went red again and he tapped his spoon against the empty mug.

Waive all politeness, make him dislike her. Badr had said, even before his windows got smashed, that here in the West they hate Islam. Standing up to go, she said flippantly, ‘Why don’t you become a Muslim then?’

He shrugged, ‘Ah wouldnae mind travelling to Mecca; ah was keen on that book.’

Her eyes filled with tears. They blurred his face when he stood up. In the West they hate Islam and he … She said, ‘Thanks for the coffee’ and walked away. He followed her.

‘Shadiya, Shadiya,’ he pronounced her name wrong, three syllables instead of two, ‘there’s this museum about Africa. I’ve never been before. If you’d care to go, tomorrow …’

No sleep for the guilty, no rest. She should have said no, I can’t go, no I have too much catching up to do. No sleep for the guilty, the memories come from another continent. Her father’s new wife, happier than her mother, fewer worries. When Shadia visits, she offers fruit in a glass bowl, icy oranges and guava, soothing in the heat. Shadia’s father hadn’t wanted a divorce, hadn’t wanted to leave them – he wanted two wives, not a divorce. But her mother had too much pride, she came from fading money, a family with a ‘name’. Of the new wife, her mother says, ‘bitch’, ‘whore’, ‘the dregs of the earth’, ‘a nobody’.