Had it not been for his old chemistry teacher he would never have gone to the mosque. At a bus stop, a face he had not seen for a number of years. A face associated with a positive feeling, a time of encouragement. Secondary school, the ease with which he had written lab reports. They recognised each other straight away. How are you? What are you doing now? You were my best student.

In primary and secondary school, he had been the brightest in his class, the most able. He sat for the three sciences in his Standard Grades and got three As. It was the same when he did his Highers. There was no reason at all, his teachers said, why he should not sail through medical school. But he got to his third year in medicine and failed, failed again and dropped out. He had counselling and his parents were supportive, but no one really ever understood what had gone wrong. He was as bewildered by his failure as everyone else was. His get-up-and-go had suddenly disappeared, as if amputated. What’s it all for, what’s the point? he asked himself. He asked himself the taboo questions. And really, that was the worst of it, these were the questions that brought all the walls down.

Snap out of it, he was told. And snap out of it he eventually did, a girlfriend helped but then she found a job in London and drifted away. He was simply not up to medical school. It’s a shame, everyone agreed. They were sympathetic but at the same time they labelled him now, they put him in a box; a student who had ‘dropped out’, a ‘giver-upper’.

One day when she brought him his plate of aubergine and mincemeat he asked her, would you like to go up Arthur’s Seat? She had never been there before. It was windy, a summer wind that carried away the hats of tourists and messed up people’s hair. Because her hair was covered, she looked neat, slightly apart from everyone else. It made the outing not as carefree as he imagined it would. She told him she had recently got divorced after six months of marriage. She laughed when she said six months not six years, but he could tell she was sore – it was in her eyes. You have beautiful eyes, he said.

Everyone tells me that, she replied. He flushed and looked away at the green and grey houses that made up Edinburgh. She had wanted to talk about her divorce, she had not wanted to hear compliments.

They talked a little about the castle. He told her about his girlfriend, not the nice one who had gone down south, but the previous one who had dumped him. He was able to laugh about it now.