She said her husband had married her against his will. Not against her will, she stressed, but his will. He was in love with an English girl but his family disapproved and stopped sending the money he needed to continue his studies in Edinburgh. They thought a Sudanese girl like her would make him forget the girlfriend he had been living with. They were wrong. Everything went wrong from day one. It’s a stupid story, she said, her hands in her pockets.

Did you love him? he asked her. Yes, she had loved him, wanted to love him. She had not known about his English girlfriend. After the honeymoon, when he brought her to Edinburgh and started acting strange, she asked him and he told her everything.

Would you believe it, she said, his family now blame me for the divorce? They say I wasn’t clever enough, I didn’t try hard enough. They’re going around Khartoum saying all these things about me. That’s why I don’t want to go back. But I’ll have to eventually when my visa runs out.

I’m glad I’m not pregnant, she went on. I thank Allah every day that I didn’t become pregnant.

After that they spoke about faith. He told her how he had become a Muslim. He spoke about his former chemistry teacher – after meeting again they had fallen back into the swing of their old teacher-student relationship. She listened, fascinated. She asked him questions. What was his religion before? He had been a Catholic. Has he always believed in God? Yes. Why on earth did he convert?

She seemed almost surprised by his answers. She associated Islam with her dark skin, her African blood, her own weakness. She couldn’t really understand why anyone like him would want to join the wretched of the world. But he spoke with warmth. It made her look at him properly, as if for the first time. Your parents probably don’t like it, she said, and your friends? They won’t like you changing. She was candid in that way.

And she was right. He had lost one friend after a bitter, unnecessary argument; another withdrew. His parents struggled to hide their dismay. Ever since he had dropped out of medical school, they had feared for his well-being, fretted that he would get sucked up into unemployment, drugs, depression; the underworld that throbbed and dragged itself parallel to their active middle-class life. Only last week, their neighbours’ son had hanged himself (drugs, of course, and days without showering). There was a secret plague that targeted young men.