For weeks Lateefa had walked up and down Oxford Street, searching for the best bargains, tightly clutching her receipts in fear that she would lose them. She would buy, exchange and agonise over every purchase. Wearing her Dr Scholl exercise slippers (because her feet always got swollen from too much walking) she would stand in the queue of Marks and Spencer’s Customers Services, tense, never quite believing that they would refund her money. She would hand in her receipt, crumpled from the sweat of her palms, and nervously explain her reasons to the bored sales assistant. And Nadia, if she was with her, would feel ashamed, not only from the slippers but from the furtive look in her mother’s eyes.

It was happening again, and it was one of Nadia’s anxieties about the summer. The air hostess was addressing her in Arabic and she could not answer. She turned to her mother and Lateefa not only translated but answered the stewardess, ‘No, we won’t give up either of our seats; we are together.’ There was a time when Nadia had spoken Arabic, her baby chatter, her first fumbling words. But then with starting nursery school, the language had started to evade her. Not overnight of course. There was a time when she understood but would only answer in English, slyly, eager to hurt her mother. And then finally came the time when she could understand a little but could not speak fluently. Yet there remained within her a faint memory of a complete closeness with Lateefa, a time of unqualified approval that was somehow lost with her ability to speak her mother’s tongue.

In Cairo she was a stranger, but a stranger who went unnoticed, who was not tricked into paying extra for taxi rides and souvenirs. The effect was like a disguise, a role she was playing in an overworld which did not demand from her much skill or strategy. She could not really think of herself as Egyptian, nor did she want to. The city’s traffic overwhelmed her, the cars weaving in and out of the lanes, the pedestrians crossing in the middle of the road, the overflowing buses. She would stare unnerved at the sight of a woman riding on the back seat of a motorcycle with a child balanced on her lap. On every trip she would long for London and promise herself she would not come again. She would tell herself that she was not a child any more, some of her friends no longer went with their families on holiday – she could do the same. But perhaps it was her mother’s anger that she feared, the hot reckless words like sandpaper on skin. Or perhaps she was bewitched by the welcome that she received from her aunt and cousins.