‘Your wife – what’s her name?’ his mother said, as if clumsily smudging out a fact, hurting it. A fact, a history: three years ago he drove Emma to the maternity ward in Foresterhill, in the middle of a summer’s night that looked like twilight, to deliver a daughter who did not make her appearance until the afternoon of the following day. Samia changed in the two weeks that he did not see her. Her growth marked time like nothing else did. Two weeks offshore, two weeks with Emma and Samia, two weeks offshore again, Emma driving him to the heliport, the child in her own seat at the back. A fact, a history. Yet here, when Manaal’s friends visited, some with toddlers, some with good jobs, careers, there was a ‘see what you’ve missed’ atmosphere around the house. An atmosphere that was neither jocular nor of regret. So that he had come to realise, with the sick bleakness that accompanies truth, that his mother imagined that he could just leave Emma and leave the child, come home, and those five years would have been just an aberration, time forgotten. He could marry one of Manaal’s friends, one who would not mind that he had been married before, that he had left behind a child somewhere in Europe. A bride who would regard all that as a man’s experience. When talking to her friends she would say the word ‘experienced’ in a certain way, smiling secretly.

Because the streets were silent, Yassir and Manaal were silent too, as if by talking they would disturb those who were resting indoors. Yassir drove slowly, pebbles spat out from under the wheels, he was careful to avoid the potholes. The open windows let in dust but closing them would be suffocating. From their house in Safia they crossed the bridge into Khartoum and it was busier there, more cars, more people walking in the streets. That part of the journey, the entry into Khartoum, reminded him of the Blue Nile Cinema, which was a little way under the bridge. He remembered as a student walking back from the cinema, late at night to the Barracks, as his hostel was called, because it was once an army barracks. He used to walk with his friends in a kind of swollen high, full of the film he had just seen. Films like A Man for All Seasons, Educating Rita, Chariots of Fire.