Yassir opened the car door to let in some air but there was hardly any breeze. There were tears in the plastic of Manaal’s seat from which bits of yellow foam protruded. There was a crack in the window, fine and long, like a map of the Nile and one of the doors in the back was stuck and could never be opened. This car, he thought, would not pass its MOT in Aberdeen; it would not be deemed ‘roadworthy’. What keeps it going here is Baraka.

The car had seen finer days in his father’s lifetime. Then it was solid and tinged with prestige. Now more than anything else, its decay was proof of the passing away of time, the years of Yassir’s absence. He had suggested to his mother and Manaal that he should buy them a new one. Indeed this had been one of the many topics of his stay: a new car, the house needs fixing, parts of the garden wall are crumbling away, why don’t you get out of this dump and move to a new house? But his mother and sister tended to put up with things. Like with Manaal recently losing her job. She had worked since graduation with a Danish aid agency, writing reports in their main office in Souk Two. When they had reduced their operations in the South, staff cuts followed. ‘Start looking for a new job,’ he told her, ‘or have you got certain plans that I don’t know of yet?’ She laughed and said, ‘When you leave I’ll start looking for a job and no, there are no certain plans. There is no one on the horizon yet.’

It was a joke between them. There is no one on the horizon yet. She wrote this at the bottom of letters, letters in Arabic that Emma could not read. Year after year. She was twenty-six now and he could feel the words touched by the frizzle of anxiety. ‘Every university graduate is abroad, making money so that he can come back and marry a pretty girl like you,’ he had said recently to her. ‘Really?’ she replied with a sarcasm that was not characteristic of her.

From the door of Zahra’s house, Manaal looked at Yassir in the car and shrugged, then banged again with both hands. But she must have heard someone coming for she raised her hand to him and nodded.