The roof was dark and cool, its floor more uneven than the floor of the house had been. The ledge all around it was low, only knee-high. El-Ma’moura lay spread out before them, the half-built houses surrounded by scaffolding, piles of sand and discarded bricks. Shadows of stray dogs made their way through the rubble. Domes of cardboard marked the places where the caretakers of the houses and their families lived. Their job was to guard the bags of cement, the toilets, the tiles that came for the new houses. Once the houses were built they would linger, drawing water from the pipes that splashed on the embryonic streets, until they were eventually sent away.

From the house next door came the sounds of children playing football, scuffling, names called out loud. A woman’s voice shrieked from indoors. Yassir and Ronan sat on the ledge. He offered Yassir a cigarette and Yassir accepted though he hadn’t smoked for several years. Ronan put his box of matches between them. It had a picture of a crocodile on it, mouth wide open, tail arched up in the air. Yassir had forgotten how good it felt to strike a match, flick grey ash away. It was one of the things he and Emma had done together – given up smoking.

‘A long way from Aberdeen, or rather Aberdeen is a long way from here,’ Ronan said.

‘Have you been there before?’

‘I know it well, my mother originally came from Elgin. They can be a bit parochial up there, don’t you think?’

At the back of Yassir’s mind, questions formed and rose out of a sense of habit, but dropped languidly as if there was no fuel to vocalise them. What was this man doing here, in a place where even the nights were hot and alcohol was forbidden? Where there was little comfort and little material gain? The painter sat on his roof and, like the raised spots on the girl’s face did not arouse his derision, Yassir felt only passive wonder.

‘If you look this way,’ Ronan said, ‘you can see the airport – where the red and blue lights are. Sometimes I see the airplanes circling and landing. They pass right over me when they take off. I see the fat bellies of planes full of people going away. Last August we had so much rain. This whole area was flooded we couldn’t drive to the main road. The Nile rose and I could see it with my telescope, even though it is far from here.’

‘How long have you been here?’ Yassir asked.

‘Fifteen years.’

‘That’s a long time.’