It was late. Footsteps no longer sounded in the corridor outside, the heating had gone off and it was cold. I went to get my shawl from the bedroom; it was folded in the cupboard just as I had left it weeks ago. I wrapped it around me and sat cross-legged again on the floor. In the final exams the Ostrich sat next to me in the hall. ‘Number three,’ he whispered, ‘number three,’ his head on top of his paper, his eyes strangely oscillating. I saw the invigilator look up towards him, towards us. I had helped him before, lending him my notes, nagging him for days to bring them back only to discover he had passed them on to someone else, and in the exams where we always seemed to sit next to each other, whispering a few helpful words here and there whenever I got the chance. That last time though, I peeled my hand off my paper and saw that the ink had been smudged, the paper made thin by my sweat. (Typical inefficiency, Majdy would say, he should have been specially examined, someone reading out the questions to him, noting down his answers). ‘Shut up,’ I whispered back, ‘shut up,’ and when the invigilator walked past, I stopped him and complained about the Ostrich. They moved him away, he protested, his eyes darting wildly as if he could not hold them still. He swore; they were harsh and dragged him away. His chair remained overturned next to me until the end of the exam. ‘Why,’ my friends asked me, ‘why tell on him like that?’ I graduated, he did not, and for years I did not see him until I met him today on the airplane.

But it was not today anymore, it was yesterday for the watch on my wrist showed 2am – midnight London time. I moved the hands slowly, pushing time back. Majdy looked tired from too much concentration. There were shiny dark grooves under his eyes. He picked the pile of printouts from the floor, bald of their edges, and began to tidy them up, sort them out into piles. Some he will not want at all; I will use them to line up drawers and give them to the daughter of the Malaysian couple who live on the ground floor. She likes to draw on them.