She started cleaning up Majed’s high-chair. Her hair fell over her eyes. She wore an apron with Bugs Bunny on it. She was beautiful, not like women on TV, but with looks that would have been appreciated in another part of the world, in another century. Her lips were naturally red. He had thought, before they got married, that she was wearing lipstick. She wore hijab when she went out, she got up at dawn and prayed. This seriousness that he didn’t have, baffled him. Something Scottish she brought with her when she stepped into Islam. The story of her conversion amazed him as much as her stories about Gavin shocked and sickened him. She had read books about Islam. Books Gavin had snatched and torn up. Not because they were about Islam, but because she was sitting on her fat arse reading instead of doing what he wanted her to do.

She wanted to learn Arabic. Hamid would doze in bed and next to him she would hold Simple Words in Arabic, over the head of the baby she was feeding. ‘How do you say this?’ she would ask from time to time, nudging him awake. When Hamid read Qur’an out loud (he went through religious spells in Ramadan and whenever one of the children fell ill), she said, ‘I wish I could read like you.’

He started to help her tidy up. He closed the flaps on the box of Rice Krispies, put it away in the cupboard. When she finished wiping the table and started on the floor, he lifted up the baby’s seat and put it on the table. If she would talk to him, shout at him it would be better. Instead he was getting this silent treatment. He began to feel impatient. What had made her search for the bottle? A smell …?

Attack is the best form of defence. Laughter blurs things, smoothes them over. Hahaha. He began to talk, he put on his most endearing voice, tried a joke. Hahaha. She didn’t answer him, didn’t smile. She pushed her hair away from her face, poured powder into the drawer of the washing machine. She bent down and began to load the washing into the machine. It was linen, the sheets that had been on Majed’s cot. Hamid said, ‘But how did you know? Tell me.’

She sat on her heels, closed the door of the washing machine. She said, ‘You pissed in Majed’s cot. You thought you were in the toilet.’ She twisted the dial that started the wash cycle, ‘I pretended to be asleep. He didn’t wake up.’

There is a place under laughter, under the hahaha.