Because they were the only two women in the room, Samia came over and sat with Dina. With her son whining and the sound of the vacuum cleaner, conversation was difficult. Samia picked up her baby and shifted her chair so that her back was to the men in the room.

‘Tell me if anyone comes,’ she said and Dina couldn’t quite understand what she meant.

She did a minute later when Samia lifted up her jumper, pulled down her bra and started to breastfeed her baby. He became instantly quiet – this was what he had been whining for.

As an average British girl of eighteen, Dina had seen plenty of nudity but she had never seen a woman breastfeed a baby. Now she was taken aback, slightly repulsed. Samia was a large woman; her loose clothes gave her a tomboyish look. The white scarf that covered her hair made her eyes dark and luminous. She smelt faintly of sweat and cooking spices. Feeding her baby, she definitely did not look like an antiseptic mum in a television ad for Pampers. The baby, Dina thought, was too old for this. She could hear him breathing from the effort of sucking, could hear him swallow, draw in the flow of milk, swallow. She looked away, not wanting this intimacy, shrinking away from what was fleshy and vulnerable. In this modern age, Dina was not psyched up for birth or motherhood. C++ was on her mind, and whether she should or should not, like her best friend Alanna, pierce her tongue or tattoo a butterfly on her arm.

Samia suddenly became chatty and inquisitive. Questions that Dina answered dully because she was mesmerised by the child, who was now dozing in his mother’s arms, sucking himself to sleep, well fed.

This was the information that Samia got out of Dina. Dina was an IT student. Her mother was Egyptian, her father Scottish. Her father had died recently, from lung cancer. Her mother worked as a beautician in a department store. Dina’s ties to Islam were fragile and distant. No, she had never been to Egypt. Shushu’s family had disowned her when she married a Scot.

‘Half Scottish, half Arab,’ murmured Samia. ‘That’s like Kassim, but he’s the other way round. His mother is Scottish and his father Moroccan.’ Her baby let go of her nipple and suddenly snored loudly, his mouth wide open. Samia laughed and hitched up her bra, kissed her baby’s forehead and pulled down her jumper. Dina laughed too – it made her feel less embarrassed.

Dina walked into the sitting room, which was dark except for the light of the television screen. Shushu was slumped on the sofa as if asleep. There was a bottle of gin on the coffee table, a glass, a packet of Panadol. Dina bent down over her mother, knelt down and touched her hair.

‘Mum.’