Shushu’s response was garbled. She turned her head away. There was mascara running down her face. Her breath, when she started to cry, was dry and sour.

‘Mum, what happened? Did anything happen at work?’ Shushu shook her head.

Dina sat on the floor and waited. She watched the black and white Egyptian film that was on Nile TV. It would have been romantic, or at least sad if Shushu was mourning her husband. But she had despised him and despised him until he had shrivelled into his grave. The good-looking khawagah, who had pursued and enchanted her in the Gezira Club, had whisked her off her feet and away from her family, had brought her to a drab life, in a drab place. In Scotland, he lost the charisma that Africa bestows on the white man, and became the average, kind-hearted father that Dina grew up with. A man who liked to go the pub, watch the football, dream of winning the lottery and not much else. Shushu expressed it now. She raised her arm up in the air, unsteadily, but brought it down hard to thud on the carpet.

‘Whoosh.’ It was all in that word, in the slender arm falling down onto the carpet. ‘Everything shrunk when your father brought me here.’

‘Go to bed,’ said Dina. She had heard all this before; none of it was new. ‘Don’t get yourself all upset.’

‘My sister won’t send me the money.’

‘That’s why you’re upset?’

‘I spoke to her on the phone,’ Shushu sat up on the couch. Her hair was dishevelled. ‘My sister has a flat in Mohandisin. She has two maids doing all the work. Imagine two maids. And yet she grudges me, what is actually mine, my inheritance from my mother.’

‘Hmm.’

‘It was a black day when I first saw your father.’

They watched the film until the end. Nile TV was good for Dina because it had English subtitles on most of the films and so she could follow them. Sometimes, but not often, Shushu would make comments about the actors or the plot, give Dina snippets of information about Egyptian culture. Comments that were acerbic and surprisingly witty. Dina treasured them.

‘Mum,’ said Dina hesitantly, when the words Al Nihaya filled the screen, accompanied by a flourish of music. ‘I phoned AA. They said I could come with you to a meeting, if you were too shy to go on your own.’ Shushu waved her hand dismissively. She lay down again on the couch.

‘Why not? It would be like Weight Watchers – once a week.’