He slowed down, separated each word, ‘Ah’ll have them for ye on Monday.’

‘Thank you.’ She spoke English better than him! How pathetic. The whole of him was pathetic. He wore the same shirt every blessed day. Grey stripes and white.

On the weekends, Shadia never went out of the halls and, unless someone telephoned long distance from home, she spoke to no one. There was time to remember Thursday nights in Khartoum, a wedding to go to with Fareed, driving in his red Mercedes. Or the club with her sisters. Sitting by the pool drinking lemonade with ice, the waiters all dressed in white. Sometimes people swam at night, dived in the water, dark like the sky above. Here, in this country’s weekend of Saturday and Sunday, Shadia washed her clothes and her hair. Her hair depressed her. The damp weather made it frizz up after she straightened it with hot tongs. So she had given up and now wore it in a bun all the time, tightly pulled back away from her face, the curls held down by pins and Vaseline Tonic. She didn’t like this style, her corrugated hair, and in the mirror her eyes looked too large. The mirror in the public bathroom at the end of the corridor had printed on it, ‘This is the face of someone with HIV.’ She had written about this mirror to her sister, something foreign and sensational like hail and cars driving on the left. But she hadn’t written that the mirror made her feel as if she had left her looks behind in Khartoum.

On the weekends, she made a list of the money she had spent, the sterling enough to keep a family alive back home. Yet she might fail her exams after all that expense, go back home empty-handed, without a degree. Guilt was cold like the fog of this city. It came from everywhere. One day she forgot to pray in the morning. She reached the bus stop and then realised that she hadn’t prayed. That morning folded out like the nightmare she sometimes had, of discovering that she had gone out into the street without any clothes.

In the evening, when she was staring at multidimensional scaling, the telephone in the hall rang. She ran to answer it. Fareed’s cheerful greeting. ‘Here, Shadia, Mama and the girls want to speak to you.’ His mother’s endearments, ‘They say it’s so cold where you are …’