I’m sweating now, even though it’s not that hot. Most of the big stones are gone so I help gather up the heartings in armfuls and transfer them to the nearest bucket. Some of the fragments are crumbling into red clay at the breaks. The dust coming off onto my gloves, staining them pink. I think of that scene in the Ten Commandments when Charlton Heston kneels in front of the burning bush and listens to God give him the order to go and speak to Pharaoh. The way Nan’s face changed when it came on in the home, after someone flicked through the channels, as though she remembered it but not watching it with me. He kneels there and the whole cave is glowing red, the special effects so dated. God’s booming American voice, and Charlton’s expression a bit hammy as the realisation dawns on him. What he’s being asked to do. But something about the way the music surges at that moment gives it weight. Stupid really, the things that set you off. I was wiping my eyes when she came over. Sana. But she didn’t let on that she’d seen. She watched with us for a minute.

‘Moses?’ she said.

I nodded.

‘Isn’t he supposed to have a problem with speech?’

I nodded again, and suddenly Charlton Heston seemed even more ridiculous with his handsome confidence, his face tanned by makeup but still so very white.

‘The story about the angel putting hot coals in his mouth when he was a child,’ she said, ‘do you have that too?’

I racked my brains. ‘Don’t think so.’

She perched there on the arm of the chair and I watched her play with the ends of her hair, cut so much shorter than usual, dark against her skin. I watched her face as she watched Moses kneel in front of the burning bush and plead inadequacy. I wanted to ask her what she did about her boyfriend in the end and if she was ok and if she wanted to go for coffee after her shift.

‘Do you have the plagues?’ I said, to keep the conversation going.

‘What?’

She looked at me and I could feel myself starting to go red. ‘In the Quran, I mean. The plagues of Egypt?’

‘Oh. Yes. The frogs. The river of blood.’