He has been worrying about where she might sit – he has plumped for the middle of the single bed and not moving up to make room for her seems rude but to do so seems like an invitation, which is much worse. Luckily, she saves him from this dilemma by taking two biscuits for herself, putting the packet on the bed next to him, then turning and sitting on the brittle-looking wooden chair in front of her table. She looks at him and says, ‘What did you do, back home?’

Odd to launch into such a question so quickly: she must be nervous. He attempts to keep his voice neutral as he says, ‘I was a research engineer. I worked on a hydro-electric plant. I was developing a new cooling system.’ He sees her blank look, then adds, ‘My job was to draw diagrams, you know, to design the machines, the systems.’

As he explains this, he observes Angela shrinking a little before his eyes, in her fragile and unsteady chair. Her shoulders sag, minutely, and her chin drops. She was assuming he was like her, one of life’s no-hopers, someone who had never quite got anything right, but the pride and clarity in his voice has told her something different – he is not any sort of loser, merely a man dealt a rough hand, who could have just as easily been successful, both personally and professionally. He could be wearing a suit to work and living in a large house with a wife and a brood of children. He and Angela may be living in neighbouring rooms in one of the poorest areas of Peterborough, England, but they are not alike at all.

They talk a little more. He tells her about coming to the UK, although not anything about the journey. When he talks about moving to Peterborough she says, ‘I did wonder why you weren’t in London. Aren’t you all in London?’

He choses to ignore her probable definition of that ‘you’ and says, ‘It’s true, most Somalis are in London, there’s a big community in East London, Camden too, and Cardiff I believe, but I was happy to move away from some of those people, some of those people …’ How to begin to explain the complexities of clan and sub-clan to her? ‘Some of them are okay, but some of them were not my people.’

They fall to silence, then he says, ‘And what about you, Angela, where are your people from?’

She gives a small smile then, and he knows it is because it has pleased her to hear the sound of her name in his mouth. ‘Bolton,’ she says, ‘in Lancashire. My mother’s father was from Iran but he came over when he was a boy and we never talked about it so we never knew about it really, we’re just, you know, normal.’