The ferry didn’t leave until the evening. At lunchtime, fresh difficulties arose. We planned to buy picnic supplies for the ferry, but we wanted a hot meal now. ‘We need a place where workers go,’ said Minna. ‘Somewhere with cheap, hearty food.’ There were plenty of restaurants, with menus posted in their windows. But Minna decided that some of them were petit bourgeois and the rest were tourist rip-offs. ‘We need somewhere real. Un ristorante popolare.’ She bit her nails and peered through yet another window as if searching for something that hung there, bright and clear. Eventually, with my pack pulling at my shoulders, it seemed to me that what she was looking for was men in collarless shirts and blondes with heavy, pearly arms – the object of her search wasn’t a restaurant but an Impressionist painting.

At last she asked the advice of a passer-by who struck her as sufficiently popolare, judging by his dusty boots. He tugged his ear and embarked on a speech, gesturing away from the port. Minna handed him her notebook and pen, and asked him to draw us a map. Before we parted, he shook hands – first looking down at his hand, then extending it to each of us in turn as if it were a gift.

‘Did you see the way he held the pen?’ Minna asked, delighted, as we walked away. ‘Like a chisel.’

She wouldn’t laugh when I said surely she meant like a hammer. ‘Or a sickle?’

The map led us to a room with five or six long tables, where overalled men sat hip to hip on benches. Steam and the smell of frying gusted from the back. A waiter came up to us, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. It was a set menu, he said, and pointed to a board: carbonara, with liver to follow and a quarter-litre of wine thrown in. At the nearest table, they’d just been served their first course. Each plate of fleshflecked spaghetti had an egg on top, a raw egg in half its shell. A workman upended one over his pasta – snotty filaments of white hung glistening from the shell. Neither Minna nor I spoke as we trudged back to the port. She marched into the first petit-bourgeois place that we saw. The food was delicious, plentiful and cheap.

That evening, we unrolled our sleeping-bags on the deck of the ferry. Three Italian boys settled down next to us, spreading out their belongings beside ours. A brisk wind arrived as we reached open water – Minna shrugged into her green jacket, and the Italians admired it. ‘It is so perfectly violent,’ said the one who spoke the best English. Soon we were drinking wine together, and the Italians opened tins of tuna. All three were studying history in Turin. They grew even more admiring when Minna told them that she was at art school. ‘Un’artista,’ said the one who wore small oval glasses. I was la professoressa – it sounded both dreary and dubious. But at various moments I caught each of those three looking at me in the way Jamal had looked at Minna: attentively, with hope.