Sarraf couldn’t contain his fury. ‘After she died, they pissed on her grave and left their shit. No one did anything about it except for a bunch of the old women from the council estate. People are only outraged when Muslim men are violent towards Muslim women. That’s the only time you people care about our women.’

‘Don’t generalise,’ Bish said. ‘I’m not a racist and most people I care about aren’t either.’

‘You like to think you’re not a racist.’

‘No, actually, I’m fucking sure of it.’

‘Watch your mouth around my mother’s grave,’ Sarraf said. ‘And give me some privacy.’

Bish walked away, reading the pamphlet he had picked up at the office. Plots in the Islamic section were on unconsecrated land, the bodies buried with their heads facing Mecca. He had always been fascinated with rituals for burying the dead. Until he had to bury his son.

Twenty minutes later he saw Sarraf stand up and walk away from the grave and figured it was time to go.

‘Don’t tell my sister we found it like this,’ Sarraf muttered as they went back to the car.

‘Your sister and I don’t get into that sort of conversation.’

‘She’ll ask. She obsesses over things like this. The only reason she let Etienne’s parents take his body home to Australia was because she knew he’d be buried on the farm.’

‘Where’s your father buried?’ Bish asked, and got no response at first.

‘My uncle took my father’s ashes back to Egypt,’ Sarraf said suddenly when they reached the London Road roundabout. ‘He was a Christian, you know. Not many people remember that. They were too busy labelling the bombing an act of Islamic terrorism.’

Bish had known that, from reading one of Sarraf’s interviews.

‘My parents met in Alexandria in the sixties. My mother was said to be amazingly beautiful. By the time she had me she’d let herself go, but my Uncle Joseph always said that if my father hadn’t married her, one of the other brothers would have. When they moved here in the late sixties my father was determined to be accepted by everyone, and refused to belong to the Arab packs, as he liked to call them. Whereas my mother’s whole identity revolved around the community. She worked like a dog to get Noor into a private school, to compete with the other Arab mothers who were just as ambitious for their smart daughters. But my father couldn’t seem to catch a break. His obsession with fitting in changed him and I got to experience the changed man, not the man he was when my mother met him. He was embarrassed that my mother wore the hijab and he believed that her being a Muslim held them back socially. They fought a lot. Some women feel strongly about being forced to wear the hijab and my mother felt strongly about being forced not to wear it.’

‘And yet your sister didn’t wear one?’

‘Noor felt that too many women wore it because they had to rather than wanted to. She and my mother agreed to disagree. They did that a lot over culture and religion, but they loved each other.’