‘Orphan!’ she said, loudly, to the woman next to her, who reached out and grabbed Zoë by the collar. It was so unexpected, and so forceful, that Zoë didn’t even struggle. She found herself at the end of one of the crocodile lines, behind a boy wearing a blanket and not much else. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked him, but he said something back to her in Turkish, and she didn’t quite understand, though it sounded like food. They snaked through the crowd towards one of the tents, joining with other lines until they were a column of shuffling, sniffing, coughing children. Zoë’s stomach started aching at the thought of what might be inside the tent. She imagined a feast laid out: ice cream and cakes and cheese pies … But then she remembered that the woman had said orphan, and Zoë felt a little spark of hope begin to glow in her heart. All the orphans, the ones who had lost their parents, were being told to go into that tent, and why would anyone make them do that, unless …

‘Are our parents in there?’ she asked a tall girl behind her, but the girl burst into angry tears and Zoë didn’t dare to ask anyone else. So she shuffled on, too hungry to think properly and feeling much too small and frightened to consider stepping out of the line.

Each time a child went into the tent, the line came to a stop, then jerked forward a few steps, then stopped again. By midday, Zoë was getting close to the tent. She was starving and terribly thirsty, as she had missed the tasteless corn mush that was doled out by way of breakfast, and she had drunk nothing since the night before. Hunger and the beating sun had long since emptied out her head of anything except a stuttering parade of images: Mama and Papa, waiting patiently somewhere inside the tent, perhaps drinking tea from china cups, smiling when they see her. She wanted that at first, more than anything. But then that picture was replaced with the food stalls on the Smyrna waterfront: souvlaki hissing over charcoal braziers, plaited sweet breads, sugar-dusted Turkish delight. Nuts and dried fruit in great, wasp-invaded heaps. The pictures in her head made her stomach hurt so badly that once or twice she had to double over in pain.