‘A refugee is …’ The woman closed her eyes and sighed. ‘It’s when someone has lost their home, and they haven’t found a new one yet. Thanks be to God that we’re still alive, I suppose. And now there isn’t room for us in the harbour here, and people are dying like flies, so they’re moving us to a camp in Athens.’ The woman leant down, and the boy shifted with her, still glaring. She took Zoë’s hands again. ‘I’m going to take you with us. I’m not leaving you here. Do you want to know why?’ Zoë shook her head hurriedly: she didn’t want to know anything else, ever. But the woman just smiled. ‘Because you used to eat cakes at the Cafe Trieste. The lady singer you liked to listen to was my sister. You were copying her, in your little voice. Your tiny little voice.’ Zoë heard a catch in her throat. ‘Holy Virgin … Look at us all here. Wallowing in our own filth. Didn’t we all used to be so beautiful? Your papa and your mama. My sister, may she be with God. No, koukla. I don’t like to think of you going off to some orphanage. I’m going to take care of you.’

‘Whah?’ It had been less of a word than a strangled yelp. The little boy was looking up at the woman with horror in his face.

‘It will be fine, Pavlo,’ the woman said. ‘The more the better. We have to stick together in this land of peasants.’

‘I don’t like you!’ the boy shouted suddenly, his face red and twisted. Zoë opened her mouth to shout something back at him, just a reflex, because she wasn’t feeling anything except despair; but then she had seen that it wasn’t anger in his face. It was terror. You’re as scared as me, a tiny voice inside her said. She looked at him clutching his mother’s skirt, at the woman whose hands were very gently stroking hers. She didn’t look like a vampire at all, Zoë realised: she looked like a mama. Not her mama, but the kind of mama who might have come out of that terrible wound of flames and smoke. Her big dark eyes reminded her of the old icon of the Virgin that Cook had kept in the kitchen at home: deep, full of loss and gentleness.