The houses between where Zoë stands and the blue inlet of the harbour have all been put up very fast – half of them weren’t here last year. The government is building whole new towns in Piraeus and Athens for the immigrants: Kaisariani, Nea Smyrni, Nea Makri, Nea Fokaia, Nea Chalkidona, Palaio Faliro. The planners have named their emergency settlements after the places their new inhabitants have been exiled from. Zoë has been to Nea Smyrni. Had the people who built the place ever been to the real Smyrna? How could they have dared name this crooked, matchbox town after her home? Where are the patisseries? Where are the goldsmiths? The beer gardens? Xenopoulo, with its escalators and the latest Parisian fashions? In New Smyrna, the houses may have roofs, but they don’t have much else. Sewage runs down culverts in the middle of the streets.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it? The nicest one!’ says Mama Katina.

Zoë shades her eyes with her hand and peers through the heat-disturbed air. None of the houses look very nice at all. She is dimly aware that two of them could have fitted quite comfortably inside the drawing room of her home in Bournabat. Zoë doesn’t like remembering the house where she had lived with Mama and Papa. It isn’t exactly real any more, just like Mama and Papa have stopped being much more than two words that make her feel sad. So she understands Mama Katina, who sometimes draws pictures of her own house in Boudjah, a French-style mansion with fretwork gables: This is what we have. This will be ours, and only ours. Katina always tears up her drawings with one of her sad smiles. ‘What’s the point?’ she says. ‘This is what we have now.’ This is a partitioned few metres of a warehouse near Piraeus Railway Station where they have lived for the past four years. Before that, they had been camping in a cinema in Athens. But that is about to change. The Refugee Settlement Commission has notified Mama Katina that the Valavani family are to be rehoused, at long last. In a couple of months, maybe sooner. ‘Before your birthday,’ Mama Katina has assured her. Zoë will turn twelve in January. It seems funny to think that she’ll be celebrating inside this odd little house.

‘It’ll be nice, you’ll see,’ Zoë says to Pavlo. ‘You can play your bouzouki and no one will yell at you.’

‘I’ll yell at you,’ Mama Katina says, and pinches both their cheeks. ‘Don’t worry, little birds. I know it looks like a shack but we’ll have our own kitchen and our own lavatory. No more wading through other people’s pee in the middle of the night!’

‘Aman! ’ Pavlo says, cheering up. The communal bathrooms in their warehouse, with their overflowing toilets and slimy cement floors, are a constant source of horror to him.