The wind changes – the Piraeus municipal rubbish tip is just to the south, and its stink has been wafting over them – and suddenly the air is rich with the smell of a goat roasting over an open fire, of steam from cauldrons of butter beans and bitter greens from the mountain, of snails – the little coffee- and cream-striped snails for which the refugee children scour the hillsides, in return for a few coins from the local tavernas – being fried with garlic, of fish being grilled alongside scrawny shanty town chickens. Zoë’s mouth is watering so much she is afraid she must be slobbering like a dog. She waves to her friends: Efi Sotirakis, Voula Mavrou, Marika Stavrides, Tula Hadjisava, Daizy Vassiloglou. People are milling around, gossiping and smoking, the men in suits and straw boaters, the women in their best dresses. Another gendarme and his young family. A soldier with a medal on his chest. Half-feral children crawl under the tables and chase the feral cats. Many of them have shaved heads stained yellow from being painted with anacryl to cure scabies. Yellow arms, yellow legs. She sees Pavlo down in the crowd, lurking by the cooking fires, and squeezes her eyes shut so that she can beam him a telepathic message: Bring me a lamb chop. Telepathy is fashionable among the grown-ups this year and Zoë has been trying to send her brother thought waves for months now, but so far she hasn’t succeeded. Pavlo sidles past the grills, which are set up over brick-built troughs filled with glowing charcoal, and heads for where a burly man in an army shirt is wrestling a cask of wine onto another trestle table. Daizy is trailing after him like a puppy: he always seems to have a girl in tow.

Pavlo has a fascination for wine and the other strong drinks, Zoë has noticed lately. He’ll make a pot of coffee and drink the lot, just to see what happens. He has taken to smoking tobacco scrounged from the dog-ends he collects up from the pavements. Little things that Mama Katina doesn’t seem to have noticed – or perhaps she doesn’t care. There are worse things happening to people in the refugee settlements than ten-year-old boys acquiring a taste for cigarettes.