This is one step further than we planned. Only one. This time, I think, I’ll do things differently. Then I stop thinking. I stay inside her as I come, and it’s like a long, profound, cathartic exhalation.

“I still hate you,” Marie-France moans in despair, clinging to me, and I know that we’ve never loved each other and never will.

For a few moments, snuggled against Marie-France’s back, I fall into as deep a sleep as is possible in this heat and the constant oppressive vigilance of the camp, and I dream that we have a son. He asks me if I’ll come to the Fathers’ and Sons’ Day at his school. Because he’s never met me. I say yes, and after that I die, drowned in a river whose waters taste of the sea.

I don’t tell Marie-France about this absurd dream or my previous déjà vu, that strange sensation of having reached a fork in the road. As if I already lay on this camp bed and had the option of kissing Marie-France or not, of coming inside Marie-France or not.

Two days later we fly to Paris via Cairo. Marie-France nods off against my shoulder as we cruise over the Mediterranean. She’s embarrassed when she wakes up and huddles against the misted-up window for the rest of the journey.

Standing facing each other in the blue-gray light of Charles de Gaulle Airport among the holidaymakers, suits, trolley cases, and Air France stewardesses in their short pencil skirts, I ask her, “Do you want to see me again?”

She shrugs, which could mean “I don’t know” or “Ask me once more.” I don’t know much about her. She’s twenty-seven, doesn’t like children, loves painting, and refuses to drink rosé wine.

“Not necessary,” Marie-France drawls. She has a particular way of tucking her hair behind her ear while she fixes me with those big, insecure, girlish eyes.

I think of the murderer who was once called Akol until he lost his identity and became Boy.

There are some women, I think, who say no because they’d like to be persuaded and because they don’t want to be the one who said yes, the sign that they’ve lost.

I think of a path that only becomes apparent when you take it, as in Indiana Jones.

I shift my heavy bag onto my other shoulder. I feel my flight instinct urging me to turn on my heel and walk away, fast. Part of me doesn’t want to explore the path that’s opening up among the arrivals and departures in the long airport halls. This part of me simply wants to return to London, do the washing, go to the pub, get drunk until I feel like sleeping, and then sleep for a month and then set off for somewhere new. Anywhere but home.