Believing himself to be a cuckold, my father beat my mother till she was black and blue. Screaming that she was a whore. How else to explain the scrawny worm that clearly wasn’t the fruit of his loins? He kept her up at night, shouting, beating her with his fists, hoping to pummel from her the name of her lover. It disgusted him to look at her, to look at me. After weeks of this terror, he forced her to decide: she must cast me aside or be banished forever. Did she want to be shunned as a harlot? She would end up in a brothel or on the streets. A filthy cur who opened her legs to any man who smiled at her.

I like to believe it wasn’t an easy decision for her to give me up. I clung to that belief – I cling to it still – that it was torture for her to hand me over into the care of another. But that was my fate, to be given away to a childless old crone in a nearby village, who wasn’t right in the head. But for the first six years of my life, she was the only mother I knew. If it hadn’t been for a boy at school who took pleasure in taunting me, I would never have known that the woman I thought of as my mother had not given birth to me. Everybody but me knew that my real mother was a woman called Sahira, the Arabic word for enchantress. Famed for her beauty and green eyes, but burdened with a husband prone to jealous rages, who rarely let her leave the house, even in the company of a guardian.

A boy who lived in the dwelling next to mine – house is too grand a word for the hovel I was raised in – took me one day to the market town where my real parents lived and pointed her out. She was returning home from the souk, accompanied by the man I learned was my father. Blood from the package in her hand, a sheep’s heart wrapped in paper, seeped through the cloth it was wrapped in. ‘That’s your mother,’ the boy said, grinning like a jackal.