I sat holding myself still against the cold. I wished Lili had stayed with me, hung about with cigarette smoke and laughing. I could still smell cigarettes. There were butts lying on the wooden floor. I missed Lili in her scarlet coat and her stench of scent and cigarettes. Nour had smoked incessantly and so had some of his aunts. My mother and Syl disapproved of the habit. My father didn’t smoke. Nor did Cynthia. The house was smoke-free when Lili went out. At the moment it smelled of food and wedding preparations and children. Cynthia had said they couldn’t go out because they might catch cold. My mother was trapped in her own house with her ex-husband and his new family. Nobody was laughing and the children were grizzling. I wondered if they would be happier on the banks of the Nile playing in the dust with the brown babies and the children or leaning against the knees of the covered, cigarette-smoking aunts. I pictured Syl’s cold house invaded by crying children and wondered if I could alter the atmosphere sufficiently to make it bearable by taking to cigarettes. It seemed like a counsel of despair. I imagined myself creeping about in the night dropping smouldering stubs in conveniently inflammable corners till all the house burned down. Perhaps if I smoked in bed Syl would sleep in the spare room. Perhaps I could drop ash on the things I cooked and he would refuse to eat them and starve to death. I wondered if it was fair to wish somebody dead because he was going to marry me. I wondered if I was truly eternally wicked and how many people had turned to destruction because they had no strength in them. I wondered if the venom of weakness was more dangerous than the rage of power, more insidious with its content of despair, and if when the world failed it would be because it was heavy with inertia and the tears of deceit, not the fires of wrath, I wondered what would happen if I laughed at Syl. He might kill me.