He hunches over further now so that the bulges rise up, and he puts his long fingers on his knees and pushes himself to stand.
‘On the night before I left, she make me best food in the world: kedjenou!’ He licks his fingers and rolls his eyes. ‘I no have kedjenou for many months, but on this night she make special for me.’
I watch his back, the movement of the wings beneath his T-shirt as he leans down to line up a pair of sandals, which he slips on over his socks. He seems to be in pain.
‘What is wrong with your back?’ I say.
‘I have bent spine from when I was a baby,’ he says.
I must be staring at him in an odd way because he pauses for a moment and looks at me. He’s so tall that even when he’s standing he is hunched over, and when he meets my gaze I notice that he has the eyes of an old man.
‘Will you be coming to have the tea with milk?’ he says. ‘I like it very much.’
‘Yes,’ I say, and my voice comes out in a rasp. ‘I will see you downstairs soon.’
I lock the door of the bathroom so that the Moroccan man will not come in again. I wash my face and hands as far as the elbows and wipe my head and my feet to the ankles. I am sweating and I can’t draw my mind away from the wings to think about the words of the prayer. As I stand on the mat to say ‘Allahu abkar’ I catch sight of my face in the mirror above the sink and I pause with my hands by my ears. I look so different now, but I can’t quite put my finger on how. Yes, there are deep lines that were not there before, and even my eyes seem to have changed – they are darker and wider, always on the alert, like Mohammed’s eyes, but it’s not that; something else has changed, something unfathomable.
The door handle rattles. ‘Geezer!’
I don’t reply but let the water run so that the bathroom steams up, hoping to see Mohammed, but he is not here.
I take my time dressing Afra. I’m not sure why she won’t do it herself, but she stands there, sometimes with her eyes closed, as I pull her dress down over her body, as I wrap her hijab around her head. This time she does not guide my fingers when I put in the hairpins, she just stays silent, and I can see in the mirror that her eyes are still closed, and I wonder why they are shut, if she can’t see anyway. But I don’t ask her. She is holding the marble so tightly that her knuckles are white. Then she lies down on the bed, reaching for the sketch-pad on the bedside cabinet, and she places it on her chest and stays there in silence, in her own world, breathing slowly.
When we go downstairs, the Moroccan man and Diomande are not there. The landlady tells me they have gone out to get some sun. She is cleaning again. She is wearing a lot of make-up, long black lashes that look too big to be real and bright red lipstick the colour of new blood. But no matter how much of that sheen she sprays and no matter how much she scrubs, she can’t get rid of the dampness and the mould and the smell of terrible journeys filled with fear. I wonder how she came to be in this country. I guess that she was born here because of her excellent British accent, and I know she has a lot of family members because in the evenings I can hear so much noise from her place next door, children and other relatives coming and going. And she always smells of spices and bleach, as if she is always either cleaning or cooking.
I contact Lucy Fisher and tell her about the problem at the GP surgery and she apologises and says that she will bring the new documents tomorrow. She is calm and businesslike, and I like that Lucy Fisher is looking out for us. But her error, however small, reminds me that she is human, that she has limitations and this makes me afraid.
Afra is sitting on the sofa listening to the TV. Apart from meetings with Lucy Fisher, this is the first time that she has agreed to venture out of our bedroom, to allow herself in some small way to be part of the world. I sit with her for a while, but eventually I drift outside into the concrete courtyard and look through the fence at the landlady’s garden. Mohammed was right! It is so green, full of shrubs and trees and flowers, with a hanging basket and a bird feeder and some children’s toys – a small blue bicycle and a sandpit. There is also a pond with a water feature of a boy angel holding a conch, but no water is coming out of it. The courtyard is bare and grey compared to the landlady’s garden, but the bee is nestled on one of the flowers, sleeping. The wooden tray suddenly reminds me of the apiaries and how the hives were like the nests of wild bees. I remember removing the individual trays to inspect the honeycomb. It was my job to ensure that the honeybee populations coincided with the nectar flows. I had to know where they occurred, where the crops were located, and then make plans so that I could manage the colonies and achieve my objectives, because it wasn’t just honey we were producing, but pollen and propolis and royal jelly.