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‌Reckoning

He that troubles his own house shall inherit the winds, and the fool shall be servant to the wise.

Douay–Rheims Bible

Peace is more important than land.

Anwar Sadat, to the Israeli Knesset
after the Yom Kippur War

‌

‌1976

‌Kuwait

‘Can I have an ice-cream? You said I could, remember? Not a lolly, a big dahab one, with nuts.’

By the seashore, the birds wheeled and circled in the gasping heat. The Kuwaiti sun was approaching its zenith in a roaring blaze and not a ghost of a breeze lifted from the oily water.

Jude fished in her pocket for change. Even the coins are hot. Once, she’d told Marc that their car at midday was hot enough to fry eggs on. The next hour, she had come outside to find him standing by the car bonnet, eggshell in hand, watching the hardening white drip slowly onto the melting tarmac.

‘Wait a moment, pet,’ she said. ‘Daddy will be here soon.’

‘Daddy doesn’t like ice-cream,’ said Sophie solemnly, leaning into the slim shade of her mother’s skirt. Marc stood in front of her, feet planted apart. The light turned his hair an aching white and his skin transparent. Fierce blue eyes looked up at her and his lips pressed together in tight disapproval. ‘But I want one now,’ he said firmly. ‘Before Daddy comes. He always says no.’

Jude silently willed Salim to hurry. He’d left the house this morning in his best suit and tie, eyes full of anxiety. Jude’s heart went out to him, even though she desperately hoped his mission would fail. If he failed, then they could all go home.

She bent down and pinched Marc’s chin. He was both old and young for his six years. Sophie, the elder twin, was her mother reprised in olive tones. Within her brown skin and almond eyes was a quiet, meticulous child, gentle and ready to love.

But Marc – goodness knows where Marc came from, Salim used to say. Salim had taken Marc’s stubborn paleness to heart – almost as if it were a deliberate affront. Jude understood his incredulous annoyance. Your Arab friends here were already suspicious of your blonde wife. And now they look at your white son and wonder – whose is he?

Jude loved Marc’s skin, but the feelings that bubbled inside it troubled her. Her little boy had a mind like a bird, full of fever and flight. He did not listen, he could not be still, soaring and plunging through feelings like the desperate gulls behind her skimming the Arabian Gulf.

‘Be patient, pet,’ she said. ‘We have to wait here until Daddy comes to tell us about his job, remember?’ Marc dropped his eyes and kicked the ground with his feet. Behind her, Jude heard Sophie shout, ‘Daddy!’ She pushed herself up, her heart leaping in her chest.

Salim was beaming, kneeling on the dusty ground, his arms open for Sophie as she ran into them. He pulled her up over one shoulder, where she giggled and kicked her legs.

Jude took Marc’s hand and hurried towards him. He turned to her and kissed her hard and long on her upturned palm – the most he could legally do in Kuwait’s puritan public spaces. ‘It’s okay, my love,’ he said, his voice surging with new confidence. Over the past month, she’d been afraid his courage was leaving him. ‘They agreed to give me a trial. For six months at least, we’re safe. And if it works out – you’re looking at the new Managing Director of Expansion for the Gulf Region.’ He stood taller and slapped Sophie on the backside, making her squeal with laughter. ‘What do you say to that, you pair of pickles?’ he shouted to the children, ruffling Marc’s hair.

What do I say? Jude squeezed his hand and smiled at him. ‘I’m so proud of you, my love. You deserve it. I hope they’re really sorry about what they did to you.’

Salim’s face fell slightly, but then he shrugged.

‘I suppose they did what they had to. The company has to think of its bottom line, and that division wasn’t making so much money.’ It was almost word for word what his American mentor had said when they’d let him go the month before.

Three years ago Jude would never have dreamed they’d be living in this empty desert. Their road in England had just started to smooth, the birth of their perfect twins reconciling doubters on both sides. Marc and Sophie had been wondrous, glorious affirmation of their courage. Those first days in the hospital Jude and Salim had been transfixed by them, these two unlikely beings clutching each other, their twined limbs formed by love.

Everything before had been so hard. Dora nearly had a heart attack when Jude told her of the engagement. It was Jack’s actual heart attack that finally opened the door to tenuous acceptance. Dora stood grimacing at their tiny wedding at Chelsea Register Office as Tony gave her away, and Hassan loomed woodenly by Salim’s side as best man.

Two years later, Salim came home with a strange look on his face. He’d sat on their white and brown spiral carpet and played with the twins, tickling their bellies to make them wriggle with joy.

Once the toddlers were in bed, he gave Jude the news that would set them all on an unknown course. A recruitment company had called to ask if he would consider relocating to Kuwait.

‘Where?’ was the first thing that Jude could find to say. Salim explained. Kuwait was a small desert nation on the shores of the Arabian Gulf, sandwiched in between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. ‘Small but very rich,’ he said, ‘and getting richer every day.’ An American company was peddling new technologies to the sheiks in their rising business districts. And they wanted someone who knew the region. ‘Although that just goes to show how much Americans know about Arabs,’ he’d laughed. A Palestinian doesn’t even speak the same language as the Kuwaitis.’

‘So why go there?’ Jude found herself holding on to the edge of the table, a lump in her throat. She’d been planning to return to her master’s degree once the children turned three, taking all the old books out of the attic and putting them back on the shelf. ‘How could I go there?’

He’d looked at her thoughtfully, but she could already see the fires of excitement in his eyes burning away reason. ‘You don’t look anything other than English,’ he’d said. ‘There are twice as many foreigners in Kuwait than Arabs – they’d never notice you. We wouldn’t need to say anything, my love.’

‘And what about you?’ she’d countered – later, after his first interview had gone so well. On the sofa that evening, in his arms, she’d played her last card. ‘You said you never wanted to go back. You wanted to be free of it, to be your own man.’

She remembered how he’d taken her hand and kissed it. There’d been tears in his eyes, but his voice was wild with happiness.

‘Don’t you see?’ he’d said. ‘That’s the point of all of this. I have a British passport. I’m not a poor Palestinian any more, being pushed around. I’m British, a westerner. They’ll have to respect me.’ He was looking up at the white ceiling, smiling at the invisible future he saw gathering there. ‘Just a few years, and we’ll be rich, my love. We will never have to struggle again.’

And a few days later, Douglas Friend, Managing Director of Odell Enterprises Gulf Division, was buying them dinner at Le Gavroche.

She remembered – it had been the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur in ’seventy-three. Bombs were once again falling around Israel; Arab forces were surging across the deserts and mountains towards Jerusalem. They were calling to take back their stolen lands and Jude despaired of knowing if they were right or wrong.

Salim had persuaded Jude to miss Uncle Alex’s uptown breaking-of-the-fast to come with him instead. How could she refuse, when their peoples were killing each other half a world away? So she left the twins with a babysitter and ached for them throughout the meal. As they ate and Salim talked, she watched the pale orange candlelight stream through their empty champagne glasses, painting ghostly pictures on the mirrors behind their heads. Later that night, she took Salim’s face in her hands and said, ‘One condition, Sal. If we go, we don’t change who we are. We protect this family. Even in an Arab country… I want the children to grow up with nothing to hide.’

They’d arrived at the time of the oil embargo that looked set to make Kuwait even richer. Now three years later – three years of diplomatic dinners, weekends at the Equestrian Club, cheap maids and aching loneliness for Jude – the dreams of wealth were slipping away.

That same Doug Friend, the one promising so much, took Salim into his office to tell him he was out of a job. The division he worked for would be shutting down, and Salim’s contract would not be renewed. Salim had come home crushed, dazed – like the dockyardman Jude once saw knocked over by a swinging crane catching him from behind.

One thin branch of hope remained – a promise to put Salim forward for a trial position in another part of the company. The weight of Salim’s anxiety had been crushing; he had to impress, or it was all over.

Now, with Sophie in one hand and Jude in the other, her husband stepped lightly as he led them into the restaurant beside the waterfront. Behind them stood the triple pillars of the new Kuwait Towers. Their sea-blue globes were raised hundreds of feet into the sky, pierced by long white needles like rockets aimed at the heavens.

Marc was ordering his ice-cream, arguing with Sophie about whether the chocolate or the strawberry dahab cone was tastier.

Salim put his arm around Jude’s waist. ‘I’m so relieved,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But I know you must feel a little sad, my love. It’s just for a while longer. A short while, to secure the rest of our lives.’ She smiled up at him, loving him for his awkward attempt at reassurance.

Marc came up beside her and tugged on her arm. ‘Mummy, can we go and buy the plants now? I waited all week.’ It took a moment before she remembered it: the garden and Marc’s obsession. It had started as a notion of their paper-skinned English headmistress; dreaming of cool summer roses under the Arabian sun, she decided to challenge the children to make English gardens at home. They’d each worked for a month, finding plants and flowers that would grow in the gasping air.

Marc’s garden had been a fantastical and elaborate construction – flowers, stone towers and a spiral of wires taken from a hoard of trash outside the house.

But the very night before the class visited, Salim destroyed it by accident. Coming home late from the office, he’d stepped on it blindly in the near dark. She’d heard the thin sounds of Marc crying the next day, seen his small hands frantically repositioning his plot in the early morning glare.

The prize went to a girl whose mother had planted a circle of geraniums. Marc pushed all of his disappointment into a ball of belief that they could be persuaded to change their mind if only he could make his garden better.

‘Let’s take the children to the Friday market,’ she said to Salim. ‘We did promise Marc last week.’

Salim frowned, and looked at his son. ‘Is this about the garden again?’ She sensed irritation seeping around the corners of his words.

‘It needs to be brighter,’ Marc said, blue eyes staring fearlessly into brown. ‘Dina’s had lots of colours, and that’s why she won.’

Salim shrugged. ‘Sure, let’s go. But this is the last time, Marc. I’ve had enough of the fuss around this garden. It’s not like a man to cry about flowers.’ He chucked Marc under the chin as he spoke.

Marc jerked his head away. This one knows how to carry a grudge. Jude suddenly thought back to Hassan’s words to her, about Salim. He can’t let anything go. You’ll see.

The Friday Market was Kuwait’s largest. Jude could always hear it before she saw it – a vast river of sound springing from a thousand throats, animal and human, conjuring camels and bronze pots, the shriek of dealers and beggars wailing. The market itself sprawled under the noonday sun like a disrobed woman with her entrails open in the heat. Flies crowded them as they walked through row upon row of people lying in the dirt, a legion of the armless, eyeless and legless. Hundreds of palms reached out to them as they passed. Those fingers tore into Jude’s conscience until she felt blooded with guilt; every time she came, she dreaded it more. Her husband, though, had never given the beggars a second glance. Marc and Sophie, she saw with sadness, did not notice them either.

Under a low tarpaulin sheet ahead of them, the stench from the animal market rose off chokingly small cages. Sophie grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled it as they walked past a box full of baby chicks popping over each other with soft cheeping sounds. Each one was dyed a startling pink, green or blue. She heard the tinny rattle of little claws batting against cages and the desperate screech of birds calling for the sky.

Sophie touched the bars as they passed. ‘Mummy, can we take another one?’ Jude shook her head and said, ‘Sorry pet, you know what we said last time.’ There was a limit to how many times a child could bring home an animal and wake up to find it dead the next morning.

Marc had raced ahead to a stall of trees and plant pots. He began pulling small tubs of bright, shrub-like flowers to one side. Then he pointed to a small, slender tree with sweet-smelling white blossoms. ‘That one can go in the middle,’ he said, brimming with excitement. ‘The others can go round the edge.’

‘The others, fine,’ Salim said, coming to stand beside him and motioning the stallholder to put the pots on the back of a wheelbarrow shuttling backwards and forwards between the stall and the cars. ‘But not the tree. It’s a lime. They don’t grow here, not in this heat. In one week it will be dead. He’s trying to rob you.’ He gave the stallholder a sarcastic smile, while the dark man flashed his yellow teeth back.

Marc shook his head. ‘It won’t die. I won’t let it. I’ll water it every day.’

Jude saw Salim wipe his forehead and then bend down to the boy. ‘Listen, Marc. I was a farmer once. I know about citrus trees. I can tell you this isn’t going to work. You should listen to me. Now don’t cry,’ he said hastily, as tears started to flow down Marc’s cheeks. ‘Oh come on now,’ he said, straightening up in embarrassment. ‘What is it? Shall I get you a bucket?’

Jude stepped up to the two of them. She had to fight the urge to hug Marc to her chest, knowing that it would inflame Salim. He would say why can’t you let him learn to be a man? And she would answer he’s only six – he’s hardly learned how to be a child.

‘What’s the harm in taking this tree home?’ she said. ‘He’ll learn something from it, even if it dies. You could help him look after it. It might be good for both of you.’ She whispered this last to Salim, lightly pinching his arm.

Salim looked at them both, and then threw his hands up in defeat. ‘You’re too soft with him,’ he said. She watched with sorrow and irritation as his hands found Sophie’s head and rubbed her soft dark hair while Marc stood aside, his white arms crossed.

‘Let’s go home, us and all the plants,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘Let’s make the best garden in Kuwait.’ She took Marc’s hand in her own and reached for Salim with the other.

For a second Salim’s face looked just as pained as Marc’s. But then he rolled his eyes, paid the stallholder and followed his family back to the broiling car.

They planted the tree in the centre of Marc’s garden, back at the villa. Long after Jude and Sophie had gone inside to make dinner, Salim saw Marc sitting on the steps outside the glass front door. The white sky had cooled to pink and violet, and the little lime tree fluttered in the rising night breeze.

The boy looked up as Salim came to sit beside him. Marc’s eyes were red from the dust of planting. Around them, the hoarse song of the muezzin filled the dusk.

‘Are you happy with your tree, then?’ he asked his son. Marc nodded. Salim felt the boy’s weariness drift over him, like a cloud of dust.

‘Did you know that when I was a boy, I had a tree too?’ The blond head shook slightly. ‘My parents planted it when I was born, and I used to look after it and pick the fruit off it every year. You and I can do that together, if you want.’

Marc looked up again, eyes suddenly wide. ‘Okay.’ Then suddenly he slid along the stoop until he touched his father’s leg. Salim put his arm around him, and they sat in silence, letting the sunset bleed through the air from the wasteland outside. He felt the wind pull through Marc’s white hair, as insubstantial as thistledown. The boy’s fingers were on his leg, clutching through the fabric. There was a weakness to him that terrified Salim. What chance would he have against the Mazens of this world?

Marc stirred, and he heard the small voice say, ‘It’s too hot to grow things here, you said.’

‘That’s right.’ Salim’s eyes were drawn to the garden, the wet dust and the lime tree planted with an anxious tilt. ‘It’s the desert here. Trees and fruit like that one need water and cool air. That’s why I told you to leave it, habibi. So I don’t want you to be disappointed when it dies. You have to learn to face facts.’

There was a pause while Salim watched Marc contemplating this truth. Then the boy squeezed his hands together and said, ‘Things grow in England. I wish we lived there. Then my garden would be amazing.’

‘But we live here, Marc. This is our home.’ Above the surprise Salim felt something colder settling on him. ‘You’re an Arab too. You belong here, not there.’

‘I wish I was there,’ said Marc again. He got to his feet, turned around and went back into the house, leaving Salim alone in the gathering dark.

They spent the evening at a party in the desert, with friends and men who called themselves family. Kuwait was full of family, Palestinian ay’an who’d travelled to this honeypot where the black wealth oozed out of the ground for anyone to scoop up. Round their dinner tables and at their desert feasts, they’d talk about the brothers dying in Beirut and the camps. And then they’d sigh, wipe their hands and drive back to their villas with their jewelled wives and their plump children.

The family car pulled up in a valley between two high dunes – a place they called Il-Saraj, the Saddle. It was famous for its monthly rallies beloved by westerners and Kuwaitis alike. Salim’s heart would swell as he filmed Sophie and Marc with his Super 8mm camera, their faces red with cheering from the height of the dunes, exhilarated by the echoing roar of engines and the squeal of tyres ripping up the ground into red strips of dust.

On this evening, the Saddle was quiet. High tent walls were swaying slowly in the breeze of the valley floor. A goat and a sheep bleated sadly on the back of a pickup truck, their legs tied together. ‘Oh no,’ wailed Sophie, pressing her face to the car window as Salim turned off the engine. ‘Are they going to kill them?’

‘That’s right,’ her brother shot back. Salim could feel his feet kicking the back of the seat. ‘They’re going to pull their heads off and then we’re going to eat them.’ Sophie screamed, ‘No, we won’t, you’re so horrible!’ and started to cry.

Salim shook his head and left Jude to sort it out. As he closed the car door on their voices, he saw a bedou wrapped in a red-checked keffiyeh hoist the sheep onto his shoulders, and carry it slowly away towards the stake and the knife.

Inside the red-fringed tent, the burned smell of Turkish coffee lay thick on the men sprawling on their low cushions. Adnan Al-Khadra was in the corner; he saw Salim and waved him over. Drums drifted in, and the wailing of a fiddle as a bedou raised his thin voice to the sunset sky.

Adnan had been the first name on a list provided by Nadia for their arrival in Kuwait – more cousins of cousins, linked by a fragile trail of bloodlines to Abu Hassan and his long-dead first wife. He’d clapped Salim on the back, kissed him on both cheeks and called him nephew. Adnan honoured tradition by referring to Abu Hassan as my brother but his other habits screamed modernist: he liked to be called by his first name, and his youngest son – a keen gun of twenty-five – was a company man in Salim’s new division at Odell.

Tonight he was cracking nuts with his teeth, in a finely tailored open-necked shirt and light linen trousers. His combed silver hair and deep black eyes made Salim think of a big, sleek American car.

‘So tell me,’ Adnan spat out a shell. ‘Everything’s good with you? You start work tomorrow, right?’

‘Insha’Allah,’ Salim replied. Adnan grinned. ‘That’s right, that’s right! Never trust the Americani until you get your first paycheque. They messed my Omar around on his salary like he was a dog begging for dinner. But now you and he will be working together. That’s very good. He’s a young man, still wild, you know? He needs someone with experience to show him how to ride the horse.’

Salim had heard it before. Riding the horse in Kuwait City meant clinging onto the mane of the American beast as it galloped through the Arab world. Adnan was saying: look after my boy, he’s one of your own. He wasn’t so modern that he expected his son to get by purely on his own skills.

Salim fantasized about telling Adnan he would happily pass his son’s papers on to Human Resources. But the ropes of guilt and duty were wound too tight.

He nodded at Adnan. ‘I’ll be happy to keep my eye on Omar,’ he said as courteously as he could. ‘He seems talented enough.’

Adnan hooted with laughter. ‘Talented! Yes, for sure he thinks he is. And what can his old father say? We’re as useless as old cars to your generation, isn’t that it? Let me tell you something. In your father’s day and mine, people took different measures of a man. A successful man wasn’t just rich – he was – how shall I say it?’ He sucked the salt off his fingers and tapped his fist to his chest. ‘Generous. He shared his money, his wisdom if he had any. Or even if he didn’t! Your father was no genius, you know that. But he was generous in his way. He had an open hand. These days, it’s all about how well you did in school, how smart you dress and how much you can cram onto your own plate. My son thinks he’s a genius because I sent him to school in the States and the Americani gave him a job. He thinks that’s all there is to life. And what about you, eh, Salim? Are you an old fellow or a new?’ He beamed a white smile.

Jude came into the tent, her blonde hair glorious in the lamplight. A wave of cool air followed her in from the clear darkness outside. She smiled as she came up to him and his heart melted as it always did. Adnan rose to kiss her on the cheek. ‘The lovely Jude. You look splendid. How are you, my lady?’

‘Hot as the devil in this tent,’ Jude said, with a smiling sideways glance at Salim. ‘Why don’t you all come outside? The children are playing round the fire and the women say they won’t dance without an audience.’

‘What are we waiting for, then?’ Salim took her hand and followed his wife out of the tent. Night had come down like a knife, and the desert cold sliced into him. The fire played underneath the bodies of the sheep and goat, their fat dripping in faint sizzles onto the crackling wood. Inside the tent, bedouin had laid large oval plates of rice with vermicelli, balls of cracked wheat and spiced lamb, cabbage leaves cooked in yoghurt and fragrant salads of cucumber and parsley.

Salim sat down on a rug in the sand next to Adnan. A young man came rushing up out of the firelight, his face flushed, all the absurdity of youth in his tight t-shirt and gulping Adam’s apple. The famous Omar. He bent to shake Salim’s hand. ‘Wow, Salim Al-Ishmaeli! Right? So good to see you again. I can’t believe we’ll be working together!’ Enthusiasm blazed from every syllable. Working under me, not with me. Salim bit back the words as he returned the handshake.

The women had started dancing around the flames. Jude was among them; he saw her, the sequins in her skirt flying like sparks, her feet bare and her hair around her shoulders darkening to deep gold. The secret of her heritage – their secret – sometimes made him love her even more. It was a hidden part of herself, visible only to him – like those Kuwaiti wives in their long black shrouds filled with the seductive power of the unseen.

She’d tried her best to blend in, taking Arabic lessons and imitating Arabic dancing. But her feet betrayed her roots. She was a northern girl skipping under a cloudy blue sky, to the light rhythms of dockyard shanties. There was nothing of the swaying, sliding east in her. Perhaps that was why he’d wanted her so much.

Marc and Sophie joined her in the dance, their skin and hair turned to bronze against the fire. Sophie followed her mother, but Marc whirled and spun like the dervishes at Nabi Ruben. That was the last time Salim had seen his mother dance, on a night like this one in another world.

‘Such beautiful children.’ It was Adnan, beside him. ‘You’re blessed to get two at once.’

‘I know I am,’ Salim said quietly. He watched them dance around and around in the golden haze. Ashes from the blaze were falling. They brushed his cheek like tears. It was bewitching to see his family so apart from him; like visions on a screen, their radiant happiness vanishing like sparks from the fire into the night sky.

‘Your wife is a brave woman to come here,’ Adnan continued. Salim looked at him sharply. ‘Why so?’ he said.

The older man shifted, his eyes fixed on the dancing children. ‘It’s hard for a western woman to bring up Arabic children. In the Arab way, I mean. Look at your ones. They can’t speak to my grandchildren in Arabic. They don’t know the Qur’an.’

‘Wait there, Adnan,’ Salim said, trying to laugh. ‘You can’t tell me you know the Qur’an. I don’t know it either – I went to Catholic school, remember?’

‘But you learned it, Salim. We all did and we all do now. So what if you’re a believer? Who cares? It’s the thing we share. It’s what binds us together in this divided world.’

‘My children know their heritage,’ Salim said. He tried to keep emotion out of his voice. ‘They know where they come from.’

Adnan smiled and put his hand on Salim’s shoulder. ‘My son – you could be my son, you know – you forget something. Men don’t raise children. Women do. What those children learn, what they take into their hearts, will come from her. That’s why I say she’s taken on a big challenge. I hope you can guide her with it, or your kids will be as much of an Arab as she is.’

Salim searched for a protest – but suddenly there were plates of rice and dripping meat in front of them, and Adnan was seizing the first eager mouthful as the children danced on and on.

The twins fell asleep in the back of the car on the way home. Salim looked at them, their closed eyes shadowed and pale under the hard brilliance of the street lights, their faces dark with soot. Fingers of unbearable love took his heart and squeezed it. Jude rested against the window, eyes half-closed.

‘I want the children to have Arabic lessons,’ he said suddenly. The words surprised him, racing ahead of his thoughts.

He saw her raise her head, startled out of sleepiness.

‘All right,’ she said slowly. ‘They can join my lessons if you like. Or you could do it yourself?’

The thought of speaking Arabic to his children disturbed Salim in a way he could not explain.

‘I’ll teach them too, but you have to make sure they learn,’ he said. ‘I always listened to my mother more than my father. No reason ours should be any different.’

‘All right,’ Jude said again. But he could see she was puzzled. ‘Why now, though? You never seemed to care much about it before.’

He struggled for an answer. The road reeled out ahead of him, a blur of neon. ‘They’re getting older. We don’t know how long we’ll be here. I want them to understand that they’re Palestinians, before it’s too late.’

Jude was sitting up now, and looking at him blankly. ‘They’re not just Palestinians, Sal,’ she said, her voice steady over the hum of the engine. ‘They have two cultures, yours and mine.’

Some people don’t feel they belong anywhere. It had been his mother’s warning, on the balcony in Nazareth before she ran. Her face floated in his memory, white as a ceramic glaze over an empty hole. Not my children. Abadan. Never.

‘You can’t live in two cultures any more than you can have two hearts,’ he said to her. ‘They have to know who they are.’

Her face was flushed now. ‘This wasn’t what we agreed. You said they would never be torn.’

‘Never being torn means choosing one.’ Salim was angry now. ‘My family already lost everything else. What happens if even our children forget where they come from?’

Jude put her hand on his arm. ‘We promised not to do this, remember?’ she said, her voice urgent. ‘We promised not to make it our fight.’ He heard her anxiety, but something stronger than compassion had started to gallop inside him.

‘Please, for me, arrange the Arabic lessons.’ He pushed a plea into his voice. ‘We can talk about the rest later.’ Jude looked at him for a moment, puzzled, as if seeing a stranger. Then she turned away, pressing her forehead to the window again. He did not challenge her. She will do it. He knew his wife, the loving girl, the peacemaker. As the blue lights flashed through the window, he glanced at the children through the rearview mirror. They looked eerie, still, like bodies pulled cold out of the sea. And to his surprise, he saw Marc’s eyes open, unfocused, two small mirrors reflecting the flickering lights of the road.

The Vice President of Odell Enterprises, Expansion and Strategy Division, had skyline offices in Kuwait City. They looked out over the hot and heaving markets to the windy Gulf waters and the distant rigs. The air in the room was dry as a desert-bleached bone, and Salim felt it pouring into his throat like sand.

Here he was, lifted above the clamouring Arab heap – but even standing in front of Meyer’s secretary this morning he’d felt as if the privilege might be snatched back at any time. Her black hair was curled laboriously around her shoulders and her eyes were suspicious. He thought she might be from Jordan or Palestine, and that in his new suit and confident stride he might be deemed worth a sisterly smile. But her red lips pursed like the bruise in an over-ripe apple. Hey habibti, he thought. Aren’t I white enough for you to show me those teeth?

‘Can I help you?’ she’d asked coolly. Her neck craned in the most peculiar way – as if to indicate that, although she had no intention of standing up, she was still capable of looking down on him.

Now he was sitting in the Vice President’s suite, and Meyer was indeed looking down at him from the corner of his desk.

‘So that’s where we are, Sal,’ he was saying. ‘Expansion is always a gamble, but that’s what we’re here for. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’

Meyer had a lean patrician face on a heavy-shouldered boxer’s body. His first words to Salim that morning had been, ‘Hey, Sal. Heard great things, man. No – please, forget the mister. John’s fine.’ It reminded Salim of what Doug Friend said to him, at the letting go last month. ‘Johnny’s a good guy. He’ll give you a shot and before you know it you’ll be on your way up again.’

Meyer went on now. ‘I know Doug gave you the basic lowdown on this Baghdad gig, but you have to know, I think it’s the biggest thing in construction right now. We need to nail that contract, before the others roll in.’ He waggled his fingers in a walking gesture, and Salim imagined hordes of white men with briefcases marching across the Iraqi desert. ‘I envy you, seriously, I do. Baghdad is insane. What a place to visit. You’re going to have a crazy few months.’

‘I’m absolutely ready,’ Salim said, brushing his palms on his suit trousers. ‘I know how to deal with the Iraqis. I was on Doug’s team handling their visit here last year.’

‘He said you did a good job on that one.’ Meyer took two cigarettes out of a silver box on the table and tossed one to Salim. As he pulled in the smoke he caught a glimpse of the sea behind the American’s head, a foamy sweep of grey and white under the noonday haze.

‘You can pick your own team,’ Meyer said. ‘You’ll need someone who knows the tech side, how our teams and the local outfits might work together. You need a marketing man and a project assistant. I can give you a few names – or maybe you have some people in mind?’

Salim thought of Omar and his promise to Adnan. ‘I might, but I’d be happy to have names as well.’ Meyer nodded.

‘The expansion business is never the easy place to be, Sal. This market was like a virgin bride a few years ago. Now it’s an expensive whore and every man with a dick is queueing up. We’re not the only people talking to the Al-Sabahs, the Al-Sauds, the Husseins… you know what I mean? We have to be faster and quicker to keep our market share. Hussein is a big dreamer. He wants Baghdad to be the next Cairo. Okay, so let’s help him build it. And if we do a good job, if we nail it, then this temporary position could turn into something a little less temporary.’

Salim stood up and shook the hand held out to him. Behind Meyer’s head, the gulls were wheeling and shrieking over the limitless sea. Something inside Salim soared with them, and he clasped Meyer’s cushioned palm fiercely. The gold souk was just next door. If he finished early, he could find earrings for Jude, to go with the Arabic necklace she had taken to wearing in place of her grandmother’s chain.

As they were walking out of the door together, Meyer said, ‘Hey, just wondering – Sal – that sounds like an Italian name. But you’re from this neck of the woods, aren’t you?’

‘Not exactly from here,’ Salim said, cautiously. ‘I’m Palestinian. From Israel, maybe you would say.’

‘Right, right.’ Meyer looked at him curiously. ‘And your real name is…’

‘Salim.’ He hadn’t been called that even once in his working life, and he hoped he wasn’t about to start now.

‘Salim.’ Meyer pronounced it Sleem, in a beautiful drawl that Salim had to stop himself from unconsciously imitating. ‘Slim,’ he said again, laughing. ‘That’s what they should call you, you’re so god-damn skinny. I wish I had your metabolism.’

‘Squash three times a week,’ Salim smiled. ‘And my wife can’t cook.’ Meyer laughed out loud, the ease of a man whose voice is the most important in earshot.

‘Okay, Slim,’ he said. ‘It’s better than Sal, anyway. That one makes you sound like a gangster – at least, where I come from.’

Salim thought for a second to ask him if he was Jewish. Meyer was just that kind of name. Then Salim could share the secret of his Jewish wife, and their families would be friends… and who knows where it would lead? But before he could decide Meyer leapt away to corner another company director, and Salim was following the assistant’s heaving backside to his new offices.

Meyer was as good as his word, leaving the names of several project assistants, managers and technicians for Salim to review. His team selection was critical. The Iraqis wanted someone to fill their skies with modern steel; a winning bid would be worth millions to Odell, and more, so much more, to Salim.

As he sat night after night, making lists and interviewing candidates, he sometimes found himself wondering at how earnest these Americans were, how disturbingly professional. We should just go with a few cases of single malt, some beautiful women and an offer to refund a portion of their payments into their Swiss accounts. He joked about it later to Meyer, who just fixed him with his grey eyes and said, ‘If that’s what it takes.’

But the fly in the ointment was Omar. He made good on his father’s hints during Ramadan, while everyone else in the office was fading away with pious hunger.

Salim had no interest in going all day without food and drink, particularly not while temperatures outside soared to fifty degrees. ‘Does God really care what you have for breakfast?’ he’d said to Jude. Even so, he felt a tinge of sympathy for the fainting fasters at work, and tried his best to hide his afternoon snacks from them.

Not so Omar. He was determined to be a sleek young racehorse, not an old donkey dragging a cart full of religious obligations. He came into Salim’s office that day, holding two big Pepsis and a chicken sandwich from the kitchen. ‘What are you doing?’ Salim asked him, pushing the door shut.

‘Sorry!’ Omar said, genuinely surprised. ‘I thought you’d be hungry. I didn’t see you go for lunch. It’s okay,’ he said, jerking his head back towards the office conspiratorially. ‘They know you don’t fast. You don’t have to care, anyway – Boss! Right?’ He sat down at the desk and began to chew on his sandwich, crumbs dabbling his neat pink shirt collar.

It turned out that Omar wanted to talk about the Baghdad project. ‘It’s going to be an amazing experience,’ he said. ‘The biggest expansion we’ve had. I hope one day I get to do what you do. It’s so great. How many trips do you think we’ll have to do, before it’s done? Two or three? They’re tough, the Iraqis. I’ve dealt with them before.’

Salim watched Omar talk with a kind of weary envy. He even sounded like Meyer, a younger version forged in Jordan and America, in marble rooms and private schools. When he talked to Salim about the struggle and his ancestry, it was like Marc or Sophie drawing stick figures in primary colours – images without meaning, fire without heat.

‘Omar, you know I haven’t chosen my team yet,’ he said. ‘I have to get approval for every name. I want to take you, but I just can’t be sure.’

Omar looked up at him, shocked. ‘Why not? I’m very well qualified. I’m the best project assistant on the floor. I’m even an engineer – I can help the technical team. Why on earth wouldn’t you pick me?’

Salim wanted to shake him, to drive some understanding into that suave, unlined face. ‘It’s not about your skills. You’re very good, I know – but so are many others. I have to justify every choice, Omar. I can’t just pick my friends straight out of the hat. What would it look like?’

Omar put down his Pepsi, resentment in his long-lashed eyes. ‘Of course, you have to make the right choice for the team, I understand. But I’m very well qualified,’ he repeated. ‘No one could blame you for choosing a well-qualified Arab for the job, just like when you got your break.’

Salim flushed. He remembered all those dark hours in London, rising before the sun to sweep the floor in Hassan’s garage and studying late into the night after coming off bar shifts. Slipping out of Jude’s warm bed in the cold light, to trek into the office and be patronized by wealthy English boys younger than this one.

‘I decide who’s qualified,’ he said coldly. ‘There’s nothing more to say about it until I’ve made my review.’ Omar’s hopeful smile faded and his face fell. For the first time, Salim saw the genuine upset behind the display of petulance. If we don’t help each other, we’re nothing.

‘Look. I know you’re a brother.’ He found himself saying the word, just as Rafan had said it of Farouk so long ago. ‘I’ll do what I can. Just trust me.’

‘I trust you,’ Omar said, and that was the end of it.

‘Why, why, why can’t they just leave me?’ he said later to Jude, slumped into the sofa while the children slept. ‘Everywhere I go, all these expectations and demands. My life isn’t my own – I have to give a piece to Nadia, and a piece to Hassan, to this distant relative, on and on and on. It’s like being sucked dry every day.’

He felt Jude run her hand over his neck and her cool palm cover his eyes. He breathed in the smell of her, a soft saltiness like baked bread or sea air.

‘Maybe it’s not what you think, Sal,’ he heard her say. ‘Some of these people really love you. Maybe they’re just trying to keep you close.’

Salim laughed. ‘Omar doesn’t love me. He’s not my family, not for all of Adnan’s bullshit about sharing blood.’ He shook his head. ‘A mosquito shares my blood, but I don’t have to call it cousin. And he’ll love me less if I don’t deliver this thing for him. Wait and see.’

After an autumn and winter of laborious preparation, Salim took his proposal for the bid structure and the Baghdad project team into Meyer’s office.

The big visit to the Iraqi capital was set for early spring. The team would make an initial presentation; if it went well, it would secure the Iraqi go-ahead to make a preferential bid for the contract of technical supplier to their construction projects. Within weeks, a fortune might change hands to see Odell lifts in every new Iraqi government-financed building for a decade to come. Or the prize – and Salim’s new job – could go to someone else.

He’d lain awake the previous night, hallucinations of failure dancing across the ceiling. In the dead pre-morning hours, Mazen’s face had bloomed from the dark ceiling. His black hair had curled tightly around his plump head and his eyes were vicious and merry. Salim, you donkey, his voice said, before fading away into the dawn.

In Meyer’s air-conditioned office, the chill helped him focus. He outlined his choices one by one. He knew they were all smart. It was a balanced team, and it included nearly all of Meyer’s personal recommendations. Nearly all. He had sweated about this too. Choose them all, and he might look like he had no mind of his own. Choose too few, and he would be a rebel, a cowboy. Leave out the wrong one, and he’d be the man who couldn’t take a hint.

Meyer sat down and listened courteously. When Salim’s pitch ended, he picked the carefully prepared files and leafed through them slowly. Salim’s palms moistened and he wiped them unconsciously on his trousers.

‘I think you have it here, Slim,’ Meyer said at last. ‘It’s a nice balance. These guys from tech look very impressive. I can’t believe they weren’t on my radar.’

‘They were on Doug’s team and they were fantastic on the Qatar project,’ Salim said quickly. ‘They lost their jobs in the closedown, but I guarantee they can deliver more on this team than anyone else. Not that the team here isn’t great, but I thought why lose a skillset this strong to a competitor?’

Meyer smiled. ‘Smart, and a humanitarian! I love it when we can cover both bases. I’m excited about this.’ Relief was flooding Salim.

Meyer turned over another page. ‘I see you passed on Eric for the project assistant position.’

‘It was very tight. Eric is an excellent planner and I know he’s been on the team here for a while.’

‘So he has.’ Meyer’s hand was poised over the page. Salim prayed he would move on to the next section, but the hand hovered there, a platinum wedding ring glinting against a ridge of thick knuckles and a light brush of silver hair.

‘I thought that Omar Al-Khadra was a more rounded choice,’ Salim said at last, drawn to plunge into the gulf of silence. ‘He’s an engineer by training. It would be an excellent way to improve liaison with the tech team. He is pretty familiar with Baghdad. You’ve always given him great performance reviews.’ He paused.

Meyer turned the page. ‘It’s your call of course,’ he said. ‘But maybe there are a couple of things worth considering, if I might be so bold. This is a very delicate project. There are other Arab teams going in there, I’m sure. Everyone wants to look like a local – local knowledge, local relationships – and so on.’ He sat back in his chair and regarded Salim, his heavy body surging up into the long neck and the grey, patrician face.

‘See – the thing is, local doesn’t really swing it. These guys want us because we’re an international, an American firm bringing that kind of expertise. And glamour, sorry to say it. That’s what they like, even if they don’t know it themselves. You know what I mean?’ Salim nodded. ‘It’s pretty unusual for us to have a local man running the team, as I guess you know.’

‘I’m British.’

‘Sure, I know. But, the question is, does it work against us in the long run to have a local guy doing the liaison too? Does it undermine the subliminal messaging? Nothing against Omar, nothing at all. But do you see my point?’

It’s a shitty, unfair point. ‘I do, for sure,’ Salim said carefully. ‘I’ll think about it. Rethink, if necessary.’

‘That’s all I ask.’ Meyer leaned over and shook Salim’s hand. ‘You did great on this. Look forward to the next update on the trip.’

When Salim walked through the door that night, he heard the children shouting in the bedroom. Unusually, the television was on in the family room. He saw Jude in there, pale in the gloom, sitting as the images flickered over her face. She stood up hastily as he came in and shut off the set.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, as she walked over to kiss him. ‘Nothing,’ she replied, but her eyes were guilty. ‘The twins are going crazy, I just needed a break. I’m making chicken for dinner.’ He watched her slip past him, into the orange-tiled kitchen. Marc came tumbling down the hall shouting ‘Mummy!’ at the top of his lungs, stopping dead when he saw Salim.

‘You came home early,’ he said. ‘Are you cross?’

Salim shook his head. He did not have the energy for Marc tonight. ‘What kind of a question is that, Marc? Who told you I’m cross? I’m not cross.’

‘Mummy says you’re cross sometimes, when you come home from the office.’

Sophie had joined him, and at that she elbowed him in the chest and whispered, ‘Marc, shush.’ Salim felt a revitalizing rush of bitterness. Even here in my own home, I’m misunderstood.

He walked away from the children, into the family room with the television and the drawn blinds. He flicked the set back on and sat down to watch the news. In the kitchen, Jude was clattering the pans with unnecessary energy, just like her mother the one time they’d met for dinner before their awkward London marriage.

The set came on in a blaze of crackling gunfire and screams. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but then he recognized the place – a town in the Galilee, not far from Nadia’s flat. The camera panned over a restless, surging mass of people, young men with dark faces. They had sticks in their hands, and they were shouting Ardna! Damna! Salim felt their voices go right through him. Our land! Our blood! Tanks were jerking along the rough roads to the villages in lower Galilee, as men in jeans and keffiyaat charged rows of young Israeli soldiers.

The commentator’s voice rolled over the scenes – an English voice filled with Arab emotions striking Salim strangely. The Israelis were seizing new holdings of Arab land around Nazareth. They cut to the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, talking about Israel’s need for security and new settlement. And then there was a fuzzy video of a man – some poet, called Ziad – calling on Palestinians to stand up and revolt. Ziad – like the man in Shatila. They’d declared a national strike and called it Land Day. Yom Al-Ard.

The commentary moved onto tensions in Iran, and Salim flicked it off. He had to face Omar in the morning, to give him the bad news. Now he felt dirty, as dirty as a traitor, sick of the whole thing.

In the kitchen, Jude, Sophie and Marc were already at the table. Sophie was attacking a chicken leg with both hands and Marc was peeling the flesh off the bone and arranging it on his plate in a neat circle. In the corner Sophie’s birdcage rattled as its wounded inhabitants, rescued from cats and car windscreens, clambered nervously along the bars.

Jude looked up as he came in. He recognized the expression of unhappy defiance. Salim’s senses were still surging on the bitter flood of memory; she looked more than ever like Lili Yashuv, standing behind her husband at the gates of their house. Jude and Lili – their two images overlaid like two transparencies, coming together in striking clarity in the lines of their long noses, their high foreheads and blue eyes.

He pulled up a chair and took a plate of rice from her hands. Shovelling it into his mouth despite his closed stomach, he tried to push the anger away. I’m British, he had pathetically pleaded to Meyer that afternoon. Pleaded like a boy, while more of his true home was being leached away by men like Meyer, women like Jude.

‘Was it okay at work today?’ Jude was asking. ‘Was Meyer pleased?’

‘Mostly.’ He looked over at Marc, who was steadily looking back at him from over a large, flayed chicken leg. ‘What about you, Marc? Did you have your Arabic lesson today?’

‘It was yesterday,’ Sophie said cheerfully. ‘Mr Shakir came to the house.’

Salim kept looking at Marc. How could he have such blue eyes? The child who would take his name forward had nothing of his nature. It was so unfair, as if Jude’s genes and his mother’s had conspired to remind him that he had no real power, nothing left worth passing on.

‘What did you learn in your lesson then?’ he asked the boy. Marc’s eyes flickered back down to his plate.

‘We learned how to name all the animals.’

‘Really? So you can tell me what you’re eating for dinner.’ Marc’s brow furrowed as he examined his deconstructed chicken. Looking back up at his father, the blue eyes were ruffled with a hint of worry. ‘I forgot,’ he said.

‘I know!’ Sophie squealed, but Salim put his hand up to silence her.

‘I asked Marc. Come on, Marc. Try to remember.’

‘I forgot, I told you.’

‘That’s not good enough. It was only yesterday you learned it. You can’t really have forgotten, can you? Weren’t you listening in the first place?’

Marc looked at his mother for reassurance, but that sidelong glance infuriated Salim. He hit the table with his hand, and Marc’s eyes snapped back to him, his body jerking in shock. Jude said, ‘Sal, please, don’t.’

‘Stay out of this,’ he said heatedly. ‘They’re supposed to be learning and you’re supposed to be helping them. So Marc, tell me something in Arabic. Tell me anything, so I can see that you’re taking this seriously, like a little man. Come on.’ He leaned over and pulled Marc’s plate from his hands, to leave nothing between the boy and him.

Marc started to cry in that painful way he had, his lip wobbling like a girl’s and tears trickling down his nose. Salim saw Jude’s face – it was white. ‘Sal, for God’s sake, enough,’ she said, her voice low. Something inside him reached out of the blaze of anger and self-pity to comfort her, to apologize. But the image of those Israeli tanks rolled over it, slamming it down.

‘If you had done your job, he wouldn’t be so fragile,’ he heard himself saying. ‘But I guess you don’t want him to be like one of these crazy Arabs, right?’

He could see Sophie starting to cry now, her dark almond eyes swimming. Where do these terrible words come from? What kind of man are you? Angry with them all, horrified at himself, he got up from the table and went into the bedroom. As he shut the door, he felt the comfort of silence slide over him, blanketing the maelstrom within.

Meyer’s wife invited them to the beach that weekend. Jude arrived with a warm smile and all the essential facts ready for new friendships: Mrs Meyer’s name was Anne; she was secretary of the International Women’s Club and had three grown children all doing something in New York.

Out on the blazing sands of the Creek, Anne Meyer gave her a fainting handshake from under a drooping sunhat, a butterfly exhausted in the shimmering air. She complimented Jude’s ‘sweet kids’, and complained about the ‘god-awful heat’. Then she turned away to her other guests.

Sophie ran off to join the mêlée of sandy little bodies at the edge of the water. ‘Be careful, pet,’ Jude called out, but her daughter just waved her arm, a brown glimmer of delight. Marc lay down under the umbrella, tracing stick figures in the sand. Out in the haze a tiny sandbank lay white against the blue. Not more than a hundred yards away, she thought. Once I would have swum there without thinking.

The rush of the water and the children brought back distant echoes of memory, the clamour of Wearside, the Junior Team Tryouts, the brightness of those friendships. Another life, another road not taken. She hugged her knees to her chest against the sudden ache, and turned to Salim.

He stood tall above her with the Super 8 camera in his hand, trained on Sophie’s leaping form. As their eyes met he knelt down, his body brown as the darkening sand, and slid a hand onto her shoulder. Since that inexplicable fight he’d been contrite and defiant by turn. The pressure of the bid – that’s all it was, she told herself. So much pressure on him to prove everyone wrong, to succeed in their hare-brained venture.

‘Okay, my love?’ She saw the concern in his eyes, and it moved her – these precious reminders that they were still uniquely attuned to each other, that each soul could still resonate with the other’s needs.

‘Perfect.’ She smiled up at him and pointed to the shoreline. ‘Look at our Sophie.’ Their daughter was skipping with another nameless girl, splashing joyously across the warm sand. ‘She’s never afraid, is she?’

‘Just like her mother,’ Salim said, squeezing Jude’s shoulder. Inexplicable tears rose to her eyes. Beside her, the sound of Marc’s humming mixed with the rush of the waves. It washed old memories over her – rain soaking her forehead when Salim had first kissed her, the flood of her waters breaking and the perfect emptiness of her being when Marc was finally dragged out of her body, hours after Sophie slipped into the doctor’s hands. Salim had rejoiced in his son and daughter, taking them from the bassinet and holding them up to the light, his face shining in pure happiness.

Even their names had been precious, a flag in the earth, staking their claim to their own choices. They named Sophie after Safiya, the Prophet’s fiery Jewish wife who converted a nation of doubters. Marc’s name had been harder to choose. Tradition would force Saeed on them, after Salim’s father. But they’d buried it behind Marc – in memory of the unknown grandfather who saved Rebecca’s life. They were so cherished, those secret truths hidden inside their children, linking their old lives to this new one they were building together.

‘Did you talk to Anne?’ Salim’s eyes were fixed on Meyer’s friends, handing out Pepsis under a large umbrella.

Jude forced herself back to the present. ‘A little.’

‘I really hope you can be friends. Tell you what, I’ll get you a drink,’ he said, standing up and strolling over to the coolbox.

She watched him, two Pepsis in hand, hovering outside the knot of laughing men. His face was fixed in happy attention, betraying the strain of matching them smile for smile as they ignored him.

Over on the other side of the beach, a large Arab family sprawled out on mats, the scent of cardamom tea drifting on the rising breeze. Every now and again Salim’s eyes would be drawn to them. She knew what he was feeling, the unspoken question, the search for a ready embrace.

She left Marc and went over to stand by him, lifting her Pepsi out of his hand. His dark eyes found hers; she saw he was embarrassed. In answer, she called over to Anne, lying in a low deckchair reading a magazine. ‘Hi Anne – can I get you something?’

‘No thanks.’ Only the thin hand moved, a restless fanning of super-heated air. Salim tried again. ‘Anne, you know you and Jude are both into teaching? Jude’s going to work at the Kuwait International School – she was doing her master’s in literature before we came here. I hear you did some teaching too.’

Mrs Meyer made a noise from her throat, halfway between agreement and dismissal. Her head settled back as if to sleep. Salim stood waiting with his Pepsi. His stance was hopeful, poised for an answer, and Jude tasted a raw hatred. You scrawny bitch. She wondered where Peggy was now, which beach she was lying on, whose shoulder her pale pink nails were gripping.

Twisting away from Salim, she marched over to the shoreline, fixing her gaze on the sandbank. A lonely gull had landed on the brilliant white, the image of remote perfection. Her fury turned to Salim – these repeated humiliations were his fault, the price of his endless thirst for acceptance. She’d given up her country for him, locked her family’s traditions away in the box with Rebecca’s menorah, but her love alone didn’t satisfy him. A jealous part of her wanted him to run, to throw rejection back in their laughing faces – but would that be any better? Had it made her happy, running from her own humiliation once, leaving all her dreams at Peggy’s front door? I was the best, the best in my year. I should have made the team.

She stepped out into the water, feeling it stroke her. The salty warmth was far from the cool, green smell of Wearside – but she could imagine Mr Hicks yelling at her, ‘Go Judith! Go on, go!’ She wanted to stand on that sandbank and look at them all from far away. She wanted to be a girl again, with everything still before her.

The sea was gentle, cooling above the steep drop-off, the waves calm. Her arms slipped through it. As she kicked she felt the glorious, familiar stretch of her body, the ache of muscles long disused, the exultation of resistance and speed.

Halfway across, the current grabbed her.

At first it was a tug at her legs. Then she saw the sandbank slipping away, sliding suddenly to the right.

Now the water gripped her; her arms grappled to make headway. She fought, incredulous, instinct commanding her to try harder. Her legs and arms beat the water – but soon her kicks turned to flails as the strength leaked out of her into the running sea.

I can make it. But she no longer knew where the sandbank was and the sun was burning into her head. She was being carried faster now, a forced surrender to the power of the rip.

Swim diagonally. The thought filled her brain. But the swell was on her now, walls of water on all sides. Water was in her mouth and she breathed it into her lungs. She couldn’t get enough oxygen, she had to get to land – she lunged out towards nothing and then she was submerged, directionless, her arms weaker, moving in frantic circles.

For a moment she rose, to see the children in sharp relief on the shoreline, like pictures from a book, a girl with her arm pointing outwards laughing or calling.

Then someone else’s arms were around her. They raised her head, and she felt them anchor her. The shoreline was there, an unimaginably small distance to safety. And as she put her hand on the man’s chest to steady herself, she felt Salim’s heart pounding with her own as he pulled them towards the beach.

They were out of the water and she fell on her knees in the sand. He fell next to her, dripping, his arms tight around her. He was crying the words, almost incoherent: ‘What were you doing, what were you thinking?’ Marc was there too, he clung to their legs and Sophie pressed between them, a tangle of limbs, of sand-streaked faces and hot tears.

She tried to reach out to them but her arms didn’t belong to her any more. And theirs were all around her, safer and stronger than her own. ‘I’m so sorry,’ was all she could whisper into Salim’s shoulder, his sweat sharp in her mouth.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he choked, as they clung together, fused into one being. ‘We’re all here now. We’re safe.’ The words rose around her with the beat of the waves, drowning out everything else. We’re all here now. We’re safe, we’re safe, we’re safe.

Everything changed a week before the Baghdad trip.

First, Marc’s tree died. Lingering just a few months through the cooler Kuwaiti winter, it finally gave up, its light green leaves curling into yellowed scraps and drifting helplessly to the ground. Salim wanted to dig it up, but Marc wept at the suggestion. In the end Sophie set stones around the base of the thin trunk, giving it an ominous aspect. To Salim it was a hateful object as he left the house every morning, something between a shrine and a grave.

On the day they booked the Baghdad tickets, Eric came into Salim’s office. Meyer’s selection for project assistant was paler than usual, his forehead creased in a puzzled frown.

‘What’s up?’ Salim asked. Eric had bright red hair, allergy-wet eyes and a nose that looked like it was dripping off his face. Meyer’s secretary said he was like the fire and the hosepipe in one body.

‘A call is coming through to this phone,’ he said, significantly, pointing to the handset on Salim’s desk. ‘I think you should hear it yourself.’

Salim picked up the phone and pushed the flashing red button that indicated a call on hold. The line instantly began to crackle. ‘Hello?’ he shouted into the long-distance buzzing.

‘Mr Al-Ishmaeli, schlonak!’ An Iraqi greeting from Abdel-Rahman, their man on the ground in Baghdad. ‘I wanted to tell you something I heard today, it’s very important.’ The line screeched and Salim held the phone away from his ear. It had been the siren of a car. Abdel-Rahman had clearly thought it wiser to call from a street phone.

‘What is it?’ He spoke in English for Eric’s benefit.

‘I went to the Al-Rashid, to check our bookings,’ Abdel shouted. The Al-Rashid was one of Baghdad’s most prestigious hotels, close to the Presidential Palaces. ‘I wanted to take one room a few days early, for preparation, you know. But the girl at the desk told me no. They have another group coming, some Americans from Bahrain. I got her to show me the name. It’s Curran, habibi. The men are coming from Curran to Iraq, in three days’ time. I called the Minister’s office and it’s true. That bastard, that kahlet, he got ahead of us. Curran will negotiate with the Minister, pay his bribes, get the deal and you will come here in time for a handshake and goodbye.’

Salim felt dizzy. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure, habibi, sure. They screwed us. What do you want to do?’

I have no idea. ‘I’ll call you back in ten minutes, Aboudy. Give me the number you’re on, and stay there.’

As he hung up, he looked at Eric, wondering what the young man saw. Another failed Arab leader, no doubt. The world was full enough of them.

‘Should we tell Meyer?’ Eric asked him, hugging his thin arms around his chest.

God, no. ‘Not yet,’ Salim said. ‘Just give me five minutes.’ Eric nodded, and walked slowly out of the door. Salim was left to himself.

Panic raced through him, carrying bitter thoughts. They had not been careful enough – they had got the timing wrong, and someone else would get there first. He would be the man who presided over a disaster, a corporate humiliation.

He stood up and walked over to the window, looking out onto the haze of the city and the long, empty desert beyond. Light glinted off the limousines sliding through the streets below. They reminded him of silver fish, circling above the desert’s waiting maw, just a finger’s width from oblivion.

A picture of Jude and the children sat on the shelf beside him. Her hair caught his eye, and a memory stirred – the Yiddish phrase she liked to use – be a mensch. Be bold. It was fine for her to say, and Meyer. They were born to be masters. The rules worked for them, so they never had to find the backhand way.

And that’s when he saw it, clear as the noonday sun, the glint of a hidden road. Meyer would never get it, but any Arab would instantly understand. It was the only possible way.

He walked across the floor to Eric’s desk, heart pumping with every step. ‘Listen,’ he said, throwing Abdel-Rahman’s phone number at him. ‘I want you to call him back and get every single room in Al-Rashid for tomorrow night. We are going to meet the Minister in Baghdad. Book the flights and tell the team.’

Eric went grey under his freckles, and a drop of sweat trickled off the end of his nose.

‘There’s no way… I mean, we are so far from being ready. And we haven’t even got an appointment with Ramadan. It sounded like they have no interest in seeing us.’

‘So what?’ Salim said, feeling a glorious wave of superior knowledge for the first time on this project. ‘Was your girlfriend interested in seeing you, the first time you met? My wife certainly wasn’t. Between now and tomorrow, I’ll make them interested.’

He left Eric and walked over to the furthest part of the floor. To his relief, Omar was at his desk.

The young man had hardly spoken a word to him after learning of Salim’s decision. Adnan had met Salim at a dinner a week later and the coolness could not have been clearer. He was polite enough, the old man, shaking his head and saying, ‘It’s a shame that you and Omar couldn’t have been working together.’ And later he’d patted Salim on the arm when they were talking about politics or travel, and said, ‘We have to watch our backs with these Americani, right, Salim? You think they’re your friends, you sell yourself, but they will remember who you are in the end.’

Omar’s eyes widened as he saw Salim coming. ‘Salim! This is a surprise. Are you well?’

‘Not the best, to tell you the truth.’ Salim sat down on the corner of Omar’s desk. ‘When you went to Baghdad last time, you hung out with that singer – what’s her name?’

‘Hanan.’

‘That’s right. You said she was a close friend of Ramadan.’ Taha Ramadan was the Minister of Industry in Iraq – the man who’d promised so much and was now poised to deliver it all into other hands.

‘She is,’ Omar replied, looking completely lost. ‘So what?’

‘So I need you to get on the phone to her now,’ Salim said. ‘I don’t care how. She needs to give me Taha’s private number. I have to speak to him today, or this entire project is dead.’ He saw Omar’s face harden.

‘I see,’ he said sarcastically. ‘So now I can do something for you, Salim, for your future.’

Salim shook his head, trying to stay ahead of desperation. ‘I can’t change what happened,’ he said, ‘but if this works, Omar, I will personally walk you into Meyer’s office and tell him you saved us.’ He saw Omar’s struggle, the fight between ambition, shame and resentment that he knew so well. When Omar’s hand twitched towards the phone, he knew ambition had won. He breathed a sigh of relief and went back to his desk, to comfort a frantic Eric and marshal the bewildered technical team.

He made the phone call at night, just ten hours before their flight was due to depart. Omar’s contact had come through, and Salim had the secret phone number in his hand. Throat dry, he picked up the phone.

It did not go well at first. ‘How did you get this number?’ Ramadan demanded, his voice a furious bass.

‘From your girlfriend, Excellency,’ Salim replied in his best Iraqi dialect. ‘She wants me to check whether you’re seeing anyone else.’ All or nothing.

There was a silence at the end of the phone, and then a raw belly laugh. ‘These Americans – so serious,’ the deep voice said. ‘I can’t believe I have to deal with you twice in one week.’

‘You may have to deal with us sooner than you think, Excellency,’ Salim replied. ‘We’re coming to see you tomorrow. I can’t wait to have some masgouf with you beside the Tigris.’ He had read somewhere that the Iraqi national dish was Ramadan’s favourite – a river-caught carp split in half down its backbone into a flat circle, rubbed with olive and tamarind and slow-cooked on a wood fire.

Ramadan coughed over the phone. ‘Yani, I wish I could. But my schedule is very busy tomorrow. Why the rush?’

Salim needed all of his courage to keep going. ‘It’s for you I’m coming earlier. We can pay more than Curran. We can do a better deal. But if they come first, it’s like a man going to his wedding knowing another man’s already been there. My bosses will never allow it. And you’ll be stuck with the lowest price.’

The other end of the phone was silent except for the wheeze of Ramadan’s hefty breath.

‘Why should I care which American I do business with?’ he said eventually. ‘Aren’t you all the same?’

‘I’m not an American, Excellency.’ Salim took another breath. ‘And if you don’t meet with me, you’ll never know how different I am.’ Ramadan snorted, but he stayed quiet – a good sign.

‘We can call it a friend’s visit,’ Salim went on. ‘We don’t have to make it in the offices. I can arrange something better, something more entertaining.’

Another cough came from the end of the line. ‘You say you’re coming, so okay, I can’t stop you.’ Ramadan seemed to be choosing his words carefully, so Salim did the same.

‘We arrive tomorrow, at eleven in the morning. I hope I’ll see you at the airport, Excellency.’

‘Yallah, it’s late,’ Ramadan said. ‘Goodnight, Mr Al-Ishmaeli.’ He hung up the phone, and the dial tone rang long and loud in Salim’s ear.

That night he dreamed of the Orange House.

It was behind him, at the end of a long, bright street. The sun above was as white as Marc’s hair, streaming in tendrils down to the ground and obscuring the air.

Ahead of him, a boy kicked a football. Salim squinted into the light; he recognized Mazen. But then somehow Mazen changed into Hassan and Rafan, as tall as men, and the ball was driving towards him so fast, too fast to catch. It flew past him as they laughed, but he couldn’t turn around to find it again. The Orange House was whispering at his back, and his mother was calling him.

He looked over the heads of the boy-men standing like shadows on the road, searching for the sea, but it was as dark and still as glass.

A terror rose inside him, and he pulled himself away from it, turning and turning until his hand hit the floor. Then he woke tangled in the sheets, neither in bed nor out of it, halfway to the ground.

The plane touched the tarmac in the furnace of Baghdad the next morning, the languorous palms of Mesopotamia beckoning them down. As the wheels screamed their protest, Salim would have prayed if there were any gods left to believe in.

The team had not slept, had not eaten, and could hardly look at each other. If I’ve led them here on a fool’s chase, they’ll never forgive me.

There’d been a time for faith, for belief in fairness, and Salim tried to reach back to it. He’d tried so hard, risked so much. Those waving palms, their green fronds so blithely welcoming – were they a sign? The trees were laden with dates close to ripening. They were smaller than oranges, but no less sweet. Had he lost his first harvest to be rewarded with a better one here?

Passing through customs, they emerged into the arrivals hall. Women and children flocked around them, old and young men hugged each other. Not a dignitary in sight. Salim’s heart, so full of hope, finally sank. It was over.

Then, Eric clutched his arm and gasped. The doors slid open, and walking in on a wave of summer heat came Ramadan, his deputy and a delegation to greet them. The Iraqis had come. And at that moment Salim knew that he was finally the man he’d dreamed of being – a winner of the race, a master of his fate.

The touchdown in Kuwait three days later was his first taste of pure triumph. From the company car he looked out at the boundless blue of the Arabian Gulf and felt the cresting surge of victory. He’d pulled off a miracle, he knew. His thrusting young executives were awed to a man. Abdel-Rahman, a gnarled Baghdadi seared to hard leather by years in the crucible of Iraqi politics, had shaken his hand with a wicked smile and said mabrouk – an Arab’s most sincere congratulations. In his briefcase, he carried the signed contract that only a few days before had been destined for another company. Meyer would bask in the glory, take most of the credit and officially confirm Salim as his Managing Director.

The lift that took him to Meyer’s floor was the same model as the many they would install in Baghdad’s expanding government and business district. It whirred softly upwards, and Salim pushed his hands to its smooth metal walls. Such a strange, boxy thing to carry a man’s life. He closed his eyes and felt the gentle tug of gravity releasing him as Odell’s technology pushed through it.

Meyer was every bit as delighted as Salim had imagined and replayed many times on the flight from Baghdad. ‘That was one ballsy move, Slim. There’s not a man in a thousand could have pulled it off.’

‘The team was amazing,’ Salim said, relaxing back in the leather chair. ‘They all did their part, put together the pitch and delivered it on no sleep.’

‘They should get a bonus, don’t you think?’ Meyer walked back over to his desk and made a note. He seemed to prefer talking to Salim perched on the corner of his desk.

‘I certainly do.’ He remembered his promise to Omar; now he could finally shake the clinging guilt off his back. ‘You should know, I couldn’t have done it without Omar Al-Khadra. He had the inside track to Ramadan. Thank God he has a busy social life, is all I can say.’

‘Well, maybe we should give him a closer look. Maybe something in liaison and oversight, when the ball gets rolling in Baghdad. Right?’

Salim had a fleeting memory of Mazen’s scorn, his father’s constant dismissals and the superiority of his first colleagues, those mighty Englishmen. ‘The Iraqis will want us to hire one of their own as well,’ he said, hiding his delight. ‘It was part of our unofficial deal with Ramadan.’

‘You’re the boss,’ Meyer said. He stood up again, and sat on the desk, a file in hand. ‘Slim, it’s time we confirmed you in the job. You’ve exceeded expectations, you know. I’m thrilled Doug passed you on to us. I drew up the contract. You can look it over if you like, but I’m happy for you to sign here and now.’ He held the file out to Salim, grey eyes impassively looking down.

Salim took it, his own hands shaking. As he read the first page, the beating of his heart rose as thunder in his ears, drowning Meyer’s smooth drawl: ‘Of course there’ll be a signing bonus, and well deserved.’

Salim’s fingers were cold. He looked up at Meyer, trying to sound cheerful. ‘There’s a mistake here, John. This contract says Associate Director. The agreement was full Managing Director.’

The American shifted his weight on the desk, his eyes still as mirrors. ‘I’m surprised you would think that, Slim. We talked about a number of positions currently open, including the Managing Director and Associate Director roles. You’ve been filling in for all of them – doing an incredible job, for which I intend to recognize you. This offer is part of that recognition.’

Salim stood up now, his eyes level with Meyer. ‘I remember our conversation very clearly. You said I would be reporting directly to you, your second in command.’

‘As you have been. Now Houston is sending someone, a very talented and experienced man with more than ten years of service to the company. He’s a great guy and I know you’ll love working with him.’

‘But it’s my job.’ Salim felt the pain spreading inside him like the kick of a horse to the stomach – breathlessness and dullness giving way to a searing ache. ‘I did everything to earn it. You promised it to me.’

Meyer was eye-to-eye with Salim now, and he could have been etched from granite, a carving from Andromeda’s rocks. ‘I’m so sorry you feel this way, Slim.’ His voice floated into Salim’s ears. ‘I feel terrible if there was a misunderstanding, that your expectations were raised.’ Behind Meyer’s head, Salim could see waves breaking white on the limitless sea.

‘If it makes any difference, I can tell you that we’ve never had a non-American Managing Director here. Wrong, maybe, but that’s how it is. So this is still a great chance for you. You’ll have a fantastic life with your family and get rich just as quickly. If it’s not good enough for you, well, I wish you the very best of luck.’

Meyer reached his hand out to Salim, who took it by instinct, heart thudding as the dry palm slid into his own.

‘You’re a fantastic guy, Slim. You’ll go far in any organization, I’m sure.’ Meyer dropped the hand and motioned at the door. ‘Now, why don’t you go home, take a rest and think about it. You’ve had a long few days.’

Salim had to force his body to move, force himself not to break out in any more humiliating arguments. If only I had a hat to hold out, I could ask him for some spare change. He walked out of the office like an old man, past the bored secretary, towards the steel of the lift doors that opened for him as if he was expected.

Once inside, he felt a disorienting lightness. It was a moment before he realized they had begun their descent towards the ground, surrendering to the grip that only closes once you try to escape.

Jude heard Salim’s car pull into the drive earlier than expected that day. She stood up, The Brothers Karamazov sliding to the floor. Her interview with the Kuwait International School was scheduled for the following morning. She’d spent hours that day brushing up on college reading, taking out her old books and clearing the shelves joyfully in preparation for more.

Through the glass-fronted door she saw her husband walk in past the villa gate. The sun was setting over the heap of tyres and rubble in the wasteland across the dirt road. His jacket and tie were off and he carried a box under his arm.

He stopped beside Marc’s beloved, dead lime tree and slowly reached out to touch it. The tiny, bare branches reached into the dry air like atrophied hands.

At first she couldn’t work out why Salim was standing there, the debris of his office around him. But then, to her horror, he picked up the shovel that stood by the gate and drove it into the ground.

She barely knew she was running by the time she reached the front door and pulled it open. ‘Sal, don’t!’ she shouted from the porch, her bare feet slipping on the dusty stone. Dirt from the parched ground was swirling around him in a yellow cloud.

The tree’s little roots were already exposed; Salim dropped the spade, took hold of the trunk and wrenched it loose. Clinging fibres rose and tore, streaming dirt into the deepening hole. Jude felt something pierce the underside of her foot as she scrambled down the steps. Reaching out, she tried to drag Salim’s arm away with all her strength, the choking warmth of dust filling her lungs.

At that moment Jude heard a wail behind her, a high, savage note, and felt something rush past her and crash into Salim, throwing them both off balance.

The little boy was crying and thrashing, his hands grappling for the tree falling from Salim’s hand, dirt from the ground covering his face. ‘No, no, no, it’s mine!’ he was shouting.

Salim gripped Marc by the shoulders and shouted back, ‘It’s dead, do you understand me! It’s dead!’ Jude felt lost in confusion as she saw Salim’s own tears begin to stream down; now he was trying to hug the boy but furious fists pushed him away.

Marc crouched on the ground and tried to lift his tree, to set it back in its space, only to see it fall down. He tried again, and again, weeping over the brittle branches as they broke and scratched him, leaving red and brown welts on his arms.

Salim stood up and looked over at Jude, his eyes full of sorrow and something that felt much colder – a kind of disgust. Then he turned around and walked into the house, past her and Sophie standing at the door with wide brown eyes.

Her first thought was her interview in the morning. Everything was a shambles, all her careful preparation. The neat little patio was a squalid earthy mess; Marc was covered in branches, tears and dirt. And when she leaned down to say ‘Let it go, pet,’ his eyes flicked up to hers, swollen and filled with blue rage.

It was Sophie who persuaded him to lay the tree on the ground and cover it with a blanket. Sophie whose arms he huddled in, submissive and empty, while Jude put antiseptic on his cuts. Eventually she laid them both in bed, cuddled up against each other. Marc was white and drained and Sophie subdued. ‘Why is Daddy so sad?’ she’d asked her mother. Marc turned his face to the wall. ‘I suppose he had some bad news at work, pet,’ Jude answered, trying to keep the fear from her voice.

As they lay with their arms wrapped round each other, Jude had the strangest sensation that they were two alien creatures, belonging to each other and not to her at all. She sat with them until their breath slowed and their faces relaxed. The pale and the dark foreheads were inches apart, heartbreaking in their sweetness.

As night fell, she stood hesitant outside her bedroom door. It opened at the faintest touch of her fingers, and she stepped warily inside.

He was sitting on the bed in a clean t-shirt and shorts. In his hand he held the picture that lived on their mantelpiece, that fading image of his old house and the baby boy in front of it. His shoulder blades jutted out as he hunched over, the teenager showing through the man. In the middle of her anger, she felt her heart ache for him.

‘You didn’t get the job?’ She sat down beside him, a finger’s width away.

Without raising his head, he passed her the picture. She took it automatically, running her fingers over the baby’s sweet, upturned face, yellowing now in its frame.

‘They were right when I was a boy.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘Mazen, I mean, about my father and me. He said we were stupid, just fellahin with a little money and big ideas. I used to think he was wrong. But then my father was tricked by Abu Mazen, and now these Americans have shown me I’m just as stupid.’

‘What’s happened, Sal?’ He wouldn’t look at her. ‘I thought it went so well.’

‘What’s happened is I’ve failed,’ he told her. ‘You and the kids. Everyone.’

‘That’s not true.’ She reached for the right words. ‘It doesn’t matter to us.’

‘It matters.’ He looked up and laughed. ‘I’ve come all this way for nothing.’

The picture frame felt heavy in her hands – a leaden weight of memory pushing him back to a past they couldn’t share.

‘I’m something, aren’t I?’ Her fingers dug into the glass. ‘Your children are something. We might be the only people like us in the world. Shouldn’t we be proud of that?’

‘Proud.’ She saw the black head shake. ‘The twins can watch your tanks crushing my people on the news and wonder who to cheer on.’

Jude froze. ‘They’re not my tanks, Sal. And now we’re your people. Your family.’

They sat in silence for a moment, and she wondered if he’d even heard her. Then he said, ‘You saw how it was, that day on the beach. An Arab with pretensions. Maybe it’s all I’ll ever be.’ She remembered Peggy smiling over Kathleen’s shoulder, the closing oak door, and her stomach clenched.

‘Let’s just go back to England,’ she pleaded. ‘You’d find a good job there. For God’s sake, Salim, you don’t have to prove anything to anyone.’

He snatched the picture back from her hand. ‘What do you know about having to prove yourself? You want me to go crawling back to England for some other white man to fuck me over? Or to work in Hassan’s garage? You know, if it wasn’t for your people, for the Jews, I would already be somebody.’ His voice was trembling. ‘A landowner in my own right. Not this.’ He hit his own chest, the flat of his hand slamming down.

She got to her feet, her own tears coming in an angry rush. ‘Look at me, Sal. Please, look at me. It’s Jude. Your wife. Am I the enemy?’

As his head turned towards her, she could see a boy’s longing in his face. It was every inch as sad and lost as Marc’s, clinging onto his dead tree.

‘Maybe I’m just sick of being the fellah who everyone pushes around,’ he said. He turned away from her to lie on his side. ‘Now let me sleep, please.’

Jude felt the brush of air as the bedroom door shut, and the warm brown carpet beneath her feet. It was an easy house to be quiet in, each footfall cushioned and the air conditioners ironing out the noises. But whenever Salim went into his room, silence seemed to lie heavier on the house, an oppressive presence impossible to escape.

Stepping quickly into their dressing room, she closed the door lightly and turned on the small light by the mirror. Her fingers reached behind a painting of the Kuwait Towers Sophie had made at nursery and pulled out a small key. It unlocked the bottom drawer near her feet, the one with all her jewellery and a small, brown box right at the back. It rattled as she dragged it out into the light.

Silver glinted as the lid came off. The shape of it was so familiar in her hands: the menorah that she used to light at Hanukkah, Rebecca’s gift to her, carried on her long journey out of the ashes of Kishinev. She almost laughed at the thought of her Arab husband lying next door. Who would have thought that road could lead here?

She closed her eyes, but, try as she might, she could not see her grandmother’s hands. Tears came into her eyes. Bubby. I’m so lonely. She had not been able to put a name to the cold feeling inside her, as cold as the moment she’d walked into Rebecca’s room and watched her life seeping away.

And then other memories came – of countless Sabbaths when the Gold family would light their solitary little candlesticks and sing the Friday night prayers. Dora had offered the Sabbath candlesticks to her as a parting gift, but Jude had politely declined.

She remembered how she used to let the candles dazzle her in the dark rooms, the rich smell of the wax and the high wail of her mother’s voice. It was a sound that seemed to come from across oceans and miles, a great tidal surge of millions of other voices sweeping over the earth. How often had she been thinking of school, or Kath, or Peggy, and wanting to be somewhere else, or someone else?

Taking two half-melted candles from the bottom of the box, she pushed them into the two furthest holes of the menorah. They would tell me that it’s not done, that it’s forbidden. But they are far away and I’m here, alone, in the dark. Striking a match from the box, she lit the flames and saw her face reflected in the mirror.

It was a stranger’s face she saw; the young woman had gone, and the old one inside was beginning to flower. Shadows dug into her cheeks, but the flickering light made her eyes burn, an inner flame she did not recognize. Leaning over the candles, she put her hands to her face and very quietly started to sing.

‌

‌1982

In the twins’ twelfth autumn, Jude was on her way back from the Kuwait International School when she heard about the bombs.

‘Hush,’ she said, over the twins’ chatter in the back seat. She reached over to turn up the radio. Was it bombs I heard today? It had sounded like thunder, a deep thud and the rattle of windows. A wind had picked up afterwards and she’d seen dark clouds in the sky. Sandstorm. That was her first instinct. She’d long learned to dread them. Every window in the house was taped shut, every crack and crevice covered. But when the storms came, the howling desert would test their defences with insidious fingers. It would always find a way in.

But today it was bombs, not sand. Six bombs, the announcer said, hitting the French and American embassies, an oil refinery and other places. More would have died, but the bombers had not learned their trade well. The war between Iran and Iraq had finally come to Kuwait, the little country placed so precariously between them. Salim’s friend Adnan had described it as two giants wrestling over an oily dwarf.

‘What’s that, Mum?’ Sophie asked. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing, pet,’ Jude said. ‘They’re just talking about the war.’ She saw Sophie’s eyes narrow at her mother’s transparency.

Jude’s hands gripped the wheel. Ever since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that summer, war had cast a shadow over all their old routines. Everything felt precarious – from conversation at the dinner table to the drive home past Kuwait’s army posts, bristling with suspicious eyes.

For years she’d brought the twins home from the International School after her classes. The primary school finished early so they’d wait for her on the playground trampoline. It was there she’d first learned that Marc was a spectacular and daring sky dancer. He had something extraordinary, something gravity-defying in his legs. He leapt as if the sky could be breached by will alone, arms stretched above his head, hair like a white halo. Now he was the star of Kuwait’s annual school theatrical, run by a group of ancient headmasters with aristocratic vowels and imperial pasts.

‘It’s not fair,’ Sophie had complained earlier in the car, for the hundredth time. ‘He makes me wait on the side all the time. It’s boring enough being there, if I’m not allowed to have a go.’

In the rearview mirror, Jude saw Marc make a face at his twin, and Sophie lash out with one elegant brown arm saying, ‘Stop it, idiot.’

‘No fighting in the car,’ Jude said, without much heat. They goaded each other for amusement, but she knew their love was as solid as the days they used to sleep clenched tight in each other’s arms.

‘Okay, Mum, we can wait till we get home to fight.’ Marc’s voice was still a boy’s – high and quick, to match his slender white body, as perfect as a chrysalis. But it would not be long before the man in him awoke, and Jude sometimes wondered what would emerge from the shell.

They pulled up into the drive and Sophie said, ‘Oh, Daddy’s home early.’ His white Chevrolet was in the drive, and the front door was open.

Jude’s heart sank. Since Salim had turned down the job at Odell, he’d taken four other jobs, each with less enticing prospects than the last. She never asked why, because in her heart she knew the truth of it: he felt perennially undervalued, he fought with management and his wounded spirit was quick to suspect slights.

Strangely, as Salim’s world shrank, Jude’s own career had started to blossom. At the end of her three-month trial at the school, the headmaster told her she had a gift for storytelling. Slowly, over the last six years, the shelves of the house had filled up with books sent by Tony from England or salvaged from the market and houses of others. Teaching had become a home of a different kind; she loved the smell of the classroom and the round eyes of her pupils as she walked them through worlds they would never see, lives stranger than their own.

Salim always said he was proud of her. But more and more these days, those words tasted of envy. And now – if Salim was back before the end of the working day, it could mean only one thing: another resignation, another few weeks frustrated at home, before another job pulled him into an ever-narrowing circle of possibilities.

She got out of the family car, her once white arms flecked from the relentless Arabian sun. Salim was in the doorway and she tried to smile at him. I’ve become so wary. Once I would have run and thrown my arms around his neck. Now it was Sophie who took that role.

Then she noticed another figure beside him – shorter, but the same lean shape and sliced cheekbones raking up to almond eyes. The strange man grinned, and rubbed his hand across the stubble on his chin. ‘My sister,’ he called out, walking casually down the steps into the dusty front garden. ‘So sorry to drop in on you like this, without an invitation.’

His accent sounded American, with a trace of something thicker, almost like French. He reached her, and she saw his eyes were a deep green, slanted like Salim’s but guileless as a child’s. He smiled, and it chilled her to the bone.

Her husband stood sheepishly behind him, like a taller shadow. ‘My love, this is Rafan,’ he said. ‘My younger brother.’ From the awkward tone, she knew Salim had no part in this sudden appearance – that he was probably as surprised as she was.

‘Hello,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘I’m so glad to meet you at last.’ He clasped her hand in both of his, as if they’d been meeting every year. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It’s such a shame we never got the chance until now. But we’ll make up for it, don’t worry.’ He raised his hands in a gesture of greeting to the twins, who hovered mystified on the edge of the conversation.

As they went into the house, Jude felt her heart jump like a rabbit bolting across the downs. Salim had rarely spoken of his brother. Jude knew that he lived in Lebanon, and never asked more. He was part of that other world – the one that Salim left behind to marry her.

They sat at dinner, the twins polite and quiet, waiting for the stranger to speak. Rafan tucked into his meal, all smiles and compliments. Salim pushed his food around the plate. He knows why Rafan is here, and doesn’t want to say. Some secret conversation on the way back from the airport had put that guilty, angry look on Salim’s drawn face.

It was Marc who finally broke the silence. ‘Did you know that Uncle Rafan was visiting, Dad?’ Marc had stopped calling his father Daddy many years ago. In fact, she could hardly remember if he’d ever done it.

Rafan waved a fork of lamb at Marc.

‘I surprised your father, little man. It’s very bad manners. But he’s such a good brother, that he doesn’t mind. Of course, in England it’s not so polite to drop in like this. In Arab families, though, it’s different. Our homes are always open to each other, did you know that?’ Marc raised his eyebrows. ‘Particularly if a brother or sister really needs help.’

‘Do you need help?’ Sophie asked.

‘A little bit, beauty. You know I live in Beirut, right? You know where that is?’ The twins nodded. ‘Well, there are many other Palestinians who live there. They don’t have houses like this one. They live in camps, all piled together, and very poor and dirty. I’m sure your father has told you.’

‘Mr Shakir told us,’ Sophie said. ‘He’s our Arabic teacher.’ Rafan laughed and nudged Salim in the ribs. ‘You got them a teacher for their own language, big brother,’ he said to Salim in Arabic. Jude’s own learning had sped far ahead of her children’s. She could understand much more than Salim ever had cause to know.

Marc pushed his elbows onto the table, looking at Rafan with his head on one side. He asked, ‘So, do you live in those camps, then?’ Rafan shook his head and said, ‘No, I was lucky to have a Lebanese passport, so I didn’t have to. But I had many friends who did. In one camp, called Shatila, there were many of my friends trying to make a better life for the Palestinian people.’ His green eyes found Jude’s and held them. ‘Trying to take back the lands that were ours before they were stolen.’

‘The Jews were in Israel thousands of years ago. They were always there,’ Marc said casually, and Jude felt fear snap inside her. ‘Doesn’t that make Israel the Jews’ land as well as yours?’

Rafan slowly turned back to Marc and smiled that feline grin. ‘Well, that’s what they say, Marc. That’s what the Jews would say. But the Jews left the land a very long time ago. If you leave something precious on the floor and someone else comes along and cares for it – let’s say, for two thousand years – do you have the right to come back and just take it away?’ Marc opened his mouth to argue, but he saw his mother’s face and closed it again.

Salim leaned forward, incredulous, and said, ‘Where did this come from, Marc?’ But Rafan tapped him on the arm, and went on.

‘So, my friends in this camp, they were protecting their Lebanese brothers from the civil war. But the Israelis knew that the bravest Palestinians were there in the camp. And they decided to get rid of those Palestinians for once and for all. So the Jews came into Lebanon with their armies. Then they made a deal with the Christians.’ He paused to swallow a mouthful of lamb. The children sat rapt, their forks at their sides.

‘In the morning, just a few days ago, the Israelis and the Christians drove their tanks to the edge of the camp, where the children and women were still sleeping in their beds. The Israelis stood guard outside, while the Phalangists went in with guns and knives.’ Rafan took his knife off the plate and slowly slid it across his throat, the blade a hair’s breadth from the skin. Jude’s mouth was too dry to swallow.

Rafan went on. ‘By the time they were finished, thousands were dead, even the little babies and the old people. You could hear the screaming across the city.’ He shovelled a forkful of meat into his mouth and chewed.

Marc’s cheeks were flushed red. ‘That can’t be true,’ he said, his voice young and pained. It’s my fault, she thought. I told him both sides, I told him not to judge. He doesn’t want either of us to be monsters.

‘Yes, little man, I don’t blame you. But it’s true. I went in afterwards and saw what happened. And I thought if this can happen to my friends it could just as easily happen to me. So I decided to come here for a while, to see my dear brother and get to know my English family.’ Another smile, this time to Jude. But she could not smile back. She’d heard about the massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon but had pushed it out of her mind. And now here it was in her kitchen, pointing a bloody finger at her and at Dora, Max and Rebecca – all those she loved. And if it was true, they were all bloodstained, every single one of them.

The table was silent for a moment, until Salim spoke up. ‘Rafan will be staying for as long as he likes. He can have the spare room.’ He spoke to Rafan. ‘My wife will arrange it for you.’

Rafan turned to Jude and gave her a nod of apparent gratitude. She returned it with a smile and a stilted ‘You’re welcome’. But inside she heard drums beating, the distant thunder of an enemy on the march.

She skipped work the next morning and drove Rafan to the local market to buy some clothes. He’d come with only one duffel bag, and he said he needed to stock up. He had a contact, he said, and asked Jude with exaggerated gallantry if she would accompany him.

In the car, she cast around for something to say. All night she’d dreamed of the screams of children chasing her down narrow, red streets. This morning, the autumn heat was oppressive and her face was moist with sweat. Her heart ached for the dead and for the others still to die as the wheel of retaliation turned.

‘I am so sorry about what happened,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t believe anyone would be so cruel.’

He turned towards her, seeming surprised.

‘Why would you be sorry, my sister? You didn’t kill anyone.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she said.

Rafan’s smile crept across his face. Today his green eyes were shaded behind dark glasses, and his t-shirt clung to a wiry body.

‘I do know what you mean, dear Jude,’ he paused, looking out of the window as the streets of Kuwait’s urban outskirts reeled by, landscaped flowers wilting in the morning heat. ‘I must say, I think you are a very brave woman.’

That surprised her. ‘Brave? Why am I brave?’

He took off his glasses, and turned to face her. She felt his gaze like prickles of heat on her skin.

‘I admire anyone willing to keep fighting a losing battle,’ he said. ‘Anyone can see it. Even your kids can see it. That Marc, he’s trying to fight your battle for you. And you’re letting him.’

‘What do you mean?’ She nearly took her hands off the wheel in shock. ‘I don’t want anyone to fight. That’s why…’ She paused to rethink. ‘Sal and I always knew it would be difficult. But we just want the children to be happy – not to feel pressured or forced to choose.’ She remembered Marc’s argument at the dinner table, his innocent defence of her. She hadn’t meant to influence him, but she’d been so afraid of what he was learning from the news that Salim now insisted on watching every night. While Sophie went straight to her room to read, Marc would go and hover by the flickering light of the screen, his young body bathing in the ceaseless colours of rage.

‘You’re dreaming, my sister,’ Rafan said. ‘You can’t live in both worlds. I know, I tried it. I am either Palestinian or Lebanese. You are either Salim’s wife, or a Jew. I have nothing against Jews, truly. Believe me. I’m just telling you this for your own sake. Here, here – on the left.’ He wound down the window and pointed to the side of the road.

They pulled up outside a shop that looked as if it sold gold, not clothes. But Rafan jumped out quickly and said, ‘Five minutes, I promise.’

As she waited, Jude rested her head on her arm. Outside the car, a man herded goats across the busy road, cars roaring their complaints.

She’d married Salim knowing they could make one home out of two: each brick an act of courage – Jude confronting Dora’s rage, Salim defying Arab disapproval. But Rafan was right – something had changed. Over the years Salim had turned his ‘betrayal’ at work into something more destructive – a reliving of all the betrayals of his past, a fear that he himself was a traitor – to his own heritage. All those disapproving Arab faces, all those miserable nights in front of the television watching their peoples tear each other apart. The doors of their home had slowly opened to the world outside, and something dangerous had entered – ghosts of loss and disappointment.

When Rafan came back into the car empty handed, she asked in surprise, ‘Where are the clothes?’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘They’ll be delivered in the next few days. I have very exacting specifications.’ He winked, and she smiled despite herself.

‘Why are you so sure that what Sal and I have isn’t possible?’ she said, as they set off for home. ‘Isn’t this what everyone says they want? Peace, happiness, an end to the violence?’

Rafan shook his head. ‘You’re so naïve, you English. Who wants peace? Let me tell you a truth. The goal of fighting is to keep fighting. Once you win, you get less money and more responsibilities.’ He laughed. ‘That’s what the Jews are finding out now.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Jude retorted. ‘Last night you told us you escaped from a massacre – who could possibly want more bloodshed like that?’

He pushed his glasses back on. ‘Peace may be sweet, dear Jude. But other things will always be sweeter. That’s why I say I admire you. When you pick peace, you pick the losing side.’

Rafan’s clothes, several black duffel bags of them, were delivered two weeks later by a narrow-faced man driving a brown pickup.

Salim helped him load the bags into the disused maid’s quarters at the back of the villa. Jude watched from the back door, her skin prickling.

Afterwards, Rafan came sauntering into the kitchen with a satisfied smile. He pinched Sophie’s cheek, took a glass of water from the filter and yawned, saying he needed a nap. ‘A long day, beauty.’ Then he vanished into the dark of his bedroom.

Salim said he was going to buy some cans and yeast; Rafan had fired him up about the idea of brewing homemade wine in the storage room. ‘I can’t believe you let these bedouin whoremongers tell you what to drink,’ he’d scoffed.

As Jude waved the car out of the drive, the song of the muezzin came rolling in behind it across the darkening wasteland. Once it had been an alien sound, a painful reminder of her loneliness. But her ears had changed with the passage of time; now its sadness spoke to her of familiar things, and resonated with her own losses. It was a drift from hate to love so gentle she could not say when she’d crossed the line between.

Sophie appeared at her side. ‘He sounds cross today, doesn’t he?’ Her daughter at twelve was nearly as tall as Jude, a slim shadow against the falling dusk.

‘Who? Your father?’ Salim had been on edge since the morning; the trip to the supermarket was probably another ruse to avoid them.

‘No, not Daddy. The mosque.’ One hand pulled through her long hair, a habit carried out of her childhood.

Jude touched the twisting fingers and asked, ‘What’s bothering you, pet?’

Sophie rubbed her foot on the ground. ‘Nothing. Only – Uncle Rafan… do you like him?’

Jude’s chest tightened. ‘Why? Did he say something to you?’

‘No. He’s okay. He’s funny. I mean… not funny ha-ha.’ Sophie looked out into the desert, thoughtful. ‘He looks like Daddy but he isn’t like him at all.’

Jude pulled her daughter towards her, feeling the strong smoothness of Sophie’s skin. ‘I could say the same about you and Daddy,’ she said. Sophie’s brown tones were the mirror of her father’s. She had his look but only Marc had inherited the restless heat of his nature. Her daughter’s colours conjured different things for Jude – cool earth and dark lakes, and Rebecca’s sturdy pine trees.

‘Daddy’s been unhappy since Uncle Rafan came,’ Sophie said, resting against her mother’s shoulder. So intuitive, my daughter. The confusion in Salim’s mind had been more visible than ever that morning, from the defiant hunch of his shoulders as he hoisted Rafan’s bags onto his back.

Suddenly, Sophie hugged her arm. ‘Hey, it’s Friday night, you know.’

‘You want to light the candles?’

‘If you’d like. Daddy won’t be back for a while.’

‘Get Marc then,’ Jude said, through the familiar rush of guilt and pleasure. ‘I’ll meet you in there.’

As Jude pulled the menorah out of the dressing room drawer, her fingers fumbled. When she’d first shown the children how to pray, how to light the Sabbath and Hanukkah candles, it was meant to be just once. She’d told herself: I have to pass on the knowledge. But they’d enjoyed it. And it had touched her, those whispered prayers and hidden lights while the muezzin rang through the air outside, so much more than the grand festivities in the open daylight of her childhood.

But that evening, her prayers came hard. In the light of the struck match she could see their distraction. Marc’s eyes were tracing the ceiling, and she found herself wanting to shake him into the present. This is how his father feels sometimes. But even Sophie’s face was thoughtful, her mind elsewhere.

When Jude finished the song and lifted her hands from her face, she heard Sophie say, ‘That thing about the place in Lebanon? Where Uncle Rafan said the Jews helped kill all those people? It’s true, you know. I heard about it at school. They really did do that.’ Marc’s gaze swung round towards her and Jude felt the cold bite of shame.

‘I know.’ Her throat was full. She sensed Sophie looking at her, and Marc too, searching for an explanation. But there was none to give.

‘No wonder he hates them,’ she heard Sophie whisper to her brother. Hates us, Jude wanted to say. But in the semi-darkness she felt the back of her neck prickle, as if unfriendly eyes were on them, an invisible witness judging every word.

‘What’s your brother really doing here?’ she asked Salim later, lying in bed. ‘Hiding from Israeli assassins,’ he said, rolling over and pretending to fall asleep. She lay there in the warm darkness listening to the unhappy rhythm of his breathing and trying to calm the buzzing of her mind.

The next morning she took Marc to his rehearsals. He was waiting in the car, dressed in the long, blue leotard he would wear on stage in just a month’s time. A pair of wire wings lay on the seat next to him. He gave her his most gleeful smile as she opened the car door, saying, ‘Come on, Mum, the star can’t be late.’

‘Who says you’re a star, you cheeky monkey,’ she said, feeling love reach deep into her heart. She stretched over the seat to touch his face.

‘Mr Trevellian says I am,’ he said, very seriously. ‘There’s no one better than me, not even in the year above. He says I have strength and flexibility. That’s why they gave me Puck, even though the older boys wanted it.’

‘I know, pet. I’m very proud of you.’

After the tree catastrophe all those years ago, Marc’s enthusiasm for life had dimmed to a dull glow. Jude had worried for a time that this strange, fragile child might not recover.

It was the Theatrical Society’s Midsummer Night’s Dream that saved him. It had young dancers, a tumbling Puck and a talking donkey. Marc had sat in enthralled silence for the whole two hours and had to be prised from his seat after the house lights came up. The next day at primary school he’d marched to the teacher to demand enrolment in the next production. Jude had received a sympathetic phone call saying no child under twelve was allowed to perform: but after Marc mastered his profound disappointment and grasped the concept of waiting, he once again had something to live for. For six years, he’d punished his body in relentless after-school gymnastics and dance training while Sophie was at Brownies, to be ready for his chance.

And at last it had come. The Society had made the serendipitous decision to restage A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the 1982 October production, after Marc’s twelfth birthday. Marc would finally play Puck on stage this year. My son is about to find out what it’s like to realize a dream.

They pulled up outside the dance school, a long, whitewashed building surrounded by old palms and watered by a deep well. Jude always felt strangely soothed under the gentle shadow of those palms, dappling the world with swashes of green and white. And the milk-and-biscuit smell of the wooden halls reminded her of Bede’s Grammar and those first bittersweet steps out of childhood.

The hall was a scrum of other children and parents. Marc vanished quickly into the crowd, and Jude heard someone shout her name. A tall woman approached her, beads of sweat dappling a brown chignon with grey hairs threaded through it like wires. She held two glasses above her head, as children scurried around her.

‘Hey, Miss Jude. Want some lemonade? It’s cold as all hell.’

Jude took the glass and smiled. Helen was one of the few American Embassy wives who didn’t think it beneath her to mix without a diplomatic passport. Her daughter was in Jude’s class at school. ‘I could never get her to read a damn thing and now she’s giving me Dickens over breakfast,’ she’d said to Jude one parents’ evening. ‘I would kiss you, but imagine the scandal!’

Today Helen’s eyes narrowed as she looked down at her, and Jude flinched under the scrutiny.

‘Now, none of that, honey. What’s up? Man or money?’

Jude shrugged. ‘I’m okay. Sal’s… okay. But his brother just arrived out of the blue from Beirut, to stay with us. And I get the feeling he’s in a lot of trouble.’

‘How so?’

‘I don’t know exactly.’ All of her suspicions came surging onto the tip of her tongue under Helen’s attentive eye. ‘He’s from Beirut, I think involved in the war somehow. He’s…’ she suddenly stopped, biting down her words. Helen’s husband was the big, jovial Chargé d’Affaires at the Embassy. ‘Look at him,’ Salim had whispered the first time they met at the Club. ‘Way too old for that job. CIA for sure.’

Helen sipped her drink. ‘Divine,’ she said. Jude took a swallow; the false sweetness of the lemon left a strange taste in her mouth. ‘That’s the thing about Arabs, honey,’ Helen went on, wiping her forehead. ‘Family here, family there. People can’t get away from them. If I had to live with my family I swear I’d go crazy. Well, crazier. No disrespect to your man, but just tell him it’s not on, if you don’t like it.’

If only it were that simple. ‘I’m going to.’ Jude put her drink down on the table. ‘I am. But I just have to find the right way. Sal feels like he owes his brother somehow. But we come first with him, I know it.’

‘Just say the word if you need a hand. We’re pretty good at getting rid of unwanted pests, you know.’

Suddenly, Marc rounded the corner, breathless and red-faced. ‘Mum!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I left one shoe behind, on my bed.’

‘Can’t you dance barefoot today?’

‘No way.’ Marc’s voice was pained. ‘The floor’s all uneven – some places you stick, some places you slip. We have to go back.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Jude said, half-laughing, half-scolding. ‘I’ll throw a party when you learn how to drive yourself. Just go into the rehearsal, and I’ll go back for the shoe. Go on!’

She reached over and squeezed Helen’s hand. ‘I’ll speak to you later, Helen. Thanks for the talk.’

‘Any time, honey. Remember what I said.’

She took the dirt road back – harder on the car but a shorter round trip. Leaving the car with the engine turning over outside the gate, she rushed into the house through the kitchen door, and into Marc’s bedroom. The beige dancing slipper was there, curled up on the pillow like a dead mouse. She put it in the back pocket of her trousers, and was walking towards the front door when she heard Rafan in the family room. He said the word Jude.

She stopped dead, holding her breath. Was he talking to me? But then she heard Salim reply, and she inched closer to listen.

‘Jude hates what happened in Shatila as much as I do. As much as you do. She would never tell the children anything else,’ she heard her husband say.

Rafan’s voice followed. ‘You’re blind and she’s blind. What do you know about Shatila anyway – either of you? They stood guard over the camp until even the children were dead. Do you know what three thousand dead people smell like, Salim?’ There was a brief silence, and Jude imagined how Salim would see it in his mind – the bodies of Marc and Sophie lying red on the ground, while a man of stone with a Star of David on his gun stood with his back to them, shutting out the world.

‘I don’t know what you want from me,’ Salim said, in English again. ‘I have a family now. I have children. I can’t come to Lebanon, even if I wanted to.’

‘There’s no need to come to Lebanon. There are things to be done everywhere. Even here.’ Rafan used the word mumkin, meaning all things are possible. ‘Where do you think our brothers get their money?’ She heard another sound, a metallic clinking, and Salim said fiercely, ‘Where did you get that?’

‘From your bedroom, big brother. It’s hers. She lights it when you’re not here, to pray to the children in Hebrew. Sophie told me by mistake.’

Ice crept down her spine and her heart seemed to freeze. My menorah? As she groped for how and when he’d found it, a memory washed through her of the last Shabbas night with Sophie and Marc, and the feeling of being watched.

A creak of a chair startled her into movement. Turning on the soft carpet, she tiptoed as fast as she dared into the kitchen and ran down the garden to the running car, panic at her heels. She slammed the door and pushed the car into gear, kicking up dust until she was safely around the corner. Running like a rat. She remembered Rebecca’s letter, the rats hiding in the cellar, afraid of the axes, barely human. Slamming her foot on the brake, she pulled up. Where is my courage? Jude leaned her head forward on the steering wheel, and wept.

That night at dinner, the storm broke. I’ve done nothing wrong, she kept reminding herself. I will not hide.

Rafan turned up for the evening meal, as excruciatingly friendly as ever. She loathed him – his insolence, his cynicism, his infectious falseness. And what was worse, she could not escape the sickening knowledge that she was partly to blame for him. The Jews had helped to forge this dark soul flying into her kitchen on the wings of bloody slaughter.

Salim came to the table late, his eyes shadowed and sad. They ate in silence for a while. At last, Marc turned to Jude and said, ‘Mr Trevellian told me that there are dance schools in England where I can learn properly. Could I go to one next year? He said he was going to talk to you about it.’

Jude looked over at Salim, who in turn had raised his head to look at his son.

‘So you want to live in England, Marc?’ he said quietly. Marc nodded, blindly unwary in his excitement. ‘I want to be a professional dancer.’ Rafan laughed and said, ‘Good for you, little man. Speak up for what you want.’

Salim said, ‘Did your mother suggest this to you? I know she loves dancing.’ His eyes were wet, but his face was pinched in a way they had all learned to dread – the strain of the volcano before the eruption.

Marc caught the tone, and fell silent for a moment. Then, boldly, he said, ‘Well, why not? We can’t stay here forever.’

Salim’s eyes widened. ‘Really? Is that what you talk about, when you’re saying your Jewish prayers? How to get away from here, and from your people and your father too?’

Jude’s eyes met his, defiant blue against the deep black. ‘You know that’s not true. How could you even think it?’

‘How can I think it?’ He flushed. ‘I ask you to give the children Arabic lessons. Now they’re twelve, nearly adults, and they can hardly speak a word. You fill them with stories of England, even though this is their home. And you teach them Jewish prayers? My children, with my name?’ His voice choked, and through the blur of her own emotions Jude saw her husband struggling under the weight of pain.

Marc sat with his mouth open; Jude tried to speak but Sophie jumped ahead of her. ‘I asked to light the candles, Daddy,’ she said. ‘It was just for fun.’ Jude marvelled at her daughter’s courage; she was fearless in the face of anger, like an ocean soaking up a storm.

‘You?’ Salim was incredulous. ‘I don’t believe you, Sophie. What’s fun about this? What were you thinking?’

‘Leave her alone,’ Marc shouted, jumping to his feet. ‘That’s not how it was. It’s not just about your side of things.’

‘No, Marc,’ Jude said, pulling him back. ‘I should have told you, Sal. But they have the right to learn something about my culture too.’

‘Not if it means they turn against me,’ he said, his face white. ‘Not if it makes them more Jew than Arab. You’ve made them into foreigners, into Zionists – like you.’

Marc yelled back, ‘Why are you so horrible all the time? You’re the one turning us against you. You don’t care about us, about anything except the stupid Arabic lessons!’

Jude gasped as Salim leapt to his feet and slapped Marc across the face. His hand left a red welt on the white cheek already losing its baby softness to the harder person underneath.

The boy put his hand up in shock. Jude saw Sophie raise hers in echoed pain. And then, into the silence, Marc spat, ‘I hate you,’ before running out of the kitchen and slamming his bedroom door.

Salim had pointed his finger at Jude and said, ‘No more dancing for him. He has to learn a lesson.’ Then the two brothers went out. She watched them from the back window, carrying Rafan’s bulky black bags from his room and hoisting them into the boot of the family car before screeching out of the drive without explanations.

She left Sophie with the dishes and found Marc in his room doing handstands against the wall. It was still covered with the story of Mowgli – the parentless boy who learned to leap like a monkey and hunt like a tiger.

Upside down, his face was bright purple. She saw tears on his forehead, nearly dried.

‘I can’t do anything right for him,’ he croaked, his arms shaking to hold him up. ‘He hates me and I hate him.’

‘It only feels like that,’ she said. ‘Love and hate feel very similar sometimes.’

Marc glanced dubiously at her. He swung his legs down and sat up flushed.

‘He never asks me anything any more, except to tell me that I’m not good enough at something.’

‘Your father had a very hard life. So many people let him down. He’s wrong to behave this way, but that doesn’t mean you should hate him.’

She saw Marc’s unconvinced face, and took his chin in her hand. ‘You two are just like each other. You both only see your side of things. When he comes back, I’m going to talk to him.’ Marc’s pale blue eyes filled with tears, and she ached to see the need there. He nodded quietly.

When she left his room, she went to the telephone and dialled Tony’s number. They spoke infrequently, because it was expensive and the lines were bad. The last time she’d seen him, the summer before on a holiday to England, his wife had been expecting their third child – and Tony had acquired a belly plus a partnership in his father’s firm.

‘This is madness,’ he said to her, after she sketched the outline of her fears. ‘You need to come home, and now. It sounds like this Rafan is in the PLO or something. Remember Munich, those Israeli athletes. These maniacs don’t know the innocent from the guilty.’ Tony and his wife had gone to Munich’s Olympiad on their honeymoon; they flew home with their tickets unused as images of the eleven slaughtered athletes filled the world’s television screens.

‘Sal will never agree to leave Kuwait now,’ she said, gripping the telephone. ‘It’s his brother, and he’s been through things we can’t imagine, Tony. But I need to start making a plan.’

‘What do you mean?’ Behind Tony’s voice she could hear his children chattering.

‘I need you to look for schools, good schools for the twins,’ she said. ‘Someone prepared to take them after the start of the school year. If I can convince him it’s best for the children, perhaps he’ll consider it.’

‘I’ll do anything for you, bubbellah, you know that.’ Tony sounded earnest. ‘But honestly, it worries me that you have to resort to all this cloak and dagger stuff. The Jude I knew would just have stood up for herself. Remember the Knedlach Incident!’ She laughed, but a part of her wanted to weep.

‘Just please let me know soon, Tony,’ she said. When he hung up the phone she listened to the dial tone for a few seconds before she could bear to set it down too.

When she turned on the light in Rafan’s room, it was empty as an open grave – only scuffs on the floor where the black duffel bags had been sitting.

By the time Salim and Rafan returned, light was creeping back over the desert wasteland, its pink fingers touching the house. She was lying on the sofa in the family room, and heard them coming up the steps to the front door.

Rafan was saying, ‘Our Iraqi friends will take the money to the border tonight. By morning it will be in Syria. The Americans are always watching. So we meet in a different place every time. The sheikh arranges it all.’ A key turned in the lock.

Salim said in Arabic, ‘How many times are you going to do this?’ His brother said something indistinct; Jude thought it was ma baraf – who knows?

They walked straight past her and Rafan headed for his room. When she heard the door close, she crept out of the room and said softly, ‘Salim.’ The name sounded strange on her tongue, and she tasted a moment of regret that she’d never called him that before.

He came back out of the bedroom, a dark outline against the open door.

‘Why are you awake?’ He looked guilty, like a boy caught in a prank gone wrong.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said, coming to stand opposite him. ‘Where have you been? I was worried.’

‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘Don’t be silly. There’s nothing wrong. I was only helping him to run an errand. It’s nothing.’ But his face was drawn and his eyes slick as marbles. She heard the lie in his voice.

‘An errand.’ Fury was so close to the surface, but she swallowed it down. That’s not the way to reach him. ‘Bags of money leaving our house in the middle of the night, where our children sleep. To buy what, Sal?’ He didn’t answer. ‘You know what, don’t you? Guns to kill other children, in other houses. Is that what you want?’

He shook his head. ‘You’ve got it wrong, Jude. Rafan’s into politics, that’s all. We’re helping the refugees.’ His voice was defiant, but he passed his hand over his eyes in a gesture of weary futility.

‘You can’t do this,’ she said, reaching inside herself for courage. ‘I know he’s your brother, and for whatever reason you love him. But if you go this way you’re abandoning us.’

He stood still for a moment, then said, ‘I’m the abandoned one, Jude. First my home. Then my mother. Then the rewards they promised me for all my hard work here. My relatives think I’m a traitor. Now my son tells me he hates me, that my family wants to leave me and that he’d rather learn a Jewish prayer than an Arabic greeting. So what do you care what I do now?’

She took his hand and pressed it to the groove between her breasts, where his head had lain and his mouth kissed so many times.

‘Remember the day you asked me to marry you?’ she said, feeling her heart beat under his palm. ‘You hadn’t even unpacked your suitcases. You held my hand and promised me you’d buy me a ring the next day. That we would be happy, we would make our own way. You kept every promise. Until today.’ His face was white and drawn, his eyes wet.

‘I know what I promised.’ His voice was full of sorrow. ‘But it got too hard. You can pretend there’s no war if you like, but it’s everywhere, all around us. And look what I became, closing my eyes and chasing my big dreams. Not an Englishman, but not a real Arab either. You changed too.’ His eyes found hers. ‘You used to understand me without even speaking. Now look at us.’ He opened his palm and showed it to her, pale and empty.

Jude put one hand on Salim’s cheek. ‘I still love you just as much,’ she said, but the words sounded tired, worn. ‘We were children back then. So defiant, just like Marc. All of these things now, they’re just… growing up.’

‘You heard Marc. He doesn’t even want to be my son.’

‘He’s a child,’ she argued, exhausted. ‘He’s like your shadow. He needs you desperately. Please, tell Rafan to go. If you want to fight for something, fight for us. It’s a fight you can win, Sal.’

She felt the warmth of his hand, and her heart beating in response. He looked down at her and shook his head. But he said, ‘I’ll talk to Marc. God knows my father never talked to me.’ She saw tears in his eyes and knew what he was thinking. Why does history only ever repeat its sorrows, and not its joys?

‘He wants you to care about the things that are important to him too,’ she said. ‘His play, his dancing. He needs to know you value him for more than his last name.’

He gave a bitter laugh, squeezed her hand and released it. ‘Okay,’ he said – a capitulation, but whether to love or weariness she didn’t know. ‘Rafan… I’ll deal with him. Go to bed now.’ She opened her mouth to reply, but he cut her off. ‘Go, please, don’t worry. I’ll be there in a moment.’ He walked around her towards the kitchen, back hunched like a beast of burden. And she slowly retreated into the dark bedroom where the picture of the orange tree was catching the faintest rays of morning.

Salim waited until he heard the quiet click of the door that signalled the end of Jude’s vigil. He turned on the kitchen tap and splashed his face with the tepid water. The drops shone between his fingers in the early light.

The kitchen window looked over the compound wall, wreathed in drying vines from their neighbour’s villa. The other house itself looked asleep, still and silent. He had a sudden mad fantasy: if he just went next door and lay there under that quiet roof he too might wake into the day bright and untroubled.

Jude was sleeping when he crept into their room to take the picture of the Orange House down from the mantelpiece.

Holding it in gentle hands, he walked over to the children’s bedroom. They should have their own rooms, he thought as he pushed open the door. It was time. They were nearly adults. We can paint it whatever colour he wants. We can do it together.

Their heads peeped out from the blankets, dark hair and white falling over their round cheeks, and mouths pursed like babies. The covers shifted with the soft beat of their breath – these two miracles, these unlikely survivors of cruel tides that had ripped so many apart.

Love swept back his hurt, like the deep undertow after a violent wave. He sat down next to Marc’s curled body. Under the covers he looked tiny, drained of defiance. As the bed creaked, the boy opened his eyes. They were glazed and the room’s shadows made them soft and dark as Salim’s own.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, his voice high with morning hoarseness. He sat up, hugging his knees, and Salim saw his features start to re-form and re-settle into the wariness he knew so well.

‘Nothing.’ As Salim sat there, he felt lost, robbed of direction. He looked at the boy’s flushed face, the arrogance of manhood struggling against a child’s uncertainty.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said quickly, before the words could eat themselves. ‘To… to say sorry. For slapping you. That was wrong.’ Marc’s eyes widened, and his hands clutched his knees more tightly. Salim waited for him to say something. Help me do this.

‘You’re always angry with me.’ It was a tiny voice, a little boy’s voice, and it reached around Salim’s throat like clenching fingers of guilt.

‘I know,’ he said. He felt tears on his eyelids as he blinked. ‘It must seem that way. But it’s not your fault. I just want you to understand your history, that’s all. It hurts when it feels like you don’t want to know.’

‘But you don’t talk to us about anything,’ Marc said, his own eyes wet. ‘You never tell us things. You just expect us to be on your side no matter what. It’s not fair to be like that.’

‘I know,’ Salim said. He handed Marc the photograph, and saw his son’s eyes widen like the baby in the frame. ‘You talk about going home sometimes. But I wanted to show you my home. The one that was stolen when I was a boy, even younger than you. It was a very beautiful place, can you see? The sea is just behind it, and it was always warm. And this orange tree here was planted when I was born. Jaffa oranges are the sweetest in the world.’ He felt his voice catching. ‘You’re what I have now, instead of my home, you and Sophie. And so I guess I expect a lot from you. Maybe too much.’

Marc ran his fingers along the picture, fascinated.

‘It looks nice,’ he said.

‘It was.’ Grief rose up, catching him unawares.

‘I don’t want to be a Palestinian or a Jew,’ Marc went on, flexing his legs onto the bed. ‘Sophie and me, we’re not like that. We don’t want to get involved in all that fighting. You never ask us what we want, who we want to be.’

‘All right,’ Salim said. ‘Who do you want to be?’

Marc paused, his face such an innocent blend of scepticism and hope that Salim almost laughed.

‘A dancer,’ he finally said, pointing his toes. ‘I’m really, really good. You never came to one rehearsal for my play. Mum’s coming next week to the Parents’ Performance but I bet you don’t even know that it’s happening.’

I did, but I was too angry to care. ‘I told your mother I’d try to come. We aren’t communicating properly, that’s all. Your mother isn’t a great communicator. Maybe I’m not so great either.’

‘So will you come?’ Marc said. ‘It’s just two weeks until the opening night and this is just to see what we need to work on.’ Sophie was stirring in the other bed. Salim looked up at the closed curtains and the white light now streaming in.

‘I’ll be there, I promise,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk more afterwards. I want that. I really do.’

He saw a ghost of a smile touch Marc’s face, a ripple of warmth crossing the white. Then his son nodded and said, ‘Okay, deal.’ Salim leaned forward and kissed his cheek. It was smooth as marble wrapped in the sweet mustiness of sleep.

‘So, a dancer?’ he said, getting to his feet as Sophie sat up and stretched her arms.

‘That’s right.’ Marc’s voice held the hint of a challenge, a cat ready to spring.

‘Whatever you like,’ Salim said. ‘As long as you’re my son.’

The Parents’ Performance was scheduled for Wednesday night – the last school night of the week.

Salim put the invitation on the bedroom shelf, next to the picture of the Orange House. It was a gold card imprinted with a picture of a winged boy. It’s an absurd thing, Salim thought, so very English-abroad. That child, a winged spirit lifted from a fairytale – it wasn’t Marc but it had Marc’s essence. Its eyes looked through Salim to some wonderful world beyond.

His attendance had been a solemn promise, and Marc was lifted by it into a cheerfulness Jude and Salim had rarely seen. He practised furiously in his room after school. Sophie was his eager helper, encouraging him, propping up his confidence and managing the music on her new boom box – a present from Rafan.

For the next four nights Marc ate voraciously at dinner and chatted to Rafan about the difficulty of the dance moves and how he was the youngest person ever to play such an important role. ‘One of the leading roles,’ he said, between mouthfuls of cinnamon lamb cooked over rice and vermicelli.

Rafan patted him on the back and laughed. ‘This one will keep you in your old age,’ he said to Jude. ‘He has his eyes on the stars.’ Salim saw Jude smile politely, the half-smile that had moved into her eyes and taken possession of her face these past weeks.

The night before Marc’s show, Salim planned to speak to Rafan and set a limit on his stay. Hassan approved; when Salim called him to wish him happy Eid that morning he’d sniffed to hear that their youngest brother was still around. ‘W’Allah, you’re more generous than I would be, Salim,’ he said down the telephone. ‘I tell you something for nothing – that boy has always been trouble and he’ll always be trouble. Your wife is right for once. Send him packing.’

As he put the receiver down, Salim noticed a scrap of sticky paper pushed under the phone base. Two words jumped out. England school.

He pulled it out and held it up to the light. It was in Sophie’s neat print. Mum, it said, Uncle Tony called about England school plans. Good news call him quickly. Cold fingers touched the back of his neck.

He looked back towards the kitchen, seeing the flash of Jude’s blonde hair as she set the table, vanishing behind the door. England school plans. What plans were these? Cold fingers of anxiety pressed into him, constricting his chest.

‘Dad!’ Marc was calling, asking for an opinion on his routine. He grabbed Salim’s arm, pulling him out onto the patio with giddy excitement, lit from within. ‘You mother said you’re perfect,’ Salim told him with a smile. ‘Why do you need my vote?’

‘Mum always says I’m perfect,’ Marc replied, pressing play on the cassette deck as the sun dipped. ‘But you’ll tell me the truth.’

As Salim watched his son leaping into the night air his heart leapt too, the confused vertigo of flying without a net. The note in his pocket was like a stone pulling him towards earth. England school plans. Call quickly. Never. Jude would never make plans to leave without telling him, never betray him like that. He tried to scramble the possibilities into a more reassuring shape as Marc spun and leapt in front of him. But his mouth was dry, and finally he had to ask his son to stop for a break.

He was drinking their homebrewed wine on the patio, swallowing down his fears, when he saw Rafan’s face coming out of the dark. His brother came to stand beside him, leaning over the low wall into the night. The thin sounds of darkness whispered around the edge of hearing – the squeak of crickets and the faint whine of mosquitoes. Salim felt silence drawing out like a wire between them. I’ll deal with Rafan, he’d promised her. His mouth opened, but doubts lay heavy on him – about Jude, love and loyalty – each one a stone in his chest.

‘I had a message today,’ Rafan said at last. Salim could only see the outline of his features, the hooked nose under a narrow brow. ‘From the Iraqis.’ His words brought that night back – their car on an empty desert road, the blank faces of the men hoisting Rafan’s bags out of the trunk, sweat trickling down Salim’s face in the driver’s seat.

Rafan turned to look at him. ‘We need to make another trip to the border tomorrow. A last time.’

Weariness filled Salim as his brother went on. ‘This location is further than before. I think at least five hours’ driving. It’s better to start in the early evening. We can leave from here after your work.’

‘I promised Marc I’d go with him tomorrow night,’ Salim said. The air around him seemed to be moving, racing through him like seconds – the future streaming into the past.

‘Ma’alish.’ Never mind. ‘He’s a boy, you’re a man. There’ll be another time for that. But not for this.’

Salim bent his head to his hands. He was tired of these decisions – at every step, another test of who he wanted to be. ‘You can take the car. Go by yourself.’

‘I can’t. I have no identity here. If anyone stops me, I’m lost, big brother. You’re the only one I can trust. The only one I have.’

Salim turned his back to the wall, looking at his brother, trying to see the little boy who used to lie next to him at night, who cried in his sleep. This is not the same person. That boy is gone, and this man is using you.

‘Fuck you, Rafan.’ He threw the words out, but they seemed to rebound on him. ‘Fuck these bullshit hints. You chose your own way – leave me to choose mine.’

Rafan snorted. ‘You know the trouble with you, Salim? You’re clever but you’re not smart. You think because you got qualifications and a British passport that the white boys would open up to you? Well, they didn’t. You think that your Jewish wife can forget her heritage and raise Arabic children? She didn’t. You think that you can forget all the shit you came from by living somewhere else? You can’t. You know what I see when I look at you? A man who doesn’t know who he is.’

Salim pressed his hands to his eyes. In the blackness, the words he had written to Rafan on the day he left Lebanon burned fierce and white. I’m sorry, but my road is not here. Would he feel better, freer, less lost, if he had never written it?

‘I know who I am,’ he said, to Rafan, to himself. ‘I have a family to think about.’

‘You’re fooling yourself. You know it, brother. She’s a lovely girl and all that, but she’ll make her own plans in the end. They always do, these people. That’s why they always win, and we always lose.’

He felt Rafan’s hand on his shoulder. England school plans. Call quickly. A dam was cracking inside him, anger leaking out in a cold flood. Her hand on his chest the other night, telling him to choose her, talking about love. And all the time, had she been keeping her own secrets? Planning a life without him, a world in which he had no place?

His brother’s voice said, ‘This isn’t bullshit, Salim. I know who you are. You’re my brother. One blood. These men we’re helping – they’re our blood too. Forget this white husband game you’re playing, Salim. If they really love you they won’t stand in your way. You want to take back what’s yours? It’s time to pay the price.’

Salim closed his eyes. Nothing about him was real; he felt like a ghost haunting the present, while Rafan and Jude loomed before him, terrifying and solid. Behind them he saw blood seeping into Clock Tower Square and the mortars falling over the sea, children skipping in Shatila while the tanks rolled in. He saw the shadow of the new settlements dwarfing Nadia’s tiny home. Our land, our blood, the words shouted over the crackle of gunfire. Meyer, coolly brushing Omar’s name into the bin. And Jude, his wife, letting the flames of the enemy burn in their children’s eyes.

He touched the note in his pocket. England schools. Call quickly. How much he’d loved her, all those years and miles ago, her face turned up to his under the cold London sun. That memory still lived in him, the sweetness of her, the thrill of entering an unknown room and suddenly recognizing it as your own. But now their house was full of strangers. The doors had closed and nothing was familiar any more.

‘One time.’ The words were out before he realized it, born of doubt rather than conviction. ‘One time, for Jaffa.’ He felt a corrosive satisfaction at turning Jude’s ultimatum back on her, at calling her bluff. Did she really love him, or just an idea of him? This was the only way to tell.

But as Rafan nodded, he felt it again, the inexplicable paralysis of his dreams. Home was somewhere close by, but his feet were frozen, fixed into the dust. Here I am, rooted helpless as a tree trunk. And there was no way to move forward without tearing up the ground.

At six o’clock on the performance night, Jude put Marc in the car and went back into the house to get Sophie. The girl was in her bedroom, carefully spreading a rose pink lipstick onto her upper lip. Jude gave her a mock pat on the head and said, ‘Come on, mademoiselle. It’s not a fashion show, you know.’

‘I don’t know why we’re hurrying,’ Sophie said casually, smudging the pink smear with her finger. ‘Dad’s not even here yet.’

‘I know, pet.’ Jude felt her stomach turn again. He cannot miss this. He promised Marc.

The conversation with Tony had set her mind flying today. He’d rung in the middle of the afternoon with a simple message – brutally simple, as it turned out. There were three schools, right next to their old home in east London, willing to consider the children for placement after the official start of the school year. Each one required an entrance exam, to be sat in November. Less than a month. Otherwise, they would be waiting another year.

‘Think about it very, very carefully,’ Tony had said. ‘I can help you if you decide to come. I’ll do anything you need.’

‘I just don’t know, Tony,’ she’d told him, filled with confusion. ‘He promised to send his brother away. If he does that, how can I leave?’

There was a long pause on the end of the line, and then Tony said, ‘It sounds like you’re at a crossroads, bubbellah. Only you know the right way to go. Just know that I’m waiting for you once you take the next step.’

The sound of another car pulling into the drive sent a flood of relief through her. ‘Come on,’ she said, tugging Sophie’s arm. ‘Daddy’s finally turned up, so let’s get going.’

She tumbled out into the fading light of day with Sophie just behind her. She saw Marc get out of the back seat of their car, his face alight.

Something’s wrong. Rafan was striding towards them from the maid’s quarters. One bulky black duffel bag was slung over his shoulder. He gave Jude a sidelong flick of his eyes as he passed her. There was a tear in the thick black leather, showing pale green notes underneath. In an instant her heart froze.

Salim was standing by their car in shirtsleeves, his dark eyes hesitant. Rafan called out to him – ‘Yallah, Salim. Let’s go. We’ll get the other ones later.’

Jude’s hand went up to her mouth, and she said to Salim, ‘You can’t.’ His head shot up and he looked her straight in the eyes. For the first time in their married life she saw nothing – nothing at all – that she recognized. Marc’s voice drifted over them, a high cry of ‘What’s happening? Where are you going?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard Salim say to his son. ‘I have to do something very important. I’ll come to your play another time.’

‘You said you would tonight. You said.’ She heard the tears before she saw them fall. Her young man, reduced to a crying child once again. Even as her heart ached she found herself moving towards Salim and taking his arm in her hand. She felt as if her fingers could tear through the skin of this stranger, to find the man she’d married underneath.

‘Don’t, Salim,’ she said, only the third time she had ever used his real name, she realized. The first was on the day of their marriage, when she took him for her own.

She felt something stir in him – a constriction of guilt. But he pulled his hand away from her, and turned and walked towards the gate. The last thing she saw was the blackness of his hair as he turned the corner, framed by the cheerful wave of Rafan’s hand as he turned to take him away.

Marc flew like a bird that night on stage, his wings a rainbow of sparkling colour over the paint on his face. His eyes were wild and his body seemed too light for the ground. She felt her heart pause every time she saw him; every movement was a vice in her chest, and she had to fight the impulse to reach out and grab him, to hold him to the earth.

They didn’t stay afterwards, not even to share a drink with Helen or hear Mr Trevellian’s praise. They drove back in silence. Sophie leaned her forehead against the rear window and Marc slumped in his seat. Jude knew that once Salim came home again later that night or the next, they would be living in a different world. If he came back at all.

The house was empty when they pulled into the drive, covered in the silent darkness of a desert night. Marc went quietly into the twins’ room and closed the door. Sophie watched his back, and then turned to her mother. Through the dim light Jude saw the faintest shimmer of pink still clinging to her daughter’s lips in faded patches.

‘Where did they go tonight?’ Sophie said, her voice firm. ‘Dad and Uncle Rafan. You know, don’t you?’

Seeing her there, so beautiful in the dying moments of childhood, Jude felt a memory stir of her Batmitzvah at the very same age. The day you can stop being afraid, the day you take your place as a woman among your people. Rebecca’s day had arrived on a broken cart, Jude’s at her grandmother’s bedside. Now it was Sophie’s turn, here in the desert, thousands of miles down the road.

‘They’re taking money to Rafan’s friends,’ Jude said. A grown woman deserved the truth. ‘The Palestinian fighters.’ Sophie nodded, her arms reaching up to hug herself as if in a cold wind.

‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said, dropping her eyes to the ground. ‘You know we can’t, Mummy.’ And then she turned to follow her brother into the bedroom, her skirt fluttering in the still air.

When the children were finally in bed, Jude went to lie down in her room. She felt as if she were floating away from her body, into a dream in which she hovered over a vast road spanning winter fields. Other roads forked and splintered off from it in every direction.

Along one, a horse-drawn cart came creaking, a girl inside it nodding her head with every step of the horse. Jude was seized with the absolute conviction that she must follow it. She raced forward, heart leaping – but then in the panic of nightmares realized the cart had already passed by. And though she tried and tried, running until her lungs burst, she could not see which of the many roads it had taken.

She woke into the light before dawn. Jumping out of bed, she pulled open the drawer where Rebecca’s menorah had been hidden. Rafan had taken it to show Salim – and she had never thought to ask if it had been put back.

The old hiding place was empty. She threw open drawer after drawer – tearing down clothes and old boxes like a madwoman.

She finally found it under the bed. Clutching it to her, she almost wept – from relief and from wonder that he’d saved it after all. For all these months it had been underneath her while she slept, keeping its silent watch.

Suddenly, she felt her desperation harden into resolution. Be brave. Be a mensch. The whistle had blown; it was time for the fearless leap into the air.

In the darkness of the maid’s quarters, only two black bags were left. She dragged them into the garden and emptied them over the sand, every cell of her body listening for the sound of returning wheels.

Bricks of green bills wrapped in cord flopped out, more and more as if from a bottomless pit. She watched them fall until they lay in a heap, tens of thousands of dollars stinking in the warm air.

When you choose peace, you choose the losing side. Maybe it was true. But she would not let Rafan win either.

Walking into the kitchen she pulled the can of kerosene out from under the sink. A box of matches stood on the side, by the gas hob. The door swung as she carried it back into the garden where the banknotes trembled in the breeze. Their flickering became rapid, helpless as the fuel drenched them.

Stepping back, she lit the match and looked into the tiny flame. The heat wavered at the tips of her fingers.

A hundred times she’d used that flame to celebrate life on birthdays, to kindle the lights during their secret Sabbath prayers. Now she would use it to set them all free.

Her fingers let the match go; it floated down and the fire seemed to roar up to meet it. She was mesmerized; there were voices in the flames. Go, Judith, go! For God’s sake, girl.

Turning her back on the blaze she ran into the children’s bedroom.

‘What’s happening?’ Sophie said, as Jude shook their shoulders and pushed them to their feet. Marc was already up, his face shining in the gloom.

‘Get your clothes packed,’ she said, pulling their suitcases down from the top of the cupboard. ‘We’re going to the airport. Uncle Tony has found you schools, and you’ll sit the exam for places next month.’

Sophie put her hand over her mouth, her face white. Jude reached over to take her daughter’s hand. ‘You were right,’ she said, squeezing it tight. ‘It’s time to find a happy place – for all of us.’ Tears fell as Sophie nodded, one hand clutching her blanket painted with leaping horses.

Marc said instantly, ‘But what about Daddy?’ The plea in his voice, the wild panic, almost derailed her. She knelt down beside him and took his face in her hands.

‘Your father needs to make an important decision,’ she said. ‘Until he does, we need to go somewhere safe. I’ll explain in the car, but now we must hurry.’

‘And my play?’ His hands caught her shoulders, clutching helplessly at her. ‘What about my play?’

She pulled him into her arms. ‘I’m so sorry, Marc. Sometimes life is so hard, I know. But I promise, there are other things waiting for you, wonderful, exciting things. Do you trust me?’

Marc nodded but his whole body wilted, like the lime tree he’d so carefully tended. He must have known, she thought, when his father walked out of the gate today, that his grand moment was like Puck himself – only ever a dream.

By the time their bags were packed and in the car, morning had arrived. The quiet of the desert surrounded them, as Jude drove to Kuwait’s airport for the last time.

The world slept, and somewhere out there Salim might be making his way back to an empty house. As if reading her mind, Sophie whispered from the back seat, ‘Will he ever forgive us?’

‘He will,’ Jude said. I know who he is, even if he has forgotten. ‘He loves us more than anything. He just needs to remember how that feels.’

As she drove, she wound down the window to let in the cool wind. It rang in her ears like the gusts down the Wear when she was a little girl, like the call of the crowd at the swimming championships she’d imagined in the silence of her room.

And then she felt it, somewhere between a memory and a wish: her toes on the edge of the pool, the water dazzling beneath her, waiting for the whistle, poised to spring.

It unfolded in a perfect moment, just as it should have happened – the glorious blue of the water, the falling light, the thrill of the cheering and the bubbles of anticipation rising within her, carrying her forward into the race. On the other side was safety, the exultation of arms linked with hers as they ran home under the boundless northern sky.

As the world blurred and the road whipped by she saw them all running beside her, clear as day – Kath and Peggy, Jack and Dora, Marc and Sophie, even Salim and Rafan – all hurtling homewards as the clouds streamed above them, chasing each other into an unknown future. Silence followed them, an emptiness slowly filling with another presence, flooding Jude with joy and relief. You are here. Rebecca was here, walking beside her, and she suddenly understood that here was the place they were supposed to meet, that she’d been waiting here all this time for Jude to find her on the long road. And so Jude reached up with love to grasp her grandmother’s hand, finally ready to guide them both home.