John’s eyes met those of the young Iraqi woman again in a Basra market. She was buying groceries, and he was on duty in an armoured car, just getting down from the moving vehicle. When she realised who he was, the half-kilo of red peppers she had just bought fell to the ground; after the last of them, shining in the sun, stopped rolling and turning, she said, Don’t say anything now, I’ll be at El Rachid tonight. El Rachid was a restaurant on the outskirts of the city providing roadside food to truck drivers who covered the petrol route from Kurdistan, and to travelling fruitsellers hawking melons of different kinds – this class of person. John went there late because something told him she would be working in the kitchens, but so late that when he arrived the place was in darkness. He spotted a light beneath a doorway. It led through to a kind of back office which smelled of spices, and when he let himself in without knocking he found her gesticulating in front of 3 men sitting before a circular table. There were bundles of paper on the table covered in formulae that John could not make out. A couple of clone PCs flickered at the back. They all looked up in surprise at this man carrying half a kilo of red peppers in a clear plastic bag. Initially, he thought they must be guerrillas, or related to the military industry in some way, but she immediately blurted out, Don’t get the wrong idea: we’re architects. They were part of a global network known as Portable Architecture, she explained, whose objective was to design and build low-cost, highly portable dwellings, with a particular focus on countries racked by long-term conflicts, and where the populations are forced to live nomadically for protracted periods. She closed by saying: This very building, for example, is prefabricated, a helicopter comes and sets it up just as you see it; it’s a 5-minute job, you put it down anywhere you like. Mohamed Smith was born 9 months later, in the JFK Field Hospital, Basra. There are people who become lost in places no one cares about.