Holidays finished on the second day of May, the day after Eid al Ummal, Labour Day. Zafir wasn’t looking forward to being at school without Rami, but he was pleased to get out of the house. With police trucks driving through the streets, groups of angry men wandering around and the television news reporting that gangs of foreign terrorists were making trouble, Tetah would only let him take messages to Ustaaz Farook across the lane. All the same, she still went to church most days. Zafir could have gone with her, but it was always too early. The neighbours, Mrs Mohammed and Mrs Shaamas and her children, came over every day. They asked for news of Pops and then sat with Tetah and talked about how bad things had become. School was definitely a better option.

‘You must not go,’ said Tetah as the taxi that Ustaaz Farook had ordered for Zafir arrived at the gate. ‘It may not be safe driving to the school. I will call and say you have to stay home.’

‘But Tetah, you agreed last night when we talked about it with Mum,’ said Zafir, exasperated. It had taken ages to persuade her to let him go and luckily Mum had also thought it was a good idea.

Ustaaz Farook stepped in. ‘I believe it will be for the best if you let the fata go to school. If he stays here he will not have enough to occupy his mind and the worry about his father and mother will grow,’ he said. ‘It is important to continue life as if normal, for then normality may be fooled into returning.’

But during the trip to school, Zafir could see that life wasn’t normal. A checkpoint made with sandbags was set up on the road that led to the school. Everyone’s vehicle was being checked by soldiers wearing camouflage uniforms. The soldier who searched the taxi had pimples and he didn’t look much older than Zafir, but he had an AK-47 slung from his shoulder. He searched the car thoroughly, even inside Zafir’s schoolbag where he found the solar cap.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, pointing to the cap as if it were something suspicious. Zafir explained to the soldier how it worked.

‘Ma sa Allah, God has willed it.’ The soldier looked impressed and for a second he grinned but then, as if remembering he was a soldier, his face went blank, he stood up straight, and he waved his gun to indicate they could pass.

There was the usual line of cars, taxis and buses driving through the school gates but when Zafir got to the locker room he found out Murshid, like Rami and a few others, hadn’t come back from his holidays. Mustafa was there though, boasting about having seen a man being beaten up in the street and demonstrating every thump and kick.

‘It was one of those foreign terrorists, so he deserved it,’ Mustafa told the crowd of boys surrounding him when he’d finally stopped kicking and punching the air.

‘How do you know?’ Zafir spoke up.

Mustafa stared at him like it was a stupid question.

‘He was screaming for his mother. No Syrian man would do that,’ said Mustafa. ‘Foreigners are like scared girls.’

‘That’s true,’ said a boy called Nasser. He wasn’t part of Murshid and Mustafa’s gang. He hung out with a group of boys from wealthy Christian families who lived outside Homs in Wadi al-Nasara, Valley of Christians. ‘I heard old Wallis has run off as fast as he can.’

‘Boys! What is doing you!’ Zafir couldn’t help himself as he mimicked the English teacher. It wasn’t that funny but everyone laughed. Zafir felt good.

‘Come on Haddad, we’d better get to assembly,’ Nasser called to him as the bell rang. That felt even better.

At assembly, Zafir stood next to Nasser. They faced the photo of the president as Mr Marbruk led the prayers for God to bless the Lion of Syria, the father of the country. Zafir looked into the icy blue eyes of the president. A thought flashed through his mind: You’re not my father. I wish you were the one in prison. It was so clear in his head that he wondered if he’d spoken it aloud. Zafir’s heart hammered against his chest. But Nasser wasn’t looking at him, nor were the boys on the other side. He breathed out and in again, trying to calm himself, because he knew if he spoke the words then someone would report him – and then the man with the icy blue eyes would send him to prison too.

Although Mr Marbruk and the teachers tried to make everything seem normal, there was a strange atmosphere at the school. For a start there was a lot more discussion about what was happening in Homs, Damascus, Daraa and Aleppo, but Zafir still felt that no one was saying exactly what they truly thought about the situation. Not one boy spoke out against the president so Zafir was also careful what he said. He definitely didn’t want to tell anyone about his father. If only Rami was here. Rami was the only one Zafir could trust.

Mum had called each night. Although she didn’t have any good news about Pops, she was hopeful. Uncle Ghazi had given up his studies to help in the search for Pops and they had even visited the Mukhabarat. And Father Papadopoulos had called her to say he’d asked a bishop in Damascus who was allowed to visit Christian prisoners to find out what he could.

‘It is interesting to see what’s happening here in Damascus,’ she’d said on Thursday night. ‘So many people are participating in peaceful demonstrations now, even those who once supported the government. Soldiers are refusing to shoot at unarmed demonstrators and a number of members of parliament have resigned in protest against the shootings.’ She’d sounded excited. ‘Everyone here thinks that it must all end within a few weeks like it did in Egypt and Tunisia. No government can continue to wage war against its people.’

‘A few weeks!’ To Zafir, that seemed too long.

‘We can only go day by day. By the way,’ she said, ‘don’t worry if I don’t call you tomorrow. I’ll be busy with … well, just don’t worry,’ she repeated. ‘I’ll explain everything when I see you.’

‘Okay,’ he said, guessing she must be planning to go on a protest march. ‘I miss you.’

‘I miss you too, habibi, sweetheart, but I’m sure I will see you very, very soon.’

When he hung up the phone he saw Tetah shaking her head. She was watching a foreign Arabic news channel that she could pick up because of the satellite dish on the roof.

‘Why are the foreign media telling so many lies? It is as the president says: these takfiri, Muslim radicals, are the source of all the problems.’

The next day when Tetah got back from church, she had a bad headache. ‘I must go and lie down,’ she said to Zafir. ‘Please ask Rosa to bring me tea.’

Rosa wasn’t in the kitchen but Zafir found her upstairs on the roof terrace. After she had hurried away to make the tea, Zafir clambered up onto the roof of her bedroom and sat with his legs dangling out into the laneway. Tetah would be hysterical if she saw him but from here he had a good view across the flat rooftops to the city. Mr Mohammed’s pigeons were sitting on the rim of the satellite dish and in a row along the electricity wires, cooing with their chests puffed out. Zafir could see the top of the clock tower and the sun glinting off the blue-and-white glass panels of the City Centre building. In the distance he could see the towers of the Khalid Ibn Al-Walid masjid. Closer by, he could see the minarets of the al-Nouri mosque.

Over a loudhailer he could hear someone yelling, ‘Today is the Friday of Defiance. The age of silence is over. The age of freedom has just begun.’ There was a roar and he heard the person shout, ‘Al mawt am azadi, death or freedom!’ and the fainter sound of a crowd repeating these words. Zafir couldn’t see the crowd, but from the top of a building not far from the al-Nouri mosque he saw a flash of fire and he heard the ratatting of a gun. Somebody was shooting into the crowd from above. Over the shouting and the roaring engines of motorcycles and cars, he heard the wailing sirens of police and fire trucks and Red Crescent ambulances. He listened and watched for a while longer. It seemed incredible that he could sit there feeling quite safe and yet be in hearing distance of people being shot at and maybe even killed.

Zafir went downstairs to email Rami and tell him everything he’d seen and heard.

Rami’s reply came quickly.

When Zafir decoded the message it read:

1. Fire trucks are being used to wash the blood off the streets.

2. Snipers have bullets that explode inside a person’s head.

3. Naqib has officially defected so if the president doesn’t resign we’ll never be able to come back to Syria.

4. Know anyone who wants one used Syrian passport?

Although Rami was making a joke of it, Zafir was shocked to think that his friend and all his family were exiles.

There was a PS on Rami’s email:

Got my phone stolen in a mall and the Naqib says he won’t get me another because I must have been careless to let a thief get it.

Zafir was about to log out when he noticed that another message had arrived in his inbox. It was from Eleni. She’d finally found an internet café. After telling him about how it was almost impossible to skate in the village because the streets were too steep and made from cobblestones, and that they had to fetch water from the well to wash with, and that she’d never known how smelly maawaa’ez were, she ended, saying:

Hope things are okay with you. It all looks horrible on the news. My dad says it will be bad for all Christians if the president goes. If that happens my dad will have to get out of Syria and then we won’t come back.

Zafir shut his eyes.

Pops was in jail and Mum was probably at a protest march and he had no idea if either of them were safe. Now, although he knew his two closest friends were okay, depending on what happened in Syria, one of them was never going to come back. His head felt as if it were about to split in two. How had it got this bad so fast? When they’d come to live in Homs the worst that Zafir could have said was that it was a boring town and his biggest problem was having to tell Murshid he didn’t want to be on the football team. But out of a calm blue sea, a tsunami of events had reared up and was about to crash down on everyone and change their lives forever. Would anyone – even the president – be able to stop it now?