That night I dreamed of Baba floating on the sea. The water was unsettled, moving as it does in the deep, rising and falling in hills. He lay on his back. He looked like a small fishing boat trying to surrender to the sea. I was there too, working hard to keep my shoulders above water, to not lose sight of him, but the sea rose, and he vanished from view. I kept swimming. I knew I was close. Then I saw him, wooden and stiff. When I reached out to touch him he turned into a fish, agile and shy. He plunged with a splash down and away. I could see his silver spine flicker below the water. I turned around and saw no shore to return to.

When I woke up I found myself in his place, in Mama's bed. I buried my face in his pillow and smelled the salt of his neck. Beneath the pillow my hands met his leather notebook. He always hid it there in case he had a dream. A slim golden pen was fixed on its spine and acted as a lock. I pulled it out and opened the notebook. Baba's handwriting filled the pages from edge to edge and from top to bottom. There was only one blank page left at the end. He could barely record one more dream here. I watched his curling blue writing interrupted only by the straightness of an alif or a laam, like the lampposts and palm trees that line Tripoli 's sea front. His dots were more like small dashes flying in the same direction, like birds or confetti scurrying above the speed of his writing, chasing a dream before it could escape his memory. I recalled his form – many mornings I had seen him like this – sitting in bed, the gentle and modest slope of his bare back hunched over this small book that wasn't longer than his index finger, recording a dream he had just woken from. When he heard me enter the room, he would lift his other arm in the air like a football referee. I locked his book with the golden pen and placed it back beneath his pillow.

Beside me, where Mama had slept, I saw the sheets disturbed, the form of her head in the pillow. There was no reason why, I thought, we shouldn't sleep like this every night, she and I together in her bed. She never spent the night here when Baba was home, and because my bed wasn't wide enough for the two of us she slept alone on the sofa in the sitting room. A good solution, I thought, was to have Baba sleep in my room and, because neither Mama nor I snored, we could have the big bed all to ourselves.

That was the excuse Mama gave for sleeping on the sofa. I never heard him snore. 'Of course you never have,' she would say, 'he only snores when he's very deeply asleep and that only occurs in the middle of the night when you yourself are deeply asleep.' I found it hard to believe, particularly that when he snored, Mama said, it was so loud the mattress vibrated. I didn't ask any more questions because I sensed in her voice, in the repetition 'you yourself, an irritation that was as much aimed at me as it was at Baba or even at herself.

During those nights, when Baba was home and Mama dragged her blanket behind her to the sofa in the sitting room, I felt something rise like a dark liquid from around our feet, separating us, sending each one sailing alone through their individual night where morning seemed too distant and abstract to be trusted. It wasn't until we were gathered around the breakfast table in the sun-flooded kitchen that I felt it recede.

Lying in bed, I would see the light from the television in the sitting room flicker on the darkened walls outside. From her makeshift bed she would lie late into the night watching Egyptian romance films where lovers and love are never satisfied and where after a single word or glance violins would begin to whine. As I live now in the country that produced those films I am familiar with their shortcomings. Their melodrama seems to mock love. That's how I explain the melancholy I felt then as a boy, lying in my bed until the early hours of the morning, listening to the violins blaze out before Mama quickly turned down the volume. She must have sat on the edge of her seat, ready for the violins, impatient for the moment that would come to strengthen her doubts about love and confirm her instinct to go without it, accepting – always accepting – a life forced upon her.

Some nights she started in her room but in the morning I would find her pillow and blanket in the sitting room, her shape within them, an ashtray beside her full of crumpled tissue paper.

On some winter mornings when the sky remained stubbornly dark, I sneaked into her makeshift bed fully dressed in my school uniform, feeling my tie tug at my neck as I coiled within the cave of her blanket, my cheek warmed by her pillow, wondering how can Heaven be anything other than this?

They, Mama and Baba, only lay together for their afternoon nap, and that was because the curtain in their room was made of thick velvet that kept the sunlight out and, I assumed, the two-hour nap didn't allow enough time for Baba to reach the depths of sleep necessary for snoring.

I always suspected there was a different reason why, when Baba was home, Mama didn't sleep in her room. I don't know why, but something in me blamed her for it. Irritation rose in my throat when I questioned her about his snoring. But this changed when one night I saw them together. Everything inside me changed.

Something seemed to wake me that night and take me to their room. Baba's bedside lamp was the only light on, and under its faint glow I saw him on top of her, moving back and forth the same sad, short distance, like one of those old ladies mourning the dead. I was standing in the dark, at the entrance of their room, where they couldn't see me. She lay beneath him, unmoving, looking away. I couldn't see her face. One of her arms lay stretched beside her, the hand open and slack towards the sky. He moaned a strange moan, stubborn like a saw. Then suddenly he froze, his back stiff and shuddering, before he fell to one side. He lay breathing heavily, staring into the ceiling. I could see his penis sloped to one side, glistening under the light of his bedside lamp. She, too, was naked. Her night dress was rolled up to her armpits. Her breasts quivered oddly when she moved to grab the bed sheet. She pulled it up to her chin, turning away from him. She cleared her throat, said, 'Turn off the light, I told you to turn off the light.' He put out the lamp and from within the darkness I heard his body move. I wondered if he was coming close to her again.

Had the Great Throne been disturbed, I wondered? I remembered Sheikh Mustafa's words: 'Every time a man and a woman lie together outside of wedlock God's own Seat shudders.' Baba and Mama weren't like that, they were married on God and his prophet's Sunna, but something about what I saw disturbed me so deeply that I couldn't imagine how God's Seat, His Great Throne, didn't shudder as my heart did.

I lay that night unable to sleep, wondering – and feeling fear, guilt and anger at my wondering – if I shouldn't have done something to stop it; if unbeknown to me Mama needed my help. I became certain it was Providence that woke me. Why else, then, was I woken at such an hour? Providence it must have been. And what a failure I proved myself to be. A failure for lacking the courage – or whatever it is that enables people to act quickly, decisively and without doubt – to rise to the occasion, to prove myself one of the faithful. I was called to stop something terrible, something that the angels I was certain never blessed, something that made Mama leave her bed every night to sleep on the sofa alone, fading, as I was fading, into sleep on the ridiculous violins of an Egyptian romance film.

I was lying in their bed thinking all of this when I heard the doorbell ring, then Moosa's voice. From the way he spoke I suspected he was either carrying something heavy, like a new sack of rice, or hot fresh bread from Majdi the baker.