I sat on the pavement for a while, drawing lines in the sand with my finger. I am sure Bahloul won't tell, he'll be too frightened to speak, I thought. When I realized how hot my head had become I went back indoors.

Something in me was ashamed of what I had done to Bahloul. It was the first time I had heard a grown man scream like that. I was glad no one had witnessed it.

I went to see Mama. Her room was dark and smelled of sleep, but she wasn't in bed.

'I am here,' I heard her say from the sitting room. 'Where have you been?' she said, facing the television even though it was still showing the photograph of the pink flowers. Her tone, the way she sat stiff and unmoving, immediately unsettled me. This was a mood that overtook her at times, one I was familiar with, and which turned her in search of conflict. 'Why did you pour the bottle down the sink?'

'I didn't know what it was,' I lied. 'I thought you wanted me to clean the bottle.'

She sighed and lit a cigarette, throwing the lighter on the coffee table. 'I see you don't need me. You are quite capable of feeding yourself on your own.'

She had mistaken Bahloul's food, still on the kitchen table, for mine. What a relief, I thought. I stood there for a few seconds, watching her back stiff in the air, her knees touching, her cigarette burning in one hand in front of her face, wondering what I could do to untangle her. Her eyes remained on the pink flowers. I wondered when the Guide would switch the broadcast back on. I imagined him in his pyjamas, drinking tea, going to fetch something, or deciding to go for a pee and on his way flicking on the switch that controlled the broadcast. How will we find Ustath Rashid now, I wondered. Will he be sitting on the chair, or handcuffed on the floor, his cheeks crimson, a heroic drip of blood from one corner of his mouth? I thought of telling her about him, how he was sitting, as still as she was now, facing the camera, squinting against the light. And how when it came to Baba's name he didn't give in to the big man with the hairless head but said, 'No.' What heroic chords that word caused to resonate in my ears! It reminded me of a film that told the life of a group of African slaves in America. At one point the slaves threw down their tools, stood in silence and slowly, like a drum beaten to announce something dreadful, clapped their hands together in unison. Slaves clapping to their white masters, I thought, makes no sense. But when I looked behind me I saw Baba poised in admiration. Something in Ustath Rashid's 'No' reminded me of that solemn standing ovation the slaves had given to their masters. As soon as the flowers came on Ustath Rashid was probably beaten, I was certain he was 'taught a good lesson', 'his face spared', as Moosa had said about those interrogated on television, but his body a 'patchwork of bruises'. I was surprised the telephone hadn't rung. At other times when we saw someone we knew interrogated several people would call to say: 'Did you see? So-and-so was on television.' I was certain that because it was aired during nap time, when under the full glare of the sun the whole world went to sleep, no one had seen it. Even Kareem and his mother probably missed it. I was probably the only one in the world who had seen it, I thought. I was suddenly thankful for the pink flowers and wished for them to stay until Ustath Rashid's interrogation was over.

'Call the bakery,' she ordered. 'When you get Majdi give him to me.'

Sometimes when Mama was unwell or busy she got Majdi to deliver bread and, if we were alone, her medicine too. She called out his number and I dialled it. When Majdi answered, I said, 'Just one moment, Mama wants to talk to you.' He didn't say a word. His silence seemed to know, as if he was expecting the call. I imagined his earnest face, his hand poking beneath the wide flour-sprinkled counter, looking about him before bringing out a bottle wrapped in black plastic.

'Good evening,' Mama said. 'I need two loaves.' There was plenty of bread in the kitchen, I knew this when I served Bahloul the food. 'And, yes, one bottle.' Her cheeks blushed. 'No no. One will be enough,' she said in an artificially formal tone.

When Majdi arrived she sat him in the reception room because it's impolite to just take what he had delivered from the door and leave it at that. He looked uncomfortable to be there. His blue jeans were dusted with flour, his hair made grey by it too. I remember thinking I couldn't wait until I had grey hair, although I knew his wasn't really grey, that when he showered all the flour would wash out to leave his hair black and ordinary. His hands clutched the armrests in a way that made me think of what Bahloul had said: 'When the devil enters he clings to everything.'

Barely a minute had passed when he stood up and said he had to go. Mama paid him and walked him to the door. She then went to the kitchen, the black form of her medicine bottle stood on the kitchen table. She threw an impatient glance at me. We sat in an uncomfortable silence. I began to tap my foot against the leg of the table. 'Stop,' she said. I felt as awkward with her now as I did when I had to keep a guest company in the reception room while she made tea. She lit a cigarette, and I went to my room.

I lay in bed, curling myself beneath the sheet. Going to bed in the middle of the afternoon had always felt strange, but now it seemed right somehow. Outside, I heard her walk to her room, a liquid being poured into a glass, the familiar chinks of ice. I remembered the cigarette that was burning in her hand. Mama only smoked when she was ill and then she didn't allow one cigarette to die before lighting the next. Sometimes she would forget and have two going at the same time, one in the ashtray, the other between her fingers. I was nervous she would fall asleep while smoking. Several times I had woken up in the night to make sure all the cigarette butts in the ashtray beside her were out, looking under the bed in case one had fallen there. That was one of the reasons why I couldn't leave her side when she was ill. I heard her move around the house. I could tell she was bored. She often, during those empty days when Baba was away, walked aimlessly around the house. And she never sang to herself in that soft, absent-minded way she often did when taking a bath or painting her eyes in front of the mirror or drawing in the garden. That singing that had always evoked a girl unaware of herself, walking home from school, brushing her fingers against the wall: a moment before the Italian Coffee House, a moment sheltered in the clarity of innocence, before the quick force which, without argument, without even the chance to say, 'No,' thrust her over the border and into womanhood, then irrevocably into motherhood. I wanted so much to make her happy, as happy as she seemed when Baba was home. Except it wasn't happiness that came over her then but something like confidence: she moved faster and sounded more self-assured. Could I ever come to inspire that in her, I wondered from beneath the bed sheet.

I had faded into sleep and woke up disoriented, not knowing what time it was. The sky was dark, the world was silent. But still I felt a warm comfort at having napped for the first time. I must be becoming a man, I thought. I noticed an odd smell in the house, but the tide of sleep was strong, it pulled me and I drifted back into the warmth and magic of its certainty.

A few hours later I woke up dying, horses galloping up my nostrils, down my throat. I jumped out of bed and opened the window. I did this in every room of the house, opening windows and doors without knowing why. She had left the gas on in the kitchen.