When she woke up the following morning she couldn't understand why I was so upset and kept repeating, 'What's this smell, did you leave the gas on in the kitchen, Slooma?'

I slammed the door shut and locked myself in my room. From the way she spoke through the door it felt as if it really was another woman who had left the gas on to kill us.

'Why are you upset at me? How do I know you are all right if you don't speak?'

My mouth was about to utter something, but I held it shut with my hand.

'How do I know that you are not dead?'

I covered my ears and shut my eyes.

'OK,' she came to say in the late morning. 'At least come out for some food. It's almost lunch time and you haven't even had breakfast.' When she walked away, I heard her say to herself, 'What a strange boy.' After a while she returned to ask, 'What if your father comes home now, what will he say about us?'

By noon she slipped a note beneath my door. It read:

I, therefore, hope that my beloved son will honour me with his visit, and I am sending my vizier to make arrangements for the journey. My one and only desire is to see you before I die. If you refuse my request, I shall not survive the blow. May peace be with you!

It wasn't funny. I recognized the words. They weren't hers, they were from a letter King Shahryar had sent, when his heart was ill with sadness and he believed he was going to die, to his brother King Shah Zaman. She just replaced the word 'brother' with 'son'. I folded it twice and pushed it back beneath the door. After a few seconds I heard her pick it up.

By the afternoon knives were stabbing at my stomach, and I was dying for a pee. I walked out and went straight into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I couldn't hear her outside. I went to the kitchen, poured myself a huge glass of milk, grabbed a loaf of bread and went straight back to my room, leaving my door ajar. It was past four, nap time was over. Where was she?

I went out on to the street to see if any of the boys were there. I found them all gathered around Adnan. Adnan was the only one who had been absent when Kareem and I had fought. If he had been there I might have behaved differently. I was certain that Osama, Masoud and Ali were now telling him their version of the story. Kareem was leaning on a car. When they saw me they stopped talking. Ali said hello and Masoud stared at him. They had all agreed, I thought, to ignore me. 'Let's go and see the school,' Masoud told them. But it wasn't a school day, it was summer. To my surprise they all followed him. I watched them walk away. Osama put his arm round Kareem, talking to him as they walked. Adnan walked beside them, listening to Osama. When they reached the end of the street and turned out of sight I began to follow, walking slowly, kicking a pebble, digging my fists into the pockets of my shorts. I turned after them and they were in view again. In the distance their figures looked closer together.

When they reached the school gates they stopped. Just before I caught up with them Kareem shouted, 'Last to Mulberry is a girl,' and like a herd they came running towards me. When they were close I thought of getting out of the way, but I suspected they were trying to frighten me so I didn't move. I closed my eyes and stood still, making myself as thin as possible, listening to their panting, feeling the wind from their speed brush past me. And I heard Kareem shout again, 'Last to Mulberry is a girl,' and I knew he meant me.

Adnan had remained by the school gates, weak with illness. He was as old as Kareem but couldn't run very far. He wasn't allowed to eat any sweets, and if his skin was punctured he was in danger of losing all of his blood. He had to take two injections a day, and he gave them to himself. Once we convinced him to show us. 'If you laugh I'll slap each one of you,' he warned before taking us into his bedroom. None of us had ever been inside his house before. He had books on his disease that occupied a whole shelf. He had a huge dictionary open on his desk with a perfectly sharpened yellow pencil in its fold. Without a doubt it was the biggest book I had ever seen. Small brown medicine bottles clustered together on his bedside table. Each bottle had his full name, Adnan el-Melhi, hand-written on its label. His room was spotless, and his bed was made so tightly I wondered if it was comfortable. He had an entire box of syringes in his desk drawer, and another with miniature yellow sponges in plastic envelopes. 'These disinfect the skin,' he explained.

'Why?' Ali asked.

'What do you mean, why?' Adnan snapped at him. 'So that no germs enter me, of course.'

We all crowded round him. He pulled down his trousers, rubbed his skin with the sponge, then without introduction drove the long needle deep into his buttock. None of us said a word. He pulled it out and pressed the small yellow sponge in its place. His buttock was dotted with brown bruises. We never wanted to see him do that again.

I envied Adnan. His illness had earned him a peculiar sort of strength and gained him something none of us had: a private world that involved books and syringes. His room was like a little house, with things that belonged only to him. And although the bruises on his buttock made me thank the Healer for my well-being, I also prayed for a disease that would give me what Adnan had, that thing that made him seem older and more independent than any of us and led us all to silently seek his approval, the approval of the only one among us who, with his own life and literature of illness, seemed to need no one. This is why, if he had been present the day before, I probably wouldn't have betrayed Kareem. Adnan had that sort of effect. The fact that he was closer to death aged him and gained him a higher moral authority. Like my heroine, Scheherazade, he, too, was living under the sword. And so the challenge – 'Last to Mulberry is a girl' – didn't apply to him.

Adnan placed his arm on my shoulder. I continued to stare at the empty school yard, our dark green flag draped under its own weight on the high pole. I remembered how we used to stand every morning in parallel lines under the weak winter sun, our school bags dense on our backs, screaming the national anthem to the lazy flag, competing with the scratchy music that blared out of the grey, cone-shaped speakers fixed to each corner of the yard, high enough so none of us, even if piled on another's shoulders, could reach them. Some mornings I stood so erect, tightening my fists and flexing my back, feeling tears sting my eyes as I sang our national anthem so loudly I had to spend the rest of the day trying to swallow the sore left in my throat. Other mornings I stood half asleep, miming the words, trying to hide my yawns under the cacophony.

Adnan pulled at my sleeve and together we walked back to our street. He didn't say anything, but I knew he was trying to comfort me. We could see the boys gathered by the entrance of our street, panting. Osama, who always won these races, leaned against the lump of stone that had the name 'Mulberry' written on it. Ali was standing beside his brother, looking unhappy. He always came last, he must have been whacked on the head by everyone and called a girl. They were all looking down our street at something Adnan and I couldn't see. When we reached them I whacked Ali on the head and called him a girl. I had no right, I hadn't taken part in the race. Still, I wasn't satisfied so I whacked him again and called him a girl three times. He tried to hit me, but it was easy to hold him off with one arm. Adnan pulled me to one side and with his shoulder nudged me away. When we were out of earshot he said, 'Is your father home?' Adnan rarely asked me a question, I couldn't help but feel flattered.

'He's on a business trip,' I said.

He looked ahead and said, almost to himself, 'That's lucky,' and walked on, his step much livelier than usual.