that? Have you got nothing better to do?' She shook her head to herself. 'I don't know why you are looking at me like that. I haven't done anything.' Then with an exaggerated earnestness she said, 'Go back to bed, it's late.'

I went back to bed but couldn't sleep. I heard her go into the bathroom. She was there for a long time. I didn't hear any water running. My heart began to race. Then suddenly she came out and went to her room. I walked to her door then hesitated.

'Hello, habibi,' she said. 'What's the matter, can't sleep?'

I shook my head to say no, happy to play her game, to pretend that some bad dream had broken my sleep. She patted the bed and I lay beside her. Just when sleep was curling itself round me, she started her telling. Her mouth beside my ear, the smell of her medicine alive in the room.

The only things that mattered were in the past. And what mattered the most in the past was how she and Baba came to be married, that 'black day' as she called it. She never started the story from the beginning; like Scheherazade she didn't move in a straight line but jumped from one episode to another, leaving questions unanswered, questions the asking of which I feared would interrupt her telling. I had to restrain myself and try to remember every piece of the story in the hope that one day I could fit it all into a narrative that was straight and clear and simple. For although I feared those nights when we were alone and she was ill, I never wanted her to stop talking. Her story was mine too, it bound us, turned us into one, 'Two halves of the same soul, two open pages of the same book,' as she used to say.

Once she began by saying, 'You are my prince. One day you'll be a man and take me away on your white horse/ She placed her palms on my cheeks, her eyes brimming with tears. 'And I almost didn't… You are my miracle. The pills, all the other ways in which I tried to resist. I didn't know you were going to be so beautiful, fill my heart…' This is why I often lay in my darkened bedroom dreaming of saving her.

When Mama heard that her father had found her a groom, she swallowed a 'handful of magic pills'. 'They called them that,' she said, 'because they made a woman no good. For who would want to remain married to a woman who couldn't bear children? In a few months, I thought, a year at the most, I'll be free to resume my schooling. It was a perfect plan, or so I thought.

'They rushed the wedding through as if I was a harlot, as if I was pregnant and had to be married off before it showed. Part of the punishment was not to allow me even to see a photograph of my future husband. But the maid sneaked in to tell me she had seen the groom. "Ugly," she said, frowning, "big nose," then spat at the ground. I was so frightened. I ran to the toilet ten times or more. My father and brothers, the High Council -who were sitting right outside the room – became more and more nervous, reading my weak stomach as proof of my crime. They didn't know how it felt waiting in that room, where the complete stranger who was now my husband was going to walk in alone and, without introduction, undress me and do filthy, revolting things.

'It was a dreary room. It had nothing in it but a huge bed with a square, ironed white handkerchief on one pillow. I had no idea what the handkerchief was for.

'I walked up and down that room in my wedding dress wondering what kind of a face my executioner had. Because that's how I saw it: they passed the judgement and he, the stranger armed with the marriage contract signed by my father, was going to carry out the punishment. When he touches me, which I was sure he was going to do, there will be no point in screaming; I was his right, his wife under God. I was only fourteen but I knew what a man had to do to his wife. Cousin Khadija, a chatterbox who had fallen as silent as a wall after her wedding night, had later, when she and I were alone, told me how her husband had lost patience with her and with his fingers punctured her veil and bled her. It was the duty of every man to prove his wife a virgin.'

I didn't know what Mama meant, but feared that when the time comes I might not have what it takes to 'puncture' a woman.

'Betrayal was a hand squeezing my throat,' she continued. 'Those hours seemed eternal. My stomach churned, my fingers were as cold as ice-cubes, and my hands wrestled with each other.

'On one of my journeys to the toilet, pulling my wedding dress up and running like an idiot, I saw my father bury a pistol in his pocket. "Blood is going to be spilled either way," were the words he had told your grandmother. She told me this later, almost laughing, relieved, giddy and ridiculous with happiness. "If, God forbid," she had said, "you didn't turn out virtuous and true, your father was prepared to take your life."

'Your father, the mystery groom, was twenty-three; to the fourteen-year-old girl I was that seemed ancient. When he finally walked in, I fainted. When I came to he wasn't there. Your grandfather was beside me, smiling, your grandmother behind him, clutching the now bloodstained handkerchief to her chest and crying with happiness.

'I was sick for days. The stupid pills didn't work. I took too many and all that vomiting squeezed them out of me. Nine months later I had you.'

The medicine changed her eyes and made her lose her balance. Sometimes even before seeing her I could tell she was ill. I would come into the house and notice a certain stillness, something altered. I knew without knowing how I knew, like that one time when, playing football with the boys, one of Osama's mighty strikes had hit me in the back of the head and I was knocked out. Just before it happened I remember seeing Kareem's face trying to warn me, then I listened to that strange silence fill my ears. This felt the same. I could be reading in my room or playing in our street, and that quiet anxiety would visit me. I would call out for her even though I didn't need her. And when I saw her eyes lost in her face and heard her voice, that strange nervous giggle, I was certain that Mama was ill again. Sometimes I felt the panic then found her well, immersed in a book by Nizar al-Qabbani, her favourite poet. That upset me more.

When she was ill she would talk and talk and talk but later hardly remember any of what she had told me. It was as if her illness got the spirit of another woman in her.

In the morning, after I had fallen asleep exhausted from listening to her craziness and from guarding her -afraid she would burn herself or leave the gas on in the kitchen or, God forbid, leave the house altogether and bring shame and talk down on us – she would come and sit beside me, comb my hair with her fingers and apologize and sometimes even cry a little. I would then be stung by her breath, heavy with medicine, unable to frown or turn my face because I wanted her to believe I was in a deep sleep.

She was shocked when I repeated to her the things she had told me the night before. 'Who told you this?' she would ask. 'You,' I would shout – shout because I was unable not to. Then she would look away and say, 'You shouldn't have heard that.'

Sometimes she talked about Scheherazade. A Thousand and One Nights had been her mother's favourite story, and although my grandmother couldn't read she had memorized the entire book, word for word, and recited it regularly to her children. When I was first told this, I dreamed of my grandmother, whom I rarely saw, struggling to swallow the entire book. Nothing angered Mama more than the story of Scheherazade. I had always thought Scheherazade a brave woman who had gained her freedom through inventing tales and often, in moments of great fear, recalled her example.