On the way home I regretted all the talking and laughing, regretted breaking my silence, allowing myself to be tricked like a cat teased out from beneath a bed with a string. I knew I had failed when, on our way back home, late in the afternoon when the bread was no longer at its best, she would stop by the empty bakery. I would stand to one side pretending to be drawing shapes with my sandal into the flour-dusted floor and watch the baker Majdi reach beneath his deep counter and think, that's the devil. He would hand her a bottle wrapped in a black plastic bag, and she would immediately bury it in her handbag. And when we were in the car she didn't place her bag beside her as she normally did, but beneath her legs, well out of view. I knew it was her medicine, bad for her and bad for me, but, doubtful of the world and my place in it, I said nothing. I massacred the hardened ends of each loaf and she didn't complain that I was ruining them.

Mama and I spent most of the time together – she alone, I unable to leave her. I worried how the world might change if even for a second I was to look away, to relax the grip of my gaze. I was convinced that if my attention was applied fully, disaster would be kept at bay and she would return whole and uncorrupted, no longer lost, stranded on the opposite bank, waiting alone. But although her unpredictability and her urgent stories tormented me, my vigil and what I then could only explain as her illness bound us into an intimacy that has since occupied the innermost memory I have of love. If love starts somewhere, if it is a hidden force that is brought out by a person, like light off a mirror, for me that person was her. There was anger, there was pity, even the dark warm embrace of hate, but always love and always the joy that surrounds the beginning of love.

That summer Ustath Rashid taught his son how to drive. He would prop Kareem up on a pillow and let him drive around the quiet streets of Gergarish. A week before we went to Lepcis, Kareem took his father's car keys without asking permission and drove me to the sea. He tried to get as close to the water as possible, but as soon as we reached the shore the wheels sank into the sand.

'Why won't you come to Lepcis?'

'Mama won't let me.'

'Stop making excuses, she already told Baba you can. What are you afraid of?'

'I am not afraid.' He didn't seem convinced. I worried he would think me a mommy's boy, so I told him. 'She's ill,' I said. 'I think she will die soon.'

'But all women are ill,' Kareem said. 'Mama bleeds all the time.'

'Really?'

'Yes. Sometimes I go into the bathroom and find the toilet water red. It's disgusting. It's their curse. But don't worry, it doesn't mean they will die.'

The water was as flat and still as oil. We ran until the water tripped us. We raced towards the turquoise, where the deep sea was cooler. I felt bad for Kareem, but also relieved that at least my mother didn't bleed.

'You'll love Lepcis.' He dived and tickled my feet.

Back on land we collected stones, wood and any rubbish we could find to stuff behind the wheels. The engine moaned and the car shifted sideways before it wriggled its way out of the sand.

Kareem had been to Lepcis Magna several times with his father. He had also seen Ghadames and Sabratha, the cave paintings in Fezzan. He had even been on a boat to Crete, where he said women swam naked. Like me, he was an only child. This was very rare because parents with only one offspring were always at the risk of leading people to believe that either the woman was no longer good, or, God forbid, both the mother and the father were objecting to God's Will. Mama was often asked why she didn't have more children. She would blush at the question. Baba blushed too when he was nudged by a friend and asked in a whisper why he didn't take another wife. Maybe it was this that in spite of the age difference – Kareem was twelve, where I was nine – had brought us close to one another. Because what united Kareem and me rarely felt like friendship, but something like blood or virtue. I wanted so much to be like him.

When Kareem and his parents first moved in next door Mama went to pay them a visit. She asked me to put on my black leather shoes, which I hardly wore because they were heavy and scraped against my ankles, and she ironed my white shirt and insisted I button its collar. I didn't mind because I was eager to meet my new next-door neighbour, who, the boys in the street had told me, was like me, without brother or sister. But when we arrived his mother, Auntie Salma, said that Kareem had gone out with his father to explore the area, then smiled, tilted her head to one side and said, 'Sorry.'

Our street was mostly lined with building plots, the foundations dug up and abandoned. The only five completed houses, identical in design, huddled together in the centre of the street: ours and Kareem's on one side; the other three, where Adnan, Masoud and Ali and Osama lived, on the opposite side.

I wandered around our new neighbours' house amused by the strangeness of being in a building that was the mirror image of ours on the outside but on the inside was completely altered by the different furniture and the colours of the walls: like two brothers who had grown distant. Our walls were lined in Italian wallpaper, European flowers in full bloom, autumn leaves falling always, the same bird perched on top of the same branch and plucking at the same twig over and over again, foreign butterflies on arm chairs, tables in dark, satisfied woods and our windows dressed in Dutch cloth and French velvet. Their walls were painted pastel, the skirting-board a dark brown, 'So that when they get dirty it won't show,' Auntie Salma explained, showing Mama around the house. 'What a clever idea,' Mama said, with worrying enthusiasm. Their windows were covered in the same cotton fabric, the sort of thing that was commonly found in Libya then, imported from Egypt. They weren't as well-off as we were; Ustath Rashid was only a university professor, whereas Baba was a businessman who travelled the world looking for beautiful things and animals and trees to bring to our country. That night I thanked God for our wealth and asked him to keep us so for ever and ever.

A couple of days before Ustath Rashid was taken I joined him, his students and Kareem on a day trip to Lepcis. I felt a string in my heart break as I looked back at Mama waving goodbye. Baba wasn't home.

At the beginning of the trip I was nervous, but then the whole bus began singing and clapping. Ustath Rashid's students were wonderfully jubilant; watching them I burned with anticipation to be at university. A couple of girls were pulled up to dance. With eyes downcast they shook their hips and twirled their hands in the air. Passing cars blew their horns. We were like a wedding party.

Kareem and I were sitting in the back, Ustath Rashid in the front, occasionally looking back at us and smiling. When the dancing and the clapping subsided, a chant took hold: al-Doctor, al-Doctor, al-Doctor… We didn't stop until Ustath Rashid stood up and turned to face us.

'I am truly honoured to have such an orderly, well-mannered and respectable group of students. I would just like to know where you unruly bunch have hidden them.'

We all laughed, clapping and whistling as loudly as we could.

'The city of Lepcis Magna was founded by people from Tyre

' LEBANON.'

'Yes – very good – modern-day Lebanon. Subsequently it became Phoenician, then, of course, Roman, when it was made famous by its loyal son, Emperor Sep…'