touch the keyboard but I cannot bring myself to check for emails. My eyes keep moving to the glass doors. Whenever the wind picks up and the light comes on, I expect to see the shape of Mohammed in the garden.
I go out into the courtyard and search for the bee, and eventually I find her crawling over some twigs and fallen petals beneath the tree. When I put my hand out she crawls onto my finger and makes her way to my palm, and there she tucks in her legs and nestles, so I take her inside with me.
The landlady brings us all tea on a tray, and some Kenyan sweets, yellow with turmeric. She speaks English perfectly, from what I can tell anyway. She is a tiny woman, so small, like she was meant to be a doll. She is wearing shoes with huge wooden blocks at the ends of her skinny legs and, as she clomps around the living room handing out the sweets and tea, she reminds me of a baby elephant.
The Moroccan man told me that she is an accountant; she works part time in an office in South London and the rest of the time she runs this bed and breakfast. The council gives her money to do this and to keep us here. She scrubs the walls and the floors as if she is trying to wipe away the filth of our journeys. But there is something else about her – her story is not simple, I can tell. There is a mahogany cabinet in the corner of the living room. It is lacquered with a sheen like water, and it is full of glasses for alcohol. Every day she polishes spotless glasses. She stands there with a cloth that looks like a torn-off part of a man’s striped shirt – I have noticed there is even a button on it. She can’t get rid of the green mould on the walls though, or the grease in the kitchen that’s as thick as my skin, but I can see she takes pride in caring for us. She remembers all of our names, which is a great feat considering how many of us come and go. She spends some time talking to the woman from Afghanistan, asking her where she got her hijab, which is handwoven with gold thread.
‘The bee is still alive!’ the Moroccan man says.
I look at him and smile. ‘She’s a fighter,’ I say, ‘and it was raining last night. She won’t survive out there though, not for long, if she can’t fly.’
I take the bee back outside, put her on a flower and I go to bed with Afra. I help her get undressed and I lie down to sleep beside her.
‘Where is Mustafa?’ she says. ‘Have you heard from him?’
‘Not for a long time,’ I say.
‘Have you checked your emails? Maybe he is trying to get hold of you? Does he know we are here?’
There is a strange sound now, a whistle deep in the sky. ‘Can you hear that?’ I say.
‘It’s the rain on the window,’ she says.
‘Not that. The whistling. There is a whistle. It doesn’t stop. Like a dust storm is coming.’
‘There’s no dust storm here,’ she says. ‘Only rain or no rain.’
‘You can’t hear it then?’
She looks concerned now and rests her head on her palm. She is about to say something and I laugh, stopping her. ‘It was cold but sunny today! Now it’s raining! This English weather is like a madman! Maybe you should come out tomorrow? We can go for a walk along the seafront.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I can’t. I don’t want to be out in this world.’
‘But you’re free now, you can go outside. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.’
She doesn’t say anything in response.
‘A boy made the most amazing sandcastle, a whole city, with houses and a skyscraper!’
‘That’s nice,’ she says.
There was a time when she wanted to know, when she would ask me what I saw. Now she doesn’t want to know anything at all.
‘We have to contact Mustafa,’ she says.
* * *
The darkness gets to me, and the way my wife smells gets to me, that mixture of rose perfume and sweat. She puts the perfume on before she goes to bed, takes the glass bottle out of her pocket and dabs it on her wrists and neck. The other residents are still talking in the living room downstairs, that strange combination of tongues. Someone laughs, and