dresses in an old grey-blue suit with a tie.
I wait until they have gone to bed and step out into the garden where I put the bee back onto the flower. The sound of traffic is soft and a breeze blows, moving the leaves. The sensor hasn’t caught me and the darkness is soothing, the moon is full and high up in the sky, and that’s when I sense someone standing behind me. When I turn, Mohammed is sitting on the ground playing with the marble, rolling it in the cracks of the concrete. Beside him there is a worm slithering into a puddle. He glances up at me.
‘Uncle Nuri,’ he says, ‘I’m winning against the worm! His name is Habib. Do you want to say hello to Habib?’
He picks up the worm and holds it high for me to see.
‘What are you doing here?’ I say.
‘I came looking for the key because I want to get out.’
‘What key?’ I say.
‘I think it’s in that tree. It’s hanging there but I didn’t know which one.’
I turn and see that there are more than a hundred golden keys hanging from the tree. They twirl in the breeze and sparkle in the light of the moon.
‘Will you get it for me, Uncle Nuri?’ he says. ‘Because I can’t reach and Habib is getting tired.’
I look at Habib, dangling from his fingers.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘But how do I know which key you want?’
‘Just get all of them and then we will try until we find one that fits.’
I go into the kitchen and find a mixing bowl. Mohammed sits patiently waiting for me to return and then I start picking the keys off the tree – there is a stepladder in the garden and I use this to get to the ones on the higher branches. Soon the bowl is nearly full and I check and double-check to make sure there are no keys left. When I turn, holding the bowl, Mohammed is no longer there. The worm is making its way into the puddle.
I take the bowl inside and upstairs into the bedroom, where I put it on the bedside cabinet on Afra’s side, next to the marble. I am very careful not to wake her. I lie down beside her. She is facing me with her eyes closed and both hands tucked under her cheek and I can tell she is fast asleep because her breathing is slow and deep. I turn the other way and stare into the darkness because I can’t close my eyes. I think back to our time in
was where I met Mohammed.
On the other side of the Asi River there was a barbed-wire fence with a hole about two metres in diameter, like an open mouth. People threw their belongings over the fence and passed infants through the hole. It was still dark and we were told by the smugglers to lie on our bellies and crawl on our hands and knees across the flat land of dusty soil and bracken.
Once in Turkey, we walked for what felt like a hundred miles, through fields of wheat and barley. It was quiet. Afra was holding onto my arm and she was shivering because the cold was unbearable. We were about half an hour into our journey when in the distance we saw a child run into the road, a silhouette against the sun. He was waving at someone and then he sprinted off in the direction of some houses.
We approached a village, small bungalows with terraces and open shutters, people looking through windows, others coming out of their homes, standing at the side of the road, their eyes wide with wonder as if they were seeing a travelling circus. There was a long table with plastic cups and jugs of water. We stopped and drank and women from the village brought out blankets. They gave us bread and cherries and small bags of nuts, then they stood back and watched us leave. I realised afterwards that the look I had mistaken for wonder was actually fear, and I imagined swapping places with them, seeing hundreds of people battered by war heading to an unknown future.
We walked for another hour at least, and the wind became stronger, pushing us back. Then there was the sudden smell of sewage and we were in an open field. There were tents everywhere and people sleeping on blankets amid rubbish.
I found a space beneath some trees. There was a sense of quiet