cabin, so that I was close to the warmth of their gas fire.
I woke up in the morning to the sound of rain on the metal roofs of the cabins. I was drenched and I got up and somehow managed to find my way back to Afra. I recognised a pink bedsheet hanging out on one of the lines. The rain was pounding down. Flies had gotten in and were all over the octopus.
Afra was already awake. She was lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling as if she was looking at the stars, and twirling the marble in her fingers, just as Mohammed had done.
‘Where did you go?’ she said.
‘I went out and got lost.’
‘I didn’t sleep last night. The rain started, and all I could hear and see in my head was rain.’
I swept my hand over the octopus and the flies dispersed, buzzing around our section of the cabin, making rings around one another and then returning to the octopus like magnets.
‘Are you hungry?’ I said.
‘You want me to share the octopus with the flies?’
‘No,’ I laughed. ‘We have bread and chocolate spread.’
I took the bread out of the paper bag and tore it into pieces, leaving some for Mohammed. Then I opened the Nutella, considering how I would spread it onto the bread without a knife. Afra said we could dip the bread into the chocolate.
Later that morning, when the rain finally stopped, I headed out again to look for Mohammed. At first I wandered around the enclosure, making my way through the people-containers, the rows and rows of the compound, the walkways, beneath the hanging clothes, calling out Mohammed’s name. The ground was saturated with water – even the shoes outside the doorways were full of water. The white gravel had been able to soak up only a certain amount. But this rain felt like it was coming out of the sea. The wire mesh, and everything now, was covered in a sheen of silver, like shining liquid metal, making the place seem even more like a prison than before, and now that the sun had come out, there were reflections and splashes of light.
I made my way to the old asylum. A teenage boy was sitting on the steps with headphones on, his head against the wall, eyes closed. I nudged him awake to ask him if he’d seen anyone who could be Mohammed. But the boy’s head rocked on his shoulders, and his eyes opened only ever so slightly. I could hear children playing on one of the upper floors, faint echoes of laughter, and I followed the laughter through the corridors to the fourth-floor camps, looking into each room; inside there were blankets hanging as partitions, shoes in neat rows, here and there I glimpsed someone’s hair, or a leg or an arm. I called out, ‘Mohammed!’ and an old man with a gruff voice replied, ‘Yes!’ and then, ‘What do you want? I am here! Have you come to take me?’
I could still hear him as I made my way down the corridor. The children were in the last room, which was full of toys and board games and balloons. A few NGO workers were kneeling next to the younger ones. One of them held a baby in her arms. She caught my eye and came to greet me.
‘This is the children’s centre,’ she said, pronouncing the words very slowly.
‘Clearly,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for my son.’
‘Name?’
‘Mohammed.’
‘How old?’
‘Seven.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘He has black hair and black eyes. Not brown. Black like the sky at night.’
I could see that she was searching her mind for a moment, but then she shook her head. ‘Try not to worry – he’ll turn up, they always do, and when he does you can give him these.’ With her free hand she rummaged through a plastic container and retrieved a box of coloured pencils attached to a notepad. I thanked her and left, and this time as I headed back down the corridor and down the stairs, I could almost see the ghosts of those people, not so long ago, gagged and chained to their beds. I heard echoes now, not of the children’s laughter, but other sounds, at the edges of the imagination, where humans cease to be human.
I made my way out of there quickly, down the stairs and out into the silver light and down to the port. The café was full of people, and I sat for a while