to inform them that I have the correct information now and want to make an appointment for Afra about her vision.
When night comes I make sure to go to bed with Afra. I follow her up the stairs, trying not to look at the door at the end of the corridor. Diomande’s bedroom door is open again and he is standing with his back to us, looking out of his window, the shape of the wings visible through his T-shirt. As if he can tell that I am looking, he turns to face me.
‘Goodnight,’ he says, and smiles, and I see that he is holding a photograph in his hands. He brings it over to show me. ‘This my mum, these my sisters.’ They are all smiling women with big teeth.
In the bedroom I help Afra to get undressed and I lie down beside her.
‘Did you have a nice day?’ I say.
‘It would have been nicer with you.’
‘I know.’
I can hear a boy’s voice calling something in Arabic. It seems to be coming from one of the other bedrooms, but I know there are no children here, unless new people arrived today. But the voice seems to be coming from the garden below.
‘What are you doing?’ Afra says. I am standing by the window now, looking down into the dark courtyard.
‘Did you not hear that?’ I say.
‘It’s just the TV,’ she says, ‘downstairs. Someone is watching TV.’
‘Not that. Someone was calling in Arabic.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Over here! Over here!’
I press my face on the window. From what I can see, the courtyard is empty; apart from the cherry tree and the rubbish bins and the stepladder, there is no one and nothing there.
‘Just come and lie down,’ Afra says. ‘Lie down and close your eyes and try not to think about anything.’
So I do as she says. I lie down beside her and feel the warmth of her body and I can smell the roses. I shut my eyes against her and the darkness but I hear it again, a child’s voice, it is Mohammed’s voice, I know it, he begins to sing a lullaby, I recognise it, it reminds me of Sami. I put my hands over my ears, but it doesn’t block out
of the crickets greeted us as we arrived at Pedion tou Areos. Wrought-iron railings stretched along the length of the high street that led to downtown Athens.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Mohammed. I thought I could hear him calling me, but I realised it was just the sounds of the city. Neil was leading the way. He’d insisted, maybe out of guilt, on holding all the bags, so he had my rucksack on one shoulder and Afra’s on the other. Before we left the school, Neil had thrown away all our old bags and given us new rucksacks and thermal blankets.
‘They built this place to celebrate the revolt against Ottoman rule in 1821!’ Neil called back to us. We passed some open wooden boxes on the pathway, but he continued deeper into the woods. Then, beneath the ferns and palm trees we saw a small village of tents and people sprawled on blankets. The place was dirty, even in the open air there were horrible smells: rot and urine. But Neil walked on. As we made our way deeper into the park, gaping potholes scarred the footpaths and the weeds grew wild and brittle. A few people walked their dogs, pensioners sat talking on the benches and, deeper still, drug addicts prepared their fixes.
Eventually we came to another area of tents and Neil found us some space on a couple of blankets between two palm trees. Opposite was a statue of an ancient warrior, and on the step of this statue sat an emaciated man. His eyes reminded me of the kids at the school the previous night.
It was much later, after Neil had left and the darkness had closed in around us, that I began to notice what was wrong with this place. First, men gathered in gangs like wolves; Bulgarians and Greeks and Albanians. They were watching and waiting for something; I could see it in their eyes. They were the eyes of intelligent predators.
The night was cold. Afra was shivering and saying nothing. She was frightened here. I wrapped as many blankets around her as I could. We did not have a tent, just a large umbrella that blocked the wind from the north. A campfire close by gave out a little warmth,