giggled. "Not that! He doesn't know that I've found them."
"Perhaps you're not meant to be using them."
"Oh, they weren't hidden. Just put away. Till Mummy gets home, I expect. She's in-"
"Canada. Right," Barbara nodded. "Well, you take care with those. Your dad's not going to be chuffed if you fall and break your head. D'you have a helmet or something?"
Hadiyyah looked down at her feet-one skated and one socked-and thought about this. "Am I meant to?"
"Safety precaution," Barbara told her. "A consideration for the street sweepers, as well. Keeps people's brains off the pavement."
Hadiyyah rolled her eyes. "I know you're joking."
Barbara crossed her heart. "God's truth. Where's your dad, anyway? Are you alone today?" She kicked open the picket gate that fronted a path to the house, and she considered whether she ought to talk to Taymullah Azhar once again about leaving his daughter on her own. While it was true that he did it rarely enough, Barbara had told him that she would be pleased to look after Hadiyyah on her own time off if he had students to meet or lab work to supervise at the university. Hadiyyah was remarkably self-sufficient for an eight-year-old, but at the end of the day she was still that: an eight-year-old, and more innocent than her fellows, in part because of a culture that kept her protected and in part because of the desertion of her English mother who had now been "in Canada" for nearly a year.
"He's gone to buy me a surprise," Hadiyyah informed her matter-of-factly. "He thinks I don't know, he thinks I think he's running an errand, but I know what he's really doing. It's 'cause he feels bad and he thinks I feel bad, which I don't, but he wants to help me feel better anyway. So he said, 'I've an errand to run, kushi,' and I'm meant to think it's not about me. Have you done your shopping? C'n I help you, Barbara?"
"More bags in the car if you want to fetch them," Barbara told her.
Hadiyyah slipped off the bench and-one skate on and one skate off-hopped over to the Mini and pulled out the rest of the bags. Barbara waited at the corner of the house. When Hadiyyah joined her, bobbing up and down on her one skate, Barbara said, "What's the occasion, then?"
Hadiyyah followed her to the bottom of the property where, under a false acacia tree, Barbara's bungalow-looking much like a garden shed with delusions of grandeur-snowed flakes of green paint onto a narrow flower bed in need of planting. "Hmm?" Hadiyyah asked. Close up now, Barbara could see that the little girl wore the headphones of a CD player round her neck and the player itself attached to the waistband of her blue jeans. Some unidentifiable music was issuing tinnily from it in a feminine register. Hadiyyah appeared not to notice this.
"The surprise," Barbara said as she opened the front door of her digs. "You said your dad was out fetching you a surprise."
"Oh, that." Hadiyyah clumped into the bungalow and deposited her burdens on the dining table where several days' post mingled with four copies of the Evening Standard, a basket of dirty laundry, and an empty bag of custard cremes. It all made an unappealing jumble at which the habitually neat little girl frowned meaningfully. "You haven't sorted out your belongings," she chided.
"Astute observation," Barbara murmured. "And the surprise? I know it's not your birthday."
Hadiyyah tapped her skate-shod foot against the floor and looked suddenly uncomfortable, a reaction entirely unusual for her. She had, Barbara noted, plaited her own dark hair today. Her parting made a series of zigzags while the red bows at the end of her plaits were lopsided, with one tied a good inch higher than the other. "Well," she said as Barbara began emptying the first of the carrier bags onto the work top of the kitchen area, "he didn't exactly say, but I expect it's 'cause Mrs. Thompson phoned him."
Barbara recognised the name of Hadiyyah's teacher. She looked over her shoulder at the little girl and raised a questioning eyebrow.
"See, there was a tea," Hadiyyah informed her. "Well, not really a tea, but that's what they called it because if they called it what it really was, everyone would've been too embarrassed and no one would've gone. And they did want everyone to go."
"Why? What was it really?"
Hadiyyah turned away and began unloading the carrier bags she'd brought from the Mini. It was, she informed