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father’s side is Welsh, English and French, but my great grand mum. She was from Egypt.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s where you get the dark skin and those dark, mysterious eyes.”
    “Must be,” He paused. “Tell me something odd about you, Silvia.”
    “Odd? I don’t know. I’m quite boring.”
    “No, you’re not.”
    “Actually, I am. Let me think. Oh! I don’t like purple.”
    “That’s all right. I don’t like cake.”
    “How in the world could anyone not like cake?” I was bewildered. “It’s soft and sweet even without icing. What do you eat on your birthday?”
    “Mum gives Alex cake. I eat hot sausages.”
    “You stick candles in hot sausages?”
    “No, not in the sausages. In the ice cream.”
    “You’re barmy!”
    “So says my mum. What I can’t understand is why you don’t like the colour purple.”
    “I hate purple!”
    “How can anybody hate purple? Purple is the colour of kings and queens! It’s noble!”
    “I hate purple because I knew someone once who was all about purple. I had to room with her at my old school and everything had to be purple. The twat was obsessed with bloody purple! Her bed, her lamp, most of her clothes…all purple! She went as far as having pencils that were purple and smelled of grapes! Ugh! I couldn’t stand her! She was a pathological liar as well! I mean, she lied so much she actually believed her own lies! She had really bad breath and she snored like an ogre! And she never brushed her teeth, either! She wore so much hairspray that her hair moved in one solid brick when she scratched her head! Oh! I still can’t stand her! To this day she makes me want to pass my lunch straight out my nose!”
    Oliver blinked a few times, “That’s immensely disturbing.”
    The one subject that seemed to create a problem for us we talked about only once in those early days. That subject was religion. Catholics had raised Oliver and I was brought up by Protestants, but I had thought the whole subject to be mostly rubbish.
    “It’s barking,” I said passionately, “A man builds a boat and gets two of every animal? How’d he travel to every continent and how’d he feed them? Did he really go to Antarctica and make his way through the glaciers in a giant dingy to gather up penguins and polar bears? Why didn’t one eat him? Polar bears eat everything! Plus, do you have any clue how many species of animals there are on the planet, not to mention back then before we conquered the land and killed most of them off? And an olive branch? How did an olive tree survive the flood? They’re native to the Mediterranean coast! Oh, yeah, the bloody coast survived a flood and was the first to produce new, fruit bearing trees! And how did a flipping little dove carry a branch in its beak...”
    “I think it was a twig, actually,” He interrupted my tirade, “And I’m glad you know so much about the origin of olive trees, but that’s not the point. God was with him. I agree that the bible stories may be a bit far-fetched, even some of the stories of the divinity of Christ are a little hard to handle in a logical sense. You have to believe in some sort of mysticism to accept any of it. It’s not about what you can see or know. It’s about believing in what you can’t see or know. It’s about faith. That set aside, though, how can you explain creation if there is no God?”
    “Science,” I answered simply. “Quantum Physics. It’s all a system of natural events and mathematical equations and we don’t have the answer yet.”
    He looked at me as if my response made him sad, “OK,” He said slowly, “But do you believe in God at all?”
    “I haven’t gotten proof yet,” I answered, “But I’m waiting. I hope there’s a God, but I don’t think for one second God is what you think it is.”
    Oliver sat for a long time just looking at me before he spoke again. When he did, his voice was quite soft, “I think that you have to believe in things at