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neighbourhood, and there they said to come here, that you’d be at your friend’s funeral,” Sam explains matter-of-factly. And then, with some contrition: “It’s sad. I hope you weren’t close with her.”
     
    “You asked for me in Yarmouk?”
     
    “Yeah.” She smiles, clearly proud of herself, and clearly oblivious of what that might mean for me. “I usually find what I’m looking for.”
     
    “How about your friend?”
     
    Her eyes lose focus and her nostrils widen. “Still missing.”
     
    I see Sam to the door of the huge car, which says Cherokee Jeep on the back. Only when she opens the door can I see Rizgar waiting behind the wheel. She waves and I wave back to her, my mind tumbling with what my neighbours are already saying.
     
    ~ * ~
     
     
    4
     
    Tumbling
     
     
     
    In our living room my father flicks the light switch, but there is no light. He switches it back and forth, curses and lifts the end table with the lamp on it and slams it down again. “Bastards! How are we supposed to live without any light?” The lamp falls over but lands on the carpeted floor. Amal is standing behind me and I can hear the break in her throat and she starts to cry. My mother announces that they are going to bed.
     
    With dim light trickling in from outside, I watch her walk Amal to her room. In a few minutes, my mother comes back with an old torch from the kitchen.
     
    She hands it to Baba. “We’ll buy an oil lamp tomorrow,” she says. Baba switches the torch on and off. “Excellent,” he says. “Maybe the next day we will trade in our car for a donkey! Would you like that?”
     
    I worry that my mother might start to cry, too, but instead she exhales a brusque retort through her nostrils. “Don’t you start, Amjad. And don’t stay up too late.”
     
    Baba sits in his favourite armchair in the dark, and I sit on the sofa across from him. It’s quiet except for the ticking of the antique mantle clock on the shelf above the dining table. My father bought it when we visited London during our time in Birmingham, despite my mother’s objections. Mum said she’d never be able to read the Roman numerals. To him this was already a compromise; he’d wanted a grandfather clock that was taller than a person, but acknowledged it would be difficult to get it back to Baghdad. In tense moments, the ticking reminds me of a children’s book we read in England, Through the Looking Glass. The clock isn’t saying tick tock, but saying tsk, tsk.
     
    My father switches the torch off and on again, and shines it in my face. “Where were you on the night of the eighth?” he growls in a perfect Tikriti accent, just like a real guy from the mukhabarat. Saddam’s men usually have that countryside drawl.
     
    “Start talking,” he orders, and we both laugh a little.
     
    He flashes it on and off again, and I realize now why Americans call this a flashlight. I suddenly remember the game my brother and I used to play with the torch as children, when we were off school and would stay up late, making each other dance in the strobe light that we’d create by toggling the torch switch as fast as we could. The jumpy movements, the light that came and went, made the dancing person look like he was in an old black-and-white film. If I reminded Ziad of this now, he’d say he didn’t remember. Ziad, my brother, a doctor like Baba, is living comfortably with his young family in Marseille, France. He is my parents’ success story.
     
    Baba stops his light show and places the torch on the wooden side table, leaving the beam of light to shine on the ceiling. Its white disc is like a small, full moon above, providing some relief from the darkness.
     
    “I still can’t believe Mahmoud’s daughter is gone,” Baba says. “She was so young.”
     
    My father has never liked to deal with emotional complications. Medical crises are much more manageable. There is either a cure or there isn’t.
     
    “There is no justice in