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her term had begun and Irini was still forming her impressions, getting accustomed to this new life, away from her sleepy home town in the north and the tight control of a strict father who had dictated the details of her existence. She had not stepped entirely outside the cloister of family life, however.
    ‘Why pay for some tatty flat,’ her father had boomed, ‘when your grandparents only live half an hour from university?’
    For this reason, like many undergraduates, Irini was in an apartment which had been familiar to her for all nineteen years of her life, with pastel-coloured stuffed toys neatly lined up on her pillow and childhood picture books lined up next to her philology textbooks; every object, on every surface, including the small vases of silk flowers, was perched on a circle of lace crocheted by her grandmother.
    It already stretched her parents’ means to be putting her through university, so she had been obliged to admit this was a good solution. Her father had a government pension which meant that they were not hard up, but any savings had already been spent on giving his children all the private tuition they had needed after school. Like most Greeks, they were fiercely ambitious for their offspring.
    It almost hurt to see her brother’s graduation photograph in pride of place above her grandparents’ electric fire, knowingthat they would be so happy when they had another to place next to it. Her grandmother had already bought the matching frame.
    ‘Why do you have so many pictures of us?’ she asked one day as they sat at the mahogany dining table.
    ‘For when you aren’t here,’ answered her grandmother.
    ‘But I’m always here!’ she replied.
    ‘Not in the day,’ interrupted her grandfather. ‘You aren’t here in the day.’
    In that moment, she felt suffocated, strangled, by the all-encompassing security her family gave her.
    ‘It’s great,’ she said now to Dimitra. ‘I’m really enjoying everything . . . a little strange some of it, but it’s good, it’s good. I’m getting used to it all. My grandmother’s dolmadakia are the best in the world.’
    Every child was brought up to think that their grandmother’s stuffed vine leaves were second to none and Irini was no different. They ordered their coffee metrio , slightly sweet, and small pastries, and chatted about lectures and the syllabus.
    From their table by the window, Irini had a good view up the street and she noticed that a group of photographers had gathered outside Zonars. As the phalanx of marchers approached, their cameras flashed in the faces of those who led the march. They were hungry for the following day’s front-page picture.
    The noise from the street was muffled by the dense plate glass that separated the customers of the café from the outside world, but there was a growing sense of threat as the close-packed group of perhaps a thousand students moved steadily closer and now passed in front of them.
    The procession had swept along with it a number of largeshaggy dogs. These strays and mongrels that roamed the streets, slept in doorways and lived off restaurant scraps were spinning around barking and yelping at the head of the crowd. A few had been adopted and were held in check by a metre of string, and the canine over-excitement lent chaos to the scene.
    The waiters in Zonars stopped working to watch them pass. Their neat, retro outfits, and the tidy rows of gleaming tables seemed a world away from the shambolic crowd that walked by on the other side of the plate glass.
    Young men largely formed the brigade of marchers and were almost uniformly in leather jackets, with unshaven faces and closely cropped hair. Their low voices chanted but it was impossible to make out what they were saying and the lettering on their banners was equally incomprehensible. On some of them the fabric was ripped, by accident or design it was impossible to tell, but it added to the sense of potential violence.
    ‘Something to